Essays in Idleness

A correspondent, Mr Michael Hendry, calls our attention to the fact that today is the 100th birthday of Nicolás Gómez Dávila. (Yesterday was the 19th anniversary of his death.) As a website that aspires to be Canada’s leading forum of Gómez-Dávilism, & all-round reactionary intransigence, we really ought to say “Eh!” & get tanked or something. Drinks will be served at the High Doganate, to anyone who can find the place in the Greater Parkdale Area. Just go to the corner of Jameson & Queen, & ask the gentleman in the turban with the long beard. The one with the hookah.

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I have carried the discussion of the last few days over to Catholic Thing, where my column continues to appear every second Saturday. (Today being one of those Saturdays.) While no Colombian sage is mentioned, the point about politics being pointless is made. I don’t think people will understand it. For many I know, giving up politics would be like giving up poker, or crack cocaine. I often think many of us know it is pointless, in the same way we know we will not win the lottery. But the devil tells us to try again. And sometimes, of course, someone does win; & then the real tragedy begins unfolding.

Which is not to say, even at this late day, that no decent men & women mix in. I have known a few, motivated by a notion of public service; who, wrongly or not, “believe in democracy,” & argue that paraphrase of Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Which is well, on the condition of self-understanding.

Burke, in my view, is the first man to read on what was best & wisest in the Anglo-American political tradition; as also for a standard in political campaigns. He refused to flatter, & gallantly accepted the consequences when required. It was he who told the electors of Bristol: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

There, in a sentence, is why populism stinks; & why it gets worse, the broader the franchise.

Conversely, however, the statesman prepared to lose his seat, the party prepared never to form a government, the man who will stand against public opinion & endure mockery on behalf of the truth — may have some power. I think that may be the exception that proves the rule.

Gentle reader will forgive a little lapse, a little traipse, in the nature of a hit-&-run, into mundane politics. There is no point to this post whatever; which perhaps qualifies it, nevertheless, as a legitimately idle effusion. I will be perhaps the 489th pundit to say what I am about to say: that it is really quite wonderful how the Obamanoids have (unintentionally, of course) picked their scandals.

My guess is that the IRS scandal is tops. Nothing could make the “average taxpayer,” in the very season of income tax returns, & with the nightmare of them freshly in memory, identify so viscerally with the IRS targets — with the tea-baggers & “patriots” & others of that ilk whom the Tax Department selected for persecution — nor infuriate him against Big Guvmint so comprehensively.

He then learns about Benghazi — a story which the gliberal media, determined to protect America from the horror of a “President Romney” — had been keeping out of his sight; storing it up for him until now. He learns that Americans were being slaughtered by Al Qaeda in Libya, as Obama’s officers of state stood by, doing nothing to help them, indeed preventing anything from being done that might enlarge the drama. That instead, they were preparing their “talking points,” to prevent the slaughter from impinging upon the President’s re-election campaign; that they went about telling bald knowing lies on all the TV talk shows, to substitute a fictional narrative for the real one.

And then, the Justice Department hit on AP. Not on Drudge, not on Fox, but on the Associated Press, that pillar of American gliberal journalistic mediocrity. Pure genius. Let every harmless progressive hack in the USA think Eric Holder is monitoring his telephone & email. Let them think Big Brubber is really after them. And, at the very moment they are reviewing storylines that could portray Barack Hussein Obama as morally indistinguishable from, if not actually inferior to, Richard Watergate Nixon.

Who knows: maybe God still loves America. And that’s why He let Obama win.

Wake me up when they impeach him.

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The above will serve as well as any political event, or “constellation” of events, to illustrate propositions from Nicolás Gómez Dávila that were being discussed, or at least referred to, in a Comments thread a couple of posts ago. Now, Gómez Dávila should not be held accountable for the remarks that follow. They represent only my own (genuinely) humble attempt to grasp the reality he discerns. I am convinced he understood it much more profoundly.

The enthusiasts of democracy, & socialist partisans especially, work from the assumption that someone has power — some Person, or Party. Let us set aside for the moment how he, how they, obtained their power — by popular election, aristocratic election, inheritance, revolution, military coup, whatever. Let us merely imagine that some person or persons are “in power.”

Embedded in this belief is the notion that, while they are in power, they enjoy some influence. They make things happen; become choreographers of events. Until they die, or are displaced, we assume they are the ones directing history. That, indeed, is why the democracy enthusiast thinks it so important for the government to be freely elected according to some specified constitutional procedure — so that it will reflect “the will of the people.”

That the people are idiots, is a point quite easy to prove, & thus like most such points, not very significant. Let me not invidiously insinuate that the people of this democracy are more idiotic than the people of that one. There is always enough idiocy to go around, & I have yet to visit a country that is experiencing a shortage. Nor am I aware of a time in history when this was different; nor is such a time conceivable. Ask any large sampling of people to compose triple roundels, or paint portraits, or construct machinery to levitate themselves, & you will get about the same proportion as should be allowed to vote in elections. Had all been trained from youth in these arts, they might make a better showing. It isn’t really their fault.

People might think a man like Barack Obama would know something about politics, since he has been bathing in them most of his life. He does in fact know something about them, but not much. This is because his acquirements were all in a specialized area of politics — that of getting oneself elected. (Read the old Commentariolum, or handbook on electioneering, attributed to Marcus Cicero’s little brother, Quintus. Nothing much changes in two thousand years.) Once outside that specialization, poor Obama is at sea. He was never exposed to the craft of governing, only to the craft of getting power. His ideas of how things work, of what can & can’t be done by government agency, are absurd & laughable. To be fair he is, in this respect, a typical politician. They all studied the same specialty; not one in a hundred studied anything else.

But leave all this aside. We still assume that, since he has the power that goes with the office, Obama must have influence over what falls out. On democratic theory, he could be held accountable. He could be replaced by someone who knows what he is doing, or is more likely to do what the people want. His replacement would then be judged by the same criteria.

Bear with me. I must say something shocking.

I don’t think Barack Obama has any power at all. Nor do I think any alternative president, or king, or generalissimo, or fuehrer, competent or incompetent, would have any power — beyond that of any other human being. That the President of the United States can lift a mug, & decide whether to fill it with tea or coffee, I will freely allow. That he may make decisions affecting other people, & that his decisions may be treated as law, I will also allow. Such laws may be obeyed or disobeyed. But all that happens beyond his power, & is only in the power of other people.

To my knowledge, Mr Obama cannot even launch a nuclear missile on his own. The gizmo on his desk only asks someone else to launch it, & the target selected is merely a suggestion. The technocrat receiving this suggestion, should he deign to listen, might if he wished select a different target, that would please him more. Granted, he might be hanged for doing that, but so it goes. Each person must weigh the likely consequences of his actions, & decide in the balance what works for him.

Does that mean the technocrat has power? Of course not. He has no more power than anyone else who happens to have his finger on the means to obliterate, say, a medium-sized city. He can kill a lot more people than a man with a rubber slingshot, or even a hunting rifle. He can, as it were, create an event that will be consequential. But he has no power to guide the consequences, nor predict them beyond the first day or two.

The nasty little boy who steps gratuitously onto an anthill may slay or inconvenience a great many ants. But the ant world continues, according to its own patterns of behaviour, regardless of that boy. The survivors soon develop work-arounds for the problems he has created for them. Our human world continues at a level of sophistication & unpredictability unknown to & unimagined by the ants, so in that sense our technocrat has even less power than the nasty little boy.

My interest in the Middle Ages has been useful in bringing this point home to me. Consider, for instance, the Black Death. Unquestionably it made an impression at the time. The scale of the catastrophe was vastly beyond anything of which mediaeval men had experience. (It wasn’t as if they lived in the 20th century, when the deaths of millions was a matter of course.) Large districts were depopulated across Europe, cities reduced to a fraction of their former size, horrors endured of an apocalyptic piquancy. Nor was the experience ever quite forgotten; we still remember it, today. Yet within much less than a generation, the Black Death had ceased to be an important issue. Life had resumed, & the work-arounds were in place.

Without doubt, the world is different for such events. To this day, things are not as they would have been, had the Black Death not occurred. But the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, had no power to determine any of the outcomes. Some other bacterium might have been worse, perhaps; but still it would have had no orchestrating power.

Someone mentioned Hitler the other day. (I think it was me.) How was he different from Yersinia pestis? Consider what trivial events would have changed the course of European history, to say nothing of the demography. A few bullets whizzed past him at Ypres. With minute adjustments in timing & the breeze, any one of them could have finished him off. He collected two iron crosses, when bullets did not miss. His siblings had all died young, of such diseases as diptheria. Neither of his parents lived to old age. And car accidents happen every day. Forget the plot to assassinate Hitler. Slightly adjust a dial, & any one of us is no longer here.

At age twenty, broke & alone, Hitler nearly perished in a Vienna doss house. “Poor vagrant who never hurt anybody. Dreamt of becoming an artist.”

He had no power. Everything he achieved was through others.

History happens, ideas have consequences, one thing follows another in a chain. But no human being ever controlled even his own destiny.

It seems to me, & it seems to me that it seemed to Gómez Dávila, that God has so arranged our world that history doesn’t matter. Or more precisely, the kind of history that we think matters, doesn’t matter much, if at all, to us. The significant events happen out of public view; & they are constantly happening. The real drama is within each human soul. Each responds to events that come his way, but the events in themselves are just props in the drama. Let us express this in a painful cliché. Politics are a way to rearrange the deck chairs. They do not change the fact we’re all going down. They only add pointless melodrama & farce to a plot already sufficiently gripping.

Of course, I would prefer monarchy to democracy. It is so much less distracting, & the taxes would be much lower. Occasions of sin would be drastically reduced. The king has a job, for which he was trained, whether well or poorly; let him get on with it. The nobles have their own lives, too. Let the world be governed by customary law, & normative tradition: how better to keep these big shots out of our affairs?

But since getting rid of democracy & replacing it with monarchy would itself be distracting, I will not press the point.

Besides, nature will take care of it soon enough.

