Peter Menzies: What Canada Needs Is a Strong Foundation in the Country’s Roots

Commentary

Back when Saturday newspapers were regularly threatening to cross the 200-page threshold, the one I worked at developed a robust section called “Ideas.”

We did that because I thought ideas were important things that had shaped our past and were about to carve out our future. At the time—around the turn of the century—the battle of ideas that had shaped the 20th century appeared to have come to a close. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama even famously and perhaps prematurely declared that we had reached the “end of history.”

Analyses of economies within the former Soviet bloc countries showed that central planning had generated far less productivity—about one-third—compared to that powered through free enterprise. That surprised many economists who had supposed the margin to be more narrowly in favour of free markets.

So, not only did this clear victory explain the collapse of the Soviet Union and its proxies within the Warsaw Pact, it appeared to settle the capitalism versus communism/socialism debate. Marxism was dead. Even the Communist Party of China shifted its economic approach, albeit without flinching on its affection for Maoist authoritarianism. Democracy in the Middle Kingdom, according to the optimistic among us, seemed inevitable.

We were wrong. As I recall pointing out at the time, Marxism might indeed have been dead but Marxist thinkers and ideas sure as heck weren’t. They were alive and kicking, and exerting influence within our institutions and social/environmental movements.

In a great many cases, they wound up controlling these institutions and movements, and, as a result, the national narrative. The Long March, as Chairman Mao famously referred to his triumphs, continued across Canada. The ideas persisted, just in different forms.

Incrementally, the leaderships of many public service unions, teachers’ associations, universities, and even the judiciary often adopted increasingly radical victim-versus-oppressors approaches rebranded as “wokeism” in their work. Articulating radical ideas as moderate and sensible ideas as extreme was achieved with considerable ease, largely thanks to the speed with which mainstream media outlets complied with requests to adopt the movement’s preferred terminology.

At the same time, negative thoughts and words regarding the power of the new influencers on the playing field of ideas were punished by accusing those who spoke and wrote them of suffering from any number of psychological pathologies. Those, in turn, inspired cancel culture—essentially a soft form of Stalinism which, instead of a bullet to the back of the head, intimidates through destroying careers.

Meanwhile, criticism of traditional cultural structures and institutions wasn’t aimed at improving them so much as it was designed to erase them.

This strategy, this Long March, has been so successful that many decision-makers today are a product of a system that has abandoned the traditional foundations of Western democratic thinking.

Those foundations, of course, involved almost 2,000 years of Christian intellectualism, which has now been under attack in Canada for at least two generations. As fewer people attend church, fewer have its teachings as a foundation for the formation of their thinking.

This was illustrated recently by the criticism levelled at comments made by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio regarding the need to preserve Europe’s traditional culture, with some calling his remarks apparently pejorative and suggesting that diversity and human rights are the defining features of Canada’s culture.

With great respect, while those are not insignificant features of life in our societies, they are not foundational. They are soulless outcomes. The genesis of human rights is found within the contention that all men are created equal and Christ’s revolutionary view that the last will be first and vice versa. Similarly (Tom Holland does a masterful job on this in his book, “Dominion”), faith affiliation is not dependent on race or ethnicity. While this isn’t an exclusively Christian perspective, it is one that emerged from Christianity and remains key to its global appeal.

Canada was founded in its modern form primarily by people representing two traditions, one French and another British. They adhered to two different brands of Christianity: Roman Catholic and Protestant. You can call that respect for diversity if you choose, but the shared base was a compatible belief in Christ.

That may not be the case anymore, certainly not in Quebec, which is an aggressively atheistic society that maintains faith has no role in the public square. And we appear to have at least come some distance from the official view of seeing Canada as bereft of a common culture.

But as leaders in Italy, Hungary, and elsewhere in Europe declare pride in their society’s Christian roots and traditions, Canada denies them. People are of course free to believe whatever they wish, but without a shared intellectual foundation—a common set of beliefs that go to the soul—there is nothing upon which to build or hold the country together.

That’s why ideas matter.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.