Dr. Julie Ponesse’s Address
Diefenbaker Lecture, Ottawa, November 11, 2024
First, thank you for coming on this drippy night. Thank you to the First Freedoms Association and to Barry Bussey, in particular, for inviting me. Barry is one of those people who is doing exactly what we all need to be doing right now. He looks at what’s happening in Canada and to Canadians, and sees that something has gotten terribly off-track. And he’s doing everything he can to remind us that, for the last 157 years (and actually quite a bit longer than that), we were sought out to escape war, persecution, autocracy, and slavery, and as a place where people could speak and live freely. He is one of those voices that, as Mattias Desmet says, must continue to speak out even when it seems no one is listening. It is making a difference and I am incredibly grateful for his voice.
This lecture takes us back into history for two reasons. First, it reminds us of another Canadian who was looking at the Canada of his time and felt that things weren’t right. Two years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was officially adopted by the UN, and in response to seeing Canadians treated as second-class citizens merely because of their names and racial origin, John Diefenbaker began drafting a document in which he wrote:
“I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right,.…”
It’s hard to read these words tonight, 64 years after Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights was enacted by our parliament, without wondering:
Are we free today?
Free to speak without fear?
Free to stand for what we think is right?
We can only hope that by, continuing to speak even when our words fall on deaf ears, and even when we face incredible opposition, we will enjoy these freedoms again one day soon.
Second, this is a night of remembrance and the act of remembering takes us into history. It makes us confront where we’ve come from, who we are indebted to, what we have done, both good and bad. And Remembrance Day celebrates heroes, in particular. But celebrating heroes today is not only countercultural; it is often seen as an act of ignorance or even rebellion. We have undergone a shift in perspective in which victims came to eclipse heroes as the subject of history and, because of that, our history has become a history of shame. It has became an account of what the world has done to people instead of what people have done to, for, the world.
I happen to be one of those radical thinkers who believes that history is important; nuanced and complex, yes, but also fixed and unrevisable. And that remembering the past — with all its triumphs and mistakes, victims and heroes — gives us a necessary starting point for our future by making us see how we are all connected and indebted.
What I’d like to do tonight is to tell you a story. A story that takes us to the heights of human ingenuity and the depths of civilizational collapse. It’s a story that takes us through history, literature, social psychology, philosophy, and even some theology. It’s a story that starts from the idea that we need to understand the past, not through the lens of what has been doneto us, but as the first step towards our future we can make and not be forced into, a step toward our humanity rather than a turning away from it. It’s a story that starts with the following question:
Do you remember where you were when it happened? Who you were with?
That moment when you first felt the ground shift beneath you.
When your friends seemed a little less familiar, family a little more distant.
When your trust in our highest institutions — government, medicine, law, journalism —started to unravel.
The last time your naive optimism allowed you to believe that the world is, generally, as it seems.
Our last innocent moment.
*
If you are reading this, then there is a good chance you have your own last moment of innocence, even if the details of it are a little hazy. Sometime in 2020, there was a fundamental shift in how many of us view the world. The delicate network of core beliefs about what makes it possible to navigate life with some measure of stability and reliability — that medicine is a patient-focused institution, that journalists pursue truth, that the courts track justice, that our friends would behave in certain predictable ways — started to unravel.
There was a paradigm shift in how we live and relate to each other. A shift in attitude. A shift in trust. A shift away from a world we can never revisit, an innocence we can never recover. The before times and the after times. And, though we didn’t know it then, there would be certain unrecoverable changes to life from which we are still reeling.
That’s from the first pages of my most recent book Our Last Innocent Moment.
I starting writing that book almost three years to the day after the World Health Organization declared COVID an emergency. Three years of watching our medical, legal, political institutions crumble, or at least reveal the slow devolution they had been undergoing for decades. Three years of seeing how 2020 was (to, somewhat regrettably, borrow Joe Biden’s term) an “inflection point,” one of those plastic moments in history where we experience a change of course so significant that it is hard even to remember what came before.
Now, we are flailing across all dimensions of life. We face unprecedented levels of national and personal debt (which are nearly double what they were in 2007), chronic illness and mental health epidemics, skyrocketing violent crime and the realization that we are, at every moment, just one missile strike away from nuclear war. Our food and health care systems are quite literally killing us and our children are being mutilated by identity-altering transgender procedures and by a pantheon of corruptive ideologies that are hard to see as anything other than “public ritualistic sacrifice.”
Not to mention the unfathomable paradigm shifts and potential harms made possible by AI and brain-computer interfaces, “editable humans,” mRNA self-replicating vaccines, deep fakes in the metaverse, and pervasive digital surveillance.
