Worth the Fee to Read It

There are many in society who now hold to the idea that the world we have built is too complex to be “taken apart” and redesigned. They hold, as a result, that the best we can do is to make many small changes — small, so that if we make a poor choice, we can change away from it, and many, so that collectively these “add up” to redesigning the whole.

Add to this the concept that society can be perfected — or that the people in society can be perfected — and you get classical liberalism. Add to that the notion that experts know better than the common man or woman what needs to be done and how to do it, and you get modern liberalism, in its range of orientations from the socialist utopians through social democrats, through the power-and-influence band, to the social moulders and corporatists. In other words, today’s Republicans and Democrats in the USA, today’s Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the UK, and today’s five parties in Canada…

Some of us disagree with the very notions of liberalism. As with Hippocrates, we begin with the principle “Above all, do no harm”: change should therefore be slow and careful (yet not wholly forestalled). Yet we stand with the people, believing them capable of understanding complex issues and making good choices about them if they are treated as competent adults rather than children to be babied by the nanny state mentality. Experts thus advise, they do not control. From the span of social order and justice (the original CCF) to the indigenous Canadian Tory, this span is currently but a fragment found (almost exclusively) in two of our parties. But it is there.

With that, let’s turn to the question of the purpose of government.

Those of us who are not liberal generally agree that the purpose of government is the provisioning of peace and order, and clarity around the rules of engagement — this is the element of justice expressed not as equality (the liberal idea) but as fairness (the same rules for all) — and the capitalisation of infrastructure needed but not yet a viable commercial investment. We may disagree on the span of items requiring infrastructure investment, and on the number of rules of engagement that may be required, but, unlike the liberals in our midst, we do not try to invoke change beyond these limits.

At the moment, for instance, it is necessary to rethink the fundamental piece of infrastructure that is our socio-economic model. This is based in (a) the uninterrupted flow of cheap energy (underlying the expectation of endless growth), (b) a disregard for locality of origin of products and services — communities, in other words, should not be encouraged to be sufficient unto themselves (globalisation), (c) a notion that despite obvious regional differences around a continental scale country one’s location should not matter (equalisation) and (d) a redistribution model for taxation expressed through the funding of many “programs” providing services (the nanny state model of extensive welfare provisioning). On these principles we have built sprawling suburbs with no attention to transportation infrastructure beyond roads, which are provided at a market discount relative to all other forms for people and goods movement, to take but one consequence.

When the environmentalists in our midst start to talk about global warming, carbon reduction, etc., it is the consequences of these fundamentals that they point to. Thus, whether we are dealing with the Gordon Campbell Government’s decision that British Columbia will have a carbon tax (to change usage patterns) and a carbon trading scheme, or the potential for their national equivalents being bruited about by various people supposedly in the know about Liberal Party policy plans, the solutions on offer are all designed to attack the consequences of the fundamental infrastructure of society that we have built.

How, for instance, retirement savings and provisioning is to be handled in a society that no longer grows at a rate sufficient to afford endless growth in nanny state activities is apparently left to the typical answer: “Oh, you’ll do it somehow”. Ayn Rand, in her novel Atlas Shrugged, showed how this was the underlying expectation of every initiative to throw sand in the gears to achieve “social purposes”. (What she failed to examine was the question of whether we needed a new fundamental infrastructure in the first place.)

Endless growth, you see, leads to endless demand. Only in a society which is fundamentally conceived of as as allowing initiative to flourish but which may not grow will our innovations overcome our limitations without setting off year-after-year redistribution of resources.

Take government paperwork. I spend, depending on the quarter, six to eight times the time and energy handling regulations and reporting requirements for my tiny company as I do on managing that company. That is utterly ridiculous: were I to have the money to retire today, I would shut the company’s doors immediately. Why contribute one more minute of my life to bureaucracy, practically none of which benefits me? Yet the real losers from that decision would be other productive people who today can engage me on solving their problems — and to whom I would be unavailable at any price. Stagnation would replace change. Multiply that attitude, and whole communities lose their spark and die to subsist on the dole of government programs, all of which suck more life out of them than initiative would do, and which demand more money and more bureaucratic “feeding” as time goes on. The weeds take over the garden and starve the plants of life.

