Liberal Education, Civic Education, and the Canadian Regime: Past Principles and Present Challenges 9780773597846

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
When Canadians Rewrote Their History: Discarding “Liberty” and Embracing “Community”
Liberal Education Embedded in Civic Education for Responsible Government: The Case of John George Bourinot
Constituting Canadians: George Brown’s Confederation Address
Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia for Canada
Canadian Guardian: The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson
Marshall McLuhan, George Grant, and the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel in Canada
Catholic Education and the Culture of Life
Liberal Education and the Democratic Soul: Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in Canada: What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians
Ties of Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World
The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor: Religious Freedom, Civil Society, and Charter Values
The Hobbesian Foundations of Modern Illiberal Education
Contributors
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
V
W

Citation preview

LIBERAL EDUCATION, CIVIC EDUCATION, AND THE CANADIAN REGIME

This page intentionally left blank

LIBERAL EDUCATION, CIVIC EDUCATION, AND THE CANADIAN REGIME Past Principles and Present Challenges

Edited by David W. Livingstone

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015 isbn 978-0-7735-4608-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-4609-7 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-9784-6 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-9785-3 (ePUB) Legal deposit third quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book was first published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Liberal education, civic education, and the Canadian regime : past principles and present challenges / edited by David W. Livingstone. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4608-0 (bound).– ISBN 978-0-7735-4609-7 (paperback).– ISBN 978-0-7735-9784-6 (pdf).– ISBN 978-0-7735-9785-3 (epub) 1. Education, Humanistic–Canada. 2. Civics, Canadian–Study and teaching. 3. Canada–Politics and government–Study and teaching. I. Livingstone, David W., 1967–, author, editor. II. Ajzenstat, Janet, 1936– . When Canadians rewrote their history. LC1024.C3L65 2015

370.11'2

c2015-902706-3 c2015-902707-1

Contents

vii Acknowledgments 3 Introduction David W. Livingstone 29 When Canadians Rewrote Their History: Discarding “Liberty” and Embracing “Community” Janet Ajzenstat 44 Liberal Education Embedded in Civic Education for Responsible Government: The Case of John George Bourinot John von Heyking 77 Constituting Canadians: George Brown’s Confederation Address Geoffrey C. Kellow 90 Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia for Canada David W. Livingstone 114 Canadian Guardian: The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson Colin D. Pearce

140 Marshall McLuhan, George Grant, and the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel in Canada Grant N. Havers 169 Catholic Education and the Culture of Life Ryan N.S. Topping 184 Liberal Education and the Democratic Soul: Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville Richard Myers 192 Democracy in Canada: What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians Luigi Bradizza 216 Ties of Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World Leah Bradshaw 231 The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor: Religious Freedom, Civil Society, and Charter Values Thomas M.J. Bateman 268 The Hobbesian Foundations of Modern Illiberal Education Travis D. Smith 287 Contributors 289 Index

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Vancouver Island University for support provided to complete this project. Of course, I also thank all of my colleagues from across Canada and the United States who contributed chapters. I’d like to thank the editors at McGill-Queen’s University Press for encouragement early on. Also, I’d like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who provided many helpful suggestions for improving the work as a whole. I also thank my teachers who taught me how to read carefully and who directed me to so many great books. I would also like to thank Diana for her patience and support during the long process of preparing this collection, which really started when I decided to pursue the PhD in Dallas, Texas. I couldn’t have done it without her. I would like to dedicate this book to Mackenzie and Campbell.

This page intentionally left blank

LIBERAL EDUCATION, CIVIC EDUCATION, AND THE CANADIAN REGIME

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction David W. Livingstone

This collection has had a long gestation, which initially grew out of my experiences in universities in both Canada and the United States. When I decided to embark on a PhD in politics, I had already completed a BA, and a master’s, concentrating on political philosophy under the direction of Leon Craig at the University of Alberta. I undertook the PhD at the University of Dallas, where the politics department enjoyed a reputation for its strength in political philosophy. It is also where PhD students, regardless of which concentration they enrol in – English, philosophy, or politics – together study core texts drawn from the western tradition of thought. The faculty at UD introduced me to something unexpected: an approach to the study of the American political tradition that situated it in the context of this tradition of thought. Probing, thoughtful debates were occurring in the Department and in select other institutions that invoked the “Founders” and the principles that they had sought to articulate, defend, and embed in the American regime. It became clear to me that these founders knew the tradition of thought that preceded them. They sometimes agreed with and employed what they learned while at other times they modified or even rejected the teachings of the past. It was also clear that rejecting past contributions was not the same as being ignorant of them. Any serious student of American politics, then, needed to know and assess, not simply accept, this tradition of thought. As one of my UD professors put it in a convocation address, “To assess this tradition, to accept, to modify, to reject any part of it, to live in freedom with it or from it, we must all join this conversation at the highest possible level with every resource at our command.”1 For many of the most serious American founders, the past was a living legacy that they confronted and deliberated about before deciding how to approach the task of creating a new constitution, a new regime.

4

David W. Livingstone

To take one example, Thomas Jefferson cites the “elementary books of public right,” including “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney” as formative influences for him as he wrote the Declaration of Independence.2 Jefferson combined classical liberalism and modern liberalism in order to articulate the fundamental principles upon which the US Constitution would subsequently rest. The argument can be made that American citizens, to truly understand the principles of their own regime, genuinely need to know not only the story of their particular founding but also its relationship to the great tradition of political thought that preceded and informed it. The competing ideas, some modern, some ancient, are uncovered and exposed for what they often are: the living roots of the present from which intellectual nourishment may still be derived. Thomas Pangle describes this approach as a Socratic or dialectic form of education and inquiry: “The aim of dialectical education is to leave the subjectivity of ‘values’ behind, by reenacting for ourselves, accepting or modifying, and therefore making truly our own, the great reasonings, the great choices rooted in argument, that ushered in our modern civilization.”3 Recovering and resuscitating the debates that occurred at the time of America’s founding and which resurface at critical junctures in American history, such as the Civil War, sheds light on contemporary issues. But it does even more than this. It provides American students, those who are fortunate enough to come across this approach to the study of their own institutions, genuine access to liberal education, the goals of which can in fact be transpolitical. Approached correctly, political history that begins from what is close at hand, namely the regime in which one finds oneself, broadens out into liberal education. As a Canadian studying the American founding in a US college the thought inevitably occurred to me: was anyone in Canada taking a similar approach to the study of our own founding documents and tradition? When I thought back to my own education in Canada, I wondered, where were the original speeches of those individuals who argued for and against Confederation? It was about that time that I was introduced by Michael Peters, a friend who teaches social studies in Alberta, to a book by Christopher Moore about Canada’s constitution making: 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal.4 I also discovered Janet Ajzenstat’s scholarship. Moore demonstrates that our founding is much more interesting that I ever remember it being taught when I was in school, and from Ajzenstat I learned that our founding was far more principled than I had been led to believe.

Introduction

5

Ajzenstat began uncovering the principles of Canada’s Constitution and their connection to the tradition of political history as a result of her studies with Allan Bloom at the University of Toronto. Allan Bloom told me to read Canadian constitutional history from the perspective of political philosophy. I’d hoped to do a Ph.D. thesis on Rousseau, or Plato. … I wasn’t going to get it. Not that he ruled out the possibility of a thesis on Rousseau. (Plato was forbidden. I didn’t have Greek.) But he urgently recommended study of Canadian political history. I was crushed. The Canadian constitution? It seemed like such a small thing to devote one’s life to. I was going to be turning my back on the world of great ideas.5 In comparison to the political philosophy of Plato and Rousseau, the Canadian Constitution “seemed like such a small thing.” What possible connection could our Constitution, which everyone “knows” was only a pragmatic deal struck over issues like railways and tariffs, have to do with the lofty ideas one finds in Plato? Fortunately for Ajzenstat (and for Canadians), there are connections; one merely has to dig up the original documents, buried in obscurity, to find them. As a result of her discoveries, Ajzenstat, along with others, reproduced the speeches for and against Confederation as those debates unfolded in the legislative assemblies of the provinces between 1864 and 1873. “Our aim,” the editors inform us, “is to present the Fathers of Canadian Confederation, their supporters, and their opponents not merely as thinkers about their country but as thinkers about politics – men consciously acting within a tradition of political thought.”6 If the men who wrote and debated the Canadian Constitution were consciously acting within a tradition of political thought, should one not make the further argument, as is done in the United States, that immersion in that tradition through a great books approach to liberal education ought to be a crucial part of Canadian civic education? Is the noted decline of liberal education in Canadian universities at least partly the result of a mode of history practised in Canada that has obscured the links between our Constitution and the tradition of political thought? What effects on Canadian citizenship might one anticipate as a result of this decline? These are some of the questions that prompted this volume of essays. This is not to suggest that the contributors were all motivated by the same background and experiences, or that we share a common perspective on the American

6

David W. Livingstone

tradition of political thought. But I sought their views on Canada’s founding, its relationship to the tradition of political thought that preceded it, as well as its connection with liberal education and civic education.

Postmodernism’s Effect on Liberal Education, Political History, and Citizenship From my own experience studying and teaching in several universities in both countries, I have found that Canadian students often pride themselves on being more “progressive” than Americans. John von Heyking reports, “Canadian higher education has been significantly influenced by Hegelian notions of progress, which seem to have resulted in a belief that it is the future, not the past, that matters – to the point that the young in Canada seem not to be able to think in terms of anything other than progress.”7 To many of these students, progressivism’s conclusions are simply common sense reinforced by the impression given to them about Canadian history: that our founders “had no strong commitment to political values, no interest in political ideas.”8 The result is that many of our students believe “Canada was created as a mere framework – an empty shell, waiting to be filled with whatever political content Canadians chose.”9 They are encouraged to neglect political history. “One of the big differences between Canada and the United States,” Heyking says, “is that Americans get taught their founding; Canadians do not even know why 1867 is significant.”10 And as Travis Smith writes, this neglect affects citizenship. “Neglect of political history reinforces the view that everything is available and ready to be transformed in accordance with the wisdom of the day. Neglecting the past is a surefire way to exacerbate the conviction that the present is exceptionally enlightened and morally sophisticated.” Furthermore, “A good part of the reason why the study of political history is neglected follows from a general perception that it offers us nothing from which to learn. This is … due to the supposition that the study of the human things is merely subjective and useless in comparison to the knowledge bestowed by the applied sciences or acquired through training for practical occupations.”11 Thus our students’ views are reinforced by the fact that the Canadian universities in which they study have changed their mission, putting job training more at the centre of what they do and retreating from liberal education. The result has been a drastic shift in the mission and purpose of Canadian universities. As Malcolmson et al. point out,

Introduction

7

The university began as an institution devoted to the ideal of liberal education … Today’s university is a quite different institution. Universities are now devoted primarily to meeting economic and social needs of society, to producing the specialized experts in the human and non-human technologies necessary to our way of life. Vocational training and a devotion to technological progress are the modern university’s defining characteristics. The philosophical questions that once formed the core of liberal education are treated as peripheral or secondary.12 As Smith and Heyking point out, our current education (or non-education) in citizenship at the university level can lead to political cynicism. While liberal education may be a vital part of the most thoughtful form of civic education, an incentive to engage fully in liberal education can come from an appreciation of one’s own political history and its indebtedness to the prior tradition of political thought. According to Ajzenstat, Canadian historians in the 1970s and 1980s removed that incentive by neglecting Canada’s national story: “[T]hey had less inclination to think about Confederation and less reason to examine, teach, or preserve the primary documents on Canada’s making.” The notion that “there was little of theoretical interest in the documents no doubt made the change of focus easier.”13 The precipitous decline of the liberal arts in North America has been noticed most recently by such institutions as Harvard, and by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.14 Peter Berkowitz summarizes Harvard’s report on declining enrolments in its humanities programs: “Remarkably, the report even gives credence, however tentative, to the suspicion that the humanities at Harvard impose ideological conformity: ‘[T]hose of us committed to criticism as critique might recognize a kernel of truth in conservative fears about the left-leaning academy. Among the ways we sometimes alienate students from the Humanities is the impression they get that some ideas are unspeakable in our classroom.’”15 Harvard’s report only hints at what Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, treats in much greater detail in Education’s End: Why Our Universities and Colleges Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. The new education modelled on postmodern theories begins from the idea that we are “constructed selves,” that the whole human world is an artifact constructed by human beings. What we can know about the world is available only through a man-made method imposed upon reality. Therefore our

8

David W. Livingstone

knowledge is always mediated by categories we ourselves have created. There is nothing that we can know that exists by nature, and nothing has an independent “essence.” Where the classical thinkers may have looked to nature, especially human nature, to learn about our ends and purposes, contemporary “philosophers” teach us instead that this was a fool’s errand based on dogmatic metaphysical assumptions. They believe, as the late Richard Rorty did, that we should stop being metaphysicians and become “ironists.” The ironist “is a nominalist and a historicist. She thinks nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence. So she thinks that the occurrence of a term like ‘just’ or ‘scientific’ or ‘rational’ in the final vocabulary of the day is no reason to think that Socratic inquiry into the essence of justice or science or rationality will take one much beyond the language games of one’s own time.”16 But if there are no natures, then human beings do not have a nature either. This “insight” leads to the conclusion that we must construct meaning in our lives rather than discover it. So according to Rorty “slogans” like “natural human rights,” concepts that the Canadian founders thought existed and ought to be secured through constitutional structures, turn out to be nothing more than “handy bits of rhetoric” referring to nothing real, nothing in nature.17 According to Anthony Kronman’s analysis of the effects of this stance on education, “Constructivism further insists that this activity of meaningmaking receives its motive and direction from a desire to assert power and control over someone or something (oneself, others, or the world).” And the purpose of education is reduced to the effort “to expose these motives.” Moreover, “it also asserts that there can be no criteria for ranking the relative worth of the meanings that human beings make or the desires that drive them to do so” because each meaning is equally an outgrowth of the same basic element: power.18 Although this approach might be motivated by a sincere desire for equality (hence the attraction to the idea that there are no objective criteria for ranking “values”) and genuine concern to achieve restorative justice for marginalized groups, it renders rational debate and compromise meaningless; the humanities, once the home of humane and rational inquiry into human longings and human meaning, become a “death zone.” And Harvard wonders why enrolments are dropping. If students are convinced that they are merely “representatives” of a marginalized group, and opinions are merely covert assertions of power, then there is certainly no incentive to be moderate. Students no longer come to class as individuals thirsty for new and unfamiliar insights into the meaning of life; they come as delegates. And “The more a classroom resembles a

Introduction

9

gathering of delegates speaking on behalf of the groups they represent, the less congenial a place it becomes in which to explore questions of a personally meaningful kind including, above all, the question of what ultimately matters in life and why. In such classrooms, students encounter each other not as individuals but as spokespersons instead.”19 What sometimes passes for modern liberal arts education on today’s campuses is really not a genuine liberal education at all.20 Even when liberal education is defended in Canada it is frequently reduced to an education that develops “transferable job skills.” Doing so conveniently removes the contentious questions concerning the content or substance of liberal education, centring the discussion instead on the less controversial aspect of developing generic skills.21 As a tactic intended to allow liberal education on campuses to be defended without reigniting the culture wars, it seems promising at first. After all, who in the modern university would really stand up and declare themselves against developing “critical thinking skills”? Yet not to engage in the debate about liberal education at the level of substance is to leave it as a hollow shell, not unlike the perception Ajzenstat says Canadians now have regarding the Constitution: it’s merely a form that Canadians can fill with whatever content they choose. This parallel between education and the Constitution is not accidental. How Canadians view their Constitution and their role as citizens, and the fate of liberal education, may be linked. It is one of the goals of this collection to explore this link. Our (mis)understanding of our own political history plays a crucial role in undermining liberal education, just as the decline of the latter may very well have contributed to the former. Would a return to genuine liberal education also require a return to Canada’s founding principles, and hence an authentic recovery of those principles through a study of Canada’s founding political documents? The work of Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles, and William D. Gairdner on recovering and reissuing Canada’s founding documents moves in this direction.22 Can Canadians understand their own constitution – the one shaped by individuals such as George Brown, John A. Macdonald, GeorgeÉtienne Cartier, and Thomas D’Arcy McGee – if they are not acquainted with the arguments made in its defence by those who had a direct hand in drafting and defending the original document? And can they understand those arguments if they have never read John Locke’s Second Treatise? Can they properly assess Locke’s argument if they do not know Aristotle, with whom Locke is in conversation? On the other hand, there is reason for caution in trying to assimilate

10

David W. Livingstone

liberal education with civic education. There is within the tradition of political education a recognized tension, even in the best regime, between educating good citizens and educating good human beings. As Aristotle points out in the third book of the Politics, “it is evident that the good citizen need not of necessity possess the virtue which makes him a good man.”23 Liberal education claims to educate, or to point the way toward being, a good citizen. But it also points beyond this goal to the higher standard of a good human being. “Its final objective is the formation of thoughtful and civilized human beings. A genuine liberal education should make you a different person, by giving you new perspectives on the questions that ultimately define our humanity. And it should give you a lifelong taste for the beautiful, the noble, the true, and the good.”24 Thus a tension can emerge between genuine liberal education and the regime within such education occurs. Presumably, this tension between “good citizen” and “good human being” lessens as one comes closer to living in (and in particular, leading) a good regime.25 Yet any regime, no matter how good, demands obedience to its laws. Liberal education encourages questioning in pursuit of knowledge, and this questioning can even reach to the foundation of the laws. In that sense it can be, or be perceived to be, subversive. Pursued properly, however, liberal education leads to considerable political moderation. It reveals the difficulty of arriving at final conclusions about some of the most important topics without necessarily ending in skepticism.26 It also reveals the limits of what can be achieved politically, and in so doing it tempers the impatient desire to reform everything in the hope that a perfect world can be brought into existence. If Canadian public universities have been abandoning genuine liberal education – the formation of thoughtful and civilized human beings who have a lifelong taste for the noble, the true, and the good (and who perhaps believe, contrary to Richard Rorty, that such things might still exist) – is this a symptom of a regime in decline? Is Canada becoming less compatible with and less hospitable to the highest aspirations of liberal education? These are big and complex issues, and I do not pretend they have obvious answers. However, what I think is incontrovertible is that Canadian public institutions of higher learning have by and large gone along with contemporary trends visible across North America and have abandoned liberal education as it was once conceived. It was in order to engage these questions further and to try to shed some light on contemporary Canadian political culture that I asked the authors who contributed to this volume to assess the problem from a vari-

Introduction

11

ety of perspectives. And I was particularly interested in following Ajzenstat’s lead in trying to determine whether Canada’s founding had deeper links to the tradition of political philosophy than most Canadians have been led to believe. For if that is the case, then perhaps the attempts at renewing liberal education in the United States, harnessed to and in a sense fueled by eros, i.e., by patriotism and the love of one’s own, and tempered, to be sure, by the discipline of dialectical education, might provide a model for Canada. We might begin to advocate for a recovery of liberal education in Canada, partly for the good it may do for the health of our regime and our own citizens, including new Canadians. To be sure, we should not lose track of the valid arguments that demonstrate the economic utility of liberal education, especially in light of increasing pressure by provincial governments to retool universities as vocational training centres.27 But we might also insist on the civic utility of liberal education. Hence, to skeptical university administrators, departments, and parents we might answer the objection that liberal education is not useful by pointing out its genuine connection to the proper formation of citizens in a functioning liberal democracy, the connection between liberal democracy and liberal education not being accidental but essential, and that our regime depends for its proper functioning on a liberal education. Moreover we might demonstrate that the founders of Canada knew this and expected Canadians to maintain the tradition of liberal education in Canada for these very reasons. But we might also advocate for, and not lose sight of, the intrinsic good for individuals promised by what has traditionally been regarded as “the highest, the noblest, and most fully human form of education.”28

The Present Volume Janet Ajzenstat sets the stage for the examination of the intersection of liberal education, civic education, and the Canadian regime. According to Ajzenstat, since the 1960s Canadian historians have sold us short on the accomplishments and intentions of those statesmen who crafted the Quebec Resolutions that eventually became the Constitution Act, 1867. Not only did the historians turn their attention to other subjects; their methodology carried within it a rebuke of previous “monumentalist” historiography. And to make matters worse, the very documents – the speeches and writings of Canada’s eminent founders – were neglected. “I am not suggesting that historians deliberately falsified the facts,” she declares. “They merely cast a veil over some events and moved others to

12

David W. Livingstone

the fore. They offered new explanations. The effect was to create a strikingly new story about Canada’s origins.” The new story began to highlight “culture” rather than institutions, and the study of Confederation faded into the background just when Canadians most needed to know what the original intentions for Canada were and why our regime was structured the way it was. “To the best of my knowledge, no one in the three decades of constitutional wrangling – during our ‘Constitutional odyssey,’ to use Peter Russell’s excellent phrase – no one turned to study of the Confederation period and the original British North America Act. No one asked how the Fathers of Confederation had gone about their work.” When we do turn to look at how they went about their work, Ajzenstat maintains, we ought to be impressed by the extent to which those who argued for, and against, Confederation did so by appealing to first principles, the “unalienable rights of man,” and popular sovereignty. When those speeches and stories are recovered and retold, even seasoned academics familiar with the field of Canadian studies can be impressed by the vigour with which early figures in Canadian history articulated and defended the principles of self-government that they saw themselves securing for the new dominion.29 John Von Heyking follows up with his article on George Bourinot, Canada’s “first political scientist,” whose works and textbooks on politics and Canadian government were well read in Canada and in England. Heyking shows that Bourinot’s estimation of the founders he studied is much higher than what most contemporary Canadians would say about them (if, that is, contemporary Canadians could even name one). Bourinot’s admiration is based in part on an analysis of precisely what Ajzenstat says is now missing from the Canadian intellectual landscape – the original speeches. Heyking, quoting Bourinot, writes: “The intellectual strength of the country must be of no mean order when it can give us statesmen like Sir Charles Tupper and Mr. Mackenzie, whose best speeches are admirable illustrations of logical arrangement and argumentative power.”30 Bourinot’s respect for the founders and the country they helped to form led him to contribute to the civic formation of Canadians through books that would teach Canadians the principles of self-government and their corresponding civic responsibilities. Thus Bourinot’s book, How Canada is Governed, “concludes with ‘The Duties and Responsibilities of Canadian Citizens,’ which exhorts young readers to civic virtue with the reminder that ‘however well devised a system of government may be, it is relatively worthless unless the men and women who compose the people of Canada are always fully alive to their duties and responsibilities,’ and they must care about the

Introduction

13

‘character and ability of the men to whom, from time to time, they entrust the administration of public affairs.’”31 Thus, “An examination of Bourinot’s political ideas … illuminates the nature of the Canadian regime, the civic education required for its citizens and statesmen, and the relationship between that civic education and a broader, transpolitical liberal education.” Returning to Bourinot’s arguments provides an initial response to the “crisis in our regime:” that contemporary students’ “education inculcates habits of thought that makes them prefer politics come to an end, which implies the rule of experts taking over from the messiness of partisan debate; … Their abstract habits of thought prepare them to be passive, not active citizens accustomed to spirited political action.”32 Contrary to Bourinot’s hope, Canadians, according to Heyking, are today being educated to conform to the late stages of democracy as Alexis de Tocqueville describes it, a state in which the central government becomes a soft despotism. The applicability of Tocqueville’s analysis is a topic that will be examined in more detail by three authors in this collection. Bourinot’s admiration for the principled rhetoric and logic of those who helped to guide Canada toward its founding impels us to look back at some of these speeches to see for ourselves what captivated him. Are they really worth the praise or even a second look by contemporary Canadians? Geoffrey Kellow examines the speech George Brown gave in defence of Confederation and answers, “yes,” and “yes.” “At almost thirty thousand words, Brown’s remarks are as sophisticated an exposition of political rhetoric, principal and purpose as the Founding Debates have to offer.” But again, like Ajzenstat and Christopher Moore, Kellow notes that this remarkable speech has been largely absent from Canadian history and political science – certainly from campus classrooms – for the simple reason that it has not been republished in its entirety in Canada since 1882. “This is a particular shame in Brown’s case because those remarks, offered on the evening of 8 February, 1865 amount to a remarkable rhetorical and forensic defence of the Quebec Resolutions.” According to Kellow, Brown’s rhetorical strategy has a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, Brown is defending the proposed resolutions and marshalling the facts and arguments required to persuade his fellow Canadians to adopt the draft. On the other hand, he is simultaneously engaged in a much grander project: “Brown identified in Confederation not merely the substance of a deal but the structures essential to building a people.” Thus Brown’s strategy was to demonstrate that “in each remedy or benefit held out by the proposed resolutions there lurked a constitutive element beyond itself.” Each remedy beyond its cur-

14

David W. Livingstone

ative force helped cultivate and secure a new Canadian identity.” George Brown was forming a constitution and a people at the same time. In my essay on Thomas D’Arcy McGee, I argue that education in Canada, at least for McGee, was connected to a political goal not dissimilar to Brown’s – the goal of forming citizens in a manner consistent with the regime’s founding principles. That education, to be effective, would need to retain ties to the tradition of political thought out of which Canada and her new institutions grew and were nourished. “McGee understood that modern liberalism required for its support a healthy respect for pre-modern reflection on ideas of justice and equality, and these would have to be supplied through a deliberate and thoughtful civic education that maintained the vitality of that tradition, not in slavish conformity to it, but in studied deference to the best it had to offer.” Through his study of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America McGee concluded that democracy can generate an immoderate desire for equality at the expense of liberty and that this impedes the advancement of merit and talent. The unique situation in Canada compared to Europe was that the artificial barriers to social and economic advancement were not as entrenched. “This is a new land,” he proclaimed, “a land of young pretensions because it is new; because classes and systems have not had that time to grow here naturally. We have no aristocracy but of virtue and talent, which is the best aristocracy, and is the old and true meaning of the term.” McGee believed the proposed constitution would preserve liberty while also checking democratic excesses. Nevertheless, he did not believe that it was safe to rely on institutions alone. He points Canadians to those authors from whom he learned about human nature and politics, such as Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville (among others). A continuous, thoughtful connection to the tradition of political thought – a liberal education – would, he said, be an essential condition of Canada’s independence. Colin Pearce follows with his article on Egerton Ryerson’s educational project. Ryerson, Pearce argues, saw himself in a role with respect to Canada not dissimilar to the role of educational superintendent discussed in Plato’s Laws. That is to say, Ryerson saw that Canada would need a teacher of teachers, one whose influence might set the necessary moral, theological, and political “tracks” that would guide the further development of Canadian intellectual and political culture. And though the position Ryerson adopted may have been modelled on the classical, Platonic original, Ryerson believed that the sources of moral truth necessary for Canada’s moral formation would need to pay heed to both Athens and

Introduction

15

Jerusalem. Pearce maintains that Ryerson’s commitment to liberal democratic principles, including representative government, is undoubted. Yet Ryerson admits that natural inequalities persist among men, and these inequalities remain politically relevant. Ryerson interpreted Canada’s civic identity in the language of “the elementary principles and practice of civil government” contained in works by authors like David Hume, Francis Wayland, Sir Robert Peel, James Fenimore Cooper, William Ellery Channing, Joseph Story, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others. Nevertheless, for Ryerson the modern “liberal” teachings, for all their indispensability to the “principles and practice of civil government,” need to be supplemented in the Canadian public mind by that which is to be found in “Jerusalem and Athens.” Hence Pearce suggests an interesting and possibly fruitful point of contrast with Ajzenstat’s claim that Canada is indebted to the principles announced in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. “Ajzenstat’s civic ‘Lockean’ template does not fit so neatly over Ryerson’s profile even though he manifestly provides evidence for the thesis of Canada’s ‘Lockeanism.’” Pearce invites us to consider the place of Canada and its founding within the debates and tensions captured by the political– theological problem, or the fruitful tension between Athens and Jerusalem. Grant Havers follows with an analysis of the thought of two later Canadian theorists: Marshall McLuhan and George Grant. In doing so, Havers further develops aspects of the political–theological question, focusing attention on the concern both McLuhan and Grant raised about the waning influence of both classical learning and Catholic thought in the western world, in Canada in particular. Havers wonders whether the compatibility that Egerton Ryerson saw between Athens and Jerusalem is more imagined than real. “As Colin Pearce acknowledges in an article on Egerton Ryerson, certain Christian virtues such as humility and charity are altogether absent in the philosophy of Aristotle.” However one answers that question, Havers points out that McLuhan and Grant singled out Protestantism because of its “anti-intellectualism.” Both McLuhan and Grant “blamed Protestantism for breaking away from the classics while it aggressively advanced the most radical currents of modernity.” “Even as they pursued in radically divergent ways the goal of preserving and strengthening premodern pedagogy in Canada, they both faulted Protestantism, in tones reminiscent of [Harold] Innis, for hindering a proper understanding of classical education and, as a consequence, fatally undermining Western civilization itself.” Employing the critical analysis of historicism developed by the late Leo Strauss, Havers detects that both

16

David W. Livingstone

McLuhan and Grant may have committed the error of “confusing this faith tradition with a more secular and political culprit.” In the case of Grant, Havers declares: “I do not deny Grant’s broader point that there is a historical connection between Protestantism and modern liberalism. Instead, my specific focus is on Grant’s refusal to ask the Straussian question whether all this history was simply the result of Protestantism or a secularized pseudo-version that had little to do with the tradition of Reformation theology.” In fact, Havers asserts, “Protestants may have had theologically sound reasons to question the validity of attempts to synthesize Greek philosophy and biblical revelation, reasons that have little to do with modern, political, and impious attempts to break away from the classical tradition.” Nevertheless, though Havers may agree that modern trends have tended to drive higher education further toward vocationalism, he doubts whether any project to reinvigorate the “great books” tradition as a counterweight can be very effective in the modern age. As an alternative, a recovery of what Protestant Christianity might offer by way of lessons in moderating modern man’s pride in his own willful and technological inventiveness under which he may become an unwilling slave might offer a more promising solution. After all, “The biblical tradition continues to have an impact on the world that cannot possibly be rivaled by the influence of Greek philosophy, which is largely restricted to academe.” Where Grant Havers examines the prospects for Protestant thought to make a helpful contribution to political culture, Ryan Topping examines what has been lost in Canada’s intellectual and political horizons as a result of the measurable retreat by Catholic institutions of learning from Canadian higher education. “What happens when that tradition is neglected? What goods central to Canadian democracy might disappear from view?” Topping argues that what Catholic higher education brought to the arena simply cannot and will not be replaced by secular, state-funded institutions. The decline of Catholic higher education, beginning in the late 1960s, was rapid, going from “some fifty-seven Catholic colleges or universities outside of Quebec” to just nineteen today. The results, Topping maintains, is that fewer and fewer Canadians have any contact with the “Culture of Life” represented by the Church, which he predicts will have negative consequences for our liberal democracy that seeks to defend human rights. “Insofar as Canadians wish to maintain a rights regime that is ordered by a conception of natural justice, loss of contact with the Catholic tradition of moral reasoning is likely to correspond to a flagging capacity to articulate the reasons why human life is sacred.” And so, “The

Introduction

17

rule of law within Canada, [which] presupposes the stubborn conviction that human life holds dignity beyond any value the state can confer,” may lose its foundation. “Institutions such as Catholic universities were once a place where such concepts could find cogent defense.” In “Liberal Education and the Democratic Soul: Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville,” Richard Myers examines the effect that democratic egalitarianism has on majority opinion. He reminds readers of Plato’s allegory of the cave, the point of which “is to suggest that the quest for wisdom, which is the true aim of liberal education, is rendered tremendously difficult by the fact that human beings are utterly enslaved to certain authoritative opinions.” The best illustration of this lesson, Myers argues, is found in the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville examines the effect that the equality of conditions has not only on the regime in America but also on practically every aspect of life. The democratic worldview generates a “‘culture of utility’ in which people are preoccupied with the pursuit of material prosperity and thus tend to measure everything in terms of profitability.” Our contemporary students are brought up in this worldview, prizing democracy and passionately advocating for more equality. And yet it is equality of conditions that in turn generates a utilitarian and money-centred outlook, leaving students with little taste and little patience for studies that are deemed “useless.” In turn, “This can have a devastating impact on liberal education for a number of reasons,” Myers argues. “In the first place, there will be little room in a culture devoted to utility for those branches of education which appear to provide relatively little financial return on the time, money, and effort invested in them.” One can see in Myers’s argument the reasons modern universities have aggressively moved to incorporate more and more vocational training, and why there is increasing pressure on faculties and departments to develop experiential learning programs, co-ops, and internships in response to these demands. Those in Canada who might argue that this “corporatization” of universities is evidence of a fiscally conservative or neoliberal agenda at work will need to consider Myers’s argument that the principal cause may be the democratic passion for equality. The growth of consumerism is criticized on Canadian campuses, and indeed its critique has become a common mantra among undergraduates, who are taught to advance progressive–egalitarian “values” as a corrective to this creeping “neoliberalism.” But if Myers is correct, progressive egalitarianism is not the counterbalance to the ethic of utility: it is the deeper source of the consumerist and utilitarian ethos. Those who complain that universities

18

David W. Livingstone

are becoming too market driven and yet expect universities to promote greater and greater social equality may only be fanning the flames rather than putting them out. Myers suggests that university teachers may have a different role to play: they should remind students of human greatness, i.e., not flatter their intellectual egalitarianism. Tocqueville recommended the study of the classical tradition as a necessary corrective to this creeping egalitarianism. Immersion in the classics brings to life a sense of intellectual disparity between us and the greatest writers and thinkers. Myers concludes by suggesting that contemporary university professors have their work cut out for them. “If we fail to convey any important sense of distinction between high and low, between the shallow and the profound, our students will never overcome their democratic indifference to the ideas and arguments that constitute the core of liberal education.” Luigi Bradizza follows up with his own analysis of Tocqueville’s enduring relevance for Canadians. In the first part of his essay, “Democracy in Canada: What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians,” Bradizza argues that Tocqueville’s Democracy in America may be considered by some to apply only to democracy in the United States, especially given the emphasis Tocqueville himself places on the importance of America’s unique point of departure with the Puritans. “Yet for all their many differences in founding politics and legal developments, the Canadian regime today is remarkably similar to that of the United States.” And picking up on the theme developed by Richard Myers, and helping to further illuminate concerns that Thomas D’Arcy McGee raised regarding the new dominion, Bradizza highlights a key similarity between the US and Canada: “Most importantly for our purposes, both democracies are committed to equality.” Moreover, “both nations have been pulled away from their respective founding and have come to similar understandings of democracy and equality in consequence of the spread of progressivism.” Hence, the commitment to equality has intensified, but in a particular manner that is problematic and, in both cases, at variance, not in conformity with the original intentions of the founders. Tocqueville warned that democratic peoples may come to love equality more than liberty, even being willing to let liberty slip away so that they may enjoy greater equality. This drift, Tocqueville warned, could lead to a vast administrative state. Bradizza, quoting Tocqueville, argues that such a condition “reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” When Canadians proclaim their progressive values, they signal that they have simply travelled further than their American counterparts down

Introduction

19

the road Tocqueville warned against. “Indeed, to the extent that Canadians argue that they are more compassionate than Americans, or that they are more committed to universal health care, or welfare, or equality of outcomes, or community as opposed to individualism, they make a Tocquevillian analysis of Canada more relevant because they strengthen the claim that Canadians are committed to (a problematical) equality and an enlarged state.” Tocqueville may have looked to private associations and to civil society as the realm in which individual liberty could be exercised in ways that were conducive to the common good and that also prevented the administrative state from smothering liberty. And although Leah Bradshaw does not discuss Tocqueville in her essay “Ties of Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World,” her analysis of Aristotle’s notion of friendship sheds light on the realm of civil society Tocqueville may have looked to. Bradshaw attempts to “outline the parameters of the classical conception of citizenship as a kind of friendship, argue for the enduring importance of this conception, and contrast it with two prevailing notions of citizenship in the current climate, grounded in rights and identity.” Recourse to classical political thought may be helpful in sorting out contemporary political issues in Canada. According to Bradshaw’s analysis, people living together in a political community must share something in common and must also know that they share something in common. Moreover, what they share in common should not be merely a shared linguistic or ethnic identity, and it also needs to be more than a shared commitment to a social contract where “Citizenship in a state protects the individual and the household and possessions against encroachment by others, and it guarantees the peace and security required for the transaction of commerce.” From Aristotle’s perspective neither of these commitments constitutes a genuinely political community. In addition, Bradshaw contrasts Aristotle’s view of citizenship as friendship with contemporary globalization theorists who speak about a commitment to “global citizenship.” In their view, she argues, “Cosmopolis trumps polis, and there is no difference in obligation toward friends/citizens (those we “know”) and obligations to strangers.” But according to Aristotle, “One must look in part upon one’s fellow citizens as one’s friends, and that means that one prefers them to others, and that one has a commitment to one’s fellow citizens that one would not extend to strangers.” As Kellow’s article on George Brown, Heyking’s on Bourinot, and my article on McGee suggest, the concern to create a nation, one that protects rights but that is attentive to and intentionally nourishes trans-

20

David W. Livingstone

political goods, such as concerns for the noble, the true, and the good, is already present in Canadian history. Be that as it may, Bradshaw suggests that recurring to our political history may not be sufficient, especially for integrating immigrants into the Canadian political community. For most Canadians it is the state that provides justice, and so it may be partly to the state that we must look for a solution. “The state should be more proactive in policies of integration, so that all Canadians can see the direct relation between their individual prospering and the health of the civic bond. How far we can go in solidifying these bonds of citizenship, and how we do it, is a matter of public debate.” Thus, “We do not need to give them lessons in Canadian history; we need to make sure that they are actually integrated into Canadian economy and society.” Thomas Bateman’s article moves us from the realm of the Canadian founding period to the role of the contemporary Supreme Court of Canada. In “The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor: Religious Freedom, Civil Society, and Charter Values,” Bateman argues “Canadian courts have taken up the mantle of the formation of moral character.” And at the same time the courts have significantly extended the reach of the Charter. At one time it was understood that the Charter protected individuals from government encroachment on their fundamental freedoms. Courts would need to identify that government action had occurred before deciding a Charter case. But quoting Justice Wilson’s opinion in McKinney v. University of Guelph (1990), Bateman argues that the Court now views the Charter as a guide for the growth of government in accordance with certain norms. “The Charter is about establishing society’s norms, not proscribing government’s limits. For her [Justice Wilson], government goes almost everywhere; so shall Charter values.” In addition, “the courts are instructed to divine and apply ‘Charter values’ as they develop the common law,” broadening the reach of the Charter even further. Finally, as Bateman suggests toward the conclusion, the fact that these “fundamental values” need to be interpreted out of the bare text of the Constitution and the Charter means that judges have given themselves near total freedom to declare what these unwritten or fundamental values are. Bateman explores these issues within the context of the Charter’s freedom of religion provisions, demonstrating that it is not altogether clear that the assumptions guiding the Court’s development of Charter values are ones that are consistent with the Constitution, or even the Charter itself, as each was originally adopted. That is, there may be a conflict between the principles implicit in the Constitution at the time of the

Introduction

21

British North America Act and those that the Court is now developing. Thus, as I argue in my article on D’Arcy McGee, implicit in the BNA Act was a view of human nature that would constrain such open-ended development of “values”: “human beings have a nature that once known indicates to the statesmen certain forms and institutions that are in conformity with its flourishing and betterment.” Bateman implies that Charter values may owe more to modern progressive views of human nature, i.e., human beings really do not have a fixed nature or a pre-political claim to be free that governments and Courts are obligated to protect. Rather, progressive thought posits freedom as a social construct. It is a product of government actions. For McGee human nature was a firmer and more fixed reference point by which one could take the measure of a regime’s claim to be just. Ideas about human nature, and hence about just government, could be gleaned from those authors, like Plato, Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville, who had developed profound insights into man’s nature. Hence it would be important for Canadians to remain in touch with this tradition of thought so that succeeding generations might not lose touch with this stable reference point, crucial for understanding the regime built in light of it. In the new view seemingly adopted by the Supreme Court, “The progressive constitution is an organic, living thing, always changing, growing, developing. Rights have no fixed reference outside of historical context. They change too … Judges are the inventors of such rights, and these rights emanate from articulations of ever-evolving values” (emphasis added). Thus one might perceive in the movement toward Charter values a tug-of-war between two Canadian regimes, as was also indicated in Bradizza’s article: one older and predicated on a view of human nature that is stable, the other “progressive” in which human liberty is “historical,” to be wrought out by government and by the courts. Allowing the Court to give itself this much authority may be problematic especially given that “Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin argued that [in her view] law is [also] a ‘comprehensive system of belief’ which ‘touches upon all aspects of human life and citizenship’ and makes ‘total claims upon the self.’” The Court may have adopted for itself the role of transforming the regime in accordance with progressive sensibilities, not preserving it in its original form and commitments. The final essay in the collection is Travis D. Smith’s analysis of Hobbes’s political hedonism. In particular, Smith describes an intentional plan for society sketched out by Hobbes in which the “regime would edu-

22

David W. Livingstone

cate its populace to be well-suited to it, systematically crafting its subjects so that their capacity for taking responsibility for their own lives and attending to the well-being of their communities is so compromised that they would come to pride themselves on their cowardice and feebleness in thought and deed.” Bateman’s analysis of the Court’s handling of freedom of religion in Canada showed that the freedom to practise one’s religion openly and publicly has diminished to freedom of conscience – that is, the freedom to privately hold beliefs that no one else believes, but not necessarily to act on them. Smith implies that the Court is simply playing out a role Hobbes expected of it. “People will be said to have other freedoms, such as freedom of religious belief, but the formation of religious belief is to be so filtered and modulated, and its manifestations in practice so subject to sanction that this liberty is highly compromised and dubious.” One should also expect in a Hobbesian regime, where the claims of the body are given highest priority, that any education intended to awaken citizens to higher concerns will be contrary to the regime. And so universities too will need to come under the arm of the state and must be compelled to forego liberal education for vocational training: people “must be given a vulgar education rather than a classical liberal education such that would cultivate in them the capacity for thinking and acting freely.” And in a Hobbesian state, the politics of recognition would flourish, meaning that hate, including potential hate perceived or anticipated by a potential victim, must be dealt with by the state, if possible in advance of the “crime” itself. Hence human rights tribunals will be formed, and universities will teach classes on “sensitivity.” Smith leaves it to the reader to draw parallels between Hobbes’s plan and current conditions in Canada. Unfortunately, he suggests, the parallels are not hard to locate. But what are we to make of these parallels? “I do not mean to say,” Smith adds, “that Canada specifically is wholly founded upon Hobbesian principles and purposes, although I do find that the overall direction of advanced Western societies is to become ever more Hobbesian – relativistic, scientistic, atomistic, and unfree with respect to thought and action.” Several authors in this collection have pointed to a potential “progressive” anthropology that might account for some of these more recent changes to the regime, the implication being that a break occurred in our past and that the recovery and rethinking of the original principles, those articulated at the founding, may prove helpful. Janet Ajzenstat, whose essay begins this collection, directs us back to Canada’s Lockean founding principles. To what extent, then, is her approach a recipe for failure? That is, even if Ajzenstat is correct, and Canada was

Introduction

23

originally based upon Lockean political principles, do not Locke and Hobbes’s anthropology have much in common? In which case a Lockean/ Hobbesian regime is essentially no different than a progressive regime: “The progressivist stew that is today’s special,” Smith claims, “featuring Marxian, Deweyan, Rawlsian and postmodern ingredients, is a more Hobbesian recipe than most adherents realize or admit.” In that case, do features of our current regime that some in the volume have criticized for being inconsistent with the founding principles in fact represent nothing more than the late stages of the anticipated, intentional, historical development of Hobbes’s thought? Granted, in Locke, unlike in Hobbes, we find that liberty is, Smith says, “among each person’s possessions, requiring therefore sustained vigilance on the part of each citizen to defend themselves against tyrannical types and aspirants.” Yet, the ennobling aspects of Locke’s theory may be crushed by the “weight of the democratic and materialistic premises and purposes” such that “the nobler elements that are necessary to sustain and preserve liberal democracy and commercial society against their worst excesses have difficulty staying afloat.” Yet is not the fact that the historical record shows that Canada’s founders spoke not only about Lockean principles but also about the necessity of cultivating virtues through great books and through religion – virtues they regarded both as good in themselves and good for a regime dedicated to liberty – sufficient indication that they did not take up this Hobbesian project? And is it not the case that if we do find ourselves in the predicament described by Smith that the great books, or Christian theology, as Pearce, Havers, and Topping might say, might still serve as counter-ballast to the “weight of the democratic and materialistic premises and purposes”? Might we even conclude with Leo Strauss that there is always a necessity in mass democracy to remind ourselves of the great and the beautiful, and the limits to human will, and that these resources remain within our tradition?33 Not only that, they were recognized and recommended to posterity by the very men who founded Canada for that very reason: to serve as essential buttresses and supports against the drift of egalitarianism because such resistance is in every citizen’s long-term self-interest. Is it time to return to our own founding with Ajzenstat’s frame of mind and to see our regime within the larger framework of political philosophy, beginning with an elucidation of the original principles and conception and then working through the changes to our regime that have occurred over time? Only then might we get a better sense as to whether the regime that we currently inhabit is the one that was originally intended, and if it is not, whether the

24

David W. Livingstone

one we happen to have now is better or worse. Or whether what we have now is the inevitable product of history or instead the product of deliberation and choice. If it is the latter, then it may be possible, if desirable, to choose to recover principles from our past rather than to blunder into the future. We should at least not fall into the vulgar mindset of those who blindly venerate success. Our own founders with their speeches may be speaking to us from the grave, urging us to use the liberty they secured for us to resist the weight of democratic and materialistic premises and purposes. When they said that liberty in Canada would have to be used responsibly and knowingly, with due deference to the best that had been said and thought in the past, who else were they speaking to if not to us, their heirs? D’Arcy McGee said “as an incipient new Nation, it seems to me, that our mental self-reliance is an essential condition of our political independence.” Young Canadians should be encouraged to “use their time; to exercise their powers of mind as well as body; to acquire the mental drill and discipline, which will enable them to bear the arms of a civilized state in times of peace, with honor and advantage.” Learning from past authors like Shakespeare, Burke, Tocqueville, and from the Bible, they can contribute their own work to “the increase of the universal literary republic” while aiming at the “object of all intellectual pursuits … the attainment of Truth.”34 Before whom do we think McGee was laying this weighty charge if not to those of us who teach in Canadian institutions of higher learning? Notes 1 David R. Sweet, unpublished Convocation Address, University of Dallas (date unknown). 2 Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Henry Lee,” 8 May 1825, Teaching American History.org (Ashbrook Centre at Ashland University), accessed 9 July 2014. 3 Thomas L. Pangle, The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Postmodern Age (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 195. 4 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997). Ajzenstat remarks that “Moore’s 1867 was the first book-length treatment of Confederation in forty years” (note 14 in her essay for this collection). 5 Janet Ajzenstat, “What Allan Bloom Told Me,” 7 May 2008, The Idea File: Thoughts on Political Philosophy, http://janetajzenstat.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/what-allanbloom-told-me/. 6 Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles, William D. Gardiner, ed. Canada’s Founding Debates (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999 [2003]). 7 John von Heyking, review of Barry Cooper, It’s the Regime, Stupid!: A Report from the Cowboy West on Why Stephen Harper Matters (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2009), VoeglinView, http://voegelinview.com/its-the-regime-stupid-review. 8 Ajzenstat et al., Canada’s Founding, 1.

Introduction

25

9 Ibid. Ajzenstat points out in a different context that by no means should one neglect conventional treatments of Canada’s founding. “The trick is to do justice to conventional interpretations of Canadian/British/American documentary history, while using one’s knowledge of political philosophy to assess those interpretations” (“What Allan Bloom Told Me,” 7 May 2008). Contrast Ajzenstat’s view with the following: “This collection is based [on the conception of democracy] which builds on Dewey’s characterization of democracy as a way of life rather than as a form of government” (18). “Following Dewey (1951) and Greene (1985), we believe in the ongoing reconstructive nature of democracy. Living the democratic spirit is not easy or straightforward; we need to continue the struggle of reconstructing democracy.” The Erosion of Democracy in Education: From Critique to Possibilities, eds John Portelli and Patrick Solomon (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Ltd, 2001), 16. 10 Heyking, review of Cooper, It’s the Regime, Stupid! 11 Travis D. Smith, “Citizenship and Education,” Guest Commentary, November 2006. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs. http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/ guest/06/ smith/isi.html accessed 1 March 2013). 12 Patrick Malcolmson, Richard Myers, Colin O’Connell, Liberal Education and Value Relativism: A Guide to Today’s B.A. (University Press of America, 1996), 19. Also consider Patrick Keeney’s comment in The National Post, 18 August 2011, “Don’t Turn Universities Into Trade Schools”: “Canadian universities have undergone radical alterations in their mandate. As recently as 1983, the distinguished American scholar Edward Shils could confidently assert that the distinctive mission of the university ‘is the methodical discovery and the teaching of truths about serious and important matters.’ But in the current age of micromanagement, mission statements and diversity offices, this description seems a quaint echo from a bygone age.” 13 Janet Ajzenstat, “Confederation and Individual Liberty,” Canada’s Founding Ideas, November 2010 (Macdonald-Laurier Institute for Public Policy), 11. 14 The Harvard report is entitled “The Teaching of Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future,” http://harvardmagazine.com/sites/default/files/ Mapping%20the%20Future%20of%20the%20Humanities.pdf. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences report is entitled “The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a Vibrant, competitive, and Secure Nation,” (http://www. humanitiescommission.org/_pdf/HSS_Report.pdf). For some interesting comments about the AAAS report, see “Liberal Education vs. Liberalist Education” by Nathan Schlueter, National Review Online, 16 October 2013. 15 Peter Berkowitz, “Does Harvard Hate Humanities? No, But It Doesn’t Understand Them,” Weekly Standard 18, no. 41, 8 July 2013. 16 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 74–5. 17 Ibid., 196. 18 Anthony Kronman, Education’s End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 180–3. 19 Ibid., 151. See Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education: The Decline of Liberal Education in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994): “The traditional

26

20 21

22

23 24 25

David W. Livingstone teacher-student relationship must be replaced with a kind of transactional therapy in which all (including the instructor) share their feelings about how they are oppressed by patriarchy, ageism, or any kind of natural or cultural constraint. The outcome, in the post-modern vulgate, is for everyone in the encounter group to realize that all life is about power – you are dominated by power structures (however benignly disguised as parents, religion, and tradition) and the only solution is to shatter their power and assert your own” (64). See Nathan Schlueter, “Liberal Education vs. Liberalist Education,” National Review Online, 16 October 2013. Paul Axelrod, Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). Also consider Liberal Education and the Small University in Canada, ed. Christine Storm (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). Contrast this with Malcolmson et al. Liberal Education and Value Relativism: A Guide to Today’s B.A. (University Press of America, 1996). Janet Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007). Canada’s Founding Debates ed. Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles, and William D. Gairdner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). Aristotle, The Politics, Book III, part IV, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Internet Classics Archive, accessed 9 July 2014). Malcolmson, et al., Liberal Education and Value Relativism, 18. Liberal education is an education that leads to freedom of the mind, the “essential freedom,” as Allan Bloom refers to it, “that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated” (Closing of the American Mind, 39). It breaks the hold on the mind of opinion and orthodoxy, and if it does not lead one to the perception of the truth, it at least reveals opinion to be to be opinion and not knowledge. Civic education, on the other hand, is intended to lead citizens to regard the history, principles, and values of their particular regime with favour if not reverence. But granted that no actual regime, strictly speaking, is the best regime, the affection and reverence for the laws evoked by civic education deliberately strengthen prejudices that favour the regime. Civic education would then seem to be in the service of strengthening opinion, whereas liberal education is intended to free us from opinion. “Liberal education seeks answers to such questions as: ‘What is the best way of life?’ and ‘What is the best regime?’ Civic education assumes answers to these questions: the best way of life is ‘our way of life;’ the best regime is this regime” (Jeffrey Wallin, “Is Civic Education Compatible with Liberal Education?” On Principle 5, no. 2, 1997). These two ends of education would appear to be deeply incompatible. The paradox is resolved somewhat if one argues, as some have, that that particular regime that sustains and favours liberal education – namely liberal democracy – as part of its own self interest must continually generate citizens who, in Aristotle’s definition of political rule, can learn to “rule and be ruled in turn.” Aristotle maintains that human beings are political animals because they can perceive justice and injustice. A political community is where these differing

Introduction

26 27

28 29

30

27

and sometimes only partial perceptions of the truth are discussed and debated. Liberal democracy, unlike other regimes such as tyranny, expects that citizens will play their part in these debates and deliberations, and a liberal education encourages this capacity to engage in meaningful discussions about the best regime with both an open mind and a steady concern for the truth. Postmodernism, on the other hand, by denying that our perception of justice and injustice is the perception of anything real undermines not only liberal education but also liberal democracy. “True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness” (Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 40). See Leon Craig, The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 335. For example, the government in British Columbia speaks about “re-engineering” post-secondary education in the province: “British Columbians can look forward to enhancements to the Industry Training Authority, as well as the re-engineering of our secondary and post-secondary institutions to ensure our students have the skills for the jobs of the future.” (“Speech from the Throne,” The Honourable Judith Guichon, OBC, Lieutenant-Governor at the Opening of the Second Session, Fortieth Parliament of the Province of British Columbia, 11 February 2014, http://engage.gov.bc.ca/thronespeech/transcript/). Malcomson et al., Liberal Education, 18. Christopher Moore writing in the Literary Review of Canada relates the following story concerning his colleague’s reaction to reading John Ralston Saul’s double biography, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin (Penguin Canada, 2011). “My perplexed colleague is a veteran of the Canadian literary-cultural-political scene. She has good reason to consider herself widely read and well informed. (Okay, she is the editor of this magazine.) Why, she wonders, with all her knowledge of this country, is this story so damned unfamiliar to her? If this is the central story of Canadian political history, and as dramatic as Saul’s telling makes it, why has she known so little about it? And if she does not know about it, whose fault is that? “Our Hidden History: Why Do We Downplay the Seminal Moment in Canadian Democracy?” (Literary Review of Canada, http://reviewcanada.ca/ magazine/2011/07/ our-hidden-history/). Not unlike Ajzenstat, Moore’s answer to these questions looks to Canadian historians: “Why this neglect? Historians do not exist outside of society. Their choices of subject matter often reflect contemporary realities and societal concerns. Is their – our – neglect of the origins of Canadian parliamentary democracy perhaps a reflection of how Canadians imagine parliamentary democracy today?” Bourinot, The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People, 116. Writing in 1900, Bourinot drew the same conclusion regarding literature, and that oratory has kept pace but, “of late years, a keen, practical, debating style has taken the place of the more rhetorical and studied oratory of old times. The intellectual faculties of Canadians require only larger opportunities for their exercise to bring forth a rich fruition” (“Literature and Art in Canada,” 104). Bourinot’s reference to “studied oratory” suggests the influence of classical and modern models of oratory among the fathers of Confederation.

28

David W. Livingstone

31 Bourinot, How Canada Is Governed, 289–90. 32 The tendency of higher education to specialize and to reduce education to vocation also plays a role in promoting submissiveness. Heyking, “Does a Liberal Education Still Have Value?” Cardus Comment, 9 March 2012, http://www.cardus. ca/comment/ article/3136/does-a-liberal-education-still-have-value. 33 Leo Strauss, “What Is Liberal Education” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968): “Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness” (5). 34 McGee, “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion,” from the Montreal Gazette, 5 November 1867: 2. Library of the Public Archives of Canada, http://www.archive. org/details/cihm_09479.

When Canadians Rewrote Their History: Discarding “Liberty” and Embracing “Community” Janet Ajzenstat

It happened in the 1960s. It was a busy decade. The Canadian economy was growing; wages and salaries rose in real terms; the baby boomers came of age. Immigration increased and Canada opened its doors to Asians and Africans. Women entered the work force and public life in greater numbers.1 Britain’s influence shrank; America’s grew. Canadians embraced the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We adopted federal and provincial human rights codes. The Province of Quebec experienced what H.V. Nelles calls an “exhilarating revival of political, cultural, and social self-confidence.”2 The national and provincial governments expanded the welfare state, built schools, hospitals, and roads, increased spending on the arts and sciences, and founded new universities and colleges. All to the good, you say? I agree. We changed the name of the country. (We used to be the Dominion of Canada; we used to speak of the Dominion government, and Dominion– Provincial relations.) We threw out the flag under which Canadian forces had fought with distinction in two world wars.3 I am less enamoured of these reforms. But boldness was the order of the day. Canadians were on the move, eyes on the future. And we rewrote our history. I am not suggesting that historians deliberately falsified the facts. They merely cast a veil over some events and moved others to the fore. They offered new explanations. The effect was to create a strikingly new story about Canada’s origins. The old story described public life and political institutions. Here it is in brief: in 1848, British North Americans adopted “responsible government,” the defining principle of parliamentary democracy, thus overthrowing the local oligarchies (the Family Compact in Upper Canada, the Chateau Clique in Lower Canada, government by “official party” in

30

Janet Ajzenstat

the Atlantic provinces).4 At Confederation, a short generation later, they made “responsible government” the central feature of the Dominion Parliament. The defeat of oligarchy was complete. The new story contends that a focus on public life and institutions fails to tell us about ordinary Canadians, our Native peoples and immigrants, and fails to give us a sense of Canada’s national character. Many countries claim to enjoy political institutions that secure liberty. If we want to know more about Canada’s particular story we must look at social history, our “culture,” taking “culture” in the broadest sense. Yes, there were good reasons to welcome the new historiography, not least that it promised to explore perennial questions about the ways in which life in Canada differs from life in the United States. But the scholars who embarked on the new story let the political history lapse. Political documents were not reprinted and the story of “responsible government” was eclipsed. The irony is that we needed knowledge of our political history even more in the 1960s than in preceding years. In response to demands from the newly assertive Quebec, Canada’s eleven governments were proposing to redraw the constitutional division of legislative powers in the British North America Act, 1867 (our founding document, now called, after 1982, the Constitution Act, 1867), and because revision of the Constitution on such a scale required formal amendment, we were soon involved in a search for an amending formula. The British North America Act was a statute of the British Parliament. In the past, that fact had facilitated constitutional amendment; the British readily acceded to requests for reform. The contention now was that the importance of recognizing Quebec’s distinctive character merited ratification by a made-in-Canada process. But attempts to devise one ran into difficulties. We were proposing to draft anew two crucial features of the 1867 Act, the amending formula and the division of legislative powers, and many political interests were involved. Let me repeat: Canadians were embarking on an ambitious project of constitutional reform at a time when historians and political scientists were promulgating ideas about the relative unimportance of constitutions and institutions. In 1982 we achieved the amending formula and entrenched a constitutional bill of rights (the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms). But formal conciliation of Quebec’s interests continued to elude us. Further attempts at reform followed, ending in 1992 with the failure of the national referendum on the ambitious reform package called the Charlottetown Constitutional Accord.

When Canadians Rewrote Their History

31

To the best of my knowledge, no one in the three decades of constitutional wrangling – during our “Constitutional odyssey,” to use Peter Russell’s excellent phrase – no one turned to study the Confederation period and the original British North America Act. No one asked how the Fathers of Confederation had gone about their work. There was an acrimonious debate about how to ratify constitutional reforms, but no one asked how, or even whether the 1867 Act had been ratified; few, indeed I believe no one, studied the arguments that had been made for and against Confederation in the colonial parliaments.

The New History, Creighton and Hartz About the Fathers of Confederation Donald Creighton says: “They were mid-Victorian British colonials who had grown up in a political system which they valued, and which they had not the slightest intention of trying to change by revolution. For them the favourite myths of the Enlightenment did not possess even a quaintly antiquarian interest. [T]hey would have been sceptical about both the utility and the validity of abstract notions such as the social contract and inalienable rights of man.”5 In a similar vein Ramsay Cook argues: “It is well known that the Fathers of Confederation were pragmatic lawyers for the most part, more given to fine tuning the details of a constitutional act than to waxing philosophical about human rights or national goals.”6 F.H. Underhill says: “The lack of a philosophical mind to give guidance to the thinking of ordinary citizens has been a great weakness of our Canadian national experience throughout our history.”7 E.R. Black repeats the sentiment: “Confederation was born in pragmatism without the attendance of a readily definable philosophic rationale.”8 In political science the seminal source for the new history was Gad Horowitz’s essay, “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation,”9 which professes to describe our national inclinations. Indeed, it makes an unabashed appeal to nationalism, arguing that Canadians as Canadians have better hearts than Americans; we are more ready to sacrifice individual interests for the common good. We are more pacific. Drawing on Louis Hartz’s interpretation of Hegel and Marx, Horowitz argues that in British North America John Locke’s robust idea of individual freedom was profoundly modified by a communitarian philosophy that originated with the United Empire Loyalists – the men and women who fled the Thirteen Colonies in the aftermath of the American Revolution

32

Janet Ajzenstat

– and was subsequently developed by British socialists, the Fabians, who migrated to British North America by the late 1880s.10 Horowitz advances no study of Loyalist statements or Fabian writings to support this contention; he says very little about what British North Americans might have been reading on any subject. He says almost nothing about the “struggle for responsible government,” or indeed, Confederation. His argument relies on the idea, drawn from Hegel and Marx, that the modern world exhibits a more or less steady progression toward socialism. Europe had developed sturdy forms of socialism – so Horowitz contended; he was writing in the 1960s – and Canada, with its vaunted Loyalist and Fabian inheritance, could be expected to follow suit. In contrast, the United States, the country from which the Loyalists had fled, was comparatively devoid of communitarian feeling and for this reason, doomed to fall behind in the race to the collectivist future. The argument in brief is that Canada has the potential to progress beyond the teachings of Locke and the European Enlightenment; the United States does not. American scholars have challenged Horowitz’s argument. But in Canada his ideas linger. How often it is asserted in introductory textbooks that Americans hew to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” while Canadians prefer “peace, order, and good government”! How often is the phrase “peace, order, and good government” interpreted to mean that Canadians qua Canadians favour gun control at home and peacekeeping measures abroad.

Contra Creighton and Hartz In the British North America of the 1830s there were two opinions about “responsible government.” The British North American Liberals – call them Whigs, if you like, or classical liberals – praised “responsible government” as a means of ensuring the equal competition of political parties for office, thus guaranteeing freedom of political speech in the legislature and “out of doors,” that is, among the general public. The colonial Tories were less enthusiastic; they were the party most often appointed by the colonial governor to the provinces’ Executive Councils, with appropriate salaries. But the Tories had another reason for rejecting “responsible government,” one for which we might feel more sympathy. They believed that adopting the principle would sever the colonies’ connection with Great Britain. “Responsible government” characterizes an independent polity, an independent “state,” if you will, in which the government of the day answers

When Canadians Rewrote Their History

33

to the people’s elected members in the popular house, and only to those elected members. It does not tolerate interference by a foreign or imperial power. It will allow cooperation with such a power. It will allow consultation. But in a legislature characterized by “responsible government,” the cooperation or consultation remains open to challenge. When the question of “responsible government” raged in British North America in the 1830s and 40s the issue was this: would its adoption spell the end of Empire? Would the colonies scatter immediately or merely drift away as the years passed?11 The experiment was tried, “responsible government” became the standard practice in the colonial parliaments, and behold, when the matter of federation came up in the 1860s, the Empire was still intact. Britain had lost the power to compel the allegiance of colonists, short of exerting intolerably coercive measures. What had kept the Empire together? In what sense was there an Empire? We might argue that advantages of mutual association and mutual sentiment had sufficed, habits of mind, affection for what an old song calls “the flag that that braved the battle and the breeze.” (The phrase occurred often in debates on Confederation in the Maritimes.) Or we could say that once the individual provinces had gained control in domestic matters they had no reason to depart. By the 1860s, the Tories, or many of them, had changed their minds on the matter of “responsible government.” When in 1864, the thirty-three men we call the Fathers of Confederation met at Quebec City to draft the constitution of the British North American union, they readily agreed that the general government of the federation, the political institution we now know as the Parliament of Canada, would be characterized by “responsible government.”12 All, whatever their party loyalties or preferences, understood that a constitution enjoying “responsible government,” would allow the free and open competition of political parties for seats in the legislature and positions in government. They had had enough of oligarchy. In the debates on Confederation in the Canadian Legislative Assembly, Alexander Mackenzie put the matter this way: The “question is not, at the present moment, what is the best possible form of government, according to our particular opinions, but what is the best that can be framed for a community holding different views.”13 Creighton and his followers gave too little attention to the enduring appeal of “abstract notions” about inalienable rights. They gave too little thought to the history of English constitutionalism. The record shows beyond doubt that the “Victorian gentlemen” who made Canada believed it was their task, first and last, to secure the blessings of liberty for their

34

Janet Ajzenstat

fellows and their descendants.14 Listen to Stewart Campbell in Nova Scotia’s debates on colonial union. He is describing life in his province from 1848 to 1866: “I am a free man. I claim the rights and attributes of a free man, speaking in the presence of a British free assembly. I have the right to criticize the judgement they [the Fathers of Confederaton] have formed and an equal right to give expression to my own.”15 William Lawrence, another Nova Scotian, says: “We are a free people, prosperous beyond doubt, advancing cautiously in wealth … under the British Constitution we have far more freedom than any other people on the face of the earth.16 “Far more freedom than any other people on the face of the earth”! That is some boast. By “the British Constitution,” Lawrence means, not the Parliament of Great Britain but parliamentary government, “responsible government,” as it operated in Nova Scotia. Newfoundland’s George Hogsett makes a similar contention: “We have here a constitution for which the people nobly fought, and which was reluctantly wrung from the British government. We had the right of taxing ourselves, or legislating for ourselves, and were we then … to give up all the rights we possess, rights which, if properly worked and administered, would secure us all the advantages and prosperity a people can want or require?”17

What Did Happen at Confederation? The Fathers of Confederation drafted Canada’s constitution at the Quebec Conference of 1864. Once drafted, the scheme went to the colonial parliaments for ratification.18 In those colonial debates the Fathers – Liberals, Tories, and Independents, are to be found, for the most part, on the front benches. They are all Confederates, that is, they favour colonial union. But they face – quelle surprise! – an assemblage of Liberals, Tories, and Independents who have mixed feelings. There are some, not a few, strongly opposed to union. We may refer to them as anti-Confederates. In those ratifying debates we discover beyond doubt that Canada’s founders were informed about the arguments of the British Enlightenment, that they understood the idea of the social contract, and that they did their best to secure for all time the rights and liberties of British North Americans. The overriding question was whether those rights, achieved in 1848, would be threatened in a federation. Participants appealed to John Locke, the most prominent thinker of the British Enlightenment, and William Blackstone, whose writings on British parliamentary and legal traditions derive from Locke. They referred

When Canadians Rewrote Their History

35

to Thomas Hobbes and Sir Edward Coke. They drew arguments from Edmund Burke, especially Burke on the issue of parliamentary representation and the duties of legislators. Some had read Jean-Louis de Lolme’s invaluable tome, The Constitution of England, which argues for the superiority of the English Constitution over European constitutions in securing the rights of individuals; it was available in the colonies from early in the nineteenth century.19 Many were familiar with John Stuart Mill’s Representative Government, published in 1861. They especially paid attention to Mill’s argument for an effective second chamber. They studied ancient “confederations” and political alliances. Thomas D’Arcy McGee and Joseph Cauchon published books on the nature of federalism. Some referred to The Federalist Papers by the American Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay; all knew of them. Many referred to aspects of the American Constitution and some to clauses in the constitutions of individual American states. Some took an interest in the secessionist constitution of the American South. Some cited the example of New Zealand, which had experimented with a form of federal union in the previous decade. They read European constitutions. They were familiar with British history. They knew, if only in outline, the story of the English Civil War and the arguments for the restoration of the English Parliament in 1688. They drew lessons from local history. The parliamentarians in the United Province of Canada rehearsed the story of the 1837–38 rebellions, the arguments for and against the 1840 legislative Union of Upper and Lower Canada, and the story of the union’s aftermath. Lower Canadians reeled off facts about life under British rule before and after 1791, the date at which Lower Canada was given a representative assembly. GeorgeÉtienne Cartier was lavish in his praise of British political institutions and the security provided for individual freedoms; he was far from the only one to speak in that vein. All recalled the “struggle for responsible government” in their province. They referred to Lord Durham’s Report of 1839 on the subject, and on the role of the political executive, the second chamber, and the duties of the individual legislator. To repeat, the great question was this: would Confederation undermine the colonists’ rights? The Confederates argued that there would be no diminution of liberty under the new constitution because it would entrench the familiar features of parliamentary government that secure it, to wit, “responsible government,” and the right of political dissent within the legislature and “outside.”

36

Janet Ajzenstat

The anti-Confederates agreed that parliamentary government secures individual rights. What worried them was that the Quebec Resolutions proposed to harness parliamentary institutions to American-style federalism, obliging colonists to obey two levels of government. Thus, the typical anti-Confederate argument took this form: we in New Brunswick (let us say) do very well with our provincial legislature. Since 1848 all domestic matters, after due deliberation, have been settled by our own government. All matters can be reviewed and amended. We are free to debate all political issues in the public arena, to argue for the repeal of unsatisfactory political measures, and to vote out an unsatisfactory government. But if Confederation wins the day, some matters affecting New Brunswickers will be settled by a national legislature, in which New Brunswickers will be in a minority. We may have to live with laws that we cannot countenance and that we cannot see any prospect of changing. We will be endangering our present, perfect freedom. Confederates like George Brown and Étienne Cartier argued repeatedly that the federation’s general government would legislate only on general matters, that is, on matters equally affecting every individual in the federation as a whole. Matters affecting particular groups, regions, traditions, and religions, would fall to the provinces. Reading the debates today it is apparent that the Confederates were thinking about federalism in terms of what would come to be called by political scientists “water-tight compartments.” To continue with the New Brunswick example, the role of New Brunswickers in the general government of the union would be, first, to participate in deliberations on matters of equal interest to all, whatever their province of origin, and second, to object to attempts to introduce in the general government matters that should properly have been assigned to the provinces.

The Enlightenment: Consent of the Governed On 15 February 1865, Legislative Councillor David Christie in the Province of Canada debates on the Quebec Resolutions, said: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the unalienable rights of man, and … to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. This is the secret strength of the British Constitution, and without a full and free recognition of it no government can be strong and permanent.” The secret strength of the British Constitution? Did Christie really

When Canadians Rewrote Their History

37

describe the British Constitution in the famous words of the American Declaration of Independence? He did. Speeches in the Province of Canada debates on Confederation were prepared for publication; legislators had the opportunity to revise. Not everyone crashed into the deliberations with Christie’s flamboyance but all knew that they were participating in a momentous decision. They were proud of what they said and they wanted to leave an accurate record. Christie was saying that British North Americans no less than citizens of the United States were beneficiaries of the seventeenth-century natural-law argument for the equality of man. Most participants in the Confederation Debates agreed with Christie on this matter, though not a few thought that British institutions offered a better guarantee of equality. In the Province of Canada debates, John A. Macdonald argued that the constitution of the United States was “one of the most skilful works which human intelligence ever created … one of the most perfect organizations that ever governed a free people.” But he and Cartier and George Brown were proposing a few improvements!20 As part of the British heritage Christie claimed the two most notable features of the political tradition that had originated in the British Enlightenment: the “unalienable rights of man,” and the principle of popular sovereignty, which he defined, borrowing Jefferson’s language, as the requirement that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. As Jefferson’s formulation indicates, the propositions are intimately related. And yet, curiously, Canadian historians and political scientists seldom acknowledge the connection and do not explore it. It is commonly said that some sort of security for individual rights obtained in this country before the introduction in 1982 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But the character of that security is seldom spelled out today. One reason for our difficulty is that we have convinced ourselves that at Confederation there was no provision for consulting “the people.” Popular sovereignty – the acknowledgement that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed – is described as a feature of the American constitution but not the Canadian. In Constitutional Odyssey, Peter Russell asserts that the Fathers of Confederation regarded popular sovereignty as a “dreadful heresy.” He continues: “[At] Canada’s founding its people were not sovereign and there was not even a sense that a constituent sovereign people would have to be invented.”21 But on this subject Russell is wrong. He did not consider the consequences of the grant of “responsible government” in 1848. And he

38

Janet Ajzenstat

did not have before him the ratifying debates. He was betrayed by the failure of two generations of scholars to consult and discuss our founding debates. We were all betrayed. The overwhelming majority of Fathers and ratifying legislators – Confederates and anti-Confederates, Liberals, Tories, and Independents, frontbenchers, and backbenchers – argued that the new constitution had to be ratified by an appeal to “the people.” Indeed there was virtually no dissent on this topic. A new constitution requires the “consent of the governed.” Locke’s formulation runs as follows; “For no government can have a right to obedience from a people who have not freely consented to it.”22 In the Canadian Legislative Assembly, James O’Halloran maintained that: “[T]he “people [are] the only rightful source of all political power.”23 In the Nova Scotia Assembly, William Lawrence – that firebrand again – said, “the principle which lies at the foundation of our constitution is that which declares the people to be the source of political power.”24 In 1870, when British Columbia was considering whether to join Confederation, E.G. Alston stated: “I am not disposed to regret the occurrence of the difficulties in Red River, for it will teach the Canadian government, and all governments, that though you may buy and sell territories, you cannot transfer the human beings therein, like so many serfs and chattels, to a fresh allegiance with impunity; that the consent of the people must be first obtained; and that though the soil may be sold, the soul is free.”25 “The soil may be sold, the soul is free.” Is that a grand statement? Yes! Is it a Lockean statement? Yes! Readers may object that a majority vote in the provincial parliament would fall short of ensuring that everyone who was to be subject to the laws of the new constitution had been consulted. If you are such a reader, I will say only that you have John Locke on your side, and Locke sets the bar high: “No one can be governed without his consent.” (And with Locke’s permission, I will amend the statement to include women; “no one can be governed without his or her consent.”) In practice, however, it is almost impossible to imagine means to secure every last person’s consent. Legislators asked whether it would suffice to put the parliamentary resolution to a vote immediately after a general election. They also asked whether the raw majority that results from a referendum is preferable to the deliberative majority produced by a parliament. To repeat: there was perhaps no topic more hotly discussed at Confederation than this question of means to put flesh on Locke’s requirement that each and all consent.

