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Barbenheimer Meets the Terminator

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                                                         Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, August 4, 2023

Barbenheimer Meets the Terminator

Just when everyone thought that the combination of two and a half years of bat flu paranoia, online streaming services, and new film releases consisting mostly of the double digit latest instalments in series that everyone had grown tired of at least a decade ago had finally killed off the cinema, Barbenheimer – the simultaneous release of the films Barbie and Oppenheimer -brought the teetering industry back from the brink of bankruptcy, as both films broke box office records their opening weekend.   The meme itself, which encouraged people to watch both as a double feature, probably had something to do with it.  I don’t know who exactly came up with it.   There is a well-known phenomenon in which rival film studies release similar films around the same time – think Deep Impact and Armageddon in 1998, for one example.   This is obviously the exact opposite of that, two movies that could hardly be more different from each other being released at the same.   Of course this is not exactly an unusual phenomenon.  Arguably, it occurs every weekend.   In this case, however, the difference between the two seems to have struck someone, or rather a whole lot of someones as the popularity of the meme attests, as being much larger than is usual.     Or maybe it was just the catchiness of the portmanteau.   The first is a live action comedy featuring Margot Robbie as the fashion doll upon which Mattel built its toy empire.   The second is a three hour biopic starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist from Berkeley who was led the Manhattan Project in uncorking the bottle and releasing the genie of nuclear weapons into the world.   With Barbie being only an hour shorter than Oppenheimer, bringing the total running time of the two to five hours, it would have been a long night at the movies for anyone who took the meme literally.   Not, “watch the entire Ring cycle in one sitting” long, but a step in that direction.

Barbie proved to be the bigger hit of the two, taking in almost twice as much as Oppenheimer.  Since it is a highly politicized movie, a fact the filmmakers made no attempt to hide prior to release, some have jumped on this as debunking the maxim “go woke, go broke”.   An op-ed cartoon in the Baltimore Sun, for example, depicts Ron DeSantis as saying “go woke go broke” as he is trampled by a mob rushing into a theatre showing Barbie.   Tori Otten wrote an editorial for The New Republic maintaining that the Barbie opening weekend sales debunk the saying that she dubs “far right”.   Perhaps she has never heard of the other saying “the exception that proves the rule”.  That might be what we are seeing here.   Then again, the rule may simply not apply.   The implications of “go woke go broke” are that companies that were originally apolitical and sold their products to a general consumer base will lose a lot of customers if they start injecting politics, especially of the obnoxious, preachy, ultra-left kind that is now called “woke”, into their brand.     What happened with Bud Light earlier this year is the textbook example.   Or, and this is particularly the case when it comes to pop culture, if a story or character originally created to appeal to the kinds of people the woke hate is suddenly given a woke makeover, it is not likely to go over well.  If someone were to film a remake of Dirty Harry, for example, telling the story from the perspective of the liberal mayor and police commissioner, with Inspector Callahan breaking down into tears, coming around to their point of view, throwing away his .44 Magnum instead of his star, and hugging Scorpio and begging his forgiveness, then I would expect that movie to do exceptionally poorly in the box office.     A movie, on the other hand, about the doll that has been associated with the Helen Gurley Brown “you can have it all, girl” type feminism from pretty much the day Ruth Handler ripped her off from a more risqué German doll marketed for adult males and repackaged her in a pink box for girls, is not likely to be harmed at the box office by its having a feminist message.

Amusingly, the film preaches feminism in such a way as to completely undermine its message.   *spoiler alert*  The title character, a feminist of the Cosmo type her brand has long represented, lives in a world inhabited by her multiple versions, and the other characters of the franchise.   That world is a complete gynocracy.  Most people would probably call it a matriarchy but none of the females who rule the place seem to have any maternal instincts – except discontinued pregnant Midge – so gynocracy makes more sense.  To “stereotypical Barbie” this is a utopia.   It is also a mirror-image parody of what feminists think the world looked like before feminism and would still look like without feminism.   Barbie thinks that due to her influence the real world is like hers.  Then she has to visit it and discovers that it is not.  In the real world she is verbally dressed down by a young girl who spouts the extra crazy version of feminism that thinks that women are all oppressed “A Handmaid’s Tale” style in the Western world today and that Barbie is the “fascist” enabler of said oppression.   This girl and her mother end up going back with Barbie to Barbieland, where they discover that it has been taken over by Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who had gone to the real world with Barbie, read about “patriarchy” in a library, went home and easily replaced the gynocracy with what he thought “patriarchy” was.   Note that patriarchy is the term feminists use for a society ruled by men qua men, who oppress women qua women, basically the Marxist concept of haves oppressing have nots, with the sexes taking the place of the economic classes.   The same objection that I made to matriarchy earlier apply to this usage of patriarchy.  The term logically suggests the traditional authority belonging to fathers which is a good thing not a bad thing.   Androcracy would be a better word for what the feminists are talking about.   It is not likely to catch on, but then as the thing it would denote only exists – and only ever has existed – in the fevered brains of feminists, it is not really needed.  

Now, and this is the point, nobody with an IQ over ten who watches this movie is going to think that the actual world around them either a) resembles Barbieland with the sex/gender roles reversed or b) resembles Kendom, the weird caricature that the idea of “patriarchy” inspired Ken to create.   Especially since in the movie, Barbie herself, after restoring her world to the way it was, sort of, opts to leave Barbieland for the real world and become a real girl with the help of the ghost of Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman, who for some unexplained reason has the same powers as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio.  

Something similar can be said about the movie’s man-bashing, which Piers Morgan and others have criticized. (1)   Yes, the movie does depict its male characters as stupid, incompetent, clumsy and boorish.   I can’t imagine anyone, however, who has not already been thoroughly brainwashed by feminism, watching the movie, and thinking that this is an accurate depiction of men.  Nor, I suspect, are many likely to be persuaded to think that the film’s portrayal of men accurately depicts how men see women, which is obviously the point it is, at least on the surface, trying to make.    It is simply too much of a caricature to be taken seriously.  The film comes across as pretending to promote feminism while actually satirizing it.   Except that this does not mesh well with anything else I have ever heard about filmmaker Greta Gerwig, I would be inclined to say this must be intentional.

Many have criticized Barbie as being far too political for a children’s movie and this criticism would be accurate regardless of whether it is the woke, feminist, propaganda that on the surface it can be read as or whether it is actually the most brilliant, satirical, takedown of the same ever made.   Except, of course, that it is obviously not a children’s movie as ought to be evident from the rating.   Like G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) and its sequel, and the more successful Transformers film series, also based on children’s toys, this film’s target audience is not children playing with the toys today, but the children who played with the toys decades ago and are today adults, if only in the sense of having passed the age of majority.

