How dedicated are the people at the Canadian Human Rights Commission?

UPDATE: The claim made in this post about a visit from the CHRC may be incorrect; it may have been a visit from some other branch of the civil service: see the discussion at the Post-Darwinist blog. I don't keep a regular eye on who is visiting this blog. Daily Bayonet, who pointed out the possible error, notes in an email: "I hope you didn't interpret my message as defending the HRC's, I don't. The visit that BCF got was definitely an HRC goon, but Covenant Zone could have been from anywhere. I only wanted to make that clarification. I've been getting visits from HRC's for months, especially the BCHRT after I followed the Steyn/Maclean's trial closely. So far I've not been disap....."

Still, one might ask: how many non-CHRC civil servants are likely to want to read this blog at 6.24 on a Saturday morning?
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Well, one of their number was at our blog, at 6.24AM Ottawa Time, using the (surely tax-payer funded) CHRC blackberry service, apparently checking for our take on the BC Human Rights Tribunal ruling (pdf) on "Elmasry v Steyn/Maclean's". Blazing Cat Fur points out in emails that the CHRC are regular visitors at her blog. Denyse has the latest evidence, with also our site meter record of the recent visit:
Post-Darwinist: Intellectual freedom in Canada: So Mark Steyn was acquitted - what about the rest of us?

I don't mind being transparent to our democratic state, when it is in turn transparent in its procedures and arguments. But today, our state is neither transparent enough, nor decidedly democratic. It belongs too much to a bureaucratic elite who are not entirely in service to the wishes of the people or their proper representatives, though the latter are in good part to blame for downloading their responsibilities for conflict management to, e.g., shadowy courts of "human rights". Accordingly, our bureaucrats follow an often imperial, post-national, NGO/UN code of "human rights" and political correctness.

It is no accident that the present national election campaign in Canada has been witness to endless "gotcha" journalism and scandal mongering. This is the kind of political culture, devoid of much serious debate on on how to renew the national political culture, that one should expect when politicians shirk responsibilities and talk up the courts and the "human rights" commissions as the proper arbiters of properly political conflicts.

One thing that is obvious about the BCHRT ruling (pdf) - based on my yet cursory glance - is that, notwithstanding its normative engagement in legal analysis of precedents, it relies on some pretty arbitrary assumptions about how to draw the line around what is and is not acceptable speech. It also relies on banishing certain questions from its argument. And these are assumptions and forbidden questions that reveal the very interested nature of the BCHRT, or of a post-national bureaucratic class, in the ruling. This is not what the law should be.

But then no law can be properly disinterested if it sets itself the task of deciding what is and is not "hate" speech. We all "hate", to some degree, because we are all inevitably resentful beings, to some degree. Yes we can have, in abstract metaphysical terms, a legal definition of "hate" that surpasses mere resentment. But when you pass a law that outlaws something we are all inclined to do, the task of proving that someone has (or not) crossed the line where the unacceptable extreme of hate is distinguished from the more ordinary resentment of humanity, will inevitably require more than abstract metaphyics: one must dabble in the arts of some kind of political correctness and scapegoating, in the more or less arbitrary designation of (bad and good) victims.

I hope to read through the ruling and have something to add to the conversation in the next few days.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Lee Harris

You can't say the forces of freedom are making no progress when, of all places, the New York Times allows Ayaan Hirsi Ali to review Lee Harris' new book, The Suicide of Reason. Here's a bit of her review:

Harris extols American exceptionalism together with Hegel as if there were no contradiction between the two. But what makes America unique, especially in contrast to Europe, is its resistance to the philosophy of Hegel with its concept of a unifying world spirit. It is the individual that matters most in the United States. And more generally, it is individuals who make cultures and who break them. Social and cultural evolution has always relied on individuals — to reform, persuade, cajole or force. Culture is formed by the collective agreement of individuals. At the same time, it is crucial that we not fall into the trap of assuming that the survival tactics of individuals living in tribal societies — like lying, hypocrisy, secrecy, violence, intimidation, and so forth — are in the interest of the modern individual or his culture.

I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed, I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe. Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have traveled with them. And the multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Harris is correct, I believe, that many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.

Both the Romantic movement and organized religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.

Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism. My reasons for reproaching today’s Western leaders are different from Harris’s. I see them squandering a great and vital opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims, especially those within their borders. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

I think Ali is right that we have to engage in a war for the minds of Muslims (but also for those in the West trapped in the irrationalities of White Guilt) and that over time we will find that more and more of them will want to be free like Ali, and not slaves to traditional forms of society, especially when they see that is not tribalism that can hope to feed them and keep them comfortable and healthy, but only our global modernity, without which the human population must greatly diminish.

However, Ali, and perhaps also Harris, though I haven't yet read his book, continues to pit reason against faith in objectionable ways. Of course there is a lot in the Western tradition of unreason to oppose. This blog never tires of berating the Gnostic left and its incoherent preaching on multiculturalism, for example. However, Ali seems to be largely unaware of how Western individualism has been in good part an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian religion, and Romanticism, and not simply of the "Enlightenment" which is best understood as a secularization or codification of what has always been a potential of a Western religious tradition that separates the moral and (the tribal) ethical, emphasizes individual moral conscience and conversation with God, as well as a history of progressive, unfolding revelations into our humanity to be discovered in human time. Furthermore, ours is a religion that, especially in the case of Christianity, calls on us to maximize human reciprocity, to see individuals as sacred centres/traders in their own right, freed of any particular social hierarchy or periphery, in a way that has led us to the free global market of secular modernity.

Similarly, the Romantic movement cannot be seriously summed up with a one-sided, good or bad, polemic, however much violence has arisen from it, both in the form of leftist political movements and resentful individuals defining their humanity against "the system" or the establishment. The modern individual, who uses the arts of consumer society, and also some reason, to endlessly differentiate individual sacred centres within a larger free market modernity, is as much a Romantic figure as is the anti-modern philobarbarist or supporter of one or another totalitarian fantasy. Furthermore, Romantic interest in the primitive can be a form of anthropology, a mix of reasoning and art that attempts a better understanding of our human origins, an improved understanding that can have liberating potential in our modernity. It is all too simple to see Romanticism across the board as an unquestioning embrace of the primitive.

It is incumbent on us to work through such contradictory possibilities in the major intellectual and artistic currents of the modern West, to foster the positive forces therein, so as to defend our modernity. This defense cannot be seriously achieved by those who would simply write off large parts of our cultural heritage as unreasonable. The Enlightenment's caricature of Reason is not alone the salvation of anything. It leads to forms of positivism which become crude Gnostic religions in their own right: see Marxism, or the French Revolution, for example, where reason and romanticism embraced in ways I don't think Ali yet knows how to separate.

I greatly admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali for showing the West what Islam is, for being a whistle blower, an informer, for insisting we hear the kind of stories that can only come from those who have lived under the oppressive tribal codes of the Islamic world. And while she seems to be someone whose escape from Islam has left her faithless and unsure how to deal with the human need for good faith, as the guarantee of our freedom, of our ability to perform for others an act of good faith, an acting that "reason" alone will never conquer, she may at least give us the courage to fight harder against those, like Mohamed Elmasry, who are actively targeting the forces of freedom in the West, as in Elmasry's recent campaign to silence Mark Steyn, or to make him unpublishable in Canada. Elmasry is the man who was widely quoted in the media for claiming that the murder of Aqsa Parvez was just a "teenager issue":

"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue," said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. "It is a teenager issue."

Thanks to voices like Hirsi Ali's, fewer and fewer Canadians are falling for such rhetorical sleights of hand. Islam is an inherent part of certain tribal societies and tribal society is arguably an inherent part of Islam, though whether there can be some kind of accommodation of Islam and modernity remains to be seen. We will only begin the serious work of finding out what can and cannot be made of Islam and modernity when we stop listening to and appeasing the anti-freedom Islamists like Elmasry, who is invited to all kinds of conferences by leftist Canadian elites, and champion those Muslims who so desperately want greater freedom for their people. Ali has rejected Islam, others are trying to reform it. Let that debate play out, let's give our attention to those Muslims interested in change and progress, and not in a defense of tribalism masked as a denial that Islam is profoundly allied with tribalism.

