"The Crimes of Motherhood"

Elle ravale ainsi l'écume de sa haine,
Et, ne comprenant pas les desseins éternels,
Elle-même prépare au fond de la Géhenne
Les bûchers consacrés aux crimes maternels. – from “Bénédiction”, in Les Fleurs de Mal, by Charles Baudelaire

The subject of discussion announced in the title of this essay may strike you as being rather odd or even grossly inappropriate for the second Sunday in May which is, after all, Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is a day set aside to honour our mothers, to express our affection and love towards them, to show our gratitude for them and for all they have given us and done for us. It is not the time to break open their closets and bring out the skeletons, to drag them before the assizes and draw up indictments against them. Would it not be better to write a glowing eulogy about the virtues of motherhood?

There would be countless ways of doing it. One could approach the subject from an historical angle and show how the influence of mothers has time and again steered the ship of human events away from hazards and perils to flow smoothly down a safe course. An example might be the devotion of Susanna Wesley, and how the pious upbringing she gave her sons John and Charles contributed to the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century that helped spare England from the horrors of the revolution in France.  Or we could turn to the Confessions of St. Augustine, where we can read about how he grieved his mother by turning away from the true faith to the Manichean heresy and a life of sin, but how the prayers of St. Monica for her wayward son eventually bore triumphed in the conversion of the man who laid the intellectual foundation for Western Christendom.

Or, if we were not in the mood for history, we might comb the pages of mythology and classic literature for illustrations of motherhood at its best. Perhaps Rhea, the Titan queen who saved her youngest son from her husband’s barbaric culinary tastes by handing over a well-swaddled boulder and then smuggling her son away, would come to mind. In Homer’s Iliad we would find Thetis pleading the cause of her son Achilles’ before Zeus and obtaining from the king of the Olympians the promise that the tide of the Trojan War would not swing back towards the Greeks until Agamemnon gave her son the honour that was due him. Later, when Achilles has sworn to avenge the fallen Patrocles against Hector of Troy, Thetis, burdened with the foreknowledge that if her son persists in this course he too will shortly fall, obtains for him armour fashioned by the gods’ own smith, in a loving, if vain, struggle against fate.

Perhaps, however, it is from Holy writ that we wish to find recourse in our quest for positive inspiration. That would not pose a problem for here there is ample material for positive portrait studies of virtuous motherhood. The New Testament alone is full of examples. There is the Canaanite woman who persisted in pleading with Jesus for the healing of her daughter until she got what she asked. There are Eunice and Lois, the godly mother and grandmother of Timothy, from whom he learned the Christian faith. There is St. Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist and, of course, the ultimate example of motherhood, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Son of God.

With all of these possibilities for a positive approach to motherhood, of the kind one expects to hear or read on Mother’s Day, why choose a topic like “the crimes of motherhood”?

For the same reason that one, intent on gazing upon the constellations of stars that appear in the firmament at night, does not choose as his viewing point, a balcony immediately below a street-lamp in a large, well-lit city. To fully appreciate the beauty of the heavenly lights one must view them against a background of pure darkness. Indeed, even the elimination of artificial light is not enough for some people. Wordsworth compared the fairness of his deceased Lucy to that a star “when only one is shining in the sky.” So, to gain a full appreciation of just how wonderful true and virtuous motherhood is, one must occasionally view it against the backdrop of its opposite.

The phrase we are using to express the opposite of virtuous motherhood, “the crimes of motherhood”, can be interpreted in several ways.   In the right context, it could be imputing crime to motherhood itself.  Or it could be suggesting that mothers are prone to certain types of crimes.   It could mean that in certain circumstances, motherly duty requires the commission of acts that are technically crimes.   Or it could speak of crimes committed by mothers that are in direct violation of motherly virtue and duty.

It is in this last sense that we will be speaking of “the crimes of motherhood”.  This would seem to be the way in which the man from whom we have borrowed the expression used it.  You may have recognized it as a translation of the last two words in our epigram.   That epigram is the fifth stanza in the poem “Bénédiction” by nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire, which is the first poem in the first section of his magnus opus, Les Fleurs de Mals, first published in 1857.  “The crimes of motherhood” is from the translation by Francis Scarfe.  An earlier translation by Roy Campbell (1), renders the fifth stanza like so:

She swallows down the white froth of her ire

And, knowing naught of schemes that are sublime,

Deep in Gehenna, starts to lay the pyre
That's consecrated to maternal crime.

“Bénédiction” resents the life of a poet whose experience would seem to be anything but the blessing alluded to in the presumably ironic title. It begins with his entry into the world by a providential decree, against which his appalled mother blasphemously rails, declaring that she would rather have birthed a brood of vipers and vowing to pass on to her son the hatred she feels God has bestowed upon her. This is what leads up to the fifth stanza in which she swallows her hatred and heaps fuel upon the flames awaiting her for her maternal crimes in hell.

In this context, “the crimes of motherhood”, would appear to be referring to a mother’s instinctive and persistent hatred of her son.  Since a mother’s instinct is supposed to be to love her children this would be a crime against the very nature of motherhood. (2)

The Holy Scriptures, as we noted earlier when considering alternative, more positive, Mother’s Day themes, provide several examples of saintly mothers.  Since one of the main overarching themes of the Holy Scriptures is human sin and depravity, we would expect it to provide plenty of the opposite examples as well.   Examples of sinful and criminal behaviour on the part of mothers are not necessarily examples of the crimes that violate the very nature of motherhood, however.

The sin of Eve, for example, could arguably be described as the ultimate example of a mother’s crime for it brought the curse of sin upon all generations of her descendants.  Eve, however, clearly did not intend harm upon her children in partaking of the forbidden fruit.  For this reason, and because it would be the ultimate act of impiety to impeach the first mother of us all, we will not lay this charge against her. 

An example of a mother who does possess mens rea, whose crimes against her son were clearly committed with malice aforethought, is Rebecca, the wife of Isaac.   It might come as a shock to find her mentioned.  She is not ordinarily thought of as a bad mother. The reason for that is that her story is told as part of the backstory of the Israelites, the descendants of her son Jacob.  One ordinarily reads the text from their point of view, which is Jacob’s point of view, and to Jacob she was a good mother.  The text, however, does not exclude the possibility of an alternate reading, from the perspective of her other son Esau.  From his point of view, his mother’s actions appear quite different.  She conspired against him with his youngest brother to deprive him of what was due him by right as the firstborn.  It was a malicious act towards her older son, but not exactly the example we are looking for.

There is, in Scripture, a story that apart from one tiny but not insignificant detail would be the perfect example.  That would be the story of the two prostitutes who came before Solomon the wise with a dispute over a child.  Each claimed that the child was her own and that the child of the other had died.   Solomon’s ruling was that the child should be cut in half and one half given to each.  We will have to excuse the prostitute who agreed to this ruling on a technicality.  She was not, as Solomon’s ruling was intended to demonstrate in the first place, actually the child’s mother.

None of the three Scriptural examples we have considered are quite what we are looking for, although the third comes closest, having been snatched away from us by a mere technicality.   Let us see if we fare better in our search for the archetypical criminal mother among mythological and classical sources.

