Priceton.org

Oh to have a munificent patron like Cosimo or Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, or Federico da Montfeltro in Urbino, who amassed great libraries for the use of such luminaries as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Cristoforo Landino, and Pietro Bembo, while supporting them in the vita contemplativa, and underwriting the publication of their books. Take me back, take me back.

The question of patronage of another kind was raised at the end of a class on Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, when one of my students expressed her indignation at the steady reduction in Canada of government subsidies for “the arts”. I was tempted to thank her—though I was restrained by politeness—for relaying the good news. I exerted myself instead to relate her comment back to the general subject (the Renaissance) of the course. How was patronage of the arts in the Renaissance similar to, but different from, that of today’s democratic welfare state? Was the former not more private than public? And even if the Medici, Viscontis, Gonzagas, Sforzas, and Scaligers were mighty princes of their realms, didn’t their political power rather pale by comparison to that of the leaders of modern liberal democracies, whose “liberality” is a function of the coercive authority of their tax collectors.   (Not even France’s Sun King could dream of such sweeping jurisdiction as that possessed by modern elected governments at the command of armies of revenue agents empowered to confiscate half of every citizen’s wealth.)

The princely virtue of liberality is discussed in Catiglione’s Il Cortegiano, when the interlocutor Gasparo Pallavicino adduces the grand public works programs of Alexander the Great and Pope Julius II as noble examples. But Ottaviano Fregoso (Castiglione’s mouthpiece) demurs, arguing that the primary excellence and responsibility of the prince is to rule over a free people with justice and wisdom. The ideal prince, he says, should observe “a reasonable inequality in being generous, in rewarding, in distributing [largesse] according to the differences in merits”. Too often, princes “not only are not secret about it, but summon witnesses and almost make a public proclamation of their generosities”, and “there are many who rob in order to give away, and thus are generous with the property of others”. Evidently, Renaissance humanism had not yet evolved to the point of regarding meritless egalitarianism, or being conspicuously “magnificent” with other people’s money, as virtues.

My student represents one of the many voices in a deafening chorus of complaints that is the music of liberalism. Every election cycle, teachers complain of larger class sizes and the cut-backs in education that have purportedly caused them; nurses and health-care workers complain that governments spend less and less on hospitals and so endanger the health of citizens; police unions accuse governments of risking public safety by “slashing” police budgets; transit workers moralize that governments are spending too little on public transit and thereby causing gridlock; public construction unions demand more money to “invest” in our crumbling infrastructure; poverty advocates indict governments of heartlessness in reducing their budgets for public housing, welfare, and the ever-proliferating multitude of social programs; the green energy lobby prophesies the death of planet earth because governments are reducing their subsidies to wind and solar power; hydro workers predict blackouts for the same reason; daycare workers depict an impending apocalypse of infants wandering the streets in diapers because budgets for public daycare have been “gutted”.

Of course, when you look at the numbers, none of this apocalyptic threnody is based in fact. Government budgets for these constituencies (and a burgeoning panoply of others) have increased consistently and ineluctably over the course of every decade since the New Deal.

Politics can now be defined as organized begging. In the democracies of the West, there is at least one, and usually more than one, political party whose entire mandate is to complain about soi-disant “shrinking budgets”. (In countries like Greece, Portugal, and Italy, these currently outnumber the individual citizens who are net producers of wealth.) Political parties now resemble industry consortiums, like the Association of Mattress Manufacturers of America, or the International Order of Pork Producers, except that they represent the competing groups of State supplicants.

In the case of the arts, liberals dare not even make a pretense of the vaunted principle of “fairness” as they define it (i.e., redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor). Peruse the typical audiences of State-supported symphonies, operas, theatres, museums, and so on, and you see overwhelmingly affluent white faces, whose tickets have been subsidized by the taxes paid by the middle class, not to mention the working and immigrant poor, who rarely choose, don’t have time for, or can’t afford, the luxury of “art”.

It ought at least momentarily to embarrass the enthusiasts of the munificent State that every interest group that has become dependent upon it clamours to be first and stay longest at the public trough, indicting itself of unreconstructed greed, which it seeks to satisfy in cut-throat, dog-eat-dog (aka “capitalistic”) competition with every other. Ultimately, our universal parasitism becomes a self-cannibalizing exercise, with everyone battening at the expense of everyone else.

