What drives the cultural upheaval may be, at some level, the recognition of human rights but, necessarily, this means de-recognizing other long-upheld rights. What is actually underway is the forcible transformation of our culture into a new culture (different rights, different ways). – But this is only half the story.
When we grasp that what is occurring is the condemnation/suppression of traditional culture we should indeed see the need to resist this, but we should appreciate even more forcefully that something has gone wrong in the West. People are now operating with a basic misunderstanding of human difference, an ignorance unthinkable in the ancient world, when it was understood that people belong to their cultures, their god, and have a place in the world.
As much as any culture the traditional culture slated for erasure belongs in this country. But we cannot join the aggressors in their folly (entertaining the matching fantasy of a conservative Canada, a Christian nation). Our task is to be ourselves and recover two key insights of our own tradition.
I
The vortex of change that we are witnessing in this century we understand by half if we see these cultural changes as both a rejection of our tradition and a condemnation of its ways. It is important to understand that ways of thinking well established in our society are being not just rejected but condemned. For instance, the public is now shifting from affirming trans women as women to, in addition, seeing those who refuse the new meaning of ‘woman’ as deniers of human rights.
The initial message was, ‘Have the decency to use the pronouns a person has told you match their authentic self’; now it is, ‘Stop saying what encourages hate speech, what increases the chance that people will suffer rejection and depression: stop endangering people’. The repeated emphasis upon safety (as in a policy introduced to “set minimum standards for New Brunswick schools to provide a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment for LGBTQ students”) has broadened the problematic behaviour from showing disrespect to indifference to the harm caused by words and actions – in short, to ‘hatefulness’ (a quality linked to the terms ‘transphobe’ and ‘homophobe’, which purport to explain the cause of hate). We are now in the region of human-rights abuse and actual crime. In the eyes of many, since the polite requests and HR directives (like those put to Jordan Peterson) failed to sway the rude and the uncooperative, what is required now is something to stop offenders. As recently explained by Scotland, governments see the
“need for new laws to help recognize the impact and harm caused by hate crime [– a kind of offence that is] aggravated by prejudice … [and] has a hugely damaging and corrosive impact on victims, their families, and communities.”
Equality, Inclusion, and Human Rights Directorate of Scotland,
“Hate Crime and Public Order Act: factsheet” (16 April 2024)
What we ought to notice in this shift is the way it problematizes the ways of life that essentially ‘harbour that prejudice’ and underlie these ‘rights abuses’. You may claim that you simply hold a traditional or biological or religious understanding of the sexes (there are two sexes only, and they cannot be changed) but for rights advocates this will not pass as a defense; you cannot ‘excuse yourself from doing harm’ so easily.1 Because of the way they fuel and justify damage, outlooks like the three just mentioned, which only yesterday were normal and positive, are being reclassified as negative. Legislators in Canada are deliberating on this at the present moment.
“This bill [C-367] comes at a crucial time as we are witnessing a surge in violence and hatred against the LGBTQ2S+ community…. Religion should no longer be an excuse for such virulent bigotry.”
Ian Bushfield, executive director of the BC Humanist Association,
cited in “New Bill Would End Religious Exemptions
To Hate Speech Laws,” BCHumanist.ca (30 November 2023)
In an employment tribunal in Britain a Christian doctor lost his appeal in a
“ruling which said [explicitly] that his belief in Genesis 1:27, that we are born male and female, was ‘incompatible with human dignity’ [and] ‘unworthy of respect in a democratic society’….”
“Christian Doctor To Take Trans Pronoun Case To Court of Appeal,
Following ‘Muddled’ Tribunal Judgment,” Christianconcern.com (29 June 2022)
In the eyes of the reformers the non-compliant behaviour is a problem, but the still-deeper problem is its source: the traditional outlook itself with its adjoining catalogue of problematic views – on male and female, on health (the desire to change gender is not self-discovery, to be encouraged, but dysphoria, to be treated), etcetera. (The core account of human nature, flourishing, education, health, psychology, authority, science, religion, etc., that identifies the Western tradition, which once shaped Canada’s institutions and culture, is extensive and detailed.) In the startling changes society is now undergoing, then, what is happening is the reclassification of the traditional outlook as essentially anti-human. – That verdict, as we have noticed before, is the verdict of a culture.
