Our Debt, Our Socialism, Our Predicament

This is an excerpt from the end of Chapter One of The Trouble With Canada .. Still! (BPS Books, 2011)

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The National Debt Prison

          Predictably, in order to finance such  utopian schemes, it was Trudeau, as we shall see, who after opening the ideological door, also opened the floodgates of irresponsible deficit spending to pay for the most astonishing and rapid period of growth in government staffing and spending in Canadian history. We will soon see that on a per capita basis, this may have been the most astonishing non-wartime expansion of government power of any free nation in history. He inherited a total national debt of $18 billion from our entire first 100 years of confederation in 1968, and raised it to $200 billion (fully 46% of GDP) by 1982, his final year in office. In his most profligate year his government spent fully 51% more than it took in. [see a chart showing this debt load on page 45 of the book]

Trudeau cannot be blamed for all of this, of course. But he established our Statist deficit-spending trend, and in the sense that we are now incapable of paying off our national federal debt, Canada has never recovered. He was followed by a number of prime ministers who continued this reckless habit. By 2008 (and expressed in 2008 dollars since 1968) Canada had spent $1.5 trillion dollars in interest payments alone on our total federal debt, with little to show for it today except the principle amount of the debt. 

           Perhaps the greatest irony of such irresponsible spending in the name of equality, however, is this: there has never been a socialist State in history more “equal” politically or economically than our free Western societies. Commenting on this fact when the USSR, the world’s most catastrophic test-case for socialism was still in existence, Harvard’s Barrington Moore Jr. wrote that although the determinants of inequality are different – economic in free societies, and political in unfree ones, “there is as much inequality in the Soviet Union as the United States … the same holds true for China.” He failed to mention the small matter that more than tips the scales in favour of free societies: in addition to their inequalities, those two socialist States in total murdered some 80 to 100 million of their own legal citizens.[1] Statism can be very bad for your health.

The Call for “More Democracy”

            As the power of the top-down State intrudes more into everyday life, public moral consensus starts to decay, and trust in political leaders, to fragment. Then delegated sovereignty begins to seem alienating. At this point we start to hear calls for a little more “direct democracy,” or “people power.” Not surprisingly, it is usually the rise of the tax-hungry and wasteful Nanny State that spurs the call for more direct citizen input. That is what happened to me.

          In fact, this entire book was originally such a reaction, and in it I recommended various instruments of direct democracy because I was certain the traditional way of life of the Canadian people was being betrayed against their true will. We needed “citizen initiatives” such as the Swiss have used for a long time to pass laws directly and by-pass a parliament that refuses to do our will; we needed referendums to give national consent on profound constitutional changes; and we needed “recall,” an instrument used to fire politicians who lie or cheat or radically betray promises to those who elected them. Today I am less certain such measures would improve much, and they might even make things worse, because I think the culture is more fragmented than ever. More on this in the last chapter. 

               I am still persuaded, however, that over matters so fundamental as a root and branch change of an entire nation – especially with respect to its core community morality, its political institutions or constitution, its basic system of law, its language rights, or its ethnicity - all citizens must be deemed in principle to have a personal stake. In this respect, I think Canada’s all but forced regime-change from a nation in full exercise of its historical English rights and liberties, into a radical welfare State steered by the political ambitions of a single powerful man in the space of two decades (roughly mid-1960s to 1984), while constitutionally legitimate, was morally illegitimate. Indeed, fully one quarter of Canada’s citizens living in the province of Québec refused consent, and one million aboriginal Canadians were never asked.

