An Examination of H.D. Forbes’s Canadian Political Philosophy: A Review and Critique of “Multiculturalism in Canada: Constructing a Model Multiculture with Multicultural Values”
Multiculturalism in Canada: Constructing a Model Multiculture with Multicultural Values. H.D. Forbes. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Introduction
This special book by H.D. Forbes appears in the “Recovering Political Philosophy” series from Palgrave-Macmillan published via Springer in Switzerland.[1] The purpose of this particular sequence of publications of which Forbes’ book forms an installment is explained by editors Thomas L. Pangle and Timothy W. Burns. What is intended, they explain, is a confrontation with the challenge posed by postmodernism to the claim that a political science premised on right reason remains both desirable and possible. However the stated intentions of the series be interpreted, earlier titles have included studies of such thinkers as Socrates, Cicero, Xenophon, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Jefferson, Tocqueville (and Beaumont), Nietzsche, Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. “What then,” one may well ask, “is a book on multiculturalism in Canada doing in a series focused on the great thinkers of the West?” The very short answer here is that the book could not be published in its country of origin. Phrased slightly differently, one of the most significant books ever published by a Canadian author with a Canadian theme could not pass muster through the academic review process in the author’s native land.[2]
Perhaps this simple anecdote says more about Canada than the book itself. So it was that in order for his book to see the light of day, Forbes had to reach out to some American colleagues who had it in their power to make publication arrangements for his massive work. A particular book that by all normal, professional standards should have been published by University of Toronto, McGill-Queen’s, or University of British Columbia presses ends up being made available to the Canadian public via an American editorial process. Canada as the most advanced, pluralistic, tolerant and open society on the planet could not stretch its openness so far as to publish a major academic work by a brilliant native son. Quite a “progressive” achievement one might say.[3]
So the story of Multiculturalism in Canada is somewhat of an agonizing one. In some sense this seems providential as at the time not only has there been a “Bonfire of the Poverties” going on of late, sending various historic structures “Up in Smoke,” [4] but this strange bonfire has also been accompanied by a kind of “Twilight of the Idols” that has seen any number of the monuments Canada has erected to her noblest “sons” including even the “Great White Mother” being pulled down and in some cases “beheaded” without any legal repercussions whatsoever for the perpetrators. So much for Canada’s Ur principle of “Peace, Order and Good Government.”
The Series Editors explain that Forbes’s book is not just a study of post-war Canadian politics. No indeed. It is much more than that. Rather the book which Forbes has presented to us is a “definitive study of the world’s ‘first postmodern nation.’” Which has managed to develop for herself “a remarkably happy synthesis of nationalism and globalism.” The editors remind us what a good thing it is that Forbes has not at all sought to confine himself to a simply straightforward account of developments in Canadian public policy in recent times. [5]
Forbes wishes for his readers to understand that his book is no ordinary product of a sabbatical’s research. Rather, the questions it addresses have been on his mind for many years. But even now he does not see himself as providing any fully satisfactory answers that all might accept without protest. “In fact, (he) fears that (his) intervention in a complicated and sometimes rather unruly debate will be dismissed as nothing but the cranky subjective opinions and weird conjectures of a grumpy old white male.”[6] One finds oneself wishing here that Forbes would spell out in more detail his actual standard for “grumpiness.”
In any case, so massive is Forbes’ study that it easily could have been split into two volumes whereby his work as both a social scientistic Canadian historian and as a political philosopher could have been considered each severally. As it is, his discussion of Canadian policymaking and of the history of modern political thought, although quite discrete in themselves, are woven together in an attempt to take the reader down one stream of discussion. One can understand Forbes’ opting for an “integralist” approach to be sure. But he may well have dimmed his own light by preventing his readers from seeing him work as a strictly social scientistic historian on the one hand, and as a political philosopher on the other.[7]
Classic Books
The question necessarily presents itself to the reviewer of Multiculturalism in Canada as to its status in the pantheon of indispensable works on Canadian socio-political life. In my view, there are at present four books which qualify for this pantheon, the study of which is essential for the proper understanding of the Canadian polity. These are Goldwin Smith’s famous Canada and the Canadian Question, Andre Siegfried’s The Race Question in Canada, George Grant’s Lament for a Nation and Peter Brimelow’s The Patriot Game.[8] Our question then is whether justice demands that Professor’s Forbes’ book join the company of Smith, Siegfried, Grant and Brimelow in our “indispensable” or “classic” category. I think the answer is “Yes – but with an explanation.”
Multiculturalism in Canada does indeed transform the quartet of “indispensables” into a quintet. But unlike the original “Fab Four,” it is a book which makes no real attempt to connect with the “common reader.”[9] Over a century ago the ordinarily intelligent and concerned citizen could be drawn to Smith and Siegfried, and certainly to Grant and Brimelow closer to our time. But this is less so in the case of Forbes’ study. Multiculturalism in Canada is very much an academic book for an academic readership and so could not be expected to reach an audience as broad as might have been available to writers of the caliber of Smith, Siegfried, Grant or Brimelow. Indeed, if a book’s “public profile” is a necessary consideration for inclusion in the indispensable books on Canada category, then Multiculturalism in Canada can only be included “with an asterisk.”[10]
In this connection it is relevant to ask the threshold question of Professor Forbes whether or not he is playing the role of a scholarly “Trojan Horse.”[11] In other words, is Multiculturalism in Canada nothing other than a vehicle for the smuggling Greek soldiers in the form of heretical and unorthodox ideas past the gates of the academe with a view to breaching the walls of the modern, Canadian, academic “Troy”? Does Multiculturalism in Canada actually go to make up a “Trojan Book” which by carefully exposing the absurdity and injustice of multiculturalism might potentially make possible the sacking and destruction of the multicultural Ilium?
At one point Forbes observes that Charles Taylor’s book entitled Patterns of Politics (1970) makes no mention of multiculturalism whatsoever. He infers from this fact that Taylor was at that time harboring must amount to nothing an “unspoken resistance to the idea” of multiculturalism. But is Taylor the only leading political theorist who ever indulged in “unspoken resistance to the (multicultural) idea”? Might not “unspoken resistance to the idea of multiculturalism” be a lurking presence throughout Forbes’ own book?
But allowing for the simple fact of Forbes’ specialized metier, he has contributed what appears to be the greatest scholarly study ever on the “Canadian Question.” His book is very much a “classic” of its kind if not a “classic” tout court. The vastness of Forbes’s scholarship can be breathtaking as readers of his earlier book on the political philosophy of George Grant will know.[12] Readers will wish to keep this in mind when considering the differences between the books of Smith, Siegfried, Grant and Brimelow on the one hand and that of Forbes on the other.
Writers: Foreign and Domestic
Going by the examples of Smith, Siegfried and Brimelow for Canada, it seems to be an almost iron law of political science that the best books about a given country tend to be written by non-natives. But in the case of Forbes, we have a native son writing about his “Home and Native Land.” The question then is how did Forbes as a born and bred Canadian manage to qualify for our pantheon of indispensable books on Canada? The answer here is that although Forbes is as Canadian as a hockey stick in the household drive, this is not the case with his education as a whole. For all his Canadianism, Forbes is “American” both in the institutional sense of coming out of Yale, and in the deeper sense of having his foremost pedagogical, if not intellectual experiences derive from a quintessentially American writer and teacher Allan Bloom.[13] Bloom taught at the University of Toronto in the 1970s, and “introduced (Forbes) to a fascinating way of looking at the relations between philosophy and politics.” Indeed, Forbes states that while Bloom’s “presence in the background (of my work) may be very hard to see” it remains the case that “my approach to describing Canadian multiculturalism and my rough understanding of the surrounding philosophical terrain in fact derive (from Bloom).”[14] Forbes then, refracts Bloom into the shape of a Canadian thinker, who qualifies as such both on his intrinsic merits as a political theorist, and as a Canadian resident during the 1970’s.[15] To the extent that Forbes’ book is at some level a reflection of the Canadian mind as it is, then Bloom may be considered one of the philosophical Godfathers of the contemporary Canadian nationhood.[16] From Indianapolis, Indiana, Bloom helped build up the academic excellence of the University of Toronto, even as C.D. Howe from Waltham, Massachusetts helped to build up the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Trans-Canada Airlines in his time. The Canadian political philosophy “industry” as evidenced by Forbes and others owes much to Bloom’s “American Imperialism” shall we say.
