Isn’t our situation a clash of cultures (traditional culture & counter-culture)? How is such a thing resolved – can any culture ‘advance’ by removing another culture?

Canada is now home to two diametrically opposed cultures, yet neither is ‘at home’, since this collision-plan is a dedicated generator of conflict. But there is nothing wrong with opponent cultures. We have always known that other-people-whose-ways-we-reject is a feature of the world, not a problem to be fixed. Our sole task is to be who we are: people who do not visit on others the very interference we seek to be free of ourselves.

When people impose on others the effect of a conviction those others do not hold – do not hold because it is contra their fundamental understanding of things (for instance, the view that choosing your own sex is simply human lives unfolding as they should, it is just people being who they really are) – when, I am saying, a notion of ‘human Good’ such as that is foisted on a large sector of the population that does not share it (and if the children in that population are taught gender fluidity in schools, encouraged by School Board and teachers to explore

“their sense of being female, male, a combination of both, or neither,”

Toronto District School Board, Facilitating Critical Conversations:
A Teaching Resource for Challenging Oppression in Toronto District School Board Classrooms (2024), 26

then this outlook is indeed imposed on people), this interferes in the lives of this second group. In a democracy, this kind of misery can virtually always be reciprocated; a journalist on the left writes,

“Florida has shown how far some states will go to make life unlivable for queer and trans people.”

Melissa Gira Grant, “Say It: Ron DeSantis’s Anti-LGBTQ Regime Is Crumbling,”
The New Republic (13 March 2024)

The attempt to dominate those who do not share your group’s conception of the human good treats them as inferiors, lesser people undeserving of the privilege you claim for your kind: the luxury of living in a society ordered around your most fundamental beliefs. This is genuinely wrong in Canada, a country whose own Human Rights Act spells out that

“all individuals should have an opportunity equal with other[s] to make for themselves the lives that they are able and wish to have.”

The Canadian Human Rights Act, S.C. 2017, c. 13

The law has even ventured to explain why that desire deserves such support, by acknowledging the special importance of a person’s identification with that way of life based on

“deeply felt internal and individual experience.”

The government’s “definition clause” for legal use of the term ‘gender identity’,
“Legislative Summary of Bill C-16: An Act to amend the
Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code”

Does a member of Cree culture have experience of this kind, settling the way she identifies herself; does a Christian? It would seem so. All of this would appear to make it crystal clear that controlling the population that does not subscribe to your conception of human good, compelling those people to fall in with its directives when their lives have a very different inclination, is a gross violation of a central Canadian principle, which affirms that to treat those who do not believe what you do as people undeserving of a home (a place in which “to make for themselves the lives that they are able and wish to have”) is a breathtaking display of moral arrogance that deserves utter condemnation.

The notion that this is a Canadian principle, definitive of Canada, is not fanciful. The plan of Confederation in 1867 was to prolong and protect ways of life that people were already living in the colonies to be united; this was stipulated by Hector-Louis Langevin as a condition of entertaining the idea of the new nation. Langevin, notably, is the man whose name the current Prime Minister has wiped from government buildings for his endorsement of the residential schools programme – an erasure by Mr. Trudeau with a notable irony. Indigenous children were taken, isolated, from their families and given an entirely Western schooling to drive out their own culture (by “separating them in the way proposed,” explained Langevin in 1883, “they acquire the habits and tastes … of civilized people” and cease to be “savages”) – but let us ask what marks this as an evil? A short answer is, the Silver Rule (do not do unto others what you would not wish done to you) conjoined to a profound such wish that had been perfectly expressed eighteen years earlier by Langevin himself. The founder of Canada who most needs remembering, re the stain of the residential schools, is Langevin.

Hector-Louis Langevin in 1865

“We are told: ‘You wish to form a new nationality.’ Let us come to an understanding on this word,…. What we desire and wish is to defend the general interests of a great country…, by means of a central power.”