Consider, for instance, the following. What does it mean to believe that parents are responsible for deciding what is good for their children? Just yesterday it meant a basic grasp of parenthood. This hardly looks to be a problematic belief, but the actual meaning of this view (like the view that we are created male or female) is being re-assessed; indeed, the general public is being repeatedly instructed that attachment to such a view means subscribing to an outlook that justifies rights abuses, that deeply injurious kind of abuse that new laws must prevent. – On the face of it, what I have just said seems groundless; it might well prompt the response, ‘I don’t see this happening’. Quite so, but there is a good reason for that. What we are noticing is indeed not this downturned side of the coin but the public side, the human-rights concern that is the entire persona of this issue.
What is emphasized, what is chanted and memed, is the positive side with all its talk of safety, inclusion, concern for well-being. But this chorused positivity is always rising from a conflict in which something is actually opposed – opposed, that is, by the ‘left’2 – and it is there that the condemnation and reclassification I am pointing to is occurring.
Yet I know that I cannot say this without demonstration; illustration is required, replete with tedious detail (but the details tell a story). Take the case mentioned above in connection with ‘safety’. In 2020 New Brunswick’s Department of Education issued a school policy on gender identity, Policy 713, which among its provisions recommended that teachers invite students to name their pronouns, and students could choose their pronouns freely, switching gender without parental approval – adding, on that point, that teachers could not inform parents of such changes without getting the student’s consent. There is nothing expressly negative about this policy and nothing brought it to the attention of the media. Indeed, it took the government two years to register the implication of this ‘welcoming’ rule, which is that parents could, and by intent, be denied the right to know that their child had changed gender at school (the school would inform them only at the ‘discretion’ of the child). Finally in 2023 the province’s Education Minister intervened and changed the rule to “require parental consent”3 – an act that instantly triggered an outcry extensively covered in the media (“controversial changes to Policy 713”).
Since then a regional division of the school board has launched a suit against the province, prompting a dozen organizations to apply to the court to help build the argument against the government revision (“N.B. Gender-Identity Lawsuit Attracts ‘Unusual’ Number of Interveners”); accompanying this is “a lawsuit filed by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and grievances from the unions representing school psychologists and teachers”; a Charter of Rights and Freedoms challenge has also been launched.
In the press the dispute has always been called a “debate over LGBTQ rights in schools”. When asked to explain the province’s intervention, the Premier voiced
“the government’s desire to ensure parents play a role in the ‘formative years’ of their children. ‘Families are the foundation of our society’, he … told the legislature. ‘And what we’re seeing is that erosion of the family role in children’s upbringing’.”
John Mazerolle citing Premier Blaine Higgs, “What Is New Brunswick’s LGBTQ
Student Controversy All About?” CBC News (27 June 2023)
It is highly noteworthy that this debate has never been called a controversy over parental rights, over “the family role in children’s upbringing”, which it manifestly is (not instead of gender concerns but additionally). It is specifically the province’s restoration of parents’ involvement in their child’s exploration of gender identity that was the cause of the outrage and the court challenges. Every group’s objections are focused on the insertion into the policy of the traditional authority of parents in directing their children’s lives (practically the whole intervention of the education minister). The ongoing Policy 713 controversy cannot be a debate about LGBTQ rights without also being a debate about the status of the family in the decision of a child’s welfare with respect to gender identity. That is the particular thing that, in this ‘debate’, the left is against: parental power to guide a child away from something that that child, on his or her own, would choose.
All of this shows us something general that we should notice. The actions advancing the cultural upheaval of our time will always be accompanied by a move to take from people a responsibility or power that is now theirs – a power that is cultural in nature (being ‘energy’ devoted to achieving something counted good by the standards of that outlook, here the traditional outlook). Re gender identification, the traditional influence of parents over children was a target of the original rules and is again the target of the court actions. If those cases go as the plaintiffs hope, the ruling will be changed back and parents will find themselves again forced out of the loop by schools now backed by the arm of the law.
