Democracy does not depend upon Entitlement.

Vincent J. Curtis

23 June 2019

The famous English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton has spoken on the business of what he calls fake subjects and fake disciplines that are proliferating at universities in Europe and North America.  These are characterized by fake scholarship and a fake philosophy that seems to convey authority, enabling people to claim authority for nonsense.  The purpose of that nonsense is to make conformity to orthodoxy the only thing that you have.  If the scholarship is nonsense, the only thing you have are the conclusions, which turn out to be the liberal axioms you started with.  And now to the matter at hand.....

That there even exists a course entitled “Social and Environmental Justice” is proof of the intellectual rot that has set into Canadian academia.  The proliferation of fake subjects and disciplines is worse in the America, and is signified by the course: “fill-in-the-blank-Studies.”

The thesis of Professor James Cairns is that democracy depends upon entitlement.  He cites the case, irrelevant to Canada, of Rosa Parks who refused sit in the back of the bus as required by law in a city of the 1950s deep South.  As an example of entitlement, he asks, “What would have happened if she had given in?”

The short answer is that the civil rights movement would have found someone else.  Rosa Parks was a carefully chosen set up to challenge that law in Federal court.

The general proposition that democracy depends upon entitlement is nonsense, starting with its poor formulation.  And poor formulation is a demonstration of the intellectual poverty of the discipline which offers it.  To begin with, what is meant by ‘democracy?’

And then the word, ‘entitlement.’  Entitlements do not cause democracy – contrary to what the thesis hold.  Canadians have rights and privileges as citizens of this country, but an entitlement refers to something like unemployment insurance and old age security.  Entitlements are things, things that are earned in virtue of something else.  Entitlements have nothing to do with the form of government under which you live.  The German Empire pioneered social entitlements as a means of staving off democracy!

Cairns, with his fake discipline, is hopelessly muddled and the product of his scholarship amounts to nothing more than the prejudices and axioms he started with.
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