When Canadians Rewrote Their History

39

New Arguments for Collectivism Robert Meynell offers a strident version of the new history in Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom: C.B. Macpherson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor.26 Like Louis Hartz, whose influence he acknowledges, he finds in Hegel and Marx not merely one strand of political thought, one source among others for thinkers like Macpherson, Grant, and Taylor, but an inclination toward collectivism that is inherently Canadian entrenched in our political culture. A curious note of anger runs through Meynell’s volume. He is scathing on the subject of Janet Ajzenstat.27 His criticism of Robert C. Sibley’s study of John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor is very nearly as harsh: [Sibley], like Ajzenstat, “concludes that Canada is not substantially different from the United States and argues for the surrender of Canadian sovereignty to the global liberal empire led by the United States.”28 Other scholars sound not angry but wistful. Canadians once had a salutary sense of benign collectivism but are now losing it. In The European Roots of Canadian Identity Philip Resnick describes Canada as a country plagued by a “persistent sense of doubt” about Canadian values.29 We do not know whether the nation will endure. In a small book with a promising title, Who We Are, Rudyard Griffiths makes a similar argument.30 We do not know who we are. As the reader discovers, Griffiths is urging us to reinvent Canada, to remake our idea of this country. Griffiths and Resnick use a term now fashionable in the social sciences, but nonetheless puzzling: “imaginary.” It is a noun. One speaks of the Canadian “imaginary.” Both argue that Canadians must develop a new imaginary. Resnick boldly suggests that we take revolutionary France as our model; we should develop an imaginative appreciation of our European roots. In neither book does the nineteenth-century struggle against oligarchy get more than a passing mention. Confederation gets only a nod. Even Charles Taylor has succumbed to the fad; in Modern Social Imaginaries, he appears to be suggesting that Canadians no longer live with the “imaginary” of the British Enlightenment.31 We have moved beyond it. Something else lies ahead – something unknown.

Well, Who, Indeed, Are We? What do we have in common? Some of us once served in armies at war with Canada. Not a few have parents who did. We do not all refer to the

40

Janet Ajzenstat

deity by the same name. Some think belief in a deity is incompatible with the good life. Some think it incompatible with a law-abiding life. Not all of us are law-abiding. We are enmeshed in a web of law, policy, and governmental practices. Some think we have too many laws; others are deeply involved in projects to expand the regulatory state. We change our minds about policy and politics as we age; we change our minds by the season. We quarrel among ourselves about the positive rights defined by our superior courts and human rights tribunals. We quarrel about our responsibilities. Let me suggest that what we have in common is our citizenship in a country created by the Fathers of Confederation and the ratifying legislators. Many things have changed in this country since Confederation, but Canada is still a federal regime governed by parliamentary institutions. Its foundations are rooted in the political philosophy of the European Enlightenment, and Locke’s philosophy of liberty. What we have in common is that precious heritage of equal liberty and consent. Notes 1 For a helpful account of the period emphasizing economic issues, see Brian Lee Crowley, Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2009). 2 H.V. Nelles, A Little History of Canada (Don Mills, On: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119. 3 Note Nelles on the flag debate: the government adopted it, after “a prolonged and exceedingly bitter parliamentary battle almost everyone forgets now.” Ibid., 218. 4 John Ralston Saul is valiantly engaged in retelling the “old story.” See his LouisHippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin (Toronto: Penguin, 2010). And see Christopher Moore’s review essay, “Our Hidden History, Why Do We Downplay the Seminal Moment in Canadian Democracy?,” Literary Review of Canada 19, no. 6 ( July/August 2011), 20–1. 5 Donald Creighton, The Road to Confederation: The Emergence of Canada, 1863– 1867 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1964), 4. Peter Russell cites this passage in Constitutional Odyssey, Can Canadians Become A Sovereign People? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 10–11. Russell accepts Creighton’s verdict: the Fathers of Confederation had little knowledge of British parliamentary traditions and no interest in a philosophy of rights. 6 Ramsay Cook, “Canada 2000: Towards a Post-National Canada,” Cité Libre (Fall 2000), 82. 7 F.H. Underhill, The Image of Confederation (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Publications, 1962), 3. 8 E.R. Black, Divided Loyalties (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), 4. 9 First published in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science in 1966,

When Canadians Rewrote Their History

10

11

12

13 14

41

“Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism,” has been reprinted many times. See the abbreviated version in Hugh G. Thorburn ed., Party Politics in Canada, 5th ed. (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1985). It is still required reading in many political science and Canadian studies programs across the country. See the several essays in Louis Hartz, ed. The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), especially Hartz’s introductory chapter, “The Fragmentation of European Ideology,” 3–23. Curiously, the chapter on Canada in this volume does not perfectly bear out Horowitz’s thesis. Kenneth McRae finds a broad streak of Whiggism in the Loyalist migration. See The Founding of New Societies, 219–74. In his Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839) Lord Durham confidently predicts that the grant of “responsible government” to the colonists will not weaken but strengthen the ties of Empire. See Janet Ajzenstat, The Political Thought of Lord Durham (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), chap. 5, “Durham and Empire.” And see John Beverley Robinson, Canada and the Canada Bill (first published in London in 1840). As I argue in “Durham and Robinson: Political Faction and Moderation,” in Canada’s Origins, Liberal, Tory or Republican? ed. Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995), 140–58, Robinson admired “responsible government” as a principle and regarded it as excellent practice in the home country. He did not believe it suitable for a colonial dependency. Peter Russell argues that “the constitution drafters saw no need to spell out the vital democratic principle that government be directed by ministers who have the confidence of the elected branch of the legislature.” Constitutional Odyssey, 26. Widely accepted, this view is entirely wrong. Readers may satisfy themselves that the Fathers wrote “responsible government” into the 1867 Act by reading the Act with a careful legal eye, paying attention to the sections establishing the legislative and executive branches of government, and to the clauses enabling taxing and spending. The term “responsible government” is not used, I would argue, because it is not precise enough for a constitutional document. See also Janet Ajzenstat, The Once and Future Canadian Government: An Essay in Political Thought (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 63–7. Alexander Mackenzie, Canadian Legislative Assembly, 23 February 1865, Canada’s Founding Debates, 94. For a supremely helpful summary of Creighton’s deficiencies on the constitutionmaking process in the 1860s see, Christopher Moore’s “Preface: As If Confederation Mattered,” in his 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997), ix–xiv. Moore’s 1867 was the first book-length treatment of Confederation in forty years. In the preface, he recalls asking Creighton why Nova Scotia’s premier, Charles Tupper, refused to go to the Charlottetown Conference of 1864 unless the leader of the opposition would go with him. Creighton had no explanation, nor, says Moore, did other leading Canadian historians. The idea that the Fathers knew they were making a constitution to foster equal contestation of political parties for office was not known to the historians. Moore thoroughly debunks the idea that Canada is a Tory party invention, made by Tories for Tories.

42

Janet Ajzenstat

15 Stewart Campbell, Nova Scotia, House of Assembly, 17 April 1866. See Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles, and William D. Gairdner, eds, Canada’s Founding Debates (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 371. 16 William Lawrence, Nova Scotia House of Assembly, 17 April 1866; Ajzenstat et al., eds, Canada’s Founding Debates, 371. 17 George Hogsett, Newfoundland House of Assembly, 23 February 1869, Ajzenstat et al., Canada’s Founding Debates, 98. 18 See G.P. Browne, ed., Documents on the Confederation of British North America, A Compilation Based on Sir Joseph Pope’s Confederation Documents, Supplemented by Other Official Material (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), Documents, Section A, in which appears an exchange of letters between the executive governments of the several colonies, and the Colonial Office. It was agreed at this early stage that once drafted by a selection of political leaders appointed by the colonial parliaments, the draft constitution would be returned to the parliaments for ratification. Browne’s Documents was first published in 1969. This recent edition retains Browne’s helpful Introduction and adds an essay by Janet Ajzenstat. 19 It has been re-issued. Jean-Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England, edited and with an introduction by David Lieberman (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007). The edition is scholarly and entirely admirable except for one fact: it describes de Lome’s influence in England and in the United States but neglects to mention that he was read in British North America. 20 The aspect of the American Constitution most often queried was this: the American President acts as both head of state, like the Canadian governor general, and head of government, like our prime minister. The fear was that an American president might use his electoral popularity and his constitutional role as head of state to introduce what Macdonald and others called “unbridled democracy,” riding roughshod over political dissent. Most liberal democracies today make a distinction between head of state and head of government, imitating the British and Canadian model. The United States is the exception. 21 Russell, Constitutional Odyssey, 33. 22 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, paragraph 192. 23 O’ Halloran, Canadian Legislative Assembly, 8 March 1865. Canada’s Founding Debates, 451. 24 William Lawrence, Nova Scotia House of Assembly, 17 April 1866; Canada’s Founding Debates, 384. 25 E.G. Alston, Legislative Council of British Columbia, 11 March 1870. Canada’s Founding Debates, 251. 26 Robert Meynell, Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom: C.B. Macpherson, George Grant and Charles Taylor (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 27 Canadian Idealism, 4–6. 28 Robert C. Sibley, Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor – Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). Needless to say, Sibley makes no such argument. Nor do I.

When Canadians Rewrote Their History

43

29 Phillip Resnick, The European Roots of Canadian Identity (Peterborough, ON: The Broadview Press, 2005). 30 Rudyard Griffiths, Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2009). 31 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

Liberal Education Embedded in Civic Education for Responsible Government: The Case of John George Bourinot John von Heyking

[W]hoever brings to the practical discussion of the questions of the day sound knowledge, which is based on the experience of the past, and shows he can well adapt principles drawn from the great storehouse of sound political science to the difficulties of the day, he will be found invaluable as a leader of men and the architect of institutions. George Bourinot The first duty of citizens in every country is to make themselves thoroughly acquainted with the nature and operation of the system of government under which they live. Without such a knowledge, a man is very imperfectly equipped for the performance of the serious responsibilities which devolve upon him in a country where the people rule. No amount of so-called “practical experience” can compensate a man for ignorance of the elementary principles of political science, and of the origin, development and methods of his own government. George Bourinot

This essay considers the political and educational thinking of “Canada’s first political scientist” and Clerk of the House of Commons (1880–1902), John George Bourinot.1 Bourinot wrote extensively on the history and nature of parliamentary government in Canada, scholarly treatises, including Parliamentary Procedure and Practice in the Dominion of Canada, Federal Government in Canada, The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People,

The Case of John George Bourinot

45

Canadian Studies in Comparative Politics, and Local Government in Canada: An Historical Study, as well as numerous books and articles for popular audiences.2 His most famous popular work is A Canadian Manual on the Procedure at Meetings of Shareholders and Directors of Companies, Conventions, Societies and Public Assemblies Generally, an edited version of which remains in print today under the title of Bourinot’s Rules of Order.3 As a political scientist, Bourinot examined the institutions and history of parliamentary government. As a public intellectual, he sought to teach Canadian citizens their “rights and responsibilities,” as he claims on the title page of the 1894 printing of A Canadian Manual on the Procedure. He also wrote books and articles on Canadian history and literature, which served a broader argument that national independence, which Canada had achieved historically through Confederation, must also be accompanied by an “independence of mind,” which is gauged by a nation’s literature and the quality of its public oratory.4 As Clerk of the Commons, he was a key figure in interpreting the conventions of Parliament and, indeed, of forming its practice. While he thought that the Speaker of the House serves as its referee as well as its primary representative, making him the representative of the representatives, the Clerk’s knowledge of “parliamentary lore” makes him the repository of prudent counsel for Parliament.5 Thus, as Clerk of the Commons, Bourinot’s practical wisdom made him the exemplar of the Canadian regime of responsible government.6 Bourinot’s theoretical and practical teachings provide a crucial civic education in responsible government for Canadians, one that also has embedded in it a liberal education that Bourinot understood needed to be conveyed in ways that would be useful for its regime’s practitioners. For Bourinot, responsible government depends on the virtues and habits embodied by classical and modern models of oratory. In these models are found the capacities of a nation to be guided by reason, as exemplified by the orator who can sway the public by reason instead of the demagogue who sways by emotion.7 However, because great orators are rare, Bourinot concentrated his efforts in propounding parliamentary procedure as the best insurance for the rule of reason. Just as ancient philosophers saw the rule of law as the rule of reason,8 as more reliable than the rule of the virtuous (who are rare), so too did Bourinot view parliamentary procedure as more reliable than the rule of the orator, though both the rule of law and the rule of the orator (as with the rule of the virtuous) share the same goal. An examination of Bourinot’s political ideas, therefore, illuminates the nature of the Canadian regime, the civic education required for its citizens

46

John von Heyking

and statesmen, and the relationship between that civic education and a broader, transpolitical liberal education.

The Crisis of Responsible Government and the Crisis of Civic and Liberal Education This consideration of Bourinot’s ideas is motivated by a diagnosis of crisis within the Canadian regime, which means it is simultaneously a crisis about its politics as well as the education of citizens. When diagnosing a crisis, it helps to return to the source of the regime. When I am feeling impish, I invite my undergraduate political science students to discuss Canadian identity, an activity that is the academic equivalent of having a root canal. My students have rehearsed the arguments before, and have become painfully aware that the debate is a dead end. Since at least junior high or middle school, it has been drilled into them that Canadian identity is a social or cultural phenomenon, and that defining it requires them to come up with some sort of symbol, like the maple leaf, beer, or doughnut, that somehow embodies what it means to be Canadian. Such debates usually end up showing that symbols are regionally specific (i.e., maple trees do not grow in Western Canada) or are frivolous. My students’ disdain for this exercise is the result of a trend or even crisis in Canadian education for the past generation that has focused on the social or society and culture as the locus of politics. As Janet Ajzenstat has demonstrated, this focus has its intellectual roots in Romanticism, and displays impatience toward classical liberalism and its emphasis on laws and institutions.9 “Real” democracy resides somewhere in the social or cultural sphere, and not in political institutions. Contained within this criticism of responsible government and liberalism is the view that representative institutions insufficiently represent, that “the people” somehow exist as a meaningful agent of action somewhere in the sphere of civil society, and that some other representative institution, such as government agencies, citizen councils, or progressive intellectuals, is better able to represent and articulate its preferences. The shift toward society and culture is also a move away from politics. Unfortunately, this shift has also meant that students have not learned the fundamentals of responsible government – not only the institutions of Parliament, but also its mores and customs, that is, its culture. Students’ education has led them to think of politics exclusively in terms of labels, propositions, and artifacts.10 Their education inculcates certain abstract

The Case of John George Bourinot

47

habits of thought: those that make them prefer politics come to an end, which implies experts taking over from the messiness of partisan debate; and those that regard politics as static, abstract, and conceptual. This prevents them from fully appreciating that politics, especially parliamentary government, is about motion, the back-and-forth and tug-of-war characteristic of Parliament, that it is a “chaosmos.”11 These abstract habits of thought prepare them to be passive, not active citizens accustomed to spirited political action.12 This problematic habit is not merely an intellectual problem, but also a political one because it means that students have not learned the nature and habits of self-government. Their habit of regarding politics only abstractly and conceptually leads them to look to a specific institution that can definitively embody and represent them. This is usually the Supreme Court or even the administrative state (the non-partisan rule of experts), whose primary role has been to distribute entitlements and create dependencies, not to inculcate self-government.13 Regarding Parliament as embodying the regime requires a certain amount of nerve because one is immediately struck by the argumentation and partisanship of Parliament, and one can only ascertain Parliament’s embodiment of the regime when one knows one’s “rights and responsibilities,” as Bourinot claimed. The common good embodied by Parliament is found in its practices, which are best understood by actively practising them, not by passive citizenship. As David E. Smith observes: “[B]y incorporating the people, the House creates the nation.”14 This is why Bourinot wrote A Canadian Manual on the Procedure as the companion book to his Parliamentary Procedure and Practice. It is meant to teach citizens the habits and rules of parliamentary practice in their lives as members of civil society organizations. Citizens can only understand the common good embodied by Parliament by exercising practical wisdom, which depends on the experience and habits of self- government, not theoretical knowledge gleaned by textbooks on Canadian identity. My students’ habits of thought and their corrupted sense of citizenship is connected to a crisis in the Canadian regime that has developed over the past generation. Canadians have lost confidence in responsible government, or parliamentary government (as it has sometimes been called more recently). Canadians seem to have lost confidence in their parliamentary institutions to deliver equitable and representative public policy, so they look instead to extra-parliamentary institutions, including the judiciary and Officers of Parliament, for such policy, which they also expect to be non-partisan. Indeed, this is the rub of the crisis: Canadians believe

48

John von Heyking

Parliament is too partisan, and, as an institution, can serve no good other than partisanship. They do not think the House incorporates them as a people. But this is not the sense in which Parliament has been understood historically. As Ajzenstat and Christopher Moore have demonstrated, Canada’s Constitution, which placed Parliament at the centre, was formed as a nonpartisan affair and Canada’s founders imported the British understanding of Parliament as the place where the people’s representatives debate their partisan views; government, in order to be responsible to them, would have to craft policy to reflect those views.15 Contemporary worries over partisanship seem, at least in part, to be due to romantic visions of social democracy that expect too much from Parliament and, with the corollary hope for an end to politics, are disdainful toward the flux of politics.16 The work of Ajzenstat and Moore has been foundational for reminding Canadians of the nature of responsible government and their regime. Even so, little attention has been paid to the kind of civic and liberal education that is required to sustain it. While there tends to be a lot of discussion about democratic education among educators and political scientists, little attention is paid to the nature of responsible government, and how liberal education can both serve and judge it.17 Emberley and Newell identify three prominent forces in Canada’s educational history that formed and were sustained by Canada’s parliamentary regime: Scottish commonsense educators, Egerton Ryerson, and the Hegelian Rationalist Idealist educators.18 They focus on how these intellectual forces shaped Canadian higher education, and they identify Thomas D’Arcy McGee as a key mediator between the wisdom sought in higher education and the practical wisdom gained by parliamentary experience. This essay complements their study by examining the writings of John George Bourinot, which emphasize the education for the specific kinds of virtues needed for responsible government.

The Study of Political Science and the Ambivalence of Liberal Education in Responsible Government Bourinot wrote numerous scholarly treatises on parliamentary government, and many books and articles on the subject for popular audiences. However, his most illuminating work is one that bridges these two genres, The Study of Political Science in Canadian Universities, because there he explains the role that political science, as a subject of liberal education, plays in cultivating citizenship. The essay provides a sense of how Bourinot

The Case of John George Bourinot

49

regarded the role liberal education has to play in forming citizens, but also how liberal education must itself adapt to the nature of the regime of responsible government. His thesis is paradoxical, reflecting the paradox of education in the regime for responsible government.19 The Study of Political Science in Canadian Universities begins with Bourinot quoting a statement by J.R. Seeley on the formative role for society of the newly defined field of political science: “[W]hen the English Universities will extend their action over the whole community by creating a vast order of high-class popular teachers, who shall lend their aid everywhere in the impartial study of great questions, political or other, and so play a part in the guidance of the national mind, such as has never been played by universities in any other country.”20 Political science had recently been created as a separate discipline of university study in England and in the United States, and in this article Bourinot explains its importance for Canada: “In a country like this, with an elaborate system of local and parliamentary government, it is a matter of growing importance that no institution of learning should keep exclusively within the old beaten paths of classical and mathematical learning, but should endeavour to bring itself as far as possible in accord with the practical aspirations of the world around it and launch boldly into the current of political and philosophical thought and study, so as to be in touch with the actual requirements of these busy and energetic times.”21 Bourinot’s statement reflects a common sentiment of the time that disdained classical learning, especially of politics, in favour of new developments in science, history, and of course politics. Instead of Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero, whom Bourinot would have studied at Trinity College, modern political science has been defined by political thinkers, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, The Federalist, Adam Smith, and above all, Montesquieu.22 While political science is to “play a part in the guidance of the national mind,” political science is also a product of the “national mind.” It must adapt to local and national conditions. Thus, political science is allied with history: “In politics … wisdom consists in the knowledge of the laws that govern the phenomena, and these laws can only be discovered by the observation of facts, history.”23 Following Montesquieu, though, “we must interpret laws by history, and interpret history by custom.”24 While “it is a truism to say that theory must always precede practice,” Bourinot indicates, by referring to custom, that the regime of responsible government is constituted for practice to precede theory.25 His explanation of this point deserves to be quoted in full:

50

John von Heyking I can well remember that the discussion of the union of the British North American provinces was actually left for years to theorists in the press, or was chiefly valued because it gave opportunities for brilliant rhetorical flashes in legislative halls. But the day came when this theoretical problem had to be solved to meet the political exigencies of old Canada, and the confederation of the provinces became a reality. Indeed, in a country like this, where the people are of essentially practical instincts in all matters affecting government, the man who should always remain a mere doctrinaire or theorist would soon become without weight or strength in the community where he lives; but whoever brings to the practical discussion of the questions of the day sound knowledge, which is based on the experience of the past, and shows he can well adapt principles drawn from the great storehouse of sound political science to the difficulties of the day, he will be found invaluable as a leader of men and the architect of institutions.26

Bourinot’s understanding of Canada’s constitutional beginnings is more nuanced than most contemporary interpretations that either treat the British Constitution Act of 1867 simply as a practical bargain struck by various interests, or as a product of Lockean political theory. For Bourinot, it was both, because politics must necessarily be a fabric that weaves together principle and interest. Thus, “doctrinaires” and “theorists” who place theory before practice will not receive a hearing from “the people [who] are of essentially practical instincts in all matters affecting government.” Political science, then, if it is to play a role plays a “part in the guidance of the national mind,” in guiding civic education, must adapt to these “practical instincts.” As we shall see, and despite Bourinot’s stated ambivalence toward “classical … learning,” the character of his concern for political science to adapt is actually classical. His discussion of parliamentary forms and procedure is influenced by a classical understanding of the function of oratory, which he would have learned about in his undergraduate education at Trinity. It follows then that liberal education, which includes the philosophical considerations of first principles of government found in the great thinkers Bourinot cites, including Tocqueville, Burke, The Federalist, Smith, and Montesquieu, must be embedded in a political science suited to the character of the regime of responsible government. Bourinot suggests three subdivisions of such a political science: political history, jurisprudence, and political economy. They share the insight,

The Case of John George Bourinot

51

gained from Montesquieu, that political science is wed to history, that “we must interpret laws by history, and interpret history by custom.” Political history includes “the lives of individual men, even the greatest men,”27 and is the study of the deeds of a nation. “General and historical jurisprudence” contains constitutional history, which Bourinot understands broadly to mean the history of a regime and its institutions: “[W]e must do it, not from the purely legal standpoint of a practicing lawyer, but rather in the spirit of a philosophic historian desirous of following the influences of systems of law on the social customs, the usages of the people and the structure of government … . The thoughtful student will in this way be able to trace the steady growth of principles adapted to the ever varying conditions of society.”28 We can see in this branch of political science the study of law, constitutions, and what Bourinot and contemporary political scientists call comparative politics. Political economy is a “branch of science” “so intimately connected with the industrial and commercial development and the material prosperity and social comforts of a people,”29 according to which, material prosperity depends on a constitutional order that secures individual liberty. By uniting political science and history in these three forms, Bourinot provides a picture of how political science is to cultivate civic education in Canada. Canadians are practically minded, not only because they are building a newly formed country out of a harsh geography, but also because parliamentary government bursts the bounds of “the old beaten paths of classical and mathematical learning.” Parliamentary government requires a new political science, and political science must be adapted to parliamentary government. Curiously, the great thinkers of liberal education Bourinot mentions who define the modern world, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, and the rest, sit uncomfortably within these three divisions and it is unclear what role they play in the study of political science for Canadians. It is not inconceivable that the study of their writings could be included in the study of “general and historical jurisprudence,” especially given that Bourinot emphasizes this must be studied in the spirit of a “philosophic historian.” Yet, even though these writers form the backbone of the curriculum, they do not appear to form a guiding role in the direct education of students. While “theory must always precede practice,” it is also true that “we must interpret laws by history, and interpret history by custom.” The study of great texts, so crucial for liberal education, is neglected or at least under-emphasized because, in part, habits of selfgovernment incline toward practice. Bourinot instead emphasizes the

52

John von Heyking

importance of local municipal government as a school for teaching selfgovernment rather than the great texts with which he was familiar, even though the latter inform how the former is constituted. Part of the reason for this might be that contemporary educators “overburden the student with work, instead of giving him opportunities for devoting himself to those particular studies for which his inclinations and abilities fit him. I do not know that it is best for a country like this to have too many superficial Crichtons.”30 Contemporary educators teach too much material at the expense of inculcating careful study that will bring to the study of political science “perseverance, diligence, and interest which will enable them to master its true teachings and make it an invaluable aid to them in the practical pursuits of their lives.”31 Among those Canadians who did “master its true teachings” were “the men who laid the foundations of our social and political structure … [and] were men who thought deeply and acted vigourously, and if they had fewer opportunities than we have, yet they made the most of what they possessed … They had the admirable teachings of Burke and Montsequieu, and the suggestive and inspiring examples of Pym, Hampden, and Russell, of all the fathers of parliamentary government in the parent state.”32 Canadian citizens need to look to the example of the Fathers of Confederation, “the men who laid the foundations of our social and political structure,” because they “thought deeply” about those foundations by reading the “admirable teachings of Burke and Montesquieu,” and others. As practising statesmen and politicians, they would have been too busy to have spent many of their days contemplating those great texts. However, as founders, their need for those texts would have been great. Bourinot’s attitude toward the place of Montesquieu and other thinkers in the canon of liberal education is ambiguous. On the one hand, they are behind the canon of political science for parliamentary government, but on the other hand, they do not hold a prominent place amidst a curriculum based on the study of customs and history. This curriculum of history, jurisprudence, and political economy is suited to a regime of practically minded and busy men and women who lack the inclination and leisure to persevere with the canon of liberal education. Liberal education, then, must come on the wings of these branches of political science that are more immediately practical for citizens of parliamentary democracy. This is not to say that Bourinot thought that reading Montesquieu is impractical. Indeed, as his mention of the “men who laid the foundation” shows, the reading of these texts is eminently practical because they are the founda-

The Case of John George Bourinot

53

tional texts of our regime. Anyone who wants to understand the nature of their regime needs to learn from them. Even so, Bourinot seems to have thought that not everyone would be so inclined, and that this marks the dividing line between liberal education and civic education. Those so inclined to look to the example of “the men who laid the foundations” wish to consider the first principles of their regime, which is characteristic of liberal education, whereas those concerned with more immediate political and economic affairs will be more inclined to history, jurisprudence, and political economy.33 The study of great texts forms political science but does not play an overt role in teaching how to practise it. Bourinot seems to have thought it enough that the study of these texts would be available to students who are inclined to study them, but the program itself would not directly push the texts toward them. Either political science is indifferent to its own first principles or Bourinot thought that a laissez-faire approach that allows those with “perseverance and patience” to be drawn to those first principles would be the best approach. Either way, Bourinot seemed to have sensed that the practical wisdom required for responsible government needs an education geared toward history and custom, and that the study of first principles, the stuff of liberal education, would have to be embedded in that study. We turn now to consider how Bourinot applied this paradoxical view of political science in his own writings, first in his Parliamentary Procedure, then in his writings on statesmanship and literature, where the teachings of liberal education are more overt and where oratory comes to the fore, and, finally, in his A Canadian Manual on the Procedure, which taught generations of Canadians the arts of selfgovernment through parliamentary procedure.

Virtue and the Parliamentary Regime Bourinot’s The Study of Political Science in Canadian Universities explains the scope and function of political science in Canada in terms of cultivating liberal and civic education. His books and articles on parliamentary institutions as well as his popular writings reflect his understanding of the nature of parliamentary democracy. His scholarly writings, most notably his Parliamentary Procedure and Practice in the Dominion of Canada, focus on the history and institutions of Parliament, while his popular writings were intended to teach the workings of government to laypersons and students, and provide greater information on the virtues, mores, and habits required by citizens and their representatives. Because “a legislature must be led,”34

54

John von Heyking

Bourinot’s discussion of the forms and institutions of Parliament presupposes an understanding of the statesmanship and virtue required for parliamentary government. Our discussion of his understanding of the parliamentary regime, then, focuses on his understanding of this statesmanship and virtue, which is never expressed systematically in his writings, but only by way of hint and allusion, in keeping with how the Clerk indirectly advises the regime, and on his description of parliamentary rules, which are meant to bring forth those virtues. Bourinot saw Parliament as the centre of the Canadian regime of responsible government. He treats Canadian history as having “an undercurrent steadily moving in the direction of political freedom,” which began first with Canada under the French Regime, followed by the rise of responsible government, with its origins in the Act of Union of 1840, and, finally, the confederation of the provinces.35 Bourinot, like most classical liberals, identified self-government and responsible government with happiness and economic prosperity. He believed that responsible government is the regime best suited for bringing out the talents and virtues of human beings. The House of Commons, Senate, Crown, and judiciary form its component parts, but Bourinot stresses that municipal government forms its basis because it is the cradle of education for self-government: “On an effective system of local self-government rests in a very considerable degree the satisfactory working of our whole provincial organization. It brings men into active connection with the practical side of the life of a community and educates them for a larger though not more useful sphere of public life.”36 Parliamentary institutions, to recall James Madison, are meant to bring the “mild voice of reason” to bear on public affairs.37 They are to facilitate calm deliberation over heated partisanship and demagoguery. Their forms, rules, and conventions are meant to induce habits of deliberation.38 Bourinot’s explanation of parliamentary forms is worth quoting in full: Some persons may find mysteries and even absurdities in the numerous formalities which surround our legislation, but no one who has studied constitutional history will be ignorant of the fact that such formalities are found absolutely necessary by the experience of the greatest deliberative body in the world. We have already shown that Parliamentary rules are particularly valuable in the direction of careful deliberation on all questions affecting the public purse, but they tend also to assist that slow and patient enquiry and discussion which can best mature useful legislation, and help to moderate the spirit of

The Case of John George Bourinot

55

faction and the play of personal animosities. It is a proud thing to be able to say that in this young country the deliberations of our most important representative assembly are conducted in that spirit of moderation and anxious enquiry, which is the distinguishing feature of the British Legislature.39 Parliamentary forms and procedures are meant to slow down deliberations, to instill calm, and to restrain partisanship. In bridling partisan passions, they provide opportunity for the common good of the regime to be worked out. Bourinot rarely explains the principles behind parliamentary rules of debate, but his description of them shows that they strive to balance the principles of freedom of debate with “propriety.” Freedom is the first principle of responsible government, but with freedom comes responsibility toward others and toward the regime, and rules of “propriety” (and “order and decorum”), as in the rule to keep speeches relevant to the topic at hand, are an expression of this responsibility.40 There are numerous rules of parliamentary debate, for both House and Senate, but we shall focus on the House.41 The Speaker is the centre of the House’s proceedings: “In the Commons, a member must address himself to Mr. Speaker.”42 This maintains the authority of the House over its members, and thus keeps the common good in view of its members. The same holds true of the rule requiring members to address one another (and themselves) as “honorable member,” which “has for its objects the repression of personalities and the temperate, calm conduct of debate.”43 Demagoguery and ambition get restrained when members are prevented from using proper names. The ambitious strive to make names for themselves, and parliamentary rules acknowledge this ambition but temper it by reminding members that they are parts of a whole, the House, whose function is to incorporate the Canadian people. No member may interrupt the Speaker, and when the House adjourns, the members keep their seats until the Speaker has left the chair.44 A key way to temper partisanship is by requiring “the use of temperate and decorous language … when canvassing the opinion and conduct of his opponents in debate.”45 This, and the imputation of unworthy motives, “are unparliamentary and call for prompt interference.” As Harvey Mansfield notes, focusing on motives instead of opinions makes debate impossible because the former are invisible and can’t be proven or disproven.46 Speech is the manifestation of the human soul, and is all human beings can rely upon to understand one another. Deliberation is impossible without speech first being paramount. Politics is impossible if motivations

56

John von Heyking

are all we seek. By preserving a home for the “mild voice of reason,” parliamentary procedures sustain politics, which, going back to Aristotle, is about reason and choice. Bourinot stresses that parliamentary conventions play a “particularly noteworthy” role in constituting the regime: “We have not only a written constitution to be interpreted whenever necessary by the courts, but a vast store-house of English precedents and authoritative maxims to guide us – in other words, an unwritten law which has as much force practically in the operation of our political system as any legal enactment to be found on the statute book.”47 They are the near-hidden sinews that keep the regime together, of which, as Clerk of the Commons, Bourinot was well placed to observe and help form. Bourinot’s Parliamentary Procedure and Practice, along with his other scholarly writings, lacks a systematic account of the types of virtues required for parliamentary government. In other words, they do not elaborate the habits that parliamentary rules of debate are meant to inculcate even though those rules presuppose a complex psychology whose goal is to have reason hold sway over ambition and passion, and concern for the common good hold sway over immediate self-interest. Even so, while Bourinot does not elaborate a political philosophy, neither does he take the workings of parliamentary institutions for granted: Great responsibility therefore rests in the first instance upon the people of Canada, who must select the best and purest among them to serve the country, and, secondly, upon the men whom the legislature chooses to discharge the trust of carrying on the government. No system of government or of laws can of itself make a people virtuous and happy unless their rulers recognize in the fullest sense their obligations to the state and to exercise their powers with prudence and unselfishness, and endeavour to elevate public opinion. A constitution may be as perfect as human agencies can make it and yet be relatively worthless, while the large responsibilities and powers entrusted to the governing body – responsibilities and powers not set forth in acts of parliament – are forgotten in view of party triumph, personal ambition, or pecuniary gain.48 Like James Madison, who refers to the constitution as a “parchment barrier” against tyranny,49 so too does Bourinot recognize that strong institutions rely on virtuous character.50

The Case of John George Bourinot

57

As with Madison, it is incumbent on the people’s representatives (referred to above by Bourinot as “rulers,” which is not his usual expression) to exercise “prudence and unselfishness, and endeavour to elevate public opinion.” Representatives are to rise above partisanship and to refine public opinion. Forms and procedures of Parliament are meant to assist in this difficult task, but Bourinot does show that such effort does presuppose certain virtues. A survey of some of his writings suggests the following characteristics of representatives and citizens necessary for selfgovernment. He points out that the development of representative institutions is “well calculated to stimulate human endeavour and develop national character,” and includes “a people who respect the law and fully understand the workings of parliamentary institutions.”51 This statement encapsulates the paradox of civic education for responsible government that Bourinot identifies: citizens and their representatives must be both ambitious (“stimulate human endeavour”) and obedient (“respect law”). Bourinot’s point is the same as that of Harvey Mansfield, who observes that the teaching of citizenship needs to avoid the extremes of teaching citizens to rule directly and rendering them apathetic: it is a blend of action (self-rule) and passivity (obedience to representatives).52 A survey of Bourinot’s description of the kinds of virtues required by the people’s representatives suggests general agreement with the American founders, that they will be public-spirited and will generally be the “natural aristoi” of the regime.53 For Bourinot, the people’s representatives should be “the ablest public men,”54 “honest and wise,”55 be “infused with a spirit of energy and enterprise,”56 “the best and purest,”57 and show “mutual respect, mutual forebearance, a readiness to concede what is not material, tenacity in holding fast that which is good; in one word, an honest desire to promote the public benefit, and to secure to every man his just rights, and neither less nor more than those rights.”58 The people’s representatives should exhibit the intellectual and moral virtues that conduce to the public benefit or common good. They should be public-spirited and therefore transcend the “democratic condition” of levelling and “party controversy” that hinders prudence about the public benefit.59 Put in the Aristotelian terms with which Bourinot would have been familiar from his classical education, as well as his reading of modern political philosophy, it would seem, then, that the people’s representatives are the aristocratic element of the regime of responsible government. They need to exhibit justice in their devotion to the public benefit, and magnanimity in their “readiness to concede what is not material.” Yet, they, like

58

John von Heyking

ancient Greek democratic statesmen, exhibit isonomia, love of equality under law, in their wish to “secure to every man his just rights, and neither less nor more than those rights.” These are the best citizens of the regime of responsible government, which is the best practical regime in the terms of classical political thought. Bourinot frequently notes how the Fathers of Confederation mark a high point in civic virtue and public oratory. He specifically mentions John A. Macdonald, George-Étienne Cartier, Wilfrid Laurier, and Charles Tupper, as the “high point of parliamentary oratory”60 because they argue logically and with vigour, and have command of language.61 They exhibit a proper weaving together of reason with the spirited defence of principle. In classical terms, they exhibit a proper combination of logos and thumos (or pathos). For his part, Macdonald stands out: “Meagre as is the record of what he said, we can yet see that his words were those of a man who rose above the level of the mere politician, and grasped the magnitude of the questions involved. What he aimed at especially was to follow as closely as possible the fundamental principles of English parliamentary government, and to engraft them upon the general system of federal union.”62 Oratory is the key liberal art sustaining the virtues of responsible government. Bourinot’s arguments harken back to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and likely immediately to that of Cicero, whose writings would have formed the backbone of the classical education he received at Trinity College. In his younger days, Bourinot seems to have regarded his classical education as helpful but as an inadequate preparation for life in the modern world.63 Even so, his thinking on the role of oratory for responsible government has a clear precedent in the classical tradition, especially that of Cicero, who argues in several places that not only must the orator be virtuous, but the mark of the virtuous orator is to communicate that wisdom: the essence of oratory is to elevate the public mind, to bring reason to the regime, just as Bourinot thought the rules of parliamentary procedure are meant to bring the rule of reason to public deliberations.64 Bourinot’s reliance on classical models does not end here, however. In addition to upholding the centrality of oratory to promote the rule of reason in the regime, so too does the regime, in a way, serve oratory in the form of literature, which, Bourinot argues, “refine[s] and adorn[s]” the regime, and completes it in an Aristotelian sense.65 I treat these two claims – oratory serves the regime, and the regime serves oratory – each in turn. In an early essay called “Statesmanship and Letters,” which Bourinot’s biographer calls “a forerunner to his later writing on intellectual history,”66

The Case of John George Bourinot

59

Bourinot argues for the utility of literature in forming the souls and speeches of statesmen, enabling them to transcend the immediate tumults of the day in order to gain a long-term view of their regime and the good life: “Statesmen have, time and again, sought refuge from the countless distractions of public life in the pleasant walks of literature, where they have been able to gratify their natural tastes, and win a reputation far more enduring than any dependent on the favour of a political party, or the applause of the senate.”67 Bourinot, in this essay, provides a brief history of ancient and modern statesmen who have sought wisdom from literature and have gained fame from that wisdom in the form of great oratory. Studying great literature sharpens the mind, and therefore the tongue, which in turn lifts up the regime through the exercise of reason. Bourinot cites an aphorism of Francis Bacon to make his point: “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man: and therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, have a present wit; and if he read little, have much cunning to seem that he doth not. Histories make men wise, poets witty, and mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep, morals grave, logic and rhetoric able to contend.”68 Bourinot’s essay is an important statement on the paradox of liberal education in a parliamentary regime. Literature constitutes an “agreeable rest” for statesmen, especially at a time of energetic nation-building that demands the time and endeavour of its citizens and statesmen. Even so, the study of literature also serves the regime by pushing the scope of its endeavours beyond short-term advantage, a condition that is more conducive to demagoguery and partyism than to statesmanship. Ultimately, though, the study of literature brings the rule of reason to passion and force within the souls of citizens. In quoting Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Bourinot states his point in terms characteristic of his Victorian-era Enlightenment optimism: “It needs no argument to prove that in this reading and writing age – ‘the age of the press,’ as it has been called – power must be wherever true intelligence is, and where most intelligence, most power. If England conquers India by intellect and bravery, she can retain it only at the price of re-educating India … ; if a United States reaches the rank of first powers, it must at the same time send its best writers as ambassadors of its interior civilization … Civilization is ever progressive, and ignorance, even in a country of pure democracy and universal suffrage, must recede before the irresistible forces of intellect and knowledge.”69 Canadians need to be reminded that, despite their practical efforts to tame their new country, they live in the modern age which is marked by the

60

John von Heyking

“irresistible forces of intellect and knowledge.” Only a liberal education in literature, broadly treated here in terms of “letters,” can produce citizens who govern themselves. Bourinot concludes the essay by touching on a key theme of his The Study of Political Science in Canadian Universities. The most useful men of the regime will be those who have learned from literature, especially those “men who are most thoroughly versed in historical learning and political economy – who have gathered inspiration from the masterpieces of classical literature, and drank deeply ‘from the well of English undefiled,’ – [they] must certainly do much to raise the standard of oratory, and give that intellectual elevation and dignity to the profession of politics.”70 While Bourinot acknowledges the “irresistible forces of intellect and knowledge” sweeping civilization, the essay is more an exhortation to study literature and make use of it for Canadian political life. As with Bourinot’s classical models, the orator can only be said to be wise if he proceeds with the activity of oratory, which is informed by literature. Reason can only rule a regime when it is effective. Bourinot’s exhortation for the effectiveness of oratory to elevate politics does not end by relegating oratory to an instrumental role. Bourinot also draws from classical sources when he claims that literature refines and adorns a polity. With this claim, he echoes Aristotle’s view that politics is not simply about life, but the good life.71 For Aristotle as for Plato, the polis is not only its walls, laws, and citizens, but a drama, a story, or nomos. For this reason, the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws explains that the citizens of the best practical regime they construct will tell poets to go away because their own polis is itself a poem or song (nomos).72 Hannah Arendt similarly observes that the activity of politics, if it makes anything, makes a story – politics is about speeches, those that exhort (the oratory Bourinot emphasizes) but also those that reminisce in the form of storytelling.73 Under modern conditions, Sir Winston Churchill used to refer to Britain’s “island story.” Politics, therefore, “refines and adorns.”74 Action begets speech. The good life is obtained through the exercise of the intellect, which for Bourinot is embodied in a nation’s literature. Two statements reflect Bourinot’s views regarding literature and the regime of responsible government. The first statement echoes Aristotle’s comment that the purpose of politics is not simply life, but the good life: British Americans have been engaged for the past hundred years in building up their country. They have raised the framework of a noble

The Case of John George Bourinot

61

edifice, and now they should add a column here and a column there, and otherwise complete it so that it will be pleasing to the eye and creditable to the builders. A man who settles in the midst of the forest is quite content for a while with the hut which he has hastily constructed out of the materials around him; but when years have passed by, and he has amassed wealth, when he has thousands of acres of rich corn-fields to show as the results of his energy and industry, his ambition is stimulated, and he builds a new residence and furnishes it in a style commensurate with his improved circumstances. So it would be with us in British America. We have surmounted our early difficulties, and built up for ourselves a country of whose wealth and vitality we have every reason to be proud; and now the time has come when we should improve our surroundings and cultivate the arts that refine and adorn.75 Human beings are not suited for simple survival, but we “refine and adorn” ourselves for the purpose of human excellence. Bourinot’s references to classical architecture betray his classical education. But his primary point is Aristotelian. Political life conduces to human excellence, and of course the regime of responsible government is meant to promote this. Literature is emblematic of this Aristotelian point, as tragedy and music were for Aristotle,76 because it provides the “record of heroic endeavor or suffering, of the struggle between antagonistic principles and systems, of human passion, frailty, and virtue, that the essence of history, romance, and poetry exists.”77 Canada and its history offer numerous “materials” for history, poetry, and romance on account of its struggle for freedom and adventure in a new land, by which men were “educated in the principles of self-government.”78 As Bourinot mentions many times in his writings, Canadian history points toward freedom, crowned by the establishment of responsible government and then of independence. Yet, the historical process is unfinished because Canadians have yet to develop a national literature. Canada is not yet a nation refined and adorned. Bourinot lets Thomas D’Arcy McGee make his point about the importance of a national literature: I consider that our mental self-reliance is an essential condition of our political independence. I do not mean a state of public mind puffed up on small things – an exaggerated opinion of ourselves and a barbarian depreciation of foreigners – a controversial state of mind,

62

John von Heyking or a merely imitative, apish civilization. I mean a mental condition, thoughtful and true; national in its preferences, but catholic in its sympathies; gravitating onward, not outward; ready to learn from every other people, on one sole condition – that the lesson when learned has been worth acquiring. In short, we should desire to see our new national character distinguished by a manly modesty as much as by mental independence; by the conscientious exercise of the critical faculties as well as by the zeal of the enquirer.79

“Mental self-reliance” is produced by a literature that tells the stories of a particular people. After quoting McGee to establish his main point, he concludes the essay by remarking that the Scottish and English peoples of Canada were formed primarily by their national poets, Robert Burns and William Shakespeare: “The great men of whom Shakespeare wrote, nearly three hundred years ago, are best remembered now by the dramas where he portrays their follies, their weaknesses, and their crimes. The kings and chieftains of the native land of Burns are almost forgotten, while deep in the hearts of his countrymen, all the world over, are imprinted the poems of that poor Scottish peasant.”80 Canadians are in need of a national poet to establish their “mental self-reliance” to fulfill their political independence.81 Ten years later, Bourinot published extensive reflections on the state of Canada’s “mental self-reliance” in his book The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People.82 There he surveys Canadian accomplishments in a wide range of endeavours, but concludes that Canadian literature has not yet produced any works that can be considered great or of interest to those outside of Canada: “Striking originality can hardly be developed to any great extent in a dependency which naturally, and perhaps wisely in some cases, looks for all its traditions and habits of thought to a parent state. It is only with an older condition of society, when men have learned at last to think as well as to act for themselves, to originate rather than to reproduce, that there can be a national literature.”83 “Colonial dependency where practical results are immediately sought for” stunts oratory;84 the greatness of Tupper, Mackenzie, Howe, and McGee, whose oratory served the cause of founding a new country and of calling forth those great founding principles, has been eclipsed by attention to short-term practical measures that fail to call forth such oratory, and, for Bourinot, do not call forth the rule of reason to the regime to the same extent. Even so, Bourinot thinks this problem is temporary: “[T]he intellectual strength of the country must be of no mean order when it can give us statesmen like Sir Charles Tupper

The Case of John George Bourinot

63

and Mr. Mackenzie, whose best speeches are admirable illustrations of logical arrangement and argumentative power. And it may be added, with respect to the present House, that no previous Parliament, entrusted with the control of the affairs of Canada, has comprised a larger number of gentlemen, distinguished not only for their practical comprehension of the wants of this country, but for their wise attainments and general culture.”85

Civic Education In connection with Bourinot’s observation about the stultifying effects of Canada’s “colonial dependency,” which exaggerates practical issues and thus short-termism, Bourinot frequently laments the superficiality taken in education. Education, liberal and civic, requires the long-term view of things, which cannot be sustained without the active leisure he observes that Canada’s founders took to study the tradition of great texts. The purpose of education is to “draw forth the best qualities of the young, elevate their intelligence, and stimulate their highest intellectual forces,”86 which cannot be done when their education focuses exclusively on practical matters: All is digested and made easy to the student, consequently not a little of the production of our schools, and some of our colleges, may be compared to a veneer of knowledge, which easily wears off in the activities of life and leaves the roughness of the original material very perceptible. One may well believe that the largely mechanical system and the materialistic tendency of education have some effect in checking the development of a really original and imaginative literature among Canadians.87 Indeed, not only is liberal education, which produces and is composed by literature, threatened by exaggerating practical education, so too is civic education, which is key to the regime where the people rule. However, Bourinot did not subsequently recommend the study of great texts for the reasons detailed above on Canada’s practical culture. Instead, he wrote a textbook to educate citizens about the workings of their government. Civic education, not liberal education, explicitly equips citizens with the habits of self-government. In the preface, he explains its purpose and contrasts it with an education that focuses only on practical education.88 The regime “where the people rule” is the one where civic education is most important. Bourinot’s argument agrees with Madison’s

64

John von Heyking

claim that republican government is that which requires the most virtue, because no other regime requires the people to rule themselves.89 The book is meant to spur the young “to perform their full share in the active affairs of a Dominion yet in the early stages of its national life.” The book focuses on Canada’s governmental institutions, and Bourinot emphasizes the importance of municipal governments, “in which all classes of citizens should be so deeply interested” because it is the cradle of self-government.90 The book encapsulates Bourinot’s description of Canada’s history and politics found in his scholarly writings, but what makes this and his other non-scholarly writings significant is their attention to civic virtue. How Canada is Governed concludes with “The Duties and Responsibilities of Canadian Citizens,” which exhorts young readers to civic virtue with the reminder that “however well devised a system of government may be, it is relatively worthless unless the men and women who compose the people of Canada are always fully alive to their duties and responsibilities,” and they must care about the “character and ability of the men to whom, from time to time, they entrust the administration of public affairs.”91 Such knowledge is not abstract, but is gained through experience, as Bourinot reminds readers that they themselves must practise the art of self-government whose bedrock is in municipalities, but also in the institutions of civil society. Bourinot’s Rules of Order, widely used today for public meetings by organizations, is the condensed and edited version of his A Canadian Manual on the Procedure (1894). He wrote this book upon receiving numerous requests for it, after publishing A Canadian Manual for “The Canadian Citizen: His Rights and Responsibilities,” intending it to educate the Canadian public in parliamentary rules for their own meetings for various organizations, including “municipal councils, public meetings and conventions, religious conferences, shareholders’ and directors’ meetings, and societies in general.”92 It is meant to promote the virtues of deliberation, of responsible government, in civil society, that is, to make Canadians selfgoverning and to promote the rule of reason: “English institutions, her people, have raised a structure of government having at its basis freedom of speech and thought,” of which the municipal and legislative councils are its primary expression.93 Additionally, Bourinot wanted to clear up confusions over parliamentary procedure in public meetings that had been introduced by the importation of American rules of order. At the beginning of the book, he observes that parliamentary rules of procedure can only be changed by Parliament: “statutory enactments cannot be changed at the

The Case of John George Bourinot

65

mere will of the body they govern, but only by the superior legislative authority that enacted them.”94 Bourinot reminds the reader not only of the supremacy of Parliament, but also of the fact that Canadians are incorporated by Parliament because, when habituated in the virtues of self-government, they also constitute Parliament. Bourinot concludes the general remarks with which he introduces the book with the observation that these rules, which he has learned through “long experience of parliamentary and public bodies,” has taught him the wisdom of adhering to them, and that “laxity of procedure is antagonistic to the successful prosecution of business.”95 Unlike his textbook (How Canada is Governed), A Canadian Manual on the Procedure is not exhortatory but appeals to the practical sense of Canadians. Bourinot does not expound on how the rule of reason operates within the conventions of responsible government. Rather, he reminds readers that adhering to these rules will help their business. He appeals to their practical inclinations but in a way that implicitly cultivates the virtues of responsible government. His oratory is not grand in the sense of Macdonald or Tupper, but is suited to the times. As Bourinot wrote in his Study of Political Science in Canadian Universities, “whoever brings to the practical discussion of the questions of the day sound knowledge, which is based on the experience of the past, and shows he can well adapt principles drawn from the great storehouse of sound political science to the difficulties of the day, he will be found invaluable as a leader of men and the architect of institutions.”96 As advisor on parliamentary and constitutional questions, as well as educator of Canadian citizens as to their “rights and responsibilities,” Bourinot was a leader of men and architect of Parliament.

Conclusion Bourinot provides a lengthy account of Canada’s regime of responsible government that appreciates the virtues that sustain it even though he does not provide a systematic account of those virtues. Even so, he understood that the key to responsible government was enacting the virtues of selfgovernment through participation in various forms of self-government, most immediately for Canadians in municipal government but generally in all forms of deliberative bodies governed by the parliamentary procedure. Procedures are meant to guard freedom of speech and thought through their emphasis on “propriety” and “decorum” whose aim is to facilitate oratory. Oratory is the part of liberal education that rules society

66

John von Heyking

because it is the way that reason appeals to and rules the passions through persuasion. Bourinot thought political science had to practise this oratory, and his own scholarly and non-scholarly writings are examples of his insistence that political science needs to adapt to Canadians’ “essentially practical instincts.”97 Our inquiry into Bourinot’s ideas on liberal and civic education has been prompted by the crisis of our parliamentary regime. However, some of the roots of this crisis can be found in the limits of Bourinot’s vision. It can reasonably be argued that Canada has still not produced a national literature, as it remains regional. What passes for Canadian literature tends mostly to be rooted in the experiences of the Great Lakes Basin and St Lawrence Seaway – Laurentia. The experiences articulated there are not those of the Prairies, the Maritimes, the North, or British Columbia.98 While Bourinot seems to have thought that national unity is based on community of race, religion, and interest, which are incorporated through Parliament,99 Canada’s literature – Canada’s “mental self-reliance” – has not concurred. Bourinot’s vision of Canada’s history as moving toward freedom is also problematic. Canada’s is a three-stage history where freedom culminates in independence. But where does Canada move after that? Where does freedom move after the institutions of responsible government have been established? For some, Canada was never founded, so Canadian history must necessarily be a continuous process of re-founding of institutions and constitutions (e.g., the Charter of Rights and Freedoms) that liberate Canadians from the shackles of their past and of the botched job of 1867.100 The rise of judicial supremacy and the administrative state play a central role in this history, and their record in defending freedom, as opposed to expanding the state’s role in people’s everyday lives (the so-called “bedrooms of the nation”), is mixed. Along with this cannibalistic version of liberalism is a popular vision of liberal education, usually referred to as multiculturalism, that sees it as liberating minorities and giving them a “voice.” This kind of liberal education, where the stories of the oppressed replace the writings of Burns and Shakespeare, not to mention Plato, Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Montesquieu, is plaintive and serves the politics of the administrative state by using those stories as a means of securing status from the administrative state.101 One can see a similar process within the discipline of political science. Bourinot’s emphasis on parliamentary institutions largely takes for granted the virtues needed for parliamentary government. He is content to mention

The Case of John George Bourinot

67

them briefly, with no elaboration or systematic exposition of those virtues. Although Bourinot understood the virtues needed for responsible government, his political science descendants focus on institutions, and relegate questions of virtue to “normative” political theory, which they regard as largely irrelevant on account of its alleged failure to live up to the methodological rigour required for the study of political science.102 Of course, years ago, the study of institutions within the discipline gave way to the study of various groups, which is frequently conducted in the form of advocacy, and which overlaps with the goals of multiculturalism. The advantage of studying Bourinot’s writings is that they provide a sense of the nature of the Canadian regime of responsible government as well as the virtues necessary to sustain it. They remind the reader how and why Parliament is the centre of our regime, and why sustaining responsible government depends on citizens exercising the habits of self-government. Even so, Canadians need to take a cue from Bourinot’s claim that “however well devised a system of government may be, it is relatively worthless unless the men and women who compose the people of Canada are always fully alive to their duties and responsibilities.”103 First and foremost among these “duties and responsibilities” is the study of virtue. While Bourinot assumes that the teachings of great texts inform political science and the liberal arts generally, these teachings need to come to the forefront of civic education so they can teach Canadians about civic and human virtue. In addition to Bourinot’s favourites – Tocqueville, The Federalist, and Montesquieu – so too do Canadians need to regain a sense of the good life that politics is meant to lead to by studying the classics, those texts Bourinot studied as a young man. Bourinot follows Aristotle in stating that politics is about more than life, it is about the good life, but he does not provide a systematic account of what that refinement and adornment means.104 Bourinot’s reflections on liberal and civic education, and on Canadian politics, evoke the existential virtues that the ancients and thinkers in classical Christianity associated with the mature thinker and statesman. He does not elaborate on those virtues, but they assume a cosmos in which the political regime is among the noblest achievements of humanity, though not its greatest. Bourinot remained cognizant that a good society recollects what is nobler than politics. Let us conclude our study of Bourinot by citing the poem, “Fidelis” by Agnes Maule Machar, with which he concludes his textbook on Canadian politics, and that, by its ascending lines, places politics and liberal education within his classical Christian understanding of the order of love:

68

John von Heyking As yet the waxen mould is soft, the opening page is fair; It’s left for those who rule us now to leave their impress there –; the stamp of true nobility, high honor, stainless truth; The earnest quest of noble ends; the generous heart of youth; The love of country, soaring far above dull party strife; The love of learning, art, and song – the crowning grace of life; The love of science, soaring far through nature’s hidden ways; The love and fear of nature’s God – a nation’s highest praise.105 Notes

1 Because of Bourinot’s voluminous writings on political science, which became standard works in Great Britain and the colonies, and because he frequently lectured at universities, Paul Benoit labels Bourinot “Canada’s first political scientist.” “The Politics and Ethics of John George Bourinot,” Canadian Parliamentary Review (Autumn 1984), 7. For details on his life and work, see Margaret A. Banks, Sir John George Bourinot, Victorian Canadian: His Life, Times, and Legacy (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 2 Parliamentary Procedure and Practice in the Dominion of Canada, 4th ed., Thomas Barnard Flint, ed. (Toronto: Canada Law Book Company, 1916); Federal Government in Canada, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, (Baltimore: N. Murray, Johns Hopkins University, 1889); The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People (Toronto: Hunter, Rose, and Company, 1881); Canadian Studies in Comparative Politics, (Montreal: Dawson Brothers, Publishers, 1890); and Local Government in Canada: An Historical Study, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (N. Murray, Johns Hopkins University, 1887). Many of Bourinot’s writings are archived on the Internet (google.com and archive.org). 3 A Canadian Manual on the Procedure at Meetings of Shareholders and Directors of Companies, Conventions, Societies and Public Assemblies Generally, abridgement, (Toronto: Carswell Law Publishers, 1894) (cited herein as A Canadian Manual on the Procedure; edited contemporary version: Bourinot’s Rules of Order: A Manual on the Practices and Usages of the House of Commons of Canada and on the Procedure at Public Assemblies, Including Meetings of Shareholders, ed. Geoffrey Stanford (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995). Beauchenes’ Rules and Forms of the House of Commons of Canada replaced Bourinot’s Parliamentary Procedure, and since 2000, Robert Marleau and Camille Montpetit’s (eds) House of Commons Procedure and Practice has been a standard reference, http://www.parl.gc.ca/ marleaumontpetit/DocumentViewer. spx?DocId=1001&Language=E&Print= 2&Sec=Ch00&Seq=5. Even so, Marleau and Montpetit refer to theirs as a “continuation of Bourinot’s book.” 4 “Statesmanship and Letters,” Stewart’s Literary Quarterly Magazine, 3 (1869– 1870): 116–24; The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People; “The National Sentiment in Canada,” University Quarterly Review, First Quarter 1890: 3–23;

The Case of John George Bourinot

5

6

7 8 9 10

69

“Canada as a Home,” reprinted from Westminster Review (July 1882) (London: Trübner and Co, 1882); “Literature and Art in Canada,” The Anglo-American Magazine (February 1900), 99–110; “Canadian Materials for History, Poetry, and Romance,” New Dominion Monthly (April 1871), 193–204. Bourinot, “Mr. Speaker,” Canadian Monthly 13, 2 (February 1878): 129–36. Bourinot advised seven Speakers during his tenure and advised Prime Minsters on parliamentary procedure and constitutional law (Banks, Sir John George Bourinot, Victorian Canadian, 101–10, 141). For this reason, an article written in 1902 characterizes Bourinot as the consummate guardian of the laws (H.F. Gadsby, “A Hard Man to Follow – Sir John Bourinot,” Toronto Daily Star, 3 March 1902: no page given; see Banks, Sir John George Bourinot, Victorian Canadian, 109. Bourinot rarely discusses the role of Clerk in his writings. This silence, however, is strategic, as evidenced by Bourinot’s own extensive counsel to prime ministers and others on points of not only parliamentary procedure but also constitutional law. Instead, in his writings he ascribes a pivotal role to the Speaker as Parliament’s primary representative and referee: “If this be the case – and the writer is not penning this inadvisedly – it is justifiable to infer that the Speakers of the different Parliaments of Canada have had much to do in establishing a correct procedure, and deserving a proper tone in the parliamentary debates” (“Mr. Speaker,” 134). As argued below, the rules and forms of Parliament – its conventions – constitute, for Bourinot, the quintessence of parliamentary democracy. If the Speaker referees and represents the representatives, the Clerk is the advisor to whom the Speaker confers. Just as the Clerk’s wisdom is embedded in the rulings of the Speaker, so too, for Bourinot, is liberal education embedded in the civic education of Canadians to teach them selfgovernment. Bourinot seems to have regarded himself as perfectly straddling the divide between the contemplative and active lives, which is the basic division traditionally spoken of by philosophers like Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics I.5 and X). While an active Clerk of the Commons, his work afforded him opportunity for what Aristotle regarded as active leisure: “Works of constitutional authority like those of Hallam, May, Stubbs, and Todd must emanate naturally from the student, removed from the turmoil and excitement of political contests, rather than from the politician and statesman, whose mind can hardly ever find that freedom from bias which would give general confidence in his works, if indeed he could ever find time to produce them” (The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People, 114) “I shall treat the questions that arise from a mere technical or legal view, but from the standpoint of one who has many opportunities of observing its practical working” (Bourinot, Federal Government in Canada, 26). Bourinot, “Statesmanship and Letters,” 116–24. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, v.1–2. Janet Ajzenstat, The Once and Future Democracy (Montreal & Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003). My understanding of politics as motion draws not from Hobbes, but from Plato and Aristotle, as summarized by Tilo Schabert: “The different political regimes are presented much more in a state of motion than in a state of firmness …. Any

70

11

12

13

14

15

John von Heyking given regime as described institutionally is a fiction. For it is, within the sphere of institutional attributions given to it, in a state of constant movement. We say there is a river, and for practical purposes that is sufficient. But in fact there is no river, but the water flowing along and along to whose perpetual movement we are giving the name, ‘river.’” (Tilo Schabert, “The True Form of Governments,” in The Primacy of Persons in Politics; Empiricism and Political Philosophy, eds., John von Heyking and Thomas Heilke (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2013), 4. Modern political science, whose first principles remain largely predicated on the physical sciences, treats the object of its inquiry being static artifacts, and not as acting persons whose actions are necessarily in flux. German political scientist Tilo Schabert explains: “This science – planned to be a ‘natural’ science of politics – presupposes a political reality whose loci are its own artifacts rather than the persons who pursue the activity called ‘politics.’… Since they cannot be ignored, the modern, rationalist theory of politics responded by a tacit prejudice: relegating the human conditions of politics to a grey zone of ‘informal’ dealings or repelling them outright as ‘aberrations.’” Tilo Schabert, Boston Politics: The Creativity of Power (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 124. I borrow “chaosmos,” the composite of “chaos” and “cosmos,” from Schabert (who borrows it from James Joyce) to characterize politics as a composite of motion and stability (Schabert, “A Classical Prince: The Style of François Mitterrand,” in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics: Essays Honoring Ellis Sandoz (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 235). The tendency of higher education to specialize and to reduce education to vocation also plays a role in promoting submissiveness. Heyking, “Does a Liberal Education Still Have Value?” Cardus Comment, 9 March 2012. (http://www. cardus.ca/comment/ article/3136/does-a-liberal-education-still-have-value.) More ambitious forms of this “end of politics” romanticism take the form of a desired civil religion that mythologizes Canada’s recent history as well as the origin and purpose of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. See my “Civil Religion and Associational Life under Canada’s ‘Ephemeral Monster: Canada’s Multi-Headed Constitution,’” Civil Religion in Political Thought: Its Perennial Questions and Enduring Relevance in North America, eds. Ronald Weed and John von Heyking, (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 298–328 and “The Charter and Civil Religion,” Faith in Democracy?: Religion and Politics in Canada, eds., John F. Young and Boris DeWiel (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 36–60. David E. Smith, The People’s House of Commons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 5–7. Smith elsewhere testifies to the paradox of studying the House, which embodies the politics of motion: “The sense of life the parliamentary form embodies is one of action as well as of representation. Adversarial not abstract, personal and partisan not impartial – these adjectives describe politics in the people’s house” (108). Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); Christopher Moore, 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997). See also

The Case of John George Bourinot

16

17

18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

71

Ajzenstat et al., ed., The Canadian Founding Debates (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). This is not the place to debate the merits of those extra-parliamentary institutions. Even so, a proper debate about their merits, and the deficiencies of Parliament, would have to consider first the virtues of responsible government, including the mores that sustain it. This essay is an attempt at such a consideration. Peter Emberley and Waller Newell’s Bankrupt Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994) is an exception (see especially chap. 6, where they discuss “The Canadian Founding” and “The Founding Educators”). Ibid., 152. On the inherent paradoxes of liberal education for modern regimes, see Eva Brann, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Brann identifies three core paradoxes that liberal education faces in being present in a modern regime: (1) the paradox of utility, whereby liberal education is both useful in the skill sets it delivers while also transcending mere utility in its purpose; (2) the paradox of transmitting the tradition of learning to students while “moving forward” and avoiding mere “traditionalism.” It does so by engaging in the first principles of various disciplines as found in the arguments of key founders of those disciplines (e.g., the need for every generation to reassess the key insights of Plato’s Republic or Galileo’s Two New Sciences to understand how modern physics presupposes his analysis of motion and departure from the Euclidean model); (3) the paradox of liberal education conducted in the mode of rationality while alert to the limits of rationality. Bourinot notices these paradoxes and focuses on the first two. John George Bourinot, The Study of Political Science in Canadian Universities (Montreal: Dawson Brothers, Publishers, 1889), 3, quoting Seeley, “The Impartial Study of Politics,” Contemporary Review (July 1888), 65. Ibid. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 5, quoting Seeley, “The Impartial Study of Politics,” 63. Ibid., 13. Tocqueville consistently emphasizes the priority of the practical over the theoretical when he observes how the practice of self-government always seems to defy theoretical articulation. He states the point prosaically when he describes how self-government changes people’s souls: “sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another” (Democracy in America, trans., Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2.2.5, 491). Similarly, David Walsh observes of the liberal tradition in general that “theory and practice are mutually illuminating, neither taking place in a self-contained realm apart from the other” (Growth of the Liberal Soul (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 107). Bourinot, The Study of Political Science in Canadian Universities, 13–14. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 9.

72

John von Heyking

30 Ibid., 15. “Crichton,” referring to James Crichton (1560–85?), is an epithet referring to someone proficient in many kinds of studies and pursuits. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 14–15. 33 Bourinot’s argument seems to be an implicit version of an explicit one Leo Strauss makes in “What Is Liberal Education?,” that mass democracy requires that an aristocracy be founded within it in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 10). 34 Bourinot, “English Principles of Canadian Government,” Canadian Magazine 9, June 1897: no page number. 35 Bourinot describes this three-stage history of freedom for Canada in many different places in his writings. The most detailed account is in Parliamentary Procedure and Practice, chap. 1. 36 See Bourinot, Federal Government in Canada, 155–6. Bourinot cites J.S. Mill’s Representative Government, ch. 15: “I have dwelt in strong language on the importance of that portion of the operation of free institutions which may be called the public education of the citizens. Now of this education the local administrative institutions are the chief instruments” (in J.S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford University Press, 1991, 412). See also Bourinot, Local Government in Canada. Bourinot and Mill were influenced by Tocqueville on this point. Bourinot singles out Francis Leiber of Columbia University, a friend and regular correspondent of Tocqueville, as one of the founders of Political Science in the United States (The Study of Political Science in Canadian Universities, 6). For the Leiber-Tocqueville correspondence, see Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings (eds.), Tocqueville on America After 1840: Letters and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), passim. The correspondence runs from 1842 until 1857. 37 James Madison, Federalist No. 42, in Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist, Gideon Edition, George W. Carey and James McClellan, eds. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 219. 38 Tocqueville emphasizes the importance of forms. See Democracy in America, II. iv. 7. 39 Bourinot, “The House of Commons in Session,” Canadian Monthly 11 (March 1877), 287. 40 Bourinot, Parliamentary Procedure and Practice, 340. 41 Ibid., 331–75. 42 Ibid., 332. 43 Bourinot, “The House of Commons in Session,” 283. 44 Bourinot, Parliamentary Procedure and Practice, 332. 45 Ibid., 352, qtd. Thomas Erskine May, A Treatise upon the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament, 333–4. See also ibid., 361–2, on unparliamentary expressions. 46 Harvey Mansfield, Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000), 28–34. 47 Bourinot, Federal Government in Canada, 33, 35. 48 Bourinot, How Canada Is Governed: A Short Account of its Executive, Legislative,

The Case of John George Bourinot

49 50

51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63

64

73

Judicial, and Municipal Institutions, 9th edition, rev. and ed., Arnold W. Duclos (Toronto: Copp Clark Company Ltd., 1909), 291. Immediately before, Bourinot writes: “But however well devised a system of government may be, it is relatively worthless unless the men and women who compose the people of Canada are always fully alive to their duties and responsibilities” (289). Letter from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson (17 October 1788). Of course, as Madison argues in Federalist No. 51, institutions are designed to bring ambition to counteract ambition, which Bourinot too recognizes. Even so, the design of those institutions presupposes designers of moral virtue and equipped with intelligence regarding the nature of ambition, as well as with the knowledge that a regime of liberty also needs extra-political and cultural supports that restrain ambition. Inordinate ambition destroys institutions because, as noted above, institutions are but expressions of persons, endowed with various degrees of virtue and vice, in motion. A Manual of Constitutional History of Canada from the Earliest Period to the Year 1888 (Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1888), 175. Bourinot wrote this as a textbook for university students. Most of his reflections on civic virtue are contained in his textbooks and popular writings, not his scholarly writings. Harvey Mansfield, “The Teaching of Citizenship,” PS, Political Science and Politics 17(2) (Spring 1984), 213. Thomas Jefferson expounds on the “natural aristocracy” to John Adams in his letter of 28 October 1813. Bourinot, A Manual of the Constitutional History of Canada from the Earliest Period to the Year 1888, 40. Bourinot, How Canada Is Governed, 12. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 291. Bourinot, English Principles of Canadian Government, no pagination. Bourinot, “Literature and Art in Canada,” 109. Ibid. “From the foregoing necessarily very brief review of the prominent characteristics of the delegates it will be seen that it would not have been possible to find in Canada a body of men with higher qualifications for the national and imperial responsibilities confided to them.” (“Makers of the Dominion of Canada” series in The Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art and Literature (Toronto: The Ontario Publishing Co., Limited) (1897–8), X: 312). Bourinot, “Notes From Ottawa,” Canadian Monthly and National Review 2 (August 1872), 170–3. Bourinot, “Makers of the Dominion of Canada,” 387. Banks, Sir John Bourinot, 12–14. On the parochialism of classical studies in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries in general, see Eric Voegelin on “On Classical Studies,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, ed., Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 256–64. This insight forms the basis of most of Cicero’s writings on rhetoric (De Oratore and De Inventione) and ethics and politics (De Officiis and De Legibus I. 58–62). I thank Walter Nicgorski for these references.

74

65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75 76 77 78

79

80 81

John von Heyking “Canadian Materials for History, Poetry, and Romance,” 200. Banks, Sir John Bourinot, 58. “Statesmanship and Letters,” 116. Ibid. 118, quoting Bacon, “Of Studies.” Ibid. 122–3, quoting McGee, “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion” (Montreal, 1867), no page number given. Ibid., 124. “While coming into being for the sake of living, [the polis] exists for the sake of living well.” Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 1252b29–30. “We ourselves are poets, who have to the best of our ability created a tragedy that is the most beautiful and the best; at any rate, our whole political regime is constructed as the imitation of the most beautiful and the best way of life, which we at least assert to be really the truest tragedy. Now you are poets, and we too are poets of the same things; we are your rivals as artists and performers of the most beautiful drama, which true law alone can by nature bring to perfection.” Plato, Laws, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 817b–c. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), chap. 5. See also concluding reflections on this theme, with special reference to the story told by the space and architecture of the city, by Schabert, Boston Politics, chap. 5. Bourinot, “Canadian Materials for History, Poetry, and Romance,” 200. As explained in Politics VIII and in the Poetics. Bourinot, “Canadian Materials for History, Poetry, and Romance,” 193. Ibid., 194. The friendship of John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier, the foundational friendship of Canadian Confederation, seems to have been lubricated by a common love of pulp fiction adventure, as related by one of Cartier’s assistants: “Sir John A. Macdonald, who was fond of reading French novels – he always kept them close at hand and even in his desk – one day strode into our office and emptied his briefcase. In the middle of his papers, I spied Le Diable boiteux by Lesage. He noticed me looking at him and said in French, ‘N’allez pas me trahir!’ Cartier stretched a hand out toward his own table and showed us Les Aventures de Capitaine Beauchêne, by the same author. Here, in a nutshell, is the history of Canada.” Quoted by Alastair Sweeny, George-Étienne Cartier (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976), 102. Bourinot, “Canadian Materials for History, Poetry, and Romance,” 204, citing McGee, “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion,” published in Montreal Gazette, 5 November 1867. Ibid. He also mentions the importance of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Cervantes for their nations, and for the “world.” In addition to his own scholarly and public writing, and his involvement with the creation of the Royal Society of Canada, Bourinot also made what he must have regarded meagre contributions to Canada’s life of poetry in the form of a handful of novels. However, he gave up writing them in the 1880s and contented himself with hosting literary gatherings in his home (Banks, Sir John Bourinot, 184).