Oppenheimer seems set to become Christopher Nolan’s most successful film yet.   It would probably have done even better if he had not insisted on shooting it only in IMAX, forcing moviegoers to either pay the steep price of an IMAX ticket or watch it in a theatre for which it is not really formatted.   It is a very timely film.   I suspect that a lot of people would agree with that statement because, due to the war between Russia and Ukraine and NATO’s involvement in said conflict on Ukraine’s side, we are closer to nuclear war than we have been since the Cold War ended.   That is certainly a valid reason for thinking the film to be timely   It is not the reason behind my statement, however.    Before looking at that reason a few remarks about the movie are in order.

The film does not just cover the period in which the atomic bomb was being developed.   It also looks at Oppenheimer’s revulsion at the destructive fruit that his efforts produced, his unsuccessful attempts to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle and the ensuing falling away between him and his former colleagues.   The movie zig-zags between this latter part of Oppenheimer’s life, the period in which he led the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and an even earlier, pre-war period of his career.   In this earlier period he apparently identified as Snow White’s evil stepmother.   Or, at any rate, he tried to dispatch his tutor, Lord Patrick Blackett, played in the film by James D’Arcy, in the same manner employed by the witch in her final attempt on Snow White’s life.   Since the apple went uneaten, neither dwarves nor prince were needed.   Pity.  They would have been available for the movie since Disney kicked them out of its new ultra-woke live action remake of Snow White.     

In the storyline about the post-war part of his life the dominant theme is the growing animosity between him and US Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss, portrayed in the film by Robert Downey Jr.    The film is shot partly in black and white, partly in colour, with the colour parts depicting when the story is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, the black and white depicting when it is told from Strauss’ point of view.   It is best to know that going into the theatre because otherwise the natural assumption would be to think it had something to do with the different timeframes the movie keeps switching between.  The contest between Oppenheimer and Strauss culminated in the 1954 AEC hearings in which Oppenheimer was asked about his Communist associations (before the war his social circle included several Communists, including his pre-war girlfriend Jean Tatlock, portrayed by Florence Pugh in the movie, Katherine “Kitty” Puening, portrayed by Emily Blunt in the movie, who became his wife, and his younger brother Frank, portrayed by Dylan Arnold) and stripped of his security clearance.   Strauss’s purpose in these hearings was more to publicly humiliate Oppenheimer than to harm him professionally – the clearance was set to expire the day after he was stripped of it.   Ultimately, it cost Strauss his own appointment to Eisenhower’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce when the US Senate voted against confirmation of the appointment in part because of the lobbying of scientists looking to avenge Oppenheimer.    In depicting these events Nolan does not stray from the Hollywood party-line on “McCarthyism”, which is not surprising since if any film since John Wayne starred in Big Jim McLain in 1952, two years before the Oppenheimer hearings, has dared to tell the other side of the story I am not aware of it.   Accordingly the film’s precise historical accuracy fails somewhat on this point.   That Strauss in hauling Oppenheimer before the AEC’s Personnel Security Board was carrying out a personal vendetta is accurate enough.  That the charges against him were bogus, well, that is not as clear as the film suggests and as many people think.   That J. Brandon Magoo took it upon himself, last December, to indulge in the empty gesture of voiding the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, suggests there might have been more to the charges than meets the eye.  

The reason, however, that I said that Oppenheimer is a very timely film, is not the Russia-Ukrainian War and the renewed threat of nuclear annihilation that the repentant Oppenheimer felt to be the inevitable outcome of his work nor does it have anything to do with Communism.   A notable moment in the film is when the title character quotes “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” upon his realization of just what he had unleashed, a line which earlier he had translated upon request from his pre-war Commie girlfriend during an, ahem, intimate moment.   The classical Sanskrit original of the quote comes from the Bhagavad Gita, an important section of the sixth parva or book of the Mahabharata, the longest epic poem still extent and one of the principal Hindu scriptures.   In its original context, the line is spoken by Krishna, avatar of the Hindu supreme deity Vishnu, to Prince Arjuna, the hero of the epic, and its intent is to convince Arjuna to go to war.   When Oppenheimer took to quoting this line in his post-war life it was rather to the opposite effect of this.   Another contrast, however, jumps out.   Oppenheimer in his testimony before the USAEC Personnel Security Board in 1954 said:

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

George Grant, the greatest thinker my country, the Dominion of Canada, has ever produced, was as fond of quoting these words, especially the first part up to the words “do it”, as Oppenheimer himself was of quoting the line from the Gita.   Grant believed that in these words Oppenheimer had captured the spirit that animates Modern technological progress and had also expressed in the same words, the very thing that was objectionable, or at the very least problematic from a Christian, ethical, and philosophical point of view, in said progress.    The question of whether or not something should be done is made subordinate to the question of whether or not something can be done and postponed until it is too late to ask the question because the damage has already been done.   Given what has already been noted about Oppenheimer’s thoughts, later in life, towards the atomic bomb, his words have the force of a mea maxima culpa.

As the trailers for Barbie and Oppenheimer were released and the hype for these movies grew we began to hear story after story about another technological genie in the process of being released from its bottle.   That is the genie of artificial intelligence or AI.

That AI poses a threat to mankind as great or greater than that of the Manhattan Project’s invention is something that even Elon Musk, the last person on earth one would suspect harboured technoskeptical sentiments, suggested that the brakes be applied.   Indeed, the man behind Tesla has been issuing these warnings for quite some time.    The AI threat that he has been talking about is a lot more serious than the threat to their careers that the striking Hollywood actors began to perceive about the time AI channels began to flood Youtube offering us artificially generated covers of every song ever written by every artist that never covered it. About five years ago he warned that AI was like “summoning the devil”, that it needed to be proactively regulated, because “By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it will be too late”, that it could produce an “immortal dictator from which we would never escape” and posed “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization”. 

Of course when it comes to warning about AI, Musk was beaten to the punch by decades by a film maker.   As you have probably deduced from the title of this essay I am talking about James Cameron.   In Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, when he was asked by CTV News Chief Political Correspondent Vassy Kapelos to comment about recent warnings regarding AI he said “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.”

1984, in addition to being the title of George Orwell’s novel warning about a totalitarian dystopia, was the year that Cameron released The Terminator.   Directed and co-written by Cameron, this film starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role as a cyborg assassin, sent back in time to assassinate Sarah Connor, the character played by Linda Hamilton.   The Terminator was sent by Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence designed by Cyberdyne Systems and placed in charge of nuclear defences that would declare war on humanity in the future and eventually be defeated by a resistance led by Sarah Connor’s son John.   The future John Connor, to protect his mother and his own existence from the Terminator, sends one of his men, Kyle Reese, portrayed by Michael Biehn back in time to protect Sarah.    Reese, over the course of the movie, becomes John Connor’s father, and he and Sarah eventually defeat the Terminator at the cost of his own life.   Before the Terminator is destroyed it loses an arm, however, which in the first of many sequels it is revealed falls into the hands of the creators of the future AI enemy of mankind, becoming the means by which they learn how to develop that technology in the first place.