The new country would be “great” simply for embodying the principle that Langevin next announces, which is that this new nation’s flag would fly over the homelands of “different” peoples who would be left alone to be what they already were, people in charge of their own societies.

“On the other hand, we do not wish to do away with our different customs, manner, and laws; on the contrary, those are precisely what we are desirous of protecting in the most complete manner by means of Confederation.”

Hector-Louis Langevin (1865), in Canada’s Founding Debates, ed. Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentler,
& William D. Gairdner  (University of Toronto Press, 2003), 235

It could not be more clear. Journalist Douglas Todd writes,

“common sense leads me to find it absurd when people suggest Canada or B.C. have ‘no culture’.”

Douglas Todd, “Is Canada a Blank Slate, With No Culture?” Vancouver Sun (14 March 2015)

His reflex is right. If in Canada there exists, as there has continued to do since its founding, a communal way of life designed to train the raw human behaviour (a kind of wild vegetation) of its own people into a productive (a good) condition … via schooling (moral education included), work, marriage, … these institutions each imposing duties to obtain their benefits, … duties being limits and norms encouraged and reinforced both by public opinion and actual laws (schooling is mandatory, late-night partying disturbs the peace, etc.), then, this is a culture. The people don’t have to worship at some church of identity with a published creed to possess an identity and know who they are. It is not mission statements that establish who Canadians are; the thing is demonstrated in the commitments of their way of life, the pattern of their actions. When Canada was formed it joined together, in a federation, four colonies that possessed just such a culture (at that time a highly comparable kind of culture, as was duly noted: colonies “inhabited by men of the same sympathies”).¹

Such a culture includes one thing more: an originating belief about the point of that shaping of behaviour. Cultures, say philosophers, are engines of ‘practical rationality’ (which is just the reasoning that to get that you have to do this). It is not necessary to turn everyone into Aristotle; people can belong to a culture as children do: as good-will participants accepting the guardrails of the culture not in stupid conformity but with feelers out, actively testing the substance of the way of life. (And, if obedient to its Tao, a culture will inevitably move some of its guardrails – tearing down the rail against votes for women and indigenous people, etc.) Yet, someone in this culture will be able to give its rationale – as in the perfect explanation of marriage offered by William Blackstone in his review of British common law, a strand in much Canadian law (marriage is a cultural device by which a certain “natural impulse must be confined and regulated,” etc.). Without such a rationale, hovering behind the law but revealable, the culture would lack the element that gives it a coherent shape.

Somewhere in every ordered society is a narrative, argument, or ‘myth’ that explains why we exist, where we came from, what it means to be Egyptians, Athenians, Cheyenne: a genuine vision, of some sort, that lays out what we are to be. Beyond that story, the culture is the parcel of forms developed so that we could be it.

But in 2024 you cannot read through that rational, ancient plan of society without hearing the complaint against it: if the objection to constraints and limits is not coming from your own heart it is coming from the protests of people all around you. There is actually another way to conceive of culture in its relation to life – but I should postpone description of it so as to reach the main point, which is this.

The cultural vortex of the 2020s is the active replacement of the above conception of culture with that other and contrary conception of culture. We are in the midst of a kind of slum removal, where the ‘slum’ is the traditional way of life and understanding I have just outlined (which, it bears recalling, the new “nationality” or federation of Canada was tasked with “protecting in the most complete manner”). First the ancient row of tenements is judged horrible, inhuman, uninhabitable; then the wrecking crew arrives to clear the ground for something decent. First the old tradition – the European culture continuous from Canada’s founding (with its Western ideas) – is reassessed … and beliefs central to it are exposed as unjust and hateful; then comes the clean-up, the general repurposing of that culture’s institutions (marriage, schools, courts, science) to serve another way of life altogether.

