My heart fails to bleed
By
I think Presidential Candidate George W. Bush was wise when
he declared “no nation-building” during his first campaign for the White House.
Had President Bush heeded Candidate Bush’s sage advice, he would have
disengaged his forces from
Where would Saddam’s former fiefdom be? In a state of bitter
civil war just as it is now. The artificial edifice called “
My heart fails to bleed for democracy as an export item
Contrary to how most Western political leaders, academics, or editorialists use the word, “democracy” doesn’t mean peace, freedom, equality, prosperity, secularism, security, or justice. The D-word simply means a method of governmental succession. It denotes a system in which governments succeed each other by being elected, usually for a fixed term, by a majority of qualified voters. That’s all.
Rule by majority mandate says nothing, in itself, about what
kind of rule it’s going to be. That depends on a society’s other traditions and
institutions of power division, conflict resolution, and public discourse such
as, say, a free press or a writ of HABEAS CORPUS. In their absence, majority
rule may amount to outright tyranny, as it did in ancient
As a method of succession, a mandate by a majority of qualified voters may well be preferable to royal descent, divine revelation, popular or palace revolution, not to mention that South American favorite, a military coup. A majority mandate doesn’t, however, remotely assure peace, order, liberty, equality, prosperity, or justice.
We think it does. We look at democracy as a cure for all social maladies, including poverty, corruption, inequality, tribal hostilities, pollution, perhaps even malaria or AIDS. Noting that “democracies” rarely go to war against each other, we promote it as a component of international peace. We feel justified in trying to export democracy, to impose it on undemocratic societies, sometimes at the point of bayonets.
But exporting democracy at the point of bayonets or Cruise
missiles might not be such a bright idea. Desirable as democracy may be, all
that can be imposed on a society from the outside is its letter and democracy’s
letter may not spell any of the words we take to be democracy’s spirit. In
My heart fails to bleed for post-democracy
Before starting to export democracy, the West should try it at home. True, when baldly put, this is just a wisecrack. Still, as glib statements go, it’s pretty accurate. The West went from pre-democracy directly to post-democracy, leaping over democracy on the way.
I’d argue that the West began its experiment with democracy
by replacing royal autocracy with secular theocracy, a system in which the
state worships shibboleths of its own creation as though they were divine
revelations. In post-revolutionary
Contemporary “politically correct” democracies do likewise.
The only thing missing is the figure of a scantily clad Goddess of Reason.
Short of that, modern Western societies worship their own ideologies with a
theological rigidity, often accompanied by legal sanctions, reminiscent of
When it comes to our ideas of blasphemy, we can be as unbending as any Wahhabi sheik. Only our punishments are milder usually. We don’t chop off the hands of university presidents who offend our state religion of feminism; we merely send them into the outer darkness. (The chattering you heard earlier this year was Harvard president Lawrence Summers gnashing his teeth.)
Are Western societies still freer than outright theocracies
or dictatorships, like
The world had a one-night stand with freedom. She came in
the late 19th century and went in the early 20th. Even the citizens of
semi-constitutional monarchies, such as Kaiser Wilhelm’s
The modern liberal state has its own dogmas, sacrileges, holy things, taboos, which it guards as jealously and enforces almost as rigidly as the Taliban used to guard and enforce its version of Islam.
Exaggeration? You decide. In the year 1300, in what we call
the Dark Ages, a pig was tried for blasphemy in
My heart fails to bleed for sheep-stealers
“Sheep-stealers” was the disdainful expression German
chancellor Otto von Bismarck employed to describe the peoples of the Balkans.
It was like “cave-dwellers,” the word the Western media favours to describe not
only al-Qaida and the Taliban but the entire region between the Amu Darya and
the
Major nations scorn minor nations almost as a matter of course, but such routine derision isn’t invariably coupled with hostility. Often it’s combined with curiosity bordering on affection, encompassing protective and beneficial impulses. They can create big-power champions for “underdog” nations, like Lawrence of Arabia.