Throughout the Terminator movie franchise both sides are constantly struggling to prevent an outcome that proves to be inevitable.   Skynet is constantly fighting against its own future defeat at the hands of the resistance, the Connors and their allies are constantly trying to prevent the rise of Skynet.   The fatality both are fighting a losing battle against arises out of the dilemma attached to the concept of time travel, that if you go back in time to change something, after having changed it you lose the motive to have gone back in time to begin with.   The present attempt to prevent AI from becoming the threat already visible on the horizon of the future often seems similarly futile but it is not.   The battle is not against a future that cannot be changed because it is the fixed reference point for everyone working to change it in the past as in the movies.   It is against a future that is only inevitable if we continue to accept the idea that when it comes to science and technology, we must first find out if something can be done, and, after having done it, only then ask the question whether we should have done it or not.   We must reject, in other words, the Oppenheimer ethic, and in its place firmly establish – or re-establish – the idea that we must first ask the question of whether or not something should be done, and not bother at all with the question of whether it can be done unless the answer to the first question is firmly determined to be yes.

If we don’t, we are at risk of unleashing a technological threat that would render the “battle of the sexes” type controversy surrounding the first of the movies discussed here moot.   For if soulless, sexless, machines take over the world, this would indeed be an end to any sort of “patriarchy”, real or imagined, but it would also be “Hasta la vista, Barbie”.

(1)   I find it hilarious that Piers Morgan has been taking this both personally and far more seriously than I have.   Morgan is liberal on most social and moral issues, albeit liberal in the sense of thirty years ago rather than today.  Indeed, the question he posed in ranting about Barbie’s man-bashing was “why does empowering women have to be about trashing men?” He framed it in that way to indicate his support for “empowering women”.   Frankly, I think there is far too much “empowering” going on in this day and age.   While people who talk about empowerment generally conceive of it in terms of self-fulfillment, in reality power is the ability to coerce others to do your will.   It is something that is very dangerous and needs to be constantly held in check and under control.   What is sorely needed today is not for more people of more types to have more power, as the left thinks, but a restoration and revival of authority, the respected right to lead, vested by prescription – the quality of having been tested and proven since time immemorial – in traditional institutions, the only thing capable of containing power and bending it to serve the ends of civilization, rather than unleashing it in a destructive manner.   The terms “patriarchy” and “matriarchy” if they were used to mean what their component parts suggest, which neither of them is, would denote fatherly and motherly authority respectively, both good things, -archy being the suffix corresponding to authority as –cracy is the suffix corresponding to power.   As far as “empowering women” specifically goes, I am unapologetically of the same mind as Dr. Johnson, “nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little”, and Stephen Leacock, “women need not more freedom but less”, and think that every wave of feminism, including the first, was based on a fundamentally erroneous miscalculation of how little power women already had in the world, but did not take offense at this movie the way Morgan did. — Gerry T. Neal

Labels: AI, Barbie, Christopher Nolan, Cilian Murphy, Dr. Johnson, Elon Musk, George Grant, Greta Gerwig, J. Robert Oppenheimer, James Cameron, Lewis Strauss, Margot Robbie, Piers Morgan, Stephen Leacock, The Terminator

Pride & The Season of Hubris

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   Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, June 22, 2023

Pride & The Season of Hubris

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.  And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good. (Ezekiel 16:49-50)

A couple of decades ago the degradation of our culture and civilization had only proceeded so far as to devote a parade once a year to honouring the worst of all sins, the sin that brought the judgement of fire and brimstone down upon the cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis.   The parade became a day, the day became a week, and now the entire sixth month of the year is dedicated to the celebration of this sin.   This year Captain Airhead, the dolt who for eight years has disgraced the office of Prime Minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa, somehow clinging to power despite scandal after scandal each of which should have been career destroying, and who never opens his mouth without sticking his foot in it, informally extended the period to a “season”.

As can be seen in the Scriptural passage that I have used as the epigraph for this essay there are several sins for which God’s judgement fell on Sodom.   Until a few generations ago, however, reference to the sin of Sodom in the singular would not likely have caused confusion because the name of the city was associated with a single sin of a sexual nature, the sin highlighted by St. Jude in his reference to the judgement on the cities in his epistle and which appears in the list in the Ezekiel passage as the last item referenced.  While this sin is, obviously, a huge part of what is being celebrated this month, it is not this sin that I am talking about but the first sin in Ezekiel’s list, the sin after which the celebration has been named.

I have often made the observation that when the name of this celebration was reduced to Pride, they abandoned the lesser of two sins – sins of a sexual nature fall under the heading of the least of the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust – and kept the worst of all, Pride.

Pride is the worst sin of all.   The concept of the Seven Deadly Sins goes back to the fourth century of Christianity.   St. Evagrius Ponticus was a disciple of the Cappadocian Fathers, first of St. Basil the Great then of St. Gregory Nazianzus whom he followed to Constantinople on the eve of the Second Ecumenical Council before withdrawing first to Jerusalem then later to Egypt, to live a monastic life.   In Egypt, he encountered the teachings of the Alexandrian Neoplatonist monks who, dividing the human being into body, soul, and mind, identified for each a trio of λογισμοί – literally, this is the plural of “calculation”, but is probably better rendered “thoughts” in this context – that influenced the components in bad ways.   This made for nine in total, which were arranged in a hierarchy proceeding from those which afflicted the body to those which afflicted the mind, with the ones affecting the body being the lowest and least, the ones affecting the mind being the worst.   St. Evagrius reduced this to a list of eight sins or rather vices if we distinguish between sins as acts and vices as behavioural patterns or habits.   St. John Cassian, who brought the monastic movement out of the deserts of Egypt by founding a monastery in Gaul or France as it is today, popularized St. Evagrius’ list in his writings.   It was further revised around 590 AD by St. Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, in his commentary on Job entitled The Book of Morals.    Technically, St. Gregory retained a list of eight sins because he separated Pride from what he called the “seven principal sins”, declaring Pride to be the source from which these seven flow.   The seven were Vainglory, Envy, Wrath, Melancholy, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust.   This was later revised so that Vainglory was folded up into Pride and Melancholy was replaced with Sloth, producing the list that found its way into St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and Dante’s Divine Comedy in which the seven levels of Purgatory correspond to the seven.   This is the list that we know as the Seven Deadly Sins to this day.  The order represents their ranking.   In The Book of Morals they are listed in descending order from worst to least, in the later revised version they would be listed in ascending order.  Although his criteria for determining the hierarchy of sin differed from that of the Neoplatonists the result was largely the same.   Subsequent lists of the Seven Deadly Sins have varied the order.   Sometimes they are listed in ascending order, sometimes in descending, other times whether in ascending or descending order there are slight changes in the ranking reflecting differences of opinion as to what is worse than what.   Consistently, however, from the Neoplatonists and St. Evagrius to St. Gregory the Great to Dante to us today, Pride has been considered the worst of all.