The Case of John George Bourinot 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101

102 103 104

75

Bourinot, The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 116. Writing in 1900, Bourinot drew the same conclusion regarding literature, and that oratory has kept pace but, “of late years, a keen, practical, debating style has taken the place of the more rhetorical and studied oratory of old times. The intellectual faculties of Canadians require only larger opportunities for their exercise to bring forth a rich fruition” (“Literature and Art in Canada,” 104). Bourinot’s reference to “studied oratory” suggests the influence of classical and modern models of oratory among the fathers of Confederation. Bourinot, “Literature and Art in Canada,” 107. Ibid., 108. Bourinot, How Canada Is Governed, v. The full quotation serves as the second epigraph at the beginning of this essay. Publius (James Madison), Federalist No. 55, 291: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind, which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: so there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.” Bourinot, How Canada Is Governed, vi. Ibid., 289–90. Bourinot, A Canadian Manual on the Procedure, ix. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 26. Bourinot, The Study of Political Science in Canadian Universities, 14. Ibid., 13–14. Barry Cooper, “Western Political Consciousness,” in Political Thought in Canada: Contemporary Perspectives, Stephen Brooks (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984), 214–15 and It’s the Regime, Stupid!: A Report from the Cowboy West on Why Stephen Harper Matters (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2009), 61–95. Bourinot, Federal Government in Canada, 160–2. On Canada and the delusion of perpetual re-foundings, see Heyking “Civil Religion and Associational Life under Canada’s ‘Ephemeral Monster,’” 321–7. For details, see Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education and Heyking, “Obstacles to Liberal Education in the Modern University,” The Democratic Discourse of Liberal Education, ed. Lee Trepanier (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press and the Grace A. Tanner Center, 2010), 134–59 and Heyking and Elise Ray, “Multiculturalism and Problems of Canadian Unity,” Political Cultures and the Culture of Politics: A Transatlantic Perspective, ed. Jürgen Gebhardt, Publication of the Bavaria-America Academy (Munich), vol. 9 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg, 2010), 109–30. See Andrew Rehfeld, “Offensive Political Theory,” Perspectives on Politics 8(2), (June 2010), 465–86. Bourinot, How Canada Is Governed, 289. Bourinot’s reliance on aesthetic categories to describe human excellence or virtue,

76

John von Heyking

which he shares with numerous educators of the nineteenth-century, betrays a failure to consider carefully the virtue teachings of the classics. A fruitful effort to rethink their meaning today is to begin with the political importance of friendship, the highest moral practice according to Plato and Aristotle (see Heyking, “‘Sunaisthetic’ Friendship and the Foundations of Political Anthropology,” International Political Anthropology 1(2), (November 2008), 179–93). 105 Bourinot, How Canada Is Governed, 291.

Constituting Canadians: George Brown’s Confederation Address Geoffrey C. Kellow

The initial decision to record, print, and publish the Confederation Debates in the Province of Canada was a controversial one. Unsurprisingly, the debate surrounded the cost of recording the debates and printing a number of copies, including fifty for each member of the legislative council and assembly. Original estimates placed the cost at roughly $2,000. By the time of publication the price had risen to more than seven times that original estimate.1 Worse still, after that original printing, outside of rare book collections and archives these printed records of the debates disappeared from view. The first widespread republication of the debates did not occur until almost a century later, in 1963 with P.B. Waite’s The Confederation Debates in the Province of Canada. After Waite’s collection fell out of print they did not reappear again until Ajzenstat et al. published Canada’s Founding Debates in 1999. It is also worth noting that, even given this welcome return, these debates are currently only available in heavily excerpted form. What is still lacking is a single source that contains the debates unabridged and in their entirety. Complete versions of all the speeches of the Fathers of Confederation exist primarily in collections of their state papers, papers that in many cases are more than a century out of print. In the case of George Brown, those general readers seeking to examine and understand his contribution to the Confederation Debates in its entirety must rely on a single source, the volume compiled and edited in the aftermath of his untimely death by Canada’s first liberal prime minister, Alexander Mackenzie. This is a particular shame in Brown’s case because those remarks, offered on the evening of 8 February 1865, amount to a remarkable rhetorical and forensic defence of the Quebec Resolutions. More than merely a defence of the Canadian project, George Brown’s

78

Geoffrey C. Kellow

extraordinary speech presented a subtle account of the means by which the citizens of a new country would become, in the post-Confederation sense, Canadians. As I hope to demonstrate below, the speech draws on an account of what we might understand as the politics of recognition to explain how the emergence of a new political entity onto the world stage would cultivate a new identity. Throughout his speech and in his recollections of his remarks shortly thereafter, Brown insists upon the importance of witness, of spectators present and future, whose appraisal both legitimates and serves to help constitute the new country. Days after the debates concluded Brown wrote to his wife Anne of his hopes for the outcome in just such terms. He wondered how both history and his own progeny would recollect his contribution. Mentioning their daughter Maggie, Brown imagined a scene both sentimental and substantial. “Come what may I have placed the question on such a basis as must secure its early settlement. Would you not like that darling little Maddie should be able twenty years hence – when we may be gone – to look back with satisfaction to the share her father had in these great events? For great they are, dearest Anne, and history will tell the tale of them.”2 Of course, there is no way of knowing if Brown’s daughter looked back and told the tale of his political activity in support of Confederation. By that time Brown had been dead five years, murdered by a disgruntled former employee of his beloved Globe newspaper. What is clear is that, despite Alexander Mackenzie’s attempts to secure his friend’s legacy, much of Brown’s vision and the countless words he wrote in support of that vision eventually faded from view, including his extraordinary speech to the legislative assembly of the Province of Canada. As president-in-council Brown was the fourth member of the legislative assembly to speak, essentially batting cleanup for the governing side. Following Macdonald, Cartier, and Galt, much was expected of Brown’s remarks. After all, his decision to join in Coalition with Macdonald had broken the deadlock in the legislative assembly. More than that it had made Confederation possible.3 He rose then, not merely to defend Confederation but to defend his own decision to cross the floor and to join with his longtime nemesis John A. Macdonald. Among his critics, most notably Luther Hamilton Holton, Brown’s speech amounted to little more than “an apology for his abandonment of all those objects for which he has contended through his political life, saving only the shadow of representation by population.”4 Clear of the fog of partisanship and the wounds of perceived betrayal, it is hard to see how Holton, who interjected repeatedly during Brown’s remarks, could have been more wrong.

George Brown’s Confederation Address

79

At almost thirty thousand words, Brown’s remarks are as sophisticated an exposition of political rhetoric, principle, and purpose as the founding debates have to offer. They amount to something very much akin to The Federalist Papers, especially considering the role of their author in making Confederation possible. Brown’s speech, equivalent in length to ten or more of the Federalist papers, sought the same four ends that motivated Madison, Jay, and Hamilton. Brown sought to describe the faults of the current order, explain the remedy promoted, defend the legitimacy of the process of ratification, and adumbrate the benefits the new arrangement promised. Beyond this, and perhaps in some ways beyond the strictly political ambitions of the Federalist Papers, Brown sought to explain the ways in which Confederation would cultivate an almost wholly new Canadian identity.

Remedies Brown began with remedies. It was the only place that he could start. He had premised his decision to join Macdonald on the idea of crisis,5 on the claim that the current constitutional order was irreparably broken. In light of his decade-long agitation, both in the legislative assembly and in the pages of The Globe, he had to begin with remedies to the problems that had most vexed him and his fellow Grits. Central among these were the closely tied questions of representation by population and taxation without representation, with the latter in many ways seen as the loathed outcome of the former. Brown recognized that any program of reform that failed to address these would be doomed to failure. Moreover, as Holton had hinted, endorsing any program that failed to remedy these would inevitably be viewed as a betrayal of all that he had worked for in the years leading up to the Confederation Debates. When Brown rose to speak, he began by addressing the most basic remedy promised by Confederation. He declared “I cannot help feeling that the struggle of half a lifetime for constitutional reform – the agitations in the country and the fierce contests in this chamber – the strife, and the discord and the abuse of many years – are all compensated by the great scheme of reform which is now in your hands.”6 Beyond the specific remedies to problems peculiar to the Province of Canada, the Quebec Resolutions promised a resolution to discord, to contest, and to agitation. Brown believed the resolutions possessed an emergent quality. They did more than remedy; they bore along with them collateral goods. This suggestion is the central rhetorical motif of Brown’s speech. In instance after instance Brown moves from specific questions,

80

Geoffrey C. Kellow

for example representation by population or the new country’s naval power, to a general claim about a collateral good. That general claim was that in each remedy or benefit there lurked a constitutive element beyond its curative force that helped cultivate and secure a new Canadian identity. For George Brown the most pressing piece of constitutional reform concerned representation by population. As he understood it, the problem constituted nothing less than an assault on the most basic tenet of liberal democracy. Brown contended that the simple reform in representation both promised benefits far outweighing any imperfections of the plan, and in their fundamental justice to the citizens of Upper Canada, promised greater benefits than all other aspects of the plan combined. Indeed, his faith in the representation sections of the Quebec Resolutions led him to declare “For myself, I unhesitatingly say, that the complete justice which this measure secures to the people of Upper Canada in the vital matter of parliamentary representation alone, renders all the blemishes averred against it utterly contemptible in the balance.”7 This passage might seem to suggest that Brown believed that the benefits of Confederation were primarily remedial. But once Brown tied this initial and essential remedy to further remedies regarding taxation, a grander vision of Confederation emerged. For Brown and for the Upper Canadian liberals in general, the ills of representation and taxation were intimately connected. The absence of representation by population made possible the injustices of taxation. On its most basic level the problem was reducible to simple arithmetic. Upper Canada contributed more money to the coffers of the Province of Canada than it received in benefits. The reforms in representation and, it must be noted, the innovations of federalism, meant that “No longer shall we have to complain that one section pays the cash while the other spends it.”8 Brown carefully constructs his claim. He leaves it initially unclear whether the primary political issue is the manifest fiscal injustice or the necessity of complaint. He suggests, in his careful phrasing, that the Province of Canada had two problems, a fiscal imbalance and a culture of largely irresolvable complaint. Unlike a medical remedy, the remedy for this does not merely return Canada to the status quo ante, it provides a necessary condition for something more, for the cultivation of a common identity. This will form the model for almost the entirety of his speech; specific solutions and particular benefits are treated primarily as means to the more general good of community formation. In discussing the various formulae, for debt, for funding the intercolo-

George Brown’s Confederation Address

81

nial railway, and for accommodating the costs incurred to the Maritimes and Newfoundland, Brown presents the same rhetorical strategy. The speech provides an exhaustive accounting of the formulae that provide fiscal incentives to the Maritimes and Newfoundland and seeks to demonstrate their fundamental fairness. However, Brown does not end there. Instead, having shown that the Maritimes and Newfoundland were being treated with simple fiscal equity, Brown concludes on a note closer to Federalist Ten than to an accountant’s brief. “I confess that one of the strongest arguments in my mind for confederation is the economical ideas of the people of the Maritime Provinces, and the conviction that the influence of their public men in our legislative halls will be most salutary in all financial matters.” Brown’s argument speaks more to the expansion and improvement of the public sphere than to the particulars of the railway project. In economic terms, Brown’s remarks closely resemble the public sphere argument Madison makes in The Federalist Papers. In Federalist No. 10, praising the large republic over small democracies, Madison contended that the extended size and scope of the United States ensured both that better candidates would be elected and that they would represent a broader range of interests and ideologies.9 It seemed clear to Brown that the same beneficent political economies of scale would apply in the Canadian case. Brown’s exhaustive rendering of facts and figures did more than clear away the grounds of intra-communal complaint; it provided an opening for a deeper accounting of the new space and substance with which to transform the Canadian public sphere. In addressing economic questions early, whether it was taxation and representation in the Province of Canada or the fiscal formula offered the Maritime provinces, the structure of Brown’s argument remained the same. The removal of a specific complaint cleared the ground for a benefit beyond the substance of the complaint. Extraordinarily, the collateral benefit promised in all three instances occupies a different category from the complaint remedied. Repairing fiscal relations and commercial connections generates decidedly extra-economic goods. In Brown’s initial accounting, which would be replicated in an even more powerful form in the second section of his remarks, he appeals first to interest, especially economic interest. Brown then subtly moves the conversation onto the ground of larger political good. His speech reveals a strategy not merely for the successful passage of the Quebec Resolutions but a roadmap for, in a much deeper sense, creating the country those resolutions promise.

82

Geoffrey C. Kellow

Benefits The second section of Brown’s speech is the most carefully organized of the three. The initial passages range over economic, political, and educational questions but focus most on the tied issues of representation by population and taxation. In contrast, the second section of his speech carefully enumerates a list of seven “unanswerable arguments”10 in favour of Confederation. In this listing, Brown replaces the initial language of remedy and opportunity with language of near unadulterated benefit. However, as with the discussion of complaint and remedy in the opening section of Brown’s speech, here too, in almost every instance, Brown begins with an appeal to interest, especially material interest, and ends with larger political concerns. Brown moves from the individual to the nation. He begins with an appeal, first to the person, then to the patriot. Of course, most remarkable of all, he appeals to the patriot of a country not yet born. The first of Brown’s unanswerable arguments makes the case most plainly. Brown begins by listing all of the assets that the Confederation project will combine. As with the discussion of remedies, there are times when, with the flurry of figures, Brown sounds more like a mergers and acquisitions officer than a statesman. However, underneath the accounting of what amount to economies of scale, Brown makes a much more subtle and significant argument. Having listed most of the material benefits, Brown poses the following question to the legislative assembly: “These are some examples of the industrial spectacle British America will present after the union has been accomplished; and I ask any member of this House to say whether we will not, when thus united, occupy a position in the eyes of the world, and command a degree of respect and influence, that we never can enjoy as separate provinces.”11 This is not an argument from material interest. Brown appeals not to selfish interest but to the passion for recognition. What he promises is not wealth but honour. Confederation will generate wealth, as can be expected from economies of scale and the merging of markets, but these are merely means to a wholly political end, respect and influence over others. Importantly, this respect and influence over others will only emerge in conjunction with the emergence of a new nation and identity. So, curiously perhaps, the parties to Confederation can hope for recognition and status only when they cease to be parties to Confederation and become Canadian. Brown’s second unanswerable argument demonstrates a similar philosophic and rhetorical structure. Brown declares his support for

George Brown’s Confederation Address

83

Confederation because it will “make us the third maritime state in the world.”12 As an appeal to interest the argument is an odd one. The generation of material benefit is relatively independent of ranking. If Brown was appealing simply to self-interest he need only point out the benefits of an expanded maritime fleet. Presumably, to have more ships in an export economy is better than having fewer. The ranking suggests a subtler appeal. The deeper appeal is not really about shipping at all. Brown was talking about our place in the world. The discussion of shipping is just more evidence of the extent to which Confederation will change that place. It is an appeal not to our desire for betterment but to the desire for recognition. That this is his true object became crystal clear when, during his account of Canada’s naval resources, Luther Hamilton Holton challenged Brown’s numbers. In particular, Holton challenged Brown’s figures on the value of ships constructed annually in the provinces, asking whether Brown’s figures included all vessels or, presumably the more significant number, only sea-going vessels.13 Brown’s reply gives away the game. First acknowledging that he included in his figures both sea-going and inland vessels, he then challenged Holton, asking “Why is my honourable friend so anxious to depreciate?” Brown responded to an economic question with a political answer.14 He moved the ground away from the facts and figures to the political possibilities they do or do not represent. He did not ask Holton why he doubts his accounting but rather suggested that Holton does not wish Canada to rise in the world. What began as an apparently quite precise calculation of interest ended in an account of how the new nation would be judged and ranked among nations. Both the appeal and Brown’s somewhat brazen retort suggest a deep connection between an understanding of where we stand and a sense of who we are. The question of recognition dominates the middle numbers of Brown’s list of seven “unanswerable arguments.” In the third of these arguments Brown contends that Confederation will give a boost to immigration. In describing the new appeal Canada will have to immigrants, Brown repeats, almost verbatim, his remarks on naval power, declaring “It will bring us out anew prominently before the world.” In the paragraph that follows, Brown moves from the estimation of the world at large to the views of the mother country. He almost gushes in recollecting his encounters with Britons apprised of the Canadian plan. “You could not go abroad, you could not enter into any company, in any class of society, where Canada or the British American Provinces were mentioned, but you heard this union movement spoken of almost with enthusiasm.”15 Brown invites his

84

Geoffrey C. Kellow

listeners and readers to imagine Canada as the object of not merely the mother country’s affection but more crucially its attention. Of course, knowledge of promising plans within Canada might prompt some to contemplate immigration, but Brown never identifies these chattering fans of Confederation as potential immigrants to the new country. Indeed, he moves on without ever explicitly connecting this vignette of a Canadafascinated British public with any obvious benefit whatsoever. Popular approbation among the British renders Canadians neither richer nor more powerful. The benefit conferred seems again to amount to a form of recognition both revelatory and generative. It is not until Brown’s fifth “unanswerable argument” that his audience actually meets with a concrete appeal that is not subtly addressed to the desire for recognition. In addressing the need for new maritime trade routes should the Reciprocity Treaty fail, Brown is content to note that the new country is far better positioned than the Province of Canada to face trade conflicts with the United States. But this account of trade routes and disputes serves merely to set up the spectre of a much more serious conflict. Brown moves quickly from trade to defence, addressing the tensions with the United States and the argument with Britain over colonial security. Here, where one might expect an appeal to passions over interests, Brown becomes decidedly dispassionate, declaring “I am not one of those who ever had the war fever.” He does not deprecate the martial virtues, rather he points out that Britain has grown weary of the burden of defending its empire, observing that, inevitably, with or without Confederation, the colonies will be asked to bear more military responsibility for themselves. But Brown’s speech is not finished with questions of war and peace, or for that matter with the struggle for recognition. He suggests that the colonies that may or may not come to comprise Canada are already ranked and measured in the eyes of others. If at first Brown appealed to the hope that Canada and Canadians might rise in the estimation of others, he now warns of the consequences of our failure to rise, or worse, to decline amongst those who have already taken notice. Brown contends “Our country is coming to be regarded as undefended and indefensible – the capitalist is alarmed, and the immigrant is afraid to come to us.”16 Where there is opportunity, Brown makes clear, there is also risk. Either Canada must seize its opportunity for greatness or others will. This again stands as a remarkable appeal. It broadens the sense of crisis. It transforms the debate around Confederation into an existential crisis, equally in terms that once again frame Confederation as a struggle for recognition. In describing the

George Brown’s Confederation Address

85

development of Canada and the hope that it will soon emerge, through Confederation, from under the protective shield of Britain, Brown declares that Britain has waited for a moment when we could “fearlessly look our enemies in the face.”17 Once again, the language of ordinary politics, of questions of a quotidian nature, gradually gives way to the language of place and primacy. Confederation promises a new stature and more crucially a single face with which to address the world. Confederation promises, quite simply, not merely a coalition of interests but the creation of a wholly new people.

Legitimacy Brown ends his defence of the Confederation project with an argument that, rhetorically at least, should perhaps have been expected at the outset. He defends the project against charges of procedural and democratic illegitimacy. These charges had gained particular traction, perhaps somewhat ironically, among the newspapers of Brown’s own Canada West.18 In particular, Confederation’s opponents pointed out that Brown, Macdonald, and company had never run on a Confederation ticket. Nor had the Charlottetown Conference initially convened to debate the question. In response, Brown generously contended that his opponents sought to reject Confederation not because of its many benefits but solely on the principle of legitimacy. Indulging their democratic sensibilities, Brown imagined them concluding that “this scheme may be all very right – it may be just, and the very thing the country needs – but this government had no authority from parliament to negotiate it.”19 In reply, Brown canvassed a number of sources, essentially recounting the public debate in the Province of Canada from Lord Durham’s Report to the meetings and resolution of the Toronto Convention of 1859. His speech sought to show that in fact the issue of constitutional reform had bestridden every democratic contest since the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. Brown then moved from a methodical recounting of the constitutional question to address the emergence of the coalition that made possible the Confederation deal. In describing the “propitious circumstances” that gave rise to the coalition Brown declared Most peculiar were the circumstances that enabled such a coalition to be formed as that now existing for the settlement of this question; and who shall say at what hour it may not be rent asunder? And yet,

86

Geoffrey C. Kellow who will venture to affirm that if party spirit in all its fierceness were once more to be let loose amongst us, there would be the slightest hope that this great question could be approached with that candour and harmony necessary to its satisfactory solution?20

Brown’s statement seems to undermine every claim that he made, at great length, defending the legitimacy of the process. He suggests that the very agitation and activity that legitimized the process, especially the activity of parties and people, now threatened it. Brown then responded to this charge in a most remarkable fashion. He suggested that the crisis Canada faced, the alternatives to his unassailable arguments, was so great that it both forged and insisted upon a post-partisan unity. In what amounted to the peroration to his speech, Brown once again listed the threats that Canada faced: the strident war-like United States, the potential loss of the Reciprocity Treaty, and the decline in support and relations with the mother country. All of these, he suggested, demand Confederation. More than this though, these challenges “unite us all in one vigorous effort to meet the emergency like men.”21 Brown once again conceives of the origins of the country not merely out of crisis but in explicit dialectic response to the crisis. For Brown the new country emerges in opposition to the challenges it faces. Moreover, the process by which Confederation and ultimately Canada emerges is legitimated not by the procedures and practices of ordinary politics, but rather by the unity in struggle and crisis. John Sanborn, speaking in the legislative council the very next day, criticized the process Brown sought to defend. Sanborn insisted that only the participatory act of voting for Confederation would cultivate a connection to the new country in the hearts and minds of the citizenry.22 Despite this attack on Brown’s arguments regarding legitimacy, beyond questions of process Brown and Sanborn were in essential agreement. Both saw in the popular responses to Confederation the sources of a new civic identity. They differed only in their understanding of the mechanisms of identity cultivation. For Sanborn that process was participatory, for Brown it was fundamentally dialogic. In characterizing the question of legitimacy in this way, Brown implies an understanding of politics that hinges on the dialogic character of recognition struggles.23 As with his earlier arguments, the challenge to legitimacy, which begins with a meticulous accounting of particulars, quickly rises to questions of how a people is constituted. However, as Brown makes amply clear in his remarks, he means “people” in a very particular sense. From

George Brown’s Confederation Address

87

his exordial observations, marvelling at the transformation in relations between French and English, praising federalism, and accepting parochial schools, Brown made clear that his understanding of national identity could not be simply conflated with cultural identity. His Confederation address built upon the concept of political nationality first enunciated two days earlier by George-Étienne Cartier. Cartier had envisioned an identity emerging out of union in “which neither the national origin, nor the religion of any individual, would interfere.”24 Brown’s vision of the Canadian people, generated by the politics of recognition in an international rather than an intra-communal context, entailed allegiance to institutions and an inclusive account of national opportunity. What it did not depend on, indeed in its emphasis on national prospect implicitly eschewed, was a substantive “blood and soil” account of national identity. George Brown, in the penultimate paragraph of his speech on the Quebec Resolutions, commends to his listeners and readers a particular approach to the Quebec Resolutions. “Let us look at it in the light of a few months back – in the light of the evils and injustice to which it applies a remedy – in the light of the years of discourse and strife we have spent in seeking for that remedy – in the light with which the people of Canada would regard this measure were it to be lost, and all the veil of past years brought back upon us again.”25 In concluding his remarks, Brown, for the first time, explicitly advocates the dialogic approach he has been quietly pushing throughout his speech. In making manifest the substantial substratum of almost all the arguments that have gone before, Brown reveals the means by which he believes a Canadian people will ultimately be constituted. In these final remarks he does something more; he invites the members of the Legislative Assembly to imagine how future generations would look upon them were they to fail. Brown calls upon the members to imagine the perspective of a people and inevitably that means imagining a people. In calling into political imagination the perspective of the people of Canada, in a very real sense Brown hopes that, in the minds of his fellow legislators at least, he calls into existence that very same people.

Conclusion One of the most striking characteristics of George Brown’s speech on the Quebec Resolutions during the Confederation Debates is how little time he spends actually discussing the resolutions. No resolution is named and discussed in detail and aside from some details about interprovincial

88

Geoffrey C. Kellow

finances and the structures of federalism very little of the substance of the arrangement is discussed either. Brown defends Confederation while hardly talking about it at all. Instead, what ties together the three sections of his speech is an underlying concern for how a people constitutes itself. Brown offers, underneath his treatment of the questions of remedy, benefit, and legitimacy, an account of the vital role of recognition in community formation. It is this underlying concern that, I believe, ultimately explains his willingness to surrender a position he had held for many years and at no small cost concerning the question of education. George Brown was perhaps Canada’s most passionate advocate of secular education. While he harboured substantial anti-Catholic sentiments, on a more thoughtful level he had long held that the unity of a political community depended upon common and public schooling. Brown had opposed the educational settlements in both Upper and Lower Canada, especially the establishment of schools and school systems along denominational lines. He deeply regretted the division he saw as a result of “the admission of the sectarian principle.”26 But I want to suggest that despite his profound commitment to what he called “mixed schools,” Brown could abide such a concession by virtue of the other sources of common identity Confederation established. Brown’s speech points to a much larger school of citizenship and crucible of common identity than schooling. Brown clearly concluded that the process and most especially the collateral products of Confederation, the recognition goods that it would produce, would teach a common civic identity that far outweighed the parochial influences of religious schools. In removing the issues around representation and taxation, those twin engines of discord, and subtly accessing the constitutive power of the politics of recognition, Brown identified in Confederation not merely the substance of a deal but the structures essential to building a people. Notes 1 P.B. Waite, The Confederation Debates in the Province of Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1963), ix. 2 Alexander Mackenzie, Life and Speeches of the Honourable George Brown (The Globe Printing Company: Toronto 1882), 233. 3 Christopher Moore, 1867 How the Fathers Made a Deal (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1997), 27. 4 Luther Hamilton Holton, “Speech to the Legislative Assembly, Province of Canada,” 9 February 1865. In Waite, Confederation Debates, 85. 5 Ged Martin, “The Case Against Confederation” in The Causes of Canadian Confederation, ed. Ged Martin (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press 1990), 27.

George Brown’s Confederation Address 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

89

Mackenzie, 299. Ibid., 311. Ibid., 312. Publius (James Madison), The Federalist Papers, ed. J.R. Pole (Hackett Publishing: Indianapolis, 2005). Mackenzie, Life and Speeches, 319. Ibid., 321. Ibid., 322 Ibid., 324 Ibid., 326. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 334. Ibid., 333. Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004), 27. Mackenzie, Life and Speeches, 337. Ibid., 345. Ibid., 346. Janet Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 82. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992), 32–3. “We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others – our parents, for instance – and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.”  George-Étienne Cartier, Canadian Legislative Assembly, 7 February 1865 cf. Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding, 89. Mackenzie, Life and Speeches, 346. Ibid., 316.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia for Canada David W. Livingstone

The two great things that men aim at in their government are liberty and permanency. Thomas D’Arcy McGee

Thomas D’Arcy McGee has been described as one of the earliest and most eloquent advocates for the union of British North America, and an advocate of responsible government. Yet he was not always an enthusiastic supporter of Canada’s union or of British institutions.1 Born in Ireland in 1825, he devoted his early career as a journalist, editor, and political radical both to Irish independence and to the strengthening of Catholic teachings among his lay audiences. Even as late as 1849, while living in United States, McGee advocated that Canada should be annexed by the United States.2 As David Wilson chronicles, however, McGee’s political ideas changed. He became disillusioned by American-style democracy, and upon immigrating to Canada he began to view British-style parliamentary government as superior to the brand of republicanism he had once espoused for Ireland.3 It was largely due to his experience of living under responsible government in Lower Canada and the freedom he enjoyed there that McGee began to change his mind. By the 1860s he was passionately urging the case for the union of British North America under the British flag and organized around British parliamentary principles. He pressed his deep learning and tremendous rhetorical skills to the task of persuading his fellow Canadians that political union was not only necessary but also beneficial. However, though his writings and speeches in Canada during the 1860s reflect a remarkably wide range of interests and topics, including and especially the British North American union, there is a recurring theme: the essential connection between education and self-government. McGee was an advocate for liberty but he was cautious about democracy,

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

91

believing as Alexis de Tocqueville did that democracy had a tendency to push equality to excess and thereby undermine freedom. McGee hoped that the right education would help provide ballast and prevent this drift. Gaining independent political institutions for Canada would mean little unless the citizens of the new nation acquired and maintained a civic education that would equip them to shoulder the responsibilities of free government. McGee outlines for Canadians what such an education would look like, and it is both a civic education and a liberal education.

Classical Sources As Waller Newell and Peter Emberley point out in their study of liberal education in Canada, McGee’s educational prescriptions are derived from classical sources.4 McGee agrees with the classical political philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, that the regime has a formative impact on the character of those who live within it. Paul Cantor nicely summarizes the classical argument. “The key question of a political community is always: who rules? And with this concentration on forms of government goes the idea that these forms are formative: they shape the way of life of the citizens living under them.”5 Leo Strauss provides a fuller account of the classical perspective on the importance of the regime, a term that embraces both a “way of life” and the “form of government.” The thought connecting “way of life of a society” and “form of government” can provisionally be stated as follows: The character, or tone, of a society depends on what the society regards as most respectable or most worthy of admiration. But by regarding certain habits or attitudes as most respectable, a society admits the superiority, the superior dignity, of those human beings who most perfectly embody the habits or attitudes in question. That is to say, every society regards a specific human type (or a specific mixture of human types) as authoritative. When the authoritative type is the common man, everything has to justify itself before the tribunal of the common man; everything which cannot be justified before that tribunal becomes, at best, merely tolerated, if not despised or suspect. And even those who do not recognize that tribunal are, willy-nilly, molded by its verdicts. What is true of the society ruled by the common man applies also to societies ruled by the priest, the wealthy merchant, the warlord, the gentleman, and so on.6

92

David W. Livingstone

Both Cantor and Strauss emphasize the regime’s influence on the tastes and moral habits of its inhabitants. However, as both scholars would acknowledge, the influence flows in both directions. Plato has Socrates argue in the Republic that the regime comes from no other source than the dispositions of its citizens, most particularly the citizens who rule it and are honoured by it. Speaking to Glaucon, his young interlocutor, Socrates introduces his famous analysis of the different forms of government with the following question: “‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘that it is necessary that there also be as many forms of human characters as there are forms of regimes? Or do you suppose that the regimes arise “from an oak or rocks” and not from the dispositions of the men in the cities, which, tipping the scale as it were, draw the rest along with them?’”7 Operating with this perspective in mind, McGee’s interest as a statesman and contributing founder of the new Canadian regime was not merely to ensure that the new constitution matched the prevailing tastes and sentiments of the inhabitants but more important, to elevate those tastes and habits through his contributions to the emerging nation. Even prior to emigrating to Canada, McGee was editorializing in his American newspaper that union “would raise the public spirit of the people and enlarge the horizon of public view; it would give imperial importance to provincial politics and the dignity of history to provincial life.”8 In his view, the fact that his colleagues were debating Confederation in the British North American colonies by 1865 was already contributing to this ennobling effect: “[M]any men now speak with a comprehensiveness which formerly did not characterize them, when they were watched only by their own narrow and struggling section, and weighed only according to a stunted local standard. Federation, I hope, may supply to all our public men just ground for uniting in nobler and more profitable contests than those which have signalized the past.”9

Tocqueville’s Influence McGee was also impressed by Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy’s influence on character and habits. In a published letter written to his friend, Charles Gavan Duffy, McGee remarks that it had been “nearly twenty years since we canvassed together the merits of the late Alexis de Tocqueville’s work, ‘Democracy in America.’” “When the complete work fell into our hands, we adopted most of his well-weighed and well-worded conclusions, or dissented from them, when we did dissent, not without respectful hesitation and regret.”10 Significantly, McGee chose the following

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

93

quotation as an epigraph for the letter: “Democracy, as it seems, must next be considered, how it arises, and, when once arisen, what kind of man it produces.” The line is from Book VIII of Plato’s Republic – precisely the book in which Socrates presents his argument on the democratic regime’s formative effect as well as its strengths and weaknesses in both the state and in the soul of the man who incorporates the principles of this regime into his own soul. McGee therefore signals that Socrates’ discussion of democracy is particularly important for the reader to bear in mind since the letter’s topic is “The Present American Revolution” (referring to the Civil War) and “The Internal Condition of the American Democracy.” McGee has both Tocqueville and Plato in mind while he is thinking through the strengths and weaknesses of democracy. McGee wonders in his letter to Duffy whether Tocqueville, if he were still alive, would alter any of his conclusions. It is likely that he would, McGee concludes. “Not,” however, “that his main conclusions on the incompatibility of slavery and freedom, the inherent weakness of the Federal bond, the downward tendency of manners, or the phenomena of democratic armies, would be revoked.”11 Among Tocqueville’s true and lasting insights McGee includes the notion that the regime affects the character of the citizens living there. He also shares with Tocqueville the view that, although the dominant principle of the age is democracy, democracy is a mixed blessing not least because of the “downward tendency of manners” it ushers in.12 McGee, like Tocqueville, was convinced that if left unguided democracy’s instincts would threaten political order. Indeed, he criticized the United States under the presidency of Andrew Jackson on the grounds that it had already become too populist. He came to distrust American-style democracy, which he often associated with mob rule, conformity, and a levelling equality that led to mediocrity. He cites as evidence of Tocqueville’s general point the revolution in the manners of Americans from the time of their own founding to his present day, the effects of which were especially detectable in the reading habits of the American public. “I will only invite you, in order to aid your estimate of the revolution in ideas and in manners, to consider for a moment the mental contrast between an average American of the year 1760, whose favourite reading was the Bible and Bunyan, and Fox’s ‘Martyrs,’ with an average American of these days, whose vade mecum is the Rowdy Journal, or some novelette weekly, filled with maudlin love stories and exploits of pirates and burglars.”13 Though the Americans do not recognize this change in themselves this is merely a symptom of their lack

94

David W. Livingstone

of self-knowledge. Rather they “seem to receive as gospel every commonplace compliment on their fidelity to the example of their ‘revolutionary fathers.’”14 In the maintenance of the broad simple theory of their institutions – that they shall be democratic and electoral, rather than monarchical or subordinated into classes – I believe they do hold with the more advanced revolutionists of 1776, and even go beyond them. But in most of their other notions, as to the constitution and administration of the Government – as to the Executive office, the settlement of new territories, the reserved rights of the States, the management of their finances, the appointment and prerogatives of the Supreme Court – as to the elective judgeship, the dignity and duty of ambassadors, the limits of consular authorities – I think it might easily be demonstrated that they are much farther removed from the example of their ancestors of 1776 than the cautious and ceremonious generation were from that of their ancestors, who took part in the English revolution of 1688.15 McGee appears to have in mind Tocqueville’s insight that liberty and equality are the two mainsprings of democracy, but that each principle presents its unique difficulties for the regime. Of the two, equality represented for Tocqueville and for McGee the subtler danger to stable government and responsible liberty. “The evils that liberty sometimes brings are immediate,” Tocqueville writes. “[T]hey are visible to all, and more or less everyone feels them.” Tocqueville acknowledges that liberty can descend into licence. But when that occurs, it is generally noticeable. Unfortunately, the misuse of freedom may sometimes end in tragedy, such as when political protests turn violent or when individuals abuse their freedom and commit crimes. On the other hand, “The evils that extreme equality can produce appear only little by little; they gradually insinuate themselves into the social body; they are seen only now and then, and, at the moment when they become most violent, habit has already made it so that they are no longer felt.” Not only are the dangers of extreme equality more difficult for most individuals and statesmen to perceive, there is an additional difficulty stemming from the seductive charm of equality itself. “The passion for equality penetrates the human heart from all directions, it spreads and fills it entirely. Do not tell men that by giving themselves so blindly to one exclusive passion, they

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

95

compromise their dearest interests; they are deaf. Do not show them that liberty is escaping from their hands while they are looking elsewhere; they are blind, or rather they see in the whole universe only one single good worthy of desire.”16 Tocqueville’s analysis is not unlike Socrates’ critique of democracy in Book VIII of the Republic, the book from which McGree drew his epigraph for his letter to Duffy. The extreme form of democracy, Socrates argues, tends to be viewed as “a sweet regime, without rulers and many-colored, dispensing a certain equality to equals and unequal’s alike.”17 The doctrine of equality comes to be extended in democracy even to the soul’s desires, rendering any distinction between base pleasures and noble pleasures meaningless. Socrates continues: “‘And,’ I said, ‘he [the democrat] doesn’t admit true speech or let it pass into the guardhouse, if someone says that there are some pleasures belonging to fine and good desires and some belonging to bad desires, and that the ones must be practised and honoured and the others checked and enslaved. Rather, he shakes his head at all this and says that all are alike and must be honored on an equal basis.’”18 For Tocqueville this passion for equality, added to the existing pressure on individuals to conform to majority opinion in democratic society, results in a restricted range of thoughts and opinions. “Today, the most absolute sovereigns of Europe cannot prevent certain ideas hostile to their authority from circulating silently within their States and even within their courts. It is not the same in America; as long as the majority is uncertain, people speak; but as soon as the majority has irrevocably decided, everyone is silent, and friends as well as enemies then seem to climb on board together.”19 In a speech he delivered on the subject of separate schools in Canada, McGee argued in similar fashion: “An all-devouring uniformity is the passion of the democrat. He insists on one costume, one tone, one accent, and one idea of everything American.”20 This uniformity resulted partly from the American system of common schools: “though the average ability of six-tenths of the generation may be drawn out by undergoing such an education, the highest ability of any one of them will rarely recover from the iron pressure of uniformity.”21 McGee thought that this pressure to conform could potentially deprive the nation of its greatest talent (which partly explains why he opposed a common school system in Canada). McGee believed that Canada should take advantage of the social conditions in the colonies. Not unlike the United States, Canada enjoyed a freedom of social mobility of which

96

David W. Livingstone

Europe could not boast. Here a genuine meritocracy could take root without the artificial interference of inherited classes and a landed aristocracy. “This is a new land – a land of young pretensions because it is new; because classes and systems have not had that time to grow here naturally. We have no aristocracy but of virtue and talent, which is the best aristocracy, and is the old and true meaning of the term.” McGee refers to aristocracy as it was originally meant by classical political science, meaning the rule of the best, or the rule of the virtuous few. In this McGee agrees with Thomas Jefferson writing to John Adams. For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. … There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government? The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.22 The democratic pressure to impose “equality on equals and unequal’s alike” would undermine meritocracy, resulting only in mediocrity. Thus, in a speech on Confederation he delivered in 1865, McGee warned his listeners of the danger to the colonies if they did not come together within Confederation. “We run the risk of being swallowed up by the spirit of universal democracy that prevails in the United States.” By contrast, “The proposed Confederation will enable us to bear up shoulder to shoulder; to resist the spread of this universal democracy doctrine.”23

The Natural Aristocracy But having criticized America for its potential for democratic excesses, McGee was far from seeing no value in what the United States had achieved politically and what its political principles represented to the world. In a remarkably prescient article written at the outbreak of the

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

97

American Civil War, McGee refers to the principles of the Declaration of Independence as “every freeman’s creed.” The interests of Canada in the Civil War are in general “the interests of all free governments, and in particular the interest of a next neighbour.”24 “As a free people. With absolute domestic self-government, with local liberties bound up in an Imperial Union, governed by our own majority constitutionally ascertained, we are as deeply interested in the issue of the present unhappy contest, as any of the States of the United States.”25 The South, he argued, was rebelling against a government that stood on a noble principle: “‘all men’ – black as well as white – ‘are endowed with certain inalienable privileges, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”26 This is the basic principle of equal rights, but McGee’s decision to edit the quotation by dropping the word “equality” indicates that he wishes to downplay the word, perhaps for fear that it will ignite the passion for the extreme and illegitimate equality criticized by Socrates and Tocqueville. Yet he also insists that the principle announced by Jefferson in the Declaration is the key to liberty. What McGee highlights as worthy of respect in the American founding is its dedication to a rational principle of liberty transcending race, ethnicity, and skin colour. And to that extent McGee remains in agreement with Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, and with John Locke, whom Jefferson acknowledges is his source for this idea; it is consistent with the principle of equal natural rights that there also exists a natural aristocracy, and “that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government.” Likewise for Locke, men in the state of nature are in a “state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal.” Yet he also maintains the following: Though I have said above, Chap. II. That all men by nature are equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of equality: age or virtue may give men a just precedency: excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level: birth may subject some, and alliance or benefits others, to pay an observance to those to whom nature, gratitude, or other respects, may have made it due: and yet all this consists with the equality, which all men are in, in respect of jurisdiction or dominion one over another; which was the equality I there spoke of, as proper to the business in hand, being that equal right, that every man hath, to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man.27

98

David W. Livingstone

Thus for McGee, Jefferson, and Locke the equality that serves as the basis for rational liberty is perfectly consistent with the recognition that natural inequality persists and that these inequalities are politically relevant. And it only stands to reason that in a regime where people are left free to exercise their talents within the bounds of the rule of law, that these differences will also generate differences in opinions, interests, and degrees and amounts of wealth. McGee praises the American founders for establishing constitutional forms intended to guide and check the power of democratic majorities. These principles and many of the constitutional forms are part of a common inheritance from Great Britain shared by Canada and the United States. The South was abandoning this precious inheritance: “[T]hus the cardinal American doctrine – which is the British doctrine too – the majority, constitutionally ascertained, should rule, was flung to the wind, along with the elder doctrine of inherent natural right.”28 If McGee is right, then principles of “inherent natural right” in the Declaration are part of a common intellectual inheritance. But it is an inheritance that must be grasped by the mind in order for it to be passed along from generation to generation. The Confederate South actively rejected this inheritance, but it is also possible to squander it out of neglect and ignorance. To take possession of this inheritance requires one to periodically reflect upon and understand the history, meaning, and purpose of those principles, which is precisely what McGee is urging his fellow Canadians do in his speech on the Civil War. This is why he asserts that what is at stake is of vital interest to Canada and to “all free governments.” The Civil War is being fought to restore the unity of the Republic, and so some might wish to argue that it is of concern only to the United States. However, “It would require very little argument – none at all if the view I have taken of the merits of the controversy be correct – to prove that a war for the unity of the Republic must be necessarily, ipso facto, a war for liberty. The dogmas on which the Republic are founded are genuine articles of every freeman’s creed.”29 McGee’s antipathy for “universal democracy” is consistent with his assessment of the nobility of the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and their connection with genuine human liberty and political aspiration.

Liberty and Permanency McGee’s epigraph to his letter about American democracy also indicates

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

99

that he believed those living in democracy often misunderstand and therefore unwittingly undermine their own freedom. This would be a particular problem for the statesman and founder living in a democratic age. This is not to suggest, however, that McGee was uninterested in securing liberty for Canada through the new constitution of 1867. Janet Ajzenstat shows that in England during the 1830s those, like McGee, who argued that inequality and constitutional forms that limit the power of democratic majorities in the legislature are essential for securing freedom were accused of being disingenuous and motivated by class interest: “The English Benthamite party, the Philosophical Radicals, were the radical group of the time most concerned with Canadian affairs.”30 The group included John Stuart Mill. Statements like McGee’s about the positive role of the “natural aristocracy” in advancing and securing liberty would have been met with skepticism and hostility. As Ajzenstat points out, this line of attack has hardly disappeared. “Statements of this order were seen by the Benthamites as malicious lies, rhetoric to blind the mass of people to the work of the aristocratic-oligarchic Whig and Tory minority. And although they use more neutral language, most historians and political scientists today appear to hold like views.”31 However, so far we have seen that McGee criticized the United States for its excessive love of equality and democracy but that he praises it for maintaining the principles of liberty that he asserts are “the British doctrine too.” McGee was interested in securing this liberty for Canadians, but he also believed that liberty could only exist where there was stability.32 Speaking before the Legislative Assembly in Canada in 1865, McGee declared the following: “The two great things that men aim at in their government are liberty and permanency.” In the letter to Duffy, McGee refers to himself reflexively as a lover of “well regulated liberty.”33 And in the speech on the American Civil War McGee maintained that the Americans would have to learn that “unity is to liberty as the cistern in the desert is to the seldom-sent shower; that of liberty we may truly say, though Providence should rain it down upon our heads, though the land should thirst for it, till it gaped at every pore, without a legal organization to retain, without a supreme authority to preserve the Heaven-sent blessing, all in vain are men called free, all in vain are States declared to be independent.”34 McGee worried that democracy’s passion for equality might eventually undermine its dedication to “well-regulated liberty,” and McGee would have agreed with James Madison that pure democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been

100

David W. Livingstone

as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”35 Direct democracy would never work to secure freedom, and it could never protect minority rights, including the legitimate rights of the wealthy, who are a minority in practically every society. Just as Madison argues in The Federalist that in a republic the people are sovereign but they should not rule directly, so McGee maintains that not majorities per se but a majority “constitutionally ascertained” ought to rule. Thus in 1865 he returns to the question of unity and liberty but this time in the context of Canada’s proposed constitution which he hopes will be set before the British monarch for final adoption, imagining what the Canadian should say at that moment: “We come to Your Majesty, who have given us liberty, to give us unity, that we may preserve and perpetuate our freedom.”36 McGee praised the pre-Confederation Canadian colonies for having already achieved a high degree of responsible liberty. It was his experience of that freedom once he immigrated to Canada that persuaded him that British institutions, shorn of the peculiar and destructive opinions of British lawmakers with respect to the Irish, were in themselves good. In a speech he delivered in Canada in 1864 on Ireland’s contribution to the literature and history of the British Empire, McGee began by claiming for himself “that full and unabridged liberty for discussion which I have never been denied in British America.”37 And not unlike other Canadians at the time, McGee believed that the British colonies had developed a degree and quality of liberty that was in certain crucial respects superior to the freedom enjoyed by Americans. Indeed, if he had learned anything about the United States during the years he lived there, “it is that the colonial condition of society, though not without follies, exaggerations, and inherent weaknesses of its own, has yet compensating advantages under the present system of locally responsible government, which far outweigh all its inconveniences and deficiencies.”38 In 1867 McGee referred to “our large powers of local government” which he hoped “may be used to wise and useful ends.”39 In the same speech he favourably referred to Canada as “one of the most lightly taxed countries of the world” and advocated that it remain thus: “[W]e need and require in these provinces that system of government and taxation which will least diminish the wages and most increase the number of our working population.”40 And while addressing his colleagues in the Legislative Assembly about the drafted BNA Act, he boldly proclaimed, “There is not on the face of the earth a freer people than the inhabitants of these colonies.” “But,” he added “[I]t is necessary that there should be respect for the law, a high central authority, the virtue of civil obedience,

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

101

obeying the law for the law’s sake.”41 Much earlier, in 1860, McGee shared with the Legislative Assembly his vision of Canada’s future in which he connected freedom with the future constitution for Canada, using the word “free” no less than five times. I look to the future of my adopted country with hope, though not without anxiety; I see in the not remote distance one great nationality bound, like the shield of Achilles. I see it quartered into many small communities, each disposing of its internal affairs, but all bound together by free institutions, free intercourse, and free commerce … I see a generation of industrious, contented, moral men, free in name and free in fact, – men capable of maintaining, in peace and in war, a Constitution worthy of such a country.42 McGee also stated in his 1861 speech on the American Civil War that “although subject to a constitutional monarchy in our external affairs, we claim to be as free a people – indeed, we flatter ourselves we are a freer people – than our neighbours of New York, or New England, or the North-western States.”43 Whether that self-praise went too far or not, the Canadian provinces, he maintains, are “riding safely by the firm anchorage of a system of self-government, the most liberal that metropolis ever conceded to colony, since the emigrating ages of the Greeks.”44

Human Nature and the Principle of Federation Once the BNA Act was drafted, McGee promoted it, not least because it included a principle not found in the British model from which much else in the new constitution was derived: the federal principle. For McGee, the principle of federalism would be the basis upon which a new Canadian nationality and a new patriotism would emerge. “You have sent your young men to guard your frontier. You want a principle to guard your young men, and thus truly defend your frontier. For what do good men who make the best soldiers fight? For a line of Scripture or chalk line – for a text or a pretext? What is a better boundary between nations than a parallel of latitude, or even a natural obstacle? – what really keeps nations intact and apart? – a principle.” The due distribution of powers in a federal union is a principle “capable of being so adapted as to promote internal peace and external security, and to call into action a genuine, enduring and heroic patriotism.”45 The principle of federation, moreover, is a “generous principle.”

102

David W. Livingstone

“It gives men local duties to discharge, and invests them at the same time with general supervision, that excites a healthy sense of responsibility and comprehension.” Furthermore, “It is a principle eminently favourable to liberty, because local affairs are left to be dealt with by local bodies, and cannot be interfered with by those who have no local interest in them, while matters of a general character are left exclusively to a General Government.”46 Nor is the federal principle a mere political convention; it pays due deference to the initiative and intelligence of individuals and local communities who ought to remain free to exercise and thereby also develop their own responsibility. Hence the principle of federalism “appear[s] to have a very deep hold in human nature itself – an excellent basis for a government to have.”47 It only stands to reason for McGee that human beings have a nature that, once known, indicates to the statesman certain forms and institutions that are more likely to promote its flourishing. The rational study of human nature, therefore, would help statesmen limn the form of government that best facilitates this flourishing. Such study would also indicate reasonable limits to politics and to the science of politics. Consistent with this realistic view, McGee counsels against those who would aim too high. “My Hon. friend is well read in political literature,” McGee said on the floor of the House. “[W]ill he mention me one authority, from the first to the last, who ever held that human government was or could be anything more than what a modern sage called ‘an approximation to the right,’ and an ancient called ‘the possible best’”?48 The spirit he adopts is one of moderation, which is something else he may have learned from Plato and Aristotle.49 It is clear, then, that along with the other advocates of the new British North America Act, 1867, D’Arcy McGee hoped to preserve and extend for posterity the liberty he came to enjoy under responsible government.50 It is also clear from his remarks about federalism that he believed political institutions are best when set on the foundation of a true understanding of human nature. Furthermore, principles and institutions are critical for forming the nation in a particular way and for giving to that nation a direction toward a particular way of life. McGee does not subscribe to the view that subpolitical forces wholly dictate political events and structures. In this he would no doubt agree with Alexander Hamilton that the crucial question is “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”51 McGee’s own words and actions clearly show that he believes the latter. And far from being merely a practical bargain worked out among

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

103

oligarchs and businessmen, as some historians have suggested, McGee asserted that the proposed constitution represented “our fundamental Charter” and the debates in each province about its content and desirability “has occasioned a discussion of the first principles of government.”52 Moreover, this constitution is “a scheme not suggested by others, or imposed upon us, but one the work of ourselves, the creation of our own intellect and of our own free, unbiased, and untrammeled will.”53 Nevertheless McGee does not believe it is safe to rely on institutions alone. He points Canadians to those authors from whom he learned about human nature and politics. And he recommends their study to future Canadians. Education, therefore, would be important if citizens of the new nationality were to remain self-governing.54 Indeed, even after witnessing the successful adoption of the BNA Act, McGee proclaimed that education would be “an essential condition of our political independence.”55 For McGee, shouldering the responsibilities of self-government requires more than acquiring merely vocational skills for the economy. In short, McGee intentionally gives to Canadians the outlines of a political education that he believed would be important to maintain if the constitutional provisions he and the other Canadian founders helped bring into existence were to survive.56

Character and Good Government McGee argues that free government depends for its stability and longevity on the good character of the people who live under that government. Regarding the new Dominion, he remarked in 1867 in an address to the Literary Club of Montreal that, “as an incipient new Nation, it seems to me, that our mental self-reliance is an essential condition of our political independence.”57 In that address he singles out in particular those he calls the talented, ambitious young men in Canada, i.e., Canada’s natural aristoi. These young men could arise from any economic class, indeed it was the openness of Canada that might for once allow for the natural aristoi to advance for the betterment of the society without being held back by the artificial barriers that held back those with talent in the older European societies. He summons them to “use their time; to exercise their powers of mind as well as body; to acquire the mental drill and discipline, which will enable them to bear the arms of a civilized state in times of peace, with honor and advantage.” He also encourages Canadians to develop their own national literature and to “set up for ourselves, a distinct national exis-

104

David W. Livingstone

tence.”58 But this distinctive national literature would also have to be distinguished. It would be insufficient simply to have a literature that one could say was unique to Canada. Ideally it should also be of a high calibre and contribute to “the increase of the universal literary republic” while aiming at the “object of all intellectual pursuits … the attainment of Truth.”59 Guiding principles and deep reflections upon human nature that would inform the development of Canadian literature and political institutions could be discovered in the writers in the European intellectual tradition to whom McGee repeatedly gives credit in his own writings and speeches – including the Bible, Plato, William Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville, among others. For Canadians to neglect the lessons of these authors would be to squander a precious inheritance. More important, it would leave future generations of Canadians less able to appreciate the principles of the new constitution itself, rendering them less capable of bearing the “arms of a civilized state in times of peace.” The Bible in particular he recommends not because it is his place to “inculcate religious duties,” but because it is “a family book mainly.” “If we wish our younger generation to catch the inspiration of the highest eloquence, where else will they find it? If we wish to teach them lessons of patriotism, can we show it to them under nobler forms than in the maiden deliverer who smote the tyrant in the valley of Bethulia?” The Bible ought to be read, therefore, “not only as the spiritual corrective of all vicious reading, but as the highest of histories, the truest of philosophies, and the most eloquent utterance of human organs.”60 What Canadian literature should accomplish – among other things – is that it should chasten Canadians, neither puffing them up and flattering them with false pride, nor causing them merely to ape what others had done. It should elevate their state of mind: “I do not mean a state of mind puffed up on small things; an exaggerated opinion of ourselves and a barbarian depreciation of foreigners; a controversial state of mind; or a merely imitative apish civilization. I mean a mental condition, thoughtful and true; national in its sympathies; gravitating inward. Not outward; ready to learn from every other people on one sole condition, that the lesson when learned, has been worth acquiring.”61 Repeatedly, McGee balances in this essay a due appreciation for what others have achieved that Canadians ought to learn from with what Canadians need that cannot easily be supplied by relying upon the literary productions of other people. But though he encourages Canadians to explore foreign ideas McGee is not a cultural relativist. He does not advocate that Canadians accept everything foreign.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

105

They must measure the contribution to civilization by others and their own by the standard of truth. They must be in a position to discern whether “the lesson, when learned, has been worth acquiring.” McGee recognized, then, that immersion into a set of selected works and texts largely drawn from the European tradition of political and moral thought would be important. He privileged the European heritage of learning over others because this heritage, or selected portions of it, was instrumental in forming the ideas and tastes of a people dedicated to the same principles of ordered liberty that he and others were attempting to preserve and extend through what would become Canada’s fundamental charter, the BNA Act. He did not argue that these works ought to be given precedence because they were European. His preference for European works over non-European texts was not due to ethnocentric prejudice, but rather to his judgment that those works that best articulated the principles of human nature and of free government that found expression in British parliamentary practice – at its best – also happened to be, and not by accident, those that nurtured, clarified, and maintained that same tradition of self-government. The test of good literature for McGee was not its ethnic origin per se but whether or not it taught the truth about human nature and its needs, and whether it served to shape human character so that it would be more likely to cultivate the virtues and capacities for self-government. If a particular tradition happened to excel in such works, McGee would not hesitate to promote it at the expense of other traditions and legacies whose products of thought, while impressive in other regards, led to other conclusions about fit government. Similarly, then, McGee would not be an advocate of simple cultural equality or cultural relativism. For him, this would only serve to undermine the point of civic education. McGee would be in agreement with John A. Macdonald who, according Rod Preece, was, like McGee, a follower of Edmund Burke. Both McGee and Macdonald looked to the British tradition, not because they were British (after all, McGee was Irish) but because the system worked to produce selfgovernment. In the words of Burke, “It is a presumption in favour of any settled scheme of government against any untried project, that a nation has long existed and flourished under it.”62 As Preece elaborates, the Burkean position suggests, “Traditional intuitions contained a sophisticated wisdom our individual rationality may be inadequate to discern.”63 But it is not only Burkean organicism that McGee celebrates. The limitation of that approach is that it might tie one to historically developed traditions at the expense of an acknowledgement of natural right. Thus

106

David W. Livingstone

McGee recommends to his Canadian audience the study of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, because Shakespeare displays “wonderful knowledge of human nature.” Moreover, “A mind so deep and clear in itself – that easily embraces all humanity as the air does our earth – must have had profound convictions on the highest of earthly interests – the sphere and duty of government.”64 McGee refers to Shakespeare as the “bard of freedom” whose plays rightly denounce “those who abuse” the kingly office and who “portrays to us, in many respects, the horrors of despotism.” However, McGee is careful to point out to his Canadian audience that “we must not run to the other conclusion – that he is the least of a democrat.”65 McGee credits the English bard with influencing his own views on Canadian politics: “I feel how far I have been from doing full justice to my subject. I sought it casually for my own instruction, and I was greatly influenced in making up my own conclusions in politics, to find that the highest genius who ever used our language was a zealot neither for democracy nor autocracy – that he was the exponent and eulogist of that Constitutional form of government of which we posses an unfinished copy in this Province.”66 “At the same time no professor of public law ever more staunchly maintained that it is the duty of rulers to be themselves rules by law and even by the opinion of the people.” 67 McGee recommends the study of Shakespeare because of the bard’s knowledge of political principles: “This great master of human nature desired liberty regulated by fixed laws, a Government heedful to opinion, but not servile to clamour.”68 And to repeat, McGee claims that “I was greatly influenced in making up my own conclusions in politics” by his reading of Shakespeare.

Conclusion In Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Legacy, Thomas Pangle writes that liberal democracy has been suffering from a theoretical crisis. The principles that animated the turn toward classical liberalism by such individuals as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke have come under sustained attack from left and right. Yet, Pangle argues, the theoretical crisis does not necessarily need to lead to a practical crisis because liberal democracy, in contradistinction to communism and fascism, derives powerful support from a way of thinking that cannot be called modern at all: the premodern thought of the western tradition. The first wave of modernity was, by contrast to the explosive rejection of classical principles by twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, “eminently sober.” “The question classical republi-

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

107

canism impels is, whether such foundations are sufficient, or whether they do not decisively rely on the supplement of a spiritual sustenance derived from what are ever more rapidly disappearing vestiges of an older religious and classical liberal education.”69 Pangle recommends a neo-Aristotelian approach to the revival of political philosophy and civic education. Such an approach, he maintains, would return to the serious study of statesmen from the past, who are studied for the seriousness of their thought and their pursuit of worthy political goals.70 “The working hypothesis is, that the conceptions shaping the evolution of a political society’s way of life are most visibly in play where those with access to rule, or those seeking such access, articulate and fight over moral goals, principles, and priorities, in response to defining problems and crises that are the turning points of historical action.”71 Therefore, Pangle concludes, what political scientists ought to be studying are the “speeches and writings that most powerfully shape and explain the present order” which are “at least as likely to be found in the formative past of a regime or nation as in the present.”72 It is certainly the case that McGee thought that Canadians were passing through a critical, formative moment during Confederation, and that the men, including himself, who were called upon to deliberate about the Constitution rose to the occasion. It may be the case, as Janet Ajzenstat argues, that Canadian historians, beginning in the 1960s, turned their attention to other topics. They began to engage in the “egalitarian” social history that Pangle criticizes that “serves to undermine respect for political debate … and to falsify the empirical reality of man as the political animal” who can be animated by concerns for justice and goodness. And in that sense Canadian history has turned Canadians away from the resources of their own past. It is indicative of this approach that the primary documents of Canada’s founding – the speeches – have until recently not been published or made easily available either for citizens or for students of Canadian politics and history. McGee accused the Confederate South of having turned their backs on their British traditions. Ironically, today American scholars and the American public are constantly engaged in the study of origins and The Federalist is available in many editions and has become part of the required reading list for university courses on American government. But in Canada the story is different: “Some of the documents pertaining to confederation have never been published; many that were once available are out of print. Canadians are relentlessly future oriented. The idea of turning to the past for instruction strikes us as futile – absurd.”73 As Travis Smith explains, “Canadians today locate their virtue in their sympathetic senti-

108

David W. Livingstone

ments, correct opinions and good intentions. They underestimate how much of their continued peace and prosperity they owe to good fortune, including geography and the virtue of generations past. They are unconsciously Hegelian in many ways, including their confidence that the necessary trajectory of history is plain, making it unnecessary to study history as if its examples might teach us anything.”74 Contrary to Canadian historians who argue that the BNA Act was simply a deal struck among pragmatists lacking political vision, McGee asserted on the floor of Parliament that “first principles” were at issue. “The provincial mind, it would seem, under the inspiration of a great question, leaped, at a single bound, out of the slough of mere mercenary struggles for office, and took post on the high and honourable ground from which alone this great subject can be taken in, in all dimensions – they rose at once to the true dignity of this discussion with an elasticity that does honour to the communities that have exhibited it.”75 The political discourse on both sides of the debate in Canada had been elevated in tone and substance, McGee argued, because of the magnitude of what was at stake. Excavating our own political history from the encrustations and layers of social history to expose those moral resources in our tradition that the founders of our constitutional order recommended to posterity as necessary supplements and supports for the regime they were building could only help us as modern Canadians think through some of the issues facing our community today. It may be to McGee that we can begin to look for some guidance for the problems with liberal democracy identified in contemporary political science. It appears that McGee understood that modern liberalism required for its support a healthy respect for premodern reflection on ideas of justice and equality, and that these would have to be supplied through a deliberate and thoughtful civic education that maintained the vitality of that tradition, not in slavish conformity to it, but in studied deference to the best it had to offer. And if McGee is right, nothing less than Canadian political independence depends on this recovery. Notes 1 A once well-known and frequently written about Canadian historical figure, McGee has disappeared from popular consciousness in more recent decades. Interest in his life and thought has gained renewed life in Canada thanks largely to David Wilson’s excellent two-volume biography, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 1: Passion, Reason, and Politics 1825–1857 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), and Volume 2: The Extreme Moderate (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011).

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

109

2 Robin B. Burns, Thomas D’Arcy McGee: A Biography, PhD diss. (McGill University, 1976), 197. 3 While McGee never stopped hoping for political improvements in Ireland, including greater political independence from Great Britain, he no longer supported the radical Irish republicans, becoming instead a vocal enemy of the Fenians in North America. 4 Peter C. Emberley and Waller R. Newell, Bankrupt Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 140. The authors assert that “Canada was founded in a century, not of first principles and revolutionary optimism, but of renewed appreciation for organic ties” (138). I will argue that, at least as far as McGee is concerned, he believed that confederation raised first principles and renewed appreciation for organic ties. 5 See Paul Cantor, “Literature and Politics: Understanding the Regime,” Political Science and Politics 28, no. 2 (June 1995): 192. “In the classical view, literature will tend to reflect the spirit of the regime under which it is written, the dominant opinions and constitutive political principles.” 6 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 137. 7 Plato, The Republic of Plato, 2nd edition, trans. with notes and an introductory essay by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991 (1968)), 544 d–e. 8 Thomas D’Arcy McGee, The American Celt, 16 August 1856, quoted by Robin B. Burns, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 311. 9 Thomas D’Arcy McGee, “Speech on Motion for an Address to Her Majesty in Favour of Confederation,” Legislative Assembly, 9 February 1865, 223. In D’Arcy McGee: A Collection of Speeches and Addresses: Together with a Complete Report of the Centennial Celebration of the Birth of the Honourable Thomas D’Arcy McGee at Ottawa, April 13th, 1925. Selected and Arranged by The Honourable Charles Murphy, K.C., LL.D. (Toronto: The MacMillan Company of Canada Limited, 1937). Unless otherwise indicated, all references to McGee’s speeches are to this edition. 10 McGee, “The Present American Revolution. The Internal Condition of the American Democracy Considered in a Letter” (London: Robert Hardwicke, 192, Piccadilly: 1863), 5. 11 McGee, “The Present American Revolution,” 5. 12 Tocqueville, “If long observations and sincere meditations led men of today to recognize that the gradual and progressive development of equality is at once the past and the future of their history, this discovery alone would give this development the sacred character of the will of God. To want to stop democracy would then seem to be struggling against God himself, and it would only remain for nations to accommodate themselves to the social state that Providence imposes on them.” “Introduction,” Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. from the French by James T. Schleifer. A bilingual French-English edition, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010). Accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/2285/218797 on 18 December 2013. 13 McGee, “The Present American Revolution,” 13. McGee’s view is shared by a modern scholar who assesses the American founding period and the US

110

14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27

28

David W. Livingstone

Constitution. “Another way of putting this is to say that the prudence and eloquence of the Founding Period in this country drew upon intellectual and spiritual capital that was not adequately preserved by the education and training of the decades that followed.” George Anastaplo, The Amendments to the Constitution: A Commentary (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 112. McGee, “The Present American Revolution,” 14. Ibid., 14–15. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, chap. 1: “Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and More Enduring Love for Equality Than for Liberty.” Plato, Republic, 558c. Ibid., 561 b–c. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2. ch. 7: “Of the Power Exercised by the Majority in America over Thought.” Also see Thomas Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and Legacy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006): “Democracy has not yet found a defence against the creeping conformism and the ever increasing invasion of privacy which it fosters,” 77. McGee, “The Separate School Question,” 157. McGee, “The Present American Revolution,” 11. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 October 1813, in The Founder’s Constitution, eds Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, web edition (University of Chicago Press and Liberty Fund), ch. 15, doc 61, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/ founders/documents/v1ch15s61.html. Also see John von Heyking’s reference to this passage in “Liberal Education Embedded in Civic Education for Responsible Government: The Case of John George Bourinot.” Heyking makes the case that George Bourinot viewed the role of the natural aristoi in Canada in the same positive way that I am arguing D’Arcy McGee did. McGee, “In Favour of Confederation,” 257. McGee, “Canada’s Interest in the American Civil War,” 170. Ibid., 171. Ibid., 173. It is worth noting that McGee’s paraphrasing of the Declaration drops the phrase “are created equal” and replaces the word “rights” with “privileges.” For some reason he also does not include, as the Declaration does, that these rights “are endowed by their creator.” It is also worth noting that his phrasing in the quoted passage is similar to Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered one hundred years later. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. Their note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (emphasis added). Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream,” 1963, United States National Archives and Records Administration, http://www.archives. gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Hollis (London: A. Millar et al., 1764), Chp. VI, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/locke-the-two-treatises-ofcivil-government-hollis-ed. McGee, “Canada’s Interest in the American Civil War,” 173–4. McGee does not

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

29

30 31

32

33 34 35

111

hesitate to criticize the Americans for violating the natural rights of Native Americans. “The Indian Treaties of the Union are an immense collection; but it is impossible to reconcile with any notion of natural right, or conventional justice, such purchases as were made, from the Osage tribe for instance, of 48,000,000 acres of land, for the wretched stipend of $1,000.00 a year, payable to the chiefs!” (174–5). For a good discussion of equality and inequality and constitutional forms in Canada, see Janet Ajzenstat “Modern Mixed Government: A Liberal Defence of Inequality,” in The Canada Founding: John Locke and Parliament (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), ch 8. McGee,”Canada’s Interest in the American Civil War,” 189. For an analysis of President Lincoln’s view on the relationship between union and freedom, see David W. Livingstone, “The Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Presidency: Lincoln’s Model of Statesmanship.” Perspectives on Political Science 28, 4 (1999). Lincoln “believed a strong Union guided by the Declaration’s principles was the best means of ending slavery. Without a Union committed to those principles there would be little hope of ending slavery in America and virtually no hope of ending it legally or gradually” (205). Ajzenstat “Modern Mixed Government,” 147. Ibid., 152. Ajzenstat does not agree with the Benthamite party view. Rather she defends Lord Durham’s view: “A measure of inequality preserves freedom, as well as equality – to paraphrase Durham, as much rational equality ‘as any people under the sun can, or ought to, enjoy’” (161). This perspective is anchored in the classical teachings regarding the mixed regime, and, I am arguing, it was also shared by D’Arcy Mcgee. The decline of traditional liberal education in Canada generates a lack of awareness about this tradition and renders us more vulnerable to the charm of modern day Benthamite radicals who can always count on the “passion” for equality to provide them with support. But as Tocqueville warns in Democracy in America, and as McGee feared, this passion for equality can be turned against the constitutional forms that were designed to hold it in check for the sake of securing freedom. These constitutional limitations on the majority begin to be viewed as illegitimate bastions of elitism masking self-interest. McGee was not alone. According to Janet Ajzenstat, “The record shows beyond doubt that the ‘Victorian gentlemen’ who made Canada believed it was their task, first and last, to secure the blessings of liberty for their fellows and their descendants” (see Professor Ajzenstat’s essay in this volume p. 33). McGee, “The Present American Revolution,” 6. McGee, “Canada’s Interest in the American Civil War,” 184. James Madison, “Federalist No. 10” in George W. Carey, The Federalist (The Gideon Edition), ed. with an Introduction, Reader’s Guide, Constitutional Crossreference, Index, and Glossary by George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/788 accessed 24 December 2013. In charting the descent of democracy into tyranny, Socrates in The Republic emphasizes the role of leaders who win the support of the demos by taking the property of the rich and “distributing it among the people,” even though the rich in becoming wealthy have not committed any crimes. In fact, he says, “when all are engaged in money-making, the men most orderly by nature

112

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52

53 54

David W. Livingstone

become, for the most part, richest” (564e–5a). But populist leaders (Socrates calls them drones with stings) can count on the envy of the demos. McGee, “In Favour of Confederation,” 265–6. McGee, “Ireland’s Place in the Literature and History of the Empire,” 20 January 1864, 77. McGee, “The Present American Revolution,” 18. McGee, “The Working Man’s Aims and Prospects,” 15 January 1867, 151. Ibid., 147. McGee,“In Favour of Confederation,” 264. McGee, “A Prophetic Vision.” From speech of Hon. Thomas D’Arcy McGee in the Legislative Assembly, 2 May 1860, ix. McGee, “The Present American Revolution,” 171. Ibid., 169. McGee, “In Favour of Confederation,” 261, 260–1. Note as well that McGee looks to civic bonds to unite the future people of Canada, not racial, religious, or linguistic ones. For the distinction, see James McPherson Is Blood Thicker Than Water?: Crises of Nationalism in the Modern World (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998). McGee, “In Favour of Confederation,” 262. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 242. He doesn’t name these two sources – “one modern and one ancient.” Could they be Burke and Aristotle? According to Allan Bloom, “Socrates thinks about the end which is ultimately aimed at by all reformers or revolutionaries but to which they do not pay sufficient attention. He shows what a regime would have to be in order to be just and why such a regime is impossible. Regimes can be improved but not perfected; injustice will always remain. The proper spirit of reform, then, is moderation. Socrates constructs his Utopia to point up the dangers of what we would call utopianism; as such it [The Republic] is the greatest critique of political idealism ever written.” “Interpretive Essay,” 410. For statements on liberty by other Canadian founders, consult Janet Ajzenstat’s chapter in this volume. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 1,” in Carey, The Federalist. See Ajzenstat’s chapter in this volume: “Donald Creighton says about the Fathers of Confederation: ‘They were mid-Victorian British colonials who had grown up in a political system which they valued, and which they had not the slightest intention of trying to change by revolution. For them the favourite myths of the Enlightenment did not possess even a quaintly antiquarian interest. [T]hey would have been sceptical about both the utility and the validity of abstract notions such as the social contract and inalienable rights of man.’” McGee, “Speech on Motion for an Address to Her Majesty in Favour of Confederation,” Legislative Assembly, 9 February 1865, 265. Even as early as 1845 McGee’s newspaper The Boston Pilot echoed the theme of the Irish newspaper, The Nation, whose slogan was “educate that you may be free.” Quoted in Robin B. Burns, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 68. While living in the United States, McGee promoted adult education classes for Irish immigrants in America. “McGee had tried to link adult education with temperance by arguing

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia

55 56

57

58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75

113

that if a person knew how to read, he would spend his leisure time consuming the delights of literature instead of alcohol” (ibid., 69). Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education, 141. McGee would have been dismayed had he been alive when John Dewey’s educational theories were beginning to transform Canadian public education, and McGee would probably have agreed with Dewey’s Canadian critic, Hilda Neatby: “The virtues of the new system [of education influenced by Dewey’s philosophy] are none of them entirely new … The vices, however, are new in this sense that they are typical twentieth century vices, representing equalitarianism and totalitarianism masquerading under the cloak of democracy. Educational experts probably do not know this because they are generally ignorant of history and of philosophy; but no respect for their good intentions, their enthusiasm or their industry should blind us to the fact that the new philosophies and the new procedures constitute a genuine danger for the liberal education which must be the foundation of a free society.” Hilda Neatby, So Little for the Mind (Clark, Irwin & Co. Limited, 1953), 133. McGee, “The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion,” from the Montreal Gazette, 5 November 1867: 2. Library of the Public Archives of Canada, http://www.archive. org/details/cihm_09479. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 6, 7. See Heyking’s chapter in this volume, “Liberal Education Embedded in Civic Education for Responsible Government: The Case of John George Bourinot,” note 79 and context. Bourinot quotes approvingly from McGee’s “Mental Outfit” essay. Summarizing the point Bourinot is making with the help of McGee, Heyking writes, “Only a liberal education in literature, broadly treated here in terms of ‘letters,’ can produce citizens who govern themselves.” Ibid., 4. Ibid., 1. Rod Preece, “The Political Wisdom of Sir John A. Macdonald,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 17, 3 (1984): 476. Edmund Burke quoted in Preece, “Political Wisdom,” 476. McGee, “The Political Morality of Shakespeare’s Plays,” St. Lawrence Hall, Toronto, speech delivered on 17 September 1858, 42. McGee, “The Political Morality of Shakespeare’s Plays,” 47 Ibid., 52. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 52. Thomas Pangle, Leo Strauss, 78, 79. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 101. Ibid. Ajzenstat “Making Parliament,” in The Canadian Founding, ch 8, 20. See also Geoffrey C. Kellow, “Constituting Canadians: George Brown’s Confederation Address.” “Education and Citizenship,” Ashbrook Centre, November 2006 (http://ashbrook. org/publications/guest-06-smith-isi.) McGee, “In Favour of Confederation,” 222.

