Number 10 it is

It is indeed a minority government -- for the Liberals. Here is the breakdown of seats in the Commons thus far: Liberals: 135; Conservatives: 99; Bloc québécois: 54; New Democrats: 19; other: 1. A governing party would need 155 seats for an absolute majority. If the past is any indication, we could be back at the polls in another year or two.

Minority government?

Canada has had 9 minority governments at the federal level since 1921. Could today see a tenth? It is possible. Incidentally, only two prime ministers never enjoyed a majority government: Nobel-prize-winner Lester Pearson and the ill-starred Joe Clark.

Dooyeweerd en español

I have recently received word that my "Introductory Essay to Herman Dooyeweerd's Political Thought" has been translated into Spanish and will be published by the Asociación para el Avance de la Educación Reformada en México.

Wedding day

Congratulations to Brian and Nicole Dijkema, who were married yesterday in Dixon's Corners, Ontario. May God bless them as they begin their life together.

Ronald Reagan's enduring legacy

Timothy Sherratt asks: "Reagan-Bush 2004?"

Top five elections: number 1

There is actually a tie for first place: the elections of 1896 and 1988. Obviously the free trade issue prompted a number of participants in the survey to choose the 1911 and 1988 elections. I do not contest their significance. However, elections which have seen major shifts in partisan support or in the parties themselves I would judge to be of greater importance.

American political scientists have long theorized about the periodic realignments which have seen such shifts occurring every generation or so in the US. The years 1860, 1896 and 1932 mark such watershed elections. One might add 1994, when Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in a generation. Although the concept of realignment is not unknown here in Canada, political scientists have not made as much of it as their counterparts in the US. This may be due to our not having had as many elections that could qualify as genuinely realigning. Certainly 1896 and 1993 would fill the bill. Yet given that a single political party, namely the Liberals, has dominated the government benches since that earlier year, few other elections have seen a similar shift in partisan loyalties. If Québec is the bellwether, then 1984 may be of significance, insofar as it saw the beginning of the end of unquestioned (federal) Liberal hegemony in that province. Yet ten years later the Liberals were more entrenched in power than ever before. We'll see whether monday will change that.

I am still surprised that so few, if any, mentioned the 1980 election, which is more significant than many of my colleagues appear to think. That election gave Pierre Trudeau his second wind and allowed him one last chance to make his mark. Indeed the patriation package that he bullied the provinces into accepting did not just change our constitution; it changed the very nature of our constitution in a way that empowered the courts over Parliament, which had always been the centre of our political life prior to that time. This has encouraged governments not to take responsibility for divisive issues and to defer to the courts. That this conflicts with our hallowed convention of responsible government would seem evident.

Diabolique

Nancy and I rarely watch movies in the theatre. Even when we rent them on video or DVD, we end up watching them in snatches over the course of two or three evenings. This is what we did with Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic Diabolique (1955). Based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, it is a suspense thriller worthy of Hitchcock.

The plot revolves around three principal characters, played by Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot and Paul Meurisse. Clouzot and Meurisse are wife and husband. She teaches and owns a boys' boarding school. He is the principal, who treats everyone badly, from his young charges and school staff to his own wife. Signoret is also a teacher and Meurisse's mistress. As the film opens Clouzot and Signoret have teamed up to murder the abusive Meurisse. We watch the murder take place -- by drowning in a bathtub -- but then strange things begin to occur. The body disappears and one of the boys claims to have seen the deceased alive. I will not, of course, give away the surprise ending.



Although Diabolique was made in the mid-1950s, it has the feel of one of the early "talkies" of the 1930s. The copy we saw had something of a grainy quality to it, but this may simply be due to age. I understand there is a restored version of the film, but this seems not to be what we viewed. The original was, of course, shot in French, but we saw the English-language dubbed version.

I mentioned Hitchcock. It seems that Hitchcock was, in fact, interested in purchasing the film rights to Boileau and Narcejac's novel, but was narrowly beaten to the punch by Clouzot. Hitchcock would eventually buy the rights to the pair's later novel, d'Entre les Morts, which would become the haunting Vertigo. As I was watching the film, I tried to imagine how Hitch would have shot the film. What sorts of camera angles would he have brought to it? How would he have directed the actors? Would the incomparable Bernard Herrmann have composed a score? Might he have accompanied the murder scene with a musical motif as memorable as the screeching violins in Psycho? (There is no score in Clouzot's film.)