That is all the detail we need in order to see that institutions like school boards, empowered to issue rules for entire populations, understand their business as correcting the culture: altering society so that those with traditional views are stripped of the power to violate human rights (“Advocate Says N.B.’S Gender-Identity Policy Violates Children’s Rights”). What institutions (including the media) are engaged in is altering society so that people who think their ‘prejudicial’ habits constitute a ‘parental right’ are disabused of that notion by the courts. The authors and the defenders of the original school policy – along with the child-advocate who drafted a “compromise” proposal (if a child under twelve requests a pronoun change “it should be up to the principal to decide if the child has enough capacity to make that decision”: the principal, not the parents, would be in charge of the outcome – again, at his or her discretion shutting out the parents) – … all these actors in the drama announce a verdict (a judgement with consequences) on traditional parents’ views of family and the parental role, of sexuality and health. The message was and remains that those views (my views, as this is my province) are unacceptable, because bad for children. The acceptable stance was taken by the school board, ruling to secure the outcome that was good: a child switching gender would be free of – liberated from – parental interference that could injure and even crush the child.
When the objectors stated that, if the government-revised rule were implemented in the schools this would cause “irreparable harm”, from where would that harm come? Not from the government (which had simply restored to parents their place in a child’s development) but from those parents who had talked their child out of the decision to change identity. If the province is now being sued for a violation of human rights (simply by requiring the release of information), it is families that are doing the actual harm. Though this charge is plainly implicit, the condemnation of the government’s “transphobic” intervention continues in the public eye (Policy 713 has scarcely ever left the news cycle) as an entirely positive effort to protect children and win them the right to take the path “fundamental to their identity”.
We ought to ask: what are we, who hold traditional views, to understand about our way of life from this and all the other changes now afoot. In the case of this one limited policy we are not just seeing other people choose an outlook different from ours, nor are we being asked to mend our ways (as just seen, the ways to mend, the wrongdoing at the heart of the controversy, are never so much as mentioned – but more, we are not being engaged at all: no case is being put in this ‘debate’ to tradition-minded citizens). Instead we are seeing central institutions adopt a stance that implicitly condemns an ordinary Canadian way of life (for the harm it threatens). When, as occurred in New Brunswick, the traditional ways are defended (backed by the cogent arguments about family that the tradition can muster) and those institutions are blocked, for imposing their anti-traditional view, we see the institutions turn and petition the courts to ‘impose that outlook legally’. Might the courts comply? Notably, the prime minister of the country has weighed in on Policy 713:
“Right now trans kids in New Brunswick are being told they don’t have the right to be their true selves, that they need to ask permission. Trans kids need to feel safe, not targeted by politicians.”
Justin Trudeau at a Toronto Gay Pride event in 2023, cited by John Mazerolle, “What Is
New Brunswick’s LGBTQ Student Controversy All About?” CBC News (27 June 2023)
The “accelerating anti-cultural vortex” we are witnessing all around us is a surge of effort to effect and enforce cultural change, to help the counter-culture flourish (removing barriers to ‘coming out’, encouraging expression of the true self) by suppressing traditional social norms that obstruct this. Those who advance this ‘progress’ (step by step and issue by issue) are working to awaken the public to the ‘fact’ (repeatedly underlined in publicity) that the traditional way of life is anti-human – my way of life is intolerant / hateful / harmful / bad. If this verdict is supported by the ‘left’, the media, politicians, artists, why not also by a legal system mentally ready to write that verdict into law?
“The law is … one of these social institutions, … there’s no reason why the law should be immune from [the objectives of the Social Justice movement, etc., any more than] any other institution: like government, like universities, like public schools, like media. It’s happening to the law too; it’s happening now.”
Bruce Pardy, “Bill C-63: Everything You Need to Know,” Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, ep. 442 (22 April 2024)
I suggested that you would understand what is going on by half if you saw that what is occurring now is a forced cultural take-over, a hostile capture of each component of traditional life that obstructs the rise of the replacement culture (the process: govern as a member of the new culture, watch for the barrier this prompts the opposition to throw into your path, engineer the removal of that barrier). This is the
“‘long march through the institutions’ [that] is the skeleton key for understanding the modern Left.”
Christopher Rufo, “The Long March Through the Institutions,” The Manhattan Institute (5 August 2022)
This is part of the picture, but there is another half: what is going on through and by means of this: the larger event that this march of domination is part of – the breakdown it signals. If you do not see the first thing you cannot see the second thing, which is actually more alarming, and we are now at a vantage point from which to see it.