Vive La Resistance!?
Following Forbes’ lead, Timothy W. Burns remarks on the extent of Canadian passivity and silence in the face of the demolition of the older Canadian regime that saw itself as “a distinct but integral part of the wider Imperial nation.”[17] Under the heading of “Post-Facto Theoreticians of Trudeau’s Multiculturalism” Burns poses the question: “(D)id no one in Canada stand up in defense of liberal democratic principles in the face of Trudeau’s onslaught?” “Not really” is his answer, at least for “Anyone who has spent time in Canada observing (her) political life.” Instead of a defense of liberal democracy what took place was “an effort to lend a theoretical clarification to what Trudeau had set in motion.”[18]
But there is a difficulty here with Burns’ comment. Anyone who was truly “politically aware” and who was living in Canada at the time under discussion would naturally have known that there was an intellectual struggle against Trudeauvianism contemporaneous with its evolution. [19] But the players in this drama remain more or less invisible to Forbes and so play no key role in his book. Burns could not be alerted to them by Forbes’s study, and for whatever reason his ten-year stint in Canada in the 1980’s did not supply the deficiency.
Thus it is, that generally speaking Forbes has not given the Canadian dissenting figures an adequate profile. But if due allowance is made for certain rebel voices then the seeming “consensus” on the innovations and transformations of Trudeauvianism, however successfully introduced they might have been, appears in a different light.
Forbes argues that in the context of Canadian politics, Left and Right are not at all “equally matched or equally visible.”[20] In his estimation, the Right in Canada “has had no prominent and influential spokesmen, and its strongest arguments have been presented only in muffled or distorted forms.”[21] In fact, “The cultural Right in Canada, overbalanced and overshadowed by the multicultural Left, is weak and easily overlooked.” But in all fairness it might well be the case that it takes a certain amount of effort to “overlook” life on the right side of the Canadian political spectrum, else the individuals listed below would be about as familiar as those of the Turkish Wrestling Champions of the last fifty years. But consider these names: Barbara Amiel, Conrad Black, F.H. Buckley, Ted Byfield, Link Byfield, William Christian, Barry Cooper, Ricardo Duchesne, Thomas Flanagan, William D. Gairdner, George Grant, George Jonas, Rainer Knopf, Ezra Levant, [22] Michael Millerman, Ted Morton, John Muggeridge, Jordan Peterson, Walter Stewart, Mark Steyn and Peter Worthington,[23]
In the light of the thesis of a “Right-Wing Absconditus” in Canada, what are we to make of the above list of names? It would seem to constitute a roster of serious dissenters from the Trudeauvian tide of history. Those on the list from earlier years were the shrewd observers who saw through the fogs and mists of the multiculturalist ideological project to its underlying reality. The more recent ones on the list persist in the cause at a time when the Trudeauvian project has become infinitely more threatening to Canadian freedom than it was back in earlier times.[24]
At all events, such names as the above listed have not been entirely invisible to the Canadian public despite their having little to no place in the mainstream outlets that have been feeding the Canadian national mind for several generations now, to say nothing of the discussion in the academy. [25]
Having reminded ourselves that there has in fact been a right-wing life of the mind going on in Canada despite how things might have sometimes appeared on the surface, there remains the question of whether the right-wing “heavyweights” can stand comparison with the more well-known “mighties” of the Canadian Left. Here I refer to such luminaries as Clifford Orwin, Ronald S. Beiner, Edward Andrew, C. B. Macpherson, Michael Ignatieff, Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, Brian Barry, Gad Horowitz, Mark Kingwell, Mel Hurtig, Naomi Klein, Leo Panitch, Harold Chorney, Wallace Clement, John McMurtry, Arthur Kroker and Linda McQuaig.
However one might assess the situation, what we can say is that not every name on the left-wing list is necessarily more well-known than any on that from the right-wing one. But even allowing that they in fact are, would this mean that one would take their books on one’s life-raft to the deserted island in preference to those of any on the rightist list? Let the thought-thirsty Canadian make his or her choice.
Right-Wing Free?
Forbes’s approach to what is sometimes called “The Conservative Revolution” sees him boxing with the shadows of liberalism’s right-wing antagonists rather than seeking a straightforward confrontation with them. He commences his study by referring to such figures as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, Jair Bolsinaro, Geert Wilders and the Brexitists, all of whom he claims collectively form a “pattern” of “resurgent populism and authoritarianism.” Such figures do not emerge into the public light by accident. Behind them has to be a philosophic demiurge such as may provide intellectual sustenance to their political intentions, much of it derived from the thought of the Old European Right. The authorities in this tradition bear such names as Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, Alexander Dugin, Alain de Benoist, D. H. Lawrence, H. P. Lovecraft, Anthony M. Ludovici, Sir Oswald Mosley, Ezra Pound, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, P. R. Stephensen, Gottfried Benn, Paul de Lagarde, Stefan George, Ludwig Klages, Rene Guenon and others.[26]
What emerges from the study of this diverse and multinational tradition is the question of whether western “Dasein” has for some time been champing at the bit to break the bondage of the traditionally rationalist, logo-centric, techno-scientific world picture. Does this “Dasein” crave expansion outwards into the “broad champaigns” beyond the occidental frame of mind. “Out there” is located the “Whole” which in all its fullness is beyond the scope of the western logocentric frame of mind. But if the Alt Right is interpreted as the rejection of classical liberalism in part or in whole, then it somehow mirrors the standpoint of the postmodern, multiculturalist Left. Forbes’s question then is whether “Equity Egalitarian Pluralism” has any limits beyond which it will not allow itself to be forced, either by left wing or right-wing pressures. Stated in terms Forbes himself would not use – “How wide can Equity Egalitarian Pluralism’s ‘Overton Window’ be opened before the view obscures the frame?”[27]
After introducing his book with a brief mention of the Alt-Right, Forbes may well decline to pursue the questions raised by its emergence in any detail, but its specter is everywhere in his discussion. As to the specifically Canadian context, Forbes is confident that the “radical alt-right is far from power in Canada.” In fact, “resurgent populism and authoritarianism” has not done well within her borders.[28] Thus, Canada appears to be something of an international “exception” in the sense that she seems to be “Right-Wing Free.” If Canada’s national faith of “Equity Egalitarian Cultural Pluralism,” relates to the “Radical Alt-Right” more or less as oil does to water, or, stated slightly differently, if Canada has powerful left-wing antibodies in her national bloodstream which immediately swarm the minutest intrusion by a right-wing virus, then she can sleep soundly knowing that this particular political infection cannot affect her ideological purity.
Even if we allow this left-wing “antibodies thesis” to possess some merit, it remains the case that the significance of Forbes’s book would be lost if we did not “feel” the presence of the specter of the Alt-Right overshadowing contemporary liberal democracy, and therewith Forbes’ every argument and observation. This is particularly the case because Forbes seeks to examine the limits of liberalism as tested by the waves of relativist, postmodern, multicultural opinion over the last half century or so.
