In my last essay, I had some words to say about why Canada was uniquely susceptible to becoming one of the world’s pre-eminent Wokeistans. Because it was near the end of a 3500-word behemoth of an essay, rather than making you find it in the original text, I shall just begin by reposting it here:
In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.
Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.
Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.
This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.
Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionistic self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.
Many found this section to be the most engaging part of the essay because it helped to account for what Canadians are experiencing as a unique vulnerability to the most bizarre forms of Woke social and political behaviour and the lack of any apparent cultural or institutional capacity to resist them. But I cannot let this story of Canada’s incomplete or superficial secularization stand as a sufficient, or even primary, explanation of the state of my country.
For one thing it does not account for the fact that Canada is not one nation sticking out within the Global North put part of a particular set of places that exhibit near-identical vulnerabilities to and comorbidities with the key themes and obsessions of Wokeness such as a celebration of censorship, placing certain groups of perceived villains (e.g. “TERFS, Zionist Jews, etc.) outside the social contract and state violence monopoly, essentialization and fetishization of race, combined with a theory of sex and sexuality primarily premised on some combination of the Emperor’s New Clothes and the Mister Potato-Head Fallacy.
If one thinks of Wokeness like Dante’s circles of Hell, Canada is not the only member of the outer circle. Out here with us are Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; the next most dramatically Woke places are Wales and Scotland and it is only then that places outside the Anglosphere enter the running, with Norway, Germany, Mexico and Brazil. Yet, although first target and most heavily invested-in in the progressive authoritarian project, the United States and England have, after many early capitulations are looked-to, the world over, as places where social movements, from feminists to Muslims to conservative Christians, are offering some of the strongest, most courageous grassroots pushbacks against Wokeness.
Clearly, there is some relationship between Wokeness and the Anglosphere but one that is complex and must be thoroughly understood because, understanding the variegated susceptibility of English-speakers to Wokeness, can reveal important things to us about progressive authoritarian identitarianism.
Now, to past! In Richard Bushman’s most underappreciated book, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, the grand old man of American history reminds us that hijacking revolutions is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. Indeed, it is in the nature of revolutions to inevitably be hijacked. That is because a revolution must assemble a substantial majority of the population to succeed; the vast majority of a population has to believe that rolling the dice on a revolution is more likely to improve their lot than not for one to happen.
The Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution originally included socialists, students, feminists, liberals and all kinds of people it would eventually turn on. Similarly, Lenin’s, Mao’s, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s, Robespierre’s, Castro’s and most other successful revolutions entailed the assembly of a vast and variegated groups of constituencies with conflicting interests but who found the destruction of the regime to be a shared interest.
It should not surprise us, then, that the first modern revolution, Washington’s Revolution was just this sort of thing. Bushman exposes, in his study of war propaganda from the 1770s and 80s that people favouring the creation of an independent liberal republic in America were a small portion of revolutionaries who fought in the American Revolution but were over-represented in the military and political leadership largely thanks to George Washington’s personal sympathies with liberalism.
When the British Empire conducted a ruthless internal inquiry as to how they lost the Thirteen Colonies, not a thing every empire can do, and a significant cultural reason that British Empires have been global hegemons for the past 260 years, a quarter of a millennium, they engaged in a truth-seeking process more interested in imperial success than protecting decision-makers. Their conclusion: the reason they had lost America was that they had made the mistake of settling it with Englishmen.
The British Caribbean, full of Irish indentured servants and Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Québec, populated primarily with French Catholic colonists, had not joined the revolution because its master discourse was not a doctrine of republican liberal independence but the assertion of the Common Law right, granted all Englishmen, to rise up against and slay the king’s evil courtiers who have falsely counseled him into misgovernment.
In other words, most American revolutionaries were as bewildered as Iranians in 1980 and Russians in 1918. They had risen up, as loyal subjects of King George, to slay his evil counselors based on their rights as free Englishmen, propounded in every constitutional document from the Salic Law to Magna Carta.
So, the British Empire made an important decision: henceforth, no colony would be run by Englishmen; it would be run by a group the British had already colonized, a group already disentitled, and members of that group already comfortable in the role of stooge. That’s why Canadian British imperial pageantry is full of kilts, bagpipes and tartans… or at least it was until Justin Trudeau’s raceplay fetish got control of it and filled it with Vanishing Indians and settlers doing Aboface, with their drums and feathers.