While Christians are being slaughtered throughout the Middle East; while their churches are being burned; yea, while women and homosexuals are being stoned to death, we now learn that what really arouses the ire of Western liberals is that gay couples in America have to trudge yards, sometimes blocks, to purchase their wedding cakes.

Since The Wizard of Oz is one of the favourite films of homosexual audiences, allow me to slightly amend Dorothy’s famous line: “I don’t think we’re in Indiana anymore.” No, Indiana, Kansas, and the entire Western world have apparently been swept up by a politically correct whirlwind into a-–let’s hope the sensitivity police aren’t reading this–fairyland Oz, in which the wicked witch of Christianity is dead, and somewhere over the rainbow flag we will all arrive at a paradise of sexual diversity, equity, and peace.

     Item. Indianapolis, Indiana. 2013. A Baptist couple was forced to close the doors of their bakery after they declined, in obedience to their Christian religious faith, to provide a cake for a gay wedding. (Rather than trying any of the dozens of other proximate establishments that would have been only too happy to comply with his request–and thereby proclaim their sexual open-mindedness to the liberal beau monde–, the “groom” went straight to the media instead.) Item. Albuquerque, New Mexico. 2006-2013; appeal pending. A small photography studio owned by a Christian couple declined a request to photograph a same-sex wedding ceremony, referring the homosexual petitioners to other photographers in the area. The gay “bride” and “groom” immediately complained to the New Mexico Human Rights Commission, which convicted the photographers of discrimination on the grounds of “sexual orientation” (even though their portfolio included portraits of a number of homosexual individuals). The New Mexico HRC levied a fine of thousands of dollars. Item. Washington State, appeal pending. When a female florist declined a request to arrange flowers for a same-sex wedding because it violated her Christian belief that marriage is between one man and one woman, the gay couple filed a complaint, which led to a suit against the florist by the State Attorney-General, a court order, and thousands of dollars in fines. The gay couple had been longstanding customers of the flower shop. Item. Denver, Colorado. 2012-2013. Another Christian bakery, another gay wedding, another demurral on the grounds of religious conscience, another complaint, another conviction and fine. Item. Oregon. 2013. Ibid (even though Oregon law defines marriage as between a man and a woman). In addition to substantial fines, the Christian couple was subjected to media protests, boycotts, violent demonstrations, and death threats, forcing them to close their bakeshop in September of 2013. Item. Indiana. 2015. In part to forestall the above, the Indiana legislature tabled their defense of religious liberty act, whereupon the NCAA, the NBA, Walmart, and Apple threatened to boycott the State. Leaving aside the fact that multinational corporations like Apple have no moral qualms about doing business with such human rights utopias as China, not to mention gay-friendly Saudi Arabia, in other circumstances liberals might be heard to remonstrate solemnly about “caving in to big business”. Unsurprisingly, the pusillanimous Governor of Indiana caved in to Big Gay, leaving one to wonder whether “gay bashing” oughtn’t now to be understood as gays bashing Christians. (I for one am re-thinking my opposition to gay-straight alliances in schools, as a prophylactic against bullying.)

It seems like really bad luck that the betrothed of the gay community keep stumbling into evangelical Christian establishments. If I were a typically paranoid right-wing, racist, sexist homophobe, I might well suspect that what we are dealing with here is an organized campaign deliberately targeting Christians. Somehow gay brides and grooms never wander into shops that turn out to be owned by Muslims. But then Muslims are rather less complacent about their religious freedoms than Christians. And it’s multicultural bad form to haul Muslims up before Western human rights tribunals, where in any case, gay activists can never be sure that, in the inevitable clash of progressive sensitivities, the liberal establishment will come down on their side.

A thought experiment (sounding too much like a bad joke): A fundamentalist Christian pastor walks in to a bakery owned by a homosexual activist. “We’re holding a prayer vigil at our local church”, he says to the proprietor. “I’ll be preaching against sin. We’d like a cake that reads–in rainbow-coloured icing, if you don’t mind–‘GOD ABOMINATES BUGGERY; SODOMITES ARE GOING TO HELL’. When can you have it ready, and how much will it cost?”