An example that comes immediately to mind is Jocasta.    There are two maternal crimes that could be charged to her account.  The one she is most remembered for is that of incestuously marrying her own son Oedipus after he unknowingly killed his own father Laius.  This crime was committed in ignorance, however, as neither she nor Oedipus was aware of their relationship at the time.   The other crime is that of instructing her slave to put her son to death when he was newly born.   In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus learns from Teiresias that the plague which Thebes, the city over which he rules is suffering from is due to the gods’ displeasure over the fact that justice had not been dispensed to the murderer of Laius.  In the course of his investigation, Jocasta casts aspersions on the oracles by saying they had been wrong before, that they had prophesied that Laius would be killed by his own son who would then marry his mother.  By an odd coincidence, a similar prophecy that he would do just that thing had caused Oedipus to flee from Corinth, thinking that the Corinthian king Polybus who had raised him was the father signified in the prophecy.  A timely messenger then shows up to tell him that Polybus is dead, and identifies himself as the Corinthian shepherd who had given Oedipus to Polybus when he was an infant.  Oedipus, who is not the quickest hare in the race, only clues in to what everyone else has figured out already, when he sends for the Theban slave who had given him to the Corinthian shephered, and the slave fingers Jocasta as the one who turned him over to be exposed in his infancy.

That is a promising start.  What other criminal mothers stalk the pages of the literature of classical antiquity?

There was Clytemnestra, of course.   She was the wife of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae.  While her husband was away fighting at Troy, she had an adulterous affair with his cousin Aegisthus, who believed, not entirely unjustly, that Agamemnon’s father Atreus had robbed his own father of the throne.   In collusion with Aegisthus, she murdered her husband upon his return from Troy.   Her son, Orestes, avenged his father by killing her and her lover, and was then pursued and tormented by the Erinyes, the spirits of vengeance.

The difficulty with using Clytemnestra as an example of the “crimes of motherhood” is that while she was a mother who committed crimes, those crimes were committed against her husband rather than her children.   Indeed, many versions of the story present extenuating circumstances which, while hardly justifying adultery and murder, point to an outraged maternal instinct as the source of her anger against her husband.  Agamemnon, according to these versions, had appeased the anger of Artemis which was preventing his ships departure from Aulis, by sacrificing his and Clytemnestra’s eldest daughter Iphigenia. (3)  The way her story is ordinarily presented, it is not her behaviour towards her children that is called into question, but rather their behaviour towards her.  In the Eumenides, the final play in Aeschylus’ Oresetia trilogy, Orestes is put on trial before an Athenian jury and it boils down to a moral dilemma over which is greater, when the two come into conflict, a son’s duty to his father or his duty to his mother.

Clytemnestra, therefore, although usually considered a less sympathetic character than Jocasta, is not as useful as an illustration of crimes against maternal nature.  There is one more example from classical mythology that we ought to consider and that is Medea.

Medea was a sorceress and the daughter of Æëtes, the king of Colchis, a land on the eastern edge of the Black Sea.  When Jason went to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece, she fell in love with him, assisted him in the tasks her father had set as conditions of his obtaining the Fleece and fled with him on the Argo, assisting in the escape and in the adventures of the Argo on its trip back to Greece. (4)  She married Jason and when they arrived in Thessaly helped him to get revenge against his uncle Pelias who had stolen the throne of Iolcus that had rightly been his father’s.  The couple then had to flee to Corinth because of the wrath of Acastus, Pelias’ son.

Euripides, in his play Medea, tells what happened after they arrived in Corinth.  Jason proved himself to be rather a jerk.  He dumped her in order to marry the daughter of the Corinthian king.   In response, Medea, after obtaining a promise of refuge from the king of Athens, sent a poisoned dress to the Corinthian princess, and then avenged herself on Jason by murdering their two children.

This is the example we have been looking for. When a mother murders her own children it is the ultimate crime of motherhood. For motherhood is all about the production and sustaining of new life, not about its termination. A mother is the person who conceives a child, bears it in her body, gives birth to it and nourishes it. For the mother to wilfully terminate that same life is an obscenity.


In the classical era, fathers had the legal right of life and death over the members of their households. Exposure, the death to which Laius and Jocesta had condemned the young Oedipus, was the usual means whereby infanticide was carried out. Christianity condemned the practice and as its influence began to spread throughout the Roman Empire it was gradually abolished.

In the twentieth century, as Christianity’s influence over Western civilization has waned more and more, the idea of a legal right to terminate the life of one’s children has begun to re-emerge. This time, however, it is being claimed for mothers rather than for fathers. When the feminist movement was revived in the 1960’s, it asserted that a woman has a right to an abortion and demanded that this right be given legal recognition.

This newfound right to an abortion has been expanding ever since. From the right to mercilessly and unceremoniously slaughter your children in the first trimester of a pregnancy, it gradually grew into the right to terminate their existence up until the very moment of birth. This is known as partial-birth abortion and the advocates of abortion rights, who prefer to think of themselves in euphemistic terms as being “pro-choice”, consider it to be dirty pool, down-right unsporting as a matter of fact, for those of us on the opposite side of the issue, to actually have the nerve to try and educate the public about it.

Ah but partial-birth abortion is oh so last season.   In the brave new world of fashionable infanticide, it is after-birth abortion that is all the rage. (5)  It makes perfect sense, after all, that this would be the logical next step.  Why bother with all the fuss and muss of a pre-birth abortion when you can just give birth and have the baby killed immediately thereafter?    What the exciting next chapter in the book of ever-expanding abortion rights will be we will simply have to wait to find out. Rest assured, however, that progressive activists, politicians, and bureaucrats are on the job, ensuring that the march to ever more freedom and equality will continue unabated, until a woman’s right to abort her child up until it reaches the age of majority is enshrined in law.

If this outlook seems dark and gloomy to you, then take comfort in that light which shines ever more brightly in the midst of all this tenebrosity. If you are reading these words then, in this dark age of women’s choice, your mother, bless her soul, did not “choose” to exercise her “women’s right” but instead followed her maternal instinct to give birth to you, love you, and raise you.

Happy Mother’s Day

(1) Francis Scarfe’s translation of the verse of Baudelaire was first published by Penguin in 1961, and then later re-issued by Anvil Poetry Press in 1986. Roy Campbell’s translation was published by Pantheon Books in 1952.

(2) Although the identification is not made explicit, it is fairly clear from the poem that the reader is supposed to identify the unnamed poet with Baudelaire himself. It would be unjust, however, to take the poem as an accurate depiction of the feelings of Baudelaire’s mother as they were or even as he actually perceived them. There had been a falling out between the poet and his mother for which Baudelaire himself was mostly to blame. His prodigal living had led his family to place the estate he had inherited from his father in trust to keep him from blowing it all on booze, women, and magic beans. He was not pleased with this, nor was he ever satisfied with the allowance he was given. His mother was the trustee. Spite, brought about by these circumstances, would seem to be the origin of the astonishing display of filial impiety in these verses.

(3) In the two plays Euripedes devoted to Iphigenia, she actually survived the sacrifice, with Artemis substituting a deer on the altar at the last minute. Clytemnestra, however, did not know of this.

(4) Although the story of Jason and the Argonauts and their search for the Golden Fleece is much older, it is most familiar in the rendition of the Argonautica, a 3rd Century BC epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes.