               Even worse, when he came back from the dead for his 1980 election campaign, Trudeau intentionally misled the people of Canada (especially those of Québec) by strategically eliminating all talk of the constitutional changes he was planning. Indeed, his election strategists urged “that he keep silent on the constitution – the issue that he had insisted on stressing [in his losing campaign] the previous May.” [2] So when, on the night of May 16, during his speech to a hushed crowd in Montréal’s Paul Sauvé arena he said he wanted to “take action to renew the constitution,” virtually every Québecer present assumed he meant action to guarantee Québec’s provincial powers and the distinct society status within Canada it craved. Instead, he was plotting to suppress their hopes forever in favour of his national socialist dream. In effect, he lied point blank to the very people to whom he was appealing for support. He also lied to himself as he reluctantly betrayed and reversed his own principle of “reason before passion,” for he had finally accepted his handlers’ advice that political success comes from manipulation of the people’s emotions, and not from reason.[3] With tears in their eyes, they gave him a standing ovation. But it was a fraud:  the radical regime-change he was gunning for was never put on the public table, either by him or by the Liberal party. He knew very well that if he had told the people truthfully what he intended, he would never have been elected. What I am calling for is a reasoned re-assessment of these corrosive facts and of the immorality of the Handicap System under which we now live, and thus, plainly speaking, for a reactionary politics.

            There is a silenced majority of Canadians deeply upset by these changes who feel that all our political parties are now Statist in orientation - and that is why they only rarely see their deepest values reflected in ordinary media, by courts, or by government. They are discouraged at the number of special-interest groups and projects they are forced to support through tax dollars (such as the $1.3 billion spent since 1973 on radical feminist causes: see Chapter Ten). A silenced people will not march in the street every time they see something they don’t like. Neither have they the time to become experts in fields such as political economy. But they know what they think and feel: they’re fed up, cynical, and worst of all, they’re totally distrustful of the political process—a dangerous climate for any “democracy” because it leads to cocooning and “dropping out.” 

          The various terms explored so far - the French vs. English styles, the Top-down vs. Bottom-up tension, the Freedom System vs. the Handicap System, Common Law vs. Code Law – all of these paired terms are an attempt to set out a basic philosophical context in which policy can be considered in Canada. In effect, whenever someone offers a political opinion you have only to decipher which of these two conflicting visions of social governance is being promoted, and then the opinion falls more easily into place. The clash of these two styles has been the constant theme - everywhere felt, if not everywhere seen - of Canada’s struggle to govern itself and establish its institutions ever since the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. One of the impediments to a clear focus on the nature of this ongoing struggle is the existence of what I call the “popular illusions,” and it is to these we now turn

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[1] Barrington Moore Jr., Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism: USA, USSR & China (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1987).

[2] For a rendering of this, see Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canada Become a Sovereign People? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, 3^rd edition), Chap 8.  See also Janet Ajzenstat,The Once and Future Canadian Democracy (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). The latter argues that Canadians were fully and legally constituted as “a sovereign people” with the BNA Act of 1867. Very true. My view, however, is that although we were indeed properly constituted as a people in 1867 – it was a very good Constitution - Trudeau and the First Ministers imposed an illegitimate regime-change on us in 1982. They did it under the letter of the law, but not under its spirit - for the reasons explained in this book.

[3] In December of 1973 Trudeau told a TV audience: “Nine-tenths of politics appeals … to emotion rather than to reason. I’m a bit sorry about that, but this is the world we are living in, and therefore I’ve had to change.” (cited in Richard Gwyn, Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2006, p.24).  

The Charter Has Made Us Colonists Once Again

(This is a re-post from September 2007. It is extracted from a brief speech given that month at McGill University, which included this comment on what the Charter really did to our tradition of responsible government)   

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    The invention of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms was a backward step that returned Canadians to the kind of political condition they endured under their British masters during the colonial period. Let me explain. At that time those who governed the separate colonies in what was to become Canada were officials of the British Crown and were not responsible to the people but to the legislators, judges, and courts of Great Britain. So for decades Canadians fought hard to bring about “responsible government” - a term which in Canadian political history came to mean that government must be responsible to the elected representatives of the people. They were granted bits of this by the mid-1840s, and by Confederation in1867 the principle of fully responsible government was institutionalized in Canada. Accordingly, the laws made by their representatives in Canada’s Parliament were considered an expression of the will of the people and hence the supreme law of the land. (It bears noting, however, that the founders both of Canada and the United States of America considered even the will of their elected representatives supreme only with respect to new statute laws; to their minds, even statute laws were subordinate to the inherited legal rights, customs and traditions of the English speaking people since Magna Carta).