For Ronald S. Beiner all these considerations raise the serious question of what he calls “Dangerous Minds.”[29] Beiner points to Julius Evola (1898–1974) and Alexander Dugin (b.1962)4 as special causes for concern. He goes on to say that Evola “was a ferocious racist and anti-egalitarian who characterized his politics as being to the right (!) of European fascism and who helped inspire far-right terrorism in Italy.” And Beiner’s Aleksandr Dugin “is a Russian fascist who despises liberal democracy and believes in Russian imperial expansion far beyond anything aspired to by Vladimir Putin.”[30]
But from the point of view of Matthew Rose, Beiner’s animadversions on Alt-Right influences are far from helpful. This is because Beiner has reasoned back from his dismissal of Bannon himself to the dismissal of Bannon’s sources. In Rose’s view what needs to be kept in mind amidst all this controversy is the prior intellectual foundation upon which the Alt-Right discussion is sustained. This intellectual foundation is absolutely not to be dismissed in Rose’s estimation. Whatever one’s opinions concerning the public face of the Alt-Right movement might be, Rose is sure that “Almost everything written about the ‘alternative right’ in mainstream outlets is wrong in one respect” – it assumes the Alt-Right is somehow stupid. But “The alt-right is not stupid.” On the contrary, the Alt-Right “is deep (and) its ideas are not ridiculous (and) they are serious.” Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments “of genuine power and expanding appeal.”[31]
Extremism and Moderation, or The Agony of the Canadian Right
At one point, Forbes explains that “the magic word in the multicultural lexicon” for what in more traditional times was called “Canadian bland” is now “balance.” As Forbes explains it, the Canada of “balance” should perhaps replace the maple leaf on its flag with a portrait of Goldilocks. In this way all the world would be able to see that Canada was “neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.”[32] The practical meaning of “balance,” is to be determined by the new elite and it will have no other relevant meaning than this official definition. Its final form and essence will remain as elusive and mysterious as the goodness that was said long ago to be “beyond being.”[33]
Forbes goes on to suggest that “The overall tension between the multicultural values favored by the progressive Left and the customary culture with its more familiar values favored by the recalcitrant Right, is the first of the practical balances needing careful attention.”[34] But at the same time, in assessing the situation, Forbes concludes that in the Canadian context, “it is no longer a practical question whose claims—those of the Right or those of the Left—are closer to the truth.”[35] This because the progressive multicultural Left has been in control of public policy for over fifty years.
Forbes suggests that the privileged official status of multiculturalism “means that the harsh, uncivil dissent of its more intemperate opponents…can be shunted out to the margins of culture and politics” and “confined in principle to a small and discredited minority.” Such a marginalized and dissenting opinion is “never to be officially acknowledged, never to be widely disseminated, and never to be given more than temporary accommodation in public policy.”[36] I surmise from Forbes’ analysis here that he is implicitly pleading for a revival of the Canadian Right or, if there has in fact been no such phenomenon in Canada hitherto, then for it to be introduced. The hope here would have to be that its subsequent flourishing would make a counterweight to the very bloated power of the Left. In other words, a plea for true “balance” must mean that an immense effort is needed to establish a Canadian right-wing politics and to see to its earliest possible flourishing. Such an endeavor should be a very high priority for all those seriously interested in the quality of liberal democratic life on Forbes’ view.
As with the breadcrumbs of Hansel and Gretel, Forbes leaves hints throughout his discussion that he is in fact, if not an outright enemy of multiculturalism at the least a modest opponent. He can gain this effect by emphasizing the importance of his position as a “Devil’s Advocate.” In this role he can pose the question “How is equality (to be) understood when it is not understood multiculturally?” But taking up the burden of presenting the clearly non-multicultural case for equality might readily involve “the risk of leading readers to suspect that my purpose is to discredit multiculturalism (and not just to understand what it is).” In other words, Forbes is saying: “Please don’t get the impression from what I say that I wish to discredit multiculturalism even though I am going to make the vigorous case against its most renowned and respected academic proponents.” But one suspects that the vigor of his presentation of the non-multiculturalist case is rooted more in Forbes’ own moral predilections than it is in a simple concern to show “fairness to all sides.”[37]
Reactionary Opponents, Unsettling Expressions and the Poorly Educated
The “reactionary opponents” of multiculturalism conjured up by Forbes might well go ahead and dismiss multiculturalism as “a topsy-turvy faith.”[38] They might even go so far as to insist that such a “faith” is as “benighted as any of the exploded superstitions of the past, on a par with a belief in horoscopes or the rapture.” These Neanderthals might insist that to join the multicultural bandwagon is nothing less than “to participate in a dream-cult of unprecedented naïveté.” It is to actually imagine “that there can be a democratic politics based on unrestricted expression and vigorous defence of all the real and emotionally charged differences of an increasing, unrestricted ‘polyethnic pluralism.’ It is nothing less than a child’s understanding of politics “to expect Canada to show the world how to make fundamental differences a source of richness and strength.”[39]
Forbes takes time to present himself as belonging to the “long runners” in thinking that “an enlightened universal social order under a law that ensures freedom, peace and justice for all” will eventually emerge precisely because “the general tendencies of nature will eventually bring us closer to these goals.” Why should this be?” Because the hard right has provided no “conclusive proof” that their contrary claims are true.[40]
This reactionary right cannot then prove any of its grim forebodings. Political idealists can therefore effectively counter its claims by insisting that any merely empirically based doubts about the possibility of the progressive future do not diminish the duty, imposed by practical reason, to pursue this future in a spirit of unselfish goodwill. So even if there is no conclusive proof that the long-range goals of multiculturalism are beyond reach and that any efforts in their service would ultimately prove absolutely futile, nevertheless we must remain under the moral imperative to keep the faith that it is somehow in the nature of things that we shall eventually be brought closer to these goals. As Forbes puts it: “We must believe (or at least say we believe) that the very rivalries and antagonisms, and even the hatreds that are so troublesome today and such a disfiguring blight on the past, will in the long run become the cause (as the justification for the construction) of an enlightened universal social order under a law that ensures freedom, peace, and justice for all.”[41]
At one point, Forbes suggests that certain segments of the western population such as “office workers, retail workers, tech workers, factory workers, tradesmen, security guards (and) the unemployed” can become prone to venting “loud and unsettling expressions of support for extreme right-wing parties and movements that espouse xenophobic views of foreigners, particularly Muslims.” Indeed, and more ominously, some of these people have joined anti-immigrant parties and even made it into the governing coalitions of some western countries.[42] Unsettled opinions can lead in the direction of the politics of the “radical alt-right.”[43] Those Forbes is referring to here are the many voters in various countries who might be dismissed as “poorly educated.”
These “poorly educated” populations seem to have a “blind spot” when it comes to properly understanding foreigners or newcomers in their cities and towns, especially if these newcomers are of the Muslim faith. So the general perspective of various office, retail, trades and factory workers et. al. may be less than fully enlightened. But Forbes is also open to the possibility that the multiculturalist theorists with whom he engages might in fact be little different from these people in the sense that their “extreme” enlightenment has transposed itself over into deep ignorance. What Forbes is pointing to here is a huge “blind spot” at the center of the philosophes of multiculturalism. It might be simpler in some sense to state forthrightly that like the office, retail, trades and factory workers the multiculturalist theorists are also “poorly educated.”
But if we do in fact join Forbes in conceiving of the multiculturalist theorists as in fact “poorly educated” individuals, we will nevertheless still find that these illuminati are among those who attract “progressive journalists, academics, politicians, and jurists (to) flock to Canada’s shores to learn the secrets of its success.” They lead the troupe of Canadian philosophers and social scientists “who are sought as keynote speakers at international academic conferences on migration, citizenship, and human rights in the twenty-first century.”[44]
Nature and History
Forbes generally re-states the multiculturalist vision as follows: “(A)fter decades or centuries of open borders and generations of personal mixing and matching of cultures and beliefs… humanity will in effect have been blended into a new, homogeneous multicultural culture (and have) created more and more complicated intersectional identities.” In this new world “Old fashioned ethnic conflict between nations will have become a thing of the past.”[45] The day will come when all will recognize with relief that Canadian and global universalism is in fact the embodiment of the final truth of multiculturalism.
According to Forbes, “even if there can be no absolute guarantee of its success” the whole Canadian multicultural enterprise is simply a means whereby one can “show good will in a situation of uncertainty.” “In a secular age,” he says, “we must expect many people to look to politics for something of ultimate significance.” This means that that ordinary democratic politics will necessarily appear as opaque, and people’s desires for meaningful collective celebrations will be met by “increasingly dreamy rituals of commitment to fanciful future.” It will be a comparatively small price to pay for “overall peace and security” if some “bitter alienation and even some violent dissent and the occasional terrorist bombing” should occur.[46] But public-spirited citizens will just have to get use to them as a necessary part of community life.
Forbes further explains that those who can be classified as very determined equalizers will blithely accept the use of discrimination on the basis of “suspect categories” (such as race, religion, or gender) as a means to correct whatever distributions have been produced by other individual traits and social processes e.g., brains, inheritance, nature, education, culture, character, connections, and the like. But Forbes indicates that this form of vengeful discrimination is very much contra naturam in that it seeks to alter “the existing, more naturally occurring distributions” in a free society. This anti-natural thinking is at the heart of “Affirmative Action” in the United States and Employment Equity in Canada” (Emphasis added).[47] These equalizing programs exemplify what might be called “Equity Egalitarianism’s” battle against the order of nature.