(5) http://static.publico.pt/docs/sociedade/JMed%20Ethics-medethics100411.pdf

The Big Bad Bill

As Michael Oakeshott pointed out several decades ago the rationalism that has come to permeate all of Western thought since the Renaissance reduces human knowledge to technical knowledge, traditions to ideologies, and the art of statecraft to problem-solving.  The reduction of state-craft to problem-solving, the methodology of the engineer, in turn reduces society to a set of designs and blueprints, and the struggles, difficulties, and evils that people face in their everyday lives, to problems awaiting a rational solution from the government.

This approach to the governing of a society is itself problematic.  The troubles that we face as societies and as individuals are not all problems that the government can solve.   Some may simply not have the kind of formulaic, universally applicable, solutions that rationalism looks for.   Others may have solutions, but ones which the government is not particularly suited to find or implement, and which are best left to be worked out by families and individuals for themselves.   When government problem-solving is applied to troubles of these sorts, it is costly and ineffective at best, and at worst will make the problem worse and/or create new problems.

Here in Manitoba, the New Democratic government has recently introduced a bill which is designed to solve the problem of bullying in the schools, particularly cyberbullying. Support for the bill has been drummed up by the main-stream media, the tendency of which, to take private sorrows and elevate them into national crises, only exacerbates the problem of government problem-solving.

 

Is bullying a problem the government can solve or will the bill only make things worse? 

To determine the answer to this we will need to examine the bill itself.

In evaluating a piece of proposed legislation the first two questions we need to ask are a) what evil is this law intended to prevent, limit, or eliminate and b) what good is this law intended to promote.   After ascertaining the answers to these two questions we must then ask whether the evil and the good are the sort that make legislation necessary to combat the one and desirable to support the other.   These categories do not include all evils and goods and, in fact, probably the vast majority of evils and goods are not of these types.   Legislation always comes with a cost – a social and moral cost as well as an economic cost.   For this reason it is well to accept as a general rule that legislation should reserved for the attainment of goods that are worth the cost and for the combat of evils that cannot be properly dealt with apart from the administration of law.  Once we have determined that the evil a bill is designed to fight requires legislation, and that the good the bill is intended to promote is worth the cost, then we must ask whether the means by which the bill proposes to achieve these worthy ends are the right means.

There is another line of questioning that we need to kind in mind throughout this entire procedure.  It  begins with the question of what other effects the legislation will have other than those it is directly and explicitly intended to accomplish. Are these effects desirable or undesirable?  If the latter, they must be counted as part of the cost of the legislation, and when we come to the question of whether this bill is the appropriate means to its stated ends, we will need to consider whether another means of attaining the same ends that does not produce these undesirable effects is possible.

Having established the method of our inquiry, let us now turn our attention to Manitoba’s Bill 18, The Public Schools Amendment Act (Safe and Inclusive Schools). (1)

 

The evil that Bill 18 was drawn up to deal with is the evil of bullying among school age children. This  includes bullying of various types, but with a particular emphasis upon a new form of bullying that is called cyberbullying, i.e., bullying by means of technological media, especially cellphones and the internet.   The good that it is designed to promote is identified in the parenthetical clause in the bill’s title “Safe and Inclusive Schools”.  Since safety and inclusivity are two quite different and not obviously related things we will treat them separately when we try to determine whether in fact they are “goods” and if so whether they are goods of the kind that would justify the passing of this bill.

That bullying is an evil hardly seems to need demonstration.  It is a form of cruelty to those who are perceived to be weaker than oneself in one way or another.  Since it serves no end that  is either good or necessary it cannot be said to have any redeeming qualities.  Victims of bullying have often been able to turn their persecution into an opportunity to develop important, positive, character traits such as endurance, courage, and the ability to stand up for oneself.   This does not alter the nature of bullying itself, however, which remains an evil.

The question, however, is whether it is an evil that demands a response in the form of an act of the legislative assembly.   Until very recently, nobody seems to have thought it to have been so.  Bullying in various forms, from relatively mild teasing and put-downs to the more serious extortion of money, food, or servitude from smaller and weaker kids through physical intimidation, has been around for a very long time.  In the past the received wisdom on the subject was that if bullying required an authoritative response from above the authorities most competent to deal with it were parents and the school principal and teachers acting in loco parentis.   It was not the sort of thing one called the police over and certainly not the sort of thing that you introduced a bill in the legislature or parliament over.

If bullying is currently such a problem that an act of government is required then either we have discovered that all previous generations were wrong about the matter or some change has taken place so that what was not necessary before is necessary now.  If it is the latter that means that either bullying itself has evolved to be a more serious menace than it was in the past or that the means by which previous generations dealt with bullies are no longer effective.

Were previous generations wrong about bullying?

That seems extremely difficult to believe.   Past generations possessed a storehouse of accumulated and passed down wisdom which we in the present have ignored and discarded to our own peril.   That wisdom had more to say about bullying than just that parents and teachers were the authorities best suited to deal with it.  It also taught that authorities of any sort, acting from above, could only do so much and that bullying was usually best dealt with in another way.   Bullies are, by nature, cowards.   They do not go out looking for fights where the odds are even or stacked against themselves.  They pick on those weaker and smaller than themselves.   They tend to gather to themselves packs of weak-minded followers to boost their confidence in their own strength.   This insight into the nature of bullying has not exactly been lost but its implications, obvious to earlier generations, have been largely ignored.   If bullies are cowards, the best way to deal with them is to stand up to them and refuse to be intimidated.   If they are not deterred by the mere fact that you refuse to be intimidated then learn to fight back and defend yourself.   Not only is this more effective in deterring bullies than a crackdown by authority on bullying it helps form in the victim of bullying courage and confidence that will help prevent him from developing into a bully himself and which he will need later on in life because bullies are not limited to the schoolyard.

Previous generations appear to have been far more sensible than our own on the subject of bullying as on most other subjects so if anti-bullying legislation is currently necessary it must be because some change has recently taken place.   

Has bullying itself changed and if so is the change such as to make anti-bullying legislation necessary?

The answer to the first part of the question is clearly yes.  The rapid development of communications technology in recent decades has brought about a change in the way bullying takes place.  Today there are countless means of communication available to people through computers, cellular phones, and the various handheld electronic communications devices that have evolved from the latter.   You can communicate with people all around the globe through e-mail, instant messaging, chatrooms, blogs  message boards, and various sorts of online social networks.   You can virtually instantaneously send from one cell or smart phone to another, text messages and visual images, including digital photographs you have taken with the phone itself.   Amazing as all of this technology is it has become an instrument of bullying as well as of communication.   The use of internet era communications technology to harass and intimidate other people is called cyberbullying.

Has the advent of cyberbullying created a need for legislation that was not needed before the age of the internet?

Advocates for legislation like Bill 18 would answer that in the affirmative.  Indeed, the idea that cyberbullying is a greater threat to the wellbeing of children than any form of bullying that antedated the internet is the heart of the argument for anti-bullying legislation.  The recent rash of cyberbullying induced suicides is given as evidence in support of that claim. 

It is natural when something terrible like a suicide takes place, and the cause is traced back to something that is in itself ugly and obnoxious like cyberbullying, to think that something “needs to be done” about it.  This is an ordinary, emotional, response to such an occurrence.  While we should not discount the emotive altogether, we need to resist the impulse to allow ourselves to be driven by it. 

