Edward Snowden On Truth
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Free Unrestricted Speech is the Servant of Truth
Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Canadian Red Ensign
Friday, May 12, 2023
Free Unrestricted Speech is the Servant of Truth
Pelagius was a Celtic monk who lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Although he was born somewhere in the British Isles, he lived most of his life in Rome until the city was sacked by the Visigoths. Following the Fall of Rome he fled to Carthage and spent the remainder of his life in the region of North Africa and Palestine. This was hardly a quiet retirement for it was in this period that the preaching of his disciple Caelestius brought him increasingly under the scrutiny of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome and led to his teachings being condemned by multiple regional synods, his excommunication by Innocent I of Rome in 417 AD, and finally, the following year which was the year of his death, the most sweeping condemnation of his teachings as heresy at the Council of Carthage, the rulings of which would later be ratified by the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431 AD making the condemnation of Pelagius and Pelagianism the verdict of the whole Church in the days before her ancient fellowship was broken.
What did Pelagius teach that was so vehemently rejected by the early, undivided, Church?
Pelagianism was the idea that after the Fall man retained the ability to please God and attain salvation through his own efforts and by his own choices unassisted by the Grace of God. Expressed as a negation of Christian truth it was a denial of Original Sin and of the absolute necessity of God’s Grace.
Over a millennium later the Protestant Reformers, strongly influenced by the teachings of St. Augustine, would read their own conflict with the Patriarch of Rome through the lens of the earlier Pelagian controversy although the Pelagian controversy had to do with the absolute necessity of God’s Grace whereas the controversy in the Reformation had to do with the sufficiency of God’s Grace. This led to further distortions of historical understanding of the earlier controversy so that in certain theological circles, particularly those who identify so strongly as Calvinists that in their hierarchy of doctrine they place the canons of the Synod of Dort in the top tier, make those matters on which all the Reformers agreed – the supreme authority of Scripture and the sufficiency of the freely given Grace of God in Christ for salvation – secondary, and assign the truths of the ancient Creeds to a tertiary position, any positive statements concerning Free Will are looked upon as either Pelagian or a step down the slippery slope to Pelagianism.
Free Will, however, is not some aberration invented by Pelagius, but a truth held by all the ancient orthodox Churches alongside Original Sin. Neither is confessed in the Creed, because neither is Creed appropriate, but both are part of the body of the supplementary truths that help us to understand Gospel truth, the truth confessed in the Creed. Free Will and Original Sin are complementary truths. Apart from Free Will, the only explanation for Adam’s having committed the sin that brought sin and death upon his descendants, is some version of supralapsarianism, the repugnant and blasphemous hyper-Calvinist doctrine of Theodore Beza that teaches that God decreed the Fall of Man to occur in order that He might have grounds to punish people He had already decided to damn.
Why did God give man Free Will if He knew man would abuse it and fall into sin?
If God had not given man Free Will, man would not be a moral creature made in God’s own image, but would rather be like a rock or a tree. Man without Free Will would have the same capacity for Good that a rock and a tree have. Rocks and trees perform their Good – the reason for which they exist – not because they choose to do so, but because they have no choice. This is a lower order of Good than the Good which moral beings do because they choose to do it. God created man as a higher being with a higher order of Good and so He gave man Free Will because man could not fulfil this higher Good without Free Will. Without the possibility of sin, there was no possibility of man fulfilling the Good for which he was created.
Original Sin impaired man’s Free Will and in doing so placed a major roadblock in the way of man’s fulfilment of the Good for which he was created. When Adam sinned he bound himself and all his posterity in slavery to sin. The ancient sages, such as Plato, urged man to employ his will in subjecting his passions to the rule of his reason or intellect. They understood that the worst slavery a man could endure is not that which is imposed from the outside by laws, customs, or traditions but that which is imposed from the inside when a man is ruled by his passions. This is the closest than man could come to understanding his plight without special revelation. When Western man in the post-World War II era turned his back on Christian truth he abandoned even this insight and began embracing the idea taught by Sigmund Freud et al. that liberating the passions rather than ruling them was the path to human happiness. Although the evidence of experience has long since demonstrated this to be folly Western man continues down this path to misery. The salvation that God has given to man in Jesus Christ frees us from this bondage to the sin principle, which rules us through what Plato called our passions and St. Paul called our flesh. This is why the work of Jesus Christ accomplishing our salvation is spoken of as redemption, the act of purchasing a slave’s freedom from bondage.
