One can tell there is something wrong with a book when individuals favoured by the Fraser Institute line up in droves to praise it. The title is far from original, and I recall two such titles appearing in the Globe and Mail review pages (one was an advertisement) simultaneous with Crowley’s original publication in 2009. The prose is also not the most engaging; and the book took ages to finish, interrupted as it was by frequent tosses to the floor (and by far more interesting readings). Not all economists need be so rigid, and as an anti-dote to dogmatism (Canadian-born) John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958) is refreshingly brisk and intellectually lively by comparison.
In the Forward of Fearful Symmetry Andrew Coyne explains that Crowley went to the London School of Economics in the 1980’s in order to debunk Professor Friedrich Hayek, who was teaching there. What followed was something of a conversion experience, apparently, which in my mind throws doubt on the value of certain postgraduate university educations, as Crowley ends up nothing more than a disciple of the marketplace.
Let us begin by examining some of Crowley’s arguments and sources. Consider his so-called “insight that the state becomes a temptation to immorality and a character-corrupting institution when it is permitted to engage in excessive redistribution.”[i] This apparent “insight” is attributed to a long forgotten French political economist, Frédéric Bastiat. Crowley goes on (with his own added emphasis) to quote Bastiat who defines the state (or, rather - more properly - the government) as “the great fiction through which everybody endeavours to live at the expense of everybody else.”[ii]
Bastiat’s true significance is revealed in a London Review of Books article (2 December 2010) by Cambridge academic Christopher Prendergast. Apparently the interest in Bastiat has long been American: it is neither British nor French. Bastiat was resurrected from the tombs of French history in the era of Cold War American anti-Communism, and later fans included Reagan and Thatcher, as guided by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, with the blessings of his fellow national Friedrich Hayek.
Bastiat’s true significance is revealed in a London Review of Books article (2 December 2010) by Cambridge academic Christopher Prendergast. Apparently the interest in Bastiat has long been American: it is neither British nor French. Bastiat was resurrected from the tombs of French history in the era of Cold War American anti-Communism, and later fans included Reagan and Thatcher, as guided by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, with the blessings of his fellow national Friedrich Hayek.
Today Bastiat is known (in Prendergast’s words) as “a major source of Tea Party ideological fervour.”[iii] He depicts taxation as “state sanctioned ‘plunder’”.[iv] And he goes on to describe the idea of levying taxes in order to assist the poor as “taking from some persons that which belongs to them to give to others that which does not belong to them.”[v] In other words, we find in Fearful Symmetry ideas that clearly belong to the Tea Party – to the far right of the Republican Party. What are they doing in Canada? Does the Tea Party represent (borrowing from half of Crowley’s subtitle) the “rise of Canada’s founding values”?
As an economist (of the right-wing persuasion) Crowley is keen on work – or on getting people to work. Families are not what we might think of them (as the sentimental bonds of parents to children, perhaps); rather they a conceived as socio-economic and productive units, the training ground for work, and the key to national fortune. This is why Crowley can quote his own father-in-law on work (p. 113) in almost the same breath that he discusses Aristotle on the same topic (p. 106), a striking combination of intellectual anti-intellectualism (or vice–versa), made all the more peculiar by the fact that the Greeks (and assuredly Aristotle) had slaves doing the daily drudgery, a choice many of us do not have today. Montaigne tells us in the title of one of his Essays, following Plutarch, that the ancient Greeks had a proverb: “Work can wait till tomorrow”, so it seems Crowley is rather unsuccessful in finding antecedents to our modern-day obsession with work.
Crowley’s most interesting chapter is “Nationalism and Welfarism in Quebec and the Consequences for Canada.” Unfortunately the chapter does not in itself deal with Quebec nationalism, and it is in fact prefaced by disturbing words disparaging the “sacred language” (p. 88). Elsewhere he speaks pejoratively of the “chosen people of Quebec” (p. 92), and he dismissed their “mission civilisatrice” (p. 71), which is truly a twist on the history of France, not that of Quebec. Again, like many liberal individualists – or libertarians – he worries for the ‘oppressed’ French minority in that province who are not learning English at school.[vi]
Crowley seems to confuse Quebec’s “welfare state” with the apparent ‘enemy’ of socialism, and his thinking suggests that developments in that province are in some ways pathological, a term he employs. According to statistics, which Crowley treats uncritically, about one fifth of the residents of Quebec live by means of social assistance. (p. 152). In 2006 44.4% of Canadian common-law relationships were in Quebec (p. 202). In 2000 CBC called Quebec the “abortion capital of North America” (p. 206). Crowley goes on to argue in package format that “Quebec has ... low levels of marriage, high levels of divorce, high levels of lone parenthood and child poverty, and low levels of fertility” (p. 204) A number of these correlations need to be better substantiated and analyzed in a more comparative fashion, throughout the provinces. For example, British Columbia (not a welfare state by any stretch of the imagination) has the highest child poverty rate in Canada, by far, and yet this does not figure in Crowley’s eyes, because he insists that the welfare state “has been a principal motor of child poverty.” (p. 276). Relative to B.C., Quebec’s child poverty rate must be lower – so Quebec (or the Québecois) must be doing something right.
