"A Song of the Harper" for Canada

In an earlier post (“On Conservatives, Roman History and the “Gothic balance”) I commented on Lawrence Martin’s Globe and Mail column “Political scholars fiddle while Rome burns.”[1]  It is worth noting that the Romans did not have fiddles, or violins, but they did have harps, which would suit our current prime minister very well, when he is not playing the Beatles on piano. Here for public edification is “A Song of the Harper”, or Song of the Dead, from fourteenth-century B.C. Egypt.   Put simply: Canadian politics is really about our prime minister playing a harp while the country burns.  Please do note the references to the pyramids, which can be likened to Canadian deconstruction in the oil sands.

“A Song of the Harper”
Prosperous is he, this good prince
Even though good fortune may suffer harm!
Generations pass away, and others remain
Since the time of the ancestors
The gods who lived formerly rest in their pyramids,
The beatified dead also, buried in their pyramids.
And they who built houses-their places are not.
See what has been made of them!
I have heard the words of Ii-em-hotep and Hor-dedef
With whose discourses men speak so much.
What are their places (now)?
Their walls are broken apart, and their places are not --
As though they had ever been!
There is none who comes back from (over) there,
That he may tell their state,
That he may tell their needs,
That he may still our hearts,
Until we (too) may travel to the place where they have gone.
Let thy desire flourish,
In order to let thy heart forget the beautifications for thee.
Follow they desire, as long as thou shalt live.
Put myrrh upon thy head and clothing of fine linen upon thee,
Being anointed with genuine marvels of the god’s property.
Set an increase to thy good things;
Let not thy heart flag.
Follow thy desire and thy good.
Fulfill they needs upon earth, after the command of thy heart,
Until there come for thee that day of mourning.
The Weary [of Heart] bears not their [mourn]ing,
and wailing saves not the heart of a man from the underworld.

Refrain: Make Holiday, and weary not therein!
Behold, it is not given to a man to take his property with him.
Behold, there is not one who departs who comes back again![2]

---

[1] The Globe and Mail, Tuesday June 4, 2013, p. A11

[2] “A Song of the Harper” in Landmarks of the Western Heritage, ed. C. Warren Hollister, Vol I: The Ancient Near East to 1789, 2^nd ed (Montreal: McGraw-Hill, nd), pp. 10,11.

On Alberta's Flood, Harper and climate change: learning to face 'the facts' - a tweet

To send the Deluge is to crack the whip!

- from The Epic of Gilgamesh, Babylonia, circa. 21^st century BC[1]

---

[1] The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian, tr. and intro. Andrew George (Penguin: Toronto, 1999), p. 41 (The Standard Version, Tablet V 105).

Collingwood tweets on Harper’s Senate, etcetera:

“Force includes Fraud”[1]

---

[1] R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, or, Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism, Revised ed. by David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 206.  Here the English philosopher-historian Collingwood (who first published his book in 1942, a year before his death) is clearly informed by Hobbes’s Leviathan.   

Canadian Democracy is Overruled: More on Moore and the CBC

Did you know that the key idea behind modern government is the concept of a separation of powers?  The legislative is supposed to be separate from the executive which is supposed to be separate from the judiciary.  And modern government is also supposed to be separate from its public broadcaster, or any media for that matter.  It’s called freedom of the press.  In Canada this will no longer be the case under the “Harper Government” aided by none other than MP James Moore, Minister of Heritage, who is directly responsible for the CBC.  If Bill C-60 passes in parliament, the CBC will no longer be at arm’s length from the “Harper Government”.  This potential for control is unprecedented in the West.

On 3 May 2011, on the day following the last federal election, Minister Moore declared: “We believe in the national public broadcaster.  We have said that we will maintain or increase support for the CBC.  That is our platform … and we will commit to that.”  Since then, Moore has overseen a 10% reduction in the CBC budget, and now he verges on converting the CBC into a kind of state or government broadcaster.

In Minister Moore’s most recent constituency newsletter I see the words “Promise Made, Promise kept” (referring  to the Evergreen Line construction).   Clearly, by acknowledgement, MP Moore was able to keep ONE promise from the last election.   Keeping this single promise is essential to making sure trains run to schedule, where efficiency rules.  Meanwhile Canadian democracy is overruled. [1]

---

[1] Letter to the Editor, The Tri-Cities NOW, Wednesday June 12, 2013. 