God created man in a state of Innocence which is an immature form of Goodness. Man in his Innocence possessed Free Will and was sinless but lacked knowledge and maturity. He was not intended to remain in this state but to grow into Perfection, Goodness in its mature form. The Fall into Original Sin interrupted the process of maturation and would have been ultimately fatal to it were it not for the Grace of God and the salvation given to man in Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, which Grace of salvation frees us from the bondage to sin into which we fell that we might finally grow in Christ into Perfection, the maturity of freedom with knowledge, in which we voluntarily choose the Good. If we could somehow remove man’s ability to choose evil this would in no way assist man in his journey, by God’s Grace, to Perfection. This is the Christian truth illustrated by Anthony Burgess in his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) The experimental technique to which the narrator submitted in order to obtain a reduced sentence, succeeded in removing his ability to commit violent crime, but failed to turn him into a good person. In the novel, Alex does eventually become a better person but not as a result of the Ludovico Technique. (1)
I recently remarked that the orthodox arguments for the necessity of Free Will for man to choose the Good can also be applied to Truth to make a more compelling case for free speech than the one rooted in classical liberalism that is usually so employed. I wish to expand upon that idea here. Think again of Burgess’s novel. The Ludovico Technique rendered Alex incapable of committing violent crime – or even of acting in legitimate self defence – by causing him to experience nauseating sickness and pain at even the thought of doing the things that had landed him in prison, but it did not change his inner nature, it merely prevented him from acting on it. Now imagine a story in which a similar form of extreme aversion therapy to the Ludovico Technique is developed, not for a violent, rapist, thug but for a compulsive liar, (2) which similarly prevents him from speaking what he knows not to be true. This would not remove his internal compulsion to lie and make him naturally truthful, it would merely prevent him from acting on the compulsion.
If it is important, both to us as individuals and to the larger society to which we belong, that we develop good character by cultivating good habits, then it is important that we cultivate the habit of speaking the Truth to the best of our understanding. By adapting the lesson of Burgess’ novel as we did in the last paragraph, we saw that artificially removing the ability to do other than speak what we understand to be the Truth is not the way to achieve the cultivation of this habit. In the actual contemporary society in which we live, we are increasingly having to contend with constraints on our freedom of speech, not through experimental aversion therapy, but through laws and regulations telling us what we can and cannot say.
These come in two forms. The first and most basic are rules prohibiting speech – “you can’t say that”. The second are rules compelling speech – “you have to say this”. This distinction has in recent years been emphasized by Dr. Jordan Peterson after he ran afoul of a particularly egregious but sadly now almost ubiquitous example of compelled speech – the requirement to use a person’s expressed preference in pronouns rather those that align with the person’s biological sex. Here, the speech that is compelled is speech that falls far short of Truth. Indeed, the people who want this sort of compelled speech are generally the same people who speak of Truth with possessive pronouns as if each of us had his own Truth which is different from the Truth of others.
The rules that prohibit certain types of speech are no more respectful towards Truth. Here in the Dominion of Canada, the rules of this type that have plagued us the most in my lifetime are speech prohibitions enacted in the name of fighting “hate”. The very first in a long list of sins against Truth committed by those seeking to eradicate “hate speech” is their categorizing the speech they seek to outlaw as hateful. Hate refers to an intense emotional dislike that manifests itself in the desire to utterly destroy the object of hatred. This is a more appropriate description of the attitude of the people who call for, enact, and support “hate speech” laws towards their victims more than it does the attitude of said victims towards those they supposedly hate. The first calls for laws of this nature came from representatives of an ethnic group that has faced severe persecution many times throughout history and which, wishing to nip any future such persecution in the bud, asked for legislation prohibiting what they saw as the first step in the development of persecution, people depicting them very negatively in word and print. The government capitulated to this demand twice, first by adding such a prohibition to the Criminal Code, second by including a provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act that made the spread of information “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” into grounds for an anti-discrimination lawsuit. The CHRA provision was eventually removed from law by Act of Parliament but the present government is seeking to bring it back in a worse form, one that would allow for legal action to be taken against people based on the suspicion that they will say something “hateful” in the future rather than their having already said some such thing. The campaign against “hate speech” has from the very beginning resembled the actions taken against “precrime” in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) in that both are attempts to stop something from happening before it happens, but the new proposed legislation would take the resemblance to the nth degree. Early in the history of the enforcement of these types of laws the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the lack of a truth exception did not render the limitations they imposed on freedom of speech unconstitutional in Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Taylor (1990). More recently this notion of truth not being a defense was reiterated by Devyn Cousineau of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in a discrimination case against Christian evangelist and activist Bill Whatcott. Whatcott had been charged with discrimination for distributing a flyer challenging a politician who had been born a biological male but who claims to be female. Cousineau made the statement in ruling against the relevance of evidence the defense intended to present as to the complainant’s biological maleness. Clearly, if the upholding of laws restricting freedom of speech on the grounds of “hate” require rulings to the effect that truth is no defense, then these laws are no servants of Truth.
