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The National Debt Prison

          Predictably, in order to finance such  utopian schemes, it was Trudeau, as we shall see, who after opening the ideological door, also opened the floodgates of irresponsible deficit spending to pay for the most astonishing and rapid period of growth in government staffing and spending in Canadian history. We will soon see that on a per capita basis, this may have been the most astonishing non-wartime expansion of government power of any free nation in history. He inherited a total national debt of $18 billion from our entire first 100 years of confederation in 1968, and raised it to $200 billion (fully 46% of GDP) by 1982, his final year in office. In his most profligate year his government spent fully 51% more than it took in. [see a chart showing this debt load on page 45 of the book]

Trudeau cannot be blamed for all of this, of course. But he established our Statist deficit-spending trend, and in the sense that we are now incapable of paying off our national federal debt, Canada has never recovered. He was followed by a number of prime ministers who continued this reckless habit. By 2008 (and expressed in 2008 dollars since 1968) Canada had spent $1.5 trillion dollars in interest payments alone on our total federal debt, with little to show for it today except the principle amount of the debt. 

           Perhaps the greatest irony of such irresponsible spending in the name of equality, however, is this: there has never been a socialist State in history more “equal” politically or economically than our free Western societies. Commenting on this fact when the USSR, the world’s most catastrophic test-case for socialism was still in existence, Harvard’s Barrington Moore Jr. wrote that although the determinants of inequality are different – economic in free societies, and political in unfree ones, “there is as much inequality in the Soviet Union as the United States … the same holds true for China.” He failed to mention the small matter that more than tips the scales in favour of free societies: in addition to their inequalities, those two socialist States in total murdered some 80 to 100 million of their own legal citizens.[1] Statism can be very bad for your health.

The Call for “More Democracy”

            As the power of the top-down State intrudes more into everyday life, public moral consensus starts to decay, and trust in political leaders, to fragment. Then delegated sovereignty begins to seem alienating. At this point we start to hear calls for a little more “direct democracy,” or “people power.” Not surprisingly, it is usually the rise of the tax-hungry and wasteful Nanny State that spurs the call for more direct citizen input. That is what happened to me.

          In fact, this entire book was originally such a reaction, and in it I recommended various instruments of direct democracy because I was certain the traditional way of life of the Canadian people was being betrayed against their true will. We needed “citizen initiatives” such as the Swiss have used for a long time to pass laws directly and by-pass a parliament that refuses to do our will; we needed referendums to give national consent on profound constitutional changes; and we needed “recall,” an instrument used to fire politicians who lie or cheat or radically betray promises to those who elected them. Today I am less certain such measures would improve much, and they might even make things worse, because I think the culture is more fragmented than ever. More on this in the last chapter. 

               I am still persuaded, however, that over matters so fundamental as a root and branch change of an entire nation – especially with respect to its core community morality, its political institutions or constitution, its basic system of law, its language rights, or its ethnicity - all citizens must be deemed in principle to have a personal stake. In this respect, I think Canada’s all but forced regime-change from a nation in full exercise of its historical English rights and liberties, into a radical welfare State steered by the political ambitions of a single powerful man in the space of two decades (roughly mid-1960s to 1984), while constitutionally legitimate, was morally illegitimate. Indeed, fully one quarter of Canada’s citizens living in the province of Québec refused consent, and one million aboriginal Canadians were never asked.

               Even worse, when he came back from the dead for his 1980 election campaign, Trudeau intentionally misled the people of Canada (especially those of Québec) by strategically eliminating all talk of the constitutional changes he was planning. Indeed, his election strategists urged “that he keep silent on the constitution – the issue that he had insisted on stressing [in his losing campaign] the previous May.” [2] So when, on the night of May 16, during his speech to a hushed crowd in Montréal’s Paul Sauvé arena he said he wanted to “take action to renew the constitution,” virtually every Québecer present assumed he meant action to guarantee Québec’s provincial powers and the distinct society status within Canada it craved. Instead, he was plotting to suppress their hopes forever in favour of his national socialist dream. In effect, he lied point blank to the very people to whom he was appealing for support. He also lied to himself as he reluctantly betrayed and reversed his own principle of “reason before passion,” for he had finally accepted his handlers’ advice that political success comes from manipulation of the people’s emotions, and not from reason.[3] With tears in their eyes, they gave him a standing ovation. But it was a fraud:  the radical regime-change he was gunning for was never put on the public table, either by him or by the Liberal party. He knew very well that if he had told the people truthfully what he intended, he would never have been elected. What I am calling for is a reasoned re-assessment of these corrosive facts and of the immorality of the Handicap System under which we now live, and thus, plainly speaking, for a reactionary politics.

            There is a silenced majority of Canadians deeply upset by these changes who feel that all our political parties are now Statist in orientation - and that is why they only rarely see their deepest values reflected in ordinary media, by courts, or by government. They are discouraged at the number of special-interest groups and projects they are forced to support through tax dollars (such as the $1.3 billion spent since 1973 on radical feminist causes: see Chapter Ten). A silenced people will not march in the street every time they see something they don’t like. Neither have they the time to become experts in fields such as political economy. But they know what they think and feel: they’re fed up, cynical, and worst of all, they’re totally distrustful of the political process—a dangerous climate for any “democracy” because it leads to cocooning and “dropping out.” 

          The various terms explored so far - the French vs. English styles, the Top-down vs. Bottom-up tension, the Freedom System vs. the Handicap System, Common Law vs. Code Law – all of these paired terms are an attempt to set out a basic philosophical context in which policy can be considered in Canada. In effect, whenever someone offers a political opinion you have only to decipher which of these two conflicting visions of social governance is being promoted, and then the opinion falls more easily into place. The clash of these two styles has been the constant theme - everywhere felt, if not everywhere seen - of Canada’s struggle to govern itself and establish its institutions ever since the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. One of the impediments to a clear focus on the nature of this ongoing struggle is the existence of what I call the “popular illusions,” and it is to these we now turn

[1] Barrington Moore Jr., Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism: USA, USSR & China (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1987).

[2] For a rendering of this, see Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canada Become a Sovereign People? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, 3^rd edition), Chap 8.  See also Janet Ajzenstat,The Once and Future Canadian Democracy (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). The latter argues that Canadians were fully and legally constituted as “a sovereign people” with the BNA Act of 1867. Very true. My view, however, is that although we were indeed properly constituted as a people in 1867 – it was a very good Constitution - Trudeau and the First Ministers imposed an illegitimate regime-change on us in 1982. They did it under the letter of the law, but not under its spirit - for the reasons explained in this book.

[3] In December of 1973 Trudeau told a TV audience: “Nine-tenths of politics appeals … to emotion rather than to reason. I’m a bit sorry about that, but this is the world we are living in, and therefore I’ve had to change.” (cited in Richard Gwyn, Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2006, p.24).  

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    The invention of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms was a backward step that returned Canadians to the kind of political condition they endured under their British masters during the colonial period. Let me explain. At that time those who governed the separate colonies in what was to become Canada were officials of the British Crown and were not responsible to the people but to the legislators, judges, and courts of Great Britain. So for decades Canadians fought hard to bring about “responsible government” - a term which in Canadian political history came to mean that government must be responsible to the elected representatives of the people. They were granted bits of this by the mid-1840s, and by Confederation in1867 the principle of fully responsible government was institutionalized in Canada. Accordingly, the laws made by their representatives in Canada’s Parliament were considered an expression of the will of the people and hence the supreme law of the land. (It bears noting, however, that the founders both of Canada and the United States of America considered even the will of their elected representatives supreme only with respect to new statute laws; to their minds, even statute laws were subordinate to the inherited legal rights, customs and traditions of the English speaking people since Magna Carta).