Canadian Guardian: The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson Colin D. Pearce

The wisdom of Plato’s maxim holds good: “We should never choose any one as a guardian of the laws who does not exult in virtue.” Egerton Ryerson And since the whole city has one end … it is manifest that there should be laws concerning education, and that it should be public Aristotle But as perfect men I regard those who are able to mingle and fuse political capacity with philosophy. Such men, I take it, are masters of the two greatest goods there are: as statesmen, a life of public usefulness, and a tranquil existence of untroubled serenity in the pursuit of philosophy … We must apply our best endeavours, therefore, both to perform public duties and to hold fast to philosophy as far as opportunity permits. Plutarch I know it is difficult to point out with certainty the means of arousing a sleeping population and of giving it passions and knowledge which it does not possess; it is I am well aware, an arduous task to persuade men to busy themselves about their own affairs. Alexis de Tocqueville [A] great nation … remains young if it has the capacity to keep faith with itself and the grand instincts it has been given, and when its leading strata are able to raise themselves into the hard and clear atmosphere in which the sober activity of politics flourishes, an atmosphere which is also pervaded by the solemn splendour of national sentiment. Max Weber

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 115

Introduction: Ryerson and the Platonic Tradition Egerton Ryerson (1803–1882) held the Office of Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada from 1844–1876. To say the least this is a long enough term to have had no small impact on his community.1 But this kind of position was not new with him or with Canada or indeed with the Europe of the Enlightenment. In fact, it dates all the way back to Plato and his Laws. In the description of his second best city (after The Republic with its philosopher-kings) Plato explains that there is a need for an Office of Chief Superintendent of Education. In the Laws, Plato’s “stand-in” for Socrates, named the “Athenian Stranger,” poses the question, “How can our law sufficiently train the director of education himself?” The short answer in this context is that there will be a “trickle down” process from the very dialogue in which the Athenian Stranger, the Cretan legislator Kleinias, and the old Spartan Megillos are discussing the education “system:” from the training of the Chief Superintendent of Education and thence to the teachers and finally to the students. Plato’s own dialogue, which embodies “the justest, and most suitable (discourse) for young men to hear,” will be the fundamental law of the best practical polis and will be the “pattern” under which the Chief Superintendent of Education in Plato’s community will oversee the “national” education. This high official can do no better than advise the teachers of the young to teach this dialogue, which is to say the wisdom of Plato.2 Speaking of the phenomenon of social advancement, Ryerson at one point uses the metaphor, very understandably for a Canadian writing in the 1840s, of the opening of a railroad. He says that for social advancement to take place “We must provide a conductor, as well as raise the steam, and set the car in motion.”3 But who is the “We” here who will employ this “conductor” who will in turn provide the necessary tutelage to the moving social “car”? To use Ryerson’s exact words, who will direct “the intellectual power of society” in “a right direction”? The implication is inescapable that it is Egerton Ryerson himself who will be laying down the ethicopolitical railroad tracks that will “conduct” Canadian society into the future, Egerton Ryerson who will conduct the conductor. Like Pericles, the great encomiast of Athenian freedom and popular public life before him, Ryerson, a master rhetorician in Upper Canadian public life for decades, had to think that he was in possession of certain rare abilities of speech and pen that entitled him to be such a guide.4

116

Colin D. Pearce

So it should not be controversial to suggest that Ryerson was well aware of the “Platonic” nature of his role as Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada.5 Whether he thought of himself as “the best and most important man in the state” as was stipulated for Plato’s Chief Superintendent of Education is open to speculation. But it seems reasonable to conclude that the thought may well have occurred to him at some point or other.6 Ryerson played his role of “Guardian-in-Chief ” for the Upper Canadian “Colonial Leviathan” twenty-five hundred years after Plato outlined his version of the position.7 Thus he was working within a tradition which had long since blended the classical with the biblical legacy. It was this “hybrid” tradition and its modern progeny of “civil and religious liberty,” at least as he understood the history of the West, that Ryerson sought to transmit to the Canadian community. He would make this transmission via his “unofficial” Lieutenant-Guardians and Assistant Lieutenant-Guardians toiling in the parishes, legislatures, courts, universities, schools, farmhouses, workshops, and households throughout the country.8 It comes as no surprise then to observe a certain “missionary” element in Ryerson’s public educational rhetoric. He pleads for “hundreds of youth” to go forth from Victoria College (of which he was the founding president) and become “ornaments of the pulpit, the senate, and the bar.” They may do so by advancing the literature, science, and arts of their country, and in this way contribute to Canada’s “elevation, prosperity and happiness!”9 From its “intake” of the provincial youth, Victoria College may discover those individuals who will make Canadian additions to the tradition that began with the Greeks and Romans so long ago.

The Many and the Few Evidently, then, Ryerson thought that the “educated men” in modern society should see themselves as responsible for handing down to the succeeding generations the standards of biblical revelation and classical reason or “Jerusalem and Athens,” to speak symbolically. These few are the “guardians and mentors” of the “coming generation.” By carrying the western legacy into the community they can determine whether the ongoing process of civilization will continue or begin to slacken. “It is for this few to say whether Canada shall rise or sink in the scale of countries – whether it shall advance or retrograde in the race of civilization.” The educated few have it in their power to say what “the character of our successors shall be.”10

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 117 Although Ryerson is a firm believer in liberal society and equality under the law, he very evidently draws a distinction between the educated few and the broad majority of the population. Natural inequality amongst human beings is a fact of existence for him and also a fact that has a relevance to the conditions of political life. In discussing the science of rhetoric, for example, he says that the “primary qualifications” for this political art par excellence must be “furnished by nature” and if one is to achieve its most successful exercise then “goodness of heart, soundness of judgment, and an acquaintance with the liberal arts are essential.” Ryerson also says that the “power which an eloquent orator exerts over an assembly” can be exerted by an able writer over a country in “an age of printing and writing.”11 No doubt Ryerson thought of himself in these terms and that his various writings would continue to exercise an influence over the Canadian people. What Ryerson is suggesting here is that one has to be more or less cut out by nature to be a true political leader. How then does he reconcile this clear acceptance of the idea of unequal qualifications to rule or exercise authority with popular or “responsible” government where numbers, as opposed to the claims of virtue, necessarily determine who has power? 12 Ryerson’s answer is simply that if those who have the good fortune to cultivate their superior natural endowments in such a way as to include mastery of the science of rhetorics then they will be capable of persuading the populace to their views, as Pericles once did in Athens, and in this way the best fitted to guide the country will have appropriate authority. Ryerson, then, believed it possible to reconcile the distinction between the enlightened few and the general population with the idea of the rightsbearing individuals exercising their civil and religious freedom equally with all other citizens regardless of religious, cultural, ethnic, or social attributes. This reconciliation, made possible by the liberal and representative state, is what is intended when he uses the terms “patriotism” and “Canadianism.”

The Roots of Patriotic Canadianism Ryerson interpreted Canada’s civic identity in the language of “the elementary principles and practice of civil government.” He concluded from these principles that the “true end” of the “machinery of government” is the “greatest good of the greatest number” defined as “the temporal and moral happiness of civilized man.”13 He says that he has always sought as much as possible to introduce “expositions” of these principles into his

118

Colin D. Pearce

various annual reports, addresses, and official documents.14 But where do these “elementary principles” come from we might ask? Ryerson provides us with one possible answer in what he called an “epitome” of his “fifty years reading and meditation, and more than forty years occasional discussion, respecting these first principles of government.”15 This “epitome” resolves itself into a core of maxims derived from such figures as David Hume, Francis Wayland, Sir Robert Peel, James Fenimore Cooper, William Ellery Channing, Joseph Story, Alexis de Tocqueville, Richard Cobden, Thomas Gisborne, Sir Charles Bagot, and Lords Brougham, Durham, and Sydenham. The names of Burke, Blackstone, and Paley may be added to this “epitome” from his other writings. But even this list of great names from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries does not constitute the whole of Ryerson’s civil curriculum. To make a long story short there is more to Ryerson’s “elementary principles” than can be circumscribed within the limits of strictly modern thought.16 In fact, Canadians should spend their reading hours “with Herodotus and Livy, with Demosthenes and Cicero, with Homer and Virgil, the same as with Paul and Moses, and David and Isaiah.”17 We see here in a key public lecture on Canadian “social advancement” that Ryerson’s list of recommendations of those with whom Canadians should “hold converse” includes none of the authors he refers to in his “epitome” of the “principles and practice of civil government.” But this list does include two great ancient historians, two great ancient orators, and two great ancient poets along with the greatest figures of the Bible: one from the New and three from the Old Testament.18 We are forced to the conclusion that for Ryerson the modern “liberal” teachings, which are to be seen in the authors included in his “epitome,” for all their indispensability to the “principles and practice of civil government,” need to be supplemented in the Canadian public mind by that which is to be found in “Jerusalem and Athens.” Ryerson thought that it made great sense to have the materials upon which the popular consciousness would be built, and its corresponding criteria for esteem and disesteem, taken in large measure from the authorities that informed the public imagination of the premodern world, both Greek and Judaic. Here we arrive at the problem of the nature of Canadian civic unity. Is it simply “institutional” in nature as in Ryerson’s “elementary principles and practice of civil government” or is it a “communion” of citizens living indeed within this institutional framework but made one in virtue of a shared legacy coming down from “Jerusalem and Athens”?

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 119

The Political–Theological Problem and Civic Unity Janet Ajzenstat argues that the “Lockean” civic institutions established by the Canadian Fathers provided an ample basis for Canadian national identity premised on a civic culture of liberalism. Ajzenstat makes a cogent case that the Canadian Fathers were legatees of Locke’s Second Treatise and its arguments for the state of nature, the social contract, the right to revolution, and so on.19 Ajzenstat is inclined to think of Locke’s Second Treatise as the Ur-text of Canadian civic culture and as such it should be accepted as “Scripture” by Canadians and their leaders. For his part, Ryerson, together with G.W.F. Hegel, saw Prussia as symbolizing certain “ideal” features of the modern state, not least of which was the civic unity so prized by Ajzenstat. His biographer notes that “In Prussia (Ryerson) had seen the advantages of strong and wise central direction and authority.”20 Ryerson’s final view was that in modern times the cause of civilization is intrinsically linked to the activities of the modern and rational state.21 Ryerson took the principle of citizen “socialization,” which he observed in Prussia, to be of immediate relevance to the situation in Upper Canada. Ryerson’s “Prussianism” is tied to his understanding that Canada was to be built out of heterogeneous elements and that therefore a statesponsored “Canadianism” would have to be developed if this “amphibious mob” was to be turned into a genuine political community. The example of Ryerson, while not directly cross-cutting Ajzenstat’s case for Canada’s resting on “Lockean” popular sovereignty and rights, etc. (at least in the way Ajzenstat argues various claims for Canadian “conservatism,” “organicism,” and “Toryism” must inevitably do), nevertheless points in a direction somewhat tangential to her starting point. Ajzenstat’s civic “Lockean” template does not fit so neatly over Ryerson’s profile even though he manifestly provides evidence for the thesis of Canada’s “Lockeanism.” For Ryerson, Canada’s civic identity is as much linked to Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity and A Letter on Toleration as it is to his Second Treatise. Canada’s “Lockeanism” subsists as much in her historical “theological” identity as it does in her parliamentary institutions. Her legacy of “theological Lockeanism” is as essential to her civic identity as her inheritance of “constitutional Lockeanism.” The problem here is how to square Ryerson’s “political–theological” interpretation of the Canadian polity with Ajzenstat’s more “constitutional–institutional” angle of approach. Ryerson certainly felt the direct influence of Locke, as his various quotations from the philosopher attest. But he would also have been under

120

Colin D. Pearce

Locke’s indirect influence via later “Locke dependent” thinkers who were in turn influential in nineteenth-century Canada, which influence Ryerson in turn did his best to spread.22 If the case of Ryerson constitutes a litmus test, it is arguable that Locke’s Christian apologetics were the conduit by which his thought entered Canadian political culture as much if not more so than the principles of the Second Treatise so pivotal for Ajzenstat’s discussion. Ryerson was then wrestling with the “political–theological” horn of the dilemma posed by Locke’s moving us to the modern, liberal society even as Ajzenstat has wrestled with the political–constitutional one. At the very least, we can say that if Ryerson’s Common Christianity is essentially the form of Christianity expounded by Locke then the circle between Ajzenstat’s “Lockean” popular sovereignty version of Canadian civic identity and Ryerson’s “Lockean” Christian version of the same phenomenon can reasonably be closed. We might say that Ryerson’s Upper Canada is indeed constituted as a political community by its liberal elective institutions but as a human community it is its historical legacy of Common (“Lockean”) Christianity that gives it substance.23 But lest we be accused of underplaying Ryerson’s “orthodoxy” here we should note that there was nothing in Ryerson’s adherence to the teachings of Methodism’s founder John Wesley that would in any way have ill-disposed him to the thought of Locke. Indeed, quite the opposite. In his famous review of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding Wesley says the book “contains many excellent truths, proposed in a clear and strong manner, by a great master of both reasoning and language” and will “be of admirable use to young students.”24 In other words, fully allowing Ryerson’s attraction to the Methodist faith does not for a minute put him outside the scope of Lockean liberalism. To be sure, there is a great distance between Ryerson and a more recent high-profile communicant of Methodism like Professor Northrop Frye for whom at the tender age of fifteen “the whole shitty, smelly garment of fundamentalism dropped to the sewer and stayed there.”25 Ryerson might therefore stand under the cloud of H.L. Mencken’s scornful characterization of Methodists as suffering from a “pathetic inability to keep up with human progress.”26 But would it be fair to include Ryerson with those whom Mencken targeted for his criticism and contempt? In brief, was Ryerson on the side of Matthew Arnold’s “Anarchy” or on that of his “Culture”? Perhaps “Anarchy,” because we know he was a defender of “middle class values” and the Wesleyan religious tradition, including the practical, active, and

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 121 economistic attitude that so concerned Matthew Arnold.27 But at the same time, as we have already seen, Ryerson was clearly “Hellenistic,” to use Arnold’s term, and sought the dissemination of “the best that is known and thought in the world” throughout the community. Although the profile of Methodism in Ryerson’s thought is high he still deserves a place on the side of Arnold’s “Culture.” He did not think for a moment that Christianity represented the totality of ethical thought any more than Locke, Paley, et al. did. He fully allows that there are nonChristian sources for morals to be found in pagan antiquity and he also believes that the development and cultivation of the human faculties are not the province of Christianity alone. Thus he qualifies as a “Hellenist” as well as a “Hebraist,” if we adopt Arnold’s categories. Arnold’s “Culture and Anarchy” question encourages us to do what Arnold himself sought to in his study of the Protestantism that prevailed in the England of his day, which means in our case to seek out the heart of Ryerson’s “Scriptural” or “Common Christianity.”28

Common Christianity At one point in writing to a fellow clergyman Ryerson said, “I abhor German theology as much as you do, but as Superintendent of Schools I am neither a Theologian nor a politician.”29 What Ryerson is suggesting here is that it is neither as a “theologian” nor as a “politician” that he is administering the school system. Thus he would have us believe that promoting Common Christianity via the educational system is neither a “theological” nor a “political” procedure. What he must mean is that advancing Common Christianity is both a theological and a political procedure and therefore strictly speaking it is neither.30 His Common Christianity cannot be either simply “theological” because it is related to the character of the political order, nor can it be simply “political” because it is very clearly related to the “theological” or “divine” order, or more generally to the ordering of the souls of the citizens.31 Ryerson, then, saw the individual person over whom the system under his superintendence presided not primarily as the location of a series of drives that are in need of conditioning for effective personal conduct under the prevailing economic and cultural conditions. Rather, that individual possesses a unique soul that is of such a nature that it points to a “higher destiny than that of states.”32 The purpose of education for such a being then is to assist in the development and cultivation of that soul such that

122

Colin D. Pearce

its best energies are not narrowly channelled or allowed to wither on the vine.33 On such a view Ryerson’s first question for any educational principle would be whether it allowed that the soul’s transcendence is the ultimate goal of all education.34 If Ryerson is correct in thinking that there is indeed an element of human nature that has a “higher destiny than that of states,” then the educational process can never be seen as solely a secular and temporal matter. To opt for a completely secular policy where religion had no role in the “public square” was for Ryerson as much as to demonstrate a naive faith that the train of “social progress” would naturally preserve ethical and moral standards without any special effort on the part of the governing authorities. The idea of the unaided preservation of moral culture via the beneficial operation of the forces of modernization and social progress was inconceivable to him. The solution then was a “common” or “nondenominational” Christianity.35

The Unity of Ryerson’s Political Philosophy Ryerson’s “Common Christianity” is misconceived if it is defined in purely religious or narrowly “theological” terms.36 His particular version of “Common Christianity” was conjoined to his view that the first principle of political life is that political parties or “factions” should not be the basis of political or legislative power.37 This bipartite standpoint forms the warp and woof of Ryerson’s political philosophy.38 In this regard Ryerson always thought in terms of a binary opposition between “Lockean” Christianity/civil government on the one hand, and the newly competing principle of the respectability of partisanship and party government on the other. The operating principle of “partyism” as it was called is at odds not only with a “theological” conception of the common good but also with any serious conception of that good from a secular vantage point. The assumption in both the religious and secular conceptions is that the general welfare must of necessity impose restraints upon partisanship and the desire to privilege particular interests over the shared interest of the whole.39 Ryerson never really felt any need to confess that behind all his transpartisan rhetoric he was at bottom a “politician.” He sees his politics of Common Christianity as in fact a political–theological straddling of the gulf between the sphere of politics as ordinarily understood and the nonpolitical “theological” or “metaphysical” realm above or beyond political life. Ryerson does not see his activities as purely “political” because he is

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 123 an actor in the secular realm with the theological perspective in view. 40 In some sense, then, he is a living violation of the principle of the absolute separation of church and state. He is a non-elected figure serving the modern “secular Leviathan” and at the same time he is serving the “theological” purposes of Common Christianity with decision-making power connected to taxpayer funds. But it is in this two-sided role that Ryerson sees himself as standing outside both the realm of politics and of religion as ordinarily practised. His sphere of activity is in fact the realm of “statesmanship” which he takes to necessarily involve both dimensions – body and soul we might say – and which transcends the principle of church/state separation itself. In other words, without the vital principle of statesmanship there would be no state to separate from the church in the first place.41 The statesmanly view of the politics of Common Christianity is that there is nothing in it available for debate and analysis on the plane of regular party politics.42 Ryerson’s own non-elected administrative–bureaucratic power goes together with Upper Canada’s “unchosen” Christian inheritance from western civilization in general and from the Anglo-American world in particular. That historical legacy is not meant to be part of the quotidian partisan struggles in the public square, but serves rather as the platform upon which the strictly partisan, self-interested political struggles can take place. Ryerson defines the defence of that platform as a duty of patriotism and not a sign of partisanship.43

“Clinging to the Wreckage”

44

One cannot today look at Ryerson’s “political–theological” social philosophy and avoid acknowledging that it has very much succumbed to the locomotive-like march of science, technology, economics, administration, and other forces of modernization. Ryerson’s “two worlds” perspective of the transcendent, eternal, infinite, and “sacred” world on the one hand and the material, temporal, finite, and “profane” world on the other has, with the passage of time, become the “one world” of modern, North American bourgeois, liberal, secular society.45 If one may speak of an inevitably “tragic” element to statesmanship then we can say that Ryerson’s “Canadian Dream” has faded into oblivion. His political–theological conception of a Canada between two worlds – the transcendent and the secular – did not endure.46 The political–theological unity of his social philosophy virtually guaranteed its failure given

124

Colin D. Pearce

the secularizing forces of the age, some of which Ryerson himself sought to promote.47 Canada is, and very firmly so, no longer a Christian society. As early as the 1960s Goldwin S. French pointed out that the Methodism that had shaped so much of Upper Canada’s history had already become a “fading memory.”48 Ontario Protestantism, in order to remain pertinent to the social culture, had to abstract its concept of the “sacred” from the public world, or, in other terms, make religion a purely private matter. It was no affair of state institutions what “values” people held. In our time, to suggest that the community should be guided in any way by scriptural values in its law-making, is to be condemned to the very fringes of the political debate.49

“Out of Thin Air” Peter C. Emberley and Waller R. Newell have said that while contemporary Canadian nationalism has been preening itself on “inventing a country out of thin air” it has “in fact turned its back on virtually every substantive Canadian account of justice and the good life.”50 One might say that Ryerson’s vision of a patriotic “Canadianism” may be included in that “substantive account of justice and the good life” on which “preening” Canadian nationalism has “turned its back.” Allowing Emberley and Newell’s point, we understand that in partial consequence of the failure of her original vision of justice and the good life Canada has resorted to the idea of multiculturalism to explain herself to herself. In no other advanced liberal democracy has a stress upon multiculturalism as the key to future harmony and national success been so influential.51 From a Nietzschean perspective Canada might be seen as a “world leader” in that it is living the principle of “A Thousand Goals and One” more fully than any other country.52 In a society the principles of which strictly limit the public sphere’s scope for reflecting the richer particularity of the private realm, it may be expected that some citizens will cling to their ethnic roots or traditions, or try to rediscover them if they had been weakened or dissolved a generation or two previously. Multiculturalism plays to this temptation insofar as it implies that these formative influences rooted in one’s unique ethnic connections are so fundamental that they might inform all decisions relevant to residency, marital preferences, electoral behaviour, party loyalty, and so on. Such a tendency is, to say the least, a long way from Ryerson’s formula of the newcomer’s “thinking and feeling in reference to local residence and relations” as soon as footfall is made on Canadian soil.53

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 125 This is because Ryerson’s cherished “patriotic feeling of Canadianism” is not the kind of sentiment that could arise simply by residing on Canadian soil, prospering in the Canadian economy, and adjusting to the Canadian climate. At the end of the day patriotism, Canadian or otherwise, is constituted by the thoughts and images passing through citizens’ heads. These thoughts and images animate and inspire the individual in all relations of life, including those to their country. Hence citizens’ reading habits are a key factor in the Ryersonian program. Ryerson’s task in the nineteenth century was to enlighten the incoming immigrants about the values and meaning of the very western civilization of which they were ultimately a product. Today, however, many newcomers are in need of basic “westernization” in the first place. Ryerson’s concern in regard to them would be, are they learning the story of Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Enlightenment, the revolutions and reforms that serve to explain the existence of a country like Canada? “Canadian values,” which for Ryerson ultimately had to mean the values of “Jerusalem and Athens,” always need sustenance and reiteration as Canadian society undergoes various transformations in the political, legal, social, cultural, and technological spheres. Whatever modern “improvements” are achieved over time must be adduced to the foundations of Canadian society in “Jerusalem and Athens” rather than allowed to derange the social culture as it evolves. Thus Ryerson insists that civilization should be seen as both “an affair of each individual mind, and (as) the work of each generation.”54 Society’s maintaining of the level of civilization it has thus far achieved, to say nothing of climbing higher, is very much dependent on an unbroken philosophical and ethical chain linking past and future. To have this chain severed would be to lose touch with the “corrections” that earlier generations have made and ultimately to the wellspring of civilization in “Jerusalem and Athens” both. Ryerson’s first question for the recently arrived is, have they been invited into the legacy of the “forefather philosophers, moralists, and statesmen” who rest in the intellectual and moral soil upon which the Canadian community was built?55 As a mind compounded of the Judeo-Christian tradition suspended in a fluid of western philosophic rationalism (or vice versa) or of “Hebraism” and “Hellenism,” to use the language of Matthew Arnold, Ryerson would certainly argue that without the “Plato to Nato” story at its core, education would have little or no orienting effect on the newcomers who must now live their lives in the culture of the West. If recently settled citizens are to

126

Colin D. Pearce

thrive in a western liberal culture then they should be steeped in the western experience and thereby integrated into the stream of western consciousness flowing down from “Jerusalem and Athens.” But today we know that, whether it is for Canadians or the recently arrived, the “Ages of Civilization” approach to education is out of favour in certain key educational circles. The practical effect of eschewing such an approach is to leave the newcomers in a limbo-land that lies between their own nonwestern values and the “value-free” or “value-relative” world of the postmodernist, multiculturalist West. For Ryerson such a situation would be unthinkable.

Conclusion Today, Ryerson might find himself arguing against a State “Educracy” that would resist any suggestion that his “Jerusalem and Athens” education should be revived as part of the curriculum.56 The powers that now sit where Ryerson once did would insist that such a curriculum was throughout infected with strains of patriarchalism, racism, homophobism, and colonialism and so has no place in the education of students who must take their place in the modern (or postmodern) globalized world.57 Today, Ryerson might appear to some observers as some kind of eccentric advocate of “Western Civ” or “Great Books” education. He might today behold not only Richard John Neuhaus’s “Naked Public Square” but also the spectacle of the “Naked Public School” and find himself transformed into a kind of rebel against the very order that he did so much to establish.58 Ryerson might respond to the challenge represented by the “Naked Public School” in the combative spirit that distinguished his career in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s.59 His putative “outsider” status in today’s situation would be no novelty to him. As a young man starting out in the young colony, he had converted from Anglicanism to Methodism and so had made himself a “second-class citizen” under the regime of Anglican privileges then prevailing. But he wrote in vigorous opposition to the Family Compact and Anglican establishmentarianism and in spirited support of liberal justice, civil equality, and “true” or Common Christianity.60 In this day and age Ryerson might find himself “blogging” voluminously for the “media” as he had once done on and off between 1829 and 1840 as the editor of the Christian Guardian, the mouthpiece of Upper Canadian Wesleyan Methodism at the time. He might fundraise for the right kind of educational institutions, as was done for Victoria College

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 127 when he became its first president.61 He might even gird up his loins and start preaching his version of Canadian liberalism on every street corner. But beyond such possible rebelliousness, Ryerson might well retreat to his study to fulfill his ambition of being a great historian, as he did in his later years. He would now have to bring his historical narrative down to the present and describe Canada’s involvement in the wars of the twentieth century (and more recently in Afghanistan) even as he had earlier described her heroes’ exploits in the wake of American Independence and the War of 1812. And no doubt today, as at that time, he would conceive of his efforts as providing Canada with a historical narrative tailored to its political needs and hopes, or in his words, giving the nation “a guide to a true policy well-grounded on the foundations of the past.”62 But whether today Ryerson would use his pen as a rapier in the public policy polemics of the hour or dip it into the annals of history with a view to historiographical greatness, we may rightly assume that, as was the case in his halcyon days, his “most earnest efforts” would be to stress the duty of all citizens to “unite in one noble patriotic feeling of Canadianism.” Such a feeling would see each citizen embracing Canada’s well-being or, in Ryerson’s precise terms, the nation’s “advancement” as “their highest earthly interest and glory” (emphasis added).63 Their “heavenly” interest and glory of course would have to do not so much with their “feeling” for Canada as their “feeling” for God. As far as this goes Ryerson’s Canada would be only too pleased if the popular “feeling” for the country was seriously rivalled by a popular “feeling” for God or that “higher destiny than that of states.” As we have seen, the two “feelings” are mutually interdependent in Ryerson’s understanding. But at the same time Ryerson would be the very first to say that when all is said and done on this particular point, each individual Canadian “must minister to himself.” Notes 1 Generally on Ryerson see: Peter C. Emberley and Waller R. Newell, Bankrupt Education: The Decline of Liberal Education in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 155–8; Alison Prentice, The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in Mid-Nineteenth century Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977); R.D. Gidney, “Egerton Ryerson” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online vol. 11 (University of Toronto/Universite Laval, 1982), http://www. biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?BioId=39939; Neil McDonald and Alf Chaiton ed., Egerton Ryerson and His Times (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978); Laura Damania, Egerton Ryerson (Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1975); Robin S. Harris, “Egerton Ryerson” in Robert L. MacDougall ed., Our Living Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959); C.B. Sissons ed., Egerton

128

2 3 4

5

6

Colin D. Pearce

Ryerson: His Life and Letters 2 vols. (Toronto: Clark, Irwin, 1937); C.B. Sissons, Egerton Ryerson (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1930); Nathaniel Burwash, Egerton Ryerson (Toronto: Morang, 1910); J. George Hodgins, “Sketch of the Reverend Dr. Ryerson,” The Methodist Magazine (Sept., 1894); The Ryerson Memorial Volume (Toronto: Warwick and Sons, 1889). The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 765d–76c. “A Lecture on Social Advancement of Canada,” Journal of Education of Upper Canada 2, no. 12 (1849): 184. In his 1841 Inaugural Address at Victoria College Ryerson quotes from Pericles’ second speech to the Athenians in Book II of The Peloponnesian War. “One who forms a judgment on any point, but cannot explain himself clearly to the people, might as well have never thought of the subject.” Inaugural Address on the Nature and Advantages of an English and Liberal Education Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Egerton Ryerson 21st October, 1841 (Toronto: The Guardian Office, 1842), 18. See Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education, 157. The classicist David Grene says that the clear implication of this speech is that Pericles is managing the people “as of right of character and talent.” Pericles’ frankness is designed to show those under his authority “that his judgment is better than theirs.” Man and His Pride: Greek Political Theory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1950), 9. Consider: “The men of the (Indian civil) service were chosen and trained on Plato’s principles as Guardians who would rule in the light of their own vision of the Good and the Beautiful – or, at least of an English compromise with Plato.” Philip Mason (pseud. Philip Woodruff), The Men Who Ruled India: The Guardians (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1954), 15. Ryerson has been described on all sides as a man whose ambition went beyond that of the daily public debate in the direction of the role of founder or philosopher-legislator. Clara Thomas describes Ryerson as “Absolutely determined that he personally would direct public opinion to its own future good … and, incidentally, to an acceptance of his will and authority in education matters.” Clara Thomas, Ryerson of Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1977), 105. Ryerson’s notion of his own special relationship to the history of Upper Canada was the inspiration behind two major volumes which revolve around his long involvement in the public life of the young colony more or less from the beginning. See J. George Hodgins, ed., The Story of My Life (Toronto: William Briggs, 1883) and Canadian Methodism: Its Epochs and Its Characteristics (Toronto: William Briggs, 1882). According to Frederick Vaughan, from the strictly “scholarly” point of view prevalent in our time, the idea of someone like Ryerson playing an “historic” role of guiding the moral formation of the Canadian community is inconceivable. Under this “scholarly” dispensation, Vaughan argues, Ryerson, like various other Canadian “greats” must come to light as a man “pushed from behind by the winds of the lowest personal motives; [and as] never motivated by high virtue or noble ambitions.” Very rarely, Vaughan says, are we permitted to see figures like Ryerson as “genuinely committed to the highest personal and political virtues” and very seldom, if ever, are we permitted to look upon them as

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 129 genuine “greats.” The consequence of this situation is that “Canada has become a nation without historic heroes … [and] for the student of Canada to seek for historic heroes we are told is ‘un-Canadian.’” The Canadian Federalist Experiment: From Defiant Monarchy to Reluctant Republic (Montreal & Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003), xi. The following items on Ryerson represent the historiography the shift from which is lamented by Vaughan: John Henderson Great Men of Canada (Toronto: Southam Press, 1929); William Smith, Political Leaders of Upper Canada (Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1931); J. Harold Putman, Egerton Ryerson and Education in Upper Canada (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912); J.L. MacNeill, “Egerton Ryerson, Founder of Canadian (English-Speaking) Education,” in Robert S. Patterson et al., eds, Profiles of Canadian Educators (Toronto: D.C. Heath, 1974). Ronald A. Manzer describes Ryerson as a type of “tutelary superintendent” who “depended primarily on (his) powers of persuasion and leadership” to bring the community into line with his “central vision of educational progress.” Manzer’s Ryerson believes in a dynamic interplay between centralized authority and locally independent initiative. On this view Ryerson’s philosophy of educational administration might be called “Dirigiste Voluntarism.” See Ronald A. Manzer, Educational Regimes and Anglo-American Democracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 48. 7 See Allan Greer and Ian Radforth, eds, Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). At one point Ryerson said he held “a somewhat similar situation” in Canada to that of Victor Cousin, the Minister of Public Instruction (1832–40) under the Adolphe Thiers regime in France. Cousin was a well-known philosopher whose authority Ryerson cited in defence of the case that training in Greek and Latin has always been a sine qua non for “the ablest statesmen of both Europe and America” (“A Lecture etc.,” 183–4). 8 For Bruce Curtis as well as for R.D. Gidney, W.J.P. Millar, and D.A. Lawr, Ryerson would be one of the “Choice Men” or “Professional Gentlemen” of the time. See Bruce Curtis, True Government by Choice Men: Inspection, Education, and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); R.D. Gidney and D.A. Lawr, “Bureaucracy vs. Community? The Origins of Bureaucratic Procedure in the Upper Canadian School System” in J.K. Johnson and Bruce G. Wilson, eds, Historical Essays on Upper Canada: New Perspectives (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989). See also Jeffrey L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); David E. Smith, The Republican Option in Canada, Past and Present (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999) and David Cresap Moore, The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Political System (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976). 9 Ryerson, Inaugural Address etc., 28. Ryerson believed that Canada’s connection to the “national life, character, enjoyments, aspirations and destinies” of Britain tied her to a legacy of greatness descending from any number of “statesmen, jurists, orators, soldiers, scholars (and) divines.” Remarks on the Historical Mis-statements

130

10 11

12

13

14 15 16

Colin D. Pearce

and Fallacies of Mr. Goldwin Smith (Toronto: Leader Steam Press, 1866), 15. See Rod Preece, “The Political Wisdom of Sir John A. Macdonald,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 17 (1984): 477. “Obligations of Educated Men (Part II),” Journal of Education for Upper Canada 1 (1848): 194. Inaugural Address etc., 18–19. Elsewhere Ryerson says a “rich variety of language … gives one man (a) great advantage over another, in conversation, in writing, and in public speaking.” (“A Lecture etc.,” 184). It is in connection with the subject of rhetoric that Ryerson mentions the case of Socrates and the longstanding allegations that he would dress up “falsehood in the guise of truth, or fiction in the form of reality.” But Ryerson insists that the popular accusation against Socrates was a false one because rhetoric rightly understood does not make “the worse the better reason” (The Apology of Socrates, 19a 4–c1) but rather is “designed to exhibit both in their native power and splendour” (Inaugural Address etc., 18). See Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education, 157. Ryerson draws a fundamental distinction between the understanding few and the far greater number who, whether for reasons of nature or nurture or both, remain unable to grasp the inner meaning of scientific discoveries. He explains that phenomena such as “the power of steam, the ascent of a balloon (or) the motions of the heavenly bodies” remain mysterious to “untaught and ignorant people” but are perfectly comprehensible to those “properly trained in the relevant science.” First Lessons in Christian Morals (Toronto: Copp Clark & Co., 1871), 77. Consider: “Where Ryerson’s plan (for native education) differed from that for the Euro-Canadian population was in recommending an increase in emphasis on religion and a slight decrease in the time spent on other aspects of education.” Ron Stagg, “Egerton Ryerson and Residential Schools,” in Citizenshift: Media for Social Change. “The Importance of Education to a Manufacturing and a Free People,” Journal for Education of Upper Canada 1 (1848): 296. Ryerson is careful to substitute the term “greatest good” for Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest happiness” to indicate that the general welfare in Canada is not to be understood in a “eudaimonistic” or “felicific calculus” way. Ryerson’s distinction between “temporal” and “moral” happiness when the usual contradistinction is between the “temporal” and the “eternal” suggests his quasi-Kantian sense that morality is somehow the eternal law. New Canadian Dominion: Dangers and Duties of the People in Regard to Their Government (Toronto: Lovell and Gibson, 1867), 3. The New Canadian Dominion etc., 5. Looking back to the ancient world Ryerson sees that there was once “a great intellectual republic” the literature of which became the universal “standard of taste.” “Even in the time of Cicero” the ancient cities “are said to have abounded in all the stores of art and resources of Instruction” (“A Lecture etc.,”184). In this context Ryerson lists the great authors of antiquity who deserve to be “imitated and emulated.” He does so in “pairs” – first the Greeks “Aristotle and Plato,” then the Greco-Roman tandems of “Herodotus and Caesar, Demosthenes and Cicero, Homer and Virgil.” Not surprisingly, then, Ryerson is critical of the “classicists” or those whom Nietzsche named the “philologists” who study antiquity without

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 131

17

18

19

20

bringing their researches into genuine contact with their actual lives and who would tarnish the reputation of this literature if its legacy was not so weighty. “Classical learning is not responsible for such folly, any more than loyalty and patriotism, and Christianity itself, are responsible for the selfishness and dishonesty of courtiers, demagogues and hypocrites.”(Inaugural Address etc., 15, 12). “(Ryerson’s) appeal to the ancients was not antiquarianism. It was intended to add breadth and stimulus to the ‘business of life’” (Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education, 158). According to Nietzsche “A Greek cook is more of a cook than any other.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “We Classicists,” in William Arrowsmith, ed., Unmodern Observations (Yale University Press, 1991), 328. Ryerson, “A Lecture etc.,” 182. “I hope whatever modifications may take place in our Colleges … that classical scholarship in Canada will ever advantageously compare with that in any other part of America, and never be inferior to that of Great Britain and France” (Ryerson, “A Lecture etc.,” 183–4). Compare Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Government of India” in G.M. Young ed., Macaulay: Poetry and Prose (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1967), 708–9. It seems significant here that Ryerson thrusts forward three figures from the Old Testament and only one from the New Testament (Paul). The reason for this is perhaps given by Nietzsche: “(A)ll honour to the Old Testament. I find in it great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest quality in the world, the incomparable naievete of a strong heart.” The Genealogy of Morals trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), III, 2,144. “In the Jewish ‘Old Testament’ … there are human beings, things and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it.” Beyond Good and Evil trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966) Aphorism #52, 65. See John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859), 1:206. Janet Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 3–5, 6–9. Jerry Bannister observes that Ajzenstat has managed to exert “significant influence” on the field of Canadian studies as “one of the few scholars to bridge the divide between political science and history.” “The Loyalist Order Framework in Canadian History, 1750–1840,” in Jean-François Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds, Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 125. See also in the same volume Ian McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution,” 392–3. Burwash, Egerton Ryerson, 16. See Egerton Ryerson, Report on a System of Elementary Education for Upper Canada (Montreal: Lovell & Gibson, 1847), 181 and The New Canadian Dominion, 17; See also James Love, “The Professionalization of Teachers in Mid-Nineteenth Century Upper Canada,” in McDonald and Chaiton, eds, Egerton Ryerson and His Times, 113. Prentice, The School Promoters,171; Emberley and Newell Bankrupt Education,159,161; Sherman F. Balogh, Ontario Educators’ Observations of the German System of Education: 1834– 1918 Master Thesis (University of Toronto, 1997); G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. with notes by T.M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press,1967), sec. 291, 190; Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge

132

21

22

23

24 25 26

Colin D. Pearce

University Press, 1972), 160; Matthew Arnold, “Friendship’s Garland,” in A. Dwight Culler, ed., Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1961), 398–9; H.L. Mencken, “The Mailed Fist and its Prophet,” The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1914). Nietzsche criticized the Prussian state as a threat to “culture.” See “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions” in Oscar Levy ed., The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 18 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1909–1911), 2:86, 88, 89. But Ryerson saw the newly emerging Canadian state as culture’s ally. He understood that it is not possible for “culture” to imitate Athena and simply spring out of Zeus’ head in a country so young and so crude as Canada. It needed a “midwife” and almost by definition that would have to be the modern state with all its attendant power of educational reform. Ryerson was a devotee of the thought of William Paley who is omnipresent in his writings. The names “Locke and Paley” were conjoined for generations in moral philosophy classes in all the major universities of the English-speaking world. See William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002); Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, 12th ed. (London: J. Faulder, 1809) and Evidences of Christianity (Philadelphia: J.J. Woodard, 1836). Richard Watson is also relevant in this connection. See his Theological Institutes: Or a View of the Evidences, Doctrines, Morals, and Institutions of Christianity (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1857), 1:5 where Watson cites John Locke as a theological authority. It is in the light of the great influence on Ryerson of Paley’s Natural Theology that it is reasonable to suggest he was at some level a “Deist.” And the imprint of Locke is clear in this connection: “Every Christian both as a deist and a Christian [is] obliged to study both the law of nature and the revealed law.” John Locke, “A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity,” in Works 9 vols. (London: Rivington, 1824), 6:229. See Albert F. Fiorino, “The Moral Foundation of Egerton Ryerson’s Idea of Education,” in McDonald and Chaiton, eds, Egerton Ryerson and His Times, 59– 80; William Sweet, “Paley, Whately and ‘Enlightenment Evidentialism’” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 45 (1999): 143–66; Niall O’Flaherty, “The Rhetorical Strategy of William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802),” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010): 19–25. Like Hegel before him Ryerson seems to think that a necessary if not sufficient condition for liberal freedom in the modern world, if not the ancient, is the Protestant Reformation or its effects. Ryerson’s list of civilized societies in his Lecture on Social Advancement includes both Christian and Pagan but not Catholic examples, with the exception of Gallican France, which some might argue was only “quasi” Catholic. None of the examples in the uncivilized category are Protestant (“A Lecture etc.,” 184). The Works of John Wesley (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1856), 7:451, 455. See Jean O’Grady, Northrop Frye at Home and Abroad: His Ideas, http://www. jeanogrady.ca/frye/ideas.html. H.L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 321. Mencken had no rivals in his contempt for and ridicule of Methodists for, amongst other things, their “Asiatic” and “medieval” opposition to “every sort of free

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 133

27

28

29 30

31

32

inquiry” (ibid., 321–2). Mencken’s influential anti-Methodism might explain to some extent why today few amongst the educated public would join J. Wesley Bready in his unstinting praise of such “puritanical” phenomena as the YMCA, the temperance movement, and the British and Foreign Bible Society. See Wesley and Democracy (Toronto: The Thorn Press, 1939), 70. Consider: “The great Methodist movement more than deserves the eulogies bestowed upon it … Its instinct may be sound. … More recently scientists and critical philosophers have followed the Methodist example … (of) wavering in their appeal to constructive reason.” Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures In Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 22–3. It is a very curious thing that so far as I am aware Ryerson’s name has never been linked to that of Matthew Arnold given that in general his and Arnold’s political purposes were very much in line – the spread of education and the carrière ouvert aux talents. Like Ryerson, Arnold was a high official in public education, in fact Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools from 1851 to 1886. And his educational works have a Ryersonian “ring” about them with titles like Popular Education on the Continent (1861) and A French Eton, or Middle-class Education and the State (1864). See J. Dover Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge at the University Press, 1960), xv. Arnold was very much concerned about how the Methodists of his era were living their Christianity. His book St. Paul and Protestantism (New York: Macmillan, 1897) was designed to explain to them what nineteenth century Victorian Protestantism was and why it was suffering the fate it did. “Whatever its bearing may be for today and the future, the western conception of liberal education was profoundly altered by the exposure of classical virtue to Christian grace” (Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education, 89). Quoted in Bruce Curtis, True Government etc., 73. Alex McGregor suggests that “It never occurred to Ryerson to ask what right the state had in the mass-rooms or classrooms of the nation.” “Egerton Ryerson, Albert Carman, and the Founding of Albert College Belleville,” Ontario History 63, no. 4 (December, 1971): 205. But everywhere in his writings we see Ryerson wrestling with this question. The relation of Christianity to the State, he said “involves nice and comprehensive considerations of the common and peculiar ends and functions of both State and the Church – as the end of both is the wellbeing of man.” To consider practical measures in relation to this “vast subject” involves “considerable knowledge of both civil ecclesiastical polity (and) of civil and ecclesiastical history” (“The Importance of Education to a Manufacturing and a Free People,” 292). Bruce Curtis argues that Ryerson’s form of Christianity represented “a new form of social and political universality” based on certain contradictory ideals of “toleration, meekness, charity, and a respect for the rights of others” (“Preconditions of the Canadian State: Educational Reforms and the Construction of a Public in Upper Canada, 1837–1846,” Studies in Political Economy 10 (1983): 356–7. We are bound to observe here that “meekness” is not a term that comes to mind readily when thinking of Ryerson. “Chief Superintendent’s Report 1857,” in J. George Hodgins, ed., Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada, 28 vols. (Toronto: Warwick Bros. & Rutter,

134

33

34

35 36

37

38

Colin D. Pearce

1897), 13:210. Ryerson believes that the “secular” or socio-political plane of human life is inadequate to comprehend the totality of man’s existence. In the words of St Augustine in the tradition of whose Christianity Ryerson may at some level be said to belong “The wise man, although he consists of body and soul, is called ‘wise’ in virtue of his soul” Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), VII, 5, 261–3. See Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 444–6. For Ryerson the soul stands outside the material chain of causation and so can be free enough from its grasp to observe that chain’s operation while being unfettered by it. He concurs with Socrates that science can posit various factors that are connected to the appearance of things but this can never amount to a final explanation of how it is that I can shut my eyes or open my mouth. Thus the soul has to remain an “impenetrable mystery to us.” Nonetheless we “act upon it every day of our lives” (Christian Morals etc.,77–8). See Plato, Phaedo (96a–99d); The Apology of Socrates (17a–24b); Phaedrus (229a–230b); Xenophon, Memorabilia (para.11–16); Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1099b15–25). “Ryerson was particularly fearful of an ‘asymmetry’ in character” that might result without “the development to a certain extent of all our faculties” (Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education, 156). “The crucial point, is not where the naturalists and supernaturalists disagreed [but their agreement that there is transcendence … [which] is there objectively [and] not subjectively.” Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (New York: Mentor, 1955), 133. Alex McGregor suggests that for Ryerson it was a “self-evident truth” that “piety was necessary to the public good.” “Egerton Ryerson, Albert Carman, etc.,” 205. Bruce Curtis says that “In practice common Christianity meant a kind of political behavior” (emphasis added) (“Preconditions etc.,” 356). See Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals (Oxford University Press, 1965), 9, 25, 84. “By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are actuated by some common impulse or passion or interest adverse to … the permanent and aggregate interests of the whole.” James Madison, “Federalist 10,” in Clinton Rossiter ed., The Federalist Papers (New York: Mentor Books, 1961), 78. In his eulogy on the death of Lord Sydenham, Ryerson says that the deceased governor general belongs amongst “the first rank of statesmen” precisely because his aim was to “espouse no party” and “to destroy party faction.” “Eulogy of Sydenham in a Letter to the Editor of the Christian Guardian, 27 September 1841,” in G. Poulett Scope, Memoir of the Life of the Right Honourable Charles Lord Sydenham (London: John Murray, 1843), 342. Ryerson’s own trans-partisan program is laid out in his “Characteristics of an Able Governor,” Christian Guardian, 3 November 1841. See also “Policy of the Government II” and “Our Position II” The Monthly Review Devoted to the Civil Government of Canada (Toronto, 1841), 87, 175–6. This unity has been noted before by historians such as C.B. Sissons who observes that “in all of Ryerson’s political writings there is no note more constant than his mistrust of partisanship.” Egerton Ryerson: His Life and Letters, 2 vols. (Toronto:

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 135 Clarke, Irwin, 1947), 2:66. Frank Underhill discounts Sissons’s view that Ryerson “disapproved on principle of the divisions produced by party politics” and was “always seeking some other basis for popular government than political party.” The truth for Underhill is simply that Ryerson gave his Victoria College Methodism the same partisan devotion that other men give to a political party. “He was as much a partisan as George Brown, and his partisanship led him to similar excesses of word and action and to the same un-Christian attitude towards his opponents.” Frank Underhill, “Review of C.B. Sissons’ Egerton Ryerson: His Life and Letters,” Canadian Forum (January, 1948), 236. The issue here is whether it is a different thing to be a partisan of a non-partisan principle, say church/state separation, or a partisan of a particular church or “anti-church” seeking to have state policy reflect its desires. 39 A full philosophical picture of Ryerson’s anti-party position would involve considering some of the following sources: Henry Lord Brougham, Political Philosophy 3 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1844; H.G. Bohn, 1853), 2:34–47; James Fennimore Cooper, “Of Party” in The American Democrat (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics,1956), 226–31; Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King (New York: Bobbs-Merrill,1965) and Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1917); David Hume “Of the Coalition of Parties” in Charles W. Hendel ed., David Hume’s Political Essays (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 89–93; James Bryce, Modern Democracies 2 vols. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921), 1:135–58; Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Moisei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties 2 vols. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964). From outside the Anglo-American world consider: “Of necessity the party man becomes a liar.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Antichrist” in Walter Kaufmann ed., The Viking Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), 640. “Now it is parties who vote: and at every vote there must be hundreds of abashed consciences.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Aphorism 318,” in R.J. Hollingdale trans., Human, All Too Human (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 284–5. 40 In 1871 Ryerson published his First Lessons in Christian Morals (see note 12 above) wherein he would give a “non-denominational” account of Christian morality that would go into all the schools. But in the very same year he also thought it his duty to spread the sciences of agriculture and political economy through the same agency. See First Lessons on Agriculture (Toronto: Buntin, Brother, 1871) and Elements of Political Economy or, How Individuals and a Nation Become Rich (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1877). We note in passing that Ryerson begins his discussion of agriculture with Genesis 18:8 and with references to the Greek poets and the ancient Romans in “the purest times” (First Lessons on Agriculture, 10). 41 According to Rousseau, the original problem of politics is constituted by the fact that the social spirit which the “machine” of state is designed to generate must somehow find a way to preside over that state’s very creation. His conclusion from this conundrum is that the Legislator must have recourse to an authority

136

42

43

44

45

Colin D. Pearce

“capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing.” This authority is the gods or religion, the purpose of which is to bring the people to “bear with docility the yoke of the public happiness.” The Social Contract, Book II, ch. vii, http://www. constitution.org/jjr/socon_02.htm#007. It seems hardly controversial here to suggest that there is some Rousseau in Ryerson in this regard. Any uncertainty on this point has to be due to the fact that a statesman in Ryerson’s position, which is to say a statesman in a society that is supposed to be self-governing and self-regulating, of necessity has to insist that he was at most an “agent” of the moral and political will of the people rather than in fact the sine qua non of the social reforms being achieved. He would have to describe his role not as the pointing of the community in the right direction, but as assisting it in following the direction it had chosen to follow in the past, albeit imperfectly. For the debate on this point at the time of Ryerson’s passing see John King, The Other Side of the Story (Toronto: James Morang, 1886) and J. Antisell Allen, Dr. Ryerson: A Review and a Study (Kingston, 1884). Consider Alexis de Tocqueville: “In order that society should exist, and, a fortiori, that a society should prosper … (the citizen) sometimes should … consent to accept certain matters of belief at the hands of the community.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 2:9. Nathaniel Burwash says that Ryerson’s writings in the church/state controversies of his time “rank among the best work of his life as an exposition of the principles ethical, political and religious, which should govern in a mixed community of varying religious convictions” (Egerton Ryerson, 227). “Ryerson stipulates that education must include religious instruction, though he is insistent that such instruction must avoid all ‘sectarianism’” (Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education, 156). Bruce Curtis notes that Ryerson’s Report of 1847 did not devote much energy in demonstrating that Common Christianity had a “real empirical content” and so is short on “doctrinal details” (Curtis, “Preconditions etc., 357). Frederick Vaughan uses the title “Clinging to the Wreckage” for the “Epilogue” to his book The Canadian Federalist Experiment (180). See John Muggeridge, “Catatonic Canada” in Orthodoxy: The America Spectator’s 20th Anniversary Anthology (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 332. The transition away from Ryerson’s “two worlds” involves, evidently enough, the demise of theology and metaphysics and the rise of the modern social sciences pursued more or less exclusively in the modernizing universities. Eldon J. Eisenach argues that in the wake of “German trained social scientists” becoming “enlighteners” of the public in the late nineteenth century, the clergy tended to become “private” actors in the sense that their audience became increasingly confined “to their own denominations.” Men like Ryerson could no longer presume “to write for and instruct the nation.” “Just as Progressive social theorists were coming to the fore as articulators of public doctrine,” Eisenach says, “churchmen suddenly began to disappear from the first ranks of intellectual life.” The Lost Promise of Religion (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 103. German historical scholarship and social science philosophy brought the older “Ryersonian” narratives of a national theodicy closer and closer to theories of social evolution. See Charles D. Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology, 1830–90:

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 137

46

47

48

49

50

Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton University Press, 1989); Neal C. Gillespie, The Collapse of Orthodoxy (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1972) and Robert Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1984), 161. See Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 264; Carl Berger, Science, God and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1983), 60; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: The Modern Library, 1902), 480–5; C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Glasgow: Collins, 1946), 38; Noel Annan, The Godless Victorian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 200–7; Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), 450–2; Nietzsche, “The Antichrist #14,” in Kaufmann, trans. Viking Portable Nietzsche, 580. Ryerson’s “Judeo-Christian” project is described by Clara Thomas as the “most basic joining of the people” via his school system. But she concludes that “There had not been, nor was there ever to be one warm encircling dream to successfully join all of Ontario’s people” (Thomas, Ryerson of Upper Canada, 136). Bruce Curtis says that “On its face, the notion of a common Christianity in Upper Canada is chimerical” (“Preconditions etc,” 356–7). See also Vaughan, The Canadian Federalist Experiment etc., 150–1, 180 and John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth–Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 146–9. Goldwin S. French, “The People Called Methodists in Canada” in John W. Grant, ed., The Churches and the Canadian Experience (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1963), 81. To some extent Wesleyan Methodism achieved the status of a quasicivil religion in English Canada for about a century. The Methodism of Ryerson’s “Rights of Dissenters” era transitioned to that of the United Church of Canada, founded two generations after his passing (1925) and remained vital until the 1950s. See William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Churches in Nineteenth Century Ontario (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 204–7; David B. Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief 1850–1940 (University of Toronto Press, 1992); Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew (Toronto and Montreal: McClelland & Stewart, 1965); Charles Templeton, Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996); Ernest Harrison, A Church Without God (Toronto and Montreal: McClelland & Stewart, 1966); and Leanne Larmondin, “Harrison Made People Think,” Anglican Journal (May 1996). Karl Löwith says “we live in a Christian world which still reflects the religious faith in the Kingdom of God, but only in its secular transformations.” Nature, History and Existentialism (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 212–13. See John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 134–8; M.C. D’Arcy, The Meaning and Matter of History: A Christian View (New York: Noonday Press, 1959), 153–4; James Collins, God in Modern Philosophy (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959); A.N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). Newell and Emberley, Bankrupt Education, 138.

138

Colin D. Pearce

51 James Jupp says that “The word ‘multicultural’ originated in Canada in the 1960’s.” James Jupp, “The New Multicultural Agenda,” Crossings: The Bulletin of the International Australian Studies Association 1 (1996), 1. 52 See Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966), II, sec. 14, 119–20. This is in fact the view of Ronald S. Beiner and Wayne Norman who rejoice that Canadian political philosophy has become more interested in the political features of countries lacking in liberal institutions and traditions than it is in the “classically” liberal features Canada shares with Great Britain, the United States, France and Germany. They are very pleased to be able to report that “peculiarly Canadian issues,” by which they mean questions such as multiculturalism, separatism, and aboriginal rights are now “all the rage on the international scene” whereas once they used to attract only a “domestic audience.” “Introduction,” in Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman, eds, Canadian Political Philosophy (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–4, 13. The twenty-six theorists represented in the Beiner/Norman volume were unable to find one thinker or text worthy of in-depth consideration in pre-twentieth century Canadian political thought. 53 “I hold that the moment a man, placing his foot on Canadian ground, says ‘this is my home and the home of my offspring,’ he ceases to be a Scotchman, an Irishman, an Englishman, or an American, or even a Frenchman, or German, and becomes a Canadian.” Egerton Ryerson, “The Education of Mechanics: Its Nature, Its Importance, and the Provision Necessary for Its Attainment,” in Hodgins, ed., Documentary History etc., 9:50. “We, in Canada, have certain more or less clearly defined ideals of national well-being. These ideals must never be lost sight of. Non-ideal elements there must be, but they should be capable of assimilation. Essentially non-assimilable elements are clearly detrimental to our highest national development, and hence should be vigorously excluded.” James S. Woodsworth, Strangers Within Our Gates (Toronto: The Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, 1909), 278. 54 “Obligations of Educated Men (Part II),” 193. “Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization.” Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh: 1767), 2. 55 “Knowledge of the past is needed to temper pride in the ways and opinions of the present and expectations regarding the promise of the future. Its neglect strengthens the perception that the traditions transmitted and institutions erected by previous generations are merely arbitrary constructs with no reasonable basis or justification.” Travis D. Smith “Editorial,” Education and Citizenship (November 2006), http://ashbrook.org/publications/guest-06-smith-isi/. 56 Ryerson’s school system underwent an immense transformation in the 1960s at the hands of then education minister William G. Davis. See Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario (1965). But the Davis reforms, a century after Ryerson’s guardianship, simply pointed up the extent to which the first Chief Superintendent had played a kind of “Platonic” role. “From Aristotle to D’Arcy McGee and Egerton Ryerson down until the late 1960’s, liberal education has had a more or less continuous pedigree … Ontario (had) a traditionally strong core curriculum in the sciences and humanities stretching back to Egerton

The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson 139 Ryerson” (Emberley and Newell, Bankrupt Education, 10, 15). 57 See John von Heyking and Lee Trepanier ed., Teaching in an Age of Ideology (Lanham Md: Lexington Books, 2013). A youtube video written and produced by Esther Buckareff and Garrett Walker and devoted to Ryerson is entitled “The Architect of Canada’s Genocide,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= PlogNfvbgJw. 58 See Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988). Ryerson today might decline to send his children to the very educational house he had done so much to build. See Greg Foster and C. Bradley Thompson ed., Freedom and School Choice in American Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin Books, 2010). 59 Ryerson played the role of the “national clergyman” who presumed to “address the nation” or “lecture the public” at these crucial historical moments (See Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Religion, 100). Throughout his career he felt it to be his duty to recommend to the people of Upper Canada that they follow this or that political path at pivotal moments in their history whether the issue was Clergy Reserves (1828), Republican Rebellion (1837), Colonial Policy (1841), Responsible Government (1844) or Confederation (1867). For the sequence of his contributions see the following of Ryerson’s works: Claims of the Churchmen and Dissenters of Upper Canada Brought to the Test (Kingston: The Herald Office, 1828); The Affairs of the Canadas in a Series of Letters By a Canadian (London: J. King, 1837); Of Civil Government: The Late Conspiracy (Toronto: The Conference Office, 1838); Some Remarks Upon Sir Charles Bagot’s Canadian Government (Kingston: Desbarats & Derbishire, 1843); Sir Charles Metcalfe Defended Against the Attacks of His Late Counsellors (Toronto: Printed at the British Colonist Office, 1844); The New Canadian Dominion etc. See note 15. 60 Egerton Ryerson, Letters from the Reverend Egerton Ryerson to the Hon. and Reverend Doctor Strachan (Kingston: Upper Canada Herald, 1828). 61 “It is humbling to remember that two or three generations ago when the country was small and poor, Canada in proportion to its size was far more ready to support … universities in which chairs of classics, philosophy and theology were considered essentials … than it is today.” George Grant “Philosophy,” The Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–51 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951), 121. 62 Quoted in Burwash, Egerton Ryerson, 269. Ryerson aspired to produce as his “chief work in the way of authorship” a kind of “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” from a Canadian point of view. See C.B. Sissons, ed., My Dearest Sophie (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1955), 12. After many years the work emerged as The Loyalists of America and Their Times 2 vols. (Toronto: William Briggs, 1880). Clara Thomas says of Ryerson’s historical volumes that we see in every line Ryerson’s “unflagging energy and strength of will” and his “affirming of life as he saw it to be lived” (Ryerson of Upper Canada, 134–5). 63 See James M. McPherson, Is Blood Thicker than Water: Crises of Nationalism in the Modern World (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998).

Marshall McLuhan, George Grant, and the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel in Canada Grant N. Havers

In 1947, the Canadian economic historian Harold Innis urged the Protestant churches of his nation to abandon the anti-intellectualism that, he believed, had been harmful to their Christian faith. The Church as a whole was in danger of being intellectually irrelevant because it had lost its “curiosity for ideas.”1 The reason for this sad state of affairs, according to Innis, lay in the fact that Canadians as a whole “have neglected the philosophical problems of the West and have not realized that the Greeks were fundamentally concerned with the training of character.”2 Innis, who had been raised in the Baptist tradition, urged his fellow Protestants to take up the classical Greek preoccupation with the “training of character,” instead of thoughtlessly focusing on the fashionable social issues of the day. Otherwise, both the Church and civilization as a whole would be in jeopardy. “The problem of the Church is the problem of Western civilization.”3 In this short essay, Innis raised some pivotal questions that have challenged and fascinated other Canadian thinkers who have worried about the survival of their nation’s philosophical and religious heritage as well as the future of liberal education. Long before Innis, distinguished Canadians such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee and Egerton Ryerson urged the study of Greek philosophy and the Bible as the essential foundation of education of the citizenry in nineteenth-century Ontario.4 Beyond the Canadian context, Innis also raised concerns about the waning influence of Protestantism within the West that have an uncanny relevance to the present age.5 Perhaps the most obvious question, and the most relevant one to the discussion that follows, is: Is there anything about Protestantism that inevitably hinders the attempt to revive liberal education? I shall discuss whether Canadian Protestantism has been reasonably open to this pedagogical project that, Innis believed, was essential to its very survival as a faith tradition of the

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

141

West. As Innis well knew, Protestantism since its inception in the early Reformation has been hostile to Greek philosophy, which was traditionally allied to its enemy in Rome: “ecclesiastical Christianity” in its Protestant mode had mistakenly “tended to suppress the Greek point of view of the New Testament” that had once emphasized training in character.6 Admittedly, the intensity of this conflict between Catholics and Protestants over the importance of Greek antiquity is perhaps long past. However, it remains unclear whether the classical Greek virtues are perfectly compatible with the moral teachings of the Protestant faith. As Colin Pearce acknowledges in an article on Egerton Ryerson, certain Christian virtues such as humility and charity are altogether absent in the philosophy of Aristotle.7 Moreover, Protestantism is historically rooted in the modern tradition, which consciously broke away from the influence of premodern philosophy over 500 years ago. In short, it is worth asking whether Protestantism is part of the solution or part of the problem when considering the serious recovery of the classical “training in character.” Do ancient Athens and Protestant Jerusalem complement or oppose each other? In order to bring out the full implications of this religiously based challenge to the project of liberal (or classical) education that Innis urged Canadian Protestants to support, it is useful to turn to two of Innis’s most famous Canadian admirers: Marshall McLuhan and George Grant. It is well-known that both McLuhan and Grant had the highest respect for Innis. McLuhan went so far as to claim that his classic study of the print age, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), was a mere “footnote” to Innis’s earlier studies of technology.8 Grant praised Innis for reminding the scholars of his nation that the “pure desire to know” must animate true inquiry within a university.9 Although Grant was more interested in Innis’s musings on the state of classical education in Canada than McLuhan was, both men also shared Innis’s interest in restoring classical ideals to the modern, predominantly Protestant nation in which they grew up. Even as they pursued the goal of preserving and strengthening premodern pedagogy in Canada in radically divergent ways, they both faulted Protestantism, in tones reminiscent of Innis, for hindering a proper understanding of classical education and, as a consequence, fatally undermining western civilization itself. Is Protestantism, then, an obstacle to the recovery of the classics that are vital to a liberal education? The quick answer to this question is that it all depends on what we mean by Protestantism, which has often been simplistically confused with other movements in modernity. Did the early Protestants repudiate antiquity for the same reasons that the early modern

142

Grant N. Havers

political philosophers had rejected the classics? The original objections that early modern Protestants levelled against classical antiquity are not necessarily identical to the objections that arose out of the Renaissance or Enlightenment traditions. The “ancient-modern quarrel” that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment made famous is not necessarily the same as the “ancient-Protestant quarrel.” In the discussion that follows, my reliance on the ideas of the philosopher Leo Strauss will be abundantly evident. The main reason for this is that no thinker in the last century rivals Strauss for considering the full implications of the ancient-modern quarrel. In brief, Strauss contends that the moderns quarrelled with the ancients over the status of humanity in the universe: modern philosophy without exception enjoyed an “anthropocentric character” that privileged humanity as the master of nature, the sole source of morality, and the successor to God as the centre of the universe. These humanistic teachings constituted a radical departure from even the atheistic philosophers of antiquity, who “took it for granted that man is subject to something higher than himself, e.g., the whole cosmic order, and that man is not the origin of all meaning.”10 The moderns, in accord with these new teachings, were convinced that they had “progressed” beyond the intellectually backward ancient philosophers. The ancient-modern quarrel, according to Strauss, is also directly related to the changing status of revealed religion in modernity. In a letter to Karl Löwith (dated 15 August 1946), Strauss observes that the greatest exponents of the “ancient-modern quarrel” in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment recognized “that the real theme of the quarrel is antiquity and Christianity.”11 Although Strauss wrote very little on Christianity per se, George Grant urged his brethren to take a closer look at Strauss’s political philosophy in order to make sense of the intellectual crisis that the Christian tradition presently confronts in modernity: Grant even went so far as to claim that Strauss was a “better philosopher than any practicing Christian I know on this continent.”12 There is also some evidence that Strauss, as a young student in Weimar Germany, was influenced by Protestant theological debates at that time.13 At a philosophical level, there is much that Christians can learn from another pivotal distinction in the writings of Strauss: his distinction between “Athens” (classical philosophy) and “Jerusalem” (biblical revelation), which is related, but not identical, to the “ancient-modern quarrel.” The conflict between Athens and Jerusalem was “the secret of the vitality of Western civilization,” including its modern period.14 The Athens–

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

143

Jerusalem distinction is particularly valuable for Protestants who wish to disentangle their own faith from modern political philosophy. While Strauss never identified Jerusalem with modernity in a literal sense, it was of great importance to him to understand how moderns had adulterated the meaning of biblical religion, or the tradition of Jerusalem, for political purposes. It was never obvious to Strauss that these purposes were identical to acts of sincere piety. Consequently, Strauss had serious doubts about the famous “secularization” thesis that gained currency in the twentieth century as an explanation for the persistent influence of religion on secular ideas. This thesis taught that religious ideas had become “secularized,” or adapted for worldly and political purposes, in the modern era. Although Strauss did not doubt that moderns since Machiavelli have made use of religious ideas for political ends, the term “secularization” was question-begging since it was unclear what remained as specifically religious content in the process of secularization: Secularization means, then, the preservation of thoughts, feelings, or habits of biblical origin after the loss or atrophy of biblical faith. But this definition does not tell us anything as to what kind of ingredients are preserved in secularizations. Above all it does not tell us what secularization is, except negatively: loss or atrophy of biblical faith. Yet modern man was originally guided by a positive project. Perhaps that positive project could not have been conceived without the help of surviving ingredients of biblical faith; but whether this is in fact the case cannot be decided before one has understood that project itself.15 In other words, the fact that modern secular thinkers made use of biblical language does not necessarily mean that there was anything fundamentally biblical about the content in question. This secularization was motivated by politics, not piety. The fact that Machiavelli secularized Christian “charity” by turning the demanding ethic of “love thy neighbour” into egoistic calculation does not make the Florentine a Christian.16 Religious and political aims were always sharply distinct, in the mind of Strauss, even if both theologians and philosophers often used the same language or concepts. Strauss was well aware that the Athens–Jerusalem distinction, which he alternately called the “theologico-political problem,” had modern origins that unfolded with the rise of both the Protestant Reformation and the Machiavellian Renaissance. In an essay on Machiavelli, Strauss writes that

144

Grant N. Havers

the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem is “at the bottom of a kind of thought which is philosophic indeed but no longer Greek: modern philosophy.”17 Because moderns do not read the Great Works of philosophy as carefully as their ancestors (including Machiavelli) did, the impact of liberal education in our age has been undermined in the halls of academe. In Strauss’s view, the hallmark of a liberal education is to understand the authors of the Great Works as they understood themselves.18 Consistent with this line of thinking, it is essential to ask what the intent of an author, philosophical or theological, happened to be, even if they all shared the same modern historical context. Did the early Protestant theologians share the same intent as the modern philosophers in questioning the philosophy of antiquity? Strauss fully recognized that it was a challenge to even ask this question in modernity. Modern historicism, after all, which reduces all ideas to a particular historical period, dismissed questions of intent as irrelevant. Historicists who automatically assumed that modernity had “progressed” beyond antiquity were even less persuaded that questions of authorial intent were serious matters of inquiry.19 It did not follow, however, that Protestants who scrutinized Greek philosophy were motivated by modern historicism. While Reformed theologians since Luther have opposed Athens to Jerusalem, this line of interpretation has been driven by theological concerns, not political or historical ones. Although it was never Strauss’s purpose to shore up the waning influence of Protestantism, it was very much his purpose to show that biblical revelation must not be confused with the political misuse of its credos. Even if Strauss sometimes overstated the influence of Machiavelli and understated the influence of revelation in modernity,20 he raised legitimate concerns about the dangers of confusing the two movements. Strauss’s hermeneutic is particularly relevant to my own interpretation of McLuhan and Grant, both of whom blamed Protestantism for breaking away from the classics while aggressively advancing the most radical currents of modernity. The “Straussian” question to ask here is: were they right to blame Protestantism for the decline of liberal education, or were they confusing this faith tradition with a more secular and political culprit?