The old culture, attacked from within by the new, marks an unexpected turning point in Canada’s history, but the same thing is happening in every Western nation. It is actually a turning point in Western history: a kind of medical crisis point, the point at which a disease might either finish the patient off (stripping Western culture of all social status) or, if the right treatment is found, peak and decline. (The ‘recovery’ of a patient is recovering the vital ways and powers he once commanded.) The three things to say about this are these. First, this conflict, this cultural revolution or disease, had to be. Second, it sorely tempts us to turn against the freedom that permitted it: to go illiberal, to think of separation and civil war, to betray ourselves. Defensive action is essential, I have said it is non-negotiable, but certain kinds of defense are fatal choices of treatment that guarantee a funeral.

And third, we who belong to the traditional culture now being demolished and replaced are not victims of this revolution because we are ahead of this problem; our past lets us see beyond the moment. We see, as the wreckers do not, the meaning of the existence of contrary ways of life: people who have elaborated conceptions of human life in flagrant indifference to our standards is an ordinary description of the world, and reality does not come as a ‘problem’. The indigenous people of Canada who did not assimilate were not the “Indian problem” but people already flourishing, heeding the call of their own ways – and soon forced by a manifest assault on those ways into a

“political struggle to live with dignity as self-determining peoples with their own cultures [and] laws.”

Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report
of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015), 184

Other-people-different-from-us is one of those facts of the Order that we are to accept; our task is simply to be who we are. As I have explained in two of these essays (II and III), being the people we are is an absolute requirement, one that does mean freeing ourselves (raising shield and spear) from domination by those intent on replacing our culture with theirs. (“Without us the world would not make sense.”) But it does not mean extending that spear into another person’s house, making those people tiptoe around it in compliance with our ways. The only riddle of the 2020s is to understand our situation correctly (seeing how horribly familiar it is) and to grasp how a member of your culture, guided by its star, would respond to it. My proposal will be that clear-sighted people will cast, on our moment, the exact sort of vision adopted in the formation of this country, set out by Langevin in 1865. Are we or are we not a confederation of distinct cultures? Do we buy the talk of Langevin (now that it might really cost us something) or do we reject it?

I

First, this conflict had to be. It was virtually inevitable that a rejection of the traditional culture would arise in the West. An essentially Christian Western culture, expanding its ideal of man to include liberty (manifesting the love of Christ, who was so little against the “ungodly” [Rom. 5:6] that he died for them), ‘produced’ revolutionaries by not suppressing them. Dissenters were free to spring up and their rejection of this constraining tradition would have to take the form of attack: commitment to driving the traditional culture out of the dissenter’s own society. How, asked the emboldened rebel, could his rebel culture survive (when its ways were against the old culture) except by overpowering and replacing that culture? The renegade culture’s chance of existence was a zero-sum game.

It is crucial to explain this simple matter of logic, which people escape from by instantly categorizing all talk of the ‘destruction/replacement of traditional culture’ as a sign of hysteria – as (if I may quote one such person) “this culture-war bullshit” (Grant, “Say It”). On the contrary, it is fairly elementary logic. Because, for example,

Heteronormativity creates and upholds a social hierarchy based on sexual orientation,

S.v. “Heteronormativity,” Wikipedia

heteronormativity is evil (Wikipedia anticipates that you right away spot this defect). What is evil, by common consent, must be uprooted, got rid of, replaced with what is good – so, replace hierarchy with its opposite: complete equality, non-hierarchy. Notice, however, that traditional culture is inherently hierarchical. It is born of a higher Order that urges human beings to recognize it as supreme, and that elevates into pre-eminence the optimal or ideal arrangement of resources (that stable sexual union that both produces new people and cares for them in perpetuity) – so, indeed, yes, ‘heteronormativity’.

Well, if hierarchy is bad, for setting up a preference for heterosexual unions, for rewarding conformity and socially discouraging departures from this norm (the actual point of Florida’s weirdly named “Don’t say gay” policy), then the culture conceived around it is evil, and what is evil must be eliminated. – Culture-wars B.S.? … What possible compromise is there? How could hierarchy be ‘adjusted’ to continue our trend of gentle moral progress when it is the problem? The voices in the street are not gentle. “Western culture” is someone’s way of life, and it’s “got to go!” It is a slum.