II
The school board just mentioned is staffed by human beings, people who want to do what is in the interest of schoolchildren (necessarily, as the board members understand it). We all agree that we must restrict (even punish) those who act against the welfare of children and we all no doubt appreciate that the behaviour we deem harmful will be picked out for us by other and deeper beliefs (about childhood development, a fulfilling life, health, etc.) – and so it has always been. The ancient Athenians advanced well-being and curbed abuse, as their outlook identified it; they did not have school boards and social media but they did not lack ways to regulate behaviour. That is how cultures work, and the New Brunswick school/political business is cultural business, because it is about the cultivation of healthy and fulfilled people (of course, according to some vision). Culture is a way of living generated by
“the values, norms, institutions, and modes of thinking to which successive generations in a given society have attached primary importance.”
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), ch. 2
But Canada is not a culture; it is by and large two cultures: the traditional Western culture and a counter-culture, cultures with opposed values, norms, and modes of thinking – diametrically opposed, because the one culture was drawn out of the other by way of rejection. In fact Canada is more than two cultures; the indigenous people of Canada have their own culture, or cultures, which have no roots in the West.
To mention Canada’s indigenous cultures is by no means to change the subject; it is the same subject – culture and cultural interference – and the indigenous-peoples connection underlines a salient fact about our very topic. No fabric of Canada is torn apart by the existence of peoples with contrary beliefs. Co-existence was the plan signalled by the agreement the First Nations gave to every treaty they made. The fabric is torn by working to force one people into the culture of another, by undertaking to suppress the culture that you and your kind condemn, because by your estimation it does harm. No one understands what is happening in our age who does not understand this.
But let’s set aside the large and increasingly well-documented native facet of this issue, as the cultures I know well are the Western ones. The cultural strife of our time is being treated as if this is the ordinary wear-and-tear of advanced Western life, the regular price of justice. It is nothing of the kind. It is the torment of injustice: it is a deep societal disorder, the mark, wherever it is happening, of a failing country. That everywhere in the West unrest like this is counted normal is the sign of a kind of epidemic of senility among nations. In their ripe old age Western states are displaying an astonishing ignorance about people (what they primarily contain), a sudden and complete vacuity re human cultures. So advanced is this dementia that some of these countries are lost even before the mirror: they have ceased to know what kind of country they themselves are.
Outside its indigenous peoples, Canada is two deeply distinct cultures; one of these is in continuity with the ‘Western tradition’ and the other is its express rejection by members of the older culture who have defected and all those who have joined this ‘new’ tradition (yet not so new after all, as its roots lie in Nietzsche, Mill, Marx, Rousseau). The original New Brunswick school policy had a rationale, which issued from some conception of the Order of things and its picture of human welfare – or if the notion of ‘the Order’ is too traditional then … came from some form of ultimate concern through which people establish how things are and ought to be. But given that, over the issue of gender exploration, there are (as no one fails to notice) two opposed conceptions of the facts of human nature … how did one of these win so that a school board would accommodate that conception in rules applying to every family? If there are two opposing outlooks on this question, there is, in our political system, no commissar to tell us which is the correct one.
Something strange and disturbing is affecting the way Canada functions (and Western countries generally). What is strange is that the members of both cultural groups are Canadians but one culture treats the other as if its members were Canada’s problem. (This is a weirdly exact echo of the former “Indian problem”, a notion cooked up by a dominant culture identifying the outlook of another culture as a kind of disease to be stamped out. Committed to that verdict, the majority culture landed quite naturally on what Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission termed “cultural genocide”.
“Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group…. And, most significantly…, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.”
Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 1, Summary:
Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 2015), 1
The culture vying for dominance wishes not to destroy actual people but to rob those people of the cultural institutions that promote their ‘backward’ beliefs and ways. Moving children to boarding schools where they are given the ‘right’ kind of education, with the traditional teaching shut out, is only one way to insulate children from family influence; there are others.)
