(or, How To Grow A Nation To Survive a National Collapse)
4167 Words
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously described Canada as a “post-nation state.” Many people – the majority of which on the political Right – objected to this statement for a variety of reasons, most of which could be counted as reactionary. Those who decried the lack of national identity, however, failed to put forward a coherent argument for what a national identity ought to be, and the objections eventually receded into the background. These protesters struggled with what was really occurring: Trudeau was claiming a is, rather than an ought. There was no plan in motion or transition occurring; Trudeau was accurately assessing the reality of Canada on the world stage, and it would be incorrect to place him at the center of the plot.
How did Canada become this way? Certainly, Prime Minister Stephen Harper broadcasting that such a thing as “old stock Canadians” existed implied there existed such a thing as a foundational Canadian identity. How could there not be such an accepted identity, when we have a dutifully recorded history of the Canadian people? If there is no Canada, it follows that that there is no Canadian.
To refocus the investigation: how did Canadians become a group that denies its own existence? Most importantly, what does this mean for the individual groping their way in the hostile darkness, silently believing they deserve to exist and feel the warmth of light again?
Canada As We Were Taught
There can be no discussion of Canada in the 21st century if it does not chart the rise of the Liberal Party and the lionization of Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, whom this author was instructed in school was the grandfather of Canada. To this day many see Pierre Trudeau as a unique 20th century breed of rock star politician, one who portrayed a brashness that could make us British offshoots believe in bureaucracy once again.
George Grant, in his overview of 1940’s Canada recorded in the landmark book Lament for a Nation, explained how Canada is continually defined as a “state-in-progress,” always becoming but having no true identity. The trick of this reasoning is that the longer people genuinely believe this, the further history is distanced, and people will genuinely believe that Canada was always bursting with Somalis, and the settlers were only here to shoot Aboriginals while raping English grammar into their children. Every nation requires a foundation mythology, and the present state of affairs positions the past as a tool to amplify the present. A recent history is no history at all, they might say, and no history at all means we can embrace a future of no history.
“We must change now because all we have ever been is change.”
We cannot maintain Canadian identity for the same reason we cannot maintain Conservatism or Traditionalism: what once existed is being erased, and its future is constructed in opposition to it. Your ancestors exist only to keep the conversation going.
Ricardo Duchesne has a similar argument in his book, Canada in Decay, where he fronts an attack on Straussian portrayal of the West as simply concerned with ideas and values with no ties to a population, while simultaneously agreeing other ethnicities must retain theirs. If you live in Canada, this is a common experience. This mainstream portrayal is ahistorical, and in his book Dr. Duchesne goes so far as to explore the census history of Canada which proves a European majority for the vast span of its existence. This underlines the modern hypocrisy of claiming the nation being at once historically multicultural, but consistently racist due to its restrictive immigration policies. The Liberal mind glitches out when presented these realities and thus must recast the Old Stock Canadian as living in the same ideological tensions as the Liberal Canadian, who at once glorifies its multicultural past while ripping down monuments to its history and leaders for not being sufficiently multicultural. To them, the history of Canada is a glory they must bury as soon as possible.
Dr. Duchesne also outlines the processes through which this change is emotionally anchored in the populace. This sequence is required to propagandize the citizen to opposing this ethnic reality, and to make them adverse to even discussing the role of ethnicity in nationhood. This transfiguration is crucial because it prohibits curiosity and installs a low-resolution panic in a person’s psyche where even mentioning this nouveau foundation elicits the kneejerk reaction of treason.
Step 1: Anti-Democracy. Race realism is the worst evil and contrary to democracy, so even if it is true, it is harmful. Step 2: Anti-Science. We see the repudiation of “scientific racism” and explaining that anyone holding these views is driven by irrational fear or ignorance. Step 3: Anti-Peace. Here we see the condemning of Western cultural imperialism and the revival of the eighteenth-century notion of the “noble savage,” with the central belief that the less cultured a society is, the more purely human they are. Anything that imposes upon that new humanism is oppression. Lastly is step 4: Anti-Humanity. All categorization beyond base (arguably animalistic) desires is destructive to a fundamental ill-defined humanity, thus uniting the people of the world against inquiry. This is where you find yourself currently, standing outside the liberal universalization of laws and rights you thought would protect you, uncertain of how you got there. Canada is the parlour of tolerance, and such a room cannot tolerate a landlord.
