Did you know that Prime Minister Harper can be summed up by
the cartoon strip “Calvin and Hobbes”?
Some thinkers, for example Michael Ignatieff and Mark Kingwell, have
looked to Machiavelli to explain Harper, while others, for example Stéphane Dion (as I have discussed in
in my blog review of
Harperland),
have erringly looked to Harper and Leo Strauss.
Meanwhile, if we peruse Paul Wells’ latest
narrative,
The Longer I’m Prime Minister,
he sums up the Conservative party as “’neo-con’ and ‘theo-con’” – and that, sadly,
is about the full extent of Wells’ intellectual analysis.
I have already discussed Harper’s relationship with Hobbes
in a previous blog entry (see my book review of Leviathan). But to get at
the first half of the cartoon reference that I suggest here, may I recommend
an impressive study – Calvin: Origins
and Development of his Religious Thought (1963, English translation) by
François Wendel. It is this work that opens up a window to
Harper and the Conservative party’s ‘theo-con’ arguments.
It is important to realize that at the core of Calvin – and
Harper – is a break from Renaissance humanism.
While Luther represents the liberal “protest” – and right to resist -
against the abuses of the medieval Catholic Church, Calvin’s Geneva “Reform”
movement represents a conservative rejection of the
culture of the Renaissance (while keeping with its spirit of
commerce). Instead of an awakening of man’s greatness and sense of human
potential, or humanism, which followed the medieval period, we see instead a
profound “consciousness of sin” – and the clearest explanation (outlined almost
500 years ago) for Harper’s anti-crime agenda.
And we find in both Calvin and Harper, as
well, an explicit predilection for the victims of crime, rooted in notions of
predestination.
Calvin’s Reformed Churches in Geneva functioned in French
(as well as Latin), and Calvin himself was well-known for his unwillingness to
admit discussion as well as for his “principles of discipline” at the heart of
which was his right to excommunicate, which now gives justification for “the
Harper government” to take control of the Canadian Senate.
Everything in Calvin’s Geneva was supposed to
be saintly. Inns were forbidden
(replaced by ‘abbys’), and all guests were
supervised
(accompanied by a French version of the Bible, as well). In other words, all aspects of Renaissance
culture were forbidden – art, music,
dance, theatre, and today the CBC.
Geneva was governed by “ecclesiastical police” and at one point even the
most common personal names were attacked – apparently because they were not
biblical enough.
When attempting to discredit their opposition at election-times,
Calvinists called them “libertines”, because they appeared (according to
argument) too shy of the rigour of discipline.
The position of the Calvinists in Geneva
continued to improve over time, because of ongoing religious persecution in France. The more refugees flooded into Geneva, thereby
reinforcing Calvin’s party, the more “the Harper government” today sees the
need to court the vote of Canada’s most recent immigrants.
Central to Calvinism is the idea of predestination: there
are the ‘elect’ and the ‘reprobate’ – both of which are the result of divine
will. Calvin finds supporting evidence
in the New Testament Sermon on Ephesians: “For he chose us in him before the
creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.”
Ultimately,
however, Calvin generates his notion of predestination from Augustine’s
City of God (AD 413-427):
… God almighty, the
supreme and supremely good creator all beings, who assists and rewards good
wills, while he abandons and condemns the bad (and yet controls both good and
bad) surely did not fail to have a plan whereby he might complete the fixed
number of citizens predestined in his wisdom, even out of the condemned human
race.
While Augustine dwells primarily on the notion of the ‘elect’,
it is Calvin who develops the logical counterpart – the idea of the ‘elect’ and
the ‘reprobate’, and in so doing Calvin (perhaps unintentionally) diminishes
the message of Christ, for some men, in spite of themselves, are apparently
incapable of understanding or achieving redemption.
(It is worth noting that Martin Luther, long
an Augustinian monk, does not dwell on predestination but instead looks to unilateral
faith, against which Calvin reacts).
To put it in François Wendel’s words, Calvin’s thinking is that “the elect cannot
lose salvation whatever they do” and the “reprobate are condemned justly by
their own fault.”
It is this type of binary thinking in Calvinism, combined
with notions of predestination, which is at the heart of Harper’s Conservative movement (the confrontational style of which
brooks no notion of the middle). In
other words our prime minister’s ‘theo-con’ playbook is almost 500 years old,
and Canadians actually have much to learn from Calvin’s theocratic Geneva.
Calvin has been combined with Hobbes (who also does not cater to the middle) to become a powerful religious
and intellectual force on the land – the results of which, unfortunately, are
not always comical.