Hostility comes when “sheep-stealers” or “cave-dwellers”
disturb the equilibrium of major powers as the Serbs did when one of them
assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne, sparking World War I, much as
Usually major powers exploit the instabilities or grievances of minor entities by inciting them against rival major powers, or utilize them as buffer zones. This is what happened in many regions during the Cold War. In the post-Cold War era, however, major power rivalries are at relatively low ebb. Peace isn’t threatened by big-power rivalries, but by the ambitions, insecurities, jealousies, and grievances of minor nations and tribes jockeying for position around the edges of contemporary history.
As the new millennium begins, it’s the appetites or gripes
of Basques, Bosnians, Chechens, Hutus, Kosovars, Kurds, Macedonians, Serbs,
Tamils, Tibetans, Tutsis, Uzbeks, Uighurs and similar minor entities that are
upsetting the tranquility of the world along, of course, with the militant
Sunni or Shiite fundamentalists of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Algeria,
Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Likewise the two remaining small Marxist
dictatorships in
What these entities have in common is that they don’t amount to a hill of beans economically, technologically, or culturally. A few may have mattered once, but no longer. If they ceased to exist in some cases, if they never existed it would make no difference to the accomplishments of mankind in art, science, technology, exploration, economy, literature, or philosophy. Even oil doesn’t provide sufficient leverage for such cultures in a world of alternate technologies. Though together they may have the weight of numbers e.g., if Islamists succeeded in “hijacking” Islam, they could array a billion Muslims against the rest of the world taken one by one, even the largest among them, such as Pakistan, would be no military match to the major powers at present.
From the point of view of the significant powers not only
the
By now, some of
The much-vaunted “root-causes” scarcely come into play at this stage. It no longer matters if some marginal countries resent major powers for valid reasons, such as having been repressed, exploited, or betrayed by them, or for unworthy reasons, such as feelings of inferiority, spite, and envy. In either case, what major powers feel for marginal groups is the hostility of urban commuters for obnoxious panhandlers wielding squeegees.
My heart fails to bleed for the needy
When we started reforming our divorce laws, our aim was to take the fight out of divorce. That’s how “no-fault” divorce came into being, among other things. The idea was to settle things on the basis of need rather than on the basis of who-did-what-to-whom. This, we believed, would make divorce more civilized, as well as less expensive and bitter.
It all sounded plausible, though some people had misgivings. I remember writing about a few misgivings of my own. First, I doubted if “need” would be less hotly disputed than “fault” was. Second, I wasn’t so sure that making divorce more civilized — i.e., easier — was an unmixed blessing. Third, I very much questioned the concept of a morality based on need.
Not that there’s anything wrong with taking need into account, in family or any other disputes. Considering people’s needs is a noble exercise, certainly in charity and maybe also in justice. However, when we go a giant step further and do it with no reference to how a need arises, the exercise is not so noble anymore. In fact, it becomes something of a joke.
When we say that in marital disputes we’ll take into account only people’s needs, with no reference to their conduct, we cannot avoid saying something else. We can’t avoid saying that we, as a society, don’t care if they’ve kept or repudiated their marriage vows.
We don’t care if they’d pulled their weight or gone along for the ride, if they were drunk or sober, selfish or selfless, industrious or lazy, supportive or abusive. It’s all the same to us whether they were good or abominable spouses. We’re concerned with neither abilities nor behaviour. All we care about is need; that’s our new concept of equity.
This amounts to saying that we’ll treat good and bad people
equally. Now treating people equally is justice, but treating good and bad
people equally is justice only in
It’s a basic fact of life that qualities increase when rewarded and decrease when penalized. If, as a society, we reward need, but penalize hard work and fail to penalize selfish conduct, your guess is as good as mine as to which qualities will increase or decrease in time.
Promiscuity is an obvious example. No-fault divorce rewards things far worse than promiscuity, but it rewards promiscuity as well. Unfaithfulness is a type of marital misconduct, so when the law recognizes no misconducts and settles disputes solely on the basis of need, it can’t fail to reward the misconduct of promiscuity. This may not be the law’s aim, but it’s certainly one of its results.
Those who thought that such misgivings were baseless need only to look around. In the last 30 years family lawyers’ phones have been ringing off the hook. Divorce is far easier and socially acceptable today, but disputes, if anything, have become more bitter. When an entire branch of the law is devoted to the family, you can be sure that the family is in trouble. And when the family is in trouble, so is society.