Let us try to think calmly and rationally about the matter. 

Do all cyberbullying victims commit suicide?

No, the vast majority do not.

Why do some cyberbullying victims commit suicide when the majority do not?

There are different reasons.  In some cases it might be because the victim was particularly vulnerable.  In other cases it might be because the cyberbullying was particularly vicious.   This certainly seems to have been the case with the recent suicides of Rehtaeh Parsons in Nova Scotia and Amanda Todd in British Columbia.   The bullying in these cases included felonious behaviour, such as rape in the Parsons case, the distribution of explicit pictures of minors and extortion.   

Which leads us to an important point. Cases of cyberbullying where the victim commits suicide are atypical of bullying cases in general. In cases like those of Rahteah Parsons and Amanda Todd, the cyberbullying involved extreme persecution that broke several already existing laws. How can suicides, committed in response to behaviour that was already illegal, be evidence of the need for provincial and possibly federal legislature, against a more general kind of bad behaviour that does not typically result in suicide?

The other possibility that might justify legislation as a response to bullying today when it was not necessary in the past would be if the means of dealing with the problem in the past are no longer effective today, if the authorities that dealt with it in the past are no longer capable of handling that.   For reasons that will be explained when we return to it we will defer a discussion of this possibility until later.

Let us turn now to the “goods” this bill is supposed to promote and consider safety and inclusivity each in turn.

Just as bullying is undoubtedly an evil, so safety is undoubtedly a good, something to be desired in and of itself.   We want schools to be a safe place for children to go and learn and a bill that has school safety as its end has a laudable goal.   Having said that, safety is not the highest good, not even the highest good of state educational policy.   This qualification is necessary because there are many people who seem to hold a kind of consequentialist belief that school safety is an end which justifies all means.   With reference to Bill 18 this sort of thinking would manifest itself in a conversation similar to the following:

Person A: I do not support Bill 18, I think it is a poorly thought out, knee-jerk reaction to cyberbullying, with a hidden agenda.

Person B: You don’t support Bill 18? You are against school safety? What kind of a monster are you?


The flaw in this kind of reasoning can be demonstrated by a simple hypothetical example.


Suppose the government were to pass a law which placed armed guards and watchdogs in every hall and classroom of every school in the country, required all students to submit to full body searches before entering the building, ordered school authorities to confiscate all personal property that was not immediately needed in the classroom, and basically turned all public schools into day-prisons.

Would this make the schools safer and help prevent future school shootings?

Undoubtedly.

Would this increase in school safety be worth the price of forcing youth to undergo a prisoner’s existence for the duration of their education?

Of course not. A person would have to be insane to think so.

Means need to be evaluated, not independent of, but definitely distinct from, their ends. Bill 18 has a worthy goal in school safety, but that goal does not mean the bill itself deserves our support.

The goal of inclusivity is different from the goal of safety in that inclusivity is not a good in the same way safety is. We do not need to ask the question “safe from what” to know that safety is something to be desired, in and of itself, albeit not necessarily something to be sought whatever the cost. With inclusivity, however, the question “inclusive of what” must always be asked. Inclusivity can be good or bad, depending upon what is being included.

The kind of inclusivity that Bill 18 is designed to promote is not a good.  It is in fact an evil.  It is the very malignant cancer that is eating away at the soul of all Western societies.   It is the inclusivity that is currently the primary ideal of left-liberalism.   The progressive ideal of inclusivity is a combination of the older progressive ideals of equality and universality.   Equality and universality have been ideals of both liberalism and the revolutionary left throughout the Modern Age but until recently they were tempered and modified by other ideals and by the constraints of reality.  Then, after World War II, the left began its crusade against “racism”.   Racism, a word not much older than the Second World War itself, is usually understood to mean prejudice against other people on the basis of their skin colour or ethnic ancestry.   It has been used to describe a wide range of behaviour from telling ethnic jokes and holding ethnic stereotypes to refusing to associate or do business with people of certain races to actively persecuting people of other races.  The left declared racism to be the besetting sin of the Western world.  Progressives reinterpreted the history of Western civilization as one long series of racist assaults on other people that led inevitably to and culminated in the Nazi Holocaust.   They then set out to eliminate Western racism, establishing a no-tolerance policy for white racism in even its mildest forms, while ignoring racism committed by other peoples.   They made it their goal to radically transform all Western societies, from traditional organic societies into which outsiders may be admitted but which maintain a core biological and cultural continuity from one generation to the next into universal societies, with no cultural identity apart from a commitment to universalism and egalitarianism, full membership in which is open to anyone, anywhere on the planet, who wants it.   The progressive ideal of inclusivity began as this new model of society.

It did not end there.   The success of the antiracist crusade led other progressive movements to latch on to the concept of inclusivity for their own causes.  Feminism, a radical movement whose intellectual foundations had been laid in the 19^th Century by liberal and revolutionary writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Friedrich Engels, had achieved success early in the 20^th Century in its demands for political, educational and legal rights for women.  In the 1960s it was reborn with a new goal – the equal inclusion of women in all areas and aspects of society that had previously been exclusively or primarily the domain of men.  Around the same time the sexual liberation movement, which demanded the abolition of traditional moral constraints on human sexuality, began to gain momentum.   It too adopted the language of inclusivity.  Traditionally Western societies had defined forms of sexual behaviour other than heterosexual, monogamous, marriage as being morally deviant.  The sexual liberation movement insisted that the standards be changed to be more inclusive of alternative forms of sexual behaviour.  One particular branch of the sexual liberation movement was especially successful in adapting the ideal of inclusivity to its own ends.  That was the gay rights movement.   Traditionally, Western societies had, for obvious reasons, regarded it as being normal and desirable that men be sexually attracted to women, and vice versa, that they form monogamous relationships, and have and raise children together.   The gay rights movement insisted that the definition of normal be changed to include attraction and relationships between people of the same sex, that these relationships be regarded as equal to heterosexual relationships, that heterosexual relationships in no way be privileged over homosexual relationships, and indeed that society bend over backwards to include homosexuals in the distinctly heterosexual world of marriage and child rearing, by redefining marriage and allowing homosexuals to adopt children.

All of this nonsense is wrapped up in what the authors of Bill 18 mean when they say the bill will help make schools more “inclusive”.  The bill itself makes that explicit.  Section 4 (2) of the bill would add a subsection 41 (1.8) to the Public Schools Act which would read:

A respect from human diversity policy must accommodate pupils who want to establish and lead activities and organizations that

a) promote

(i) gender equity,
(ii) antiracism,
(iii) the awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people who are disabled by barriers, or
(iv) the awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities; and

b) use the name “gay-straight alliance” or any other name that is consistent with the promotion of a positive school environment that is inclusive and accepting of all pupils.

It would seem that the people behind this bill are exploiting the suffering of cyberbullying victims in order to promote a progressive, left-wing agenda.   This is rather distasteful, showing the complete lack of class we have come to expect from the New Democratic Party.   Even if that were not the case, however, this particular progressive agenda would be objectionable. 