Those now readying themselves to argue before judges the need to restrict parents (as per the original Policy 713) are not irrational, but they run the logic of a single culture, assuming only that culture’s premises. They do not believe they are doing that, imagining, on the contrary, that they speak for the nation. As they see it, ‘tradition-minded parents are a problem because they are out of step with the outlook on rights that this country (privately, in the beliefs and values of its citizens) has voted into power’. This is a serious error because in a country like Canada there can be no such phenomenon as deciding the country’s values. Wherever this conception of the-values-Canadians-have-chosen arises you have a fundamental confusion of culture with politics. Democracy is not a culture hammer. Voting elects politicians, it does not decide the legitimacy of the people (!), picking out the kind of people to be progressively muscled into the behaviour dictated by the values-Canadians-have-chosen (parents resigning themselves to the boundaries drawn for them by a new master called The Culture).
If a culture could ever be ‘voted into power’ that victory would license the suppression of the culture condemned by the majority, now targeted for systematic erasure (starting with moves of disempowerment). It would set in motion the active destruction of the social institutions of the rejected culture (via rule changes, the redirection of policy, the installation of new authorities, new curricula, etc.). But adopting these ways of pressuring one people to act like a different people (diverting one man’s energy into the flourishing of another man’s way of life) turns governmental power against the very heart of the people. It betrays a serious loss of grip on reality, since, in reality,
- cultures belong, inalienably, to people – they are freely chosen;
- cultures are not rejected or wiped away by electoral or judicial triumphs (with the backing of government and court); they are rejected in your own soul – you can purge your soul of them as thoroughly as you want, but that is the end of the cleansing;
- and if a government – of any kind: a Human Rights office, a professional society, an employment tribunal, a school board – targets a culture, that government becomes not a servant and aide but an enemy of people.
There is nothing more costly than making reality into a problem (the enraging efforts must fail, but must continue until they succeed!). If Canada’s cultural institutions (schools, courts, professions, media, etc.) are dedicated to condemning, restricting, re-educating, and thereby neutralizing the Canadians who belong to the second culture (whose ways obstruct the ends of the dominant culture), and if those Canadians are thereby deprived of institutions by which to replicate themselves (and get their own people into the future), then Canada takes up as an instrument of its everyday life what was long ago called
“violence to the Souls of Men”.
Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (1652; in James Calvin Davis,
On Religious Liberty: Selections from the Works of Roger Williams
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 169
Ask an indigenous Canadian if these tactics of cultural assimilation (the capturing, prohibition, or limiting of social institutions like the family, inherited teachings, the authority of elders, rites and customs, etc.) are spiritual forms of violence. The souls of men choose a culture shaped to protect what is in their very hearts. The ‘everyday business’ that renews these assaults on the spirit is a deep national derangement. Every country that is home to this kind of conflict and not seeking to resolve it is a ship deeply off its course.
Clearly there are Canadians who, on the matter of sexuality, believe that traditional parents are oppressors who must be outwitted by the schools by denying them the information they would use ‘transphobically’, to restrict a child’s development. This is the view of an actual culture,4 a culture not mine. This ‘leftist’ or ‘progressive’ culture (call it what you wish: there are never good names for cultures) exists; its outlook is indeed a position that a thinking person may take and many have freely taken it. Canada is a free country, a sensible country, in which people are free to believe what they find actually believable, free to reject the outlook of my tradition. I fully expect many people to dismiss my culture’s map of reality (as I dismiss theirs, for their stifling and deadly illusions); it is their right – but, much more basically, the multiplicity of conflicting ways of life is one of the most blatant facts of history, and nothing in the record of recent human enlightenment has done a thing to alter it.
Have people forgotten that conflicting ways do not spell conflict? People elaborating conceptions of human life in flagrant indifference to my standards is an ordinary description of the world, and reality does not come as a ‘problem’ to be fixed. Yet today, commonly, we tell each other that the problem is our neighbours,
“the enemies of the Good”.
Quoted from the current issue of a prominent magazine
That is not our problem; our problem is not the emergence of bad ideas or the existence of people who hold them (antithetical and even evil ideas, by the standards of my culture). These ideas are thinkable (and there is always something positive about them) and people whose minds are not controlled will choose them. Our problem is the conflict not of ideas but of people.