But this happy 115-year tradition was radically altered in 1982 with the introduction of a Charter that was declared “the supreme law of Canada,” and thus a law over and above the laws of Parliament and all other inherited and customary forms of law . The result has been that since then the will of the Canadian people as expressed in Parliament has been subordinated to and must now conform to interpretations of the law of the Charter. In short, the ultimate authority over the meaning of all existing laws and especially over any new laws made by Canada’s legislators is once again, as in colonial times, held by officials the people did not elect, who cannot be removed by the people, and who are not responsible to the people in any direct way.

In response to this charge, Canada’s judges maintain that parliamentarians still hold the ultimate authority because they can make and re-make laws. However, any balanced scrutiny of the record since 1982 will show an abdication, if not a judicial suppression of legislative freedom and responsibility: Parliamentarians are so fettered by the threat of actual or potential Charter scrutiny that they repeatedly defer to past court decisions or to anticipated Charter rulings prior to creating new legislation. The emphasis since 1982 has shifted from the question of what laws the people wish their elected representatives to make, to the question of what laws their judges will allow them to make.

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             Modern Statists soon see that the people will easily accept an amazing amount of political, economic, and attitudinal control - and taxation - in exchange for greater private and personal freedom from a traditional morality increasingly caricatured as the old slave-master. That is why it seems almost a theorem of modern Statism that as real freedoms are diminished, sexual freedom increases. That is also why so much of modern democratic discourse centres on the rights and pleasures of the physical body, as distinct from former eras when it centered on political freedom and rights, and the freedom of the spirit.

             Consider how many of the radical egalitarian claims made in the name of democracy have to do with the body: abortion rights, homosexual rights, contraception rights, single-parent rights, transgendered rights, co-habitation rights, in vitro rights, and so on. We could say that the primary site for democratic dispute in modern times has shifted from conscience, to body, from morality to personal appetite, from very public differences over general moral rectitude, to personal will and sexual desires.

            Conclusion: The people tend not to complain about the historical losses of their political and economic freedoms, or of being controlled even in their speech and inner attitudes as long as they get complete sexual and personal bodily freedoms as a substitute. We no longer crave an escape from the body (the objective of so many in the past who saw human beings as slaves to their own appetites), but rather the opposite - immersion in its functions and pleasures as a democratic right. Accordingly, the past century has been witness to a perfect correlation between rising taxation, government regulation, and citizen dependency, paralleled by increasingly open sexual expression and claims of “sovereignty” over the body. The old spiritual ecstasy in contemplation of transcendent spiritual meaning (an ultimate meaning higher than, and beyond the reach of the State), is a goner. Instead, we may think of the sexualized democratic State as a political entity that strives through the offer of substitute physical ecstasy to incorporate transcendence into itself. That is to say, by means of a generalized and open sexualization of the masses (which must include a vigorous moral and legal attack on the former restrictive biologically-based natural sexual order as “discriminatory” and “anti-democratic”) the democracies of the West have sought to resolve the great political problem of the missing moral and spiritual transcendence in secular societies. This was a move that entailed a certain loss of our real freedoms.

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        As it happened, in his very person Trudeau embodied the French and English styles described above, for he had a French-Canadian father, and a Scottish mother. Canadian scholars burn a lot of energy debating whether Trudeau was a “socialist” or a “libertarian” and assume the two things are contradictory. For he famously said that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” But he also entrenched coast-to-coast radical equalization policies in his Charter. Here was a man very comfortable with multiple mistresses, with legislating homosexual rights, and who, even as Prime Minister did not mind taking off his clothes and sunbathing nude in mixed company.[1] He was a flamboyant libertarian who imposed the most controlling and expensive Statist regime on Canada in its history.

         So was he a socialist or a libertarian?

         My answer:  he was a “libertarian socialist,” and we Canadians all now live under his libertarian socialists regime. But how? How can this circle be squared? These things are opposites, aren’t they? Not really. It’s just the two labels are applied to different things. Think of what is individual, private, and physical: your body. Then think of what is public and general: a service like health care, or education, or a language right. Trudeau’s Charter combined and enabled these two conflicting styles by encouraging the separation of the private body, from the public body.  He was a libertarian in that he believed matters of the private body are no one else’s business. But when it came to goods he felt we all deserve from the State? Why, then a powerful system for providing, equalizing, and controlling access to such goods must be set up, and this would be done through taxation and fiscal bribery of the provinces; that is, through shared-cost programs or grants financed by exorbitant levels of individual taxation and unconscionable borrowing.  But what kind of socialism was it? What kind of libertarianism?    

His Socialist Conviction

             Trudeau was trying, as mentioned, to spin the wheel slowly, so that without realizing the change of direction, a Canadian would find himself “disembarking at a different island than the one he thought he was sailing for.” Fundamentally, on the public level, all that he did was clearly and resolutely substitute the French-Statist style for the English-Liberty style at every opportunity. By the time he was finished, Canada had changed from a fiscally stable, low-debt, reasonably free, only mildly-socialized nation under limited government, to one bending under huge public debt, highly managerial, and much more thoroughly socialist in its fiscal and social commitments. In his first and only major book, Federalism and the French Canadians, Trudeau clearly outlined this plan for Canada. At the time, most leftists argued that socialism could not successfully be planted in a nation such as ours with an existing federal system because the powers of governance in such nations are already divided as between central and local jurisdictions, and this division of powers is entrenched forever in their constitutions. So the general conclusion was that Canada was not and never would be a candidate for socialism. But Trudeau disagreed. He spoke admiringly of "that superb strategist, Mao Tse-Tung" who argued that “planting socialism” in various regional strongholds was "the very best thing." Accordingly, Trudeau developed the argument that systems such as Canada’s, contrary to the advice of all the theorists, can indeed be made socialist, and that our British-style federal system "must be welcomed as a valuable tool which permits dynamic parties to plant socialist governments in certain provinces, from which the seeds of radicalism can slowly spread"[2]

 His Libertarian Conviction

                 Trudeau probably wrote as much about individual rights as about socialism, and most scholars, and the public in general continue to believe these two political philosophies are in clear contradiction. Certainly, in their party platforms, socialists and libertarians are sworn enemies. But as mentioned, Trudeau’s genius was to combine these contraries by splitting their domains between what is inside our skin, and what is outside it: private body, and public body; person and polis.    

        He was throwing the Canadian people a bone by reducing the larger realm of freedom to which they had been accustomed, to their persons and bodies. But all the “public” freedoms having to do with economics and trade, private property, education, provision of health care, welfare, and so on, would fall under Statist regulation. He knew that if he could leave us unfettered and free with respect to most of our personal bodily pleasures, we would be fooled into believing we were still free in all our former ways. But those were precisely the freedoms he despised: the bottom-up political, economic, and legislative realities essential to the creation of the British-style that produced what he called scornfully, our "checkerboard federalism." To him, Canada’s parliamentarians were “just nobodies,” and “a crummy lot” (this, he uttered publicly in 1969).  The British Style was a reality that stood in the way of his French-style plan for Statism. So the system had to be changed. Trudeau was Canada’s Procrustes, doing his utmost to make a one-size-fits-all political bed for Canadian citizens.   

