Book Review: The Other North America
In order to understand Canada, it is essential to understand North America. The vast continent on which Canada and its neighbours stand is the geopolitical reality which has shaped our history. Settlement, ideological conflict, and the competition between British-Canadian and American expansion westward shaped the development of both cultures and institutions. This means that deep ties of heritage, culture, and political traditions continue to exist between the various regions of Canada and the United States. Our branch of global European civilization is continental in nature.
There exists a tendency among some Canadian nationalists – conservative, liberal, and left-nationalists – to define Canada against or in the absence of its historic neighbours. Indeed, it could be said that the left-nationalists alone are often the ones who point out their common colonial roots, if in terms of revolutionary struggle against them. But is it possible to tell the story of Quebec or Nova Scotia without mentioning New York or Virginia? Seemingly not. Likewise, the High Tory tradition which was defended and preserved in Canada has roots and descendants stretching through New England and the South, even reaching the Caribbean. The Other North America is an excellent demonstration of these ties; published as a series of essays by various authors, it combines modern and historical thinkers from the three major regions of British North America. Editor D. H. Graham explains the overarching theme behind the work in his short preface:
Tradition tells us to defend the interest of English peoples in North America, though it does not so clearly tell us what aspects of Anglo-American civilisation we ought to defend in so doing…It is the seeking of answers to this question, of what English traditions in North America ought to be preserved, with which our dialogue about North Americanism should be most principally concerned.
Due to the number and variety of essays, this review will focus on several major ones. Stephen Leacock’s early 20th century pamphlet Greater Canada: An Appeal and Gerry Neal’s more recent essay The Old Canada and Her Britishness are two Canadian voices in the anthology. The longest essay by far is The True Interest of North America, written in 1776 by Charles Inglis. After serving as one of the strongest loyalist voices in the colonies, he was forced into exile from America and became the first Anglican bishop in Canada, serving Nova Scotia. From the South, we have George Fitzhugh’s essay The Revolutions of 1776 and 1861 Contrasted, written in the midst of the American civil war. D. H. Graham himself ends the book with an essay on Fitzhugh’s Tory inheritance in his George Fitzhugh: Tory Revolutionary. The volume contains other essays which we will not have room to focus on here, including contributions by Kenneth W. Gunn-Walberg, Ron Dart, V. Francis Knight, and Michael Cushman.
Stephen Leacock was one of Canada’s most prominent authors in the early 20th century. He was also a staunch Tory and nationalist. However, his nationalism was rooted in a connection and admiration for the British Empire. Greater Canada: An Appeal, written in 1907, is a voice from a time when this vision was still eminently possible. He targets both the pro-American sympathies of liberals and the “little Man of the Province” who refused to raise himself to the imperial consciousness. Beginning with an overview of the value and size of Canada, he then praises the way which English and British institutions have adapted themselves through their various ages of crisis. We will see later that Fitzhugh views the American revolt as having come naturally from communities which had grown beyond mere “colonial” standing. Leacock believes the same of Canada. But instead of rebellion and separation, Leacock believes that full membership in the community of Empire must be the result.
Find for us something other than mere colonial stagnation, something sounder than independence, nobler than annexation, greater in purpose than a Little Canada. Find us a way. Build us a plan, that shall make us, in hope at least, an Empire Permanent and Indivisible.
This highlights one of the major distinctions of Canadian High Tory thought. Due to its continued political connection to the mother country, Canadian High Tories did not see their project as merely philosophical. Mere “civilizational ties” as even American separatists would have been happy to claim with Britain, did not adequately express their goals. For Canadians in this tradition, these ties demanded a full institutional manifestation. That manifestation was the geopolitical and cultural force of the British Empire.
The idea invoked by Leacock and other imperialists was that this project had to move from the colonial-dominion model to a federal model. The project of the Imperial Federation was the most popular expression of this impulse; it proposed a united federal and imperial superstate, an Imperial Parliament with representation of the many territories, and a sovereign unity in the British Crown. The major obstacles to this project were not only colonial nationalism, but the perceived threat to the autonomy of colonial elites. This included Canada’s burgeoning “Laurentian elite” as present especially in the Liberal Party, but also various provincial interests. These interests are the ones called out by Leacock in his essay. Especially subversive for Leacock was the possibility of these interests being an insufficient bulwark against American power. He writes, pointedly:
The propaganda of Annexation is dead. Citizens we want, indeed, but not the prophets of an alien gospel. To you who come across our western border we can offer a land fatter than your Kansas, a government better than Montana, and a climate kinder than your Dakota. Take it, Good Sir, if you will: but if, in taking it, you still raise your little croak of annexation, then up with you by the belt and out with you, breeches first, through the air, to the land of your origin! This in all friendliness.
With the failure to realize this in the 20th century, Canada maintained independence but saw itself integrated into the American world order. Furthermore, its culture – particularly its British heritage – underwent a systematic rewrite under the direction of the Laurentian establishment and Liberal governments. Gerry Neal covers several aspects of this rewrite in his essay. One consideration rarely made today is that of French cultural preservation. Quebec’s place under British protection made possible the preservation of its religion and way of life against swallowing up by America. Sir George Étienne-Cartier, father of Confederation, remarked that this French survival “was precisely because of their adherence to the British Crown.”
Neal notes that the closest brushes with full separatism came not under British Canada, but in the decades following the Quiet Revolution. This social shift dissolved much of the heritage Quebec had fought hard to defend, particularly its Catholic roots. The Liberal response to this was in fact to minimize and abolish precisely those elements of higher Canadian unity, highlighting the differences themselves as what defined Canada. To this day, Quebec has refused to adopt on a provincial level the Liberal conception, still having not ratified the 1982 Constitution Act. Unfortunately, this will to defend what remains of its culture has often made it an object of attack in English Canada rather than an example.
One of the supreme ironies of all this was the response of the current generation of the Liberal Canada vision to some of Harper’s more conservative initiatives. It is a tendency among the Laurentian-Liberal elite to in fact accuse Tories of doing the “rewriting” when they depart from these post-1960’s norms. Neal cites anti-Harper author Michael Harris:
Until that moment, Canada had been a secular and progressive nation that believed in transfer payments to better distribute the country’s wealth, the Westminster model of government, a national medicare program, a peacekeeping role for the armed forces, an arm’s-length public service, the separation of church and state, and solid support for the United Nations. Stephen Harper believed in none of these things.
The presumptuousness of the Laurentian class to identify itself and its values with Canada has often drawn the ire of Tories, both high and modern. Secularism as a market is essentially a lie in a country which recognizes the supremacy of God in its Charter preamble, and has often granted extensive privileges in public institutions to both Catholic and Protestant clergy. Peacekeeping and the UN were a replacement for precisely the imperial project which this Liberal rewrite undid. For the High Tory reading these words, policies – even good ones – are not a replacement for a civilizational identity and mission.
But while in Canada the High Tories held out until the 20th century, their battle in New England was much earlier and more violent. Charles Inglis’ life is testimony to this, and his essay is a rousing denouncement of revolutionary propaganda. Specifically, it is a rebuttal to the famous work Common Sense by Thomas Paine, which radicalized the anti-British sentiments among American leaders and was a propaganda win for separatism. Paine would later be imprisoned in France during his attempts to further the revolution there, out-radicalized by his enemy Robespierre. His American friends were able to secure his release. Unfortunately for Paine, his anti-religious views and later criticism of Washington made him a pariah in the republic he had worked to secure; he died isolated, with only six people attending his funeral.
Paine’s deism and outspoken anti-Christian views made him a fitting mouthpiece for rebellion against a Christian monarch, against sacred vows. Charles Inglis, on the other hand, would infamously pray aloud for King George III whilst George Washington himself sat in the congregation of Trinity Church in New York. As rector of the Church, Inglis would be a figure of unity among Loyalists; returning to England after the evacuation of New York Loyalists, he would become Anglican Bishop of Nova Scotia.
The True Interests of America is part rebuttal and part polemic. Inglis highlights and responds to several main themes of Common Sense. First, he refutes what he considers Paine’s misrepresentation of the English constitution. Next, he rebuts two of Paine’s major arguments against monarchy: first that monarchs are a cause for violence, and second that monarchy is unbiblical. It may be noted that Paine’s view of the scriptures as pure myth and drivel did not stop him trying to use them – much as anti-Christian forces today will try to argue via misrepresented Christian doctrine. Finally, Inglis spends the largest portion of the essay putting the lie to Paine’s dark depiction of the British-American relationship. In particular, he defends the economic and military power of a British America. He finally makes the case that the further development of this bond is key to a great American future.
Inglis’ defence of the British constitution is simple. He begins with an important premise:
…there is in every state, whatever its form of government may be, a supreme absolute power. The distribution of this power is what constitutes the different forms of government…
This reflects an axiom of reactionary political thought found in authors from Filmer to Moldbug: political power is inherent to human societies, and the question of politics is its allocation and exercise. Contrary to theorists of social contract and liberalism, power is not artificially created. He then defends the constitution – not a document, but the structure of the British regime – by the fact that it contains the elements of the three classical forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. He views the British regime as the result of history and crisis shaping and whittling away the weaker elements of its structure. Shaped by trial and synthesis, he sees the regime of 1688 as achieving an optimum of the three forms, while limiting their weaknesses. He references the republicans’ own claims that the Commons enjoys a long history within the state. The preference for tested institutions against model written constitutions is one of the key aspects of High Tory thought.
Inglis further attacks the famous distinction made by Paine between government and society – one which unfortunately has come to define much of the American and Canadian political right. Paine claims that humans begin in a natural state of liberty, and that the first thought of the settlers in the New World would not have been government, but society. Inglis replies, bitingly:
[Paine’s account] is so far from “representing the First peopling of any country” that I sincerely believe it represents the first peopling of no one country since the days of Adam…The first British emigrants to America were in a state of society before their emigration; – in England they jointly applied for grants of land here – they received grants, charters and instructions, which vested them with a legal title to those lands, and marked the outlines of those governments that were to be formed here. When those emigrants found themselves in America, they did not then first think of society; for they were in a state of society before, and the governments they erected here were conformable to the plans they had previously received in England.
The following claim that kings are a source of violence, coming from a republican, is easily contested. Inglis points to the long engagement in warfare of the premier republic of his day: the Dutch Republic. This state was deeply involved with the religious wars of its time, and later became involved in colonial conflicts with England, Portugal, and other countries. He further points to the very classical republics so admired by 18th century republicans: the Greek city states were drawn into the thirty year conflict between Athens and Sparta. That other great republic, Rome, built its empire on the basis of warfare and domination of its neighbours. Thus, history contradicts Paine’s starry view. In hindsight, we know that the United States would be involved in minor and major conflicts for nearly all its history up until the present day.
Paine’s religious argument relies heavily on the notion that the monarchy of Israel’s first king, Saul, was instituted against the will of pious leaders such as Gideon and Samuel. The First Book of Samuel portrays the choice of Israel for a monarch to be a rejection of the direct rule of God via his judges. It is also shown to be a rejection of Samuel himself, the prophet and guide of Israel. Paine highlights the anti-monarchic interpretation of this text. Inglis counters by expanding on those parts of the book left out by Paine: the fact that the prior regime was not a republic, but a Divine monarchy. Inglis points out that the book of Deuteronomy in fact lays out instructions for choosing a king and his personal conduct. He points out the distinction between the pomp and worldliness of the monarchy demanded by some in Israel, and the more ascetic and religious monarchy demanded by the God of Israel. Saul is chosen by Divine ordination, which is recognized by his own successor David when he stops the killing of Saul by Abishai, his nephew. Finally, Inglis points to the injunctions by Christ regarding the Roman monarchy of his day: “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”
However, Inglis’ most exhaustive effort in his work is to prove the beneficial nature of the British-American relationship. Paine’s major points can be summarized as follows: that after the battle of Lexington, no American can countenance reconciliation; that Britain’s benefits have been exaggerated; that Britain’s continued relationship limits America, which can make do on its own militarily; finally, that America will benefit more from independent trade with Europe. Paine also (ironically, by modern standards) condemns the toleration of Catholics in Quebec, accusing the King of closet “popery”.
The broad overview of Inglis’ defence is an excellent systematic outline of the loyalist position. He admits bad judgement behind British actions at Lexington, where regulars ultimately fired on and charged a local militia despite neither side having expected deadly force. But, Inglis points out, this is hardly a reason to dissolve bonds of blood, culture, and trade which have allowed two countries to prosper. To see this as a case for separation rather than the establishment of a better relationship is the mark of one who sought secession from the beginning. Inglis takes a strong stance that Britain’s political involvement alone has allowed the American colonies to prosper and grow. Paine’s assertions of unbonded “society” do not hold water. Britain provided a market for goods, a system of law, and military protection. Inglis further rejects Paine’s argument that America can win peace through a republican policy of trade and liberty, and thus needs no British military protection:
A flourishing trade naturally increases wealth; and for this and other reasons, as naturally leads to war. Venice and Holland – all commercial republics – were frequently engaged in bloody wars, in the days of their prosperity.
This would in fact come to pass, with American military engagements beginning immediately and taking President Jefferson’s military power to North Africa. This would in turn grow the strength of the federal government of the very republic Paine argued for on radical liberal grounds. Inglis finally lays out a detailed study – numbers at hand – regarding the cost and size necessary for a theoretical American navy. He concludes that the British union assures far greater protection, and at less cost. Overall, Inglis’ engagement with one of the stalwart voices of rebellion and separatism makes this essay a valuable resource for historians as well as those interested in political philosophy.
The final essays we will cover in this piece bring us to the American South. Once again, American states believed that they encountered insurmountable differences and unjust treatment. But unlike 1776, the rebellion of 1861 would end in failure. The ideology of the northern American class had shifted from one demanding liberty to one which saw themselves as engaged in a salvific mission.
Indeed, aspects of Toryism could be found on both sides. The north maintained a Tory attitude which believed in the justness of a central and expansionist state engaged in a great civilizational work. The south, as we will see, maintained the attitude of localism and saw themselves as more firmly rooted in old Europe. Fitzhugh represents the most reactionary tendency, which rejects many fundamentals of 1776 that the Confederate polity tried to use for its own legitimacy. Michael Cushman’s essay is a useful supplement, although we will not discuss it in detail here. He shows how the social structures of the Confederacy grew out of the slave-holding agricultural societies of the Caribbean and Latin America. Cushman sees the southern states as forming the north of a distinct cultural sphere called the Golden Circle, which extends as far south as Brazil.