While the Seven Deadly Sins are a later theological construct and so are not listed as such in the Bible it is difficult to argue with the contention that the ranking of Pride as the worst of all sins is Biblical.   A search of the Bible for a use of the word that is positive or even neutral yields little in the way of fruit.   The first occurrence of the word and the only occurrence in the Pentateuch is found in Leviticus 26:19 in which the LORD, telling the Israelites what He will do to them if they do not obey His commandments, says that “I will break the pride of your power”.   In the historical books, David’s brother claims to know David’s Pride (1 Sam. 17:28)  in what is clearly not intended as a compliment and Pride is what King Hezekiah has to repent and humble himself from (2 Chron. 32:26) .   In the Psalms Pride is consistently the characteristic of the wicked (10:2,4; 36:11; 59:12).   In Proverbs Pride is hated by the LORD and those who fear Him (8:13), brings with it shame (11:2), contention (13:10), destruction and a fall (16:18), is in the mouth of the foolish (14:3) and will bring him low (29:23).   In the Prophets Pride is something that brings the judgement of God upon a people whether it be Israel (Is. 28:1, 3 – Ephraim, from which tribe the ruling dynasty of the Northern Kingdom came, is used here as it often is to signify the schismatic Kingdom as a whole), Moab (Is. 16:6), or Judah (Jer. 13:9).  In the book of Daniel it is what brings judgement on Nebuchadnezzar (5:20). There is only one verse in the Old Testament in which the word Pride could possibly be taken in a sense less negative than those we have already looked at.   We shall consider it after looking at the New Testament references which are few.   In the New Testament, Pride is absolutely, unambiguously evil.   In Mark 7:22 it is one of the evil things that come from within a man and defile him.   In 1 John 2:16 the “pride of life” is one of the three things that make up “the world” in the sense of the system organized against God.   In 1 Tim. 3:6 St. Paul warns St. Timothy against the ordination of a novice “lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil”.   Here the Apostle associates Pride with the devil, a traditional association which is the reason why the one verse in the Old Testament that could possibly be taken as neutral probably should not be so taken.   The verse is Job 41:15 which begins with “his scales are his pride”.   His in this passage refers to Leviathan.   Leviathan was the name of a creature conceived of as a sea serpent or sea dragon.   When the Old Testament speaks of him it is invariably speaking about Satan.   The enemy of God makes his first appearance as a serpent in Genesis.   In Revelation the Dragon is identified as that serpent of old, the devil and Satan.   In Isaiah 27:1 Leviathan the sea serpent is clearly Satan.  There is no reason to think that the Leviathan of Job is any different, especially when the chapter goes on to describe him as “king over all the children of pride” (Job 41:34), and the structure of the book as a whole rather demands that a reference to Satan be made precisely at this point.   The reference to his Pride in verse 15, therefore, cannot be taken as an exception to the rule that Pride is always a bad thing in the Bible.

The verses we looked at in the previous paragraph are verses that use words rendered “Pride” in our Authorized Bible.  The related adjective “proud” is used slightly more often than the noun.   The noun can be found in 46 verses, the adjective in 47, but these support the picture of Pride that one gets from the verses that use the noun.   Several of them, for example, use the adjective as a substantive, “the proud”, who might as well be called “the wicked” as they are always referred to as people whom God “resisteth” or hath otherwise set Himself against.   Needless to say verses that use synonyms that are translated “haughty”, “arrogant”, and the like, provide additional support.

Now it might be argued that all of this merely proves that Pride is bad, not that it is the worst of evils.   The traditional view that it is the worst of sins was derived in a number of ways.   To the Neoplatonists it was the worst because it was the ultimate sin of the mind, the sins of the mind being worse than the sins of the soul, which in turn are worse than the sins of the body, because the mind is higher than the soul which is higher than the body.   For St. Gregory the Great it was the worst because it offended the most against Love.   One can only image what St. Gregory would have thought if he could have looked ahead in time to the day when multitudes would march under the banner of Pride chanting the tautological mantra “love is love”.   Scripturally, Pride’s being the worst of sins is derived from it literally being the Original Sin, the source of all others.   There are two ways in which this is the case.   The one, clearly found in the Bible, is that Pride led to the Fall of Man.   The serpent’s temptation of Eve in the Garden was temptation to Pride.   “Ye shall be as gods”, i.e., like God Himself.   That the serpent – the serpent of old who is the Devil and Satan – would tempt man with Pride, provides support for the traditional view that Pride is what was behind his own Fall.   In the traditional view, the devil started out as Lucifer, a high ranking angel in heaven, who became the first liberal, or Whig to use Dr. Johnson’s parlance, urging his fellow angels to support him in his rebellious bid to overthrow the Sovereign King of the universe, God, and establish a cosmic democratic republic with him as its head.   His rebellion failed but the Cosmic Cromwell became the cruel tyrant of all who followed him in rejecting the King of the universe, setting the pattern for all subsequent human liberal democratic republicanism.   There is no explicit account of the origin of Satan in the Old Testament as there is of the Fall of Man but it is inferred from passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel where human rulers are spoken to in such a way as to suggest that the supernatural evil behind them is who is truly being addressed.   The explicit account is found in the twelfth chapter of the book of Revelation.   The point is that Pride is believed to have been what motivated the rebellion.   This is based on St. Paul’s words to St. Timothy and what can be inferred from Isaiah 14.

In the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek made by seventy Jewish scholars for Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt and which became the Christian Old Testament,  the Wisdom of Solomon says that “through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it” (Wis. 2:24).   This is not discussing the cause of Satan’s Fall but his motivation in tempting man.   Envy, however, is closely related to Pride.   It refers to hating someone else for having something you don’t or being something you aren’t so much that you seek to destroy that person. In the standard list of the Seven Deadly Sins it stands next to Pride.     On the one end of the list are the vices which are classic Aristotelian vices – ordinary human appetites indulged in to excess.   Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, and Sloth fall into this category.   On the other end of the list are the vices that are Satanic in nature.   Pride and Envy fall into this category.  Wrath either belongs with Pride and Envy or is the middle ground between the two categories.   Some have produced lists in which Avarice rather than Envy stands next to Pride.   I suspect this to be the result of crackpot left-wing ideas infiltrating theological circles.   Avarice is the vice associated with capitalism.   Envy is the vice associated with socialism.   One can be a businessman, or at least one used to be able to be a businessman in the days before globalism, multi-national corporations, tech giants and media conglomerates, without succumbing to Avarice.   One cannot be a socialist without embracing Envy for Envy is the essence of socialism, its sine qua non, the spirit that moves it and motivates it.