Forbes extends his account by discussing the question of sexual or gender equality in terms of “the traditional notions of the distinct natures and capacities of males and females.” by explaining that in the multiculturalist future the sexual difference will still exist in the future, these “liberal” thinkers have assumed, and it may be as exciting and distracting as ever, but Forbes at bottom he just thinks the progressive plan to have “roles, expectations, and obligations quickly become the same for all” is insane. “The fundamental point on which all have been agreed is that the traditional sexual division of labour based on ancient sexist ideologies— the supposedly ‘scientific’ ones as well as the unabashedly religious claims about divine revelations—must become a thing of the past.” It will be difficult for our children’s children to imagine a society based on the sexual division of labor as it is for us to imagine a society constructed on the basis of the difference between noble and common birth. “A just future would be one without gender,” as a leading American theorist explained. “In its social structures and practices, one’s sex would have no more relevance than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.”[48]
So Forbes points in the direction of ineradicable differences between the two sexes as a pivotal question for the new order of society following in the wake of the multicultural revolution. This point stands out in Forbes’ discussion because he has also argued in such a way as to sound to all the world like a thorough-going historicist. But we know from various points in his account that he is also a “naturalist” at some level.[49]
The evidence for Forbes’ “naturalism” can be seen in his implication that the hard right’s backlash against the multicultural and diverse society is in fact the truest possible manifestation of human nature in its recalcitrance to the fantasy-land vision of the multiculturalist elites?[50] Forbes’ pointing directly to the possibility that multiculturalist policies are utterly contra naturam means he thinks he can foresee its shipwreck on the shoals of human nature itself. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. Perhaps he interprets the “hard right’s” screaming even more loudly than Howard Beal that “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” is nothing less than the voice of nature. Such political discontent might be more indicative of man’s ingrained and natural passions and how they truly relate to the ideal of marching forever towards the free and equal “Promised Land.”[51]
Even in those national bastions of liberal constitutionalism, such as Great Britain and the United States, there have been “some clear and disturbing signs of a dwindling faith in our ability to manage the integration of the Third World into the First World.”[52] Our question here is why such manifestations should be seen as “disturbing.” Could it be possible that they might in fact be signs that western liberalism wishes to perdure and have its way of life survive long into the future. If Third World demographics do indeed pose a danger to western liberal institutions, then the sounding the “fire-bell in the night” in the midst of a largely somnolent population should be welcomed. Such an alarm should only be seen as “disturbing” in the sense of rousting one from sleep when one’s house is on fire, and not in the sense of upsetting those who claim a right to doze all day.
At one point in the recent past, the threat of World Communism was cause for alarm and the need for vigilance was stressed by many observers, not all of them by any means on the political right. This alarm was caused by the “disturbing” signs that we were heading for a communized world. But is it not possible that in the 21st Century world demographics could represent an even greater danger to the western liberal order than did World Communism back in the day?[53]
Unnatural Canada: Defence or Transformation
At one point in his The Patriot Game, Brimelow makes a distinction which catches our immediate attention. He states that as a follower of the specifically Goldwin Smith tradition of Canadian political thought, he takes the view “that Canada in its present form is an unnatural entity” (emphasis added).[54] Indeed, according to Brimelow the “ersatz nationalism” which is peddled in Canada reveals her to now have a “hollow heart.” This ersatz or “unnatural” nationalism and the confected multiculturalism accompanying it, “are actually mutually exclusive ideas.” In other words, for Brimelow there are “natural” nations and “unnatural” nations and Canada falls into the latter category. Fashionable or “nouveau” Canadian nationalism is not true or “natural” nationalism because it represents “a denial rather than an affirmation of the underlying reality.”[55]
Brimelow’s case here is that in principle any true nationalism seeks to “preserve and protect” the national culture, in this instance the Canadian one. But if this is allowed to be the case then any approval this nationalism might bestow on Ottawa’s new multiculturalist intentions means it is in fact accepting the changing of the country “out of all recognition.” This transformation might involve metrification, changing the flag and anthem, alterations to the practices of parliamentary government, redefining individual rights and the systematic encouragement of “massive immigration of totally divergent ethnic groups and the retention of their language and customs.” But “Either Canada’s culture is unique and must be defended, or it is wanting and should be transformed.”[56]
But Brimelow’s estimation of the distance between what is “natural” and that which is historically and self-consciously created and artificially engendered, is completely lacking amongst the “anglophone intellectuals.” These sophisticated types are more inclined to advocate a menagerie of incoherent political ideas. The tendency for such philosophes is to believe that nations are like individuals, and that people need only to be nice to each other. But such an alternative has been an unmitigated curse to English Canada, “rendering it helpless in its hour of need.”[57]
So when it comes down to it, Brimelow is prepared to state point blank that “it is simply unnatural that two nations should live together in the same state (Emphasis added).” For him it is simply a given that “the differences between Anglophones and Francophones are in themselves…quite sufficient to make conflict certain.” Moreover, “it can be predicted with absolute confidence that these difficulties are not going to go away.” With respect to the question of national unity, Brimelow says simply that “All issues of guilt or innocence, superiority or inferiority, are in the end irrelevant.”[58]
In other words, what Brimelow acquires by applying the adjective “natural” to political phenomena is a basis for socio-political prediction. On this view, what is astonishing is not that the two national communities locked into a single Canadian state should suffer from continual crises, but that “they (should) have got along so peaceably for so long.” Brimelow’s “naturalistic” approach allows him to conclude that in all reason, agreement to a “no-fault divorce” on the practical level would lower emotions and minimize recriminations between the two peoples. “Good fences make good neighbors – and sometimes even reasonably harmonious ex-spouses.”[59]
Charlottetown, Vienna and Paris: Karl Popper and Henri Bergson as Canadian Fathers
Another portion of Forbes’ study tends to support the thesis that, faute de mieux the foreign writers tend to be the best students of any given country. I refer here to Forbes’ discovery that none other than the Austrian Karl Popper and the Frenchman Henri Bergson may be seen as playing very roughly the same role for the “New Canadian Mind” as Locke, Hume and Montesquieu did for the early American equivalent. By bringing Popper and Bergson’s role in Canadian development to our attention, Forbes has opened our eyes to a whole new perspective on Canadian political thought, and in so doing has revealed the contradictory tendencies inherent in the specifically Canadian fund of philosophical ideas.[60]
That Forbes should find his way to Popper is not surprising given the profile he gives to “openness” as a new Canadian value. Forbes explains that Popper’s particular way of contrasting open and closed societies tended to strengthen (by rationalizing) existing loyalties to particular, prosperous, technologically advanced, open and national societies. Indeed, in the Canadian context Popper comes to sight not so much as the great proponent of the “Open Society” but rather as a kid of “nationalist”!! `
According to Forbes, it is Popper’s purpose to show that the necessary philosophical foundation for an open society has to be supplied by scientific knowledge. Popper says that a truly scientific political science “would recognize the value of clear and substantial variations in the values of its policy variables.” Only such variations (i.e., clearly different “experimental treatments”) can promise to reveal empirically (based on empirical data analyzed statistically) “the real effects of different policies and thus to discredit and displace as fast as possible the junk science of political ideologies.” Popper’s open society might be able to “relatively quickly develop a strong and comprehensive empirical theory of cultural accommodation.” This theory would be able to harmonize and integrate “backward traditional cultures, and competing world religions, but also different Canadian provinces.”[61]
For one possible reaction to the idea of a “Popperian” Canada outlined by Forbes we can turn to his mentor George Grant. This is a natural step for the obvious reason that there is no doubt as to George Grant’s influencing Canadian political culture over his long career and thereafter. In particular he represents the philosophical apogee of Canadian “Red Toryism” or “Socialist Christianism” or “Christianisme Marxisant.” And so we learn that Canada’s most noteworthy “nationalist” intellect is exceedingly cool to Popper, Popperianism and all that it entails.