George Fitzhugh was born into a distinguished Virginia family, practiced law, and married into a line which included unrepentant loyalists. He grew to admire and identify himself with this Tory heritage explicitly. Fitzhugh is most known among modern historians as one of the most radical defenders of the Southern social order. What makes Fitzhugh strange, and offensive to the majority of pro-slavery southerners from his time, was his refusal to identify slavery with race. Fitzhugh took the radical line that slavery was a component of all societies, and that there was in fact no good reason to exclude the white populace from it. He also defended a more common Southern view which saw slavery as being in some sense kinder than “northern industrialism”; this was due to the closer familial relationships which characterised the hierarchy. Perhaps alone in history, he sympathized with socialism because he saw it as attempting to re-establish these more “humane” relations – in other words, he agreed with the modern conservative line that “socialism is slavery” and found himself affirming both. Fitzhugh is no doubt an uncomfortable figure for Tories to grapple with; nevertheless, the fact that Tory societies included slave societies in a fact that must be confronted.
Fitzhugh takes the first paragraphs of Revolutions of 1776 and 1861 Contrasted to detail his understanding of the American revolt: that 1776 and 1861 represented the natural separation of countries which had become capable of independence, and that the unnecessary Lockean-Jeffersonian justification was a dangerous force. Furthermore, he views the figures behind these doctrines as being not so much deluded as malicious, seeking to expand their own power.
Nothing so pompous, so mal-apropos and so silly is to be found in history until our revolution of ’76…It would have been well for us, if the seemingly pompous inanities of the Declaration of Independence, of the Virginia Bill of Rights and the Act of Religious Toleration had remained dead letters. But they had a strength, a vitality and a meaning in them, utterly uncomprehended by their charlatanic, half-learned, pedantic authors, which rendered them most potent engines of destruction.
Fitzhugh takes on the doctrine of the social contract in a more direct way than Inglis. Fitzhugh sees Locke’s doctrine as especially pernicious (he does not address Hobbes in this essay) and contrasts him with the classical view of politics. For Fitzhugh, the egalitarianism of Locke must be contrasted with the hierarchy of human society which results from natural inequalities.
A professing Christian himself, [Locke] is the father of all modern infidelity – infidelity in religion, in morals, in everything. Rousseau borrowed from him, and sowed his infidel and anarchical principles broadcast throughout Christendom…Aristotle had taught, and his teachings had been respected and heeded for two thousand years, that society or government was natural to man; that he was born under government, born a member of society, and did not frame or originate government or society…for society can only exist as a series of subordinations.
Fitzhugh then makes a claim which is especially noteworthy in the hegemonically Protestant south: that these doctrines could be tied to the Reformation. It should be noted that Fitzhugh’s own family belonged to the Episcopal Church, the American representative of the Anglican tradition which has always included both Reformed and Catholic tendencies. This has made it possible for many Anglicans of a reactionary bent to take a critical approach to the Reformation.
Locke’s doctrines, and those of Adam Smith, were mere outgrowths of the Reformation, which was a political and social more than a religious revolution…[philosophies] of Reformation run mad.
[…]We now come to the Southern Revolution of 1861, which we maintain was reactionary and conservative – a rolling back of the excesses of the Reformation…a solemn protest against the doctrines of natural liberty, human equality, and the social contract, as taught by Locke and the American sages of 1776, and an equally solemn protest against the doctrines of Adam Smith, Franklin, Say, Tom Paine, and the rest of the infidel political economists who maintain that the world is too much to be governed…and should not be governed at all, but “let alone”…
Fitzhugh also takes on the American myth of a Puritan inheritance. Despite this American mythology lasting until our own day, his criticism is in fact based on considerable historical truth. The earliest settlers of those regions which became Virginia and the Carolinas were not radical Puritans, but Cavalier royalists granted land by the restored King Charles II – hence the name of the city: Charleston. Fitzhugh goes on to quote at length from the London Quarterly Review, a Tory outlet, regarding this tradition’s view of the British constitution. He sees it as equivalent to the Southern view of political constitution. He goes on to state:
The doctrine of the natural origin and growth of society is the distinctive Tory doctrine of England, the very opposite to the theories of Locke and the Fathers of our late Republic. In adopting it, we begin a great conservative reaction. We attempt to role back the Reformation in its political phases; for we saw everywhere in Europe and America reformation running to excess, a universal spirit of destructiveness, a profane attempt to pull down what God and nature had built up and erect ephemeral Utopia in its place…”anarchy plus the street constable” [from Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets] stared us in the face.
[…]We are Tories not only in feeling, sentiment, and opinion, but Tories by blood and inheritance. Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas colonized the rest of the South; and those states were settled by cavaliers, which was the first name which Tories bore. More than half of England was imbibed with Puritanism and sided with Cromwell against the crown. Virginia and Maryland, the then Southern colonies, were conservative and sided with the crown.
The radicalism and rhetorical prowess of Fitzhugh’s statements are formidable, for which reason D. H. Graham calls him a “Tory revolutionary”. Without question, his view of power as inherent to human societies inherits the High Tory view, which itself inherits the view of Christendom, Rome, and Greece, and is shared by many of the great civilizations around the globe. He explicitly cites Sir Robert Filmer as an influence, and is clearly also a student of Thomas Carlyle.
Fitzhugh’s position that on power is perhaps the most important aspect for political thought: that power exercised through slavery is not fundamentally different to that exercised through industrial economic power or the political power of even liberal states. This view makes Fitzhugh a theoretician of power who finds more in common with socialist thought – which likewise saw all these institutions as cases of power and exploitation – than liberal. The liberal is outed as inconsistent, viewing certain forms of coercion as morally evil and others as good – or at least, necessary. If we accept Fitzhugh as faithful to the High Tory view, then what is in question between the Tory and the socialist is the moral nature of power as a part of human society. The socialist sees it as something which can be overcome; the Tory replies that it is inherent and that the socialist refusal merely results in an abdication of moral responsibility.
D. H. Graham addresses this question further in his essay, seeing Fitzhugh as reflecting a feudal view of power. He points to Fitzhugh’s admiration of the Young England movement in the mother country. Proclaiming a policy of “Tory socialism”, Young England sought to imbue the aristocracy and common populace alike with a more collective, duty-based consciousness. It would influence Prime Minister Disraeli’s “One Nation” philosophy. However, Fitzhugh criticized Young England for not rejecting the liberal worldview more fully.
Graham concludes that one must distinguish and expand Fitzhugh’s conception of what slavery meant. Instead of referring simply to the racialized chattel-slavery system of the South, it entailed a totally different conception of power which maintained the moral duty of obedience to superiors. Young England emphasized the other side of this equation, which was the duty of care and protection to those over whom one had power. Graham further highlights that Fitzhugh has a radically different conception of property, one neither liberal nor modern socialist:
Possession in the older British tradition was not understood as being common or individual, but as existing relationally rather than absolutely – and as such having aspects that related to the individual but which were also shared. The King could possess an interest of property in the Lord, the Lord his vassal, the vassal his wife, his wife their child, and the child their doll, while at the same time, the King would possess a property interest in the doll, and so all the way down the hierarchy, at every level, and encompassing the various concentric circles…This understanding of property is “personal” but is not rightly “private” – “shared” but not “common”…
In [Fitzhugh’s] view, only the intimacy of personal interest in human property would ensure familial “affections” that produced a society content with natural inequalities, being built on “harmonious and friendly relationships.
This makes clearer what precisely Fitzhugh is defending in the Southern social order. For Fitzhugh, social hierarchies exist such that humans have “interests” in other humans which are equivalent to those in material property (though morally different). Thus, slavery properly describes not only the Southern order but the true nature of perhaps all social orders. The industrial north merely redefined the power relationship along lines of wage dependency, and socialist or communist societies made humans the collective property of the state. Certainly, we might consider whether the treatment of humans as property truly ended with the 19th century. Communist states saw their populations treated as disposable en masse to achieve the aims of the revolutionary state, whether in Stalin’s armies or Mao’s collective farms. And liberal capitalist society? The mainstream use of the term “human capital” by economists certainly has connotations of property; Heidegger further proposed that technological society had reduced man and nature to a “standing reserve”, an essentially mechanistic and tool-like mode of being. High Tory resources can certainly be used further in exploring this relationship between power, property, and hierarchy.
Graham concludes with an important discussion of how Fitzhugh can justify the Southern secession. The problem is that Fitzhugh has now taken up a worldview where power hierarchies are natural and obedience to them is a moral duty. But in rejecting the premises of 1776, he has also rejected the premises which allowed the Confederacy to “withdraw” from the Union of the several states. Fitzhugh, in discussing Sir Filmer, attempts to say that society at large may rise up against power and that this may be interpreted as an action of Providence.
Generally, the High Tory read of de facto authority, for example in following the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, was that it justified not the insurrection itself per se, but support for the government it put in place after the fact…Fitzhugh is right to see this doctrine in Filmer, but he is both peculiar and in error to draw the conclusion from it that it makes ethical “insurrection, to correct misrule or punish tyrants”. What he has instead given us in the place of the orthodox doctrine of “passive obedience”…is a different doctrine, that of “might makes right”.
[…]
…Fitzhugh is making the Southern position in the war one of advocates of Christendom attempting to reclaim portions of it which have been lost to “infidelity”. It is here that he comes closest to making an argument that could find justification within the Tory tradition: presenting the South as a distinctly Christian people, of “number”, seeking to institute a Christian government in the fact of rule by an infidel and alien power. When, however, he adds to this argument in the year 1863 “Deo duce vincemus”, that is, “Under the leadership of God we will conquer”, he is ultimately appealing to a “might makes right” read of the legitimacy of de facto governments by the virtue of Providence. It is this passage alone which is absent when he has the essay republished after the war in 1867.
This boiling down to the foundations of the High Tory tradition and the groundwork for further writing and discussion makes Graham’s essay among the most interesting in the book. Fitzhugh, while being a shocking figure for the modern reader, in fact exposes fundamental questions which remain unanswered today. If the socialist is wrong and power is inherent in human society, then this presents a challenge to the modern moral framework.
There exists at least one answer in Western religious thought: that only a superior spiritual power with Divinely instituted authority may loose the moral bond between ruler and ruled. Since the Protestant churches have traditionally been either without hierarchy or bound to temporal heads, this doctrine has been most developed in the Catholic Church. The Papal power as voice of the universal church to bind and loose has been exercised in history; one example is when English Catholics were released by Pope Pius V from any oaths of allegiance made to Queen Elizabeth I in the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis. This doctrine has always been debated, with such schools as the Gallicans minimizing this power and the Ultramontanists emphasizing it. However, the long separation of English High Tory thought from the continental Catholic tradition means that there is much possible work to be done on this question. Indeed, it drives at the heart of reactionary debates surrounding the nature of power and sovereignty.
To conclude, The Other North America is an important survey and investigation of Anglo-American High Tory thought. It is an important volume for Canadians and Americans alike, as it ties together the common foundations of our countries. The work strikes a balance between a holistic continental view and important regional distinctions. Given that America is often separated from the rest of the Anglosphere, as much from a certain anti-American prejudice as from historical rivalry, The Other North America does a service in showing that it is in fact inseparable. Whether it continues to be a key part by the end of the century is an open question, and Graham appears somewhat pessimistic. This pessimism may be the main thing to criticise: one area of exploration left untouched is how these traditions might be applied in overcoming the political and social crises faced by America and its world order.
Nevertheless, the volume more than makes up for this in opening the way for further scholarship and writing. In this book, we come across a hidden continent. North America discloses aspects of its identity long walled off by the liberal order. This disclosure makes the work vital for those investigating these traditions.
Disdain And Mismanagement: A Century in the Life of Our Armed Forces
Another week, another defense procurement blunder by the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC). This time it is the much-maligned jet procurement file. After unwisely canning the F-35 acquisition plans as per their election promise, the government found itself in a bind. Trudeau’s puzzling electoral announcement came back to bite them in the hind parts. While a free and fair competition would be held, the F-35 would not be included in such competition (for whatever reason). This commitment was nothing more than blatant electioneering, an attempt by the then third party to capitalize on the generally negative public perception of the F-35 file helped along by a healthy dose of disinformation by our state media. Excluding the contradictory aspect of this statement (how can a competition arbitrarily exclude one product and still be called fair and transparent), it created a rather complex problem for Harjit Sajjan’s DND. While the F-35 is likely the only reasonable option if we wish to operate a fifth-generation fighter and keep Canada current in the air power department, the boss just eliminated that option for the sake of differentiating himself from the opposition.
What could be done? Our current airframes, the F-18, are ancient. Despite heroic efforts by the RCAF’s maintenance teams, their life cycle is quickly coming to an end. Buying 4th generation European fighters would have been an unwise move and invited the wrath of the American military-industrial complex that has the ear of Washington and waiting until after the next election would have us run the risk of having a grounded fighter fleet and the massive skill gap that it would entail. A rather odd solution was found. The very same Jet fighter is now to be bough, second hand, from the Australians!
How buying the very same aged airframe we are trying to replace from an allied nation who is replacing them with the very same F-35 that has become politically toxic to the Liberals is an enigma not even the likes of Gerald Butts or Katie Telford could shed light upon. At this point, the Liberal strategy is clear. Since too much outrage has been generated by the LPC about the F-35, to turn around and admit they were completely wrong during the reign of Trudeau II would be too bad for optics. Therefore, a stopgap solution was devised which would allow the Liberals to hold off until the after the next round of elections when the public’s notoriously fickle attention span will be focused on other issues thus allowing the Liberals to award the contract to Lockheed Martin’s F-35 without losing too much face.