          His libertarian ethic, which is based on the idea that liberty means doing whatever you want as long as you don’t harm anyone else, was absorbed from typical English individualist thinking that was radicalized by John Stuart Mill in his canonical booklet, On Liberty (1859). It is called Mill’s “Harm Principle,” and it neatly articulated Mill’s simplistic argument for the privatization of morality that it has by now become the standard reasoning in defence of personal moral autonomy all over the Western world. Prior to Mill, throughout our long Judeo-Christian tradition, morality – codes of right and wrong behavior - had always been considered a community good. Moral standards reflected common religious and community standards. The metaphor was that we all live under a common moral bubble wherein by means of conviction, belief, and debate we sustain a common set of shalls and shall-nots that defines us morally … who we are.  Mill argued instead that we each ought to live under our own private self-defined moral bubble, and be concerned for others only if we bump into them. Then we just apologize, or negotiate a solution to any harm done.

         Mill failed to see that if you are completely alone in the universe it is true that you can do whatever you want, and call it “morality” if you like. But because there are no other human beings in existence and you cannot therefore help or harm anyone else, you can also call it Winnie-the-Pooh. However, as soon as someone else exists in addition to yourself, you must take into consideration whether your actions will help them, or harm them, now, or in the future, directly or indirectly. Suddenly, what was a personal and private act, becomes public, and thus falls under the term “morality,” rightly considered. In his person and in his politics, Trudeau combined two conflicting styles: the personal libertarianism articulated by Mill, and the Statism of Rousseau.

[1] Richard Gwyn, The Northern Magus (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1980), p.28.

[2] Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians, (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), pp.126ff.

      But you can tell when a country has opted for the four G's when, instead of more freedom, you get more Government; instead of a focus on the natural family, you get a focus on politically-defined Groups; instead of the promotion of free enterprise, you get a focus on Grants and tax-Grabs; instead of the social direction provided by a moral law common for all, you get the official promotion of moral relativism and Godlessness in schools and the public square (which leaves the state free to direct all things).

       There are five forms of radicalism in contemporary life that aim to bring about a   switch from the four F’s to the four G's.

RADICAL FEMINISM
        The first, and perhaps most virulent of these is radical feminism, which seeks to overthrow the order of human biology by promoting the fantastical idea that the sexes are exactly the same, and that any differences in the way they choose to live must result from brainwashing. We are told that gender is not natural, but “constructed” and freely-chosen. But as Harvard professor Michael Levin once dryly suggested, "any parent who has raised both boys and girls, and still thinks they are born the same, has already withstood more evidence to the contrary than any laboratory could possibly provide."

           The first mistake, however, is to identify feminism with women in general, most of whom have never supported it. And with respect to its intellectual credentials, "feminist theory," as the insightful British critic Kenneth Minogue put it, “does not really belong in the cool groves of academe. It is passionate and salvationist in a way similar to Marxism, to new religious movements, and occult enthusiasms. Academically, it is mostly unsophisticated. A little light generalizing work is followed by polysyllabic decoration and some spray-on indignation."
(But the people don't support radical feminism, so the law is its instrument).

THE ABORTION/EUTHANASIA MOVEMENT

            The second radicalism is the radical abortion/euthanasia movement, which attempts to end our age-old principle of the sanctity of life, thus to overthrow the order of love in society. Euthanasia is really an extension of the abortion movement (which is better thought of as pediatric euthanasia). The choice to kill someone inside you easily develops into the "right" to kill someone who asks you to kill them. Canada is slowly moving into a period where formal euthanasia will eventually be practiced by state physicians licenced to kill. Only too late will we discover that the ultimate form of equality in the socialist state is the right of the state to direct this killing ethic to the elimination of lives it considers not worth living.

(Once the people grasp the true consequences of legalized killing, they do not support it, so the law is its instrument).

RADICAL PANSEXUALISM

       The third radicalism is the radical pansexual movement, of which the homosexual, pornography, polygamy, and pro-incest movements are connected parts. This radicalism seeks to overthrow the sexual order, especially the marital order, of western society, which is based on prohibitions as to the number, gender, and age, and blood-relation of legal sexual partners. It does this in the name of "love", on the belief that because we are all naturally good, then all consenting sex, with whomsoever, and however, must also be good. This belief dispenses completely with our two-thousand-year-long tradition of attempting to teach the difference between good love, and bad love (such as narcissism/self-love, incest love, sexual love of little children, love of polygamy, love of adultery, and so on).

But our history clearly shows how, in the name of a generalized ideal of love rooted in uncontrolled human desires, any behaviour can be justified. Just so, Canadarecently proceeded to legalize homosexual marriage (unlike France, which refused due to the impossibility of procreation – what it termed the lack of “filiation” – in such unions).
(Majorities of the people have never supported pansexualism, or homosexuality - so the law is its instrument).

EDUCATIONAL RADICALISM

           The fourth radicalism is educational radicalism, and here we have a continuous attempt, as the Swedes put it (when radical elitists in Sweden in the 1960s, decided to force a switch from the Four F’s to the Four G’s) "to divest the parents of their authority over their own children." Now education radicals everywhere in the West, who see themselves as “change agents,” seek to overthrow the order of private family authority.  

          The connection is from Plato, to Rousseau, to such as John Dewey - to teacher-training institutions like OISE, in Toronto. The strategy is to persuade the public that the teachers are trustees of the nation's children, not for the family, but for the state. It was Canada's Laurier Lapierre who, in 1978, intoxicated with the vision of the top-down, redistributive state, declared that "the child of Ontario is not a family child. He is an institutional child. It is not the school that is the extension of the home, but the home that is the extension of the school."

Soon after, former Calgary Board of Education Chairman (and law professor) Alex Proudfoot, was more blunt. He told a meeting of astonished parents: "The child is not your child. Canadian children are the property of the state, like our oil, our gas, and our pipelines...it's the law."

(But the people don't like educational radicalism - so the law is its instrument).

LEGAL RADICALISM

            And finally, we have legal radicalism, the most powerful of all, emanating from law schools, law reform commissions, and tribunals and charters of every description, all of which are intent upon circumventing the democratic process.

         It is the legal fraternity that is rapidly becoming the most powerful wing of the political class, and the reason is that they have figured out how to use legal rather than political means to overthrow what they believe is the dim-witted democratic order of a free society.

The chief instrument used in this subtle exercise is Canada's 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Our formerly sovereign and free legislators are now subordinate to the dictates based on the Charter with respect to most things in life that really matter. For the Charter specifically promotes and entrenches the notion of “substantive equality” (making people equal in real life) rather than the original formal equality (ensuring equal opportunity for all) on which Canada was based, and so radical egalitarian judgements and social programs get smuggled in under that label by unelected judges whom no power in the land can remove.

           This is a process that bypasses our formerly free parliamentary sovereignty and replaces it with a new judicial sovereignty. Canada identifies whole classes of citizens that are to be favoured over other classes according to linguistic, gender, religious, ethnic, or other such differences, in the most blatant forms of legal discrimination imaginable. 

            Professor Sue Sherwin of Dalhousie law school warned us in October of 1993 that the reform of legal and political systems alone is inadequate. What we really need to change, she said, is "the private realm, the way people think."

          If you want more of this kind of equality, you need more government, and if you want total equality, you need total government.

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February 20, 2012 

Salim, my friend -

So nice to chat with you the other day.

And thank you for sending me your "Decade After 9/11" essay. I have read it carefully and learned from it.

Where you and I diverge somewhat (only perhaps due to my inadequate understanding) is where you discuss how the Islamic convulsion will eventually "work itself out."  

I would say that in this section you are conflating classical liberalism and democracy, as if they were the same thing.

I used to believe they were. but I no longer do.

So I humbly suggest that all the peaceful and tolerant accommodations ("reconciling") you mention as essential things for the Islamic nations as they "work toward democracy" are in reality, and historically speaking, unique features of Western liberalism as it has evolved, and not of western democracy per se.

