Bless this mess
Mark Steyn - Monday,22 May 2006
Western Sandard
Is it just me," wondered Linda McQuaig in The Toronto Star, "or does anyone else find it ominous that Harper says 'God bless Canada'?"
You don't have to do the full Jaws orchestral accompaniment to concede that Linda has a point: Whether or not it's "ominous," it is a little weird in contemporary public discourse to hear Stephen Harper say "God bless Canada." The question then arises: Why should it be so weird?
A generation or two back, Canadian schoolchildren sang "God Save The Queen." On public property! Then they went home and their parents sang along to "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys. Voluntarily! Even today we sing, "God keep our land glorious and free." And on every coin in our pockets the sovereign's likeness is accompanied by the phrase "DG Regina"--"Dei Gratia Regina"--i.e., she's Queen by the grace of God and not, as many of us thought, by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court reversing an earlier decision by the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
Nobody minds a passing reference to that old-time religion if it's like the DG and the "God keep our land" stuff--a bit of Heritage Canada vestigial parchment-and-sealing-wax religiosity. It's the "ominous" feeling that Harper's "God bless Canada" might portend a non-heritage religiosity that gets the Trudeaupian secularists all rattled. And, as a consequence, their objections to his use of the expression sound way weirder than his using it. Even the CanWest News Service report on a pro-Harper poll--65 per cent of Canadians have no objections to the "God bless" line and want him to go on using it--sounded weird:
"Most Canadians are accepting of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's religious sign-off . . . One in four felt mixing the mini-prayer with political speeches was the wrong way to go . . . The term has drawn comparisons between Mr. Harper and U.S. President George W. Bush, who regularly ends speaking engagements with 'God Bless America' . . . "
"Religious sign-off"? "Mini-prayer"? And, while we're at it, "speaking engagements"? Clinton and Reagan and Carter and Ford and so on and so forth all ended their "speaking engagements" with "God bless America." After 9/11, Celine Dion ended singing engagements with "God Bless America." And, depending on who produced and arranged the record, Celine's "God Bless America" may even qualify airplay-wise as Canadian Content.
But Linda McQuaig and co. are still using the Stockwell Day playbook. Stephen Harper isn't evangelical, born again, speaking in tongues or even much of a churchgoer. He's not a professional God-botherer or social conservative but a cautious libertarian incrementalist. So, instead of screeching about how Scary Stephen is plunging us headlong into a Southern Baptist redneck theocracy, why not stop to consider the far more interesting reality: a man of no fierce religious convictions personally nevertheless has consciously chosen to re-introduce modest invocations of the Almighty to Canadian public life. Why?
Well, perhaps because, as the media reaction suggests, the absence thereof is far more psychologically unhealthy. I look on religion like gun ownership. Jurisdictions such as Vermont and New Hampshire with a high rate of firearms possession also have a low crime rate. You don't have to own a gun, and there are plenty of sissy arms-are-for-hugging granola-crunchers who don't. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump-toothed neighbors do. If you want to burgle a home in northern New England, you'd have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world pantywaist's pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who'll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his 70-dollar TV. That's the way it is with religion. A hyper-rationalist can dismiss the whole God thing as a lot of applesauce, but his hyper-rationalism is a lot more vulnerable in a society without a strong Judeo-Christian culture.
A New Hampshire non-gun owner might tire of all the Second Amendment kooks with the gun racks in the pickups and move somewhere where everyone is, at least officially, a non-gun owner just like him--Washington, say, or London. And suddenly he finds that, in a wholly disarmed society, his house requires burglar alarms and window locks and security cameras.
As with state gun control, so with state God control. There's a big difference between a society of lapsed Catholics, twice-a-year Anglicans and legions of individual atheists, and a society of official state atheism. Last year, George Weigel published a very illuminating book, The Cube and the Cathedral: the title contrasts two Parisian landmarks--the cathedral is Notre Dame and the giant modernist cube is la Grande Arche de la Défense, commissioned by President Mitterand to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and which boasts that the entire cathedral of Notre Dame, including spires and tower, would easily fit inside its cold geometry. That's the question Weigel ponders: How did the cube--the state--come to swallow the cathedral--the church? He revisits the controversy (if one can call it such, given the unanimity of the political class) over whether to include a reference to Europe's Christian inheritance in the preamble to the EU's constitution. A former Swedish deputy prime minister dismissed the proposal as "a joke"; a French Socialist called it "absurd"; Scandinavia's largest newspaper said it would be a "huge mistake"; a British Labour Euro-MP objected that it would "offend those many millions of different faiths or no faith at all." The ruling class rose up as one Linda McQuaig and squashed even the most glancing reference to any Christian past.