It’s important to note how all of this occurs on the emotional level, as this baseline secular humanity can only expressed in emotional terms. As an illuminating starting point, I refer to the popular book The End of History and the Last Man, which posits that the Liberal project in the 20th century has achieved the utopian endpoint of sociopolitical development, and all that must be done is either export this tolerant, materialistic, individualistic ideology to the rest of the world, or import them into the West which will force them to be changed by degrees and over the course of generations. Fukuyama presents perhaps the most in-depth summary of how Western Liberals see the world in a practical sense, and their view of how to project their influence across the globe.
This is what Canada believes is its civilizational essence, and more than anything this informs Liberal Party policy. This is reflected in the desire of Canada’s federal government to champion their values internationally, and to become a world leader on the normalization of progressive issues.
There is no significant gulf between Liberal political parties throughout the Western world. Liberals believe the tragedy of the “is” creates the “is not,” and the fact elicits discomfort within the passive citizen causes great concern. The Liberal mind is in a constant state of flux, where one must be loyal to their heritage and protect their identity but having an in-group preference makes you anti-group. The practical benefit of being a confused individual is that when you lash out, you lack the awareness to believe you did anything wrong.
“The enormity of the break from the past will arouse in the dispossessed youth intense forms of beatness. But, after all, the United States supports a large Beat fringe. Joan Baez and Pete Seeger titillate the status quo rather than threaten it. Dissent is built into the fabric of the modern system. We bureaucratize it as much as anything else. Is there any reason to believe French Canada will be any different? A majority of the young is patterned for its place in the bureaucracies. Those who resist such shaping will retreat into a fringe world of pseudo-revolt”
– GEORGE Grant, Lament for a Nation
Liberals are by their nature universalizing. As with United States of America, Canada can be seen as a fulfillment of these Enlightenment-era British principles rather than a revolt against them, positioning Canada as the vanguards of the age of progress and the belief that they are stewards of an inevitable upward progress. This is because their worldview begins with idealism rather than observation and study. They will enthusiastically call this the “multicultural experiment,” but will deny such an experiment can have a terminus and thereby an assessment of what was learned. As we have established, Canada is always becoming, and the experiment never ends.
It’s obvious that any universalizing ideology will align itself with either continental or global corporations at some point since they both desire the same borderless connectedness, however for different reasons. The politicians and civil servants desire the abolition of conflict. Here we witness the fuel to this engine, one which nationalists still have not matched with the same emotional impact: “we do this to save lives. You clearly don’t want to save lives.” Liberal theory, claims Dr. Duchesne, came about in reaction to a “spiritedness,” in the wake of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War. In staking a firm position against conflict, Liberalism takes aim at the forces of identity, competitiveness, and as Hobbes described, a thirst for power and riches. They see Western nationalism as uniquely destructive, and whether born from ignorance or fetishization, they view other nationalisms as childish at best.
All you need to do is look to who many see as the Godfather of Modern Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. In a famous essay titled “The New Treason of the Intellectuals,” he wrote “the very idea of the nation state is absurd,” pessimistically stating that to have a nation state one must have an ethnic majority while minorities constantly carve out their own ethnic enclaves in a state of constant tension and conflict. The answer to this, repeated by his son Justin years later, was to abolish the nation state and all traces of even a historic ethnic or national identity.
The Nationless Nationalist
At this point, a simple question comes into sharp relief: what is a nation? We ask in rigid terms, because we don’t want to fall into the trap Conservatives find themselves in: defining their present by yesterday. What is to be argued for in the affirmative, if as we have established Canada has always had at best a tenuous grasp of self-identity? To start, we must have an essential understanding of what constitutes a nation, and to establish this you must understand what constitutes a people.
