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Posted on January 6, 2024 by admin

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

Monday, January 1, 2024

Hier Stehe Ich! (“Here I Stand (I Can Do No Other”) — Martin Luther

Every year since I started Throne, Altar, Liberty I have, on the kalends of January which is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on the Church Kalendar and New Year’s Day on the civil calendar, posted an essay summarizing where I stand on matters political, religious and cultural, the subjects on which I write. It is a custom I adopted from one of my own favourite writers, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. I have often used Dr. Luther’s famous “Here I Stand” as the title in one language or another. This year it is the German original. Each year it is a challenge to write this anew because, while I hope my views have matured they have remained basically the same. Each year I have to resist the temptation to just point to T. S Eliot’s “Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, classicist in literature” and say ditto. I usually do make reference to Eliot’s famous self-description, which I read as a twentieth-century update of the definition of Tory that Dr. Johnson wrote for his dictionary, because it provides a handy frame on which to organize my thoughts.

Before getting into my views I will provide as usual some basic background information about myself. I am a patriotic citizen of Commonwealth Realm that is the Dominion of Canada and a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III as I was all my life prior to his accession of his mother of Blessed Memory, our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth II. I love my country’s traditional institutions, Loyalist history, and basically everything about Canada that the sniveling twit who currently occupies the Prime Minister’s Office either wishes we would forget or is endlessly apologizing for. I have lived all my life in the province of Manitoba, where I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, where I studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College – at the time it was Providence College and Theological Seminary – in Otterbourne which is a small college town south of the provincial capital, Winnipeg, where I have lived for the almost quarter of a century since.

Am I, like T. S. Eliot an “Anglo-Catholic in religion”? If by Anglo-Catholic you mean holding the theology expressed in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, the admirable collection published by John Henry Parker in the nineteenth century of the writings of the classical Anglican divines of the centuries previous including Lancelot Andrewes, the martyred King Charles I’s martyred Archbishop William Laud and the other Caroline Divines, the scholarly apologist for Trinitarian orthodoxy Bishop George Bull and the Non-Juror George Hickes, I would say yes. If you mean embracing the views of the Oxford Movement I would be more hesitant. I think that the most important thing Keble, Newman, Pusey et al. got right was that the truest and most important establishment of the Church was that by Christ through His Apostles rather than establishment by the state. I have far less sympathy for the tendency that manifested itself in some, not all, of them to look Romeward, to regret the Reformation for reasons other than that all schism that harms the visible unity of the Church is regrettable, and to regard the Anglican formularies with a “this will have to do for now” type attitude.

The Vincentian Canon, “that which is believed everywhere, at all times, and by all”, and its tests of antiquity (does it go back to the Apostles), universality (is it held throughout the Church in all regions and ages rather than particular to one time and place), and consent (was it affirmed by the Church’s leadership in a way that was subsequently received as authoritative throughout the Church) is in my view the right way of determining what is truly Catholic, not whether it has been declared dogma by the Patriarch of Rome or one of the Councils that his adherents have held since the Great Schism between East and West. I come from a family in which most of my relatives were either United Church (Presbyterian/Methodist) or Anglican, became a believer with an evangelical conversion when I was 15, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church while a teenager and confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult. As my theology matured I came to realize and respect the Symbols handed down from the ancient Church – the Apostles’ and Nicene (Constantinopolitan) Creeds and the Athanasian Symbol – as the basic definitions of Scriptural orthodoxy, to recognize that episcopalian Church government is not adiaphora but clearly established in the New Testament (the Apostles governed the whole Church, while it was localized in Jerusalem they exercised the authority Christ gave them to establish the order of deacons, after the Church was scattered they appointed presbyters or elders over the local Churches which seems to be something they borrowed from the synagogues, and as their ministries closed they passed on to others, Scriptural examples of which include SS Timothy and Titus their government over the Church including the power to ordain the lower orders), and that the ministers of the Church are priests (St. Paul explicitly states this of himself in the Greek of Romans 15:15) charged not with offering new sacrifices but with feeding the people of God with Christ’s One Sacrifice through the Sacramental medium of bread and wine.

Thus I am basically a High Anglican of the pre-Oxford type, with a Lutheran soteriology, and a fundamentalist-minus-the-separatism approach to basic orthodoxy who regards every article of the ancient Symbols taken literally as fundamental and the Bible as God’s written Word, by verbal, plenary inspiration, infallible and inerrant, which we are to believe and obey rather than to subject to “criticism” based on the false notion that because God used human writers to write the book of which He is the Author that it is a human book rather than a divine book. Criticism based on that false notion makes fools out of those who engage in it, whether it be the higher critics who think that the fact that Moses varied which name for God he used means that his books were slapped together by some editor after the Babylonian Captivity from previously separate sources despite the total lack of anything such as examples of these “sources” in a pre-“redaction” state of the type that would logically constitute actual evidence or the lower or textual critics who think that the most authentic text of the New Testament is not to be found in that that has been handed down in the Church as evidenced by the thousands of manuscripts she has used (these are of the Byzantine text type) but either in small handful of old manuscripts that were not in general use and were particular to one region (the Alexandrian text) or in something slapped together by text critics in the last century which can be found in no manuscript whatsoever (the eclectic text). Someone who makes the false idea that the Bible is a human book rather than God’s book the basis of his study of it will end up drawing unsubstantiated conclusions about it that no competent scholar would similarly draw about actual human books and will end up sounding like a blithering idiot. So expect me to thump the Authorized (1611) Bible as I tell you that salvation is a free gift that God has given to all us sinners in Jesus Christ, that the only means whereby we can receive it is faith, that faith is formed in us by the Holy Ghost through the Gospel brought to us in the Word and Sacrament ministered to us by the Church whose Scripturally established governors under her Head, Jesus Christ, are the bishops in whose order the ordinary governing office of the Apostles has continued to this day.

That I am a “royalist in politics” should already be evident from the second paragraph if it is not sufficiently evident from the title of my website. I will add here that I am also a monarchist. For some that will be a redundancy, the two terms being for them interchangeable. It is for the sake of others who distinguish between the two that I add that I am both. I am a much stronger monarchist than those Canadian conservatives are who are basically liberal democrats but who defend our monarchy because it is our tradition and make its non-interference with their real political ideal the sole basis of their argument. I have been instinctually a monarchist all my life. While C. S. Lewis famously said that monarchy is an idea easily debunked but those who debunk it impoverish and bring misery upon themselves (I am paraphrasing from memory, Lewis said it better than that) I have found as I have studied the matter over the years that monarchy is rationally defensible. Plato and Aristotle argued that the rule of true kings is the best of simple constitutions and I think their arguments still stand, just as I think that in our age the divisiveness, partisanship, and other evils that attend upon democratically elected government make an ironclad case for hereditary monarchy that makes the unifying figure at the head of the state one who does not owe his office to partisan politics. Thus I would say that we should be arguing that our monarchy is essential not that it is merely acceptable. The Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, makes a strong case for monarchy’s essential role in our constitution similar to that frequently made by Eugene Forsey.

I am grateful to Ron Dart for drawing my attention to these men and their books years ago. I find little to admire in the Modern ideal of democracy and defend instead the institution of Parliament for while Parliament is, of course, a democratic institution it is also a traditional one, a concrete institution that predates the Modern Age and has long proven its worth, which to me outweighs all the flimsy arguments Moderns make for democracy. Ultimately, I have found a sure and certain foundation for monarchism in orthodox Christianity. God is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the absolute Sovereign Ruler of His Creation, i.e., all other than Himself that exists. In the governance of the universe, we find the ideal form – think Plato here – of government, of which temporal earthly governments are imperfect representations and to which, the greater their conformity, the more their perfection will be. This is why the most orthodox forms of Christianity – traditional Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional Roman Catholicism, and the better kind of Lutheranism – saw Christian monarchy as the highest form of earthly civilization, and the least orthodox forms that can still be seen as Christian in some recognizable sense, Puritanism and Anabaptism, are the ones that contradicted the obvious implication of the title “King of Kings” by saying “no king but King Jesus”.

It is in the sense of someone who holds the views expressed in the previous two paragraphs and not in the common partisan sense of the word that I call myself a Tory. The words “conservative” and “right-wing” as they are used today, even by most who self-apply them, have had their meaning defined for them by the very liberalism and the Left they purport to oppose. Liberalism is the spirit of the Modern Age. It consists of the demand for ever increasing liberty (in the sense of individual autonomy) and equality, despite the fact obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that these two cannot be maximized at the same time. The universal homogeneity that it demands would if actualized be the ultimate form of totalitarian tyranny in which freedom, the real human good and not liberalism’s false ideal of liberty/individual autonomy, would be eliminated entirely. The Left also worships liberalism’s false gods and historically has differed from liberalism primarily in its notion of how to achieve their goal. A century ago the Left was identified primarily with socialism, the idea that all of man’s problems can be traced to economic equality arising out of the private ownership of property and are solvable by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with public ownership. From the standpoint of orthodox Christianity this is utterly repugnant because it misdiagnoses the human condition (the correct diagnosis is sin), prescribes the wrong medicine (the right medicine is the grace of God freely given to man in Jesus Christ), and is basically the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, disguising itself with the mask of the highest of the Christian virtues, charitable love.

Today, the Left is identified primarily with an expression arising out of American racial grievance politics, “wokeness”. “Wokeness” is like socialism in that it claims (generally falsely) to be the mouthpiece for the oppressed, but differs from socialism in that it it does not divide people into oppressor/oppressed by economic status (Marx’s “haves” and “have nots”) but by a legion of personal identities based on such things as race, sex, gender, etc. Some, such as Dr. Paul Gottfried, have argued on the basis of specific content that today’s Left is something totally different from the Left of a century ago, from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity there is a discernable continuity in the Left. Whether it speaks in terms of economics or in the terms of race and sex, the Left is an entirely destructive movement, driven by hatred of civilization as it historically has existed for not living up to the false and self-contradictory ideals of liberalism, that, whenever it has succeeded in tearing something down, has never been able to build anything good let alone better on the ashes of the good if not perfect that it destroyed. The orthodox Christian must condemn this utterly because it clearly displays the spirit of Satan who operates out of the same hatred directed towards God. Therefore I describe my orthodox Christian monarchist views as Tory and reactionary (in John Lukacs’ sense of the term, basically someone willing to think outside the Modern box, not by embracing the nihilism of post-Modernism but rather the good in the pre-Modern), preferring these terms over conservative which for the most part denotes a false opposition to liberalism and Left defined entirely by liberalism and the Left.

As for being a “classicist in literature” I think that if we take this to mean someone who seeks to learn from Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been thought and said” this is a goal that someone with the views expressed above can recognize as most worthy to pursue with regards not just to literature and reading, but to the other elements of culture such as music and the visual arts as well. It is also a difficult one to consistently follow as many are the enticements, more so today than ever before, to distract one from the classical heights of the Great Books and the Great Tradition into the murky swamps of corporate, mass-manufactured, pop culture. I have striven to follow this goal on and off again – it makes an excellent resolution for those who do that sort of thing today – with varying degrees of success at resisting the distractions. Perversely, I have found stubborn contrariness has often been a great motivator in this regards.

I read Mark Twain’s remark that a “classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read” years ago and thought to myself “Sez you, Sam Clemens” and set out to read nothing but classics, persisting in this for several months. Similarly, Thomas Fleming, the former editor of Chronicles Magazine several times enriched my reading habits with remarks about about books nobody was familiar with today prompting a “Sez you, Tom Fleming” response. Today, as the Left in its “woke” form as described in the previous paragraph has laid siege to the Great Books and the Great Tradition it is more important than ever to reacquaint ourselves with “the best that has been thought and said”. This is a far better and ultimately more effective way of resisting wokeness than generating and posting any number of anti-woke internet memes could ever be. So I resolve today once again to seek to elevate my reading, listening and viewing habits in 2024 and encourage you to do the same.

Happy New Year!

God Save the King! — Gerry T. Neal

Crime And No Punishment

Posted on August 4, 2023 by admin

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Crime And No Punishment

I recently returned to Winnipeg after visiting my father on his farm where the radio is constantly tuned to 880 CKLQ the country and western station out of Brandon. On the morning of the day I drove back they played a familiar classic by Merle Haggard, “Mama Tried”. The song is semi-autobiographical, written in reflection on the time the to-be country star served in San Quentin for an attempted robbery in Bakersfield. I say semi-autobiographical for while Haggard did indeed reach the age of majority in prison the sentence he was serving was nowhere near as severe as the lyrics suggest:

And I turned twenty-one in prison doin’ life without parole
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied
That leaves only me to blame ’cause Mama tried

When I listened to these familiar words again this time it occurred to me to wonder what on earth someone would actually have to do to be sentenced to life in prison without parole while still a minor. Even in 1957 when Haggard was convicted it would have had to have been a lot more than what he did. California was not as crime-friendly then as it is today but they would not have locked a minor up and thrown away the key for an unsuccessful break and entry in which no one was hurt, not even with all of his priors. His actual sentence was fifteen years of which he served three. Today, it is highly unlikely that anyone in any jurisdiction outside of Texas would receive such a sentence for a similar crime.

All across North America today, both in the United States and in my country, the Dominion of Canada, major cities have seen a massive rise in violent crime especially in, but by no means limited to, their downtown, core, neighbourhoods. More than one factor has contributed to this urban crime crisis, of course. One of the disturbing aspects about the crisis is that “unprovoked random attacks” by strangers, i.e., when someone you don’t know from Adam comes up to you and assaults you for no discernable reason, which were previously very rare, have spiked and account for a huge percentage of the crime wave. Two explanations for this jump to mind. The first is the vast increase in mental illness over the last three years induced by idiotic governments forcing people into social isolation for long periods of time in a failed and absurd attempt to protect them from a respiratory disease that in most cases had only mild symptoms and from which the vast majority fully recovered. The second is the increase in drug abuse, particularly of paranoia-inducing substances like crystal meth, which is partly due to the same thing that caused the uptick in mental illness, but which is also the result of stupid politicians having prioritized in their drug policy the making drug use safe for users over the safety of others who might be harmed by drug-induced violence.

