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Douglas Farrow’s article “Kangaroo Canada”, published in the August / September issue of First Things, offers a brief but incisive reflection on the human rights complaints against Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn, Stephen Boisson, and Catholic Insight.
The full online text is behind a subscriber wall, but I’ve purchased a paper copy and here reproduce the concluding paragraphs, in which Farrow broaches the bigger question of why the authoritarian “human rights” agenda has garnered such widespread allegiance in contemporary Western societies.
[A] more important question is how the whole idea of rights has been transformed into a cover for monstrosities like the HRCs—for an intellectual, moral, and juridical violence that has turned rights into the enemy, rather than the friend, of basic human freedoms. That question has an answer too long to attempt here. Even to raise it, however, is to bump up against a curious fact: The mainstream media, for the most part, has turned a blind eye to this violence, even where it threatens (as in the Levant and Steyn cases) the freedom of the press.
The explanation for that, I think, lies in the myth that the concept of human rights is entirely a modern invention—and an invention that defines the morality of our own secular age. The thought that the very foundations of our morality should prove so flimsy is more than we can bear. Are we not the great generation of rights? The truth is, of course, that authentic human rights discourse belongs to a tradition that the West has now largely discarded, and that what passes for that discourse today is something else.
The threat that this something else poses can scarcely be overestimated. Those in Canada who think that repealing Section 13 will solve the problem are mistaken (although that would be a good first step); likewise those in America who think it will be enough if the creation of HRCs, which some states are considering, is prevented. A society with a bad conscience, we may be sure, will always find ways to police speech and pursue thought crimes.
And we do have a bad conscience. Not merely because we have broken with the past but because we have committed ourselves to the obvious absurdity of claiming that pluralism is our only norm, multiculturalism our only cultural foundation, diversity our only basis for unity, and tolerance our highest virtue.
Tolerance the highest virtue. That goes a long way to account for the spectacle of intolerance that Canada has been offering to the world.
Farrow’s rumination has clear affinities with Binky’s recent elfnote that we are all seeking a kingdom, and that HRC people seek to establish an earthly utopian kingdom. But would that utopia be a land of liberty or tyranny? Dr Farrow’s line of argument implies the latter. Binks and I and many other Canadians would agree.
Douglas Farrow is associate professor of Christian Thought at McGill University and author of several books, including Ascension and Ecclesia and Nation of Bastards.
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