Covenantal Integrity

I'm sorry I haven't written much this week. But I just want to get out a quick post to announce our weekly Thursday meeting in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library - the commercial part of Library Square that isn't closed by the civic workers' strike - 7-9pm. We meet in front of Blenz Coffee, often with blue scarves, and discuss the political covenant that is Canada, what we can do to insure for each other the freedoms and civil exchange without which the covenant cannot continue to grow and avoid a collapse into some neo-tribalism or totalitarian empire.

One thing I read this week that I thought usefully touched on this theme was an argument by Richard Landes: On Just What Not to Do: The Honor-Shame Logic of Walt-Mearsheimer. Thinking more broadly about the covenant among Western nations, the responsibilty each free nation has to act as a guarantor for other nations' freedom (however much they compete with and resent other free nations), to uphold a system that guarantees the freedom of national self-rule in face of forces like the anti-national Jihad (with its dreams of a renewed Caliphate) and the imperious, leftist "internationalist" Utopias (whose promoters actively seek to regulate and destabilize free nations, and to exacerbate conflicts like those between Israel and the Arabs, or Canada (with NATO) and the Taleban, in order to increase the market for their - necessarily incoherent - utopian internationalism). Landes points out clearly why it is both our responsibility and self-interest as free people in self-ruling nations to defend Israel's existence, whether we think Israel is special because it is the first nation and the Biblical or historical guarantee of the possibility of realizing later covenants in the cause of shared freedom, or whether we see that Israel as just a run-of-the-mill little nation with corrupt politicians and foolish intellectuals, etc. If we cannot stand up for the first and for the ordinary Western nation, we are basically saying we no longer have the resolve to defend any part of Western national freedom from those who resent it and who dream the impossible dream that human conflict (which is part of freedom) could somehow be ended if we all just bowed to a common God.

It all boils down to a question of our own moral integrity, something a covenant zone exists to encourage by bringing people together so that they may realize good faith is not something an individual has on his own but is only good to the extent that it is shared with others in a common religious or political (national or truly inter-national) cause to expand the possibilities of a freedom we must share with each other, those we often resent, while avoiding the totalitarian political and religious systems and fantasies that would dictate to all if only they ever could:

Israel’s problems with Jihad (the problem from the beginning, not Palestinian nationalism), are our problems with Jihad. Israel’s experience of “withdrawing and conceding and apologizing” are keys to what we can expect when, for example, we leave Iraq, or we grant autonomy to majority Muslim cities and zones in the West.

Right now, despite the perverse fantasies of the moral relativists and their demopathic partners among the Muslims, everyone, at some level of consciousness, knows that the West is morally superior in its values and actions than the Jihadis and the corrupt Muslim regimes around the world. This includes the Muslims, who use Western values to make their demopathic case; and the “radical leftist” Westerners who would never chose to live in a Muslim country unless they had the privileges of a traitor to their own culture. By calling on the West to sacrifice Israel to their honor demands, Muslims have set up a moral test they hope — and expect — we’ll fail.

We dare not.

In the world of honor and shame, wisdom and sanity demand that one stick by one’s friends and confront one’s enemies. The Arabs and Muslims know that Israel is part of the Western world — one of the main reasons they hate it — and they are on the other side. And will respect us for acting accordingly, no matter how much it might anger them. And if we remain firm in these commitments, we have a real chance to provoke genuine and desperately needed self-criticism on the other side. Only by behaving with such integrity does the West stand a chance to survive; indeed, such integrity may mean more than survival. It might mean inaugurating a dynamic that will lead to a peaceful 21st century.

Ironically we come to the moral dimension of the realist argument. By behaving immorally (realistically in Walt-Mearsheimer terminology), we lose our status and our ability to make any demands of our foes. It is in the nature of “constructivist” as opposed to “realist” political science that moral discourse plays a key role. One does not rise from prime divider societies to civil ones without moral commitments, among them, putting aside the “dominating imperative” of “rule or be ruled.” And when civil societies are in conflict with prime divider ones, the most critical capital the former can lose is the “moral high ground.” Only fools and moral equivalencers would think we’ve lost that ground. And once we really do lose it, by doing something so irreversible as sacrificing Israel, we’ll know what it means to have really lost it.

Our move.