These factors, while they help account for random stranger attacks, do not in themselves explain the larger urban crime crisis. Another factor that significantly contributes to the overall rise in urban crime is the soft-on-crime attitude promoted by the sort of people who like to think that being forward-minded, progressive, and liberal amounts to being enlightened and that they are therefore more enlightened than others. This attitude has in recent years been translated into various sorts of bad policies that are often described as “catch and release” or “revolving door”. These include sentences that are too short or too soft, parole being too easily obtained and too early, and, more recently, pretrial release being too easily obtained even with multiple prior convictions. This latter, due no doubt to its relative novelty, is the most discussed at the moment. In several American jurisdictions liberals have demanded and sometimes obtained the elimination of cash bail either entirely, as in Illinois as of New Year’s Day this year, or for all but the most heinous of crimes, as in New York four years ago. In Canada, criminal law falls under the jurisdiction of the Dominion government, even though in practice its day to day administration is carried out by the provinces, and so provincial premiers and legislatures cannot enact such policies within their own provinces the way American state governments can. Not that any of the current provincial premiers would want to do so. In January of this year all provincial and territory premiers signed a letter unanimously calling on the Dominion government to enact bail reform of the opposite sort to that of the just mentioned Illinois and New York examples, the toughening of bail laws to make it much harder for a repeat offender or one likely to repeat, to be released back into the public. Unfortunately, the Canadian politicians most in sync with American liberals in their thinking on this matter happen to be the ones in power at the Dominion level.

In 2018, while they still had a majority government, the Liberals introduced Bill C-75 which passed Parliament the following year. Bill C-75 contained a number of amendments to the Criminal Code and related legislation such as the Youth Criminal Justice Act. While I consider most, if not all, of these amendments to be bad, they fall into three categories. The first is those which are bad for reasons that are not germane to what we are discussing here, such as the lowering of the age of consent for anal sex. The second consists of amendments that limit the traditional rights of Canadians when accused of crimes. Examples include the near-elimination of preliminary inquiries (intended to speed cases through the court system this has the opposite effect and so infringes on the right to a speedy trial), the abolition of peremptory challenge in juror selection (this infringes as it was intended to do on the defense’s right to exclude those prejudiced against the accused from the jury system), and allowing police to testify via affidavit (this infringes on the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his accuser). What needs to be said about these amendments is that while they do not err in the direction of being soft-on-crime in the sense we have been discussing (1) they are not legitimate steps in the opposite direction either. There are a lot of people who confuse the rights of the accused with soft-on-crime but they are very different. The rights of the accused are there to protect the innocent from the abuse of the criminal justice system. They may, at times, result in a guilty person getting off, but they are based on the traditional conviction that for justice to fail in this manner is to be preferred over it failing by punishing the innocent, a conviction that is right and Scriptural (see Genesis 18). Soft-on-crime policies do not protect the innocent from wrongful accusation but are rather about lighter sentences for criminals that disregard the safety of the public. The third category consists of amendments of the soft-on-crime type. Examples of this include the hybridization of offences and the related reduction of sentences and, most relevantly, the amendments to the bail provisions of the Criminal Code. The stated purpose of the bail amendments was to make the earliest possible release the default outcome of an arraignment rather than detention, with fewer conditions and less requirements of cash, bond, or other surety. In other words it was very similar in intent to Cuomo’s experiment in bail elimination in New York around the same time.

It was similar in effect too and one consequence of that was the aforementioned unanimous letter by the premiers demanding that the Dominion government walk this back and make bail harder for repeat violent offenders. In May, David Lametti, who lamentably holds the portfolio of Minister of Justice and Attorney General in His Majesty’s government – lamentably because he has shown in numerous ways, the most recent being his favourable attitude towards criminalizing disagreement with the obviously distorted and easily debunked false official narrative about the Indian Residential Schools, that he ought not to be put in charge of the penalty box at a hockey game, much less the Ministry of Justice – responded to the premiers’ demands with Bill C-48 which proposed further amendments to the bail system. Unfortunately, but sadly not unpredictably, the “reform” that stands out the most is itself an egregious error of the sort contained in the second category of bad amendments in Bill C-75. This is the proposed reverse onus for repeat violent offenders. In other words, someone previously convicted of a violent offence, arrested a second time, would have to prove that he should be granted bail, rather than the Crown having to prove that it should be denied him. This is something that all the Justice and Public Safety Ministers – Dominion, provincial, territorial – called for when they met in Ottawa in March. Admittedly, this is a lesser offense against the principle of the presumption of innocence than reversing the burden of proof when it comes to guilt in an actual trial would be, but it still offends against the principle, opening the door for worse such offences. Indeed, an examination of Bill C-48 demonstrates that most of the proposed amendments are merely different variations on the idea of reverse onus. With all the possible ways out there of toughening up our policies towards crime without violating even in minor ways the ancient and sacred principles like the presumption of innocence that protect us all from abuse of the criminal justice system, this was the best the provincial governments could recommend and the federal government could come up with?

What is behind this push to implement policies that turn dangerous criminals back out into the streets as quickly as possible and to meet complaints about how this undermines public safety not by walking back said policies but by eroding the rights of the accused and the principles that underlie them?

We might say that it is an inversion in the priority of sympathies in which some people sympathize more with those who commit crime than with those who are its victims. This inversion manifests itself in a number of different ways. One of these is the liberal’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy and right of defending one’s self, one’s loved ones, and one’s property from criminals. Look at the current uproar over country and western singer Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town” and the accompanying video. The song’s lyrics talk about violent urban crime such as sidewalk assaults, carjacking, liquor store robbery, etc. and challenges the thugs who do these sort of things to “try that in a small town”. Sniveling idiots like Sheryl Crow have accused Aldean of “promoting violence” in the song and worse idiots have accused him of promoting “lynching” on the flimsy grounds that one had apparently taken place a century ago on the popular filming location where he shot the video. To normal people, the person who sucker punches someone on the sidewalk, the carjacker, and the liquor store robber are guilty of criminal violence, and someone fighting back in defense of himself and his community is using legitimate force. The distinction is lost on liberals – and people who whatever their politics have had their minds and souls destroyed by being brainwashed with human resources and public relations “education” – who use the word violence to describe people who exercise their God-given right of self-defense to repel criminal assaults with force but avoid using this word for the criminal assaults themselves. While this inversion would not be a wrong answer to the question, it is a description of the problem rather than an explanation for it.

We could say that it is a result, intended or otherwise, of sixty to seventy years of liberal and progressive crusading against discrimination. The population of prison inmates looks very different from the general population. This may be true of economic status. The imprisoned are far more likely to come from poverty than from wealth. Note, however, that the poorer outnumber the richer in the general population in any society. It is certainly true of race. In the United States the black percentage of the prison population is far higher than the black percentage of the general population. In Canada this same disparity exists between the representation of North American Indians in the prison population and the general population. By contrast, in both countries, the percentage of Asians in gaol is far lower than in the general population. It is also true of sex. Indeed, here the greatest disparity is to be found. In Canada, women represent on average about five percent of the incarcerated. In the United States it is higher, about eight to ten percent. In both countries, however, men are vastly overrepresented in the prison population if the basis of the comparison is their representation in the general population. Even though the disparity with regards to sex is much, much, greater than the disparity with regards to race, and greater still than the disparity with regards to economic status, it is never alluded to by those who demand the criminal justice system be reformed in a softer-on-crime way because it is unfair. Neither do they reference Asian underrepresentation. This is because both of these facts go against their narrative in which society and its structures are biased against women rather than against men and in favour of whites against all other races. Indeed, when it comes to the huge disparity with regards to sex, this not only goes against the narrative it rebuts it entirely. The reason men comprise ninety percent or higher of the prison population is because men commit ninety percent or higher of the crimes that land one in gaol. There is not really much of a dispute about this. Discrimination in the system, therefore, is not the cause of male overrepresentation in the prison population which is not really overrepresentation when the basis of comparison is what it should be, the percentage of males in the general population who commit crime. This suggests that something similar could be argued for the overrepresentation of blacks in the American prison population and of Indians in the Canadian prison population, a suggestion supported by the underrepresentation of Asians in the prisons of both countries, which can hardly be explained by a racial bias that favours whites against all others, and by statistics gleaned from the victims of crime as to the race of the perpetrator. Liberals and progressives treat any suggestion that the races overrepresented in the prison populations of Canada and the United States are not overrepresented when contrasted with the percentages of each race among the criminal perpetrator population rather than the general population, no matter how backed by facts and data that suggestion may be, as arising out of racism. Their actions, however, and the policies they support demonstrate that they do not really believe this, that on an unspoken level they acknowledge it, but in their need to be seen and to see themselves as sympathetic with American blacks, Canadian Indians, and, to switch to the economic status category, the poor, they blame the larger society for this. This makes them, of course, vulnerable to all the ugly accusations they hurl against others. Blaming the larger society for the overrepresentation of American blacks, Canadian Indians, and the poor is to deny agency to blacks, Indians, and the poor. Furthermore, justifying being soft-on-crime in the name of being fair to these groups, overlooks the fact that they are also overrepresented among the victims of crime. This is a fact that goes hand-in-glove with these same groups being overrepresented among the perpetrators of crime because the majority of crimes are in-group rather than perpetrated by members of one racial or socioeconomic group against members of another. Therefore, it is favouring soft-on-crime policies that is discriminatory against these groups, because even if American blacks and Canadian Indians are represented among perpetrators of crime at a higher percentage than they are represented among the general population, the majority of these groups are not criminals and all members of these groups, here including the poor, are at a higher risk of being the victims of violent crime than the general population, and so need the protection of hard-on-crime policies more. However, liberalism and progressivism’s misguided, ill-informed, and myopic crusade against discrimination, while it may explain the shape of the arguments currently used by soft-on-crime liberals and the policies they currently support, it does not explain the origin of their way of thinking.

This is so because liberals have been soft-on-crime for a lot longer than they have been obsessed with discrimination. In the “Enlightenment”, the seventeenth and eighteenth century movement away from the light of orthodox Christianity into the darkness of the superstitious idolatry of science and materialistic reason that took Puritanism, the anal retentive form of Calvinism and transformed it into liberalism, the anal retentive form of secular agnosticism, the early liberals decided that traditional criminal justice was barbaric and cruel both in its penalties – death for capital crimes like murder, corporal punishment, fines, public humiliation, exile and such for lesser crimes – and its underlying theory – that by breaking the law, criminals incurred a debt to society which they had had to pay. In place of the older penalties the early liberals wanted incarceration to become the default penalty for crime which they achieved in the nineteenth century. In the traditional system gaol was merely for holding the accused until trial, long term imprisonment was reserved for political prisoners. Punishing people for their crimes, the liberals said, was not justice but revenge. This is nonsense. In all the ancient accounts of the origins of the traditional criminal justice system, from Aeschylus’ tragedic account of the origins of jury trials in his retelling of the myths of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes in the Oresteia to the account of the establishment of refugee cities in ancient Israel in sacred Scripture, the criminal justice system was not based on revenge but implemented to curb the lust for revenge and protect societies from out of control cycles of vengeance. Although obviously, for criminal justice to do this, it must legitimately satisfy the need which blood vengeance seeks to satisfy in an illegitimate manner – unsuccessfully as its tendency to get out of control indicates – there is a careful and clear distinction between the two. In revenge, a wrong doer’s debt is owed to the victim or his kin, and they exact it from him to the extent that they are able and that they themselves see fit. Under justice, the debt is owed to the laws of society, it is not exacted by those with a personal stake in the case but by the lawfully appointed court and its officers, guilt has to be investigated and established and the accused has the right to present his own case, and the law places limits on the penalties that can be exacted. The Lex Talionis – “an eye for an eye” – whether enshrined in the Code of Hammurabi or the Law of Moses is in its fundamental nature, a limit on the penalty someone can be made to pay for injury to another. The principle underlying it is that expressed by Cicero in De Legibus III.4, noxiae poena par esto, more commonly remembered as the Roman legal maxim culpae poena par esto which means “let the punishment fit the crime” (or “offense” in Tully’s wording). By treating the traditional system of criminal justice as being the very thing it was designed to limit, prevent, and replace the liberals committed a most impious injustice against multiple generations of their ancestors stretching back to antiquity. They argued that making a criminal pay for his offence must not be the goal of the criminal justice system, that the only acceptable goals were deterring others from committing similar crimes and reforming or rehabilitating the criminal. This was the original liberal soft-on-crime attitude.