That, as we have just seen, those seeking to restrict speech are serving something other than Truth, something they are willing to sacrifice Truth for, is a good indicator that it is free speech that is the servant of Truth. Further analysis confirms this. If speech is restricted by prohibitions – “you can’t say that” – then unless those who make the prohibitions are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that much that is prohibited will be Truth. If speech is compelled – “you must say this” – then again, unless those compelling us to speak are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that what we will be compelled to say will not be the Truth. The good habit of truth-telling, which we ought to seek to cultivate in ourselves, in which cultivation the laws and institutions of society ought to support us, is a habit of caring about the Truth, searching for the Truth, and speaking the Truth. Restrictions on speech, rather than helping us cultivate this habit, teach us to take the alternate, lazier, route of letting other people rather than the Truth determine what we must and must not say.
Even restrictions on speech aimed at preventing the spread of untruths ultimately work against the speaking of Truth. As long as there are such restrictions, especially if the penalties for breaking them are severe, there will be something other than Truth to which people will look to determine whether or not they should say something, and the result will be that less Truth will be spoken out of fear of running afoul of the restrictions.
The classic liberal case for free speech was made by utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in his On Liberty (1856). It is the topic of his second chapter “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” which begins by arguing that this freedom is necessary not only when governments are tyrannical and corrupt, but under the best of governments as well, even or especially, when governments have public opinion behind them. “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion”, Mill wrote “and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” In support of the position taken in these justifiably famous words, Mill’s first argument was that mankind is better off for having all opinions, false or true, expressed, because the expression of the false, makes the true stand out the more. He wrote:
the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
In what he stated here, Mill was quite right. Unfortunately, what he meant by truth, small t, is not the same thing as Truth, big T. Mill wrote and thought within what might be called an anti-tradition that started within Western thought almost a millennium ago with nominalism and which has produced a downward spiral of decay within Western thought. Mill came at a late stage in this anti-tradition, although not so far down the spiral as to think that truth is entirely subjective and different for each person as so many do today. It had been set in that direction, however, by nominalism’s rejection of universals, whether conceived of as Plato’s otherworldly Forms existing in themselves or Aristotle’s embodied Ideas existing in their corresponding particulars, except as human constructions that we impose on reality by our words so as to facilitate in the organization of our thoughts. By so departing from the foundation of the tradition of Western thought, nominalism introduced an anti-tradition that over time came more and more to resemble an embrace of Protagoras of Abdera’s maxim “man is the measure of all things”. In the wisdom of the ancient sages, Truth, like Beauty and Goodness, were the supreme universals. Philosophically, they were the Transcendentals, the properties of Being or existence. In Christian theology, they existed in God Himself not as attributes or properties, but as His fundamental nature. Human happiness, however the philosophical and theological answers to the question of how it is attained differed (the Grace of God is the theological answer), consisted in life ordered in accordance with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Mill’s small t truth is worlds removed from this and this weakens what is otherwise a good argument against restrictions on the free expression of thought. If truth is not Truth, an absolute ultimate value in itself which we must seek and submit to upon peril of loss of happiness, but something which may or may not be available to us because we can never be certain that that what we think is truth is actually truth, then it is a far less compelling argument for allowing all thought to be freely expressed in words that it serves truth better than restrictions would. It opens the door to the idea that there is something that might be more important to us than truth, for which truth and the freedom that serves it might be sacrificed. Indeed, Mill provided the enemies of Truth and freedom with that very something else, earlier in the first, introductory, chapter of his book in which he articulated his famous “harm principle”. He wrote:
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
On the surface, this seems like a principle that could do nothing but safeguard people against the abuse of government power. In our day, however, we can see how it is actually a loophole allowing the government to justify any and all abuse of power. Our government, for example, is currently using it to justify its bid to bring the flow of information entirely under its own control. The Liberal Party of Canada, which is the party currently in office, has made combatting what it calls “Online Harms” part of its official platform. The Liberals’ not-so-thinly-veiled intention is enacting this goal is to bring in sweeping internet regulation that will give them total control over what Canadians can say or write or see or hear on the internet. Neither freedom nor Truth is a high priority for the Liberals, nor have they been for a long time, if they ever were. The late Sir Peregrine Worsthorne years ago wrote that by defeating its old foes, and turning its attention to declaring war “on human, and even eventually animal, pain and suffering” and thus introducing the necessity for vast expansion of government power, liberalism “from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people” had rapidly become “a doctrine designed to put it back again”, and, he might have added, in a more burdensome manner than ever before.