I mean to say that almost all of these things (private property rights, freedom of speech, individual liberty, etc.) existed in England and her colonies centuries before "democracy" in any meaningful or broad sense came on the scene as a permanent feature of our common life.

Further, I believe that we can in turn trace those still-evolving features to their roots in Christendom, and perhaps more specifically to Post-reformation Christendom. I think that prior to that epoch there was very little tolerance of the faiths of others -- indeed, there was much persecution. At any rate I find it hard to imagine that people (especially Muslims) without these roots will ever evolve the classical liberal ways of the West without those roots from which the tree of our liberalism has grown.

I see democracy in the West, I mean modern, individualistic democracy (as distinct from the Greek or Roman or Venetian sort) as "a child of the Reformation," and specifically born, not of any generous love of tolerance, but of a practical need for it, due, not any grand spirit of the British people, but to the fragmenting of Protestantism into its hundreds of sects that made this tolerance necessary on a tit for tat basis … to avoid slaughters.     

Another reason (sorry to go on so long) that I believe we will never see this reconciliation of Islam with the Western way of life is that Islam/Muslims worship a God of pure Will. Hence, the Koran is in many respects a Book of Laws/Rules for living (a little like Judaism’s “Halakkah” with its 613 rules for living).

The Will of the Islamic God (it seems to me) is absolute, unquestionable, and not subject to Reason of any kind. This means that nothing this God has decreed (in the Koran, Shari'a law, etc) can be countered, disobeyed, or subjected to human questions or to democratic decrees. For no matter how unreasonable, there is nothing this God cannot do. Hence, I cannot see how such a religion/theocracy could ever accept the will of democratic majoritarian rule. God has already declared what is good. So the people, no matter how many vote, cannot change that. Indeed, I would think that for a true Muslim, the very idea of "the people" voting to decide whether things such as homosexuality, or euthanasia, are morally right or wrong, or lawful, or not, must seem a blasphemy. It does even to me!

Christianity, it seems to me, rests on a different theological ideal, namely, on a God of Reason. For Christians, there are many things God cannot do. He cannot do something contrary to his love; He cannot do something evil; He cannot make a square circle; he cannot make what is true, false. He cannot contradict himself, and so on. So, there are many things that a Christian believes are good (or evil) in themselves, and not specifically or only because God says so. God loves certain things because they are Good; they are not Good just because he loves them.

So the Bible, it seems to me (pardon my ignorance once again) is not so much about God's Will and His rules for living (except in the Old Testament) as about a transformation of the spirit (New Testament). We could also say (whether or not this is an historical development or not, I don't know) that it has become a religion rooted in the idea of universal love as the very ground of (reasonable) existence.

So I think the Western ideal of democracy (since the Reformation at least) somehow has worked well for the Western world because underlying it is this idea that a mere individual can grasp God's Reason by himself (Luther: sola fides/sola scriptura, etc.).  So, if a mere human being can grasp God's intent directly, goes the assumption, then he or she can also be trusted to vote in a democratic system comprised of reasonable people who share a faith in ... human love and reasonableness. From this perspective, majority rule will seem to be the rule of the reasonable; of the democratic masses infused with the very Reason of God (accessible to them because they are "made in his image," and because they need only "the Word" to decide the truth/His truth, for, and by themselves).

I guess what I am suggesting is that I don't think these two very different systems (rooted in such contrary notions of God) can ever be put together. We can always create a "democratic system" for another people, of course. That is what American hegemony is attempting everywhere, as if democracy itself were a secular religion in need of converts. But if the underlying liberalism has never taken root, a democratic system can only lead to a formalization of pre-existing factionalisms. (I suppose it has "worked " in India because they are 85% Hindu, which is a system that already tolerates hundreds of diffferent Gods, and so their democracy divides to conquer rather than the opposite).

Sorry to go on so long. It interests me. More when we meet.

All best wishes

Bill

Dear Bill,

Thanks for your kind words, and for this relatively long letter setting forth your thoughts on a matter you have reflected much.

I cannot respond in kind, since a response of the sort that your reflections merit is one that would also take much space. Perhaps this is a subject that deserves a long conversation between us or among friends who have also done some reflection on the matter.

My response here is therefore a quick reply to the issue that you elaborate upon, i.e. that Western liberalism (individual freedom, tolerance of other(s), separation of religion and politics, etc) predates democracy, and it being a fruit of somewhat special circumstances in the evolution of Western culture rooted in Judeo-Christian values and Ionian rationalism cannot be transplanted or embedded into non-Western cultures, especially Islam. In other words, this Western liberalism is a unique product, and being a unique product paradoxically it is not of or for universal adaptation since political and cultural climate will not be found hospitable for its nurture outside of the Western environment.

If the above is true, and this is in essence it seems to me what you are saying, then however unique and valuable this Western liberalism is it is not something for non-Western people since their body-politics will reject it as alien implant. And if it is not universal in essence, then Western liberalism is just an off-shoot of a culture that will wither in time just as the West might well wither in time as have other cultures and civilizations most notably the ancient and vibrant culture of Greece. And therefore with the decline of the West the ideas of Western liberalism will fade and in time vanish, and the loss will be less than the loss of Ionian cultures since it lacks universalism.

I do not share your view and your premise, and from it the conclusion, and therefore one can derive as I have done.

Western liberalism was born in a culture zone now described as the West (or Occidental), but its vitality meant it carried a universal appeal in terms of idea and  practice as did, for example, Euclidean geometry. But unlike Euclidean geometry, the meaning of liberalism is not as fluid and transparent, and so its adaptation into other cultures is more difficult. But over time it can be absorbed. Japanese samurai culture, for instance, has faded as Japan in its own fashion adopted the ideas of Western liberalism. India has been absorbing the ideas of Western liberalism since its first encounter over 300 years ago, and since India is a hugely diverse entity Western liberalism has penetrated many different population segments of India including Muslims.

Your views about Islam and Muslims reflect the contemporary view of many, a view that is reductionist and in ways essentialist and un-historical. To simply assume that Islam is entirely alien in its essential creed from Judaism and Christianity, and in essence hostile to Ionian rationalism, is (to put it politely) a reading that is now fashionable given the political ideology of Islamism and events such as 9/11. Such a reading lacks historical perspective not only of Islam, but of what Islam is being compared with, and that produces a judgment that closes off history -- in this case of Islam and Muslims. Recognizing difficulties in the realm of inter-cultural exchanges out of which world history evolves is not the same as concluding that because of difficulties such exchanges are not only unlikely but impossible.

The paradox is in how Western liberalism is defined and understood. If it is to be understood entirely as a Western project, unique and therefore limited or not "repeatable" outside the cultural zone of the West, then of course there is no need for anyone else who is not part of the West to be taken up with or be impressed by this unique project.

This indeed is also the argument of Islamists, and they are not alone. Ironically it is also the argument of the cultural relativists in the West who see Western liberalism as a "colonial" or "imperial" project when taken outside of the West's cultural zone. I emphatically disagree with any such suggestion, and on the contrary I view Western liberalism as a universal project just as Christianity itself (in its essence as Abrahamic monotheism preached by Paul to the Gentiles) was a universal project and not a Palestinian/Jewish heresy, and also Islam itself (in essence Jewish faith and Abrahamic monotheism brought by Muhammad to pagan Arabs and through them to other people not touched by Paul's mission) was a universal project. The problem lies in how people conflate and confuse the universal with the particular and, thereby, cannot or are unwilling to see and separate the universal that gets embedded in the maze of a particular culture and history.

Let this conversation proceed when we meet.