The smaller a man’s mind, the easier it is to drive him out of it, as I have observed passim over the years. In certain academic, sherry-drinking milieux, it could be done only a generation ago with just five syllables (“As Leo Strauss says, …”) & sometimes with just three. Unfortunately today they no longer drink sherry, & probably wouldn’t recognize the name. Strauss was a delicious affront to the Bouvards & Pécuchets of post-classical liberalism. He was the worst kind of “fascist” in the sense that he embodied pre-post-classical liberalism. He taught his (many illustrious) students to read the classical texts of political philosophy with attention & great care; to escape from the narrow present into an historical breadth of thinking. By doing so they would find any number of things that were deeply affronting.

Nineteen sixty-three is a year I recall vividly, though I had only ten years’ experience of this planet at the time & was still, as it were, getting up to speed. It was the annus mirabilis in which, as the late Philip Larkin noted, sexual intercourse was discovered (too late for him; too early for me), “between the end of the Chatterley ban, & the Beatles’ first LP.”

I was not, incidentally, then or later a student of Leo Strauss. The best I’ve ever been able to do is read his beuks. But I have some further idea of his “presence” from having met some of his academic progeny.

He was Jewish in the best sense, from a Christian point of view: the leaven in our bread, the particle in our oyster, the perfect outsider, within. It was the Jews that made Christian Germany, indeed Christian Europe, “rise” intellectually, tiny though they always were in number. They did so simply by remaining Jewish, often even when they ceased to be practising Jews. But, thinking as Jews. Though I will admit the remark is rather mysterious, the Jews have remained God’s gift to us, & the means by which we could obtain a certain self-understanding; without which we could not. Even in pogroms, mediaeval & later, they gave us a gift of self-understanding, as no other people could — in that case, of the evil in us. That Christ himself was a Jew, is at the heart of this mystery, which even in this temporal world, seems strangely to transcend time. But that is another, very long story (one with which, incidentally, Catholics were wrestling, painfully, in 1963).

Re-reading a couple of the essays collected in Strauss’s Liberalism Ancient & Modern, in wee hours of a sleepless night,  I was reminded of his nearly angelic ability to drive a certain class of people out of their little minds. Let me cite, for example, this brief passage, from an essay in which Prof Strauss was reviewing a social science colloquium, in 1963:

“Not a few people who have come to despair of the possibility of a decent secularist society, without having been induced by their despair to question secularism as such, escape into the self & into art. The ‘self’ is obviously a descendant of the soul; that is, it is not the soul. The soul may be responsible for its being good or bad, but it is not responsible for its being a soul; of the self, on the other hand, it is not certain if it is not a self by virtue of its own effort. The soul is part of an order which does not originate in the soul; of the self, on the other hand, it is not certain whether it is part of an order that does not originate in the self. Surely the self as understood by the people in question is sovereign or does not defer to anything higher than itself; yet it is no longer exhilarated by the sense of its sovereignty, but rather oppressed by it, not to say in a state of despair. One may say that the self putting its trust in itself & therefore in man, is cursed. …”

Strauss was alluding to Jeremiah (17:5 et seq). He goes on to say: not only cursed but haunted. The self (contemporary with 1963), though an “unwilling witness to the biblical faith,” & in that sense unbelieving, was nevertheless in no sense pagan. It might have wished to be, but could not be. “It is the unbelief of men who, or whose parents, were Christians & Jews. …

“They are haunted men. Deferring to nothing higher than their selves, they lack guidance. They lack thought & discipline. Instead they have what they call sincerity. Whether sincerity as they understand it is necessary must be left open until one knows whether sincerity is inseparable from shamelessness.”

One sees immediately how he might be hated. And that is before he has mentioned that this “sincerity,” which has become so prized, “fulfils itself in shrill & ugly screams.”

We begin to see where this is going; that the essay is developing into a very nice analysis of the mental outlook of the generation that found its primary intellectual expression in protests against the Vietnam War, against “racism,” against “inequality,” against “conformity,” against everything that could be defined as “American” — while dreaming of an American “great society” of no discernible content.

“We have met the enemy & he is us.”

That immortal line from the comic strip, Pogo, sounded depths deeper than its draughtsman designed. For the scream of that sovereign Self could only be screamed against itself. People who acknowledged no moral law, & no ground upon which any law could fasten, uttered protests that assumed the existence of immortal & unalterable moral law. What were they thinking?

Of a time only slightly displaced from them, when such a moral law was acknowledged.

And to compound the joke, the cry for “diversity” was already in the air, together with demands that every alternative to the stifling conformity of the atomized self — in its secular state, demanding secular statism — be overcome. And for the sake of world peace.

Truly, for world peace, & world government, & perfect universal conformity, for as Strauss also noted it is the very existence of diversity in thought & life that is the cause of conflict. In effect, looking back over fifty years, we have the moment in which “tolerance” was being redefined, from “live & let live” to an absolutely uncompromising intolerance of anything with moral, intellectual, or spiritual substance.

Has there been any progress in the last fifty years? I would say that our liberal intellectuals today are less haunted; or rather, if haunted, not by memory but by some ghost more directly; perhaps, as I speculate, the Holy Ghost, whose grace still operates even on lost souls. A liberal intellectual of 1963 could still see specific things that he did not like, against which he was furiously rebelling. His descendant, his intellectual grandchild of 2013, shadow boxes in a complete fog, entirely of his own exhalation. In that sense, the secular humanist Revolution has been achieved.

So that today it is no longer necessary to utter five syllables, in order to drive a liberal intellectual out of his mind. We find him out of his mind already.

My Chief Texas Correspondent, a great enthusiast for the burning of fossil fuels, ping’d me yesterday a link to Charles Hugh Smith’s blog, on “Degrowth, Anti-Consumerism, & Peak Production.” To my surprise, he pronounced himself amenable to it, “except for the knock on fossil fuels.” I proposed a compromise, in which we continue to dig, pump, frack, & pipe at a merry old rate, but instead of using the products to fuel anything, simply flare them off directly into the atmosphere. Thus we might benefit global agriculture (plants just love carbon dioxide), & contribute what we can to global warming (against the threat of the next Ice Age), while sparing the planet from all these frigging cars.

I love the vocabulary of the Degrowth Movement: “financialization,” “phantom collateral,” “Keynesian cargo cult enablers,” combine in a rich emulsion that may be rolled into sentences as, “the quasi-religion of growth is just the public relations narrative that mesmerizes the debt serfs, political toadies, & media sycophants.” … “Décroissance” (French), “decrescita” (Italian), “decrecimiento” (Spanish) are apparently the alternative labels for this movement, among those sophisticated, cheese-eating furriners. (Americans shouldn’t be told about them.) From sources discovered in a quick Google search, I see it must be internationally trending.

That the “spiritual” consequences of consumerism are frequently mentioned is all very nice, except, these days “spiritual” in no way implies “Christian,” nor precludes any of the dozen or less standard gnostic heresies — known to us through twenty centuries; patiently & repeatedly explained & exposed — that are exhumed & relaunched yet again in every fervid round of New Age fallacy.

The first point to make is that there are worse sins than consumerism; & consumerism itself cannot be effectively attacked without a fairly full understanding of this. Nor is it really a particular sin, but a glom of many, most of them venial. Without some larger view of the moral order, within which fast & abstinence take their part; without some joyful apprehension of the purposes served in human life, I don’t think attacks on consumerism will get us anywhere. They tend to devolve into attacks on other people’s consumerism or, when precept is put into practice, become the ghostly fuel to power spiritual pride. Do we propose to be holy, or do we propose to be smug?

Notwithstanding, the “degrowth analysis” is basically right. More & more we inhabit a bubble economy, in which we have amateur physicists dressing as bankers, inventing exotic financial instruments to summon new & illusory forms of wealth for themselves, from out of thin air. We have built “consumer confidence” into a network of confidence tricks, many easily spotted. The term “financialization” is as good jargon as any to describe economies that depend on “phantom collateral,” starting from the paper & electronic money that is, even in principle, ultimately exchangeable only for itself.

Paradoxically, the Degrowthians are prone to recommend new statistical indicators that are every bit as tomfool as the ones they would replace. “Gross domestic product” is an insane way to measure the “progress” of any society, but there is no way to quantify “gross domestic happiness” that does not equally depend on grossly arbitrary assumptions.

I am a real Chinaman in this regard. Which is to say, I hugely admired traditional Chinese ways of doing business, & going about the government of trade, which survived in many locations into my own earlier manhood. These were businessmen who eschewed abstract statistics; who made their contracts verbally, & had no use for courts. They operated in a marketplace where reputation was everything, & where it was also put into question the moment wealth was flaunted. Numbers were of course used, but they were numbers corresponding to real things: weights & volumes of the commodities, for instance. You know to the tael what you have in your warehouse, & you deliver it to the measure, intact & on time — or you are no longer in business. Indeed, no legal action is ever necessary, because no one will ever buy from you again if you fail, even once.

A question such as, “How much are you worth?” — asked typically on North American visa applications — was meaningless to these people. Dollars, whether Yankee, Mexican, or Hong Kong, meant nothing to the traditional Chinese businessman, except as weights of alloyed silver. The Chinese, after all, invented paper money, & were therefore the first to see through it.

(Which is another thing I love about Mediaeval Man. He was pretty Chinese about things. He did not confuse forgiveness with mercy, nor extend mercy on behalf of his unconsulted neighbour. He did not feel the modern obligation to let himself be suckered again & again. He was habitually inclined to Christ’s preferential option for direct action.)

The modern advice of the Degrowthians is sound enough, so far as it goes, for it was the advice of our ancestors, passed parent to child, constantly reinforced by church & community. Do not buy what you can make for yourself. Buy nothing for show. Use anything you own until it can’t be fixed any more. Buy, when you must, the best you can afford. Avoid clutter. Ignore advertisements & salesmen. Do what you can to drive any kind of tempters out of your environment, & use violence when necessary to keep them away from your kids. Give to those genuinely in need, care directly for your sick & old, volunteer when a barn needs raising. Regardless of cost, be reliable.