Ours is not a culture that is becoming peacefully unmoored from its foundations but is, with leadership from its cultural officers, actively destroying them.

David Humbert, “Desire and the Politics of Anti-culture:
René Girard and Philip Rieff on the Mystique of Transgression,” 1

Intentionally destroying, because the inherited institutions, the very terminology they use (‘marriage’ by the old definition), are all tools for constructing a ‘bigoted’, ‘discriminatory’, nay-saying culture. From the standpoint of the rival culture, the inherited culture and its vision of man, its rationale, must be replaced.

Much as I would like to move to the two concluding points it would be a serious omission not to describe this rival culture, which is a new type of culture. To an extent it is just one more culture of the type I began by describing (a way to generate the human Good as members of the alternative culture see it). It possesses a vision of that absolute and has institutions to promote it (marriage, universities, language, all repurposed to its own end). But there is one feature of all the cultures I have referenced in these essays (Athenian, Persian, Egyptian, Cheyenne) that it rejects: the transcendence of their Source.

What those cultures answered to is not simply what was ultimate to Athenians, what was highest in its people’s estimation; it is what was ultimate in itself, objectively – expressly not on account of mere people. In the Western tradition the highest motto of government is “Dieu et mon droit,”2 a formula that opens with God. The nation that is oriented to the divine takes direction from it; because ‘life’ is God’s invention, ‘living’ stands revealed as ‘becoming a human being’, fulfilling an ideal of humanity that is written into the Order. Traditional cultures were means of conforming society to this ideal and did not hesitate to spell out the norms of human fulfilment. – The new form of culture rejects exactly this kind of absolute, making it even more deeply antithetical to Canada’s traditional culture than Persia was to Athens. It detests the veneration of such ‘ultimacy’ (raised higher than the desires of actually living people!) and it reviles the equation of ‘fulfilment’ with conformity (only individuals can be fulfilled!). One thinker summarizes the new way thus:

Every previous human culture had a bedrock of authority that is absent today: “True barbarism has never existed before. We are witnesses to the first true barbarians.”

David Glenn, citing Philip Rieff, “Prophet of the ‘Anti-Culture’,”
Chronicle of Higher Education (11 November 2005)

We are at least twenty years beyond the moment when Philip Rieff recognized that history has delivered an entirely new kind of culture distinguished by “its rejection of any and all visions of sacred order.” This culture is by now fully operational all around us.

Just ask, without a transcendent Order what is a human ideal? It is a constraint fashioned by dead men, one that people today reject – and it is a condemnation or derogation of all ‘contemporary’ ways of living (which are, by design, dismissive of inherited norms). In the new culture there is no Ideal to which to conform: there are only the various ways of life you are left to explore when you break the spell of all fictional realities (the Tao, Ma’at, the moral law, the Great Spirit and Master of Life), at last learning to say, There is only us; there is nothing but history, the record of what people choose to do. The new culture shapes people, in fact, by engaging the hearts of individuals (tapping into that “deeply felt internal and individual experience”), without reference to any terminal vision or orienting star.

At some moment not long ago Western societies reached the tipping point of a centuries-long cultural revolution that had steadily attracted generations of adherents to this alternative way of seeing. (Again, they could sign on without any of this theory but its many theorists – Freud, Sartre, Foucault – were heavily read). What we are seeing today is not a Wokeness from out of the blue but the rapid flowering of confidence (reached by testing our ‘armed Athena’, who proved docile) that the changes wanted can now be made: the institutions are amenable, the new culture has won, Canada has dropped the notion of adherence to a tradition.

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada…. [In Canada we] search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.”