On Conservatives, Roman History and the "Gothic balance"

Recently Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail published an interesting column: “Political scholars fiddle while Rome burns.”[1]  While there is some merit to the fact that Canada’s scholars are not playing as big a role in our national debates as they used to, I wish to draw attention to the “Roman” metaphor considered apart from the familiar allusion to Nero’s role during the great fire of AD 64. It is in fact Canada’s Conservative Party, once aided by  Tom Flanagan (since fallen from public grace) that has pushed the references to Roman history; any number of Professor Flanagan’s Globe and Mail op-ed contributions drew examples from the Roman period. But are Conservative Party principles consistent with Roman history?

A reading of the philosopher- historian R.G. Collingwood would imply some consistency but is not flattering. He explains in The New Leviathan: “although the word ‘legislation’ is one we owe to the Romans, the Romans did not clearly distinguish in their own minds between what we call legislation and the enactment of an executive decree.”[2]  This is clearly the problem with the Harper’s very troubling use of numerous “omnibus bills” (amounting to hundreds of pages in length each) which mask the executive as the legislative.   Another significant historical parallel are the Enabling Acts, beginning in Weimar Germany in October 1923, which gave Cabinet the power to “enact such measures as it deems advisable and urgent in the financial, economic and social spheres.”[3]  Does the reasoning not sound familiar?  Germany had previously engaged in four years of trench warfare and was at the time enduring hyper-inflation.  In a recent statement the incoming Governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, described recovery from the 2008-09 financial crises in excessive terms as “post-war reconstruction.”  For the “Harper Government” in other words, history implies a Roman legacy of executive decrees – or war.

Another thing the Romans gave us was the rule of law, which by inversion meant that everyone is equal before the law.[4]  However, this central principle suggests that Conservative Party thinking is not in agreement with Roman history.  In Canada everyone is equal before the law, except for the “Harper Government” which rules as if there is no reciprocity in political life, because expanding one’s power is considered more important than Parliament.  A corollary of this is Harper’s definitive refutation of Friedrich Engels (the close collaborator with Karl Marx) who famously claimed that “the state is not ‘abolished,’ it withers away.”[5] Harper’s anti-statism is only party pretension, and we can see that in his current interference with the CBC, which should be at arm’s length from the government of the day.  In Canada the state shall not wither away, because the Conservative Party has now become the country’s ruling class.[6]

The Romans also gave us the secret ballot, and here is James Harrington on the topic in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), aided by his reading of Cicero:  “the tablet or ballot of the people of Rome (who gave their votes by throwing tablets or little pieces of wood secretly into urns marked for the negative or affirmative) was a welcome constitution of the people, as that which, not impairing the assurance of their brows, increased the freedom of their judgement.”[7]  Given the implicit role of some unknown people in the Conservative Party behind the “robo-call” affair, and given the continuous brow-beating of negative party advertising, one wonders how “free” the vote is in Canada.  Again, the Conservative Party does not compare well with this Roman example.

Finally, it is worth noting that the Parliament buildings in Ottawa are not “Roman,” or “neo-classical” (as in Washington, which definitely has a more than a touch of Versailles to it); rather, they are neo-Gothic, modelled after the Houses of Parliament in England, which burned to the ground in 1834, after standing for 800 years, only to be rebuilt.  And keep in mind that the average Gothic window has only three points to it, likely inspired by St. Augustine’s Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, a theme that I have developed elsewhere in this blog.  This three-fold nature is also known as the “Gothic balance”: there is an implicit sense of mediation, reconciliation and reciprocity – in other words, a notion of “the middle”.[8]  These are not intrinsically Roman values (despite the moderating influences of Cicero and Horace); they are Medieval ones, aided as I have said elsewhere by St. Augustine and, of course, Aristotle.  By preoccupying themselves with various aspects of Roman history, the Conservative Party may have missed the boat on essential Canadian history and culture.  In other words, under Harper there is no sense of “Gothic balance”. This essay is an attempt to clarify a very un-Canadian problem.

---

[1] The Globe and Mail, Tuesday June 4, 2013, p. A11.

[2] R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism. Revised ed. by David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) p. 217.

[3] Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), p. 25.

[4] Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 329,331.

[5] Friedrich Engels, Anti-dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, tr. Emile Burns, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, nd [Nabu Press, USA, Reprint, 2010]), p. 315 (Part 3, Chapter 2).

[6] See R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p. 277.

[7] James Harrington, “Oceana” in Ideal Commonwealths, Intro. Henry Morley (New York: The Colonial Press, 1901), p. 205.  Harrington first published The Commonwealth of Oceana in 1656.

[8] For “Gothic balance” see Harrington in Ibid., pp. 216 or 217.