To understand what makes a people or folk, I believe we need to look no further than Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer, which provides a very robust cataloguing of the 24 characteristics that define a folk, including speech ways, building ways, religion ways, magic ways, work ways, and time ways. This means that everything from how we utilize the hours in the day down to how we balance religion with folk mythology strengthen an ethnic group, especially evident in North America where settlers were transplanted in a completely unfamiliar terrain yet were able to build a world apart.
Speech Ways: Conventional patterns of written and spoken language; pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar.
Building Ways: Prevailing forms of vernacular architecture and high architecture, which tend to be related to one another.
Family Ways: The structure and function of the household and family, both in ideal and actuality.
Marriage Ways: Ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and divorce.
Gender Ways: Customs that regulate social relations between men and women.”
Sex Ways: Conventional sexual attitudes and acts, and the treatment of sexual deviance.
Child-Rearing Ways: Ideas of child nature and customs of child nurture.
Naming Ways: Onomastic customs including favoured forenames and the descent of names within the family.
Age Ways: Attitudes towards age, experiences of aging and age relationships.
Death Ways: Attitudes towards death, mortality rituals, mortuary customs and mourning practices.
Religious Ways: Patterns of religious worship, theology, ecclesiology and church architecture.
Magic Ways: Normative beliefs and practices concerning the supernatural.
Learning Ways: Attitudes toward literacy and learning, and conventional patterns of education.
Food Ways: Patterns of diet, nutrition, cooking, eating, feasting and fasting.”
Dress Ways: Customs of dress, demeanor, and personal adornment.
Sport Ways: Attitudes toward recreation and leisure; folk games and forms of organized sport.
Work Ways: Work ethics and work experiences; attitudes toward work and the nature of work.
Time Ways: Attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the conventional rhythms of life.
Wealth Ways: Attitudes towards wealth and patterns of its distribution.”
Rank Ways: The rules by which rank is assigned, the roles which rank entails, and the relations between different ranks.
Social Ways: Conventional patterns of migration, settlement, association and affiliation.
Order Ways: Ideas of order, ordering institutions, forms of disorder, and treatment of the disorderly.
Power Ways: Attitudes toward authority and power; patterns of political participation.
Freedom Ways: Prevailing ideas of liberty and restraint, and libertarian customs and institutions.
If you can have a response for every element of the above list, you can count yourselves as a distinct people. This is true even if you borrow something from your ancestors who may have seen themselves as wholly distinct; this is the case for most folks. Far from a nationalist endeavor, this is basic anthropology, and a system afforded to tribes and city-states throughout the world. Fulfilling this list something old-stock Canadians can certainly accomplish, as it is utilized by Aboriginals, African Americans, and various Asian sub-categories encountered daily within Canada. Absent the state and absent borders, this is the configuration that undergirds it all.
In light of this criteria, how would a people become what we presently understand to be a nation? It is clear that not all folk become nations, and even those that do become nations don’t ascend to the level of sophistication seen in the West. There exists a higher level of unity, power centralization, and most importantly self-awareness required to achieve full national sovereignty. In other words: when someone pushes you, you can push back. How could a relatively small and ethnically disjointed island such as Britain become an international powerhouse, while their neighbors in Ireland did not?
In The Construction of Nationhood, Adrian Hastings presents a model of the nation that, counter to the modern claim of origins existing no further back than the 19th century, extends to the Middle Ages at least. While nations as we know them took their current structure in the modern era of power centralization and statecraft, the thesis is that these would not have been possible without an essential conceptualization grounded in the people, having these essential characteristics: ethnic history in a region, a shared vernacular that has evolved to the written form, that written vernacular having the ability to produce literature that allows these people to imagine themselves as a united ethnicity, and most importantly a horizontal conceptualization of kinship. The people – folk, peasants, serfs, subjects – cannot merely be human capital within a monarchical hierarchy; on the contrary, they can survive on their own before, after, and outside of the state. The German people were historically the best example of this, starting as a strong ethnic and cultural identity without a formal state-like infrastructure, while France came approached a synthesis from the opposite direction, by leading with the monarchy and later establishing its horizontality through revolution.