Many would say that there is a good Pride and a bad Pride and that everything said above pertains to the bad Pride.   This is an Aristotelian concept, at least if we regard Pride as a proper translation of μεγαλοψυχία from book four of his Nicomachean Ethics.   That this is a proper translation is rather doubtful.   Liddell and Scott give as their first definition of it “greatness of soul, highmindedness, lordliness” and even “generosity”.   “Greatness of soul” is what you get when you split the word into its components and literally translate each of them.  Unfortunately, what you get when you transliterate the word is megalopsychia, which sounds like it describes a mental condition that will get you locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane.    This is not the word translated Pride in the New Testament.   In Mark 7:22 the word is ὑπερηφανία, in 1 John 2:12 it is ἀλαζονεία, in 1 Timothy 3:6 the phrase in which it occurs is in Greek the single word τυφωθείς.   ὑπερηφανία, a compound formed from the word for “over” and the word for “shine”, basically means self-promoting arrogance.   This is the word that is used for Pride in the early Greek versions of what would become the Seven Deadly Sins.   Its adjectival form occurs five times in the New Testament, in three instances being used substantively to mean “the proud” and in the other two used as “proud” in lists of attributive adjectives, all of which are negative.  The primary meaning of ἀλαζονεία is “false pretension, imposture” from which the meaning of “boastfulness” is derived, which is its meaning in the Scriptural text.   Τυφωθείς, rendered “being lifted up with pride” in the Authorized Bible, is a passive aorist participle form of the verb τυφόω which in the active voice means to “delude”, but when it is used in the passive voice indicates that the subject of the verb is “crazy, demented”.   Liddell and Scott give as more specific versions of the passive meaning “demented, rendered vain” and “filled with insane arrogance”.  Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία does not appear in the New Testament and it would be difficult to take the word as he uses and describes it as a synonym for any of the New Testament words for Pride, although it would also be difficult to argue that it is consistent with humility, which both Testaments stress is something God insists upon among the faithful.   Liddell and Scott do give a second definition, noting that the word can be used in a bad sense, in which case they render it “arrogance”, which of course, would be a synonym for the New Testament words for Pride.   Those today who would distinguish between a good Pride and a bad Pride seldom have anything like what Aristotle meant by μεγαλοψυχία in mind.   What they think of good Pride is something along the lines of “an honest and non-inflated sense of achievement or accomplishment” or “thinking well, but not too highly, of oneself”.

The Pride that our civilization has decided in its apostasy and decadence to celebrate every June, however, bears no resemblance to either these more modest redefinitions of Pride or to Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.   Observe the way in which those who celebrate Pride now demand that everyone else do so as well.   Public figures, even if they do not actively speak against Pride but merely do not speak in favour of it, do not march in its parades, do not wave its flag perverted from the sign God gave the world as a token of His Covenant never to send a world-destroying Flood again in defiance of Him and ignorance of its full implications (1), and are basically deemed insufficiently supportive, find themselves in a position eerily similar to the person in the Soviet Union who was the first to stop clapping after one of Stalin’s boring harangues.   This “you must support us or be destroyed” attitude is hardly consistent with either a modest rather than inflated positive feeling about yourself and your accomplishments or Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία which can be translated “generosity” or “magnitude”, i.e., the opposite of the attitude in question.   It is, however, very consistent with another Greek word that is often associated with Aristotle, albeit with his writings on rhetoric and Greek tragedy more than his Ethics.   This is the word ὕβρις.   Transliterated as hubris this word continues to be used in English today.

The primary meaning of ὕβρις provided by Liddell and Scott is “wanton violence, insolence”.   They provide an explanation of this definition in which they clarify that the violence arises out of the Pride of strength or of passion.   Think of someone who thinks that because he is strong he can walk all over those who are weaker – a bully would be a good example – and you have a pretty good picture of what is meant by it.   Aristotle identified it as foremost example of a character flaw – interestingly he used a word that has the basic meaning of “failure, fault” that in the New Testament is the primary word for sin – that in tragedy, brings about the fall of the hero.   ὕβρις is not used often in the New Testament.  It occurs three times and in our Authorized Bible is translated “hurt”, “harm” and “reproaches”, i.e., designating the acts that spring from the attitude rather than the attitude itself.    In the LXX, however, it is frequently used for Pride.   It is used alongside ὑπερηφανία in Leviticus 26:19 when the LORD says that He will break the “pride of your power”.   Rather fittingly considering its association with a fall in Aristotle and popular ancient Greek thought it is also used in the LXX of Proverbs 16:18 and is the Pride those who fear the Lord are enjoined to hate in Proverbs 8:13.

This word so appropriately describes the attitude that is on display in the celebrations of Pride that I humbly suggest it be used instead to clarify more precisely what is being celebrated.

 (1)   The “bow” in “rainbow” is not the bow you tie around your neck or in the strings of your shoes but the “bow” that an archer uses.   The Latin word for bow is arcus, from which the words archer, arch, and arc are derived.  Arch is an architectural device that shares the shape of the weapon which is also the shape of the sign that appears in the sky after it rains.   An arc is a curve in geometry.  The kind of artificial rainbow that is sometimes produced by passing light through a prism is often called an arc.  Welding arcs and electrical arcs are also so-named for their curved, bow-like, shape.   When Genesis records the LORD’s covenant with Noah and His placing His “bow” in the sky as His promise never to destroy the world in a Flood again, the word for “bow” is קֶשֶׁת which denotes the weapon and which like its English equivalents is derived from a verb meaning “bend”.   The significance of this sign is that LORD was hanging up His bow, i.e., putting it away never to use it again.   Also implied, however, in the use of the image of a weapon as the sign, is a warning not to behave in the way that brought the judgement of the Deluge in the first place. — Gerry T. Neal
: Aristotle, Dante Alighieri, Dr. Johnson, Justin Trudeau, Neoplatonism, Pride, Seven Deadly Sins, St. Basil, St. Evagrius Ponticus, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas

ἐνταῦθα ἵστημι Ancient Greek for “Here I Stand

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Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Sunday, January 1, 2023

ἐνταῦθα ἵστημι Ancient Greek for “Here I Stand

It is the Kalends of January once again.   On the civil calendar this is, of course, New Year’s Day, and the year 2023 AD is upon us.   On the liturgical kalendar, it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord, falling as it does on the octave day of Christmas, that is to say the eighth day of Christmas when “eight maids a-milking” is one’s true love’s gift by the old carol and, more relevantly, when Jesus was circumcised in accordance with the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law.   This is also the day upon which I post my annual essay telling about myself, who I am, and where I stand on various matters.   As usual I shall begin by mentioning where I picked this custom up.   I learned it from a man who was one of my own favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who was a career op-ed columnist with the Orlando Sentinel whose thrice-weekly column was syndicated by King Features.   Reese wrote a column like this once a year, sometimes at the end, sometimes at the beginning, and recommended that other writers do the same.  I believe the Rev. Chuck Baldwin has also followed Reese’s recommendation in this matter.


