Author: Kieran Wilson

By Kieran Wilson

Let me take you back to the year 509 BC. The nobility and people of Rome, chafing under the despotic rule of King Tarquin the Proud and outraged by the wickedness of his son Sextus who “wrought the deed of shame,” have cast off their monarchy and proclaimed a republic. The common citizenry, armed with a newly-powerful vote, rejoice that they are now subject, not to the whims of tyrants, but to laws that apply equally to all. White-togaed patricians, their blue blood thrumming at the prospect of competing to fill the king-shaped void in the Roman constitutional order, offer themselves up to the popular favour and venture themselves as candidates for the two annual consulships that have replaced the monarchical office. The age of kings has passed, and a new era of republican virtue is dawning.

So, at least, runs the traditional account, recorded with almost breathless enthusiasm by the historian Livy, of the expulsion of the Roman kings and the foundation of the Roman Republic. Livy does, however, reserve one word of praise for monarchical rule. Arbitrary power, he tells us, was necessary during the infancy of the Roman state while a common sense of national identity was still developing among the founding peoples of Rome:

“What would have happened if this band of herdsmen and immigrants, fugitives from their own peoples, having taken hold of liberty–or, at any rate, impunity–under the protection of an inviolable sanctuary and being free from awe of royal power, should have been tossed about by the winds of popular fervour and taken up quarrels with the leading men of a city not their own, before the ties of wives and children and the love of the very soil … had made them to be of one spirit?” (Livy, AUC, 2.1; my trans.)

Livy’s account of the foundation of the Roman Republic, scholars now agree, is more myth than history, and, though he could not have known it, Livy himself was living in that “golden age” during which the Augustan revolution, wrapping itself in the toga of republican virtue, was progressively eroding, to the point of dissolution, the very representative institutions and democratic impulses that the historian praised. 

Even so, I think Livy’s fundamental point in this short passage is sound, in that he accurately identifies the two indispensable ingredients for creating a healthy polity: first, love of family–which, because man is a social animal, includes love of neighbour and, because he is a political animal, love of national institutions–and second, love of place. A shared identity, bound together by the love of hearth, home and country, are, in Livy’s day as in ours, the necessary preconditions for free institutions and a democratic polity to endure and thrive. It was only once such an identity had matured that despotic government could safely be discarded.

Now let’s cast our minds forward across the centuries and oceans to British northwest America. The year is 1858, and gold has been discovered along the Fraser River. Would-be prospectors and a confident and expansionist American government look with hungry eyes across the 49th Parallel towards the vast hinterland over which Britain makes good her claim with little more than a string of Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts. Fearing the loss of its Pacific possessions, the British government establishes the colony of British Columbia and appoints James Douglas, already governor of the neighbouring colony of Vancouver Island, to bring British order to the territory and transform the motley band of foreign fortune-seekers who crowd the banks of the Fraser into loyal subjects of Queen Victoria.

The colonial secretary, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, gives Douglas his marching orders: he is to preside over the erection of a system of English courts to dispense the Queen’s justice impartially, and he is to work towards setting up representative institutions–but not too hastily. As Lytton warned Parliament in words that might very well have been lifted from Livy, it would be dangerous to “risk at once the experiment of self-government among settlers so wild, so miscellaneous, perhaps so transitory, and in a form of society so crude.” (Quoted in Ormsby, British Columbia: A History, p. 156.) In New Westminster as in Rome, a tight rein must be kept on the settlers until a common identity and permanent ties to the land could develop. In the meantime, Governor Douglas would be to them as lawgiver, and a handful of judges, gold commissioners, and Royal Engineers, few but fearless, would see that his–and the Queen’s–law was obeyed.

By the tireless efforts of these men, a common identity and shared purpose did develop among the denizens of the goldfields and the rainforest, and British Columbia was favoured with representative institutions that still survive, with all the scuffs and dents of a century and a half of electoral contest, to this day. But what of her shared identity? How has it fared over the past 150 years?