Time to perform personhood?

(HT: 3massketeers)

Covenant Zone meets every Thursday, 7-9 pm , in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee. Given the recent weather, we might even be wearing our blue scarves.

When the existing politics and governing ideology no longer work, when they really aren't much in touch with pressing new realities breaching all the old walls, we must, through the art of the covenant, bring a new political reality into being. In a self-ruling nation, it is the responsibility of each of us to perform this task when required. Come to Covenant Zone and be inspired to our work.

Our choice to die as a society, or not

There is a deeply silly but dangerous article in this week's Macleans. The title, Polygamy: Legal in Canada, is meant to argue that while polygamy is still technically proscribed by the Canadian criminal code, it is now a fact that numbers of people (no one seems to know how many) are practising polygamy in this country and the government is unwilling to do anything about it.

The article is silly because it is full of quotes and ideas from silly people who hold to an understanding of liberalism that is little more than a suicide wish for the particular form of modern society that Canada has been, even as these people do not appear to be in favour of any kind of coherent replacement for the society they would kill off, beyond holding to some vague and incoherent idea of "multiculturalism".

I don't have time now to do a serious critique of the article, and the point of this post is to remind people in Vancouver of the weekly Covenant Zone meeting, every Thursday, 7-9 pm in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee, look for the blue scarves.

But a quick contrast between the article and Covenant Zone is in order to help clarify why we meet. The great fear represented in the article is that Canadian society (and not just the government) might be in some way "discriminating" against people who choose to practise polygamy. Well of course we are discriminating, because how else can people build any form of society and defend any kind of freedom? for example, the kind of freedom to live in a self-ruling society that, so far (and in any logically foreseeable future), has only ever existed among people who produce, through nuclear families, the kind of people sufficiently free and independent and desirous of participating in extra-familial forms of society, to participate in the kind of self-ruling civil society on which our Canadian culture and civilization is founded.

Our state and society is, ultimately, a compact or covenant among families, not individuals, since individuals, as we rightly value them, cannot exist without families and only certain kinds of families at that.

The legal argument written by Canada's Chief Justice in the recent court ruling giving a constitutional right to "same sex marriage" (as if marriage could be, by court dictate, something other than what it has ever been, anthropologically: a license to have children, and a compact between and among families) is mentioned in the Maclean's article:

As the Supreme Court of Canada noted in the same-sex marriage reference, the notion of a "Christian" marriage is no longer relevant. "Canada is a pluralistic society," the court ruled. "Marriage, from the perspective of the state, is a civil institution."

What the Supreme Court did not explain, however, is why it is only in Western societies, today and for the foreseeable future, in which we find anywhere near a majority defending "gay marriage" and "multiculturalism" in a spirit, if not reality, of "non-discrimination". Everyone else openly knowingly and happily discriminates; (for how else is a society to be built and defended?) Every freedom we enjoy is defined by its limits. That's what most people in this world know.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada may not be aware of this, but she is a typical product of a post-Christian society (which is to say in many respects a hyper-Christian society, but to explain this hyper-Christianity that is at the same time anti- or post-Christian requires a further argument about the nature of Christian society, in the spirit of Rene Girard, that I will leave aside for now). It is only post-Christians (i.e. products of the Christian world) who engage in the kind of intellectual folly that is pervasive in the Macleans article: the assumption that there is some conflict between religious freedom (as it could possibly ever exist in the real world) and a traditional Christian understanding of marriage as the basis for the Canadian state, which the state thus has a duty to defend.

What Canadians no longer understand is how different Christianity is from all other religions (even from Judaism, though here to a lesser extent than all others). For most non-Christian people in this world "religion" (though they don't use the word as we do) is a ritual code defining a uniquely correct set of behaviours. Any freedom allowed by the code is in the domain of what is not proscribed by the code and of what can be done once one has committed time and resources to following the ritual code. In most societies, the distinction that has grown up in Christianity, among religion, civil society and politics/government, giving freedom to each within their own constitutionally limited domain, simply doesn't exist. This is because only Christianity has given up the idea of following a uniquely correct ritual code (beyond liturgy) in society/poliitics. For people who follow other political religions, like Islam, to the letter of the ritual law, to come to Canada and think they can follow their religion as they would at home would require that they be admitted the freedom to promote, e.g., the supremacy of Islam and discrimination against non-believers, which is not compatible with how "religious freedom" is understood in this ([post] Christian) country.