How do you imagine the gay baker might respond? “Well, sir, your request violates the deepest stratum of my moral conscience; but thank you for choosing Puff Pastries R Us. That’ll be $21.95 with tax. Your cake will be ready in the morning.”

Not a chance. He’d indignantly refuse. He’d be mortally offended by this insult to his most deeply held beliefs. And rather than being prosecuted for discriminating against his customer on the grounds of religion, he’d be universally celebrated for standing up for the “rights” of his fellow homosexuals.  (Meanwhile the Christian pastor’s sketch of the cake would be impounded as evidence in his trial for hate speech.)

Now surely everyone should recognize that it is unreasonable to demand that a gay shopkeeper lend his labour to a Christian cause that is abhorrent to him. Why, then, should a Christian business owner’s services be conscripted by the State into the celebration of a gay marriage that is a profound affront to both his moral and religious conscience?

In the Gay American Wedding Cake Affair, the sanctimonious hypocrisy of liberals, normally epidemic, has become self-satirizing. The way, for one, in which the Axis of Progress has turned the words “tolerance” and “diversity” on their heads must make the superannuated propagandists of the former Soviet Ministry of Truth green with envy. In ordinary language, toleration denotes an acceptance of differing and often conflicting beliefs and world-views; it means, amongst other things, the toleration of moral criticism, social disapprobation, and polite demurral. But for homosexual militants, tolerance has come to mean State-coerced approval of gay desiderata, along with State-enforced intolerance of traditional Christian beliefs and norms. One might say that gays want to eat their cake of diversity (to masticate it into a happy homogenous mush of ideological conformity) and have it too.

I’m loath to invoke another cliché, but for inclusionist gays, tolerance is an exclusively one-way street. An accommodating heterosexual majority has made same-sex marriage legal, and enshrined LGBT propaganda in the classroom from kindergarten to graduate school. All universities now have departments of Queer Studies; and with Kathleen Wynne’s sex-education curriculum about to begin next September for first-graders, the registrars of those departments can look forward to a bumper enrollment in another twelve years or so. Already in universities across North America, posted above doorways, seating areas, and even the cubicles in male washrooms—which must surely puzzle the officers of the law–, are precious little signs declaring each zone a “gay and lesbian positive space”. Of course, the apparatchiks of the Ministry of Cultural Diversity and Good Vibes who come up with these schemes never stop to consider that gay and lesbian positive spaces are negative spaces for traditional Christians, Jews, or Muslims: direct rebukes to their religious beliefs and moral sensibilities. (Liberalism is all about not offending people; unless, that is, they are conservatives). But having so conceded the dominant culture to homosexual activists, must Christians now also bake their nuptial cakes, decorate their matrimonial chambers, and design their bridal gowns?  In the spirit of tolerance and diversity, can’t gays leave Christians alone to run their businesses and live their lives as their consciences dictate?

In the West, the crusade for homosexual equality and “rights” is merely the latest front in a secular liberal jihad against Christianity that has been underway for half a century now. The ayatollahs of liberal enlightenment cannot abide the fact that infidel Christians continue to blaspheme against the alternative gay lifestyle. They tolerate no reciprocal right to the prosecution of a non-alternative lifestyle, not even the right to decline to participate in the sanctification of practices that Christians, along with the millions of other adherents of the world’s three major religions, have regarded as sinful for millennia. It seems quaint to recall that freedom of religion was the galvanizing aspiration and seminal project of the founders of Western democracy. Today, the Established Irreligion of liberal democracy has effectively restricted the exercise of non-conformist religions to inside the narthex. Christians are free to attend services in the morning, but must forget everything they have heard and done there once they exit the church doors for the workplace or the public square. As Mark Steyn has quipped, gays and liberals don’t mind people being Christians, as long they keep their Christianity in the closet. Atheists and other critics of religion have always accused its adherents of hypocrisy; but for the first time in history, it is considered a virtue (indeed, an obligation) not to practice what you preach.