By the way, I wouldn't bother with Jeremiah S. Chechik's ludicrous 1996 remake, starring Sharon Stone, Isabel Adjani and Chazz Palminteri. The plot is basically the same, but it simply does not work here.

I'll end with film critic Roger Ebert's telling of a humorous anecdote:

A man wrote to Alfred Hitchcock: "Sir, After seeing Diabolique, my daughter was afraid to take a bath. Now she has seen your Psycho and is afraid to take a shower. What should I do with her?" Hitchcock replied: "Send her to the dry cleaners."

Writing award

Last April I learned that Political Visions and Illusions had been shortlisted for an award by The Word Guild. This evening I am happy to learn that it in fact won the award in the category of culture, where it had been placed with three other contenders. The awards were announced at the organization's annual conference in Guelph, Ontario, last friday. I am, of course, grateful for this honour.

Top five elections: number 2

Mapleleafweb's countdown continues. At the second-place spot is the crucial election of 1993. Finally, I've got one right.

Vietnam and the Montagnards

Few people outside Vietnam are likely aware of the persecution of the largely christian Montagnards (or hill tribes) by the ethnic Kinh majority, which is in turn sanctioned by the Vietnamese government. Who are they? According to this Zenit report:

The Montagnards represent a population of more than 30 different tribes, with thousands of combatants. The two principal tribes are the Banar, with close to 400,000 people, and the Jarrai, with 300,000. In large measure they are Christians.

An incident which occurred just prior to Easter this year was not widely, if at all, reported in the western press:

On the eve of the 2004 Easter celebrations, the Montagnards organized a demonstration starting from their widespread villages, across municipalities and reaching provincial capitals in the central highlands of Vietnam, to come together and pray publicly before the buildings of the Vietnamese Communist Party.

The motto was "Moak Hrue Yesus Kgu Hdip" -- Joyful Day, Christ Has Risen. According to local sources, there were 130,000. Government forces used arms causing about 400 deaths.

It is difficult to confirm what really happened because the Vietnamese government impeded foreigners from going to the region.

Christians in the west need to be made aware of the plight of the Montagnards in Vietnam.

EU constitution

The European Council has approved a new draft constitution for the European Union. Will the political leaders who have been part of this process now come to rank historically with the American founding fathers and Canada's fathers of Confederation? It's too soon to tell. Unlike those earlier exercises in nation-building, the EU constitution will be submitted to popular referendum in several member states, including Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Luxembourg, and possibly Poland, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and France as well. This could ultimately doom the effort. Why? "Analysts agree that a 'no' vote in any one EU state could plunge the EU into a serious crisis. In theory the constitution must be ratified by all EU member states to come into force."

As I've written before, wholesale constitutional change is difficult to sell under the best of circumstances. Look at Canada's Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, as well as the recent Annan Plan in Cyprus. Add to this the fact that Europeans appear to be in a generally "Eurosceptic" mood, as demonstrated in the results of last week's elections to the European Parliament, and it would appear that a successful European constitution is by no means a foregone conclusion.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the US Constitution, now so revered by Americans but new and untried in 1787, had had to go before the voting publics of the 13 prospective member states. I rather imagine it would have been voted down in at least some states. That might have ended the undertaking then and there. Or the US might simply have consisted of, say, 8 or 10 members, with the remainder maintaining their independence in some form. This would seem to indicate that the formation of constitutional federal systems, with each member state possessing the same powers vis-à-vis the federal centre, may be a thing of the past. Constitution-building is intrinsically an enterprise for élites. The incorporation of direct democratic mechanisms into the process, coupled with a unanimity provision, would appear to be a recipe for failure, although no one seems willing to admit this outright.

The wave of the future may thus be asymmetrical treaty federations, like the old Holy Roman Empire, or the EU today, in which the various member states negotiate their own unique relationships with the federal -- or, perhaps more accurately, confederal -- centre.

Later: By the way, the EU constitution fails to mention Europe's christian roots.

How to change a culture

Yesterday morning Redeemer University College was privileged to host, along with the Work Research Foundation, Prof. James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC) and The Center on Religion and Democracy at the university. Hunter is best known for his book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, which brought a 19th-century German phenomenon, Kulturkampf, into the English language. Thursday evening he had spoken in the legislative dining room at Queen's Park on how "To Change the World," which he had delivered some years earlier at a Trinity Forum gathering. Yesterday's gathering was an informal discussion of the speech and the ideas therein.