So, the British Empire re-thought Ireland. The people to colonize Ireland were not the English but the Irish Scots, Scots who, for one reason or another, factual or not, believed that they were the true, pure Irish. Not a surprise in an era governed by the discourse of fictive etymology to re-describe the Irish colonial project not as Englishmen civilizing the Irish but as the Ulster Protestant Scotsmen returning to their homeland and reclaiming it.
Have you ever wondered why Indian accents sound so similar, whether the native speaker speaks an Indo-European/Aryan language from the North or a Dravidian/Tamil language from the South, like Malayalam? There is a reason for that: the thing that unites Indian accents from Kerala to Punjab is the “Welsh lilt.” Because the Welsh, like the Scots, people conquered by the English, were disproportionately sent to India.
In this way, every post-1787 white settler state in the Anglosphere (New Zealand, Canada, Australia) was colonized by an already-colonized people, as was Ireland, the original template for the project. The US, Scotland and Wales were merely, as so brilliantly expressed in Trainspotting, merely colonized by the English, who are wankers. But what happens when those colonized by wankers colonize others?
I would suggest that our deep colonial consciousness causes a constitutionally supine nature to enter a populace that has never even met its oppressor but instead only encounters, as authority figures, members of peoples also conquered by its oppressor. This also helps to explain the cases of Mexico and Brazil. Brazil, it must be remembered: produced the greatest black slave-hunters in the world, escaped and manumitted African slaves in Brazil who still had enough cultural knowledge to sail back to Africa and enslave African war captives in the Sertão around Luanda (the first place to legally define whiteness as—the possession of shoes).
This supine nature suffuses the cultures of the outer Anglosphere. It is no coincidence that the strong leaders of Canada’s twentieth century were overwhelmingly from outside Anglo culture, Laurier, St. Laurent, Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien all grew in French-majority communities that threw off the culture of stoogery during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, to declare that Quebecois were “masters in our own house.”
Anglo Canada, Australia and New Zealand, furthermore, are all places designed to toady to whoever the hegemon is. The position of stooge transcends one specific empire. Once the British Empire entered terminal decline, all three rapidly realigned their politics to serve the interests of the United States over the interests of Britain. And it is no coincidence that, since the Chinese Empire has regained its belligerent swagger under Xi Jinping, each of these countries has had a major Chinese political interference scandal, in which their national governments were beginning to hedge their bets, and, not knowing whether to kowtow to Washington or Beijing, began doing both.
Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand are proceeding in lock step to return to their colonial past, transferring power from democratic institutions to technocrats within government or within the regulated oligopolies with which their governments are fusing. All three are increasingly in love with censorship, gun control and the transfer of parental rights to the state. Unlike Westminster, parliamentarians have discarded all pretense of representing their constituents to the government and now brazenly represent the government to their constituents, always voting with the party whip and belittling local voters who demand better as victims of “Russian disinformation” or bigots.
And it is not so much that these countries are becoming newly authoritarian. It is that their essential nature, carefully baked-in by the nineteenth-century British Empire is coming to fore. This is how they are designed to respond to stress, uncertainty and threat; they are returning to their roots, rediscovering their inner toady and petty enforcer. What was mistaken as cultural conservatism in these countries a hundred ago is being mistaken as a kind of illiberal cultural liberalism today. But the reality is that these things are both simply expressions of fundamental weakness, a desire to conform, a desperation for approval from whoever appears to hold the hammer, a nature intentionally built into these societies from their founding.
Progressive Canadians and New Zealanders, especially, are playing up their white guilt colonizer myths to histrionic proportions. There are many reasons for this, which I have been exploring on this blog for more than five years. But let us not discount what this myth is being used to obscure: that Canadians and New Zealanders were never the big, tough, warlike colonizers we have made our ancestors out to be. Part of the core of the myth of intentional genocide is a myth of our colonial ancestors possessing a strength and a ruthlessness they never did. We love to compare ourselves to Israel these days because part of us wishes our nation had been forged by truly great men, by powerful, ruthless, proud figures like David Ben Gurion and not a bunch of colonial administrators and mediocre lawyers at a genteel booze-up in Charlottetown.
To turn things around the people of the Outer Anglosphere must finally find their courage. At its core the crisis we face is not an information problem; it is not an ideological problem; it is not a public opinion problem; it goes much deeper. It is a problem of courage.