Family is more important than business. The home is more important than the marketplace or the halls of government. The purpose of education is to prepare children to be responsible, adult members of society. Being responsible, adult, members of society includes many things of varying degrees of importance. The duties and responsibilities of behind a husband and father for men, and of being a wife and mother for women, are more important than the pursuit of a profession or career. The preparing of boys to be husbands and fathers and of girls to be wives and mothers is a part of education that is best done by parents in the home rather than teachers in the school, but the education provided in the schools should be supportive of this effort in the home and not subversive of it. “Gender equity” is neither consistent with nor compatible with this family-centric view of things. A school “human diversity policy” that requires the promotion of gender equity would be subversive of the role of parents in the home.

In theory, antiracism means opposition to unfounded prejudice against and/or mistreatment of people of other races and to the ideological exaltation of one’s own race as superior to others or destined to rule others. In reality antiracism is itself an irrational prejudice against white people. Antiracists typically believe that racism is most prevalent or even only found among people of white European ancestry, when in reality, it is the extreme tolerance of other people to the detriment of one’s own that we call “liberalism” that is the moral disease of the Caucasians. Antiracists treat the slightest verbal expression of racial prejudice on the part of a white person as the moral equivalent of leprosy, requiring the person who uttered it to be exiled and ostracized from the community while dismissing the idea that acts of criminal violence against white people by people of other races could possibly be motivated by racial prejudice.

There is also a great deal of irony to the fact that a bill that is purportedly against cyberbullying would be promoting antiracism.   You can see this irony for yourself, if you care to plunge into the Stygean depths of the netherworld of the internet, by checking out the blog known as Anti-Racist Canada.  You will see that the author or authors of the blog, who hide behind the anonymity of pseudonyms like noonespecial200 or nosferatu200, occupy a large part of their time and bandwidth in such activities as tracking down the online activities of obscure, “white pride” or “white power” groups, “outing” their members, infiltrating their Facebook and/or other social media connections, reposting their pictures and words, and subjecting them to ridicule.   You can judge for yourselves whether in all of this the “ARC Collective” is engaged in a valuable public service or whether they are just facilitating the future perpetual harassment of the people they write about and, if the latter, whether this is not a classic example of cyberbullying.

If it is objectionable that the public schools be used as instruments for propagating the progressive agenda of gender equity and antiracism, it is that much more odious that they would be used to promote the “awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.”  Do not let the white-washed language fool you.  A program designed to promote “the awareness and understanding of, and respect for, people of all sexual orientations and gender identities” will not merely be telling children “you should not harass, bully, or otherwise be mean to people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or whatever” but  rather “you are not allowed to think that for men to be sexually attracted to women, and women to be sexually attracted to men, is more natural, normal or right than whatever other alternatives are out there”.   If that were not the case, this part of the bill would not even be controversial, for the opponents of the bill are not arguing for the position, which few if any hold, that people who are not heterosexual ought to be bullied.

This part of the bill is even more subversive of parental authority than the clause about the promotion of gender equity. An important part of parenthood is raising your son to be a good father and husband himself, and raising your daughter to be a good wife and mother herself. Parents should not expect the schools to do their job for them but they have the right to expect that the schools they send their children too will not be actively subverting their authority and hindering them from doing their job. The task of preparing your son to be a good father and husband, or your daughter to be a good wife and mother, requires the assumption that your son will eventually be a father and husband and that your daughter will eventually be a wife and mother, the assumption of heterosexuality as the default and the norm. To attempt to eliminate the idea of heterosexuality as the norm or default on the grounds of an ideological notion of inclusivity is to undermine a fundamental element of the task of parenthood. To turn schools, with which parents entrust the education of their children, into institutions for the propagation of ideology that undermines their raising of their children, is particularly and extremely obscene.

We have seen that bullying, the evil which Bill 18 is designed to combat, has until very recently been left to the authority of parents and teachers and that it is questionable that it requires a legislative response today. We have seen that one of the goods Bill 18 is designed to promote, safety, while unquestionably a good, is not a good to be attained by any and all means possible and that the kind of inclusivity the bill is intended to promote is not a good at all but an evil. Since the bill has therefore failed the test of ends, the test of means is unnecessary, but we will submit the bill to that test nonetheless.

The main thing Bill 18 sets out to do is to amend the Public Schools Act to include a definition of bullying. Section 3 of the bill includes three subsections that would be inserted into the Public Schools Act as Section 1.2. The first of these gives a definition of bullying, the second specifies characteristics and forms of bullying, and the third states that the person who “intentionally assists of encourages the bullying behaviour in any way” is to be considered as participating in the bullying alongside the person who is directly carrying it out. The definition of bullying reads as follows:

In this Act, “bullying” is behaviour that

(a) is intended to cause, or should be known to cause, fear, intimidation, humiliation, distress or other forms of harm to another person’s body, feelings, self-esteem, reputation or property; or

(b) is intended to create, or should be known to create, a negative school environment for another person.

Definitions can err by being either too broad or too narrow. A definition that is too broad includes too much. An example would be to define water as “a liquid”. This would include all liquids in the definition of water, regardless of their chemical substance. A definition that is too narrow excludes things which should not be excluded. If one were to define a liquid as “water”, for example, this would exclude all liquids that are not water.

This is a definition that is way too broad. The presence of virtually anything that a person objects to could be said to create “a negative school environment” for that person. The action that creates “a negative school environment” doesn’t even have to be intentional, it just has to be something that “should be known to” have that effect, which is an extremely vague way of putting it. Who exactly is supposed to decide what “should be known to” have these effects and what should not? Furthermore, everything that hurts someone’s feelings is included in this definition, with the same qualifications as pertain to the creating of a negative school environment.

The effects of defining bullying so broadly can only be bad. If this definition is included in the Public Schools Act, and school boards are required to incorporate it into their policies on bullying, it will mean that school officials will be required to administer and police social interaction, especially social interaction, between their students. It will mean that every thought students express, every word they say, will be subject to review to determine that no one else’s feelings are hurt by it. The difference between this and the hypothetical armed guard/watchdog policy discussed earlier when considering the objective of school safety is only one of degree, not of kind.

Bill 18 is clearly not the solution to the problem of bullying.

Is there a solution to the problem?

If there is, I doubt it would look anything like Bill 18. While legislation like Bill 18 is peddled by the government and its media supporters as giving tools to school boards, principals, and teachers to fight bullying, all it really accomplishes is to interject further provincial government control into the educational system. Earlier, in considering the question of whether bullying is now a problem that requires legislation, we deferred the question of whether the authorities that dealt with bullying in the past, parents and teachers, were no longer competent to do so. That is a question more appropriately considered here, in the contemplation of alternative solutions to bullying, because of an interesting paradox. A case can indeed be made that parents and teachers, who were capable of dealing with the problem of bullying in the past, are no longer capable of doing so. The authority of parents and of teachers has undeniably been greatly eroded in recent decades, which would certainly undermine their ability to deal with bullying. Yet, although this fulfils one of the conditions which could potentially make anti-bullying legislation necessary now when it was not in the past, ironically such legislation itself would contribute to the very situation which has been eroding parental authority.