A religious defense can be found, somewhere in the world, for pretty much any offensive behaviour, including homicide (against troublesome non-believers). Thus for any society to defend "religious freedom" it must have a good idea of what exactly it means by religious freedom for it surely cannot mean the freedom to do anything that any or all of the worlds' various ritual codes demand. Human sacrifice was a common religious practice until recently, and some people still practise it. Will I one day be given religious freedom to practise it in Canada? Maybe, but not in the kind of Canada I have known and loved.

"Religious freedom" in Canada can only be given a precise definition by reference to our cultural history of Christianity and of its secularized forms. For a Supreme Court Chief Justice to dismiss this fact is a sign we are now living in crazy times with lots of silly people in positions of power, for example in the office of the Attorney General of British Columbia who is being told by his own high officials that he shouldn't prosecute polygamists under the law because the anti-polygamy provisions of the criminal code are surely unconstitutional.

Who is it for these dimwits who have committed to a kind of liberal relativism that requires they stop thinking and show a great anthropological ignorance of how culture works in the rest of the world to think they know OUR constitution, which is ultimately a covenant among certain kinds of families and their individuals, to the exclusion of others. The bottom line is that we are today ruled by Gnostic elites who don't want us to participate in ruling our own society, unless we sign on to their game. They want to tell us what to think, what is and is not rational and acceptable, and in order to do this they have to undermine the basis for a self-ruling society; and that begins with the family. They encourage cultural confusion in the name of multiculturalism and an open society so that we will have no choice but to look to them for high court and bureaucratic rulings on how to think and live. What is going to guide their decisions, once they have foregone loyalty to any cultural tradition, is anyone's guess. But it will be arbitrary and tyrannical. It already is.

For people who respect the equality of women and men, and equality among men and among women, the practise of polygamy, and the erosion of the nuclear family that produces maximally free and equal men and women, is a threat. But to understand this fully, maybe you need to participate more in your civil society with your equals, and also to study the restraints on civil society in places where polygamy is still practised. Maybe you need to give some attention to what a national Covenant is and what it cannot be. Maybe you need to learn how to discriminate, respectfully, intelligently. That's what we try to do every Thursday night in the Covenant Zone.

What is Covenant Zone?

We meet again today, as every Thursday, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, 7-9 pm, in front of Blenz coffee. Look for the blue scarves and the Israeli flag on the ballcap.

What is Covenant Zone? Most simply, in my view, it is an attempt to create some new form of market in which people seeking covenants, for various purposes, can come together, not around a specific dogma, platform, or manifesto, but more generally out of a desire to create new possibilities, freedoms, through shared promises to do things whose end or covenantal outcome cannot be entirely foreseen but will emerge as a negotiation among free and responsible individuals seeking personal opportunities while renewing the covenantal culture of Western civilization in opposition to those (the elite bureaucratic class and the "victims" they patronize and encourage in order to justify the rule of bureaucratic elites) who see every innovation, political departure from a status quo, and market freedom as a probable source of victimization of those who do not immediately share in the advance.

As usual, Adam Katz has some ideas on how this can work:

One of the most pernicious elements of the post-World War II, welfare state culture has been the assumption of a consensual “mainstream,” authorized to marginalize “extremes.” The deflection of American civilization during this period was toward anti-covenantal, anti-constitutional forms, toward the rule of experts in circularly self-accrediting institutions. Even conservatives play into the logic of such institutions when they complain about the “liberal bias” of the media. The very notion that the media should be unbiased is a liberal one, and unwittingly supports the association of journalism with institutions genuinely charged with disinterestedness, like scholarly activity and, more important, the judiciary. Criticizing journalists for falsifying the reality they report on is perfectly appropriate, of course, but there is nothing wrong with a newspaper or TV station primarily concerned with eviscerating one party in particular. The most healthy media environment is one in which each outlet seeks to please and increase its audience, and in which each reader therefore has access not merely to publications with widely varying political stances but publications with widely varying tolerance for error (so there would be some insisting upon very high standards of verification while others sacrifice some credibility in the interest of getting better hidden stories, or getting stories faster), with different standards for “appropriateness,” etc.—and without any one or any combination having the kind of near monopoly status that enables it to be certain that ignoring some other interest won’t cut into its own audience share. Meanwhile, newsmakers themselves would harvest their own “value” as objects of attention, and confer it upon those media markets they favor, while always needing to calculate the value they might be losing by sacrificing the attention of another audience, ultimately trying to use their “capital” to use antagonistic outlets for their own purposes.