But this happy 115-year tradition was radically altered in 1982 with the introduction of a Charter that was declared “the supreme law of Canada,” and thus a law over and above the laws of Parliament and all other inherited and customary forms of law . The result has been that since then the will of the Canadian people as expressed in Parliament has been subordinated to and must now conform to interpretations of the law of the Charter. In short, the ultimate authority over the meaning of all existing laws and especially over any new laws made by Canada’s legislators is once again, as in colonial times, held by officials the people did not elect, who cannot be removed by the people, and who are not responsible to the people in any direct way.

In response to this charge, Canada’s judges maintain that parliamentarians still hold the ultimate authority because they can make and re-make laws. However, any balanced scrutiny of the record since 1982 will show an abdication, if not a judicial suppression of legislative freedom and responsibility: Parliamentarians are so fettered by the threat of actual or potential Charter scrutiny that they repeatedly defer to past court decisions or to anticipated Charter rulings prior to creating new legislation. The emphasis since 1982 has shifted from the question of what laws the people wish their elected representatives to make, to the question of what laws their judges will allow them to make.

Socialism and the Sexualization of the Masses

Excerpt from Ch. One, The Trouble With Canada ... Still! (BPS Books, 2010)

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             Modern Statists soon see that the people will easily accept an amazing amount of political, economic, and attitudinal control - and taxation - in exchange for greater private and personal freedom from a traditional morality increasingly caricatured as the old slave-master. That is why it seems almost a theorem of modern Statism that as real freedoms are diminished, sexual freedom increases. That is also why so much of modern democratic discourse centres on the rights and pleasures of the physical body, as distinct from former eras when it centered on political freedom and rights, and the freedom of the spirit.

             Consider how many of the radical egalitarian claims made in the name of democracy have to do with the body: abortion rights, homosexual rights, contraception rights, single-parent rights, transgendered rights, co-habitation rights, in vitro rights, and so on. We could say that the primary site for democratic dispute in modern times has shifted from conscience, to body, from morality to personal appetite, from very public differences over general moral rectitude, to personal will and sexual desires.

            Conclusion: The people tend not to complain about the historical losses of their political and economic freedoms, or of being controlled even in their speech and inner attitudes as long as they get complete sexual and personal bodily freedoms as a substitute. We no longer crave an escape from the body (the objective of so many in the past who saw human beings as slaves to their own appetites), but rather the opposite - immersion in its functions and pleasures as a democratic right. Accordingly, the past century has been witness to a perfect correlation between rising taxation, government regulation, and citizen dependency, paralleled by increasingly open sexual expression and claims of “sovereignty” over the body. The old spiritual ecstasy in contemplation of transcendent spiritual meaning (an ultimate meaning higher than, and beyond the reach of the State), is a goner. Instead, we may think of the sexualized democratic State as a political entity that strives through the offer of substitute physical ecstasy to incorporate transcendence into itself. That is to say, by means of a generalized and open sexualization of the masses (which must include a vigorous moral and legal attack on the former restrictive biologically-based natural sexual order as “discriminatory” and “anti-democratic”) the democracies of the West have sought to resolve the great political problem of the missing moral and spiritual transcendence in secular societies. This was a move that entailed a certain loss of our real freedoms.

How Canada Opted for Libertarian Socialism

This is an excerpt from Chapter One of The Trouble With Canada ... Still! (BPS Books, 2011)

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        As it happened, in his very person Trudeau embodied the French and English styles described above, for he had a French-Canadian father, and a Scottish mother. Canadian scholars burn a lot of energy debating whether Trudeau was a “socialist” or a “libertarian” and assume the two things are contradictory. For he famously said that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” But he also entrenched coast-to-coast radical equalization policies in his Charter. Here was a man very comfortable with multiple mistresses, with legislating homosexual rights, and who, even as Prime Minister did not mind taking off his clothes and sunbathing nude in mixed company.[1] He was a flamboyant libertarian who imposed the most controlling and expensive Statist regime on Canada in its history.