That is what a carbon tax would do. Forget the rhetoric of “revenue neutrality”: how can it be? Who pays, and when, changes from today — the burden is shifted. Worse, it is shifted into places we have consciously and deliberately disadvantaged by limiting their options already — and there is, despite the speechifying of politicians and experts, no real set of choices for the automobile and truck dependent far-flung villages and towns, and suburbs, of the Canadian landscape. We at one time had alternatives which we systematically starved into extinction. They no longer exist. Nor — under our current laws — will they easily come back.

Meanwhile, since no existing taxes are outright discontinued — all proponents of the social engineering that is carbon taxation merely diddle rates rather than make it impossible to collect further taxes of other types — these will soon become revenue accretive (to pay for more programs demanded to “relieve the suffering” brought about by the destruction of value in motor-dependent communities by this tax). This isn’t just sand in the gears of the economy, as one writer has put it: these are a means to outright stop innovation that isn’t part of an “approved path”. “Grind to a stop, we will.”

You can kiss your savings for retirement good-bye, then.

Let’s stop diddling around the edges. The disease is liberalism and the infrastructure it built of an economic model requiring endless growth. To “do no harm” these days we must detox our society, so to speak: we must wean it from dependency back to self-sufficiency, and wipe out taxes and programmes left, right and centre rather than add to the pile.

The end of cheap energy will take care of most of the issues with carbon emission. Going beyond that into changing what we tax to influence behaviour must start with what we stop doing and stop demanding those of us who create economic results must do. Otherwise we will starve ourselves — and, two decades hence, see if that wasn’t a highly accurate statement of our impoverishment under the weight of a state we can’t afford without the endless growth model cheap energy provided — instead of free up the initiative space and resources needed to change our fundamentals.

Sometimes the Tory advances basic change with many follow-on effects to correct a path that has gone fundamentally wrong. This is one of those times. For without such a diagnosis, this patient won’t make it.

First, detox the junkie (don’t give him or her a place to shoot the drugs into their body “under supervision”). All three Insite studies show that that medical principle holds despite the promotion of “harm mitigation”. So, too, we must detox the junkie that is the body public, whose answer to all questions is “what’s the Government doing?”

Don’t expect me to support you, Mr. Campbell, in next year’s election, unless you get cracking on what should have come with your carbon tax. As for M. Dion, I’d expect you to get the picture, too — except you’ve spent your entire working life with your lips firmly coupled to the public teat. Take your carbon tax proposal and go away.

We don’t go out of our way to teach history. Such “history” as is taught today is really social studies: forcing the peoples of other times and places into a convenient matrix that reinforces current social norms. We’re neither interested in truly exploring other times, nor do we encourage the notion that maybe, in difference, there is something to be learned, nor the idea that perhaps to take this step forward, society also took a different step backward.

Know Where You Come From …

Western society today is anything but monolithic when it comes to religious belief — the Protestant revolution, scientism in the nineteenth century and a feeling of guilt surrounding autochthonous and immigrant communities saw to that — but the reality is that if you look back to 1000 CE you find, in the West, a compact, unified, Latin Catholic society. These are our ancestors: projects such as the combined National Geographic/IBM genographic project are demonstrating the concentration of genetic paths in Western society, not just in Europe but in the settler communities of the Americas, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. We — mostly — remain within our compact society to this day.

I bring up religion because of an experience I had in 1991. On the Côte d’Azur for the first time, my family and I made our way to a little Provençal hill village — Mougins — for a late lunch. After a fine meal on the square, we wandered across to the Church on the other side and pulled open the door. A millennium of must, dust, soot (from the candles) and the stink of people over the centuries rolled over us. (This is why I had come!)