My heart fails to bleed for a morally outraged judge in Delaware
Neonaticide — a traumatized mother killing her baby right
after birth — is viewed with some lenience by most cultures. One study, quoted
in the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, found that in “nearly 300 cases of women
charged with neonaticide in the
Contrast this with the treatment of Amy Grossberg and Brian
Peterson a few years ago. They were the college sweethearts who checked into a
motel room to deliver her baby, then threw its body into a trash bin. The
Superior Court Judge Henry duPont Ridgely was especially censorious about Grossberg’s attitude as illustrated by some letters she wrote to Peterson. Six months pregnant, the girl seemed unhappy about losing her figure. She penned remarks like “What did we do to deserve this? All I want is for it to go away.”
The puzzling thing is this. Had the couple decided to end Grossberg’s inconvenient pregnancy by abortion, the same society that passed such stern moral judgment on them would have gone out of its way to facilitate their choice.
We call abortion for convenience a “choice” to accommodate women who might feel the same way about their babies—and figures—as Grossberg did. In most jurisdictions a woman, even if she rejected motherhood as late as the 24th week of her pregnancy, could have her baby’s skull collapsed and removed through the birth canal in a process known as a partial birth abortion. If we give women a 007 licence vis a vis their fetuses, it’s because we regard them as entitled to the attitude that Grossberg exhibited in her letter.
The fact that abortion is legal makes all the difference in a court of law, of course. But legality isn’t necessarily relevant to a discussion of character. Yet it was Grossberg’s character that the court elected to castigate in this case. The judge expressed moral outrage over the teen mother’s selfishness. “There’s a disturbing aspect to your character,” Judge Ridgely lectured Grossberg, “an egocentrism… that blinded you to the intrinsic value of the life of your child.”
Egocentrism, in an abortion culture? Intrinsic value of a child’s life, in a society where any fetus can be aborted for the asking? Remarks like this seem more at home in a Monty Python skit. In a morally sane society it isn’t the law that informs values. It’s values that inform the law. It’s not wrong to murder because it’s illegal; it’s illegal to murder because it’s wrong.
The popular reaction in this case, as reflected in the media, makes one wonder about the moral sanity of our society. We claim to condemn Grossberg and her boyfriend for their callous selfishness, for ridding themselves of an inconvenience at the cost of another’s life, when in fact we’re only condemning them for not employing the socially approved method for doing so.
One wire service story quoted a
My heart fails to bleed for those who wish to bring God up to date
Some people are unhappy with their churches. Hardly a week goes by these days without a person accusing his or her church of being insufficiently up-to-date, or of unfairly restricting some human desire. The complaints may range from sexual matters to obscure points of ritual. They may demand that their church approve of divorce, or maybe of contraception or abortion, or the ordination of women and homosexuals.
All such complaints boil down to one thing. It is that the moral teachings, or sometimes the mysteries, of a given religion restrict some of the complainers’ worldly ambitions or pleasures. The usual code word expressing this complaint is “relevance.” The complainers worry that the church is becoming “irrelevant” to their lives. Only if the church agreed with their views on premarital hanky-panky or whatever would it become “relevant” again.
It would be easy to imagine that such complaints are novel, or in some way peculiar to our times. Many of the specifics are indeed quite contemporary, but the basic phenomenon is anything but new. Leo Tolstoy gave a memorable description of such a complainer over a hundred years ago.
Helene Bezuhov plays a minor role in WAR AND PEACE. She is married to Pierre Bezuhov, one of the leading characters in the novel, but she doesn’t feel suited to him and hopes to contract a more agreeable marriage. Maybe even two marriages. She contemplates marrying an older prince first, and then, after he dies, perhaps saying yes to a much younger applicant.
Helene is beautiful. Her arms and shoulders are the marvel
of
“According to her understanding,” writes Tolstoy, describing Helene, “the whole point of any religion was merely to provide recognized forms of propriety as a background for the satisfaction of human desires.” Tolstoy continues: “I imagine, (says Helene to her new Jesuit confessor) that having espoused the true faith I cannot be bound by any obligations laid upon me by a false religion.”
