Essays in Idleness

In defence of the harmlessly mad, and of the not-very harmful, I argue that the world is terribly prejudiced against them. However, I join in the world’s sometime prejudice against the unambiguously evil, and will recommend it to public subscription. Since the evil tend to be easily confused with the innocently bababulah (a useful term in Thai that I am trying to transfer to English), there is controversy about what kind of madman, or madwoman, we should be trying to discourage. For surely, we should suppress some of them.

Even common-garden leftists, who tend themselves to be quite mad, generally do not classify Hitler as harmless, although they may have trouble naming another, unless he is the most recent Republican or Conservative candidate to win an election. Nevertheless, I hold that there are objective definitions of crimes, which the many harmful tend to commit (not just Hitler), and which, until recently, were given as grounds to arrest, try, and imprison them; or, in the old days, even to withdraw their right to get up in the morning. But now that “human rights” have been extended, towards fierce animals for instance, such as polar bears — who may be impossibly cute when there is not too much blood on their mouthes and faces — the situation is confused.

Now that I have become old myself (harmlessly?), I argue that the best thing we humans can hope for in this world is the restoration of some civilized habits. These might consist of a return to “not-very harmful” public life, and the participation of the relatively innocent in our ceremonial government; rather than their habitual indulgence in fiendish corruption and evil-doing. To this end, I would think the perfect, or complete, elimination of the “welfare state,” and any form of government assistance to any social group whatsoever, would be indicated. Friends, family, churches, and batty old ladies with surpluses of inherited money, could be restored to the eleemosynary functions. However, their philanthropy should be voluntary, not forced on them by taxation. (Note, that this would also solve our public debt crisis.)

We might make a list of other acts of incivility to be prosecuted, or government actions to be entirely eliminated, but shouldn’t become too ambitious. For that might lead us, paradoxically, back to what Saint John Henry Newman identified as the ur-crime, of liberalism.

Among my more memorable rides on the College streetcar in Toronto, was one I took past the “Clarke Institute of Psychiatry” (as it was then called). Outpatients were picked up between St. George and Spadina, and these included, on that day, a woman with a dazzling head dress, who was wearing a magnificent gown, and spake with a powerful, dramatic voice. It was rush hour, and the trolley was packed full, yet with apparently little effort she commanded the attention of everyone aboard.

And she declaimed, to all of us:

“The Army is my son! … The Navy is my son! … The Air Force is my son! …”

And then, turning for some reason specifically to me, she asked: … “Are YOU my son?”

I should be proud, I suppose, of my disproportionate success in attracting the attention of eccentric persons. This was a prize instance, though it ended when the lady suddenly disembarked, at Bathurst. Still, I have been ruminating upon her question, ever since, without yet coming to a satisfactory answer.

But next best is attitude, and a way of life, like this exceptional lady. I was thinking this just this morning, after having posted this email to my perfectly sane and responsible elder son:

“My position, as a luddite reactionary diehard troll, is that we should always be ready for a Carrington Event, with low-tech back-ups for every high-tech system. … That we should build everything to last for at least a century, or better for a thousand years. … Too, I am an enthusiast for labour-intensive, regenerative agriculture, without combine harvesters; of splendid fresh foods and fine cheeses, beer and bacon; and for the punishment of poor craftsmen. …”

(I should have mentioned that the army is my son, &c.)

Gentle reader does not need me to provide reporting on the glorious Trumpian capture of Venezuela’s chief socialist drug lord; or the bombings of Muslim terrorists in Nigeria; or the next intervention in Iran by the United States and (blesséd) Israel. All were, are, or will be acts of self-defence by civilization and the West, and I certainly subscribe to Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of justifiable violence. One should never be a coward when attacked (and will be attacked less frequently once one has established this reputation). Then if, like the overwhelming majority of men, one has not the discipline or patience to stand still while being murdered, at least one should not run away. It is important to defend oneself in “kill or be killed” situations, and when possible bring each to a victorious conclusion. Gandhi was not a wus.