It is public wisdom that the LPC is notoriously anti-military and while the party and its luminaries can be said to have no love for our armed forces, the Tories can similarly not be said to have been particularly been good patrons for the CAF. An excellent example is with the case of our oncoming armed icebreakers which are neither capable of breaking heavy winter ice nor particularly well armed (The Mk. 38 25mm deck mounted gun is a pea shooter by naval standards.) By the way, this mess can squarely be blamed on the previous Conservative government, as the project was left mostly untouched by the present government. One could also cite Diefenbaker’s cancellation of the Avro Arrow (though some may argue it was indeed the right decision when faced with the ICBM induced obsolescence of the nuclear bombers the Arrow was supposed to intercept) or how the previous CPC government under Stephen Harper quickly reneged on its scheduled increases for defence spending even while it had attained unconstrained majority status by 2011 due to its policy goals of zero-deficit at any cost.
Military mismanagement is not a specifically Liberal problem. I will posit to you, my dear readers, that it is a historical problem in our fair country and a partial result of the toxic dichotomy of tandem rule by the Tories and the Grits (the other dominant factor being geography.) Take, for example, the establishment of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) on the 4th of May 1910. As the British empire was beginning another arm’s race, this time with Germany, the colonies were expected to pony up and contribute. While the Tories wanted Canada to send money to Britain for her to build Dreadnoughts (footing our share of the bill for imperial defence), the Liberals, who were in power at the time, wanted us to have our own fleet (partially to appease the nascent Franco-nationalist movement which wanted nothing to do with the Empire). The compromise solution was that Canada would have its own navy but that she would be turned over to the Empire if a war was to break out.
Plans were made for five cruisers and six destroyers and while this may have seemed respectable, even by today’s standards, the plan was soon to be in jeopardy. The Conservatives under Borden were elected (in parts due to Laurier losing support in Quebec) and their own plan of sending money instead was enacted. Problem is, we already had a navy and two ships: HMS Niobe and HMS Rainbow who had been gracefully donated by HM’s Royal Navy. The ships stayed, as did the navy, but the funds dried up as the Tories had other priorities. The Canadian fleet rotted at harbor until WW1, when necessities of total war led to the expansion of our army and navy to match wartime demands. Canada showed itself more than capable of generating and sustaining a large field force as the Canadian Corps distinguished itself during the war during battles such as Ypres and Passchendaele. In total, 420,000 men served in the expeditionary corps and almost 60,000 perished. A respectable contribution for a nation that had, only a few years before, not aspired to more than a semi-permanent militia force.
The interwar years came and with them a peace dividend of sorts. The government increased the authorized size of the permanent force to 10,000, though numbers remained much lower so much so that by the Great Depression, only 2000 men were available for muster. A pitiful number, even by second-rate power standard. Canada had no modern equipment, not much of a navy or air force, and fewer men than one could fit in a medium sized hockey arena. The reality was that war exhaustion had taken its toll on Canadian society. While Britain and France had to contend with a resurgent Germany and had their increasingly unruly colonial empires to police, Canada enjoyed geographic isolation and the protection of the United States which would tolerate no foreign influence intrusion in North America.
All the while, Canada was not particularly contributing to imperial defense (or to the coffers of the American treasury, for that matter). In other words, we freeloaded at a time were our fellow imperial citizens on the home islands endured the harsh economic conditions of the depression while still having to foot the bill for imperial defense, notably in Asia. The fact was clear at the time as t is today that Canadians did not believe in defense because its necessity had never been made manifest to them through hard lessons. As such, any expansion of the armed forces where society had begun clamoring for ever-increasing government intervention in daily life would be politically damaging. Pragmatism, geography, the somewhat naïve mindset of Canadians proved itself to be the greater factor rather than a purely ideological dislike for the military by Liberal politicians.
WWII came along and with it a rapid expansion of the RCAF, the RCN and the Canadian Army which was again borne out of necessity. In total, the military establishment counted some 700,000 personnel. Once more an impressive achievement for a nation of 11 million. By war’s end, Canada boasted the third largest navy in the world and even operated its own aircraft carriers. The Cold war era is too large and too complex to go over exhaustively. What is noteworthy is that the period saw the Canadian Armed Forces progressively go down in size, usually coinciding some sort of perceived de-escalation between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. Notable was the decommissioning of HMCS Bonaventure, our last carrier, without replacement leading to the loss of most of our naval aviation.
A landmark decision, and to this day a controversial one, was unification. In 1968, the Trudeau government undertook a reorganization of the Canadian armed services. The stated goal was a rationalization of the command structure. Before, all three services (army, air force and navy) had been entirely separate with separate HQs, separate command structures, separate ranks, and uniforms. The process was to unify command and organizational structures to form a sleeker and more streamlined command structure. For some reason, Paul Hellyer, the defense minister went one step further and did away with the services altogether. This might sound innocuous to those non-military types, but it was a seismic change. Gone were the ranks of Admiral or Air Commodore, gone was the British style regalia, the Sam Browne belts, the pips and crowns and all of the most excellent pomp ad circumstances handed down to us by the British. All services, now wore a simple green US cut uniform, used army ranks (even Ship Captains were now Colonels, much to the confusion of our allies and the chagrin of our sailors), and worked in joint HQs often run by civilians.
Civilianization was rampant and caused such frustrations that hundreds of senior officers quit. Hellyer and Trudeau had gone much further than necessary, and one can suspect part of the reason was to strike back one of the last remaining holdouts of Imperial British culture. This move proved to be unpopular and led to the sacking of the chief of the Navy, the resignation of many senior officers and a general drop in morale. To this day, Hellyer’s legacy is marred by the event. The confiscation of the services’ identity was tantamount to an attack on military spirit itself. While the ensuing decades saw the restoration of many aspects of the old military such as separate uniforms and ranks and the restoration of traditional identities, something was gone for good. It was as if the lineage of the Empire had been broken. The image of British smartness was gone, replaced by massed squares of tri-colored overweight HQ servants parading in Ottawa, often led by Canadian civil servants. The incident differentiated the Grits and the Tories for good when it came to the military. While the Tories would neglect it, the Liberals were and remain, disdainful of and sometimes openly hostile to the military, and the dark year of 1968 was proof of this.
The Cold War ended with a whimper and with it came the vaunted peace dividend. The Liberals, under Chretien, drastically cut the forces to levels comparable to today’s. Salaries were low and so was morale and capabilities were degrading fast. This was partially a result of the Trudeau spendthrift years which led to austerity measures. The military not being dear to New Canada’s heart (never mind its foundational role in our national identity) was gutted.
The Shidane Arone incident in Somalia severely damaged public trust in the institution and demonstrated that under the thin veneer of support lay a bedrock of pathological hostility to the military. The modern expression goes that Canada’s support for its military is ‘a mile wide but an inch deep’. While Canadians love to make a show of their support for the military and of their patriotism in general, this support is clearly lacking as it fails to translate into lasting political support for a stronger military. Once again, this harkens back to Canada’s inexperience as a nation and its somewhat naïve outlook. Since no credible threat can be fathomed by Canadians and since we are essentially protected by the US, our polity is unwilling to foot the cost of defense, seeing is as a useless expense at a time when social programs are constantly expanding.
The period of famine lasted into the 2000’s when the Paul Martin takeover led to the beginning of a decade-long overhaul that was continued under Harper. When our troops became an object of international curiosity for wearing green camouflage in a desert environment, it had become clear even to the Liberals that years of neglect had taken their toll. Emergency procurement was undertaken by both Liberals and Conservatives. A fleet of 100 state-of-the-art tanks was procured as well as modern howitzers, MRAPs, strategic airlift, tactical airlift and so on and so forth. For a time, it looked like the Conservatives under Harper were doing right by the military. The budget was increasing, and new equipment was being bought. Then came the recession and the obsession with balanced budgets. Budget increases were canned and funding stagnated. The earlier mentioned Harry DeWolf class had its designs downgraded and acquisition schedules were pushed to the right. The Conservatives had proven themselves to be unreliable.
Today, the Liberal government is showing barely concealed contempt for the military. The F-35 debacle is but a symptom of the fact that the military is a purely political consideration for or ruling elite. Absent any credible threat and the old-fashioned (some would say archaic) notion that a strong military is a point of pride and a necessity for a sovereign state, our armed forces are thus treated as they always have. As a somewhat annoying but necessary tool that Canada is mandated to have due mostly to external pressures such as NATO and the UN. There was a time were the peacekeeping myth was going strong but even this fanciful notion has abated as the LPC’s attempts at peddling this fantasy of old has mostly amounted to nothing.
One thing can be surmised for certain and that is that our armed forces are not worth much politically to our political establishment and that this fact is directly predicated upon the absence of tangible support for the military in our population. Such absence of support is historical as can be seen throughout the 20th century as there exists no evidence to suggest that any government was ever punished by the electorate for drastically cutting, mistreating and otherwise mishandling the armed forces. Thus we must understand and act upon the assumption that as long as Canada remains a democratic state, any long term improvement in the lot of our army, navy and air force will only be achieved through a paradigm shift in how our population sees our armed forces.
What of today? What do our Canadian Armed Forces amount to? Are they ready for the increasing complexity of a multipolar world? What of the future? More in part II.
Canada and the Geopolitics of Restoration
One of the results of North America’s security between two oceans has been a lack of geopolitical thinking. There is even a school of thought – encouraged by Alexander Dugin and similar writers – that America and the Anglosphere receive cultural traits like individualism and ideological thinking from their oceanic existence. On the flipside, Russia and other land civilizations think religiously and geopolitically, analyzing in terms of power and not ideology. But let’s dig beyond that. In fact, Canada has always by necessity thought more geopolitically than its southern neighbour. This is to no small extent because of the proximity of said neighbour – we are Pierre Trudeau’s mouse in the shadow of the elephant. Our whole policy from the American Rebellion, through the Imperial era, up until the turning focus on Pacific relations, has been forwarded with the fact of our continental neighbourhood in mind. Unfortunately, geopolitics in the Canadian mind has been reduced primarily to military and economic matters. Since the end of the cold war, the latter has dominated. But in this age of strife across global borders, we must increasingly consider a more civilizational approach to geopolitics. In this piece, we will consider Canada’s position as an opportunity.
Much of European political thinking has taken as its starting point the essence and structures of power. Its goal has been to determine the nature of power and how it operates in the world. This is true both of pre- and post-liberal schools of thought. For example, the 17th century English author Sir Robert Filmer sees power as being integral to human societies and not established by rights or contracts. It is also scaleable, with the power of fathers having a macrocosm in the power of kings. Thus, the will of the ruler is the source of law and political decision. Marxist thought, conversely, saw power as founded primarily on economic control and driven by dynamics of exploitation. Against both of these we have the Western liberal tradition, which has taken multiple rhetorical and political forms. However, there are several unifying themes. In its most developed forms, it states that the governed populace are also the ultimate source of power and that political institutions should be democratic representatives of this populace. It also holds that the sovereign individual is the important unit within this populace, and that such institutions are more or less applicable to all of global humanity.
The United States and the world order which it has built are infused with the latter ideology. Let us consider that Canada’s foundations differ. Without a doubt, huge segments of its governing classes embraced the liberal worldview (19th century editions) even at its founding. Today, it is dominant among all political parties. However, Canada’s founding traditions also include a significant inheritance from traditions predating this one. Some of these are reflected in our laws and institutions. Our policy of multiculturalism and acceptance of “distinct societies” like Quebec show that we view the human as more than sovereign individual, but also has a cultural being. The Crown which forms the sovereign head of the state is a fundamentally illiberal institution. It is occupied by familial inheritance and as an institution it is descended from the ancient monarchies which include William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great. Its power is not to represent the people, but to give unity and coherency to the exercise of sovereign power. The fact that she is crowned and anointed by an Archbishop reveals a fundamentally religious view of the world, and not a secular or relativistic one. The human is not simply economic man but also cultural man, ethnic man, social man, familial man, and religious man.
For the purposes of this piece, let us propose that these traditions are fundamentally necessary to overcome our crisis of disintegration. The liberal order realizes that cultural and class conflict are rising. They realize that there is polarization not only between parties but also between regions, cultures, and even the sexes. However, their solutions have always returned to the economic. Neither tax cuts nor tax rises alone will rescue us. Both the desperate working class and the alienated upper class have seen sons leave to join terror groups, daughters succumb to mental illness, and both share in the demographic crisis. While we will not use this space to detail every application and solution, let us take as a general principle that these traditions have much to offer in solutions. The question now becomes, how do we transmit these traditions in an effective way to those with the power to transform our world order? Additionally, how can we build the alternative to which such people can rally around (and dare one say, defect to)?
This is where Canada has a unique position. While not by any means the source of military might or international clout, Canada is an integral member of the American alliance. Moreover, our institutions are highly integrated with those south of the border. Canadian and American centers of government and education are tightly linked and exchange human and intellectual resources. If Canada is not the most visible country of the alliance, its reputation remains large positive. This is our institutional position. Canada also maintains powerful ties to the European and Western world. First and foremost we turn again to our monarchy. The Crown as an institution is shared by the UK and other countries in the Anglosphere, and it retains a special relationship to numerous others. These countries share in the British Imperial inheritance, which expands into philosophies of politics and government and is not only institutional. The British traditions are engrained are in the memories and subconsciouses of these countries, even if we are long past the days which James Anthony Froude described in his accounts of the West Indies:
The British race dispersed over the world have celebrated the Jubilee of the Queen with an enthusiasm evidently intended to bear a special and peculiar meaning. The people of these islands and their sons and brothers and friends and kinsfolk in Canada, in Australia, and in New Zealand have declared with a general voice, scarcely disturbed by a discord, that they are fellow-subjects of a single sovereign, that they are united in feeling, united in loyalty, united in interest, and that they wish and mean to preserve unbroken the integrity of the British Empire.
However, much of the Anglosphere has separated itself from this heritage politically. Others have retained it but lack the specifically North American context. Canada alone of the Anglosphere consciously maintained not only Anglo political traditions, but Anglo-American ones. English Canada is tied by blood and culture to English America. The borders of 1776 and beyond were ones of ideology and geopolitics, but not of blood and culture.
However, Canada is not only tied to the Anglosphere. By virtue of the French heritage in particular, as well as migration more generally, it has significant ties to continental Europe. Unlike America, which was at that time more homogeneously English, Anglo- and French communities in Canada’s predecessor states had to deal with continental conflicts spilling over into the New World. Because of this, political authorities had to devise settlements between different ethnic and linguistic groups. These mirrored the continental approach more than America’s cultural melting pot and unified expansionism. America’s moment of division would of course come during its civil war.