This was sound advice because anyone could do it; no one had to wait for Armageddon. Then or now: no one need wait for some other person to do something first, nor think about the result of the next meaningless federal election. (From the thinnest vine, the vineyard may be restored.)

Yet it was made sounder still, by fretting & interlacing each sensible point of domestic doctrine into the crown of a solid theology. For in the view not only of the Church, but of my own Calvinist & Methodist ancestors, the purpose of life was not to increase some abstract efficiency. Rather, the opposite is closer to the truth: that the purpose of efficiency is to increase life; to grow both materially & spiritually towards an end that is in God. And not just any god, mind, but the One revealed in Christ Jesus.

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I know this sounds crazy & impossible to the emancipated man of today, steeping in our contemporary consumerism. He is constantly told to maintain confidence, & keep his pecker up for hope & loose change. His capacity for trust, so far as it goes, is invested in the hope that his debts will not be called in, that everything he owns won’t be hauled away, & himself in the next truck turned into the landfill. Under all the anxieties of his fast-paced life — work till you shirk, shop till you drop — he believes himself to be a team player. He is anyway reminded in a thousand subtle ways, & a thousand more obvious, of his most solemn public responsibility. What would his friends say if he broke rank, & stopped doing his bit for “the economy”?

He must make his obeisance to the clichés that bind us all together, as worthy citizens of a modern secular state; to “the Gods of the Market Place,” as Kipling called them, “& their smooth-tongued wizards,” operating in politics & business alike. He must maintain the common faith that animates our democracy; that sacred faith in Peter Pan — that if we all keep our eyes closed together, the facts of life will eventually go away.

How can he dare let go of that? What would be the consequence if he did? Who could reasonably expect him to embrace an alternative “blind faith,” that might separate him from his fellows, & from the safety of the crowd?

And why anyway should he believe in what, according to the scientific consensus, is a crop of old myths? For that’s the real rub. According to the scientific consensus, he’s just a lump of dirt, or at best a worm crawling in it. Why should he believe that his soul has any value? That he is not just a worm, or a number, but a man? Sounds like narcissism to him; sounds rather selfish; sounds downright unscientific. For in his heart he believes that he is worthless. In his heart is the counsel of despair.

What is impossible today was not always impossible, however. There was a world before Peter Pan. Even I retain glimpses of another way of life, not in some distant place, but right here under the asphalt, in a country that once had a little dignity. (Canada today is a country of which her ancestors, of every confession, would be rightly & deeply ashamed.)

That it was never secure can go without saying, for it is gone. Nothing in this world survives, that is not constantly maintained & replenished, & what is built in faith requires the renewed faith of every generation. And the truth is that faith was broken, except a few resilient threads. (Which the devils try so desperately to sever, from the fear that they might grow again.)

Yet I recall an old house in Cape Breton, where every degrowthing principle was once observed, as a matter of course, & where this text adapted from the Book of Joshua (24:15) was embroidered & framed:

“If it seem evil to you to serve the Lord, you have your choice. Choose whichever strange gods you will serve. But as for me & my house, we will serve the Lord.”

I love to quote the opening line of Praeterita, John Ruskin’s uncharacteristically light & playful book of autobiographical sketches, happily completed just before he went insane:

“I am, & my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school; — Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, & Homer’s.”

As pendant to my last post, I thought perhaps to parry a criticism received in email. Like too many of my correspondents, this critic did not wish to advertise his name, & therefore would not post a formal Comment. He nevertheless had a complaint, that I’m “beginning to sound like John Ruskin,” & this was accompanied by a reminder of John Ruskin’s fate.

With world enough & time, I should love to ramble on about Ruskin & Ruskinism. My relation with that grand Victorian sage; with the Pre-Raphaelites buzzing around him; with the painter J.M.W. Turner for that matter (whom Ruskin worshipped); with Pugin & neo-Gothicism, including the neo-Gothic Tracts for the Times; with the whole cumbrous tide of Victorian Romanticism & Reaction — is full to choking with love & hate. It trails off on William Morris wallpaper in a mixture more of hatred & contempt. (O Lord do I despise William Morris!) But in the descent of Ruskinian opinion & ideals I trace shadows from my own family. Kipling, too, came out of that fecund primal ooze, to which I can return by a straight line passing through my father & grandfather.

Hatred & love are not an odd combination. It flourishes within most families.

I would love to ramble on about Ruskin, but had better not. I propose, today, to come swiftly to my point. Any other approach would be suffocating. Even the paradoxes run too thick, as we advance from the Victorian Reaction, to the anti-Victorian Reaction; from Their House to Bauhaus, as it were. We are dealing with a huge & catastrophic failure — as I see it now, the failure of the drowning English mind to catch the life-line of Catholic Christianity.

The points I would make are anyway almost perfectly captured in a book published in 1939. It is by Rosalind Murray — daughter of the august Gilbert Murray, sometime wife of Arnold Toynbee, mother of Philip, grandmother of Polly Toynbee, &c — who skipped ship, or turned traitor to her own class. For the book, entitled The Good Pagan’s Failure, presents the high-minded Victorian paganism from which she herself sprang, & the high-minded Liberalism it begat — the Enlightenment of the Enlightenment, if you will — in all its best arguments & finest poses. And then it utterly demolishes them.

The flaw in the heart & mind of Ruskin is not to be found in his raging Toryism. It is instead to be found in the largely unacknowledged, high-minded paganism that was admixed to it. In a sentence, Ruskin, as so many of his contemporaries & followers, embraced the external signs of high civilization, as if they were that civilization itself. At core, he is not a believer. He merely believes that he believes. At core he is as self-creating as his exact contemporary in madness, Friedrich Nietzsche. And of course Ruskin thinks that art can save us, & more subtly, that politics can save art.

Yet he is gloriously right in discerning the cheapness of modern life; in attacking evils that have only become worse since his time. His excoriating tract, Unto This Last, & his many lesser tracts that deal with “political economy,” are, if gentle reader will forgive the occasional atrocious pun, “right on the money.” He understands what is wrong with what we might call “optimistic capitalism” — with the whole analytical school descending from Adam Smith, & the entire Utilitarian project beside it.

Let us put the argument plainly. The problem is not with trade, per se. Trade is noble, or potentially noble; private enterprise goes without saying. The problem is with the development of trade in the direction of cheapness. Products of an inferior nature drive out products of a superior nature, because they are cheap. Capitalists become obscenely rich by cutting corners, & offering cheap, through methods of mass production which drive the decent & honourable tradesman out of business. If he survives at all, it must now be by making & selling luxuries to those rich. But meanwhile the broad world fills up with garbage, in the strict sense of goods disposable by design.

My shirts, for instance. I would be happy to own two shirts, that would stand up to a little wearing. Instead, for the same price I might pay for those, my closet is filled with shirts (I count nine at the moment) which survive for a year or two only by alternating use, & very gentle laundering. Indeed, I have roughly calculated that the best the shopping malls offer will begin to disintegrate — the collars fray, the elbows come out, stains become unwashable, &c — after being worn only a few dozen times; which is to say, their life expectancy can be expressed in weeks. Better than that comes only from a tailor; though no longer from just any tailor.

Now, Ruskin can be laughed off as naïve. As he was himself too angrily aware, the ideology of “cheap” was prevailing; of “free market competition” to obtain the lowest price; of quality standards enforced to “the lowest common denominator” — as much by the demands of the market as by any legal requirement. It would be wrong to suggest there are no quality standards at all. (A shirt that disintegrates the first time one puts it on is unlikely to sell a second time.) But it is amazing how many corners can be cut, over time, & how acceptable this will be in the marketplace when it is done gradually. Mass “lifestyle” advertising is itself designed to make it acceptable, by distracting from each product’s essential worthlessness, & has proved cheaper & more efficient than any effort to improve the goods. The whole idea is wonderfully conveyed by the vulgar expression, “bottom line.”

Ruskin’s solution to the problem can also be laughed off. It was to end competition for price, & replace it with competition for employment. The tradesman selling inferior goods, the craftsman making them would be, under his regime, soon out of business — instead of the purveyor of superior goods. True, Ruskin rather relished the idea of the hucksters starving.

What he advocated was close to mediaeval economic arrangements, & he further bought into the guild systems by which they were regulated. Guild regulation should not be compared (invidiously) with “free markets” — which in practice never exist for long, & are as rare to start with as “perfect communism.” Rather they should be compared (fairly) with the massive centralized bureaucracies which are our way of regulating trade, & perfectly inevitable in any democracy.

To a Ruskinian view, the truly naïve & laughable position consists of failing to see the real choice. This is not between “free markets” & “socialism” — the propaganda simplification by the ideological fanatics on both sides. That is a choice between abstract positions, neither of which can survive in our human world — the law of the jungle versus cages in a zoo. Nor is “something in between” much of a choice, either. It is one foot in the fire & one foot in the freezer, on the theory that this yields a comfortable average.

It is true that Ruskin went insane. This may have been from some other cause than his views on art & political economy. But let us suppose him a victim of his own over-earnestness. His condition may then be sanitized, by supplying just one missing Catholic dogma. It is never to take too seriously one’s hopes for improvement in this world.

If one has been aboard a sailboat during a good blow, one will appreciate the stress on windows. It increases dramatically with the size of the window, a potentially catastrophic problem compounded by the need to support the accumulating weight of the window itself. The lead joining the coloured pieces in the transparent mosaic of stained glass — is soft, to say nothing of heavy. Hence the iron bars, & traceried stone, integrated into the design of the great Gothic cathedral windows.

Much of this work survives. Most has been lost, however. Yet surprisingly little was lost to nature, for the men who constructed these windows knew what they were doing.

It is a curious fact that most of the great art of the highest phases of civilization has been, over time, destroyed either pointedly & intentionally, or as “collateral” from some larger intentional act of destruction: war usually, or riot. Hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, can be troublesome, too, in districts that are prone to them. But man, as we should have grasped by now, is a considerable destructive force, & by far the worst enemy of great art.

