We have only ever sought the common good from the basis of a culture
Whether people realize it or not Canada is still the Dominion of Canada, the name adopted in the Act that created this country. Though effectively dropped by 1970 the name has never been changed. ‘Dominion’ (a word that appears hundreds of times in the King James Version of the Bible) is might – which is to say exercised might, effective domination. That Canada intended, unapologetically, to dominate something, in some way, in the territory it possessed, is explicit in its name. And ‘dominion’, as we see in the Bible, is both possession and control.
If since the ’60s (why then?) it has been fashionable to avoid this word and shun its entire unholy nest of associations (no one should be dominated, nothing must be exclusively ours, nothing suppressed, Canada has no enemies, needs no army except to help others – and the slew of kindred thoughts that found such fertile soil in Canadian minds), … if this thinking has been the late-modern tendency, then the 21st century has made it amply clear to the ‘enemies of domination’ that foes have at last appeared, and they are Canadians who will not fall in step with the new programme.
You cannot get around the actual purpose of government, which the constitution of this country spells out:
to make Laws for the Peace, Order, and good Government of Canada.
British North America (or Constitution) Act, 1867 – Enactment no. 1, sec. 91
Canada is still a dominion, and, do not be deceived, no one in power is at all reluctant to put down, in some way, in the territory of Canada, what threatens the “Order”. We have, however, been greatly misled about this order by Enlightenment theorists who told us that a new concern for what we have in common would lift us out of the divisive and constricting ways of premodern history.
Liberal theorists of the 19th century told us that there could be a cultureless culture: an order that was not an Order, in a politics that got out of the business of capital-O order and capital-G good. All of that would be left to people to decide for themselves, individually, in carrying out the most essential task that falls to any human being: as the late Frederick DeCoste put it,
to author their so-brief lives as each sees fit
Frederick C. DeCoste, “What’s the Charter Got to Do With It?”
in Divorcing Marriage (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 124
– which is to say, in a way that made that life fulfilling. Canada was to be a place in which people were free to do this.
The theorists of liberty told us that it was not the purpose of government to promote or secure any way of life, that the modern conception of government rejects the identification with culture made by the state in the age of traditions, devoted as those traditions were to ‘monocultures’.
The modern world has escaped the historic past in which a militant Athena protected the Athenian way and the pharaoh’s gaze (held fast by a god) was trained on ma’at, maintaining the Order that formed Egyptians: the people who love the Egyptian conception of Good and hate the chaos that is the name for everything contrary.
This new story is a glorious narrative of the birth of a new age, the Age of Liberty, but it is necessarily more: the dawn of this age, this place of flourishing, brings with it (or perhaps accompanies) the birth of a new man – which is to say, a man of a certain kind. What kind? The possibility immediately flashes … that we might not have left ‘monoculture’ behind after all. Is this architect of flourishing not a man with a new mode of life? This new dawn is a true Glad Day (the title of the print by William Blake that is this essay’s image, guidance from our tradition), but the dawn of Liberty raises a significant question about the new man, the man who proves fit to deliver it. Does he seek a world of order, or is it the Order he glories in?
Who is the new man of history? The Enlightenment theorists of liberalism answered as follows. This man lives in a multi-culture, by expressly disconnecting his own personal culture from all his society’s public institutions (those that by definition serve everybody), since the directives of his own culture would interfere with the lives of all those citizens who are not fellow believers. Public institutions will now be run, instead, on the basis of the common good (that set of good things that the nation’s people all agree are good). Institutions serving all the people are governed by manifestly shared values and these values/institutions nourish and energize our multiculture. This is a new kind of society, apparent also in the way that ‘private’ institutions (by definition, those built around unshared beliefs) do not intrude into anyone’s life: unshared views of life never touch your family or group; they affect you only if you welcome them – when they cease to be unshared.
In the 2020s we enjoy the benefit of having thoroughly tested this attractive theory, which promised a society that you and I have never seen, because it is a fantasy. The liberalism just outlined speaks as if it were the voice of liberty, repudiating coercive monocultural ‘traditions’, but that is a posture. Liberalism is a tradition: a particular outlook passed on to people who receive it as their way of life, an outlook that drove a “transition from one kind of social and cultural order to another,” to quote Alasdair MacIntyre from a chapter he titled, with pointed irony, “Liberalism Transformed into a Tradition”. It takes considerable blindness not to see, by the 2020s, that, contra its theory,
liberal individualism does indeed have its own broad conception of the [capital-G] good, which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially, and culturally wherever it has the power to do so, but also that in doing so its toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is severely limited.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame University Press, 1988), 326, 327, 336
Well before MacIntyre, Nietzsche had observed that
there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (1889),
trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Oxford: Penguin, 1968), sec. 38, 92
Promising a collective escape from capital-O order, ‘liberals’, ‘classical liberals’, or whatever you choose to call them, have instead shifted power from the old Order they demonized to a new Order passed off as the common good. Sold as a dissolver of division, liberalism eagerly stokes division, stamping Canadians angered by the loss of their culture as intolerant foes of Canadian values.
To the retort that we should finally try liberalism, try it seriously, the response is that the thing I have just described is a tradition (like the Athenian, Egyptian, etc.) pretending not to be a tradition, so there is no way to ‘try it’. That would mean erecting (seriously, this time) liberalism’s defining structure: the ‘wall that keeps toxic ingredients of belief and ideology contained’, leaving to flow through public spaces the positive nourishment wanted by all – but that protective barrier would in fact be a wall against how people live, on the left and the right, and so it is a thing that no one wants (a reluctance loudly proclaimed in the historic behaviour of liberals). It is a wall that no human being could build because no person can treat as toxic the convictions that, in his own eyes, make him human, just so he could get along with others. Its pivotal dichotomy (shall we co-operate or shall we live by our convictions) is absurd.
