On Tuesday, John Robson discussed the results of a recent Angus Reid survey that, among other things, indicated that Canadians are at least as anti-military as they’ve been since the first Trudeau government:
Canadian soldiers set a perimeter position after disembarking a U.S. Navy landing craft during a simulated amphibious landing, 24 April 2009.
U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer Seth Johnson via Wikimedia Commons.
The National Post reports an Angus Reid survey finding that a significant majority of us favour compulsory voluntary service by the youth of today. Which might sound like a bracingly traditional Jordan Peterson clean-your-room, stand-up-straight, shoulders-back attitude until you read the fine print, which would risk making Peterson ill if he weren’t already. Because it turns out we want to conscript them to work in health care so we get stuff we didn’t pay for, not to defend the country because if ye break faith and so on.
According to the survey, 74 per cent of respondents want young people to have to give a year of their lives to bolstering our failing, structurally unsound socialized medical system. Respondents were also in favour of mandatory service in support of the environment (73 per cent), “youth services” (72 per cent), whatever it might be, and “civil protection” (70 per cent). But when it comes to (ugh) national defence, just 43 per cent supported it, with 44 per cent opposed.
Spending on comfort while barbarians undermine the city walls lacks prudence as well as dignity. As I observed in a long-ago graduate-school debate about American national security, it didn’t matter how wonderfully progressive the Dutch social welfare system was in 1940 when the Nazis came calling. And we too seem to have our priorities backward.
If I might confuse the government by discussing principles of political economy, there are good reasons why national defence is considered a binding duty on those able to contribute to it. First is the “free rider” problem that everyone benefits from successful protection of the community, especially, at least in a narrow and hedonistic sense, if you send some other chump to die for your freedom while you recline comfortably at home.
Second is the moral consideration that, as John Stuart Mill famously if uncharacteristically put it, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse”. Which comes from, yes, his “Principles of Political Economy”.
Mill was no warmonger. As he immediately continued, “When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people”.
But not all wars are like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, let alone Hamas’s attack on Israel. As the anything-but-bellicose Mill added, “A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice — is often the means of their regeneration”.