Mill was right that truth is better served by allowing all thoughts to be freely expressed, even false ones. Apart from the acknowledgement of Truth as Truth, the absolute unchanging universal value, however, the argument is weak. Within the context of liberalism, it is doomed to give way to that ideology’s insatiable lust to control everyone and everything, in the insane belief that it is protecting us from ourselves, and re-making the world better than God originally made it. When we acknowledge Truth as Truth, we recognize that it is what it is and that it is unchangeable and so no lie can harm it. Lies harm us, not the Truth, by getting in our way in our pursuit of Truth, but attempts to restrict and regulate the free verbal expression of thought, even when done in the name of combatting falsehoods, do far more harm of this type than lies themselves could ever do. Just as men need free will to choose the Good, we need the freedom to speak our thoughts, right or wrong, in order to pursue and find and speak the Truth.
(1) The chapter containing this ending was omitted from the American edition of the novel and from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation based on the American edition.
(2) The idea of preventing a liar from lying has been explored in fiction. The science fiction device of truth serum is one common way of doing this. Note that the real life interrogative drugs upon which this device is based, such as scopolamine and sodium thiopental, don’t actually compel someone to tell the truth, they just make him more likely to answer questions put to him. In Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) the title puppet, a compulsive liar, is not prevented from lying, but prevented from getting away with it, by the device of his nose growing whenever he tells a lie. Closer is the 1997 film Liar, Liar, starring Jim Carrey as a lawyer whose son is magically granted his birthday wish that his father be unable to tell a lie for 24 hours. William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the polygraph or lie detector, under the penname of Charles Marston created the comic book superheroine Wonder Woman and gave the character a magic lasso that compelled anyone trapped in it to speak the truth. None of these stories was written with the idea of the necessity of freedom of speech for genuine truth telling in mind. — Gerry T. Neal
The Monarchy and the Permanent Things
Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Canadian Red Ensign
Thursday, May 4, 2023
The Monarchy and the Permanent Things
The Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III is set for this Saturday, the sixth of May. As this event, the peak of the ceremony surrounding the accession of our new Sovereign, has grown nearer, the woodworks have released a fairly predictable swarm of vermin intent on spoiling things as much as they can. Liberal Party bureaucrats circumventing proper procedure to quietly commission changes to our royal symbols to make them less evocative of tradition. Special interest groups trying to make what should be a solemn yet celebratory occasion embodying unity, stability, and continuity for each of His Majesty’s realms and for the whole Commonwealth, as was the Coronation of His Majesty’s late mother, all about them. Left-wing journalists calling our institution of monarchy “outdated” and “archaic”, which it, being timeless, can never be, suggesting that we “severe our ties” to it as if it were something external and not integral to our constitution, and defaming both the monarchy and our country as a whole by insisting that our history be read through the distorting lens of BIPOC racial grievance politics. Sadly, these latter have found a strange bedfellow in the person of Maxime Bernier, the leader of what they would absurdly describe as the “far right” People’s Party of Canada. For me, this last means that come the next Dominion election I will have one less option to vote for. While on most things, perhaps everything except this, where Bernier’s views differ from those of the present leadership of the Conservative Party I agree with Bernier, this is a deal breaker. No small-r republican will ever have my support, no matter how right he is on other things.
