Essays in Idleness

DAVID WARREN

Strong leaders

The gift that the Trudeaux have brought to Canada — Monsieur Trudeau, père et fils — is, or should have been, the gift of bad experience. It is the gift of demagoguery. Both were once popular, for shallow reasons, and both proved contemptible over what was, in politics, a long stretch of time. Unfortunately, as a low-intelligence country (at least east of Wawa, Ontario), we did not realize what we had done, and persisted in our democratic error. Had we given Trudeau père the boot, all the way down the stairs, in 1972, we might have avoided a long plague of misery and debt, or made room for some misery of a more entertaining kind. But we kicked him only half-way down the stairs, in the indecisive election of that year.

It is now the fiftieth anniversary of the reversal of this half-recovery. In 1974, the Liberals swept back into majority power. Stanfield, the opposition leader, an intelligent man but not too much, had proposed to legislate a price freeze in answer to the oil-crisis inflation. This was a very stupid “plausible” idea, which Trudeau mocked effectively, and then, upon winning the election, did it himself. For Trudeau the elder had been lying, as he was habitually, or what in the end is worse that lying — what in French we call, the “bowl-sheet.” Canadians had been, as usual, very easily suckered.

What Sir Herbert Read, the anarchist, called “the cult of leadership,” was displayed in this case. It is an invariable constituent in all political catastrophes. “The peeple” think that a Strong Man will fix their problems. He comes to power because he is arrogant, and knows how to exhibit the Strong Man style. He is indifferent to personal liberty, to the integrity of the family, to tradition and the rule of law, &c. He promises “change.” He parades, and seems wonderfully “cool” to the persons at the broad bottom of the intellectual pyramid.

And if he is lucky, he dies in his sleep, surrounded by his appropriated wealth. “The peeple,” whose ruin and poverty he also achieved, will die more modestly.

Prisoners enchained

Towards the end of the last century, I was offered a (free) “Blackberry.” This was by an executive of the Tottawa Zit (or, as they called themselves, the Ottawa Citizen), and whether I took it or not was up to me. The advantage, if I took it, was that I could be contacted by the company at any time, for instance three in the morning, and as a journalist could be made aware of “breaking news” — presumably, as it was broken up. After careful thought, to which I devoted fully five nanoseconds, I resolved to decline.

Others were accepting, for they found the little devices “cool,” and the possession of one would identify its owner as a member of the privileged class, qualified to work “24/7.”

This, of course, was the world of almost thirty years ago. In this time, I have fought off the gifts of several smart- and cell-phones, and still refuse to own (or be owned by) one. It is not just reactionary, Luddite views that inhibit my enthusiasm for the latest technology.

I would also decline the offer of a slave — a sentient slave, capable of innumerable chores and functions — who would follow me around day and night, walking beside me on the sidewalk, doing my bidding, carrying my groceries, and when not in use, could be folded to slide into a pocket. She might beep whenever her battery ran low, but otherwise promise not to disturb me. For even the chance of a sudden beep, would impinge upon my consciousness.

It is odd. A large majority of my neighbours now belong to shiny gadgets. Since this is Parkdale, where housing is provided for the criminally deranged, one might expect them to have electronic devices affixed to their ankles, or be compelled to clank iron balls and chains. Instead, they have accepted the hand-held monitors, voluntarily.

Relieving man’s estate

Francis Bacon was unquestionably a Protestant, and I think that my dislike of him begins there. And yet, he may be twinned with the Frenchman, René Descartes, a nominal Catholick. Both of these characters were put at the head of the Western, “secular,” scientific “revolution” of the XVIIth century, that underlies our modernity. In the case of both Bacon and Descartes, we are dealing with a new spirit in human affairs, for both are liars of a new, and extremely subtle, sort. In order to present themselves as the continuation of philosophical reasoning, they misrepresent the thinking of the past, inverting the inherited works of wisdom.

In the works of Descartes, as Étienne Gilson showed, the task consisted of using scholastic vocabulary for anti-scholastic (and ultimately anti-Christian) ends. At the extreme, in the Meditations on First Philosophy, he strips away the very possibility of objective, sensory knowledge. It was Descartes who “finally” overthrew Aristotle, although the Greek “master of those who know” is still waiting in the wings, like Trump.

Bacon discarded everything except sensory knowledge, and launched the vain project “for the Relief of Man’s Estate.” This he of course mentioned after “the Glory of the Creator,” but it was just words. It was a special kind of glory, omitting Faith. And it was at the root of our modern obsession with artificial technology, and by extension, the scheme of creating an impersonal, bureaucratic culture in which everything has been reduced to numbers. (And doing this strictly for pleasure.)

