By Christopher DeMarcus (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 30, 2013
Ron Dart is a prolific writer and thinker, publishing over 20 books and countless articles. He has been part of UFV since 1990, teaching political science and religious studies.
Dart’s recent book Keepers of the Flame: Canadian Red Toryism arrives as we approach the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, a moment in time that also marks a distinct change in Canadian and American relations: the 1962 election in Canada was highly influenced by the Kennedy administration, and the end result was further assimilation of Canada into the American empire.
Why have you done a book about the red tory tradition?
In one sense there is a counter to cultural amnesia in my work. I’m putting the historical pieces of the drama back together again, replaying the play. I was contacted by a press in Quebec and asked to cobble together a variety of essays that tell the red tory tale.
In the manifesto section of the book you lay out an ideal political ideology for the problems we face in modernity. Why don’t more people embrace red toryism as a political view?
I tried to condense the ideas in the manifesto because I’m often asked, “can you compress what this tradition is all about?” In doing a manifesto I’m thinning out a very complex tradition by giving people a teaser, an entranceway in.
The dominance of the blue tories and the cultural amnesia of the past has resulted in the red tory tradition being scattered like a broken Ming vase. Parties pick up elements of it; the Greens have the ecological and environmental elements.
If you read high English romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Southey, they were at the forefront of ecology and they were all high tories. As poet laureates of England, they had a great impact on Canadian thought.
But when people study those poets they often only study their literary side, not the political.
It seems the voice of the poet has turned into a whisper in the modern age. Does Canada, being a newer country, lack the great historical poets than England had?
We have the four great confederate poets (Charles Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campell Scott) who were also profoundly ecological. But many people choose not to study Canadian literature, or if they do, they ignore its politics. Then you get literature reduced to aesthetics. When in fact the geniuses of our literature were poetic, metaphorical, political and profoundly ecological.
Some students are completely dismissive of red toryism. Is that a consequence of progressive liberalism?
It comes as a threat to the economic, social, and political power elites. If people have amnesia they can’t talk back, they don’t even know what the story is of a nation or western civilization.
And Canada participates in the much bigger story of western civilization.
Looking at how we emerged from part English, part French, and part First Nations traditions; the English were an empire, the French were an empire. So Canada participates in a global history as the child of imperial cultures. And our First Nations history stretches out, as some argue, from Russia. There are huge connections between us [and] the world; the French are in Africa and the English are in India, and we’re connected to it.
The dominant ideology is progressive liberalism, which is history as progress. If we’re somersaulting forward, why would you do back-flips that ask where we are going? When people buy into that without thoughtful insight, they don’t want to hear about the past. It’s dead to them.
But the reason we study these men and women from the past is because they might have seen things that we don’t see. Modernity has revealed, but concealed much. What it has concealed the ancients reveal.
Has red toryism always been with us in the West in different forms?
When you think of the West, it grew out of the great clash between Plato and Aristotle. That agon has always been there.
The red tory tradition is deeply grounded in Plato rather than Aristotle. And you find it being worked out by Christian thinkers from both the Catholic and the Orthodox. It begins to fall in the 16th century with the Protestant reformation. That is when you get the spearhead of principles like liberty, individuality, quality, choice, willing, making, and creating.
Red toryism is a counter-culture now, but historically it’s always been a polyphonic element in the conversation.
Technology is supposed to enhance our memory, but do you think in some ways it erases the lessons from history?
The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt challenged the drift in western civilization towards this driven, active, hyper-rationalism which renders people as victims of their own drivenness. They get put in the cage of rationalism like hamsters on a wheel, running faster and faster, but going nowhere. They become incapable of being attentive.
The deeper traditions give priority to the contemplative; slowing down, being still, listening. Contemplation is the highest quality in Plato, Aristotle, and Christian theology. Classical philosophy is not about playing logical games, it’s contemplative.
There is value in the Protestant work ethic, but it has gotten dumbed down to only a work ethic, then to simply work without ethic which becomes the busyness of amusement. From that we get a pop culture which is really a reduction of Protestantism on steroids. Or as T.S. Eliot says, “People are diverted by diversions through diversions.”
Do you think contemplation can be mislabelled by pop culture as a disorder, that critical thinkers are written off as depressed when they are just more awake?
I think that the artists and deep philosophers, the people who love wisdom, have the risk of getting marginalized because they don’t conform to the culture of mindless entertainment.
Metaphorically speaking, many people are lobotomized: there’s nothing there.
Is that the job of the university, to prevent the removal of memory?
I think the arts and humanities are under attack by business on the one hand and a scientific paradigm on the other. Often the way universities survive is by saying, “Look what good scientists we are and look what fine capitalists we produce.”
But the humanities are able to probe deeper to keep the university healthy. It’s like a toothache – you can take drugs to numb the pain, but the pain is a signal for a deeper problem. The philosophers and the poets are the pain. The pain is a gift, illuminating that something is wrong. Poets are the voice of cultural conscience, but they can be dismissed because they are seen as agony and suffering. They see the problems. Seeing has consequences.
Do you think progressive liberalism will remain the dominant ideology?
Progressive liberals are getting what they want on their yellow brick road, but they’re not liking where they end up. The intellectual food they are being given isn’t satisfying. [George] Grant called this “intimations of deprival” and [Charles] Taylor called it “a malaise.” Something doesn’t feel right. Sure, we have all the perks, the toys, all the amusements and diversions. But the soul longs for more.
We’ve used reason and will to make the world as we want it, and now we’re dealing with nature speaking back: “You pollute me, I’m going to pollute you!” And at some point, you wonder, is this train I’m on really going to take me to the utopia it promised? This doesn’t feel right and I’m being polluted. I’d better get off this train, or maybe we can put some steel in the wheels.