Warmest regards,

Salim

I think this research is for real, and this is eventually going to be a world-wide health issue.

A key quesiton is: if manufacturers are posting such warnings about their own products -- what do they

alrready know that is being kept from us? And ... why are these warnings in small print at the back of the manual? (check your own manual to see what I mean).
 
Best to take it seriously

Muslims in Europe are increasingly converting empty Christian churches into mosques. The proliferation of mosques housed in former churches reflects the rise of Islam as the fastest growing religion in post-Christian Europe. There are now more practicing Muslims than practicing Christians in many parts of Europe, not only in large urban centers, but also in smaller towns and cities across the continent.

As Islam replaces Christianity as the dominant religion in Europe, more and more churches are set to become mosques, which increasingly serve not only as religious institutions but also function as the foundational political building blocks for the establishment of separate, parallel Muslim communities in Europe that are based on Islamic Sharia law.

The latest churches destined to become mosques are located in Germany, where the Roman Catholic Church has announced plans to close up to six churches in Duisburg, an industrial city in northwestern part of the country, due to falling church attendance. Duisburg, which has a total population of 500,000, is home to around 100,000 mostly Turkish Muslims, making it one of the most Islamized cities in Germany. Muslims in Duisburg are now clamoring to turn empty churches in the city into mosques, according to the Germany daily newspaper, Der Westen. All of the churches slated for closing are located in the gritty Hamborn and Marxloh districts in northern Duisburg where Islam has already replaced Christianity as the dominant religion, and where several Catholic churches have already been abandoned in a previous round of church closings. In Marxloh, all eyes are set on the Church of Saint Peter and Paul, which is the last remaining church in a part of Duisburg that is now almost completely Muslim. The church may be closed as early as the end of January 2012.Marxloh also happens to be home to the Duisburg Merkez Mosque, the largest mosque in Germany. Completed in 2008 at a cost of more than €7.5 million ($10 million), the Ottoman-style mega-mosque can accommodate more than 1,200 Muslim worshippers at a time. Merkez now wants to turn the churches in Hamborn and Marxloh into mosques and prayer centers that would serve as extensions of the mega-mosque. According to the chairman of the Merkez Mosque, Mohammed Al, "Regardless of whether it is a church or a mosque, it is a house of God."

In addition to Roman Catholic churches, some Protestant churches have also been converted into mosques in Germany, where the Muslim population has jumped from around 50,000 in the early 1980s to more than 4 million today. In Germany as a whole, more than 400 Roman Catholic churches and more than 100 Protestant churches have been closed since 2000, according to one estimate. Another 700 Roman Catholic churches are slated to be closed over the next several years. By contrast, there are now more than 200 mosques (including more than 40 mega-mosques), 2,600 Muslim prayer halls and a countless number unofficial mosques in Germany. Another 128 mosques are currently under construction, according to the Zentralinstitut Islam-Archiv, a Muslim organization based in Germany. In neighboring France, mosques are being built more often than Roman Catholic churches, and there now are more practicing Muslims in the country than practicing Catholics.

Nearly 150 new mosques are currently under construction in France, home to the biggest Muslim community in Europe. The total number of mosques in France has already doubled to more than 2,000 during just the past ten years, according to a research report, "Constructing Mosques: The Governance of Islam in France and the Netherlands." The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, has called for the number of mosques in the country to be doubled again -- to 4,000 -- to meet growing demand. By contrast, the Roman Catholic Church in France has built only 20 new churches during the past decade, and has formally closed more than 60 churches, many of which are destined to become mosques, according to research conducted by La Croix, a Roman Catholic daily newspaper based in Paris. Although 64% of the French population (or 41.6 million of France's 65 million inhabitants) identifies itself as Roman Catholic, only 4.5% (or 1.9 million) of those actually are practicing Catholics, according to the French Institute of Public Opinion (or Ifop, as it is usually called).By way of comparison, 75% (or 4.5 million) of the estimated 6 million mostly ethnic North African and sub-Saharan Muslims in France identify themselves as "believers" and 41% (or 2.5 million) say they are "practicing" Muslims, according to an in-depth research report on Islam in France published by Ifop. Taken together, the research data provides empirical evidence that Islam is well on its way to overtaking Roman Catholicism as the dominant religion in France.

In Britain, Islam has overtaken Anglicanism as the dominant religion as more people attend mosques than the Church of England. According to one survey, 930,000 Muslims attend a place of worship at least once a week, whereas only 916,000 Anglicans do the same. Muslim leaders are now claiming that, given such a rise of Islam in Britain, Muslims should receive a share of the privileged status of the Church of England. Overall, at least 10,000 churches have been closed in Britain since 1960, including 8,000 Methodist churches and 1,700 Anglican churches. Another 4,000 churches are set to be closed by 2020, according to Christian Research, an organization that tracks religious trends in Britain. By contrast, there are now more than 1,700 official mosques in Britain, many converted from former churches. In addition, there are an estimated 2,000 Muslim prayer halls and unknown thousands of unofficial mosques in garages or warehouses scattered throughout the country. Islam is set to displace Christianity in Britain even further in the years ahead. The number of Muslims in Britain is forecast to double to 5.5 million, or 8% of the total British population, by 2030, according to the Washington, DC-based Pew Research Center. British Prime Minister David Cameron, in a December 2011 speech in Oxford on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, said Britain is a "Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so."But the official Citizenship Survey published on December 21 found that the number of people who call themselves Christians in England and Wales fell by nearly 10% over the past five years.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.

                       On The Rise of Microfascism in the Western Democracies 

           There has never been much agreement on the definition of fascism. Nevertheless, the impression that whatever its form, it always has to do with the triumph of the Will over nature, seems a penetrating truth about its early as well as more recent manifestations. The French saying, “Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop” (“banish the natural, and it comes galloping back”) is a truth of nature that, absent the help of massively oppressive State powers, no degree of Will could ever succeed in altering for long. And yet, despite this bald reality the recent history of the West has been a disturbing and repetitive narrative centered on the complexities and catastrophes that result from efforts to banish nature.  In what follows I argue that all the modern unnatural, and therefore anti-human attempts to bend nature, and human nature to the Will, have been expressed in two basic forms, one Macro, the other Micro. By the end, we may want to ask to what peculiar quirk of nature we owe our apparently insatiable hunger to banish nature.              

            Preliminary to looking at the differences between these two forms, however, let us ask about the origin of the word “fascism,” for which it suffices to recall the imperial image of victorious Roman legions marching in triumph with the fasces borne aloft - bundles of bound sticks from the centre of which protruded a menacing axe. The symbolism could not be clearer: Roman power binds and controls all individuals as one. This ancient form of Macro-fascism, while originally an engine of military empire, eventually found its most coherent modern political and moral expression in the Social Contract (1762) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in which he insisted, not on a majority to be obtained by counting heads, but rather, on the complete absorption of all individual wills into a single national, or General Will.  The plainest description of this template for what we now recognize as a uniquely European form of totalitarian democracy may be glimpsed in his novel Emile, where we read of his ambition “to transport the I into the common unity, with the result that each individual believes himself no longer one, but a part of the unity, and feels no longer except within the whole.” This was the first fully-articulated political formula for what may be called a democracy of the One, rather than of the Many (the latter, a form that found theoretical expression only a century later -- about which more below).  It eventually served as a guide and moral justification for the murderous fanaticism of the Jacobins during the French revolution, and then for Hitler’s Nazi party as well as for Mussolini’s Italian fascism. Hitler often burbled publicly, “This revolution of ours is the exact counterpart of the French Revolution,” and Mussolini famously formalized his own philosophy in the slogan, “democrazia organizatta!” 