This question does not apply to the Pacific province alone. For decades, Canada’s dominant ideologies, official and popular, have encouraged the adoption of attitudes and policies that, if they do not actively undermine a common national identity, have done precious little to preserve and strengthen it. Our political class seldom ventures a more substantial account of Canadian identity than a woolly invocation of “values” and appears, at least if immigration policy and school civics curricula are anything to go by, to regard social cohesion as an optional extra to be cultivated, perhaps, once the GDP has been attended to. Shared identity and love of home play second–sometimes third or fourth–fiddle to economic considerations. Yet, if Livy and Lytton are right, a shared identity is not an optional extra, but the necessary precondition of a healthy democratic polity.

The result of our disregard for this truth is a society ever more fractured and factious, its centre straining valiantly to hold in the midst of so many and great centrifugal forces. Our representative institutions survive, to be sure, but the common identity that built them does not. We take our institutions for granted, believing them to be self-justifying and self-sustaining. This is true in part, but if we neglect the nurture of the tradition and culture that produced them, we risk losing our grasp of the reasons they came to be and the internal logic by which they function. We risk being left as barbarians looking upon the ruins of Roman villas and vainly pondering how they were built and what for.

Part of the problem is immigration policy. Admitting too many people too fast on nakedly economic motives–both theirs and the Canadian government’s–without adequate regard for how these newcomers would be integrated into the society they aspired to join, granting the franchise indirectly to non-citizens via internal party nomination and leadership races, and extending citizenship by descent to the third generation with only nugatory residency requirements, all conspire to cast doubt on the integrity of our political process, to make Parliament and our provincial legislatures little more than ventriloquist’s dummies for foreign squabbles, and to cheapen Canadian citizenship

The problem lies not in immigrants themselves, nor even in the number of immigrants admitted per se. Canada, like the United States, has historically welcomed proportionally far more immigrants than it does today and has shown itself up to the task of incorporating them organically and integrally into our national life. But the Canada that was able to do this was a Canada that had faith in itself and its institutions.

We find ourselves now in the midst of a crisis of confidence, an inability–or rather, more culpably, an unwillingness–to tell our national story in a way that we ourselves, let alone those outside of or newly arrived in our country, find attractive and compelling. The provinces have been happy to neglect civics instruction in schools, leaving the formation of the next generation of engaged citizens in the hands of the proverbial uninterested and uninformed PE teacher. The result is a national broadcaster that cannot even correctly identify Canada’s head of state as our head of state. Provincial and federal politicians alike have been content to hew down the tree of national identity and heap its limbs on the pyre of regional grievance if it serves their electoral fortunes. This is a crisis, not of others’, but of our own making.

There are, of course, broader forces that undermine our shared national identity. The anonymity and atomisation of our urban lives and the irresistible gravitational pull of our placeless and faceless digital cosmos are barren soil in which to grow a love of place and ties of common affection. We enwrap ourselves in enfeebling, isolating, and stultifying digital cocoons, and in so doing alienate ourselves from our neighbours and from the very sod of the country itself. These are not so much failures of policy but vices of the soul–of habit and of will–and they will not be healed but by the cultivation of the collective and individual virtues that oppose them. I seem to hear two ethical maxims, one ancient, one modern, combining to offer a remedy to these ills. The first is “Love your neighbour”–not just any neighbour, not humanity in the abstract, but your neighbour, the often not easily lovable people you find next to you. The second, equally pithy and pointed: “Touch grass.”

In Red Tory circles, to make claims like these is to lay the lash to a horse that is well and truly dead. We know what the problems are, but the solutions are by no means clear. What is sufficiently clear is that these problems will not be solved by abrogation of representative institutions. That particular feline will not, I suspect, be willingly coaxed back into its bag, nor indeed could it be without dealing a serious blow to the ideals of fairness and equality before the law that we have been fortunate to inherit from our forefathers. Our courts and parliaments, our cabinets and King are our priceless heritage as English- and French-speaking British North Americans. It is as absurd to put them in pawn for the sake of a half-baked, social media-driven vision of unity as it is to chip away at them in the cause of political expediency or a slight uptick in our GDP.

