Below is an excerpt of the presentation Wednesday, May 5, 2021, via zoom by Fr. Tony Van Hee.
People will recall that Fr. Tony uses quotes from Dr. Jordan Peterson on his sandwich board when he stands peacefully near the abortion facility in Ottawa.
Fr. Tony draws upon Dr. Peterson's discussion on the topic of free speech to demonstrate that in a democratic society such as Canada, free speech truly is the cornerstone of Western civilization.
The Importance of Free Speech
My knowledge of free speech, and its importance, comes from Dr. Jordan Peterson, professor and clinical psychologist at Toronto University. I will quote him especially in regard to the importance of free speech grounded in the ineradicable value of the human being.
Jordan Peterson has extraordinary knowledge, a passion to help people, and the vocabulary to do just that. He is at his best in this talk that he gave March 11, 2017, at the Ottawa Public Library,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Before discussing that talk, I want you to hear what he has to say on the obligation of free speech, which he mentioned in a talk at Linfield College in Oregon, five weeks after the Ottawa Public Library talk.
“We've talked a lot about, the right to free speech. And something you might also want to consider, is the obligation of free speech, because I actually think it's deeper than a right. I think you're obligated to speak freely, because otherwise people don't have the benefit of whatever wisdom you possess, and at least you possess the wisdom of your own experience, at the very least you have that, and that's as valid a form of truth, as any other form of truth, and it's often a truth that can be usefully communicated to other people, and so, it's to the community's benefit that you say what your experience has taught you, because there isn't anyone who has your experience”.
Besides the obligation to share the wisdom of your experience, we have a further obligation to oppose unjust laws.
Martin Luther King Jr said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963:
“One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.' “How does one determine, whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law, is a human law, that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.”
How much more unjust is the case for abortion, which not only distorts and damages, but painfully dismembers and kills. Therefore any law which allows, or promotes the killing of an innocent person is an unjust law, and any law that protects those who kill an innocent person, such as the bubble zone law, is doubly unjust, and we have a moral obligation to disobey and oppose such laws and work to get them repealed.
Now some excerpts from Professor Peterson's Ottawa talk. Because they are excerpts the connections between them will not always be immediately evident, but the importance of free speech, and the importance of the individual are the common thread in all of them, the primacy of free speech is grounded in the sovereignty of the individual, or put in another way, free speech is the distinctive sign of the sovereignty of the individual.
“You support free speech, because it’s the mechanism, that maintains the sanity of the individual and society, and you live in relationship with the spoken truth, to the best of your ability, because the alternative is Hell, and if Hell is what you want, then you can remain arrogant, and resentful, and deceitful. But if you want to work to better the world, to bring it up to what it might be, then you speak forthrightly, you clarify yourself, and you act properly in the world, and then you see what happens” (1:09:37-1:10:21)."
“You never know what will happen if you say something that's true. It's a miracle! Miracles will happen.”
Because Peterson maintains, that “respect for the Logos, and respect for free speech are the same thing”, I want to say something about the word itself. Logos is a Greek word which can mean: word or speech or reason or wisdom. In the prologue of St John's Gospel, (Jn 1:1-18) the Logos is presented as the Son of God who became man and speaks the Logos (the Word of God) into the world.
“So here’s the idea that lurks at the beginning of Genesis. There’s three elements that are involved in the creation of habitable order from chaos, at the beginning of time. One of them is, whatever is represented by God the Father, and one of them is whatever is represented by the chaos that exists at the same time, and the other is whatever is represented by the idea of God’s Word."
"That’s the Logos from a Christian perspective....The story at the beginning of Genesis means that structure, that’s the Father, structure extracts habitable order from chaos, through speech, and that’s what we do.... The idea is, that there's something about the human being, and whatever it is that makes us conscious, that interacts with the chaotic potential, that constitutes reality, and extracts out from that, the order within which we live."
“And there's something divine about that, and that's the value of the human being, that's the ineradicable value of the human being, and the idea that each individual, even the criminal, even murderers, the worst and most reprehensible people, have to be treated with the respect due to a divinity, because we partake in the capacity, to extract habitable order, from chaos with our consciousness, with our speech, and with our capacity to communicate”.
“The story that is being sold to people who are sold a Nationalist story is: [T]he State is the ultimate identity! Well, actually that's technically wrong, because the problem with the State is, that the State is what is uniform across people, and the thing is, that we need what’s actually diverse across people, in order to rejuvenate the State, and to keep it awake, and so if you reduce individuals, to what’s homogeneous about them, across all people, you eradicate the very variability, that allows people to adapt to new things, and because we are constantly being presented with new things, we need to keep that individual variability paramount, because it’s upon that variability, that the very State depends, and that’s actually what the West discovered."
"That’s why we have always subordinated the State, to the divinity of the individual, and that’s expressed, as I already said, in the primacy of free speech in our civilization. It’s the cornerstone, the primacy of free speech, and it’s because the individual has something to offer the State.... The State is a corpse. The State is dead, but it’s a gift that the dead have given to [us], and [we] have to provide it with vision, and with speech, because otherwise it can only blunder around like a zombie”
”We could solve any problem, we can solve any problem, if we used all the resources that are available to us, if we lived properly, we have no idea what we could turn what we're in, into.
"And this is the final thing I'll say. I spent a long time studying the Sermon on the Mount. It's a key document. It's Christ's commentary on the 10 Commandments. In a sense, the question being, if you codify the rules, by which a society might function, is there something within the structure of the rules, that rises above them, that acts as the fundamental principle, from which they're all derived? It's the ultimate question of human ethics, what is the highest principle? And the answer that's put forward in the Sermon on the Mount is quite straightforward. Aim at the highest possible good that you can conceive of. That serves as your God, for all practical purposes...Having aligned yourself with that good, speak the truth, and see what happens."
“That's the act of faith. The act of faith is, whatever the truth reveals, is the best of all possible worlds, regardless of how it appears to you now. It's a guess. It's something you stake a bet on. Well, what do you think? The best of all possible worlds will be brought into being by deceit? It seems unlikely. You know that doesn't work in your own life, (1:11.38) you tangle yourself up in your own lies, one lie breeds 10, and 10 breeds 100, and maybe you put the consequences on down the road, and you don't fall into the pit for 5 or 6 years, maybe you've even forgotten why you fell in, when you finally do fall in, but everyone knows, everyone knows that you don't get away with anything."
"And so the issue is, well, what would happen if you just said what you thought, stupid as it is, inaccurate as it is, and listen to people criticize you in response, to shape you and make you more articulate? What would your life be like? And the answer to that is, and I know this to be true. I've worked with many, many people on precisely this problem. Your life gets better, and better, and better, and richer, and deeper, but that comes with a heavier and heavier burden of responsibility. Well, that's okay. You use the observation of your own capability, to bear responsibility, to buttress yourself against the terrors of being finite. You say, “Weak and miserable as I am, I can still stand up to the terrible tragedy of life, and prevail. And that's good enough."