But it is the Things that have been created, as opposed to the numbers which decorate them, that bespeak the Glory of God.

Unextirpations

A Gray Whale has been spotted from an aeroplane, off the Boston States. The flight was taking a census, to illustrate the whale decline in the North Atlantic, “owing to global warming” — which is the cause of everything on the weather channel. Cetologists were surprised.

Gray Whales of the North Pacific, last of the family Eschrichtiidae, are fifty feet long and forty tonnes heavy and can live for eighty years, we learn from the Wicked Paedia. But there was no entry for the Atlantic version, because no one had seen one since the XVIIth century (when the whalers called them the “Devil Fishes”). Given their size, and tendency to persist, and reputation for showmanship, how did they hide for such a long time?

The scientists must speculate. They think a Gray must have slipped through the Northwest Passage, “owing to global warming.” But he would have encountered fewer obstacles if he swam directly from the planet Neptune.

One of my idle hobbies is noting new species that are discovered around the world; often in quite public places. Some, for instance, appear right off Nantucket. If we do a census, we find that more new animals are discovered, than old ones are reported extinct. And those extirpated then show up, after the good-byes. Should we attribute this to global warming?

MLXVI & all that

Having supper last night with dear friends of the Anglican persuasion (not their fault, they were raised that way!), I felt, among them, a particular Christian warmth, in which Newfoundland was crossed with the far east, of Ontario. The parents are, by citizenship, both Canadian, but there are deeper cultural traits — which I share with them. They, we, are of British ancestry, with a Protestant history, preceded by a misty Catholic one, “beginning” with Normans, who spoke French. But prior even to this there were the indigenous English, who ruled over themselves, except while they were being overrun by Vikings.

Their English is, alas, a language we must now learn, for it looks as strange as Althochdeutsche, but has a poetry and a prose immediacy that makes the effort worthwhile.

When the French wish to insult us, they call us “Anglo-Saxons,” and this serves also as an abusive racial term to hurl at any “white man,” ignorantly. Our enemies were (sometimes still are) under the naïve impression that we habitually colonize and enslave the gentle, virtuous peoples. In truth, we were colonized and enslaved ourselves, nearly a thousand years ago. I do not complain about this, for it would be pointless: “history happens.” We were “got” by the Normans, to use a fine old Norse part-of-speech.

But the genuinely Catholic “old England” was of a kind with the old Ireland. Christianity was sprung on western Europe through missionary efforts from these islands — in days when England and Ireland were instinctively in league, rather than at each other’s throat, as imperial politics later put them.

My Anglican friend is a perfesser in the university here, who lives in the past, most impressively. He is a student of the Old English liturgical forms, chiefly accessible through Latin manuscripts. Under them we find Anglo-Saxon (or, “West Saxon”) speakers, in a national culture that would be utterly transformed by the Norman invasion.

The dynasties followed. One thinks of Angevins, Plantagenets, Lancastrians, Tudors, Stuarts, succeeding to the conquered estate.

And one contrasts them not only in language but with the monarchs of the authentic Old England. For these “furriners” changed the essence of the islands, from a religious into a political reality.

The earlier kings — Alfred, Aethelstan, Edmund, Edgar, Edward the Martyr — had been infused with a different spirit, and with an unambiguously Christian conception of kingship. Sanctity was not impossible for them. They made an England in every sense superior to the Englands that superseded.

Art in everyday life

A crumbling book, published by the Macmillan Company of New York in 1925, written by Harriet and Vetta Goldstein, and intitulated Art in Everyday Life, can now command a splendidly pretty penny on the Internet, as will several of its subsequent printings. This is one of the achievements of the Internet: to make second-hand books impossibly expensive, so that only specialized collectors may afford them; or else worthless, until all but a few of their owners have had them pulped.

Harriet was the elder of these two spinster sisters, and the book was in its time the “Emily Post” of art and design. The authoresses were twinned fixtures of the home economics department, in the University of Minnesota, before exactly gauging what the mass market would bear. My father obtained his copy as a boy of fourteen or so, and was inspired by it to become an industrial designer (though a Spitfire pilot first). He said this to me, sans ironie, while feeding the book to me as a child.

While in subsequent editions the book’s advice, especially on women’s fashions, was watered down towards inoffensiveness, the first had just enough edge to awaken the curious reader. It was the age of Picasso, and the Bauhaus. Yet the advice is not now entirely out of date, nor has it receded into flea-market camp.