The continental approach to geopolitics was mirrored in both English and French Canadian Prime Ministers. Even Pierre Elliot Trudeau, renowned as the arch-liberal Prime Minister, took a strong statist and nationalist view against French separatism. His willingness to use military force revealed (perhaps ironically) a very French view of the Canadian state as being more than a sum of its parts. While part of this is due to his progressive democratic views (as opposed to nationalist or separatist), one must recall his early Jesuit education. According to those around him, such as Trudeau advisor Marc Lalonde, the Jesuit schools of the time retained strong sympathies for the states of Franco and Salazar, and even to an extent that of Petain. The strongest English Canadian example of continental geopolitical thought was, of course, Sir John A. Macdonald himself. His state-driven securing of the Dominion’s western territories reveals an approach which would likely be familiar to a European statesman such as Bismarck.
In the midst of the current crisis, there are two errors which we must confront. One is an error built into the systems which have caused much of the crisis. The other is one which confuses escapism for solutions. These two errors are internationalism and petty nationalism. By internationalism, we mean the globalist conception which imagines a universal humanity which can be ruled by homogeneous, multilateral, liberal institutions. By petty nationalism, we mean a nationalist response which forgets to think on the civilizational level. It seeks to retreat to a small state and protect itself from the fray. In Canada, we might think of the sort of barely self-conscious civic nationalism which knows it’s suspicious of Islam but understands nothing of our own history. We must consider how Canada’s ties to Europe and America enable it to effectively confront both errors.
The British and European roots we have described above make it clear that institutions are rooted in unique histories and populations. This also holds true for international or imperial institutions, which develop through the specific challenges faced by particular empires. British North America ruled diverse but predominantly European populations; meanwhile, the African territories or India had institutions which were also uniquely British but which evolved differently due to the different challenges they faced. The People’s Republic of China includes many ethnicities beyond the Han, but its fundamental institutions were created by its dominant and majority population. The American empire rests on institutions created by an individualistic populace which preferred to think of itself as free and sovereign, which is why it calls itself the “international community” rather than admitting its true nature.
Canada’s experience in the American order has let it see firsthand the dominance of states which can operate across international great spaces. The wealth and power of nations is one of the guarantors of political sovereignty. Those which have secured powerful and loyal ties to allied states or populations have seen their own power grow. It is for this reason that Russia, China, and Iran have put decades of diplomatic and military effort into avoiding or overcoming isolation. The responsible ruler understands that sovereignty demands technological and economic capability. This is not because economics is the source of values, since to make economics supreme is one of the fundamental errors of conservatism. Not all wealth is created equal. But there can be no question that countries which have no control over their sources of food, media or technology are not sovereign. Since no country has universal access to all the resources it requires, they either become dominant powers or are allied to a greater dominant power. Thus, political orders operating on vast continental and cross-oceanic scales have appeared. In the literature of Dugin and the European New Right, this concept is called the “great space” and is defined around a foundational geopolitical “pole”.
Canada’s pole is without question the United States. Canada’s ethnocultural and historical cousins in Western Europe and the Anglosphere are integral fellow members of this great space. At this time, there is no alternative pole or great space which Canada can realistically consider itself to be part of. And for this reason, we must confront that it is precisely the governing elite of this space which is the cause of much ideological and political turmoil.
But the great space of global liberalism is not a reality cemented by the fates. It is men who have built it, and it is men who can remake it. The idea of Restoration is one which imagines a new and better order arising in this space. It believes that the traditions which we possess have true and valuable knowledge. It believes that this idea can animate the thoughts and actions of those who govern, or who can build the power to govern. Finally, it believes that with a class of able governors animated this idea, the great space of our civilization can use its great wealth and technology to secure a far better world.
Canada’s unique position is that it ties together older traditions with our world order. An opportunity exists for our country to build this vision and bring it forward. What is needed, first and foremost, is able people and a willingness to unlearn and learn anew. By allowing our traditions to unveil the idea of Restoration, we can take the first step in a new geopolitical vision.
Thanksgiving: A Common Inheritance
It comes as no surprise that Thanksgiving should have taken root in North America. With similar festivals having deep roots across Europe, it was only natural for communities with their survival at stake to give thanks for what bounties they received. Today, it is one of the inheritances from old Europe which still binds together Canada and the United States. The date has varied between time and places, but the tradition has stood firm. Although less prominent in Quebec, similar days “l’action de grâce” were proclaimed on such occasions as peaces reached between France and England, and the anniversary of the 1837 revolts.
It is often held that the first English meal of thanksgiving was held by the explorer and privateer Martin Frobisher on modern Baffin Island, and the height of this meal was the offering of communion. This was the first English Christian liturgy in the Americas. Samuel de Champlain held similar meals of thanks in the French colonies he established. He also encouraged the establishment of the Order of Good Cheer, which held meals of thanksgiving and in fact survives until this day in Nova Scotia.
In honour of Thanksgiving, Northern Dawn wishes to republish some of the proclamations of this day on our continent. In particular, one should take note of a general gratitude in all these statements of Thanksgiving toward Divine Providence. This reflects a culture still infused by the Christian spirit.
First, we present the declaration of a day of thanksgiving by the Province of Canada in 1859:
VICTORIA, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, QUEEN, Defender of the Faith, &c., &c., &c.
To all to whom these presents come – GREETING:
WHEREAS it hath pleased Almighty God in His Great Goodness to vouchsafe unto Our Province of Canada, the blessings of an abundant Harvest; We therefore, adoring the Divine Goodness and duly considering that the blessings of Peace and Plenty now enjoyed by Our people in the said province, do call for public and solemn acknowledgements, have thought fit by and with the advice of our Executive Council of Our Province of Canada, to issue this Proclamation hereby appointing a General Holiday and Day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God for these His Mercies to be observed throughout Our said Province of Canada, on THURSDAY, the THIRD day of NOVEMBER next, and We do earnestly exhort all Our loving subjects therein that they do observe the said Public Day of Thanksgiving.
Second, we have George Washington’s first declaration of a day thanksgiving in 1789. Even though the Thirteen Colonies had broken away from the political and spiritual unity of the English monarchy, they bore with them a great patrimony which could not be so easily discarded. Washington is quoted here in part:
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.
[…]And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.
We also see the setting aside of a day of thanksgiving by Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Though seeking to break away from the United States, the Confederacy also saw itself as tied to Christian European roots. The fact that the political aims of the Confederacy were consistent with continuing the tradition of Thanksgiving in the inherited way are testimony to this aspect of the Southern identity. It shows that the Thanksgiving tradition was not in any way seen as tied to the American republic as a political regime. Lincoln would likewise set aside a day of thanksgiving in 1863.
WHEREAS, it hath pleased Almighty God, the Sovereign Disposer of events, to protect and defend us hitherto in our conflicts with our enemies as to be unto them a shield.
And whereas, with grateful thanks we recognize His hand and acknowledge that not unto us, but unto Him, belongeth the victory, and in humble dependence upon His almighty strength, and trusting in the justness of our purpose, we appeal to Him that He may set at naught the efforts of our enemies, and humble them to confusion and shame.
Now therefore, I, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States, in view of impending conflict, do hereby set apart Friday, the 15th day of November, as a day of national humiliation and prayer, and do hereby invite the reverend clergy and the people of these Confederate States to repair on that day to their homes and usual places of public worship, and to implore blessing of Almighty God upon our people, that he may give us victory over our enemies, preserve our homes and altars from pollution, and secure to us the restoration of peace and prosperity.
Given under hand and seal of the Confederate States at Richmond, this the 31st day of October, year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty one.
Thanksgiving has come in and out of fashion, has been given at different times, and has been celebrated in different ways. But it has been a continuous tradition on this continent from the times of the first European settlers onward. Its celebration is a bond with the past and a gift to the future.
Therefore, let us give thanks!
Deus Ex Machina: Tradition and the Essence of Technology
How is a traditionalist to treat his relationship to technology? For a tool destined to set us free and bring about world-wide enlightenment, technology has been largely a force of imprisonment for the masses. As the title of this essay suggests, technology was envisioned to be a literal “Deus Ex Machina”: our salvation and means to achieve peace here on Earth, and this is a point that the so-called “post-humanists” (Kurzweil, Zuckerberg, and so on) will not shy away from, although they stop just at the boundary of naming this force, this phenomenon, their own artificial Christ.
But those of us who yet retain or have salvaged some participatory and real relationship to the divine’s presence in the world are confronted with a reality in which we too are caught up within the bounds of this overwhelming and forward-seeking force. The technological is inherently tied to the philosophies which were its boon and nurturing soil. The hyper-rationalism and instrumentality of the Enlightenment has been so ingrained in the very operation and understanding of technology that it becomes very difficult for one to view the phenomenon from a non-technological perspective.
The problems of technology only breed more technology. This instrumental view of reality is a mode of being we have to consciously escape from. The modern man regards all things based on their function and benefit, while the traditional man confronts reality and “brings-forth” being.
Technology vs. Tradition
When we speak of technology we use words like “progress” or “exponential growth” and our fancy imagines a world of tomorrow full of miraculous machines which can conform to our every whim and need. This is the allure and illusion of technology: that it must and will always serve our purposes. In fact, the word “machine” is noted in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “probably related to the Greek μῆχος ‘means, expedient, remedy’”, but ultimately deriving from the Latin root machina, which in its second sense denotes “a device, plan, contrivance, a trick” (OED).
Technology: a trick of a remedy. Technology as a force, and a means to an end is temporally always future-oriented. It advances and never regresses, it always speeds up yet never slows down. This is fundamentally in opposition with the living tradition which is at its root past-oriented, while also being constantly renewed in the present. The main difference here is that although technology was present in antiquity it wasn’t there in it’s entire form, whereas we call tradition ‘alive’ because it maintains wholeness throughout time and space. Technology must always accumulate because it is never complete: there is always one more improvement to make, one more way to increase efficiency. And this is its essence.
Technology as an Essence
When speaking of the essence of technology, the purpose is to find the character of its being and relation to other beings. This is not a newly posited question. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger seeks to resolve the very same issue encountered here. There are many nuances to Heidegger’s argument which encompasses and builds upon his notions of being and time, but for our purposes, a few key points are crucial to understanding what is essential about technology:
First, the essence of technology is not something we make; it is a mode of being, or of revealing. This means that technological things have their own novel kind of presence, endurance, and connections among parts and wholes. (Blitz)
The difficulty of separating oneself from the technological is not just one of material consequence (e.g. to remove all technological apparatuses from one’s life) but rather it is a separation that would involve the very make-up of the modern consciousness. The scientific mind places great emphasis on the “tool-making” phase of man’s evolution as a fundamental step towards our later sapience or wisdom. Thus, it is impossible to not think about technology without being caught in the philosophies and modes of thought that themselves produced technology (the post-enlightenment, modernist philosophies).
Like a snake eating its own tail, the paradox of technology endures, and all criticism of itself and the solutions to the problems caused by the technological are technological in nature themselves. In an article for the Catholic theological journal Communio, titled “Thinking About Technology” George Parkin Grant begins his piece with the quotation: “…Technology is the ontology of the age.” What he goes on to outline and explore (in dialogue with Heidegger) is that somewhere along the way we could not escape a technological way of perceiving the world, each other and as a matter of fact the divine.
The Technological as a Mode of Perceiving the World
Due to being immersed in the technological mode of thought, it seems extremely difficult if not impossible to escape from it’s grip. This is especially true for those of us born in the internet age; we have accepted it to be a fact of life as natural as the function of one’s own arms,. Yet for millennia man lived and sought another mode of life: a different relationship with the world and the beings around him. This mode or experience is often described as a “naivete” or better yet an acceptance of the mystery inherent in the world. To retrieve this is to polish the philosopher’s stone. Yet while many have claimed to find their way back to the Edenic state and to be in conscious communion with the gushing divinity revealed through creation, we as Western peoples have in recent history not paid any heed to these individuals. Instead, we have rather implicitly accepted the utilitarian and instrumental experience without question. Until now, that is.
The scientific claim for the objective truth or interpretation of reality is to treat the thing out there (whether the natural or personal) as object. The scientist is he who takes a scalpel to all things (whether social, literary, natural or divine). Grant states:
At a higher level of attention we can recognize that our political and social decisions are interwoven with the pursuit and realization of technological ends (613)
He later on calls the technological trend a homogenizing one (619); it devours all things in an attempt to deny anything outside of it’s objectifying gaze, like the Medusa of the ancients, turning all things into stone. Heidegger originally explores this notion as the ability of replacing “the familiar connection of parts to wholes; everything [becomes] just an exchangeable piece” (Blitz). Whether human, animal or religious, its meaning extends only as far as its use does. This is witnessed in our social and political institutions. This is true of the liberal capitalistic society where the individual is reduced to the consumer or just another component of the free market, and the Marxist, where the worker is as equal as another screw in the communist machine.
This instrumental view of reality is a mode of being we have to consciously escape from. The modern man regards all things based on their function and benefits. This is a system, or schema, or machine which has been integrated and envelopes our consciousness. It acts from the very time a babe wakes and lamentably finds him/herself in the present age and continues on through that grinding factory we call public education. In this world every lesson and sensation tells us that what is real is only what we can objectify and analyze; all else is rubbish or a primitive’s fancy.
Speaking on the new sciences (more particularly particle physics, but the point can expand to everything we encompass under the neat umbrella term STEM) Grant goes on to say:
…[the sciences] were in their essence folded towards the mastery of the energies of nature, in a way that was absent in the pre-modern.. (612)
Although our ancestors utilized the bounty of nature and manipulated it, the manipulation was not both the means and end within itself. Most of their mechanisms were one or two steps removed from the natural element. The classical man knew that without respect for the numinous forces present in the energies and states of matter found in the universe he would be doomed forever serve them.