Nor indeed is the solution, pace online ethnonationalists, to “return” to a fictive racially homogenous Canada of yore. Ethnic and racial diversity has been a feature of all New World polities since the beginning of European settlement. Our forefathers were equal to the challenge of building a common identity among an ethnically and culturally heterogenous population; the example of James Douglas is evidence enough of that. That white ethnonationalists believe this to be an impossible undertaking betrays a dearth of imagination and a want of faith in their own ability to convince others of the value and strength of Canadian identity and Canadian institutions. It seems they are as much cowed by a lack of confidence as the “globalists” they despise.

Traditional Canadian Tories, from Douglas to John Farthing, have always affirmed that they have more in common with, say, West Indian Anglicans born and bred in the political and cultural heritage of the Commonwealth than with American republicans who happen by an accident of nature to share their skin tone. Our goal cannot be to build the ideal ethnostate–which is as impossible as it is undesirable to achieve–but rather to make our own band of “herdsmen and immigrants” into a nation that knows and wills itself to be united in purpose and to be bound by ties of patriotic love.

We cannot achieve this without a revival of national confidence and a realignment of priorities. What might an immigration policy, or an education policy, or an economic policy that prioritised national unity and shared identity look like? How do we tell our national story to new Canadians, both those born here and those who have come from afar?

Is it a story that emphasises our differences, that dwells with an almost narcissistic fixation on what makes us–as individuals or as cultural subunits–special? Difference is not, cannot, be denied, but it must be thought and talked of, insofar as it need be talked and thought of at all, only through in the context of diversity-in-unity. To extend the metaphor of the Canadian “mosaic,” now trite on the lips and in the press releases of our political class, a collection of tiles can only become a thing of beauty when arranged by expert craftsmanship under a unified creative vision; the parts, while not unimportant in themselves, must nevertheless be ordered towards and subsumed into the whole.

What should that confident, strident, united vision be for today’s Canada? What practical steps must we take to see it realised? The problem of national disunity is vast and its causes various, and I hope in a series of articles to explore how a sense of common identity and national unity might be rebuilt. The shards of our national mosaic–some the dower of centuries, some fresh from the kiln–lie heaped and scattered about us. All that remains for us is to set them in order.

By Kieran Wilson

Summary: The books we read as a child are central to the formation of our political instincts and outlook. Kieran Wilson takes us to the world of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge stories, arguing that they offer glimpses of Tory utopia to kindle the conservative imagination of young and old alike.

Why am I a Tory? Sometimes, on frosty winter evenings when the fire burns low and the ice lolls about pleasantly and sleepily at the bottom of my glass, I catch myself asking this question. And when I do, I find I am not asking myself why I support a certain political party or subscribe to a certain set of philosophical propositions. My question is far more psychologically probing than that, for, as far as I can tell, I was not argued into my Toryism, nor did I come by it by reading Burke, Johnson, Oakeshott or Scruton, as important as these luminaries have been in shaping the preexisting raw matter of my conservative impulses.

My Toryism is pre-ideological and instinctual, bubbling up in my boyhood from some font hidden deep in my character. It belongs, in its beginnings at least, to the realm of imagination, of affection, of aesthetic delight. It is not a system of ideas but an assortment of loves, love of place and past, of tradition and hierarchy, of beauty and right order. These things have I loved far longer than I have been able to give an account of my love for them.

Where, then, does my Toryism come from? Before my daughter was born, I would vainly ponder this question until the fire was cold and my glass was empty, and I would shuffle off to bed no nearer the answer than when I had first begun pondering. But since I became a father and assumed the ancient and venerable mantle of bedtime-story reader, I think I’m closer to solving the puzzle: my Toryism comes, at least in part, from the books I read as a child.

Yes, I am persuaded that The Wind in the Willows, with its tender evocation of the ordered beauty of nature, along with kids’ histories of Canada, with their watercolour sketches of Tecumseh, Brock, and Secord daring all for hearth and country, have done more make me a Tory than whole oceans of ink poured out in the cause of political theory ever could. In other words, I owe my Toryism, not to Edmund Burke, but to Mr Toad.