The same is true, more problematically but therefore more exemplarily, for more entrenched institutions like our universities. In the last instance, universities provide their graduates with something employers or graduate and professional schools want; somewhere along the line it is likely that other ways of providing that, more cheaply and perhaps better, will be invented. On-line “academies,” for example, modeled on the discovery of free inquiry in ancient Greece, might hire tutors and issue certificates that such a participant has received such an evaluation from other participants in a reading group on American literature, or sociology, or a for pay apprenticeship at a blog or in a hospital or laboratory, and that, furthermore, this group including the following members and was supervised by the following tutors…in the end, one would put together a package that would have a certain value for employers and professional schools. In that case, each person and each institution will have to take responsibility for assessing value, which would, moreover, be constantly changing as such groups would most likely have far more rapid turnover than today’s universities. The day of the New York Times or Harvard “brand” would, thankfully, be over. And, rather than all of us being peppered by hysterical assertions of academic freedom or journalistic privilege, subversive and illuminating truths would come out because somewhere along the line we would find someone interested in helping the discoverer disseminate them, and we would all get in the habit of “shopping around.”


I would consider such associations products of a genuinely covenantal culture insofar as they would refer us back to the pledged reality each generates, rather than some manufactured or hyped “right” or empty references to the public good. Also, in order to “receive” and judge the results of such institutions we would need to covenant with others ourselves: enforcing an acceptable degree of transparency would require that we collaborate with others on determining norms and standards, on the distance between the reality and the pledge. We would all be gatekeepers, editors and certification boards for each other. And we can already begin to speak in these terms now, and thereby help hasten the arrival of such a reality, by examining institutions in terms of covenants between teachers and students and among faculty, between media outlets and readers and viewers and among journalists themselves: what, precisely, can we determine to be the implicit terms of any particular “covenant,” training ourselves to ignore banal invocations of journalistic “ethics” or academic “rigor” or “consensus.” There can and will, indeed, be covenants in which the participants pledge to suspend existing assumptions and arrive at a representation of reality all could contribute to, but the basis for judging such efforts will lie in the specific “devices” and “procedures” the covenant itself accounts for.


Proposing or even, at times, acting unilaterally on the assumption of a covenant with those behind enemy lines provides the most promising way of generating a pledged reality capable of displacing the viral one imposed by the Global Intifada. I mean this, first of all, in the simple sense of creating facts that can’t ignored because they in turn create webs of other facts which ultimately touch other facts that pretty much anyone would be interested in. In my most recent essay for New English Review, I proposed that the Israelis might offer citizenship to individuals (and their families) who help in substantive ways with finding kidnapped Israeli soldiers (or, let’s add, help break up the system of terror in other visible ways). The principle can be extended in many ways. We should, for example, be opening cracks in the increasingly monolithic Muslim world, by asserting Christian and liberal interests wherever we find them and introducing them where we don’t. If the Saudis can fund madrassahs throughout the world and give millions to fund chairs in Middle Eastern Studies we can surely establish Friedrich Hayek Centers for the Study of Economic and Political Liberty in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and insist that our government make permitting the existence of such institutions a condition of diplomatic relations with these countries. Not to mention supporting every single persecuted Christian we hear about, and setting in place mechanisms (like rewards and promises of asylum) to make sure that we do hear about them. Private institutions can provide funding for memorials to the victims of jihad (past and present), as Marianne Pearl called upon the Pakistani people to do for her murdered husband. In this way we would be creating realities, around which events and conflicts would coalesce, and on our terms—this would not be mere spin or disinformation, in part because we would willing concede control over the outcome. Our own position would be impeccable, in terms of both human rights principles and long term self-interest, and we would be placing ourselves (or, to be honest, some of us would be placing the rest) in situations where all we need is courage.
[...]
Even my proposal for common Israeli-American action raises no principled questions, only ones of prudence—and that a mere question of prudence has become so taboo is itself revealing. In fact, our willingness to consider such a break with an established taboo would itself be a sign of our enhanced “market value” as an ally; conversely, its “unthinkability” testifies to our sinking value. Clearly there would be a great deal to debate here, but the point would first of all to create events worthy of sparking such debate. In other words, we should first of all “seed” the world with “sites” we are ready to pledge ourselves to support and defend, and let that be our continuing source of reality.