Over the last century or so a transformation has taken place in public education. Originally a very decentralized affair, in which neighborhood schools and their boards were directly answerable to the parents of the students, and government control was minimal, it has evolved through a number of means, such as the infusion of funds from the government and previous progressive campaigns to establish uniform educational standards and the like, into a highly centralized system that is basically the educational branch of the government. This changed the role and authority of teachers. Their authority had originally been derived from that of the parents to whom they were deputies of a sort and who generally stood behind them and upheld their authority. As government gained control of education the basis of the teacher’s authority shifted and the teacher became more the agent of government than the deputy of the parent. Parents and teachers became more competing, rather than cooperating, authorities, especially since the new government-controlled educational system was increasingly used by progressive forces to subvert traditional authorities and institutions. This weakened the authority of parents and teachers alike.

If this decay in the authority of parents and teachers has contributed to the present problem of bullying, which it has, and Bill 18 would add to one of the biggest reasons for that decay in authority, which it would, then perhaps the solution to the bullying problem lies in the exact opposite direction, a relinquishing of government control of education, devolution of educational authority back to local school boards, the re-establishment of parental control over their children’s education, including their right to send their children to schools where they won’t have politically correct nonsense shoved down their throats.

It would at least be a start.

(1)   http://web2.gov.mb.ca/bills/40-2/pdf/b018.pdf

Enoch Was Right

Forty-five years ago today, the Conservative Political Centre for the West Midlands met in a room in Midland Hotel, in Birmingham.  It was a small meeting, not the kind that would ordinarily attract much media attention.   The man addressing the meeting, however, was no ordinary man, and his speech was no ordinary speech.  It would be the talk of the nation for days, weeks, even years to come.  It would earn the speaker, an articulate, well-educated intellectual, of High Tory convictions, the love of the lower and middle classes, and the hatred of the progressively inclined, academic and media elites.  It was due to this speech that dock workers, union members, and other manual labourers would march in defense of the most outspoken advocate of free enterprise since World War II and prior to Margaret Thatcher.

The Man

The man speaking that day was John Enoch Powell, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton, South West, the constituency he had represented since 1950. (1)   He had twice been Minister of State for Health in the government of Harold Macmillan.  In 1968, however, the Labour Party was in power and Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.  The Conservatives, led by that wettest of the “wet Tories”, Edward Heath, were in Opposition, and Powell was Shadow Secretary for Defence   Until he gave the speech, that was.  April 20^th was a Saturday that year.  On Sunday April 21^st, a vivid Heath sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, replacing him with Reginald Maudlin, the Deputy Leader of the Party.  Powell would never again hold a position within a Conservative Cabinet, government or Shadow.   The rift between him and the Conservative Party leadership, especially Heath, would never be repaired.   In 1975 Heath was replaced as Conservative leader by Margaret Thatcher, an admirer of Powell’s who had advised Heath against firing Powell and who expressed agreement with the controversial speech in her memoirs, (2) but by this time Powell, while remaining a Tory by conviction, had left the Party in disgust over the way Heath had betrayed his Party’s principles and platform in his premiership and had compromised British national sovereignty by bringing the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community.  

 

Powell had been born in Birmingham, the city of his famous – or infamous, depending upon your perspective – speech, in  June of 1912, three years after the marriage of his parents.  His father, Albert Enoch Powell, of Welsh descent, was an elementary school teacher and later principal.  His mother, Ellen Mary Powell, nee Breese, a policeman’s daughter who had been a teacher herself before her marriage, was a woman of immense scholarly aptitude, who had taught herself classical Greek, and who encouraged this same trait when it manifested itself early in her only child.  He won an early scholarship to King Edwards’, a grammar school in Birmingham, when he was only thirteen.  He initially entered as a science student, but transferred to the classical form after one term.  In the break between, under his mother’s tutelage, he learned two years worth of Greek in two weeks, catching up with his fellow students.  (3)  

After graduating with distinctions in Latin, Greek, and Ancient history, he entered Trinity College at Cambridge with several scholarships,  where he studied Latin under A. E. Housman, the classical scholar more famous as the poet author of A Shropshire Lad, and read the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.   Nietzsche had become the professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland when he was only 24.  Powell acquired an ambition to beat his then-idol’s record.   He did not succeed in this, but he came close to matching it.  He became full professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in Australia in 1937 when he was 25.   The following year his Lexicon to Herodotus was published by Cambridge University Press which also published, early in 1939, his History of Herodotus.  His career as a classical scholar was already well-established but events of that same year, would lead to the resignation of his professorship in a romantic answering of the call of duty.   On September 3^rd, 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany.  On the following day, Powell resigned his position and caught a flight back to England, determined like the character of Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s novels, to offer his services to King and country.

Powell was more successful in this than the fictional Crouchback, joining the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a private in October of 1939, being promoted to lance corporal while still in basic training, and then selected to be trained as an officer.  This training began in January 1940 and lasted four months, after which he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the General List, to be shortly thereafter transferred into the Intelligence Corps.  This pattern of promotion continued throughout the war until he attained the rank of brigadier.   Stationed in Cairo, Algiers, and Delhi, he developed an ambition to become Viceroy of India and a lifelong dislike of the Americans, whom he correctly believed were trying to bring down the British Empire as well as the Axis Powers.

When the war ended, Powell had the pathways of two careers in which he had already achieved success open before him.  He could have retained his commission and continued to climb the ranks of the military.   He could have gone to Durham University, where he had been elected Professor of Greek and Classical Literature to resume an illustrious career in classical scholarship.   Instead, he resigned both commission and professorship to go into politics, initially with the idea of achieving his goal of becoming Indian Viceroy.

Powell was, by instinct and conviction, a Conservative, or, to use the term he preferred himself, a Tory.  His excellent definition of a Tory was “a person who believes that authority is vested in institutions.” (4)   In defending the authority of institutions which he had instinctively revered from his earliest days, he grounded it in the concept of prescription, i.e., legitimacy derived from tradition and tested and established through long usage.   It was because the Conservative Party traditionally embodied these concepts and not because he was particularly impressed with the way the Party handled the reins of government when in office that he sought to become a Conservative candidate for office.   He was added to the candidates list and, while he lost his first bid for office in Normanton in 1947, he was given a job in the meantime in the Parliamentary Secretariat and later the Conservative Research Department where he met Pamela Wilson, at first his secretary, later his wife and the mother of his two daughters.  His next candidacy, was in Wolverhampton.  One Sunday evening, on his way home to his Wolverhampton apartment, he heard the bells of  St. Peter’s Collegiate Church.  Although Powell had lost his faith as a youth,  become an atheist, and then an admirer of the notoriously antiChristian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he responded to the summons and entered the church to hear Evensong.  He found himself drawn to participate in the worship, and after that regularly attended the church each Sunday.  He soon abandoned his atheism to become a devout if idiosyncratic High Anglican. (5)   In 1950 was sent to the House of Commons by the electorate of Wolverhampton South West to begin his new career as a statesman.

As mentioned previously, Powell served as a minister in Macmillan’s government.  What most distinguishes his Parliamentary career, however, is his erudite and articulate speeches.   Although he is remembered today chiefly in connection with one issue in particular, he was hardly a single-issue controversialist.     When the Macmillan Conservatives introduced the Life Peerages Act he spoke out against it.   The Conservative leaders behind the Act, regarded it as a means of preserving the House of Lords through modernization.  The Labour Party rejected the Act on the same grounds, because they wished for more radical modernization.  Powell, however, regarded it as the first step towards the democratization of the House of Lords.  This would be an unacceptable redundancy, Powell argued, in which the two Houses would both be representatives of the same electorate, creating a constitutional crisis over which of the two is rightly representative.   He championed traditional, hereditary, peerages, soundly arguing that it was prescription that legitimized the authority of the Lords, just as prescription was the basis of the authority of the Crown and even of the elected assembly.