But far more destabilizing than any of this is that, as a people, we have become untethered from the basic commitments that once grounded us. We set ourselves adrift from life framed by core Western liberal values — liberty, equality, autonomy — the values our Bill of Rights takes for granted. All of this leaves us standing at a precipice where we can no longer take some very basic ideas for granted: the idea of democracy, the idea of reasonableness, and the idea of the value of individuals.
In many respects, we are the frog in the simmering water wondering if now is the right time to jump out of the pot.
Our position is so perilous that some are starting to ask, is our civilization on the verge of collapse? In 2022, the journalist Trish Wood wrote “We Are Living the Fall of Rome (though it’s being pushed on us as a virtue).” Civilization collapse was the subject of geographer Jared Diamond’s 2011 bestseller “Collapse” and it’s a prominent subject on the World Economic Forum website (though it’s part of their climate change and epidemic preparedness propaganda).
Whether our civilization will collapse or not, I think it’s reasonable to ask, if we survive this moment in history, what will life look like 100 years from now? How healthy will we be? How free? Will life be recognizable? Or will we go the way of the doomed Viking colony in Greenland, the Aztecs, Anasazi, the Qin Dynasty of China, or the collapsed iconic Roman Empire.
When scholars talk about “civilizational collapse,” they typically refer to stresses that overcome a society’s coping mechanisms. Stanford classics professor Ian Morris, for example, identifies what he calls “the 5 horseman of the apocalypse”, the five factors show up in nearly every major collapse: climate change, famine, state failure, migration, and major disease.
Will we be wiped out by climate change or an epidemic? Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s not my area of expertise nor am I that interested in the fall of civilization as an extinction event. My interest tonight is in the decline of the aspects of our civilization that make us human: civility, civil discourse, and how we value the components of a civilization — its people. My interest is in whether there is something within our civilization that is creating our current catastrophe and what might be able to bring us out of it. And that’s what I’d like to focus on tonight.
After the initial shock of the events of 2020 started to wane, while everyone seemed to be focused on who to blame, how the global elites came to control “big pharma” and nearly every major world government and media outlet, and how our own Prime Minister was connected, and all quite rightly, the questions that began to consume my thoughts were more local and personal: Why did we give in so easily? Why were we so vulnerable…so quick to turn on each other? Why did we forget, and even revise, history so easily?
I started thinking about other historical moments where we seemed to fail in the same ways and that, unfortunately, took me to some of the worst of them: the human rights atrocities of WWII, of course, but also the Late Bronze Age collapse, the Destruction of the Roman Empire, moments where we seem to have taken ourselves to the edge of human ingenuity, and then fell not by external invasion but by our own errors and misplaced ambitions. And then I started thinking about the biblical story of Babel and how much the events of our time echo it.
Just over 5000 years ago, somewhere in the middle of the desert in the land of Shinar (south of what is now Baghdad, Iraq), a group of migrants decided to stop and build a city. One among them suggested that they build a tower so tall it will reach to the heavens.” Other than the fact that we know they used the new technology of making artificial stones (i.e. bricks) from mud, we don’t know much about what the tower looked like, how high it reached, or how long it took to build. What we do know is that God came down and, so displeased with what they were up to, confused their language and scattered them over the face of the earth.
In 2020, I think we experienced another ‘Babel moment,’ a system failure on a global scale. We had been building something, innovating, expanding, and then it all went terribly wrong. It’s a story of the natural consequences of human ingenuity running ahead of wisdom. It’s a story about misguided unification projects. It’s a story echoed in so many of the fractures we see today: between the left and right, liberals and conservatives, Israelis and Palestinians, truth and lies. It’s a story about what’s breaking between us and within each of us.
I wondered, do all these ‘Babel moments’ have something in common? And is there something in us that keeps bringing us to them?
One thing we can learn from examples of civilization collapse is that they are not always due to a calamitous, external event like Bedouin charging in from the desert. More often than not the cause of their destruction is complex and internal. If you are a student of classical literature (the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, in particular), you might recognize something familiar in them. In each of these stories, you find tragic characters with the thing that all tragic characters have in common: a hamartia or fatal flaw, that leads the character to create his own destruction, e.g. Oedipus’ blindness led him to bring disaster to his city and family, Macbeth’s vaulting (“blind”) ambition set off a chain of events that culminated in his own demise. And for a more contemporary example, it seemed to be excessive pride that led the science-geek schoolteacher Walter White in Breaking Bad to destroy his own family.
So I wondered, is there a tragic flaw that runs through history and humanity, that led to the crisis we face now, something that, every so often, rears its ugly head and takes us perilously close to our own destruction?