Covenant against evil

This week finds us dwelling on acts and omens of great evil around the world. But just because evil is always with us, and because there are no final solutions to it, we should not fall into the trap of thinking it is such a great mystery, that it is futile to attempt to understand it in hopes of temporary remedies. Here, for example, is a good definition of evil (Mark Gordon quotes the Orthodox priest, Fr. James Thornton):

…One may define evil as nothingness. Certainly evil never exits by itself but only inside of Goodness. Evil is a pure negation, a privation, a mutilation. But, though evil is a void of nothingness, it is a void which exists, which swallows and devours beings. It has no power to create, but its destructive power is enormous. Evil never ascends, it always descends. The very debasement of being that it produces is frightening. Evil is chaotic, it is a separation, a decomposition constantly in progress, a disorganization of the entire structure of being.

In other words, evil entails the loss of meaningful differences, or creative discriminations, under the force of a resentful mimesis, a burning desire to possess the things and status that some other possesses, to the point where one can no longer base one's sense of identity on a positive affirmation of what makes one different, but only on a negative resentment of those who seemingly alienate one from all that is sacred. When the nightmare of a constantly mimicing and frustrated desire reaches its evil climax, the only apparent "solution" is destruction of those people and their idols that alienate, that victimize, that remove us from what is our due and our right.

In what passes for our public and political life today, we witness an ethic of relativism and of victimary thinking in which an imperative to continually render all people equal in status rules. This entails, for our educational leaders, the deconstruction of meaningful differences, of status inequalities; and so the liberal "order" under which today's young people must try to find their way, often turns out to be a nightmare that sucks us down into nihilism, if the refusal of our desire for a solid sense of purpose and direction may even be figured as a downer. With a lack of ethical differentiations that define shared values and also the different places from which a symmetrical exchange of differences may be organized in shaping and contesting those values, with no particular hierarchy of values into which a young person might be initiated, or merely prepared for membership by the functionaries of our public "education" systems, the individual has to find his or her own ways to find values and ways of initiating himself into membership therein. Religion and good faith save some (not that religion alone solves for anyone the problems that can only be addressed by a political exchange among all stakeholders in a nation or civilization). But faced with such a daunting task, a fragile narcissism that easily takes offense, and just as easily proclaims the greatness of its owner, becomes the prevalent personality type.

Meanwhile, to take a humanities degree in the university - often on the naive presumption that one is there taught the best of what our culture has created and knows - one must today learn how to deny or deconstruct and criticize so much of the tradition by which Westerners formerly found value, meaning, and identity, and to get along in maternal classrooms where every child is special, where "it's all good". Odes to "critical thinking" ("hegemony" bashing) are substituted for real thinking.

So many us fall down in that world; and if we survive and go on, we may come to see how deeply we have become immersed in resentment's chaos and evil. Then, we should realize the need to renew the means by which we must collectively defer the next violent force, the resentment that is presently eroding what is left of the meanings and identities with which we hope to save ourselves, our sense of purpose in a political and ethical existence.

The means for renewing meaning and identity are the promise and the covenant, the two basic ways by which human beings exchange signs (which lays the ground to exchange things) and in so doing find new ways to signify, identify, value, an always re-forming network of exchange.

Every Thursday the Covenant Zone bloggers meet in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, central branch, from 7-9 pm. Consider joining us and helping build up our network for the exchange of political signs, so that we may have a firmer grip on the values and identities that can save us from the seed of evil that is in each of us. We meet under the sign of the blue scarf.

