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5.0 out of 5 stars
Gairdner's Latest, February 20, 2009
This review is from: Oh, Oh, Canada! A Voice from the Conservative Resistance (Paperback)
William D. Gairdner, Ph. D., is usually described as a "best-selling Canadian conservative author". The phrase is arresting: of the possible partial combinations of these four words, most are so improbable that the complete catena almost defies belief. It is rare enough to be a best-selling writer in Canada (especially of non-fiction); no less rare to be a Canadian writer of conservative opinion; rarest of all to be a Canadian writer of conservative opinion whose books consistently make the best-seller lists.
But Gairdner is all of these things, and more. As the author of ten major works and counting (including The Trouble with Canada, The War Against the Family, and The Trouble with Democracy), he has almost single-handedly laid the philosophical and theoretical foundation that this country's tenuous conservative political movement has hitherto so conspicuously lacked. Even so, such is his erudition and amplitude of mind, that to think of Gairdner as merely a political philosopher is on the order of thinking of Milton as a pamphleteer, or Plutarch a biographer.
With Oh, Oh, Canada and The Book of Absolutes, Gairdner now adds two more tomes to an already impressive opus. As the title suggests, Oh, Oh, Canada is the lament of a patriot burdened with a sense of humour--a patriot, that is, of a far different sort from the complacent moral triumphalists of Canada's liberal establishment--for a nation that seems to him to be going to the dogs.
The book is a miscellany of thirty-eight short essays, organized in sections on culture, science, religion and morality, family and sexuality, and politics and law. (Who else in Canada could write--authoritatively--on topics ranging from Nativism in Chomksy to Natural Law in Cicero?) Each essay obeys the same Gairdnerian imperative to provide, as the author calls it in his Preface, a "second-order answer" to serious questions: to understand how ideas and ideologies "work", not merely how they "operate".
With the ancients, Gairdner seeks to know the causes of things, and this imposes upon him the scholarly obligation to examine today's modish assumptions and enthusiasms against the vast backdrop of human historical experience and wisdom. (Gairdner evidently believes that the past has much to teach us, rather than the other way around.) In due course he lines up "the smelly little orthodoxies of the day" (in Orwell's depressingly perennial phrase) -secular materialism, egalitarianism, feminism, multiculturalism, deconstructionism, environmentalism, the modern welfare state--and arraigns them before the bars of history, nature, and reason.
The conservative resistor can only delight in the impudence with which Gairdner interrogates the dull adherents of these dogmas. In "On Atheism", he asks his generic anti-theist, "How did you come by your faith?", before proceeding to demonstrate that atheistic certitudes about the coming into being of an unfathomably complex and ordered universe by spontaneous happenstance are tantamount to a belief in magic, and hardly less fideistic than the traditional postulate of a prior Cause.
In "Late Night Thoughts on Equality", Gairdner reflects that nothing in nature is "equal to anything else", and that even in the most radical phase of their democracy, the Greeks never for a moment believed that people of different ranks and abilities were "equal", except before the law. Until the French Revolution, liberal societies accepted their own "fruitfully interacting inequalities", and it was only with the rise of the current "hyperdemocracies" that irrefragable human differences in intelligence, character, ability, and gender were abolished by ideological fiat or main force.
Instead of guaranteeing equality as the freedom of every individual to rise or fall by his own abilities and efforts, the modern welfare state now substitutes the ideal of "equalization"; nor is it shy about using its monopolistic powers to bring this about ("Restoring the Pro-Family State"). As Gairdner remarks wryly ("Women and Equality"), Procrustes was the first modern egalitarian, and his myth has all too accurately foretold the violent methods used by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century to "equalize" natural human differences.
The same theme resonates throughout many of Gairdner's most bracing essays. As we listen to the proponents of same-sex "marriage" intone their bromides about "equal rights" and "discrimination", it is refreshing to hear the plain truth that all defensible public policies and laws are meant to discriminate between human behaviours and communities of citizens, so as to "move society in one direction, rather than another"; whence a policy that promotes "equality" for all is no policy at all ("There Can Be No Sex in Homosexual"). Benumbed by the everything-is-a-cultural-construct argument, it is edifying to be reminded of the existential and moral priority of marriage and the family to all laws and political institutions, and of their anciently recognized natural telos of engendering and nurturing children. Indeed, as Gairdner observes, this is the first time in history that the political class has claimed the right to redefine marriage "so as to intentionally impose a motherless or fatherless home on a child, as a matter of state policy".
In Oh, Oh Canada, Gairdner traces such moral solecisms to the competing claims of loyalty exacted by the modern welfare state on the one side, and all such time-honoured, organic, and voluntary human associations as the family or the Church, on the other. Hence the state's antipathy to traditional marriage, which it regards as a "cradle of social privilege and inequality", because spouses have had, until now, to "qualify" (albeit minimally, by being male and female) for society's nuptial blessing. In this way, traditional marriage and the family have become palpable threats to the state's principal claim to moral authority as the bestower of "equal rights" upon one and all. ("Mourning Marriage")
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