         So was he a socialist or a libertarian?

         My answer:  he was a “libertarian socialist,” and we Canadians all now live under his libertarian socialists regime. But how? How can this circle be squared? These things are opposites, aren’t they? Not really. It’s just the two labels are applied to different things. Think of what is individual, private, and physical: your body. Then think of what is public and general: a service like health care, or education, or a language right. Trudeau’s Charter combined and enabled these two conflicting styles by encouraging the separation of the private body, from the public body.  He was a libertarian in that he believed matters of the private body are no one else’s business. But when it came to goods he felt we all deserve from the State? Why, then a powerful system for providing, equalizing, and controlling access to such goods must be set up, and this would be done through taxation and fiscal bribery of the provinces; that is, through shared-cost programs or grants financed by exorbitant levels of individual taxation and unconscionable borrowing.  But what kind of socialism was it? What kind of libertarianism?    

His Socialist Conviction

             Trudeau was trying, as mentioned, to spin the wheel slowly, so that without realizing the change of direction, a Canadian would find himself “disembarking at a different island than the one he thought he was sailing for.” Fundamentally, on the public level, all that he did was clearly and resolutely substitute the French-Statist style for the English-Liberty style at every opportunity. By the time he was finished, Canada had changed from a fiscally stable, low-debt, reasonably free, only mildly-socialized nation under limited government, to one bending under huge public debt, highly managerial, and much more thoroughly socialist in its fiscal and social commitments. In his first and only major book, Federalism and the French Canadians, Trudeau clearly outlined this plan for Canada. At the time, most leftists argued that socialism could not successfully be planted in a nation such as ours with an existing federal system because the powers of governance in such nations are already divided as between central and local jurisdictions, and this division of powers is entrenched forever in their constitutions. So the general conclusion was that Canada was not and never would be a candidate for socialism. But Trudeau disagreed. He spoke admiringly of "that superb strategist, Mao Tse-Tung" who argued that “planting socialism” in various regional strongholds was "the very best thing." Accordingly, Trudeau developed the argument that systems such as Canada’s, contrary to the advice of all the theorists, can indeed be made socialist, and that our British-style federal system "must be welcomed as a valuable tool which permits dynamic parties to plant socialist governments in certain provinces, from which the seeds of radicalism can slowly spread"[2]

 His Libertarian Conviction

                 Trudeau probably wrote as much about individual rights as about socialism, and most scholars, and the public in general continue to believe these two political philosophies are in clear contradiction. Certainly, in their party platforms, socialists and libertarians are sworn enemies. But as mentioned, Trudeau’s genius was to combine these contraries by splitting their domains between what is inside our skin, and what is outside it: private body, and public body; person and polis.    

        He was throwing the Canadian people a bone by reducing the larger realm of freedom to which they had been accustomed, to their persons and bodies. But all the “public” freedoms having to do with economics and trade, private property, education, provision of health care, welfare, and so on, would fall under Statist regulation. He knew that if he could leave us unfettered and free with respect to most of our personal bodily pleasures, we would be fooled into believing we were still free in all our former ways. But those were precisely the freedoms he despised: the bottom-up political, economic, and legislative realities essential to the creation of the British-style that produced what he called scornfully, our "checkerboard federalism." To him, Canada’s parliamentarians were “just nobodies,” and “a crummy lot” (this, he uttered publicly in 1969).  The British Style was a reality that stood in the way of his French-style plan for Statism. So the system had to be changed. Trudeau was Canada’s Procrustes, doing his utmost to make a one-size-fits-all political bed for Canadian citizens.   

