Category / Current Discourse

by William Gairdner

Can Democracy be Moral?

The following is a slightly edited version of a previously published essay by Canadian thinker and author, William Gairdner. Discourse Online is pleased to have Bill’s permission to reprint significant pieces of his work that appear on his website.

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the distinction that seems to have been lost between a democracy conceived as a corporate body of individuals devoted to the good of all, and a democracy conceived as a collection, or an aggregate of individuals concerned mostly for their own good.

The most fundmental principle of direct popular democracy is that even if the will of the people runs dead against a Member of Parliament’s personal conscience, he or she must nevertheless express that will.

Such logic compels us to ask: So why not just pick a rep out of the phone book? For that matter, why pick anyone? Why don’t the people just send a letter to a vote-counting parliamentary computer by overnight courier? The answer leads straight to a conflict between two irreconcilable views of truth under democracy:

Permanent Truth
Politicians who consider themselves leaders, rather than delegates, will take the classical conservative view, as outlined from ancients such as Plato to moderns such as T.S.Eliot. As distinct from their modern finger-in-the-wind counterparts, such conservatives believe that the greatest moral truths of life are absolute, permanent, and unchanging. There are enduring values that must be discovered through reflection and experience, and relied upon by wise leaders. Once discovered, and only then, the proper political and moral judgements can be made, unaffected by how many might vote this way, or that, on Monday or Tuesday. Moral truth, in other words, like “two plus two equals four,” cannot be altered by voting.

Popular Truth
Unlike a leader, the delegate sees him or herself as empowered to express the will of the people, which is equated with what is desirable and good. Soon, pleasing the masses at every opportunity by removing all restraints on their will becomes the highest priority; not incidentally because it results in reaping a corresponding popularity. Technical methods such as electronic town halls facilitate such direct expressions of mass desire.

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by William Brooks

A cautionary tale for American Republicans

On the eve of a House vote on the Trump Administration’s first major Bill, The American Health Care Act, it was business as usual for Washington Democrats and their fellow travelers.

Maxine Waters was still calling for impeachment, young anarchists were still beating up senior citizens at “March 4 Trump” rallies, Chuck Schumer was still blocking Trump appointments in the Senate and Adam Schiff was still hot on the trail of a phantasmagoric Trump plot to hand the USA over to the Russians. Liberal media outlets were still hammering home the President’s negatives and much of America’s top drawer meritocracy remained opposed to a man they regard as a populist buffoon who won the Presidency with voters from the bottom end of American society.

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by Neil Cameron

From elite Prometheanism to free research

“Our time and energy are being sapped by bureaucrats and politicians. The SSC is becoming a victim of the revenge of the C students.”
– Dr. Roy Schwitters, Head of the Superconducting Supercollider Project, in 1993.

“The open science movement is gaining momentum…But the Neuro is bringing open science to a new level by making a commitment to share everything from brain imaging to tissue samples to the data associated with its experiments.”
– McGill Principal Suzanne Fortier, McGill News, Winter 2016/17.

The early 1990s may now be recalled mainly for large political developments. In Canada, they were the climactic years of a decade of constitutional conflict, ending in negative outcomes of two referendums; in the U.S., the victory of Bill Clinton. But two other events would cast long shadows over the quarter century that followed. One was the large popular vote won in the 1992 presidential election by the unconventional third-party candidate, Ross Perot, a major factor in denying George H. W. Bush a second term. It was an early portent of the growing current of cultural and economic nationalism that has now culminated in the victory of Donald Trump, with signs of a similar direction arriving in Europe. The other, less-recalled but highly significant in its own way, was the 1993 cancellation by the U.S. Congress of the funding necessary to complete the building of the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) project in Waxahachie, Texas.

The SSC was spearheaded by the Harvard physicist Roy Schwitters, co-winner of a 1976 Nobel Prize, experienced both in past large projects and lobbying in Washington. His 1,900 scientists and construction workers were building the SSC to learn more about the fundamental properties of matter, with what would have been the largest and most expensive scientific apparatus ever built. Everything about it was gargantuan. It required an elliptical tunnel 150 feet underground, 54 miles in circumference, and fitting together more than 10,000 large superconducting magnets, cooled to less than -200 degrees C by a river of liquified helium. Completion would have taken until at least 1999, at a cost of above $8 billion. The scientists had been working around the clock, almost as driven by deep conviction as the atomic physicists of the Manhattan Project. They hoped for world-changing discoveries, which might have made Schwitters as famous as Robert Oppenheimer. Instead, like Canada’s Avro Arrow, the SSC ended in heroic failure. More, it became the symbol of a worldwide retreat from decades of unbounded “Prometheanism” in natural science, changing the understanding of science in general.

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by Kevin Richard

Trudeau deficits will plunder the defenceless

Over the course of the holiday season the federal finance department subtly published a report stating that Canada could be facing decades of deficits. While the report acknowledges that there is a fair degree of uncertainty in its projections, as is the case with all long-term projections, it is far from being the worse-case scenario that the Government would have us believe it is. The report is in fact a base-line scenario. It describes itself as a broad analysis of the Government’s fiscal position, allowing it to respond to upcoming challenges as well as to protect the long-term sustainability of public finances.

The report refers to a mix of stable and unstable variables, such as demographics, current economic trends, fiscal policy, and so on. Some of these are in the Government’s control and some not. But the report highlights an important fact that seems lost on the Trudeau Government, which is that “economic growth stems from growth in either labour supply or labour productivity – real output per hour worked.”