Some Scenes of Vancouver from the 1920s and 30s

Thanks to historicphotos.ca. Studying the past, we get a sense of the long roads that have brought us to our present place. Trapped in the blinking present, we can only ever know the past, and so those roads may seem to define a future course for our one-way trip, as if our road were now an arching arrow, taking us to our final place with geometric logic. But the road becoming arrow is really more like a river emptying into an uncharted sea whose tides and currents will push back and diffuse our rivers into the endless possibilities of the future. Meanwhile, in the delta, the people depend for life on the dependable long flowing river and on faith in the untold wealth and general benevolence of the ocean to come.

We, as the present, are the people of the delta, with the freedom to build roads and islands into the sea, to channel the future course of the river, if we have the courage to experiment in building these new islands, to create new centres of attention for the nation, islands that our fellows may or may not soon come down to join, creating more new centres, competent individuals taking it upon themselves to take a lead in representing the nation. But if we fear being told by established elites and interests that we have no right, no permit, to build, because our island might exclude someone or another, we will find that we have no choice but to remain on well-charted and -divided land, each is his or her own proper place. But this land is always at risk of eroding under the weight of ages, under the inertia and violence of massed resentments. If we fail to find new ways to go out from old piles in both political and economic freedom, to build again, each with equal rights but no special privileges, the river in time will wash us away and revert to a more primal course.

The Covenant Zone bloggers meet every Thursday in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, 7-9 pm. We wear blue scarves. Join us in the political delta and discuss the future of the Canadian covenant that allows each of us, as humble ordinary members of the nation, to build new islands together, to welcome others, and negotiate our differences in freedom, and not in bondage to some guilt- or fear-mongering empire of liberalism, the dictatorship of relativism, the empire that would, if it could, rule over all tributaries, the empire that seeks to obscure the differences among our many rivers, and between rivers and seas, all in a magic aimed at confusing the purpose of freedom's builders and vainly pretending, with its over-bearing dams of taxation, regulation, and public relations, to be directing the proper shape and size of the roads and endless flows from past to future. Empires never hold together forever. Those who want to survive the coming flood need to start building islands, nations, now.

Juxtaposing Memories

From this wonderful collection of historic Canadian photos, some Cyril Littlebury scenes from the Capilano Valley, our Charles' favorite neck of the local woods (site of many of the photos he publishes here):










From the poem Coast Range by Pat Lowther (1935-1975):

Just north of town
the mountains start to talk
back-of-the-head buzz
of high stubbled meadows
minute flowers
moss gravel and clouds

They're not snobs, these mountains,
they don't speak Rosicrucian,
they sputter with
billygoat-bearded creeks
bumsliding down
to splat into the sea

they talk with the casual
tongues of water
rising in trees

They're so humble they'll let you
blast highways through them
baring their iron and granite
sunset-coloured bones
broken for miles
[...]
The land is what's left
after the failure
of every kind of metaphor


The plainness of first things
trees
gravel
rocks
naive root atom
of philosophy's first molecule

The mountains reject nothing
but can crack
open your mind
just by being intractably there

And now, if you believe that First Things are really to do with the human, with the birth of the esthetic effect that lets us love the mountains, let's have a look at the conclusion to the poem, Vancouver, I love you, by Stanley Cooperman, who killed himself, in sight of those mountains:

There's no figuring this
town, anything
can float in with
the logs: used books and
ecstasy majors, Indians,
kosher salami and Danish
pastries: hookers
who wait
for French rolls
in the Italian cafe, where Luigi
imports wives and cheeses
for Sicilian brick-
layers
with money or dreams
in their pockets.

How did it get here, this
city,
perched like a neon
thumb
on the edge of nothing?
Listen: whatever nightmare
you carry with you
tonight,
whatever tongue you use
to reach your private
taste,
remember that men have built
a magic moustache
under the nose of the Big Snow,
a trick
bigger than all the icicles
on the other side
of despair.

In this spirit, let us remember the tragedies of the generation of 1968, of romanticism and modernism finally done to death. Let us also recall past victories in the art of the covenant, that we may revive and seek out new ways to remember and to covenant for the future we cannot know until we take the leap and convert to it. As Arthur Lower wrote in the preface to his history of Canada, Colony to Nation (1946):

The main association which Canadians themselves have had with their own history has consisted in the terrifically boring stuff shoved at them in their school days.