“Modern man,” in his tower flats & suburbs, who thanks to “improvements in education” may not realize that milk comes from cows, needs to have these things explained to him. The grand minsters & shrines whose ruins may enchant him, in the Albion countryside for instance, did not dissolve like cubes of sugar abandoned in the rain. They were wrecked on purpose, & the missing stone was “privatized.”

A naïve hippie of my then acquaintance once asked a thoughtful question. Why did sculptors so often leave the heads off statues, in times gone by? We were in northern India at the time, where almost every head is missing for a thousand miles. There was a simple explanation. The sculptors had originally remembered to include the heads, I explained. But later, certain iconoclast fanatics had removed them, with big hammers. (I think that may have been the first time I used the expression, “Devils in human flesh.”)

She was a Glaswegian hippie, slightly prejudiced against one religious group, so in the interest of world peace I explained it was not just the Muslims. Back home she would find that her Presbyterian ancestors (& mine) had performed the same service for the Caledonian statuary. They were also into smashing stained glass windows, melting chalices, shredding elegant garments, defacing murals, burning libraries, & so forth. To the Scottish mind, at the Reformation, the more beautiful an object was, the more flagrant an example of “popery.” And yes, the Puritans “did England,” too, only a little less thoroughly. Nor can one study mediaeval art, across the Continent of Europe, without frequent reminders of what the Reformation was really about.

In America, the Pilgrim Fathers had it easier. They were taking possession of virgin territory (from the virgin inhabitants). Their task was more simply to prevent beauty from getting started. But it keeps coming back, & after a century or two, their own descendants were indulging the human weakness for frivolous decoration. By this time the continuous Western traditions which had engendered such monuments as Chartres, were fractured. The “reformed” mind can at least take pleasure in contemplating the fact that nothing very beautiful was ever erected, north of the Rio Grande on this side of the Atlantic. For just when the new folk art traditions were beginning to coalesce, into something impressively larger, & the impulse to high civilization was stirring again, the Industrial Revolution came along to knock it flat.

Now here is a curious thing about religion, or rather, two curious things I have noticed over some decades of considering its phenomena. The first is that religion is the binding force that enables a race of barbaric savages (such as occupied Europe, in the decline of pagan Rome) to rise out of their condition. Or prevents them from doing so; it depends on the religion.

The second is that, while the appeal of religion is ultimately to the individual person — telling him how to live, what to do, & why — it has profound communal implications. This is true not only of Christianity, but of all the “world religions,” including paradoxically enough that vicious parody of the worst kind of tyrannical religion, called “Secular Humanism.”

Obvious this may be in itself, & yet, not obvious to the post-modern mind, which is taught that Secular Humanism is “not a religion” but rather, sweetness & light in its purest form. It is a mind more thoroughly atomized &, in a generic sense, iconoclastic, than any in history. It goes without saying, to the post-modern pedagogue, that children should be raised in a culturally “neutral” way (even though this is impossible); that “freedom” commands they be left to decide their own affiliation as they grow up (so long as it is with Secular Humanism). In other words, nothing resembling the development of a high civilization should be allowed, nor any civilizing act long tolerated.

This has proved a successful teaching, for it unleashes one of the most powerful forces in nature: that of human narcissism (which most other religions had tried to tamp down). In its broadest, most exploitably collectivist form, this consists of the self-celebration of man, considered as if he were his own creation. Another expression for this might be, “the American Dream.”

People did not create themselves, however. Nor, as a certain U.S. president avers, are they created by government departments, even today. They did not in the first instance even give themselves their own names, & could hardly have acquired a language by wandering individually through the primaeval forest. Survival itself requires parenting in our species; & that is where “cultural neutrality” ends. Every identifying quality in a human being is inculcated, is given or endowed; everything you are, beyond an “accident of nature,” is a product of the family & society through which you were raised & in which you function, unless we include the Grace of God. All human thought is interplay, & the most aloof eremite in the desert has taken with him a mind formed, even bounded, by others. The interplay also continues at these most remote locations; a conversation between the soloist & the choir.

“But my darling, there is nothing about your little ‘self’ that is worth expressing.”

I do not think Mrs Wrigglesworth (a backward-looking teacher who once inspired me) ever said this to anyone, in an “art class” or elsewhere. Yet she was the embodiment of this idea, & I’ve constructed the phrase to describe her being. She did not anyway need to say such things; her eyes told you. Her principles were the precise opposite of those now enforced by the immense, Kafkaesque education bureaucracies.

No one, in particular no artist, has anything serious to express “from within,” except crude, often murderous appetites, & a more general propensity to sin. There is nothing in there that was not shaped in peculiar reflection of what lies outside. The soul is real, & individual, but it is fully interactive. Alternatively, it is comatose.

Indeed the collapse of modern art, which was showing some real promise here & there in the earlier decades of the last century, had everything to do with unsustainable heroism. Each major artist tried to fashion for himself a kind of civilization, a language & a style, from the broken fragments he found in his environment. Each, in effect, had to reinvent the wheel — to imagine a whole civilization for himself, & then try to produce its archaeological remains. “Art movements” linked the works of some artists — in group efforts to achieve some cooperatively imagined ideal.  But these merely came & went out of fashion. In the end the most magnificent talents were like wheels spinning in gravel, digging a rut. A magnificent rut, in some cases.

*

In later life my father took up stained glass, as a hobby. He had no grand ambitions in this. He had started as a child with watercolour, & perhaps had doubled back to a mysterious appreciation of patterned colour, with backlighting effects. His inspiration was not expressly religious, though he collected slides of religious works of art. I am looking just now at a small rectangular frame in which he constructed the abstractly reaching arm of a crab, by leading together found pieces of coloured bottle glass, & textured shards from sliding bathshower panels & the like. There is some life in the little composition. It seems to move when one is not looking.

We would argue, my papa & I, about everything; even about stained glass. We both enjoyed playing devil’s advocate to whatever position the other took. (“Interplay.”) In one of these conversations we reached towards an important truth about stained glass, not then grasped by either of us, yet stated with comprehensive precision in e.g. such a classic work as that by Hugh Arnold entitled, Stained Glass of the Middle Ages in England & France. (Illustrated not with useless photographs but with the carefully executed coloured plates of Lawrence B. Saint; published 1913.)

Stained glass does not work like watercolour. It cannot accommodate “washes.” The extraordinary effects produced by the (often anonymous) artists of the 13th, 14th, then 15th century, were possible because they actually rejected a technological innovation. When the means were found to paint transparently on clear panes, then fuse that to the glass in the furnace, it was also found that the method produced glib, mediocre, unsatisfying results. It gave, in effect, too much freedom. Instead, they used paints — “enamelled” into the glass, as it were — only to introduce opacities. Features of face & garment could be drawn or, as it were, “inscribed” onto the flat surfaces in this way: a purely graphic touch, leaving the colour entirely “within” the glass pieces of the “mosaic.”

This method — together with the conscious & confident integration of the structural iron bars as divisions within the greater composition, & the commission of elaborate masonry to frame it — raised decorative flourish to high art, dimensionally beyond the glasswork of all previous ages (or any time since). Transparent “window painting” would only sap these effects. The craftsmen didn’t fall for it.

An analogy I found was to postage stamps, where designers fell, & fell hard, for the technical possibilities of colour photo-lithography to replace the older techniques of engraving. It gave them much greater freedom: the freedom to create mud. The sharp precision of engraving had required great skill; was extremely unforgiving of mistakes. But it did make possible something that could stand up under magnification to the minutest scrutiny, & in the hands of a master could be extremely beautiful. It was not, as 99 percent of postage stamps now are, mud, rubbish, crap.

The moral in this case was plain. Great art is not a pile-on of effects. It depends as much or more on what has been excluded. It requires intense discipline of form, & tremendous craftsmanship. There is not, & there will never be, an easy way out. There may well be technical innovations that contribute to this craft: such as the flux to melt silica at lower temperatures, making glass more ductile in the craftsman’s hands (the very ancient discovery, that made glass-blowing possible). But there will never be an innovation that obviates the continuity, in apprenticeship, of one generation to another — the “interplay” within human society, not only through space but also over time, made possible when men become civilized.

The creative force, the fine craft, the necessary science of an art — the very narratives & subjects for depiction — are intimately related. “Progress,” in the sense of improvement — as opposed to decadence & degeneration — requires the ingenious coordination of all these things. The development of the art of stained glass, through the later centuries of the Middle Ages, is deeply thrilling: consistent gains with very little lost along the way. Though alas, in the end, almost everything is lost, at least to this world, through human depravity.

“Civilization begins,” according to the poet Ezra Pound, “when people start preferring a little done right to a great deal done wrong.”

Like the capacities for speech, art, music, & sanctity, this is written somewhere in our DNA, deep down where it can be forgotten. As Pound decried, that “great deal” comes out in the popular star system, & every other way of pandering to the masses; in the replacement of what is local & specific with what is general & plugged in. Whereas, a concert of music by Dufay, for instance, or the filling of a niche with an item of carved stone, would be a little deal.

To my mind, as a religious nutjob, tyranny begins with the abuse of talents, with turning God’s gifts (or Nature’s, if you wish) to purely personal account, as the means to wealth & power. The modest, who may also have talents but perhaps not for making big fortunes or winning national elections, must nevertheless try to get by. They become enslaved on many different levels. For they must agree to accept certain terms of employment. They agree to serve: not God, except privately, nor their neighbour, except abstractly. Tangibly, the modest must serve these “men of vision,” these “nation builders” & other wilful cranks — whose talents are for plausible rhetoric; for moral & material posturing; for nerveless appropriation & the ruthless seizure of the main chance. These great become our paymasters. Money talks, & we are paid to obey.

Which is not to say tyranny is a modern invention. But I do think the technology for it has been vastly improved.

*

The late George Grant once explained to me that the Volvo in his driveway was “a modern irony.” It was in fact a mode of conveyance, which he could afford on the salary of a “philosophy professor”; mostly the wife drove it. But we spent a pleasant morning in Halifax once, thirty years ago, discussing the amount of human art & science, focused skill & moral discipline, subtracted from Civilization & added to The Economy by the invention of such things.