One thing that characterized the COVID years, the COVID narrative in particular, is the language of safety, purity, immunity, and perfection. To offer a couple of examples, in 2021, NPR cited studies describing “superhuman or “bulletproof immunity” to Covid, and an article in the British Medical Journal the following year claimed that the virus could simply be “eradicated.” The shots, the masking, the distancing, the words; it was all designed to give the impression that, by our own efforts, we could control nature absolutely.
The evolutionary biologist, Healther Heying, when diagnosing the failure of the COVID shots, located the problem not so much in our attempt to control a virus; the problem, she said, is that we had the audacity to think that our attempts to do so would be infallible. She wrote:
“Humans have been trying to control nature since we have been human; in many cases we have even met with moderate success. But our arrogance always seems to get in the way. …The attempt to control SARS-CoV2 may well have been an honest one, but the inventors of the shots ran into serious problems when they imagined themselves infallible. The solution was deeply flawed, and the rest of us weren’t allowed to notice.”
The problem, Heying said during a longer conversation, was the nature of the idea. It’s an idea that allowed for no caution, no questioning, and certainly no dissension, because it was an idea that was already perfect. Or so we thought.
There is a lot of the Babel story in this. Babel is a cautionary tale of what happens when we get intellectually too ‘big for our britches.’ The Babylonians wanted to build a tower that extended beyond their capabilities, to transcend this world, to make themselves superhuman. They thought they could dissolve the distinction between heaven and earth, the mundane and the transcendent. To borrow the term made popular by U.S. Congressman Steward McKinney, they thought their idea was “too big to fail”.
But more than this, the WOW factor hit Babel. They became obsessed with their new invention. They thought, “We’ll make a name for ourselves!” Not to provide housing, not to promote peace and harmony. But to become famous. To paraphrase Rabbi Moshe Isserles, fame is the aspiration of those who see no purpose in life. For all we know, the builders of Babel saw no purpose in their project. They wanted to build something big in order to feel big. But when you use technology without purpose, you are no longer its master; you become its slave. The Babylonians had invented a new technology, and that technology, as it so often does, reinvented humankind.
Babel wasn’t just a tower but an idea. And it wasn’t just an idea of innovation and improvement; it was an idea of perfection and transcendence. It was an idea so lofty that it had to fail because it was no longer human.
Leading up to 2020, we were similarly audacious. We were arrogant. We bought into the idea that every aspect of our lives could be made immune: by an ever-expanding and fine-tuned set of laws and policies designed to keep us safe, by vaccine technology, by hacks aimed to make life easier, more efficient,… . The “We can, so we will” attitude barrelled us forward without the “Should we?” question to guide us.
If perfectionism is the tragic flaw that got us to this place, if it’s responsible for our blindness and our innocence, what can we do now? How do tragic characters typically manage their flaws? And what can we do about ours?
One thing that makes a hero tragic is that he undergoes a “catharsis,” a process of intense suffering and purging through which he is forced to confront who he really is and what it is about him that led to his downfall. Specifically, tragic characters undergo an anagnorisis, from the Greek word for “to make known,” that moment when the hero makes a critical discovery about the reality of the situation and his part in it, undergoing a shift from ignorance to knowledge.
I think it would be fair to say that we are in the midst of our own catharsis, as we start to see where we are and what got us here. It’s a “painful adjustment”. Like Gatsby, we’ve had our years of indulgence and gluttony. We’ve had our projects of reckless pride. We’ve overspent and under-thought, we’ve outsourced responsibility for every facet of our lives — health care, finances, education, information. We built the tower, and then it crumbled all around us. And something significant needs to adjust for that.
How do we convert our innocence into the kind of awareness and accountability that will get us back on track? How do we become human again?
One thing that’s interesting about the doomed civilizations I mentioned earlier is that some had all five traits of imminent collapse but they bounced back. What made the difference?
If you take Rome, for example, in the 3rd c. AD, 200 yrs before the empire actually falls: Emperor Aurelian made a concerted effort to place the good of the people above his own personal ambition. He secured the borders and defeated breakaway empires, reuniting the empire.
Similarly, in the early 7th c. AD, Emperors Gaozu and Taizong of the Tang dynasty of China — not only made brilliant political and military maneuvers, but they seemed to understand the limits of absolute power.
One lesson from these two simple examples is that really good leadership matters. And, fortunately, I think we are entering an era where really good leadership is possible.
But what rescues civilizations is often much more cultural and, in a way, simpler than this.
Do we have any Irish here tonight?
Well, your ancestors just might have saved our civilization once upon a time.
Has anyone heard of Skellig Michael?