          His libertarian ethic, which is based on the idea that liberty means doing whatever you want as long as you don’t harm anyone else, was absorbed from typical English individualist thinking that was radicalized by John Stuart Mill in his canonical booklet, On Liberty (1859). It is called Mill’s “Harm Principle,” and it neatly articulated Mill’s simplistic argument for the privatization of morality that it has by now become the standard reasoning in defence of personal moral autonomy all over the Western world. Prior to Mill, throughout our long Judeo-Christian tradition, morality – codes of right and wrong behavior - had always been considered a community good. Moral standards reflected common religious and community standards. The metaphor was that we all live under a common moral bubble wherein by means of conviction, belief, and debate we sustain a common set of shalls and shall-nots that defines us morally … who we are.  Mill argued instead that we each ought to live under our own private self-defined moral bubble, and be concerned for others only if we bump into them. Then we just apologize, or negotiate a solution to any harm done.

         Mill failed to see that if you are completely alone in the universe it is true that you can do whatever you want, and call it “morality” if you like. But because there are no other human beings in existence and you cannot therefore help or harm anyone else, you can also call it Winnie-the-Pooh. However, as soon as someone else exists in addition to yourself, you must take into consideration whether your actions will help them, or harm them, now, or in the future, directly or indirectly. Suddenly, what was a personal and private act, becomes public, and thus falls under the term “morality,” rightly considered. In his person and in his politics, Trudeau combined two conflicting styles: the personal libertarianism articulated by Mill, and the Statism of Rousseau.

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[1] Richard Gwyn, The Northern Magus (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1980), p.28.

[2] Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians, (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), pp.126ff.

From the Four F's to the Four G's

         Countries that undergo a peaceful regime-change from free and open, to closed and less free, usually do so by accepting the gradual substitution of one set of values for another. They abandon what I call the four F's, and accept the four G's (or, more often, the latter are imposed via surreptitious legal maneouvres).

      The four F's are: Freedom, Family, Free enterprise, and Faith, and these are the essential cornerstones of a free society.

      But you can tell when a country has opted for the four G's when, instead of more freedom, you get more Government; instead of a focus on the natural family, you get a focus on politically-defined Groups; instead of the promotion of free enterprise, you get a focus on Grants and tax-Grabs; instead of the social direction provided by a moral law common for all, you get the official promotion of moral relativism and Godlessness in schools and the public square (which leaves the state free to direct all things).

       There are five forms of radicalism in contemporary life that aim to bring about a   switch from the four F’s to the four G's.

RADICAL FEMINISM
        The first, and perhaps most virulent of these is radical feminism, which seeks to overthrow the order of human biology by promoting the fantastical idea that the sexes are exactly the same, and that any differences in the way they choose to live must result from brainwashing. We are told that gender is not natural, but “constructed” and freely-chosen. But as Harvard professor Michael Levin once dryly suggested, "any parent who has raised both boys and girls, and still thinks they are born the same, has already withstood more evidence to the contrary than any laboratory could possibly provide."

           The first mistake, however, is to identify feminism with women in general, most of whom have never supported it. And with respect to its intellectual credentials, "feminist theory," as the insightful British critic Kenneth Minogue put it, “does not really belong in the cool groves of academe. It is passionate and salvationist in a way similar to Marxism, to new religious movements, and occult enthusiasms. Academically, it is mostly unsophisticated. A little light generalizing work is followed by polysyllabic decoration and some spray-on indignation."
(But the people don't support radical feminism, so the law is its instrument).

THE ABORTION/EUTHANASIA MOVEMENT

            The second radicalism is the radical abortion/euthanasia movement, which attempts to end our age-old principle of the sanctity of life, thus to overthrow the order of love in society. Euthanasia is really an extension of the abortion movement (which is better thought of as pediatric euthanasia). The choice to kill someone inside you easily develops into the "right" to kill someone who asks you to kill them. Canada is slowly moving into a period where formal euthanasia will eventually be practiced by state physicians licenced to kill. Only too late will we discover that the ultimate form of equality in the socialist state is the right of the state to direct this killing ethic to the elimination of lives it considers not worth living.

(Once the people grasp the true consequences of legalized killing, they do not support it, so the law is its instrument).