            These recent forms of Macro-fascism, whether French, Italian, German, or Russian, have  always been collectivist, secular, and militant, striving through the fearsome top-down powers of the State to draw all things into the ambit of a single pattern of national -- or in the case of Communism, international -- Will, or centralized choosing, a Will always expressed by the subjugation and assimilation by force of things spontaneous, private, and natural, to artificial and unnatural public designs. For private religious belief? A secular and wholly materialist belief. For concepts of transcendent natural law? Man-made laws only. For the private family? An array of public programs and services from national daycare, to health care, to subsidized housing, to old-age homes. For private enterprise and free markets? Intensive regulation, ever-higher taxation, and the direction of the forces of production to State ends. For countless voluntary community organizations? Equivalent public organizations. In short, the Nanny State, cradle to grave. The German word that described this transformation of the private and natural into the public and artificial was “gleichschaltung,” which means “to bring everything into line.” Take note of the word “line,” for the variety of methods used to force all things natural, spontaneous, curved, and organic (think of all those charming European village laneways, a map of which looks like a biological or botanical growth) into geometrically rigid lines and grids, conceptual or actual, is truly astonishing. The fanatically linear-minded architect le Corbusier, in gloating upon his fantasies for the perfect Soviet city, could not resist sniffing that “curved lines constitute paralysis, and the winding path is the path of donkeys.” 

            On this general theme of regulation, however, our liberal-democratic regimes cannot afford to be smug, for although we have never had to pack machine-guns to enforce our softer, but no less pervasive brand of Statism it remains true that most of the policy specifics common to Macro-fascism are hauntingly recognizable in our own “progressive” regimes. To wit, more than three-quarters of the German and Italian programs (and a lot of the communist ones) are virtually indistinguishable from our own political fare, and this is true for all the Great Society, New Society, or Just Society programs (etc., etc.) of our modern “liberal” States. In short, into no matter which democracy we look, we find ever-increasing Statism, taxation, debt, and regulation; everywhere, the larger national or federal political units continue to absorb and subjugate (bring into line) the smaller states, provinces, regions, and municipalities; and so everywhere, we see more “democracy,” but less freedom.  And what might be the reason?

           Some say that all fascism is a reactionary response to a felt loss of natural community. But the deeper sources are likely rooted in despair over the glaring imperfections of human existence, most notably our anger at the apparent absence of justice on this earth (which is to say, at our perceived abandonment by God). From this has sprung the modern resolve to go it alone, so to speak: if there is no God to make earthly existence perfect, then we’ll do it by our own means, powered by the belief that human beings (at least of the planning type) are actually godlets (“made in the image of God” is the template) who have an obligation to impose a uniform design of perfection (whether national or international) on all natural but imperfect expressions of human life. This secular work began in real earnest with the rise of the modern State during the French Revolution (Rousseau’s Contract in hand) and what it entailed then and since may be seen in sobering detail in James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (Yale, 1998), where the militant effort to create “a single national society, legible from the center,” in which all things natural and non-conforming were to be “denaturalized” (a cure that operates more like a disease), is clearly displayed.

           The standard recipe for spreading this disease requires only a few ingredients to create “a full-fledged disaster.” The first is a comprehensive aspiration to “the refashioning of social habits and of human nature itself.” The second is an ideology legitimizing the “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state” for the satisfaction of human needs according to a “rational” model. The third is “a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.” In a putatively democratic age ruled by a supposed “sovereignty of the people,” this is surely the saddest element.

          From this ideological gestation has emerged the modern Statist dystopia, which relies on well-worn tools of regimentation. Examples are the imposition of official languages that enable internal colonization by means of which whole regions formerly illegible to central government may be linguistically-subdued and culturally incorporated. Another standard tool is the eradication of all local systems of weights and measures. The foot? The pound? The ounce? Such intimately natural human measures have been made illegal in most nations by metrication, the most zealous proponents of which always argue that a more “rational” unit will produce a more rational and rationalized (and therefore a more easily organized) citizenry. But the most menacing novelties of modern Statism are surely the highly precise and all-pervasive instruments of statecraft such as computerized data, myriad encrypted identity cards, statistical bureaus, modes of instant satellite communication, precise cadastral (tax) maps, intensive tax-harvesting (by instalments) on an unprecedented scale, pervasive State invasions of the private realm, sophisticated spying and security measures, and much more. Suffice it to say that none of these modern tools now common to our putatively free nations could have been imagined for a moment in even the most frenzied dreams of any absolutist king or despot in all prior human history. It is indisputable that we were much freer (less regulated, spied upon, and taxed), before the onset of modern democracy.   

            Personal examples of the loss of freedom to the macrofascist Will over nature are very close to many of us. For one of the purposes of modern property-codification and taxation regimes has been to incorporate into the State all of what Scott calls the “free gifts of nature” such as forests, game, wastelands, prairies, surface minerals, water, and air rights. And this has meant that most once-private natural property is now under the surveillance of the land, resources, and animal police. Recently, after two years of caring for a pair of swans on my pond that might otherwise have become a meal for coyotes, I was shocked to see two smartly-uniformed federal officers from Wildlife Canada pull up in a brand new Jeep Cherokee. They served me with a $240 dollar fine for “keeping swans without a licence” (a $10 dollar fee I had failed to renew). Protestations that it was costing me plenty in food and in bubblers to keep my pond open in winter were for naught. And then, this past spring, in an attempt to purchase a piece of vacant land for a new home and put in a driveway, I was informed by several layers of bureaucracy that work could not begin until July, “after the birds have left their nests,” and that the one thing that would “absolutely stop the driveway” would be the discovery by a government inspector of a butternut tree in its path. My question, asked, I am ashamed to admit, in a somewhat tremulous voice: “Why are my birds to be more protected than my snakes, beetles, turtles, or worms?” produced a kind of “just wait and see” look from a bureaucrat. 

                                                                          ~

             By the close of World War II, the Macro form of violent fascism that had threatened to throw all of Europe under the jackboot was finally defeated, and one of its main lessons was that nature cannot be altered or extinguished by force from above for very long. In his bleak review of the various utopian carnages of the twentieth century, Professor Rudolph Rummel, in Death by Government (1996) verified about 50 million military deaths, but in addition an appalling 150 million legitimate citizens slaughtered by their own governments! In short, Macro-fascism, which started with a respectable reputation -- recall that Hitler was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938, and Mussolini was the hero of Western cocktail chatter -- ended with a very bad name. Despite these dark failures, however, the original manifestations of Macro-fascism as systems aiming to triumph over nature have continued in newer, more subtle and pervasive ways. No machine-guns required, so far. But places like Canada and Sweden are on the brink of becoming -- may already be -- Tripartite States in which one third of the people work to create wealth and jobs, one third works for government, and another third receives significant support from government. Anyone can see that the last two thirds will always gang up on the first – which is why no machine guns are required (all you need is democracy).  

            So it seems that in a pragmatic response to the dark failures of the Macro form, a softer Micro-fascism, also rooted in a much earlier intellectual tradition, has emerged slowly in the second half of the twentieth century, and is now in full bloom as our most pervasive and therefore most invisible political religion. It has produced an historically unprecedented type of polity characterized by a radically individualistic and autonomist ethic that nevertheless, and rather ironically seeks to organize itself as a national inventory of common public orthodoxies expressed, not as a collective triumph of the Will over nature, as in the past, but instead as the triumph of the Will of each and every individual over his or her own individual nature.  