It’s a remote, rocky island 7 miles off the west coast of Ireland, rising 700 feet out of the rough sea. It is, for its obvious otherworldly qualities, a UNESCO world heritage site and the location of a number of the more recent Star Wars movies. For most of its history, it was a third world country with a stone age culture, but it had one moment of unblemished glory.
As Europe was collapsing into chaos in the 5th century, and barbarians were descending on the Roman cities, looting and burning books and anything associated with the classical world, a small group of Irish monks, in a monastery on Skellig Michael, took up the painstaking task of copying every bit of classical literature they could get their hands on, making them conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the newly settling tribes of Europe.
While the Romans were unable to salvage their once grand civilization, with this simple act, the Irish saints rescued it and brought it into the future.
Without the monks of Skellig Michael, the world that came after (the world of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution) would have been entirely different. It would, at least, have been a world without classical books, and a world without the history, the ideas, the humanity they contain.
And by the time we get to the Renaissance, several centuries later, humanity was able to continue to rescue and reinvent itself after nearly a millennium of social regression, cultural stagnation and rampant violence, after the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Renaissance was, in many ways, a reset: a reset of our literacy, art and architecture, a reset of our presumptions about the value of questioning and curiosity, of individualism and humanism. We desperately need a similar reset today. Don’t worry, not the kind Klaus Schwab has in mind. But we do need a reset as an antidote to our hubris, arrogance. We need to remind ourselves that living well is not necessarily a matter of living bigger or faster or across more dimensions, or that we become successful by sacrificing ourselves for the collective.
We need three things in particular:
First, we need a return to humility: One of the great lessons of Babel is what happens when pride gets out of hand. It “goeth before destruction,” Proverbs tells us, and it is the original and deadliest of the ‘seven deadly sins.’ It is, as the Ancient Greeks knew, a foolish way of investing energy in the humanly impossible.
The opposite — humility — as C.S. Lewis wrote, is “…not thinking less of ourselves, but thinking of ourselves less.” Pride gives us the false impression that we can build towers to reach heaven; and the cure is to realize and embrace our own unique natures and see our place in something greater than ourselves.
Second, we need to realize that human nature can’t be transformed instantly:
In the fall of 1993, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech at the dedication of a memorial to the thousands of Frenchmen who perished during the Vendée genocide in western France. During his speech, he warned against the illusionthat human nature can be transformed in an instant. He said, “We must be able to improve, patiently, that which we have in any given ‘today.’”
We need patience today. Our tragic flaw, if it is as I have described it, took a long while to fester and grow and deceive us into this place. And we need to give ourselves time to go through the awakening, the painful adjustment needed to cure ourselves of it. But we don’t just need patience; we need active patience, to speak when we are able, to keep a soft heart when it would be easier to harden it, and to water the seeds of humanity we find when it would probably be simpler to plough them under.
Finally, we ABSOLUTELY must not give up on meaning:
In Goethe’s Faust, the story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power, the fundamental motivation of the devilish Mephistopheles is to make us so disenchanted with our humanity that we give up on the project of living. And isn’t that the ultimate way to destroy us? To convince us that all the little choices we make every day are futile, that meaning and purpose are a fool’s errand, and that humanity, itself, is an unwise investment?
In the face of this, we must simply decide that we aren’t going to let meaning be stripped from our lives, that there is no amount of money or fame or promises of safety that can replace the feeling of living with purpose. Our lives mean something and they mean just as much as they did before we were told that they mean nothing.But meaning isn’t passive or spontaneous. We need to give meaning to things, see meaning in things. And we need to keep doing it even when the world refuses to validate our efforts.
Back to the Babylonians for a minute. They got something fundamentally wrong by aiming for something outside themselves. They tried for transcendence and destroyed themselves in the process. Human meaning isn’t to be found in trying to perfect ourselves, in trying to rise above our fragility but, rather, in sinking into it, and making ourselves ever more human by doing so.
At this moment, we are not so unlike Europe of the 4th and 5th centuries, standing at a precipice of barbarism and illiteracy. Nearly half of Canadians today are unable to pass a high school level literacy test ,and 1 out of every 6 adults is unable to complete the most basic literacy tasks, such as filling out a job application. And those of us who are technically literate spend more time reading emails, text messages, and social media posts than in sustained engagement with lengthier, more demanding texts.
We desperately need a resurgence of literacy, if for no other reason than because being broadly literate frees us from narrow-mindedness and the myopia of thinking that our times, our value, and our struggles are unique. It also makes us understand that things are rarely black and white, but usually some mixture of the greys in between. It might not be a coincidence that Abraham Lincoln, who paved the way to end slavery, was known to have read everything from Aesop’s Fables and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty to Plutarch’s Lives and Mary Chandler’s Elements of Character. Literacy is not elitist and it is certainly not gratuitous; it is essential to our civility if only because it makes us part of the “great human conversation” that cuts across time and space.