Moreover, we should rejoice that at last America has an intelligent president, not a moronic “liberal” like every other president since Clinton. Trump understands that removing a foreign political leader should be done quickly and decisively, and not in a languid and “democratic” way. Too, the wise ancient Chinese, particularly Sun Tzu, understood that one should cause the minimum of casualties, not only for one’s own side, but for either. Zero casualties would be the Taoist ideal, though even Taoist sages recognize that this isn’t always possible.

Practically, it makes no sense to replace one foreign regime with another that one has designed. Rather, one should specialize in removals of governments that are Communist or “Islamist,” &c. By more involvement, one will become entangled in politics one is ill-equipped to understand, and make rushed, messy calculations. Also, don’t waste time. Let the inmates of the invaded state decide whom they should install, to replace the défunte, and avoid another invasion. The same assumptions should apply here as to all other forms of entertainment; the showman should “leave them laughing,” or indeed “wanting more.” Mr Trump seems to understand this, perhaps because he is the first president since Reagan who received professional theatrical training.

If one does not have the power or might to knock off an enemy quickly, i.e. in a few hours or days, perhaps the idea of having a war was not a good one. (Consult Vladimir Putin, if you will.) Of course, the enemy may have a say, about how prolonged the war should be, but this will not be an issue if he was removed promptly. Do not delay until tomorrow what must be done today.

“Only the silent hear, and those who do not remain silent do not hear.”

The quotation comes from Josef Pieper, a most valuable Thomist from the last century; a man whose wisdom and learning deserves to go unchallenged. This perhaps over-obvious and irrefutable remark seems the best way to enter a New Year.

Herr Pieper, who is of course now dead (1904–1997), might be considered the practical inspiration of this Idlework, for his beuk, Leisure the Basis of Culture, fell into my hands very early, and is still falling into them after many decades, together with his many other works, each quite succinct.

Should any young person reading this feel in need of an education, I would think Pieper, and the scholarly Frenchman Étienne Gilson (History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages), and Gilbert Keith Chesterton, are the places to start upon a course in philosophy. That all three of them are Christian and Catholic is no coincidence. These authors will in turn supply you with others to read, ranging wide, but they are the best schoolmasters for immediate purposes. To assign lengthy reading lists right from the start, especially to young people who may not be reading habitually yet — or at all, if they graduated from a progressive high school — is too much bother. Moreover, bear in mind that the way the Greats are presented in the universities today, makes university truly worth not attending.

One should not be impatient to read a lot of beuks, only intelligent ones, and comprehensible only to a person who is awake. They should be read no faster than you can take them in. On the other hand, you should not waste time by not reading. At the present day, as your German teacher says, “the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.”

In other words, “Artificial Idiocy,” and the “Wicked Paedia,” should be among the first distractions to silence, with extreme prejudice as it were. Use your own brain to explore things, it craves some exercise. Learn to sit still. Don’t merely shut up: become silent.

For the world, especially in view of the technology that is now unfolding, has been re-designed to make you not only unphilosophical and unleisured, but to an extraordinary degree, stupid and obnoxious. We are easily addicted to things that cause unnerving and repulsive noises, and are big, red, and shiny — even on New Year’s Day.

False optimism kills, having left its garish marks on all its victims.

Wednesday, 31st December, 2003, was the date on which I was received by the Catholic Church, after fifty years of loafing and deliberation. I wrote, and as usual discarded, a verse memoir of the event under the title “Half Moon,” having not shown it to my priest, Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, for fear he might approve. It was a day for shedding things, and in particular, I shed my last claim to “secularity,” for I was no longer on my own. I had stayed up all the previous night, trying to condense fifty years of sin and error into a few moments of Confession before limping to the Holy Family chapel, to have this lifted off.