C. S. Lewis answered this earlier version of the liberal soft-on-crime attitude in an essay entitled “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” that was originally published in The Twentieth Century in 1949 and later included in the collection of his essays posthumously edited and published by William Hooper as God in the Dock in 1976. Lewis clearly felt very strongly on the matter – he alluded to it in later essays, asked T. S. Eliot to write an essay about it in a letter in 1962, and included a discussion of it in his novel That Hideous Strength. What made Lewis’ response so interesting is that he based his case against the progressive view to which he gave the name found in the title of his essay and his defense of the traditional view on the argument that the progressives’ humanitarian theory failed on the very point on which it claimed superiority over the traditional view, that is, treating offenders in a humane, dignified manner. Its advocates think it “mild and merciful” but in reality it “disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end”. Removing the concept of “desert”, i.e., the offender getting what he deserves as punishment for his crime from the picture, removes “the only connecting link between punishment and justice” so that without retributive justice, rehabilitative justice is not justice at all. By treating crime as essentially pathological and the courts and prison system as essentially therapeutic, the progressive humanitarian theory opens the door to excessive punishment by transferring the decision as to the fate of the convicted into the hands of “technical experts” trained in “special sciences “which “do not even employ such categories as rights and justice”. These, since they are operating under the idea that they are curing the criminal rather than punishing him, are not bound by the limits which justice places on what punishment can be exacted from a criminal and will keep on until they are convinced he is cured. Lewis argued that this theory made it possible for good men to act “as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants” or “even worse” because “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive” since “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience” and while they “may be more likely to go to Heaven” they are also “likelier to make a Hell of earth”. Lewis argued that far from being “humane” the system advocated by the progressives in the name of humanitarianism treated law breakers as less than human. This seems indisputable. The traditional system treated the criminal as responsible for his actions and so owing a debt the payment of which squared the criminal with the law and society. The progressive humanitarian system denies responsibility to the criminal and keeps his crime dangling above his head forever as the experts who “cured” him keep perennial watch lest he have a “relapse”.

Lewis’ answer to the humanitarian theory, since it addresses it on the level of its fundamental injustice, is an answer that would stand even if the experiment in “curing” criminals had been one hundred percent successful. The experiment has not been successful. It has rather proven to be a colossal failure. Yes, people have gone to prison and come out reformed. Merle Haggard, referred to at the beginning of this essay, is an example. His reformation in San Quentin, however, had less to do with the prison’s rehabilitation system working than with its retaining part of the older retributive system. California did not abolish the death penalty until 1972. Haggard was sent to San Quentin while Caryl Chessman was serving his last days on death row there before his execution in 1960. Chessman’s early life, with the experience of being in and out of detention, initially for petty crimes, later for more serious ones, mirrored Haggard’s in some ways. Later, however, he had been convicted of the “Red Light Bandit” crimes, a series of robberies and rapes that had taken place in the Los Angeles area in 1948, and sentenced to death. By Haggard’s own testimony it was the experience of being caught brewing liquor in San Quentin and sent to “the shelf” – a row of solitary confinement cells in the same part of the prison as death row – where he saw Chessman, awaiting his execution, and this scared him straight. He was rehabilitated in prison, but not by the prison, at least not in the direct sense that liberal supporters of the rehabilitation theory had in mind. Others have entered prison and for various reasons – being further corrupted by worse criminals themselves, being hardened by prison culture and as a necessity for survival, etc. – have ended up worse than when they went in. According to a research summary entitled “The effect of prison on criminal behaviour” published by Public Safety Canada in November 1999 which looked at 50 studies involving 300 000 offenders “None of the analyses found imprisonment to reduce recidivism”.

The liberal and progressive attitude towards how society should deal with crime and criminals has consistently been based on the conceit that their ideas are more “humane”, “enlightened”, “kind”, “compassionate”, et cetera ad nauseam than anything that preceded them no matter how ancient and time-tested-and-proven. Initially, this manifested itself as the idea that it is more “humane” to treat criminals as rats in a social experiment in rehabilitation in prison laboratories than to treat them as men, responsible for their actions, who owe a debt to society and society’s laws. Later, as the progressive conceit evolved from an attitude of superiority to the past and the civilization we have inherited from it to one of hatred for said past and civilization, it manifested itself in the idea that the criminal is the true victim, the real blame belongs to civilized society, and so civilized society must be made to pay rather than the criminal, who should be released into the rest of society as soon as possible with as few conditions as possible. The progressive mind has proven remarkably resistant to the abundance of evidence demonstrating these ideas to be the very opposite of “humane” and “enlightened”. For people who are always shooting their mouths off about their “compassion” and demanding that various groups be made “safe” from words and ideas that offend them they are extremely blithe about how their absurd policies make everyday life less safe from the threat of actual physical harm due to violent crime in our cities.

Ultimately, the liberal and progressive conceit goes back to the superstition they imbibed during the period that would more appropriately called the Darkening rather than the Enlightenment. Having transferred their faith from the True and Living God to the idol of science, they no longer recognized that the True and Living God, in Whom both Perfect Justice and Perfect Mercy are untied without compromise, has delegated authority to two earthly institutions, to one of which He gave a sword and charged it with the exercising of Justice, to the other of which He gave a pulpit and an altar and charged it with bringing His Mercy and Grace to people all of whom are offenders under Divine Law. The State, consisting of the king and his ministers, an earthly depiction of the government of the Universe, God as King of Kings, served by His ministers in Heaven, for which reason king-headed government is the only legitimate form of the State, was given the sword of Justice, but Justice that was to be tempered with Mercy, for which reason kings and the courts that act in their name have always had the power of clemency and pardon. The Church, consisting of the Apostolic priesthood and the congregations of baptized Christians they shepherd, brings God’s Mercy and Grace to the sinful world by preaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments. While the Church’s ministry is primarily one of Mercy and Grace, as the State’s ministry is primarily one of Justice, just as the State must temper the Justice it exercises with Mercy, so the Church’s Apostolic leadership has been given the keys – the power of excommunication – to exclude from the ministration of Grace those who defiantly persist in rebellious and open sin until such time as they repent. No longer recognizing the God from Whom the authority of Church and State alike are derived, liberals and progressives reject the Church and have replaced divine Mercy and Grace with inferior human substitutes the burden of distributing which they have placed on the State, the divine authority of which they have sought to replace with democratic power, the power of the mob. Idols always fail those who worship them, however, and it has become abundantly clear that liberalism’s efforts to create a new justice superior to the old and more merciful after cutting itself off from the Source of true Justice and Mercy have failed and unleashed upon our civilization the opposite of both Justice and Mercy.

It is about time that we as a civilization turned our backs on liberalism forever and returned to the True and Living God, Who is Merciful and Gracious to all who turn to Him in repentance and faith, but has given to the State the sword to punish crime and expects it to be used for the safety of us all.

The Fifth Article – The Victory of the Christ

Posted on May 5, 2023 by admin

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, April 14, 2023

The Fifth Article – The Victory of the Christ

In our discussion of the fourth Article of the Creed we noted that the Creed speaks only to the what of the Son of God’s suffering, crucifixion, death, and burial for us, and not the question of how this accomplished our salvation. We looked at the controversies that arose over this question long after the period which gave us the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds. I mentioned that the late Eastern Orthodox Metropolitan Kallistos Ware had offered a number of helpful questions for evaluating the different theories or models proposed to answer this question and applied the first of those questions, “does in envision a change in God or us?” to the Anselmic model of satisfaction and subsequent models derived from Anselm’s such as the Reformation model of penal substitution and observed that the Metropolitan’s question shows us how far to take the language of analogy employed by these models. Metropolitan Ware’s third question was “does it isolate the Cross from the Incarnation and the Resurrection?” It is a weakness in the model if it does this and so it is good to observe again that in the Greek and Latin original texts of both Creeds the third, fourth, and fifth Articles are part of the same sentence.

That the Cross should not be isolated from the Resurrection is of particular importance when it comes to the subject of the Victory of the Christ. The Cross should never be thought to have been a lost battle before a final victory. In both the Cross and the Resurrection Jesus Christ is Victor. On the Cross Christ’s victory was accomplished but concealed, in the Resurrection Christ’s victory is openly revealed.

It is important to keep this in mind when we consider the fifth Article of the Creed. In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed this Article reads καὶ ἀναστάντα τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ κατὰ τὰς γραφάς which is rendered in the English of the Book of Common Prayer as “and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures”. The phrase κατὰ τὰς γραφάς or “according to the Scriptures”, taken from St. Paul’s summary of the Gospel he preached in 1 Corinthians 15 was not present in the original Nicene Creed but was added by the Council of Constantinople. The Apostles’ Creed does not include this phrase and it begins with a phrase not found in the conciliar Creed. The Latin text of the Apostles’ Creed is descendit ad inferos, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis which in the English of the Book of Common Prayer is “He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.”

While there are some who think that the traditional division of the Articles is mistaken in assigning descendit ad inferos to the fifth Article with the Resurrection rather than the fourth with the suffering, Crucifixion, death and burial, this viewpoint is wrong. The descent belongs with the Resurrection as part of the open revelation of the victory of Christ. We shall address this at length momentarily. First, however, the Modern controversy over the descent clause and its translation needs to be addressed.

The traditional English translation of descendit ad inferos as we have seen is “He descended into hell”. Squeamish Moderns dislike this translation and have suggested such alternatives as “He descended to the dead”. While this would not be a mistranslation of the clause taken in isolation from what precedes and follows it, it is not a good translation of the clause in its context. When, later in the clause “the dead” is incontrovertibly used to denote those from among whom He rose again, it is a mortuis in Latin, not ab inferorum. This is the ordinary way of saying “the dead” in Latin. The adjective inferus means “lower” or “below”, and the masculine plural when used as a substantive as it is in the Creed literally means “those below”. This was understood by Latin speakers to mean the souls of the dead who were “those below” because they were in the underworld. While it was more common to use the neuter plural to indicate the place and the masculine plural to indicate its inhabitants the one implied the other. The traditional translation of “hell” is better than “the dead” here because following “was crucified, dead, and buried” and preceding “The third day he rose again from the dead”, “He descended to the dead” does not really say anything in English that is not already affirmed in these other clauses.

Some evangelical teachers have rejected this clause and the doctrine of the Descent into Hell for reasons other than the Modern squeamishness referred to in the previous paragraph. Wayne Grudem, past president of the Evangelical Theological Society and the author of a very popular one-volume Systematic Theology, has said that this clause should be removed from the Apostles’ Creed. John Piper has said that he omits the phrase when reciting the Creed. Both claim that the doctrine lacks Scriptural attestation, a position that can only be taken by those who assert that “Hell” can only refer to the punishment of those who finally reject their redemption in Jesus Christ and should not be used of the Hebrew שְׁאוֹל‎ (Sheol) or the Greek Ἅιδης (Hades), i.e., the underworld, the land of the dead. This is an untenable and absurd position for many reasons. For one thing, in Old English the word Hell had the same meaning as its Danish, Germanic, and Norse cognates which all derived it from their common proto-Germanic root, and that meaning was identical to that of the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades. For another, it retained this meaning after it came to be also used for what the Book of Revelation calls the Lake of Fire, and continues to have both meanings in the general culture to this day. Finally, the concepts of Hades and the Lake of Fire while distinct are not so unrelated that a common term cannot serve for both. Hades is the realm of the dead and death throughout the Scriptures is the punishment for sin (Gen. 2:17, Ez. 18:20, Rom. 6:23). After the Book of Revelation describes Death and Hades as being cast into the Lake of Fire it says that the Lake of Fire is the Second Death. That Jesus was in Hades between His death and Resurrection is a fact found in the very first Gospel sermon preached by St. Peter after the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles on Pentecost (Acts 2:24-31).

Grudem and Piper are both Reformed in their theology, that is to say, adherents of the version of Protestant theology enshrined in the canons of the Synod of Dort. This type of theology is often called Calvinist, although it arguably owes more to Theodore Beza’s interpretation of John Calvin than to John Calvin himself. Beza was an early proponent of excising the Descent clause from the Apostles’ Creed. Calvin was not himself in favour of this, but his interpretation of the clause was very different from the traditional understanding. He understood the Descent into Hell to refer to Christ’s suffering the penalty for sin as man’s substitute. Interpreted in this manner, it must either a) refer to Christ’s sufferings on the Cross up to and including but completed by His death or b) mean that the payment for man’s sin was not complete when Jesus died and had to be completed in Hell. The second of these is so obviously unacceptable that the only person I can think of who actually taught it was a very heretical televangelist. Calvin understood it the first way. If this is what “He descended into hell” means, however, then it is rather conspicuous for being the only item in a long list of otherwise consecutive events not to chronologically follow what preceded it. Calvin’s fundamental error here was that he, with his lawyer’s mind, focused solely on Hell as a legal penalty for sin and so read the Descent into Hell as part of Christ’s Passion, His voluntary submission to suffering and death for us. In a long tradition going back to the Fathers, however, the ancient Churches – including the ones that do not make liturgical use of the Apostles’ Creed – have understood it to be the first step in Christ’s Exaltation rather than the last in His Humiliation, as part of His Resurrection rather than His Passion.

To understand the traditional view of the Descent, it is best to personalize death, that is to say, to think of Death as a person. Since St. Paul does this in 1 Corinthians 15 (vv. 26 and 55) and St. John does this in the Apocalypse (6:8) there should be no objections to this on Scriptural grounds. Then think of Hell – in the sense of Hades, the underworld, as Death’s kingdom. To be more precise, think of Hell as one of Death’s two kingdoms, the other being the Grave. In the Grave Death holds the bodies of men captive, in Hell he holds captive their souls. God decreed to man in his Innocence that if he disobeyed God he would die. Thus Death has a claim on the bodies and souls of all who sin. Adam sinned and passed sin on to his descendants so that Death claimed them all (Rom. 5:12ff – another passage in which Death is personalized). Then the Son of God became Incarnate as a man. Born of a Virgin, He was the promised Seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15), Who inherited human nature but not Adam’s sin, nor did He, although He endured Temptation (Matt. 4:1-11, Lk. 4:1-13, Mk. 1:13), sin Himself (Heb. 4:15). Death, therefore, had no claim on Him. He, however, Who was without sin, allowed the sins of the world to be placed upon Him (2 Cor. 5:21, I Peter. 2:24) and voluntarily submitted to arrest, trial, scourging, crucifixion, and death. That His submission was voluntary is stressed in the Scriptures – the Prophet Isaiah declaring in prophecy that He would be led like a Lamb to the slaughter and open not His mouth (Isaiah 53:7) and He Himself told St. Peter in Gethsemane that He could call upon His Father to send more than twelve legions of angels to His rescue (Matt. 26:53). This is important because, again, the Passion of the Christ was not a temporary defeat before the final victory, although it had that outer appearance. The Passion was Christ’s Victory. By voluntarily submitting to all this injustice He forced Death to claim the body and soul of Someone over Whom Death had no claim – and Who, being God as well as Man, Death could not possibly keep captive. When Death claimed Him, he forfeited his claim on anybody else. So when Christ entered Hell, Death’s kingdom, it was not as captive but Conqueror. He had already defeated Death, and was now revealing that victory, first of all to those whom Death had held captive in Hell and whose liberty He had just secured.