Meanwhile, gays are also the most recent of the fully-accredited victim groups in our society to be granted immunity from criticism. The mildest dissent from the gay agenda—a politician’s refusal, for instance, to attend the local Gay Pride Parade, the common-sensical observation of a link between homosexuality and AIDS, or the slightest mockery of the gay lifestyle–will be met with the same sanctimonious outrage as evinced in the fundamentalist Muslim world by criticism of the Prophet. No bombs will explode and no infidels will be killed, but the soft-totalitarian slur of “homophobe” will be enough to put careers, businesses, and reputations in jeopardy. Jobs will be lost, apologies will be demanded, speech will be censored (or self-censored), and another layer in that suffocating blanket of political correctness will be wrapped around the corpse of democratic liberty.

Hesiod measured the distance ‘twixt Heaven and Hell as “a full eighteen days’ journey as the bronze anvil falls”. Nothing compared to the ideological infinity that separates today’s liberals and conservatives. That, in part, is the thesis of William Gairdner’s latest book, The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree.

Gairdner is the prolific author of a dozen titles, including The War Against the Family, The Trouble with Canada, The Trouble with Democracy, The Book of Absolutes, and The Trouble with Canada…Still: heretical tomes which, notwithstanding the liberal orthodoxy of our age, and the unpromising economies of modern scholarly book-publishing, managed to become immediate bestsellers. The new book is in a sense Gairdner’s summa. Dealing less with topical controversies and policies than the perennial philosophical and moral questions that underlie and inform them (the nature of man, reason, freedom, equality and inequality, and so on, each treated in a separate chapter), The Great Divide is a lucidly reasoned taxonomy of conflicting liberal and conservative ideas. It is certain to be of invaluable use to generations of readers to come, whether serious students of political philosophy, or ordinary citizens who simply like to contend in the arena of ideas, but would prefer to understand more deeply what they are contending about.

As Gairdner observes, our modern Western democracies “from Vancouver to Venice” have triumphed over the external enemies of fascism and communism only to succumb to a protracted civil war between two opposite and irreconcilable world-views. Liberals and conservatives are currently estranged across so vast and unbridgeable a chasm that, even when they are speaking to one another, they are obliged to shout at the top of their lungs, and still can’t make themselves understood.

While he harbours no illusions that the divide will ever be healed, Gairdner exhorts both sides to examine the foundational principles of their own, and their opponents’, arguments, if the emotional volume of the debate is to be turned down, and a resumption of rational discourse made possible again. (Contemporary observers may be forgiven for not knowing that the talking points of political partisans are rooted in intellectual soil. Gairdner shows that they are.)

The first part of his book traces the evolution (or revolution, in the case of liberalism) of the two schools of thought from their Enlightenment origins. What becomes immediately clear is that the classical liberalism of a Voltaire or Locke has rather more in common with the conservatism of Hume and Burke (and with that of today’s benighted “reactionaries”) than it does with its current liberal namesake.

From the birth of democracy in both the United States and Canada to as recently as the beginning of the New Deal, liberals and conservatives have agreed on most things, e.g.: that the preservation of human liberty, which is the principal promise and burden of liberal democracy, can only be accomplished through the restraint of the arbitrary, monopolistic power of the State; that traditional, organic, empirically proven moral norms, customs, institutions, and voluntary associations (family, marriage, church, the free market, local organizations and clubs) are the bedrock of civil society, (and having been formed by voluntary consent, they are the repositories of a spontaneous moral authority in the commonwealth of free men); that a diversity of economic and social conditions is the inevitable and just consequence of both the existential diversity of human character and effort and the ancient principle of equality before the law; that the fault (or advantage) lies in ourselves, not in our stars (whether economic, social, or other “root cause”); and that egalitarianism (as contemporary liberalism defines and evangelizes it) is a direct repudiation of all of the above.

Since then, classical liberalism (and liberal democracy) have mutated into something like parodies of their original selves. While “we still use the flattering term liberal democracy to describe our political systems”, the average ratepayer is now a bondsman of the Pharaonic State for almost half of every working year (until his manumission, that is, on tax freedom day). In today’s Western democracies, the machinery of government is more coercive, more tentacular, and more rapacious–while the residual social and economic liberties of private citizens are fewer, smaller, and more precarious–than practically ever before in history, including under the absolute monarchies whose oppressive yokes the liberals of the eighteenth century thought they had once and for all cast off.