One of the great joys of fatherhood has been rediscovering some of these formative books with my daughter. They offer up fragmentary glimpses of the Tory ideal, partial visions, almost, of Tory utopia, a perfect world in which Tory principles, given free rein, beget imaginary societies in harmony with themselves and the world around them.

A series of children’s books that falls into this category is the Brambly Hedge series by the late Jill Barklem. The eight Brambly Hedge stories follow the lives and adventures of a community of hedgerow mice through the turnings of the seasons and the adventures and celebrations that punctuate their lives. These are not merely stories to be read; they are whole imaginative worlds to lose oneself in. The pastel pageantry of her rich watercolour illustrations – the detailed cross-sections of the mice’s homes are my favourite – earns Barklem a place in the foremost rank of children’s illustrators alongside E.H. Shepard and Beatrix Potter. My pen cannot hope to do these illustrations justice; the reader will just have to discover them for herself.

The world of Brambly Hedge is confessedly utopian. As Barklem writes in her introduction to the omnibus edition, “Brambly Hedge is my ideal world,” whose inhabitants belong to “a loving and caring society.” I submit that Brambly Hedge is in fact a Tory utopia, an ideal embodiment of Tory principles in an imagined setting. I propose in what follows to attempt a sort of anthropological (musological?) study of this utopia, to emphasise some of the main Tory themes in Barklem’s stories and to commend them to a budding generation of Tory readers – and their parents to boot. What follows is not a manifesto, nor yet a practical guide to building one’s own Tory utopia, but a simple reflection on a series of stories that I have come to love and that have stirred my imagination even at the decrepit age of thirty.

First, a word in defence of utopia. The Tory is nothing if not a practical person, and descriptions of ideal worlds however charming might not at first commend themselves to her consideration. A utopia is famously both a good place (eu-topia) and no place at all (ou-topia). Precisely because a utopia has no real existence, it is a useful venue for the human mind to play as it will, to propose theories and pursue them to their logical conclusions, to imagine the world not as it is, but as it might be.

Ideal worlds are instructive not merely as thought experiments, but as objects for the will to strive for. They form our tastes, indeed our innermost desires, as much as they provide a sandbox for the intellect to sport about in. We see the good of the utopian vision before our mind’s eye and we yearn for it. And even if we acknowledge the impossibility of attaining our ideal world, we may still be content that we have contributed something towards recreating an imperfect simulacrum of it in the imperfect world in which we find ourselves. It is in this spirit, then, that I invite you to join me in the world of Brambly Hedge.

Brambly Hedge is a community at peace with itself and at peace with its past. Countless generations of mice have lived in the cottages of the hedgerow that runs along the banks of the millstream, and their collective wisdom has been treasured up in traditional customs and rituals that each generation passes on to the next.

The mice are comfortable in their environment, and its natural rhythms give shape to their understanding of the passage of time. The cycle of seedtime and harvest, midsummer and midwinter, intertwines with the patterns of birth and marriage, youth and maturity (there is no death in this Arcadia) of the mice’s lives. Theirs is a ritual year, marked by festivals during which their communal memory is expressed and reinforced in song and story. The mice even have a kind of natural religion complete with grace at meals, wedding ceremonies, and quasi-baptismal liturgies. These rites are solemnised by the Old Vole, who acts as a kind of parish priest, though whether it is his oldness or his being a vole that especially qualifies him for the cure of souls is never quite made clear.

Mice at harvest.

The effect of the mice’s reverence for the past and their common ritual life is an organic social harmony. Each mouse knows herself to be part of a whole that, while deeply rooted in place, transcends the present moment to embrace the dead, the living, and the unborn. Within this whole, its parts – the individuals and families of Brambly Hedge – retain their integrity in their distinctive roles, from Lord and Lady Woodmouse, who superintend the affairs of the mice from their ancestral fastness, to Basil, the perpetually sozzled keeper of the hedgerow cellars, to the children who help their parents with their daily tasks.