The Instrument is Us
As technology progressed and took on its own being, a vague awareness permeated our subconscious that this force was an uncontrollable one with its own “mind” and intention. Today in the so called “digital age”, concerns over meddling too far with the primal forces of matter, or talk of the dangers of artificial intelligence are all too present for even the common citizen. With what great burden must he fall asleep knowing that the fate of reality is in the hands of those that see him as but another machine, a marionette doll to be poked and prodded?
The sad reality is that we did not need technology but technology required us. We Westerners are the ones instrumental to its development and eventual chaotic cycle. Although the technocrats are fooled into believing they hold the reins or press the buttons; it is technology that uses them as the “raw material” (Grant, 624) required to plaster together its Frankenstein and its own Metropolis. On this, Heidegger believes:
these acts [the minutia of technological development] occur not primarily by our own doing; we belong to the activity. Technological conscriptions of things occur in a sense prior to our actual technical use of them, because things must be (and be seen as) already available resources in order for them to be used in this fashion. (Blitz)
Therefore, since the technological doesn’t encompass only the material aspect but the conscious orientation of the individual, the person wittingly or unwittingly makes oneself a propagator of its destiny. Without us the natural world has no need to assemble a Boeing 747 by its own means. Whether this destiny is our shared destiny or a challenge to spiritual man is yet to be seen. But any person adherent to tradition must be aware of its affects on one’s very perception of the world. With awareness and vigilance, we can begin to unplug from its power over us. Ever so slightly, we can lift the veil of “objectivity” anew to glance upon the living world.
The Essence of Technology is Demiurgic, Daemonic, Satanic
These three terms are not to be understood interchangeably but as different aspects of the same beast. The Demiurge – quite literally meaning “maker” or “craftsman” (OED) – was a Platonic (and heretical) concept of deity. It was later utilized by the Gnostics as a being antagonistic to the spiritual development of man and responsible for the soul’s entrapment within the material body. Like technology, the folly of the Demiurge is to not accept anything outside the bounds of its own being. It believes that it can treat everything contained within as similar in nature to itself. Such that under the gaze of the mechanism, we too become machine.
Like technology, the Demiurge has the potential to fool the masses to believe this assumption to be true. For many, anything beyond the material (read: mechanical) is incomprehensible: the brain is a computer, the mind a hologram, while the soul is written off as a glitch somewhere along the way. Yet for the few with a lingering sense of mystery and awe, however small, this is the eternal lie: there always has been something more and forever will be, to think otherwise is the folly of the fallen.
Within this context, the daemonic is from here on taken to mean “of the underworld”, “pertaining to the lower nature of man”, or more simply just “downward-looking”. The technological experience of the world focuses on sensation and phenomena claiming to ascertain their causes while in actuality only referencing back to itself and its own terminologies and neologisms. To be utilitarian is to be constantly concerned with the basic appetites: how to feed, how to bathe and how to achieve maximum pleasure.
Even when gazing heavenwards, the technological man reduces the planets (once perceived to write destinies) to statistics and chemical compositions ignoring their spiritual and symbolic significance. So we ask them, would the Egyptians, conscious of astronomical phenomenon and well-versed in their observation assign so much significance in their architecture and religion merely to dense gaseous bubbles? Or were they conscious of some significance beyond the one available to the very self same eyes we share?
Finally, arriving at the Satanic aspect, a problematic term absolutely, but one suiting for the Heideggerian essence of technology as “challenging-forth” rather than the “bringing-forth” power of the revelatory experience of being. Satan, or “shaitan” is denoted as the “adversary” or “great accuser”, the one who challenges God and all his workings. What has been the greatest challenge to the Christian conception of the world if not the technological/scientific developments which followed the 17th Century? Constant and proud in its intention to leave no stone unturned and to substitute truth with fact, technology is truly an arm of Satan. Did Blake not warn of “these dark Satanic Mills” when gazing upon the industrialization of his ancestral homeland? When explaining what he means by challenging-forth Heidegger reveals:
…that everything is imposed upon or “challenged” to be an orderly resource for technical application, which in turn we take as a resource for further use, and so on interminably. For example, we challenge land to yield coal, treating the land as nothing but a coal reserve. The coal is then stored, “on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it,” which is then “challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running.” (Blitz)
It is technology’s inability to see the real world outside it’s own earthward-looking gaze that challenges the sanctity and divine nature of being. Such a gaze when persisted upon will turn all that is beautiful to simple symmetry (as seen in the progression of the “modern arts”) and even all that is spiritual into the merely psychological. Or as the poetry of Blake puts it with greater force and reality than all the prosing in the world can hope to aspire to:
And all the Arts of Life they changed into the Arts of Death in Albion. (Jerusalem, Chapter 3)
From the Tool-Making Man to the Worshipping-Man
From the beginning man’s essential relationship to the world is one of praise, reverence and stewardship. The traditional man sees that the material and sensory is only one of many interpretable layers available for him to access in the universe around him. Yet this does not make it any less essential than the rest. To treat the physical as something to be avoided or moralized as evil was never the intention of this treatise, but rather to see it as a beginning point which leads us to a more whole and participatory experience of being. To do this one must escape the spiritual grip of technology.
The internet, social media and technology have been, if anything, nourishing to the spread of a traditional ontology or perception of the world. It has brought many people towards the path of light and removed many a clouded veil from the formerly lost. But it is only a means for the living tradition to transmit itself, while it remains unchanging. It would be foolish to take on a luddite approach to the bounty of technology, to completely immerse oneself in so-called “primitivism”. The substance to be transformed only begins with the body but it’s intended goal is man’s conscious perception of the world around him.
Evola’s lesser known esoteric work within the bounds of the anonymous UR Group, gives a guiding principle to take from all of this on the difference between the “cause” as seen by the spiritual man (the initiate) and the hardened scientific man (the uninitiated). They1 state:
Modern men believe that this is the same in the case of their science, since through various techniques science brings about well-known material realizations; and yet they are grossly mistaken, since the power afforded by technology is no more a true power than the explanations of profane sciences are true explanations. The cause, in both cases, is the same; it is the fact of a man who remains a man, and who does not change his nature to any significant degree.
Once the technological baggage weighing down consciousness is dissolved, then a new and meaningful universe will emerge and others will be recognized as common souls. The very same universe of Plato, of Augustine, of Dante will present itself to you: overflowing with fullness and divinity.
What is the traditional point of view, if it isn’t seeing all of creation as a sacrament of our Creator and Lord?
1: The pronoun “they” was chosen out of respect for Evola and friends’ desire for anonymity
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Blitz, Mark. “Understanding Heidegger on Technology.” The New Atlantis. N.p., n.d. Web.
Ea. “The Nature of Initiatic Knowledge.” Introduction to Magick (n.d.): n. pag. UR Group, Julius Evola. Web.
Grant, Mark Parkin. “Thinking About Technology.” Communio 28 (2001): 610-26. Print
Doorways to Restoration: A Reflection on Canada
The following essay is part of Northern Dawn’s Symposium for Canada’s 150th anniversary. The theme is Canada: Who Are We? We hope these studies of Canada’s heritage will inspire readers to consider its future, and the broader civilization of which it is a part. Those who rule must know what they are ruling.
In this last essay, Mark Christensen gives final thoughts on the Symposium and reflects on the value Northern Dawn sees in the traditions of Canada.
When we decided to hold the first Northern Dawn symposium, we were shooting in the dark. After all, we’d just begun to set out some topics of investigation for Canadians who have apostatized from our world’s current orthodoxies. Would we be able to provide work of substance?
We are glad to say that the Symposium has surpassed our expectations. Our contributors have provided research and reflection on a variety of themes, from literature to the CBC. These essays will remain up under a segment of the site, and we want to thank everyone who participated. We also encourage readers to engage these themes further and take the leap if they want to contribute further thoughts on anything that has been discussed.
When Northern Dawn first launched, we did not label ourselves as conservative, or nationalist, or even alt-right. Although these labels aren’t entirely inaccurate, we called it a project of Restoration. It’s time to delve into the full extent of what that means.
First, we are not conservative for one very simple reason. There is nothing left to conserve. Not in a large scale political sense, at any rate. Liberalism is the geopolitical order, the state ideology, and a good deal of the culture. Even so-called Rightist movements like the Counter-jihad claim to oppose Islam because it is not progressive enough. Our forebears in ancient Europe, Christendom, and the imperial era passed down much. But the flame must be rekindled.
So why not nationalist? Of course, there is a sense in which Northern Dawn is a nationalist project. We want to preserve sovereignty, our cultural and ethnic heritage, and so on. But Canadian nationalism as it appears in the popular imagination is a warped concept. At its most basic level, it is bound up in vague ideas of tolerance and hockey. This is undesirable because Canada is not a normal nation-state. It is an echo of imperial power, built on the English Crown but encompassing several historic ethnocultures. Some Canadian nationalists focus on cultural issues such as Islam or immigration, which is good. But as George Grant and others show us, to be a nationalist in Canada means to be part of a broader civilization. The High Tories, in their day, did not conceive of Canada outside of the British Empire. The peoples of Europe, when they are healthy, are not merely concerned with sovereignty. We grow, explore, and expand. We carve out the Northwest Passage. We land on the moon. A healthy civilization has the imperial mindset.
Is Northern Dawn an ethnic project, qua the alt-right? Of course, any culture or civilization is built on an ethnic foundation. We reject the notion that peoples are interchangeable. Likewise, we reject the idea that culture and social institutions should be overlooked in order to “avoid division” and focus on ethnic preservation. On a purely practical level, no people has ever preserved itself on an ethnic foundation alone. A people is united by symbols, culture, religion, and sovereign power exercised by its elites. Without these elements, there is no continuity.
Northern Dawn takes Canada as its starting point. The Dominion is built on both English and French continental foundations, with ties across European civilization stretching back far before the era of liberalism. It binds us to the Anglo and European diasporas around the world. Most closely, we are part of the European inheritance on the North American continent, shared with those to our south. Though 1776 saw the important royal center of English unity cast aside, the rhetoric invoked to justify this was itself built on the “rights of Englishmen.” Edmund Burke, who supported their cause, reflected the same:
…the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen…They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles…My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron…
Of course, these facts have long since been disguised, rejected, slandered, and locked away in favour of the ideology of liberal universalism. Since at least WWI, a world order has been built on this ideology. It swept away the remaining political holdouts in the West, and then turned to do the same globally. In our day, Russia and China remain the only power centers with a significant degree of sovereignty from that world order. Saudi Arabia, though illiberal, exists due to its relationship with this system. For those of us whose roots lie in the West, generations now have faced the crises of atomization, cultural breakdown, and alienation.
Our generation is at a unique juncture; for the first time, the dire state of things has become completely apparent. Demographic breakdown leaves the elderly dying alone and the young without any kind of family structure. Mass migration has made ethnic and religious conflict a daily fact in many cities. Ideological factions gain power in our institutions with the explicit aim of destroying what remains of our heritage and social technology. Even the center of power itself – the political and military networks built by the United States and its allies – seems to be crumbling into competing factions. Contradictions and tensions abound in everything from ideology to foreign policy.
Let us reject certain solutions from the outset. The solution is not to reconstruct “true liberalism”, as the libertarians and “alt-lite” would do. The solution is also not to reconstruct dead traditions, which have completed their organic life-cycles. The British Empire has completed its time on this earth. Northern Dawn is an attempt to go deeper than this. Within the annals of Christendom, the writings of the High Tories, and the political philosophy of the old order, are a number of principles about the world, humanity, and civilization. Among these are: the view that order pervades the universe rather than nihilistic chaos; that civilization depends on the maintenance of certain fundamental institutions like state and family; that there are natural hierarchies in society and within the person; that social institutions are no substitute for rulers of virtue and ability. These principles have been rediscovered time and again across numerous societies. By their nature, they can be taken up at any time. Therefore, societies can be born and reborn when those who govern choose to do so.
Northern Dawn invokes the tradition of Canada because it contains these principles. These contradictions become most apparent at the very end of the High Tory line. While men like Leacock or Strachan saw liberal modernity in its young forms, George Grant saw its fully grown and most powerful form: the American post-war international order. While Strachan intellectually faces off with Jefferson or Hamilton, Grant deals with Nietzsche and Heidegger. But unlike Grant, many of us have not even grown up in the remnants of Christendom (the final stages of which arguably were destroyed after the Great War, but which took until the 1960’s to fully lose their hold).
If we accept that the loss of these principles leads to disintegration, then regaining these needs to happen before new forms or great political programs can even be discussed. The election of Trump in the United States has become a stark reminder of this, with the lack of fundamental unity between the coalitions of GOP, red-state populists, and alt-right leading to infighting and chaos. Northern Dawn engages what has been handed down in order to regain an intuitive knowledge of these truths. What we do in Canada must be done in throughout the Anglosphere, America, and Europe, which were once united in their fundamental guiding worldview.
So how do we carry out this engagement? First, we should remember the wealth of testimony and recollection that has been handed down to us from earlier stages of history: classical, medieval, European colonial, and otherwise. In engaging with these texts, it is vital to approach them as more than collections of facts. We want to be able to take a problem and contemplate how Sir John A. Macdonald, King Alfred the Great, or Augustus may have tackled it. We want to be able to think like those who have come before, on the basis of shared principles. Second, we want to engage with the tradition where it remains alive and practiced: the Royal family, the remnant scholars, the Roman and High Anglican patrimonies, and so on. Northern Dawn is intended to serve as an online schelling point for collection, presentation, and investigation.
The key mission is to unlearn the assumptions and biases ingrained by a failing liberal order, and absorb what was handed down on a deep internal level. This changes the way one approaches the world and the values one holds. It is also vital to band together with others who share this personal mission. This guards against personal alienation and the nihilism which can follow. Maennerbund is the force which patrols the bordering frontiers, and is a foundation for personal and social order.
What is built must be shared and handed down, so that it can have a future. For this reason amongst others, we seek out spouses and form families. The maennerbund and the families which are bonded to it make up a community together. Historically, these communities are united by a common altar which orients them upward, and a sovereign power which creates order here below. When this scales upward to a large enough extent, we have the entities we call civilizations.
These are the necessary foundations. Let the building go on.
More Than A Tory Touch: A Survey of Canadian Writing
The following essay is part of Northern Dawn’s Symposium for Canada’s 150th anniversary. The theme is Canada: Who Are We? We hope these studies of Canada’s heritage will inspire readers to consider its future, and the broader civilization of which it is a part. Those who rule must know what they are ruling.