RADICAL PANSEXUALISM

       The third radicalism is the radical pansexual movement, of which the homosexual, pornography, polygamy, and pro-incest movements are connected parts. This radicalism seeks to overthrow the sexual order, especially the marital order, of western society, which is based on prohibitions as to the number, gender, and age, and blood-relation of legal sexual partners. It does this in the name of "love", on the belief that because we are all naturally good, then all consenting sex, with whomsoever, and however, must also be good. This belief dispenses completely with our two-thousand-year-long tradition of attempting to teach the difference between good love, and bad love (such as narcissism/self-love, incest love, sexual love of little children, love of polygamy, love of adultery, and so on).

But our history clearly shows how, in the name of a generalized ideal of love rooted in uncontrolled human desires, any behaviour can be justified. Just so, Canadarecently proceeded to legalize homosexual marriage (unlike France, which refused due to the impossibility of procreation – what it termed the lack of “filiation” – in such unions).
(Majorities of the people have never supported pansexualism, or homosexuality - so the law is its instrument).

EDUCATIONAL RADICALISM

           The fourth radicalism is educational radicalism, and here we have a continuous attempt, as the Swedes put it (when radical elitists in Sweden in the 1960s, decided to force a switch from the Four F’s to the Four G’s) "to divest the parents of their authority over their own children." Now education radicals everywhere in the West, who see themselves as “change agents,” seek to overthrow the order of private family authority.  

          The connection is from Plato, to Rousseau, to such as John Dewey - to teacher-training institutions like OISE, in Toronto. The strategy is to persuade the public that the teachers are trustees of the nation's children, not for the family, but for the state. It was Canada's Laurier Lapierre who, in 1978, intoxicated with the vision of the top-down, redistributive state, declared that "the child of Ontario is not a family child. He is an institutional child. It is not the school that is the extension of the home, but the home that is the extension of the school."

Soon after, former Calgary Board of Education Chairman (and law professor) Alex Proudfoot, was more blunt. He told a meeting of astonished parents: "The child is not your child. Canadian children are the property of the state, like our oil, our gas, and our pipelines...it's the law."

(But the people don't like educational radicalism - so the law is its instrument).

LEGAL RADICALISM

            And finally, we have legal radicalism, the most powerful of all, emanating from law schools, law reform commissions, and tribunals and charters of every description, all of which are intent upon circumventing the democratic process.

         It is the legal fraternity that is rapidly becoming the most powerful wing of the political class, and the reason is that they have figured out how to use legal rather than political means to overthrow what they believe is the dim-witted democratic order of a free society.

The chief instrument used in this subtle exercise is Canada's 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Our formerly sovereign and free legislators are now subordinate to the dictates based on the Charter with respect to most things in life that really matter. For the Charter specifically promotes and entrenches the notion of “substantive equality” (making people equal in real life) rather than the original formal equality (ensuring equal opportunity for all) on which Canada was based, and so radical egalitarian judgements and social programs get smuggled in under that label by unelected judges whom no power in the land can remove.

           This is a process that bypasses our formerly free parliamentary sovereignty and replaces it with a new judicial sovereignty. Canada identifies whole classes of citizens that are to be favoured over other classes according to linguistic, gender, religious, ethnic, or other such differences, in the most blatant forms of legal discrimination imaginable. 

            Professor Sue Sherwin of Dalhousie law school warned us in October of 1993 that the reform of legal and political systems alone is inadequate. What we really need to change, she said, is "the private realm, the way people think."

          If you want more of this kind of equality, you need more government, and if you want total equality, you need total government.

Liberalism, Democracy, and Islam

Below is a recent exchange of opinions between myself and my good Muslim friend Salim Mansur, Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario. To be continued ...

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February 20, 2012 

Salim, my friend -

So nice to chat with you the other day.

And thank you for sending me your "Decade After 9/11" essay. I have read it carefully and learned from it.

Where you and I diverge somewhat (only perhaps due to my inadequate understanding) is where you discuss how the Islamic convulsion will eventually "work itself out."  

I would say that in this section you are conflating classical liberalism and democracy, as if they were the same thing.

