Letter to Ukraine

Recently you were visited by our Prime Minister, Mr. Stephen Harper, but I am sorry to say he failed to make a stopover at Runnymede, site of the signing of the Magna Carta, before he ventured into Ukraine to promote your democracy.  You see, what Harper says in Ukraine is the opposite of what he does in Canada, and on this particular occasion he did not have his music band with him to serenade you with current Beatles hits.  If his band were reunited (God forbid), and if our Prime Minister were to sing, may I recommend “Hello, goodbye” (“I don’t know why you say goodbye. I say hello”).

Here at home the “Harper Government” has introduced the so-called “Fair” Elections Act, which has garnered criticism from all corners, including the Globe and Mail, our newspaper of record, which has published an unprecedented 6 editorials eviscerating the legislation, which is being rushed through Parliament, as with all government bills since the Conservative Party election to majority government.  You would think that if the bill were “fair”, and given that it has everything to do with how our elections are run, the government would not limit debate; maybe it would even consult some of the opposition parties.

The same Conservative Party that had trouble with the scandal of robo-calls in the last election are now gutting Elections Canada, the body responsible for investigating such irregularities.  Canada was widely regarded as an open democracy, but now voting rights are being limited by a hidden problem we did not know even existed until the legislation was drafted.  The real problem is now voter suppression, and the real targets are the young, who are not likely to vote Conservative.  Moreover campaign spending is protected by a curious loophole that benefits mostly, you guessed it, the Conservative Party. And now, as well, each incumbent will have the power to appoint election officials, formerly the domain of (non-partisan) Elections Canada.

This is really the tip of the iceberg, but it is also the tipping point.  While he was jetting off for Ukraine, Canada’s Supreme Court declared that Harper’s monkeying around with his appointment to that same august body “illegal” and “unconstitutional.”  If it were not for that major embarrassment, dragged over six months, and if not for the implications the decision bears on Harper’s fiddling with the Senate, Canada would be ever closer to the “Alberta model”, where there once was a “King Ralph” and where the same party has ruled for 43 years.  The “Harper government” needs its comeuppance, but Canada’s Parliament is not up to the task of Runnymede, because Canadians no longer live in a meaningful democracy, saved only by the Supreme Court.  This is why, I respectfully suggest, Ukraine should say “goodbye” when King Harper comes to say “hello”.

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.

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[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.

St. Augustine on "robo-calls" in Canada. Reflections on justice, community and the loss of 'the common sense of right'.

Here is St. Augustine writing after the sack of Rome in the year 410 and interpreting Cicero’s work On the Republic. The subject is Scipio Africanus, who destroyed the Phoenicians, yet the heroic leader laments the absence of a “common sense of right” in the Roman Republic:

Book II, Chapter 21. City of God

He [Scipio] starts by repeating and supporting his brief definition of a commonwealth, that it is ‘the weal of the community’, and he defines ‘the community’ not any and every association of the population, but ‘an association united by a common sense of right and community of interest’.  He goes on to point out the advantage of definition in argument; and from these definitions of his he derives the proposition that a commonwealth (i.e. the weal of the community’) only exists where there is a sound and just government, whether power rests with a monarch or a few aristocrats, or with the people as a whole.  But when the king is unjust (a ‘tyrant’, as he calls him, in the Greek manner), or the nobles are unjust (he calls such a combination a factio – a caucus) or the people are unjust (and for this he finds no accepted term, unless he should call it a collective tyranny), then, he holds, the commonwealth is not corrupt, as had been argued on the previous day, but, by a logical conclusion from the definition, it ceases to exist at all – for there can be no ‘weal of the community’, if it is unjust, since it is not ‘associated by a common sense of right and community of interest’, which was the definition of a community.[1]

Book XIX, Chapter 21. City of God

This brings me to the place where I must fulfil, as briefly and clearly as I may, the promise I gave in the second book.  I there promised that I would show that there never was a Roman commonwealth answering to the definitions advanced by Scipio in Cicero’s On the Republic.  For Scipio gives a brief definition of the state, or commonwealth, as the ‘weal of the people’.  Now if this is a true definition there never was a Roman commonwealth because the Roman state was never the ‘weal of the people’, according to Scipio’s definition. For he defined a ‘people’ as a multitude ‘united in association by a common sense of right and a community of interest’.  He explains in the discussion what he means by a ‘common sense of right’, showing that a state cannot be maintained without justice, and where there is no true justice there can be no right.  For any action according to right is inevitably a just action, while no unjust action can possibly be according to right.  For unjust human institutions are not to be called or supposed to be institutions of right, since even they themselves say that right is what has flowed from the fount of justice; as for the notion of justice commonly put forward by some misguided thinkers, that it is ‘the interest of the strongest’, they hold this to be a false conception.

Therefore, where there is no true justice there can be no ‘association of men united by a common sense of right’, and therefore no people answering to the definition of Scipio, or Cicero.  And if there is no people then there is no ‘weal of the people’, but some kind of a mob not deserving the name of a people.[2]

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[1] St. Augustine, City of God, tr. Henry Bettenson, intro. G.R.Evans (Toronto: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 73,74.

[2] Ibid., pp. 881,882.