It was, we agreed, a superior car, a marvel of engineering. (A Volvo, well kept, might last almost half as long as a passenger airliner.) But one was like another, & ten-thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, lived out their lives for the sake of Volvos — starting from the poor wretches digging the iron out of the ground, or drilling for the oil; & ending with the slick advertising agents & the showroom salesmen. And then there are the other car manufacturers.

Indeed, the late Ivan Illich — half mad to be sure, but no one could tell which half — demonstrated that if we take the total of man-hours devoted to making, fuelling, fixing, insuring, & otherwise accommodating cars (highways, garages, traffic cops, &c), then divide by the grand total of passenger miles driven, for any fixed period, the average actual speed of a car may be calculated. It works out to just over three miles per hour. Which is to say, the same as walking, but considerably slower than a horse. To put this another way, the entire monstrous effort produces a null result.

Really, it is much less than a zero, as we see when we look at the matter more in the round. Let us tackle, for instance, the crowding issue.

The world, since I was born, has more than doubled in population. The human race, according to the environmentalcases, takes up too much space. We have a “problem” today, of “overpopulation.” Yet even they, no friends of big industry (at least in their own distorting imaginations) seem to have overlooked a simple fact. We, humans, have increased by a modest two or three times (since anno 1953). But those, cars, have increased by twenty times or more, over the same period. And each one of them leaves a bigger carbon footprint; especially when you remember that the newly arriving humans are just little ones.

Why this emphasis on getting rid of us?

Why, while we still can, don’t we get rid of them?

For consider, the average car is nearly defenceless. But the cars of the future might not be. (Unfortunately, the little humans are also defenceless.)

Now, cars give the appearance of moving very fast, to those who do not think analytically, & for the sake of having nice shiny cars in loud solid colours, the masses are happy to exchange not only the direct cost in human labour, but such “intangible” costs as may be associated with making our cities ugly, filling the air with pollutants, constraining souls within metal boxes, & turning the streets where children once played into killing zones.

Include this, too, in what we mean by “a modern irony” — that cars have made our cities spread, until one needs a car to get around them. Owning one has ceased to be a luxury, & become a necessity instead. One can hardly keep a job without one.  And one needs that job in order to pay for things, such as cars.

Cars are not everything, of course. There is so much more on the same basic scheme: the sound & fury of modern industry, signifying the nothing it all works out to. Yet let me not suggest that the lives lived, minding all the machines, are wasted. The work is wasted, goes into the black hole. But there is something irreducible in the experience, even of industrial desolation.

In one of my many pre-deleted posts, I considered instead the real estate industry. In another ramble, a couple of years ago, I reviewed a study by some Californian, linking cars & real estate together. The thesis, easily proved, is that the allocation of automobile parking spaces had, by the 1920s, determined the shape of every North American town & city, & the disposition of all human habitation within. The little Stalins, called “city planners,” have since that time been using this allocation of parking spaces as their basic “planning tool,” to micromanage the Kulaks.

Movement along the actual roads & highways is only their reserve tool.

That, in turn, leads to a larger observation about the way of our world: people constantly moving, houses constantly changing hands. We have become nomads again, high-tech nomads, while eviscerating local & regional culture, & eliminating almost every prospect of what Illich touted as “conviviality.”

But that is just where I stand confuted. One can hardly conceive of an evil that does not add a few dollars to the GDP. Say what I like about the collapse of Western Civ, the truth is it was good for the economy. And this can be easily proved, by the numbers, for they get bigger every day.

*

It will soon be nine hundred years since the White Ship went down in the English Channel (November 25th, 1120), drowning, among several hundred mostly drunken passengers, the only legitimate heir to King Henry, thus setting the stage for “The Anarchy” & everything that has fallen out since. It is barely one century since the Titanic went down (April 15th, 1912), also with huge casualties including many quite respectable, well-dressed people.

Bernard Berenson somewhere contrasted the different public responses to these two events. The first occasioned not the slightest indignation, but a great cry of woe & contrition. The second triggered a series of public inquiries, as the politicians sought to identify those responsible for the disaster, on the assumption that something contractual had failed. (The iceberg, curiously enough, was never called to testify.)

So it goes, or so it has gone, for Western society. The awe that is commanded by a great disaster, is frittered away. The large fact is quickly absorbed by many small. Moreover, so far as the awe persists, it tends to be expressed with maudlin sentimentality — with grief poured over the individual victims — unctuously, as it were. This is another way in which the large is absorbed by the many small. We find ourselves weeping for individuals whom, in the course of our natural lives, we would never have met, nor heard of. One might almost call these “virtual” tears.

Today is of course “May Day,” itself somewhat transformed from mediaeval antecedents. By modern European tradition, it is the day on which we celebrate international organized labour, or in a word, Communism — in both its socialist & capitalist forms. Indeed, everywhere I look about me, in the Greater Parkdale Area, I see new condominiums being raised, to extraordinary heights, to provide comfortable dovecotes for the New Soviet Man (capitalist version). For this New Soviet Man demands to live in a “condom”; demands not only to pay his mortgage, but a kind of rent on top of that; in addition to his demand for ever higher taxes, “daycare,” & so forth.

Alas, apart from being human, I find little in common with this New Soviet Man. He does not seem to be, in the least, animated by my classical & mediaeval enthusiasms. And I, for my part, do not long for a Volvo. Yet we celebrate so many of the same events, knowingly or unknowingly. He, with his demands for fresh public inquiries. I, with awe & contrition — for I am so impressed with the scale of the disaster.

The older I grow, the less I know. And yet, by way of compensation, the more certain I become that I know little. Such, anyway, was my thought in the wee hours of last night, as I acknowledged the arrival of my sixtieth birthday. By morning, there was still no evidence that anyone had published a festschrift in my honour.  But the day is not yet out.

Sixty is of course a fine, Babylonian number. One is now two thirties, three score, four 15-year-olds, five 12-year-olds, &c. As my late father explained on his own 60th birthday, the odd thing is only the physical decay. From inside, it seemed to him, he was the same creature he had been, entering into adult life, or for that matter entering into childhood. The same “outlook” was there. He did not feel old, except physically; but that was no different from being young, & ill. Even as death grew inevitably nearer, his sense of immortality was robust. The wisdom of the old still struck him as hogwash. He had met so many elderly fools. In T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “old men should be explorers.”

In my own experience, maturity or immaturity can remain as constants. I know this both in myself, & in others. By now I’ve known, in addition to myself, some parallel souls for a long time. I remember, forty-two years ago, telling an acquaintance to “grow up.” He did not follow the instruction. For many, perhaps for me, “second childhood” will be merely an extension of the first. My absent mindedness, for instance: care givers may mistake this for something new. The key question, it has seemed to me, is how one handles the transition to adulthood, through later adolescence. If there is going to be an improvement, it is most likely to happen there. After that, only God can save us; & the birthdays are just numbers.

Among atheists, I have observed a remarkably consistent fact. (Yes, it’s time to be mean to atheists, again.) At some emotional moment in adolescence each “discovered” that God does not exist. For the rest of their lives they remain in a state of arrested spiritual development, which further impedes moral, aesthetic, & intellectual growth. A mental block prevents them from getting beyond the glib answer to any question, the reductive explanation of any phenomenon, no matter how complex. To the poetic, the miraculous, the mysterious, the sanctifying, they remain deaf, blind, & mechanically distrustful. Not one of them will agree with me, but I have seen what I have seen: death in adolescence. Atheism is a killer. Therefore choose life.

I think of an acquaintance, my exact contemporary, who died forty-one years ago. His descent into the underworld began on drugs. Not suicide, but a “death from misadventure,” some coroner ruled. Raised to be pious, in a stifling puritanical home, this Leo lost his faith, en route to losing everything. No one could feel as sorry for him as he felt for himself, in his imagined victimhood, in his projective political obsessions. But girls were adding to his pain by showing no interest in his tragic dimension, only mild pity for a loser. I cannot believe his death was not intentional suicide; he had repeatedly threatened to kill himself, playing Young Werther in the late hippie style. Why not die? The world was not worthy of him. There were too many humans on the planet, anyway.

It is not unusual for young men to commit suicide, at their hormonal peak; or to commit murder; or both. Death is calling to them. Heroism is also calling; but they must choose.

Indeed, where would Islamist terrorism be, without a plentiful supply of Muslim Young Werthers? Religious fanatics by proclamation; atheists within. Outwardly spouting the politics of the Ummah; inwardly caring for no other soul. This is actually a commonplace story: the prospective suicide bomber, shamelessly partying until the night before, in a provocatively un-Islamic manner. It reveals this little truth about them: that they are faithless, inside. That they do not believe in anything. That even their hatreds are hollow.

Leo, too, could have been turned into a suicide bomber, given suitable cultural cues. He had about him, towards his end, that satanic glibness.

He could also have survived his adolescence. We could be sending each other birthday cards today. His fate turned on a straw. He pulled one of the short ones; took no one with him, but never grew up. And what I retain, after all these years, when I alone have turned sixty, is the terrible memory of him. Not death in itself, for I had seen death already at that age. Instead, something worse than death, something smaller & uglier & heavier & sinking down, down, down.

By contrast I have found life large, & growing; ever rising in defiance of the grave; rising by that better instinct, from gravity to Grace.

This is why, in turn, I cannot take “lost youth” lightly. All around I am darkly aware of people who also died in some way. Dead in their hearts, but stolid in survival; not zombies, yet aspiring to be. These are people who have never known joy, only the pleasure of relief; who live on grimly with the bitterness inside them; the anger from never getting their way; the cowardice before death so final & — “there’s the rub,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet says. I have watched, with horror, people clutching desperately to small worldly things, till they lose their grip & fall.