Helene would be reassured to know that her heritage lives on. Having acquired the liberty to do as they please, some people now demand religion to also applaud their moral choices. These people want their churches, their priests, their rabbis, even the very Vicar of God, to approve and endorse what they do, or else they threaten him with irrelevance. God Himself will become irrelevant the minute he can’t be used as a social rubber stamp for legitimizing human desires — because, as Tolstoy points out, this is all that religion means to Helene Bezuhov. That’s how it was in 1812, and that’s how it is in 2006. I happen not to be religious. If I were, however, I think I’d have something more important to worry about than God’s relevance to me. I’d worry about my relevance to God.
My heart fails to bleed for mad officials
Is there a sure sign of a society going off its rocker? G.K. Chesterton suggested one test in his celebrated essay THE MAD OFFICIAL, written for the DAILY NEWS in 1911. He could easily have written it today. “Whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely,” Chesterton wrote, “then the State is growing insane.”
In
It’s hardly a puzzle why Jolina chose this particular topic. Most children (as well as most adults) have imitative imaginations. “Child abuse” has been a staple in both school and popular culture for years. Probably no day passes without a TV program about child abuse.
But after Jolina wrote her story, a female caseworker called her out of class to question her, then visited and questioned her mother. Later Keith Baird in the Quality and Accountability Office of the Ontario Ministry of Education explained that teachers who mark tests have a “professional obligation” to call in the authorities if they suspect child abuse. According to Mr. Baird, the policy is to err on the side of caution. Some might say it’s more like erring on the side of stupidity. By summoning a frightened 11-year-old from class, Children’s Aid Society officials seem to be the only people involved in child abuse.
“I should,” Chesterton noted in 1911, “think the world a little mad if the incident were received in silence.” In our days such incidents are routinely received in silence. “There are commonwealths,” Chesterton wrote as the 20th century got under way, “which pass from freedom to slavery, not only in silence, but with serenity.” I think we’re living in such a commonwealth today.
While terrorists are running loose in Canada, we dress up police officers as prostitutes to entrap taxpayers, as we did a few years ago, entrapping a prominent heart surgeon right here in Ottawa. We may have reservations about male (or female) sexuality and some of its cruder expressions, but it has taken our contemporary feminist-inspired neo-Victorian meddlers to make propositioning a prostitute a criminal offense and not just a crime, but a crime worth seducing men into committing by setting up police matrons as decoys.
A wild scheme by mad officials if ever there was one, just as described by Chesterton especially considering that prostitution itself is NOT a crime in our society. Yet we submissively put up with our officials and their winking jailbaits. If this isn’t a sign of a society gone mad, what is?
The worst is this. The outstanding surgeon and distinguished citizen, instead of telling a bunch of petty post-feminist martinets where to stick their silly law, meekly gave into them. The doctor apologized and resigned his position. Luckily wiser heads prevailed, and his resignation wasn’t accepted. But far from expressing outrage at the intrusion of officious busybodies into his private life, he expressed contrition. He went to “john school”, for crying out loud perhaps even delivered the valedictory, as one wag quipped at the time. No indignation, no protest. As Chesterton put it, “all blows fall soundless on the softness of a padded cell.”
In a way the spectacle was reminiscent of the victims of Mao
Zedong’s Red Guards. They, too, put a dunce’s cap on their own heads, but at
least they had the excuse of being threatened with torture and death. The
Assuming that ordinary expressions of male sexuality should be made police matters at all, I’d suggest that before spending the first minute of law enforcement time and the first penny of law enforcement dollar on entrapping male citizens who have a propensity to proposition streetwalkers, Canada should have safely put behind bars the last terrorist, along with the last robber, burglar, fraud artist, murderer, and thief.
If after that we have any resources left, and are genuinely convinced that heart surgeons responding to police matrons are the only things that separate us from perfection, we might dress up cops as prostitutes (or perhaps deputize hookers.) But until such time, doing so proves only the clinical insanity of our officials.
Perhaps in
We may still be some way from such acute levels of idiocy, but as Chairman Mao himself reminded us, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. By the end of the 20th century we have taken several steps along the way. We’re as Chesterton described a mad society in 1911: When we give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, we do not start or stare at the monster. We have lost the power of astonishment at our own actions.
I came to
My heart bleeds for
that free country of 1956. I suppose that makes me a bleeding-heart
conservative. I’m not a pessimist, though. I think