Bernier has allowed his objections to Charles the person blind him with regards to monarchy the institution. His objections to Charles have to do with the king’s views on certain controversial points. Our prime minister, Justin Trudeau is far further removed from Bernier’s views on these same points – and many others as well – than is our king. Imagine if Bernier had tweeted that because of his objections to Trudeau we should replace parliament with something else. This would be recognized instantly as a terrible suggestion. Yet the same bad reasoning – get rid of the institution because of objections to the person – is worse in the case of what Bernier actually said. The monarchy is a non-political – in the sense of party politics – office. It is therefore much worse to attack the institution because of objections to the officeholder based on partisan political views in the case of the monarchy than in the case of parliament and the prime minister.
It is because he approaches monarchy from the standpoint of Modern democratic assumptions – yes, populist nationalist assumptions, comically labelled right-wing by those seemingly unaware that the original right was anything but populist and nationalist, are Modern democratic assumptions, well within the boundaries of historical liberalism – that Bernier makes the basic blunder of failing to recognize that it is because the monarchy is non-democratic that it is non-political and that it is because it is non-political that it can both stand above partisan politics as a beacon of unity and serve as an anchor of stability for parliamentary government in the turbulent sea of Modern democratic politics, an institution far more important and valuable even than its ancient democratic complement of parliament, which only the basest of fools would want to mess with.. This mistake can be categorized with others common to those who have so imbibed the basic assumptions of the Modern Age that they simply cannot think outside that box and find it painful to even try. These mistakes all involve prioritizing that which, important as it may be to the moment, is fleeting and ephemeral, over that which is fixed, stable, permanent, and lasting. This is the consequence of turning our backs on the consensus of the wisdom of all of human tradition until yesterday and deciding that the marketplace is a better model for the whole of society than the family.
When we speak of stability and permanence with regards to human institutions, of course, we are referring to these qualities to the extent that they can be possessed by anything in our earthly, mortal, existence. Monarchy is the state institution that has demonstrated the largest capacity for such. Family is the most permanent social institution. While I am referring to family in the general sense of “the family”, the oldest and most universal social institution, specific families also have much longer lifespans than the individuals who belong to them in any generation. We are born into families that have been around a lot longer than us and, until very recently at any rate, those families raised us to behave in ways that would ensure they would be around long after we are gone, i.e., grow up, get married, have kids, raise those kids to do the same. Like living under the reign of a king whose Sovereignty has passed down to him from those who reigned over generations of our forebears this reminds us that we are not each our own individual selves the centre of the universe around which all else revolves and to whose wills reality must bend the knee. This is a reminder we are in constant need of now more than ever since we are constantly surrounded by voices telling us otherwise.
The recognition that everything is not about us, that we are part of things bigger, more important, and longer lived than ourselves, is, paradoxically, absolutely essential to our growth as individuals, not physical growth of course, but our development into our best possible selves, the selves we are supposed to be, the kind of growth that perfection in the original root meaning of the word points to and which in the language of the ancient thinkers consists of finding and accomplishing to the best of our ability our good, that is to say, our end, our purpose, the reason we are here on this earth. For we cannot find and serve our own small-g good, if we are solipsistic prisoners of our own selves. Our individual small-g goods are not, pace Nietzsche, goods we make for ourselves out of our own wills, but are that within us which answers to big G Goodness. We do not have to be able to conceive of Goodness in philosophical terms, but none of us will ever come near being the best version of ourselves possible without acknowledging Goodness as something that is what it is regardless of what we think, say, or do about it and something to which our will must bend rather than vice versa.
Goodness is often spoken of in connection with Beauty and Truth, both of which like Goodness are what they are regardless of us and to which our wills must bend. These are stable and permanent in the absolute sense. In philosophy and theology they are called the Transcendentals, which term means “the properties of being, i.e., that which is to existence itself what “red” is to “apple”, but as has already been stated, a philosophical understanding of these things is hardly necessary. The important thing to understand is that we don’t have a say in what Goodness, Truth and Beauty are and that we are to conform ourselves to these rather than to try to force them to conform to our will.