At the time the leaders of the Conservative Party had agreed to support the Keynesian and socialist economic policies brought in by Clement Attlee and William Beveridge after the war. Powell, however, broke with the Post-War Consensus, to insist that Keynesianism generated inflation, to call for monetarist reforms to combat such inflation, and to preach the virtues of private enterprise and the free market.

At the end of the war Powell was still an imperialist.  After India achieved independence in 1947, however, he was convinced the Empire could no longer be maintained and adopted a nationalist approach to foreign policy similar to that of  the Taft Republicans in the United States.  In the Cold War he opposed both the Communism of the Soviet Union and the hubris of the Americans.  His British nationalism led him to oppose the UK’s entry into the EEC in the 1970s and to take up the cause of Unionism in Northern Ireland.   It was also intimately related to the position he took in his most famous speech.

The Speech

The subject of the talk, that would earn Powell the love of the masses, the ire of the fashionable, progressive, chattering classes , and his place in history was immigration and racial strife.   His enemies accused him of trying to incite racial strife by stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment.   The reality is quite different.  In fact, he as actually trying to prevent racial conflicts and violence by warning that such would be inevitable if large scale immigration continued.   The progressive-minded, without listening to or reading the text of his speech in its entirety, responded to the selected excerpts highlighted by the media and accused him of racial prejudice and of promoting discrimination against new immigrants and their descendants.   In reality, Powell declared in the speech what he consistently maintained throughout his political career, that British subjects and citizens were entitled to the same rights and protections under British law, regardless of whether they had arrived on British soil yesterday or whether they lived where their ancestors had lived since the days of Alfred the Great.   It was the Labour government of Harold Wilson, Powell insisted, that was trying to create special privileges for new immigrants at the expense of born and bred, white British people, through their proposed Race Relations Bill.  The second reading of this bill was scheduled for the Tuesday after the speech.

The speech itself was masterfully constructed.   He began by declaring that “the supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”  (6)  The statesman, however, encounters difficulties in performing this function, because preventable evils lie in the future and are not perceived as being as pressing as present evils, leading to the “besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.”   The statesman must rest this temptation, for if he does not he will “deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after”. 

Having thus prepared his listening audience for predictions that they might find unpalatable he launched into his subject by recounting a conversation which had taken place a week or two previously between himself and one of his constituents.  His interlocutor was “a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries” who had expressed dissatisfaction with the direction in which Great Britain was going and a desire to emigrate and to see his children and their families settled overseas.   The genesis of this seemingly rather unpatriotic despair, Powell quoted in the man’s own words, as the feeling that  “in this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

Later in the speech, he quoted at length from a letter he had received describing the plight of another of his constituents.  The lady who wrote to him, told him about an elderly woman, who had begun renting rooms in her house to make ends meet after losing her husband and sons in the war, but who was now the only white on her street, the other, including her tenants, having moved away as the neighborhood filled up with immigrants.  Without the rent income, and unable to get her rates reduced because of an unsympathetic government, she was now subjected to threats, abuse, vandalisim, and the taunts of “Racialist” from immigrant children who followed her whenever she went to the store.  

 

Nothing in Powell’s address seems to have infuriated his critics, whether from Labour or among the “wet” leadership of his own Party, more than these anecdotes.  Ostensibly, the reason for this is that the most inflammatory rhetoric, the kind most vulnerable to the charge of racism, in the whole speech is contained within them.   Yet the glaring fact that in neither case was the rhetoric Powell’s own but rather that which had quoted from ordinary people who had spoken or written to him does not seem to have mollified his enemies’ rage in the slightest.  If anything it increased it.   One can only speculate as to why this would be so.  The Labour Party has always tried to present itself as being the voice of the ordinary, common, working, Briton, and presumably did not appreciate this lesson in how out of touch their thinking actually was with that of the very people they claimed to represent.(7) Those Conservative leaders who were enraged by the speech appear to have made the same mistake in reverse.   Powell’s  views on immigration were, as he himself pointed out in the speech, the official position of the Conservative Party, and men like Edward Heath, Quintin Hogg, and Edward Boyle appear to have seen Powell’s statement of that position as an embarrassment.  They misjudged the tremendous amount of popular support that actually existed for their own party’s position and jumped on the rhetoric Powell had quoted as an excuse for not acting on that plank of their platform, claiming, quite unreasonably, that Powell’s speech had made the subject of immigration untouchable.

Whatever his opponents may have thought, by including these quotations in his speech, Powell demonstrated his willingness to take seriously the concerns of ordinary British people, in his own constituency and elsewhere, that through forces beyond their control, including the inertia or even malice of their own government, they were becoming strangers in their own country. This was a refreshing change from the attitude of the typical modern intellectual who believes that such fears should be treated as irrational, dismissed and ignored, or changed through an aggressive campaign of social engineering on the part of government, church, media, and institutions of education.

In fact, the bulk of Powell’s speech demonstrated that such fears are far from being irrational in the sense of being contrary to fact and reason.  Noting that in some areas mass immigration was producing a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history”, he cited the Registrar General’s calculations that within fifteen to twenty years, there would be three and a half million immigrants and their descendants in the UK.  From these figures, he extrapolated that by the year 2000 the number would be between five and seven million, and pointed out that these would not be distributed evenly throughout the country, but would rather be concentrated in certain areas.

He made it clear that the problem is not immigration qua immigration but is rather a matter of scale. “[N]umbers are of the essence” he stated for:

the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

He was also careful to distinguish between an immigrant, someone who entered the country with the purpose of settling there, and someone who entered the country to visit or to study, with the intention of going back home.   The problem, then, was not that alien people were entering the country, or even that alien people were entering the country to stay, but rather that the latter were coming in so fast and in so large numbers that it was transforming the country, or at least the parts of it where the immigrants were concentrating.   Later in the speech, after quoting from the letter about the widow who had lost her tenants and was experiencing harassment, he made another point that is logically connected to the idea that the scale of immigration was the problem.  This was with regards to the integration of immigrants.  Integration, he said, means that the immigrants “become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.”   Physical differences such as colour make integration “difficult though, over a period, not impossible”, and of the new coloured immigrants there were “many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.”  Nevertheless, it was, he said “a ludicrous misconception” to think that was true of the majority of them.  The large scale of immigration and the concentration of immigrants in particular areas, was, of course, a deterrent to integration, which Powell noted, although he brought it up in the context of discussing the Race Relations Bill, an even greater deterrent to integration.

Since the increase in the immigrant population would make it harder and harder to deal with this as time went on and it was happening at such a rapid rate that it was a matter of urgency that it be dealt with immediately.  The government could deal with it in a simple way, he declared, first by “stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow” and second by “promoting the maximum outflow”, noting that these suggestions are “part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.”    By “promoting the maximum outflow” he did not mean kicking people out of the country, but rather encouraging the re-emigration of those who wished to go, and providing them with “generous assistance” to do so.   He did not know how successful such a program would be because “no such policy has yet been attempted” but he noted that immigrants in his constituency had approached him, on occasion, asking for such assistance to return to their country of origins.

