Diversity is Not Our Strength

 

Yesterday in Saint John, there were two opposing demonstrations scheduled: the second One Million March for Children, protesting sexual orientation and gender ideology in the schools, and “Love is Louder than Hate,” demanding sexual orientation and gender ideology in the schools. All over Canada, there are large demonstrations protesting the genocide of Jews by Hamas in Israel, and competing demonstrations protesting the genocide of Arabs by Israel in Gaza. And this on top of the longstanding demonstrations for and against abortion.

Opposing demonstrations are not in themselves alarming. But these positions seem irreconcilable. There seems to be no room for calm debate or compromise. After all, to the one side, it looks like the other side is committing genocide. To one side, it looks like the other is trying to harm their children. 

It looks like civil war is coming inevitably closer all the time, and seems the necessary ultimate result. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Sooner or later, here or somewhere, competing demonstrations are going to clash violently, there will be a body count, there will be calls for vengeance, and the fighting will spread. One thinks of “Bleeding Kansas.”

The underlying problem is that we have lost or abandoned all our shared values or principles. Any society needs shared values to function: some underlying set of shared premises from which to argue and eventually come to an agreement. We used to all agree, or nearly all agree, on Judeo-Christian principles and the principles of liberal democracy. Now a large portion of the population no longer do.

The only way to prevent a civil war is either a wholesale return to these values, or general adoption of some new set of shared premises. Marxism offered one, based on material progress and “dialectical materialism”; but, leaving aside its philosophical flaws, Marxism has surely by now been discredited in practice. Bad things happen wherever it is tried. Nazism offered one, a new morality based on the Theory of Evolution; but I think we can agree that did not turn out well. Islamism is one current candidate; but the state of the Muslim world does not inspire confidence.

I vote for a return to Judeo-Christian principles and the principles of liberal democracy. To be clear, that means restrictions on abortion, absolute preference for Christian and Jewish over Muslim immigration, and no mention of sexual orientation or gender ideology in the schools.