The school teacher, however, is mainly effect rather than cause. If Canadians were able to realize themselves as a people and to lavish their profoundest loyalties on their own country, instead of dissipating them in half a dozen different directions, then interest in their own past would come readily enough and the invincible determination to remain in ignorance of all except its superficial aspects would disappear. French Canada, it is true, finds in its history much of the spiritual sustenance that enables it to go on existing, but little of this can pass over to English Canada. There are, as yet, two Canadas, inhabited by two peoples who, as often as not, are at outs...

Writing Canadian history remains an act of faith, the substance of things hoped for.

No doubt if Lower (who was not an advocate of mass immigration and endless racial mixing) could have anticipated the age of "multiculturalism" and its "many Canadas" (ideas which are really a singular and simple imperial ideology that today's schoolteachers shove down students' all-too-homogeneous, largely-ignorant-of-any-but-a-simple-syncretic-pop-culture, throats) he would have had to build an even stronger faith that we, the new Canadian multitude, can still covenant together, building our shared political future ourselves, without need of righteous minders to dictate how we must behave with each other. And yet, if we wish it, we can still learn to understand and write our history in a way to make it so...

Here's the concluding thought from Adam Katz's latest essay:

Our capacities for dealing with reality from any other standpoint than that of the special prosecutor looking for Watergate-style conspiracies in every nook and cranny of existence have significantly atrophied. A fully human reality is based upon mutual promises and covenants and upon keeping faith with them. This means we are obliged to follow 'Abraham, the man from Ur, whose whole story, as the Bible tells it, shows such a passionate drive toward making covenants that it is as though he departed from his country for no other reason than to try out the power of mutual promise in the wilderness of the world, until eventually God himself agreed to make a covenant with him' (Hannah Arendt). The retrieval and extension of firstness is the exercise of this power; it is all that can be holy for all of us today, and all that we need.

Or, we can choose today's current "British" form of oblivion:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

And a final thought from another essay on the spirit of the covenant, lest we forget the importance of overcoming the prejudice that will, if it is not overcome, eventually destroy all nations, leaving the peoples in the chains of an anti-American and Judeophobic empire of post-national, dhimmi bureaucrats:

In the unified way of life that is Judaism, liberation and remembering are inseparable. The problem of the West is that it is in flight from its past, the Jewish root it appropriated only to despise, and thus lusts for the future, for the green light at the end of the dock, for the fantasy image, the digitalized virtual ‘reality’ not the living presence of life simple and abundant. “But the future is empty, a void” Kundera notes correctly. It does not, cannot, will not exist without a present firmly rooted in remembrance of the past, — the essence of identity.
[...]
The powers and interests that rule the world East and West want to destroy Israel for many reasons and have attempted and continue to attempt to do this in brutal synchronicity. As they gather against and war over Jerusalem (Zechariah 12-14; Zohar 32a on Exodus, portion Vaeira) it becomes more and more clear that the war against the Jews is a war on remembrance as the essence of genuine freedom, continuity, honor and faith which is buried by “security measures” as well as bombers. The bonds of the generations that the Modern West has done so many things to trivialize, damage and break reflects its war on Judaism and the Jews, — and its suicidal tendencies.

Remembrance, the sages emphasize is the foundation in holiness, yesod haTiferet, holiness in and through the generations that Esau and Ishmael each in their way corrupt and destroy, the way of peace and joy in a world lost and lusting for war and terror (ibid 200, 203b), lost in pursuit “of the fantasies of its own heart (Proverbs 18:2); and so the earth fills with profligacy and Hamas (Genesis 6:1-13).

The bonds between the generations and the intertwining of grace-education (chinuch from chein the root of Chanukah, “dedication,” also intrinsic to freedom and remembrance) with freedom and memory are at the heart of Passover when fathers are commanded to teach their children the story of metzias Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt as the primary manifestation of the Eternal One’s faithfulness, remembrance, and desire for ordered liberty, dignity and responsibility as the human state of freedom with teaching and grace through the generations entwining it in a threefold cord.

But the modern world wants to go “beyond freedom and dignity.” Their progressive cult is profoundly regressive, a dead-end street, a lust for chaos and the abyss.

If you are in Vancouver, consider joining us as we remember and seek new covenants for our nation, every Thursday, 7-9 pm, in the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library, central branch. We're in the blue scarves, in front of Blenz Coffee.