In the most frequently quoted remark he ever made, Sir Wilfrid Laurier got it dead wrong. He said that the20th century would belong to Canada. The opposite turned out to be true: Canada belonged to the 20th century. In other words, our country suffers from all the ills which have afflicted other developed nations this century.

In his introduction to his Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom declared that one thing a university professor can be sure of is that his students believe that truth is relative. This is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, as they see it. If challenged, they react with indignation – “Are you an absolutist” – using the tone they might use in asking, “Do you believe in witches?” The danger they have been taught to fear is not error but intolerance; openness is the single moral virtue with which they have been indoctrinated. Liberalism without natural rights, the kind taught by John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, Bloom argues, taught Americans that the only danger confronting them was being closed to the new, the progressive – ignoring traditional principles and the moral virtues which teach men to live by them.

Well before Bloom wrote, Kathleen Gow showed in her Yes, Virginia, There is Right and Wrong that the same phenomenon could be found in Canada. Surveying the opinions of an Ontario high-school class on moral absolutes, she came to a clear conclusion: for them, such standards did not exist. What is right for me, said one student, is what enables me to get through the night; and the others said the same thing in different words. As far as they were concerned, moral standards belonged in the dustbin.

Such thinking by high-school students is bad enough; when something like it appears in the Parliament of Canada, the result is disastrous. In his Moral Vision in Canadian Politics: The Abortion Controversy, Father Alphonse de Valk showed that the report of the Wolfenden Committee, set up in Britain in 1957 to study the legal status of homosexuality and related questions, affected debates in the Canadian Parliament a decade later. The Committee was heavily influenced by the founder of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham. He held that nature has placed us under the governance of two principles, pleasure and pain; these alone should determine our courses of action. Out the window went objective standards of right and wrong; an action was good if it was likely to result in more benefit than harm. Is adultery wrong? It depends on the circumstances. Are homosexual acts wrong? Not unless it can be established that it does more harm than good.

The Wolfenden Committee decided that the law should not concern itself with morality as such; it should confine itself to those activities which offend against public order and decency, or expose the ordinary citizen to what is offensive or injurious. So homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offense, because there was no evidence that removal of them from the criminal code would have harmful effects on society.

The Wolfenden ideas became the basis for the Omnibus Bill which Pierre Trudeau, then Justice Minister, presented to Parliament in December 1967. They were the basis of his remark that “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation,” a remark which referred to homosexuality but was soon used regarding abortion as well. It soon became the mantra of the Liberal Party; it has been quoted again and again, and few have called attention to its falsity. As a Catholic, Trudeau should have realized that homosexual activity is gravely sinful, and that traditionally it has been looked on with abhorrence; as a thinking person, he should have realized that there are many other activities in the bedroom of which the law must take cognizance, such as wife abuse, child abuse, and incest.

By the time the abortion legislation came before the House, John Turner was Justice Minister; but he was hardly an improvement. He too was a Catholic, but he rejected the idea that there are moral norms to which legislation ought to conform:

The problem of trying to render synonymous law and morality is that we come down to the question: Whose morality? Whose standards of behaviour? . . . . In a pluralistic society there may be different standards . . . and the law cannot reflect them all. Public order, in this situation of a pluralistic society, cannot substitute for private conduct. We believe that morality is a matter for private conscience.

In his approach to abortion, Turner indulged in wishful thinking. All he was doing, he said, was ensuring that abortions being done in the back alleys would be done hygienically in hospitals. Rejecting proposals for a conscience clause for health care workers, he even went so far as to say that nothing like this was needed because the number of abortions would not increase. He too was ignoring reason, and his Church’s position that abortion is a gravely sinful act. Tragically, except for the time Kim Campbell was Prime Minister, all the occupants of that office in the last 30 years have been Catholics, and all of them have rejected Church teaching on abortion.

In contrast, in the abortion debate in Parliament the 14 members of the Créditiste Party, all Catholics, tried to remind their co-religionists in the Liberal Party of their moral responsibilities. They eloquently defended the proposition that if any human life is negotiable then all human life is in danger. Roland Godin of Portneuf, for example, quoted the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae while warning the legislators that they “must not allow a degradation of the moral tenets of nations through legal processes [and] practices which are contrary to natural and divine law.”

Most of the Catholics on the Liberal side were silent; the Créditistes taunted them because they “seem to be seated on six inches of Lepage’s glue; we do not hear a peep out of them.”

The 1969 abortion law, one of the most significant pieces of legislation to appear in Canada in the twentieth century, a bill which overturned our traditional understanding of justice, came into being through Catholics denying or repudiating their own faith and through intellectual errors resulting in catastrophic moral decisions.

The landmark 1988 ruling in Morgentaler proved that our courts were at least as unreasonable and erratic as our parliament. Justice Bertha Wilson virtually assumed that third-wave feminism ought to be the basis for Canadian abortion law. She also praised, again and again, the American landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973), for which, as Judge Bork has said, no justification has yet been found. Chief Justice Brian Dickson, when he declared that a pregnant woman has lost security of the person, seemed to believe that the practice of obstetrics had not made any advances since the eighteenth century. The only judgment which made sense was that of dissenting Justice MacIntyre, pointing out that no evidence had been presented to show that the system of hospital abortion committees established by Parliament in 1969 caused fatal or near-fatal hardship to women seeking abortions.

January 28, 1988 was a dark day for Canada. I wrote concerning it that I felt as if my country had left me. My country was not one in which the abortionist could go free and the defender of the rights of the unborn baby could feel the full force of the law’s displeasure. The rule of unreason had been established.

The reign of unreason has continued. The 1890s were the age of decadence; the 1990s are the age of absurdity. Ian Hunter, who writes regularly on legal matters for the National Post, described himself on September 30 as a stranger in a strange land: “A one-party state where the most significant decisions are taken not by the political oligarchy but by unelected judges . . . . A country where the RCMP does not enforce the law on Indian reserves, and the Toronto police do not enforce the law in gay bars . . . . I think infantile regression is the holy grail that Canadian nationalists have sought for so long.”

The tally of absurdities proceeding from our Supreme Court has made the highest court in the land a national joke. Retiring Chief Justice Antonio Lamer has said that the euthanasia question must be settled by the law alone, without any reference to philosophy or religion – so he evidently wants to take away the underpinnings of law in both philosophy and morality. Unreason could hardly go farther.

Our problem at the end of the millennium is clear: how do we escape from absurdity? As First Things editor Father Richard John Neuhaus would say, the answer is to turn to the writings of John Paul the Great. As he shows, relativism leads to scepticism, and scepticism to nihilism, and nihilism to despair. The remedy is not to suppress the desire for truth which is innate in all men, but to follow the truth “as blind men long for light.”

The papal encyclical on faith and reason, Fides et Ratio teaches a lesson which Catholics at least ought to be able to absorb easily: faith and reason are two different but complementary ways of approaching the truth. We must convince our contemporaries that truth exists and can be found. We now have a monumental educational task in front of us – that of spreading this message first among Christians, and then to the world at large. Our task is no smaller than that of redeeming the world, by convincing it that reality has a meaning and that its meaning can be discovered. No society can be based on the conviction that unreason is the way of the world.

David Dooley is professor emeritus of English at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.