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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 6, 2007
I hate nanny
In my absence I see that the Conservative government I voted for has embraced a broad new “post-Kyoto” nanny-state environmentalist agenda, to head off competition from the environmentalist lunatics on the other side of the Commons floor. Also, that they have sunk in the polls -- having been trashed by the media for insufficient environmentalist zeal, and for insufficient sensitivity to the health and safety concerns of Islamist psychopaths caught red-handed by our military in Afghanistan.The sense that one is returning from vacation to a madhouse is on me again. The question of whether democracy was really such a great idea bubbles again to the surface. Not a serious question, of course. We are stuck with our system just as it has evolved -- representative government for a population that has been idiotized -- and there are only two ways forward. One is to somehow make the people smarter, so that they forcefully demand the elimination of government from all gratuitous nannying and redistributive functions, and its return to protecting us, more than passively, from our deadly enemies: both criminals at home, and aggressors abroad. In other words, we all agree to grow up, and to re-assume, at the individual and family level, the risks that come from having been born on this planet. And the other is to continue sinking. For I simply do not have the means to overthrow the existing regime and install something more sensible. Yet neither do I see a plausible way to claw back the Nanny State, by conventional political means. For we have all, to greater or lesser extent, grown into its machinery. No one agrees to be the first unplugged from its cumbersome and arbitrary and often morally malignant life-support apparatus. The whole machine will have to break down, before the people attached to it can be set free. In the meantime we feel compelled by the illusion that the machine is capable of perpetuating itself and preserving us -- even after we, the people, have largely ceased to have babies, or make net contributions to the tax furnace that heats the engine that drives the machine. It does not matter how we came to believe it, we have, in practice, all come to believe that “a massive, legalistic, micro-managing bureaucratic machinery under the direction of the most aggressive vested interests is the best way to secure the greatest decadence for the greatest number.” Do I sound like a libertarian? I’m not. It happens that the elimination of most of the government bureaucracy is a necessary precondition to the restoration of a sane social order. But that is to draw attention only to the negative, or destructive task. There is also a positive and creative task, which is to rebuild, through individuals and families, a social order in which good has some chance of triumphing over evil, or on the less spectacular days, better over worse. This means in turn rebuilding the Church, and the many allied, non-governmental institutions that reinforce a wise moral and spiritual order. For I am not among the naïve who think that men and women are naturally sanctified. Guidance we need, and will always need: but guidance in freedom, not an elected minder that makes all free choices on our behalf. The Church in its nature addresses adults, with counsel. The State in its nature addresses children, with force. It is for adults to regulate children, and not the State to regulate all. The “secularisation” of everything involves, necessarily, the idiotization of the masses, the reduction of human life to the conditions of a kindergarten in which we are told what to do and accept fatuous reasons. In America (our America; Canada is an American country), we had a population that would not be nannied, for a long time. This was chiefly thanks to pioneering conditions on a new continent, combined with the sort of immigrants we used to get from Old Europe -- the enterprising types, who did things for themselves, and were eager to assimilate. The continent is now settled. The proportion of our income that is taxed has gone from negligible to nearly half. In addition to the many enterprising immigrants -- and from all over -- a significant number are attracted chiefly by the welfare provisions of our Nanny State, demand support by right, and often refuse assimilation. Moral relativism and "multiculturalism" are established as public doctrines. The conditions have changed, and we have changed: "evolving" towards dissolution. And we can’t go back, in time, only forward. But would that we could choose our way forward, rather than having it chosen for us, by the fate that awaits any society whose members are unwilling and unable to act for their own good, or the common good. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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