            The most influential prophet of this revolutionary trend was the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who enunciated most clearly in his canonical booklet On Liberty (1859) the notion that liberty – and therefore morality - boils down to doing whatever you want to do as long as you do not harm someone else. It took a while, but Mill’s “harm principle,” although developed from a number of European ideas (most likely lifted from Article 4 of the French Revolution’s Declaration of 1789) slowly began to radiate outwards to infect all western nations, where it today operates as a corrosive solvent upon community morality by persuading millions of people that individual freedom of Will ought generally to be prior in importance to the common good. So powerful is the appeal of this new individual standard that it has been enshrined into the highest law by such as Canada’s Supreme Court (R. v. Labaye, 2005) as a replacement for community standards, and that Court specifically cited Mill’s harm principle as its authority. Just so, the myriad communities of the West seem to be fragmenting into a collection of millions of highly-regulated individuals who live within their own private moral bubbles. No need take notice of anyone else’s behaviour unless bubbles collide.

             In retrospect, it seems as if the deeply revolutionary Christian insistence on the moral freedom of each individual human being has continued apace, but in a mutated secular form especially visible in our tortured skewings of law and social policy to grant legal priority to private Will, or “choice.” This is doubly ironic, of course, because whereas our spiritual progenitors exercised their free Will to escape a dreaded slavery to their own natural bodily appetites and temptations, we now cite the sanctity of choice as our authority for indulgence in those same appetites. This new war of the Will against constraints, especially those on one’s own biological nature, has taken many forms, and what follows is a kind of fugue on that theme.

              Signs of the shift to radical individualism have been visible for a long time, especially in public disputes about “sovereignty,” which today has little to do with the admirable Western struggle to establish individual liberty within a politically and morally ordered polity. Rather, sovereignty, as we now conceive it has more to do with “rights” talk and with individual claims against the body politic; which is to say, with the demands of the imperial Self. To trace this path over past centuries is really to describe a halting line falling from heaven to earth: from God to Royalty, to Aristocracy (where it is still partly lodged in new and devious forms, such as on our judicial Benches), to “the people,” and finally ... to the solitary individual. The British historian George Gooch once observed that modern democracy is “a child of the Reformation,” because he had traced the rapid transformation of the original Protestant demand for individual spiritual autonomy, into a secular demand for political and personal autonomy. This went viral, as the saying goes, rather quickly, in quirky displays of antinomianism. During the English Revolution, for example, discontented soldiers in Cromwell’s army actually insisted that the Generals should be taking orders from the soldiers! But Gooch did not live to see the radical expression of this same trend in what  may be called our “hyperdemocracies” -- political regimes in which, against even all democratic logic, sovereignty and rights are believed to inhere primarily in individuals, rather than in their communities. “One man, one vote,” is now a slogan emblematic of the egalitarian democratic faith, but it would have shocked our forbears (who wondered why the vote of an idiot should cancel the vote of a genius), and is an indication of the downward historical trend of sovereignty, which has only come to a halt in our prisons: voting rights are granted even to convicted criminals in places like Canada, where no one bothers to ask why those who have demonstrated a preference for breaking the laws ought to have the right to determine them.

             Another hint of Micro-fascism at work is social atomization. Aristotle famously declared that we are all zoon politikon, or political animals who naturally affiliate in social groupings.  And yet paralleling the descent of sovereignty has been a startling growth in the “atomization” of the natural social molecule. There are now millions of “administered” individuals, each an entry in bits and bytes on the lockstep computers of the all-seeing State as well as in the electronic files of any corporation that can afford such information-gathering (often purchased from or provided by the State). When I was young, we had a family health card; we each now have an individual one, a process of individuation repeated in all walks of life, public and private, and now considered a normal and rational informational requirement of human organization. Ironically, although we have never believed ourselves to be more free, we are individually under near-total surveillance. Consider the spread of the RFID or “spychip,” a tiny “radio-frequency identification device” so small it can easily be placed almost anywhere. It is activated by a radio receiver-transmitter such that when you walk into a government building or your favourite department store the spychip inserted in your shirt, tie, bra, eyeglasses, or blue-jeans during manufacture will reveal lots of details on your whereabouts and behaviours.

           So much for the individuation of bodies. The real focus of the new Micro-war against nature is biology -- everything from the skin inward, especially sexual desires, reproductive matters and, for serious ideological reasons, the ultimate question of the existence or non-existence of human life. That is because in a regime of personal Will it is possible for an ideologically-inconvenient “other” to throw into jeopardy the elaborate moral and legal justifications of the regime itself. Whenever this looms as a real threat, the most urgent question then becomes: How can we make the threatening other disappear? For the truth is that in order to sustain ideological purity, many regimes in history -- we are no exception -- have been forced to make entire classes of humans disappear legally.  Most Greeks and Romans, for example, simply took for granted that their empires -- especially their democracies -- were impossible to sustain without chattel slaves whose labours freed citizens to participate in political life. But as no free person can in good conscience enslave another free human being, they had to invent a special category of law that transformed slave-humans into slave-things. My point is that the most egregious ancient as well as modern example of the triumph of the Will over nature is human slavery. It is a triumph that simply cannot be sustained without making a target class of natural human beings disappear. Although the transatlantic slave trade was the most recent commercial employment of this dark art, it is an art still very much in service to the ideological maintenance of our own hyperdemocracies.

           We see this slave-making technique in operation today where equality radicals have been forced to negate the natural and eternal biological differences between the genders. They have succeeded in arguing that in order to be equal citizens women have the right to triumph over the natural consequences of their own sexual behaviour by removing the natural burden of their own unwanted children. This could not be achieved, however, without first converting an entire class of human beings – the unborn -- into things, for which the legal weapon of the ancients was required. Accordingly, in order to attain to egalitarian purity, democratic nations have legally converted their unborn children into womb-slaves whom they declare to be non-human until born alive. A physician friend clarifies this technique by asking why, on one side of a one-inch thick hospital wall, physicians are spending a million dollars on high-tech professional skill to save and preserve the life of a premature baby, while on the other side more physicians are throwing an aborted baby of exactly the same weight and gestation into the garbage? Clearly, if at the right moment the two mothers were to make the opposing “choice”, the child to be saved would disappear, and the non-human child would suddenly become human. Clearly, the source of such existential prestidigitation is the naked Will of the mothers, whereby human life is created ex nihilo or extinguished, not via biology, but by Will alone. I am not judging this fact morally at the moment. I am simply trying to present the bald truth that as a political and moral extension of the Micro-fascist Will to triumph over nature, the western democracies, by ideological imperative, have adopted a legal technique for converting millions of human beings into things, and thus we have become slave-regimes of a new kind.   

            Another looming reality in our aging democracies is the growing clamour -- already achieved in some jurisdictions -- for the right to control natural death. Suicide means making yourself die. But other than the fact that to rest the ethos of a human society on a right of suicide would be to opt for something very dark indeed, we cannot object to nor very easily prevent this use of Will. Euthanasia, however, always means someone else has to make you die or help you die; someone living must be an instrument in the killing of another, regardless of how remotely. So here too, the Will, ever strident, is rising for mastery over nature. In the Netherlands there is now a group called “Out of Free Will” campaigning for the right of people over 70 who are “tired of life” to be euthanized. Clearly, this right implies a corresponding obligation upon another (usually an agent of the State) to do the killing required by such a law. The underlying logic is that just as we can create life, or make it disappear in the womb by Will alone, we ought to be able to end it by Will alone. Just so, the legal right to Will a kill, so to speak, is shaping up as the ultimate triumph over nature, because it means openly playing God. We do not want to play the God of the Good we grew up with, however. We have switched allegiance to a God of pure Will in whose image we shape the world as we please (on which more in the conclusion).  