This is on the one hand the easiest essay I have to write every year and an the other the hardest.   It is easy in the sense that I know the subject thoroughly and intimately and no research is required.   It is the hardest because it pertains primarily, not to my thoughts on passing events, but to my more basic convictions and principles underlying these thoughts, and since these remain very constant it is something of a challenge to write this every year in a way that is fresh and not one that might as well just say “see last year’s essay”.  The title can be the biggest part of this challenge and this year as in 2019 I have recycled the title of the first of these essays, the quotation “Here I Stand” from Dr. Luther, by translating it into a classical tongue.   It was Latin in 2019, it is Greek in 2023,


I am a Canadian and a very patriotic Canadian provided that by “Canada” is understood the great Dominion envisioned by Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George Étienne Cartier and the other Fathers of Confederation, established by the British North America Act of 1867 which came into effect on 1 July of that year.   If anyone is offended by this mention of our country’s founders, I assure you the offense is entirely intentional on my part, you will never hear one word of apology from me for it  no matter how entitled you feel to such an apology or how imperiously you demand it, and nothing would delight me more than to offend you further.   I was born and have lived all my life in Manitoba, which is the eastmost of the prairie provinces situated  pretty much smack in  the middle of the country.  While I have lived in the provincial capital of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century, I still consider myself to be a rural Manitoban rather than a Winnipegger.   I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in the southwestern part of the province.   In between growing up there and moving to Winnipeg I studied theology for five years at what had once been Winnipeg Bible College, was Providence College and Theological Seminary when I studied there, and has subsequently become Providence University College.   This is a rural school located in Otterburne, about a half hour’s drive south of Winnipeg near the small town of Niverville and the village of St. Pierre-Jolys.   


I started on the path that led me to study theology at Providence when I was fifteen years old.   That summer, the summer between my finishing Junior High in Oak River Elementary School and beginning High School at Rivers Collegiate Institute I came to believe in Jesus Christ as my Saviour.    This was the type of experience that in evangelical circles is called being “born again”.   Interestingly, the evangelicals who borrow this phrase from Jesus’ nocturnal interview with Nicodemus in the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and apply it to personal conversion tend to avoid the term “believe”, so emphasized in the Johannine and Pauline literature of the New Testament and indeed in the very discussion in which Jesus’ introduces the idea of the new birth and replace it with language such as “invite Jesus into your heat” and “make a commitment to Christ”.   Infer from that what you will.   My conversion was certainly a matter of faith, of believing and trusting which are, of course, the same thing approached from different angles.   I had had some religious instruction as a child.   My family was mostly mainstream Protestant, United Church and Anglican, and in addition to what I learned from them, in elementary school we said the Lord’s Prayer every morning and in the younger grades had Bible stories read to us.   No, this is not because I am extremely old – I am a few months away from my forty-seventh birthday and a few years younger than the Prime Minister.   The Bible and the Lord’s Prayer persisted in rural public schools long after urban ones had abandoned them, and it was not until my sixth year that the Supreme Court of Canada gained the same power to remove these things from the schools that its American counterpart had had and had exercised around the time my dad was born, and it was much later that it began exercising those powers the way the American court had done decades earlier.   At any rate, in my early teens I had gained a deeper understanding of the message of the Christian faith from the Gideons’ New Testament that I had been given – in school – when I was twelve, and books by Christian writers such as Nicky Cruz, Billy Graham and Hal Lindsey that I had borrowed from the library.   I had come to understand that Christianity taught that God is good, that He made the world and us in it good, that we had made ourselves bad by abusing the free will He had given us and sinning, but that God in His love had given us the gift of a Saviour in His Son, Jesus Christ, Who, like His Father and the Holy Ghost, was fully God, but Who by being born of the Virgin Mary became fully Man while remaining fully God, and Who, being without sin Himself, took all the sins of the whole world upon Himself when, rejected by the leaders of His own people, He was handed over to the Romans to be crucified, and Who offered up His Own Suffering and Death as payment for the sins of the world, a payment, the acceptance of which was testified to by His Resurrection, triumphant over sin and death and all else associated with these things.   We are unable to achieve or even contribute to our own salvation, it is given to us freely in Jesus Christ, we merely receive it by believing in the Saviour.   When I was fifteen, I was finally ready to do so and believed in Jesus Christ as my Saviour for the first time.


While I was in still in high school I was baptized by a Baptist pastor.   Much later as an adult I was confirmed in the Anglican Church.  Many would probably see this as two steps in opposing directions.   I left the mainstream denominations after my conversion because of how heavily permeated by religious liberalism – a compromised form of Christianity that seeks to accommodate all the Modern ideas that are hostile to orthodox Christianity and as a result resembles outright unbelief more than faith – they were and was baptized in a fellowship where the Bible was still taken seriously.   Strange as it may seem, however, the same basic principle led me to take the second step and seek confirmation in the Anglican Church.   That principle is that Christianity should be believed and practiced the way it has been believed and practiced in every age and region of the Church since Jesus first instructed the Apostles.   I would later learn that St. Vincent of Lérins had beautifully encapsulated this principle in his fifth century canon: “In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est”, which means “So in the Catholic Church itself, great care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed always, everywhere and by all.”  Liberalism remains a problem in the mainstream churches, indeed, it is much worse now than thirty-some years ago, and so when I joined the Anglican Church it was a parish that had been associated from the beginning with the Anglican Essentials movement that had started up to combat liberalism about the time I was graduating from High School.   In my continued study of the Bible and theology, however, I had come to see that the principle of St. Vincent’s canon should not apply merely to the absolute fundamentals but to the faith as a whole.    While I remain firmly Protestant in my Pauline and Johannine conviction that salvation is a free gift that we are incapable of earning or in any way contributing to but must receive simply by faith and in my conviction that the authority of the Church – and God has established authority in the Church – and her traditions – beliefs, practices, etc., handed down through from one generation to the next, an essential safeguard against reckless experimentation and so overall something that is very good rather than bad – are and must be both subject to the final authority of the written Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, I have come to strongly oppose what I call hyper-Protestantism.    Hyper-Protestantism rejects not merely the sort of things the early Reformers like Dr. Luther had fought against, which were generally things introduced by the patriarch of Rome after the Church under him had separated from other equally old Churches – the Byzantine Churches in the eleventh century, the Near Eastern ones in the fifth – and so were properly distinctively Roman, but much of what is genuinely Catholic – a good rule of thumb is that if it is shared by these other equally ancient Churches it is probably Catholic not Roman.   It holds the same view of Church history – that the Roman Empire, after legalizing Christianity, immediately created a false Church, the Catholic Church, that those who held to the true original faith opposed as a persecuted minority throughout history – that is common to all the heretical sects from the Mormons to the Jehovah’s Witnesses that hyper-Protestants call “cults”, although ironically what distinguishes the “cults” from the other hyper-Protestants is that they, that is the cults, are more consistent and take the logic of this deeply flawed view of Church history to its logical conclusion in rejecting the Trinitarian faith of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, an irony that is all the more poignant when one takes into consideration how reluctant hyper-Protestant evangelical leaders have been to expel from their midst leaders who have prominently defected from Nicene Trinitarianism themselves by rejecting the Eternal Generation of the Son.   I think that re-inventing the wheel and fixing that which is not broke are among the stupidest things human beings try to do and that this holds double when it comes to religion and faith.    Nobody has been able to produce a statement of Christian faith that better expresses the core essentials than the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, nor one which does a better job of shutting out all opportunities of heresy than the Athanasian.    Nobody has been able to devise a form of Church government than that established in the New Testament.   Christ placed His Apostles as the governing order over His Church, establishing them as a new albeit different sort of high priesthood – this no more conflicts with the universal priesthood of all Christian believers than the establishment of the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high priests conflicted with the proclamation in the Torah of the universal priesthood of national Israel and St. Paul uses Greek words in Romans to describe his ministry as an Apostle that can only be used of an established priesthood, and they used that authority to establish two other orders to assist them, the deacons (ministers) first, who were charged with looking after food distribution and the like, then as the Church spread beyond Jerusalem, the presbyters (elders) who were also initially called episcopoi (overseers) because they were the administrators of the local Churches who answered to the Apostles, and to admit others such as Timothy and Titus to their own order, which appropriated the  title episcopoi from the presbyters to itself  soon after the Apostles died in order to reserve “Apostle” for those directly commissioned by Christ.   This form of governance has served the Church well for two millennia, apart from the problem of a certain member of the post-Apostolic episcopal order intruding into the jurisdiction of other bishops and asserting supremacy over the entire Church, and nothing that has been thought up to replace it in the last five centuries has been an improvement.    Contemporary forms of worship are hardly improvements on traditional liturgies derived from ancient  sources.   While obviously many disagree with me on this last point, and many others who don’t would say that it is subjective, a matter of aesthetic preference,  traditional liturgies are generally far more theocentric, focusing God and requiring an attitude of reverence from the worshipper, whereas contemporary worship is much more anthropocentric – or perhaps autocentric – focusing on how the worshipper feels about God, and  encouraging familiarity over reverence.