Most important, the book contained moral-aesthetic reasoning against ludicrously costly clothes and furnishings, assuring the young lady that a tasteful cloth coat could outshine a cumbersome fur, and the young gentleman that his devices should be useful. It explained how to be artful, in line and volume, without the conspicuous consumption that had been condemned in Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class.

John Ruskin (also from papa), and then Bernard Leach, confirmed my own attachment to simplicity, an “ideal” that is not always simple to comprehend. This is because it is pre-modern.

But the Goldstein ladies retain their place of honour.  For, they were the occasion of a delightful argument I was able to pick with my father. For the first time, perhaps, I was myself inspired — to the observation that modernity is prim.

Blessed Luddites

Our present contest with the pagans, Donatists, Arians, Manichaeans, and their modern equivalents by whatever name (“Woke” is the current catch-all) has not been going well, mostly because we are not fighting. When contradicted by violent bullying and threats, the contemporary Christian gentleman, or narcissist, will lay down his arms and arguments, and avoid direct confrontation by hiding. This, at least, is my own strategy. The only places where we are winning, is where we have not laid down. Unfortunately, the Christian movement (Catholic at centre) is advanced mostly by vulgar politicians; the bishops seem to be swinging the other way. So I have come to adore some of these “stooges of the people”: Mister Donald Trump, Signora Georgia Meloni, Señor Javier Milei. And note, “adore” them as persons, not necessarily for their political judgement, which may stray sometimes.

They do not expressly campaign as Christians, but most unusually, they do not try to avoid the charge, or hide from their accusers. This is what makes them remarkable, today. They know that family, faith, and freedom are the lodestars, against the obfuscating bureaucracies; satanic machinery that has been installed everywhere in public life. For unlike common politicians, they have a noble purpose; and are aware that nobility invites martyrdom. That impetus, is to break the machine.

Land & sea

Stupid people are a danger, chiefly to themselves. But smart people are a danger to the whole community.

I was reminded of this recently, when idly studying the dolphins. They are generally credited, by human naïfs, as perhaps the smartest of the marine animals: highly intelligent, sophisticated social life, known linguistic ability. I, personally, would try to converse with an elephant, before mixing socially with a bottlenose, or a chimpanzee (at the low end of this intellectual pyramid). But that is because I am also perilously naïve. (Have you ever seen an elephant having a temper tantrum?) All three creatures can be dangerously clever, certainly compared to snakes, and poisonous frogs, who tend to mind their own business. But dolphins socialize back, as we learn on the sight-seeing expeditions. They not only mix, but are extroverted.

Dr Chantel Elston, my favourite marine biologist on the U-Boob, studies stingrays in her native Cape Province, South Africa. She is also informative on other marine topics, and it is from her that I have learnt of the bottlenose dolphin’s propensity to purposely-organized gang rapes, and their many other incidents of aggression and violence.

Infanticide, for instance, is among their disagreeable habits. So advanced is their understanding of genetics, that the males know how to pick out the children of questionable paternity. Nature requires mothers to defend all of the babes, but allows fathers to be selective. The dolphin calves, like young humans presently, are responsively suicidal. They often beach themselves after such an assault has broken their backs and cracked all their ribs. It’s not easy, coming of age as a dolphin. They must wish their fathers were slower-witted.

Don’t kid yourself: emotional intelligence is actual intelligence, and like the other forms, is minacious, as any persecuted husband or boyfriend will tell you. (Human males are, of course, much less intelligent than the females.) Dolphins, indeed, are among the most emotional animals. They have mastered cute and cuddly, when swimming with people, as an act to get food and snacks, but may with little warning switch to another mood, in which they bite viciously, ram, and attempt to drown their companions — unlike the dim-witted sharks, who only want more food (and may go about choosing it unwisely). For the emotional are subject to strange hungers, that can never be satisfied; whereas a stupid creature can just eat something, then be at peace.

Dolphins kill porpoises gratuitously, as individuals when they dislike a face, or collectively when the dislike is for another pod or tribe. They have complex inter-personal relationships, and as gentle reader may know, politics and war follow from that.

They also call each other by name. As our knowledge of marine biology increases, we are bound to discover satirical intentions.

Bissextilism

We (myself, plus imaginary companions) are fully bissextile, up here in the High Doganate. For like others of British race, we accept the gaily leaping Gregorian calendar. It took us palefaces less than two centuries to count ourselves Inter gravissimas — or “Among the serious” whom Pope Gregory XIII addressed in his papal bull of late February, 1582. Some of the presumably less serious have not yet caught up, for it requires them to take, initially, a long jump: currently thirteen days that they will never have again.