            Wanting to be a godlet is not some modern trend, however, but rather an ever-present and once-heretical human desire. The freedom-loving Amaurians of the 13^th century, for example, declared that God was incarnate in each one of them, and the Adamites of the 15^th century believed themselves so pure and god-like they were incapable of sin. Their altered Lord’s Prayer began: “Our Father, who art in us, Thy will be done” (etc.), and their passion for adultery they considered a sacrament, good simply because freely-willed. In the 17^th] century Jacob Bauthelmy declared that God is in everything, in “this dog, this tobacco pipe, he is me, and I am him” (no capital H for egalitarian Gods). Many such voluntarists recommended promiscuity and adultery for “the subtle in spirit” whom they encouraged to indulge in “a paradise of the senses” without shame (as in the Garden of Eden), thereby to become “as free as little children once again.” One such fellow, Abeizer Coppe, promised that due to the conscienceless purity of his motives, all women who fornicated with him would become virgins once again (perhaps the craftiest sexual self-promotion ever invented).

           Of other biological aspects of nature over which we now seek a mastery of Will, there are too many to count. But one of them, “no-fault divorce” (“two to make it, one to break it”), considered purely as a social site for the expression of radical Will, has clean removed the natural contractual basis of marriage, thus returning us to the radicalism of the French Revolution during which the Jacobins argued that if the two spousal Wills are not in accord, then no marriage exists anyway. This has had the effect of subjecting both the union of marriage and the honest contractual intentions of observant spouses to the unilateral “choices” of disaffected spouses.

             More of the determination to triumph over nature is apparent in our gender-constructing, gender-bending, and gender-merging discourse, too, not to mention our choose-conception, choose time of birth, and choose a womb, a sperm, and an egg options. The theme here is that there is actually no binding natural order, because nature can be altered by Will. Perhaps the most tiresome inebriations of anti-biology logic are produced in egalitarian campaigns calling for laws and public funding to impose androgyny upon us, the most devout exponents of which insist on forcing boys to play with dolls, and girls with trucks. On this score, my feminist neighbour finally surrendered in good humour when, after six months of attitude-correction of her children, nature came galloping back: she caught her daughter putting her little red fire-engine to bed with a bottle. In Sweden, where the campaign against natural biology has been in full swing for half a century, the tax-funded Egalia pre-school invented and now enforces the use of a “genderless” pronoun. An Egalia “gender pedagogue” said (notice again the emphasis on the child’s Will) that this change gives the children “a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be.” Once again, purity of one’s own existence is imagined springing from the purity of unencumbered Will. In Toronto recently there was an uproar because two parents insisted on raising their 5-month-old child “genderless.” Such children, they claimed (same theme) would grow up as “whoever they want to be.” And in a kind of double-header, the international “autonomy rights” movement aims to recognize self-sovereignty even in minor children, and so wants to invoke the agents of the State to enforce such rights against parents. This combines Macro and Micro fascism in a single initiative. 

            Another disturbing aspect of the war against nature is modern “multicultural” policy. In the early twentieth century Julian Freund opined that only three things matter in politics: command and obedience; the public and the private; and the insider-outsider distinction. Deep culture is a product of this latter frankly illiberal, but deeply natural human tendency to bond socially according to widely-shared values as insiders creating outsiders. This means that wherever a deep culture exists and is upheld, people will naturally tend to assimilate to it, and the modern nation-state is a natural expression of this tendency.  Rather ironically, then, multicultural policy, which began as an earnest attempt to denaturalize this natural illiberal fact of life, has turned millions of citizens into cultural microfascists. For as the French critic Pascal Bruckner has observed, it has condemned hundreds of ethnicities to “house arrest in their own skins,” thus engendering an isolating “identity politics” that would have made the Nazis proud. In short, multiculturalism has mutated into multi-fascism, a trend that is creating mini-nations within nations, many of which, as in France, are now violent “no-go” zones for police. Nature has come galloping back again.

             Just how far does this Micro-fascist trend of extending Will over nature go? As far as the entire cosmos, it seems. In 1971 the American astronaut Alan Shepard was sufficiently irreverent to drive a golf ball 800 yards on the moon -- a gestural transfiguration of the solar-system into a personal playground. But the extension of Will over nature extends even farther. In the notorious Casey decision of the US Supreme Court of 1992 we heard for the first time that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This oft-quoted declaration betrayed an utterly unself-conscious confidence and conceit, whereby even cosmic meaning was declared subject to, a creation of, personal liberty, and wherein there lurks a right not simply to search for ultimate truth outside ourselves, but in a kind of cosmic inversion, to create it within ourselves. It was a pro-godlet ruling that subjected the meaning of all of nature and the universe to individual Will, while at the same time pulverizing that meaning into demos-bits.                     

          We may conclude by saying that our view of freedom and therefore of God have changed a lot. We used to say that because God is the ultimate Good and therefore can only do good things, we ought to follow suit. Freedom was obedience to the Good. But we have switched Gods to make life more convenient. We had to, because a regime resting on a foundational ideology of individual sovereignty requires a God of pure Will in whose image we can proceed to fashion ourselves with every personal choice. At such a point, with no external truth, the Good is absorbed into whatever is Willed. Will becomes truth, not in the body politic as Rousseau had hoped, but in each individual body, thus producing our millions of godlets. This switching of Gods constitutes a theological revolution in Western life with profound and as yet unforeseeable implications.  

The reason we don't have to wait is that free-market medicine and medical insurance for pets are not regulated or banned by our governement. Accordingly, there is a huge market in pet medical services and insurance, and most owners concerned about costs for animal medical care use their insurance to cover all readily-available veterinary/surgical/drug expenses for their beloved pets. There is lots of money for pet medical care, and so there is no waiting. None.

Also, the pet-euthanasia solution that Sean C. believes is so prevalent is usually used only when a pet is too sick or too old for surgery. It is sad but true that many pet owners love their pets more than some of their own friends and family, and will only put their pets down as a very last resort, to shorten their suffering. 

But the equivalent cornucopia of free-market medical providers and services is banned in places like Canada, North Korea, and Cuba, where it is is illegal for citizens to freely buy or sell the medical services that are "insured" (but not necessarily assured) by their governments. 

So you could argue, as I do, that under all government-controlled systems for rationing health care, citizens have suffered a transition from the human medical-care system they once enjoyed, to a veterinary medical-care system ... for humans.

The logic of this comparison is that just as pets have masters who decide how much to spend on their care, so now do alll human beings in countries where their political masters ration what medical care they are allowed to receive, and when. Canadians have had political medical masters for over four decades.

Furthermore, Canada, as far as I know, is the only country that regulates and rations the provision of government-controlled health care (most European countries also do this) while at the same time banning the provision of free-market care for the government's list of insured services. That is what permits me to argue that we have transitioned from human care, to veterinary care for humans. No other country offering a socialized medical system has gone this far. Not even the former Soviet Union! They all have an open "parallel" public as well as private system ... because: they value human freedom just as much as they wish to ensure that all citizens get medical care.

This is the solution Canada will be forced to adopt soon - a "mixed system." Not because we have actually come to grips with the original illegitimacy of controlling what citizens want to spend on their own health care, but for the mundane reason that socialized medicine (actually, anything socialized) will always gobble up increasing portions of the annual tax harvest and eventually bankrupt the jurisdictions that try it. Example? When Canada first switched to a veterinary medical system for humans four decades ago, the cost was about 15% of provincial budgets. Today so-called medicare in Ontario (just one exanmple) is fast-closing on 50%. That is the direction for all of Canada's provinces.

Go figure, as they say.