But what do I know? One cannot inhabit the soul of another person; only see in through the eyes. One cannot even see through the eyes of the “happyface” mask; only observe the misery of an atomized consumerism. Always, more is going on than appears; & while there is life, hope is not yet extinguished. In like case, so much of the world becomes stranger as I grow older; things once taken as familiar become less & less so. And then the impossible quietly unfolds.

The books I had read, & now return to, I did not understand. My own most confident assertions about them were often quite ridiculously wrong. I read what I was expecting, what I imposed, what had been imposed upon them by repetition, by habit. I ignored what did not fit with expectation, missed the most obvious clues. And while I am alive, & Leo is dead, it was a close-run thing. For I’ve behaved, all in all, as a typical modern, & thought like a modern, from within modernity’s foetid head.

For instance in youth how often I myself “played Hamlet” in some way — not realizing that Shakespeare himself despised him. Hamlet is the charismatic modern man: the charming, gifted, whimsical tyrant; who feels no pain but his own; a Death’s Head that Shakespeare foreshadows & condemns. How consciously Hamlet has chosen evil, & pursued an unforgivable revenge; how wilfully he brings destruction on a world that hasn’t pleased & accommodated him. He is guided by fantasy & apparition. What begins as a pose ends in real madness, spreading by contagion. For Hamlet is a brooding, superstitious atheist; a moral relativist; even a Sartrean “existentialist”; a character no more to be trusted than Iago, nor followed than Macbeth. I was taught that the play is “half Catholic, half Protestant,” but that isn’t true. It is entirely Catholic, & pointedly anti-Lutheran. “To be or not to be” may be the signal speech; but it has been wantonly misunderstood since the 18th century. (I don’t think it was misunderstood before.) I must have read the play ten times before an essay by Rebecca West triggered the realization: that we do not understand Shakespeare. But Shakespeare understands us.

And still I remain a product of my time, & only with age begin to outgrow it. For time itself will need to be outgrown, if youth is ever to be recovered.

It has been a “ha!” week in the news. Today alone, after a quick sweep of the Beeb, Mop & Pail, Drudge, & so forth, I count about a dozen easy marks for Idlerine mockery. Lord grant me the power to resist, as most of these “stories” have “tragic” undertones, if not overtones, & my mommy taught me never to mock someone in pain, unless he is family.

Nobody was killed, or even seriously harmed at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, however, so let me have a go at that. The man himself, & all current & former “Potusas” (“President Of The USA” in plural) were present for the ceremony yesterday, each on his best behaviour. We are told that the new facility in the Southern Methodist University at Dallas is the biggest yet, certainly the most expensive; so that we anticipate the Obama Presidential Library may usefully take out a substantial chunk of Chicago.

Now, a leftoid might observe that “Bush” & “literature” do not naturally pair, but let us avoid that swipe. At second hand, but also briefly at first, I noticed that Mr Bush is an intelligent man, married to a small-town librarian & himself an avid reader — if almost exclusively of beuks I wouldn’t have bothered to read myself. He graduated from a prestigious university, & was clocked, even in his youthful drinking days, with an IQ far above the national average. His “Bushisms” were frequently hilarious, & usually intentional. They were a tool in his political bag of tricks, performing two functions. The first was to make his enemies misunderestimate him. The second was to help his own constituency identify with him.

(Alas, meanwhile behind the scenes, he was doing things too clever by half, perhaps by three-quarters.)

In the days when I had a slight “in” to that White House, I once received a private “hedz-up” that Mr Bush would be delivering a crass remark at a press conference in France. The remark itself would be left to his spontaneous genius, but surely it would come. At the press conference, a New York Times reporter asked President Chirac a reasonable question, in elegant French. Bush seized the moment, interrupting his host to sneer at this reporter, then boasting that he could speak Spanish. It was a brilliant way to antagonize all the sophisticated people who’d never vote for him anyway, while cheering up Middle America — where the phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” had become implanted.

I was delighted, in a low way, as I get a kick out of political craftsmanship, & have to suppress a giggle before condemning it. Bush played dumb to trick his opponents into playing dumber. This invariably worked, for their vanity made them unteachable. Of course, all this contributed to the further decay of political standards. One recalls the observation of Mark Antony: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Tombs for the still living are an American innovation, an extension perhaps of the California funerary customs satirized by Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One. The idea of filling them with video exhibits, state papers as well as state furnishings, & housing yet another Think Tank within, adds surreal touches that might have titillated the ancient Egyptians. For when contemplating the U.S. Presidential Libraries, I think of the Tombs of the Pharaohs. And of the desert sands blowing over them.

“Think globally, act locally” could be taken as the slogan of any radical ideological cult, but it applies with special force to Islamist terrorism. It provides an adequate answer to the question, “Why, why, why?” now being asked in e.g. Boston local media. I had plenty to say on this, right after the surprising conclusion of this year’s Boston Marathon, but thought I should leave it until the smoke had cleared, & all the bodies had been counted.

There were not one but two forms of ignorance that Socrates was attacking in old Athens. The first is people claiming to know what they do not know. But his dialectical process was designed to uncover the complementary opposite, too: things people know but pretend they don’t. He was the original warrior against political correctness in a democracy, who paid the price for exposing the malice, the hypocrisy, & even the defeatism of the political class in his day. And yet that was not his project. Upsetting the municipal authorities, exciting the demos or mob, was merely a by-product of his quest for truth.

“Why, why, why?” is not a Socratic question. It might be too flattering to call it a rhetorical question. I cannot imagine a Sophist who wouldn’t sneer at such a confession of helplessness.

Terrorism has been adopted by political Islam (“Islamism”) because it works. It works especially well against politically correct secular humanists, & more generally a population whose moral & spiritual formation is vague. They can be counted on to miss the point of it, which puts the perpetrators at a large advantage. It is of course intended to make us fearful, to make us respond emotionally & mindlessly, to run about squealing “why why why.” From what I can see through our North American media (both mainstream & substream), the most recent hit in Boston had its intended result: the wallowing in grief & confusion, the lockdown of an entire city while the police searched for a couple of young thugs, the rivetted attention to an incident in which the number of casualties was comparatively small.

In the state of Borno at the moment, in the northeast of Nigeria near the border with Chad, hundreds of corpses are being added to the many thousands so far created by Messrs “Boko Haram” — the generic name for the Islamist operatives in that country. Western media present them as a “separatist movement,” or where factions have been detected as “separatist movements.” The Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, & Russia are five more countries with active Islamist “separatist movements,” counting only from news reports in the last week. For that matter, across Europe, Islamism is seething in hundreds of “banlieues,” & each might be presented as a “separatist movement.” In France, Sweden, & elsewhere, many of these have become “no go areas” for police & other emergency services, who will be greeted with rocks if they answer a call for help from within.

Except in some superficial & irrelevant sense, these are not separatist movements. In each case, the Islamists have thought globally, but acted locally. In each non-Western case, I might add, the number of casualties has been somewhat inflated by local resistance — for the Catholic Christian majority of the Philippines, the Theravada Buddhist majorities of Thailand, Burma, &c, are not yet in the Western “negotiation” mode.

I recall an email from an old Delhi friend a couple of mornings after 9/11, in which he expressed bewilderment at the restraint of the American people. “Where are the retaliations?” he asked. “If that had happened in India, there’d be fifty thousand Mussulmans floating down the Jumna by now.” (He was alluding to the number of Sikhs assaulted in Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by a Sikh bodyguard, in 1984.)

In at least one incident in Sri Lanka, I noticed, there were violent clashes involving Buddhist monks, simply because the word “halal” had turned up on food packaging in Colombo supermarkets. From what I can make out, the monks were the aggressors. They, too, were “thinking globally, acting locally,” in a pro-active way. As the late Samuel P. Huntington famously observed, “Islam has bloody borders,” but only where those borders are shared with people trying to resist dhimmitude or enslavement.

In the West — as also now in the East, where progressive secular consumerism has made its biggest advances — it is generally believed that resistance is futile. In Europe, I am still sometimes surprised by the fatalistic glibness with which “Islamicization” is received. Of course “they” are going to take over. They have children, & the will; the European natives have neither. The notion that “demography is destiny” has settled in minds right across the mainstream political spectrum. “Expecting to lose improves the odds of losing,” as a hockey coach once explained to me.

It is only about one thousand years since Western attitudes were much different. More precisely, it is 1,004 years since the Fatimid caliph, Hakim, began levelling Christian churches in the Holy Land, massacring Christians (& Jews), & arresting the flow of Christian pilgrims. The “Franks” (Latin Christian Europe) took their time deciding what to do, & assembling their resources. But in due course, the Crusades were their answer.

The day after 11th September, 2001, a certain George W. Bush, then president of those United States, happened to use the word “crusade” to describe his intended response to “terrorism.” He wasn’t really thinking at the time: he meant a “crusade against terrorism,” not against Islam, rather on the analogy of the “war on drugs.” He & his staff spent the next several weeks taking the word back. I have sometimes briefly entertained myself with a counter-factual: how current history would now be playing out if instead Bush had told a press conference, “I said ‘crusade’ & I meant Crusade.”

As we saw in Afghanistan, then Iraq, the United States alone had the military means to change any number of irritating Middle Eastern regimes. It could help itself to all their oil, if it wanted. Though unthinkable to us, this was thinkable to the Arabs, who kept it constantly in mind when judging how far they should go in antagonizing USA. At the height of the American “outreach” to Iraq, even so irritating a malefactor as the late Muammar Ghaddafi of Libya was politely abandoning his nuclear & chemical weapons programmes, at Washington’s request; & the ayatollahs of Iran were being downright cooperative with American efforts to eliminate the Taliban.

And then, everything went wrong. The Islamist enemy watched the Americans snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The subsequent public relations campaign, to instil “democracy,” cost USA many times what the invasions had cost, in both blood & treasure. Their final accomplishment was the “Arab Spring” — the victory of Islamists at the polls in one previously allied Muslim country after another. To this day, the West is doing what it can, in the name of “democracy,” to advance the cause of our mortal enemies against our (admittedly ugly) friends. Among other consequences, there is now a Christian exodus from lands where they had lived continuously, since centuries before the first Islamic conquests.