Gairdner traces the origins of this wholesale surrender of liberal principles to nineteenth-century socialist theorists, who began to ascribe inequalities to uncontrollable (“unfair”, as we would say today) external causes, and argued that the establishment of universal economic and social equality was the raison d’etre of the beneficent State. But since free individuals, relying upon their own varying talents, exercising their own spontaneous choices, and expressing their own natural differences, will inevitably become “unequal”, socialists have always resorted to the brute leveling force of government (taking from some and giving to others) to reify their egalitarian dreams. Modern democracies have thus “abandon[ed] their previous emphasis on freedom for all, under laws the same for all”, to adopt the egalitarian monstrosity of “equality for all, under unequal laws”. With the progressive income tax, personal and corporate subsidies for some (but not others), affirmative action (for some but not others), and human rights for all (except, e.g., Christian refuseniks of abortion and homosexuality), the foundational principle of the rule of law–impartial and identical treatment of all citizens, irrespective of person–has been peremptorily overturned. After the medieval divine right of kings, after twentieth-century totalitarianism, the modern liberal welfare state has managed to re-enshrine the pre-civilized ethos that might, in the execution of a ruler’s caprice, makes right.

Gairdner postulates that liberty-loving citizens accepted this new statist tyranny as a Faustian bargain: they surrendered their ancient public and political liberties (including their original democratic rights to freedom of speech and religious expression) in exchange for a more or less unlimited freedom of will within a newly-created zone of purely personal and private morality, having to do principally with the modern fetish of sex. Their governments bribed them, that is, with accommodating divorce laws; universally accessible contraception and abortion (further “liberating” them in the quest for sexual “self-realization”); homosexual rights; transgender rights; gay marriage, and so on–all of which were made available “to all equally in the name of freedom”.   While the State has thus abdicated its traditional interest in this newly immunized, irreducibly “private” moral sphere, it has created a “vast public realm funded by massively increased taxation and permanent public debt”, insinuating itself into every corner of formerly autonomous human activity (business, trade, education, child care, health care, elder care, science, the arts), and setting itself up as the universal “benefactor, regulator, and protector” of mankind.

The result has been that conjunctio oppositorum that Gairdner calls “libertarian socialism”, and along with it, the contemporary “tripartite state”, in which one-third of the population work to create wealth, one-third work for government, and the final third live off the benefits distributed to them by the second, having confiscated them from the first. This, as Gairdner suggests, is a self-perpetuating Ponzi scheme, since in majoritarian democracies the latter two sectors will always out-vote the former. No less repugnantly, the tripartite state has created a miasmal swamp of moral confusion, with depredatory, power-hungry governments claiming credit for compassion and generosity, and demagogically inciting their dependents to condemn the “greed” of the productive minority on which they both parasitically batten.

In two illuminating chapters (“On Conservatism” and “The Forces at Work”), Gairdner examines the traditional social structures and customs beyond which the modern welfare state has so heroically progressed. Unlike liberals, conservatives have always tended to accept the imperfections of life as a product of the fundamental imperfectability of human nature; (as the late Joe Sobran has described it, their defining mood is one of gratitude, rather than gnawing discontent).   As such, conservatives prefer the civilizational wisdom accumulated by long experience (“the best that has been said and done by our progenitors”) to the abstract concepts and theories upon which revolutionary liberals have founded their successive codes, declarations, and charters for the creation of a perfect society of scrupulously “New Men”, (which have more often resulted in totalitarian hells than the promised heavens on earth). For the renovation of man’s fallen nature, conservatives have relied instead on empirically tested, time-honoured institutions, customs, and norms (the “formative vehicle[s] of our human second nature”), which have evolved and been refined over the course of an immemorial civilizing process. As “natural and organic product[s] of historical experience”, these traditional social arrangements are in fact “prior in existence and importance” both to individuals and the State. Having arisen “from the ground up”, by mutual cooperation and consent, they have an inherent moral authority, which is a direct affront to the coercive power of the imperial State.  And as Gairdner points out, their existential priority wholly invalidates the vaunted liberal “social contract” theory of government: “because…in order for a contract creating civil society to come into being, an entire structure of civility, law, and custom protecting and policing such a contract–a functioning society–would already have to be in place”.