The pope was not legislating a “reform,” however, let alone anything progressive; for popes, who must follow divine law, are instructed to do neither. He was rather “restoring” the (northern) vernal equinox to what it had been during the Council of Nicaea, when not only the most contentious Christological issue was settled (the relation of God the Son to God the Father), but the date for Easter, and a first handful of canon laws. The calendar had been drifting through the centuries that had intervened since then, and needed steadying. This was an appropriate “centralizing” job for the pope.

Now, the twelve demonstrably lunar months have only 354 days, or sometimes 355, whereas the solar year has 365, or sometimes 366, when fractionated into days; so that either may require at least one intercalary day, and there will be many such loose and awkward days if we try to use both. Thanks to Pope Gregory, we are now set up with just the one predictable bissextile “leap” until the day before eternity, using solar calendar alone, as we did less cautiously in the old, solar, Julian calendar — and with a unique February 29th, when necessary, instead of two consecutive February 24ths. For this 24th was the sextus in February, i.e., the sixth day before the end of the February; which was formerly, the last month of the year.

Alas, we are no longer counting backwards, in the Roman manner. The sextus, or sixth day back, was what we would call the fifth day. This is because the Romans always began counting from one, whether going forward or backward. As the numerate may be aware, they did not have the zero we adopted from the ancient mathematicians of India. Thus the Romans counted the Ides, the Nones, and their other days, backwards from the end of the month, instead of forward from the beginning as we do now. For we’ll do anything, no matter how perverse, for the sake of “progress” — even counting zero as a number.

But, as Saint John Henry Newman observed, we walk to Heaven backwards, constantly falling and failing and flipping and tripping over ourselves. It is our human way: incessantly “course correcting.” Perhaps it was from the old Romans that Newman gathered this profound insight: that backwards is the natural way forward.

Spiritual warfare

By their fruits ye shall know them. I might call this Christ’s recommended principle for taking sides. Note, it is seldom if ever in our capacity to judge “as God judges,” for we have neither the fulness of evidence, nor the sophistication of analysis that is available to Him.  God, in this sense, actually has the right to form a liberal conclusion, should He do so. In looking through the murky annals of our human history, we may think we glimpse meanings in the works of providence. But without certainty.

By this recommended principle — know the fruits — we may steer away from the obvious poisons, at least. Even the wild animals do this, though none has, to my knowledge, any appreciation of history (whether ours, or theirs). It is to know the fruits, and not to hunger, except after truth and righteousness.

Father Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, my late confessor, wrote a marvellous book on Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, in which he treats of this most judiciously. It is a book on ascetical theology — “the science of the saints, based on the study of their lives” — that does not reduce sanctity to abstinence, nor avoid the topic. Kindness, patience, truth-telling, and chastity, are instead creative forms, in which the element of self-denial does not constitute the beginning. But in Scupoli’s Spiritual Combat, which has spread as much through Orthodox Greek and Russian translation as by the original Italian, we begin not only by trusting God, but by distrusting ourself. For by our own fruits, we know ourselves.

Ignorance and curiosity are our twin outward-looking debilitations.

Knowledge “from the fruits” is, in fact, the only reliable moral knowledge for us, about the external world. It is why the origins of heresies need not, possibly should not, be investigated.

Two years later

Diplomatists and statesmen should note, than when I recommend a war in these columns, it is likely to end badly. In my own much-needed defence, I would insist that — starting with Vietnam, in the last century — these wars were not fought in the manner I put forward. For instance, the frequent American resort to saturation bombing self-defeats many objects in a good war, and may complicate arrangements for peace, later. War is a craft, not just a technology.

Still, one could apologize too much for heavy bombing. “Shock and awe” has its place in any offensive strategy. And it is important to convince a ruthless enemy that we can be more ruthless, by a factor of many times.

Most important, the war should be over relatively quickly. This is especially important if one is saddled with the rule of a “democracy,” in which your own people will whine and go peacenik, when they get bored. For unlike chess, a poorly projected war can be interminable. A civilized, defeated nation, such as Germany, Italy, or Japan, will benefit from temporary occupation, but among the desert savages of the frontier (Iraq, Afghanistan) it is best to leave promptly, after smooshing them.

The Romans knew this.