McLuhan versus Protestantism Although McLuhan’s main claim to fame is his study of mass media which made him wildly popular as a guru of his age in the 1960s, it is less wellknown that he lamented the decline of serious study of the Great Works

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

145

in the modern era.21 As a convert to Catholicism in the late 1930s, McLuhan left behind the “loose sort of Protestantism” of his childhood in favour of the far richer philosophical foundations that Thomism offered.22 McLuhan would have had no difficulty in understanding what Innis, his onetime colleague at the University of Toronto, perceived as the dire straits of Protestant intellectual life in Canada. In McLuhan’s stern view, Protestantism had played a pivotal role in causing the ancient-modern quarrel. In his doctoral dissertation on the Elizabethan humanist Thomas Nashe, which he defended at Cambridge in the early 1940s, McLuhan did not hesitate to associate Protestantism with Machiavellianism. Together, they worked as a demonic duo to almost fatally undermine the delicate classical and medieval synthesis of nature and grace: Most writers have recognized that his [Machiavelli’s] Satanocratism or his violent scission of nature and grace, in which he is at one with Luther and Calvin, is thoroughly Christian. That is, Machiavelli, like Hobbes, Swift or Mandeville, cannot be explained except in terms of Christian culture. There is nothing pagan about his skepticism concerning human nature. He rather looked on nature as shut off from grace and as shut in upon itself, and abandoned to the interplay of its own distorted forces. Within this dying order, however, Machiavelli envisaged the ideal prince as a man devoted to political action, impressing his character upon the flux of events, and living solely for the commonwealth which alone is the expression of the integral laws of our now fallen nature. There is much of the Old Testament attitude in Machiavelli – the attitude of trust in the prince as one who cooperates with God to bring good out of evil, having regard to the passionate and blind violence of men.23 This was not the last time that McLuhan linked the Protestant portrayal of human nature, as devoid of inherent goodness and in desperate need of God’s grace, with the cynical realpolitik of the Florentine. In his essay “American Advertising” (1947), he targeted both Machiavelli and Calvin for opening the door to the age of corporate capitalism and mass advertising that reduces all human beings to mere mechanistic objects or playthings. In the process, this unholy alliance had made it almost impossible “to remember the common human nature which persists intact beneath all the modes of mental hysteria rampant from Machiavelli and Calvin until our own day.”24 Nothing less than the restoration of premodern pedagogy

146

Grant N. Havers

along Thomistic lines could save modern education from the materialistic and cynical vices that the Reformation and the Renaissance had unleashed. One year before the publication of his essay “American Advertising,” McLuhan pithily laid out his own perspective on the ancient-modern quarrel in “An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America.” In sharp and provocative tones, McLuhan contrasted the crass commercialism of the Yankee North with the aristocratic nobility of the South. Having taught literature at St Louis University in the late 1930s and early 1940s, McLuhan was impressed that education in the South still held onto the old medieval trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectical reasoning that had once informed the West. McLuhan accordingly lamented the modern assault on the trivium, which privileged the authority of dialectical reason above that of grammar and rhetoric. This quarrel had roots in the dispute between Socrates and the Sophists.25 This fateful move opened the door for the triumph of instrumental reason, which was further reinforced by the joint ascendancy of Protestantism and capitalism.26 In short, this “ancient quarrel” became an intense battle in modernity because the moderns had fatally split reason from grammar and rhetoric. It is tempting to argue that these remarks represent the early stage of McLuhan’s thought. After all, he later admitted that his early scholarship was far too “moralistic” in his assessment of modernity, motivated by a judgmental approach to modern thought and technology. His later work, from the late 1950s onwards, was more concerned with taking a “neutral” stance that simply makes sense of modernity, especially the effects of technology.27 Yet two points are worth considering here. First, McLuhan never abandoned his interest in restoring the classical trivium to its rightful place in higher education. In his last work, the posthumously published Laws of Media: The New Science (1988), which he co-authored with his son Eric, McLuhan once again took up the “ancient quarrel” of which he had previously written several decades earlier. This time, however, he related the modern dualistic opposition between dialectical reasoning on the one hand and grammar and rhetoric on the other to his interest in the human brain: this opposition paralleled the split between the logical left hemisphere and the emotional right hemisphere of the brain. Yet only the premodern mind, which lacked scientific knowledge of the brain’s two hemispheres, had understood this tension: “with the trivium as a retrieval of the oral logos on the new ground of writing, the conjunction of grammar and rhetoric on the one hand, and dialectic on the other, provided a balance of the hemispheres.” Unfortunately, the modern age, which essentially began with

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

147

Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, destroyed this “basis of liberal education and Christian humanism,” because the “visual stress of the alphabet gained new ascendancy” and strengthened the left hemisphere at the expense of the right.28 In short, McLuhan always longed for the return of the trivium to the halls of learning even if he did not expect this grand event to happen. Second, McLuhan, despite his disdain for “moralistic” judgments applied to technological change, never relinquished his suspicion of Protestantism as one of the primary forces that destroyed all that was once good and venerable about western civilization. In his last years, McLuhan associated the decline of the trivium with Protestantism.29 Even as McLuhan eagerly hoped for the disappearance of Protestantism in the new age of electric media, he blamed Protestants for exerting sufficient influence to push the Catholic Church into heretical and modernist directions in the 1960s. As late as 1977, three years before his death, McLuhan confidently pointed to the obsolete nature of the Reformed tradition, which had entered the world with the rise of print and just as surely would disappear with this medium. Because “Luther and the first Protestants were ‘schoolmen’ who were trained in literacy,” it followed that their faith would share the same fate as the book and the newspaper in the electric age of media.30 Yet he also faulted Protestantism for indirectly encouraging the Church to embrace the liberalizing reforms of Vatican II that, in his view, robbed Catholics of the mystery that lay in the Latin Mass. Once the Church practised the Protestant custom of having the celebrant face the congregants, the very meaning of the Mass was lost: “A continuous confrontation of the audience by the celebrant reduces the occasion to the merely humanistic one. A Catholic priest, in this regard, possesses no more power or mystery than a Protestant padre.”31 Whatever the validity of these observations, McLuhan was clearly associating Protestantism with modern ideas such as humanism, liberal individualism, and, as we saw earlier, Machiavellianism. For these reasons, McLuhan reduced Protestantism to the status of a political phenomenon, rather than a substantial theological threat. This faith tradition was more of “a political ploy rather than a doctrinal adhesion.”32 Consistent with this line of thinking, McLuhan emphasized that the same historical context, the print age of Gutenberg, had ushered in both the secular philosophy of Machiavelli and the theology of Calvin. These two epiphenomena of the print age would disappear with the rise of the new electric media.33 What

148

Grant N. Havers

apparently did not occur to McLuhan is the possibility that Protestantism and liberalism were distinct from each other. Instead, McLuhan reduced both Protestantism and liberalism to the same modern age whence they both sprang. The fact that the age of Gutenberg, or the dawn of the printing press, ushered into being both the Reformation and the Enlightenment in tandem persuaded McLuhan that it was impossible to disentangle one from the other. This line of analysis was perfectly consistent with McLuhan’s historicist method. Although McLuhan, to my knowledge, never called himself a historicist, it is a term that usefully describes his method. McLuhan was not necessarily opposed to an historical method as long as it was not a “closed system” that ossified into a fixed point of view.34 Here I rely, once again, on the ideas of Leo Strauss, perhaps the foremost philosophical critic of historicism in the last century. As already mentioned, Strauss described historicism as the modern tendency to reduce philosophical ideas to their historical context, without giving adequate attention to the possible distinction between the intent of the authors and their historical contexts. The historicist, Strauss thought, categorically disallows the possibility of a philosopher’s ideas successfully resisting, transcending, or even surviving the conventions of his time; instead, the philosopher must slavishly mirror and imitate these conventions for as long as they persist. “Since all human thought belongs to specific historical situations, all human thought is bound to perish with the situation to which it belongs and to be superseded by new, unpredictable thoughts.”35 McLuhan sounds uncannily just like this type of historicist when he dismisses the implication that ideas can somehow enjoy an influence that is independent of their historical age. His most famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” essentially denies the autonomy of ideas. Consistent with his technological determinism, McLuhan was convinced that the media “work us over completely” and “leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”36 It is no surprise, then, that McLuhan lumped Protestantism and Enlightenment liberalism together, since they both mirrored and imitated the technological effects of the Gutenberg age. In order to convey a deeper sense of McLuhan’s historicism and its implications for his understanding of the role of Protestantism in modernity, it is instructive to assess the influence that the classical scholar Eric A. Havelock had on McLuhan. Havelock, who was McLuhan’s colleague at the University of Toronto, arguably exerted as great an influence on McLuhan’s media studies as Innis had. In particular, Havelock’s study

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

149

Preface to Plato (1963), which argued that the Greek philosopher had unwittingly advanced the transition from oral speech to writing in antiquity, was particularly celebrated by McLuhan.37 Havelock in turn lavished great praise on McLuhan. The classicist credited McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) with “shedding light often unwittingly upon the role of orality in the history of human culture, and its relation to literacy.” Moreover, McLuhan “performed two services of great importance,” namely the aphorism that the medium is the message (technologies control the content of a message) as well as the need to question whether the human mind is “a constant in human history” or “subject to historical change.”38 Havelock is relevant to this discussion for another key reason. He and Strauss were fierce critics of each other’s scholarship on the Greeks. In a scathing review of Havelock’s study The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (1957),39 Strauss faulted the author for judging Plato with modern criteria that misunderstood the original intent of the classical philosopher. Instead of understanding Plato on his own terms, as Strauss always taught, Havelock, who was deeply influenced by Karl Popper, interpreted Plato as an illiberal totalitarian whose understanding of politics is automatically inferior to the moderns. Indeed, in Havelock’s view, all Greeks, including Hesiod as well as Plato, simply did not understand their time as well as modern readers do. According to Strauss, “Havelock takes it for granted that the modern social scientist, but not Hesiod, understood what happened in Hesiod or to Hesiod.”40 Once again, in Strauss’s view, the hallmark of a liberal education is to understand the authors of the Great Works as they understood themselves. Havelock never forgot the harshness of Strauss’s review. In the last lecture that he gave before his death in 1988, Havelock accused Strauss and his followers of ignoring the historical contexts that shaped and determined the philosophy of Plato. Instead, Havelock portrayed the Straussians as academics who ignorantly believe that one can bring about the Platonic dream of philosopher-rule in modern America, despite the massive historic differences between antiquity and modernity: “The politics of Platonism, especially as recommended by the Straussian school of interpretation, mirrors itself in those programs and policies which have promoted the Cold War of our own times. We ourselves become the ideal society; our American way becomes the one ideal way; our constitution, the ideal diagram immune to amendment or extension.”41 Havelock was apparently unaware that Strauss, on more than one occasion, had forcefully disavowed both the desirability and the possibility of literally restoring the ancient Greek polis, real or utopian, on modern

150

Grant N. Havers

soil. Four decades before Havelock wrote this polemic, Strauss was already warning that Plato’s “writings cannot be used for any purpose other than for philosophizing. In particular, no social order and no party which ever existed or which ever will exist can rightfully claim Plato as its patron.”42 While it is beyond the scope of my discussion to fully evaluate the Strauss–Havelock debate, this much is clear from Havelock’s scholarship and Strauss’s critique of it: Havelock was a progressive historicist who believed that moderns had a better grasp of the ancients and their times than the ancients themselves. This typically historicist view is abundantly played out by McLuhan in his study of the media. In fact, he credited Havelock with the insight that the historian enjoys this superior retrospective understanding: Today the cultural historian can reveal the hidden factors in the cultures of the past, just as the programmes of innovational processes have the means of seeing the effects of any action before it begins. The approach is that of the instantaneous testing of processes under controlled conditions. When we push our paradigms back, we get “history”’ when we push them forward, we get “science.” The historian, such as Eric Havelock in his Preface to Plato, has now the same power to recall ancient events. History offers the controlled conditions of a laboratory for observing patterns of change, much as primitive societies living in prehistory (preliteracy) give postliterate man the means of observing the action of the latest technologies.43 It is no surprise, then, that McLuhan chided Plato and Aristotle for failing to understand the effects of “man-made technologies” in their time. Instead, they vainly “invented ‘Nature’ as a world of rigorous order and repetition” that ignored the chaotic effects of technological change such as those that stemmed from the replacement of oral speech with writing. Thus, the Greeks failed to understand that Nature is an invention, an extension of themselves. Only modern “Electric man” has been able to make sense of technological change and its impact throughout history.44 Why Plato should be primarily judged according to his insight into technological change, which is not his primary interest, is never explained by McLuhan, who is uninterested in questions of authorial intent.45 It never occurs to McLuhan that if this historicist method is true, then the validity of his own ideas can be questioned. As Strauss relentlessly pointed out against historicists, if all thoughts are historical and destined

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

151

to perish, then historicism itself “can be of only temporary validity.”46 Did McLuhan know that his ideas are just as epiphenomenal as those of Plato? If they are simply mirrors of his own age, then they are no better than any other ideas. However, if they somehow escape the context in which he lives, how exactly are they exempted from the powerful and all-determining effects of the media? Most relevant to my discussion here is the implication that McLuhan’s own critique of Protestantism is shaped by the biases of his own age. To blame twentieth-century liberalism on the Reformed theology of the sixteenth century illustrates McLuhan’s tendency of reading history through an historicist looking-glass of his own time without allowing for important distinctions between modern ideas that cannot be fully explained by their common historical context. As we have seen, McLuhan is determined to associate, if not conflate, modern Protestantism with liberalism. As early as his thesis on Thomas Nashe, he associated the theology of Calvin with the political ideas of Machiavelli. In later works, he reduced both thinkers to the ephemeral context of the print age. In the process, McLuhan bought into a particularly questionable version of the “secularization” thesis by refusing to consider the possibility that moderns who make use of Protestant language may not be particularly pious in motive or purpose. Although Strauss definitely agreed with McLuhan that Machiavelli’s use of pagan ideas did not make the Florentine a “pagan,” he just as certainly disagreed with McLuhan that Machiavelli was simply imitating a Christian context that put particular emphasis upon an Old Testament view of the fallenness of human nature. Machiavelli was neither pagan nor Christian: “He had not reverted from the worship of Christ to the worship of Apollo.”47 Whereas Protestants decried the sinfulness of human nature, Machiavelli made use of this grim fact to justify ruthlessness in politics. If human beings were sinful, the wise prince must govern them with the realistic view that their sins must be controlled and used, not eradicated through divine intervention. Strauss always cautioned against projecting a pious intent upon Machiavelli and his modern successors. Their “secularization” of the Bible had little to do with Protestantism. Machiavelli’s rejection of the ancients was based on their lack of political realism, a critique that had nothing in common with the Protestant repudiation of Plato and Aristotle. Whereas Machiavelli decried the utopian reliance of the ancients on virtuous rulers, the Reformers targeted the Greeks for lacking a concept of a loving, personal, and stern God that cares for His creation.48 As Strauss showed in his studies of Spinoza, the fact that this Enlightenment philosopher invoked

152

Grant N. Havers

Protestant language to buttress his philosophy does not make his concept of Enlightenment a mere extension of a Protestant tradition that emphasizes the severe justice of the Almighty: “Nothing could be more odious to the Enlightenment than the conception of God as a terrible God, in which the severity of mind and heart, the spirit of the Book of Deuteronomy, finds its ultimate justification.”49 For this reason, Strauss chided Eric Voegelin for attributing to Spinoza a Protestant bias that ignored the subversive nature of his hermeneutic. There was nothing Protestant about Spinoza’s denial of miracles: this was at best a “pseudo-Protestantism.”50 In a different context, Strauss also faulted Voegelin for attributing to Machiavelli a dependence on biblical ideas (e.g., his praise of Moses as a strong-willed prophet with the virtù necessary to build new modes and orders).51 McLuhan, who may have been influenced by Voegelin’s position that radical Protestant movements were responsible for all that ails modernity, arguably made the same mistake in assuming that Protestants simply marched in lockstep with the apt pupils of the Florentine.52 A few large questions remain here. Even if McLuhan was too quick to blame Protestantism for modern excesses, which included a visceral hostility toward classical education, what exactly can Protestantism teach us today about the Great Works as well as the implications of the Athens– Jerusalem distinction? Is Protestantism irremediably anti-intellectual? What difference does Protestantism make anyway? To address these questions, I turn to the ideas of George Grant, a Canadian admirer of Strauss who, in un-Straussian fashion, closely associated Protestantism with the worst excesses of modern philosophy and politics. In the process, Grant inadvertently raised questions that encourage a reassessment of the distinctive Protestant challenge and contribution to liberal education.

Grant versus Protestantism At first glance, any attempt to closely associate the ideas of George Grant with those of Marshall McLuhan seems a daunting task. During the heyday of McLuhan’s popularity in the 1960s, Grant was harshly critical of the “McLuhanite cult” that, in his view, ignored fundamental questions about control over technology.53 Additionally, Grant’s thought is much closer to that of Strauss than McLuhan’s ever was. In Time as History (1969), the same series of lectures in which he blasted McLuhan’s followers, Grant followed Strauss’s critique of historicism so closely that that he essentially agreed with Strauss that this ideology logically leads to the amoral and

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

153

tyrannical rule of Nietzschean supermen.54 Moreover, in the few discussions that compare Grant with McLuhan, it is usually recognized that McLuhan was far more optimistic about the liberating effects of technological change in creating a “global village” than Grant ever was. Although Grant often sounded like McLuhan when he worried that the effects of technology, especially the computer, often defy the control and even the comprehension of their human inventors, Grant never entertained even the possibility that a better world would emerge from the rise of the electric age, as McLuhan often did.55 Nevertheless, Grant and McLuhan (and Innis, whom they both admired) converge on one fundamental point: the responsibility of Protestantism for the problems of modernity. At the biographical level, the parallels are startling. Like McLuhan, Grant came from a Protestant background that was far more liberal than anything anticipated by the early Reformed tradition. Grant identified the “secularised Protestantism” in which he had been brought up with “liberal progressivism.”56 By Grant’s own account, this Protestantism was not particularly pious. As he bluntly put it, “bourgeois Protestantism in Canada was largely made up of people who considered religion simply as a buttress for certain cherished moral ideas.”57 His own family consisted of prominent Tory nationalists who identified their Protestant faith with a fervent belief in the British Empire’s mission to civilize the world. In fact, it was rather evident to Grant that his family’s faith in this secular political mission was far greater than their belief in traditional Christianity. Grant once described his mother, Maude Parkin, as a “secularized Protestant who didn’t believe a word of Christianity” even though she fervently believed in the cause of progress that was made possible through the rule of Anglo-Saxon hegemony around the world.58 At least in his youth, Grant also supported this view of the world and, for a time, embraced Hegelian progressivism as the philosophy that gave this perspective a rational foundation (until he discovered Strauss, who saved him “from the grip of Hegel”).59 Yet Grant never doubted that this “progressive” Christianity still had discernibly Protestant roots. He also gradually came to the conclusion, in the post-Second World War period, that this faith tradition had gravely harmed both his own nation and western civilization as a whole. Although Grant remained loosely Protestant throughout his life, and even joined the Anglican Church in the late 1950s, he ultimately agreed with McLuhan that Calvinism was one of the most disastrous forces that ever arose out of modernity. In Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959), Grant argued that the

154

Grant N. Havers

one positive achievement of Calvinism, a belief in human equality, had led to the rise of a postwar liberalism that threatened to turn all human beings into thoughtless capitalists. South of the border, Calvinism had also led to the creation of American pragmatism, which had effectively eradicated all precapitalist barriers to technological progress. Grant, who sympathized with the famous thesis of Max Weber that Calvinism had spawned capitalism, also interpreted American pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey as philosophers who secularized their faith.60 Well into the 1960s and 1970s, Grant deepened his dislike of Calvinism for preparing the ground for that enemy of Christianity, liberalism. The Calvinist valorization of the individual believer’s solitary relationship to God “encouraged that individualism which was at home with a politics essentially defined in terms of individual right.”61 It was bad enough that the Calvinists showed little interest in the wisdom of the Greeks, as Innis had pointed out earlier: “Calvinist Protestantism was itself a break in Europe – a turning away from the Greeks in the name of what was found in the Bible.”62 It was even worse that they hardly had any interest in preserving their own faith. American Protestantism, with its strong roots in Calvinism, suffered from a “driving will to righteousness” that made a mockery of the biblical virtue of humility. Modern-day Protestants on both sides of the border had thus effectively replaced a belief in God’s providence with a faith in human will. Although Grant appreciated that early modern Protestants had benefited humanity by curing illness and raising the standard of living for millions of people, Protestantism had “become a tame confederate of the mass secular society.”63 In short, Grant doubted that Calvinism had been a boon for liberal education. At times in his writings, Grant spied some daylight between liberalism and Calvinism, even if “most Canadians are a strange and confused mixture of the traditions of liberalism and Reformed theology.”64 (Grant’s focus on religion here was perhaps part of a larger post-Second World War intellectual trend in Canada that, according to Janet Ajzenstat and John von Heyking, overemphasized the study of society and culture at the expense of political history.)65 He even doubted that liberalism, with its emphasis on individual choice, could fully accommodate the Christian belief in the sanctity of life after abortion was legalized in the 1970s. Even within this context, however, Grant never swerved from his view that modern contractualism’s “determined political activism relates it to its seedbed in western Christianity.”66 He categorically rejected the notion that liberalism

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

155

simply overrode the influence of Protestantism. Rather, they had always reinforced each other in a negative dialectic: “This co-penetration of Protestantism and liberalism must not be understood in terms of a simply passive overriding in which Protestantism gradually lost itself. It was a veritable co-penetration in which Protestantism shaped as well as being shaped.”67 It was no wonder, then, that “the Reformed tradition seems to have turned its back on any strenuous theological life, replacing it by rhetoric, organization, evangelical excitement, and democratic cliché.”68 Protestantism had effectively surrendered to the liberal tradition that it helped to create in the first place. I do not deny Grant’s larger point that there is a historical connection between Protestantism and modern liberalism. Instead, my specific focus is on Grant’s refusal to ask the Straussian question of whether all this history was simply the result of Protestantism or a secularized pseudo-version that had little to do with the tradition of Reformation theology. Although Grant was deeply influenced by Strauss,69 the two men profoundly disagreed over the validity of Max Weber’s famous thesis that capitalism was secularized Calvinism. Grant himself occasionally admitted that, despite his “enormous debt” to Strauss, he “interpreted differently the relation of Christianity to the modern philosophers.”70 The vast differences between Grant and Strauss emerge dramatically in their approaches to the history of Protestantism. Grant followed Weber in asserting that “Calvinist individualism and the development of capitalism went hand in hand,” although he also thought that even the great German sociologist of religion (along with Marx) failed to appreciate fully the connection between Protestantism and the scientific revolution.71 By contrast, Strauss, as an anti-historicist, argued that capitalism had far more in common with modern libertine political ideas than the stern morality of Calvinism. Strauss took aim at Weber for failing to say that “the corruption of Calvinist theology led to the emergence of the capitalist spirit.”72 Grant’s willingness to blame Protestantism for the crisis of modernity may also explain his puzzlement at Strauss’s famous distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. Although Grant lavished considerable praise on Strauss in the 1950s and 1960s, he turned to the work of Eric Voegelin late in life because, in his view, Voegelin wrote more deeply on revelation than Strauss had. Why did Grant change his mind on Strauss? The reason for this shift lies in Grant’s conviction that Voegelin was far more open to the synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem than Strauss was.73 Both of these great

156

Grant N. Havers

traditions, in Grant’s view, disclosed the same truth about the meaning of life, albeit in different ways. In his addendum to his essay “Two Theological Languages,” Grant wrote: Whatever differences there may be between Platonism and Christianity as to how and when truth is given us, it is clear that in both freedom is given us through truth. Therefore we do not stand before good and evil choosing as it were between equal alternatives …. To put the matter in language not easy for moderns, Platonism and Christianity are at their centre concerned with grace – if that word is given its literal meaning. Grace simply means that the great things of our existing are given us, not made by us and finally not to be understood as arbitrary accidents.74 Who, then, was responsible for demolishing this synthesis of Plato and the Gospels that had founded western civilization? In the same essay to which he had later contributed this addendum, Grant had already made no secret of his belief that Protestant theology had fatally undermined this metaphysics. In particular, Grant faulted the distinguished Protestant theologians Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Anders Nygren for erroneously asking us “to turn our back on rational theology and accept pure Biblical religion (whatever that may be).” They “are quite useless as positive theologians because they leave one with an inevitable split between Christianity and reason.”75 In short, traditional Protestant anti-intellectualism, dressed up as theology, had demolished the necessary synthesis of reason and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem. Worst of all, the destruction of this synthesis had fatally opened the door to progressivist Christianity.76 It never occurred to Grant that there may be good reasons, offered by philosophers such as Strauss as well as theologians from the Reformed tradition, for doubting the perfect compatibility of Athens and Jerusalem. These reasons, moreover, did not amount to mere anti-intellectualism. As already mentioned, there is some evidence that Strauss, as a young student of philosophy in Weimar Germany, was influenced by Protestant theological debates over the roles of reason and experience, which could never be dismissed as exercises in irrationalism.77 In short, Protestants may have had theologically sound reasons to question the validity of attempts to synthesize Greek philosophy and biblical revelation, reasons that had little to do with modern, political, and impious attempts to break away from the classical tradition.

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

157

To press this point, I shall compare the hermeneutic of the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren, whose work Grant quickly dismissed as hostile to “rational theology,” to that of Strauss to answer the question: what positive lesson can Protestantism teach about Athens and Jerusalem as well as the relation of liberal education to these two traditions? Before such a comparison can be undertaken, it is necessary to clarify just how deep this conflict goes, in Strauss’s view. Is it a conflict over the content of morality or its expression? It is sometimes argued by followers of Strauss, particularly Thomas Pangle, that the Athen–Jerusalem distinction simply parallels the ancient opposition between philosophy and poetry. If this interpretation is correct, then the conflict between these two founding traditions of western civilization is no more than a point of difference over alternative expressions of the same fundamental morality, not a conflict over what constitutes morality itself. Since the Bible is to be read as literature, like poetry, it is not to be understood as a work of reason. Philosophy adheres to rational inquiry whereas revealed religion is based on faithful obedience.78 Strauss himself sometimes gives the impression that Athens and Jerusalem essentially agree on what morality is. In “Progress and Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization,” one of the few essays in which he focuses on the implications of this distinction for the West, he writes: One can say, and it is not misleading to say so, that the Bible and Greek philosophy agree in regard to what we may call, and we do call in fact, morality. They agree, if I may say so, regarding the importance of morality, regarding the content of morality, and regarding its ultimate insufficiency. They differ as regards that “x” which supplements or completes morality, or, which is only another way of putting it, they disagree as regards the basis of morality.79 At first glance, Strauss’s emphasis on agreement here suggests that there is no serious tension between these traditions. If Athens and Jerusalem simply “disagree as regards the basis of morality,” it is tempting to conclude, as Pangle does, that faith motivates religion whereas reason animates philosophy.80 Yet in the same essay Strauss goes on to point out differences that sharply qualify his view that Athens and Jerusalem agree “regarding the content of morality.” Here he admits that Athens and Jerusalem teach sharply distinct lessons about morality, strongly implying that these amount to differences over content. For example, while Greek philoso-

158

Grant N. Havers

phers, especially Aristotle, hold up magnanimity (pride) as a virtue, the Bible condemns it as a vice. Strauss has in mind Aristotle’s famous praise of the “great-souled man” who looks down on those who lack such greatness and is obviously intolerant of those who insult him (Posterior Analytics, 97b 15–25). In Strauss’s view, this Aristotelian teaching obviously violates the biblical imperative to be humble before God, who recognizes all human beings as equally fallen beings. This biblical teaching on humility fundamentally conflicts with the Aristotelian teaching that a few human beings can become virtuous based on their reason alone. Now there is a close kinship between Aristotle’s justice and biblical justice, but Aristotle’s magnanimity, which means a man’s habitual claiming for himself great honors while he deserves these honors, is alien to the Bible. Biblical humility excludes magnanimity in the Greek sense …. Magnanimity presupposes a man’s conviction of his own worth. It presupposes that man is capable of being virtuous, thanks to his own efforts. If this condition is fulfilled, consciousness of one’s shortcomings or failings or sins is something which is below the good man.81 If I understand Strauss correctly here, Athens and Jerusalem differ over the content of magnanimity: is it a virtue or a vice? The Bible always warns that those who doubt they have need of God’s grace, because of their foolish pride, are self-destructive. Their failure to be conscious of their “shortcomings or failings or sins” will lead to their doom. For these reasons, Strauss chided liberal theologians of his time who water down the severity of Christian morality in order to achieve political (that is, Machiavellian) goals.82 This biblical repudiation of pride is powerfully entrenched in the Protestant tradition. Nygren, in his classic work Agape and Eros, makes the same distinction as Strauss does when he follows St Augustine in insisting that only humility (humilitas) can overcome the destructive power of pride (superbia). The only real cure for this superbia which prevents Eros reaching its goal is God’s Agape, His love in sending His Son, who humbled Himself even to the death of the Cross … Nothing can reveal and overcome man’s superbia like God’s humilitas, nothing shows how far man had strayed from God so much as the fact that he could only

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

159

be restored through an incarnate God …. Eros, left to itself, can see God and feel itself drawn to Him. But it sees God only at a remote distance; between Him and the soul lies an immense ocean, and when the soul imagines it has reached Him it has simply entered, in self-sufficiency and pride, into the harbor of itself. But for pride, Eros would be able to bring the soul to God. Here Agape must come to its assistance: God’s humilitas must vanquish man’s superbia.83 Two important differences stand out that reveal the chasm between Athens and Jerusalem. First, the highest goal of Eros, self-sufficiency and pride, is condemned as both empty and sinful in the biblical tradition. Second, Eros is not the same as Agape. Whereas Eros teaches a fatal (prideful) love of oneself, Agape commands love of God and one’s neighbour. Although Strauss did not write extensively on biblical love or charity (Agape), at times he admits that the Greeks lack this ethic altogether. Both Strauss and the early Protestants would heartily agree that both humility and charity are unnatural, whereas pride is all too natural to human beings. Perhaps for this reason, Strauss emphasized that the Bible lacks a concept of “nature” per se.84 Within the context of his distinction between biblical humility and Greek magnanimity, Strauss even provocatively acknowledges that Greek philosophy is “heartless” on matters that pertain to care of the poor, whereas the Bible “uses poor and pious or just as synonymous terms.”85 As we have seen, Grant never agreed with Strauss on the tensions between Athens and Jerusalem, nor did he sympathize with his own ancestral Protestant tradition that once emphasized these differences. (Grant would have likely been chagrined by Egerton Ryerson’s view that the ethics of Greek philosophy was “radically deficient in the light of revealed religion.”)86 It was bad enough that even the greatest of Protestant theologians were anti-intellectual. Yet Grant even went so far as to blame Western Christianity in toto for opening up a concept of “Will” that had made all the disasters of modernity possible in the first place. As he writes in Time as History: “[W]e would have to examine how it was that Christianity so opened men to a particular consciousness of time, by opening them to anxiety and charity; how willing was exalted through the stamping proclamations of the creating Will.”87 It is a safe bet that Grant has Protestantism in mind here, given his visceral attack on Calvinism as a tradition that degenerated into a theology of the modern will and its capitalist manifestations. Once again, Grant associates Christianity with modernity as two traditions that march in perfect lockstep. It is legitimate to ask, once again,

160

Grant N. Havers

the Straussian question: does a modern philosophy of the Will have anything to do with real Protestantism, considering the early Reformation’s (especially Luther’s) attack on the sinful valorization of the Will? It is also far from obvious that early Christian theologians and their Protestant heirs would have believed that history can “progress” after the Christ-event, which renders all other history insignificant. Perhaps for this reason, both Strauss and Löwith doubted that premodern believers in traditional Jerusalem had a concept of “history” in the progressivist sense.88 Grant also seems to ignore the fact that the early Protestant emphasis on humility is a rejection not only of the modern obsession with human will: it also represents a severe questioning of Greek philosophy. What is radically distinct within Protestant theology seems to be lost on Grant, who associates the Reformed tradition with modernity even as he faults it for rejecting the authority of Plato and Aristotle. He also fails to appreciate how the old Protestant doubts about Greek philosophy, illustrated by Nygren, are a liberating corrective to the defects of the modern age. As a result, Grant turned to Greek philosophy, especially Plato, to make sense of the crisis of modernity. In Grant’s harsh view, Protestant theology had nothing to teach the modern age. Yet Grant never confronted the questions that both Strauss and Nygren raise about the merits that stem from the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. An ethic of magnanimity, for example, is not an obviously useful corrective to the dangers of rapid technological change. Although progressivism is unlikely to level any serious objection to the possible benefits that stem from the new age of biogenetics, the old Protestant tradition that insisted on humility, or a realistic understanding of the severe limits of human wisdom as it applies to the control of technology, may still be a powerful bulwark against dreams of reinventing a “better” human nature. Does the tradition of Athens offer an equivalently powerful corrective to technological nihilism? That is not obvious, since it is possible that self-proclaimed “great-souled” individuals may wish to use the new technologies of genetic engineering to create their own legacy of magnanimous progeny who are also convinced of their own superiority. By contrast, the biblical ethic of humility forcefully reminds human beings that no one, including the allegedly “great-souled” human being, has the wisdom to employ technologies that can potentially reconstruct human nature.89 Here the influence of Jerusalem trumps that of Athens, since the biblical tradition continues to have an impact on the world that cannot

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

161

possibly be rivalled by the influence of Greek philosophy, which is largely restricted to academe.90 The students of Strauss would also do well to engage these questions related to the Athens–Jerusalem distinction, since they follow their teacher in insisting that only the recovery of the Great Works can stem the crisis of modernity and even act as a “counter-poison” to mass culture.91 Strauss doubted that a recovery of biblical religion was possible, perhaps because its “secularization” in modernity had rendered any political use of Scripture suspect. Yet, by Strauss’s own admission, liberal education “will always remain the obligation and the privilege of a minority.”92 McLuhan’s stark reminder that we live among a “post-literate” generation whose youth are uninterested in the close reading of texts may be another necessary qualification to Strauss’s prescription here. The fact that the Christian tradition still exists and teaches the primacy of biblical charity and humility on a mass scale may be the last best hope for humanity against the tide of technological nihilism and consumerism. What Innis, McLuhan, and Grant feared as the irrationalist core of Protestantism may turn out to be its saving grace. A true liberal education must, at the very least, encourage serious reflection on the implications of the Athens–Jerusalem distinction that Protestants once engaged. Notes 1 Harold A. Innis, “The Church in Canada,” in Harold A. Innis, Essays in Canadian Economic History, ed. Mary Q. Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956), 392. 2 Ibid., 385. 3 Ibid., 383. 4 See Colin D. Pearce, “Canadian Guardian: The Educational Statesmanship of Egerton Ryerson.” Innis soberly notes that Ryerson’s project still placed too much emphasis on “the formalities of religious instruction in the schools and a neglect of the basic problem of character” (385). For McGee’s views, see David W. Livingstone, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Civic Paideia for Canada” in this volume. 5 See James Kurth, “George W. Bush and the Protestant Deformation,” American Interest 1, no. 2 (2005): 4–16; Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995); Paul E. Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward A Secular Theocracy (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002); Clifford Orwin, “The Unraveling of Christianity in America,” The Public Interest 155 (Spring 2004): 20–36. 6 Innis, “The Church in Canada,”390. 7 See note 86. 8 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, with new essays by W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, and Dominique Scheffel-

162

9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22

Grant N. Havers

Dunand (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 56. McLuhan also praised Innis as “the first person in the Western world to make an extensive study of the effects of technological innovation and the related disequilibrium in man and society.” See his “The Fecund Interval,” in Eric A. Havelock, Harold A. Innis: A Memoir (Toronto: The Harold Innis Foundation and University of Toronto Press, 1982), 9. George Grant, “Harold Adams Innis,” in The George Grant Reader, ed. William Christian and Sheila Grant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 356. Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. with an introduction by Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 270. See also pages 269–72. Leo Strauss, “Correspondence concerning Modernity: Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss.” Independent Journal of Philosophy 4 (1983): 106. George Grant, “Letter of Resignation,” in George Grant Reader, 189. Samuel Moyn, “From Experience to Law: Leo Strauss and the Weimar Crisis of the Philosophy of Religion,” History of European Ideas 33, no. 2 (June 2007): 174– 94. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 289. Leo Strauss, “Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy, 83. See Clifford Orwin, “Machiavelli’s Unchristian Charity,” American Political Science Review 72 (1978): 1217–28. Leo Strauss, “Niccolo Machiavelli,” in Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, with an introduction by Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 211. Leo Strauss, “What is Liberal Education?” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy, 318. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 259–65. See Grant N. Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), 85–91. Commenting on the feature in Life Magazine (26 January 1948) on the new “Great Works” program that Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler had established at the University of Chicago, McLuhan wondered why the article “should have so mortician-like an air – as though Adler and his associates had come to bury and not to praise Plato and other great men.” He went on to write: “The ‘great ideas’ whose headstones are alphabetically displayed above the coffin-like filing boxes have been extracted from the great books in order to provide an index tool for manipulating the books themselves.” These polemical remarks are from his first published work, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Boston: Vanguard Press, 1951), 43. McLuhan’s belief that the age of the alphabet and print put too much emphasis on the power of the eye probably led him to the conclusion, by the time of The Gutenberg Galaxy, that the Great Works pedagogy was obsolete, since it had originated in a media age that had long past. This quote is from Eric McLuhan, “Introduction,” in Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999), ix.

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

163

23 Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2006), 195. 24 Marshall McLuhan, “American Advertising,” in Essential McLuhan, ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1995), 14. 25 Marshall McLuhan, “An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America,” The Classical Journal 41, no. 4 (1946): 157–8. 26 McLuhan once described the self-improvement guru Dale Carnegie as “an exact imitator of Machiavelli’s principles.” See his “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,” in The Medium and the Light, 159. McLuhan delivered this lecture in 1954. 27 Marshall McLuhan, “Playboy Interview,” in Essential McLuhan, 265. McLuhan gave this interview in 1969. 28 Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 125. 29 According to Eric McLuhan, his father believed that Protestants “hitched their fortunes to dialectic, and abandoned the old alliance of rhetoric and grammar to which the Church still resolutely adhered.” See his “Introduction,” in The Medium and the Light, xv. 30 Marshall McLuhan, “Keys to the Electronic Revolution: First Conversation with Pierre Babin,” in The Medium and the Light, 47–8. This conversation was originally published in French in 1977. See also “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,” 163. 31 McLuhan, “Liturgy and Media: Do Americans Go to Church to Be Alone?” in The Medium and the Light, 135. This essay was published in 1973. For McLuhan’s misgivings over the Protestant influence on the Catholic Church, see also pages 62, 130, and 208. It is not obvious, however, that Protestantism pushed the Catholic Church in a liberal direction with Vatican II. Instead, the reverse might have happened. See Mark A. Noll, What Happened to Christian Canada? (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 2007), 51–3. Noll observes that Vatican II’s most enduring impact on liberal Protestants may lie in the fact that it became harder for them to hold a negative image of their old enemy, the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, after Vatican II, these Protestants had to compete with Catholics for the status of being most liberal in theology. 32 McLuhan, “Liturgy and Media,” 131. 33 McLuhan once wrote: “Machiavelli is now as obsolete as Gutenberg from whom he stems” (Essential McLuhan, 79). For his hopes that Protestantism would disappear in the electric age, see note 30. 34 McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 8. 35 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 19. 36 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 26. 37 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). 38 Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 25. 39 This study was published by Yale University Press. 40 Leo Strauss, “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy,” in Leo Strauss, Liberalism: Ancient and Modern. Foreword by Allan Bloom (Chicago: University of

164

41 42

43

44 45

46 47 48

49

50

Grant N. Havers

Chicago Press, 1995), 37. In a letter to his student Seth Benardete, Strauss comments on his review of Havelock’s book: “This was the only time I took out a ruler and rapped somebody over the knuckles.” See Seth Benardete, Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete, ed. Ronna Burger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 102. Eric A. Havelock, “Plato’s Politics and the American Constitution,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 93 (1990): 19. Leo Strauss, “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” Social Research 13, no. 3 (1946): 351. On page 332, he also cautions that the “teaching of the classics can have no immediate practical effect, because present-day society is not a polis.” See also his The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 11. For an extensive discussion of Strauss’s modernist tendencies (that is, his opposition to any attempt to restore “classical” ideals in modern politics), see Paul E. Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy, 33–64. Marshall McLuhan, “Postures and Impostures of Managers Past,” in Essential McLuhan, 76–7. See also Gutenberg Galaxy, 29: “Plato shows no awareness here or elsewhere of how the phonetic alphabet had altered the sensibility of the Greeks; nor did anybody else in his time or later.” McLuhan, “Pro-log to Exploration,” in Essential McLuhan, 361–2. In the Phaedrus (275a–e), Socrates points out the threat that writing poses to human memory. On page 285 of Essential McLuhan, McLuhan makes note of Plato’s insight here, as expressed through the voice of Socrates. Yet McLuhan would call this “rear-view mirror” thinking, a sign that Plato was aware of the effects of technological change (e.g., the rise of the alphabet) only after they happened. See “Playboy Interview,” 238. McLuhan, who exaggerated the inattention of Plato to technological change, could have benefited from Strauss’s insight that the ancients, especially Aristotle, were only too aware that “the liberation of technology from moral and political control would lead to disastrous consequences,” including the creation of a “universal and perpetual tyranny” (Natural Right and History, 23). Strauss also comments on the ancient distrust of technological change in Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 298. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 25. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 175. For Strauss’s distinction between the impersonal god of Greek philosophy (especially Aristotle) and the loving God of revelation, see his “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections,” in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. with an introduction by Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 396: “For Aristotle it is almost a blasphemy to ascribe justice to his god; he is above justice as well as injustice.” Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E.M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 209. Strauss devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of the vast differences between Spinoza and Calvin (193–214). See the correspondence between Strauss and Voegelin in Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper (editors and translators), Faith and Political Philosophy: The

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

51

52

53

54

55

56

57 58 59

60

165

Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin 1934–1964 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 60–1, 71, 73. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 183–4. Strauss is responding to Voegelin’s review of On Tyranny, which is reprinted in Cooper and Emberley, Faith and Political Philosophy, 44–9. On page 48, Voegelin associates Machiavelli’s “prince” with a “Western–Christian” mindset. For a small portion of the McLuhan-Voegelin correspondence, see Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 30: Selected Correspondence 1950–1984, trans. Sandy Adler, Thomas A. Hollweck, and William Petropulos (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 173–4. For an illuminating discussion of Voegelin’s animus toward Protestantism, see John J. Ranieri, Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 151–3. See George Grant, Time as History, ed. with an introduction by William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995 [1969]), 50: “Who deserves to be the master of electronics? [Is it] The last men and nihilists from contemporary television journalism and politics? One would be happier about the McLuhanite cult, if its members dealt with such questions.” Grant, Time as History, 42–56. On page 63, Grant approvingly quotes Strauss on the “oblivion of eternity” that took place in modernity. For a discussion of Grant’s embrace of Strauss’s views on historicism, see Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy, 122–36. See George Grant, Technology and Justice (Concord, ON: House of Anansi Press, 1986), 19–20. When Grant disputes the popular idea that the computer does not “impose” the way it is used, he sounds like McLuhan. For a comparison of Grant and McLuhan’s views on technology and politics, see Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1984), 52–4, 84; Grant Havers, “The Right-Wing Postmodernism of Marshall McLuhan,” Media, Culture, and Society 25, no. 4 (July 2003): 522. George Grant, “Two Theological Languages,” in George Grant, “Two Theological Languages” by George Grant and Other Essays in Honour of His Work, ed. Wayne Whillier (Toronto: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 17. Grant gave this lecture in 1953. See also H.D. Forbes, “George Grant and Leo Strauss,” in George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education, ed. Arthur Davis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 189–90: The “starting point of Grant’s life and thought was the liberal pragmatic Protestantism of the Canadian middle and upper classes between the world wars.” Grant, “Two Theological Languages,” 17. Quoted in Charles Taylor, Radical Tories (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2006), 135–6. George Grant, Selected Letters, ed. with an introduction by William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 369. For a discussion of Grant’s early Hegelianism, see Robert C. Sibley, Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor – Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 109–67. George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

166

61 62 63

64 65

66 67

68 69

70 71 72

73

74

Grant N. Havers

1995), 77–89. For other examples of Grant’s animus toward Calvinism, see his Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1969), 65–6. Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1974), 59. Grant, Technology and Empire, 19. George Grant, “The Minds of Men in the Atomic Age (1955),” in George Grant Reader, 57. In Technology and Empire, Grant praises the tough-minded early modern Protestants for taming the “indomitable” lands of North America as well as forcing “commodities from the land” and building “public and private institutions of freedom and flexibility and endurance.” (24). Grant, “Two Theological Languages,” 11. See Janet Ajzenstat, “When Canadians Rewrote Their History: Discarding ‘Liberty’ and Embracing ‘Community,’” and John von Heyking, “Liberal Education Embedded in Civic Education for Responsible Government: The Case of John George Bourinot,” in this volume. Grant, English-Speaking Justice, 76. See also pages 82 and 86. See also Technology and Empire, 19–23. Grant, English-Speaking Justice, 63. Note that Grant was not identifying these Protestants with cynical “conservatives” who doubted the truth of religion even though they thought it was useful as a tool for “social cohesion.” See Technology and Empire, 54, and English-Speaking Justice, 54. Grant, “Two Theological Languages,” 15. See Grant Havers, “Leo Strauss’s Influence on George Grant,” in Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics, ed. Ian Angus, Ron Dart, and Peg Peters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 124–35. Grant and Strauss also profoundly disagreed over the validity of liberalism. Grant never understood that his philosophical mentor valued the older tradition of liberalism that appreciated the Great Works. Instead, Grant saw liberalism as an imperialist ideology that was modern to the core. For an extensive discussion of Grant’s and Strauss’s philosophical differences and similarities, see Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy, 122–36. Grant, Technology and Empire, 19, note 1. Grant, English-Speaking Justice, 59. His criticism of Weber is in Technology and Empire, 20. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 62 (my italics). A few pages earlier, Strauss notes that even Weber thought that Calvin did not intend to provide a theological rationale for capitalism (59). Late in life, Grant turned to Voegelin because he was “fundamentally more in Voegelin’s ambience than Strauss’s” due to Voegelin’s allegedly greater sympathy toward revelation. See Grant, Selected Letters, 380. Yet Voegelin and Strauss shared similar doubts regarding the various medieval and modern attempts to base politics on revelation, even if Voegelin was more candid than Strauss in expressing his misgivings. See Ranieri, Disturbing Revelation, 152–3, 160–1. Grant, “Two Theological Languages,” 16. In this addendum, which he wrote shortly before his death in 1988, Grant is critical of his early attempt in his 1953 lecture to confuse the language of modern existentialism with the Bible. He does not,

the Ancient-Modern-Protestant Quarrel

167

however, retract his views on the ultimate compatibility of Athens and Jerusalem. 75 Grant, “Two Theological Languages,” 11, 12. That said, Grant makes clear that he is unwilling to accept the Catholic (Thomistic) synthesis of reason and revelation (11, 15). 76 In “Two Theological Languages,” Grant chides Barth and Niebuhr for speaking “with the assumptions of progressive capitalist democracy.” (11) 77 Moyn, “From Experience to Law.” 78 See Thomas L. Pangle, “Introduction,” in Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 11, 20. For an extensive critique of Pangle’s interpretation of Strauss (who denies that the Bible is simply literature), see Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy, 157–8. 79 Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” 274. 80 Strauss, in “Jerusalem and Athens,” notes that “there is no biblical word for doubt” (381). 81 Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 277–8. See also Strauss, “Perspectives on the Good Society,” in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern, 268: “The true ‘Pharisee’ in the Christian sense is not the Pharisee proper, but Aristotle’s perfect gentleman who is not ashamed of anything or does not regret or repent anything he has done because he always does what is right or proper.” 82 In Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss writes that “the Bible sets forth the demands of morality and religion in their purest and most intransigent form” (133). For his critique of liberal theologians who water down biblical morality, see pages 50–1. Grant occasionally noted that Strauss himself thought that Christianity was too demanding an ethic for politics, since the faith had contributed to an “overextension of the soul.” See William Christian, “Introduction,” in George Grant Reader, 19. Strauss, whose comment is restated by Grant here (and is not in his writings), presumably means that Christian piety is not well suited for the rough and tumble world of politics. For Strauss’s doubts about the political applicability of Christian charity, see Ranieri, Disturbing Revelation, 161–80. 83 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 473–4. Augustine, of course, deeply influenced Luther and other early Reformed theologians. 84 Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 281. For Strauss’s views on biblical morality, see Ranieri, Disturbing Revelation, 161–80; Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy, 153–68. 85 Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 277. For an extensive discussion of the vast differences between the biblical and pagan views of magnanimity, see Larry Arnhart, “Statesmanship as Magnanimity: Classical, Christian, and Modern.” Polity 16 (Winter 1983): 263–83; Carson Holloway, “Christianity, Magnanimity, and Statesmanship.” Review of Politics 61 (1999): 581–604. This biblical teaching on pride may explain why the God of revelation treats all human beings equally in a manner that is unimaginable to Plato, who distinguishes between the wise few and the ignorant many. See Ryan Topping, “Catholic Education and the Culture of Life,” 176 (in this volume). 86 See Colin D. Pearce, “Egerton Ryerson’s Canadian Liberalism,” in Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory, or Republican? ed. Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1997), 188. Pearce goes on to note Ryerson’s

168

87 88 89

90

91

92

Grant N. Havers

view that there was no alternative to the Bible in matters related to “instruction in duties and virtue” (196). Grant, Time as History, 29. See Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 251, 260, 272. See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 198–202. I discuss these issues in my “Natural Rightism and the Biogenetic Debate,” in Values and Technology, vol. 37 of Religion and Public Life, ed. Gabriel R. Ricci (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011), 93–105. Ranieri writes: “to compare the Bible with classical philosophy is to compare a tradition that is still very much alive and operative in the world with one that is essentially nonexistent except in university departments. The Bible continues to inspire and inform living traditions in a way ‘philosophy’ does not” (Disturbing Revelation, 231). Strauss may well have agreed with this comment. See note 42. Strauss, “What Is Liberal Education?” in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern, 5. For an elaborate discussion of how a Great Works education is essential to the spiritual health of liberal democracy, see Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Foreword by Saul Bellow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Bloom was one of Strauss’s most famous students. Strauss, “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern, 24.

Catholic Education and the Culture of Life Ryan N.S. Topping

Introduction Catholic colleges and universities throughout most of Canada’s history have enjoyed public patronage both through access to government funding and by the legal protection of their charters.1 The preservation of such institutions was worthy of our national effort, it was argued, because of their capacity to defend and transmit a conception of the common good essential to our enduring political identity. Historically, liberal democracies have depended upon pre-political concepts such as the dignity of the person and the objectivity of the natural law. Such concepts have been nourished and defended in our polity by communities loyal to and conversant with the Christian intellectual tradition. What happens when that tradition is neglected? What goods central to Canadian democracy might disappear from view? Since the mid-twentieth century the number of Catholic institutions has decreased sharply, mostly on account of being absorbed by secular institutions. This chapter traces the recent decline of Catholic higher education in Canada, and then considers, briefly, what this loss might portend for the health of our civic culture. A major contribution of Catholic universities has been the promotion of what Pope John Paul II termed “the culture of life.” With respect to the concept of human dignity, I will argue that the decline of Catholic universities deprives Canadian civic culture of ready access to a tradition of thought capable of promoting a good that is central to a democratic conception of justice.

The History of Catholic Higher Education in Canada Canada’s founding educators drew upon the European liberal arts curricu-

170

Ryan N.S. Topping

lum as this was interpreted through the prism of their various religious traditions, chiefly, Presbyterian, Anglican, and Roman Catholic. Among the strengths that these traditions promoted was the commonsense philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, the close textual study of classical literature, and, in Roman Catholic schools, fidelity to the scholastic doctrine of the natural law. Throughout the nineteenth century, and alongside Protestant schools and colleges, Canada developed an extensive network of Catholic institutions, which the twentieth century inherited.2 Since Fr Laurence Shook’s Catholic Post-Secondary Education in English-Speaking Canada (Toronto 1971) there has been no comparable history of Catholic colleges.3 I will not attempt to make good that deficiency. Nonetheless, to map out the contours of the recent decline of contemporary Catholic education and its potential effects, I offer several observations on Shook’s handling of his subject, and in particular his insight into the coming closures of Catholic institutions in our country. Beginning with his final chapter, “Contemporary Directions,” Shook offers a series of judgments about the future of Catholic education. In the 1970s anything seemed possible for the Church of the future. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) had surely been an epoch-making event. But its meaning was still unclear. Did it inaugurate a new Church? Did it mark a point of no return? For many, in those years between Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae in 1968 (which reaffirmed the Church’s ban on artificial contraception) and Karol Wojtyla’s election in 1978, the answer was: yes. Recalling Hegel’s metaphor “the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk,” at the time of Shook’s history, in Canada at least, the first stars had already appeared in the turn from the Church of Trent to the Church of Vatican II. What strikes the reader forty years on is not, as is so often the case with the predictions of an historian, that Shook was wrong; indeed he saw correctly. What startles is the serenity with which he welcomed the tempest. After noting, among other things, the then-present trends of priests exiting Catholic schools, and laity rushing into secular ones, Shook anticipates the imminent closure of Catholic colleges. As he writes, these “hard facts” do not necessarily point to the total disappearance of Catholic colleges in the country, but first, “to a real and relative curtailment of their operation,” and second, “to the need of transferring their basic functions into the large public university.”4 He predicts that there will remain only “one or two” English Catholic Universities; the colleges that survive will exist as appendages to the body of their larger provincially funded host universities.5 In addition to these, also standing after the storm will be a few

Catholic Education and the Culture of Life

171

research centres,6 presumably like Toronto’s Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies (PIMS), of which Fr Shook was president from 1961–73. What happened in the history after Shook’s History? Catholic institutions did indeed close. In 1968, for example, there were some fifty-seven Catholic colleges or universities outside of Quebec, including junior colleges (offering one- or two-year programs that weren’t equivalent to a university bachelor degree).7 Over the next fifteen years this network virtually collapsed. Thus, between 19708 and 1983 twenty-three institutions closed, bringing the total from forty to seventeen.9 As of today, twenty belong to the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities of Canada (ACCUC).10 By any reckoning, the twenty years after the Council for Catholic education in Canada were lean. The number of institutions has held steady over the last quarter of a century. But bear in mind that the surviving colleges are all small, each serving (roughly) between 100 and 5,000 students, and that these vary in their attachment to their religious identity. When you add to this the increase in Canada’s Catholic population since 1983 (by about 2.5 million),11 the achievement diminishes. From a demographic point of view, parents in Canada hoping for their children to study at a Catholic college will likely send them far from home. Canada’s relative lack of institutions becomes clearer by comparison: in the United States there is one college or university for every 300,000 Catholics; in Canada roughly one for every 600,000.12 In respect of the ethos of these colleges, as elsewhere on the continent, their identity was shaped, foremost, by the religious men and women who established them. The landscape of religious life changed swiftly after the Council. Taking figures from our neighbours to the south we note that in 1965 there were 179,954 religious sisters in America. Five years after Shook’s publication, however, in 1975, there were 135,225 sisters or about 25 per cent fewer than in 1965.13 Currently there are fewer than 50,000, with an average age of around 70 years. Vocations in Canada have suffered similarly. Not needing to rehearse the now familiar story, for those who worked on Catholic campuses through the 1970s to the 1980s the pace of change must have startled. With a glance at one Basilian college in particular, St Thomas More in Saskatoon, in 1936 there were thirtynine students who declared themselves members of the college with Fr Rush, Fr Anglin, and Fr Markle lecturing in French, history and economics, and scholastic philosophy, respectively.14 For the first twenty-five years of the college’s history there was roughly one cleric for every forty students. Following the baby boom, the influx of undergraduates was not matched

172

Ryan N.S. Topping

by more Basilians. By the mid-1960s there were still twelve priests on faculty (in 1966, eleven Basilian and one Redemptorist), but added to these were some thirteen newly appointed lay teachers.15 The gap increased through the 1970s and 1980s. By 1990 there were 1,054 students for nine religious; in 2005 there were 2,661 for three; presently, no Basilians remain.16 St Thomas More is not unique.17 The point in recounting this is simply that Shook, writing in 1970, foresaw much of what was to come, even if he might not have seen how quickly the faces of those serving Catholic colleges would age and in many cases disappear altogether. What is surprising, nevertheless, is how little concern Shook betrays. Having marked the ominous horizon, his concluding chapter leaves the reader with an uncanny word of consolation. On the absorption of Catholic institutions into secular ones he writes: “Catholics need no longer fear that such functions cannot and will not be assumed by the secular universities.”18 For Shook, those functions were three: putting Christ at the centre, teaching theology, and making a home for Christian scholars.19 What is missing from the historian’s account is how and why one institution would voluntarily assume the functions proper to another. In other words, what reasons did he have to believe that secular campuses would pick up the tab left behind by the disappearing Catholic ones? The only evidence cited was that similar assimilation advanced elsewhere. In this, Shook was partly right. We have to remember that at the same moment that the Church opened her windows to the modern world, the modern world was only too happy to crawl in. In politics, in health care, as in education, by 1971 the planks of the welfare state were then being assembled piece by piece. “After all,” Shook continues, “there will be a community of which Christ is the centre if men who love Christ take him there; and Christ can be taken to the public campus as easily as to the Tridentine seminary!”20 The History of Catholic Post-Secondary Education in English-Speaking Canada anticipates other trends of the future. One could, for instance, mention the adulation the author pours over the then-emerging field of religious studies, or derision upon “sectarian theology”;21 but it is clear enough where our historian is heading. Shook’s analysis appears to have depended, as did many at the time, on a determined optimism. In 1971 the first stars at dusk already shone. Hope soared for the future rapprochement between the Church and the world. On this point some have observed the irony that just when sociologists and political philosophers were discovering again the value of ritual, habit, symbol, and place for the formation of distinctive communal identities, many in the Roman Church were simply

Catholic Education and the Culture of Life

173

tossing aside the marks of Catholic identity. (Whatever happened to fish Friday?) In any case, Fr Shook’s expectation was that the secular academy of the present would prove hospitable to the Catholic intelligentsia of the future.

From Scholasticism to Catholic Studies To the rapid loss of Catholic colleges in Canada and the decline of religious, we complete our survey of Catholic higher education by singling out three mid-century developments in the history of the curriculum. The concurrent disappearance of scholasticism, the establishment of departments of religion, and the loss of a core curriculum, each in its own way, has contributed to the present malaise. Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) initiated throughout the Catholic world a renewed advance of scholastic and especially Thomistic philosophy. Thomism had previously enjoyed a privileged status.22 What distinguished the Leonine revival, and was carried forward by Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis,23 was that it self-consciously aimed to achieve a coordinated practical effect. Through a series of reforms, the Church was to equip herself and her young with the educational tools to meet the great heresies of the day, then grouped under the term “Modernism”: in politics this was the liberal exaltation of freedom on the one hand, and the socialist denial of responsibility on the other; in religion this was the Protestant separation of faith from reason; in ethics, the denial of sin; and so forth.24 Leonine scholasticism was as much about the recovery of scholastic philosophy as the defence of Catholic culture. As Fr Terence Fay SJ has pointed out in A History of Canadian Catholics, the early twentieth-century revival of devotions in Canada such as Eucharistic adoration, holy-hours, and the rosary, were fruits of this movement.25 In higher education, its most prestigious edifice in Canada is the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, founded in 1929.26 But the rippling effects of Aeterni Patris were not only felt in Toronto. In Saskatoon, one of the founding acts of the faithful toward the foundation of their dreamt of Catholic college was to bring to the city and to the University of Saskatchewan its first professor of scholastic philosophy; this they did in 1926 in the person of Fr Basil Markle (an amiable, devoted, and by all accounts extremely popular lecturer), priest of the Archdiocese of Toronto and newly graduated with a Roman degree.27 In the field of education at least, what many after the Council wished to displace was the hegemony of scholasticism over Catholic institutions.

174

Ryan N.S. Topping

At St Thomas More, as elsewhere, deference to scholastic methods, divisions, and doctrines has of course been displaced by an eclectic pluralism. At the same time that Catholics lost confidence in scholasticism as a unifying philosophy of education, religious studies was born. In the wake of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), David Strauss (1808–1874), and Rudolf Bultman (1884–1976), among others, sought a truly scientific and objective approach to religion. Here, not revelation but human experience was the object of enquiry; its methods took inspiration from the newly developing social sciences. The consequence of these ideas on institutions took nearly half a century to realize. But by the 1960s and 1970s the first departments of religious studies appeared, rapidly displacing theological faculties throughout the Englishspeaking world. Notably, in the United States, the National Association of Biblical Instructors (est. 1909) reinvented itself in 1964 as the American Academy of Religion (which now boasts over 8,000 members).28 Lancaster developed the first religious studies department in Britain in 1967. The University of Toronto established its undergraduate religious studies department – alongside, it should be noted, the Toronto School of Theology – in 1969.29 Among British, American, and Canadian universities, this more aggressive interpretation of religious studies would arguably appear to have advanced with the best success in Canada. Again to draw a comparison, traditional academic theology has in the United Kingdom – as at Oxbridge in the south and Edinburgh and Aberdeen in the north – maintained a strong tie to the churches. This anchoring of tradition meant that newer approaches to religious study have been introduced gradually and made their home alongside the older curriculum. In America, the sprawling network of independent institutions (there are, for example, about 200 Catholic colleges and universities in the US to date) has made it less easy for a single methodology to dominate. By comparison, Canada has lacked both tradition and money. The consequence of this for the study of religion alongside the liberal arts curriculum is that there now exists less diversity in Canada than elsewhere. Moreover, for Catholic colleges, since many religious studies departments disavow a confessional point of view, they are not usually called upon to carry a college’s parochial identity. The third development, now moving beyond philosophy and theology, concerns the shift within the humanities curriculum more generally. Since Charles Eliot’s reforms of Harvard University, of which he was president (1889–1909), there has been a steady movement away from the older European liberal arts model toward the elective system of course selection.

Catholic Education and the Culture of Life

175

Robert Hutchins’s Great Books movement was the counter-reform instigated during his tenure as president at the University of Chicago (1929–51). But in Catholic colleges, as in the state and provincial schools, defenders of the Great Books approach typically find themselves in splendid isolation – the Don Quixotes of education tilting at windmills. Following trends in the US, throughout the 1960s and 1970s the University of Toronto, for one, saw the creation of a host of interdisciplinary courses, such as, in 1971, women’s studies.30 In Canada and the United States, after the reforms of the 1960s, virtually any semblance of a core of set texts or set classes had been shepherded, with a rough staff, out of the academy. Out were courses on western civilization and Victorian literature, in were courses on Black history and women. Since then, gender studies, African-American studies, then Latino, Hispanic, Native, and Judaic studies, and even Catholic studies have flooded the undergraduate market in an ever-expanding curriculum.31 In short, having lost the epistemic confidence that once supported core curricula, Canadian (and American) universities have welcomed multidisciplinary programs without demanding to know how their individual components might relate to the unity of knowledge. A situation now prevails where special interest groups stake their individual claims upon the humanities the way that the market has long dictated the university’s science curriculum.

Education and the Culture of Life Having sketched a brief history of the decline of Catholic institutions, one can ask: Why does any of this matter? What are the likely effects of the decline of Catholic higher education? What goods central to Canadian democracy might disappear from view? These are large questions to which there are a variety of answers. In his influential 1995 teaching encyclical Evangelium Vitae (Of the Gospel of Life), Saint John Paul II coined the term “culture of life.” He spoke of the “dramatic conflict” between forces for good and evil in our time, a conflict between two conceptions of the dignity of human life. As he defined the terms, in one view human life is merely of instrumental value. Human life is a good, but it is not intrinsically good. John Paul II described the cluster of ideas and institutions that embody this view as belonging to the “culture of death,” a culture that permits practices such as euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion. This he contrasted to the “culture of life.” Whereas the culture of death extends to human freedom power over life and death, “the culture of life” defends its sanctity.32

176

Ryan N.S. Topping

Western democracies have historically championed the dignity of the individual. The connection between Catholic universities and the defence of human dignity I wish to make is as follows. Once the fundamental dignity of the person is disregarded, once, in other words, law privileges the life of the strong over the life of the weak, not only is there a grave injustice; the integrity of the law itself is compromised. The biblical and natural law tradition furnishes cogent arguments in defence of the dignity of the individual. Insofar as Canadians wish to maintain a rights regime that is ordered by a conception of natural justice, loss of contact with the Catholic tradition of moral reasoning is likely to correspond to a flagging capacity to articulate the reasons why human life is sacred. Although the Catholic Church is not the only institution that defends the biblical notion of human dignity, within Canada Catholics comprise the most easily identifiable such community. The biblical notion that Christians inherited may be verified by reason, but it is given definitive expression in revelation. In the language of Genesis, God has created every person in his “image” and “likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Plato long ago recognized how difficult it is to find grounds for equality. To say that two things are equal implies a common unit of measurement. Where can we find one? Between men and women, between individuals like Peter and Mark, stand innumerable inequalities – of intelligence, merit, opportunity, and so forth. In the ancient world, the polis never attempted to enfranchise non-Greeks in any number. Roman citizenship was applied more generously; but the law’s protection was also severely limited. For instance, at the time of Christ, the Roman father, the paterfamilias, retained the right of life and death over not only slaves but also his children. Infanticide was among the many customs that brought the Christians into conflict with the civil society of their time. Prior to the conversion of Constantine, and the subsequent outlawing of the practice in 374 AD, the habit of rescuing exposed children brought the early believers both fame and ignominy. The Greek exclusion of foreigners and the Roman practice of infanticide call to the surface a permanent question. In the face of natural inequalities what justifies equal protection by the law? Is there a measure that can be applied among nations and individuals that might allow us to recognize someone otherwise unknown or unlike ourselves as entitled to care? The debates over immigration in Europe and North America attest to the enduring relevance of our question. To pagan politics Christianity offered a novel solution: human equality rests upon divine paternity. As a consequence, and despite evident inequalities of birth, of power, of educa-

Catholic Education and the Culture of Life

177

tion, the successor nations to the old Roman Empire came gradually to accept that political right could extend to an ever-expanding circle of men. The God-given dignity of the person was of course understood by the Jews. But the Western Christian contribution was to apply the concept more broadly. After the offer of the Gospel to the Gentiles, race was no longer a supreme barrier to participation in the political community. My point is not that Christianity inevitably requires a classless society. It is rather that within the trajectory of the West it came to be recognized that the law must find its own ways of expressing this hitherto unknown theological truth: there is no longer slave or free, Jew or Greek. Race, and any number of inequalities of class or sex, could be set aside among the baptized since St Paul announced, “you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). The example of charity among brothers had repercussions for politics. What Christianity taught the West was that all are created in God’s image; and that, since God’s invitation extends to every person, no one is without dignity.33 Western democracy is predicated upon Christian anthropology. Rights express a dignity guaranteed by the divine image. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be seen as a late modern reaffirmation of this conviction in the aftermath of its violent disregard. States do not confer basic rights; they merely recognize them. We need to be careful not to move too quickly. No one denies that western nations have undergone a long development. Partially on account of the seventeenth-century wars of religion, partially under the influence of the Enlightenment, partially as a response to increased pluralism, we in the West expect a clearer distinction between religion and politics than is tolerated, for example, by Muslim states. And yet this distinction can be exaggerated. The origin of the doctrine of human rights has antecedents in the Greek philosophical tradition; but its contemporary expression is the legacy of the medieval scholastics.34 This contribution to western political practice – equality under God expressed by equal dignity under the law – is everywhere evident throughout our history and embedded within our founding documents. Drawing from recent history, the American civil rights movement is unimaginable without it; Canada’s Bill of Rights and Charter of Rights and Freedoms explicitly evoke it. I wish to point out not merely that democratically ordered justice depends upon a pre-political commitment to the dignity of the person. We can go a step further. Any explicit attack on the dignity of the person hastens the advance of a culture of death, and jeopardizes the very rule of law. A statement to this effect is proposed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

178

Ryan N.S. Topping

“Respect for the human person entails respect for the rights that flow from his dignity as a creature. … They are the basis of the moral legitimacy of every authority: by flouting them, or refusing to recognize them in its positive legislation, a society undermines its own moral legitimacy” (CCC 1930). The assertion here is two-fold: particular rights flow from the dignity of the person de facto; if a legal framework is to retain its legitimacy these rights must also be represented de juro. Let me take up these propositions in turn, and then conclude by linking them with the educational concern with which we began. In what sense do particular rights flow from the dignity of the person? The easiest way to approach this is by taking up a concrete legal question, such as the permissibility of abortion. Abortion serves well because it offers an extreme test-case. The practice both affronts the weakest members of society (the unborn), and deprives them of their greatest good (continued existence). In Canada abortion was in effect decriminalized in 1969 with Trudeau’s “Omnibus Bill.” Later attempts to limit the practice were struck down by the Supreme Court, as in the 1998 case Morgentaler vs The Queen, as unduly limiting the liberty of women.35 At the outset some might wonder why abortion should still occupy our concern. After all, has the question not been settled? And, unlike in some countries, no one in Canada is forced to abort their child. In the face of so many pressing social concerns why not simply concentrate our energies on matters upon which we can hope to find agreement? This is a tempting solution, but shortsighted. Even those who cannot see that abortion is intrinsically disordered have cause to worry about the precedent this practice inserts into our legal tradition. Biologically speaking, there is no question as to whether life in the womb is human. Cats beget kittens; men and women beget sons and daughters. The supposedly relevant difference between parent and child is not of kind but of extension, of size, or perhaps of capacity. But even to speak of capacity is misleading. Genetically, the embryo is in no respect different in its “capacities” from its parents; it is only that some of these powers have not yet been realized. So, whatever reasons a woman might have for wishing not to remain pregnant – and these can be weighty – her liberty is not set against the liberty of a being different in kind. Her liberty is set against another member who differs in size. For the sake of clarity at least, we need to recognize what it is we are accepting once we permit such killing. To say that a mother’s liberty should trump the claims of the infant’s life is to pit the strong against the weak. Once we have allowed this, and we have, we are back again with

Catholic Education and the Culture of Life

179

the ancients. Once more it is parents who wield the power of life and death. In short, to allow abortion is to admit with Thrasymachus that justice truly is “nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.”36 There is a second sense in which legal killing undermines our democratic tradition of law. Lobbyists can sometimes forget this, but every acknowledged right involves someone in a corresponding obligation. So, on public roads, an extension of my right to mobility implies your obligation to obey traffic signals, to welcome me into your store, and possibly to rent me your property. My right to pass through an intersection, however, is not free to be exercised under all conditions. Once I see you crumpled in the middle of the road on top of your bicycle, for instance, your right to life asserts itself against my right to mobility. The law judges that I am no longer free to proceed. In other words, not all rights are equal. In the Charter a series of rights are protected, among them, freedom of mobility, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. None of these can be exercised apart from the right to the protection of life. Quite literally, to undermine the “right to life” in the name of a supposed “right to choice” is to misapprehend the hierarchy of rights that justice requires. To pit your life against my freedom is to attack a primary good in the name of a secondary one. This is a categorical mistake. It is also why legal abortion in Canada undermines the rule of law. And, once the government is free to revoke life, are speech and religion far behind?37 This brings us back to education. I have raised the case of abortion to illustrate how grave are the questions that confront us. Canada’s tradition of enlightened government cannot be taken for granted. It has been the firm conviction of western liberal democracies that laws that contravene natural justice are not laws at all. Once the law undermines human dignity, it ceases to inspire respect. The above moral argument entails an educational implication. If it is accepted that even young life is worthy of our protection, it follows that we need institutions that will perpetuate the knowledge of how to come to their defence in speech. As history amply attests, no legal system survives without people who can defend the law’s fundamental principles. Chief among these, in the West at least, has been respect for human dignity. Since the defence of innocent life is a central feature of the Catholic moral tradition, this is where Catholic institutions can serve civil society and foster the culture of life. This is also where the absence of such institutions will be felt. Are there political goods that we in Canada are in danger of neglecting? I believe there are many. The loss of Catholic institutions, and by

180

Ryan N.S. Topping

extension of an intelligentsia formed by the Catholic moral tradition, is a loss not only for the Catholic Church but also for Canada’s political and civic culture. The rule of law within Canada presupposes the stubborn conviction that human life holds dignity beyond any value the state can confer, or take away. Institutions such as Catholic universities were once a place where such concepts could find cogent defence. If they cannot provide such leadership let us hope that other institutions will fill this void. Notes 1 This chapter incorporates elements of a previous article “Catholic Studies in Canada: History and Prospects” published in CCHA Historical Studies 76 (2010): 101–6. 2 Canada’s constitution (cf. Constitution Act, 1867, Section 93) makes provision for the funding of schools formed by their religious identity; several provinces continue to fund Catholic institutions at the primary, secondary, and tertiary level. On the development of Canada’s curriculum see George S. Tomkins A Common Countenance: Stability and Change in the Canadian Curriculum (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall Canada, Inc., 1985) and P. Emberley and W. Newell’s Bankrupt Education: The Decline of Liberal Education in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 3 Most recently, Terence J. Fay, in his A History of Canadian Catholics (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2002), treats the origin and development of several Catholic post-secondary foundations. Several institutions, such as St Thomas More College (Margaret Sanche, Heartwood: A History of St. Thomas More College and Newman Centre at the University of Saskatchewan (Muenster, SK: St Peter’s Press, 1986)), and St. Francis Xavier (James D. Cameron, For the People: A History of St Francis Xavier University (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996)), have published their own histories. A recent and concise overview of the number and kinds of Catholic colleges and universities in Canada is given by Michael W. Higgins in a redaction paper of four panel presentations delivered by principals of Catholic institutions in Canada at the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCUC) 2007 General Meeting, “The Northern Iteration: Challenges, Successes and Opportunities of Catholic Universities in Canada” Current Issues in Catholic Higher Education 26.1 (Winter 2007): 109–20. 4 Laurence Shook, Catholic Post-Secondary Education in English-Speaking Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 418. 5 Ibid., 420. 6 Ibid. 7 Including Quebec, that number as of 1968 was sixty-three. See E.F. Sheffield, “The Universities of Canada,” Commonwealth Universities Yearbook, 1969, 1031–57, cited in A Commitment to Higher Education in Canada: The Report of a Commission of Inquiry on Forty Catholic Colleges and Universities, February 1970 (Ottawa: National Education Office, 1970), 2. As discussed in the Commission’s report (at pp. 1–2), difficulties with classifying and enumerating post-secondary institutions

Catholic Education and the Culture of Life

8

9

10

11

12

13

14 15 16

17

181

in Canada arise because of the many possible criteria that can be employed. For example, some institutions (e.g., junior colleges such as St Peter’s College, Muenster, SK) only offer one or two years toward a university degree, which then must be completed elsewhere. The 1970 federal document, A Commitment to Higher Education in Canada: The Report of a Commission of Inquiry on Forty Catholic Colleges and Universities, lists a number of closures of colleges between 1967 and 1970 (13). Citing the 1970 federal document A Commitment to Higher Education in Canada, Brian Hogan reports that there were forty Catholic post-secondary institutions in Canada at that time. By 1983, however, this number had decreased to seventeen. See Hogan “‘The Word’ and the University World,” 58–72 (see particularly 66–70) in Spiritual Roots: Historical Essays on the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto at 150 Years of Age, John Duggan, SJ, and Terry Fay, SJ, ed. (Toronto: Our Lady of Lourdes, 1991). As listed in the 2015 Canadian Catholic Church Directory (Montreal: Novalis Publishing, 2015), 44. These numbers do not include two recent foundations, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy, Barry’s Bay, ON, and Catholic Pacific College, Langley, BC, which, as far as I am aware, have not sought membership with ACCUC. The count of Catholic institutions might also be adjusted when you take into account other juridical and institutional features. For example, we might subtract Assumption University, transferred to the University of Windsor in 1962, which does not provide regular teaching nor does it have a permanent teaching staff; alternatively, we might add Laval University which retains some ecclesiastical connection through its faculty of theology. As of the 2001 National Household Survey 38.7 per cent of the population was Roman Catholic (or 12,728,900 out of 32,852,300 persons); in 1981 that figure was 47.3 per cent (or 10,320,024 persons). Based on the current number of Catholics in the United States (25 per cent of 305 million), where there are approximately 200 colleges, and Canada (39 per cent of 33 million), where there are twenty. Currently, there are 49,883. These statistics are reported on the CARA website (the Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate) at the University of Georgetown, http://cara.georgetown.edu, accessed on 16 April 2015. Sanche, Heartwood, 68–9. Ibid., 116. I record here the number of students who voluntarily list themselves as members of St. Thomas More College in proportion to the number of religious administration or full-time faculty: 1936 (39 students/3 religious); 1940 (60/4); 1946 (100/6); 1950 (175/6); 1955 (180/6), 1960 (390/7); 1965 (790/12); 1970 (820/13); 1975 (780/14); 1980 (780/13); 1985 (1161/11); 1990 (1054/9); 1995 (1246/6); 2000 (1467/4); 2005 (2661/3); 2007 (2316/3). Thanks to Dr Margaret Sanche, archivist of St Thomas More College, for providing these figures. The most comprehensive study done on the waning of institutions’ identity is James T. Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids: Wm.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998).