Distinctions could be made between “Muslims” & “Islamists,” exactly as distinctions could be made between Germans & Nazis in the 1930s. Churchill came to power in 1940 when the British had tired of making such distinctions. Not all Germans were Nazis, not all Muslims are Islamists, but then as now the trendline is discouraging. This is the big fact — the very big fact — that we in the West are trying to ignore. A generation ago, the notion that the people of, say, Egypt, or Pakistan, were eager to see the strict imposition of Shariah, would have been ridiculous. In each case only a tiny, if often violent minority were demanding this. Today, it could fairly be said that the cause commands a majority in Egypt, probably in Pakistan, & soon in Bangladesh.

What has changed?

Through terrorism, & every nuance of what the nice people in the Pentagon call “asymmetric warfare,” the Islamists have proven to the Islamic world that they are the wave of the future. They claimed that the West was rotten at the core, that it hadn’t the will to defend its own interests, that the “Great Satan” (USA) would cave when put to the test, that the Europeans had caved already, that the “Little Satan” (Israel) would get no support when it came time to exterminate the Jews. They claimed that former Christendom was utterly decadent, & the Dar al-Islam could now push it over. (None of these claims were or are made subtly, by the way.)

This is an old story. One thinks of the over-civilized Chinese, succumbing to barbarian Mongol invasions, when they had the Mongols not only vastly outnumbered but, in man-for-man technological terms, seriously “outgunned” & out-organized. One thinks of later Rome, for that matter, collapsing before the incursions of tribes which had given them no hardship for centuries. Gentle reader may consult Toynbee & many other standard sources for the full list of “asymmetric warfare” victims. The details vary with each time & place, but the background condition is unmistakeable: a civilization that has inwardly decided it no longer wishes to be preserved. The one statistical constant is perhaps a declining birthrate; or in deeper Christian terms, this is the invariable marker of a “Culture of Death.”

We have neglected the symbolism in each Islamist attack. The Boston Marathon was as appropriate as the Twin Towers, the transit platforms of Madrid & London, the pizzerias of new Jerusalem. They are hitting us where we live, in the crowd scenes of modern consumerism. Note how seldom the terrorists have selected churches; how they left the Ultra-Orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem alone. It is only where they have found a committed Christian minority, in Iraq, in Egypt, & soon in Syria, that the churches get attacked to drive them all away. The Ultra-Orthodox of Israel will be comparatively safe, until Israel falls.

And think about it. Think about all Boston huddling indoors until one young immigrant Chechen psychopath was found. The enemy knows what he is doing, & he is doing it well.

I did not lie to gentle reader when I said, nearly a month ago, that I was “likely to become more ebullient again after Easter.” It was indeed likely, though my discomfiture, amounting almost to a “writer’s block,” evaporates more slowly. Only narcissistic writers have blocks, of course, & I’ve noticed even they have them only for unpaid work. The exception would be holy persons, who have little to say in the first place, & that little carefully considered, as “yea, yea; nay, nay.” But it is hard to imagine a person of saintly disposition starting a blog of any sort. A Twitter account, maybe.

Well, spring has reached the Greater Parkdale Area, or may have done after a prolonged occupation of the Province of Ontario by Arctic air. Up here in the High Doganate, while indulging the writer’s block, I have been spring cleaning. Following advice we gave to the rest of the world (Girolamo Savonarola & I) to make a “bonfire of your vanities,” I set about removing a selection of luxurious, but pointless things, that were crowding my immediate environment. Many of these had been obtained originally by serendipity from flea markets, Sally Annes & the like, & to them they were returned, satchel by satchel. Five cumbersome articles of furniture were identified & cleared, at risk to my enfeebled back (twenty years since I slipped a disc, & my spin-bowling days were over).

A fair part was inherited a few years ago, when my dear parents, through their own aged enfeeblements, had suddenly to move from their house. Sentiment had prevented me from parting with e.g. redundant kitchen equipment, or large accumulations of my ancestors’ artistic impedimenta, added to my own. The High Doganate has less than 600 square feet, counting the balconata. There is no space for a pack rat, here. I waxed ruthless.

Nostalgia for the irrecoverable past is a natural part of the conservative outlook, but a time comes for one last loving look, then “rise & be on our way.” I am persuaded that everything is anyway sustained in the memory of God; that nothing is lost. In moments I have sensed this: the immortality even of the tiniest events & objects; the impossibility of eradicating what has happened. We have been moving through the “time capsule” of this world, & will move outside, yet it will not cease to have been there, when we leave only our dust behind.

That balconata faces west, & I have glimpsed by now several thousand sunsets, each unique. They were more beautiful than anything I own, yet not one could I keep. My primitive attempts to capture something of the colours with a brush on paper (the old tin palette from my Great Aunt Alice has been retained) came to nothing more than exercise. But a useful exercise: to learn, by degrees, how much greater is God, & how little one is, beholding.

*

On the email list that preceded this blog, I would irritate my friends by persistently misspelling the word “book” as “buke.” This was in order to suggest the Scots pronunciation, but a genuine Scotsman has since proposed that “beuk” would be a more appropriate misspelling.

By weight, I would guess that more than 90 percent of my possessions have been & continue to be beuks, & beukcases. There were about 10,000 of these things accumulated in the house from which I was removed, about the beginning of this century; three-quarters of those had to be abandoned. I had long shared with Cicero a certain notion of domestic bliss: that a home should consist of a library, in a garden. But in the normal condition of modern life, this is not possible, or not possible for long. Modern man is a nomad again; a high-tech nomad.

Many of these beuks I had never read, & would never have the opportunity to read, given the length of one human life, but possessing them I was possessed by the belief that such a fine library would be a delight to generations after my own. In my time I would lay down the basic structure, lay in the classics across the fields with which I was acquainted; & my children’s children would grow up surrounded by beuks, & add knowingly to the collection. Since late adolescence I have had a clear idea of how beuks should be typographically designed, printed, & bound, along with snooty bibliographical positions. Not one in those ten thousand was a cheap paperback.

Aheu, it is gone, except the part that was most important & familiar to me; & with the passage of time this has been shrinking, overall. Two beuks out for every one in, by estimate, through the last decade. After this latest round of de-acquisition, I have noticed how Catholic the collection has become; my Anglicana retained only where it was also beloved English literature. The point has almost been reached, when each surviving beuk is too precious to part with.

They are, in a sense, live things. Coleridge, admittedly often on drugs, noted once how the spines on his beuks seemed present to him as the bellies of living, winged creatures, containing the shades of men long dead. Though down to one room, towards the end of his life, he could not separate himself from such angelic companions.

When the hearth was built into the old Idler Pub, we had an inscription set into the concrete, in brass letters reading, Hae nobis propriae sedes. It was from Virgil: “Here we have found a suitable abode.”

So many of these beuks have been with me for decades, now. The very pages are coloured with personal associations, & I recall for instance the pain of shipping many from continent to continent in my wandering youth.

There was an incident last month when I was donating a significant clump to a second-hand dealer who, while making mildly insulting remarks about how unsaleable they were, threw one onto his trash pile so roughly that the spine, already weakened by use, was finally broken.

I kept my silence.

The dealer noticed from my eyes that I was very angry. I explained that I had not brought these beuks for the money, but in the hope they would find good new homes; that nothing I had brought him was “junk.” His store was among the few places left where suitable new keepers might be found for my orphans, & I would have left his shop happily without a penny from him, so long as I knew he would care for them, & price them instead of tossing them away.

Crimine ab uno disce omnes.

Arguably, politics is the oldest profession. By convention, we acknowledge prostitution instead, but I wonder if the two aren’t closely related, even different versions of the same enterprise: politics being the masculine way, prostitution the feminine way, to obtain things not legitimately available. Which is hardly to say the two provinces of human activity are restricted to the respective sexes.

As the more masculine enterprise, however, politics has tended to attract more male participants. There is, contrary to official secular belief, a serious distinction to be made between the sexes, & I have often noticed that despite what everyone says they are not the same. It is not just biological, or else, the biological goes deeper than may first appear. That women alone have babies is sometimes allowed, even by the politically correct; & I have met feminists who still claim that women are more “nurturing.” (Being male, I hardly know what that means.) Other distinctions may be more controversial.

Example: men are team players. Not all of them, of course, & not all women aren’t; it is time to invoke Warren’s Rule of Thumb. This is modelled on the Pareto Curve, & I first proposed it to explain the presence or absence of a geographical sense of direction. Some 80 percent of men have this, 20 percent do not. Perhaps 20 percent of women also have it, & let’s leave it there, as a recurring ratio in nature — four to one, or that of fingers to thumbs. So when I say, “men are team players” I don’t mean you can’t find me a tomboy.

Indeed, if gentle reader has ever wondered why, no matter what advantages are given to women, men usually emerge to rule, I can answer in four words. Men are team players.

Hence, the common observation of the resemblance between party politics & another essentially masculine activity, professional team sports. From what I can see, it has been so from the beginning (the Byzantine political parties began as horse-racing factions), & while representative democratic arrangements bring this into full bloom, we may also detect party formations within entirely non-democratic political orders. They are, potentially, a highly unpleasant fact of life. For men not only play in teams, they are also in their nature highly competitive. The word “tribal” could be inserted somewhere around here.

Ask a democratic politician why he got into the trade, & he is likely to claim some absurdity, such as, “to serve the public.” He will then claim one party is more apt to serve it than another, & give that as the reason for his party affiliation. But no: it is the game of politics that appeals more deeply to the “alpha” male participants (along with female thumbs), as well as to the more numerous “beta” spectators egging them along. It is a tribal contest, & as I have actually come to believe, the motive for opposition between parties is not disagreement over public policy. That is the ball that is in play, & anyone who has looked into political history should have noticed that possession of any given “policy ball” changes sides frequently over time.