And, as with the "God Bless Canada" flap, the objections were far weirder, far more doctrinaire, far more coercive, far more (gosh) intolerant than the original modest offence. They were also a denial of reality--never a good foundation for any constitutional project. In 1944, at a terrible moment of the most terrible century, Henri de Lubac wrote a reflection on Europe's civilizational crisis, Le drame de l'humanisme athée. By "atheistic humanism," he meant the organized rejection of God--not the freelance atheism of individual skeptics but atheism as an ideology and political project in its own right. As de Lubac wrote, "It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man."
Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its more benign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanism. Last year The New York Times ran a column by the eminent Princeton economist Paul Krugman. The headline was "French Family Values," and the thesis was that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about "family values," the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more "family friendly." On the Continent, claimed Professor Krugman, "government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff--to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family."
How can an economist make that case without noticing that the upshot of all these "family friendly" policies is that nobody has any families? Isn't the first test of a "family friendly" regime its impact on families? On present demographic trends, by 2050 60 per cent of Italians will have no brother, no sister, no aunt, no uncle, no cousins. The last surviving big bountiful Italian mamma will have no one to dole out the pasta to. "Funiculi, funicular, funic yourself," as Noel Coward remarked in another context.
As for that "desirable tradeoff" and all the extra time, what happened? Continentals work fewer hours than Americans, they don't have to pay for their own health care, they don't go to church and they don't contribute to other civic groups, they don't marry and they don't have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair.
So what do they do with all the time? Where's the great European art? Where are Europe's men of science? A present tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with the present surging Muslim populations, it will soon be post-European. An entire continent is expiring from civilizational ennui.
The U.S. fertility rate is bang at replacement rate: 2.1 births per woman. The Spaniards and Italians are at 1.1, 1.2. Canada is closer to the latter than the former: 1.48. These are dry numbers but there's something metaphysical and profound behind them, and no responsible leader would look at the EU without wanting to do everything to ensure his country's not the next in line. I don't suppose Stephen Harper is thinking all this when he says "God bless Canada," but I'd be surprised if he didn't know the stats and didn't understand the awful dead end of Euro-secularism. I don't know whether a society can recover its faith, or even recover the lip service to faith of, say, social Anglicanism. But it should at minimum be able to end its disdain for the public expression of faith, and Harper's modest sign-off is a belated recognition of that. Separation of church and state is one thing, but the modern social democratic West's belief in the state-as-church has been a disaster.
Mark Steyn - Monday,22 May 2006
Western Sandard
Is it just me," wondered Linda McQuaig in The Toronto Star, "or does anyone else find it ominous that Harper says 'God bless Canada'?"
You don't have to do the full Jaws orchestral accompaniment to concede that Linda has a point: Whether or not it's "ominous," it is a little weird in contemporary public discourse to hear Stephen Harper say "God bless Canada." The question then arises: Why should it be so weird?
A generation or two back, Canadian schoolchildren sang "God Save The Queen." On public property! Then they went home and their parents sang along to "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys. Voluntarily! Even today we sing, "God keep our land glorious and free." And on every coin in our pockets the sovereign's likeness is accompanied by the phrase "DG Regina"--"Dei Gratia Regina"--i.e., she's Queen by the grace of God and not, as many of us thought, by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court reversing an earlier decision by the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
Nobody minds a passing reference to that old-time religion if it's like the DG and the "God keep our land" stuff--a bit of Heritage Canada vestigial parchment-and-sealing-wax religiosity. It's the "ominous" feeling that Harper's "God bless Canada" might portend a non-heritage religiosity that gets the Trudeaupian secularists all rattled. And, as a consequence, their objections to his use of the expression sound way weirder than his using it. Even the CanWest News Service report on a pro-Harper poll--65 per cent of Canadians have no objections to the "God bless" line and want him to go on using it--sounded weird:
"Most Canadians are accepting of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's religious sign-off . . . One in four felt mixing the mini-prayer with political speeches was the wrong way to go . . . The term has drawn comparisons between Mr. Harper and U.S. President George W. Bush, who regularly ends speaking engagements with 'God Bless America' . . . "
"Religious sign-off"? "Mini-prayer"? And, while we're at it, "speaking engagements"? Clinton and Reagan and Carter and Ford and so on and so forth all ended their "speaking engagements" with "God bless America." After 9/11, Celine Dion ended singing engagements with "God Bless America." And, depending on who produced and arranged the record, Celine's "God Bless America" may even qualify airplay-wise as Canadian Content.
But Linda McQuaig and co. are still using the Stockwell Day playbook. Stephen Harper isn't evangelical, born again, speaking in tongues or even much of a churchgoer. He's not a professional God-botherer or social conservative but a cautious libertarian incrementalist. So, instead of screeching about how Scary Stephen is plunging us headlong into a Southern Baptist redneck theocracy, why not stop to consider the far more interesting reality: a man of no fierce religious convictions personally nevertheless has consciously chosen to re-introduce modest invocations of the Almighty to Canadian public life. Why?