It was the end of many months of preparation, under good Father Jonathan’s direction. Millions, actually many billions, had come this way, towards Heaven’s Gate in Jerusalem Wall. In each soul, there was a secret story of spiritual advance. In my over-literal imagination, I pictured the Damascus Gate, up the road along which I had been staying at Cairo House, on a winter’s day when it had been snowing, thirty-two years before; and my feet had been covered only by flip-flops, and two plastic bags against the snow. Yes, this is how I prepared for things, at that age and frequently since.

Now it is the seventh day of Christmas, the eve of the Octave of the Nativity: … Puer natus est nobis. … And a Son is given to us: whose government is upon His shoulder. … And we have been inducted into the Christian city. Rejoice!

Six times convicted of “racial hatred,” of making “Islamophobic statements” on numerous occasions, and once of describing the inhabitants of Reunion Island as “degenerate savages” — I did not realize that Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot, Ordre impérial de la Légion d’honneur, had such advanced opinions. Her animal rights advocacy — generally as the playground alternative to “human rights” — might also be celebrated, and added to her list of distinctions; and I’m sure there were many others, though I have yet to search diligently through her X files.

Her death, yesterday, at the tender age of ninety-one, is greatly to be regretted. She was just getting started.

We should seize the opportunity to think of her, at a time when France has, like England and most other European nations, become so contemptible. Once the Franks led us in the Crusades. Now we have to depend on the Americans, which means enduring the Somalification even of Minnesota. (Its Democratization was bad enough.)

Fortunately the Yanquis have a Secretary of War who wears the Jerusalem Cross on his skin, though alas, no other armour.

Bardot was once elected to the office of French “Marianne,” to appear on the nation’s tin and aluminum coins, postage stamps, &c. This was the lady wearing the Phrygian “liberty cap” in the allegory of fakery and betrayal, that rolled in with the decapitations during the Revolution. She was the “new” symbol of the Republique, but later, in an age of glib fashion, she “evolved” into a representation of French sensuousness and whoredom. She was the secular, bureaucratic alternative to Joan of Arc, who had represented genuine liberty, creative and frightening.

Whereas, Bardot was simply a reminder that “God created woman.”

Except that we can’t do aphorisms, this might be considered an age of aphorisms, rather than an age of narratives, of histories, of theories, or of literature in any other style. It abjectly fails as any sort of scientific age, some century or so having passed since the last hint of originality in science or maths, although there have been some inductive aphoristic moments, incomprehensible to the querulous world. Part of the definition of modernity, if it is not the whole definition, is our lost ability to put anything together, and grow it. Our narratives are like the snippets on YouTube — a lot of quick gunplay and violence, then two more commercial spots. When one has skimmed through a few hundreds of these, one’s chance of retaining anything at all has evaporated.

We used to get this at a slower pace from newspapers. The invention of the “yellow press” at the end of the century before last was the announcement of an end, more terrible than Gutenberg. Soon, even our wars would cease to make sense, at least to the people who were fighting them. Yet for a few more decades, one could still subscribe to The Times of London or Figaro, or even read a “beuk.” I can still remember my papa reading, and how impossible it was to get his attention, unless one inserted oneself between his eyes and the page. But now the paperless environment has arrived.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) was in some ways the master aphorist, signalling this progression from the “age of enlightenment.” He was, of course, very entertaining. A brilliant scientific mind, and a hunchback pioneer of experimental physics, nothing he wrote or calculated came to much, except his aphorisms, and his anglophilic Commentaries on the engravings of Hogarth. None of his satires could be formally proved. Direct apprehensions were what was left to him and his readers.

Somewhere he comments on the organization of the universe. “It is certainly much easier to explain than that of a plant.”

And, “there is so much goodness and ingenuity in a drop of rain that you couldn’t buy it in an apothecary’s under half a sovereign.”