This is the understanding of this event that can be found throughout the pages of the Patristic writings and in artistic depictions in Church buildings around the world. The typical portrayal of the “Harrowing of Hell” in art features the Gates of Hell smashed to pieces, on top of a figure who may be either the personalized Death or the devil, with Christ, often standing on the smashed Gates, extending His arms to a procession of the captives He has liberated, led by Adam and Eve.

The next step in the revelation of Christ’s Victory was the Resurrection itself, linked with the Descent into Hell in the Apostles’ Creed, and the sole event mentioned in the fifth Article of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Unlike the Descent, historically controversy over the Resurrection had been between believers and unbelievers, over whether or not the event took place, rather than between believers over the interpretation of the event. In the last century or so liberals have re-interpreted the Resurrection by saying that it meant that Jesus lived on in the hearts of His followers while His body remained in the Tomb but this too is a controversy between believers and unbelievers, since such liberals are not believers, but unbelievers trying to disguise their unbelief as faith. If you do not believe that after Jesus literally died on the Cross, and was buried in the Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, on the third day His spirit and body were re-united, His body was restored to life, and He left the Tomb empty of all but His grave clothes, you do not believe in the Resurrection.

In the Resurrection, Jesus was raised from the dead in His body, but not merely to the same state in which He was prior to His death. His body also underwent a transformation. The same will be true of everybody else in the Final Resurrection on the Last Day. St. Paul in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians explains this in terms of the analogy of a grain planted as a seed. The grain “dies” when it is planted, and springs to new life as a plant. The Scriptures do not spell out all the details of the difference between pre-death and post-Resurrection life. In His encounters with His followers after the Resurrection Jesus was recognizable, although in some instances, such as with Mary Magdalene in the garden outside the Tomb (Jn. 20:14-16) and the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Lk. 24:13-31) the recognition was not immediate. This could indicate that His outward appearance was altered in some way, although the nail prints in His hands and the spear wound in His side remained (Jn. 20:27). The most important difference is that prior to His death His body was mortal, after His Resurrection it was incorruptible, no longer subject to disease, decay and death.

Like the Creation of the world, the Resurrection is represented in Scripture as an act in which the entire Trinity was involved. While most often the Scriptures speak of God the Father as the Agent Who raised Jesus His Son from the dead, Jesus did speak of actively raising Himself from the dead (most obviously John 10:17-18 but this is also the import of His saying that He would raise the Temple in three days), and St. Peter speaks of the Holy Spirit as the Agent in the Resurrection (1 Pet. 3:18). St. Paul also speaks of the Holy Spirit in connection with the Resurrection in Romans and his wording may suggest that the Spirit’s role was instrumental in a way similar to that of the Son in Creation.

When St. Paul wrote “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Rom. 10: 9) he summarized the Gospel with the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the one Gospel truth that contains all the others. That God raised Jesus from the dead necessarily means that Jesus had to have died, and for Him to have died means that He had to have come down from Heaven and become Incarnate as a Man. As well as encapsulating the entire Christian faith in a single truth, the Resurrection is the evidence of the truth of the faith. When Jesus was asked for a sign to prove His claims for Himself and His authority to do the things He did it was the Resurrection to which He pointed when He spoke of Himself building up the Temple after three days and the sign of the prophet Jonah. As the evidence for the truth of the Christian faith as a whole, the Resurrection remains one of the best attested facts of history being attested not only by an abundance of evidence of the legal-historical type – such as the eyewitness testimony summarized by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 – but by nature itself. The Resurrection took place on the third day after the Crucifixion, and the Crucifixion took place on the Jewish Passover, which falls on the Ides of the month the Hebrews originally called Aviv – spring. Spring is the season in which the trees bud and grow leaves, the flowers bloom and the grass turns green, the birds come back and animals awake out of hibernation after winter, the season of coldness, barrenness, death and decay. While rationalistic skeptics have tried to write the Resurrection off as another myth symbolizing the renewal of life and fertility in spring after the barrenness of winter, they got this exactly backwards. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a historical event that occurred at a known time, in a known place, in a province of the largest empire of the civilized ancient world. Therefore the natural renewal of life in springtime to which countless pagan myths point must itself have been made by nature’s Creator, God, to point to the Resurrection of His Son. (1)

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the basis of our hope as believers. To the ancient pagans Hell – the underworld – was the final destiny of all people, the wicked and the just alike, after death. In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses, visiting the underworld before death, encounters the other Greek heroes of the Trojan War, including Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes, who gloomily tells him that it is “better to serve on earth than rule in hell”. The hope of the pagans, such as it was with this gloomy worldview, was to achieve glory that would survive them in this world. In the Old Testament, Hell – Sheol –similarly awaits all after death, but there are passages that indicate that this is only a temporary destination. Job expresses the hope that he will be raised from the dead, King David expresses similar hope in several of the Psalms, and Daniel spells out clearly that at the end of time the dead will be raised to either everlasting joy or everlasting shame depending on the outcome of the Last Judgement. In Christianity, the Old Testament hope of resurrection was made solid and certain by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the first fruit of the Final Resurrection. In the closing chapters of the Apocalypse St. John gives his vision of a new heaven – the heaven visible to the eye – and a new earth, that will replace the old heaven and earth, to which the New Jerusalem, the City of God, which is basically the same thing as the heaven that is invisible to the eye, i.e., the location of God’s throne, the place of His immediate presence, will descend to the earth, and so heaven and earth will be one Kingdom of God. The hope of the believer is not bliss in a disembodied state but to be raised bodily to live in this Kingdom of God on the New Earth, or, as N. T. Wright puts it, not life after death, but life after life-after-death. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the pledge to the believer of his certain hope to participate in this resurrection. Indeed, even in this life we are told to consider ourselves, who have been baptized into Christ’s death, to be raised with Him into newness of life, and so His Resurrection is the basis of the faith in which we walk, as well as of our ultimate hope.

(1) The realization of this is what brought C. S. Lewis to his conversion to Christian faith. — Gerry T. Neal

Technocracy Triumphant — Manitoba Court Cancels The Charter Rights You Thought You Had

Posted on October 29, 2021 by admin

THRONE, ALTAR, LIBERTY

THE CANADIAN RED ENSIGN

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2021

Technocracy Triumphant — Manitoba Court Cancels The Charter Rights You Thought You Had

Taking the attitude “who am I to judge” is, under many circumstances, appropriate and admirable. There is one circumstance, however, when it is extremely inappropriate and reprehensible. That is when you are a justice of Her Majesty’s bench before whom one person or group has brought another person or group, complaining that the latter has injured them in violation of the law and asking you for redress of their wrongs. If you happen to be in that situation then your job – your only job – is to hear the case, weight the evidence, and issue a ruling, in short – to judge. To plead humility as an excuse for not doing so is to abandon your duty.

Earlier this year, in the late spring, Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba heard evidence that lawyers representing the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms presented on behalf of the Gateway Bible Baptist Church in Thompson, along with six other congregations, two ministers and one other individual in two related but distinct constitutional challenges to the provincial bat flu public health orders. (1) One of these challenged the sweeping powers with insufficient accountability that had been given to the Chief Public Health Officer. The other challenged portions of the public health orders themselves on the grounds that they violated the fundamental freedoms named in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such a way as could not be justified by the “reasonable limitations” clause of the Charter’s Section 1. The evidence in these challenges was heard in May. After taking the summer to deliberate or take a vacation or go for the world’s record in thumb twiddling or whatever, last week on the twenty-first of October Chief Justice Joyal finally ruled in these cases. For the purposes of distinction the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of the powers of the Chief Public Health Officer will be called “the first ruling” and the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of portions of the orders will be called “the second ruling”.

The Chief Justice ruled against the applicants in both cases. In one sense, however, the second ruling could be called a non-ruling. In paragraph 292 we find the following:

I say that while recognizing and underscoring that fundamental freedoms do not and ought not to be seen to suddenly disappear in a pandemic and that courts have a specific responsibility to affirm that most obvious of propositions.

This is very good and right. The problem is that the next sentence begins with a “but.” Apart from the bad grammar involved – Chief Justice Joyal is old enough to have still had the rule never to begin a sentence with a conjunction like “but” drilled into him in grade school – buts have this nasty habit of leading into material that completely negates everything that precedes the “but”. Here is what followed:

But just as I recognize that special responsibility of the courts, given the evidence adduced by Manitoba (which I accept as credible and sound), so too must I recognize that the factual underpinnings for managing a pandemic are rooted in mostly scientific and medical matters. Those are matters that fall outside the expertise of courts. Although courts are frequently asked to adjudicate disputes involving aspects of medicine and science, humility and the reliance on credible experts are in such cases, usually required. In other words, where a sufficient evidentiary foundation has been provided in a case like the present, the determination of whether any limits on rights are constitutionally defensible is a determination that should be guided not only by the rigours of the existing legal tests, but as well, by a requisite judicial humility that comes from acknowledging that courts do not have the specialized expertise to casually second guess the decisions of public health officials, which decisions are otherwise supported in the evidence.

This constitutes an abdication of the very responsibility he had just acknowledged. If fundamental freedoms still exist in a pandemic, and it is the court’s special responsibility to affirm this, this means that the court cannot defer to the public health authorities, the medical experts, on the question of whether their own measures are reasonable and justified. If civil authority A is accused of trampling on the public’s fundamental freedoms, and the court defers to the expertise of civil authority A on the question of whether the latter’s actions are reasonable and justified, this translates into “civil authority A can do whatever he sees fit, there are no limits on his powers to which the court will hold him accountable”. Indeed, saying that courts should be guided not just by the “rigours of the existing legal tests” but a “humility” that forbids them to “casually second guess” the decisions of public health officials is tantamount to saying that medical science is a higher authority than the law. (2)

In the sections of the ruling that immediately follow the paragraph from which we have quoted, we see what this “judicial humility” looks like in practice. In these pages Chief Justice Joyal considers the question of whether the public health orders meet the standards of the Oakes test. The Oakes test was established by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1986 to determine whether legislation or other government action that infringes upon Charter rights and freedoms is nevertheless permitted under the “reasonable limitations” clause. To pass, the infringement must first be shown to serve a “pressing and substantial objective”. Second, the infringement must be show to be proportional, which means that it must a) be shown to be rationally connected to the objective, b) be shown to only minimally impair the right(s) and/or freedom(s) in question and c) be shown to provide a benefit to the public that is greater than the harm done by impairing the right(s) and/or freedom(s). (3) For each of the stages of this test, the Chief Justice essentially takes the position that because Brent Roussin decided, after weighing all the information available to him, that each public health order he issued was what was necessary at the time, therefore the orders meet the standards of the test. Such a ruling in effect declares that Brent Roussin, as Chief Public Health Officer, is above the law insofar as he is acting in the capacity of his office. If the court defers to him as to whether his actions in the capacity of his office meet the standards of constitutionality set in the Oakes test or not, then he is above the Oakes test and the Charter and cannot be held accountable to either.

The ramifications of this extend far beyond the issues pertaining to the public health orders and the pandemic. What it means is that while we remain in form the country that we were, governed by a parliament under the reign of a constitutional monarch, in which Common Law and Charter nominally protect our rights and freedoms, in actual practice we have become a medical technocracy.

Anyone inclined to think that this is a good thing, or even a tolerable thing, is invited to consider the words of C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. (God in the Dock, 1948)

This description fits the rule of medical technocrats to a tee.

That a de facto medical technocracy is inimical to the freedom that permeates our parliamentary form of government, our constitutional monarchy, and the Common Law is the real issue at the heart of the other challenge. This was the challenge to the constitutionality of the provincial legislature’s having named Brent Roussin dictator, with Jazz Atwal as his Master of Horse, for the duration of the pandemic, which had to be framed, of course, as a challenge to the sections of the Manitoba Public Health Act (2009) which provided for this situation. These are sections 13 and 67. Section 67 empowers the Chief Public Health Officer to take special measures if he “reasonably believes” that “a serious and immediate threat to public health exists because of an epidemic or threatened epidemic of a communicable disease” which “cannot be prevented, reduced or eliminated” without the special measures. Section 13 allows him to delegate his own power under the Act to a deputy.

Chief Justice Joyal ruled that this two-fold delegation of power, first from the legislature to the Chief Public Health Officer, second from the latter to his deputy was constitutional. In the course of explaining his decision he made a number of statements that suggest a troubling sympathy with the technocratic impulse of the age. He gave his approval to the province’s claim that with the “emergence of new threats such as SARS, West Nile, monkey pox and the avian flu” it was important that the government focus on the “modernization of the PHA”. The modernization of the Public Health Act, that is to say, bringing it in line with contemporary trends around the world, means making it more technocratic. In this context the Chief Justice asserted with regards to the centralization of the public health system in the person of the Chief Public Health Officer that:

the act sets out the powers afforded to public health officials to address communicable diseases and importantly, it also constrains those powers so as to ensure an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health (first ruling, 12).