After discussing the possibilities of a re-emigration policy, he turned to “a third element of the Conservative Party’s policy” by way of introducing the subject of the Race Relations Bill.   That third element was that the law and the government ought to treat all citizens the same and not practice discrimination.   This, he said:

does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

That, of course, was exactly what the Wilson government was setting out to do with its Race Relations Bill.   The supporters of this bill – among whom, Powell singled out the press and the ecclesiastical authorities for specific mention – were completely mistaken.  The bill was not a two-way street and was not intended to be.   It was being enacted to protect the new immigrants from discrimination on the part of the white British.  This kind of legislation was not only unnecessary, it completely mistook the situation and who needed protection from what.  The new immigrants were not in the same situation as American blacks.  The latter had been brought to their country as slaves before the country even existed, and who had gradually been emancipated, enfranchised, and given full citizenship rights.   The new immigrants, however, had entered the UK with full citizenship rights.  Their entrance was “admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought” and it was the existing populace that was feeling the adverse effects as:

For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

Now the Race Relations Bill was set to make things even worse, being:

a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

Powell’s analysis of the problems inherent in mass immigration and anti-discrimination legislation and his proposed solutions were quite reasonable.  This is not what attracted the attention of the media and the British nation.  It was rather, in addition to the anecdotes referred to above, the apocalyptic tone in which he set his predictions of future evils.  The admission of immigrants at such a high scale was an act of national suicide:

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

The Race Relations Bill would give the immigrant communities a loaded weapon to use against their unarmed citizens.   Powell expressed his reaction to this in the most famous line in the entire speech, the one which caused it to be dubbed “Rivers of Blood”:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. (8)

The Parallel Voice

In that line, Powell compared his premonition of unnecessary racial strife due to mass immigration and the Race Relations Bill to the ominous prophecy of the Sybil in Virgil’s Aeneid.   From the perspective of hindsight, a more apt comparison might have been to Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, or to Laocoon the Trojan priest.  Having been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, but having spurned his erotic advances, Cassandra had been cursed by the jilted god, who made it that her warnings would not be believed.   She warned against accepting the wooden horse from the Greeks, as did Laocoon.  The warnings went unheeded.  Likewise, Powell’s warnings were disregarded by those with the authority to put his recommendations into action.

He was not the only one to fill the role of Cassandra with regards to immigration.  In 1973, a novel entitled Le Camp des Saints was published, written by French author Jean Raspail.  An English translation by Norman Shapiro was published a couple of years later.   The novel, set in a “near future”, told of an armada of one hundred ships, that had set out from Calcutta laden with thousands of the poorest of the poor and destined to arrive at the French Rivera on Eastern Sunday.   As the ships slowly make their way, the French debate what to do about it.   Leftist elites, in the government, the church, and the media, declare that the immigrants must be welcomed.  They declare the ships to be carrying “The Last Chance for Mankind” and utter banalities like “we are all from the Ganges now” but are basically given free reign to spread their views because the one right-wing publisher left in France, refuses to print anything about the matter except a map of the progress of the ships, and a countdown to the “moment of truth”, i.e., their arrival.  

Throughout the book various people who believe in France and French civilization, oppose the leftist consensus.  One of these is a man who had immigrated from India years previously but who had integrated into French society.   These gather in the home of one of their number, a retired professor whose house overlooks the beach where the ships have landed, and make a last stand for France and Western civilization, as it crumbles all around them, brought down by the burden of a liberal guilt that had rendered the West incapable of fighting to ensure its own survival against hordes armed with their own pitiable condition.

The Retrospect

How do Powell’s predictions appear in hindsight, forty-five years later?

If anything, he appears to have erred on the conservative side in the sense that the things he predicted have come true on a much larger scale.

The Race Relations Bill passed and, like similar anti-discrimination legislation in the United States and Canada, it has been used in exactly the way Powell predicted, as a weapon against white people.   It is more than just the anti-discrimination legislation, however.  A complete double-minded attitude towards race, racial prejudice, and even racial hatred has developed in the UK, North America, and other Western societies.  What is forbidden of white people is tolerated and in some cases even praised when directed against white people.

Powell’s described the United Kingdom’s admission of immigrants on a large scale as the act of a nation “engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”, i.e., committing national suicide.   Immigration rates have continued to be high and an additional factor has joined high immigration to contribute to the national suicide of Great Britain, i.e., a decline in British fertility rates.   Declining fertility and high immigration are a deadly combination.   For a nation, which is a living, collective, entity, to survive, its present generation must continue to be primarily descended from its past generations.   People from other nations can enter a nation and become integrated into the nation without threatening the nation’s survival, but if the nation takes to bringing in immigrants on a large scale to offset its own failure to reproduce, it will die.  

To maintain that mass immigration and multiculturalism have been good for the United Kingdom or any of the other countries that have adopted them is to bury one’s head in the sand and ignore reality.   The traditions and institutions of these countries have been undermined and in some cases changed beyond all recognition.  There has been a loss of a sense of continuity, and with that, of a sense of community.   With this erosion of social capital and increase in alienation have come the unnecessary ethnic strife that Powell strove to prevent.

 

It is not fashionable to say it, but it is nonetheless true, that Enoch was right!

(1) My main source for the biographical details about Enoch Powell contained in this essay is Simon Heffer’s Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Phoenix Giant, 1998, 1999). This is a comprehensive biography, which, while not an “official” biography, was written with the cooperation of its subject, who made his archives available to its author, with the stipulation that his most private papers would be accessed only after his death. I have also consulted Patrick Cosgroves’s The Lives of Enoch Powell (London: The Bodley Head, 1989).

(2) Margaret Thatcher, The Path To Power (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995) p. 146.

(3) By the end of his life, he could fluently speak English, French, German, Greek (modern and classical), Italian, Latin and Urdu, read Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Welsh, and was learning Hebrew.

(4) This is in response to the question “Can you tell me what it is to be a Tory?” in the interview he granted to Naim Attallah in 1992. http://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/no-longer-with-us-enoch-powell/ Variations of this same basic definition can be found throughout his various speeches and interviews

(5) The idiosyncrasy is most noticeable in his Biblical scholarship, which he took up as his primary pastime after his career as a statesman.

(6) The text of the Birmingham speech is available to read on The Telegraph’s website: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html

(7) To give the devil his due, while the Labour Party as a whole was vehement in its denunciation of Powell and his speech, there were exceptions. Michael Foot, later to become leader of the Labour Party, whose friendship with Powell crossed the vast divide between their different views and parties and survived the speech, said that Powell had been tragically misunderstood. Another Labour MP, Christopher Mayhew, cancelled a speech he had been invited to give at Birmingham University after the school reneged on an invitation to Powell. Mayhew told the school bluntly “People who believe in free speech and practice it should stick together whatever their other differences. If Birmingham University won’t have Enoch Powell they can’t have me.” (quoted in Heffer, op. cit., p. 472, italics added)

(8) According to Simon Heffer, in the actual address Powell quoted the line “Et Thybrim multo spumentem sanguine” from Virgil’s Aeneid, in its original Latin first, and then translated it, but provided only the translation in the press release. Heffer, p. 454.