Sometimes I allow myself to make a wish list for the future. If I could change the world with a snap of my fingers, with a rub of the genie’s bottle, what would I wish for?
Some things are pretty clear. We need government to release itself from the control of deep state elitists, we need our scientists to cling fearlessly to curiosity and free thought. We need our physicians to rise above their obsessive compliance and protect their patients whatever the costs. We need journalists to report facts and not transmit ideas. And, we need humility to triumph over hubris, individualism over collectivism, and as controversial as it may be to say, nationalism over globalism.
Over the last three years, we’ve seen humanity move quickly and disloyally from one heroic figure to another: Tam and Fauci to Gates, and then Zuckerberg and, even in the freedom camp, from Danielle Smith to Elon Musk or some other Olympian figure who will “bring fire to the people.” We’ve become conditioned to outsource our thinking to the current saviour of the moment, however worthy that person might be. But the truth is, there is no politician who will save us, no billionaire who will cure what’s really broken in us.
Yes, we were lied to, yes we were betrayed and manipulated. Yes, we need to regain control of our captured institutions. And there will be a long and well-deserving list of people to bring to account for that. But, at the end of the day, what we need to focus on first and foremost is regaining control of ourselves. We need to read better, think better, remember better, vote better. We need to learn how to speak out when it would be easier to remain silent and when we face great opposition. We need to learn how to hold tightly to the mast even as the torrent blows around us.
Some very positive things are happening in the world. Within days of being elected, Donald Trump announced his plan to deport illegal migrants en masse and revoke Joe Biden’s policies on gender-affirming care, and he appointed regenerative farmer Joel Salatin to the USDA. What we saw in America last week was not just a shift to a new political regime but a powerful mandate from a people who said “enough is enough.” At some point, the intricately woven, but ultimately thin, woke narratives all started to fray. Americans are done being ignored, they are done being told they are racist, sexist, fascist; they are done being fed a legion of well-orchestrated lies, being told their common sense is unsophisticated and dangerous; they are done being a pawn in someone else’s game. What that election did is it created a shift where we are no longer in the minority. We aren’t crazy or fringe. We are just simply human.
But, as promising as all these developments are, the greatest things happening today are not political. Civilization is being awakened. We are a hungry people. We are not hungry for safety and security and perfection; we are hungry, desperately hungry, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, whether we know it or not.
We want to live a life that, however small, we can be proud of and that will form a meaningful chapter in our descendent’s memories. In big and little ways, our civilization is being saved every day by the saints of our time: by unrelenting, truth-seeking citizen journalists, podcasters and Substackers, by freedom lawyers and physicians, by ex-urbanites learning to grow their own food, by parents who are taking their children’s education into their own hands, and by an uprising of Canadians who are simply no longer willing to accept the lie that we don’t matter. There are well-known, well-highlighted heroes leading the charge but let’s also remember the heroes walking among us we may never know but who are saving our civilization in little steps every day.
We are in the middle of a war. Not just a political war, a health war, an information war; it’s a spiritual war, an existential war, a war about who we are and why we matter.
What got us into trouble in 2020 is that, like the Babylonians, we tried to become something we aren’t; we tried to become gods and, ironically, by doing so, we turned ourselves into savages. If we are to redeem ourselves, we need to remember that, more important even than perfection, is refusing to give up on the sacred concept that is at the core of the dignity of every human life: reason, passion, curiosity, respect for each other, and humanity. And if we remember those things, we will have gone a long way to reclaiming them.
Our job as humans is not to become perfect. Our job is to figure out what our function is, what are our unique talents and abilities (as individuals), and then do the best we can to offer that to the world, without excuse, without blame or resentment, even when things aren’t perfect, and especially when they aren’t perfect.
When the history of our time is written, this period will be a case study for students of global corruption, classical tragedies and mass psychosis, and we’ll be used as an example of what humans must never do again. I thought we had learned that lesson on the plains of Shinar 5000 years ago and in that courtroom in Nuremberg in 1946. But it seems that we needed to learn it again in 2020.
We’re lost. Sure. We’ve made mistakes. We set our sights too high and in doing so we forgot our humanity. But we can work through our tragic flaw and…remake our future.
Our last innocent moment could be the sign of our collapse…
Or it could be our first step forward.
Dr. Julie Ponesse’s book Our Last Innocent Moment – can be ordered here.