In other words, wealth is the result of real productive effort, which necessarily requires the use of actual human time and energy of which all of us have only a limited supply. A person’s time and energy is their dominion; they alone have authority to determine how it is to be spent. If a person chooses to spend wealth prior to producing it then, for better or worse, they voluntarily make themselves a servant to their creditor. If, however, a state chooses to spend wealth prior to it being produced; and if the anticipated production of wealth is postponed or does not occur, the state’s debt is coercively transferred to future citizens. In short, productive members of the next generation can be economically enslaved by a previous generation that lived beyond its means.

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by Neil Cameron

Max Aiken and the Limits of Unidirectional Power

The Canadian who did most to change the world in the first half of the 20th century did so as a a British tycoon. Max Aitken, First Baron Beaverbrook (1879-1964), a small pixie in appearance, was a phenomenon of energy. Son of a Scottish clergyman, growing up in New Brunswick, he made his first fortune in Canada as a bold and adventurous company promoter and stockbroker, becoming a millionaire before he was thirty. He left permanently for Britain in 1910 and became a Commons MP less than a year later. He then set about becoming the richest and most politically influential of the British press barons. He built the Daily Express, from a circulation of 40,000 when he acquired it, into a giant, with hundreds of thousands of readers by the end of the 1920s; after 1945 it reached daily sales of almost 4 million, highest of any newspaper in the world. By then, he owned as well a large string of other newspapers and businesses, and maintained a dozen luxurious homes in England, France, Canada, and the U.S., famous as well for his many affairs and for the lively conversation at his dinner table.

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by Neil Cameron

Advice from a 17th Century French Aristocrat for Public Figures of Our Times

For many years Senior Discourse Contributor, Neil Cameron, has been fond of sharing a piece of Christmas doggerel with friends and colleagues.

This holiday season his inspiration is François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, (1613-1680) who was one of the finest writers of maxims in the 17th century. The carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’ is about a 10th century Bohemian monarch, now patron saint of Czechs; its melody is from 16th c. Finland, the English lyrics from 1853. For Christmas 1916, the notion came to Neil that, with a few judicious adjustments, a dozen of the Duc’s maxims could be sung to the melody of the carol, as good advice to some celebrated folk of our time. Here it is for your fireside pleasure.

Re-reading La Rochefoucauld, found us still his brothers;
Had we no faults., be less pleased, finding fault in others.
And take one on success eased, done in manner steady:
Always pretend, when you can, you’re success alrea-dy.                              (Donald Trump)

Judging speeches aimed at you, use this firm foundation:
Sincerity is found in few, much dissimulation.
Self-reflection seldom nails, how two things we sever:
All admit their memory fails, but their judgement ne-ver.                                (Hillary Clinton)

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by Kevin Richard

Hysteria Knows No Borders

Discourse Online contributor, Kevin Richard responds to a November 11, 2016 Huffington Post article by Nicki Sharma entitled: “White Canadians, Be Honest: Do We Need To Be Afraid of You?” According to the Huffington Post, Ms. Sharma is a lawyer who practices aboriginal law.

Dear Ms. Sharma,

Since learning that I am so deeply feared on the basis of the colour of my skin, I thought I’d accept your open invitation for response. I must admit that I was somewhat puzzled by your article, especially in light of your commendable response to the racial slurs recently directed at you. I strongly suspect that the substitution of “white” for any other colour would make you quiver at the sound of your own words.

In case you’re wondering where I fit into the categories to which you assign much importance, I am a white, bilingual, bicultural (French-Canadian and English-Canadian), male. These categories may indeed provide some insight into my perspective, but to anyone who claims to judge a man on the basis of his character, they should have no bearing on my credibility as a man of independent thought and opinion.

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by Neil Cameron

The Soldier President and the Conservative Philosopher

“We know more than we can tell.”   – Michael Polanyi.

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” – Dwight Eisenhower.

Historical amnesia began reaching new proportions in the 1960s, especially in the United States. Baby boomers in their salad days felt the impact of network colour television and its depiction of the Vietnam War. Among many of them. even the major two most destructive wars of all time in 1914-18 and 1939-45, , and the first decade of the Cold War were almost consigned to oblivion.

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by William Brooks

America’s Choice: “Trickle Down” or Trickle Up”

Throughout recent election campaigns, from the articles, speeches, broadcasts and lectures of North America’s chattering class, the public has been hearing a lot of condescending reference to something the liberal left likes to call “trickle down” economics.

Progressive humourists, entertainers, politicians and academics generally use the term to disparage the merits of free-market capitalism. More specifically, they are referring to “supply side economics” which shaped the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions of the early 1980’s. It is something they say we should never return to.

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by Neil Cameron

History’s Slow Dance of the Seven Veils

The past is not dead; it’s not even over.
– William Faulkner

Voltaire once joked that historians are more powerful than God, ‘as even God can not change the past’. But sometimes no revisions by historians are necessary to make the world view the past differently; profoundly important public events can accomplish that directly. The great year for that was 1956, when three such events arrived. The first was the leaked ‘secret’ February speech of Nikita Krushchev to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party; the second, in October,-was the aborted British-French military intervention in Egypt, intended to protect the Suez Canal from Nasser’s new ‘pan-Arab’ nationalism; and the third, at roughly the same time, was the outbreak of revolution in Communist-controlled Hungary. All of these, surprising enough in themselves, led to the instantaneous collapse of three concepts about domestic and international politics that had held sway in all quarters since the end of the Second World War.

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