The debate we need will be well served if we renew our interest in Western culture and history so that it does not become a sources of easy polemics and caricatures for those fighting for freedom and modernity. We only really defend freedom and modernity when we are not unnecessarily casting out parts of it, but grasping the greater mystery by which so much has and can be held together as a network of free individuals making their lives sacred in any number of ways.

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Faith and Anthropology

Gil Bailie has put up a quote from Romano Guardini that I, not a great believer in salvation through works, like much:

All around us we see activity, organization, operations of every possible type; but what directs them? An inwardness no longer really at home with itself which thinks, judges, acts from the surface, guided by mere intellect, utility, and the impulses of power, property and pleasure. An "interiority" too superficial to contact the truth lying at life's center, which no longer reaches the essential and everlasting, but remains somewhere just under the skin-level of the provisional and the fortuitous.

Before all else, then, man's depths must be reawakened. ... In a word, man must learn again to meditate and pray. ...

Therefore we must return to the essence of being and ask: What is the connection between a man's work and his life? ... What is obedience, and how is it related to freedom? What do health, sickness, death really signify? ... When may attraction claim the high name of love? What does the union of man and woman known as marriage mean (at present [1951!] something so seedy, so choked with weed, that few people seem to have any serious conception of it, although it is the bearer of all human existence)?

Now this is an argument for meditation on the purpose of our Being in history that comes to us from a Christian context, but it is not an argument whose truth is only negotiable by believing Christians; i.e. its truth, or lack, can be appreciated, limited, weighed, by anybody from within a secular anthropological and historical discussion of human nature. As I was telling Dag last night after our Covenant Zone meeting, I think our Western postmodernity will soon either collapse into ruins (because of its difficulties in motivating its members to reproduce themselves and their productive roles), or, more likely, it will turn away from its current nihilism, its materialism without much sense of purpose of what things and productive activity are for, towards a new kind of faith that combines a new kind of anthropology with more traditional religious positions, positions that will become somewhat re-positioned thanks to the new kind of anthropological and historical discussion that is emerging in the wake of (post) modernity's destruction of traditional cultures.

An example of this, again from a frankly Christian context, is provided by Mark Gordon's discussion of the Christian anthropology of Bailie and Rene Girard. Christianity, Gordon notes (and I would say this is true of Judeo-Christianity), is not simply one faith tradition among others, but a radically innovative attempt to interpret human nature and origins. And, as such, it is a claim on fundamental truth (truth about our specifically human origins and the purpose of human culture) that can and should be compared to others. This work of "anthropologizing" faith, and in turn of learning to put greater faith in our anthropology's original and ongoing purpose - a purpose that is both articulated (with more or less self-understanding) and evidenced by the history of societies' ways and means of representing their ethics - continues today. We find it not only in the high-minded discourse of the likes of Gil Bailie, but also in the more popular trenches of religious and political debate, as was made evident to me when I saw, a few days ago, the republication of an article "What Would Muhammad Say to Jesus?", by Mohamed Elmasry, head provocateur of the Canadian Islamic Congress, in whose newsletter the article originally appeared.

As soon as we are forced, by historical circumstances, to start comparing and contrasting two faith traditions put in close proximity, we either become close-minded dogmatists, or open-minded anthropologists, or some combination thereof. In his dogmatism, not only does Elmasry reveal a great ignorance of Christian theology and teaching, and of the anthropological truth behind trinitarian belief (the trinity is, among other things, a theory of human representation, a [Christian] means of symbolizing three basic ways people experience language or representation) but, I think, Elmasry also reveals a desire to engage Christianity in a larger debate about human nature that he thinks is the key to winning converts to Islam. In other words, I see him as a simple dogmatist with a small foot in the door of a larger anthropological wisdom.

To win this discussion, he will either have to hope there are a lot of lame brains out there who have already made up their minds that Christianity is a failed religion, and will show no interest in what it really teaches, or he will have to do a lot better in explaining how Islam can make a claim on fundamental truth regarding the co-emergence of (a name for) God and humanity at the origins of human culture, an explanation that can surpass that of Christian anthropologists like Gil Bailie and Rene Girard, or even that of a guy who comes up with a quick but pretty devastating inversion of Elmasry's article.