That point Blake thoroughly understood, asserting (in words pencilled in the margin of another print),
Every thing is an attempt to be Human.
In reality no man ever disconnects his own culture from the public institutions that let his countrymen thrive, unless he has been fooled (as were so many late-modern Christians) about how to be himself.
Blake gave a second title to Glad Day (an illustration to his poems “Milton” and “Jerusalem”): The Dance of Albion. The image depicts ‘Albion’ or England “Giving himself for the Nations” (an annotation Blake made on some of the impressions). It would be a Glad Day if any nation arose to give other nations the gift of freedom, but Blake drew Albion nude because in the quest to be human Albion must shed the “wormy Garments” designed for him by elements within himself (ideas of certain Englishmen) that would turn him off the path of his true life.
The Glad Day announced in Blake’s image is the day the human spirit is freed of foul and false trappings, and what the theory of liberalism is false to C.S. Lewis explained in The Abolition of Man. There Lewis writes that everything that is counted a human good (freedom, for instance) but that is used to overcome the Tao, the Order that must be maintained – anything elevated into “a new system of value in its place,” that urges us to marginalize the Order, to make pursuit of the Good toxic to our fellowship) – “is self-contradictory”. Liberalism is undermined by the suppression it demands of the very activity that gave us the good of liberty. All ideals, liberty included, are but
fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1944; New York: HarperOne, 2001), 43–44
In Blake’s print we see Albion stripped of man-made rags and turned to something beyond him, to what is sounding forth the music to which he dances. In the synergy that dance is Albion has been moved
To wash off the Not Human, …
……..
To cast off Bacon, Locke, and Newton from Albion’s covering,
To take off his filthy garments and clothe him with Imagination
Blake, “Milton,” book 2, sec. 48,
in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1946), 430
– he means, becoming fully responsive to the Image of beauty that he is receiving through his entire body and (this is morality) conforming himself to. Every person who loves the ideal of Liberty loves the capital-letter Order to which it belongs.
To conclude, liberalism is not the way of freedom it pretends to be. Because no human being committed to her humanity will ever anaesthetize it in her society for the sake of mere small-o order, liberalism is a fraud. It was an unnoticed Trojan horse, advanced to endow the West with freedom but designed to unseat the reigning traditional Order: it is the Western birth of liberty co-opted to install a progressive regime (not really a general theory of politics at all, then). There is no such thing as a cultureless culture, an order that is not an Order; everything fosters some conception of man. To repeat, the liberal wall will never be built because it cannot be built – no one wants it, as no human being has any inclination to treat as social poison what he has already chosen as the path to life’s fulfilment. The pretense that in modernity we have reached some plateau of achievement that transcends particularity is utterly fraudulent; we have only ever sought the common good from the basis of a particular culture.
But we cannot end here. Inevitably, someone will agree with this by saying something like, To follow the Tao is really just to put the moral Order first, leaving freedom to find what place it can – virtue, not freedom, is what our Dominion is for. But to think this way is to miss altogether what Lewis was teaching; the Tao refuses this dichotomy. ‘Is the first concern of government virtue or freedom’ is just another of the rotted hand-me-downs of fractious Western thought. Today, writes political theorist Yuval Levin, we have to reject
the core claim of today’s post-liberals, that we have to choose between a society that takes its moral foundations seriously and expresses them in its laws and a society that protects core communal individual rights through a classically liberal kind of constitutionalism.
Yuval Levin, “Making Men Moral’s Challenge to Liberalism,”
Making Men Moral: 30th Anniversary Conference, American Enterprise Institute (December 2023)
Of course, it is the very same claim, the very same dichotomy, handed us by present-day liberals.
Freedom is a Christian discovery, discovered via love by people who have picked up the strains of the actual divine Order, and it cannot be left to fall where it may. Freedom is a part of the moral order itself, so that to pursue virtue instead of freedom is not to pursue virtue. I have no room left to explain this further (see the next and concluding essay), but we will not understand the Glad Day that is our tradition’s answer to the riddle of our moment in history if we do not hear the false note in the other false solution. – Suppose you are offered the wormy dichotomy of the theorists, and you take it, and answer like this:
― What do you want government to do: foster a virtuous society or protect individual liberty?
― I want virtue of course.
― Well what do you think government is giving you, with all its Wokeist needling (‘don’t you care about the safety of trans children, the sadness of young people who want to die; don’t you care about the earth, the climate, future generations; can’t you be welcoming to people fleeing misery in their homeland, can’t you suck it up and get the jab like average selfless Canadians’, etc.): it’s wall-to-wall virtue and how do you like it?
― It’s a bloody nightmare.
― So what you want isn’t institutionalized virtue, it’s institutions pushing your take on virtue: you just want to hand your nightmare to the Woke.
And suppose it is true that you do dream, as I do, of a government fostering the main lines of virtue as our age-old tradition understood it. Is it also true that the ‘Wokeist’ hell you are now suffering (being officially labelled a barbarian hostile to Canadian values, hating what ‘good Canadians’ love) means nothing to you at all provided it is suffered by someone unlike you? (and your labels for those degenerates are as sharp as theirs for you).
The Christian who is alive only to her freedom, aware of the life-force opened up to human beings only in her own formulation of humanity, her own tradition of Order is a person already falling away from her tradition. The Christian discovery of freedom belongs to an Order, one that commands love – a demand that has the ring of absurdity to those not hearing the music.
Mind you, it may well look to anyone as if there is no third option, no place in any structure of government for a thing like ‘love’: just what other configuration is there? But it is the principal theme of these essays that if this question can be answered, that answer will be waiting, for us, in our tradition.