The one statistic that is particularly worth noting is the rate of suicide in Quebec, apparently the highest in Canada, a figure that presumably excludes our indigenous communities (p. 205). Towards an explanation, Crowley quotes former PQ premier Bernard Landry’s notion that the Quiet Revolution’s “break with Catholic morality,” (beginning in the 1960’s) and the inability to establish a successful secular moral code is, nonetheless, apt here (p. 206). However, the phenomenon of suicide is logically distinct from Quebec’s so-called existence as a welfare state: correlation does not mean causation – first year university stuff.
Crowley writes as if Keynesian economics were the dysfunctional child of Quebec – and Quebec alone, revealing a kind of myopia: “Without Quebec and the profound changes unleashed there by the Quiet Revolution and the Boomer generation, I am convinced that Canada would not have trod the path of massive state expansion we did.” (p. 282) Has he forgotten about the massive expansion of the state during and following World War II - and because of the war itself? Was not the growth of the state an almost global phenomenon throughout most of the twentieth century? And who was John Maynard Keynes anyway – a closet Québecois?
But Crowley also asks a valid question about the affordability of the so-called status quo, as Quebec and other deficits loom. Here he is informative: “Equalization is financed solely out of federal tax revenues, chiefly the GST and personal and corporate income tax and these come disproportionately from Ontario.” (p. 238) Will Quebec be able to continue with its level of public services if Ontario is an equalization recipient, and here he predicts “the mother of all federal-provincial battles.” But, alas, recent discoveries of massive natural gas deposits and shale gas in Quebec have boosted its energy potential considerably – and revenue from natural resources fall under provincial jurisdiction.[vii] So, Crowley’s argument is now outdated. He need not fear monger and demonize Quebec any further; indeed, he may even live to regret it.
Where else does Crowley go wrong? Look to family planning. Because divorce is difficult, time-consuming, and takes away from our GDP (and possibly fertility) he wants from those couples who plan to have children “a deeper form of marriage commitment ... in which both parties agree that the marriage would be indissoluble by unilateral action by either of the spouses until their youngest child reaches the age of, say, sixteen.” (p. 273) In this instance, Crowley would have been better off deferring to the classics: Montaigne described marriage as “the most useful activity of human society,” and both Plato and Aristotle also appreciated the institution for its utility.[viii]
The whole point of Crowley’s book is to outline “the fall and rise of Canada’s founding values.” No doubt, ever since the fall of Soviet Communism, much of the globe – and not just Canada - has resorted to some variant of "small-l" liberalism, which was typical of much of the nineteenth century, especially in Britain, when the middle class was dominant, or at least emerging as a political force. Postmodernism in other words can be argued as a return to nineteenth century liberalism. And if it were not for such liberalism, Canada’s Parliament would not be neo-gothic in form. But to presume we are returning precisely to the “founding values” of 1867 is a bit much, given that we have been betrayed by two prorogued parliaments – and one contempt of parliament verdict, the first in Canada’s history.[ix]
If one sifts through the nineteenth century, we see ourselves still wrestling with Charles Darwin’s theories of “natural selection” and his Origin of the Species, published in 1859, popularly interpreted as “the survival of the fittest” by Herbert Spencer’s coinage in 1864. In other words, we are returning to the values of social Darwinism of 1864, found in Crowley’s “Canadian” revival of the Republican Tea Party hidden in his use of Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat, who prefigured Darwinism along with a host of many others. As well, Crowley is indoctrinated by a kind of Darwinian “struggle” (“the mother of all ... battles”) in the Canadian political arena, which lends itself to an acute antiparliamentarianism (a certain distaste for speaking), the likes of which we have never seen before – at least not domestically. My advice: avoid Crowley and find another book to read.
The whole point of Crowley’s book is to outline “the fall and rise of Canada’s founding values.” No doubt, ever since the fall of Soviet Communism, much of the globe – and not just Canada - has resorted to some variant of "small-l" liberalism, which was typical of much of the nineteenth century, especially in Britain, when the middle class was dominant, or at least emerging as a political force. Postmodernism in other words can be argued as a return to nineteenth century liberalism. And if it were not for such liberalism, Canada’s Parliament would not be neo-gothic in form. But to presume we are returning precisely to the “founding values” of 1867 is a bit much, given that we have been betrayed by two prorogued parliaments – and one contempt of parliament verdict, the first in Canada’s history.[ix]
If one sifts through the nineteenth century, we see ourselves still wrestling with Charles Darwin’s theories of “natural selection” and his Origin of the Species, published in 1859, popularly interpreted as “the survival of the fittest” by Herbert Spencer’s coinage in 1864. In other words, we are returning to the values of social Darwinism of 1864, found in Crowley’s “Canadian” revival of the Republican Tea Party hidden in his use of Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat, who prefigured Darwinism along with a host of many others. As well, Crowley is indoctrinated by a kind of Darwinian “struggle” (“the mother of all ... battles”) in the Canadian political arena, which lends itself to an acute antiparliamentarianism (a certain distaste for speaking), the likes of which we have never seen before – at least not domestically. My advice: avoid Crowley and find another book to read.
[i] Brian Lee Crowley, Fearful Summetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values (Toronto: Key Porter, 2009), p. 62.
[ii] Ibid., p, 62.
[iii]Christopher Prendergast, “Short Cuts”, London Review of Books (2 December 2010), p. 21
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Fearful Symmetry, p. 93. See my review of Robert Sibley’s Northern Spirits.
[vii] See Neil Reynolds, “Fleur-de-lis and wild rose – together at last?” Globe and Mail, April 11, 2011.
[viii] Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, tr. M.A. Screech (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), p. 906.
[ix] Fearful Symmetry, p. 299.