The building was in the oldest style of Western architecture, when the West was first starting to set its own style. (This style — Romanesque — spread almost as wildfire across Europe in the space of a few decades.) This church betrayed both the recent occupation of the area by the forces of the Caliphate and the older Levantine Latin Orthodoxy that preceded the long transformation of the Western Church: it remained a “world cave” of the Levant, common to Orthodox, Monophysite and Nestorian Christians, Jews and the residual Samaritans, Muslims, Zoroastrians and Parsees, and the like, where the building is all interior (the outside merely creates the cave but is not really worthy of decoration, and windows are small, merely to allow a little light in, but not to illuminate the space). Yet the West can be seen: the ceiling was not rounded, to close the space in, but peaked and drew upward to the infinite; the interior designs drew the eye up; even in the stonework images of men, angels and the Lord appear, the graven images forbidden in the Levant and replaced by iconostases and geometric designs. This was a poor church, and had been from its creation — but it spoke to the birth of a new people. In only a century more, the foundations of generations-long projects to build soaring cathedrals would be laid.

Look how much is embedded in this simple description: comparative art and architecture, the sense of self of a people, theological history, style, substance and passion, comparisons to others who were not of this society, even though from one generation to the next, in this part of the world, Latin (as it evolved into Provençal, Savoyard and the language of the oc, then was taken over by the langue d’oil of French and the Italian dialect spoken there only 150 years ago was pushed out through centralized education) has never been lost: one generation has always understood the previous and the next. Yet the presumptions of Classical Rome in its Latin, of Levantine Orthodoxy in the Latin of, say, a St. Augustine or a St. Benedict, and of Western Mediaeval Latin are as different as night and day: each is part of a self-contained society.

For those of the Renaissance to throw away the learning of the High Mediaeval — that of our society — in favour of the works of Classical Rome simply because Cicero and his kin never said ego habeo factum and instead used feci was a ridiculous loss and rejection of self, especially since that assertion of the self and the worth of the person is part of what makes the West the West. But from then to now our society remains riven by currents of denying what it is, what makes it unique, valuable and (from time to time) great, and therefore why doing what is needful to preserve it rather than changing just anything and everything on a whim is wrong, and so the rear guard of those who would conserve the West — true Tories, one and all — against the leftward drift of liberalism continues.

… and Where You Are Going

So much political and economic writing — goodness knows, I’ve contributed my own share of it! — leaves the historical in the dust. Liberalism or leftism (at the time of the French Revolution the two would have been synonymous) is resolutely anti-historical: all that matters is the current situation, and there are no restraints other than the practical (not enough tolerance for debt “right now”, or too many other things pressing on us “right now”) placed on change.

Yet what that says is that we — and other peoples from other civilisations — are all fungible and malleable; that someone’s traditions are folklore and easily discarded. It is certainly true that individuals who emigrate and settle in the lands of a civilisation not their own by heritage can and do acculturate, often, after two or three generations, to the point where they have accepted their new home and its traditions not only as their own, but, in a peculiar sense, as their heritage. (It is what the French do with their process of educating future citizens, either in school or to prepare to take the citizenship test: one reaches a point where one can say, without irony, “Our ancestors, the Gauls”.)

Acculturation and blending in — the Diefenbakerian “unhyphenated Canadian” motif in our own national life — is one thing at an individual level. But, as George Grant, the Canadian Tory philosopher, noted, our love of the good, the true and the beautiful is rooted in love of self, of immediate family, of friends, of community, of nation … and thus of society. To reject the West and its traditions, then, is to demonstrate a lack of love for who you are. Philosophers have noted that you can have “love for the amorphous” (a “love of all humanity”, for instance), but only at the price of denying love for yourself as you are, love for friends and family, love for your community, etc.

To reach the amorphous, one must deny history. This is best done by removing it from serious study: burying it in scholastic detail where it is taught (universities), turning it into social studies (or removing it from the curriculum altogether) in the schools, treating questions of whether to preserve past buildings and existing inefficiencies in the urban fabric as an economic decision, etc. Thus we have our society as it exists today, with no concern for its past — or its future (witness that we have known since the 1970s [US President Carter was reviled for pointing it out!] that the days we are now coming into were inevitable, yet we continued to build as though tomorrow would not come).

Only through learning history fully will we find our way out and prosper again.