But the main function of civil society, and the private voluntary associations that are its organizing units, is “to welcome and encourage the creation of inequalities in the form of exclusive group privileges, benefits, and duties that are shared by group members only”. For that reason, they have lain directly athwart the path of the egalitarian bulldozer. The reader can think of any number of recent examples, from the assaults on Christian educational institutions, charitable organizations, or the Boy Scouts, to the fiat by which the State has conferred, in the name of equal rights, the privileges of traditional marriage upon same-sex couples, who are disqualified by definition.

The grand project of egalitarian liberal democracy, then, is to declare all formerly exclusive privileges a “right for all”, to annul all qualifying distinctions, and thus, as universal Benefactor, to “transfer to itself the deep loyalties and gratitude generated by the civil social-bonding process”. The State usurps these allegiances by providing what Gairdner calls “substitute caring”, the myriad social programs, community facilities, subsidies for the arts, and so on, which it so generously offers at the expense of every taxpayer, including those who will never use them. A thriving pluralist civil society is thereby converted into what politicians proudly call our “one national family”.   Meanwhile, the dissolution of natural social bonds, which have always been the nurseries of human liberty in flourishing societies, removes the few remaining “real-world barriers to state coercion”.

In these and many other ways, Gairdner traces the descent of liberty and civil society into modern liberal democratic servitude.   A series of eight chapters on some of the fundamental philosophical questions on which liberals and conservatives disagree (human nature, the limits of reason, freedom, will, democracy, equality and inequality, morality and self, God and religion) constitute the bulk of his book; but it is impossible, within the scope of a review, to do justice to the complexity and breadth of Gairdner’s analyses of the liberal-conservative divide on these themes. By way of summary, at the end of each chapter, Gairdner appends a handy little comparative table, through which the reader can determine where he stands on the question (and whether he and his new bride will still be on speaking terms in a couple of years).

The one fault of Gairdner’s work is also its virtue. Though he makes no effort to hide his conservatism, he strives throughout to rise above polemics and referee the debate from a posture of neutrality (to which one only wishes modern governments would return). And he succeeds too well. Few liberals, it seems to me, could have written this book.   Since the Sixties, the zealous avidity with which liberals have striven to abominate traditional institutions and norms has far outstripped the disorganized instincts of conservatives to preserve them. Witness the pusillanimous capitulation to President Obama by a recently triumphant majority of Republicans in Congress, desperate not to be accused of creating “gridlock” in Washington, where gridlock, as defined by liberals, is what happens when there’s a Democrat in the White House; (when the President is a Republican, gridlock is the wisely intended consequence of the Founders’ “prudent separation of powers”).

And though Gairdner hopes that an examination of first principles will help to turn the volume down, very early in the book he mentions “political correctness”, whose purpose is to turn the volume off. Political correctness is a liberal project, enforced by all of the totalitarian agencies of the modern egalitarian State about which Gairdner writes. Under its shadow, the problem is not that the debate has become shrill, but that it has become silent.

Finally, as Gairdner demonstrates (though one wishes he had said so explicitly), the Great Divide can hardly be laid at the feet of conservatives. It is liberalism that has decamped to the wildest fringes of the ideological topocosm. And yet it’s liberals who reflexively vilify conservatives as “right wing ideological extremists”. Which is rather on the order of calling one’s relatives back home in Pennsylvania “eastern extremists”, after setting off with one’s stoner buddies to Haight-Ashbury.

But these are quibbles. Gairdner’s analyses of the political quarrels between liberals and conservatives, and the way in which they erupt from subterranean fault-lines of which neither may be fully conscious, are always penetrating and often brilliant in their originality. The style throughout is at once accessible, elegant, and revelatory: replete, that is, with the ironies, paradoxes, and aphoristic strokes for which Gairdner is widely celebrated.   For both liberals and conservatives who wish to think their arguments down to their roots, there is probably no better guide than The Great Divide.