I describe myself as a Tory.   I have to explain this every time I do so because in common Canadian parlance Tory is used for members and supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada.   There are also those who call themselves small-c conservatives to indicate that conservative refers to their political ideas rather than their partisan allegiance.   When I say that I am a Tory, however, it is with a meaning that I would contrast with both big-C and small-c conservatism.   As with small-c conservatism it is not about party allegiance.   It is the institution of Parliament that I believe in, support, and am concerned  about, not any of the parties that vie for control of it every Dominion election.   Each of these parties is constantly prattling on about “our democracy” but it is Parliament the institution not democracy the abstract ideal that I care about and this is a significant part of what I mean when I say that I a Tory.  While democracy is an old word, going back to ancient Greece where it was used for the constitutions of various cities, most notably Athens when she was at the height of her cultural influence, since its revival in the Modern Age it has been used for an abstract ideal.   Abstract ideals are as old as the word democracy, of course.   The “Forms” that feature so prominently in Plato’s dialogues could be described as abstract ideals.   An abstract ideal is something you see in only in your mind and not with your eyes.   While this is traditionally regarded as where Plato and Aristotle diverged from one another – Plato thought the Forms were more real than the physical world, that everything in the physical world was an imperfect copy of some Form or another, and that the Forms could be perceived only through reason, whereas Aristotle thought that the Ideas, his  modified version of the Forms, were not in some other real but embodied in the physical world, and had to be observed in the things in which they were embodied – for both, the abstract ideals they were concerned with were universal ideas that in some way or another were connected to specific concrete examples in the physical world.    Modern abstract ideals are not like that.   The Modern conceit is that man has the rational power to think up entirely in his head something superior to anything that exists in the concrete world and that he can improve or even perfect the concrete world by forcing it to conform to these ideals.   I reject this way of thinking entirely and reject the “democracy” that is this kind of ideal.   In my country, the politicians who speak the loudest about “our democracy” have the least respect for Parliament, its traditions and protocols, and its constraints upon their doing whatever they want.   Indeed, the current politician who uses the phrase “our democracy” more than any other, is the Prime Minister who seems to think that it means his right, having barely squeaked out an election win, to govern autocratically and dictatorially until the next election.   Nor is there any reason for him not to think so because “democracy” as a Modern ideal with no essential connection to the concrete is whatever the idealist wants it to be.   No, it is Parliament not democracy that I believe in, because Parliament is real and concrete, a real institution that is ancient, that has weathered the test of time and through that test proven itself.


Since this – believing in and supporting concrete institutions that have been proven through the test of time rather than abstract ideals that Modern minds think up and seek to impose on reality – is such an essential part of what I mean by calling myself a Tory, it should be obvious that my belief in and support for hereditary monarchy is even stronger than my belief in and support of Parliament, for it is an older and more time-tested institution.    I have been a royalist and monarchist all my life, and, as a citizen of Canada, a Commonwealth Realm, have been a loyal subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II all my life until her passing late last year, when I became a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III.


Parliament needs monarchy.   The seats of the House of Commons are filled by popular election, and each elected Member has a duty to represent the constituency he represents as a whole, to the best of his ability, looking out for their interests whether they voted for or against him.   He also, however, faces pressure from the party to which he belongs to support their interests.   There is a potential conflict of interest here and in that conflict it is his duty to his constituents that ought to win out over his duty to party.   Some nincompoops think the system could be improved by “proportional representation” – another abstract ideal – which, of course, would settle the conflict in favour of the party over the constituents every time.   Mercifully, the King, who is above Parliament as Head of State, has no such conflict of interests because he inherited his office and is not beholden to any party for it.   He, therefore, can do what no elected Head of State can do, and represent the country as a whole as a unifying figure, in whose name the government elected in Parliament exercises executive power and in whose name the runner-up party, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, holds the government accountable to Parliament.   While this does not eliminate the divisiveness of partisan politics altogether, it does usually prevent it from getting as bad as it is in the republic south of our border.   In addition to being such a time-proven source of unity, order, and stability monarchy represents the older view of society as an extension of the family, which is superior to the Modern view of society as an extension of the commercial marketplace represented by the republican model.   


When I call myself a Tory I mean, therefore, someone who believes in our traditional institutions, first and foremost the monarchy, but also Parliament, because they are real, concrete, and of proven worth, over and against Modern schemes to improve or perfect the world by imposing abstract ideals upon it, a political way of looking at things that I believe is complementary to my small-o orthodox, small-c catholic, traditional Christian faith discussed above, and so, like such Tories as Dr. Johnson and T. S. Eliot before me, I put the two together under the term.   This, as I said before, intentionally draws a contrast with both big and small c conservatives.   This is not because they would necessarily disagree with my support for said institutions or my faith, but because these things are not essential to what they mean by “conservative” the way they are essential to what I mean by “Tory”.    What small-c conservatives see as essential to conservatism is a set of views that is no different from those held by those who call themselves conservatives in the United States who are small-r republicans and, these days, usually big-R as well.    