182

18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28

29

30

31

32 33

34

Ryan N.S. Topping

Shook, Catholic Post-Secondary Education, 419. Ibid., 418. Ibid., 419. Ibid. On this, see Romanus Cessario, A Short History of Thomism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005). On the reception and influence of Pascendi see Marvin R. O’Connell’s Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1994), especially at 355–75. See again O’Connell’s chapter in Critics on Trial, 355–75, and Fergus Kerr’s Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neo-scholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism (London: Blackwell, 2007), 1–17. Fay’s preferred terminology is “ultramontane spirituality,” in A History of Canadian Catholics, 93. See here the official biography of Gilson by Fr Shook, Etienne Gilson (Toronto: PIMS, 1984), particularly 210–16; and, for the intellectual significance of PIMS in North America, W. Hankey’s “From Metaphysics to History, from Exodus to Neoplatonism, from Scholasticism to Pluralism: the Fate of Gilsonian Thomism in English-speaking North America,” Dionysius 16 (1998): 157–88. Sanche, Heartwood, 39. Even into the 1990s, philosophy at St Thomas More College was consciously modelled on a scholastic course. See D.G. Hart’s account of the significance of this change of name in A Student’s Guide to Religious Studies (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Institute Books, 2005), 32–6. On this see Donald Wiebe’s chapter “Alive, But Just Barely: Graduate Studies in Religion at the University of Toronto” in The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 206, which argues that Toronto’s historic and continuing connection with Christian theology – particularly through its federated colleges – has hindered the progress of a truly scientific, and academically respectable, program in the study of religion. On this see, for instance, Martin L. Friedland’s chapter “Multidisciplinary Endeavors” in his The University of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 479–98; on women’s studies, 591. Thus, as Anthony Dosen has recently argued, it is within the immediate context of the rise of ethnic studies that “the concept of Catholic Studies was born.” See his “The Development of Catholic Studies Programs in American Catholic Universities,” Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice 12:3 (March 2009): 360–7 at 364. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae (Vatican: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1995), nos. 20– 1, 50. On this see particularly Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and, with Joan O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004). Among the numerous modern studies one could point to John Finnis Natural

Catholic Education and the Culture of Life

183

Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) and Jean Porter Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics (Ottawa, ON: Novalis, 1999). 35 For background see Alpohnose de Valk Morality and Law in Canadian Politics: The Abortion Controversy (Dorval, QC: Palm Publishers, 1974) and Raymond Tatalovich The Politics of Abortion in the United States and Canada: A Comparative Study (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). 36 Plato, Republic, 338c. 37 For a study of this see Ezra Levant, Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009).

Liberal Education and the Democratic Soul: Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville1 Richard Myers

It has always seemed to me that the best way to explain the meaning of “liberal education” is to invoke the Allegory of the Cave from Book VII of Plato’s Republic. Socrates describes this cave as a dark, underground dwelling with a long path leading upward to the light of the outside world. The cave is populated by human beings who have spent their entire lives in chains that restrict their movement and that confine their vision to a large stone wall opposite them. Above and behind these prisoners are other human beings who, by dangling puppets in front of a fire, are able to project shadows on the large stone wall. Never having seen anything but these shadows, the prisoners naturally mistake them for reality; the shadow of a wooden flower is for them a real flower. And if one were to lead them up the path out into the light of the sun, and to show them real flowers, they would at first think that what they were seeing was some kind of illusion. The point of the allegory is to suggest that the quest for wisdom, which is the true aim of liberal education, is rendered tremendously difficult by the fact that human beings are utterly enslaved to certain authoritative opinions. Of necessity we lead our lives on the basis of opinions about what is good, what is noble, what is just, and so on, but those opinions are almost never freely chosen. Our religion, our “society,” our “culture,” our political regime – all of these things create a worldview whose authority over us is virtually absolute, precisely because it is the only one we know. And no matter how open we think we are to other views, no matter how much diversity we believe we experience, we always see everything only from the perspective of our own cave. Two prisoners might discuss in a very open-minded way whether a particular shadow was a horse or a cow, but they would never have any idea that it was neither, that it was merely the shadow of a puppet. If the quest for wisdom is to be fruitful, then, we must somehow weaken

Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville

185

the hold our cave has on us. That is precisely what liberal education is meant to do. Indeed, one might say that at its deepest level, liberal education may be defined as liberation from the cave. Now the best illustration I know of the lesson of the cave is the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America.2 Tocqueville’s objective here is to explain the impact that America’s democratic political regime has had on the way its citizens see the world. He argues with great plausibility that the adoption of the democratic principle of equality leads to an entirely new way of seeing not merely politics, but almost every aspect of life. According to Tocqueville, the democratic political order fosters, among other things, a new understanding of the family, a new way of studying history, a new kind of literature, a new approach to religion, and even a new set of sentiments. This is exactly what Plato meant by the cave. In this chapter, I would like to examine what Tocqueville’s reflections might teach us about the practice of liberal education in the democratic cave. Allan Bloom once wrote that “there is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul.”3 By this he meant that effective education depends on the instructor’s capacity to understand and work with the tastes, interests, and prejudices of those they are teaching. If both Bloom and Tocqueville are right (and for the purposes of this chapter, I will assume they are), then effective liberal education in democratic regimes depends upon our understanding of the special characteristics that are imparted by democracy to the souls of our students. There are many passages in Tocqueville that would be useful in this regard. Because of time constraints, I shall limit myself to a consideration of what I take to be the two main points. The first is that democracy leads students to see liberal education as unprofitable; the second is that democracy leads students to see liberal education as irrelevant. One of the most striking characteristics of the democratic soul, according to Tocqueville, is what we may call its utilitarianism. Tocqueville finds in democratic America a people unusually preoccupied by the pursuit of prosperity. He suggests that the source of this is to be found in the American democratic political regime. In aristocratic regimes, he notes, the economic status of both rich and poor is fixed. This means there is no reason for either group to give much thought to the pursuit of wealth: “In nations where an aristocracy dominates society, the people finally get used to their poverty just as the rich do their opulence. The latter are not preoccupied with physical comfort, enjoying it without trouble; the former do not think about it at all because they despair of getting it and because

186

Richard Myers

they do not know enough about it to want it.”4 In democracy, on the other hand, rigid classes have been abolished so that one’s socio-economic status is in principle no longer fixed. Tocqueville describes the democratic situation as follows: When distinctions of rank are blurred and privileges abolished, when patrimonies are divided up and education and freedom spread, the poor conceive an eager desire to acquire comfort, and the rich think of losing it. A lot of middling fortunes are established. Their owners have enough physical enjoyments to get a taste for them, but not enough to content them. They never win them without effort or indulge in them without anxiety. They are therefore continually engaged in pursuing or striving to retain these precious, incomplete, and fugitive delights.5 The democratic regime thus produces what a sociologist might call “the culture of utility” in which people are preoccupied with the pursuit of material prosperity and thus tend to measure everything in terms of profitability. This can have a devastating impact on liberal education for a number of reasons. In the first place, there will be little room in a culture devoted to utility for those branches of education that appear to provide relatively little financial return on the time, money, and effort invested in them. I once came across an amusing New Yorker cartoon that illustrates the point quite nicely. An earnest-looking young man is having a disagreement with his responsible-looking father, presumably about his educational plans. Evidently the son is arguing in favour of some kind of liberal education and in doing so, has invoked the celebrated Socratic dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The father responds gravely, “Yes, but unfortunately the examined life doesn’t seem to produce much income.” The situation described in this cartoon reflects a harsh reality of our situation. We all know that parents, teachers, and guidance counsellors have a tendency to try to stream the brightest high school students into science rather than arts, so that many of the best prospects for liberal education never get the chance to taste its pleasures. Tocqueville would argue that this is ultimately a consequence of our democratic regime and the culture of utility it fosters. The utilitarian ethic is also evident among those students who do choose a liberal arts education. To illustrate the proper spirit of learning, Tocqueville cites the example of the great inventor Archimedes:

Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville

187

“Archimedes,” Plutarch tells us “was of such a lofty spirit that he never condescended to write any treatise on the way to make all these engines of war. As he held this science of inventing and putting together machines, and all arts, generally speaking, which tended to any useful end in practice to be vile, low and mercenary, he spent his talents and his studious hours in writing only of those things whose beauty and subtlety had in them no admixture of necessity.”6 According to Tocqueville, Archimedes captures perfectly the aristocratic attitude toward learning: learning is to be pursued for its own sake, for its inherent beauty and dignity. In our democratic world, such an attitude is not only rare; students are so imbued with the utilitarian ethic that they find Archimedes positively incomprehensible. Generally, they want to know what they can “do” with a degree in political science (or history or philosophy) and they approach their studies with the same kind of mentality (“Is this going to be on the final exam?”). And even among those few who develop a real interest in the great questions of liberal education, the vast majority do so out of a kind of utilitarianism. They see liberal education as something that will help them make more effective “life choices.” And, of course, it will. But when Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, he did not mean that one should be philosophical in order to make more effective life choices. He meant that the examination of the great questions of life was itself the good life, that the activity of liberal education is good in and of itself. Socrates said in his defence speech that this was a concept few of his judges would understand. I think Tocqueville would say that what was true of those Athenians is doubly true of modern democrats. This is one of the most difficult problems facing those whose task is to attract students to the life of the mind. What can be done about this intellectual utilitarianism? Tocqueville points to a partial solution in a chapter entitled “Why the Study of Greek and Latin Literature is Peculiarly Useful in Democratic Societies.” Here he argues that “it may be good for the literature of one people to study that of another even though it has no bearing on their social and political needs.”7 This is because the literatures of different peoples will have different strengths and weaknesses, which may well be complementary. In the case of democracy, Tocqueville thinks that the study of Greek and Latin literature will provide “the best antidote against the inherent defects” of democratic literature because it is strong precisely where democratic literature is weak,

188

Richard Myers

in its order, its regularity, and its concern with “an ideal beauty.” It seems to me that Tocqueville’s advice about literature might be applied to the problem of utilitarianism. The concern with utility cannot be eradicated, and it would be irresponsible for us to try to do so even if it were possible to succeed. After all, our students are not leisured aristocrats, and they are therefore right to be concerned with making money. But perhaps a strong dose of aristocratic literature, which is filled with sentiments similar to those of Archimedes, would serve to moderate their overwhelmingly utilitarian approach to education. If it could, this would constitute one of the strongest arguments on behalf of the continued teaching of the classics. Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic soul also helps to explain another major difficulty faced by liberal educators – their students’ indifference to the questions raised by liberal education. Liberal education, as I understand it, is intended to make students wiser about the fundamental questions of human existence, questions about subjects like happiness, justice, love, God, and death. The arguments presented by Socrates in Plato’s dialogues make it clear that in a formal sense, human beings should have the greatest interest in such questions. But Socrates had to play the gadfly and constantly badger his fellow citizens precisely because they did not take those questions as seriously as they should have. In Socrates’ case, this was at least to some extent a function of the power of Greek religion, which, by giving authoritative answers to those questions, made thinking about them unnecessary. In today’s world, however, teachers are faced with a different problem. In my experience, today’s students are indifferent to the questions of liberal education for two distinct reasons. On the one hand, they find the pursuit of the great human questions a waste of time because they believe there are no answers to those questions. This is the position of the value relativist, for example, who claims that there is no such thing as an objective definition of happiness. But students will also dismiss the questions of liberal education on the grounds that the problems at issue are basically matters of common sense; everyone knows that happiness is pleasure, and pleasure is whatever makes you feel good. It is not difficult to counter each of these objections if one is confronted by them separately. One can easily point out the problems with simple relativism, and one can easily demonstrate that “common sense” is often misleading. What makes the current situation so difficult is that stu-

Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville

189

dents take both of these positions at the same time, even though each is inconsistent with the other. They believe that everything is relative, and yet they also affirm that everything is just a matter of common sense. This produces a kind of compound skepticism about liberal education that is very difficult to combat because whenever you attack “common sense” the students retreat into relativism, and whenever you attack relativism, they take refuge in “common sense.” In trying to understand why this happens, and what can be done about it, I find it invaluable to think about Tocqueville’s account of the formation of opinion in democratic regimes. In the first chapter of Volume II, “Concerning the Philosophical Approach of the Americans,” Tocqueville suggests that democrats are highly skeptical of intellectual authority. The chief cause of this is their democratic political regime: the regime teaches them to see each other as political equals, and this imperceptibly leads them to see each other as intellectual equals too. Now while one might expect this skepticism of intellectual authority to produce a healthy independence of thought, Tocqueville argues that just the opposite is true. In the next chapter, “Concerning the Principal Sources of Beliefs Among Democratic Peoples,” he claims that the democrats’ refusal to accept the intellectual authority of any particular individual leaves them utterly enslaved to the intellectual authority of public opinion, which is to say, the majority: In times of equality men, being so like each other, have no confidence in others, but this same likeness leads them to place almost unlimited confidence in the judgment of the public. For they think it not unreasonable that, all having the same means of knowledge, truth will be found on the side of the majority. The citizen of a democracy comparing himself with the others feels proud of his equality with each. But when he compares himself with all his fellows and measures himself against this vast entity, he is overwhelmed by a sense of his insignificance and weakness. The same equality which makes him independent of each separate citizen leaves him isolated and defenceless in the face of the majority. So in democracies public opinion has a strange power of which aristocratic nations can form no conception. It uses no persuasion to forward its beliefs, but by some mighty pressure of the mind of all upon the intelligence of each it imposes its ideas and makes them penetrate men’s very souls.8

190

Richard Myers

Tocqueville’s paradoxical conclusion, then, is that while democracy frees us from subjection to the opinions of specific individuals or classes, it creates the most powerful conformity imaginable. The regime that provides the greatest political freedom turns out to be the darkest cave of them all. It seems to me that Tocqueville’s analysis of this paradoxical combination of intellectual independence and intellectual conformity provides the key to understanding our students’ entrenched indifference to the questions of liberal education. On the one hand, their unshakeable faith in the power of common sense can be understood to be the natural result of what Tocqueville called the power of public opinion; for in the final analysis “common sense” is really nothing more than the opinion of the so-called common man. On the other hand, our students’ easy-going relativism can be seen as a manifestation of their egalitarian hostility to intellectual authority. For, setting logic aside, and looking at the matter in psychological terms only, it is a short step from the position that everyone is intellectually equal to the position that everyone’s intellectual views are equal. If our students are easy-going relativists, then, it is in large part because they are lovers of equality. So what is to be done about our students’ indifference to liberal education? If this part of Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic soul is correct, it follows that the only way to combat such indifference is to attack the root of the problem: intellectual egalitarianism. This means, in the first place, that we should be wary of student-centred teaching methodologies that both assume and promote the notion that students are the intellectual equals of each other, of their professors, and of the authors whose works they study. Indeed, if Tocqueville is right, one of the teacher’s fundamental objectives should be to demonstrate the intellectual inequality of those who are not intellectual equals. This means that educators must in a sense go on the attack, politely but aggressively demonstrating to students that they are not as wise as they think they are. That will perhaps sound harsh to our democratic ears, but it is worth noting that for Socrates, the most famous teacher in history, education consisted essentially of showing people that they had no idea what they were talking about. Yet education cannot, and should not, consist merely of refuting people. In attacking intellectual egalitarianism, it is also essential to ensure that students have something to look up to, some models of intellectual greatness to inspire them in their quest for wisdom. For this reason it is imperative that we inculcate in our students a deep respect for those thinkers, writers, and artists whose works reflect a particularly deep under-

Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville

191

standing of the questions that form the core of liberal education. This means that teachers must avoid the trap of historical reductionism, in which the works of great minds are studied merely as the product of certain times or cultures. It also means that we must try to focus our teaching on those works that we believe present genuinely profound treatments of important human questions and that we must concentrate on trying to explain why we find them profound. For in the final analysis, we, the teachers, are always the most influential models. And if we fail to convey any important sense of distinction between high and low, between the shallow and the profound, our students will never overcome their democratic indifference to the ideas and arguments that constitute the core of liberal education. Notes 1 This is a slightly edited version of Myers’s essay that originally appeared in Liberal Studies in the Canadian Context: The Nature, the Need, the Prospects: A Conference sponsored by the Brock University Great Books–Liberal Studies Program, March 4–5, 1994 ed. Erik Liddell (St Catherines, ON: Brock University Liberal Studies Program, 1994). I am grateful for the author’s and the editor’s permission to republish it here. I would also like to thank Connie Livingstone for help with preparation of this manuscript for republication (D.W. Livingstone). 2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969). All citations are drawn from this edition. 3 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 20 4 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, ii, 10. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., II, i, 10. 7 Ibid., II, i, 15. 8 Ibid., II, i, 2.

Democracy in Canada: What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians Luigi Bradizza

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is an important work of political philosophy and central to the liberal education of Americans. Yet its lessons are not limited to Canada’s southern neighbour. Although Canada has a history and founding quite different from that of the United States, the liberal democratic political cultures of both nations have substantially converged in our day in ways that make Tocqueville relevant to both. Indeed, the democratic maladies about which Tocqueville warns have advanced pari passu with progressivism in both North American nations. Today, Canadian political culture exhibits signs of the soft despotism familiar to American readers of Tocqueville. The Canadian state makes comprehensive provisions for the needs and desires of its citizens. It protects and guides them with a dense web of laws and regulations. Meanwhile, some of the important institutions and beliefs that Tocqueville promotes as bulwarks against these baleful developments have eroded. In particular, religion has faded as a force in Canadian private and public life, and civil associations are weak. There are few better ways of recognizing and understanding some of the more damaging problems of contemporary Canadian democratic political culture than by studying Democracy in America. This chapter is intended to prepare the way for such a study by arguing for the applicability of Tocqueville’s analysis to Canada.1 Any attempt to apply Tocqueville’s political insights in Democracy in America to Canada is complicated by the fact that Tocqueville visited Canada and wrote about it – mostly in the form of notebook entries and letters.2 This has led some readers of Tocqueville with an interest in Canada to focus on his writings on Canada in the apparent belief that they have more to tell us about Canada than Democracy in America does.3 Consequently, before we consider applying the lessons of Democracy in America to Canada,

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

193

we must account for the value and the limits of Tocqueville’s observations of Canada.

Tocqueville in Canada Together with his travelling companion Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville visited Canada for two weeks in 1831 in the course of his voyage across America. Curiously, during those two weeks, he bypassed Upper Canada and spent his entire Canadian voyage in Lower Canada.4 He had earlier very briefly visited Sault Ste. Marie, and there met mostly Francophones.5 Some scholars have speculated that Tocqueville did not visit Upper Canada because he was spurning English Canadians as conquerors of the French Canadians.6 But the evidence doesn’t support this view. Instead, it appears that Tocqueville became especially curious about French Canadians, understanding them to have retained the social arrangements and attitudes of pre-revolutionary France. Indeed, Tocqueville might never have visited Canada had not Rev. John Power, the grand vicar of New York, “urged this voyage upon” him and Beaumont.7 Moreover, hostility toward English Canadians would hardly be consistent with Tocqueville’s later decisions to visit England – the nation that defeated the French in Canada – and to marry an Englishwoman. Tocqueville proved himself capable of fair assessments of the English during his stay in the British Isles, despite his knowledge of many of the abuses committed by the English against the Irish.8 All the same, Tocqueville noted with dismay the status of French Canadians as a conquered people,9 and he hoped for their eventual independence.10 His writings on Canada have in recent decades gained the attention of Canadian and French scholars, who, in their examination of Tocqueville’s meaning to Canada, have devoted much effort to issues of Quebec nationalism.11 From a Tocquevillian perspective, such research must remain of secondary importance to a more direct application to both Canada and Quebec of Tocqueville’s theories of democracy. Whether as part of Canada or as a separate nation, a democratic Quebec must contend with many of the same problems to which other democracies are subject. Separation from Canada cannot save a democratic Quebec from the problems of democracy identified by Tocqueville in Democracy in America.

Limits of Tocqueville on Canada Tocqueville’s writings flowing from his trip to Lower Canada suffer from

194

Luigi Bradizza

some limitations that reduce their value to us. He clearly did not see enough of Montreal and Quebec City to form an adequate impression of the political circumstances of Lower Canada. While in Canada, he wrote in his diary that “[h]e who is to stir up the French population and raise it against the English is not yet born.”12 As a number of scholars have noted, it appears fairly clear that he did not know about Louis-Joseph Papineau.13 To be sure, Tocqueville did later write about the Rebellion of 1837.14 In the course of his comments on it, he does perhaps helpfully point out that French Canadians are “less enterprising … than the English race,”15 an insight that might shed some light on the marginalization of French Canadians. Another limitation of Tocqueville’s direct observations of Canada follows from the changed political circumstances in Quebec in the years since his visit. Having been absorbed into the democratic Canadian polity, Quebec must be understood as a democracy observing parliamentary forms largely inherited from England. And so we must alter the way we apply Tocqueville’s evaluation of New France in The Old Regime and the Revolution. In that work, in a note entitled “How it is in Canada that one can best judge the administrative centralization of the Old Regime,” Tocqueville writes about the French in Canada under Louis XIV. The French were in a new land, and in that land the monarchy was free of the restraints from other French institutions under which it operated in France. Consequently, “[t]here nothing prevented the central power from abandoning itself to all its natural inclinations and from making all laws in accordance with the views which inspired it. In Canada, therefore, not even the shadow of municipal or provincial institutions was permitted, no authorized collective power, no individual initiative.” All rule was exercised from Paris. The economy was harmed by “all kinds of petty artificial procedures and little regulatory tyrannies,” including “forced cultivation, … requirements to farm in a certain way,” and other such laws. The government was “dominant, active, regulatory, constraining, wanting to foresee everything, taking everything over, always more familiar with the interests of the governed than they are themselves, constantly active and sterile.” Tocqueville contrasts this with “the English system of decentralization” in the United States. He has a high regard for “[t]he republican element which is the base of English mores. Government, properly speaking, does little in England, and individuals do much.” In the United States, English mores have their fullest expression: the government “is no longer involved in anything, so to speak, and individuals uniting together do everything.”16 This is a striking and damning criticism of pre-revolutionary France.

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

195

It arguably has some direct relevance to an understanding of the mores of nineteenth-century Lower Canada. But it is a long way from the mores of Old France to contemporary Quebec democracy, and if any traces of the old order remain today, they are heavily qualified by political forms adopted (or imposed upon) and accepted by Quebec since then. Indeed, some important elements of democracy are already found in Lower Canada by Tocqueville. Leclercq notes one of Tocqueville’s observations of Lower Canada, that “the democratic spirit of equality is experienced there as it is in the United States.” Leclercq comments: “In Canada Tocqueville finds past and future closely bound up with each other: he finds the legacy of old France engaged in the inexorable process of democratization that animates the entire American continent. In Canada, he sees the French governing themselves according to British constitutional institutions.”17 Tocqueville’s comments on religious life in Lower Canada must also cause us to question the applicability of his observations of Canada to our day. He notes the intense religiosity of French Canadians, and the importance of priests to their civic and political life.18 But changes to the religious life of Quebecers over the past half-century or so have rendered these observations quite out of date. One can, of course, find pious and observant Quebecers today. But the overwhelming reality of religion in modern Quebec has been the secularization of the province and its people from the Quiet Revolution onwards.

Evaluating Tocqueville on Canada In reviewing Tocqueville’s writings on Canada, we must conclude with Leclercq that “colonial Canada is not at the forefront of his research.”19 Gérard Bergeron agrees with this assessment: “In the whole of Tocqueville’s work, this very brief stay in Lower Canada will ultimately end up having a role whose importance is minor but not negligible.”20 Scholars of a more Marxist orientation fault Tocqueville for being a poor observer of Lower Canada on the grounds that he neither spoke enough to ordinary French Canadians nor grasped the scale of their economic and political oppression.21 But Tocqueville did speak with many ordinary people. He also noted the economically dominant position of English Canadians. He objected to French Canadians’ fallen status as a conquered people, and he understood that French Canadian priests were a bulwark against oppression. Bergeron strikes the appropriate tone by taking an intermediate position: “It seems to us that a justifiably critical attitude requires situating oneself

196

Luigi Bradizza

between … two [improper] positions, thereby avoiding any undue slanting of the texts in one direction or the other, either toward adulation or toward disappointment.”22

Tocqueville in Great Britain From a Canadian perspective, Tocqueville’s observations on England might be considered more directly relevant than his observations on America, because Canada evolved its institutions from English ones, and English Canada brought English mores to the New World. But we should not make too much of Canada’s connection with England at the expense of acknowledging Canada’s greater similarity to the United States. Indeed, Tocqueville’s observations on England should make us question the particular usefulness of some of them to Canada. Tocqueville considers the relative openness of the English aristocracy to new entrants to be an important factor distinguishing it from continental regimes.23 But Canada developed into a democracy, not an aristocracy. In this respect, the lessons from England don’t carry over at all; we more closely resemble the United States in our absence of an aristocracy. Tocqueville also identifies an important source of English liberty in the tradition of local government. But this tradition carried over into America, and so the lessons on local government from Democracy in America are also applicable to Canada. There is nothing that is peculiar to both England and Canada, but not to America, that has a political relevance so important that it should cause us to think that Tocqueville’s observations on England might serve Canadians more profitably than his observations on America.

Tocqueville on America’s Origins The most straightforward way of applying Tocqueville’s insights on democracy and equality to Canada would have us viewing Canada as Tocqueville presents America, through the lens provided by Democracy in America. But this approach is complicated by Tocqueville’s understanding of the origins of the United States. Tocqueville believes that a nation’s origins decisively affect its political culture. “People,” he tells us, “always feel [the effect of] their origins. The circumstances that accompanied their birth and served to develop them influence the entire course of the rest of their lives.”24 In the case of the United States, Tocqueville argues that its Puritan origins are highly significant to understanding its commitment to democracy and

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

197

equality in his day: “Puritanism,” he writes, “blended at several points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories.”25 If Tocqueville is correct, then this complicates the view that Canada and the United States, with their significantly different origins, are similarly situated in terms of political culture, and therefore similarly fit for analysis through a study of Democracy in America. But in fact, Tocqueville is wrong to place so much emphasis on the New England Puritans. Thomas G. West makes the case that “Tocqueville misunderstands the American Revolution. He never mentions that in our Founding we Americans understood ourselves to be dedicated to the truth that all men are created equal, and that this dedication, and this truth, are what justified the break with Britain and made us a nation.” West goes on to criticize Tocqueville for his “total silence on the Declaration of Independence,” the key founding document that makes the case for human equality on philosophical grounds. 26 Where “Tocqueville stresses subpolitical causes” in the form of, for example, mores and the fact that “[l]and was easily available,” West would have us look to “the conscious choices made by citizens and statesmen.” West points out that “the political science of the Founders maintains that government forms society. Although habits and beliefs are crucial to the success of decent republicanism, their ultimate cause is politics and law.”27

Canada and the United States: Crucial Similarities If politics and law decisively shape a nation’s political culture, then we might again question whether Canada, with a different politics and law, could be seen as sufficiently similar to the United States for the purposes of a Tocquevillian analysis. Yet for all their many differences in founding politics and legal developments, the Canadian regime today is remarkably similar to that of the United States. Canada’s democracy is, like America’s, a liberal democracy,28 with protections, however imperfect, for individual rights. Like the United States, Canada has a federal governmental structure. Most important for our purposes, both democracies are committed to equality. Canadian democracy finds its primary legal support in the Constitution of Canada. That Constitution explicitly asserts the equality of all Canadians.29 In the case of the United States, since the end of the Civil War, and especially since the end of Jim Crow, America has institutionalized greater equality through its constitutional and legal order.30 But beyond legal protections, Canada’s democratic government is a

198

Luigi Bradizza

long-established institution that is embedded in Canadian political culture. It has very broad and deep national support across a range of political views encompassing parties as varied as the left-wing NDP and the centre-right Conservatives. Canadians’ commitment to equality is also broadly shared, although their understanding of the meaning of the term equality varies. Furthermore, as mentioned, there is no Canadian aristocracy, and the monarchy is but a figurehead. Montesquieu saw that in England, “the republic hides under the form of monarchy.”31 His observation is even more correct if applied to Canada. Canada’s commitment to democracy and equality is paralleled by that of the United States; we see a no less deep-rooted, long-standing, and decisive commitment to democracy and equality (however differently the latter term is understood) among the broad mass of the American people. An institutional and popular commitment to democracy and equality can express itself in very different ways, depending on one’s understanding of the proper limits of democracy and the meaning of equality. And that understanding might be tied to a nation’s founding. Scholars have vigorously contested various understandings of the American founding. In recent decades, the Canadian founding has also come in for scholarly debate. If one were to conclude that the two foundings were very different from each other, then one might also conclude that democracy and equality have very different meanings north and south of the border – at least during the period of time that Canada and the United States have been under the sway of their respective foundings.32 But this potential source of national differences cannot decisively inform our understanding of the contemporary situation, because over the course of the last century, both nations have been pulled away from their respective foundings and have come to similar understandings of democracy and equality in consequence of the spread of progressivism. North and south of the border, this progressivism is committed to a greater equality of outcomes and protection from economic and social stresses arising from unequal talents and property holdings, all secured by means of a rational administrative state. The clear evidence for the rise of progressivism in both nations is the greatly enlarged role for governments at all levels, expressed in the growth of the welfare and regulatory state. This progressive commitment to equality and the means by which it is secured make a Tocquevillian analysis even more applicable to both Canada and the United States today than it was in the past. Yet scholars differ on the question of the similarity in our day of Canadian and American attitudes toward equality. Seymour Martin Lipset

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

199

cites 1990 survey data that show that “[w]hen asked to give priority to freedom or equality of position, Americans were the least likely of the citizens of seventeen developed countries to choose equality.” The American figure of 24 per cent was much lower than Canada’s, at 34 per cent.33 By contrast with Lipset, Edward Grabb and James Curtis argue that there are greater similarities between Canada and the United States. Both nations, they say, are divided into two distinct political cultures. In their view, “these internal divisions involve a distinctively more liberal Quebec within Canada and a demonstrably more conservative southern region of the United States. The remaining two sub-societies, i.e., the northern United States and English Canada, tend to stand in between the other two on this conservative–liberal ‘morality continuum.’”34 They also claim that Lipset is wrong to think that Canadians are less individualistic and more statist and collectivist than Americans.35 The political cultures of Canada and the United States are quite similar – indeed, much more similar than either Lipset or, for that matter, many Canadian nationalists might imagine. In particular, they write that “for many of our measures, English Canadians and northern Americans … share more in common with each other than they do with their fellow citizens from Quebec and the American South.”36 Using a different methodology, Edouard Cloutier comes to conclusions similar to Grabb and Curtis’s. Following Ramsay Cook, he writes that English Canadians would be supporters of Locke in that they regard the individual as the fundamental building-block of social analysis, from which it follows that democracy consists in treating individuals as equal beings and in treating the majority as the basis for the process of collective decision-making. French Canadians moreover are perceived by Cook as adhering to the principle of Rousseau, that the whole of society takes precedence over its components. As a result they believe that, because groups are more important than individuals, they can be given special privileges that go against majority rule.37 Cloutier goes on to argue that Americans and English Canadians have similar notions of equality: both tend to favour equality of opportunity, whereas French Canadians have a greater tendency to favour equal outcomes.38 For our purposes, the differences between scholars such as Lipset, who argue for greater Canadian/American differences, and those such as Grabb and Curtis, who argue for greater similarities, are irrelevant. Also irrelevant

200

Luigi Bradizza

are the differences between Quebec and English Canada. For as the dispute between these scholars makes clear, to the extent that Canada and the United States are thought to be different, Canada is understood to be more committed to big government and greater equality of outcomes. And to the extent to which Quebec differs from English Canada on these two issues, it comes out in favour of bigger government and even greater equality of outcomes than English Canada does. There is no credible claim that either English Canada or Quebec is less committed than America to big government and equality of outcomes, whether one considers America as a whole, or whether one confines oneself to northern America. Indeed, to the extent that Canadians argue that they are more compassionate than Americans, or that they are more committed to universal health care, or welfare, or equality of outcomes, or community as opposed to individualism, they make a Tocquevillian analysis of Canada more relevant because they strengthen the claim that Canadians are committed to (a problematical) equality and an enlarged state. We must also reject the claim that America is decisively different from Canada because of the former’s greater levels of violent crime. Canadians often distinguish themselves from Americans by claiming that their society is better ordered and less violent, yet the facts present a more nuanced picture. While overall statistics make it quite clear that the US murder rate is substantially higher than Canada’s, much of the greater US crime rate can be traced to socioeconomic factors unique to America. As Marc Ouimet writes, “A crime gap may appear between the US and Canada when quick comparisons are made. Detailed analysis shows a more complex situation, however. It does not necessarily follow that two individuals of the same gender and similar age and socio-economic status living in comparable areas of Canada and the US would have different risks of victimization.”39 He concludes that “crime is not univocally more prevalent in the US than in Canada. Large cities aside, it is impossible to say whether Canada or the US North has the bigger crime problem.”40 In short, similarly situated Canadians and Americans suffer from roughly equal risks of violent crime. The various important similarities between Canada and the United States strongly argue for the applicability of Democracy in America to Canada. We might add to this the fact that Tocqueville addressed his work to the French, and not to Americans.41 He intended that the work serve France as it moved, in a process he saw as inexorable, toward democracy.42 But surely Canada more closely resembles the United States than France does. And therefore, if Americans can properly take lessons from Democracy

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

201

in America in spite of it being addressed to the French, so too can Canadians. Indeed, there is broad scholarly acceptance of the applicability of Democracy in America beyond the United States. Jean-Claude Lamberti writes that “Democracy in America is not a mere description of the institutions and manners of the Americans. In some way or another, the work always deals with democracy outside America as well.”43 Scholars have noted that the second Democracy in America (published in 1840) contains few references to America and appears addressed to democracies in general. As Peter Augustine Lawler puts it, “[V]olume 2 often seems barely to be about America at all. Tocqueville describes and accounts for much that is not particularly American but simply democratic or egalitarian.”44

Canada at Risk Applying the lessons of Democracy in America to Canada is, unfortunately, made easier in our day because the nation has begun to exhibit many of the democratic maladies against which Tocqueville warned. Indeed, at least some of the signs and causes of the soft despotism he describes are present today in Canada. In particular, Canada has in recent years seen a decline in religiosity that exposes it to moral confusion, a substantial growth of the welfare state that threatens to smother the independence of many Canadians, and a decline in civil society that threatens people with atomization and an unhealthy individualism. Meanwhile, the Canadian judiciary, while it remains properly insulated from popular passions, too often uses its power to promote a radical egalitarianism at the expense of the liberty of isolated individuals.

Religion From a Tocquevillian perspective, the risks to Canadian political liberties have increased over the last generation in consequence of a significant decline in religious beliefs among Canadians. Data collected in 2009 show that 23.1 per cent of Canadians have no religious affiliation. A further 21.9 per cent had not attended religious services over the previous year.45 From 1985 to 2005, weekly church attendance declined from 30.3 per cent to 21.1 per cent of the population. And there was a correspondingly large increase in those who never attend church, from 21.5 per cent to 32.8 per cent.46 In apparent contradiction to these findings, approximately twothirds of Canadians reported that religion is important to their life.47 We

202

Luigi Bradizza

must wonder, though, whether this sentiment is more aspirational than actual, because the proof of importance would seem to lie in action, that is, in attending services. In any case, it is evident that the political effects of religion are low. A 2010 survey indicated that 58.1 per cent of Canadians report that religion has “no impact” on how they vote. A further 20.8 per cent report that it has “little impact.”48 The level of religiosity is even lower for young Canadians aged 15–29. As reported by Michael Valpy, “Only 22 per cent say religion is very important to them, down from 34 per cent in 2002.”49 Valpy also reports that “[r]eligious scholars see perhaps the majority of today’s young Canadian adults as disappearing down a black hole of spiritual illiteracy from which institutional religion cannot retrieve them.”50 We should treat such predictions cautiously. In any event, a further decline in religiosity is unnecessary to the arguments of those who would join Tocqueville in being concerned about a great problem presented to the irreligious: their inability to reason their way through, and independently come to agreement on, ethical issues.51 A second great problem that comes from a decline in religiosity is, in Tocqueville’s view, the risk of a descent into pantheism. Lawler defines pantheism as “the doctrine that all distinctions human beings perceive are merely apparent or illusory products of the imagination. There is nothing, in truth, that separates inanimate nature, brute, man, and God.”52 Immersed in equality, having lost a sense of human individuality, and unable to accept the possibility of hierarchy, democratic man, in Tocqueville’s analysis, searches for a “single cause” that can explain all and justify viewing all the world, including God, as a “unity.”53 Lawler identifies environmentalism as an expression of contemporary pantheism.54 And indeed, Canada has seen a substantial and visible growth in the environmental movement over the past few decades.55 The rise of Canadian environmentalism overlaps the decline in Canadian religiosity. Clifford Orwin tells us that this increased attention to environmental issues has led some to define Canada in terms of a concern for the environment.56 Orwin correctly points out that Canada is most fundamentally a liberal democracy but all the same, for many Canadians, the attachment to and yearning for equality has led them to obscure formerly clear distinctions between the human and non-human realms. According to Tocqueville, pantheism teaches that “the things material and immaterial, visible and invisible that the world includes are considered as no more than diverse parts of an immense being which alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual change and incessant transformation of all that composes it.”57 On this understanding, men, beasts, and rocks are all equally sacred because

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

203

they are all equal and undistinguished components of the Divine. But that is to say that because all are sacred, then none is sacred. Tocqueville tells us that “all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat against [pantheism].”58 Pantheism is dehumanizing because in its radical, metaphysical egalitarianism, it can neither recognize nor permit human excellence, because no human achievement could possibly elevate the whole cosmos simultaneously. Instead, great men must of necessity distinguish themselves from the inferior world around them and thereby impermissibly violate norms of equality. It is here that Tocqueville points us toward a contradiction in pantheism. Tocqueville sees “haughtiness” in the mind of the pantheist.59 He is haughty in his awareness of his understanding of the cosmos. But the concept of haughtiness is meaningless in the absence of an order of rank that elevates the haughty individual above those who (in this case) have not discerned the equality of all of existence. And yet the pantheist must deny all orders of rank. But there is something still more troubling than this contradiction: because pantheism is the enemy of greatness and hierarchy, it must also be the enemy of liberty, which clears a path for human greatness. Canadian environmentalists might well be comfortable living with the contradiction indicated by Tocqueville. But for other Canadians, one open and disturbing question concerns the degree to which Canada can remain a liberal democracy if liberals are not permitted to prefer liberal, human ends that conflict with or rise above the subhuman, natural world.

Big Government The size and reach of government in Canada must be another concern of readers of Democracy in America. The large growth of governments at all levels over the past few decades60 has to a substantial degree been aimed at producing a greater equality of outcomes for Canadians – a result many Canadians believe distinguishes them from Americans. At this writing, total spending by all levels of government in Canada remains above 40 per cent of GDP. This figure is up from a recent low in the high 30s.61 That recent low, however, was driven by a 1990s downgrade of the federal government’s credit rating. With Canada’s credit rating restored, we can expect little pressure for reduced spending in the years ahead – particularly because the Canadian political consensus clearly supports a large and elaborate state. That public support, however, is small cause for comfort to those

204

Luigi Bradizza

concerned with soft despotism, for it is part of the mechanism that Tocqueville warns against. People might willingly march to an ever more intrusive and comprehensive state. Indeed, Canadians have over many decades consistently supported the growth of a government that seeks to insulate them from chance and to provide them with comprehensive material security. The clear and unmistakable evidence for this public political support lies in the fact that for decades, campaign promises by political parties for more spending have been a path to electoral success. Canadian governments at all levels have responded to this desire among ordinary Canadians with various social services, income support programs, and subsidies. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville writes of the enervating effects and threat to liberty of a large, paternalistic government that is committed to the comprehensive care of atomized, democratic individuals: I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others …. Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. … [I]t seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood …. [I]t provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?62 To be sure, there are limits to the reach of government in Canada. Perhaps the most significant limit on these intrusions lies in their financial sustainability. That is, they are significantly limited by the economic damage they do as reflected in declining government revenues, or increasing business bankruptcies, or unemployment. But these supply-side limits, real as they are, cannot finally reassure us against the concern that millions of Canadians are content to be treated as partial wards of the state. Writing of the French colony in Canada, Tocqueville was sharply critical on the issue of a stifling state paternalism: “If the government claims to be able to do everything for [the colonist], he, for his part, is only too ready to appeal to the government for all of his needs: he does not trust his own efforts,

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

205

he has little taste for independence and it is almost necessary to force him to be free.”63 Many Canadians appear to be returning to this condition, if they are not already in it. Also of concern should be the myriad regulations by which governments at all levels manage elements of the economy and the lives of Canadians. As a result of their number and complexity, many regulations cannot be directly passed into law by elected legislators and are instead left to the bureaucratic arms of government, or the administrative state. The Treasury Board unwittingly alerts us to the undemocratic character of the administrative state: “Regulations are a form of law – they have binding legal effect … Often referred to as ‘delegated,’ ‘secondary,’ or ‘subordinate legislation,’ regulations are made by persons to whom or bodies to which Parliament has delegated authority, such as Cabinet (the Governor in Council), a minister, or an administrative agency.”64 These regulations – these laws – are created by individuals and organizations who have been delegated legislative authority by Parliament and provincial legislatures. Tocqueville warns against an administrative state that covers [society] with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigourous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born … [It] reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.65 This dystopian scene is given a more detailed explanation years later. In an extraordinary letter to his nephew (who was considering the study of administrative law), Tocqueville criticizes centralized administration and administrative law, key aspects of the soft despotism and paralyzing regulations described above, as threats to liberty: Unless one is careful to guard against it, there is no study that is more likely to narrow and distort the spirit than what one calls administrative law. All authors who have written on this matter … have found themselves unable to judge for themselves the value and goodness of the rules they teach, nor have they been able to look beyond the science on which they comment, in order to perceive the

206

Luigi Bradizza more general and greater science that teaches the conditions under which societies prosper … They are all infatuated with their science. And they imagine that there is nothing more perfect in the world … Centralized administration, for which administrative law has as its goal to teach the rules, is assuredly a strongly constructed machine of government; and if one is looking at it only from the point of view of the ease it gives to government to extend its reach everywhere, to conduct and control all men and all affairs, one can even admire it. It is a very well made machine of government, but one that is unfit to produce the security, the liberty, and the public virtues that produce the prosperity and grandeur of empires. It is to this above all that we owe our incessant revolutions, our servile mores, and the impossibility that we have always experienced of founding a moderate and reasonable liberty; it is to this that the [French] provinces owe the kind of intellectual bastardization into which they have fallen and which has made it so that any movement there is extinguished … We must, while learning this law, judge it; we must see, by standing above and outside of it, what it lacks, and in the end regard centralization as a machine that is admirably organized in the interest of those who govern, but is always defective and often detestable from the point of view of the common good.66

As in the case of the welfare state, Canadians find practical limits for the regulatory state in its financial costs. Tocqueville points Canadians beyond this narrow concern, and toward the administrative state’s enervating effects on human ambitions and its harm to human liberty.

Civil Society Tocqueville argues that voluntary associations are important means by which citizens in a democracy can gain the assistance of others that is necessary if they are to attain “their common desires.”67 Grabb and Curtis note that “there is little difference between Canadians and Americans in voluntary-association activity.”68 But “[t]he average number of active memberships [in voluntary organizations] in Canada and the United States is about one per person.”69 This disturbingly low figure is confirmed by a 2008 Statistics Canada survey that shows that almost 63 per cent of Canadians belong to either no organizations or only one.70 These figures are made less baleful by the relative health of mass media. Tocqueville tells us that “[w]hen

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

207

men are no longer bound among themselves in a solid and permanent manner” then “get[ting] many to act in common” is possible “habitually and conveniently only with the aid of a newspaper; only a newspaper can come to deposit the same thought in a thousand minds at the same moment.”71 In our day, we might add television, radio, and the internet to newspapers insofar as we seek this result. But the compensation provided by such mass media for low levels of membership in voluntary organizations can only be partial. The mass media cannot substitute for a range of civic groupings that are necessary to supplement the weaknesses of individual Canadians. In consequence, Canadians are at risk of having their needs and desires unmet, or met perhaps quite imperfectly and perhaps quite paternalistically, by an enlarged state threatening to their liberty.72

The Judiciary Counter-majoritarian institutions are intended to mitigate the risk to Canadians of soft despotism, but in fact they often amplify the core Canadian value of equality, and thus function to reduce those remaining (aristocratic?) impulses that work in favour of hierarchical distinctions. Particularly disturbing examples of egalitarian counter-majoritarian institutions are the various human rights commissions,73 which protect minorities from the expression of attitudes deemed to be in conflict with human equality. Ezra Levant has detailed many of the human rights abuses of these human rights commissions.74 Among the violations of individual rights and liberties he recounts are: the legal proceedings brought against him in consequence of his republication of the Danish cartoons satirizing Mohammed;75 the legal proceedings brought against Maclean’s magazine for allegedly insulting Muslims with its publication of excerpts of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone;76 the legal proceedings, financial penalty, muzzling, and coerced published apology levied against Rev. Stephen Boissoin for a letter to the editor of the Red Deer Advocate (which the paper published in June 2002) arguing against homosexuality;77 and the legal proceedings (lasting four years) and financial penalty levied against comedian Guy Earle for a lesbian joke he told at a pub’s comedy night.78 To be clear, the purpose here is not, of course, to defend the truth or appropriateness of any of the speech or publications just described.79 Rather, it is to promote reflection on these various violations of individual rights and to ask, How did these rights violations come about? The complainants in all these cases have in common the perception that they are

208

Luigi Bradizza

in a position of unequal power with respect to the broader population.80 In Levant’s telling, as originally conceived, “human rights commissions … were supposed to be an equalizer to help the poor and powerless stand up to the rich and powerful.81 But over time, the mission of the various human rights commissions evolved, and they came to compensate for inequality by enforcing the equal treatment of Canadians by each other, even at the cost of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and principles of fundamental justice.82 Tocqueville argues that America’s independent judiciary is an important bulwark against the persecution of individuals by oppressive majorities. Ironically, the Canadian persecutions here described were carried out by the Canadian judiciary itself. Tocqueville cautions us to observe the forms of justice and to retain our loyalty to individual rights.83 Here too, the human rights commissions have failed, because they operate in violation of long-standing, traditional, constitutional, legal norms designed to secure protections for individual rights against state oppression.84 And Tocqueville argues for the great importance of freedom of the press to political liberty.85 It should be shocking to Canadians that Boissoin, Levant, and Maclean’s were persecuted for political opinions they expressed in print. These persecutions reveal a threat to Canadian liberty from an extreme egalitarianism.86

Conclusion It is the task of liberal education to liberate the individual from the prejudices under which they have been raised, so as to prepare them for life as a free citizen in a free country. In Canada, two related ideas impede liberal education. First, under the influence of historicist progressivism, Canadians are inclined to an overly optimistic view of the prospects for Canadian liberty. Tocqueville believed that democracy was inevitable; he did not at all believe that liberty was inevitable. The political and social dysfunctions Canadians now suffer from were not present, or were only present in more attenuated form, in the past. In many respects, the prospects for Canadian liberty have darkened. Tocqueville can help disabuse Canadians of their belief in – their prejudice in favour of – an allegedly inevitable progress by showing them just how far they have regressed in recent decades. Second, liberal education is made more difficult in Canada because many Canadians (and, for that matter, a good number of Americans) labour under the misconception that Canada and the US are significantly different from each other. In our day, for students of Tocqueville, they are not.

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

209

These two prejudices reinforce each other. Canadian progressivism becomes a vehicle with which some Canadians seek to isolate and distance Canada from alleged American shortcomings. It is thought that Canadians should be more progressive so that they can be more unlike America, and more unlike America so that they can be more progressive. Democracy in America can help free Canadians from these two prejudices. The routine study of Tocqueville’s great work can help advance the liberal education of Canadians, and ultimately help secure Canadian political liberty, on which the whole of Canadian liberal education is currently precariously perched. Notes 1 Some serious problems in contemporary Canadian education are given a Tocquevillian analysis by Richard Myers in his contribution to the present volume. 2 Most of Tocqueville’s writings on Canada have been collected and published in Alexis de Tocqueville, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, ed. Jacques Vallée (Montréal: Les Éditions du Jour, 1973). 3 This is particularly true of Jean-Michel Leclercq, Gérard Bergeron, and Stéphane Dion. 4 See Jean-Michel Leclercq, “Les études canadiennes d’Alexis de Tocqueville” (Lille, Mémoire pour le diplôme d’études supérieures de sciences politiques, 1965; Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2007), 82, http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1522/ 24950437. 5 Alexis de Tocqueville, Letters from America, trans. and ed. Frederick Brown (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 153–4, 161. 6 André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. Lydia Davis and Robert Hemenway (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 139. See also Jean-Michel Leclercq, “Alexis de Tocqueville au Canada (from 24 August to 2 September 1831),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 22, no. 3 (1968): 360. 7 Tocqueville, Letters from America, 76; see also 25. 8 Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, trans. George Lawrence and K.P. Mayer, ed. J.P. Mayer (London: Faber and Faber, 1958; reprint: New York, Arno Press, 1979), 59–62, 66–74; cf. 123–4. 9 In his notebook, Tocqueville wrote: “But it is easy to see that the French are the conquered people. The well-to-do belong for the most part to the English race. Even though French is the language almost universally spoken, the majority of the newspapers, the posters, and even the signs of French shopkeepers, are in English. Commercial enterprises are almost all in their hands; they are truly the governing class in Canada.” 25 August 1831, in trans. George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 [1938]), 318. See also his entries of 27 August 1831 in Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, 90–1; and 25 November 1831 in ibid., 112–13. After a visit to a court proceeding in Quebec City, he wrote, “Fundamentally, the impression produced was sad, however. I have never been more convinced than on leaving that place that the greatest and most irretrievable misfortune for a people was to be conquered.”

210

Luigi Bradizza

27 August 1831 in Pierson, Tocqueville in America, 325–6. 10 “I still have hope that the French, despite the conquest, will succeed one day in forming a robust empire for themselves in the New World.” Tocqueville, 25 August 1831 in Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, 89; my trans. (I am grateful to Derek Morrow for his help with my translations. Any errors remain my responsibility.) See also Tocqueville’s entry of 29 August 1831 in ibid., 100–3. And there is this noteworthy observation on and prediction about Lower Canada by Beaumont: “The English government is mild, not the least tyrannical; its wrong was its original conquest. The conquered will remember their defeat long after the conqueror no longer remembers his victory.” Beaumont to his father, 5 September 1831 in Tocqueville, Letters from America, 170. 11 Leclercq, “Les études,” 86 ff; Fernand Ouellet, review of Tocqueville au BasCanada, by Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Jacques Vallée, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 28, no. 1 (1974): 129–32; Stéphane Dion, “La pensée de Tocqueville: l’épreuve du Canada français,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 41, no. 4 (1988): 537–52; Stéphane Dion, “Tocqueville, le Canada français et la question nationale,” Revue française de science politique 40, no. 4 (1990): 501–20; Stéphane Dion, “Le nationalisme dans la convergence culturelle: Le Québec contemporain et le paradoxe de Tocqueville,” in Raymond Hudon and Réjean Pelletier, eds, L’engagement intellectuel: Mélanges en l’honneur de Léon Dion (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1991); Stéphane Dion, “La conciliation du libéralisme et du nationalisme chez Tocqueville,” La Revue Tocqueville / The Tocqueville Review 16, no. 1 (1995): 219–27. Pierre Trudeau is an exception; he cites Tocqueville in support of Canadian federalism. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1968), xxii–iii. 12 Pierson, Tocqueville in America, 322; Pierson trans. 13 Ibid., 323; Armond Yon, Le Canada français vu de France (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1975), 14; Ouellet, review of Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, 132. 14 Edgar McInnis, “A Letter from Alexis de Tocqueville on the Canadian Rebellion of 1837,” Canadian Historical Review 19, no. 4 (1938): 394–97. 15 Ibid., 396; my trans. 16 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. Alan S. Kahan, ed. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1:280–1n20. 17 Leclercq, “Les études,” 16, and quoting Tocqueville; my trans. 18 See Tocqueville, 24 August 1831, Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, 86–8; Tocqueville, 2 September 1831 in ibid., 105–6; Tocqueville to Abbé Lesueur, 7 September 1831 in ibid., 106–9; Tocqueville to Ernest de Chabrol, 16 January 1832, in Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Eduardo Nola, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), 303–4 n(f), http://files.libertyfund.org/files/ 2286/Tocqueville_ 1532-02_EN_EBk_v6.0.pdf. See also: Yon, Canada français, 14; Simon Langlois, “Alexis de Tocqueville: un sociologue au Bas-Canada,” La revue Tocqueville / The Tocqueville Review 27, no. 2 (2006; Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2007), 20–2, http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1522/030045879. 19 Leclercq, “Les études,” 59; my trans. 20 Gérard Bergeron, Quand Tocqueville et Siegfried nous observaient … (Quebec: Les

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28

29

30

31

32

33 34

211

Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1990), 175; my trans. See also 81. Langlois claims that “[a]nalysis of the Canadian question occupies a minor place in the work of Tocqueville.” Langlois, “Alexis de Tocqueville,” 9; my trans. Ouellet, review of Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, 130–1. Bergeron, Quand Tocqueville, 60; my trans. Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, 59–61. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1835, 1840]), I.1.2, 28; Mansfield and Winthrop’s interpolation. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Democracy in America are taken from this edition. Ibid., I.1.2, 32; see also I.2.9, 266–67, and II.1.19, 468. Thomas G. West, “Misunderstanding the American Founding,” in Interpreting Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” ed. Ken Masugi (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 157. Ibid., 158–9. Clifford Orwin, “Canadian Values Boil Down to Liberal Democracy,” Globe and Mail, 9 May 2009, A19, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/canadianvalues-boil-down-to-liberal-democracy/article788651/. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, s. 15, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), 1982, c 11. Subsection 1 asserts the equality of all Canadians, and subsection 2 qualifies that equality. It is arguable that America’s abandonment of natural rights over the course of the Progressive Era has had the effect of producing a constitutional order dedicated to a greater equality of outcome at the expense of equal natural rights. On a natural rights understanding, the political and economic equality of all races was advanced by the Civil War amendments and harmed by the Progressive Era reforms. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1748]), bk. 5, ch. 19, 70. Janet Ajzenstat argues that the American and Canadian foundings have significant constitutional similarities grounded in similar political ideas. See Janet Ajzenstat, “Comment: The Separation of Powers in 1867,” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 20, no. 1 (March 1987): 117–20. See also Ajzenstat, “Modern Mixed Government: A Liberal Defense of Inequality,” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 18, no. 1 (March 1985): 119–34; and her contribution to the present volume. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 101; see also 145. Edward Grabb and James Curtis, Regions Apart: The Four Societies of Canada and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 165. They go on to argue that northern Americans do have some conservative tendencies, while some aspects of English Canadians are liberal. Roger Gibbins and Neil Nevitte come to roughly similar conclusions. Their study reveals Quebecers as more liberal than English Canadians. They find that the Right in English Canada holds views similar to those of the Right in America, while the English Canadian Left is not quite as left-wing as the American Left. Gibbins and Nevitte, “Canadian Political

212

35 36

37

38

39

40 41 42

43 44

Luigi Bradizza

Ideology: A Comparative Analysis,” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 18, no. 3 (September 1985): 577–98. Another analysis also finds significant ideological similarities between Canada and the United States. See Ronald F. Inglehart, Neil Nevitte, and Miguel Basañez, The North American Trajectory: Cultural, Economic, and Political Ties among the United States, Canada, and Mexico (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996), esp. 11–23, 47–81. Grabb and Curtis, Regions Apart, 192. Ibid., 257. Tocqueville’s views are in broad agreement with those of Grabb and Curtis. His references to Canada in Democracy in America are few and scattered. But he does note that English Canadians commercially dominate French Canadians and threaten to marginalize them. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I.2.10, 319n19. He goes on identify English Canadians very closely with Americans: “This population [i.e. of English Canada] is identical to that of the United States. I am therefore right to say that the English race does not halt at the limits of the Union” (ibid., 392). These great similarities are reflected in greatly similar behaviour: English Canadians, “who obey a king, increase in number and extend almost as quickly as the English of the United States, who live under a republican government” (ibid., 393). He anticipates that the spread of ideas, a task made easier in the modern world, will help produce a convergence in culture and thought in all of English-speaking North America (ibid., 394–5). See also Dion, “Tocqueville, le Canada français,” 505–6. Edouard Cloutier, “Les conceptions américaine, canadienne-anglaise et canadienne-française de l’idée d’égalité,” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 9, no. 4 (December 1976): 583–4; my translation Ibid., 586–7. Other scholars have also argued for Lockean elements in Canada’s political origins. See Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, “Liberal Republicanism: The Revisionist Picture of Canada’s Founding,” in Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory, or Republican?, Ajzenstat and Smith, eds. (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995). See also: Janet Ajzenstat, The Once and Future Canadian Democracy: An Essay in Political Thought (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); Janet Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); and Ajzenstat’s contribution to the present volume. Marc Ouimet, “Crime in Canada and the United States: A Comparative Analysis,” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 36, no. 3 (August, 1999): 394; see also 391. Ibid., 405. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Intro., 3–8. See Seymour Drescher, “Tocqueville’s Comparative Perspectives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, ed. Cheryl B. Welch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 25. Jean-Claude Lamberti, “Two Ways of Conceiving the Republic,” in Interpreting Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” 26. Peter Augustine Lawler, The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 33. Lamberti agrees with this view. See Lamberti, “Two Ways,” 26.

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

213

45 Michael Valpy and Joe Friesen, “The State of Religion in Canada Today,” Globe and Mail, 11 December 2010, A16. 46 Colin Lindsay, “Canadians Attend Weekly Religious Services less than 20 Years Ago,” Matter of Fact 3 (June 2008): 2, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-630-x/ 2008001/article/10650-eng.pdf. 47 Valpy and Friesen, “State of Religion.” 48 Ibid. 49 Michael Valpy, “Young Increasingly Shun Religious Institutions,” Globe and Mail, 15 December 2010, A4, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/youngincreasingly-shun-religious-institutions/article1837678/. 50 Ibid. 51 See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.1.2, esp. 407–8; see also II.1.1, 406–7. 52 Lawler, Restless Mind, 35; emphasis his. See also Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. and Delba Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s New Political Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, 85. 53 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.1.7, 426. 54 Lawler, Restless Mind, 49. 55 For example, Greenpeace was founded in 1971 and now has 89,000 Canadian members. See “Greenpeace Canada: FAQ: Organization: How many members does Greenpeace have?,” http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/About-us/FAQ/. As for the broader Canadian population, according to Statistics Canada, “[a]bout 45% of Canadian households had very environmentally active lifestyles in 2006 … Another 45% were moderately active.” See “Study: Participation in Environmentally Active Lifestyles,” The Daily (9 December 2008), http://www. statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/081209/dq081209c-eng.htm. Also see Serge Legault, “Environmentally friendly behaviours of Canadian households and the impact on residential energy consumption,” Envirostats 6, no. 1 (Spring 2012), http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2012001/part-partie4-eng.htm. Legault writes: “In the past decade, Canadian households have increasingly engaged in activities that could be considered ‘environmentally friendly.’” 56 Orwin, “Canadian values.” 57 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.1.7, 426. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Jean Soucy and Marion G. Wrobel, Fiscal Policy in Canada: The Changing Role of the Federal and Provincial Governments (Ottawa: Parliamentary Research Branch/Library of Parliament, 1991; revised 2000), http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/ CIR/912-e.htm. Within this document, see “Figure 3: Total Government Expenditures.” 61 OECD, “OECD Economic Outlook,” no. 2 (November 2011), 247, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1787/eco_outlook-v2011-2-en. 62 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.4.6, 663. Canadians might be more susceptible than Americans to government paternalism. We can make out something of this risk by considering the dark side of Canadian claims of greater order and law-abidingness. In his discussion of metric conversion in Canada and the United States, Lipset notes that Canada converted to the new system, whereas Americans

214

63

64

65 66

67 68 69 70

71 72 73

Luigi Bradizza

did not. He accounts for the difference by contrasting “[t]he American disdain of authority” with Canada’s “Tory-monarchical history and structures [which] have made for much greater respect for and reliance on the state.” In consequence, Canadians “conformed to the decision of their leaders.” Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 21. Grabb and Curtis dispute this view, and claim that “Canadians are actually less trusting, less accepting, and less deferential than Americans toward their government leaders and institutions.” Grabb and Curtis, Regions Apart, 233. While they note Lipset’s overall claims here (ibid., 24), they do not grapple with the telling example of metric conversion. We might add to this the examples of the rapid acceptance in Canada of the one dollar and two dollar coins, while in the United States, two attempts at a widespread adoption of a dollar coin have both failed. Tocqueville, “Quelques idées sur les raisons qui s’opposent à ce que les Français aient de bonnes colonies [1833],” in Tocqueville au Bas-Canada, 122; my trans. See also Leclercq, “Les études,” 40–1; and Dion, “Tocqueville, le Canada français,” 506–7. Dion notes the contrast with the United States. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, “Cabinet Directive on Regulatory Management” (1 October 2012), http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/rtrap-parfa/cdrm-dcgr/ cdrm-dcgr01-eng.asp#cha2. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.4.6, 663. Tocqueville to his nephew Hubert, 15 February 1854, in Alexis de Tocqueville, Œuvres complètes, eds André Jardin and Jean-Louis Benoît (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 14:293–4; emphasis his; my trans. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.2.5, 490; see also 489. Grabb and Curtis, Regions Apart, 241. Ibid., 240. Catherine Allan, 2008 General Social Survey: Selected Tables on Social Engagement (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2009), 9, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-640-x/89640-x2009001-eng.pdf. Cf. Grant Schellenberg, 2003 General Social Survey on Social Engagement, Cycle 17: An Overview of Findings (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2004), 36, http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/bsolc/olc-cel/olc-cel?catno=89-598XIE&lang =eng. The grim American situation is confirmed in such works as: Robert D. Putman, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.2.6, 493. Ibid., II.2.5, 491–2. The Canadian Human Rights Commission can refer cases to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) for further compulsory legal action. The CHRT tells us that it “functions like a court.” Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, “Jurisdiction,” (Ottawa, CHRT, 2007), http://chrt-tcdp.gc.ca/NS/about-apropos/ jurisdiction-competence-eng.asp. The Alberta Human Rights Commission can refer cases to human rights tribunals, which “are quasi-judicial administrative tribunals.” Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, “The Tribunal Process” (2012), http://www.albertahumanrights.ab.ca/complaints/tribunal_process.asp. In B.C., the provincial human rights tribunal describes itself this way: “The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal is an independent, quasi-judicial body created by the B.C.

What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians

74 75 76 77 78 79

80

81 82 83 84 85 86

215

Human Rights Code. The Tribunal is responsible for accepting, screening, mediating and adjudicating human rights complaints. The Tribunal offers the parties to a complaint the opportunity to try to resolve the complaint through mediation. If the parties don’t resolve the complaint, the Tribunal holds a hearing.” “B.C. Human Rights Tribunal” (2011), http://www.bchrt.gov.bc.ca/. In Ontario, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario has a legal mandate similar to that of the BC Human Rights Tribunal. The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, “FAQ” (2010), http://www.hrto.ca/hrto/?q=en/node/18. Ezra Levant, Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009). Ibid., ch. 7. Ibid., 24–8. See Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006). Levant, Shakedown, 83–8. The letter is reprinted in Boissoin v. Lund, 2009 ABQB 592 (CanLII). Levant, Shakedown, 88–92. See also: Neal Hall, “Comedian Fined $15,000 Seeks Help from B.C. Supreme Court,” Vancouver Sun, 25 June 2011, A2. Indeed, not all of the respondents described are prepared to defend the content of their speech. In 2010, Guy Earle colourfully offered that he “didn’t think being an [***]hole was illegal in this country.” Margaret Wente, “A Bad Night at Zesty’s and Other Tales of the Rights Tribunal,” Globe and Mail, 3 April 2010, A19, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/a-bad-night-at-zestys-andother-tales-of-the-rights-tribunal/article1520928/. For a more extensive discussion of the contemporary Canadian judiciary and its use (or misuse) of the doctrine of equality, see Thomas M.J. Bateman’s contribution to the present volume. Levant, Shakedown, 5. Ibid., 19, 74–78, 82–3, 92–3. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.4.7, 668–70. Levant, Shakedown, ch. 2. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I.2.3, 172–4. Section 13 of the Human Rights Act, the “hate speech” provision, has since been repealed by Parliament. But Canadians can still be prosecuted for “hate speech” in more traditional courts.

Ties of Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World Leah Bradshaw

What does it mean to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century in a western liberal democracy, and, more specifically, in Canada? We in Canada live in a rights-based state with a parliamentary government, a constitutional charter, and a federal structure. The United States is our most significant trading partner, and the success of our economy is closely bound up with that of our southern neighbour. We admit more immigrants, relative to our population, than any other country in the world. We are known around the world for our multicultural accommodations, and for this we have often been called the first postmodern nation, a polyglot of identities. Yet none of these characterizations of what it is like to be a Canadian in the twenty-first century really captures the core of citizenship. Citizenship has a specific legacy in the western tradition, dating back to the democracies of ancient Greece, in its association with friendship. My goal here is to outline the parameters of the classical conception of citizenship as a kind of friendship, argue for the enduring importance of this conception, and contrast it with two prevailing notions of citizenship in the current climate, one grounded in rights, the other in identity. I shall try to make a case for why the original conception of citizenship as friendship is relevant for us.

Aristotle and the Western Origins of Citizenship Aristotle was writing at the demise of the Athenian experiment in democracy, the first experiment, and one only briefly lived in the history of the West. Aristotle defended the polis, the self-contained and self-governing Greek city-state against the encroaching tide of imperialism and selfdestructive war. One philosopher, of course, does not rescue a civilization, and shortly after Aristotle’s writing, the Greek experiment in democracy

Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World

217

imploded, not to surface again in a different guise until the late modern period in Europe. There are a number of things worth noting in Aristotle’s political thought. Political rule (polis rule) is different from all other forms of rule (despotic, paternal) because it presupposes a distinction between the private and public reams of activity. What goes on in the so-called private realm is reproduction, family matters, household management, acquisition of money and things, and thinking. All of these engagements are “natural” to human beings, and no matter what sort of community we look at, we will find these preoccupations. Any one of these activities can become swollen to the point where it dominates the political agenda. So there have always been communities that are led by tribal leaders based on kinship ties, or led by those who have a monopoly on wealth, and even by those who believe that they have an idea – a “philosophy,” a “calling” – that ought to be the singular principle of governance. In contrast to all these phenomena, Aristotle holds out the beacon of citizenship, defined specifically as the capacity to rule and be ruled. Citizenship requires moving out of one’s private considerations into a sphere shared with other citizens, and the fluidity to move back into the private domain. The public realm equalizes people of varying private identities and levels of wealth and status, and so citizenship is possible only in some variant of democracy. “Political rule,” Aristotle says, is the rule “over free and equal persons.”1 Citizenship requires the effort to move into a sphere of shared concerns. This is the definition of politics, not just one definition among many. Citizenship is not possible without the articulation of a common life. A city is said to be in concord when “the [citizens] agree about what is advantageous, make the same decisions, and act on their common resolution.”2 What binds people together is not merely a shared belief, because, Aristotle notes, strangers and cosmopolitans can hold the same beliefs. People, for example, can hold a revealed religion, across different cultures, and different states. Citizens require “like-mindedness” specifically tied to their common political commitment. Without this sense of concord, Aristotle cautions, the individuals who live in a community are likely to become selfinterested, behaving like an “isolated piece in a game of chess,” and thereby always looking to make war with each other.3 There are many kinds of justice, and Aristotle enumerates them in his Politics, and any governing body has to take account of them: they include distributive justice (making sure that people get their fair share), and retributive justice (making sure than criminal acts of aggression do not go unpunished), but political justice is

218

Leah Bradshaw

attentive to the common project of a shared life. If we do not grasp this fundamental insight about politics, the citizenry will collapse. Here is a remarkable passage from Aristotle’s Politics: Even if [people] joined together in this way [by contract], but each nevertheless treated his household as a city, and each other as if they were a defensive alliance merely for assistance against those committing injustice, it would not by this fact be held a city by those studying the matter precisely … if, that is, they participated in a similar way when joined together, as when they had separated. It is evident therefore that the city is not a partnership in a location [merely] for the sake of not committing injustice against each other and for transacting business.4 This paragraph is remarkable because Aristotle singles out two things that politics is not, but which in fact I believe are the very things that many contemporary Canadians hold are the primary benefits of citizenship. Citizenship in a state protects the individual and the household and possessions against encroachment by others, and it guarantees the peace and security required for the transaction of commerce. But let me repeat here what Aristotle warns: once people regard citizenship exclusively in this light, the polis is on the way down.5 What sustains a political community is friendship, and Aristotle claims that although citizens can never be intimate friends, they ought to understand their common bond in reference to the ties of friendship. He goes so far as to claim that friendship in “cities” may be a more important consideration for legislators than justice.6 Who is a friend? A friend is someone for whom one cares as one cares for oneself. True friends, according to Aristotle, have no need for justice between them because their bond transcends the legalistic terms of justice.7 They have affection for one another. One does not feel the same way toward one’s friend, or one’s fellow citizen, as one does toward a stranger. And one does not build a polis, or the relations of trust that “ruling and being ruled” require, without a commitment on the part of citizens that they will shield and nurture one another. Although citizens cannot be friends in the fullest sense, Aristotle sees the ties of citizenship as allied with those of friendship in some way, because there is a bond among citizens that is more than merely a contractual arrangement grounded in self-interest. John von Heyking fleshes out beautifully the connections in Aristotle among citizenship, friendship, and the

Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World

219

commonly shared public sphere that is necessary for their flourishing. As human beings, Heyking says, “in seeking to know, we also seek to be known.”8 “Our incompleteness prevents us from fully understanding ourselves because we only see ourselves from the inside, as it were, and friends enable us to see ourselves from the outside.”9 Heyking defines the Aristotelian idea of friendship/citizenship: “Friendship is the expression of the human intellect whose nature is to identify with the known.”10 Here are the good things from Aristotle, and the things that I think are absolutely essential to understanding citizenship. Citizens are equals, and they are made equal by their participation in the polis, that is, the laws and institutions that circumscribe the community in which they live. They are not subjects of rule; they are capable of both ruling and being ruled. Their purpose as citizens is to uphold a common way of life that transcends, although it includes, their many private pursuits. And here is the troubling part. None of this is possible without the underscoring commitment to friendship, the moral underpinning of citizenship. One must look in part upon one’s fellow citizens as one’s friends, and that means that one prefers them to others, and that one has a commitment to one’s fellow citizens that one would not extend to strangers. This is disturbing to many because we live in a globalized world in which many speak of our obligations to humanity as a whole. Is Aristotle’s conception of citizenship outdated in such a world? Does it lead to xenophobia, fear of others, exclusion, chauvinism? Aristotle’s citizenship is countered in the modern West by two principal currents: the universal rights doctrines handed down from the Enlightenment, and the reaction against this universalism by “identity politics” on the part of groups who want to assert their particular identities against what they perceive as the imperialism of universal rights.

Rights and Identity Politics The advancement of human rights is arguably the most powerful moral discourse in the West, and there are varying justifications for this, both in the English tradition (beginning in the seventeenth century with an emphasis on natural rights and the idea of government as a contract among people anxious to protect these natural rights), and in the cosmopolitan philosophy of Immanuel Kant (eighteenth-century German philosopher). The idea that Canada is merely one of many rights-bearing countries in the world, and therefore justifies its existence because of its participation in a universal rights culture, is widespread.