Forbes observes of Grant’s Popper article that it sought to expose the very questionable assumptions of a thinker who was “then in vogue.” He explains that Popper’s “inflated reputation survived (Grant’s) forceful objections which were easily brushed aside by leaders of the profession in Canada. But Grant’s unorthodox conservatism – his way of combining fidelity to religious traditions with antipathy to domination of Canadian life by scientists and businessman – was welcomed in other quarters.” [62] Forbes’ attachment to Grant does not deter him from bringing Popper into the fold as a kind of “honorary” Canadian founding father.
Henri Bergson and the Universal Society
To discover that Karl Popper has played a role in the Canadian experience is perhaps not so surprising given the influence of his thesis of the “Open Society and Its Enemies” since WWII. But to discover that Henri Bergson is an honorary “Canadian Father” provokes some bafflement as to how Forbes might come to such an ingenious discovery. But my suspicion is that there is something of Roman Catholicism at work here. I say this for no other reason than that the impact of Bergson on Jacques Maritain, and Maritain’s ensuing impact on the tradition of Canadian thought in terms of Catholic philosophical theology makes the connection.[63] At one point Mrs. Maritain said of the impact of Bergson on her and her husband that “(he) restored philosophy to its own domain by showing that science and its procedures belonging thereto are completely inapplicable to it…At the time we were attending his lectures…we received the benefits of the horizons opened to us – away from the empty and colorless world of universal mechanism and toward the universe of qualities, towards spiritual certainty, towards personal liberty.”[64] Given Maritain’s influence on Canada, his wife’s remarks on Bergson seem to sustain Forbes’ case for the inclusion of the theorist of “Creative Evolution” as an honorary Canadian political thinker.[65]
Whatever the route by which Forbes came to the point of turning Bergson into an honorary Canadian, he presents him as not at all equating modern science with openness, and religion with closedness. Bergson rather tended to favour the opposite correlation. His handful of “moral heroes and mystics” who find ways of talking meaningfully about experiences of a more mysterious and religious character, have no place in Popper’s world. So it is that Bergson may be used to overcome the limitations of narrowly instrumental scientific reasoning by supporting our more protean ideals and intuitions of cosmopolitan justice.
Forbes’ Bergson represents a radical contrast between the principle of “openness” on the one hand and “closedness” on the other. Bergson seeks a level of openness that even Popper would find extreme. He sees his task as undermining all partial loyalties in favour of an overarching loyalty to all mankind as such. He seriously looks forward to the creation of an international “organism” that could “intervene with authority in the legislation of the various countries and perhaps even in their administration.”[66] Bergson’s ethic involves a transformation, or a kind of transcendence in the direction of universal belonging which early humanity inherited from the instincts of their evolutionary ancestors. But whereas in the past this unreconstructed instinct would “otherize” others and so turn them into “Outsiders,” it will now tend in the direction of a belonging and friendship which utterly “transcends the need for the enemy.”[67]
So in marked contrast to Popper, Bergson was not concerned to classify Britain and the United States as “open” societies. This was because these nations were content with their overall design and practiced only “piecemeal social engineering.” Bergson’s argument means nothing less than “Popperism’s” being necessarily wrong in its classifications. This is because other societies, similar in scale and complexity to Great Britain and the United States such as the Soviet Union, may have to be defined as “closed” because of the pressing demands involvedin pursuing “bigger and bolder political experiments.”[68] Thus, the fundamental distinction for Bergson is not between “open” and “closed” forms of society, but between the “Piecemeal” and the “Bold” systems of government. With this “Bergsonian” distinction in mind, the multiculturalist vision of the future then might be placed somewhere in the middle between a pragmatic rational politics and a bold, transformational politics that makes fewer concessions to the practical political world.
Stepping back for a moment to view the larger historical perspective it could be argued that even if the Canadian story be seen as an epochal one of onward movement through the thought of Bentham, Burke, Blackstone, the two Mills, Macaulay et. al. to the subsequent “modernized” liberalism of the Fabians and the progressives, so too has the new postmodern Canada moved onward to embrace philosophical “continentalism.”[69] Popper and Bergson disagree on some basic values even as Burke and Bentham did before them. And as was the case with Burke and the “Philosophical Radicals” back in the days of Canada’s political formation, they are at clear odds with each other on the fundamental question as it is related to Canada. When placed face to face Popper’s famous “Open Society” stands in stark contrast with Bergson’s “Universal Society.” Whatever the tides of modern philosophy that may have impelled Canada to pull away from her inherited past and turn towards a new future, she has done so with the end result of being no closer to unifying her riven philosophical foundations than she was at the outset.[70]
But however this must be, Forbes has reminded us that insofar as Canadian political culture involves a mélange of Grant, Popper and Bergson it is distinguished by any number of paradoxical philosophical recipes. There is “Empirical Mysticism,” “Metaphysical Positivism,” “Transcendental Materialism,” “Objectivist Subjectivism” and “Absolute Relativism”[71] to mention only a few. How much easier it would have been, if in the long term just as historically problematic, if Canada’s founders and thinkers had simply and wholeheartedly committed to the Enlightenment and the principle that the chief and only end of government is to protect “the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property” among human beings! (Madison, Federalist #10)
[1] Hugh Donald Forbes, Multiculturalism in Canada: Constructing a Modern Multiculture With Multicultural values (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2019)
[2] The issue here is illustrated when Professor Forbes tells his personal “bumper sticker” story. As it happened one of his academic reviewers simply did not believe that while driving the highways of Canada, Forbes had seen a bumper sticker that read “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” In other words, this particular academic reviewer was so self-confident that multicultural policies would never lead to a kind of unofficial but state encouraged sloganeering as distinguished from old-fashioned “proverbial” ones (like “Live Free or Die”) that he accused Forbes of professional dishonesty. But Forbes responds that even though “at least one scholarly reader of this manuscript thought I must be making it up” he nevertheless has “the photographic evidence of (the bumper sticker’s) existence.” Multiculturalism in Canada, pp.264-275.
[3] The difficulties which Forbes faced in getting his book published in Canada, reminds us of Peter Brimelow’s observation that Canada has an ongoing resemblance to “certain obscure sea creatures” who have “evolved vital organs outside its skeletal structure, in this case south of the 49th parallel…All roads lead to Rome, and all the vital organs Canada has developed outside its skeletal structure are trained on the United States.” The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities (Toronto: Key Porter Books,1986), p.12, p.99.
[4] Canadian Tommy Chong is famous for his marijuana movies, the most famous of which bore the title Up in Smoke (1978).
[5] “Series Editors’ Preface” Multiculturalism in Canada, p.viii
[6] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.xv
[7] Another possible approach is to suggest that Multiculturalism in Canada is the second volume of a two-volume work, the first volume of which is Forbes’ George Grant: A Guide to His Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
[8] Goldwin Smith, Canada and the Canadian Question (Toronto: Macmillan and Co.,1891); Andre Siegfried, The Race Question in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens University Press,1966); George Grant, Lament for a Nation (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press,2005); Peter Brimelow, The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities (Toronto: Key Porter Books,1986). There are for sure other “contenders” here which might include Janet Ajzenstat’s Discovering Confederation: A Canadian’s Story (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), Frank Underhill’s In Search of Canadian Liberalism (Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada,1960), Donald Creighton’s The Passionate Observer (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,1980) or Edmund Wilson’s O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1963). There are yet other books that might deserve consideration here if the bar for a “classic” were to be lowered somewhat. But if the applied criterion is “indispensability” then the above “Fab Four” should be the “automatics.”
[9] Thomas Powers wisely asks: “But then do we really need another ‘academic’ book on multiculturalism? Does not Forbes’s own survey of the academic theorists he treats demonstrate that his idea has now been talked to death?” “Review of Multiculturalism in Canada” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy Volume 47:2(2021):426. For Powers the short answer is “Of course we don’t need another ‘academic’ book on multiculturalism.” But Forbes’ study is the ne plus ultra in the field as he more or less puts all the other “academic” books on the subject to bed and renders them of no further serious use.