The United States is a Modern country in the sense that it was founded by men who chose to break away from the British Empire to which they had belonged and its older tradition that still included elements from before the Modern Age and to establish their country from scratch on the foundation of Modern abstract ideals.   While something is not necessarily bad or wrong because it is Modern, the more Modern the mindset the more one tends to be blind to what was good or right before the Modern Age.   Indeed, one recurring aspect of Modern thought is the tendency to view history as a linear march from the bad in the past to the good in the future, variations of which include the nineteenth century “Whig Interpretation of History” associated with the British Whigs (liberals), and the twentieth century idea of the End Of History, associated with American neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama who wrote the paper and book by that title.   Indeed, the very concept of “progress” when used in a political sense is a version of this Modern theme.   This theme is closely associated with the Modern take on abstract ideals that I have already discussed.   Both Modern thoughts are fundamentally a rejection of the truth recognized both by the ancients and by the Christian Church that human beings live within boundaries or limits, some of which they cannot cross, others of which they cross only at their own peril.    Both the ancients and the Church recognize some such limits as belonging to the nature of the world – in theology we would say that these are limits built into Creation.  Christianity recognizes other limits as being the result of man’s fall into Original Sin.    Mankind, created good, damaged his goodness by sinning in the Fall, and was expelled from Paradise.  While fallen man can accomplish many great things and can strive for virtue and justice and Goodness, Truth and Beauty, he cannot perfect himself and regain Paradise through his own efforts, but must rely upon the grace of God.   In the New Life which Christians live out in the world in this age, the Kingdom of God is present in one sense, but in the fullest sense the coming of the Kingdom and the restoration of redeemed man and Creation to Paradise awaits the Second Coming of Christ at history’s end.   Modern thought is based upon a rejection of this, upon a rejection of the idea of respecting limits in general, on the idea that man through Modern reason and science can perfect himself and regain Paradise through his efforts, which the Modern mind conceives of as the Kingdom of Man rather than the Kingdom of God.   It would be foolish to deny that Western Civilization has accomplished anything worthwhile in the centuries it has been dominated by this kind of thinking.   I would say, however, that as impressive as Modern accomplishments may be in terms of volume and quantity, in terms of quality the most  valuable parts of our civilization’s heritage are those that come to us from ancient times and Christianity.   Another aspect of Modern thought is that when its earlier experiments fail to produce perfection and Paradise on earth, it tries again, and its new abstract ideals and new experiments, not only fail again, but tend to make things worth.   The longer man travels on the road of trying to achieve Paradise by his own efforts, the closer to Hell he will get.   The liberalism that the United States was built upon in the eighteenth century was a set of early Modern ideas.   In the early twentieth century a new “liberalism” emerged in the United States consisting of later, worse, Modern ideas.   The conservative movement that  arose in the United States after World War II  was largely a response of the older kind of liberals to the emergence of the new.   It was good that someone was fighting the new liberalism, which has since been replaced itself by something far, far worse, but I maintain that a firmer foundation to stand on is one that recognizes the greatest wealth of our Western heritage to be that bequeathed to us from ancient Greco-Roman civilization and Christendom and respects the limits recognized by these older forms of our civilization, rather than the shifting sands of early Modernity.


There is, of course, much in the small-c conservatism with which I agree.   I will list two sets of views that I share with most small-c conservatives in Canada and the United States, or at least the small-c conservatives of the generation prior to my own.   The first is the following:
– Abortion is murder and should be against the law, and the same is true of euthanasia, now euphemistically called “medical assistance in dying”.- Human beings come in sexes of which there are two, male and female.- There are three genders – masculine, feminine, neuter – but these are properties of words not people.- Marriage is a union between a man (male adult human being) and a woman (female adult human being – not so difficult to define now, was that?)- Divorce should be hard to obtain not easy.- Families should be headed by husbands/fathers.- Children should be raised by their parents loving but with firm discipline, corporal if necessary, and not just allowed to express and define themselves anyway their immature minds see fit.- Teachers in schools are in loco parentis and 100% accountable to parents.- The job of a teacher is to teach children such basics as reading, writing, and arithmetic.   If a child fails to learn he should be held back.   If he learns he should be rewarded.   If he misbehaves he should be disciplined. If all the children in a class fail to learn the teacher should be sacked.   If instead of teaching said basics the teacher tries to convince boys that they are girls or vice versa and exposes them to sexually explicit material she should be arrested and severely penalized.   The same should happen if she tries to stuff their heads with anti-white racist propaganda.-  The criminal justice system is not there to rehabilitate anyone.   If someone commits a real crime, that is to say murder, rape, theft, and the like, not some stupid thought crime that some dumbass politician or bureaucrat drew up, they should be punished, after due process has been done, of course, with a real penalty.   He should be given neither a slap on the wrist not made the guinea pig of some social experiment in rehabilitation.   Once the penalty has been paid, his debt to society has been discharged, and the matter should be declared over and done with.   It is perpetually subjecting him to efforts to rehabilitate him that is the true “cruel and unusual punishment”.-  The guilt for crimes – again, real crimes of the type just listed – is the perpetrators and not society’s.-  Drugs of the type that alter one’s mind bringing out violent and aggressive traits that would otherwise be suppressed and which are known to have this or similar effects even in small amounts so that they cannot be safely partaken of through practicing moderation are a huge social problem.   While prohibition may not be an effective solution, a government policy that encourages drug use by making drugs available at government controlled facilities in the name of looking out for the safety of the users is no solution at all but an exacerbation of the problem.- Government policy should be natalistic – encouraging citizens to have children and replenish the population – and friendly to the traditional family – encouraging men and women to marry each other, remain married to each other, have their kids in wedlock, and raise their kids together.   It should not do the opposite – promote abortion and encourage every kind of alternative family setup to the traditional.   It definitely should not do the latter and then attempt to compensate for the social problems that arise from a large number of kids being raised outside of traditional families with expensive social programs that make matters worse, nor should it practice an anti-natalistic policy and try to compensate for the children not being born through large-scale immigration.- Governments should neither discriminate between their citizens on such bases as sex and race, nor should they criminalize private prejudices or worse try to re-program such prejudices out of people.   If members of a minority population are overrepresented among those convicted of crimes this does not necessarily indicate discrimination on the part of the criminal justice system.   If the same minority population is also overrepresented among those whom victims of crime and eyewitnesses identify as perpetrators and if the same minority population is also overrepresented among victims of the same kind of crime the problem is not racism on the part of the institution.
That was the first set.   

The second is the following:
– Taxes should be low and not designed to redistribute wealth.- Governments need to balance their budgets rather than run deficits and amass huge debts.- Governments should not follow the inflationary policy of using government spending to stimulate economic growth.- Governments should only intervene in their domestic markets when there is a genuine national interest at stake.  If, for example, a country needs resource X, which it can produce at home but can import cheaper, if  the foreign supply chain is unreliable or there is a possibility of it being cut off by war, and interruption of supply would be a disaster rather than a temporary inconvenience, the government has a legitimate reason to protect domestic production.   Otherwise, people are better managers of their own businesses and affairs than government are.


The first set of these views which I share with small-c conservatives I consider to be by far the most important and essential of the two.    Small-c conservatives tend to think it is the other way around.    This is yet another reason why I prefer “Tory” as I have explained it, to “conservative”.


Happy New Year!God Save the King! — Gerry T. Neal