Does it ensure such an appropriate balance? As this is the quod erat demonstrandum, this forthright assertion of it would seem to be a classic example of petitio principia, especially when we consider the weakness of everything that was then put forward in support of the assertion. After providing quotations from speeches in the legislative assembly at the time the new Public Health Act was being debated that show that the legislators acknowledged the need for such a balance, the Chief Justice finally specified the constraints this Act supposedly places on the powers it gives to the Chief Public Health Officer (first ruling, 17). Not a single one of these is a real check that prevents the office of the Chief Public Health Officer from being corrupted into a medical technocratic tyranny by the excessive emergency power vested in it.

The first of these is that the official must believe there is a public health emergency that requires special measures to be taken. The third is that the orders require the prior approval of the Minister of Health. The fourth is the stipulation in section 3 of the Public Health Act that the restrictions on rights and freedoms of the special measures be as few as possible, the equivalent to the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test. In practice, the attitude of deferral to the specialized medical expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer on the part of the Minister of Health ensures that none of these constitutes a real constraint. The sixth, which is that the Chief Public Health Officer must be a physician, is a limit on who the Minister of Health can appoint to the office not a limit on use of the powers of that office by the officeholder. The seventh and final “constraint” pertains only to the secondary matter of the sub delegation of the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers to his deputy. This leaves the second and fifth, both of which warrant special comment and so have been reserved for last.

The second “constraint” is that under subsection 2 of section 67 “the types of orders that can be made are clearly delineated”. This is true, but the types so delineated are so extensive that this is not much of a limitation even without taking into consideration how much further deferral to the expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer would stretch them.

The fifth is the stipulation in subsection 4 of section 67 that “an order requiring a person to be immunized cannot be enforced if the person objects.” Although this looks like a real constraint on the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers, for several months now he has gotten away with making a total mockery of this stipulation by doing everything short of strapping objectors down and forcing the needle into them to compel them to be “immunized”.

Therefore, quite to the contrary of what Chief Justice Joyal claims (first ruling, 18) these constraints provide no real protection against the danger of the powers the Public Health Act confers upon the Chief Public Health Officer in a public health emergency being used to run roughshod over our rights and freedoms. Whatever the intention of the legislators in 2009, the Public Health Act fails to provide an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health. Instead, it places all the weight on the side of the latter.

It needs to be stated here that the need for an appropriate balance between individual rights and freedoms on the one hand and the public good on the other is a truism. The art of statecraft – politics in the best sense of the word – could be said to reduce to finding just this balance. The problem, at least in Canada, is that for decades now we have only ever seemed to have heard this truism trotted out whenever someone is insisting that individual rights and freedoms need to make cessions to the public good. Balance requires that there also be cessions from the public good to individual rights and freedoms. Indeed, since the vast majority of decisions that need to be made in any complex society have to do with the good of individuals and small groups, rather than the good of the society as a whole, and it is individual rights and freedoms that ensure that those making such decisions are the ones most competent to do so, which with only rare exceptions means the individuals and small groups directly concerned, balance arguably requires far more cessions to individual rights and freedoms from the public good, than the other way around.

The basic assumption of technocracy is contrary to all of this. This is the assumption that technical knowledge – the kind of specialized knowledge in any field that qualifies one as an expert – renders one competent to make decisions for other people if the expert’s field at all touches upon those decisions. This assumption is laughably false – technical expertise in one field does not translate into technical expertise in another field, much less all fields, and it is rare that a decision requires information from only one field. The most technical knowledge ought to qualify an expert for is to advise people in the making of their own decisions, not to make those decisions for them. Indeed, were we to assume that the greater an individual’s expertise is in one specialized field, the greater his ignorance will be in all others, and the more utterly incompetent he will be at making decisions for himself, let alone other people, our assumption would be wrong, but a lot less wrong than the assumption inherent in technocracy.

Technocracy is odious enough when it takes the form of the army of civil servants, passing the endless regulations that boss people around and tell them what to do in their own homes and how to run their own businesses, by which Liberal Prime Ministers have so effectively circumvented the constraints of our Crown-in-Parliament constitution in order to impose their will upon Canadians. A medical technocracy enacted in a public health emergency is far worse. Throughout history, mankind has been much more often plagued by tyranny than by insufficient government power, by too many rules than by too few, and the exploitation of emergencies, real or manufactured, and the fear they engender in the public, is the normal means whereby a tyrant seizes unconstitutional power. For this reason it is imperative than in any emergency, those empowered to deal with the emergency be subjected to even greater scrutiny and held to even stricter accountability, than in ordinary circumstances. This is the opposite of the attitude of deference that Chief Justice Joyal contended for in 281-283 of the second ruling, and which he reiterated in the first sentence of 292, “In the context of this deadly and unprecedented pandemic, I have determined that this is most certainly a case where a margin of appreciation can be afforded to those making decisions quickly and in real time for the benefit of the public good and safety.” (4)

This deference is fatal to the court’s role as the guardian of fundamental freedoms. Chief Justice Joyal acknowledged (284), as, in fact, did the province, that these freedoms were violated, and that therefore the onus is upon the government to justify the violation. (5) When the court gives this “margin of appreciation” to “those making decisions quickly and in real time”, however, is it possible for the province to fail to meet this onus in the court’s eyes?

Consider the arguments that the province made that it met the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test. Chief Justice Joyal reproduced (303) the reasons the province offered in support of this contention from paragraph 52 of their April 12, 2021 brief. Reason c) begins with “Unlike some other jurisdictions, there was no curfew imposed or a ‘shelter in place’ order that would prevent people from leaving their home other than for limited reasons”. That you cannot validly justify your own actions by pointing to the worse actions of someone else is something that anyone with even the most basic of training in logical reasoning should immediately recognize. The same reason includes the sentences “It was still possible to gather with family and friends at indoor and outdoor public places, up to the gathering limit of 5 people” and “An exception was also made for people who live on their own to allow one person to visit.” Offering these as “reasons” why the public health order forbidding people to meet with anyone other than members of their own household in their own homes for over three months only “minimally impaired” our freedoms of association and assembly is adding insult to injury. That is called throwing people crumbs, not keeping your infringement on their freedoms to a minimum. “Minimally impair” is not supposed to mean to impair the freedom to the point that it is minimal.

Reason e) which pertains to freedom of religion is no better. The province declared that there was an “attempt to accommodate religious services”. The first example of this that they gave is that “Religious services could still be delivered remotely indoors, or outdoors in vehicles”. It seems rather rich of the province to offer the latter up as proof that they tried to only minimally impair freedom of religion when, in fact, the churches that offered such services had to fight to obtain that concession.

Had Brent Roussin forgotten that he had initially banned drive-in services when he ordered churches to close in the so-called “circuit break” last fall?

Or rather had he remembered that it was Chief Justice Joyal who on the fifth of December last year had ruled that drive-in services were in violation of the public health orders before he, that is Roussin, amended the orders to allow for these services?

Either way it is rather disingenuous of him to make this allusion in this context.

The next sentence is even worse. “As well, individual prayer and reflection was permitted.” So, because he didn’t ban people from praying by themselves in the privacy of their own homes, which even officially Communist countries never attempted, he is to be credited for only “minimally impairing” our freedom of religion by forbidding us to obey God’s commandment to forsake not the assembly of ourselves, forbidding us to sing God’s praises as a community of faith, and forbidding us from partaking of the Holy Sacrament? Indeed, what this sentence tells us is that the person who wrote it thinks a) that individuals need the permission of government to pray and reflect in private, b) that it is within the powers of government to withhold such permission and forbid private prayer and reflection, and c) government’s not having done so means that their violations of our freedom of religion and worship have been minimal and reasonable.

Any sort of cognitive filter that allows a Chief Justice to look at this sort of nonsense and conclude from it that the province has met its onus of justifying its impairment of our fundamental freedoms as the minimum necessary under the circumstances is clearly a dysfunctional filter that ought to be immediately discarded.

Indeed, the province’s arguments illustrate the point made above about technocracy being inimical to freedom, constitutional government, and the balance between individual right and public good. Technical knowledge or specialized knowledge in a field of expertise, as stated above, does not translate into expertise in another field, much less expertise in all fields. Indeed, it tends towards a certain kind of deficiency in general reasoning that could be regarded as a sort of tunnel vision. It is called déformation professionelle in French and is similar to what is called the Law of the Instrument, illustrated in Abraham Maslow’s proverb about how if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A physician’s technical expertise is in the field of medicine – treating sickness and injury and promoting health. He will therefore be inclined to subordinate everything else to the goals of his profession. In an epidemic or pandemic, this inclination will be all the more exaggerated. To a medical expert in such a situation, the answer to the question of what public health orders constitute the minimal necessary restrictions on fundamental freedoms will look very different than it does to those who do not share this narrow focus.

Consider the words that George Grant in his important discussion (Technology and Justice, 1986) of the implications of the increasing technologization of society identified as encapsulating spirit of technological thought, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “when you see that something is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.” The significance of these words is that the technological mind is inclined to reject external limitations, such as those of ethics, that stand between it and the actual doing of whatever it finds itself capable. Modern medical thinking is thoroughly technological and Oppenheimer’s thought, translated into that of a physician and epidemiologist overseeing a pandemic, would be “when you see that you can slow the spread of the disease by doing A, you go ahead and do A”. A might have a thousand other effects, all negative, but the mind that prioritizes slowing the spread of an epidemic over all other concerns can acknowledge this and still come to the conclusion that the benefit outweighs the harm, demonstrating that its ability to make calculations of this sort is seriously impaired. (6)

It is absolutely essential that those charged with the duty of protecting our fundamental rights and freedoms and holding government to its constitutional limits, recognize how the very nature of medical expertise tends towards the skewing of the medical expert’s perspective in this way and that therefore he is the last person to whose opinion government ministers and judges should defer in determining whether public health orders infringing upon fundamental freedoms are constitutionally justified out of necessity.

For the courts to fail to recognize this is for the courts to shirk their duty and acquiesce as our country succumbs to the tyranny of technocracy. (7)

(1) The applicants were the churches: Gateway Bible Baptist Church (Thompson), Pembina Valley Baptist Church (Winkler), Redeeming Grace Bible Church (Morden), Grace Covenant Church (Altona), Slavic Baptist Church, Christian Church of Morden, Bible Baptist Church (Brandon); ministers: Tobias Tissen (pastor of Church of God, Restoration in Sarto, just south of Steinbach) and Thomas Rempel (deacon of Redeeming Grace Bible Church); and individual: Ross MacKay.

(2) Tom Brodbeck’s editorial commenting on these rulings for the local Liberal Party propaganda rag – or paper of record, depending upon your perspective – was given the headline “Case Closed, Science Wins”.

(3) There is an unfortunate tautology here in that proportionality is the term used for both all three stages of the second step of the test taken together and the third stage of the same.

(4) The pandemic is “unprecedented” only in the sense that the measures taken to combat it have been unprecedented in their extremity. The Spanish Flu which ended about a century before the bat flu pandemic began killed between 25-50 million people. The bat flu has killed about 5 million over the course of a similar span of time. Not only is the total of the Spanish Flu much larger than that of the bat flu, it represents a much larger percentage of the world’s population which was considerably smaller at the time. It took place at a time when health care and medical treatment options were far more limited than they are today, and yet public health orders never came close to what they are today, despite the earlier pandemic having started in a time of war when people were already accustomed to emergency restrictions.

(5) Many of the news articles reporting on these rulings have been extremely misleading. Several have reported that the Chief Justice ruled that no Charter rights were violated. This is true only in the sense that there is a distinction between rights and freedoms and that the Chief Justice ruled against there having been a violation of Section 7 and Section 15 rights. With regards to Section 2 fundamental freedoms, however, he ruled – and the province admitted – that these had been violated, and that therefore there was a burden of justification on the government to prove these violations to be constitutional in accordance with Section 1. As the discussion of Section 2 was by far the most important part of the case, to summarize the entire ruling as if it were all about the Sections 7 and 15 challenges, is to utterly distort it.

(6) Suppose that a virus is spreading which, if unchecked, will cause 10 000 deaths. The public health officer, if he takes Action B, can prevent the epidemic and all of those deaths. However, Action B will itself cause 10 000 other deaths. The number of deaths will be the same whether action is taken or not. Should the public health officer take this action or do nothing? It would be odious to attempt to resolve the dilemma by comparing the value of the 10 000 lives lost the one way, with the value of the 10 000 lives lost the other. The person who makes the case for the public health officer’s taking Action B, therefore, would have to reason along the lines that since it is the public health officer’s duty to combat epidemics and save lives threatened by disease, and the intent behind Action B would be to save the 10 000 threatened by the epidemic not kill the other 10 000, Action B should be taken and the 10 000 lost to it considered collateral damage. The person who would argue the other side would point out that the 10 000 lost to the epidemic would die of natural causes, that the 10 000 lost as a result of Action B would die as the direct consequence of human action, and that the human moral culpability for taking an action that directly results in a death is greater than the human moral culpability for not taking an action that would prevent a death by natural cause, ergo it is worse to take Action B than to not do so. Which of these two arguments is the most persuasive. I would suggest that for people who are both normal and capable of rational, human, moral thought, the second of the two arguments is likely to be the most persuasive, and that those persuaded by the first of the two arguments are most likely to be found among medical experts.