The motive is instead tribal. It is mutual pathological hatred, that quickly associates with class & ethnicity. Under earlier, more aristocratic regimes, when the idea of a Christian gentleman was still in play, this was masked behind sportsmanlike etiquette. Indeed, British parliamentary practices were until recently imbued with a tremendous quantity of unwritten rules, now lost upon our over-literal society. The masks have been coming off, together with the gloves, & rather than a contest confined to at least a semblance of policy debate — to playing the ball not the man — we have sheer barbarism.

I was struck, in following arrangements for the interment of the late Baroness Thatcher for instance, by the fear it might turn into a circus. There were already people — so young as not to have been around when Mrs Thatcher was in power, & therefore trained to hate her by another generation — doing their Morris dancing in Brixton, & Glasgow, singing songs with unbecoming lyrics, & so forth. As the politicians say, “The youth are our future!” & one may glimpse the future of our politics in such performances. Not argument, nor even a pretence of argument, rather, straightforwardly violent public demonstrations of moral filth & satanic ugliness.

*

When Thomas Aquinas & others explain why democracy will never work, some emphasis is placed on its divisive nature. In announcing himself for limited monarchy (1a 2ae, question 105, 1st article & thereabouts), Saint Thomas expounds the typically mediaeval & Catholic notion that all should participate in government, in such a way as to sustain unity. Electoral democracy does not follow from this. In the Summa, & in his political treatises, he is vividly aware that tyranny is borne of faction & disorder. The basic problem with democracy is not “the people” per se, but the cultivation of faction inevitable when men form into competitive political teams. By increments, unadulterated democracy leads to civil war. Even the adulterated sort will get there if the mix is heady enough.

It would be anachronistic to make Saint Thomas into a pundit of our present political order. He died in AD 1274; he doesn’t give sound bites any more. It is thus wrong to assume that despite what he says, he would be in favour of “Democracy” were he alive today — perhaps as “the worst form of government except all the others.” That was not the set of his mind. He did not advocate limited monarchy, & the subsidiary institutions the monarchy crowned, as a least evil. Rather, he considered it as something good intrinsically. Nor did he restrict his understanding of the fallen nature of man to political behaviour. He was aware of it in many more dimensions than we are, in our philosophical poverty. He was also aware of the human propensity to distort language, so would have cut through a great deal of the bafflegab we employ, in championing democracy — in particular the purposeful confusion of specific institutions with abstract ideals, as if one constitution or another were the inevitable embodiment of civic freedom & virtue.

He assumes politics is a male sport. We assume that is only because he was limited by his time to assume that. Perhaps he wasn’t. His remarks show an acute grasp of the masculine nature of this sport, regardless of the sex participating; so much, it can turn women into men. I think, though I cannot yet prove, he understands that this sport is as much in need of public repression as, say, prostitution. To the Christian, sin needs repression. We need not “give it an outlet,” it can find its own.

The Thomist, as more generally the mediaeval mind, looks for ways to restrain the evils associated with each known form of government, while also looking to the good that each embodies. It seeks the best available combination of the virtues in monarchy, aristocracy, democracy — & finds in each bulwarks against the vices to which each other is prey.

While modern teaching on the Catholic principle of “subsidiarity” is associated with the Jesuit, Oswald von Nell-Breuning (who helped Pius XI draft Quadragesimo Anno); & behind that goes back only to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891; the thinking which animates it is thoroughly mediaeval, indeed formatively Christian. It is a view of society so organized that the higher genuinely serves the lower, rather than the other way around. The last eleven popes have been struggling to interpret this teaching in terms comprehensible to our Age of Revolution. It is a struggle because political factions are determined to use whatever the popes say for their own immediate purposes.

Party is itself the insuperable obstacle here. It is hard to conceive of a party whose purpose is to obviate party, as it is hard to conceive of a centralized government whose purpose is to restrain centralized government. Only Marxists can believe in that sort of thing. To my mind, it is what stands in the way of any direct, genuinely Catholic participation in the democratic, party political order. One is put in that odd position described by Malcolm Muggeridge: of being the pianist in a brothel, playing “Abide With Me.”

My thought for today is that we do not need a Catholic Politics. On the contrary, we are desperately in need of a Catholic Anti-Politics, & if someone could tell me of what that might consist, I would join up right away.

Let us add our voice from the High Doganate to those of the world’s more prominent statesmen & cultural figures, regretting the death of Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, the retired research chemist & barrister. We are all so terribly sorry. She was also, as I vividly recall, wife to the late Major Denis Thatcher, MBE, and prime ministrix of one of the larger states in the European Union for an extended period.

Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) rose to prominence herself in the 1970s, as ministrix of education in the Edward Heath cabinet, when she cut funding for a free milk programme & thus became “Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher” to the people her husband characterized as “bloody poofs & Trots.” Then she replaced Mr Heath, after his defeat in the second 1974 election, to the consternation not only of the Left, but of the old guard in her own party.

At the time I lived in England, in a small workman’s cottage in Vauxhall, at the north end of the Borough of Lambeth, inner London near the Thames. I was in a parliamentary constituency where the Tories could expect to finish sixth, behind not only Labour, Liberals, Leninists, & Maoists, but also the Monster Raving Loony Party of Screaming Lord Sutch. It was therefore provocative of me to put a party poster featuring Mrs Thatcher’s smiling face in my parlour window, & I remember the tinkle of glass when a rock came through it the first night.

(It was a large window, & cost me just over 4 pounds to repair. A few months later I repeated the experiment with a Yankee flag crossed with the Union Jack, & the legend, “O Say Does That Star Spangled Banner Yet Wave!” in commemoration of the U.S. Bicentennial. By this time the price of the glass had risen to 4 pounds, 90 new pee, & I resolved to stick with velvet curtains.)

An enthusiast for the death penalty, who had voted in Parliament for the decriminalization of homosexuality, & of abortion, back in the 1960s when both measures were certain to lose, the Iron Lady was in no sense a “social conservative.” She became one only in the Left’s fevered imagination. Nor, curiously enough, was she ever fundamentally opposed to the welfare state (which continued to grow under her premiership), nor any kind of Imperialist abroad beyond a mild nostalgia for the old British Empire, & opposition to Soviet Communism.

She was most certainly a larger than life politician. A unique case, at the time, of a woman becoming head of a national government whose father or husband had not preceded her, she belongs to the history of politics, not the history of ideas. The most useful comparison is I think to Charles de Gaulle, a man whose interests were neither Left nor Right but vested entirely in France. Thatcher winced, physically winced, at the decline of Britain, & like de Gaulle would do anything necessary to reverse national decline. Her embrace of various economic measures was not ideological. A very intelligent woman, capable of thinking even while in elective office (extremely rare), she became sincerely convinced that privatization, deregulation, & breaking the back of the unions was the only way for Britain to pull out of its post-War death spiral.

Prior to about 1974, she was not even clearly a “Thatcherite.” She deeply admired Keith Joseph, for his courageous & independent view of British realities. It was through his circle she heard of Friedrich Hayek, whom I’m sure she never had the time to read, but was called in to explain to her some of the broader points of economics. A give-&-take politician, she sounded more strident than she was thanks to a screechy Lincolnshire fishmonger accent which she had “fixed” with professional voice training. (Sarah Palin would be President today if she’d taken lessons in voice & deportment.) Thatcher stepped forward as candidate to succeed Heath only as a replacement for Keith Joseph, who was convinced he did not have the temperament for the job. Thatcher, he believed with characteristic foresight, had that temperament.

She was lucky to remain in opposition through four full years, thus given leisure to complete her self-transformation. She won in 1979 perhaps only because James Callaghan made a political miscalculation, not going to the polls the year before. It was the shivering “winter of discontent” that steeled the British public to abandon Labour’s badly failed industrial policies, & it was the behaviour of the radical union bosses that made voting for Thatcher thinkable even among the working classes.

I will not go into more of the long history, but skip forward to the moral, or morals, which are three. The first is to admire the character of Mrs Thatcher, the politician, holding her ground when she “knew” that she was right. Courage is a rare thing in any walk of life, but the kind of courage that was required to stand up against received opinion & attitudes not only in the country at large, but within her own party, & among her own cabinet colleagues, was quite extraordinary. She was the equal of Churchill in that regard.

The second is to acknowledge providence. She rose to office, survived in it, & prevailed on major policy questions, against formidable odds, thanks often to sheer luck. Some of this happened in plain public view (e.g. the Falklands crisis that saved her government in 1982, or the Brighton hotel bombing in 1984), but much of it below the radar of the media, in the “constellation” (nice old Elizabethan astrological term) of chance events in individual lives. And each she seized upon, without much choice, as she was sinking. When she did finally go down for the count in 1990, it was with all luck expired & one last knife in the back from her contemptible deputy, Geoffrey Howe. She very nearly survived that, too, but in the end personal grit was insufficient.

The third is to recognize how difficult it is to put & keep a decent politician in power, at any time in any genuinely representative democracy. “The lady is not for turning,” Mrs Thatcher famously said, but the British public was always for turning, & never bought into the “Thatcher revolution,” or felt the least commitment to it. Her doctrine of enterprise was taken up, mostly, by a small minority of hucksters, who made Britain not only superficially much richer, but also much more crass. The people at large learnt nothing, even from their pain, & casually abandoned the course she had set soon after she was gone, retaining only the crassness. Whether for better or for worse, they never much loved, usually despised, & did not deserve Mrs Thatcher.

What they have now, in the slimy David Cameron, is closer to what they deserve: a typical politician floating with the jetsam on the shallow waves; a man not of character but of rat cunning, like the overwhelming majority of successful politicians in every democracy; who will flourish until his own luck runs out, & leave a legacy of waste, moral stench & dissolution.

Gentle reader will know me for a fairly rabid “social conservative,” who could not possibly approve much of the Thatcher agenda, though I was with her entirely through the Cold War, both foreign & domestic. She was hardly an enemy of “statism” — she was saving the state, & the bourgeois economy upon which it depends for its sustenance, from ruin. In the larger sweep of time, we cannot know whether doing that was a good thing. It may well have been irrelevant to Eternity.

But one of the great men of history, graced with an exemplary spine.