220

Leah Bradshaw

Kant is an early champion of international governance, cosmopolitanism, and the worldwide expansion of the principles of right. Kant starts with the premise that all human beings are autonomous creatures, that the most important end that we all want is the fulfillment of individual freedom, and that political institutions exist to protect and maximize individual rights. We know this imperative through reason, and “right is the restriction of each individual’s freedom so that it harmonizes with the freedom of everyone else … and public right is the distinctive quality of the external laws which make this constant harmony possible.”11 In the Kantian firmament, politics is about framing the right sorts of laws to guarantee a maximum of individual rights. We can see how far this conception of politics is from Aristotle’s. There is no common good, there is no understanding of politics as a hybrid of friendship and there is no sense that politics entails a public sensibility that is different from the pursuit of private rights, private goods. Indeed, elsewhere I have argued that on Aristotle’s terms, there is no need for politics in the traditional sense.12 The state can be eclipsed by cooperative and international schemes of “governance” if in fact these serve the advancement of individual rights better than discrete states. There is a whole body of political and international theory advocating for just this. “Globalization” theorists like Jürgen Habermas and David Held make the case that networks of international law should supersede the sovereign nation state. Habermas calls for “the cosmopolitan transformation of the state of nature among states into a legal order,”13 and Held asserts “the future ought to be conceived in cosmopolitan terms … with a new institutional complex with global scope, given shape and form by reference to basic democratic law.”14 Cosmopolis trumps polis, and there is no difference in obligation toward friends/citizens (those we “know”) and obligations to strangers. The global appeal to universal human rights may appear to many to be a morally superior all-inclusive standpoint, yet we live in a world in which the transpolitical appeal to human rights seems to be offset by an equally intense appeal to ethnic and other forms of subpolitical identity. In Canada, we have the “identity politics” of Aboriginal Canadians, and of French Canadians, institutionalized within the constitutional order. We have a famously multicultural state that is home to peoples of varying religious and ethnic backgrounds, some of whom remain attached to loyalties that are far from the discourse of cosmopolitan right. Think of the TamilCanadian diaspora demonstrations in Toronto (2009) that blockaded major highways in an effort to persuade the Canadian government to intervene

Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World

221

in a civil war halfway around the world on behalf of a separatist movement led by a man with a history of brutality and intolerance. The struggle for recognition of specific identity within a liberal democratic framework can be framed in indigenous claims, language distinctiveness, ethnic belonging, or some combination of these. While “identity politics” may seem to be a long stretch from what Aristotle meant by the “concord” or “friendship” that binds the political community, there is some affinity. I think Aristotle was absolutely right in zoning in on “friendship” as the basis of political identification. People do not want only rights and autonomy, though those are abstract and rational goals attached to a free market ethos and to a rational embrace of mobility, education, and an unencumbered freedom. They want, in the words of Heyking “to know and be known.” This is actually the basis of Charles Taylor’s “politics of recognition.” Taylor is one of Canada’s most famous political theorists, and for a couple of decades now he has been speaking to this fundamental need for people to be recognized, not just in their individual accomplishments, but in their identities with others. Taylor counters the appeal to universal human rights, the “identical basket of rights and immunities” with what he (and others) terms the politics of difference. In the politics of difference and identity, “we are asked to recognize the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else.”15 Aristotle was aware of this fundamental inclination for people to congregate around their shared identities. People will aggregate on the basis of kinship ties, tribal loyalties, common language, and ancestry, and they will be aggressively hostile to outsiders. The political and democratic experiment, however, is one that elevates people out of those primal associations into a different kind of association, based on shared laws and governing institutions. “The citizen in an unqualified sense is defined by no other thing so much as by sharing in decision and office” and “the citizen is a citizen above all in a democracy.”16 Politics works on a constitutional and just model, when people make the transfer from identifying their own on these more primal bases, to identifying what is their own as the public commitment to citizenship. “Although citizens are dissimilar, preservation of the partnership [in the regime] is their task and the regime is this partnership; hence the virtue of the citizen must be with a view to the regime.”17 If Aristotle is right, that people need to live together in communities that are at least partly self-sufficient, and that they fulfill themselves in ruling and being ruled, and in the kind of friendship that a political association provides, we may consider that the push for a universal, cosmopolitanism

222

Leah Bradshaw

grounded in rights may be dangerous because it does not eliminate what is perhaps a natural human need for ties of belonging. It may expel these ties from the public sphere, thus fostering the fire of tribal, ethnic, and identity conflict. By steadfastly refusing to accept the need for “ties of belonging” and the further need to convert those ties from ones of tribal and ethnic association into ones of civic friendship, the cosmopolitanism advocate, I fear, may contribute to driving people into a kind of exclusivist politics.18

Building Civic Ties in Canada Rudyard Griffiths makes the case for a reinvigorated Canadian citizenship in a highly provocative book called Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto. In Griffith’s view, “Canada has steadily shifted away from the traditional institutions and symbols of nationhood to new markers of belonging and identity.”19 Citing globalization enthusiast Pico Iyer, Griffiths says that “Canada has become the spiritual home … of the very notion of an extended, emancipating global citizenship.”20 Griffiths is worried about the lack of cohesion in Canada, and the apparent lack of commitment to a commonly shared citizenship. He identifies a scary “troika” of the future: a rapidly aging population that is going to depend upon a healthy tax base to sustain its pensions and its health care, continuing high waves of immigrants from non-western backgrounds whose levels of social and economic mobility in this country seem to be stalled, and an impending environmental crisis with global demands on our natural resources. He writes: The relentless greying of Canada will pit the young against the old and newcomers against the long settled; it will place many of the country’s cherished institutions and social conventions in jeopardy and endanger our long-term prosperity. Add mass immigration to the mix of intercultural and intergenerational tensions coursing through the body politic, and it quickly becomes apparent how vital it is that Canadians maintain high levels of social cohesion. Far from being anachronistic or impeding the country’s development, assuming substantive civic obligations, adopting shared values and mastering a body of common cultural knowledge will be essential to achieving the consensus and solidarity required to survive the divisive debates and hard choices that lie ahead.21

Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World

223

I share Griffiths’s concerns but I do not necessarily agree with his prescriptions. A lot of his argument rests upon a rebuilding of Canada’s cultural heritage, and making sure that all Canadians, new and old, share in this history. Griffiths identifies two periods in Canadian history when civic commitment was high, and both are in the aftermath of political crisis (1848) or war (the Second World War). I do not believe that given the multicultural caste of Canadian society, especially its intensification in recent decades, coupled with the institutionalized divisions within Canada among French Canadians, Aboriginal Canadians, and everyone else, with regard to “founding stories,” that such a consolidation is desirable or possible.22 I do, however, entirely agree with Griffiths that we are in real danger of losing our “civic friendship,” and that we had better do something about it. As far as I can tell from a lifetime of studying politics, only the state can provide justice and security for people. Justice arises from considerations of equality and fairness (and these are things best dealt with by law) but also from considerations of kindness and desert (who deserves what), and in this second set of considerations, we need friendship, not just law. A good state looks after the interests of the robust and the intelligent, the entrepreneurial and the ambitious, but also the old, the young, the weak, and those temporarily disadvantaged by linguistic and cultural barriers. We do have in this country a remarkable web of publically funded services, including health and education. Citizens pay for this. People will pay into a commonly shared good not only if they see some benefit to themselves individually, but also if they can see that the commonly shared life is something worth sustaining. It is a worrying thing when more settled Canadians move off into communities where people look like them, when they take their children out of public education and put them in private institutions with children who are like them, economically and socially. Canadians get resentful when they perceive that people are using a Canadian passport as an insurance policy against the hazards of the world (as when LebaneseCanadians, many of whom had never lived in Canada, invoked their citizenship in a rescue mounted by the Canadian government in a state of civil war in Lebanon in 2006, at an estimated cost to Canadian taxpayers of $94 million). And new Canadians get resentful when their race, ethnicity, or just plain “foreignness” prohibits them from social and economic mobility.23 Globalized citizenship is not going to fund education and health care in Canada. The working population is, and increasingly the working population is going to be made up of first- or second-generation immigrants.

224

Leah Bradshaw

We do not need to give them lessons in Canadian history; we need to make sure that they are actually integrated into Canadian economy and society.24 Before closing the arguments of this chapter, it might be appropriate to state clearly the grounds upon which I disagree with some of the contributors to this volume. John von Heyking is cited by Livingstone in his opening comments as lamenting that “Canadian higher education has been significantly influenced by Hegelian notions of progress, which seems to have resulted in a belief that it is the future, not the past, that matters – to the point that the young in Canada seem not to be able to think in terms of anything other than progress.”25 Many of the authors included in this volume have drawn upon the work of Janet Ajzenstat, to whom we Canadians owe a great debt for resurrecting an important emphasis upon the principles of Canada’s founding documents and institutions. Ajzenstat, as her readers know well, has made a compelling case for the embeddedness of Canada’s founding institutions in the work of John Locke. She has castigated Canadians for abandoning their history, and embracing a newer “story” about themselves that is immersed in culture rather than founding institutions, and has called repeatedly for a broader public awareness of these founding principles, and the institutions they fostered, as a way of consolidating Canadian belonging. Many of the contributors also invoke Tocqueville, and his enormous influence upon understanding the importance of civic and liberal education in the United States, in an effort to impart the significance of Tocqueville for Canadians. I do not disagree with Heyking that we may in fact in Canada inhabit a “space” in which our eyes are turned toward the future, not the past, and that Canadians live in a culture that is overwhelmingly committed to progress. The question is what we do about that. Given the incontrovertible facts about contemporary Canada – that we are the most multicultural country in the world, that we are dependent upon immigration, mostly from non-western, non-Christian countries for our continued economic health, and that we do not have a single history that is embraced by our legally recognized communities of French Canadians and Aboriginal peoples – I do not believe that invigorating founding stories is going to consolidate a sense of citizenship for us. There is a deeper question for me about whether Lockean principles of liberty, grounded as they are in the unassailable dominance of private property rights, and the embrace of acquisition, can rescue citizens in any western democracy from disintegrating into atomization. Here, I agree with much of what Travis Smith writes in his analysis of the Hobbesian character of contemporary Canada.

Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World

225

Smith characterizes elements of the Canadian ethos as “relativistic, scientistic, atomistic, and unfree,” all of which he attributes to the Hobbesian underpinnings of our politics, but Hobbes may be the wolf that parades boldly where Locke’s sheep hide.26 Neither do I believe that Tocqueville can help us. In a formidably ambitious book, The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a Democratic Age, Ralph Hancock singles out Alexis de Tocqueville as the man who can save us in our current democratic age.27 Tocqueville, according to Hancock, understood the threats posed by the “emancipation of individual freedom from politically and socially authorized virtue,” and his strategy was to “strengthen democratic souls, or preserve their strength, by sustaining practices that Americans themselves understand to be devoted to material wellbeing ‘well-understood.’”28 Those practices include above all, for Tocqueville (and for Hancock) a “practical harmony” of politics and religion that will foster the “elevation of soul and political liberty,” in a twin pairing of “absolute submission and absolute liberty.” In a review of this book, I wrote that while I found much of Hancock’s diagnosis of the ills of liberal democracy compelling, I could not accept his catharsis in the works of Tocqueville. I repeat what I wrote there: “I am a Canadian and a woman. Tocqueville holds little ground in Canada, a nation founded by English Loyalists and French Canadians (not Puritans) and now bearing a constitution that entrenches multiculturalism. The twin towers of absolute liberty and absolute submission endorsed by Hancock in the name of Tocqueville cannot hold as a model for Western democracy in general. In addition, as Hancock notes, part of Tocqueville’s project entails the retention of women in the home as guarantors of a ‘moral regularity essential to the perpetuation of an orderly society.’29 Nowhere in Western liberal democracies have the majority of women stayed loyal to this aim.”30 For me, the rehabilitation of citizenship in Canada means bolstering allegiance to the political institutions and laws of Canada, but also providing a substantive basis for trust and friendship among Canadians. In the world of ideas, Aristotle can help us understand what the meaning of the political is, as I have tried, however briefly, to demonstrate here. As a university educator, I regularly teach a course titled “Citizenship” in which I spend a great deal of time trying to communicate the importance of Aristotle’s formative ideas on politics, democracy, friendship, and citizenship. I believe that what Aristotle has to teach us about the difference between our individual good(s) and our common good as citizens is instructive for us in Canada today.

226

Leah Bradshaw

On the practical policy level, we have to look out for each other. The state should be more proactive in policies of integration, so that all Canadians can see the direct relation between their individual prospering and the health of the civic bond. How far we can go in solidifying these bonds of citizenship, and how we do it, is a matter of public debate. Recently, in Canada, there has been much debate about the proposed Charter of Values in Quebec, a document released by the ruling sovereigntist party advocating for the abolition of “conspicuous” religious insignia in the public sphere. While the Parti Quebecois has defended this Charter as an effort to build civic bonds in a multicultural and religiously plural context, many have argued that its effect, if implemented, would likely erode bonds of citizenship. Charles Taylor, co-author (with Gerard Bouchard) of the Quebec Report of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (2007) has stated emphatically that if such a bill were to pass in the Quebec legislature, it would “tear Quebec society apart.”31 Differences in culture, religion, language, and social and economic status constitute the fabric of modern liberal democratic communities, including Canada. As Jonathan Sacks writes, the problem is not difference, but what we do with it. Sacks argues for a kind of “integration without assimilation,” but this means that we have to see differences as “gifts we bring to the common good.” That in turn requires that we have “a concept of the common good, which in turn means that there must be a strong sense of national identity, a felt reality of collective belonging.”32 This does not mean that citizenship as friendship requires a monolithic state-centric identity. To the contrary, as Richard Sennett points out, it requires just the opposite. Sennett summons Aristotle whom he identifies as “perhaps the first Western philosopher to worry about repressive unity.” Aristotle thought of the city as “a synoikismos, a coming together of people from diverse family tribes – each oikos having its own history, allegiances, property, family, gods.”33 There are important things we can learn from this ancient classical thinker about politics that may aid us in getting out of the current dualism between the discourse of universal human rights and the discourse of identity politics. What is a citizen? A citizen exists only in a democracy, and democracy is a rare and fragile phenomenon in western history. A citizen is someone who shares in rule, someone who understands that equality consists in a public realm of shared institutions of justice, someone who has a “friendly feeling” toward his fellow citizens, and who trusts that the

Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World

227

common bond of citizenship will afford him or her a better life than one lived as a “solitary piece of chess,” always tense in the suspicion of attack. Citizenship does require that one prefers one’s own country and is willing to work for its success, but those who decry a strong sense of citizenship on the grounds that it breeds intolerance are wrong. Friendship toward those one “knows” and with whom one shares a common fate need not be hostile to strangers. A good and secure home is more hospitable to others that an acrimonious and splintered one. Notes 1 As any scholar of Aristotle will know, citizenship in the ancient Greek polis excluded women, slaves, and anyone who was not native-born to the city-state. In Athens at the time of Aristotle’s writing (and Aristotle himself was a foreigner), there would have been many more adult non-citizens than citizens. Non-citizen residents, and even slaves, could own property and participate in commerce, but they could not take part in the common deliberations of the assembly. A question for scholars of Aristotle has been whether the conditions attached to his conception citizenship are necessary or merely contingent ones. I am clearly on the side of those who would argue that the prototype of citizenship offered by Aristotle still holds up in its fundamental principles, and I have written specifically about the “woman question” in Aristotle to try to show how Aristotle did not in fact hold that women are inherently incapable of “ruling and being ruled.” They were habitually incapable of it within the social and familial norms of classical Athens. (Leah Bradshaw, “Political Rule, Prudence and the ‘Woman Question’ in Aristotle,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 24, no. 3 (1991): 557–73. 2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002), 1167a25. 3 Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1253. 4 Aristotle, Politics, 1280b1, 20–30. 5 While Aristotle is emphatic that the polis is not an arrangement primarily for guaranteeing the protection of private property, and ensuring a peaceful environment for the conducting of commerce, there certainly are significant accounts in the western tradition of political thought that would contest this. Notable among them is John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, in which Locke firmly declares “the great and chief end of men’s uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property” (John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), #124, 66). 6 Aristole, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a25. 7 Ibid. 8 The idea that wanting to “know and be known” is an intrinsic part of citizenship is one echoed in the work of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (although Taylor draws on modern sources, not on Aristotle). It struck me, though, in reading

228

9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18

Leah Bradshaw

Heyking’s paper on Aristotle that this idea that one wants to be recognized by people who know and accept you, is an integral part of citizenship. Taylor’s work on the “politics of recognition” is known throughout the world, and it is this work that prompted the Quebec government to initiate the commission (co-led by Taylor) to inquire into the problems with Quebec cohesion. Taylor writes that “a number of strands in contemporary politics turn on the need, sometimes, the demand for recognition … our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition by others, and so a person, or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or the society around them mirror back a demeaning, or contemptible, picture of themselves.” Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Penee, and J.R. (Tim) Struthers, eds, New Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1997), 98. John von Heyking, “‘Sunaisthetic’ Friendship and the Foundations of Political Anthropology,” International Political Anthropology 1, no. 2 (2008): 182. Ibid., 187. Immanuel Kant, “Theory and Practice,” Kant’s Political Writings ed. H.S. Reiss (Cambridge University Press, 1970), 73. Leah Bradshaw, “Empire and the Eclipse of Politics,” David Tabachnick and Toivo Koivukoski, eds, Enduring Empire: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 77–95. Jürgen Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace With the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight,” James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds, Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Boston: MIT Press, 1997), 149. David Held, “Cosmopolitan Democracy and the Global Order,” Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann, eds, Perpetual Peace, 250. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism (Princeton University Press, 1994), 38. Aristotle, Politics, 1275a25, 1275b1. Ibid., 1276b25. There is a widely disseminated scholarship among political theorists on the work of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt has, in my view, some disturbing theses regarding politics. For Schmitt, all politics can be framed in a tension between “friend” and “enemy,” and any effort to transcend this dichotomy, particularly in the language of “human rights,” is destined to be corralled by political forces for the advancement of their own particular interests. “When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but rather a war in which a particular state tries to usurp a universal concept in its struggle against its enemy, in the same way that one can misuse peace, justice, progress and civilization in order to vindicate oneself and to discredit the foe.” Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, 1976), 52; cited in Jürgen Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight,” James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds, Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Boston: MIT Press, 1997). Schmitt is not the only alternative to human rights universalism, and he is in fact an ominous one, in that one can see easily how his theories can be co-opted to justify ethnic nationalism.

Friendship and Citizenship in a Globalized World

19 20 21 22

23

24

25

229

While, clearly, I have reservations about universal rights as the exclusive grounding for political communities, I argue that political communities can justify their integrity on the grounds of civic virtue, and do not necessarily have to pit them themselves against enemies in order to gain a sense of purpose. Rudyard Griffiths, Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto (Vancouver, BC: D&M Publishers, 2009), 13. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 63. I do not have space here to track another strain of modern citizenship, through Machiavelli, but I have written about this (Leah Bradshaw, “Republic to Empire,” Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Canadian Congress, Carleton University, Ottawa, 28 May 2009). Machiavelli (sixteenth century) is often heralded as the founding father of modern republicanism, but I argue that Machiavelli’s idea of citizenship rests on a triad of founding myths, instrumental religion, and continuing acts of, or preparedness for, war. This is very different from Aristotle’s notion of citizenship as friendship, and in my view, much less likely to be sustainable. In an article in The Globe and Mail, a summary of a study of employment accessibility in the greater Toronto area showed some alarming results. Six thousand resumes were sent out listing a bachelor’s degree and four to six years’ work experience. “Across the board, those with English names such as Greg Johnson, and Michael Smith, were 40% more likely to receive callbacks [for employment] than people with the same education and job experience with Indian, Pakistani or Chinese names such as Maya Kumar, Dong Liu and Fatima Sheikh.” The authors of the study conclude that “an applicant’s name matters considerably more than his or her additional education, multiple language skills, and extracurricular activities.” The study also noted however, an anomaly: second-generation immigrants of Chinese and Indian origin statistically have above-average levels of education and income. The Globe and Mail, 21 May 2009, L3. In a policy paper by Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos and Inder Marwah, the authors speak specifically to this crisis. “The failure to properly recognize the credentials and skills of immigrants has increased the disparity in income levels between native-born and immigrant populations. Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of immigrant populations living below Statistic Canada’s low-income rate rose from 24 percent to nearly 36 percent, while the low-income rate in the nonimmigrant population fell from 17 percent to 14 percent. This is particularly problematic, given that Canada has, over the same period, increased the percentage of economic-class immigrants from 37 percent to 54 percent. While some progress has been made in meeting this challenge, more needs to be done to develop means of recognizing and rewarding immigrants’ talents.” (Canada–Europe Transatlantic Dialogue: Seeking Transnational Solutions to 21st Century Problems: Europeanizing Canada’s Citizenship Regime? University of Toronto, May 2009.) Indeed, there is a strong intellectual current in Canada that emphasizes the Hegelian influence on some of our major political thinkers. Books that pursue this theme include Ian Angus, Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality and Wilderness (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); James Bickerton,

230

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Leah Bradshaw

Stephen Brooks, and Alain Gagnon, eds. Freedom, Equality, Community: The Political Philosophy of Six Influential Canadians (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006) with a focus on George Grant, Harold Innis, Charles Taylor, P.E. Trudeau, Andre Laurendeau, and Marcel Rioux; Fredrick Vaughan, Viscount Haldane: The Wicked Stepfather of the Canadian Constitution (University of Toronto Press, 2010) specifically on the enduring influence of Haldane’s Hegelianism on the Supreme Court of Canada, especially since the institution of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and Robert Meynell, Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) on the progressivist thread running through C.B. Macpherson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor. I have written about the dangers of Lockean liberalism elsewhere, contrasting the atomism of Locke with the citizenship theory of Aristotle. Leah Bradshaw, “Oligarchs and Democrats,” Toivo Koivukoski and David Tabachnick, eds, On Oligarchy: Ancient Lessons for Modern Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) 140–59. Ralph Hancock, The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a LiberalDemocratic Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). Hancock, The Responsibility of Reason, 272. Ibid., 267. Leah Bradshaw, “Nature and Justice,” Review of Politics 74:2 (Spring 2012): 320–3. Charles Taylor, McGill Symposium on Religious Freedom and Education, 3 October 2013. Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (London: Continuum Press, 2007), 234. Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2012), 4.

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor: Religious Freedom, Civil Society, and Charter Values Thomas M.J. Bateman

Introduction Is liberal democracy a political mode for the protection of ways of life or is it a way of life itself? The common contemporary answer is that liberal polities protect rights, and rights afford individuals the means by which they pursue their own accounts of the good life. Beyond minimal rules for peaceful coexistence, people enjoy robust individual freedom, including access to a broad, deep realm of associational existence without state interference. This thin account implies room for considerable cultural and religious diversity within the bounds of basic liberal democratic principles. A different answer to the question is that liberal democracies have an interest in ensuring that their citizens develop in ways that are consistent with these principles. The polity requires a more complete citizen allegiance. Liberal democracy is not about institutions alone; it is also about mores and manners, sensibilities and norms. As Stephen Macedo has put it, liberalism reaches the soul as well as the body; its reach is “deep and pervasive” and its aim is to “mold” people in ways that make the private life congruent with “the ways of a liberal republic.”1 In a liberal regime as Macedo understands it, religious neutrality is a mirage. The basic political value of “equal freedom for all appl[ies] within the religious sphere and all other spheres.”2 In this account, liberal democracy itself is a way of life into which citizens must be inducted. Liberal democracies, then, are not principally about maintaining civil order coupled with limits on state power, but about the formation of citizens’ moral character. Following from this, non-state associations operate on the sufferance of the state and are properly subject to its dictates. William Galston describes this understanding as viewing “public institutions as plenipotentiary and civil society

232

Thomas M.J. Bateman

as a political construction possessing only those liberties that the polity chooses to grant and modify or revoke at will.”3 Liberal democracy in this view requires a thick code of values directing the moral development of the liberal democratic citizen. The state, then, has an interest in what its people believe, and so it must intervene in the development of citizen character and belief. Courts were once thought to be the institutional guardian of the constitutional barrier between the state and citizens’ moral and associational lives. But what if the courts themselves understand it to be their role to remake citizens according to the values of liberal democracy? What if they see the constitution less as a set of rules limiting government and more as a statement of values to be applied to both the public and private realms? What if the courts consider themselves not just legal decision-makers, but moral tutors, setting and enforcing the standards for Canadians’ civic education? The development of this newer, thicker liberal democracy is apparent across a number of areas of Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms jurisprudence. This chapter will focus on changes to the understanding of freedom of religion, protected by s. 2(a) of the Charter, suggesting that Canadian courts are transforming freedom of religion into individual autonomy. In other words, they are contracting s. 2(a) of the Charter and expanding the importance of s. 7.

Freedom of Religion and Liberal Democracy Freedom of religion was traditionally taken to mark a jurisdictional boundary between sacred and secular things. Sacred things had a worldly presence but their administration was set off from affairs of state. It meant that ecclesial authorities should not possess temporal power.4 It also meant that the affairs of ecclesial bodies, within broad limits, are not the business of the state. Freedom of religion once meant the legal protection of a nonstate jurisdiction or legal space in which confessional life might be lived out. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it this way: the American Bill of Rights protects not freedom of belief or freedom of worship, but free exercise of religion, “a recognition that religious faith cannot be reduced to a purely private or individual affair.”5 Some observers draw attention to the “firstness” or priority of religious freedom, arguing that it is the mark of civic freedom. According to Thomas Farr, “Religious freedom is the sine qua non of living freely. You may allow me to vote, own property, and associate freely in the public square in every other way. But

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

233

if you do not permit me to speak and to act on those beliefs about ultimate reality that define who I am and why I am on this earth, then the other freedoms mean little. In a very real sense, then, all human freedoms depend on the freedom of religion.”6 In the new understanding, the secular refers to a religion-free zone in which individuals’ religious beliefs do not as a matter of fact – and shall not as a matter of prescription – have anything to do with life outside an intimate private realm. “Liberal” values occupy the space left by the contraction of the realm of a sacred into the narrowly private and intimate. Increasingly, religious freedom is taken to be a private, interior world of conscientious belief or unbelief protected by the principle of individual autonomy. Individual autonomy as a cardinal constitutional value in Canada is displacing freedom of religion. The chain of argument is this: A set of “Charter values” undergirds the specific rights provisions of the Charter. Charter values govern not only the actions of the state but also the life of institutions and individuals in civil society. Freedom of religion is not a guarantee of the worldly fellowship of persons pursuing their understanding of the sacred, but rather the exercise of individual autonomy consistent with Charter values. Contrast Douthat and Farr’s views above with the highly individualistic account of eighteenth-century writer Thomas Paine, for whom “My own mind is my own church.”7 This reduction is the project on which the Canadian courts in the Charter era seem to be embarked. Needless to say, the contemporary judicial mission to transform freedom of religion into an individual freedom of private conscience is far from the “common Christianity” fostered by the Egerton Ryersons of an earlier period in Canadian history. It is equally far from the deeply communal character of religious life at the time of Confederation that informed the drafting of s. 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867. It is far from Canada’s founding. The Supreme Court’s tutelage of Canadians is a forward-looking, progressive project, not a backward-looking conservation of founding principles. While in some matters the Court is assiduous in grounding its decision in the historical compromises and fundamental bargains on which Confederation was premised,8 in Charter jurisprudence the metaphor of the “living tree” is frequently invoked. The Constitution, intones the Court, is a living tree: its shape and meaning change over time and the Court is the pruner of this tree.9 The issue for the Court is rarely original meanings; it is more often updating the meaning of the Constitution to meet the felt needs of the day.

234

Thomas M.J. Bateman

Charter Values and the Judicial Penetration of Civil Society The Canadian Charter’s entrenchment in 1982 is sometimes characterized as Canada’s belated attempt to limit the reach of government into the lives of Canadians: a stable, judicially enforced set of rights that citizens can assert against the intrusive state. This much is classical liberalism and the rule of law. But the Charter’s entrenchment was more than this. It was also a daring political attempt to create a national myth of Canada as a progressive, democratic, bilingual, multicultural society. After thirty-three years, what has the Charter become? Has it been an instrument of classical liberal limitation of state power, or has it become the template for the reconstitution not only of Canadian government but of Canadian society along the lines of progressive values? The story is long and complicated, the courts at times striking a classical pose and at others applying Charter values more deeply into civil society. This section will survey the jurisprudence and suggest that the courts have taken important steps in applying the Charter “all the way down” into civil society. Section 32 of the Charter provides that it shall apply to the Parliament and government of Canada and to the legislature and government of each province “in respect of all matters coming within the authority of” the legislative bodies of each order of government. On its face, the provision reflects the principles of classical liberal constitutionalism: the Charter binds government, not private, non-government actors. Consider the definition of “law” for Charter application purposes. For traditional liberal constitutionalists, swaths of civil life are “Charter-free zones” since the Charter applies only to government, and government itself is limited. We unfold our lives according to principles and visions having nothing to do with law. In Dolphin Delivery,10 the first and most significant consideration of Charter application, the Supreme Court was asked to apply the Charter to the common law. If it did, it would depart from classical liberal constitutionalism, since the common law governs non-state relations among legal persons: property law, torts, contracts, and so on. Legislatures of course frequently legislate to supersede and nullify common law principles, and in these cases positive law is subject to the Charter. But in the absence of state action, the common law prevails. Should the Charter apply to and prevail over (judicially enforceable) common law? Early in the Charter period, Justice William McIntyre noted that s. 52

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

235

of the Constitution Act, 1982 declares that the Constitution of Canada is “the supreme law of Canada” and that “all law” is subject to it. This includes common law. But s. 32 declares that the Charter applies to the legislative and executive branches of government. These branches usually depend on positive law for authority for state action. But sometimes they rely on common law principles like prerogative powers. His resolution: Action by the executive or administrative branches of government will generally depend upon legislation, that is, statutory authority. Such action may also depend, however, on the common law, as in the case of the prerogative. To the extent that it relies on statutory authority which constitutes or results in an infringement of a guaranteed right or freedom, the Charter will apply and it will be unconstitutional. The action will also be unconstitutional to the extent that it relies for authority or justification on a rule of the common law which constitutes or creates an infringement of a Charter right or freedom. In this way the Charter will apply to the common law, whether in public or private litigation. It will apply to the common law, however, only in so far as the common law is the basis of some governmental action which, it is alleged, infringes a guaranteed right or freedom.11 In this analysis, courts are not part of government for the purposes of s. 32. As a result, they do not import Charter considerations into the common law as it is interpreted and developed. Of course, this also means that courts themselves are not subject to the Charter, a remarkable assertion. In order to limit the constitutionalization of civil society, the Court placed the judiciary above the Constitution.12 McIntyre’s conservative, restrained holding on Charter application produced a torrent of criticism among legal academics seeking Charter application all the way down into civil society.13 But a nuance in the decision perhaps escaped their notice. Wrote McIntyre: Where such exercise of, or reliance upon, governmental action is present and where one private party invokes or relies upon it to produce an infringement of the Charter rights of another, the Charter will be applicable. Where, however, private party “A” sues private party “B” relying on the common law and where no act of government is relied upon to support the action, the Charter will not apply.

236

Thomas M.J. Bateman I should make it clear, however, that this is a distinct issue from the question whether the judiciary ought to apply and develop the principles of the common law in a manner consistent with the fundamental values enshrined in the Constitution. The answer to this question must be in the affirmative. In this sense, then, the Charter is far from irrelevant to private litigants whose disputes fall to be decided at common law. But this is different from the proposition that one private party owes a constitutional duty to another, which proposition underlies the purported assertion of Charter causes of action or Charter defences between individuals.14

Thus was born the “Charter values” doctrine. Regardless of the explicit terms of the Charter, and of the reach of the courts and of the Charter itself into civil society, the courts are instructed to divine and apply “Charter values” as they develop the common law. Early in the Charter period, members of the Court were divided on the significance of the Charter values doctrine. In Hill v. Church of Scientology,15 the issue was whether in the age of the Charter the Canadian common law of libel should take greater account of freedom of expression, particularly in regard to public officials. Covering old ground, the Court held that the Charter does not apply to the common law. But the comments of two justices on Charter values are interesting. Justice Cory diminished the significance of Charter values relative to Charter rights, seemingly relying on a classical liberal constitutionalism: Private parties owe each other no constitutional duties and cannot found their cause of action upon a Charter right. The party challenging the common law cannot allege that the common law violates a Charter right because, quite simply, Charter rights do not exist in the absence of state action. The most that the private litigant can do is argue that the common law is inconsistent with Charter values. It is very important to draw this distinction between Charter rights and Charter values. Care must be taken not to expand the application of the Charter beyond that established by s. 32(1), either by creating new causes of action, or by subjecting all court orders to Charter scrutiny. Therefore, in the context of civil litigation involving only private parties, the Charter will “apply” to the common law only to the extent that the common law is found to be inconsistent with Charter values.16

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

237

Justice L’Heureux-Dubé, on the other hand, declared more enthusiastically that “Even though the Charter does not directly apply to the common law absent government action, the common law must nonetheless be developed in accordance with Charter values.”17 These comments suggest some ambivalence about Charter values and the degree to which courts ought to apply them to civil society. For Cory, Charter values are a grudging concession to partisans of thick liberal constitutionalism; for L’Heureux-Dubé, they are a more promising, prodigious standard for legal relations among persons in civil society. As a recent study of Charter values doctrine indicates,18 the courts have referred to Charter values frequently and the doctrine now joins an arsenal of techniques that courts can use to apply constitutional values: courts now comment on constitutional conventions,19 and articulate constitutional principles implicit in constitutional texts.20 And because governments are not involved in making the common law, they cannot participate in litigation in which a legal rule is under constitutional review, thus they are not able to present reasons why a common law may be a reasonable limit on a Charter right under s. 1. Judicial rumination on the consistency of a common law rule with Charter values occurs in the absence of s. 1 analysis.21 What exactly are Charter values? A catalogue has never been produced. However, in R. v. Oakes,22 in which the Court gave interpretive shape to the s. 1 reasonable limits clause of the Charter, rendered the same year the Court decided Dolphin Delivery, Chief Justice Dickson approached the question by way of unfolding the meaning of a “free and democratic society” for the preservation and advancement of which Charter rights are both guaranteed and occasionally limited. Wrote Dickson: The Court must be guided by the values and principles essential to a free and democratic society which I believe embody, to name but a few, respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, commitment to social justice and equality, accommodation of a wide variety of beliefs, respect for cultural and group identity, and faith in social and political institutions which enhance the participation of individuals and groups in society.23 Little can be said about this list except that it is illustrative and general, enabling rather than constraining the exercise of judicial discretion. The Court made no attempt to sort out and render mutually compatible values that easily clash with one another. Any concrete understanding of Charter

238

Thomas M.J. Bateman

values is to be found in the case law. Another mechanism for the application of constitutional values is the definition of “government” that courts adopt for purposes of s. 32 of the Charter. The Supreme Court in McKinney v. University of Guelph considered whether universities are “government” for purposes of Charter application.24 Several professors challenged university mandatory retirement policies and the human rights legislation that permitted such age-based discrimination. The concrete dispute is of less interest than the Charter application question. For the majority, Justice LaForest followed the spirit of Dolphin by supporting a restrained account of Charter application, arguing that the Charter is “essentially an instrument for checking the powers of government over the individual.”25 Further: The exclusion of private activity from the Charter was not a result of happenstance. It was a deliberate choice which must be respected. We do not really know why this approach was taken [!], but several reasons suggest themselves. Historically, bills of rights, of which that of the United States is the great constitutional exemplar, have been directed at government. Government is the body that can enact and enforce rules and authoritatively impinge on individual freedom. Only government requires to be constitutionally shackled to preserve the rights of the individual.26 In this pragmatic view, conceding that private actors can violate the “rights” of other private individuals (what kinds of rights he is thinking of he does not elaborate), LaForest relies on democratic legislative imperatives to address whatever social ills may arise in private life. He also shrinks from Charter application to private conduct because of the “impossible burdens” this would impose on judicial institutions unsuited to the resolution of such disputes. Where government goes, so should the Charter – but no further. LaForest: “Unless … it can be established that they form part of government, the universities’ action here cannot fall within the ambit of the Charter …. Many institutions in our society perform functions that are undeniably of an important public nature, but are undoubtedly not part of the government.”27 In her stinging dissent, Justice Wilson seems to confuse LaForest’s views of Charter application with what she takes to be his general views of the proper scope of government, attributing to him Lochner-era views linking laissez-faire with constitutional propriety. His is an American view

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

239

of government and constitution, she charges, whereas Canadians have always accepted government as their ever-present friend and helper in time of need. More pointedly: a historical review of the growth of the Canadian state makes clear that those who enacted the Charter were concerned to provide some protection for individual freedom and personal autonomy in the face of government’s expanding role. I do not think they intended to do this by carving out or preserving “private” spheres of activity. I believe, however, that they considered it crucial to establish norms by which government would be constrained in performing the many roles it has assumed and will no doubt continue to assume. They sought to do this by setting out basic constitutional norms rooted in a concern for individual dignity and autonomy which government should be compelled to respect when structuring important aspects of citizens’ lives.28 Wilson articulates a constitutionalism of basic norms guiding not the reach of government but the ways in which that reach is extended. She points to the Charter as a procedural limit on government. But notice that the rationale for the reach of government and the terms on which this is achieved is a concern for “individual dignity and autonomy.” The Charter is about establishing society’s norms, not proscribing government’s limits. For Wilson, government goes almost everywhere; so shall Charter values. Government shall advance individual autonomy as it goes.29 A recent Alberta high court decision takes Charter application a step further. In Pridgen v. University of Calgary,30 one justice on a panel of three of the Alberta Court of Appeal held that, though the University is a nongovernment entity, the Charter applied to its disciplinary proceedings. Justice Paperny’s reasoning is that a private entity may nonetheless be subject to the Charter in respect of those of its functions that are governmental in nature or are performed as a matter of statutory compulsion. If an entity is operating as an agent of government, then it is subject to the Charter. In this case, Justice Paperny held that Alberta’s Post-Secondary Learning Act grants universities the authority to impose academic discipline, including suspensions, expulsions, and fines, and these sanctions go “beyond the authority held by private individuals and corporations.”31 Justice Paperny went further, noting that governments have assumed responsibility for education and that in delivering education universities are performing an essentially governmental function. “That education at

240

Thomas M.J. Bateman

all levels, including post-secondary education as provided by universities, is an important public function cannot seriously be disputed.”32 The University argued that universities are separate institutions properly shielded from government control, and that the principle of academic freedom is the critical reason. The justice responded by arguing that robust Charter application is not the enemy of academic freedom but rather its friend. Charter application is not the same as government control; the former is only triggered by the latter. To the extent that the Charter applies to universities, so will freedom of expression and this is a bulwark of academic freedom, not a hindrance. “Academic freedom and the guarantee of freedom of expression contained in the Charter are handmaidens to the same goals; the meaningful exchange of ideas, the promotion of learning, and the pursuit of knowledge. There is no apparent reason why they cannot comfortably co-exist.”33 In other words, while government control attracts Charter application to otherwise private institutions, it will be Charter values, not governmental policies, that will prevail. What is to be made of this brief account of Charter application doctrine? What explains Canada’s particular progress down this road? In a speech delivered to a conference on religion, pluralism, and public policy in 2002, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin argued that law is a “comprehensive system of belief” that “touches upon all aspects of human life and citizenship” and makes “total claims upon the self.”34 It is “a way of being in the world” that necessarily comes into competition with other ways of being. Law is a “system of cultural understanding” upheld by the principles of “human dignity, autonomy, and respect for the parallel rights of others.” In McLachlin’s view, law is a comprehensive system of cultural meaning that makes room for freedom of religion and presumably other forms of private life and pursuit. Its principles permeate other realms: “[T]he Charter has affected the way in which family units, classrooms, and … religious communities have talked about the import and purpose of religious liberties. Alongside the doctrinal law as delineated by the court, the language of dignity, freedom, autonomy, and rights has permeated all aspects of the public sphere.”35 McLachlin’s account of law may be the intellectual and moral background to the expansion of Charter application: law embodies a substantive worldview based on individual dignity, freedom, and autonomy, and its empire extends these principles to all that the law touches. Under the cloak of the rule of law is smuggled an account of the good life based on individual autonomy and a catalogue of rights. Religious freedom as a civil liberty has been understood traditionally

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

241

to imply limits on the society-wide and society-deep infusion of Charter values. McLachlin’s empire of law conflicts with this. As the next section indicates, the Supreme Court has increasingly narrowly applied s. 2(a) of the Charter. It increasingly identifies religion with individual conscience, reduces the associational dimension of religious life to an experience of interior conscientious belief, and increasingly renders religious belief an aspect of individual autonomy.

Freedom of Religion: From Associational Vitality to Individual Autonomy Whereas the 1960 statutory Bill of Rights referred to the “freedom of religion,” s. 2(a) of the Charter protects “freedom of conscience and religion.” “Conscience” is both broader and narrower than “religion.” It is broader in the sense that it captures beliefs conscientiously held that have nothing to do with “religion” as conventionally understood. Ideological, philosophical, non-religious, and anti-religious views are thus protected. But it is narrower in the sense that conscience is an inward matter of the mind, whereas religion connotes this as well as the outward performance of acts and rituals in associational settings in concert with other believers – the institutionalized living out of norms, tenets, and understandings of an inherited way of life. Analysis of constitutional texts teaches us some things. But most of the action in constitutional law is in judicial interpretation, not in constitutional draftsmanship, not least because courts decide whether to adhere to the meanings of the text set out by the drafters for them. Constitutions, we are now told, are living trees, and it is the judges who shape their growth.36 Students of Charter s. 2(a) jurisprudence often find that the cases are incoherent. In his penetrating study, John von Heyking concludes that the Supreme Court has been inconsistent in its treatment of religious freedom.37 Indeed the court has swerved in different directions at times. But there are discernible trends. One is the Court’s predilection to discount the importance of the associational dimension of religious belief and a desire to reinterpret freedom of religion increasingly as individual autonomy. The seminal religious freedom decision is R. v. Big M Drug Mart,38 in which the Court considered the constitutionality of a federal law authorizing provinces to pass legislation regulating commercial and other activities on Sundays, the Christian Sabbath. What is most striking is perhaps the generosity with which Chief Justice Dickson expounded the

242

Thomas M.J. Bateman

meaning of religious freedom. He declares that “a truly free society … can accommodate a wide variety of beliefs, diversity of tastes and pursuits, customs and codes of conduct,”39 and that freedom “in a broad sense embraces both the absence of coercion and constraint, and the right to manifest beliefs and practices.”40 Leaving aside the problematic existence of constitutionally mandated support for denominational schooling in s. 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867, Dickson argued that preferring one sect over another in public policy ran afoul of the Charter’s s. 27 recognition of the need to interpret the Charter in light of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.41 These comments point to support for religious freedom in the broad sense – both belief and the conduct that flows from it. But, according to Dickson, religious freedom is important because it implicates voluntarism, and voluntarism is central to democratic selfgovernment: [A]n emphasis on individual conscience and individual judgment also lies at the heart of our democratic political tradition. The ability of each citizen to make free and informed decisions is the absolute prerequisite for the legitimacy, acceptability, and efficacy of our system of self-government. It is because of the centrality of the rights associated with freedom of individual conscience both to basic beliefs about human worth and dignity and to a free and democratic political system that American jurisprudence has emphasized the primacy or “firstness” of the First Amendment. It is this same centrality that in my view underlies their designation in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as “fundamental.” They are the sine qua non of the political tradition underlying the Charter. … [T]he purpose of freedom of conscience and religion becomes clear. The values that underlie our political and philosophic traditions demand that every individual be free to hold and to manifest whatever beliefs and opinions his or her conscience dictates, provided inter alia only that such manifestations do not injure his or her neighbours or their parallel rights to hold and manifest beliefs and opinions of their own. Religious belief and practise are historically prototypical and, in many ways, paradigmatic of conscientiously-held beliefs and manifestations and are therefore protected by the Charter. Equally protected, and for the same reasons, are expressions and manifestations of religious non-belief and refusals to participate in religious practice.42

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

243

Justice Wilson concurred in Dickson’s account of religious freedom in Big M. But her response was frequently to limit s. 2(a)’s reach to religion’s associational dimension. In R. v. Jones,43 a pastor of a small church headed a school in the church basement and objected to having to apply to the Alberta government for permission to operate his school. He also argued that the regulations limited his s. 7 right to raise his children according to his lights. A majority of the Court rejected all his arguments. In dissent on the s. 7 issue, Justice Wilson offered this ode to liberty: “I believe that the framers of the Constitution in guaranteeing ‘liberty’ as a fundamental value in a free and democratic society had in mind the freedom of the individual to develop and realize his potential to the full, to plan his own life to suit his own character, to make his own choices for good or ill, to be non-conformist, idiosyncratic and even eccentric – to be, in to-day’s parlance, ‘his own person’ and accountable as such.”44 She commented that while Pastor Jones does not have the right to raise his children as he sees fit, he does have the right to raise his children “in accordance with his conscientious beliefs. The relations of affection between an individual and his family and his assumption of duties and responsibilities toward them are central to the individual’s sense of self and of his place in the world. The right to educate his children is one facet of this larger concept.”45 Notable here is the linking of the parental relationship to a matter of the “individual’s sense of self.” Justice Wilson’s clearest presentation of her individualism was in her concurrence in Morgentaler v. the Queen,46 in which the Court considered the constitutionality of the Criminal Code ban on all but therapeutic abortions. Four of five members voting to invalidate the provision did so in two separate procedural interpretations of s. 7, the right to security of the person, leaving it open to Parliament to relegislate on abortion. Their reasons were complex, detailed, and seemingly designed to avoid the sweeping statements of the United States Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Wilson’s Roe-like opinion, with its grand claims and bold rhetoric, got most of the media attention.47 Recalling a poignant Lockean metaphor, she argued that the rights guaranteed in the Charter “erect around each individual, metaphorically speaking, an invisible fence over which the state will not be allowed to trespass. The role of the courts is to map out, piece by piece, the parameters of the fence.”48 Citing John Stuart Mill with approval, she argued that the concept of human dignity undergirding the Charter implies thoroughgoing individual self-determination:

244

Thomas M.J. Bateman Individuals are afforded the right to choose their own religion and their own philosophy of life, the right to choose with whom they will associate and how they will express themselves, the right to choose where they will live and what occupation they will pursue. These are all examples of the basic theory underlying the Charter, namely that the state will respect choices made by individuals and, to the greatest extent possible, will avoid subordinating these choices to any one conception of the good life. Thus, an aspect of the respect for human dignity on which the Charter is founded is the right to make fundamental personal decisions without interference from the state. This right is a critical component of the right to liberty. Liberty … is a phrase capable of a broad range of meaning. In my view, this right, properly construed, grants the individual a degree of autonomy in making decisions of fundamental personal importance.49

Wilson argued that the law limiting a woman’s access to abortion offends s. 2(a) because “a decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision, a matter of conscience ….Is the conscience of the woman to be paramount or the conscience of the state?”50 For her, the question answers itself. Section 2(a), she makes clear, should be broadly construed to “extend to conscientiously-held beliefs, whether grounded in religion or in a secular morality.” For her, conscience is independent of religion, and any decision of the state to deny someone’s freedom of conscience is a breach of s. 7. Justice Wilson rarely carried the whole Court with her in these grand pronouncements on individual liberty and freedom of conscience. But she expressed more clearly, as we will see, the gravitational pull of the Court’s thinking. Freedom of religion implicates parental authority and education. Parents, one might think, have an obvious interest and obligation to pass their faith – their vision of the good and the true – to their children, for whom they are particularly responsible. Accordingly, they have an interest in the education their children receive. It is no accident that churches historically were involved in the delivery of education. The advent of public education amidst increasing religious and cultural diversity complicates the protection of religious freedom. For now, public schools purport to bracket out particular ethical views to present curricula that apply to all persons equally regardless of their particular religious scruples. And when they do inculcate “values,” these are held to be those acceptable to all and

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

245

necessary for the continuation of political society. Religionists might wonder, however, if public education is really in the business of replacing the religious views of children with an alternative quasi-religious worldview under the guise of “neutralism,” “secularism,” or liberal watchwords like tolerance and respect and dignity. Religious freedom in this context can take two alternative institutional forms. First, public education can be offered on “secular,” “value-neutral,” non-confessional principles, preserving for parents the freedom to have their children schooled in independent, sometimes confessional, institutional settings. (Independent schooling can be at parents’ expense or subsidized by the state.) Policy options here include public enforcement of minimum educational standards and public funding in support of alternative education. Second, public education can be made mandatory for all; there shall be no opting out for religionists, no state entanglement with religion. In this model, education shall be strictly secular, along the lines of France’s policy of laïcité. Canada’s approach has been an inconsistent mix of principles. Section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867 provided constitutional protection for publicly funded Protestant and Catholic grade school education in those provinces that offered these at Confederation. In several provinces this formally dual system persists to this day. Quebec secularized its dual system via constitutional amendment in 1997. How has the Supreme Court dealt with confessional principles in the delivery of education? In Ontario, Canada’s most culturally diverse province, there is a growing movement to secularize its Protestant and Catholic dual system. In reality, the movement is to deny the Catholic system constitutional standing and funding since the Protestant boards have long since become a de facto secular system, and since the Catholic Church’s resistance to several elements of the cultural program of sexual liberation is increasingly considered by opinion elites to be discriminatory and bigoted.51 But this is a relatively recent development. In the 1980s and 1990s the concern was to achieve confessional equality not by secularizing the system but by extending public funding to other confessions on terms equivalent to those extended to the Protestant and Catholic confessions. In Adler v. Ontario,52 the issue was the constitutionality of the Ontario provincial government’s failure to fund other Christian and Jewish schools. Justice Iacobucci’s majority decision against Adler was based on grounds that skirted the religious freedom and equality rights arguments. He argued that s. 93 was a constitutional mandate to the Ontario govern-

246

Thomas M.J. Bateman

ment to fund the Catholic boards. A “child born of historical exigency,” s. 93 is “a comprehensive code with respect to denominational school rights.” And one part of the Constitution – Charter religious freedom and equality rights – cannot invalidate another part of the Constitution. Ontario may decide in its wisdom to fund the other confessional schools, but the Constitution does not require it to do so. Iacobucci thus put the ball in the legislature’s court. Writing for one other justice, Justice Sopinka’s concurrence dismissed Adler’s case on more direct s. 2(a) terms. He noted first that the Ontario legislative framework allows for independent confessional education either at home or school. But what of the funding disparity – that Catholic parents have their costs covered by the tax system whereas other religious parents must pay their taxes and additional tuition? Sopinka: While a distinction is made between these religious groups and the separate Roman Catholic schools, this distinction is constitutionally mandated and cannot be the subject of a Charter attack. The legislation is not the source of any distinction amongst all the groups whose exercise of religious freedom involves an economic cost …. [T]he appellants have no complaint cognizable in law since the disadvantage they must bear is one flowing exclusively from their religious tenets.53 This is curious reasoning. Any law differentially affecting religionists could be dismissed on the basis that it is the complainant’s religion, not the law itself, that caused the conflict. This argument guts the conceptual basis of reasonable accommodation law in Canada, according to which laws of general application that burden particular persons based on religion must be interpreted or altered to accommodate such persons to the point of undue hardship to the interests the law was designed to protect. Human rights activists would call this blaming the victim. Sopinka’s reasoning did not govern the Court’s thinking in a 2006 decision that affirmed a reasonable accommodation whereby a Sikh student could wear his kirpan on public school grounds on which weapons were prohibited.54 On the other hand, the Court was much more consistent with Sopinka’s reasoning in Adler when it dismissed the appeal of Alberta Hutterites who wished to retain a religiously inspired exemption from a requirement that all driver’s licences in the province contain photo identification.55 In that decision the majority of the Court considered it merely

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

247

inconvenient that the rural, communal Hutterites contract others to drive their vehicles if their religious scruples forbade them from obtaining photo-ID licences. Sopinka’s reasoning calls to mind an older line of thought on religion in a liberal society. John Locke argued that the state ought to tolerate religious dissenters but that laws of general application shall apply regardless of religion. “[T]hose things that are prejudicial to the commonweal of a people in their ordinary use and are, therefore, forbidden by laws, those things ought not to be permitted to Churches in their sacred rites. Only the magistrate ought always to be very careful that he do not misuse his authority to the oppression of any Church, under pretence of public good.”56 Locke’s principle is consistent with religious freedom when the scope of the state is modest, leaving a broad range of human life beyond the reach of the law and public policy. In the contemporary administrative state, however, whose tentacles reach most areas of individual life, the collisions of general laws and religious conduct multiply. To dismiss such collisions as merely the consequence of one’s chosen religion is either thoughtless or disingenuous. In Trinity Western University v. B.C. College of Teachers,57 the tension between the corporate associational identity of a Christian university and the individual rights of persons was at the forefront. The university (TWU) required students to sign a statement agreeing not to engage in a variety of immoral acts, including sexual sins like fornication. TWU had operated a teacher training program in which four years of education were completed at TWU and one at Simon Fraser University. It applied to the College (BCCT) to be able to operate its own four-year program. The BCCT refused, alleging that TWU engaged in discriminatory practices contrary to the public interest and that a fifth year at SFU would be needed to impart more sensitivity to the TWU students. The BCCT lost at the Supreme Court. The majority at one point remarked in a manner consistent with an older, thinner liberal democratic constitutionalism: TWU is not for everybody; it is designed to address the needs of people who share a number of religious convictions. That said, the admissions policy of TWU alone is not in itself sufficient to establish discrimination as it is understood in our s. 15 jurisprudence. It is important to note that this is a private institution that is exempted, in part, from the British Columbia human rights legislation and to which the Charter does not apply. To state that the voluntary

248

Thomas M.J. Bateman adoption of a code of conduct based on a person’s own religious beliefs, in a private institution, is sufficient to engage s. 15 would be inconsistent with freedom of conscience and religion, which co-exist with the right to equality.58

This sounds like a vigorous defence of religion in its full associational dimension, a case of judicial restraint in the application of Charter values. But TWU’s victory was more pyrrhic. First, TWU’s policy was interpreted to be not especially demanding. The Court was at pains to point out that the school’s code of conduct fails to refer to homosexuality or sexual orientation; that it concerns itself only with “practices that the particular student is asked to give up himself, or herself, while at TWU”; that there is no evidence that anyone was denied admission for failing to sign the document or expelled for breaching its terms; and that the sexual practices are nested in a longer list of acts including drunkenness, dishonesty, profanity, and so on.59 In other words, the Court minimized the significance of the statement of the code of conduct, a rhetorical tack of small comfort, no doubt, to the TWU leadership. Second, the Court ruled against BCCT’s position for lack of evidence of discriminatory, hateful conduct, the implication being that if a court henceforth found TWU graduates to act in a discriminatory fashion (whatever this means) toward or with respect to homosexuals, BCCT would have a case.60 Third, the Court indicated that BCCT in its assessment of the accreditation of TWU must consider not only s. 15 equality rights considerations but also religious freedom considerations, implying that religious freedom does not trump other Charter considerations. Fourth, later in its reasons the Court characterized the conflict as one between individuals – the religious freedoms of some against the fundamental rights of others.61 The Court, in other words, neglected to link individual religious freedom to the associational context in which it is exercised. Finally, the evidence question was important because of the Court’s distinction between belief and action pursuant to belief. “The freedom to hold beliefs is broader than the freedom to act on them.”62 Here the Court chips away at the more capacious account of religious freedom in Big M in which the court articulated a more robust link between belief and conduct pursuant to belief. Trinity Western was relatively easy to decide because the accrediting body had no evidence on which to base its position that Trinity Western graduates were harmful to other students and the gay community generally. In Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 36,63 evidence of harm was not

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

249

at issue. Instead, the issue was the degree to which young students in public schools, in a sense, can be forced to be free – to be exposed to different family forms and lifestyles as a means to their development as tolerant individuals in a diverse society.64 A kindergarten teacher applied to the school board to have three books approvingly depicting same-sex-parented families authorized for classroom use by teachers. The board declined to approve the books, citing the age of the students to be exposed to the material, the objections of parents, and the difficulties posed to children exposed to materials at odds with standards upheld at home. In short, looming large for the Board was the role of parents in raising their children.65 The teacher cited British Columbia’s legislative framework for delivering education, stressing as it does strict secularism and openness to persons of all backgrounds, interests, and needs. To refuse to present same-sex families to children, on this account, is discriminatory. The majority of the Court gingerly sidestepped the concrete question, but its analysis leans to the teacher’s position. According to the majority, the board wrongly acted on parents’ moral objections to same-sex families by failing to consider Charter equality values as well as religious freedom values – in other words, the interest of same-sex parents “in receiving equal recognition and respect in the school system.”66 In addition, the board took too seriously the argument from cognitive dissonance – that children would be confused by different teachings at home and at school. Here the Court’s position is itself somewhat confused. On the one hand McLachlin states clearly that the point of exposure to diversity is not to demand that students approve of others’ views and practices, but instead to learn to tolerate others and respect their right to equal respect.67 In this sense, exposure to diversity has a limited aim associated with a modus vivendi. The parents’ cognitive dissonance argument fails because there is no dissonance created by exposure to practices one is not asked to approve. In this sense exposure to different family forms is like being exposed to persons of different hairstyle: I am to observe them and tolerate them but I do not have to consider the different hairstyle a competing pattern of life I am pressured to adopt for myself. But the Court also dispenses with the cognitive dissonance argument by citing other examples of dissonance to which students are frequently exposed: The number of different family models in the community means that some children will inevitably come from families of which certain

250

Thomas M.J. Bateman parents disapprove. Giving these children an opportunity to discuss their family models may expose other children to some cognitive dissonance. But such dissonance is neither avoidable nor noxious. Children encounter it every day in the public school system as members of a diverse student body. They see their classmates, and perhaps also their teachers, eating foods at lunch that they themselves are not permitted to eat, whether because of their parents’ religious strictures or because of other moral beliefs. They see their classmates wearing clothing with features or brand labels which their parents have forbidden them to wear. And they see their classmates engaging in behaviour on the playground that their parents have told them not to engage in. The cognitive dissonance that results from such encounters is simply a part of living in a diverse society. It is also a part of growing up. Through such experiences, children come to realize that not all of their values are shared by others.68

While the Court denies the existence of cognitive dissonance in one part of its judgment, it admits it in another. Dissonance is caused when two teachings of the same moral gravity and concerning the same subject cause distress. In this latter passage, the majority claims that dissonance does exist but that it is inevitable and formative. In so doing, it also, as one observer notes, equates divergent family forms with divergent modes of dress and cuisine.69 The Court tries to lower the temperature of the issue, suggesting that it is not that big a deal and that perhaps the parents are overreacting. To do so, the majority evaluates the significance of representations of samesex families to objecting parents and urges that their views ought to change. This aside, its confusion about the existence of moral conflict – for which “cognitive dissonance” is the more benign therapeutic term – operates as a way to skirt the question about the nature of moral formation implicit in the “exposure” policy. Note also that the Court fails to distinguish causes of dissonance arising willy-nilly from the interactions of kids from different backgrounds, on the one hand, and those authorized or mandated by the educational establishment, on the other. In dissent, Justice Gonthier (writing also for Justice Bastarache) insisted on parents’ primary responsibility for their children’s education, that this authority is delegated to school boards, and that boards act on their behalf. This makes it entirely appropriate for boards to take parental views into account. Gonthier recalled the belief–conduct distinction raised in Trinity Western, now flipping it in favour of the objecting parents:

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

251

If many Canadians, as a result of deeply held religious or nonreligious beliefs or opinions, draw such a line and commit to such a distinction in their daily lives, must the law obliterate it because of the allegation that acts of discrimination against persons are born from the view held by some that certain persons’ conduct is immoral or inappropriate? Does a commitment to eradicating the potential for future instances of discrimination require that religious persons or others be forced to abandon their views regarding the immorality of certain conduct? Can s. 15 be used to eliminate beliefs, whether popular or unpopular? In a society committed to liberal values and robust pluralism, the answer to all of these questions must be in the negative.70 In the absence of evidence of harmful conduct, Gonthier concluded, no link can be made between the beliefs of parents and the concern about discrimination. But is harmful conduct or moral recognition the real issue? Gonthier suspected that “it is a feeble notion of pluralism that transforms ‘tolerance’ into ‘mandated approval or acceptance.’”71 “[L]anguage espousing ‘tolerance,’” he argued, “ought not be employed as a cloak for the means of obliterating disagreement.”72 Religious freedom, as the Jones and Chamberlain decisions indicate, is bound up with parental obligation and authority, as well as educational choice. Bluntly put, the scope of religious freedom is determined in part by the degree of control over children’s lives exercised by parents on the one hand, and the state and its agencies on the other.73 In Chamberlain, Gonthier’s dissent on behalf of parental authority is the older perspective from which the Court increasingly departs. An important trend in Supreme Court Charter jurisprudence is the increasing prominence of s. 7, which declares that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” While the Court took some time to sort out whether s. 7 was primarily a procedural protection or both procedural and substantive, and whether it applied to the administration of justice alone or to public law more generally, it has emerged as perhaps the critical provision of the Charter and its application by the courts suggests that a key Charter value is individual autonomy. As noted above, this was Justice Wilson’s objective from the outset. The case law supports the view that s. 7 individual autonomy

252

Thomas M.J. Bateman

considerations are capacious enough to encompass many if not most religious freedom considerations.74 In the end, this may mean that s. 2(a) will atrophy as a Charter right and that individual conscientious belief will increasingly be understood as a matter of s. 7 rights to liberty and security of the person. Religious freedom may eventually be assimilated into s. 7. This is not merely a terminological matter. Religious freedom has a collective, associational dimension: it is cramped and trivialized in the absence of a right to worship in a communal context, to engage in myriad activities in continuing association with others.75 Section 7 protects only individual rights; it captures and protects the interior, private, and individual dimension of religious belief and practice. So any movement from s. 2(a) to s. 7 as the bulwark of freedom of conscience and religion is significant.76 Support for this conclusion is found in a line of cases involving the religious freedom of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Witnesses are unwittingly among Canada’s champions of civil liberties, their members having litigated important freedom of expression and religion cases since the 1940s.77 In the Charter era their successes have been few. Significantly, they have made more headway framing their claims in terms of individual autonomy than religious freedom. In Young v. Young,78 the Court grappled with the consequences of an acrimonious marital breakdown rooted in religious differences between the spouses and involving the degree to which the access parent could share his Jehovah’s Witness faith with his daughters over the objections of the custodial parent. An initial court order limited the father’s ability to involve his daughters in his religious activities. The father appealed this condition, arguing that his Charter s. 2(a) rights were infringed. The case turned in part on the federal Divorce Act’s “best interests of the child” (BIC) test which governed custodial and access decisions and its relationship to the Charter. Does BIC incorporate Charter values like freedom of religion or can Charter rights be asserted against interpretation of the BIC test? In her majority reasons Chief Justice McLachlin overturned the judge’s access order because she held that the judge failed to consider the benefits to the children of knowing their father’s faith.79 She agreed that the BIC test is the ultimate criterion governing decisions about custody and access. This means that the custodial parent cannot dictate terms to the access parent. It also means, however, that the BIC test erects a lower threshold for state intervention than s. 2(a) of the Charter:

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

253

It is clear that conduct which poses a risk of harm to the child would not be protected. As noted earlier, religious expression and comment of a parent which is found to violate the best interests of a child will often do so because it poses a risk of harm to the child. If so, it is clear that the guarantee of religious freedom can offer no protection. But I think a case can be made that even in cases where a risk of harm may not have been established, the guarantee of freedom of religion should not be understood to extend to protecting conduct which is not in the best interests of the child …. The vulnerable situation of the child heightens the need for protection; if one is to err, it should not be in favour of the exercise of the alleged parental right, but in favour of the interests of the child. An additional factor which may come into play in the case of older children is the “parallel right” of others referred to by Dickson J., “to hold and manifest beliefs and opinions of their own.” For these reasons, I conclude that the Charter guarantee of freedom of religion does not extend to protect conduct which is not in the best interests of the child under the Divorce Act.80 Notice the reference to older children in this passage, no doubt born of evidence in the case transcript that the couple’s older daughter expressed discomfort at being taken to Jehovah’s Witness events. The implication is that as children mature they become more self-determining, more autonomous, and their desires and inclinations acquire more weight in a BIC analysis, the obvious assumption being that it is in the best interests of a person to make informed decisions affecting him – or herself. Regardless of the age of the child his or her interests are to be weighed independently of the parents’ interests and obligations. The principle of individual autonomy becomes paramount in B.(R.) v. Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto.81 An infant born prematurely was in need of a life-saving blood transfusion, a practice contrary to the religious beliefs of the baby’s Jehovah’s Witness parents. The baby was taken into custody by the Children’s Aid Society and transfused. Though moot, legal proceedings continued on the constitutional questions. The parents made not only a religious freedom argument but also a libertyprivacy-autonomy argument under s.7, claiming that this provision guarantees a substantive parental liberty to make decisions affecting their children. This is an important conceptual tack because it shifts the terms

254

Thomas M.J. Bateman

of argument away from freedom of religion to legal ground more squarely fixed to the morality of individual autonomy. The outcome in B.(R.) was never in doubt; it is hard to imagine a court in a liberal democracy sanctioning faith-based decisions made on behalf of an incompetent person leading inexorably to that person’s death. (While legalized euthanasia may soon be coming to hospitals and hospices, it will be justified on the principle of the individual autonomy of the patient, not the religious freedoms of others.) Such limits on the parents’ religious freedom would always be considered reasonable. The question is how the Court accounted for its decision to rule against the parents. Writing for two others, Justice LaForest held that the Charter protects individuals, not families. But individuals as parents have interests in the welfare of their children. And their right to liberty protected by s. 7 recognizes this. These interests should be protected by the Charter not so much because the liberty of parents is sacred but so that they will be bound by Charter values: The state is now actively involved in a number of areas traditionally conceived of as properly belonging to the private sphere. Nonetheless, our society is far from having repudiated the privileged role parents exercise in the upbringing of their children. This role translates into a protected sphere of parental decision-making which is rooted in the presumption that parents should make important decisions affecting their children both because parents are more likely to appreciate the best interests of their children and because the state is ill-equipped to make such decisions itself. Moreover, individuals have a deep personal interest as parents in fostering the growth of their own children. This is not to say that the state cannot intervene when it considers it necessary to safeguard the child’s autonomy or health. But such intervention must be justified. In other words, parental decision-making must receive the protection of the Charter in order for state interference to be properly monitored by the courts, and be permitted only when it conforms to the values underlying the Charter.82 On the s. 2(a) question, LaForest elaborated a theme hinted at in Young, that a child’s increasing intellectual competence enables him or her more legal power to articulate and determine his or her interests. He notes that “it is the freedom of religion of the appellants – Sheena’s parents – that is at stake in this appeal, not that of the child herself. While it may be conceivable to ground a claim on a child’s own freedom of religion, the child

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

255

must be old enough to entertain some religious beliefs in order to do so. Sheena was only a few weeks old at the time of the transfusion.”83 In their concurrence, Justices Iacobucci and Major (joined by Cory) take LaForest’s remark in a different direction, suggesting not that the child is helplessly dependent and that its interests are backstopped by the state, but that the four-month-old possessed rights against her parents. On the one hand, they argue that the baby’s parents “are constitutionally entitled to manifest their beliefs and practice their religion, as is their daughter. That constitutional freedom includes the right to educate and rear their child in the tenets of their faith. In effect, until the child reaches an age where she can make an independent decision regarding her own religious beliefs, her parents may decide on her religion for her and raise her in accordance with that religion.”84 On the other hand, they describe the baby as a possessor of rights that can be asserted against her parents: The appellants proceed on the assumption that Sheena is of the same religion as they, and hence cannot submit to a blood transfusion. Yet, Sheena has never expressed any agreement with the Jehovah’s Witness faith, nor, for the matter, with any religion, assuming any such agreement would be effective. There is thus an impingement upon Sheena’s freedom of conscience which arguably includes the right to live long enough to make one’s own reasoned choice about the religion one wishes to follow as well as the right not to hold a religious belief. In fact, denying an infant necessary medical care could preclude that child from exercising any of her constitutional rights, as the child, due to parental beliefs, may not live long enough to make choices about the ideas she should like to express, the religion she should like to profess, or the associations she should like to join.85 So not only are religious freedoms and the right to liberty on the part of the parents limited, but the baby has a Charter right to freedom of conscience the justices assert against the parents’ religious scruples. Does this argument not render any parental role in the inculcation of religious faith in their children constitutionally suspect? While parents may consider that they have not only an interest but also an obligation to impart their faith to their children, the justices suggest the opposite – that their obligation is not to interfere with the individual autonomy of their children. The primacy of individual conscience finds its apotheosis in a denial of the legitimate authority of parents to raise their children according to their

256

Thomas M.J. Bateman

own religious faith. Ultimately, the logic suggests child rearing according to Charter values, not religious ones. The Supreme Court seems to nod in this direction. A recent decision concerning Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Charter rights represents something of a resolution of years of religious freedom-related defeats before the courts. In A.C. v. Manitoba (Director of Child and Family Services),86 a fourteen-year-old Witness suffering from Crohn’s disease was considered to be in need of a blood transfusion. A.C. had prepared an advance directive refusing such medical treatment but this was ignored. She was taken into state care and given the transfusion. She claimed that, though only a minor, she was competent to refuse medical treatment. Manitoba legislation stipulates that minors over sixteen years of age are considered competent to refuse medical treatment unless unable to appreciate the consequences of their decisions, but no provision is made for persons under sixteen. For children under sixteen, medical decisions are made using the BIC test. A.C. unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of the law based on ss. 2, 7, and 15, but it is clear that the s. 7 protection of individual autonomy was A.C.’s argument of choice. She cited a battery of s. 7 case law indicating that s. 7 contains a substantive right to liberty and autonomy which includes the individual freedom to make decisions of personal importance.87 She argued that she was a “mature minor,” a category incorporated into Canadian law from Britain and applied in 1986 in the case of a sixteen-year-old seeking a therapeutic abortion over the wishes of her parents,88 and that mature minors are entitled to liberty to make fundamental decisions concerning their own lives, as a full, substantive interpretation of s. 7 guarantees. In her reasons concurring in the decision upholding a law depriving A.C. of the right to refuse medical treatment, Chief Justice McLachlin folded the religious freedom claim into the autonomy argument: “In this case, the s. 7 and s. 2(a) claims merge, upon close analysis. Either the Charter requires that an ostensibly ‘mature’ child under 16 have an unfettered right to make all medical treatment decisions, or it does not, regardless of the individual child’s motivation for refusing treatment. The fact that A.C.’s aversion to receiving a blood transfusion springs from religious conviction does not change the essential nature of the claim as one for absolute personal autonomy in medical decision making.”89 Dissenting in the result, Justice Binnie also reduced the religious freedom claim to a constitutional right to liberty to make “life choices” and decisions of “fundamental personal

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

257

importance”: “To a Jehovah’s Witness, nothing is of more ‘fundamental personal importance’ than observance of the teachings of the church.”90 A.C. v. Manitoba confirms trends noticed by other contributors to this volume. In his essay on Tocquevillian themes in Canadian democracy, Luigi Braddizza marks a deepening individualism in Canada coupled with an atrophying associational life. Insofar as freedom of conscience embraced all manner of beliefs – secular, ideological, and spiritual – then a case can be made that s. 2(a) of the Charter is the guarantor of a Canadian pantheism.

