Our inorganic Greens
Working my queasy way down the Oct. 19 ballot, I must also skip the Greens. Just as the Tories are fake conservatives, these guys are fake environmentalists. If only Turquoise were on the ballot.
Partisans of both may insist that environmentalism and conservatism are opposed, with conservatives keen to pave paradise and put up a mall and greens wanting us to eat moss in cold dark caves. But I say conservatism and conservation share linguistic roots because they are in natural harmony.
My conservatism is well-established, even if I’ve been voted off the island for denouncing the Harper administration’s betrayal of it. But I’m also environmentalist to the bone. Partly from spending childhood summers at a cottage without electricity or road access, I cannot be whole in big cities. Like Whittaker Chambers, I cannot flourish away from the land.
The cottage is not magical because I slack off there amid the products of modern industry, though I’ve been known to. It’s magical because I walk barefoot on the soil, swim in live lake water instead of the dead mockery of a swimming pool, fall asleep to the hum of insects and the calling of loons, not the hideous roar of traffic, and life is “slow” in Carl Honoré’s admirable sense.
I appreciate human ingenuity as much as the next person. But I shrink from neo-cons who think if man does not live by bread alone, Wonder Bread will do the trick. I truly would prefer the Middle Ages or, better yet, J.R.R. Tolkien’s organically conservative Middle Earth where electricity is unknown, machinery rare and hobbits live in harmony with external nature and their own.
The Greens simply don’t seem to share this vision. They’re just the NDP with a shiny green fig leaf over their orange nakedness. But socialism is a mechanical vision from the industrial age, centralist, modernist, brutal, standardizing.
In his manifesto Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher says “Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract.” Now there’s a core Turquoise principle, like preaching restraint, humility and limits. Yet the political Greens support compulsory unionization, national minimum wages and virtually every large-scale, arrogant, bureaucratic, soulless progressive left program.
Their peculiar appetite for state coercion would suit Saruman’s Isengard full of hammers and forges. But it would ruin the Shire. So where are the Greens on rural issues, including property rights that let individuals and communities fend off outside intrusion and develop in their own way?
Where indeed is their appreciation for the organic nature of a market economy, spontaneous, decentralized, full of odd enterprises occupying niches, one firm’s waste being another’s raw material, and a ceaseless unstructured process of mutual co-operation?
Yes, some pseudo-conservatives engage in bloodthirsty neo-liberal chest-pounding about cutthroat competition.
But the vast majority of firms are in symbiosis; a maker of, say, furniture has a few rivals but endless partners from varnish suppliers to insurance companies to supermarkets that feed their staff. It’s like the environment, man, whereas state planning backed by the policeman’s truncheon is harsh, brutal and unnatural. Imagine trying to centrally plan an ecosystem.
The Greens’ foreign policy, too, seems reflexively anti-Western, as though the environment were healthier in China than Canada, Islamists felt greater affinity to nature than Israelis and American nuclear weapons were more dangerous than Iranian ones.
Their social vision also strikes me as entirely inorganic, for instance their embrace of hate speech laws and tribunals. Rather than grasping that humans create cultural habits in a delicate, intricate dance of give and take, they reach for government Raid at the first sign of a pest.
It’s worse on sex. They deny natural differences between men and women, prefer state daycare to traditional parenting, and fiercely defend abortion, the horrifyingly inorganic chemical and surgical annihilation of women’s natural fertility. One can imagine such things in Mordor but not the Shire.
Likewise, Dreher says he and his wife avoid artificial birth control partly as faithful Catholics and partly because “‘Better living through chemistry’ is not a popular phrase in our house.”
If a corporation were doing to a river what “the Pill” intentionally does to women’s bodies, Elizabeth May would be leading the protest. Instead she’s pushing universal pharmacare instead of a lifestyle where we don’t need to force people to buy us endless happy and other pills to achieve false balance.
Where in all this shouting is Green respect for human nature (there’s that word again), unchanging, sometimes flawed, but with deep, organic roots? Why do they consistently side with what Tolkien called our world’s “orcs,” regimented, hateful and anti-life?
Their program is not organic and nor is their philosophy. It is small compensation that their granola is. The Green Party contains too many artificial ingredients to get my vote.
Their program is not organic, nor is their philosophy. It is small compensation that their granola is