Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Monday, June 29, 2015

Voltaire on the Niquab affair (and more)

The Harper government’s legislative attempts against the Niquab in citizenship ceremonies places Canadian nationalism above religious freedoms thus making our society less tolerant – despite pretences - of Muslims in general (who are alleged by Conservative party innuendo to harbour certain ‘terrorist’ links). Perhaps the words of Voltaire should guide Canadians here. Note the Reformation-era context of the following passage, signalling a kind of ‘distant mirror’ to our own age.

The human race resembles a crowd of passengers on board a ship.  Some are at the stern, others at the prow, many in the hold and in the bilges.  The ship leaks from every side, the storm does not abate: the wretched passengers will all be swallowed up! Instead of giving each other the necessary assistance that would make the passage less arduous, should we make the voyage still more dreadful?  Here is a Nestorian, there a Jew; one believes in an inhabitant of Picardy [Calvin], another in a native of Eisleben [Luther].  Over here is a family of fire-worshippers, over there are Moslems, and not far away are some Anabaptists.  But what does it matter to which sect they belong?  They should work together to stop the ship from leaking, so that each one, by securing his neighbours life, also secures is own.  Yet they quarrel with one another and perish.[1]

- Voltaire, author of the Treatise on Tolerance, 1763.



[1] Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance and other writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, tr. and ed. Simon Harvey (Cambridge: University Press, 2000), p. 124. p. 134.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Today: 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta

Consider the development of Crusdaer ‘democracy’ using Villehardouin’s account of the Conquest of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.  Here is an excerpt from his chapter dealing with ‘The Emperor’s Covenant, July-November 1205’, when, eventually, “peace and concord were established in the army”.[1]  Interesting parallels can be drawn with the following account and the signing of the Magna Carta, June 15, 1215.

The barons replied that they would like to talk the matter over in private.  They recognized quite clearly that the [new] Emperor [of Constantinople] had given them a true picture of the situation, and were fully aware that such a course as he had proposed was best, for both him and themselves.  They told him, however, that they could not consent to it except with the general agreement of the army.  They would therefore find out the army’s opinion on this matter and let him know what transpired.  So the Emperor left and went back to Constantinople.  The barons remained in camp, the next day held a conference to which they summoned all the great lords and leaders of the army, together with most of the knights.  Here the Emperor’s request was communicated to them exactly as he had made it.

This proposal gave rise to much discord in the assembly, as much indeed as had on many other occasions been provoked by those who wished the army to be disbanded, since the whole affair seemed to them to be lasting too long.  The party that had stirred up dissension at Corfu now reminded the others of their oaths, and said: ‘Give us the ships as you swore to do, for we wish to go off to Syria.’[2]     





[1] Joinville & Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, tr. M.R.B. Shaw (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), p. 79.
[2] Ibid., p. 78.

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Augustine and Hobbes: Thoughts on Harper and the Conservative Right

Herbert A. Deane’s The Political and Social Thought of Augustine (1963) serves as a blueprint for the Harper government’s political agenda – in particular its notions on crime.  Central is Augustine’s own idea of original sin, when “human life in this world became penal” after the Fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.[1]  Augustine is also replete with notions of pre-Calvinist predestination; those in the City of God are a self-described minority elected to salvation, where liberty is achieved by an avoidance of sin.[2] The innocent are best protected when criminals are punished, and offenders must be prevented from abusing their liberty.[3]  In other words, Deane’s book puts Augustine at the heart of Christianity’s Old Testament tradition, where the divinely-established state works to subdue and penalize wickedness.[4]

Where Deane’s book is truly pathbreaking, however, is in the link from Augustine to Hobbes.  Hobbes’s “war of all against all” is compared to Augustine’s famous pre-Darwinian statement: “And when one fish hath devoured, the greater the less, itself also is devoured by some greater.”[5]  Moreover, Hobbes’s well-known statement about the “perpetual and restless desire for power that ceaseth only in death” can be compared to Augustine’s claim that no one is innocent (that is, because everyone is conceived in sin) even babes at the bosom of their mother.[6]  Augustine’s notions of “original” sin thus re-affirms Hobbes’s argument that all men are by nature self-interested.

The alleged link between Hobbes and Augustine caters to Harper’s Calvinism (which acts like a bridge), and it explains the Conservative government’s current tendencies towards a coercive state.  Deane’s book was reissued in 2013, and in the Forward (“A Response to Herbert Deane”) Richard Munkelt suggests that Augustine could not possibly have anticipated a Hobbesian-type police state for early Christianity.[7]  Indeed there are no references to Augustine by Hobbes in his landmark work, and Hobbes thought little about On the Trinity (Augustine’s other major work aside from Confessions and City of God), with the exception of Chapter 34 in Part 3 of Leviathan where he writes “Of the significance of spirit, angel and inspiration in the Book of the Holy Scripture.”