“A nation is a far more self-conscious community than an ethnicity. Formed from one or more ethnicities, and normally identified by a literature of its own, it possesses or claims the right to political identity and autonomy as a people […] A nation-state is a state which identifies itself in terms of one specific nation whose people are not seen simply as ‘subjects’ of the sovereign but as a horizontally bonded society to whom the state in a sense belongs.”
– Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood
The claim put forward by Hastings is the modern nation-state as we know it was created by Britain (and inspired its neighbors to adopt it,) and this makes it relevant to the current Canadian who owes its broad political structure to Britain, including its personality and worldview. It is understood that the centralized power offered by nationhood and the unity of the people granted them power over their neighbors and posed an existential threat to wider European sovereignty. Britain could command its forces and gather resources with novel efficiencies which put its competitors at a disadvantage. It seemed that once a disorganized group bumped up against a nation, they quickly realized they too must nationalize simply to survive. We see this across the globe with nations that adopt the vague titles and dressings of a nation, but for all intents and purposes are no more than tinpot republics or tribal dictatorships with a flair for continental fashion. Throughout the 20th century we saw ethnicities nationalized to the extent they had to establish power over other groups, but not a proper evolution into a nation, evidenced by their inability to content with true national powers.
There is a case to be made that the entire planet is slowly entering a post-Nation state, either organically, by persuasion, or occasionally by force. However, to have that conversation we must acknowledge the existing power dynamics are evolving to an even more advanced configuration – supra-national entities that still possess sovereignty and control over those who cannot advance – whereas Canada is proclaiming we must naively abandon power dynamics entirely, with the assumption that everyone will follow our lead. Rather than being a post-nation state, Trudeau seeks to bring us to a pre-nation state: a loose grouping of ethnicities loyal to an effectively hollow central apparatus that will inevitably fall prey to the nearest coordinated aggressor.
To nationalists we must ask, when you look about your political surroundings, do you detect the necessary horizontal unity? Even within the European-Canadian hegemony, is there any sort of orientation that feels like it could exist if the Liberal bureaucracy were to vanish tomorrow? If you believe it can be reduced to skin colour, you have not been paying attention. If you have not been paying attention, your destruction is assured.
The Last Economic Man
The Liberals propose that this pre-nation state be populated by a new man, the Last Man. Modelling their Proto-Human, the only thing the population of Earth desires is money, freedom from the fear of death, and total non-conflict between every individual. The Liberal measures their success by materialist gains, and the fulfillment of emotional desires. Groups are not mentioned, only atomized individuals. These atomized individuals are permitted to organize themselves in groupings as long as their stated goal is the pursuit of these goals, and it is here we see the rise of supra-national collectives, typically populated by economical men united by their desire for power.
“My view is quite different: if we are interested in preserving and advancing the interests of European Canadians, it is better to work within the existing framework of multiculturalism than to promote assimilation. Current Conservatives are hyper-Liberals in believing that all forms of group identity can be discarded, and that Liberalism is all about “freeing” the individual from any historical or biological antecedents, and making identities purely a matter of personal choice – except when they criticize Leftists for ignoring biological differences between men and women.”
– Ricardo Duchesne, Canada in Decay
George Grant tracks the rise of the Liberal party with their alignment with the urban areas, which was aligned with the large corporations that were continental in scope. While tightening ties to America through capital, it allowed another vector of pressure in the pursuit of control or political influence. As George Grant later says, “their aspirations of progress have made Canada redundant.” There is no horizontality to be found here, there is no sense that the extended folkways need to be answered to. The locus of power has always been in capital cities – historically city-states – but the city as a satellite economic engine to the political center slowly centralizing its own power is a phenomenon that defines Canadian urban centers to this day. What’s interesting is this is not historically unprecedented.
In The Law of Civilization and Decay, Brooks Adams posits a case for civilizational corruption reaching as far back as the fall of Rome, and presently occurring in America. The thread uniting the decline and fall of complex empires, he states, is the rise of a purely economic man who attains supreme power, thereby making the traditional founding stock obsolete.