But there are wars that can’t be won, given the vastly superior arms, and implacable will of an enemy. This does not mean they are not worth fighting, of course. When Stalin’s troops invaded Finland, on 30th November 1939, the valiant Finns resisted. They taught the Russians many painful lessons, but by mid-February the Russians had begun to learn. In March, the Finns “bit the bullet,” and ceded their eastern districts to the lumbering bear. They did not have to cede their middle, however.

The Ukraine war has now gone on too long for anyone’s advantage or comfort, and if the NATO allies want the best possible result, they will insist that Ukraine cede her eastern districts. The rest of the country has now fought nobly for its independence, and the intention should be to win the peace.

Moreover, the allies should learn from the nasty experience that stockpiles are necessary. For if anything like this should happen again, we mustn’t again be running embarrassingly short of ordnance and munitions.

The woman’s vote

My mother, from whom I inherit my Tory endowment, did not flinch at the usual Tory scandals, nor fall for any of the Whiggish lies about “equality” and so forth. She did, however — on only one occasion, so far as I am aware — vote for a Liberal candidate. That was during the year of “Trudeaumania,” AD 1968. She confessed to having been briefly seized by the disease, from which by year-end she had completely recovered. By the grace of God, I was then too young to also vote for that affliction, though in the event of War Crimes Trials, I would have to admit some transient, debilitating forays.

Well, I was young, then. Imbecilic stupidity is common in the young, who are subject to fashionable excitations. My mother, on the other hand, was older. As a Tory, she of course doubted whether women should vote at all; but as my father was of old Ontario Methodist farmboy stock, his congenital propensity to vote Liberal had to be acknowledged.

“I have to vote Conservative, for his sake,” she reasonably explained.

She had compounded his characteristic error in 1968, however, and felt she owed an explanation to her son. This began by reminding me of her fragile, female sex.

“One thinks of the party leader on the analogy of going for a date.”

And true enough, the Tory leader, Mr Robert Stanfield, was the sort of man you could present to your father. He could be relied on, to get you home safely, and on time.

“But there are times when a woman does not want to get home on time,” mama added.

She, a registered nurse acquainted with the eccentricities of mental patients, called my attention to a phenomenon I had not previously noticed. Whenever a truly monstrous (male) psychopath is strapped away in gaol, the prison receives adoring letters for him, from women. These correspondents have never met him, and know him only from accounts in the yellow press. He may have been found guilty of heinously murdering a succession of wives and lovers. But they promise to be waiting for him on the steps of the penitentiary; and as the police will confirm, they are still there.

My mother had never comprehended how a woman could be so crazy. But when she realized that she had herself just voted for “Pierre,” she suddenly understood.

Little Hunting Creek

George Washington’s birthday is still observed (on a first Monday instead of on the actual day by the Julian or Gregorian calendar), in the United States — at least, in the Republican (“fascist”) tradition. Those who lean Democratic have gone mostly Woke/Satanist, and may wish to protest the fact that Washington, along with the other wealthy Founding Fathers, owned slaves. He inherited them, O lucky man, along with considerable land holdings, including the Plantation at Little Hunting Creek, which was renamed Mount Vernon — within an easy cart-ride of Alexandria, Virginia. His white, cisgendered, Anglican family had owned some of that property since 1674, and the founding president extended it. Slaves thus proved useful — as they had through humanity’s universal past. Washington was good to his slaves, said the old narrative.

Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, while also white, cisgendered, and Anglican (though truth be told he converted from Presbyterian), has also been spurned and repudiated by the progressively smug, though he could not own slaves. For the (spurned, repudiated) first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, Lord Simcoe, had abolished the importation of slaves in 1793, so that any surviving slave would have croaked from old age by Macdonald’s time. Instead, charges against Macdonald have been stitched together from the way he treated Indians (letting some go to residential schools), the Metis (allowing an insurrectionist murderer to be hanged), and immigrants from China (imposing a “head tax,” of fifty dollars). … Boo! boo! bad man! as my little sister would say, who was rather Woke from the age of four.

We do not celebrate prime ministers’ birthdays in Canada, except that I understand December 25th is the Nativity of Justin Trudeau. But instead of Washington’s Birthday, when leading capitalist enterprises may wish to close north of the border, the way they do to the south, we devised Family Day — or whatever it is called by the whim of politicians outside Ontario.

But family is a form of slavery, and may be heteronormative, and thus opposed to transgenderism. Moreover, a family that breeds children is an affront to the woman’s right to an abortion; as well as to the pregnancy rights of a deadnamed male. I do not see how anything like a “family day” can be allowed to stand.