(7) That technological science was leading us to a universal technocracy which would be the worst of all tyrannies was a warning sounded frequently throughout the Twentieth Century by such thinkers as Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society, 1954, Perspectives on Our Age, 1981), C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1943, That Hideous Strength, 1945), and René Girard (I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, 1999). In Canada, George Grant played the role of Cassandra on this theme, which runs through his entire corpus of work from Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) to Technology and Justice (1986). It was central to the thesis of his 1965 jeremiad Lament for a Nation that by succumbing to the technologically driven capitalism of America, Canada was losing the pre-liberal traditions that informed her founding, and would be drawn like the rest of the world into the “universal homogenous state”, a technocracy that the ancients had predicted would be the ultimate tyranny. Technological science, as he argued in the first essay of Technology and Justice, begins as man’s mastery of nature, but progresses into man’s master of himself, which translates into his mastery of other people. He did not shrink from implicating modern medicine along with other more obvious culprits in this.POSTED BY GERRY T. NEAL

The Abandonment of Truth and the Fall of Civilization

Posted on December 27, 2020 by admin

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, December 17, 2020

The Abandonment of Truth and the Fall of Civilization

Exactly when Medieval times or the Middle Ages ended and the Modern Age began has long been a subject of discussion and debate. It will continue to be so, since the transition was not instantaneous but took place over an extended period that included any number of events which, depending the criteria being taken into consideration, could be identified as the turning point. The question must, therefore, remain open, and for several decades now has taken the backseat to the questions of whether the Modern Age has ended, if so when, and what comes next. Despite the temptation created by so many of the events of the current year having been presented to us in an apocalyptic framework, it is not my intention to address the latter set of questions here, other than to refer my readers to the interesting and persuasive discussion of such matters by the late John Lukacs in The Passing of the Modern Age (1970), The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (1993), and At The End of an Age (2002). It is the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization, a matter that touches on the questions pertaining to both the beginning and the end of the Modern Age that I shall be talking about here. Or, to be more precise, I shall be discussing one aspect of that transformation.

Was the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization the start of the Modern Age (one of the possible answers to the first question), the end of the Modern Age in both the sense of the purpose towards which that Age was directed and moving and in the sense that when it was accomplished the Age came to an end (if so this touches on the answer to all of the questions pertaining to the end of the Age), or was it simply one and the same with the Modern Age?

Christendom is a word that can be used in a narrower or a wider sense. Let us take it here in its fullest sense of civilization that takes the Christian faith as its foundation and organizational principle. It is essentially the generic version of what American Russian Orthodox hieromonk, Fr. Seraphim Rose, described in its Eastern Orthodox form when he wrote “that the principal form government took in union with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical social structure” (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, 1994, 2018, p. 28). Obviously, by the end of the Second World War, one of the time-markers for possible ends of the Modern Age, this had been replaced by liberal, secular, democratic, Western Civilization, in all but the most outward, nominal, sense. At the deepest level, of course, the transformation had been accomplished much earlier than this.

What this suggests, of course, is that, paradoxically, all three options in the complex question in our second paragraph can be answered in the affirmative.

While the question of when exactly the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization began must remain open, like the related question of when the transition into the Modern Age began, it is certain that the radical epistemic revolution belongs to the earliest stages of the transformation. By radical epistemic revolution, I mean the fundamental shift in how we conceive of what we know and how we know it that involved a repudiation of both tradition and divine revelation as evidentiary paths to knowledge and which introduced so drastic a change in the meaning of both reason and science as to constitute a break from what these things had been since classical antiquity. The consequence of this revolution for Christian Truth was that it was removed from the realm of knowledge and reassigned to the realm of a “faith” which had itself been radically redefined so as to bear no resemblance to St. Paul’s “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) but to be almost the very opposite of this. Clearly this was a most significant event in the breaking of the union between civilization and Christian Truth.

In my last essay, in which I talked about the increasing confusion with regards to basic logical concepts that has occurred in a period that has also seen dogmatic authority increasingly assigned to “science” despite this contradicting the non-authoritarian nature of science in both pre-Modern and Modern meanings, I mentioned the paradox of the fact that the removal of tradition and divine revelation from the realm of evidence which thus emptied that realm of all but the kind of evidence which historians and courts rely upon and the kind which scientists rely upon should have tipped the balance in favour of reason in the ancient debate about the priority of reason versus evidence but has seemingly had the opposite effect of elevating one particular form of evidence over reason and the other remaining form of evidence. It also needs to be observed, with regards to the dogmatic, authoritative, voice now ascribed to “science”, that in the most obvious cases of this, actual empirical evidence has itself been trumped by something else. In the anthropogenic global warming/climate change “crisis” of recent decades and the Wuhan bat flu “crisis” of this year, in both of which we have been told that we must accept a drastic reduction in human freedom and submit to totalitarian measures and group-think in order to avert a catastrophe, dissenters have been told to “shut up and listen to the science”, but the “science” in question has largely consisted of computer model projections, which have been granted a bizarre precedence not only over reason, such as the questioning which provokes the “shut up and listen to the science” response, and non-empirical evidence, such as the historical record on the world’s ever-changing climate which directly contradicts the entire alarmist narrative on this subject, but even empirical evidence as this has until recently been understood, observations and measurements made in either the real world or the laboratory. Since plenty of this sort of empirical evidence joins non-empirical evidence in supporting reason against these narratives, we are in effect being told that we must set both reason and evidence aside and mindlessly obey orders backed only by the fictional speculations of an artificial “intelligence”. Anyone still open to the evidence of tradition and divine revelation, will find in Scriptural descriptions of the effects of idolatry upon the minds of those who practice it, an ample explanation of this phenomenon.

That tradition and divine revelation became vulnerable to being forced out of the realm of evidence can in part by attributed to their having been set against each other in the period that produced the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Both sides share the blame here. The papacy and its adherents at their worst placed such an emphasis on tradition that they sometimes gave the impression that they had elevated it over divine revelation and thus were inviting a response similar to that given to the scribes and Pharisees by the Lord in Matthew 15:1-2, emphasis on verses three and six, whereas the more radical elements of the Protestant Reformation went so far in the opposite direction as to contradict such New Testament affirmations of tradition as I Corinthians 11:2 and II Thessalonians 2:15 and 3:16. It is beyond the scope of this essay, of course, to offer a full resolution of this conflict. I shall simply point out that by divine revelation I mean what theologians call “special revelation”, which is distinct from “general revelation” such as that described by St. Paul in Romans 1:19-20. General revelation or natural revelation, is God’s revelation of Himself in the natural order of His Creation, and is the source of such truth as can be found in all human tradition. Special revelation, is God’s salvific revelation of Himself in His Covenants, His written Word, and ultimately in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. When Christianity makes claims of exclusivity, such as “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man cometh to the Father but through Me”, these rest upon special revelation. When Christianity acknowledges truth in other religions, this is on the basis of the general revelation that informs all traditions. See the essays by C. S. Lewis in the first section of God in the Dock (1970), and the book Christianity and Pluralism (1998, 2019), by Ron Dart and J. I. Packer for a more extended discussion of these matters. Special revelation, because of its role in the ordu salutis, comes with promises of divine protection against corruption (Matthew 5:17-18, for example) that are obviously not extended to general revelation (see the larger context of the Romans passage cited above), which would seem obviously to place the primacy on special divine revelation, without eliminating the epistemic value of either human tradition in general or the particular Apostolic tradition affirmed in Scripture in the aforementioned Pauline references.

The turning of divine (special) revelation and tradition against each other facilitated the rise of rationalism which attacked their now divided house and excluded them both from the realm of reason, evidence, and knowledge. That this having ultimately led to evidence taking primacy over reason in an ongoing discussion/debate which began prior to Socrates seems counterintuitive is due to the reasons mentioned above, however, it seems more inevitable when we consider what is asserted about Jesus Christ in the first verse of the Gospel according to St. John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The word rendered Word in the English of this verse is Logos, the word from which logic is derived. It does indeed mean “word” in the sense of the unit of speech that is the basic building block of sentences, although it can also mean “sentence” in certain contexts, or even “speech” in general. It also, however, can mean thought, in the sense of calculation, judgement, evaluation, and basically everything suggested by the word “reason”. This personification of reason and ascription to it of divine status would have been familiar territory to the Greek thinkers of the day, as just such a thought had long been a dominant theme in Greek philosophy.

Heraclitus of Ephesus, who is otherwise best known for his view that constant change is the defining characteristic of the world – “you never step in the same river twice” – introduced the concept of the Logos into Greek thought. Logos, to Heraclitus, was a divine, rational principle that governs the world of flux and brings order and meaning to what otherwise would be chaos. In the first century, the Hellenizing Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, had famously equated the Logos of Greek thought with the personified Wisdom in Jewish Wisdom literature. The eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament is the canonical example of this personification of Wisdom, and the Wisdom of Solomon, one of the disputed books of the Septuagint, is a book long example of the same, possibly originally written as expansion of or commentary on the chapter in Proverbs. Even prior to Philo there had been a tradition in Jewish thought somewhat parallel to the Greek Logos, represented primarily in the Targum (a translation, or more accurately number of translations, of the Old Testament into Aramaic, along with midrash or exegetical commentary on the same, also in Aramaic), in which the personified Memra acts as the messenger or agent of God.

There was one huge difference between Philo’s synthesis of Greek and Hebrew thought on this matter and St. John’s. For Philo the Logos was not God, per se, but a divine intermediary between God and Creation, roughly the equivalent of the Demiurge, albeit the benevolent Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus not the malevolent Demiurge of the Gnostic heretics. For St. John, the Logos was both with God, and was identical to God. The lack of a definite article preceding Theos in the final clause of the first verse of the Gospel does not mean that a diminutive or lesser divinity is intended. Since the clause joins two nouns of the same case (nominative) with the copula, and Theos is the noun that precedes the copula, its anarthrous condition indicates that it functions grammatically as the predicate rather than the subject (E. C. Colwell, “A Definite Rule for the Use of the Article in the Greek New Testament”, Journal of Biblical Literature 52, 1933). Even if this were not a recognized grammatical rule, St. John’s intention could hardly be clearer, as his Logos, identified in the fourteenth verse as Jesus Christ, repeatedly makes statements employing the Greek equivalent of YHWH in such a way as to unmistakably identify Himself as God. Indeed, this makes St. John’s use of the Greek philosophical term for the divine principle of reason that makes reality orderly in a way that evokes the first chapter of Genesis with its repeated “and God said…and it was so”, transforming what had been “without form and void” into that which “was very good”, a much more powerful embrace of reason than Philo’s. See Calvinist philosopher Gordon H. Clark’s The Johannine Logos (1972)for a fuller discussion of this. This is why the rejection of Christian epistemology, which affirms both special revelation and tradition, and embrace of a rationalist epistemology that removes both from the realm of evidence – although done in the name of reason and hence the term “rationalist” – must inevitably assign reason a much lower place than it had occupied in a worldview that acknowledges the Divine Logos.

The elevation of empirical evidence over historical evidence was also an inevitable consequence of the same epistemological revolution. The reason for this is that the special revelation and tradition which were banished from the realm of evidence, each have a unique relationship with one of the two evidences allowed to remain. When special revelation and tradition were sent into exile, the hierarchical relationship between the two was also rejected, leading to the inversion of this hierarchy for the corresponding two evidences.

Empirical evidence or science – real empirical evidence, mind you, not the computer generated, pseudoscientific, fiction masquerading under its name today – corresponds with tradition. Here, I mean tradition in the generic sense of “that which has been passed down” (tradition comes from the passive perfect participle of the Latin trado, the verb for handing over or passing on) rather than the content of any particular tradition. Tradition’s chief epistemic value is that it is the means whereby that which has been observed, deduced, and otherwise learned and known in the past is made available to those living in the present so that each generation does not have to re-invent the wheel so to speak and discover everything afresh for itself. Apart from this, human knowledge could not significantly accumulate and grow. As mentioned briefly above, with regards to Romans 1, the truths of general or natural revelation which are passed down in tradition are susceptible to corruption, but it is also the case that living traditions are flexible and self-correcting. That this, and not the rigid inflexibility that rationalists falsely attribute to it, is the nature of tradition, was an insight that was well articulated by Michael Oakeshott (see the title essay and “The Tower of Babel”, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962). While true science’s value is primarily utilitarian rather than epistemic – “science is always false, but it is often useful” as Gordon H. Clark put it – the merits of tradition as described in this paragraph overlap to a large degree those which scientists would ascribe to their vocation and methodology. In the best sense of the word, science is itself a particular tradition, which has been accumulating natural knowledge and correcting itself since Thales of Miletus.

Special revelation, on the other hand, is connected to historical evidence. This can clearly be seen in both Testaments. The Old Testament is primarily the record of God’s revelation of Himself through a Covenant relationship established with a particular people, Israel, in a particular place, the Promised Land, over a specific era of time stretching from the period of the Patriarchs, from whom the people were descended, to the partial return from their exile in Babylon at the beginning of the Second Temple period. Even the portions of it which are not strictly historical narrative in literary genre fit in to that history. This is most obviously the case with the prophetic writings, which contain divine warnings given to Israel and sometimes the surrounding nations, in connection with events described in the historical record, but even in the case of the Psalms of David, many of these can be tied to specific events in that historical king’s life, as they collectively are tied to his life as a whole.