I used to believe they were. but I no longer do.

So I humbly suggest that all the peaceful and tolerant accommodations ("reconciling") you mention as essential things for the Islamic nations as they "work toward democracy" are in reality, and historically speaking, unique features of Western liberalism as it has evolved, and not of western democracy per se.

I mean to say that almost all of these things (private property rights, freedom of speech, individual liberty, etc.) existed in England and her colonies centuries before "democracy" in any meaningful or broad sense came on the scene as a permanent feature of our common life.

Further, I believe that we can in turn trace those still-evolving features to their roots in Christendom, and perhaps more specifically to Post-reformation Christendom. I think that prior to that epoch there was very little tolerance of the faiths of others -- indeed, there was much persecution. At any rate I find it hard to imagine that people (especially Muslims) without these roots will ever evolve the classical liberal ways of the West without those roots from which the tree of our liberalism has grown.

I see democracy in the West, I mean modern, individualistic democracy (as distinct from the Greek or Roman or Venetian sort) as "a child of the Reformation," and specifically born, not of any generous love of tolerance, but of a practical need for it, due, not any grand spirit of the British people, but to the fragmenting of Protestantism into its hundreds of sects that made this tolerance necessary on a tit for tat basis … to avoid slaughters.     

Another reason (sorry to go on so long) that I believe we will never see this reconciliation of Islam with the Western way of life is that Islam/Muslims worship a God of pure Will. Hence, the Koran is in many respects a Book of Laws/Rules for living (a little like Judaism’s “Halakkah” with its 613 rules for living).

The Will of the Islamic God (it seems to me) is absolute, unquestionable, and not subject to Reason of any kind. This means that nothing this God has decreed (in the Koran, Shari'a law, etc) can be countered, disobeyed, or subjected to human questions or to democratic decrees. For no matter how unreasonable, there is nothing this God cannot do. Hence, I cannot see how such a religion/theocracy could ever accept the will of democratic majoritarian rule. God has already declared what is good. So the people, no matter how many vote, cannot change that. Indeed, I would think that for a true Muslim, the very idea of "the people" voting to decide whether things such as homosexuality, or euthanasia, are morally right or wrong, or lawful, or not, must seem a blasphemy. It does even to me!

Christianity, it seems to me, rests on a different theological ideal, namely, on a God of Reason. For Christians, there are many things God cannot do. He cannot do something contrary to his love; He cannot do something evil; He cannot make a square circle; he cannot make what is true, false. He cannot contradict himself, and so on. So, there are many things that a Christian believes are good (or evil) in themselves, and not specifically or only because God says so. God loves certain things because they are Good; they are not Good just because he loves them.

So the Bible, it seems to me (pardon my ignorance once again) is not so much about God's Will and His rules for living (except in the Old Testament) as about a transformation of the spirit (New Testament). We could also say (whether or not this is an historical development or not, I don't know) that it has become a religion rooted in the idea of universal love as the very ground of (reasonable) existence.

So I think the Western ideal of democracy (since the Reformation at least) somehow has worked well for the Western world because underlying it is this idea that a mere individual can grasp God's Reason by himself (Luther: sola fides/sola scriptura, etc.).  So, if a mere human being can grasp God's intent directly, goes the assumption, then he or she can also be trusted to vote in a democratic system comprised of reasonable people who share a faith in ... human love and reasonableness. From this perspective, majority rule will seem to be the rule of the reasonable; of the democratic masses infused with the very Reason of God (accessible to them because they are "made in his image," and because they need only "the Word" to decide the truth/His truth, for, and by themselves).

I guess what I am suggesting is that I don't think these two very different systems (rooted in such contrary notions of God) can ever be put together. We can always create a "democratic system" for another people, of course. That is what American hegemony is attempting everywhere, as if democracy itself were a secular religion in need of converts. But if the underlying liberalism has never taken root, a democratic system can only lead to a formalization of pre-existing factionalisms. (I suppose it has "worked " in India because they are 85% Hindu, which is a system that already tolerates hundreds of diffferent Gods, and so their democracy divides to conquer rather than the opposite).