Hunter's thesis is as follows: There is a widespread notion that cultures consist of values held by individuals and the choices they make based on those values. Therefore, if one wishes to change a culture, one must do so by changing individuals one by one, working from the bottom up. However, this conception ignores history. Those who have succeeded in changing a culture have done so from positions of prominence and power. They have done so by means of strategically positioned organizations and networking among those possessing culturally-formative power. Hunter argues for five propositions: (1) "Culture is a resource and as such, a form of power"; (2) culture is deliberately produced; (3) "cultural production is stratified in a rigid structure of 'center' and 'periphery'"; (4) cultural change comes from the top down and hardly ever from the bottom up; and (5) "world-changing is most intense when the networks of elites and the institutions they lead overlap."

This speech made a deep impression on Michael Van Pelt and Gideon Strauss, both of the Work Research Foundation, and they have been attempting to use the insights contained therein in their own efforts. Yet there would appear to be a central difficulty in Hunter's argument, at least if one takes it as a timeless and rigid position, representing the author's final say on the matter. Granted that Harvard and Yale would seem to be possess more cultural formative power than Redeemer University College. Granted that a degree from the first two institutions would give the graduate more access to the centres of influence in North America than a degree from the latter. Does that mean that my colleagues and I are just spinning our wheels off at the margins while the real thing is happening south of the border in Cambridge and New Haven?

I asked Hunter this very question, because he seemed to have changed his tune to a large extent in his remarks to us, and evidently to the gathered audience the previous evening. It soon emerged that Hunter's speech had been explicitly tailored to the Trinity Forum audience, which included a number of influential people -- those with the means to effect the sort of top-down change he was envisioning. It was by no means intended to deprecate the work of others in their capacities as mothers and fathers, sunday school teachers, labour union representatives, &c. Hunter's answer to my question was, no, the rest of us are not spinning our wheels. Everyone in the Body of Christ has a role to play in bringing healing to the larger culture. In fact, it may that those who minister to the poor and despised of this world are more evidently doing the work of God's kingdom than those caught up in a Nietzchean will to power. In this context Hunter spoke of servant-leadership, something I stress to my own students, particularly in the introductory political science courses.

A couple of personal notes. First, I learned that Hunter is a graduate of Gordon College, of which two of my sisters, a brother-in-law and a niece are graduates. In fact, he recognized my brother-in-law's name when I mentioned it. Second, after the discussion was over, I was invited to lunch by three young gentlemen, who had taken time from their summer activities to attend this event. As I had been suffering sorely from a lack of youthful company since the end of the academic year, I was happy to accept their invitation to spend some time with them. (Read Mr. Joustra's reflections on Hunter and his ideas.)

Hunter's presence at the University of Virginia is rather ironic, as it was founded as a militantly secular institution by Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello plantation overlooks the campus from the heights above. Yet the IASC has moved from the margins to the centre of the university's life and has gathered together a number of traditionally religious scholars -- Christians, Jews and Muslims alike -- who are interested in the interplay between religion and culture. Hunter is obviously having some success in living out his own advice. In the meantime, the rest of us are attempting, with God's help, to do our respective parts in changing the culture.

Giving up on the church is giving up on ourselves

The following is a slight modification of a column I wrote for Christian Courier in March 2000:

When I was a young man some three decades ago, I was quite certain that the christian community in which I had been raised was hugely deficient in any number of ways. I had only recently become aware of the biblical commands to do justice. Since childhood I had heard John 3:16 and Romans 3:23 and knew that salvation is in Jesus Christ. But I hadn’t read Isaiah or Amos. I hadn’t known – or at least it hadn’t yet sunk in – that God calls us to do justice to our fellow human beings and that scripture has much to say about the ways rulers treat their subjects.

This was the era of Watergate and the final years of US involvement in Vietnam. Moreover, the struggle for racial justice in America was still very recent, and it was less than a decade since Alabama Governor George Wallace had stood for the presidency on an openly segregationist platform. I was embarrassed by the fact that many believers had voted for Richard Nixon, had supported the bloodletting in Indochina, and had even been slow to embrace civil rights for American blacks. In short, Christians were on the wrong side of these watershed issues, which was nothing less than scandalous.