[10] One is tempted to paraphrase Dr. Johnson’s famous lines on Milton’s Paradise Lost as applicable to Forbes’ volume. “Multiculturalism in Canada is one of the books (where) the want of human interest is always felt and which the reader admires and lays down and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read (Forbes) for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.” “Lives of the Poets.” We might also ask here whether it is possible to have Forbes describe his own book by using the words he himself employed to characterize a book by Brian Barry: Forbes says: “Many will be tempted to dismiss his book as a typical example of intramural academic debate – pedantic squabbling that generates more heat than light. In fact, (Forbes’s) academic preoccupations seem to have obstructed and distorted his view of multiculturalism as a whole, which involves academic theories, to be sure, but which also involves ad hoc responses to important practical problems in particular circumstances, which need to be kept in view before the related theories can be rightly understood.” Multiculturalism in Canada, p.88. We certainly do not wish to lump Forbes in with Barry but when we place his book side by side with Brimelow’s The Patriot Game we find ourselves thinking that as Forbes is to Barry, as Brimelow is to Forbes.
[11] Forbes refers to the commentator Gilles Paquet’s remark that those who wished to challenge (multiculturalism) would inevitably have to adopt what he calls a “Trojan horse approach.” Paquet states that given that the moral rot of “moral relativism” has gone so far, “nothing less than a Cassandra-like denunciation has any chance to attract the necessary attention and to result in any significant change.” “Troy must not be, nor goodly Ilium stand?” Forbes then explains that Paquet ultimately opts for the “middle way in the form of a “refurbished and strengthened notion of citizenship” based on “an intermediate cosmopolitanism perspective.” Multiculturalism in Canada, p.275n6. Paquet’s approach could well be a stand-in for Forbes’ own. See Gilles Paquet, Moderato cantabile: Toward principled governance for Canada’s immigration regime (Ottawa: Invenire Books, 2012), p.28, p.31, p.54, p.80, p. 94.
[12] H.D. Forbes, George Grant: A Study of His Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). In his anthology of Canadian political thinkers Forbes includes Grant’s essay “Teaching What Nietzsche Taught.” H.D. Forbes ed., Canadian Political Thought (Toronto: Oxford University Press,1985), pp.433-444.
[13] Forbes differs from many outstanding Canadian scholars in that he “came home.” I know personally quite a few such people who removed to the U.S. deliberately and permanently for consciously political as much as professional reasons. In the case of one of them it was the return of Pierre Trudeau after the brief Joe Clark interregnum that prompted him to pack his bags. These Canadian expatriates found themselves living and working in the U.S. very much in order to escape the New Multicultural Progressive Canada that Forbes describes. The cost of this Canadian “Brain Drain” has been enormous in terms of excellence in the university, in classrooms and in Canadian policy development.
[14] Multiculturalism in Canada, p xx. One comes away from Forbes’ study with a fuller appreciation of the sense in which the globalist, internationalist, “non-nation” of Canada is nothing more than an instance of what Marshall McLuhan said was the “insularity, parochialism and complacency” of the “small (Canadian) village.” Peter Brimelow adds that “Only a shared North American parochialism and innocence of world history permits Americans and Canadians to think…that the relationship between the two countries is (not) special.” The Patriot Game, p.112. The point of Brimelow’s observation is that from an “external” point of view the Canada/U.S. distinction is akin to the distinction between Australians and New Zealanders or Ukrainians and Russians when viewed by someone who hails from neither country, i.e. they seem indistinguishable. But to some Canadians and Americans at least, their differences appear as great as those between the French and the Germans. I once had a Canadian insist to me that Canadian football was a totally different sport from the American game. See Brimelow, The Patriot Game, p.272, 275.
[15] Bloom also played an outsized role in the development of Janet Ajzenstat’s political thought further cementing his role as a Canadian “Father.” “Mr. Bloom gave me the instruction that guides my research to this day.” See Janet Ajzenstat, Discovering Confederation (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014),p.8, p.9, pp.23-24,p.32,p.60,p.62,pp.65-68,p.82,p.100,pp.129-130,p.134. Rainer Knopf and Ted Morton of the famous “Calgary School” also came under Bloom’s spell during their time at the University of Toronto to mention only a few. Much of the thinking that emerged in Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster,1987) was done while Bloom was resident in Canada.
[16] The names of Bloom’s well known students Thomas L. Pangle and Clifford Orwin may also be included with that of Bloom as having a long-term impact on Canadian philosophical thought as a result of their long tenures at the University of Toronto. Curiously enough, Pangle became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada during his ten years at the University of Toronto, but this is not the case with Orwin whose whole career of nearly fifty years has been built at that institution. In any case, for those who know the deep background of these things all roads lead to “The Master” – Leo Strauss. This Chicago philosopher’s remote impact on Canada has been enormous and qualifies him as an honorary “Father of Confederation.” On a strictly per capita basis, Canada could be described as the most “Straussianized” nation in the world. See Lou Bradizza, “Democracy in Canada: What Tocqueville Can Teach Canadians in David Livingstone ed. Liberal Education and the Canadian Regime (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens, 2015), pp.192-215. See also Peter C. Emberley and Waller R. Newell, Bankrupt Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1994).
[17] Brimelow, The Patriot Game p. 118
[18] Timothy W. Burns,” Multiculturalism: Democracy by Experts” Academic Questions 34:2(2021) p.123.
https://c2cjournal.ca/2020/08/the-united-states-and-provinces-of-red-north-america/
[20] Multiculturalism in Canada, pp.263-264. See Tasha Kheireddin and Adam Diafallah, Rescuing Canada’s Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution (HarperCollins, 2013).
[21] According to Forbes the latent opposition to multiculturalist policies “normally appears only in disguise” as, for example, “opposition to extreme multiculturalism” which allows for the conceding of “the essential rightness of the thing itself.” Multiculturalism in Canada, p.264. The founder of The Peoples Party of Canada, ex-Tory cabinet minister Maxime Bernier, has said “Trudeau’s extreme multiculturalism and cult of diversity will divide us into little tribes that have less and less in common, apart from their dependence on government in Ottawa. These tribes become political clienteles to be bought with taxpayers dollars and special privileges.” The PPC then “advocates for scrapping the Canadian Multiculturalism Act and reducing immigration to Canada to 150,000 per year” (CBC News, August 13, 2018) https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/maxime-bernier-extreme-multiculturalism-1.4783325
[22] Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn are deserving of special mention as they did yeoman duty against the New Canadian State. Their victory at the Human Rights Commission over the Mohammed cartoons issue became a step on the way to the revision of the Human Rights Code Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act was legislation designed to deal with hate messages. Complaints under this section could be brought to the Canadian Human Rights Commission and if the Commission found sufficient evidence, the case would be heard by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. The legislation was repealed by the Parliament of Canada in June 2014 when An Act to Amend the Canadian Human Rights Act (Protecting Freedom) was passed. This act repealed section 13 and received and passed third reading in the House of Commons by 153–136.
[23] Pierre Trudeau’s hatred for the late Peter Worthington went so far as to prompt him to send the RCMP to have him arrested for disclosing information contrary to the Official Secrets Act. “The CBC had already disclosed the information a few days earlier, but Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who truly couldn’t stand the Sun, nor Peter) moved to have our Fearless Leader arrested.” Rita DeMontis “A Trip Down Memory Lane” Toronto Sun (October 29th, 2021) https://torontosun.com/news/demontis-a-trip-down-memory-lane-inside-a-real-life-word-factory and “Pierre Trudeau’s damaged Canada” The National Post (March 31st, 2011) https://nationalpost.com/full-comment/peter-worthington-pierre-trudeaus-damaged-canada. Peter Worthington, “Whatever Justin Trudeau is, he isn’t his father” Toronto Sun (February 26, 2013) https://torontosun.com/2013/02/26/whatever-justin-trudeau-is-he-isnt-his-father
[24] One might supplement this observation by noting that the arrival of the American “Draft Dodgers” or “D D’s” on Canadian soil in the 1960’s and 70’s gave a huge impetus to left-wing politics and in general and traditional Canadian Anti-Americanism in particular. Consider: “It is hard to believe that our present antifascist movement would have sprung up in Canada without an increasing American presence.” Paul Gottfried, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,2021), p.23. On a personal note, I remember walking along Toronto’s Bloor Street in the snow with Jane Jacobs while she explained as how she removed to Toronto from New York City on account of her draft age son. I also remember walking along Bloor Street where the flyers on the hoardings along the way announced “DD’s – Get Landed!” Call: 416-123-4567. In those days, playing touch football at the Hart House’s back campus meant playing with lots of were “DD’s.” The number of prominent Canadian “critics” who are in fact American is legion. Or to make a long story short – the U.S. has had its nightly Canadian-born news anchor in Peter Jennings and its morning weather reporter in Canadian-born Janice Dean; while Canada has had her nightly American-born news anchor in Barbara Frum and her morning television from Canadian-born American Marilyn Denis. CNN has its Canadian financial analyst Ali Velshi and the National Post has its American born editor Diane Francis. Additionally, it should be noted that the “Calgary School” was very much a product of U.S. Imperialism given that Ted Morton and Tom Flanagan were American imports. It seems as though the two imperialisms need each other. Compare Al Capone: “Canada? I don’t even know what street that’s on” and Pierre Trudeau: “Where’s Biafra?” The Patriot Game, p.70. Those wishing to follow up on the “Can-Am” philosophico-ideological dialectic would do well to consult Forbes’ paper “Conservative Minds: Canadian and American: Comparing George Grant and Russell Kirk” Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (Concordia University, 3 June, 2010). See also Waller R. Newell, “A Fruitful Disagreement: The Philosophical Encounter Between George Grant and Leo Strauss” in Jeffrey A. Bernstein and Larissa Schiff eds., Leo Strauss and Contemporary Thought (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2021), pp.161-186.