Many will be quick to agree with this, imagining that this expresses their own thinking. Do the leftists blaming the conflict on ‘right-wing culture warriors’, and also the Christians denouncing other Christians for not putting Jesus’ love first, ahead of culture and politics, … do these two groups not desire to lead us away from strife (stop being ‘divisive’, love your neighbour)? Yes: but it makes no difference: their advice is utterly strife-ensuring as it does not even touch the disorder I have named. What these two groups bizarrely identify as our trouble is simply dissatisfaction with our trouble – they are annoyed with the dissatisfaction, thus, it would seem, astonishingly at ease with the trouble (which they leave undisturbed). Far too little has been said about the exact nature of the misery that this country (like every Western country) is now a high-tech incubator of.
Our problem is not our differences but the refusal to acknowledge that difference is part of the Order, part of the plan: rather stupidly, we concede the presence of difference in history but have decided to find it intolerable in the present, in the country in which we live. (We have been tricked into thinking this by a quirk in the history of the West that we have responded to just as densely.) Or, to come at it from another angle, our problem is the refusal to see the different as countrymen, a failing that may stem from a deeply embarrassing blindness to actual human nature – embarrassing because no ancient Egyptian or Persian was ever so clueless. That mistake is the following. Twenty-first-century Westerners appear unable to understand that human beings are people under an obligation to their conception of the Order, and that to act in that way (according to their culture, obedient to what matters most to them) is the ONE thing that they and all people want. When Canada was created, out of already functioning colonies, the people of those colonies explained that they wished to govern themselves,
“which means the protection of our own interests and the establishment of our own welfare in our own way; the passing of our own estimates in our own way.”
T.L. Wood on British Columbia in 1870, in Canada’s Founding Debates, ed. Janet Ajzenstat,
Paul Romney, Ian Gentler, & William D. Gairdner (University of Toronto Press, 2003), 25
The clashing that is now common in this country is most centrally the refusal to accept that other human beings governing themselves by their own values belong here, and the effect of that mistake is a disturbingly familiar kind of ugliness: acknowledgement only of our own kind – “this land is my land” … but not your land, because you are “the enemies of the Good”. It is doubly disturbing in that this is alien to Canada.
Canadian life today is a succession of outrages, a life of chronic passionate grievance, in both cultures (a pattern evidently still repeating in the experience of indigenous Canadians). It may be calm outside your window, in the physical country, but in its citizenry this entire country has moved into a state of fever (a heated collective paralysis) in which everyday acts of life are met by shrieking opposition and even more powerful checks to thriving. The cause of this illness is obliviousness to a small set of facts known to all in ancient times, facts about the ‘enemy’.
In brief: the enemy has his own gods (which are alien gods) and also his own place. He has a home in the world; he (who is a barbarian beside us) is in fact fully a part of the world. His gods are indeed ‘alien’ but this just means foreign-relative-to-me (literally, the term ‘alien’, applied to his gods, just factors in my attitude), and in the Order of the world his gods do not hang over me (all alien gods I can just brush away, both repudiate and evaporate). So the servant of those gods (going about his sworn business) concerns me very little; he only becomes an ‘enemy’ when he enters my homeland and interferes in my business – destroys my temple, or takes over my school, or separates me from my children – working to deny me the life that is mine, which I have chosen, with my people, in obedience to our God (a life that keeps us living, hands our children a map, makes human beings of us). Biblical scholar Chad Bird points out the centrality of the concept ‘Amen’; indeed, it is crucial not just Biblically but to all of culture. As Christ is the ‘Amen’ to the Father (Revelation 3:14) the ways of my people are the ‘Amen’ to Him: the bidden and necessary response. (No question arises as to whether we have this duty, the only uncertainty is whether we will render it: participate in the Order, give what is owed.)
Among these facts is a final but key point: ordinarily, given his proximity to me (he lives just over the border) the one whom I have been calling an enemy is not an enemy at all: he is my neighbour. But his decision to stay in that role depends as much on me as on him (on my own willingness to be, to him, neighbour and not enemy).
Our great trouble in the West is thus a startlingly simple failure, the failure to join up the few axioms just listed with the most salient fact of modern history,
“the cultural divide in the modern West.”