I never stopped attending church altogether. I loved worship too much for that. But for a while I did have difficulty praying, particularly in public settings. I could no longer listen to the preaching of the word with an open heart, because I was certain of being surrounded by so much hypocrisy. Surely all this preaching about salvation and sanctification concealed the cynical self-interest of people who on election day would vote their pocketbooks rather than vote for justice, particularly for the poor and disadvantaged.

I am now ashamed to say that at the time I was more than a little arrogant. If others might be guilty of the sin of hypocrisy, then I had fallen prey to pride, which is arguably the root of all other sins. Obviously this is not something I look back on with satisfaction, though perhaps I can plead that my youthful inexperience blinded me, not only to the full complexities of life, but to the sin in my own self. Unable to see the church as the body of Christ – the community of the redeemed – I saw it instead filled with bishops supporting corrupt Latin American oligarchies, television preachers extolling the “American way of life” – warts and all – and comfortable middle-class pew sitters piously condoning their governments’ oppressive activities abroad while quoting Romans 13.

I have never lost the passion for justice sparked in me during my late adolescence, though I am less willing now to accept that all justice issues are a simple matter of defending the oppressed against apparent oppressors. Where I have changed most, however, is in my attitude towards the church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that God hates visionary dreaming. Those engaging in such dreaming are fired with a vision of what the church should be but cannot bring themselves to love her for what she is. After all, the church is composed of ordinary, fallible human beings for whom Christ died. God loves us, not because we are virtuous, but precisely because we are sinners standing in need of grace. Yes, the church contains hypocrites, as well as dishonest entrepreneurs, people who vote their own self-interest, and even arrogant youth. But we dare not give up on the church, unless we are willing to give up on ourselves and on the God who has redeemed us with his love.

A Swedish victory at Poltava?

Conservative pundit David Frum wonders, while visiting Stockholm, how history would have been different if Sweden's Charles XII had won the Battle of Poltava against Russia's Peter the Great. What if's are always fascinating though ultimately pointless. Yet I suspect that my 6th great-grandfather, one Gotthard Witzell, would have returned to his home in Livonia (in present-day Latvia) rather than going to Finland, where he begat generations of Finnish descendants, some of whom would eventually make it to North America. Not to put too fine a point on it, I would not be here.

Later: As I consider the matter further, it is entirely possible that none of us as individuals would be here if Sweden had won at Poltava. It's not to say there would be no people at all; only that each of us with our unique identities might never have come into existence while other unique persons who were never born would have been. There are probably people -- presumably with independent means -- who devote their time to calculating the number of possible alternative universes predicated on the slightest variances in a single historical event, such as Poltava, Waterloo, Gettysburg, &c. I will not venture to judge those who are experts in this field, except to say that I myself am not one of them.

Marriage, family and public policy

Jennifer Marshall writes on "Marriage: What Social Science Says and Doesn’t Say":

Social science data indicate that the intact family—defined as a man and a woman who marry, conceive, and raise their children together—best ensures the current and future welfare of children and society when compared with other common forms of households. As alternative family forms have become more prevalent since the 1960s, social science research and government surveys have indicated an accompanying rise in a number of serious social problems.

Government’s interest in marriage has been based primarily on its interest in the welfare of the next generation. Among the many types of social relationships, marriage has always had a special place in all legal traditions, our own included, because it is the essential foundation of the intact family, and no other family form has been able to provide a commensurate level of social security.

In all other common family and household forms, the risk of negative individual outcomes and family disintegration is much greater, increasing the risk of dependence on state services. A free society requires a critical mass of individuals in stable households who are not dependent on the state. The most stable and secure household, the available research shows, is the intact family. Therefore, the state has an interest in protecting the intact family and we should be cautious about facilitating other forms of household, the effects of which are either deleterious or unknown.

Unfortunately this eminently sensible approach to family policy runs counter to what I have called the "choice-enhancement state," that is, the fifth and latest stage in the liberal project, which demands that government take a position of benign neutrality towards a wide range of individual lifestyle choices for fear of making it an oppressive legislator of the good life. Over the long term such neutrality will prove unsustainable -- even utopian. People's choices inevitably have practical consequences, both for themselves and for others. Some of these will be harmful, while others will be beneficial. Because the harmful ones will require remedial action by the state, the latter would be ill advised simply to acquiesce in the indiscriminate subsidizing of all choices. Far from being just, such a policy is close to being outright foolish.