The following essay is by Ron Dart. In addition to regular contributions to the journal Clarion, he has written and taught widely about the High Tory tradition, its religious and cultural heritage, and its impact on Canadian life. His most recent book is The North American High Tory Tradition, reviewed here.
1
The publication of Gad Horowitz’s “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation” in 1966 created an immense flurry and stir amongst political theorists and activists. Most had assumed that Canadian conservatism was just a variant of American conservatism and, in the USA at the time, the Goldwater-Kirk combination of conservatism would be much the same in Canada. However, the publication of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism in 1965 made it abundantly clear, that Canadian Toryism could not be equated with American conservatism. Horowitz had argued in his lengthy article, later published as the lead article in Canadian Labour in Politics in 1968 that there was a Tory touch in Anglo-Canadian political thought and action that would and could not be absorbed into the Anglo-American conservative matrix. Horowitz tracked and traced this Tory touch in his article, and many were the positive and negative reactions to it. It should be noted that Grant factored large in clarifying the Tory touch.
Horowitz replied to many a critic of his plough to soil article, and, in 1970, his article, “Red Tory”, in William Kilbourn’s A Guide to the Peaceable: An Anthology, linked the Tory touch to Red Toryism (the connection had been made earlier, though). Can the Tory touch be equated with Red Toryism? Horowitz thought it could, Grant did not. Additionally, what did Horowitz miss in his main thesis? It is significant that Kilbourn’s article in A Guide to the Peaceable Kingdom was “Tory Ontario”. There are differences to note between Horowitz and Kilbourn in their read of Toryism and Grant. It is significant that Horowitz never dealt with Stephen Leacock and, more to the poignant point, the High Toryism of religious-political thought in 19th century Canada, in any depth or detail. Such was the needful task of a meticulous historian that grounded his thinking as much in theory as in historic fact.
2
S.F. Wise is, without much doubt, one of the finest historians in Canada; the publication of God’s Peculiar Peoples: Essays on Political Culture in Nineteenth Century Canada grounds, in many ways, the thesis of Horowitz and Kilbourn in much firmer and more solid soil. This is not theory cut loose from historic events or historic facts bogged down in micro details delinked from larger political philosophy. And, to the telling point, Wise was keen to illuminate how the Tory touch has substantive historic reality in Canada, in opposition to Canadian historians and political theorists who only see Canada as a smaller version of the American liberal fragment. There was, as Wise articulates in his multilayered essay tome, a distinctive Toryism in Canada with predictable religious grounding. Wise is acutely aware that to do political theory from a purely secular perspective does a serious in injustice in interpreting 19th century Toryism in Canada.
God’s Peculiar Peoples places arrow in bow and hits the bull’s eye again and again in his twelve chapters: 1) “Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History” (most Canadian historians simply ignore this genre), 2) “God’s Peculiar People”, 3) “Canadians View the United States: Colonial Attitudes from the Era of the War of 1812 to the Rebellions of 1837” (a chapter not to miss in which the Tory touch emerges in its fullness), 4) “The Rise of Christopher Hagerman” (oft neglected yet needful to know about), 5) “John Macaulay: Tory for All Seasons” (again, much to ponder in Macaulay that Horowitz ignores), 6) “Tory Factionalism: Kingston Elections and Upper Canadian Politics, 1820-1836” (which makes it clear Toryism was not a homogenous tribe), 7) “Canadians View the United States: The Annexation Movement and Its Effect on Canadian Opinion, 1837-1867” (a superb companion article to chapter 8) “The War of 1812 in Popular History” (not to be missed for a read of Toryism), 9) “Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition”, 10) “Conservatism and Political Development: The Canadian Case”, 11) “Liberal Consensus or Ideological Battleground: Some Reflections on the Hartz Thesis” (quite pertinent for the Horowitz argument and those who oppose him) and 12) “The Ontario Political Culture: A Study in Complexities”.
Each of the chapters in God’s Peculiar Peoples goes to historic places Horowitz did not go; Wise, unveils and reveals, in a multidimensional and step-by-step way, the layered nature of Toryism (not necessarily “red”). He focuses on 19th century central Canada and, to the foremost point, the close connections between religion and politics at the time. This is an area Horowitz had little or no background in, given his more secular approach to political thought. Wise rightly realized that 19th century life in Canada emerged from a religious vision; such a vision had political consequences, and 19th century Toryism was deeply suspicious of the liberal American experiment to the south. In short, God’s Peculiar People had more than just a Tory touch, but such a Tory touch could not be reduced to a homogenous notion of what Toryism is in the 19th century. There is a tendency to equate conservatism and Toryism in Wise’s tome (and many do the same), but the distinction, when rightly understood, does make a difference.
It would have been of much use and value if Wise had probed more deeply and further the Anglican Toryism of Bishops John Strachan (Ontario) and Jacob-George Mountain (Quebec) to get a fuller sense of Anglican catholic High Toryism in the 19th century. Many of the Maritime bishops and priests were considerably impacted by the Oxford movement in England in the 19th century, and they shaped much of Anglican political life in the Maritimes at the time. The much respected catholic Anglican poet, F.G. Scott, stands very much within a long line and lineage of 19th century High Tory Anglicans. It is somewhat remiss of Wise and Kilbourn to miss and ignore such significant High Tory Anglicans in 19th century Canada. It is quite understandable, though, why Horowitz would be blind to such realities given his more secular approach and ideological leftist tendencies when interpreting Toryism. George Grant held Bishop John Strachan high in his roll call of 19th century Anglican leaders in a book review of Saint James’ parish (where he attended in the 1960s-1970s when teaching at McMaster University).
I might also add that Thomas Haliburton (1796-1865) has often been omitted from the list of important Canadian High Tories. Haliburton is a legend of sorts in Canada and he is often viewed as the first Canadian novelist who did well in the larger literary ethos of the time. Haliburton was much remembered for his Clockworker series that elevated the American entrepreneur, Sam Slick, to an ambiguous level. Sam Slick took to front stage in a variety of Haliburton’s novels published in 1836, 1838, 1840, 1843, 1844 and 1853. Haliburton playfully sports with the American Sam Slick, at times nodding towards his aggressive sale gimmicks and skills, at other times seeing such an approach to life as seriously problematic and demeaning. But there can be no doubt that Haliburton, the Nova Scotia High Tory, via his many portrayals of Sam Slick, built into the Canadian psyche a certain notion of Americans as slick entrepreneurs and a distinctive Canadian attitude to the “Sam Slick’s” across the border. Stephen Leacock would, a few decades later, draw much from Haliburton and the Sam Slick tendencies that Canadians should be wary of.
There can be no doubt that the United Empire Loyalists cannot be merely equated with High Tory Anglicanism, as Norman Knowles has rightly noted in Inventing the Loyalists: The Ontario Loyalist Tradition & and the Creation of Usable Pasts (1997). But there is, nonetheless, a distinctive High Tory Anglican heritage that needs attention beyond the liberal caricatures of it. Donald Creighton, probably, the finest High Tory Canadian Anglican of the 20th century, argued that the liberal “authorized read” of Canadian history tends to distort and demean the High Tory heritage for substantive ideological reasons. Such an approach by the liberal mandarin and family compact class in Canada has, for the most part, clear cut and levelled the Tory tradition by describing such a way in mostly negative terms. This pro-liberal and anti-Tory approach in Canadian history has served the liberal ruling class well, but has produced a dishonest Orwellian rewrite of Canadian history. Hopefully, in this the formal 150th year since Confederation, wiser and more balanced reads of Canadian history will emerge. A turn to the historic insights of both Wise and Creighton would illuminate much and go beyond Horowitz’s rather reductionistic approach to defining Canadian Toryism.
It is somewhat irritating that the most recent history of Anglicanism in Canada, Seeds Scattered and Sown: Studies in the History of Canadian Anglicanism (2008), never really probes or substantively discusses High Tory Anglicanism in any depth or detail—such again is the impact of liberal ideology both within the Anglican Church of Canada and the broader Canadian historic community. It is therefore to Wise’s credit that he, more than most, has walked the extra mile to bring the Toryism of the 19th century to light in a thoughtful and far reaching manner. Indeed, there is more than a Tory touch that needs to be covered and such High Toryism cannot be equated with blue conservatism or the later concept of “red toryism”.
3
There has been an unfortunate tendency to assume that the gender hierarchy of High Toryism historically relegated women to a merely docile role. An attentive reading and interpretation of 19th century Toryism in Canada contradicts such a notion. Two of the most significant women of the 19th century were Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Both women played a significant role in pioneering 19th century literature in Canada and demonstrated great competence within the social order they inhabited. Gentle Pioneers: Five Nineteenth-Century Canadians, although dated in some ways, tells the uncanny tales of Susanna-John Moodie, Catharine-Thomas Parr Traill and Samuel Strickland. The women in this timeless work of 19th century pioneer history emerge as creative and engaged leaders in the far-from-cultured setting they were raised and bred in.
I was fortunate, when younger in the 1950s, to spend summers in Stephen Leacock country. Leacock, as a young man, lived in the Lake Simcoe area. A leading lady of the time, and a dear friend of Leacock’s mother, was Susan Sibbald. The Sibbald home, Eildon Manor, was a centre of much High Tory life in 19th century in Ontario. Bishop John Strachan would often make trips to Eildon Manor to visit the Sibbalds and Susan Sibblad’s Memoirs tell a graphic and poignant tale of Tory Anglican life at such a period of time. Georgina: A Type Study of Early Settlement and Church Building in Upper Canada illuminates much about the historic and extended Sibbald family and their Tory leaders (and opposition to the rebellion). Eildon Manor was a centre, salon and fount of Anglo-Canadian Toryism. Susan Sibbald, like Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill were at the forefront of leadership in such a Tory ethos and setting.
Mazo de la Roche is buried close to Stephen Leacock at St. George’s parish in the Sutton area by Lake Simcoe. The parish was built by and supported by the Sibbald family. Mazo de la Roche was a 20th century woman, but her sixteen novels on the Whiteoaks of Jalna (the finest epic series in Canadian literature) deals, for the most part, with 19th century Ontario. The final novel in the series, Breakfast at Jalna, was set in the 1860s, when the American Civil War was at its most intense and heated. The American Civil War that raged from 1861-1865 in which an estimated 620,000-750,000 were killed (and many others seriously injured or refugees to the north) had an impact on De la Roche’s literary imagination. The North and South were violently destroying one another and the Tory Whiteoaks were in the thick of the fray. It is pertinent to note that Adeline Whiteoak (the matriarch of the family) both brooded over the family and set the agenda. Adeline was certainly no passive observer, compliantly taking a backseat to the leadership of others. Mazo de la Roche, like Susan Sibbald and Catherine Parr Traill, was a literary leader in Canada, and many of the women in her chronicles of the Whiteoaks give the lie to the notion that women lacked influence in the Tory social order.
4
The American War of Independence in 1776 forced many a British subject to make difficult decisions. Would the break from England and the forming of a new country be a way forward or would such a severing wrench too much from the mother country? There were those, obviously, for a variety of reasons, who were convinced the umbilical cord had to be broken. There were others who thought such a decision unthinkable. The latter group, the United Empire Loyalists, came to Canada in droves. Education was, as many soon settled in their new home, central to their growing national and cultural lives. Bishop Charles Inglis was one of the leaders of the northwards trek (his biography, The First Bishop: A Biography of Charles Inglis, tells his journey well and wisely) and he played a pivotal role in establishing, what has become, the oldest chartered university in Canada and the first English-speaking university in the Commonwealth outside the United Kingdom.
The University of King’s College was founded in 1789 by both Loyalists and Tory refugees of sorts that sought a more ordered and peaceful life north of the 49th, and education was foundational to their forward looking pathway. It is significant to note that University of King’s College, to this day, has one of the finest programs in Canada in grounding students in classical texts that have shaped western culture and civilization. The Foundation Year Programme (FYP) grounds students in the time tried wisdom that has been thought, said and done. The catholic and Tory Anglican ethos that pervades such a learning context has done much to preserve the ancient insights that are, again and again, being eroded by modern and postmodern education. The University of King’s College (initially in Windsor, Nova Scotia and now in Halifax, Nova Scotia) continues to incarnate some of the best of Tory Anglican education.
Likewise, Trinity College in Toronto has a history of catholic Tory Anglicanism at its root and source. I have mentioned above the pivotal work of Bishop John Strachan. Strachan, with other Anglican Tories, hard on the heels of the Oxford Movement on 1832 in England and the Rebellion of 1837, started Trinity College in 1852. The aim of Trinity was to raise up a generation of leaders in Canada through an educational setting in which theology, philosophy, ecclesial, literary and High Tory culture would be maintained and carried into the future. Needless to say, there was many a challenge to such an educational vision, but for many a decade Strachan’s vision persisted.
The fate and history of King’s and Trinity have gone in somewhat different directions since then, but when probed further and deeper, there still lingers an older vision of faith and education (and its perennial relevance to our time) at King’s and Trinity. The Tory touch, indeed, was and still is more than merely a touch.
5
I have, in this short essay, highlighted the fact there is much more to Canadian Toryism than either “Red Toryism” or merely a “Tory touch”. The role of educational institutions such as Kings and Trinity, leadership by women such as Mazo de la Roche (Chronicles of Whiteoaks), Susanna Moody and Catharine Parr Traill, Susan Sibbald, C.F. Wise’s God’s Peculiar Peoples: Essays on Political Culture in Ninteenth Century Canada (and Donald Creighton), and Thomas Haliburton’s Sam Slick portrayals, all reveal areas of Toryism in the 19th century that few have integrated or synthesized. Such a tradition cannot be merely dismissed as pettily reactionary or quaintly dated.
There is much to this way of being that lingers deep in souls longing for depth, wisdom and insight in an age in which most landmarks have been destroyed, history clear cut and the foundations undermined. The Hegelian form of progressive liberalism that has so come to dominate most areas of Canadian culture, education and religion has serious blind spots and weaknesses. Many of the most insightful in our time are searching for a centre that will hold and the classical Canadian Anglican Tory way has still much to offer for those who have grown weary of the tepid and vapid waters of ideological liberalism.