[25] “Left-wing political correctness is an irritation and a nuisance. It becomes a threat to the young only when it invades the public schools…Right-wing political correctness…is a weapon with which small-town bigots, conducting pogroms.” – Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr Quoted in Michael Lind “Why Arthur Schlesinger’s Disuniting of American Lives On” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/books/review/arthur-m-schlesinger-jr-multiculturalists-monoculturalists.html (November 2, 2017). “Today, when ‘multiculturalism’ is all the rage, in England as well as in America, (but when pluralism) can be of no help and may even do harm in the struggle to prevent the balkanization of our common culture and the dissolution of its intellectual and academic standards….we see in the supine response of liberals to the diseased mutation of pluralism that is ‘multiculturalism.’” Norman Podhoretz, “A Dissent on Isaiah Berlin” “A Dissent on Isaiah Berlin” in Thomas L. Jeffers ed., The Norman Podhoretz Reader (New York: Free Press,2004), p.434. Commentary (February,1999)
[26] Mark Sedgwick, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2019).
[27] According to Heidegger “the great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other greats and who can transform it in an original manner.” Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume One (New York: Harper & Row,1979) Ch.6.
[28] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.xv. According to Peter Brimelow populist insurgencies are less likely in Canada than in the United States because of her “political structures” even as she has a populist tradition, most especially on the prairies.” The Patriot Game, p.168. As I write one of the greatest populist waves to have impacted any liberal country at any time is taking place in Canada with the “Truckers’ Protest” of the vaccine mandate regime.
[29] See Ronald S. Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Beiner is particularly concerned that the study of illiberal or anti-liberal thinkers or in his terms “Dangerous Minds,” is fraught with moral peril in this day and age. Beiner fears that Nietzsche can work magic on impressionable readers who might take his ideas to heart and seek to put them into some kind of contemporary practice. He argues that while “Nietzsche shared Aristotle’s aristocratic anti-commercialism,” “his allegory of the Übermensch, or ‘Superman,’ envisons a superior race of aristocrats who were free to create new values in the absence of God.” So it was that when Heidegger picked up Nietzsche’s torch he created a “Heideggerian” Nietzsche who illuminated “a world of hyper-nationalist men in uniforms, celebrating their Volkisch rootedness, fearing and despising others.” For Beiner it is a very dangerous world that can harbor such a vision and that world is “back in front of us” (and) “That’s why I wrote the book. I’m terrified.” https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/in-the-rising-far-right-philosophers-are-seeing-a-return-of-the-bad-nietzsche
[30] Ronald Beiner, “The rise, and apparent fall, of President Bannon” Inroads: The Canadian Journal of Opinion (Issue 41) http://inroadsjournal.ca/the-rise-and-apparent-fall-of-president-bannon/
[31] See Matthew Rose, “The Anti-Christian Alt-Right” First Things (March 2018). Rose identifies Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist as key Alt-Right influences. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/03/the-anti-christian-alt-right. Political scientist George Hawley conceded in a recent study, “Everything we have seen over the past year suggests that the alt-right will be around for the foreseeable future.” Making Sense of the Alt-Right https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Alt-Right-George-Hawley/dp/023118512X/?tag=firstthings20-20
[32] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.262. Forbes says that John Ralston Saul, in his On Equilibrium (Penguin Canada, 2001) “rightly distinguishes a merely static, evaluating balance (best symbolized, perhaps, by the scales that Justice is often depicted holding) from the more relevant ‘dynamic equilibrium’ needed by a progressive society with evolving values, in which, as he says, ‘the balance comes from the flow’” (Ibid).
[33] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.263. The rise of the “New Elite” to guide the “New Canada” into the future is the theme of both Forbes’ and Brimelow’s books. “Along with their newfound nationalist ploy, the Liberals had developed a crucial political asset in the shape of an emerging alliance of civil servants, educators and assorted media and political hangers-on – a social group that had appeared throughout the western world with the development of the welfare state and had become sufficiently powerful to assert class interests of its own.” The Patriot Game, p.18.
[34] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.263.
[35] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.266. “The strategy of internalizing ethnocultural rivalry and enmity has gone too far already for it to be called into question.” Forbes holds out no hope that the folly of multiculturalism can be restrained or reversed. Any attempt to rebalance this balance now would cause “untold pain and suffering. It is almost unthinkable.” Multiculturalism in Canada, p.267 (Forbes’ Emphasis). But surely this consideration involves Bentham’s famous “felicific calculus.” Is the “pain and suffering” of resisting multiculturalism greater or less than the “pain and suffering” that will ensure as the multicultural juggernaut rolls on. If it is greater, then we must acquiesce in our multicultural “End of History.” But if it is perceptibly not greater surely then, we have not just the right but the human duty to fight back against the multicultural “Leviathan” in any way we can and by any means necessary. As long as such efforts have the effect of minimizing the “pain and suffering” generated by the multicultural revolution then they would have to be accepted as just (at least on the utilitarian view).
[36] Multiculturalism in Canada, 266-267. Harsh, uncivil dissent “may sometimes have to be heard by a few experts and officials in order to sharpen their understanding and management of ethnocultural diversity” (Ibid., p.267).
[37] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.75.
[38] Forbes here assumes we will take multiculturalism’s “reactionary opponents” as being other than himself. But is he in fact “telegraphing” some of his own views in this characterization of the so-called reactionaries’ various convictions? Is he not concealing a right-wing “iron fist” under a kid-glove of “othering” the firm anti-multiculturalists?
[39] Multiculturalism in Canada, p. 265.
[40] Multiculturalism in Canada, pp.264-265. To be sure Forbes also characterizes the hard or extreme or “Alt-Right” position as “unnatural” in that it is one that involves wishing away serious problems and dreaming of a future that will never be. But Forbes has made it clear that he is not a “pure” positivist but more of a “metaphysical” one – which is to say he is with Aristotle in thinking that social science must not seek for more precision than the subject matter will allow. In other words, on his own grounds he should be very open to the possibility that the hard right’s claim, even in the absence of “conclusive proof” – if “conclusive proof” be taken to mean a demonstration via statistical methodologies, that diversity is a source of political instability and social division could be valid.
[41] For Forbes, those least sympathetic to multiculturalism might bridle if they were told by an eminent theorist that “difference as such is not a source of conflict.” If they saw bumper stickers with slogans to this effect they might just smile and reflect that there is no end to nonsense. “Differences of values and practices would create no divisions, they might agree, if we were all able to recognize, accept, and celebrate them all, but the inability to do so, they could say, is not just a psychological quirk calling for some new psychotherapy, but rather a logical impossibility that cannot be removed except by a lobotomy.” Multiculturalism in Canada, pp.264-265.
[42] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.261.
[43] Multiculturalism in Canada, p. xv, p. 265, p.267.
[44] Multiculturalism in Canada, 261. “Canadian journalists have had a greater tendency than their U.S. counterparts to abase themselves before cliques in the governing party.” The Patriot Game, p.66.
