FORSETH: The decline of Canadian courage and the struggle to get it back

In 1978, the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a commencement address at Harvard, warning about the loss of national self-confidence and will. “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today,” he declared.Those words still bear the ring of truth. The enemies of democracy seem to be full of passionate intensity — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Nicolás Maduro and others including non-state radicals within Canada itself. Meanwhile, those who try to defend civil norms can seem like the Reform Party MPs who opposed the Laurentian Elites and the corruption of the Liberal Party. It was honourable and decent work, but lacking for a time, the strength to unite and overcome the divisions.Conservative democratic capitalism is not an abstract idea. It rests upon the past success of real people in real communities who strived for fuller and more dynamic lives.For lessons from history, the rise of old Dutch economic strength in the 16th century was more than economic success. Culture flourished from civic and political stability built around somewhat decentralized power and a relatively egalitarian culture that included moral restraint from Dutch Calvinism. It encouraged self-discipline and norms that put limits on the display of wealth.The next leap forward occurred in Britain. In the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of the late 1680s, a Dutchman, William of Orange, became King of England and helped import some of the evolving Dutch political institutions, ushering in a period of greater political and religious moderation. The pattern was that technical and economic dynamism went hand-in-hand with cultural creativity, political reform, agriculture technology and a moral revival.British inventors and tinkerers such as James Watt perfected the steam engine. From 1770 to 1870, real British wages rose by 50% and over the first half of the 19th-century British life expectancy greatly increased. The great political reform acts in the 1800s gave more people the right to vote and reduced political corruption. The rise of Christian social conscience in the public square was part of varied social movements led by people who sought to abolish the slave trade, reduce child labor, reform the prison system, reduce cruelty to animals, ease the lives of the poor, and introduce codes of social propriety into Victorian life.America was next and the pattern was somewhat replicated. New inventions such as the telephone, the electric lightbulb and the automobile available to the average worker changed everything. People flooded into the cities as the agrarian way of life evolved into more city living. During the 20th century, American culture dominated the globe. Entrepreneurial free enterprise surged and rising living standards blossomed.Compared to 1980, the global gross domestic product nearly doubled by 2000 and more than tripled by 2015. Yet for all its benefits, the defence of democratic freedoms and the promotion of cultural idealism is ailing and in retreat in places such as Turkey, India, Brazil and perhaps even in Canada.We are forgetting the powerful appreciation for the glories of constructive conservativism and not making sufficient effort to understand what has gone wrong.Years ago, holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said that man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation of social life. To feel at home in the world, people need to see themselves serving some good — doing important work, loving others well, living within coherent moral communities, striving on behalf of a set of positive ideals. Individuals can endure much and overcome much if they have a meaningful reason to do so. Can we understand the brokenness of Canada through this lens?The great emancipating societies expanded and celebrated individual choice and individual freedom. But when Western society thrived, the personal freedoms lay upon a foundation of commitments and moral obligations that precede choice: our obligations to our families, to our communities and nation, to our ancestors and descendants and God.However, over recent years the celebration of individual freedoms has somewhat devolved into excess and has eroded the underlying sense of common decency and community obligation. Significantly after World War II and into the 1960s, there was the privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom and situational ethics. We were less likely to assume that people acquired positive values by living in coherent moral communities. There was the social wave that each person could invent a personal sense of right and wrong. Recall the saying, "If it feels good — do it.” But if what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what an individual chooses to invent, then as a country, we would slide outside social civility.Trust is the faith that other people will do what they ought to do. But when there are few shared moral values and norms, then social trust evaporates. People feel alienated and under siege and in desperation may turn to authoritarianism as a coping response. People eagerly follow the great leader-protector, the one who will lead the struggle that could give life meaning.The positive social values of the western democracies are under threat. There is a tendency to retreat into economic nationalism. Around the world, authoritarian moralists can promise to restore the old ways, the old moral codes and a sense of lost national greatness. Indeed, much in the community could be viewed as more important than the self-indulgence of the 'me generation' and ego feelings. There is a need to restore the anchors of cultural, moral and civic stability.Prime Minister Trudeau and his advisors have tried to win over the disaffected by showering them with economic deficit spending. It doesn’t seem to have worked politically, because the real absence people are feeling is an absence of meaning, belonging and authentic recognition.The inherent discrimination of “woke” has been rejected. There is some parallel with the USA and the disenchantment with the Biden administration and the political angst longing for an alternative.Elections are coming. 2024 is a historic election year, with elections in 50 countries. More than two billion voters will head to the polls in countries including the United States, India, Mexico and South Africa. Geopolitical volatility is a big risk.Around the globe, the tensions will be about basic security and whether conservative democratic capitalism can thrive again. We must choose wisely to be part of this glorious and ongoing social journey. We understand that we conservatives can’t just offer economic benefits; we also have to make the spiritual and civic case for a better way of life. The greatest challenge remains to infuse our journey with moral meaning and imbue it with the sense of purpose that religion once did — to fill that emptiness in the heart.There is social reward in striving to add more chapters to the great Canadian story of social progress — in building a society that is technologically innovative, commercially daring, with expanding opportunities for all. This would be a society in which decent culture is celebrated, families thrive, a society in which the great diversity of individuals can experience a sense of common purpose and have the space and energy to pursue the adventure of fully living — as a Canadian.

FORSETH: The decline of Canadian courage and the struggle to get it back

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