Referenced edition: God’s Peculiar Peoples: Essays on Political Culture in Nineteenth Century Canada Edited by A.B. McKillop and Paul Romney S. F. Wise Carleton University Press, Ottawa Canada: 1993
Canada, Tradition, and Government
The following essay is part of Northern Dawn’s Symposium for Canada’s 150th anniversary. The theme is Canada: Who Are We? We hope these studies of Canada’s heritage will inspire readers to consider its future, and the broader civilization of which it is a part. Those who rule must know what they are ruling.
The following essay is by Cole Dutton. Cole blogs at The Dominion Standard about a variety of traditionalist and conservative themes.
The traditionalist Canadian often faces a certain type of assertion roughly analogous to ‘why is that the role of the government?’ Or ‘the government deserves no part in that.’ Now, aside from market considerations, it becomes very difficult to respond to such assertions in a succinct and cogent fashion. It is the aim then of this piece to take a glance backwards at Canada and its liberal political discourse and contrast it with the principal notion of intellectual and political conservatism: the assertion that government for conservatives has an end or purpose specific to it. This position enables one to see the importance of government in asking the critical question fielded by Northern Dawn in response to Canada 150. And that question is ‘who are we?’
From this observation, it behoves the conservative to counter that the government plays a larger role than the electoral apparatus, the law, or social services. In contrast to both the classically liberal perspective and the egalitarian doctrines, the conservative considers neither freedom nor equality substantive when comprehending the fullness of government. This position is one of government as a necessary and positive institution in society. The government, in this case, has drifted from its appropriate purpose and lost its orientation. This change has come at the expense of the well-being of society and the free individual.
The chief problem of Canadian politics is identical to the one that has infested and metastasized across the western world. Erik Kuenhelt-Leddihn termed it the choice between Calvin or Rousseau.[1] The western world chose Rousseau and a vision of mankind’s goodness that led western man to see the state as a little more than an instrument. This modern western man perceives the state as something that is not its own organism, and intertwined with the soul of the civil society as Roger Scruton imagined it.[2] Rather, his view of the state presupposes two particular principles: first, that mankind is by nature good; second, that even when it is self-evident that the individual is not by nature good, democratic elevation of the majority is a capable antidote to the ills of the individual.[3]
The position then becomes one of man as corrupted creature. However, in response the modern mind imagines that the herd is wise; to the modern western man, good men will always outnumber the bad (as if the bad were not the same men as the good). The modern vision of man’s corruption is not corruption in the sense of the metaphysical. It is not the corruption of the mind referenced by Susan Schreiner in her masterful study of reformation intellectual history entitled Are You Alone Wise? Nor is it the corruption encapsulated in the story of Genesis. It is the corruption of man by inadequate political and social systems. These systems operate in a systematic fashion upon the individual character. This is the liberal and socialistic paradigm. A paradigm that consists of the argument that material and social conditions govern the quality of the individual and find expression in social pathology. This diagnostic view paves the way for immediate prognostication and remediation. The government then becomes the engine of reform and revolution. The state exists as merely a tool to remake the society. This liberal state stands independent of the institutions of government, in the name of the artificial and elevated virtues of equality and liberty.
This is problematic for a simple reason: upholding liberty and equality as the paramount virtues necessitates the obliteration of other virtues in kind. This elevation comes at the expense of justice, piety, obligation, and temperance in particular. For they demand the destruction of distinction and the levelling of value to embolden those who engage in vices condemned by historical and traditional norms. Given these basic claims, the liberal and egalitarian transformation of the social fabric of Canada makes sense. The extirpation of the history of Canada creates incredible problems. This arises because the system of authority embodied by the current state destroys the basis for civil society: tradition. In the same fashion, this movement also undermines the promogulated norms that legitimise the authority of the state.
Yet, this has not stopped the chattering classes of Canada, particularly the liberal party, from innumerable crimes against the nation. These acts consist of eliminating the Royal designation from numerous institutions. The list in no particular chronology and only in part reads as follows. The Liberal Party adopted a new flag, and the Alberta NDP attacked Catholic schools on the issue of LGBT rights. The Liberal Party weakened the already feeble Senate; it also established a vacuous national anthem in O’Canada; meanwhile, it aimed to destroy our first past the post system. Various groups have also agitated on behalf of a narrative of aboriginal genocide. The liberal party continues to claim Canada had a multicultural history of mass migration; Justin Trudeau asserted Canada is a post national state (itself a contradiction in terms); and lastly, Pierre Trudeau and his Liberal Party wrote a charter which undermines the principles of Parliamentary supremacy and the validity of the king in Parliament.
How then may conservatives challenge the position of the government as utility? How can they obstruct the tendency of the modern western mind to engage in instrumental thinking at the expense of the soul of civil society and the state? The answer demands a clear statement of what conservatives in Canada ought to imagine as an ideal understanding of the government. By understanding the purpose of government, Canadian conservatives can direct their policy proposals toward doing justice to who we are.
From this position, the argument is that government exists as the proper and capable trustee of the soul of civil society. The distinct communities, institutions, families, faith, and modes of living which allow the emergence of the fully distinct and free individual compose the soul of civil society. Philosopher John Kekes terms the same soul the pluralism of tradition.[4] This pluralism of traditions provides a framework, unconscious to most and embodied in natural prejudice, that enables individuals to interact with each other in a coherent and predictable fashion. This predictable engagement is necessary for the exercise freedom without sin both against the future and the past. Kekes states, ‘when individuals form their conceptions of a good life, what they are to a very large extent doing is deciding which traditions they should participate in. The decisions may reflect thoughtful choices, thoughtless conformity to familiar patterns, or something in between.’[5] This same pluralism of traditions allows numerous historically couched visions of the constitution of good government to attempt to address the demands of human nature in varying ways while adhering to the same objective realities of the human condition.
Working from Edmund Burke’s fundamental political axiom: mere ‘renters’ cannot fulfil true government. Instead, the government must be a compact between ‘not only . . . those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’[6] Government, given that it cannot exist solely for those interests currently embodied in the present generation, is not an instrument of the political class or of the demos; it is a being itself with a life of its own and duties appropriate to it. In fact, it is the only body in existence that can take the soul of the people and instantiate it beyond the limits of generation and time. To abrogate this principle is to not only attack our ancestry, but to attack future generations who may have no trust that their land, people, institutions, and faith will be safeguarded in the future. It is to put ourselves and the present in the position of supremacy and shackle those to come. Tradition defines the framework for social relations and answers to the questions of how best to live. In this way, it becomes imperative for the conservative theory of government to steward custom and history both so that the present may benefit from them as well as the future. This is the first principle of conservative government, but not the last.
The final and most important principle in a conservative theory of government is its stance against evil. Of course, asserting the existence of evil, especially for the modern mind, is begging the question. When we cannot agree on the basic constitution of evil in the world, we do not have a failure of philosophy or theology, but a reflection of the moral vacuity of our present condition. Regardless, for my purposes here it is enough to concede the existence of evil, and leave the definitions to the philosophers and theologians.
It’s important to recognise that evil did not play a minor role in constitutional theorising in the past. Even in the humanist epoch of the Renaissance the force that is evil was acknowledged. Recognition of evil had a strong theological founding located in the scepticism of medieval theorists. Renaissance thinkers recognised the instability and frailty in mankind. Dante Alighieri noted in his De Monarchia ‘higher natur[ed]’ men must leave behind a legacy to posterity. However, if there is a higher nature there must be a lower something not admitted in our modern discourse.[7] Marsilius of Padua spoke likewise in his support for a plurality of governing institutions; he states that he is dealing with a fallen man, when he argues “and [if Adam] had remained in this state [of innocence], the institution or differentiation of civil functions would not have been necessary.’[8] Modern man does not make the same theological claims, but he need not abandon the assumption of evil and the need to respond to it. For the government, itself stands ready as an arbitrator to do justice between victim and perpetrator.
This is where government’s moral role enters the political calculus. Liberals, secularists, and socialists think that the purview of the state should be limited to ambivalence regarding right conduct. The state instead should direct its sympathy toward the individual. This individual himself is a product of conditions, not natural frailty. This position is evident in the abject surrender in the Omar Khadr settlement. There is no judgment of evil in this instance. The rights of the individual, in this case, Khadr came without duties. For Khadr being born on Canadian soil entitled him to all the rights and protections of the liberal state without any necessary obligations in return. Meanwhile, the state itself could not condemn such an individual if he was by nature good. Likewise, the state abandoned its moral imperative or more likely lost confidence in it. A conservative state then is one that is sure of its moral position, recognises the evil in man, and buttresses itself and the society against such evils. It is a state that demands of its participants something in return beyond taxes and offers more than freedom. David Lowenthal speaks to the need of free societies to affect the morality of their civil life, and though his examples pertain to America they are apt here as well:
…for men to live together as a civilised nation devoted to their common freedom rather than as a loose collection of individuals devoted to their own pleasures, moral virtues are necessary. . . . Only in free societies does what pleases most individuals—whether it is consistent with sustaining the regime or inconsistent with it—make a crucial difference to their destinies. Only free societies require of all their members the moral dispositions and capacities that make cooperation in self-government possible.[9]
Freedom is empty without good people. In turn, the state in its active prevention of evil brings about the condition for good lives while not permitting evil to flourish in its name.
To pull the threads together, it is worth examining another claim from Kekes that necessarily arouses the consternation of the liberal modern man. To Kekes, autonomy is an inadequate political end in part because by loosening the fetters on the good, we likewise loosen the fetters on the evil. It is only possible to admit absolutes of liberty when we surrender the moral imperative to prevent evil.[10] This is not the only problem the liberal or egalitarian mind faces because the conservative vision of government, in its stewardship of history and tradition, limits the potential of government to act as an emancipatory engine. A vision of Canada as a specific state, character, and history is a necessary leash on the attack dog of liberalism. Therefore, to the modern mind, virtue and the past must both kneel before the modern man. The modern mind does not care to answer the question ‘who are we?’ because the answer is always ‘I am only who I am and who I am is my present consciousness and no more.’ They reject the a priori concepts and the antecedent reality in which they emerged because to be beholden to the past is limiting to the autonomous individual and the levelling projects of the egalitarians.
In response, Canadians can answer the question ‘who are we’ by building a government that lets those answers emerge through the civil society of which it is the transgenerational expression. By acting as custodians of our inheritance while building and enforcing a moral framework accommodating the reality of evil, conservative government can protect the social fabric. This social fabric enables the soul of civil society to respond to the question proposed.
[1] Erik Von Ritter Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “The Western Dilemma: Calvin or Rousseau?” Modern Age, Winter 1971, 45-46, 48. [2] Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 3rd ed. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2014), 40. [3] Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “The Western Dilemma: Calvin or Rousseau?” 52. [4] John Kekes, “A Case for Conservatism,” The Good Society 8, no. 2 (1998): 5. [5] Kekes, “A Case for Conservatism,” 6. [6] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 194. [7] Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia, Trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. [8] Marsilius Of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, trans. Annabel Brett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 31. [9] David Lowenthal, No Liberty for License: the forgotten logic of the first amendment (Dallas, Tex: Spence Publishing Company, 1997), 91, 102. [10] John Kekes, A Case for Conservatism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 81, 86-88.
Dominion Media: Why Sovereignty Demands the CBC
The following essay is part of Northern Dawn’s Symposium for Canada’s 150th anniversary. The theme is Canada: Who Are We? We hope these studies of Canada’s heritage will inspire readers to consider its future, and the broader civilization of which it is a part. Those who rule must know what they are ruling.
The following essay is by Warg Franklin.
Is Canada a political community, or isn’t it? This is Northern Dawn’s core question of investigation.
For the past one hundred and fifty years of our peoples’ collective adventure on the North American continent, the answer to that question has been a decisive yes.
One of the very first moves our leaders took on the founding of our nation was the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The reason is obvious: The CPR turned Canada from a disjointed set of British territories, held by British military power and tied together by British sail, into an entity in its own right. The railway made it possible to hold Canada by Canadian power, and to trade and travel via Canadian rail. If rail could move Canadian troops more effectively across the land than rebels, natives, and foreigners could attack, then Canada could be militarily self-sufficient. In peacetime, if rail could move goods and settlers within the community effectively enough, then it became useful to speak of a specifically Canadian economy and a specifically Canadian community.
In this way, the practical reality of a community is not in its formal existence on a piece of paper, or even in people’s minds and blood, but in its ability to exist as a unit provided by its infrastructure of collective existence.
We must not forget that these early projects undertaken by the leaders of our nation were not just measures in pursuit of economic prosperity, but also in pursuit of political strength and unity. To forget this is to forget how to build our own political community, and thus to surrender our unique endowment to the forces of global homogenization.
Throughout our history, the same story has played out with other infrastructure: our highways, our universities, our geological survey, our legal system, our nationalized utility monopolies, our protected industries, and of course, our CBC.
In recent times, “Conservative” political factions within Canada have taken to criticizing taxpayer support of these institutions, especially the CBC, claiming that they should be left to sink or swim on the free market. This is not part of the historical conservatism of MacDonald and the High Tories, but an imported free market ideology championed by libertarian think-tanks, small-government devotees, and assorted Jewish-American intellectuals .
This is partially understandable, as the CBC is manned by the political enemies of conservatism. They lace its programming with a “progressive” narrative about what Canada ought to be about. Conservatives rightly identify that this narrative is both hostile to their values and constituency, and ultimately short-sighted and destructive for Canada as a whole. They are also right that destroying the CBC would be a blow to this narrative, and at least a temporary boon to their “team”. With simple us-vs-them thinking of the kind you sometimes need in an existential fight, the decision to attack the CBC is thus understandable.
But let’s step back and take an objective look at the questions here.
The CBC is a big part of Canada’s infrastructure of intellectual and cultural sovereignty. We all grew up watching 22 Minutes, Red Green, and Hockey Night in Canada on CBC, and listening to CBC radio. Because of its publicly supported ubiquity, many of us had the CBC and little else, and were mostly unaware of the avalanche of more polished American content that would otherwise have taken its place. Canadian content became our shared cultural reference material that defined what it meant to be Canadian, and helped tie Canada together against cultural dissolution into our neighbours to the south.