[45] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.266. If Norman Podhoretz is any guide then Forbes is and is not a “neo-conservative.” By this I mean he is in agreement with the neo-conservative opposition to affirmative action, but unlike Podhoretz’s neo-conservatives he chose not to fight it out with the Left in “hand to hand combat” from the “get-go.” “The neo-conservatives fought against affirmative action from the very beginning, and precisely on the ground that it represented a violation of the traditional liberal principle that every individual should be treated on his own merits as an individual and not as a member of a group. Here the neo-conservatives really were the true defenders of pre-1960’s liberalism in the face of a policy built on a rejection by the Left of a fundamental element of the liberal creed.” “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy” in Thomas L. Jeffers ed., The Norman Podhoretz Reader (New York: Free Press,2004), p.278.
[46] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.83
[47] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.83
[48] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.79
[49] Multiculturalism in Canada, pp.79-80. For a fuller views of Forbes’ views on the question of nature see his George Grant etc., pp.115-116, 118,125-126.
[50] “The moment the very name of Quebec is mentioned …the Canadian elite and its friends seem to bid adieu to common sense and behave with the fatuity of idiots.” The Patriot Game, p.216.
[51] At one point Forbes that some of his fellow-citizens will feel the anger within as a result of being “losers” in the multicultural game. He adds that if indeed such citizen anger is in fact the desired result of multiculturalist policies, it must be because the “incentive effects” are in fact foreseen. “What else, apart from inequalities of income and status, can be used to motivate our pilots and brain surgeons and a lot of other important people, like professors, to keep their minds on their jobs?” Multiculturalism in Canada, p.145.
[52] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.262.
[53] “The threat from a non-West which sees Sub-Saharan Africa posting fertility rates at five, six, or seven children per female (depending on location) to a West in which many countries have fertility rates at sub-replacement level.” See Multiculturalism in Canada, p.238.
[54] The Patriot Game, p.194-195. See Elizabeth Wallace, “Goldwin Smith, Liberal” University of Toronto Quarterly vol. 23 no.2 (1954):155-172 and Goldwin Smith: Victorian Liberal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1957).
[55] “If radicalism in Canada has to mean nationalism, then Canadian Nationalism has to mean radicalism. It is essentially a cover for a hidden agenda of unlimited social engineering, concerned not with the past but with the future, not with patriotism but with power. When scratched, Canadian nationalists turn out not to be true nationalists, but progressives of a familiar Anglo-American type. For them nationalism is ultimately an uncouth, reactionary and probably racist atavism, valuable only as a demolition tool.” Nationalism…is after all an elite fashion and Canada is so well provided for that, like the mandarin’s daughters, it will never have to earn a living.” The Patriot Game, pp.147. John W. Dafoe sated that “Nationalism is simply a stop on the way to Internationalism” and Anthony Westell followed up by noting “The real choice for Canadians is what role to play in the new supranational society.” The Patriot Game, pp.144.
[56] The Patriot Game, p. 143
[57] The Patriot Game, p.179
[58] The Patriot Game, p.187
[59] The Patriot Game, p.194-195. This was substantially the Jane Jacobs’ view also. See Ibid., p.201 and Jane Jacobs, The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2011).
[60] For Janet Ajzenstat the Locke connection is as fundamental for the Canadian experiment as it is for the American if not more so. See The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens University Press, 2007). The evidence would suggest that Forbes is not in agreement with her here.
[61]Multiculturalism in Canada, p.255n.23.
[62] Forbes, George Grant etc., p.8. See George Grant, “Plato and Popper” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 22(1954),185-194. “(I)t is undeniable that (Grant’s)politics were grounded in his Christian faith. And while young Canadian radicals did not share his pessimism, they did share his opposition to the American empire and the Vietnam War. Not surprisingly, some Christian radicals were interested in Grant’s ideas too; for example, on one occasion, George Grant spoke at a meeting of Brewster Kneen’s Christian Left group….(and his) Lament for A Nation (1965), inspired many young activists in the Canadian New Left (including) James Laxer, who claimed that Lament was ‘the most important book I ever read in my life.’”Bruce Michael Douville, The Uncomfortable Pew: Christianity, The New Left, and the Hip Counterculture in Toronto, 1965-1975 (PhD. Dissertation, York University, 2011) p.184, p.383. https://www.academia.edu/901149/The_Uncomfortable_Pew_Christianity_the_New_Left_and_the_Hip_Counterculture_in_Toronto_1965_1975_Title_Page
[63] Maritain’s first North American lectures were delivered at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1933. “Jacques Maritain, who is so closely associated with St. Michael’s, helped bring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to life by recognizing ‘the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.’” “Maritain and Manley” https://stmikes.utoronto.ca/news/maritain-and-manley-2
[64] “Introduction: Dante’s Innocence and Luck” in Houston Peterson ed. Essays in Philosophy (New York: Pocket Library,1959), p.457. See Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011).
[65] Walter Terence Stace notes: “If one were a Bergsonian, one might believe that nature deliberately put illusions into our souls in order to induce us to go on living.” Walter Terence Stace, Man Against Darkness, and Other Essays (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press,1967),p.11.
[66] Multiculturalism in Canada, p. 186
[67] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.196. Forbes notes here that a society thus transformed might need a sufficient supply of “enemies,” perhaps even some dangerously deviant “insiders” to satisfy the rigid instincts (the people) had inherited from “their wilder, exoskeletal ancestors.” He does not in this case refer to the famous Schmitt-Strauss debate on the human necessity for friends and enemies. See “Jens Meier Henrich and Oliver Simons The Oxford Handbook on Carl Schmitt (Oxford University Press, 2016)
[68] Multiculturalism in Canada, p. 186. “The first impulse to the anti-conceptualist, ant-intellectual, anti-pictorial point of view in philosophy was given by Bergson…With him we see the impulses of the evolutionary organic philosophy reaching the glorification of the consciousness in the abdomen…establishing a new revolutionary capital – the navel (which is) the enemy of the head, with its hated intellect.” Wyndham Lewis, Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot (London: Chatto and Windus,1923), p.177.
[69] Multiculturalism in Canada, p.186. Peter Brimelow makes a comment very relevant to Forbes’ presentation of Popper and Bergson’s roles as Canadian “fathers” and their dichotomous relationship as to the basics. He suggests that in the context of the Canadian socio-political theatre there has been a playing out of the endless battle between continental or “Cartesian” rationalism and Anglo-Saxon Lockean empiricism. As far as I know – no observer (other than Forbes in his Popper-Bergson account) has picked up on this theme and developed it fully. This might be because the philosophical divide constituted by the English Channel was historically overshadowed in Canada by the Roman Catholic-Protestant divide. Brimelow notes: “Appropriately for a man educated in the rationalistic tradition of France as opposed to the mindless Anglo-Saxon empiricism native to the majority of people he was to govern, Trudeau’s basic policies can be described as four “isms” – bilingualism, socialism, centralism and nationalism.” The Patriot Game, p.6
[70] See “Editors’ Preface” Multiculturalism in Canada, p.ix and Burns, “Multiculturalism: Democracy by the Experts” Academic Questions, pp.125-126.
[71] It might be wonderful that Forbes has discovered in Bergson a new Canadian “Father.” But it might not be so wonderful if this new Father’s legacy is more carefully considered. Wyndham Lewis, who knew a thing or two about Canada (See Adam Hammond, “Self-Condemned: Wyndham Lewis hated his native Canada, but his ideas helped shape the nation” The Walrus April 14, 2020 (https://thewalrus.ca/self-condemned/) and about Bergson, having attended his lectures in Paris, sees him as sinning “against the hard-edged ‘classical’ model of reality he (Lewis) favoured.” John Carey continues: “Bergson had privileged duree or fluid psychological time, over the strict limitations of clock time, and his account of the mind as a string of temporal happenings undermined the stable old-world concepts of personality…Bergson’s duree, and the welter of relativity theory seemed yet another erosion of solid, traditional, manly truths…(For Lewis) the great figures of history and the great works of art could not be reinterpreted or altered by succeeding generations…the modern idea that value judgments are relative, and culturally determined Lewis dismissed as a feminine invention.” John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, pp.187-188.
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