The distinction implied in my title is the fundamental distinction separating “liberals” from “conservatives,” the latter contending that, whatever the circumstances of our lives, we must all be held accountable for our actions, the former, given to Marx’s “materialistic determinism,” exonerating even acts of horrific violence on the grounds that their “oppressed” perpetrators were the victims of circumstances which left them no other choice.
An article in the Sept. 10 edition of my local newspaper insists on the validity of Critical Race Theory, pointing out that while the Indigenous comprise only 5% of Canada’s general population, they represent 32% of its imprisoned criminals. The same sort of statistics apply to America’s Blacks. The implication, of course, is that racism is at work here, that the White Supremacist legal machine arrests and convicts non-Whites in a grossly prejudicial manner. One would be a fool to suggest there are not racists operating within our legal systems, both in Canada and the U.S.. It is unequivocally true, however, that Indigenous and Black people break the law at an inordinately higher rate than their White contemporaries. This is a fact and not some ignorant, populist delusion!
One wonders if Cole Gately, the writer of the article cited above, is aware of the Gladue principle, an edict validated by Canada’s Supreme Court in 1999 which, in response to the 1995 murder of her common-law husband by a Cree woman, Jamie Gladue, mandated that Canadian courts needed to consider the historical oppression to which our Indigenous have been submitted in passing sentence on anyone of that ethnicity. Indigenous women are violated at a significantly higher rate than White women, most often by Indigenous males. But the Gladue ruling suggests the latter ought to be spared harsh legal repercussions inasmuch as their forefathers may have been abused 100 years ago in one of our Residential Schools. Really, think of the “logic” of this typically “liberal” piece of legislation.
Yes, many of Canada’s Indigenous as well as America’s inner-city Blacks grow up in truly deplorable conditions. But while injustices, both past and present, are to some extent responsible, there is no doubt that both the continuing poverty and high rate of criminality within both those demographics is exacerbated by the Culture of Victimization endorsed by the Left, a culture which implicitly exonerates them of any responsibility for their situations. Whereas self-knowledge is essential to a Moral Mode of Being, those who mindlessly don the mantle of Victimization rarely look inward, indeed feel entitled to vent even the most destructive of their urges in reaction to their “oppression.” Hence, for example, the gang warfare, drug abuse and wanton sexual promiscuity evident amongst a significant percentage of the young Black males of inner-city America, theirs a culture which inevitably results in high levels of fatherless children who will ultimately be sucked into the same vortex of criminality.
But it is interesting, is it not, that millions of People of Color who grew up in similar circumstances have managed to prosper, educating themselves, getting jobs and ultimately sharing in the freedom, affluence and happiness available to all law-abiding U.S. citizens. The same is true of hundreds of thousands of Canada’s Indigenous. Do such facts not impugn the very basis of the Left’s Deterministic narrative? Is it not obvious to anyone but an abject sentimentalist that it is the Inner Life of Man rather than the material circumstances by which he is confronted that is the ultimate determinant of most every Individual’s fate?
As Covid was surging in Aug. 2020, the front page of the same “woke” Hamilton Spectator featured the following headline: “City’s COVID cases divide along race, income lines.” It turns out that infection rates in poorer neighborhoods were as much as 80% higher than in the city’s more affluent regions. Just in passing, the article’s author points out that failures in the educational realm were similarly skewed. But while his implication is that poverty was the primary cause of such disparities, is it not reasonable to conclude that the very qualities which led the impoverished to be so in the first place were also the cause of their higher rate of infection and academic failure? Absurdly, a pragmatic approach to life, one grounded in personal responsibility, has come to be impugned by the Left as merely a White, Patriarchal, Capitalist prejudice. Poor people are not poor because they have failed to behave responsibly. No, they are poor because “the system” has oppressed them. But why would their economic status lead them to be infected with Covid at almost twice the rate of others? While I can see how their living conditions might impact such statistics, was it not made perfectly clear to all from the very beginning of this pandemic what they needed to do to stay safe? Is donning a mask and keeping one’s distance from strangers significantly more difficult for those of lesser income? Or is the thrust of the article in question and indeed the contemporary Left in general so absurdly superficial that it simply dismisses the impact of “character” on the Human Dynamic?
At no point have I endorsed a callous disregard for the plight of the poor, a characteristic typically ascribed to “conservatives.” But if programs designed to assist those in our lower socioeconomic echelons succeed with some but not with others, is it not fair to assume the latter are probably the victims of their own the moral/intellectual shortcomings? During the regime of the horridly “conservative” Stephen Harper, hundreds of millions of dollars were directed towards the plight of Canada’s Indigenous. I have no problem with such expenditures. When it seemed to Harper that much of that money was being purloined by various Tribal Chiefs at the expense of their own people, he sought to legislate greater clarity in the history of those dollars. He was predictably denounced as a racist for the very suggestion that Indigenous leaders might be motivated by greed. Such is the naivete if not stupidity of the contemporary Left, a regime apparently convinced that superficial categories such as Race, Gender, Skin Color, etc., rather than Moral/Intellectual Integrity, ought to be the informing principle of their “progressive” world-view.