The market would not deliver this service to us. Cultural protection is a collective action problem, and the market does not solve collective action problems. It would give us more polished American content, funded by advertisers and investors for purposes that have little to do with public education or cultivation of shared culture. We would lose an important piece of our cultural cohesion, in exchange for some money and more compelling content.
In individualist free market ideology, this is a great outcome. Why shouldn’t all the world have a homogenous individualist monoculture controlled by Hollywood and CNN? Of what value is the cultural integrity and heritage of “Canada”, when we could have slightly lower taxes and “better” television instead?
Needless to say, Northern Dawn, and most serious people, reject this deracinated viewpoint. There is value in the uniqueness of our cultural and political community, and as a community, we should support it through institutions like a publicly funded CBC.
Society, the political community, organized through the institution of the state, is prior to the individual. It is necessary and proper that the state have a large formal stake in the shaping of culture and the national idea. It is the collective organization of culture that makes it possible for that culture to express a higher meaning and purpose. Otherwise, as a society we lose our ability to organize ourselves. Our culture becomes nothing more than entertainment to be consumed, and we are dissolved into the meaningless global consumer monoculture.
A society, a nation, and a civilization is much more than a system of infrastructure to deliver material goods and optimized entertainment content to the individual. That is turning the natural order on its head. Civilization is the organization of the mass of individual humans into an order that is larger and more meaningful than themselves. That organization requires public support. This is the principle behind the CBC, that Canada is more than a hotel to deliver cheap and compelling service to a mass of individuals; Canada is a nation. A nation requires a strong state, and a strong state requires a strong public broadcaster.
It’s great to say that this can be done more efficiently, or the content could be better, or that the current progressive narrative promulgated by the CBC is antithetical to Canada’s true purpose. All these things are true. But the proper way address them is to propose visionary measures to improve things in accordance with their purposes. Canada’s cultural production should be made more efficient so that we can have more of it and so that we have resources to spend on other things, not because we just don’t want to pay the costs. The content of the CBC should be better so that Canadian culture is made stronger, not so that individuals are “better entertained”. The narrative content of public messaging should be changed to promote a healthy and strong national concept, not just so that we don’t have to endure the propaganda of a degenerate elite that hates the true substance of Canada.
Conservatives understand very little of this. All they understand is that the CBC is staffed by their political enemies, and that “muh free market” is a popular rallying cry of their people. Too bad.
This brings us to addressing the second question: is attacking enemy-controlled infrastructure like the CBC a viable or commendable strategy for conservatives?
If the conservatives weren’t what they are, if they had a serious and viable program to crush their enemies, install themselves as a new elite, build a new state, and rule Canada as it deserves to be ruled, then it would be proper to do so by any means necessary, including destroying the CBC. But they have no such ambition. The resentment by conservatives of the CBC is just that: the resentment of the ruler by the ruled.
Achieving the conservative idea of victory over the CBC, all we would get for our trouble is some more market-optimized television, a more globalized and Americanized culture, and a pissed off elite. Once the conservatives were routed from parliament again, like rats from a palace, and the liberal elite restored to its proper place, the business of actually ruling Canada would be able to proceed. And ruling requires that the state and elite propagate its perspective to society. They would continue to do so, only now with a more vengeful attitude towards conservatives, and more socially expensive means. Some victory.
This is why the conservatives are not taken seriously by thinking people. They propose stupid things for tactical reasons that wouldn’t even pan out in a worthwhile victory, motivated by sheer resentment populism.
What if we were serious about ruling Canada properly? What should be done with the CBC?
It’s not our place in this single essay to work out the details and economics, but we can comment on the heart of the matter, and the heart of the matter is simple: Canada needs a strong public broadcaster with as little advertising as possible, ubiquitous free availability, a focus on public education and exploration of the soul of Canada, and deep integration with the ruling class and the most powerful, fashionable, and educated perspectives in the nation.
But what about the politics of the matter? Isn’t the CBC controlled by liberal progressives and SJWs? Don’t they hate the traditional values and ethnic core of Canada and want to replace them with degeneracy and obedient imported voter bases? Wouldn’t empowering the CBC just be handing power to the hated enemy? Well yes, and no.
Consider this: the progressive ideas are foreign. It’s not coming from ourselves. We’re into that stuff for three reasons:
1. It makes us look good to the international community: “Look how nice we are. Please accept us.”
2. It’s a vector of power. Immigrants vote Liberal, and degenerated “old stock” Canadians are less of a problem than when they are strong and free.
3. We don’t have our own home-grown cultural value system and national self-concept to replace it. We pick what’s available.
But the more secure power you have, for example through a stronger CBC, the less you feel the need to suck up to your fashionable friends at Harvard, and more you have subordinates instead of enemies. A subordinate is an asset, and an enemy is a liability. I for one would rather be treated by our rulers as an asset than a liability. And in what forum are we to develop our home grown national self-concept, if not the CBC?
Here’s how would we want to see this playing out:
At first, a more powerful CBC would simply push the same stuff. But soon, as it began to pick up cultural currency and build a stronger distinctly Canadian culture, a deeper conversation would develop. We would start being able to think thoughts and have debates that are not just rehashes of the same stale culture war that is playing out all across the West, but would start going in our own direction.
And most importantly, with power over the national conversation and culture, our dear leaders would begin to feel in charge. Once you feel securely in charge, an important change in priorities naturally follows: you put away childish things like old rivalries and the latest social justice craze, and start thinking about how to rule.
Naturally, to transition to a true aristocracy is a long process that will not happen overnight, and it wouldn’t happen automatically, even with a stronger CBC. It will require a movement within the CBC and the elite to revive the concept of responsible rule for collective greatness. This is of course what we’re up to here at Northern Dawn.
Instead of getting into resentment-fueled attacks on Canada’s infrastructure of cultural sovereignty in the name of short-sighted political fights and shaky abstractions like the “free market”, Canadian patriots should take a more nuanced two-pronged strategy:
1. Strengthen the institutions of central state and elite power and national sovereignty, like the CBC, to strengthen Canada and Canadian culture, and incentivise the elite to think in a more aristocratic mode.
2. Do what can be done to drive the culture of the CBC and the elite more generally towards the aristocratic idea and the development of a stronger and healthier national concept. Mostly by actually developing the alternative perspective and evangelizing it to the right people.
This is what the Conservatives (or the Liberals, for that matter) would be doing if they were serious. But they won’t, so it will have to be us.
We want a revival of Canadian culture and political tradition, a stronger Canada, and an aristocratic elite that is thinking about how to rule for the greatness of Canada. A stronger CBC is crucial for that.
So here’s to Canadian content on the CBC, and 150 more years of Peace, Order, and Good Government.
Power, Press, and Musket: Why Canada Remained Loyal
The following essay is part of Northern Dawn’s Symposium for Canada’s 150th anniversary. The theme is Canada: Who Are We? We hope these studies of Canada’s heritage will inspire readers to consider its future, and the broader civilization of which it is a part. Those who rule must know what they are ruling.
The following essay is by Bill Marchant. He writes at Northern Reaction.
Why are we celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday on July 1st, and not the 241st birthday on July 4th? Why did Canada not join America’s rebellion against Great Britain? (Being a good Loyalist, I will use the contemporary British name for what others call the American Revolution.) This is a question that seems to attract essentially no inquiry on the Canadian side, despite the fact that Canada as a sovereign state only exists because of the answer to this question. Americans will occasionally tackle it, but it is usually framed as a military question: “Why were we not able to ‘liberate’ Canada when we liberated ourselves?” However, even this question has faded into the distance in the last 100 years, since Justin Smith published Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony, and essentially answered the American side.
Perhaps the reason why Canadians do not ask this question is because the answer reveals uncomfortable truths about America’s founding, Canada’s old stock, and the nature of political power. But we here have no fear of uncomfortable truths; we revel in them, as an uncomfortable truth is no less a truth than a comfortable one.
Before revealing the true answer, it is important to dispel an easy answer that is absolutely false. This is the idea that America simply did not care about Canada, since it was cold and full of Frenchmen. In fact, the Continental Congress sent three letters, four delegates, and an invading army into Canada to convince them to join the Continental Congress and by extension the Rebellion. They also put an open invitation to Canada (and to no other colony) in the Articles of Confederation, and Benjamin Franklin’s opening offer for peace with Britain in the Paris negotiations was that Britain give Canada to America.
Clearly America cared, and cared deeply, about securing Canada to their cause. There are many, many reasons for this desire. It doesn’t really matter for our purposes why they wanted Canada. (If you’re curious, read the first five chapters of Smith’s book. It’s available for free.) What we want to know is, why did Canada say no? Though there are nearly as many reasons for this rejection as there was for America’s desire for Canada, two of the most important factors were Governor Guy Carleton, and the role of the American soldiers themselves. This implies that most other factors mentioned by Smith and others could be removed; if Carlton and the American soldiers maintained their roles, Canada would still have rejected America’s rebellion.
First, Carleton. Guy Carleton was British officer in the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. After the Seven Years’ war, in 1768, Carleton was chosen to be the Governor of Canada (at that point, basically Quebec). His actions as Governor are the first of our reasons why Canada did not rebel with the Americans. Carleton did two things incredibly, shockingly well: he restricted the press, and he kept the elites on his side.
Press in Canada was very close to nonexistent. There was a single printing press, which was used to print a newspaper called the Quebec Gazette. Carleton made the sensible and safe choice to continue the policy of his predecessors, and use the Quebec Gazette to post all new laws affecting the colonists, any government job postings, and information about what ships were coming and going and when. This seems trivial, but what it meant was that the Quebec Gazette was financially dependant upon the government of Canada in general, and Carleton in particular. And Carleton made it clear that there should be no politics in the Quebec Gazette. It is quite odd to read Smith and other modern historians discuss this; they describe the Quebec Gazette as incredibly conservative, when all sides agree that its content was in every way apolitical. The implication is that by not being expressly rebellious, the paper was therefore anti-rebellion. It is left to the reader to look for modern parallels.
The Quebec Gazette stands in stark contrast to American newspapers at the time. Everyone knows that the Federalist Papers were originally published in newspapers, but that was true of many political documents, the angry ramblings of Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton’s anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, and insane imagined speeches by British politicians, calling for the blood of Americans, all to work the American people into a rebellious fervor. And it worked. Congress was able to raise armies because the American people believed (wrongly) that the British were baying for their blood, and this belief was fomented and in many ways created by the radical newspapers coming out of Boston and New York and elsewhere.
Essentially, by passively preventing the Quebec Gazette from becoming rebellious, Carleton stopped it from inciting the Canadian people.
“But,” I hear my more reactionary readers call out, “what does it matter what the people want? Every successful revolution is just a power struggle between two sets of elites. They often use ‘the people’ as pawns, but the people are not the drivers!” This is a sound criticism that comes from Pareto and de Jouvenal. The belief is that there are no successful “popular uprisings”, outside of elites weaponizing sections of “the people” against each other.
I do not know if Carleton intuited this concept, or if he just happened to stumble on the right answer, but he acted as if he knew it. Carleton chose exactly the correct groups of people to keep on his side, and the correct group to neglect. There were five groups in Canada that could possibly be considered “elites.”
The first of them, the British civil servants, were appointed directly by London, and as such had a lot to lose in any potential rebellion. Carleton did not have to worry about them. The second group was the British military. As Carleton was a military man by birth and occupation, it was only natural that he would give preferential treatment to them. This also kept his men loyal during the American invasion, even when Montreal fell and things looked grim.
The next two groups were the old French elite class, left over from before Canada was given to Britain in exchange for Guadeloupe. These two groups, the Catholic Priests and the Seigneurs, were the groups most closely connected to the vast French peasant population. Carleton ensured that both of these groups were taken care of in the governing document of Canada, The Quebec Act. The priests were once again allowed to tithe the Catholic population, and the Seigneurs were ensured that their property rights would be respected. As such, when the rebellion came to Canada, both the Priests and the Seigneurs remained loyal to Britain.
The final group of elites was the English-speaking merchants in Quebec City and Montreal. These were mostly immigrants from America. They brought with them their rebellious American ideas. It has been noted previously that Britain attempted to appease the American demands for unimpeded speech, and that such appeasement encouraged rebellion by spreading and normalizing their ideas. Carleton made no such appeasements to the English merchants, and although they attempted to help the Americans, they never saw much chance of success, and kept their rebellious thoughts mostly to themselves.
By keeping the first four groups of elites on his side, and by not appeasing the fifth group, Carleton ensured that any rebellion would at the very least have an uphill battle. However, if the Americans had acted perfectly, they may have still flipped one or two of the groups to their cause. However, the American invasion was poorly planned. There were not enough supplies, so the army started buying Canadian goods. But they did not not bring enough gold either, so they started using paper currency, which the Canadians did not want. When the Americans realised that their money was useless, they began to steal from and pillage the Canadians. This was the final straw, turning large numbers of the neutral peasants and the somewhat pro-American merchants against the rebellion.
The Americans were not removed completely from Canada until much later, when Carleton routed them after the invasion of Quebec, but their hopes of having Canada join them as the fourteenth colony were essentially quashed at that point. America would continue their attempts. Another letter, the invitation in the Articles, the offer to Britain, later the War of 1812, and many more attempts both official and surreptitious were tried. But Canada rejected each, and that rejection can be traced back to Guy Carleton’s wise decisions, and the American Army’s poor planning and ill-prepared state in the early stages of the uprising.
There are at least two lessons to be learned here. The first is that a “free” press is a powerful weapon. Whoever controls the press in many ways controls the fate of the nation. The fact that the vast majority of the press today is aligned against those with rightward values should be grave cause for concern. The second lesson is that Canada is not America. We do not have the violent rebellious beginning that America had. We rejected that beginning. We instead chose to gradually change into what we are today. Yes, what we are today, politically, is an embarrassment. But, unlike America, we did not burn our bridges. For Americans, there is no going back beyond the American Rebellion without another bloody rebellion. We, in the Great White North, may have exited through the door on the far left, and we may have closed the door behind us. But we did not throw away the key. Perhaps, one day, we will walk right back through that door.