The founding of a great civilization is typically accomplished by a core marital class of men, in the case of Rome these would be the soldier-farmers who exemplified the blood and soil ethos. This father at the head of an ancestral line tied to the home and hearth was the basic atomic unit of the entire society. You can find a similar case in the British yeomen, that synthesis of self-contained culture and duty stronger than the brainwashing of the state. We find it again in those who settled America, and the strong history of British libertarianism which America will never be able to shake. While many in dissident spheres mock libertarianism, they ignore the importance of having a sovereign and self-aware founding stock that can exist in any coordinated fashion outside of the state.
“In proportion as movement accelerates societies consolidate, and as societies consolidate, they pass through a profound intellectual change. Energy ceases to find vent through the imagination and takes the form of capital; hence as civilizations advance, the imaginative temperament tends to disappear, while the economic instinct is fostered, and thus substantially new varieties of men come to possess the world.”
– BROOKS ADAMS, THE LAW OF CIVILIZATION AND DECAY
Over time, we see this martial class – alternatively known as yeomen and freemen – disappear upon the emergence of the Economic Man, the man who typically exists outside the unifying spirituality and ethnos but nonetheless seeks power inside the system. This materialist man is capable of playing power games that would not occur to the traditional man, and by greed, ambition, and cunning they are able to hijack the levers of power and completely transform how the empire operates. Never in history have we seen the economic man dethroned before the empire evaporates from internal inertia. Over the course of decades or even centuries, we see the old stock dispossessed and, in the case of Rome, form a massive slave class that can only succeed in giving the central powers managerial headaches. The overwhelming multiplication of dependents of the state seems inevitable in these case studies, and by the point of total collapse these economic men have absconded.
Marxists would classify this group as the bourgeoisie, but it is not simply the emergence of a class that can be combated and removed from power, their presence is the signal of the internal crisis of the group itself. Brooks claims that in all cases throughout history, the imaginative man has fallen before the economic man, surely as spirituality falls to empiricism. Unfortunately there never seems to be a return to tradition that occurs on a scale large enough to avert course.
The trick is, once the system finally collapses, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe pointed out, what can persist in the resulting chaotic anarchy? And can spirituality re-emerge in an empirical world with wisened armor?
Don’t Disparage the Lost Dog
Socialism as we know it, if accomplishing everything it endeavors to, will inevitably see its success as shame if it is not spread to all those who it feels deserve it. It is not enough for Canada to be an example of tolerance, the tolerance itself must be of an aggressive nature. This is the cross bore by the Last Man Corporation, the entity that currently sits at the center of the Conservative mind, where Liberalism meets global market forces and capitalism.
One form it takes is the global exporting of homosexuality, oft decried by the Right. Under the current Conservative leadership, this is why the best people feel they can hope for is Monopoly Man Sodomy. It is often remarked that the Conservatives have failed to conserve anything over the century past, and the reason is clear: because what they seek to conserve is Liberalism by way of Capitalism, both of which are exemplified by the Liberal party, who can also corral the New Democratic Party and their legion of pill-popping progressives. Conservatives may desire to speak on the things we have explored here, and they may very well believe them deep down, but within one generation you will see all semblance of tradition and European identity vacate those organs of power entirely. Conservatives exist to gather around what is permitted by power, and this can be important later but not currently
All mainstream political organizations lack the ability to define what a Canadian nation is, and it is up to you to present it to them in the form of victory. They will become your friends after you win, but they are not even capable of fighting on your behalf. The lack the language, they lack the historicity, and they lack the time horizon necessary to engage this project. The project is to utilize practical strategies to create a distinct ethnos from a historically distinct multicultural pool that, rather than harken back to commoditized tradition or admire low-resolution tribals, rather thrives in the current historical period with a distinct utilization of Old Stock Canadiana. This project endeavors to create a folk that has the capability to ascend to a nation, and to achieve sovereignty in a world where new and terrifying forms of sovereignty are emerging.
If all we have been is becoming, perhaps we can hold Canada to its sorrowful promise.