War (without end) against terrorism

How many people are aware that the United States' struggle against terrorists from the Arab world began almost immediately after its independence was recognized in 1783? Read the story of The United States and the Barbary Pirates.

Top five elections: number 3

It's the 1917 election, in which conscription was the dominant issue. Thus far I'm batting a thousand.

No obvious winner in second debate

The CBC carries coverage of last evening's leaders' debate in English: "Leaders back on campaign trail after two nights of debates."

Lack of content in conservative vision

National Review Online has been carrying selections from John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation. I was struck by these revealing remarks by the authors in "A Different Conservatism":

[T]he fact that the Right is such a broad church — that it includes a hefty dose of liberal heresy along with the traditionalism — yields both weaknesses and strengths. On the positive side, it helps to explain why it is such a big and vibrant movement. American conservatism cannot help but contain contradictions because it contains so many vital elements. There are thousands of conservative activists, hundreds of conservative think tanks, a small army of conservative intellectuals. One useful book of conservative experts, published by the Heritage Foundation, the movement's biggest think tank, is as thick as a telephone directory. Yet the broad church also means that people are often worshipping different gods.

Look at Colorado Springs and you'll find at least three competing forms of conservatism — the laissez-faire individualism of the tax cutters and the gun owners, the Christian moralism of Focus on the Family and the militaristic nationalism, represented by the neighboring Air Force Academy and the bumper stickers laughing at Saddam Hussein. But how can you trumpet a strong military and a vigorous foreign policy and then insist on small government? How can you celebrate individualism but then try to subject those individuals to the rule of God? Wherever you go in the Right Nation, you discover similar contradictions.

Note the references to "broad church" and "worshipping different gods." These overtly confessional metaphors seem particularly appropriate and would appear to vindicate my own thesis that ideologies are fundamentally religious. As for these "different gods" themselves, could this very diversity within conservatism be indicative of its lack of coherence as a political vision? Liberalism at least is based on a commitment to individual autonomy and the voluntary character of all communities. Liberal principles are much more easily identifiable than those of, say, conservatism or nationalism. Hobbes' and Locke's political philosophies have a certain intellectual rigour lacking in much of conservatism.

This is not to say, of course, that conservatives are "the stupid party," as John Stuart Mill famously put it. There are many intelligent and eloquent conservatives who stand on definite political principles. Some of these, such as Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Canada's own George Grant, I appreciate a great deal. At the same time, their vaunted principles do not necessarily have a causal connection to their conservatism. One looks in vain, for example, for a distinctively conservative view of the state or any other human institution. Some conservatives, such as Friedrich A. von Hayek and Ayn Rand, have to look to liberal principles to flesh out their conservatism. Conservatism is simply a collection of attitudes towards change and existing institutions. Providing they do not become ideologized and thus distorted, such attitudes are undoubtedly a necessary corrective to those whose zeal for reform might upset the ship of state. Yet attempting to derive a full-fledged political theory from them is an unpromising effort unlikely over the long term to yield fruit.

This means that conservatism will always be handicapped in the larger political debate. Lacking a substantive vision of their own concerning the place of politics within life as a whole, conservatives will be able effectively to challenge their opponents only insofar as they embrace principles drawn from elsewhere, e.g., Catholic social teachings, neo-Calvinism or another of the traditional religious faiths.

Totalitarian Canada?

Fr. Raymond J. de Souza argues that Canada is afflicted by a "Thinly Disguised Totalitarianism."

A full-fledged totalitarian state recognizes no limits to state power. There are no spheres where the state is not competent to act. But before totalitarianism triumphant, there is the totalitarian impulse, which may be understood as the ambition of the state to extend its authority to realms where it has no authority. The totalitarian impulse is a threat to democracy because it seeks to overturn the democratic value of limited government. The totalitarian impulse necessarily seeks to limit religious liberty. . . .

There are no restrictions on freedom of worship in Canada today. Canadians can practice their faith unmolested by the state. But increasingly, full participation in civil, commercial, and professional life is requiring that religiously grounded beliefs be left at the door. The threat is coming not only from courts and legislatures, but from tribunals, regulatory bodies, and professional associations.

There is much to be said for Fr. de Souza's analysis. But might it be that democracy itself, if understood as an ideological belief in popular sovereignty, contributes something to this totalitarian tendency?