Sorry to go on so long. It interests me. More when we meet.

All best wishes

Bill

Dear Bill,

Thanks for your kind words, and for this relatively long letter setting forth your thoughts on a matter you have reflected much.

I cannot respond in kind, since a response of the sort that your reflections merit is one that would also take much space. Perhaps this is a subject that deserves a long conversation between us or among friends who have also done some reflection on the matter.

My response here is therefore a quick reply to the issue that you elaborate upon, i.e. that Western liberalism (individual freedom, tolerance of other(s), separation of religion and politics, etc) predates democracy, and it being a fruit of somewhat special circumstances in the evolution of Western culture rooted in Judeo-Christian values and Ionian rationalism cannot be transplanted or embedded into non-Western cultures, especially Islam. In other words, this Western liberalism is a unique product, and being a unique product paradoxically it is not of or for universal adaptation since political and cultural climate will not be found hospitable for its nurture outside of the Western environment.

If the above is true, and this is in essence it seems to me what you are saying, then however unique and valuable this Western liberalism is it is not something for non-Western people since their body-politics will reject it as alien implant. And if it is not universal in essence, then Western liberalism is just an off-shoot of a culture that will wither in time just as the West might well wither in time as have other cultures and civilizations most notably the ancient and vibrant culture of Greece. And therefore with the decline of the West the ideas of Western liberalism will fade and in time vanish, and the loss will be less than the loss of Ionian cultures since it lacks universalism.

I do not share your view and your premise, and from it the conclusion, and therefore one can derive as I have done.

Western liberalism was born in a culture zone now described as the West (or Occidental), but its vitality meant it carried a universal appeal in terms of idea and  practice as did, for example, Euclidean geometry. But unlike Euclidean geometry, the meaning of liberalism is not as fluid and transparent, and so its adaptation into other cultures is more difficult. But over time it can be absorbed. Japanese samurai culture, for instance, has faded as Japan in its own fashion adopted the ideas of Western liberalism. India has been absorbing the ideas of Western liberalism since its first encounter over 300 years ago, and since India is a hugely diverse entity Western liberalism has penetrated many different population segments of India including Muslims.

Your views about Islam and Muslims reflect the contemporary view of many, a view that is reductionist and in ways essentialist and un-historical. To simply assume that Islam is entirely alien in its essential creed from Judaism and Christianity, and in essence hostile to Ionian rationalism, is (to put it politely) a reading that is now fashionable given the political ideology of Islamism and events such as 9/11. Such a reading lacks historical perspective not only of Islam, but of what Islam is being compared with, and that produces a judgment that closes off history -- in this case of Islam and Muslims. Recognizing difficulties in the realm of inter-cultural exchanges out of which world history evolves is not the same as concluding that because of difficulties such exchanges are not only unlikely but impossible.

The paradox is in how Western liberalism is defined and understood. If it is to be understood entirely as a Western project, unique and therefore limited or not "repeatable" outside the cultural zone of the West, then of course there is no need for anyone else who is not part of the West to be taken up with or be impressed by this unique project.

This indeed is also the argument of Islamists, and they are not alone. Ironically it is also the argument of the cultural relativists in the West who see Western liberalism as a "colonial" or "imperial" project when taken outside of the West's cultural zone. I emphatically disagree with any such suggestion, and on the contrary I view Western liberalism as a universal project just as Christianity itself (in its essence as Abrahamic monotheism preached by Paul to the Gentiles) was a universal project and not a Palestinian/Jewish heresy, and also Islam itself (in essence Jewish faith and Abrahamic monotheism brought by Muhammad to pagan Arabs and through them to other people not touched by Paul's mission) was a universal project. The problem lies in how people conflate and confuse the universal with the particular and, thereby, cannot or are unwilling to see and separate the universal that gets embedded in the maze of a particular culture and history.

Let this conversation proceed when we meet.

Warmest regards,

Salim