We live in a time when we are suffering the consequences of having done the exact opposite on a massive scale. Take Beauty for an example. Our cities look as one would expect them to after a century or so of architects and city engineers designing buildings and streets with the idea that Beauty must take backseat to utility. Our countrysides, while not affected as badly as our cities, show the scarring one would expect when those responsible for projects that affect the countryside share the same priorities as the aforementioned architects and city engineers. Is it any wonder, with such disregard for Beauty being shown by the engineers responsible for city and country alike, that so many others add to the problem by strewing garbage all over both? We have art and music that looks and sounds like what one would expect from a century or so of sculptors, painters, and composers who no longer saw the primary purpose of their vocation as being to create works of Beauty but to “express themselves” and “reach the people” even if that meant shocking them with ugliness. Bernier’s objections to Charles the person are based on His Majesty’s life-long outspoken environmentalism which, in the minds of Bernier and many who think like him, make His Majesty into someone like Bill Gates or Al Gore. Even if His Majesty was that type it would still be utter folly to wish to abolish the office of the monarchy because of such a quirk in the present officeholder, but it is also an ill-informed misjudgment of His Majesty. His environmentalism began as countryside conservationism rooted in his love of the Beauty of the countryside. His love for Beauty has manifested itself in a similar outspokenness with regards to the other things discussed in this paragraph. It would be difficult to read his defense of older buildings and architectural styles and his biting criticism of modernism and functionalism as anything other than a deep traditionalism. Similarly, if you consider everything he has said and done with regards to environmentalism instead of focusing in only on climate-related matters, it is quite evident that he is more of a Wendell Berry than a Bill Gates.
Late last week a bill cleared parliament, the first of several planned by the current Liberal government, that will have the effect of severely limiting Canadians access to Truth by giving the government the same, or even stronger, control over alternative sources of information online that they already exercise over the traditional media. This is not, of course, how the prime minister and his cult of followers talk about what they are doing. They say that this first bill is intended to protect “Canadian content” on online streaming services. They say with regards to their internet legislation as a whole that they are trying to protect Canadians from “online harms” such as “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “hate”. If one were to make the mistake of taking this language literally and seriously one could be fooled into thinking that it is the opposite of Truth that the government is trying to keep from Canadians for “misinformation” and “disinformation” as these words are properly used mean information that is false. The Liberals, however, use these words to mean information that disagrees with whatever narrative they happen to be promoting at that moment and since that narrative is almost inevitably false it is Truth that ends up being censored as “misinformation” or “disinformation”. A Ministry of Truth never promotes Truth, it only suppresses it. It is always a bad idea, but especially so when coming from someone like our prime minister who never tells the Truth when a lie will suffice. Only a few days before the Online Streaming Act passed he told an audience that he never forced anyone to get a vaccination. This was a rather audacious lie considering there were not many world leaders worse than him when it came to imposing vaccines on millions by preventing anyone without one from having any sort of a normal existence. Many opposed this bill and will continue to fight it, in the courts if need be, and to his credit Bernier is a leading example of these. This was done, however, in the name of freedom of speech, and freedom of speech was championed, not because of its necessity to Truth (without freedom of speech, including the freedom to speak that which is false, we do not have the freedom to speak Truth, the parallel to the classical theological argument that without Free Will, including the ability to choose evil, we do not have the ability to choose the Good) but because it violated our individual rights. I don’t deny that individual rights are important, but they are a liberal value, and like all liberal values their importance is greatly exaggerated in this age. Truth is more important. Sir Roger Scruton wrote “beauty is an ultimate value – something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations”. (Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, 2011) Imagine how different the fight against the Liberal Party’s plans to seize control of what we can say or see online would be if those fighting fought first and foremost in the name of Truth, the permanent and lasting value, and framed their arguments accordingly.
My hope and prayer for Max Bernier is that his eyes will be opened and that he will come to see that as important as all the things he has been fighting for are, what T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things”, both the truly permanent ultimate values of Truth, Goodness and Beauty and the relatively permanent concrete human institutions such as the family and in the political sphere parliament and especially the monarchy which point us to those ultimate values, are more important and that he will repent of having allowed his minor objections to Charles the person to attack the monarchy and espouse small-r republicanism. Until such time, he will have to do what he does without my support.
God save the King! —Gerry T. Neal
Don’t Trust the “Experts”
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