Well, perhaps because, as the media reaction suggests, the absence thereof is far more psychologically unhealthy. I look on religion like gun ownership. Jurisdictions such as Vermont and New Hampshire with a high rate of firearms possession also have a low crime rate. You don't have to own a gun, and there are plenty of sissy arms-are-for-hugging granola-crunchers who don't. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump-toothed neighbors do. If you want to burgle a home in northern New England, you'd have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world pantywaist's pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who'll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his 70-dollar TV. That's the way it is with religion. A hyper-rationalist can dismiss the whole God thing as a lot of applesauce, but his hyper-rationalism is a lot more vulnerable in a society without a strong Judeo-Christian culture.
A New Hampshire non-gun owner might tire of all the Second Amendment kooks with the gun racks in the pickups and move somewhere where everyone is, at least officially, a non-gun owner just like him--Washington, say, or London. And suddenly he finds that, in a wholly disarmed society, his house requires burglar alarms and window locks and security cameras.
As with state gun control, so with state God control. There's a big difference between a society of lapsed Catholics, twice-a-year Anglicans and legions of individual atheists, and a society of official state atheism. Last year, George Weigel published a very illuminating book, The Cube and the Cathedral: the title contrasts two Parisian landmarks--the cathedral is Notre Dame and the giant modernist cube is la Grande Arche de la Défense, commissioned by President Mitterand to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and which boasts that the entire cathedral of Notre Dame, including spires and tower, would easily fit inside its cold geometry. That's the question Weigel ponders: How did the cube--the state--come to swallow the cathedral--the church? He revisits the controversy (if one can call it such, given the unanimity of the political class) over whether to include a reference to Europe's Christian inheritance in the preamble to the EU's constitution. A former Swedish deputy prime minister dismissed the proposal as "a joke"; a French Socialist called it "absurd"; Scandinavia's largest newspaper said it would be a "huge mistake"; a British Labour Euro-MP objected that it would "offend those many millions of different faiths or no faith at all." The ruling class rose up as one Linda McQuaig and squashed even the most glancing reference to any Christian past.
And, as with the "God Bless Canada" flap, the objections were far weirder, far more doctrinaire, far more coercive, far more (gosh) intolerant than the original modest offence. They were also a denial of reality--never a good foundation for any constitutional project. In 1944, at a terrible moment of the most terrible century, Henri de Lubac wrote a reflection on Europe's civilizational crisis, Le drame de l'humanisme athée. By "atheistic humanism," he meant the organized rejection of God--not the freelance atheism of individual skeptics but atheism as an ideology and political project in its own right. As de Lubac wrote, "It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man."
Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its more benign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanism. Last year The New York Times ran a column by the eminent Princeton economist Paul Krugman. The headline was "French Family Values," and the thesis was that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about "family values," the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more "family friendly." On the Continent, claimed Professor Krugman, "government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff--to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family."
How can an economist make that case without noticing that the upshot of all these "family friendly" policies is that nobody has any families? Isn't the first test of a "family friendly" regime its impact on families? On present demographic trends, by 2050 60 per cent of Italians will have no brother, no sister, no aunt, no uncle, no cousins. The last surviving big bountiful Italian mamma will have no one to dole out the pasta to. "Funiculi, funicular, funic yourself," as Noel Coward remarked in another context.
As for that "desirable tradeoff" and all the extra time, what happened? Continentals work fewer hours than Americans, they don't have to pay for their own health care, they don't go to church and they don't contribute to other civic groups, they don't marry and they don't have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair.
So what do they do with all the time? Where's the great European art? Where are Europe's men of science? A present tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with the present surging Muslim populations, it will soon be post-European. An entire continent is expiring from civilizational ennui.
The U.S. fertility rate is bang at replacement rate: 2.1 births per woman. The Spaniards and Italians are at 1.1, 1.2. Canada is closer to the latter than the former: 1.48. These are dry numbers but there's something metaphysical and profound behind them, and no responsible leader would look at the EU without wanting to do everything to ensure his country's not the next in line. I don't suppose Stephen Harper is thinking all this when he says "God bless Canada," but I'd be surprised if he didn't know the stats and didn't understand the awful dead end of Euro-secularism. I don't know whether a society can recover its faith, or even recover the lip service to faith of, say, social Anglicanism. But it should at minimum be able to end its disdain for the public expression of faith, and Harper's modest sign-off is a belated recognition of that. Separation of church and state is one thing, but the modern social democratic West's belief in the state-as-church has been a disaster.