Liberal Democracy and the Courts as Moral Tutors Political regimes require citizens to embody a certain character. The moral character of the citizenry defines the regime and also supports it. Liberal democracies have sometimes propagated the fiction that they are morally neutral and merely construct the procedural side constraints within which individuals live out their various moral lives. They have argued that liberal democracies protect individual citizen’s rights, not public morality, and that rights themselves protect the ability of each to unfold his or her life according to the good he or she defines, as long as that good does not impair the same rights held by all others. The state, in this view, is neutral with respect to the good. It maintains the conditions for individual pursuits of the good without taking sides. This view is incorrect: liberal democracies, like all regimes except perhaps tyrannies, are concerned as much as others with the morality of their citizens. At issue is the nature of that morality and by what means it shall be encouraged. Liberal democracies have stood for centuries for the protection of freedom of religion, and liberal thinkers have claimed that the protection of freedom of religion is not only a way to limit the scope of government and resolve divisive and violent conflicts among the religions for primacy, it also assures the continuing salience of religious faith for maintaining a minimal public morality necessary for peaceful civil life. Liberal democracies lack within themselves the moral resources for their sustainability over time. They need to exploit or conscript external resources for that task. Religion, the argument goes, provides the necessary popular foundation for the legitimacy of the laws; it also restrains the exercise of freedom. Religion keeps liberty from descending into licence. Self-governing individuals make collective self-government possible. Religion promotes self-government. As American President Eisenhower famously (and comically) put it in 1952, “[O]ur form of government has no sense unless it is

258

Thomas M.J. Bateman

founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” The problem raised by this line of argument is that some religions are better supports for liberal democracy than others. Mayan child sacrifice to appease the gods is a religious practice liberal democracies must do without. Alexis de Tocqueville famously claimed, on the other hand, that the vitality and prospects of democracy in America are due to the peculiar Puritan congregationalism that combines self-reliance, moralism, and practical ethical acumen. Germaine de Staël, the stalwart admirer of British liberal constitutionalism, maintained that Christianity “has brought liberty upon earth; justice toward the oppressed, respect for the unfortunate; finally, equality before God, of which equality under the law is only an imperfect image.”91 What kind of moral character is appropriate for liberal democracy in contemporary conditions and who decides? All this may sound deeply illiberal. Maybe so, but it is not without precedent. The impeccable liberal John Stuart Mill, for example, known for his defence of individuality and expansive toleration of diverse religious beliefs in On Liberty, in other places proposed the gentle, artful development of a “Religion of Humanity” shorn of dogmas and threats and inconsistencies that insult the intelligence, a this-worldly commitment to benevolence, disinterested sympathy for the fate of others, “a sense of unity with mankind, and a deep feeling for the general good.” As he makes clear, religion is considered the improver of mankind, but it has fallen so far short of this ideal “that the other good influences on human nature have had as one of their hardest tasks the improvement of religion itself.”92 This must all be a bit embarrassing to contemporary post-Christian liberal democrats. Surely, they would say, liberal democracy does not need religion. Perhaps the constitutional protection of freedom of religion itself is an anachronistic special status for certain conscientious beliefs – a special compromise with faith we can now terminate. Perhaps freedom of religion should be recast as individual autonomy – a constitutional value more congenial to, and more productive of, an increasingly secular political culture.93 The “pressure on religious observers to conform to secular values”94 proceeds apace. This chapter demonstrates that Canadian courts have taken up the mantle of the formation of moral character. They apply Charter rights to government and apply “Charter values” to civil society.95 Potentially all legal relationships, beyond those defining the relation between state and society, are subject to these judicially defined values. So values held in civil society are subject to judicial monitoring and alteration when they conflict

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

259

with judicially defined Charter values. Courts as moral instructors refashion social life in the image of Charter values. This pattern is consistent with what many commentators have described as the “Charter Revolution,” the momentous changes to attitudes and legal character coextensive with the entrenchment of the Charter in 1982. One need not attribute the changes to the Charter itself; the Charter is, after all, merely words on paper.96 However, the Charter authorizes a complex of constitutional decisionmaking involving the courts in adjudicating competing claims by interested actors who mobilize constituencies and deploy resources to convert political and moral objectives into successful legal arguments.97 One Charter value applied to s. 2(a) claims is individual autonomy. Claims for religious freedom conflicting with this value rarely succeed. Indeed, freedom of religion as a constitutional right is being shrunk in favour of the right to liberty protected by s. 7. Of course, voluntarism has always been at the core of liberal thought and is one of the principles that makes liberal democracy a decent alternative to authoritarianism. Government by consent of the governed goes back to Hobbes, even to Plato’s Crito. Liberal thought did not invent the idea of the dignity of choice. It merely radicalized it. As Patrick J. Deneen has recently argued, liberal thought “dismissed the idea that there are wrong or bad choices and thereby rejected the accompanying social structures and institutions that were ordered to restrain the temptation toward self-centred calculation.”98 As Deneen notes, liberal thought claims to describe how humans live, what motivates their action. “Yet implicitly it was constituted as a constructive or normative project: What it presented as a description of human voluntarism in fact had to displace a very different form of human selfunderstanding and longstanding experience.”99 In like manner, Lawrence Cahoone argues: Individualism … wants to conceive of my life as a series of choices, and in so far as those choices involve others, free agreement or contracts. But un-chosen relations form the permanent and virtually inescapable scaffolding of the individual’s life. The most powerful relations on which our lives most obviously depend are usually those not chosen at all: one’s birth family, neighbourhood, culture, and country. And even chosen relations, of course, create dependency.100 Radical individual autonomy, Deneen and Cahoone claim, is based on a false philosophical anthropology. If the new autonomy-based moral order

260

Thomas M.J. Bateman

is to predominate, then humans must change. A liberal democracy premised on the society-wide application of Charter values is the mechanism by which this might be achieved. Assurances of “neutralism” to the contrary notwithstanding, liberal values as Charter values are about remaking individuals as autonomous choosers; and the dignity of choice emanates from the act of choice itself, not from the character of the choices made. An act is moral when autonomously chosen; what is chosen is governed by subjective will subject only to the harm principle. This is an attractive, even seductive, doctrine as it appears to release us from difficult choices between and among different views of the good life. It renders the hard decisions of government merely procedural in character: the problem with “risky behaviours” is not that they are wrong or immoral but that they endanger a person’s selfdetermining capacity or impair others’ self-determination rights. But the mistake in this position is to fail to see that this view of persons as selfdetermining choosers is itself a moral–philosophical account of what humans are and what they rightly aspire to be. It is not morally neutral to see people as autonomous choosers. The Charter revolution, after all, is about the society-wide application of Charter values. As the Jehovah’s Witness cases indicate, the principles of the revolution have been internalized, even by those earnest and spirited enough to mount constitutional challenges against state action. If the revolution is to succeed, the young must be educated into the new order. Recall Justice McLachlin’s remark in Trinity Western to the effect that s. 2(a) protects belief but not necessarily the actions that stem therefrom. Does it not ultimately make sense to fashion acceptable beliefs in the first place, thus guaranteeing acceptable actions? Thus the application of Charter values to education assumes importance in the cases. For John Stuart Mill, it was crucial for a liberal society to see that the young were educated, but even for this champion of individual liberty, the state was not to control the content and delivery of “public” education.101 Not so contemporary Canadian liberal democracy. Charter values mandate toleration – not toleration as a type of modus vivendi, a putting up with others with whom one must share social, economic, and political space, but toleration as recognition, respect, acceptance, and approval. There may be another reason why exposure to different lifestyles is important in a secular liberal society. Such exposure affirms the principle of self-determination. If I am sheltered from lifestyles different from my own, I cannot be said to be involved in choosing my own life. But if I am so exposed, I come to

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

261

know many of the options available to me. I might choose one of them. But even if I do not, by knowing other options and remaining as I am, I can more plausibly be said to have chosen my own lifestyle. I have tacitly chosen my lifestyle. Thus a central anthropological tenet of liberal society is affirmed: the individual as self-determining, autonomous agent, for whom what is most important is not what one chooses, but that one chooses. I choose, therefore I am.102 Canada’s debate on Charter values unfolds in the shadow of progressivism – the early twentieth-century bundle of ideas and dispositions that combined social Darwinism, historicism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, a belief in scientific expertise, inevitable historical progress, and the benevolent power of the state – and particularly its account of constitutionalism. The progressive constitution is an organic, living thing, always changing, growing, developing. Rights have no fixed reference outside of historical context. They change too.103 John Dewey, one of the most famous and prolific progressive philosophers, claimed that “the concept of liberty is always relative to forces that at a given time and place are increasingly felt to be oppressive. Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage.”104 As new limits on human freedom are “felt,” new rights must arise to combat them. Judges are the inventors of such rights, and these rights emanate from articulations of ever-evolving values. For Dewey, “liberalism” – his term for progressive ideas that are to be distinguished from older Lockean natural right liberalism – does not pit the individual against the potentially ruinous, meddling power of the state. Rather, it deploys the state to assist individual development and effective liberty. The work of renascent liberalism, “is first of all education, in the broadest sense of that term. Schooling is a part of the work of education, but education in its full meaning includes all influences that go to form the attitudes and dispositions (of desire as well as of belief), which constitute dominant habits of mind and character.”105 Fundamentally, the liberal state does not find and protect individuals; it makes them. “[S]ocial arrangements, laws, institutions … are means of creating individuals … Individuality in a social or moral sense is something to be wrought out.”106 While any regime, liberal democracy included, must attend to the education of citizens, what is the meaning of deploying state power for the creation of individuals? Is not individualism precisely what needs to be tempered if self-government, both individual and collective, is to succeed?

262

Thomas M.J. Bateman

Are Charter values obviously better than the older constellations of moral principles at achieving individual and collective self-government? Notes 1 Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 13–15. Others argue like Macedo that liberal democracy is a “way of life” but they refuse to invest the phrase with the heavy moral content that Macedo does. Liberal democracy, for some writers, means a thin public stock of morality and a more diverse, robust private realm with which the state has relatively little to do. See Clifford Orwin, “Canadian values boils down to liberal democracy” Globe and Mail, 9 May 2009, A19. 2 Macedo, Diversity and Distrust, 85. The remaking of private life and association in the image of liberal values, Macedo, asserts, “is both legitimate and at odds with the notion that our basic commitment is to difference, diversity, or versions of multiculturalism designed without keeping civic aims in view.” Ibid., 164. 3 William Galston, “Religion and the Limits of Liberal Democracy,” in Douglas Farrow, ed., Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society: Essays in Pluralism, Religion, and Public Policy (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 42. 4 See Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2002), Part 1. Also, Iain Benson “Considering Secularism” in Farrow ed., 83–98. 5 Ross Douthat, “Defining Religious Liberty Down,” New York Times (28 July 2012) www.nytimes.com (accessed 31 July 2012). For his fuller account of the embedded, institutional character of religious life, see his Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, 2012), chap. 1. 6 Thomas Farr, “Is Religious Freedom Necessary for Other Freedoms to Flourish?,” https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/religious-freedomnecessary-other-freedoms-flourish. Accessed 21 August 2012. 7 Thomas Paine, “The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and of Fabulous Theology,” in Paine: Political Writings [1794], ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 268. 8 Recent Supreme Court opinions indicate that the amending formulae contained in Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982 protect original agreements and bargains that ought to persist in Canadian constitutionalism. Changes to Canadian institutions – the Senate and the composition of the Supreme Court, for example – that disturb the federal balance on which Confederation is premised, can only be made by the onerous rules set out in ss. 41 or 42. See Reference re Senate Reform, 2014 SCC 32, and Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss. 5 and 6, 2014 SCC 21. 9 The seminal case is Re B.C. Motor Vehicle Act, [1985] 2 S.C.R. 486. It is important to note that the living tree metaphor, lifted from the reference opinion of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Edwards v. A-G Canada [1930] A.C. 124, almost certainly does not in fact mean what its contemporary fans think it means. See Scott Reid, “The Persons Case Eight Decades Later: Reappraising Canada’s Most Misunderstood Court Ruling,” (2013), http://papers.ssrn.com/ sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=2209846. Accessed 6 May 2014.

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

263

10 RWDSU v. Dolphin Delivery Ltd., [1986] 2 SCR 573. 11 Dolphin, para 34. 12 Belatedly realizing that this proposition means that a judge could in principle never violate the Charter, the Court modified this assertion in Rahey v. The Queen, [1987] 1 S.C.R. 588. Now, courts are subject to the Charter but their decisions do not convert private law into state action subject to Charter standards. 13 See for example, Robert Howse, “Dolphin Delivery: The Supreme Court and the Public/Private Distinction in Canadian Constitutional Law,” University of Toronto Faculty Law Review 46 (1988): 248–58; Brian Etherington, “Notes of Cases: RWDSU v. Dolphin Delivery: Canadian Bar Review 66 (1987), 818–38; and Allan C. Hutchinson and Andrew Petter, “Private Rights/Public Wrongs: The Liberal Lie of the Charter,” University of Toronto Law Journal 38 (1988): 278–97. 14 Dolphin, para 39. 15 [1995] 2 S.C.R. 1130. 16 Hill, para 95. 17 Ibid., para 206. 18 Mark S. Harding, Value Added? The Supreme Court’s Use of ‘Charter Values’ (MA Thesis, University of Calgary, 2011. 19 Re: Resolution to amend the Constitution, [1981] 1 S.C.R. 753. 20 Reference re Secession of Quebec [1998] 2 S.C.R. 217. 21 It is the defender of a law’s constitutionality who argues that a law, if in violation of a right, is nonetheless a reasonable limit on that right. In the case of positive law, this is the state in the person of the attorney-general. In the case of the common law, the state is typically not a party to a dispute, and in any case it is the judges who ‘made’ or declared the common law, always in accordance with fundamental constitutional norms. Charter values are now an additional set of norms guiding this development. The Court considers itself the “guardian of the Constitution.” See Hunter et al. v. Southam Inc., [1984] 2 SCR 145, at 155. 22 [1986] 1 SCR 103. 23 Ibid., para 64. 24 [1990] 3 S.C.R. 229. 25 Ibid., 261. 26 Ibid., 262. 27 Ibid., 269. 28 Ibid., 357–8; emphasis added. 29 In the event, a majority of the Court, applying a bulky, indeterminate test it developed for the occasion, held that the Charter did not reach the university. In a companion case, it was similarly held (4–3) that the Vancouver General Hospital was not governmental: Stoffman.v. Vancouver General Hospital [1990] 3 S.C.R. 483. Subsequently, however, the Court decided that a non-governmental entity can be subject to the Charter due to, and to the extent of, a governmental function it performs. So a hospital providing legislatively defined “medically required services” is to that extent subject to the Charter: Eldridge v. B.C. (A.G.) [1997] 3 S.C.R. 624. An airport is subject to the Charter (Committee for the Commonwealth of Canada [1991] 1 S.C.R. 139), as is the principal of a public school R. v. M. (M.R.), [1998] 3 SCR 393, and a community college when it is financially

264

30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

Thomas M.J. Bateman and administratively controlled by provincial government, (Douglas/Kwantlen Faculty Assn. v. Douglas College [1990] 3 S.C.R. 570). 2012 ABCA 139. Pridgen, para 105. Ibid., para 104. Ibid., para 117. Beverley McLachlin, “Freedom of Religion and the Rule of Law: A Canadian Perspective,” in Douglas Farrow, ed., Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society, 12–34. Ibid., 32–3. Re: B.C. Motor Vehicles Act. In a recent study of the application of religion and state clauses of constitutions around the world, Jonathan Fox found a lot of slippage. Public policy does not often reflect the facial meaning of constitutional prescriptions for the relationship between religion and state; “while constitutions matter, they do not matter nearly as much as one would expect.” Jonathan Fox, “Out of Sync: The Disconnect Between Constitutional Clauses and State Legislation on Religion” Canadian Journal of Political Science 44:1 (March 2011): 76. John von Heyking, “Civil Religion and Associational Life under Canada’s ‘Ephemeral Monster’: Canada’s Multi-Headed Constitution,” in Ronald Weed and John von Heyking, eds, Civil Religion in Political Thought: Its Perennial Questions and Enduring Relevance in North America. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 320. [1985] 1 SCR 295. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 122–3; emphasis added. [1986] 2 S.C.R. 284. Ibid., para 76. Ibid., para 79. [1988] 1 S.C.R. 30. Mind you, Chief Justice Dickson’s reasons did not entirely escape notice. The following remark made it into the news stories: “At the most basic, physical and emotional level, every pregnant woman is told by the section that she cannot submit to a generally safe medical procedure that might be of clear benefit to her unless she meets criteria entirely unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations. Not only does the removal of decision-making power threaten women in a physical sense; the indecision of knowing whether an abortion will be granted inflicts emotional stress. Section 251 clearly interferes with a woman’s bodily integrity in both a physical and emotional sense. Forcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction, to carry a foetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with a woman’s body and thus a violation of security of the person.” Ibid., 56–7. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 176.

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

265

51 Consider the debate on Ontario’s Accepting Schools Act (“Bill 13”) which requires all schools, Catholic or otherwise, to establish gay–straight alliances at the instigation of any student. It should be noted in this context that while many object to the very existence of schools that depart from the secular public model, the Toronto District School Board operates high-school programs designed to cater to sexual minorities. Oasis Alternative Secondary School operates “Triangle,” which “offers courses exclusively to queer students in Toronto.” See Donn Short, ‘Don’t Be So Gay!’: Queers, Bullying, and Making Schools Safe (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 125. 52 [1996] 3 S.C.R. 609. 53 Ibid., 702. 54 Multani v. Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys, [2006] 1 SCR 256. 55 Alberta v. Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, [2009] 2 SCR 567. 56 John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration [1689] (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 42. 57 [2001] 1 S.C.R. 772. 58 Ibid., para 25. 59 Ibid., para 22. 60 Ibid., para 38. In addition, the Court knew of no evidence that the fifth year would indeed re-educate the students along the lines the BCCT had intended. 61 Ibid., para 28. 62 Ibid., para 36. 63 [2002] 4 S.C.R. 710. 64 Though Chief Justice McLachlin, writing for six of the seven justices in the majority, avoided the Charter issue directly, she noted that “human rights considerations” were in play. Certainly, Justice Gonthier in dissent considered the Charter applicable to the school board. 65 Ibid., para 55. 66 Ibid., para 58. 67 Ibid., para 59. 68 Ibid., para 65. 69 See Heyking, “Civil Religion,” 319. 70 Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 3, para 128. 71 Ibid., para 132. 72 Ibid., para 134. 73 For a discussion of the relational triangle of parent, child, and state in the context of the ERC program, see Alison Braley, “Religious Rights and Quebec’s Ethics and Religious Culture Course,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 44:3 (September 2011): 613–34. She argues for a weak recognition of parental authority over children, noting that parental influence is inevitable and that the formation of values in their children is a parental obligation. But children are persons, not parents’ property, and parents cannot legitimately forbid the “exposure” of their children to values that may challenge the desirability of those held by parents. 74 This is a development in keeping with observations of the application of s. 7 in the criminal legal context. Here the courts have discovered several rights implicit in the s. 7 guarantee. One scholar, for this reason, calls s. 7 “the fairest

266

75

76

77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90

91 92

93

94

Thomas M.J. Bateman Charter right of them all.” If the Canadian Constitution is a living tree, “then s. 7 of the Charter is its tap root.” See Richard C.C. Peck, “Section 7 of the Charter: The Fairest Section of Them All?” in Ryder Gilliland, ed., The Charter at Thirty (Toronto: Canada Law Book, 2012), 75–104. A comprehensive defence of this position is presented by Alvin J. Esau, The Courts and the Colonies: The Litigation of Hutterite Church Disputes (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), particularly chapters 3 and 12. It can only be noted in this context that the Charter’s s. 2(d), the guarantee of freedom of association, has been undeveloped by the courts except in relation to union rights and collective bargaining. See Gary Botting, Fundamental Freedoms and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1993). [1993] 4 S.C.R. 3. In the companion case of P.(D.) v. S.(C.) [1993] 4 S.C.R. 141, the majority similarly reversed a lower court order restricting the religious activities of an access parent, holding that the order was based more on presumption than evidence of harm to the children. Young. Young, 122. [1995] 1 S.C.C. 315. Ibid., 372; emphasis added. Ibid., 381. Ibid., 434–5. Ibid., 437. [2009] 2 SCR 181. See, for example, Wilson’s reasons in R. v. Morgentaler, 166; Godbout v. Longueuil (City), [1997] 3 S.C.R. 844 R. v. Malmo-Levine, 2003 SCC 74, [2003] 3 S.C.R. 571, at para. 85; Blencoe v. British Columbia (Human Rights Commission), 2000 SCC 44, [2000] 2 S.C.R. 307, at para. 54; Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General), 2005 SCC 35, [2005] 1 S.C.R. 791; and B. (R.). A.C. v. Manitoba, 58. Ibid., 155. Emphasis added. The Court by a 6–1 margin upheld the Manitoba law and found the BIC test at the heart of the province’s law governing persons under 16 years of age to be constitutional, able as it is to take account of the circumstances of a mature minor. Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution [1818] ed. Aurelian Craiutu. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 752. John Stuart Mill, “The Usefulness of Religion,” ed. Jonathan Bennett, [1873] (2008), http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/mill1873c.pdf. Accessed 29 August 2012. For a discussion of the recasting of older, traditional, and often confessional moral standards into more palatable secular language, see Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Janet Epp Buckingham, Fighting Over God: A Legal and Political History of Religious Freedom in Canada (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 150. Epp Buckingham’s fine book also discerns a reduction of religious freedom to freedom of individual conscience.

The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor

267

95 Frederick de Coste has noticed the Supreme Court’s interest in the management of religious conduct in other areas of law. In Bruker v. Marcovitz, [2007] 3 SCR 607 the female partner in a broken marriage sought damages for the estranged spouse’s failure to obtain a divorce (a Get) under Jewish religious law as he had committed to do in a divorce settlement. The majority of the Supreme Court granted those damages, citing a variety of egalitarian constitutional values with which it considered the Jewish law to be inconsistent. “Writ large,” de Coste argues, “Bruker stands for the proposition that the state is properly possessed of a weltanschauung – the state’s ‘fundamental values’ … to which the conduct and projects of its subjects, including their religious conduct and projects, are properly held to judicial account.” See F.C. De Coste, “Caesar’s Faith: Limited Government and Freedom of Religion in Bruker v. Marcovitz,” Dalhousie Law Journal 32 (Spring 2009): 153–76. 96 For a sustained argument that the Charter was the product of a variety of social and cultural forces for change, not the cause of them, see Ian Brodie and Neil Nevitte, “Evaluating the Citizens’ Constitution Theory,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 26:2 (June 1993): 235–59. 97 See for example, Charles R. Epp, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and F.L. Morton and Rainer Knopff, The Charter Revolution and the Court Party (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000). 98 Patrick J. Deneen, “Unsustainable Liberalism,” First Things (August–September 2012), 26. 99 Ibid., 27. 100 Lawrence E. Cahoone, Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 174. 101 “A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty [1859] ed. Edward Alexander (Peterborough: Broadview, 1999), 156. 102 This variant of the Cartesian principle is taken from Bradley C.S. Watson, Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence (Willmington: ISI Books, 2009), 188. 103 And expand. Scholars increasingly note with concern the proliferation of human rights documents and the attendant moral inflation attending this increase. The right to vacations is now lumped in with classic, first-generation civil liberties like habeus corpus. If everything is a human right, nothing is. See Jacob Mchangama and Guglielmo Verdirame, “The Danger of Human Rights Proliferation: When Defending Liberty, Less is More,” Foreign Affairs (24 July 2013), accessed 31 July 2013. www.foreignaffairs.com. 104 John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action [1935] (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000), 54. 105 Ibid., 62. 106 Quoted in Thomas G. West, “Progressivism and the Transformation of American Government,” in John Marini and Ken Masugi, eds, The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 15.

The Hobbesian Foundations of Modern Illiberal Education Travis D. Smith

Thomas Hobbes’s political teaching works to convince us that we should regard our ideas and actions as so insignificant that we ought never to insist on them, whereas our appetites should be reckoned as so significant that we ought to insist that society should be arranged so as to assist us in the satisfaction of them, provided they’re harmless enough.1 Hobbes reduces each person’s ideas regarding the true and the good to expressions of her or his subjective appetites and aversions, so that they may be judged adversely if they are found, perceived, or imagined harmful. Applying this teaching, so that the attitudes and behaviour of individuals will fall into alignment with it, requires comprehensive social engineering and soulcraft. It involves laws and regulations that discipline our thoughts and feelings and govern the minutiae of our daily lives through incentives and disincentives. Through formal and informal modes of education, in which proper socialization is the highest priority, the trick is to get people to fancy themselves free and come to enjoy the pleasures and comforts they happen to prefer without calling their goodness into question, attaining those pleasures preferably but not necessarily through their own labour, all the while getting them not only to forgo their own freedom of thought and action but also to approve of the suppression of these liberties throughout society. This chapter looks to explore, generally speaking, how a Hobbesian regime would educate its populace to be well-suited to it, systematically crafting its subjects so that their capacity for taking responsibility for their own lives and attending to the well-being of their communities is so compromised that they would come to pride themselves on their cowardice and feebleness in thought and deed. Descending to particulars, I then offer an account of how the ethos engendered by Hobbes’s reductionist psychology mandates a crusade against hate that would manifest itself, for example, in

Modern Illiberal Education

269

speech codes enforced on university campuses. I do not in this chapter empirically detail the relevance of my analysis to an understanding of freedom as it is learned or practised (or not learned and not practised) in Canada.2 The success of my analysis does, in part, depend on the reader’s perception of its applicability to present-day circumstances. I do agree that, even if nowadays we do resemble the realization of Hobbes’s intentions, to say that our situation is his fault or achievement would give him too much credit or blame. However, I think that we can gain a fair understanding of ourselves and our situation through an understanding of what Hobbes intended, or at least what is implied by his teaching, given that the democratic psychology he recommended has become so familiar and widespread.3 Hobbes’s political teaching aims at the abolition of the political and the philosophical, not to mention the theological. There is, Hobbes works to persuade us, no special good to be derived from living either the active life or the contemplative life. Indeed, active participation in public affairs is a poison for everyone involved and affected. Disagreements should be perceived as attacks. Attempts to persuade should be reckoned as attempts to manipulate with an aim to subjugate. People should mind their own business. Nobody should presume to be their brothers’ and sisters’ keeper; that job falls to the government that we have appointed for the purpose of keeping everybody safe and able to satisfy their appetites – an exhaustive and exhausting task because nobody can be sated and yet they won’t stop trying. The friendly pursuit of the good or the true or the noble together is not merely rare and difficult; it should be regarded as inherently objectionable. Politics is reduced to public administration, bypassing public contestation, to become the coordination and application of powers by those authorized to wield them, snuffing out politics properly so-called. The goal is to secure contented enjoyment in the satisfaction of harmless appetites, the moderate accumulation of stuff, and inoffensive camaraderie among people. To this end, the only knowledge of value is the technological,4 the design of those means by which pleasures are to be attained and anguish averted. People will understand themselves as free insofar as they are able to succeed at enjoying their preferred pleasures and avoiding whatever pains them. Felicity, according to Hobbes, is only the continual attainment of whatever one desires, and freedom is simply the absence of obstacles in that ongoing pursuit.5 Hobbes understands that people enjoy their lives more when they feel that they attain what they enjoy “by their [own] industry,”6 indicating that a sense of individual agency is a component of human happiness, but it belongs to government to assist people by

270

Travis D. Smith

removing the obstacles in their way and facilitating their successes. It falls to the sovereign’s counsellors, magistrates, and sundry regular officials to design and implement laws and policies, especially with respect to education, that will point people’s preferred pleasures in the direction of the more readily attainable, more easily deliverable, and less risky, as well as make their fears more manageable and less disruptive, although not necessarily less intense. Public officials will do their best when they, too, share the same psychology, the same conception of the human good, and the same standards of success as those over whom they govern7 – governing not out of a sense of responsibility or duty to others, but only out of their own self-interest. It is better for public servants to be self-interested so that they are not expected to see their service as a sacrifice. You would not want to recruit self-sacrificing types as public servants, lest they discover that those whom they serve are not worthy of their sacrifices. Instead, institutions of government should be established such that public servants simply get to enjoy more of what they want to enjoy if they apply their skills in a fashion that allows others to enjoy more of whatever they want, too.8 Everyone should embrace a way of life previously understood as base, and we will all live better together on account of it. A political system that defines what is praiseworthy strictly in terms of what serves the many depends on ruling out the development and elevation of those whose conception of and concern for what is noble leads them to show contempt for their inferiors. Ideally, the disregard for what is noble or fine rises all the way to the top. The stability of the system depends on educating out of men the thymotic concern for honour and any longing for transcendent truth. The intellectual and moral qualities of public administrators should be assessed only in terms of their ability to calculate and implement policies of social utility. Thus, rulers and the ruled alike are to be dissuaded from imagining that personal self-development beyond fulfilling one’s social role is of importance. I mean, sure, people should have hobbies to keep themselves busy pursuing what pleases them, privately or in association with others who share their innocuous interests. But the pursuit of the good life, the cultivation of virtues of mind and character for one’s own sake, independent of, or worse, in tension with, what is socially approved or merely personally pleasing, and the building of friendships among persons so oriented, aiming at each other’s benefit along these lines, are to be actively discouraged. The distinction between the good person and the good subject (it is imprecise to speak of “citizens” in the classical sense within a Hobbesian regime)

Modern Illiberal Education

271

should be collapsed. Should anyone be so quirky as to actually engage in the private development of their mind and character in accordance with old-fashioned standards of virtue, or worse still, God’s will, they shall be required to keep it private – a policy with the inherent consequence of discouraging and distorting their cultivation, since the possibility of becoming wise and virtuous actually requires living it out in practice, and not merely wishing or secretly intending it. Freedom of thought, whether with reference to theology and philosophy, or politics, history, and poetry, must be rejected in theory and inhibited in practice. Authoritative definitions, interpretations, and procedures settled upon by a unified, centralized power should prevail, according to Hobbes. The concept of deliberation is, to this end, emptied of meaning and significance by him, effectively saying that all of our decisions are really only whimsical, no matter how much we mull over them.9 Freedom of action must be smothered by quashing the acquisition of those habits, skills, and experiences necessary for developing good judgment, acting voluntarily, taking reasonable risks, assuming responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions or inaction, and acting in association with others in a fashion that fosters interpersonal responsibility and teaches people how to compromise. What was traditionally recognized as cowardice is made into a virtue by Hobbes, who collapses honour, piety, justice, and reason into complaisant obedience in word and deed. Obedience is equated with good character. To be obedient, one must overcome the natural inclination of the passions to violate the laws of nature,10 most notably in this instance the third law, which enjoins obedience to the civil laws.11 By Hobbes’s logic, everyone should be commended as if they were being brave for what amounts to steadfastly heeding their fear of punishment. But it is not enough simply to turn everyone into cowards; society must be rearranged so that cowards make good. The freedoms left to people should pertain only to efforts to satisfy their appetites, condoned, regulated, and sponsored by the state. People will be said to have other freedoms, such as freedom of religious belief, but the formation of religious belief is to be so filtered and modulated and its manifestations in practice so subject to sanction that this liberty is highly compromised and dubious.12 Religiosity itself will be reconceived in terms of subjective appetites and aversions. Part I of Leviathan, which seems to be the least political part of the text, at least on an initial reading, is in good part a treatise on the power of propaganda, on how people believe what they hear, given how a person’s

272

Travis D. Smith

thoughts, feelings, and actions are all products of sense experience,13 modified by speech and imagination, but even then in mechanistic fashion.14 By controlling the things that people hear and say, you can control their hearts and minds and thereby regulate their behaviour.15 The heart is “but a spring,” Hobbes tells us, and (though it be a fleshy spring) I am inclined to read him literally here rather than metaphorically, in the spirit of his war against metaphors.16 When Hobbes affirms the Christian formulation that “faith comes by hearing,”17 for example, what he means on his own terms is that people believe what they are repeatedly told to believe and feel what they are told to feel. The mind must be understood strictly in terms of matter in motion, there being nothing else to life, or anywhere else in the cosmos for that matter.18 Hobbes knows that while his materialistic account of the world calls metaphysical conceptions of freedom into question, as well as the idea that human beings ought to be regarded as moral subjects, people must nevertheless be treated as if they are moral subjects because, due to a delusion based on pride and fear, people want to think of themselves as moral subjects. Luckily, they can be persuaded to pat themselves on the back for behaving selfishly, convinced that their craven, harmless pleasure-seeking exemplifies and encapsulates the moral life. Hobbes recognizes that, on his own terms, technically speaking, nothing and nobody has innate “worth.”19 Hence, people in the state of nature as well as sovereign powers may in principle do anything with and to other people.20 But his teaching also depends on people nevertheless remaining proud enough to suppose that their own lives deserve to be preserved and that they are right to expect to be able to satisfy their appetites – despite being nothing but stimulus-response mechanisms.21 They think that making choices that bring them pleasure and benefit is praiseworthy, as is empowering the state so as to enable them (and others) to enjoy more pleasure still. Only a misanthrope would object to having people’s liberties abridged if the result were greater security, comfort, and delight. People should learn to treat other people’s lives and desires as if they, too, have value, and pride themselves on so acknowledging their value, even if it is really only out of enlightened self-interest that they grant it. People will be trained to reciprocally claim that each other’s lives are important and that the pursuit of everyone’s own preferred pleasures should be respected for fear that otherwise one’s own pursuits may be frowned or infringed upon. Indeed, it is bad enough to be regarded just indifferently. Hobbes discerns that being regarded indifferently is to be contemned, which democratic souls find almost as unbearable as being criticized.22 Therefore, we

Modern Illiberal Education

273

must celebrate differences and not merely tolerate them – so long, of course, as they are practised safely. On this scheme, cheering others on in getting what they want and enjoying what they like, and being proud of themselves for it, is what makes somebody a good person. People will play along for fear of what would happen or what we would realize if we stopped pretending. They will accede to the suppression of their own intellectual and political freedoms so as to preserve themselves against the harms they anticipate – obstacles to the satisfaction of their own appetites and enjoyment thereof – should others be allowed to exercise freedom of thought and action disagreeably. So, as was stated at the outset, we all have to agree that we are not so important that we should be seriously concerned about our ideas and deeds, and yet we are so very important that we ought to remain seriously committed to satisfying our appetites and expect to be regarded as good for so doing. To be able to do so, we should expect the impersonal assistance of others, administered through the state that represents us – a mechanism that saves one from the meddlesomeness of other, actual persons, however well-meaning, and the inconvenience and discomfort of being expected to provide direct assistance to anyone else personally. Any person who takes his own ideas or deeds too seriously is a menace, and people with highminded conceptions of mankind (and not just of themselves) are a cause of misery. The plan is to simultaneously lower everybody’s expectations regarding what is important in life and raise our expectations such that we believe that we deserve what we want. It’s a precarious scheme, hoping for peace and prosperity on the basis of universalizing the tyrant’s definition of freedom – i.e., getting whatever one wants or thinks one deserves and enlisting others in attaining it, while avoiding whatever one doesn’t like, especially criticism – while trying to tame it, trusting in the power of fear to limit not only the wants of others but our own, too. This daring endeavour requires managing people’s wants and fears so that everyone wants to avoid causing or suffering pain. People should be made hypersensitive to pain – other people’s, too – including sore feelings and the mere anticipation of pain. You should feel pain at causing another person to feel pain. Seeing anyone else cause people pain should make you afraid. We should demand that all afflictions and inflictions be stopped, or better still, prevented. Nobody should be expected to deal well with pain or the threat of pain on her or his own. Acquiring fortitude involves confronting and enduring the fearful and the painful, which is, needless to say, difficult (i.e., painful). Thus, the very expectation that people should become courageous

274

Travis D. Smith

amounts to an approval of their suffering. How insensitive! Of course, there is no limit to the amount of power that must be marshalled to save people from every sort of pain, felt, anticipated, and hypothetical. It is not so bad that human beings aren’t so noble, in Hobbes’s estimation. In fact, their vulgarity is something that we can work with if we are honest about it. We may even benefit from exaggerating and amplifying it. In so doing we might construct a society we would be glad to call home, seeking a kind of happiness that better befits the kind of creatures we actually are,23 or most of us anyway, which the rest of us may be made to better approximate.24 We tend to become that which we believe ourselves to be, especially when the laws and doctrines of our society compel us. A generous reading of Hobbes must assume that he believes that his teaching would be the greatest work of charity mankind has ever received, were it heeded. A society (and ultimately, a world) better than any that has ever been realized is possible if we do not expect too much from people, even from the brightest and most ambitious – or rather, especially them. They, too, must be given a vulgar education rather than a classical liberal education that would cultivate in them the capacity for thinking and acting freely – for their own sake, sure, but mostly for everybody else’s. They, too, must be socialized so as to seek happiness in satisfying desires, content to enjoy life while complaisantly accommodating themselves to everyone else.25 Among those who nevertheless remain motivated to think and act, most of them can be directed to take up the cause of the unmotivated, pouncing on any obstinate stragglers on their behalf. It befits “great minds,” Hobbes tells us, to “free others from scorn”26 – or as we might say today, to take the lead in destigmatizing difference. Universities in a Hobbesian regime are instruments of social control, public institutions operated by the state for the attainment of socially useful purposes, realizing the well-being of the people, conceptualized hedonistically. They are, in Hobbes’s terminology, “bodies politic,”27 not exempt from submitting to the civil sovereign’s authority in any matter. The refinement of learning for its own sake is not their mission, less so the refinement of the learned. Intellectual and artistic pursuits must be justified in terms of utility to the collective in accordance with the governing ideology. It belongs to the state to determine the official definitions of things,28 even against long-standing traditions, especially in matters deemed a cause of quarrel, trusting that if the laws change the definitions of things, men’s minds will follow. The state shall furthermore determine which kinds of learning have value, privileging those deemed salutary and disadvantaging

Modern Illiberal Education

275

and discrediting projects and purposes that fail to serve the public agenda. Amending and censoring university curricula is such a major issue for Hobbes that he raises it as early as the first chapter of Leviathan.29 In determining the doctrines and priorities of the elite classes of people – “lawful pastors,”30 legal and medical professionals, and the gentry – the views and purposes they represent will be conveyed to the rest of the populace in trickle-down fashion.31 Eventually everyone will be educated to pose no obstacle and be no threat to anybody else’s enjoyment of life. People may even facilitate others’ enjoyments, although preferably indirectly, through the institutions and mechanisms of the state, so as to avoid generating feelings of personal obligation among either benefactors or recipients. So confident is Hobbes in the power of the state to re-educate a people that he permits parents the freedom to educate their children as they please,32 trusting that, in time, parents will follow the lead of the educated elites and educate their children as the state desires. Children will resist indoctrination by their parents where it diverges from what is socially acceptable. Parents may feel compelled to be inauthentic in their public expressions – arguably, for Hobbes, inauthenticity is the sine qua non of peaceable civilization – but the habituation of the next generation ought to yield a greater degree of authentic dedication to the desired prejudices. Hobbes describes human minds, especially those of “the common people,” as “clean paper” to be “imprinted” with whatever doctrine the sovereign wishes.33 He trusts that it will be especially easy to imprint on people attitudes that flatter and magnify their naturally vulgar, fearful, and proud personalities. In order to illustrate some particulars of the general account I have outlined above, I will descend from my broader reading of Hobbes’s psychology and focus more narrowly on how it can be seen as forming the ideological basis for efforts to abolish hate, especially by punishing people for beliefs, attitudes, and utterances that may be designated hateful. As the embrace and internalization of Hobbesian psychology spreads, the implementation of these corrective measures should become more popular. One should expect their application to be most strident on university campuses, universities being the locus and vanguard of societal re-education – or, as Hobbes puts it, “the fountains of civil and moral doctrine,” where what is said and taught should be “pure.”34 In a Hobbesian commonwealth, all disagreement is perceived as a portent of and pretext for quarrel. All argumentation is tantamount to attack and all disapproval is harmful. According to Hobbesian psychology, pleasure and pain are our masters. Whenever people express disapproval

276

Travis D. Smith

of something, it must be because they feel or expect pain from it, and therefore find it fearful. Because reason only ever serves the passions, all of the arguments that people fabricate to justify their expressions of disagreement and disapproval are ultimately emanations from their fears and rationalizations for the hatreds those fears inspire. Hatred is an aversion to something actually hurtful, apparently hurtful, or imagined to be possibly hurtful, often grounded in ignorance. People are said to hate what they think is bad, but what they think is bad is merely what they dislike, and what they dislike is simply what they fear, because they expect pain from it.35 Those pains may be purely conjectural or altogether phantasmical, the fancied fallout of some improbable war, societal collapse, divine wrath, or natural catastrophe that shall befall us for permitting this or enjoying that. The antipathies that these phobias engender beget so much needless suffering. In the Review & Conclusion of Leviathan, Hobbes gives us his friend Sidney Godolphin as a model of virtue. He is described as “hating no man, nor hated of any.”36 Hobbes’s eighth law of nature, against contumely, declares that “no man by deed, word, countenance, or gesture, [may] declare hatred or contempt of another.”37 Both hatred and indifference to others are alike always unreasonable – as in contrary to your own self-interest – as they “provoke to fight.”38 Provided that the law of nature, which may be ascribed to God,39 recommends “peace and concord,” then any “doctrine repugnant to peace” must not be held true.40 Haters are always wrong to hate. Since in matters political it is the appearances of things that are decisive, it is the offended party who is the sole judge of whether or not someone has insulted her or him, regardless of whether or not any harm was intended by the purported malefactor. Accusations of hate based on inference or suspicion trump protestations of innocence. As if it were not hard enough to refrain from offending people on purpose in the first place, there is no amount of self-discipline and self-censorship that can guarantee against being accidentally offensive. Hobbes counts hate among the natural passions of men,41 among the “infirmities so annexed to the nature … of man” that only “extraordinary use of reason” or “constant severity in punishing” may hinder it.42 Nevertheless, the law of nature prohibits it, even the appearance of it. In a Hobbesian commonwealth, the sovereign power must interpret the laws of nature and codify them within the civil law.43 It may set punishments as it sees fit.44 Punishments are meant to correct violators of the law, and when that cannot be accomplished, to deter others.45 Even though the state cannot stop any given man from hating by punishing

Modern Illiberal Education

277

his alleged hatred, its correctional measures may still succeed in reminding other people to proceed gingerly in their interactions with others. The soil on which the Hobbesian commonwealth sits is made up of eggshells. Hobbes advises you not to hate for your own sake. Hating people makes you feel miserable on the inside so long as you have to put up with those whom you hate, whereas trying to remove them from your life may lead you to commit criminal acts,46 and being punished for those will undoubtedly make you more miserable still. Laws that curtail freedom of speech and expression and impose penalties for objectionable beliefs and feelings fall within the scope of sovereign authority.47 Indeed, they have much to recommend them.48 Given Hobbes’s theory of authorization, when you violate laws enacted by the state you are only contradicting yourself. In being prosecuted for your violations, you are supposed to imagine that you are only correcting yourself. In civil society you must behave as if you do not hate, even if you do,49 and even though you will. In terms of its foolishness, confessing your hatreds aloud today is what proudly professing atheism was in Hobbes’s time.50 Political correctness and the punishment of speech, thought, and action identified as hate-based bears a resemblance to religious persecution. Politically incorrect speech is like heresy; criticism of political correctness is akin to blasphemy.51 One difference is that without reference to a God who forgives us and obliges us to forgive others it falls instead to us to appoint a power assigned the task of fixing us. Whereas religious persecution was once practised in the name of universal love, secular powers nowadays harass people in the name of inclusivity. Just as it was ingenious to make men compete at earning a reputation for championing equality, given that inequality is an ineradicable fact about human relations, it was shrewd to make it fine to hate the haters, given that hatred cannot really be abolished.52 To avoid uncomfortable (i.e., painful) confrontations, Hobbesian subjects should have ready recourse to the sovereign’s power to protect them against such villains instead of having to defend themselves, either personally or in association with others. Those who would offend should be restrained from provoking; those who would be offended should be relieved of the pressure to enact private revenges against those who “disgrace” them.53 Among “crimes against private men,” Hobbes ranks “contumely in words or gesture” behind only murder, mutilation, robbery, thievery, and rape in terms of severity.54 And it is never a strictly private affair; the insulting of one person by another is acknowledged as having an inherent public dimension.55 Among the ancient Greeks and Romans, Hobbes observes, contumely was not treated as a crime, but

278

Travis D. Smith

this was because offended parties, “conscious of their own virtue,” were not supposed to be so pusillanimous.56 In Hobbesian society, however, pusillanimity is encouraged. We ought to be thin-skinned. For the sake of civil peace, people should not exhibit nobility of character; they ought to be timid and dependent on the state to come to their rescue. The fact that societies hitherto have neglected to treat contumely as a crime is irrelevant. There are many “unjust actions” and “evil customs” that have historically gone “uncontrolled” that should be outlawed, Hobbes observes.57 Ultimately, I cannot help but wonder if Hobbes wants us to hate hatred so much in order to divert our attention from the fact that, on the basis of his premises, which are to become ours, there are no grounds upon which to treat human beings with justice, let alone love.58 Does Hobbes emphasize the fear of violent death as the greatest of all fears in an attempt to distract us from the fear that our lives, on his terms, now ours, are meaningless, insignificant, and without purpose?59 Pride, in the sense of treating others as your inferiors, is against the ninth law of nature,60 but Hobbes’s entire political-philosophical system, dedicated to the preservation of our lives, is erected upon sheer vanity.61 Good Hobbesian subjects rig up a system in which everybody agrees to esteem each other so that nobody has to notice that their own self-esteem is baseless.62 We cannot abide someone who will not play along and esteem everyone else for fear of discovering that human beings, we mere meat machines, are not even worthy of hatred. We want to be proud of our enlightenment, even though we can’t take credit for it, and even though it delegitimizes our pride. So we will punish those who hate, in rituals that serve to confirm the value of our lives and affirm our enlightenment, even though a mechanistic view of man should absolve those who hate of blame for their opinions and actions. The prohibition of hatred is only the flipside of the suppression of love that is essential to Hobbes’s teaching. Love is as problematic for civil peace as hate, from Hobbes’s point of view – if not more so. Love forms bonds and bonds form factions, out of which may develop powers that could rival the sovereign for people’s devotion and loyalty. This is why it is unsurprising that Hobbes prefers public charity to private charity.63 Love is a kind of action that aims at making another person better, saving them from themselves.64 Love is meddlesome and judgmental, but when it disapproves it does not mean to condemn, and that is what the Hobbesian cannot grasp or accept. From the Hobbesian perspective, the disapproval of another is always offensive, always a form of assault. Hence the need for a new religious outlook that reduces love to nonjudgmental empathy, approving of

Modern Illiberal Education

279

others taken as they are found. And today, some denominations do seem to reduce Christianity to one big group hug. The only change we should work to bring about in people is to get them to stop trying to change other people – which amounts to convincing them to stop loving. Hobbes’s crusade against hate, inseparable from his war on love, is related to his insistence that there is no such thing as selfless giving,65 or that even if there is, we must ignore it, not count on it, and discourage people from attempting to imitate it. For Hobbes’s teaching to be as charitable to mankind as he hopes it will be, everyone, first of all, has to be brought to regard themselves and all others as essentially selfish, and find that acceptable. Hobbes summarizes the entirety of the moral law as not doing unto others what you would not have them do unto you.66 There is no positive imperative requiring anyone to work directly to better anyone else’s life. Love, which is always personal,67 is a necessary casualty in the endeavour to benefit all of humankind impersonally. Hobbes thinks it is a price we can be persuaded to pay. How free we shall feel when we no longer feel obliged to be of any good to anyone else, other than in voicing vain affirmations of them, while counting on them to leave us alone to live as we please without feeling shame or guilt. Let’s live and let live, flatter each other, and call ourselves good on account of it.68 In contributing this essay to this volume, I do not mean to say that Canada specifically is wholly founded upon Hobbesian principles and purposes, although I do find that the overall direction of advanced western societies is to become ever more Hobbesian – relativistic, scientistic, atomistic, and unfree in thought and action. Perhaps it may be said that we are becoming more Hegelian, but Hegel’s political doctrine, according to which all that is good is done in, with, and under the state, is the culmination of Hobbes’s, only rendered more sophisticated. The progressivist stew that is today’s special, featuring Marxian, Deweyan, Rawlsian, and postmodern ingredients, is a more Hobbesian recipe than most adherents realize or admit. The Canadian founding – like the American, although not as emphatically – originally followed the liberal detour forged by John Locke, as the historical-theoretical research of Janet Ajzenstat has demonstrated.69 Locke’s refinement of Hobbes’s teaching helped us to avoid taking the direct route to democratic despotism that terminates with Marx.70 Locke’s teaching is heavily indebted to Hobbes’s but ennobles it by recognizing that we must acknowledge that there are things prior to government and things higher than government. Locke’s liberalism appreciates our natural

280

Travis D. Smith

sociability. It includes one’s liberty as among each person’s possessions, requiring sustained vigilance on the part of citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical types and aspirants. It recognizes the inherent dignity of every individual’s life, relates this to a defence of religious freedom, and affirms the right to revolt against tyranny on the basis of it, insisting that we are beings capable of and responsible for self-government. Locke’s claim that people must not simply seek to preserve themselves but also work to preserve mankind involves an appeal to our heroic inclinations, even if it prudently pulls back from a requirement for ready self-sacrifice.71 Elements like these in Locke’s teaching restored considerations of honour that are decidedly absent in Hobbes’s democratic psychology. The late modern, expansive, intrusive, centralized, technocratic, bureaucratic state featuring a strong executive that presides over legislation much more closely approximates the regime that Hobbes envisioned than early modern monarchies ever did. When I suggest that Canadian society is more Hobbesian now than Lockean, I don’t think that this is peculiar to Canada. The United States is currently divided between those who audaciously clamour for more Hobbesian government and those who cling to their guns and religion in opposition to that prospect. Within Canada, not everywhere is equally Hobbesian. Quebec, where the state likes to enmesh and entangle itself in every aspect of society, and where the notion of collective responsibility is touted most, is at the forefront. To whatever degree Quebec’s culture is distinct on account of the preponderance of French spoken there and the nationalism attending that difference (as if language constituted culture rather than being a medium for the communication of culture), and despite its overt hostility toward religion and minorities, the distinctiveness of its socio-economic and political culture tends to be exaggerated – although having a more thoroughly Hobbesian political culture has taken a toll on its economy, as if the language politics and nationalism weren’t already sufficiently destructive of it. Quebec has a problem with religion precisely because religion represents the refusal to totally surrender to a secular identity and depend wholly on the state. Not so different from much of Europe, Quebec is just further along the progressivist, statist trajectory projected by many (and maybe most but not yet all) provinces and states within North America.72 The Lockean detour represents a semi-noble effort, but the weight of the democratic and materialistic premises and purposes that even it is grounded on proves too great, and the nobler elements that are necessary to sustain and preserve liberal democracy and commercial society against

Modern Illiberal Education

281

their worst excesses have difficulty staying afloat. Over the long haul, democracy being majoritarian, one should expect democratic prejudices to win out and extend themselves determinedly and promiscuously. Democratic peoples cannot abide anything that retains a whiff of privilege or prestige. The vulgar desire victory over the noble and the learned, as if that proved them right and good; it is not enough for them to see the noble and the learned oriented to serve their interests. Canadians have largely lost sight of their Lockean heritage, due in no small part to the efforts of politicians, political scientists, ideologues, judges, bureaucrats, activists, and reporters to drown it. That said, I concede that the Hobbesian way of life is hardly the worst. In comparison with the alternatives, surveying other places and times, it still looks pretty good. The critical inspection of its pitfalls remains needful, however, particularly if we would like to resume and prolong our Sunday drive along the detour. What is worrisome is that any people educated as fearful and vain pleasure-seekers with little practical experience in the activities of citizenship and little training in the use and analysis of words and ideas in public discourse will be poor judges of what should and can be done by governments to help us to enjoy our lives, poor judges of who they can trust to make decisions for them, and with what powers they can be entrusted, and poor judges in assessing the decisions those persons make on our behalf. Should such a people feel that something about their situation calls for change, their ability to discern and articulate what would be better and what ought to be done would be so compromised by then that they would be prone to errors in trusting either themselves or others in the endeavour to regain the freedoms that are proper to them as human beings. Notes 1 Aspects of this chapter were presented in draft form at the Early Modern Political Thought Colloquium organized by James Moore in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, on 28 March 2014; the Association for Core Texts and Courses annual conference in Gatineau, Quebec, on 25–28 April 2013; a seminar on “Liberty, Virtue, and Ethics” co-hosted by the Institute for Liberal Studies and the Manning Centre for Building Democracy in Calgary, Alberta, on 9 February 2013; and the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Toronto, Ontario, 3–6 September 2009, as part of a roundtable on “Conscience, Expression & Liberty: Pitfalls of Political Correctness,” sponsored by the Eric Voegelin Society. The author thanks David Livingstone and Samuel Ajzenstat for their feedback on earlier drafts, plus Andrew Sabl, Eli Friedland, and Sibbyl Nickerson for fruitful conversations on these subjects. For the purposes of my present argument I draw on Thomas Hobbes,

282

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

Travis D. Smith

Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curly (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). Citations refer to this edition by chapter, paragraph, where R&C denotes the Review & Conclusion. John Carpay and Michael Kennedy, Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, The 2014 Campus Freedom Index (http://www.jccf.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/ 01/2014CampusFreedomIndex.pdf) is valuable for its catalogue of abridgements of free speech on Canadian university campuses, even if the document’s system of grading campuses from A through F is iffy. One of this volume’s anonymous reviewers writes regarding my chapter, “Smith begins by assuming Hobbes is wrong,” adding, “His ‘criticism’ of Hobbes is therefore actually a description of Hobbes.” With respect to the first point, I may be more accurately described as hoping that Hobbes is wrong. (A confession: I fear that he may be right. But I also resent him a little, like sons typically resent their fathers. Perhaps I should be more grateful, like most sons should be, and honour him more.) With respect to the second point, my usual modus operandi is to try to spell out the meaning and significance of the spirit of Hobbes’s teaching, primarily through internal analysis, although my findings may not be exactly what he intended. I try to follow where his argument takes me but I don’t pretend to read his heart. Hobbes did not and would not have described his teaching in the same unflattering manner that I do, but at least he had a sense of humour. (There are few things more delightful in Hobbes’s corpus than his dissection and deflation of Descartes’ Meditations.) I do try to make explicit some curious and troubling elements within Hobbes’s teaching that he liked to elide. Maybe in articulating them some reason to hold Hobbes wrong – or not altogether right – can be found. The same anonymous reviewer calls this chapter “a polemic.” On that count, I am guilty as charged. Hobbes, Leviathan, 5.20, 46.1. Ibid., 6.58, 11.1, 14.2. Ibid., 13.14, 17.13. See Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 414c. Hobbes, Leviathan, 25.11. Ibid., 6.53. Ibid., 17.2. Ibid., 15.3. Hobbes reassures Christians that they need not worry if the state makes pronouncements or passes laws regarding worship that contravene their religious convictions, since “A private man has always the liberty (because thought is free) to believe or not believe” (37.13). But according to Hobbes’s own conception of human nature, thought is not free like this at all. Hobbes need not believe in freedom of conscience, however, in order to see the utility of taking advantage of the belief in freedom of conscience. So that they might give up trying, he reminds Christians that, on their own terms, the heart cannot be moved through the use of force (42.107). But sound is only the result of subtle motions caused by the application of some force upon a body. And if faith comes by hearing, and what would be believed will not be repeated, whence shall faith come? Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.2.

Modern Illiberal Education

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

283

Ibid., 3.3. Ibid., 18.9. Ibid., Intro.1; cf. 4.4, 5.14, 25.12. Ibid., 29.8. Ibid., Intro.1, 6.58, 46.11. Ibid., 10.16. Ibid., 14.1, 4. Ibid., 14.2, 21.1. Ibid., 6.5. Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Signet, 1968), 10.1127–9. Hobbes himself is no Hobbesian, but he wants us to become Hobbesian, and he would advise those of us who can’t or won’t become Hobbesian to pretend nonetheless. That said, I have trouble shaking the suspicion that Hobbes was a Hobbist. Hobbes, Leviathan, 15.17. Ibid., 6.42. Ibid., 22.16. Ibid., 18.19; cf. 4.24. Ibid., 1.5. Ibid., 43.8. Ibid., 30.14; cf. 46.13–16, R&C.16. Ibid., 21.6. Ibid., 30.6. The choice of a printing press metaphor suggests that people’s personalities are to be mass produced, impersonally, mechanically, rapidly, and cheaply, rendered identical and disposable. Contrast this with what it would mean to describe the formation of men’s souls using manuscripts as the metaphor: expensive, unique, beautiful, and created with care. Ibid., R&C.16. I wonder, do I really need to assure the reader that I am not an apologist for hatred? Let me be clear: hating is shameful; haters are jerks. I am no fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s position, expressed in his essay on “Self-Reliance” (1841), that “The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines.” What I am critical of is the psychology behind the attempt to eradicate hate, and the attempt itself. I am anti-anti-hate, not pro-hate. To be more specific, I am anti-hate on personal and interpersonal levels, absolutely, but against anti-hate as a political project. What James Madison says about the attempt to cure factionalism being worse than the existence of factions in Federalist No. 10 is analogous to what I think about the endeavour to save mankind from hatred. It is not a war that can be won, and the casualties, the sacrifice of freedom of thought and action it entails, do not constitute acceptable losses. Hatred cannot be abolished among men without changing human nature – that is, without abolishing man. Moreover, the attempt to abolish hatred yields a bloated and ravenous conception of what counts as hate that produces calumny, falsely attributing hatred to persons, beliefs, and behaviour that are not instances of it. It excludes ways of thinking and being in the name of inclusivity. The crusade against hate produces a propensity to find it everywhere,

284

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50 51

52

Travis D. Smith

which, in combination with the expectation that society should prevent and punish its every imagined instance, cultivates cowardice and an inability to deal with the everyday difficulties that arise from the existence of differences among peoples – all in the name of celebrating diversity. Hobbes, Leviathan, 6.2–4, 7. Ibid., R&C.4. Ibid., 15.20. Ibid., 15.20; cf. 8.17, 19; 14.3. Ibid., 15.41. Ibid., 18.9; cf. 15.38. Ibid., 17.2. Ibid., 27.18. Ibid., 26.8. Ibid., 18.14. Ibid., 15.19. Ibid., 27.18. Hobbes reminds Christians that, on their own terms, only God may read the hearts of men (31.32, 40.2, 42.80), but he premises his entire teaching in Leviathan on the possibility of becoming one who “searcheth hearts,” emphasizing the need of those who “govern” to learn how to “read … mankind” (Intro. 3–4). Policing the thoughts of men is essential to the successful operation of a Hobbesian state; it does what Tocqueville says one should expect from democratic tyranny: it “goes straight for the soul” and cannot bear differences of opinion. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1.2.7. Even though Hobbes recommends that laws and punishments should be as clear as can be, to reduce the ambiguity inherent in all language (27.34; cf. 26.26), and even though Hobbes warns against punishing the innocent (26.24, 28.22), because hate must be controlled through the fear of severe punishment (cf. 14.31), I can almost imagine that Hobbes might well approve of legal institutions for the suppression of hate with relatively nebulous mandates, seemingly arbitrary procedures, and unconventional magistrates, exploiting the ambiguities of language, where the burden of proof falls on the defendant and not the accuser, whose accusations need not be grounded on anything other than reports of subjective feelings. That sort of thing would certainly help to generate the kind of fear that is needed to shut most men up. Hobbes would have been disappointed, I think, when Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was repealed in 2013. Time will tell if that change represents the beginning of a reversal of a trend or only a minor backslide to be undone eventually as progress marches onward. Hobbes, Leviathan, cf. 42.11, 106. Ibid., cf. 15.4. Cf. Travis D. Smith, “Forgiving Those Not Trespassing Against Us: Hobbes and the Establishment of the Nonsectarian State Church,” in Civil Religion in Political Thought, ed. Ronald Weed and John von Heyking (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 97n6. Hobbes, Leviathan, cf. 12.23.

Modern Illiberal Education 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

69 70

71 72

285

Ibid., 27.20; cf. 27.35. Ibid., 27.41–50. Ibid., 27.54. Ibid., 27.50. Ibid., 26.7. See Plato, Republic, 382a–b. Given our infatuation with the body and our neglect of the soul, and our having founded modern political society for the sake of protecting our bodies, it is understandable that we feel entitled to everything we can imagine that the best possible medical science would deliver, at any expense. We regard sickness and death as if they were injustices – and not merely social injustices but cosmic injustices – and we expect the state to remedy them. The more we hope and trust that technological means should grant us the power to overcome death, the more mortality appears as a tragedy. The modern, non-teleological version of the idea that the universe has a rationally comprehensible order yields as its upshot despair at our inability to master it, as well as the opinion that life is meaningless because it ends. Without the perspective of eternity, along a long enough timeline, the significance of our temporal existence drops to zero. Hobbes, Leviathan, 15.21. Ibid., cf. 28.26. Ibid., cf. 10.16, 18. Ibid., 30.18. Cf St Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), 10.3. “Benefits oblige,” Hobbes maintains (11.7). We must presume that all gifts are given with an expectation of return. Hobbes, Leviathan, 15.35. Precisely because love is always personal, I am against love as a political project, just as I am against anti-love as a political project. I am not arguing for theocracy. That’d be crazy. Another confession: I offer my criticism of Hobbesian psychology not because I am confident of my own ability to change people for the better through love – I am much too aware of my own deficiencies for that – but rather because I am also aware that my deficiencies would be more grievous still were I not the recipient of potent criticisms from ones who have shown me love. See Janet Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007). Other thinkers located along the detour include Montesquieu, Smith, Burke, Constant, and Tocqueville. But around Hume, the road starts to curve back around. By the time the signpost reads Mill, the main road is once again in sight. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), s. 6. Do I really need to say that my few critical remarks regarding Quebec do not denote hatred for French-Canadians? The largely bilingual part of eastern Ontario where I live abounds in former Quebecers who sought to escape Quebec’s economic and political culture. Moreover, within Quebec, not all French-speaking Quebecers adore the prevailing mode of governance in that province.

286

Travis D. Smith

The division among the political parties there has, however, effectually left its inhabitants with an electoral choice between the statists who want to stay a part of Canada (not always for reasons that please the rest of Canada) and the statists who say they want to depart. I say that there is something offensive about equating French-Canadianness with the prevailing attitudes and preferred policies of Quebec’s current cultural and governing elites, who are always trying to prescribe some uniform identity to which everyone who opts to stay in the province should conform.

Contributors

janet ajzenstat is professor emeritus of political science at McMaster University. She has authored and edited several books on Canadian political thought and the Canadian Constitution, including The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament and The Once and Future Canadian Democracy. thomas bateman is associate professor of political science at St Thomas University, where he has served as chair of political science and also as a member of the university’s great books program. He has published numerous articles in journals and in edited collections on the Canadian judicial system. luigi bradizza is assistant professor of political science and of American studies at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. His principal area of research is the American founding and the progressive era. He also conducts research in political philosophy. He recently published a monograph critically examining Richard Ely’s progressive thought and its effect on the American constitutional order. leah bradshaw is professor of political science at Brock University. She teaches and writes on the history of political thought, as well as on contemporary issues in political theory. Much of her career has evolved from considerations on the work of Hannah Arendt, and has been preoccupied with the breach between classical and modern political thought. grant havers is professor of philosophy and political science at Trinity Western University. His research interests are in political philosophy, the history of philosophy, the ethics of natural rights, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the tension between reason and faith, and right-wing political thought. His most recent book critically examines the thought and legacy of Leo Strauss.

288

Contributors

john von heyking is professor of politics at the University of Lethbridge. His main area of research and teaching is political philosophy. He has edited and contributed to several books on politics and political philosophy and authored the monograph Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World. geoffrey kellow is assistant professor of humanities in the College of the Humanities at Carleton University. His research interests include Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, the political thought of Cicero, and liberal education. david w. livingstone is University-College Professor in Liberal Studies at Vancouver Island University. He is currently the chair of the Political Studies Department. His primary area of interest is in classical and early modern political philosophy and he has published on the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln. richard myers is the president of Algoma University, and was formerly professor of political science at St Thomas University, where he served as vice-president (academic) for seven years. He has published on topics in political philosophy and on liberal education and is co-author, with Patrick Malcolmson, of The Canadian Regime, now in its fifth edition. colin d. pearce is a visiting fellow at Clemson University. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. He has published in a number of journals including the Canadian Journal of Political Science and The Journal of the History of Ideas. His areas of interest include political theory, American politics, American political thought, and Canadian politics. travis d. smith is associate professor of political science at Concordia University in Montreal. He is principally interested in the intersection of politics, religion, and science, especially in early modern political philosophy. His publications include examinations of the ideas of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. ryan n.s. topping is a fellow at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. He has published on a variety of Catholic themes and figures, from St Augustine, to Dante, to G.K. Chesterton in academic and popular journals and has published four books. His most recent book is Renewing the Mind: A Reader in the Philosophy of Catholic Education.

Index

Ajzenstat, Janet, 4–5, 7, 9, 46, 48, 131n19, 154, 224; on Canada’s founding debates, 11, 12, 27n29, 77; on Confederation, 25n9, 107; on Locke’s influence on Canadian founding, 15, 22–3, 32, 119–20, 211n32, 212n38, 224 Alston, E.G., 38 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 7 American Civil War, 4, 93, 97–9, 101, 197, 211n30 Anastaplo, George, 109n13 Arendt, Hannah, 60, 287 aristocracy, natural, 14, 72n33, 73n53, 96–9, 110n22 Aristotle, 4, 49, 112n48, 130n16, 160; and Christian virtues, 15, 141, 158, 164n48, 167n81; on citizenship, 9–10, 19, 26n25, 56, 216–30; civic and liberal education, 69n5, 114, 138n56; in classical education, 58, 66; friendship, 75–6n104, 218; goal of politics, 60–1, 67, 69n10, 74n71; Machiavelli’s critique of, 151; moderation, 102; on regimes, 91; technology, 150, 164n45; women in the polis, 227n1 Bacon, Francis, 59 Berkowitz, Peter, 7 Bloom, Allan, 5; on liberal education,

26–7n25, 168n91, 185; on Socrates’ critique of utopias, 112n49 Bourinot, George: on civic and liberal education, 19, 44–76, 113n59; estimation of Canada’s founders, 12–13; on oratory, 27n30; role of aristoi, 110n22 Brann, Eva, 71n19 British North America Act, 12, 30–1, 105; Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s praise of, 100–1, 102–3, 108; implied view of human nature, 21 Brown, Anne, 78 Brown, George, 9, 19, 36–7, 135n38; speech on Confederation, 13–14, 77–89 Browne, G.P., 42n18 Burke, Edmund, 49, 50, 112n48, 285n70; influence on Canada’s founders, 14, 21, 24, 35, 52, 104, 105; influence on Ryerson, 118 Burns, Robert, 62, 66 Cantor, Paul, 91–2, 109n5 Cartier, George-Étienne, 9, 36–7, 58, 74n78, 78, 87, 89n24 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 30, 37, 177, 179, 230n25; Charter values doctrine, 20–1, 231–67; as effort to re-found Canadian institutions, 66, 70n13; and equality, 211n29; Hegelian influence on, 229–30n25

290

index

Christie, David, 36–7 Churchill, Winston, 60 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 4, 49, 58, 118, 130n16 civic virtue, 12, 54, 58, 64, 67, 73n51, 229n18. See also moral virtue Confederation, 4–5, 7, 30, 33, 92, 96, 109n4, 262n8; George Brown’s views on, 13, 77–89; Canada Supreme Court’s departure from, 233; debates on 36–7; education required to sustain, 9, 45, 52; neglect by academics, 12, 31, 39, 41n14, 107, 112n52; popular sovereignty and, 12, 38, 40; and rights, 35 Constitution Act, 1982, 11, 30, 180n2, 211n29, 233, 235, 245, 246, 262n8 Cook, Ramsay, 31, 40n6, 199 Creighton, Donald: view of Canada’s founders, 31, 32, 33, 40n5, 41n14, 112n52 Crichton, James, 52, 72n30 Declaration of Independence, 4; and Canada’s founders, 37; Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s interpretation of 97–8, 110n26, 111n29; Tocqueville’s silence on, 197 Dewey, John: influence in Canada, 25n9, 113n56; and progressivism, 23, 154, 261, 279 Duffy, Charles Gavin, 92, 93, 95, 99 Durham, Lord, 35, 41n11, 85; on inequality, 111n31; in Ryerson’s civic curriculum, 118 equality: and Calvinism, 154; of condition, 17, 195–204; excessive desire for in democracies, 18–19, 91, 93–108, 109n12, 113n56, 185, 189; judicial advancement of, 207–8, 215n80, 217, 226, 231, 237, 245–6, 248–9; legal or civil, 34, 37, 40, 58, 117, 126, 211n29, 223; in mixed constitution, 111n28, 111n31; of opinions, 8, 190; pre-modern notions

of, 14, 108, 176–7, 219, 226, 258 federalism, 35, 36, 40, 58; George Brown’s views on, 80, 87, 88; as unifying principle, 101–2 Federalist Papers, 35, 49, 50, 67, 79, 107; extended republic argument, 81; on factions, 134n37, 283n34; on moral virtue, 73n50, 75n89; popular sovereignty, 100 Gairdner, William D., 9, 276n22, 42n15 Gentles, Ian, 9, 24n6, 26n22, 42n15 Grant, George: critique of Protestantism, 15–16, 140–68; Hegel and Marx’s influence on, 39, 153, 229–30n25; purpose of universities, 139n61 Griffiths, Rudyard, 39, 43n30, 222–3, 229n19 Hamilton, Alexander, 35, 79, 102. See also Federalist Papers Hegel, G.W.F.: historicism, 6, 108, 119, 224, 229–30n25, 279. See also Grant, George; Horowitz, Gad historicism, 8, 15, 144, 148, 150–2, 155, 165n54, 208; influence on Supreme Court of Canada, 261 Hobbes, Thomas, 21–3, 35, 69n10, 106, 145, 224, 225, 259, 268–86 Holton, Luther Hamilton, 78, 79, 83, 88n4 Horowitz, Gad, 31, 32, 41n10 Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 24n2, 37, 53, 73n49, 73n53, 96–8, 110n22 Kronman, Anthony, 7, 8, 25n18 Laurier, Wilfrid, 58 Lawler, Peter Augustine, 201–2 liberal education, 140, 147, 149, 152; abandonment by Canadian universities and schools, 9–11, 22, 25n12,

index

25n14, 25–6n19, 28n32, 70n12, 111n31, 113n56, 138n56, 144, 274; Christian conceptions of, 133n28, 141, 154, 157, 192; and civic education, 4–5, 13, 14, 45–53, 59–60, 63, 69n5, 71n19, 91, 107, 168n91; as counterweight to reigning orthodoxies, 17–18, 26–7n25, 184–91; and human greatness, 28 22, 67, 72n33, 161, 208–9; and oratory, 65; postmodernism’s effect on 6–9, 66, 113n56 Lincoln, Abraham, 111n29 Locke, John, 4, 9; and Canada’s founding, 15, 22–3, 31, 32, 34, 38, 40, 50, 97, 119, 120–2, 224–5, 279–81; contrast with Aristotle, 227n5, 230n26; contrast with progressivism, 261; defence of inequality, 98, 110–11n28; influence on Egerton Ryerson, 132n22; on religious toleration, 247 Löwith, Karl, 137n49, 142, 160, 162n11, 168n88 Macdonald, John A., 9; as Burkean, 105; friendship with Cartier, 74n78; reputation as statesman, 65; and US Constitution, 37, 42n20 Machar, Agnes Maule, 67 Madison, James: on institutions, 54, 56–7, 73n50; on republican virtue, 63–6, 75n89, 79, 81, 99–100, 134n37, 283n34 Mansfield, Harvey, 55, 57, 71n25, 72n46, 73n52, 135n39, 211n24, 213n52, 284n47 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy: civic education, 14, 24, 48, 59, 61–2, 90–113, 138n56, 140; on human nature, 19, 21; McLachlin, Beverley: Charter sections 7 and 2a, 256; Charter values, 260, 265n64; on courts’ “best interest of the child” (BIC) test, 252; on diversity, 249; as progressive, 21, 240–1 McLuhan, Marshall, 15–16, 140–68 Mill, John S., 35, 285n70; English

291

Benthamites, 99; influence on Justice Wilson (SCC), 243; On Liberty, 72n36, 258; on public education 260, 267n101 Montesquieu, 198, 285n70; in Bourinot’s thought, 49–52, 67 Moore, Christopher, 4, 13, 24n4, 27n29, 40n4, 41n14, 48, 70n15, 88n3 moral virtue, 12, 14, 23, 45, 48, 107–8; and Aristotle, 10, 15, 75–6n104, 221; and Christianity, 133n28, 133–4n32, 141, 154, 158, 168n86; discouraged by Hobbes, 270, 271, 276, 278; of public representatives, 53–67, 73n50, 114, 117, 128n6. See also aristocracy, natural; civic virtue multiculturalism, 66–7, 124, 138n51, 220, 224, 225, 226, 242, 262n2; as postmodern idea, 126, 216, 234; and Charles Taylor, 89n23 natural law, 37, 169, 170, 176 natural right, 97, 98, 105, 111, 168n89, 211n30, 219, 261 nature: human nature, 8, 14, 21, 75n89, 101, 102–6, 122, 145, 151, 160, 258, 282n12, 283n34; as normative principle, 8 Neatby, Hilda, 113n56 oratory, 27n30, 45, 50, 53, 58, 60, 62, 65, 66, 75n85 Pangle, Thomas, 4, 106, 107, 110n19, 157, 167n78 Parliament of Canada, 33, 45, 46, 47–8, 54, 57, 63–7, 69n5, 71n16, 85, 205, 215n86, 234, 243 patriotism, 11, 101, 104, 117, 123, 125, 131n16 Plato, 5, 69n10, 71n19, 128n5, 138n56; in John Bourinot 58; cave allegory, 17, 184–5, 188; and Christianity, 156, 160, 167n85, 176; on friendship, 76n104; Eric Havelock’s interpretation of, 149–51; Laws, 14,

292

index

60, 74n72, 114–16, 259; Marshall McLuhan’s critique, 164n43, 164n45; moderation, 102, 104; on the soul, 91–3, 134n32 postmodernism, 6, 7, 23, 26–7n25, 126, 216, 279 progressivism, 23, 32, 136n45, 160, 192, 224, 229–30n25, 279, 280; and Canadian Supreme Court jurisprudence, 21, 22, 233, 234, 261; in education, 6, 17, 150, 208, 209; and egalitarianism, 18, 109n12, 198, 211n30; influence on George Grant, 153–6 Resnick, Philip, 39, 43n29 responsible government, 29–30, 33–7, 41n11, 41n12, 90, 102, 117, 139n59; neglected by Gad Horowitz, 32. See also Bourinot, John Romanticism, 46, 48, 70n13 Romney, Paul, 9, 24n6, 26n22, 42n15 Rorty, Richard, 8, 10, 25n16 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 135–6n41, 199 Russell, Peter, 12, 31, 37, 40n5, 41n12 Ryerson, Egerton, 14–15, 48, 114–39, 140, 141, 159, 161n4, 168n86, 233 Sanborn, John, 86 Schabert, Tilo, 69–70n10, 70n11, 74n74 Shakespeare, William, 14, 21, 24, 62, 66, 104, 106 Socrates, 115, 130n11, 133–4n32; analysis of democratic soul, 92–7, 111–2n35; on political moderation, 112n49. See also Plato Strauss, Leo, 15–16, 164n40, 164n42, 164n45, 166n72, 167n78; ancient– modern quarrel, 142–4; Athens– Jerusalem, 157–61, 164n48, 164–5n49, 167n80, 167n81, 168n90; critique of historicism, 148–52; and George Grant, 152–7, 165n54, 166n69, 166n73, 167n82; and liberal education, 28n33,

72n33, 161; on regime’s influence on the soul, 91–2 Supreme Court of Canada, 20–1, 47, 94, 178, 229–30n25, 231–67 Sweet, David, 24n1 Taylor, Charles, 39, 89n23, 221, 226, 227–8n8, 228n15, 229–30n25, 230n31 Tocqueville, Alexis, 13–15, 17–19, 21, 24, 49, 50, 51, 66, 67, 71n25, 72n36, 72n38, 104, 114, 118, 257–8, 285n70; applicable to Canada, 192–215, 224–5, 257; on belief/opinion, 136n42, 284n47; on democratic soul, 184–91; on egalitarianism, 109n12, 111n31; influence on Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 91–7 Tupper, Sir Charles, 12, 41n14, 58, 62, 65 vocational education, 7, 11, 16–17, 22, 28n32, 70n12, 103 Waite, P.B., 7 Weber, Max, 114, 154–5, 166n72 Winthrop, Delba, 71n25, 211n24, 213n52, 284n47