The politics of Brambly Hedge reflect this harmony. Brambly Hedge is governed, loosely speaking, with benevolent hereditary paternalism by a duumvirate of mice, Lord Woodmouse and his father-in-law Mr Apple, the warden of the Store Stump. They preside over the affairs of the hedgerow, convene the mice, and coordinate their collective action, but they also take their share in the common labour. The doors of Lord Woodmouse’s hereditary seat, the Old Oak Palace, are flung wide to his subjects, and his kitchen and halls are ever ready to accommodate their merrymaking. If there is a hierarchy among the mice, it is a hierarchy without hubris.

The Old Oak Palace, the ancestral seat of Lord Woodmouse and the venue for the mice’s annual Midwinter celebration.

This is not noblesse oblige, for that would imply an extrinsic relationship between a distinct class of commons and an elite who condescends to do them favours. There is no such distinction between the leaders of Brambly Hedge and the community they lead; their relation is as natural and unmediated as the relation of head to body. Barklem paints, in essence, the perfect picture of an idealised pre- or early-modern village, with its close collaboration between the lettered and hereditary leadership and the ordinary householders. Readers of Eamon Duffy’s sensitive descriptions of village life in Tudor England will see more than a little of Morebath in Brambly Hedge.

The economy of Brambly Hedge embodies principles that, while they would curl the toes and upset the digestion of the libertarian right, exemplify the Tory ideal of a harmonious relation between the parts of the community and the whole. Food, gathered by the common efforts of the mice, is deposited in the Store Stump to be distributed, under the kindly eye of old Mr Apple, to each family without payment to furnish their tables. The private kitchens of Brambly Hedge supply in turn the round of feasts and festivals that lend rhythm and order to the hedgerow’s common life. Housing, too, is provided from the community’s shared stock: cottages left empty by the passing of one generation are given as needed to newly-formed families.

The interior of the Store Stump, from which the hedgerow kitchens are supplied.

In the economy of Brambly Hedge, there is an organic and reciprocal relationship between the private lives of households and the public life of the community as a whole. The community supplies the needs and respects the integrity of the household, and the household in turn acknowledges its obligations to and enriches the life of the community.

What the libertarian rightist might condemn as rank rodent dirigisme is anything but. The economy of Brambly Hedge is in no sense directed by an abstract “state” because no such thing as a state could possibly exist in the narrow sphere of the hedgerow’s common life. Indeed, the binary of a state- versus a market-directed economy simply breaks down: if the community is too small for anything like a state to exist, it is also too tight-knit to allow the needs of its members to be met or not according to the mere whims of supply and demand. Free from the cold indifference of the market and the cack-handed concern of the state, the economy of Brambly Hedge is just that, the nomos of the oikos, the law of the household, the practical expression of shared affection and common interest in a hyper-local setting.

It is perhaps this aspect of Brambly Hedge that seems to us most fantastical, not least because it depends upon a social cohesion that no longer exists in Canada. Such economies may still limp along in the very smallest towns, and can perhaps still be found, like huddled groups of dispossessed noble emigres, in little enclaves in cities. But how could such an arrangement, which depends on friendship and trust between a handful of households, be implemented in a country of 40 million people? Here, again, the value of utopia is in offering us, not a model to be replicated, but an ideal to strive for.

The economic system of Brambly Hedge springs naturally from the community’s shared identity, its sense of itself as a community, and it is sustained by the bonds of neighbourly love. We could do worse in cultivating this Tory ideal than by investing our time and treasure in the “little platoons” (to pinch a phrase from Burke) – our churches, clubs, Legion and Oddfellows halls – that approximate the affectionate reciprocity of Brambly Hedge in the midst of the unfeeling anonymity that otherwise characterises our collective life. More than this, we might advocate – and vote for politicians who advocate – for the renewal of our common national identity against the centrifugal forces of left and right that seek to undermine it.

I am conscious that the picture I have painted of the utopian vision of Brambly Hedge may seem rather more sterile and static than the stories themselves. I own my limitations, and I can recommend only one way to supply the defects of my description: read the stories for yourselves and, more importantly if you wish to raise up a new generation of Tories, read them to your little ones. You will be glad you did, and your Tory imagination will thank you for it.

Images in this article are taken from The Complete Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem (London: HarperCollins, 2011) and are reproduced for the purposes of criticism and review under section 29.1 of the Copyright Act.