This is all the more the case with the New Testament. The New Testament presents us with God’s ultimate revelation of Himself, both to the people with whom He had established the Old Covenant and promised a New, and to all the peoples of the world, in the Incarnation of His Son “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”. The story of God’s Incarnational revelation is told in the form of history – events about specific people, in identifiable places, at identifiable times, attested to by witnesses. We are told that the Virgin Birth, the event shortly to be commemorated at Christmas, occurred in the reign of Augustus Caesar, when Herod the Great was king of Judea, and Cyrenius was governor of Syria, and that it took place in the city of David, Bethlehem. The baptism of Jesus by His cousin John the Baptist is the event that signaled the beginning of His public ministry. We are told that John the Baptist’s own ministry began in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judeau, Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee, and Annas and Caiaphas were high priests. The locations of Jesus’ most significant miracles are identified, and the events of the final week of His public ministry are related in great historical detail – His dramatic entry into Jerusalem, His teaching in the Second Temple, His betrayal by Judas for thirty pieces of silver, His Last Passover Supper with His Apostles, His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, His first, illegal, trial before the aforementioned high priests and the Sanhedrin, His second, official, trial before the aforementioned Roman governor, the mob turning against Him, His torture by the Roman soldiers, His crucifixion between two thieves at the hill of Calvary, and His burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Real places, real people, real events. As St. Paul would say to Festus a few years later, “the king (Agrippa) knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely, for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him; for this thing was not done in a corner.” The same St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, would set forth the evidence for the crowning event of God’s Incarnational revelation of Himself in history, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, citing eyewitness after eyewitness. The Resurrection is not something to which evidence of the empirical sort can speak, but the historical evidence for it is overwhelming. (1)

In the Christian epistemic hierarchy special revelation which takes place in and through history ranks higher than tradition of which science at its best is a particular example. The abandonment of Christian epistemology early in the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization involved a repudiation of both special revelation and tradition as well as the ranking between the two. Even though considered in themselves, a strong case could be made for the superiority of historical evidence over empirical evidence – the latter consists of observations made in artificially controlled situations to test hypotheses and so cannot be counted upon to have epistemic value, to speak truth about reality, things as they are in themselves, even when they have the utilitarian value of helping us to manipulate things to our own use, and so when it comes to determining truth about reality, the empirical must count as merely one form of testimony among the many that make up historical/legal evidence, as it is in standard courtroom practice, and is therefore logically subordinate to the larger whole of which it is a part – this has resulted in science being elevated over other forms of evidence, over tradition of which it is a particular example and thus logically subordinate to the general form, and over reason. Science, which belongs at the bottom of the epistemic totem pole and is essentially magic that works (see C. S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”, the third lecture/essay in the book of the same title), has been raised to the very top of the pole.

This elevation of science over all other evidence, all other traditions, and reason itself goes a long way to explaining how people who are scientists only in the sense that they speak the technical language of some branch of science or another have managed to substitute baseless predictions spat out by some machine for actual empirical evidence and ascribe to these the kind of authority that properly belongs to special revelation. They have put this false science to the use of frightening people into giving up their basic rights and freedoms in exchange for protection against one Bogeyman or another and are thus laying waste to what little remains of the civilization that was once Christendom. This demonstrates just how fundamental to civilization is its account of reality and truth.

(1) In his essay “Myth Became Fact”, C. S. Lewis spoke of this historicity of the Christian story as the distinguishing point between it and pagan myths with similar elements, and thus described the significance of the Incarnation in this way:

Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens ‐ at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.

It was precisely this consideration, that the Christian message was a “true myth”, as put to him by J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, which had brought Lewis to Christian faith. His interpretation here, of the Incarnation transcending myth by presenting us with a “myth which is also a fact” comes after, of course, his explanation of the meaning and value of myth qua myth, for which explanation I refer you to the essay as a whole which can be found in God in the Dock.
Labels: C. S. Lewis, Fr. Seraphim Rose, Gordon H. Clark, Heraclitus, history, Hugo Dyson, J. I. Packer, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Lukacs, logic, Michael Oakeshott, Philo, Plato, Ron Dart, science, special revelation, tradition

Don’t Trust the “Experts”

Posted on December 2, 2020 by admin

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Don’t Trust the “Experts”

Until a short time ago the word “misinformation” referred to statements purporting to be factual which fell short in some way, whether in letter or spirit, of the ancient and ageless transcendental landmark known as truth. “Disinformation” meant the same, but with the additional connotation that the erroneous information was being spread in mala fide by those with a deliberate intent to deceive. Both words have been in the soi-disant news far more frequently in recent days than has been the norm in the past. Indeed, it would almost seem that other words have dropped out of the vocabularies of our regular commentators on passing events, because they have been using these multiple times per day. It would appear, however, that the words have undergone a change in meaning. They now seem to mean anything which differs or disagrees with whatever the media’s approved experts happen to be saying at any given moment even if it conforms with what they had been saying in the moment immediately prior to that one.

This is indicative of just how far we have apostatized from the wisdom of the ancients who sought the illumination of the eternal beacons of Goodness, Beauty and Truth to light their path. To the extent that the media, the information machine which has far too much influence over how we perceive and think of the world, acknowledges truth today, it is truth in the old leftist sense of whatever advances the cause of the revolution. This, of course, is not truth at all in the proper and older sense of that permanent standard, recognized as a basic aspect of being itself, which we strive to attain by conforming our indicative or descriptive speech to reality, i.e., things as they are in themselves.

Ultimately what we are seeing is the result of centuries of assault on the foundations laid for Western thought, at least in its Classical and Christian phases, by the Attic philosophers, specifically the Socratic school and especially Socrates himself. I addressed this matter earlier this year in an essay about how Western academe has betrayed the very foundation of its venerable tradition, the first of a series that scrutinized the corruption of the various branches of the universities. It is worth revisiting now as the media is once again telling us to blindly trust the experts as they impose all sorts of invasive restrictions on us in total disregard of our prescriptive and constitutional civil rights and basic freedoms in the name of keeping us safe.

If the message of the Socrates who has come down to us primarily through the writings of Plato could be summarized in one sentence, which, of course, it cannot, that sentence would be “don’t trust the experts”. For Socrates’ career as a philosopher basically consisted of going around and pestering experts, those who claimed to have authoritative knowledge about courage, justice, piety and the like, with questions that demonstrated that the experts didn’t really know what they were talking about and didn’t possess the kind of knowledge they professed. He was, in other words, someone who spent his entire life doing the exact opposite of what those who say “shut up and listen to the science” tell us to do when we question the climatologists’ prophecies of doom by pointing out holes in the theory of anthropogenic climate change or question the epidemiologists’ insistence that we must sacrifice all of our freedoms and necessary social interaction and put ourselves in house arrest for weeks and months at a time to prevent the spread of the Chinese bat flu.

“Isn’t it true that human beings have historically thrived better in warmer periods than colder periods?”

“Isn’t it true that climate has been constantly changing through history and that this has affected how people live rather than the other way around?”

“What about that Danish study from this summer in which masks were found not to reduce the spread of the virus?”

“What about all the deaths that lockdowns cause?”

“Why should we believe that the same health authorities who support abortion and euthanasia are taking our freedoms away because they want to save lives?”

“Why all this hype about a virus that is non-lethal for well over 99 percent of people under 65 and in good health, most of whom will experience only mild symptoms or none at all?”

The answer we hear to these questions and countless others like them is always “Shut up, listen to the science, and trust the experts”.

Some might raise the objection to my point that today’s experts differ from the ones to whom Socrates was, in his own words as recorded by Plato in the Apologia, a “gadfly”, in that they have science to back up their claims to authoritative knowledge.

Let us consider that argument and see whether it can bear up under scrutiny.

Science, although it bears the Latin word for knowledge as its name, is not synonymous with knowledge but is rather a specific type of knowledge. The admirers of Modern science see the history of its development as one of unprecedented and exponential expansion of human knowledge to the benefit of the species. This is not, however, the only way to look at it. From a different perspective Modern science can be seen as a contraction rather than an expansion of knowledge. Furthermore, it is rather difficult to deny that science has done harm to the species as well as good.

Whether science is an expansion or contraction of knowledge depends on what measuring stick you are using. Allow me to illustrate. Imagine two men with studies in their home in which their personal libraries are kept. The one man keeps all of his books in a single bookcase. The shelves are crammed full and overflowing. The other man has several bookcases around the room, but none of them is full and there is plenty of space for other books. Which of the two has the larger library?

The answer depends upon how you are determining library size. If the measurement is in bookcases the second man obviously has the larger library. If, however, we are measuring in number of books, the first man might have the larger library. Indeed, for the sake of making the point of the illustration let us stipulate that he does have more books in his one bookcase than the other in his many. Therefore the answer to the question of which has the larger library is different when size is measured by bookcases than by books.

Now here is how that illustration applies to science: pre-modern science was integrated into philosophy which concerned itself with the whole of reality. Pre-modern science like Modern science, involved specialized knowledge of different aspects of reality, but, being integrated into philosophy as it was, it recognized the general knowledge of the whole that philosophy sought after to be the higher and greater knowledge, and therefore did not exclude any part of that whole as an area of interest for its more concentrated study. The science that emerged from the transition into the Modern Age, by contrast, was far less integrated into philosophy, which itself was undergoing a radical transformation, and not, in my opinion, for the better. Neither Modern science nor Modern philosophy shared the pre-modern hierarchical ranking of general knowledge of the whole as higher and superior to specialized knowledge of the parts. Furthermore, Modern science narrowed the areas in which it was interested, excluding several parts or aspects of the whole of reality that pre-modern science had not so excluded.

In other words, when it comes to the parts of the whole of reality that science concerns itself with, Modern science is actually interested in less than pre-modern science. This is often overlooked since Modern science has subdivided those fewer parts of reality that have retained its interest into multiple fields to facilitate its scrutiny of each. Think of it as being like a food store that originally sold all different kinds of food – meat, fruit, vegetables, dairy, grains, etc. – then limited itself to fruit, but multiplied the kinds of fruit it offered, now including all the exotic varieties alongside every available type of the staple apples, oranges, pears, peaches and bananas. Although it has actually narrowed what it has to offer, someone who only ever entered the store to buy fruit might miss this because for him the variety has increased. The point is that when measured by the criteria of the portion of reality that Modern science takes an interest in compared with pre-modern science, the development of Modern science is clearly a contraction of knowledge rather than an expansion.

When it comes to the areas in which Modern science has retained an interest, it has, undeniably, expanded one type of knowledge about those areas, and that exponentially. That type of knowledge is the kind that answers such questions as “How does this work?” and “What is this made of?” That providing highly detailed answers to such questions in no way answers such questions as “what is this thing in itself?” and “what is the good of such things?” was beautifully illustrated by C. S. Lewis in the exchange on the nature of a star between Ramandu and Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and explained more prosaically in a number of his non-fictional writings.

The reason Modern science can answer the one type of question well and in great depth but is hopeless at answering the other type of question is the same reason why it is interested in some parts of the whole that is reality and not others. Finding the answers to the first type of questions with regards to the areas in which it is interested serves the end of Modern science. Finding the answers to the second type of questions does not serve that end. Nor is there anything in the areas of reality which Modern science has excluded from its interest that would serve that end.

This is because the end of Modern science, that for which it seeks and strives, is not truth at all, but power and control. As C. S. Lewis opened his lecture on “The Abolition of Man”, the third of the lectures transcribed and published together under the same title in 1943, “’Man’s conquest of Nature’ is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science”. Lewis’ entire lecture is well worth reading to understand the implications, positive and negative of this, as is the entire book in which it can be found and, for that matter, his treatment of the same subject in That Hideous Strength, the third and longest of his “Space Trilogy” in which theological and philosophical discussion is presented in the form of science fiction. That this is the goal of Modern science, however, rests not merely on the assertion of one of its more distinguished critics. We also have the word of one of its earliest advocates. Sir Francis Bacon famously expressed the end of Modern science as the mission statement of his fictional Salomon’s House in his unfinished novel The New Atlantis (1626), “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”

It is because this is its purpose that Modern science is interested only in those parts of reality which it can bend to serve the human will and only in the kind of knowledge that serves that purpose, such as what those things it wishes to bend and harness into service are made of and how they work. Answers to the questions of what things are in themselves, what their good is, how they fit in to the larger whole of reality, and how they contribute to the good of that whole, are entirely irrelevant to that purpose, as indispensable as they are to Truth. Indeed, true knowledge of the good of things in themselves and the part they play in the order of reality as a whole, would in many cases run counter to the goal of Modern science for it would identify a good for all things which is not imposed upon them by the will of man, and to which man is obligated to bend his will.

The history of Modern science itself demonstrates that truth is entirely irrelevant to it at the theoretical level. Theory is the essential link between scientific fact gathering – observation and recording – and scientific application – the use of those facts to bend the nature of things into the service of the will of man. It begins as hypothesis – an interpretive explanation of what has been observed – which, if it survives testing by experimentation, becomes theory, that is to say, an explanation that is accepted and taken to be true for the purpose of devising further hypotheses and developing practical applications. This is the means whereby science has obtained its great success at manipulating the nature of things to serve man’s will. This success, however, has never required that the theories underlying human invention actually be true. Indeed, most if not all of what are considered to be Modern science’s greatest successes, are the culmination of a series of advancements, each based upon a theory that has subsequently been shown to be false. Success for Modern science is measured by whether it works, not by whether it is true. The philosophy of science took a major step towards acknowledging this in the twentieth century, when Sir Karl Popper successfully replaced “verifiability” with “falsifiability” as the litmus test of whether a theory is truly scientific or not. To be scientific, Popper argued, a theory must be falsifiable, that is, susceptible to being shown to be false. Logic, of course, would tell us that if a theory is capable of being shown to be false, it is, therefore false, and, indeed, Gordon H. Clark argued convincingly that all scientific theories are false, by the standards of logic, for they all involve the fallacy of asserting the consequent.

Now perhaps you are wondering whether any of this matters or not. Since science presumably aims at using the mastery over nature it seeks to benefit mankind is not the question of whether it works all that really matters? This objection would have more validity if everything science had accomplished had been beneficial. Some things science has given us – the ability to preserve food longer for example – are unquestionably beneficial. Other things science has given us – nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction – are decidedly not so beneficial, quite the opposite as a matter of fact.

This is directly related to everything we have seen about how Modern science has divorced its inquiries from an appreciation of things as they are in themselves, contemplation of the whole, and Truth as it was classically and traditionally understood. A science that seeks only such knowledge as can be used to bend nature to man’s will is a science that recognizes no limits on man’s will. Such a science is incapable of distinguishing between a good use of its mastery of nature and a bad use. Goodness like Truth, from which it can be distinguished but never separated, is a transcendental, an element of the permanent order of reality that cannot be bent to serve human will but which requires man to bend his will instead to his own peril if he refuses. Since Modern science is based upon an assertion of the will in rejection of these limitations it dooms itself to using its power in an evil way, as in the example given in the previous paragraph.