Deane might have found inspiration for his argument from the following succinct aphorism by Hobbes, where religion is considered not as philosophy but is explained as law:[8]

These dictates of reason men used to call by the name of laws, but improperly; for they are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves; whereas law, properly, is the word of him that by right hath command over others.  But yet if we consider the same theorems as delivered in the word of God that by right commandeth all things, then are they properly called laws.[9]

As the philosopher A.E. Taylor puts it otherwise: an “authorised religion” is about “our submission to the rightful political authority of the sovereign.”[10]  In other words religion is a form of social discipline - subjects are to obey dutifully, but at the same time rulers are prone to abusing the state by actually seeking to stimulate piety and eternal salvation among their peoples.  The latter nuance was a problem Augustine’s conscience wrestled with,[11] and it would appear that the “Harper government” has trappings of this evangelical tone, in addition to appealing to church discipline, but what matters to Hobbes – in his scientific way - is whether a law promotes peace or discord.[12]

Hobbes spent most of the rest of his life after writing Leviathan arguing against the claim that he was atheistic.  It is towards his conclusion of Part 3 (“Of a Christian Commonwealth”) that he famously purges himself of the Papacy, the early Christians, and by implication Augustine, who had been Bishop for 15 years when Christianity became the official state religion of Rome:[13]

For, from that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy or kingdom of darkness may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies, that is, to the old wives’ fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats that they play in the night.  And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.  For so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.[14] 

If the Bishop of Rome can be compared to a “kingdom of fairies”, then perhaps there is not much room for Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo.  In other words, the link between Hobbes and Augustine is more imaginary than real, but unfortunately the Harper Conservatives are not about to revise the Deane thesis. Hobbes is central to Conservative ideology, which is not prepared to give up on the Church Father.  More importantly, the argument that Augustine is all about some form of state repression severely limits the importance of his vast oeuvre which goes in all so many directions, including concepts of the ‘middle’, the will, and arguments pre-dating Descartes’ cogito, among many others.  Canada’s conservatives need to put down their 1963 version of Deane’s book – and consider reading the 2013 “Forward”, which, while not salutary in its entirety, does justice to Augustine.



[1] Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 17.
[2] Ibid., pp. 24, 25.
[3] Ibid., p. 165.
[4] Ibid., p. 223.
[5] Ibid., p. 47.
[6] Ibid., pp. 56, 57.  See also Saint Augustine, Confessions, tr. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 9.
[7] Richard A Munkelt “Forward” in Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of Augustine (Tacoma, WA: Angelico Press, 2013), p. XI
[8] A.E. Taylor, Thomas Hobbes (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), p. 117.  This reprint of a 1908 Edition belongs to the Thoemmes collection of “Key Texts: Classic Studies in the History of Ideas.”  It was very helpful in this assessment of Hobbes.
[9] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002). p. 119 (Chapter 15, para. 41)
[10] Taylor, Thomas Hobbes, p. 117.
[11] Deane, Political and Social Ideas of Augustine, p. 133.
[12] Taylor, Thomas Hobbes, p. 117.
[13] Munkelt, “Forward” in Political and Social Thought of St. Augustine, p. VI note.
[14] Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 519 (Chapter 47, para 21).

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Riverview Hospital meets the Fraser Institute

Did you know that the fate of Riverview and its 244 acres of grounds rests not with Coquitlam (and its Mayor), or with the urgent needs of the mentally ill (for example, hospital-prone schizophrenics, or the frequently sick and homeless), or with the Film Industry, or with fans of the arboretum, or with any spurious Heritage society.  No: none of the above.  The answer actually lies with Vancouver’s own Fraser Institute.

Canada’s largest and most powerful neo-liberal think tank has not only been dabbling in rating schools in B.C., and across the country, it has helped shape the Tea Party on the Right of the Republican Party in the United States, and it has contributed “private” ideas to the Conservative government under Stephen Harper.  Its members include prominent non-British Columbians, for example, Mike Harris, former Premier of Ontario responsible for ushering in the “common sense revolution”, and the late “King Ralph” of Alberta, who left British Columbians with a taste of his disregard for the mentally ill while he was Premier there.

The Fraser Institute holds in very high esteem the work of a little-known (and short-lived) French economist and legislator, Frédéric Bastiat, who wrote during the turmoil of the mid-nineteenth century. It is his ideas that are propagated which are having a determinative effect on the fate of Riverview.  In his most famous essay “The Law” Bastiat argues that “property, like the person, is a providential fact”.[1]  Further to his argument he elaborates “man is born a property owner” and that “property is a divine institution and that its safety and protection are the object of human law.” [2]

Clearly Bastiat, like the Fraser Institute, is thinking only of private property – not public property, so Riverview as a consequence is now considered a prime real estate option above all other costs.  Any development there has to make its own money, or at least “break even” (when it is the province that has brought Riverview and the mentally ill to ruin).  This is consistent with the Fraser Institute’s vociferous case for privatized health care.

But Bastiat’s most famous declaration appears in “The State” where he claims in 1848, a year of Revolution: “The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”[3]  In other words, when one reads (and considers accepting) dogmatic economists such as Bastiat there is (as has been the case) no room for the mentally ill at Riverview – or for a restoration.

Fraser Institute ideology has made its way into “provincial” thinking.  It also explains why the province argues that the absence of a specialized hospital can be made up for by a number of local facilities which supposedly serve patients better in their respective regions by bringing them closer to their families.  But just because a mentally ill person can now be treated in Prince George does not mean we should eliminate the original “public” role of Riverview and its lands. Besides, judging from Vancouver’s Downtown East Side alone and the problem of concurrent disorders, B.C. needs hundreds of new beds, if not more, not just a couple dozen here and there.
 
Absence of treatment is mistreatment, and the public should think much less of the Fraser Institute - and consequently think much more without - given its role in helping to undermine the fate of Riverview.




[1] Frédéric Bastiat, “The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 1843-1850, ed. Jacques de Guenin (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 2012), p. 44.
[2] Ibid., pp. 44,45.
[3] Ibid., p. 97.