Vivek Ramaswamy on X (17 April 2024)
It is an historical oddity that one culture has come out of the other, that the ‘foreign’ opposition has come from no foreign place but has arisen within the original culture – via people accepting premises that counter those of the tradition. The ‘progressive’ culture aims to progress beyond the tradition; the choice to go ‘left’ is not to go ‘right’
but to go in the opposite direction. From this has developed an entire counter-culture.
But the original culture has gone nowhere; it has been weakened (usually by withholding its amen – playing to the counter-culture cheering it on for doing just that) and it has been diminished, but it has not been dissolved in any way by the rise of the new. Can it be denied that these cultures exist, that over the past century, especially the past sixty years, two opposed cultures, two actual ‘peoples’ whose ways of life are directly opposed, have come to exist, here, under a single government? Two cultures born of history came from the womb, so to speak, each with a foot in the other’s face, like Jacob and Esau:
“The children struggled together within [their mother, who] said, ‘… why is this happening to me?’ … And the Lord said to her, ‘Two nations are in your womb,….’”
Genesis 25:22–23
In the West, however, the trouble has been that each culture (fighting just to govern itself in its own way) has chosen to treat the other as undeserving of that right. – Why? Does one brother hate the other so much that he would deny the other the very means of life he demands for himself?
No, he fights him for a very banal reason: there is only one crown. Where there is only one crown how can two heads wear it? If there is only one set of instruments (to be adjusted so that Jacob’s children can become whole, strong, and fulfilled by Jacob’s grasp of the Order) – one school board, one set of laws, one college of physicians, etc. – what is guaranteed in this situation is a bitter fight for control of those means. But as political philosopher Russell Hittinger notes,
“in pluralistic societies [countries “like Canada and the United States, which are deeply pluralistic”] it is essential to ensure that the organs of power are not commandeered by one group.”
Russell Hittinger, The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law
in a Post-Christian World (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003), 132
Yet the elementary thinking that dictates that fight – driven not by hatred but by ‘survival’, survival as a people, driven by the need to be, in the very manner urged by the Order – has destroyed the love of Canadians for each other.
Admittedly, there is something of a puzzle here. How could this antagonism not have arisen, if it is true, as I have insisted here and earlier, that people are under an obligation to their conception of the Order? The problem seems insoluble – the thinking that urges ‘soul violence’, unassailable. But that is not so; that thinking is defective because it prefers its self-regarding ‘iron-clad logic’ to the message of love coming straight from the Order – from a cosmic voice proclaiming human recognition. What we are called to is not strife but recognition, of what the late Jonathan Sacks called
“the dignity of difference.”
Jonathan Sacks, “The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations,”
Kenan Institute for Ethics Distinguished Lecture, Duke University (2007)
This is a message that was taught, first, by our own ancient tradition, but also by the brilliantly insightful form of Canada’s political system.
In the conclusion of this series, the two lessons, about the nature of man and the nature of our own system of governance, that dispel the riddles of the 2020s.
1. Regarding the justification that you hold a Biblical understanding of sexuality, the proposed Bill C-367 (“An Act to amend the Criminal Code”) seeks to remove religion as a defense. It would strike out of the Code the provision, under “Public Incitement of Hatred”, that now reads: “No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text;….”
2. The usual perception of these controversies is that one side is for an advance, the other side against it: the left is the for side, the right the against side. But in all of these ‘debates’ both sides are both for something and against something – and that they are not actual debates is proved every time the full set of issues (what each side both supports, for its good, and rejects, for what is wrong with it) are not brought out. If never aired, then never debated.
3. The changed rule: “6.3.2 Formal use of preferred first name for transgender or non-binary students under the age of 16 will require parental consent.”
4. Carl Trueman traces the centuries-long development of a strand of that cultural outlook in his study of the ideas behind the belief in non-binary gender: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020). In Trueman’s view this ‘development’ is “cultural amnesia” and marks a precipitous decline of coherence and meaning, led by figures who, for example, grant “priority … to inner conviction over biological reality”. But we should not miss the fact implicit in Trueman’s account. There are people who believe that very priority switch to be an advance: a deepening of meaning (since conviction means more to them than biology). It is amnesia for Trueman, but it is something like discovery for those participating in “the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West”. See Trueman, 19–20, 51–52.