I offer the above as grounds for continuing the Socratic tradition of not trusting the experts. Modern science, for the reasons given, is cause for regarding today’s experts as being less reliable than those of Socrates’ day, not more.

Someone may, however, object that this does not apply to the medical experts we are being told to trust today because their science is devoted to the end of saving people’s lives and health and that this ensures that medical science cannot serve evil ends like the science that went into creating the nuclear bomb. The response that jumps to mind is to point to all the harm and destruction done – small businesses going bankrupt, massive job losses, mental health breakdowns, alcohol, opioid and other addictions, suicides, the erosion of social capital, distrust of family, friends, neighbours, the development of a snitch culture, the trampling of basic freedom and constitutional rights, the cruel locking away of people in the last days of their lives from their loved ones, the brainwashing people into regarding such things as a friendly handshake or a warm hug as sources of contagion, the cancelling of weddings, birthday parties, holidays, and all the joys of life, forcing people to merely exist rather than truly live, etc. – by the lockdowns that so many of these medical experts have been demanding and imposing for the sake of preventing the spread of a disease that most often produces only mild symptoms, has over a 99 percent survival rate for those under 65-70 and in good health, and which poses a threat mostly to the very old and very sick. Medical experts who would recommend such a thing demonstrate thereby that they are completely unworthy of our trust.

George Grant devoted his philosophical career to the contemplation of the significance of the transition from ancient to Modern thinking, focusing specifically on the shift from the view in which the permanent order of reality held us accountable to standards such as goodness, justice, and truth to the view in which the only “goodness”, “justice” and “truth” are values we impose on reality by bending it to our will. He frequently quoted Robert Oppenheimer’s statement “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it” as encapsulating the thinking behind Modern technological science and showing why such thinking precluded bending and submitting to the order of the universe. He contrasted this unfavourably with the old adage a posse ad esse non valet consequentia as epitomizing the older and wiser way of thinking. He spoke and wrote frequently about the troubling paradox of freedom, wherein the prevalent liberalism of the Modern Age made freedom its highest value, but understood freedom as the unshackling of the will from the constraints of the order recognized by ancient wisdom, and in developing the science and technology necessary to so “free” the will as to make every desire attainable, created the conditions for unprecedented levels of social control that were eliminating freedom in the older sense of protected civil liberties and rights and ironically, in the name of freedom, were moving us closer to tyranny. That medical science was as much a part of this problem as any other he recognized when he wrote:

The proliferating power of the medical profession illustrates our drive to new technologies of human nature. This expanding power has generally been developed by people concerned with human betterment.

Yet nevertheless, the profession has become a chief instrument for tightening social control in the western world, as is made evident by the unity of the profession’s purpose with those of political administration and law enforcement, the complex organization of dependent professions it has gathered around itself, its taking over of the cure of the ‘psyche’, and the increasing correlation of psychiatry with a behaviourally and physiologically oriented psychology. It becomes increasingly necessary to adjust the masses to behave appropriately amidst such technological crises as those of population and pollution and life in the cities. (“Thinking About Technology”, in Technology and Justice, 1986, pp 16-17.

Posted by Gerry T. Neal

How Captain Airhead Makes Andrew Scheer Look Much Better Than He Really Is

Posted on June 13, 2019 by admin

Thursday, June 13, 2019

How Captain Airhead Makes Andrew Scheer Look Much Better Than He Really Is

The Conservative Party of Canada really ought to be paying Captain Airhead a salary. He is the best publicity man they have. He has been doing a much better job of promoting their cause in the upcoming Dominion election than their own lackluster leadership. I do not mean merely that he makes them look good by being such a lousy, awful, and indeed, downright, horrible, alternative, although that is certainly the case. What I mean is that if there were a speck of truth to be found in any of his recent, scare-mongering, accusations against the Conservatives, the party would certainly rise in my esteem as it would that of any sensible and sane person. Evelyn Waugh once said that the problem with the Conservative Party was that it “has not turned the clock back a single second” and the Canadian incarnation of the party has given no indication that it plans to do so any time in the near future. Yet Justin Trudeau would have us believe that the Conservatives, if elected, would set the clock back by about a hundred years. My response to which is to say that if this happens, it would be a good start, but we need to go much further than that.

To say this, of course, is to commit the unpardonable sin of the Modern Age, blasphemy against the spirit of progress. It is a sin to which I gladly, and unrepentantly, plead guilty. Readers of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia might recall how in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Governor Gumpas of the Lone Islands, upon being told by King Caspian that the slave trade “must be stopped”, protests “But that would be putting the clock back”, adding “Have you no idea of progress, of development?” to which Caspian replies “I have seen then both in an egg…We call it ‘Going Bad’ in Narnia.” Needless to say, I subscribe to Caspian’s – and Lewis’ – view of progress. This is the view of genuine British and Canadian Toryism – that progress does not happen, and if it does it is a bad thing and we need to put a stop to it. Sadly, the Canadian Conservative Party of our day, like the British Conservative Party of Waugh’s day, have abandoned the more authentic views of their tradition for something closer to American republicanism, which worships at the altar of the same idol of progress as liberalism and the Left. Justin Trudeau is deluded if he seriously thinks otherwise.

I am not going to dwell at any length on Trudeau’s accusations that Andrew Scheer is in bed with “racists”, “white supremacists” and “white nationalists” as I have already dealt with this in another essay. It shows how extremely unhealthy, the political climate has become in present day Canada, that these labels can be attached to people who do not so describe themselves and who neither subscribe to a racialist ideology like National Socialism nor have engaged in violent rhetoric or action either as individuals or organized groups towards other races. All that one needs to do is to oppose a particular kind of racism – the anti-white racism manifested in the immigration policy of making the country as diverse as possible as fast as possible and hence as least white as possible as fast as possible, in the progressive notion that all whites and only whites are racists, and in the cartoonish re-writing of history into a bad melodrama in which whites are assigned the role of the moustache-twirling, villain in the top hat and large black coat and everyone else plays the helpless maiden whom he has tied to the railroad track. Heck, one does not even have to actively oppose this anti-white racism himself – it is sufficient to be seen in the same room as someone who does. My respect for Mr. Scheer and the Conservative Party would skyrocket if they actually did take a bold, consistent, and principled stand against this pervasive form of progressive anti-white racism, but I am not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. The accusations against them are entirely of the “you were seen with so-and-so, who said such-and-such” variety. Indeed, the disgusting manner in which Scheer threw Michael Cooper under the bus, the fact that he seems to have enforced silence upon his party about the Grits’ disturbing plans to bring back the vile Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and the way in which Warren Kinsella, of all people, has been defending Scheer against Trudeau’s charges using arguments amusingly similar to those that I would have used to ridicule Kinsella’s book Web of Hate twenty years ago, all point inevitably to the conclusion that Scheer, like Harper before him, is on the same side as Trudeau on these issues, leaving the many Canadians who wish for the freedom to think differently from Kinsella, Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, Harry Abrams, Helmut-Harry Loewen and others of that ilk, without anyone in Parliament to speak for them.

What I am more interested in addressing here are Captain Airhead’s accusations of what he considers to be sexism. Back when Stephen Harper was Conservative leader the Liberals were constantly accusing him of having a “hidden agenda,” i.e., to re-criminalize abortion. Trudeau, who has constructed a political image of himself as a “male feminist” which has taken a severe beating over the last couple of years for reasons that I will not get into here, and who as part of that image takes a rather clownish, over-the-top, hard-line, “it’s a woman’s right” stance on abortion, has revived the old “hidden agenda” line for use against Scheer. He has been able to use recent events south of the border, where several states have passed strong anti-abortion legislation now that there is a perceived right-wing majority on the Supreme Court in the hopes of provoking a legal battle that will end in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, to help him stoke the fears of his feminist support base.

Again, if there were the slightest amount of truth to Trudeau’s accusations, the Conservative Party’s stock would certainly rise in my books. I remember very well, however, that while Stephen Harper allowed pro-life people to run for his party at a time even as the other major party leaders began telling them they were persona non grata, this was the extent of his “support” for the pro-life cause. Pro-life people were allowed to run as Conservatives but woe unto them if they actually tried to do something to end abortion. There is not the slightest amount of evidence that things are any different now. This is extremely unfortunate for Canada because the current status quo on abortion, of which Trudeau is so proud, is an ever growing bloodstain on our country that cries out to heaven for divine justice, and there are no realistic options for changing that status quo, that do not require action by the Conservatives in the Dominion parliament. Even if it could be accomplished at the provincial level, which it cannot, the provincial Conservatives seem to have no more inclination to do so than their federal counterparts. The right-populist premier of Upper Canada assured the media last month, after progressives threw a tantrum when one of his MPPs pledged at a pro-life rally “to make abortion unthinkable in our lifetime” that his government “will not re-open the abortion debate.” Even more recently the provincial Conservative government here in Manitoba has announced that an abortion pill will now be fully covered by the public. There are many health care products and services which are necessary to help people who are suffering from excruciating pain or are in danger of going blind which are not fully covered by the public, but a pill that murders babies soon will be.

It is difficult to think of anything that puts the lie to the entire left-liberal concept of progress more than this matter of abortion. The progressive position is that a pregnant woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy. Canadian progressives, including the leadership of the Liberal Party, take the most extreme degree of this position, which allows for no qualifications such as “up to this-or-that stage of development”, insists that this “right” be protected against even interference of the persuasive variety, requires that the public pay for it, insists that the debate is closed and that the other side should be made to shut up, and boasts that their victory shows how advanced we have become in our thinking. Their entire position, however, is based upon a lie. The position that a woman has or ought to have the right to terminate her pregnancy could scarcely be formulated, much less justified, apart from the notion that the pregnancy is something that concerns her, her body, and her health alone. “Pro-choice” lingo such as “the procedure”, “reproductive rights”, “control of her own body” is all carefully selected to create this impression. Yet, obviously, pregnancy is not simply a matter of a woman, her health, and her body. It also concerns her baby, whose very life is at stake in the pregnancy. An abortion is not merely a medical procedure undergone for the health of the pregnant woman. It is the termination of the life of a baby.

Far from being an advanced state of ethical thinking the so-called “pro-choice” position of the progressive left is a regression into the darkest form of paganism. In the times of ancient paganism, infanticide was not an uncommon way of keeping the family within the means of its resources. The story of Oedipus is but one of the ancient legends that address the cruelty of the practice of exposure by telling of a child rescued from this fate by a kindly couple. Worse, the worship of several pagan idols required the sacrifice of children, usually the first-born. Several of the most important ethicists of ancient Greece and Rome condemned this practice in Carthage, the city-state in what is now Tunisia in northern Africa which was Rome’s rival for control of the Mediterranean world in the third and fourth centuries BC. The Carthaginians would sacrifice their children to an idol, whom the Greek and Roman commentators identified with Kronos or Saturn from their own mythologies, by placing them in the heated arms of a huge bronze statue. This is a practice they inherited from Tyre, the Phoenician city-state in what is now Lebanon, of which Carthage was originally a colony. The Phoenicians shared this practice with their southern neighbours, the tribes of Canaan, and this practice is clearly identified in the Old Testament as one of the worst forms of the wickedness that brought divine judgement upon the Canaanites in the form of Israel being sent to conquer and drive them out of the Promised Land. Later, when the Israelites apostatized into the idolatry of their neighbours, this practice is again pointed to by the Prophets as having particularly defiled their land and led ultimately to the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. A curse was pronounced upon the place outside Jerusalem where these sacrifices took place and by the time of the New Testament it was regarded as a defiled place, fit only for burning refuse and the bodies of criminals, and lent its name to the fate of those to be condemned at the Final Judgement.

Even before the Exodus, and the giving of the Mosaic Law which strictly forbade the Israelites from participating in the abominations of Canaan, such as child sacrifice, and required that they redeem their firstborn with animal sacrifices instead, the Book of Genesis draws a contrast between the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the false gods of the pagans. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, but prevents him from actually going through with the sacrifice, for it is faith and not his son, that God wanted from Abraham. Abraham, when asked by Isaac where the lamb for the sacrifice is, makes the prophecy that God Himself will provide a lamb, a prophecy that we see fulfilled in the New Testament when John the Baptist, speaking of Jesus, says “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” The pagan idols, who are really devils, require their worshippers to sacrifice their children, the true and living God, gave His only-begotten Son as the sacrificial Lamb Who would take away the sin of the world.

As the Christian religion grew and spread throughout the ancient world, its influence led, among other things, to the Roman Empire’s finally banning infanticide. If anything actually deserves to be described as an enlightened ethical step forward in the right direction this was it. By using this language to describe the revival of pagan baby murder, the Left demonstrates just how much its concept of “progress” really is King Caspian’s “going bad” after all. It also reveals itself to be just another form of ancient, pagan, devil worship.

The question for Andrew Scheer and the Conservative Party is, what God do you serve? Scheer, who was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, claims to be a Christian but this is also the case with Justin Trudeau. As long as Scheer, like his predecessor Harper, prevents the members of his party from actively combating the evil of baby murder and instead requires them to join in the loony Left’s crusade against its chimerical bugbear of “white racism”, it is not the true and living God that he is serving.

Fortunately for him, he has Justin Trudeau to make him look so much better than he really is. How much better for us, it would be, however, if instead of relying on this, he were to come out and take a bold stand on the things for which the Conservative Party ought to be standing. He could start by promising the turn the clock back a century and a half, to right after Confederation before the Liberal Party got their grubby hands on the country and things started to go downhill.

CAFE

Dedicated to Free Speech, Immigration Reform, and Restoring Political Sanity

Tag Archives: C. S. Lewis

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