Justin Trudeau, cited in Guy Lawson, “Trudeau’s Canada, Again,” New York Times Magazine (8 December 2015)

What we are seeing in the 2020s is the consistent application, in every corner of society, of an alternative conception of man and world that was carefully elaborated in the thought of Rorty, Marcuse, Dewey, Nietzsche, popular Romantic poets, Marx, Rousseau (we could name many more). Philosopher of law Russell Hittinger notes how 20th-century popes were alerting Catholics to the rise of alternative

“anthropologies that regard the ‘human’, given by nature, as raw data, a [mere] outline of what man might be when he is made ‘specifically human’ in the ‘historical and cultural sphere’”

Russell Hittinger, “The Three Necessary Societies,” First Things (June 2017), 22, 24

– which is to say, a sphere of history and culture that invents the human it prefers, a design inscribed in nothing but will. What a society is to call ‘human’ (or ‘a woman’, ‘marriage’, ‘a person’, ‘a child’) is for us to decide. That is not the view of anyone who believes this world was made by God. And in 2024 we can already see that, once we have picked our answer to, say, ‘what is a woman’, what we call experts and scientists will evolve analogously, to protect the rights of these women against the misgendering, disrespect, and endangerment to be expected from the witless “deplorables” who have planted themselves on the wrong side of history (the age that is meant to sink into oblivion). In the new society experts will be what they need to be (scientists as fact police).

It is important to underline that the absolute conception of man in the new culture is non-substantive: man is ‘as he defines himself’. The way of life is people making their lives what they want them to be (so far as circumstance, technology, and funding permit), since man himself is nothing. The project of the new culture is therefore not to form a way of life (this was Rieff’s point in calling it an “anti-culture”): it is to allow ways of life, … especially by demolishing the major barrier to this that is the old culture – a culture that was designed, truly, to divert people from these very tendencies, through its affirmation that man, inherently, is something.

That these two cultures, then, are fundamentally contrary – opponent cultures not just guaranteed to collide with one another but designed that way – is not a view deserving scorn but a fact. It is, however, an especially unattractive fact in that it entirely derails the narrative of ever-increasing moral progress that won the anti-culture all its public support. The forcing-together of two cultures with directly contrary rationales (‘merging’ being impossible) – with people increasingly robbed of their chosen way of life by having another culture’s verdicts imposed on them (by federal acts, courts, school boards, professional associations, etc.) – is not moral progress. It is a form of hostile invasion: culture war of the especially repugnant zero-sum kind.

You merely have to ask yourself, what should you think about Athenian customs the moment it is revealed that they violated a taboo of the Persian way of life? – The answer is, nothing; or rather, to give the more exact response offered by Alasdair MacIntyre,

“that will depend upon who you are and how you understand yourself. This is not the kind of answer which we have been educated to expect…, but that is because our education … has by and large presupposed what is in fact not true, that there are standards of rationality, adequate for the evaluation of rival answers to such questions, equally available, at least in principle, to all persons, whatever tradition they may happen to find themselves in….”

Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988), 393

The ‘progressive’ culture condemning my culture is not in fact progressive. It was not progress when Persia obliterated the temple of Athena. Progress is the non-destructive improvement of a way of life. Satisfying the Suffragettes who cried “Votes for women!” made the traditional culture progress, but the slogan of, say, an extremist of the 1960s, who tells us that

“a … mania of the time was ‘smash monogamy’,”

David Gilbert, Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground,
and Beyond (Oakland: PMPress, 2012), 125

promises change of an entirely different order: progress as the replacement of a culture. But what culture advances when it removes another culture?

A standard of lifelong marriage, of heteronormativity, of ‘cisnormativity’ (accepting the sex you were born with), etc., is not an injustice of any kind in the terms of my culture, by its understanding of reality – so how could it be progress to ‘smash’ it? In my culture the future is binary, simply because the above (traditional) standards are a rational, good, indeed superior interpretation of the Order: of how things are actually and sensibly arranged, with human welfare given careful attention (heteronormativity is not hate, hate is an evil). Nor is it unjust or bizarre that people like me fall back on this defense: a violation of decency easily spotted by rising to a more universal way of identifying injustice, which eclipses my culture. – Whose way is this – man’s way? There is no cultureless man. To a degree cultures overlap on justice, but all the ways of framing justice are internal to someone’s culture.

“Conceptions of justice and of practical rationality … characteristically confront us as closely related aspects of some larger, more or less well-articulated, overall view of human life and of its place in nature.”

MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 389

It follows from what I am saying, however, as I hasten to add, that heteronormativity is unjust to a person whose culture is the vehicle of that new view of human life and reality that arose, in the West, to escape the constraints of the traditional culture – and that Canadians were free to believe in and take up for themselves. People have presumed, rashly and ignorantly, that this is the new Canada; it is not. It cannot be, as explained with perfect clarity by Langevin. The conflict-ridden mix of opponent cultures vying for control in the Canada of our day is an illness that the country is undergoing. This mix was never an impossibility; indeed, that we could arrive here was, in a way, foreseen when Canada was founded. As our first Prime Minister observed,

“No one can look into futurity and say what will be the destiny of this country. Changes come over nations and peoples in the course of ages.”

John A. Macdonald (1865), in Canada’s Founding Debates, 281

No one could predict the rise of the counter-culture (it has no settled name: call it what you will), but that it could happen was predicted. The question now, for the whole country, is, who are we?

Are we people dedicated to forbidding others the luxury (seized for ourselves) of living in a society ordered around the fundamental beliefs we share with that mass of people with whom we identify? Are we people who claim that those others have no title to a human way of life (one expressive of the commitments that make their existence meaningful) – no right because their commitments are inferior to ours? (“Hateful,” defined in the terms of one culture only, is the new “savage”.) The human way to live a human life is culturally (in the constraining forms of institutions, laws, language, schools, professions, standards … all framed according to some people’s view of human life): is one culture to be the victor, with control of laws and institutions the spoils? Are they entitled to this and we denied it? Is the misery of reciprocated interference in each other’s lives the normal state of 21st-century life (are we helplessly locked into this pattern by history, given what people in years past have both freely permitted and freely chosen)?

Canadians are people now handed a disturbing diagnosis: Canada is suffering from a disease – a disease of the form that afflicts states: a fear-driven feedback cycle of injustice. That what is going on among us, and widely, is injustice is strictly undeniable by any Canadian who understands Langevin (when still true to the vision of liberty). But Langevin’s principle is more deeply rooted here than we think. A person who extols the Western impetus that “led the way in civilization by spreading the great principle of freedom”3 is making no mistake if he sees that what is great here is not the West but its subservience to the Tao (while the West spread liberty it was also spreading the disease I have described) … and sees also that, there alongside the ‘West’, ‘leading the way in civilization’, were ‘aboriginal’ tribes . The principle I am identifying with Canada is so great a principle that it is also indigenous.

“It is agreed that we will travel together, side by each, on the river of life … linked by peace, friendship, forever. We will not try to steer each other’s vessels.”

Principle signalled by the Haudenosaunee two-row wampum belt,
symbolizing an agreement of mutual respect

“[The French traders] were good people. We could depend on their word, and we trusted and respected them. They did not interfere with us nor attempt to break up our tribal organizations, laws, customs. They did not try to force their conceptions of things on us to our harm.”

Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau tribes of British Columbia,
“Memorial” to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Premier of the Dominion of Canada (1910)

Are we not people who see that nothing in the creation of a nation, and nothing in the rationale of a culture, confers on one culture the right to suppress another culture that is different from it – not even if it is the very antithesis of its way of life.

1. Canada’s Founding Debates, 182.

2. “Dieu et mon droit” (God and my right) is the motto of the British monarchs. Droit is both ‘law’ and ‘right’ in the sense of ‘rights’ (revealing their interrelation). The motto had at first a personal meaning as the watchword of Richard I asserting a God-given claim to his kingdom and his possessions in France, but even in that context it betokens more: his right has a source, others may claim rights, and the law (via the king) is the guarantor of such claims.

3. William Lawrence (1866), in Canada’s Founding Debates, 127.