I tend to make my pointless little resolutions at Christmas, and at other memorable dates. That way, if I forget the resolution, I may still remember when it was made. This year, for at least the hundredth time, I have resolved to give up paying attention to politics, or expecting anything to come from that source. Nothing is ever achieved by politics, except mild disappointment, or sometimes major disappointment and catastrophe. The man who takes his politics seriously deserves this result. If one has acquired any idea about oneself, and one’s fellow human creatures, one knows that every human project will end in disaster. Sanctity offers the only strange exceptions. But without sanctity, democracy is merely a means to speed the disaster along.

This does not mean there is not good and evil.

But curiously, Christ changes everything. It is impossible to look hopelessly upon the future, once one has begun to accept Christ, even as a little child in a manger at Bethlehem. He has arrived to show us that God is. We needn’t trust in ourselves to make things bigger and better, we need only become holier.

Not enough attention has been given to Pieter Bruegel (the elder, of Antwerp, mostly). This is a situation I have been able to remedy, at least for myself, over the last week or so. I have the old Phaidon collections, of the drawings and of the paintings respectively, and being an idle person I have been flipping through the pages, while sometimes pausing, to stare.

Bruegel’s landscape drawings, especially one which shows a sketcher, very small, at work within the mountains, is an autobiographical indication that he will abscond when the sketch is finished. He is “the master of moving on.” Bruegel never did portraits, consciously — depicting only beggars, peasants, and connoisseurs as they happen across his way. He “graduated” into colour painting and more visionary and apocalyptic compositions, just as he was retiring from the trade of producing pretty prints for the tourists. And, having not participated in the lucrative market for religious genre paintings — it was a quick way to make a Guilder in bourgeois Netherlandish times — he instead wandered off, quite by himself. He persists in being more draughtsman than composer, even as a painter. He is no surrealist; he has no plan. He paints just what he sees. Sometimes it is of the moral universe within nature.

His landscapes, like his people, are so very much alive. They are moving, and seem never awkward.

The Fight Between Carnival & Lent is the Plate from which I extracted the detail, mentioned in my headline. It is a scene mixed rife with gaiety and tragedy, outdoors and urban, in the shadow of a church. Bruegel has humour, but it is amazing what he is without. He lacks mockery.

I must ask gentle reader to forgive me, for I’ve had another rather grim prang. (A prang is an entirely physical condition, as when sports cars collide, though it can carry spiritual implications and cosmic effects, such as death to all parties.) I fear I won’t be writing, even awkwardly like this, for at least another week, and perhaps even longer. For I’m spending too much time collapsed on the floor, up here in the High Doganate. Really I would prefer to be preparing for Christmas, and upsetting the usual hateful customers, although being annoying might not be a spiritual requirement for either task. I might think, theologically, that abstention might be because “I have passed out entirely.” But no; fasting is supposed to be voluntary. So, wrong again.

Cost is often numerated in dollars or pounds, plain and material. They can be counted, using simple arithmetic, which is why we go to such trouble to conceal our costs. But still more, we go to the trouble of pretending that things which are very expensive must really be almost free, when we decide that each is necessary.

Cars, for instance; who would be without a car, if he has a job? He rides it just to get to work, or on holiday sometimes, for “leisure” has also become a necessary convenience. Therefore cars are as if free, unless one cannot be satisfied with a car that is boring and conventional. Then one buys a car that costs real money, though of course little of it if one can also afford a private jet. Getting to the aerodrome then becomes the convenience. Or the aeroplane is only a convenience, if one is Elon Musk, or an elected politician.

But generally, it is convenient to be rich, on the large scale, but also on the small. There are more and more things that one may take for granted, and therefore count as a convenience. And under socialism, the expensive infrastructures are also a convenience, though only for the ruling class. They are expensed, to the taxpayer, in the welfare state, where everyone expenses more and more, so there is always an insoluble “debt crisis.” Only right-wing people realize there are some limits, and then only when paying for things they don’t want.

My fanciful suggestions about roads and highways are meant to call attention to this. Who will pay for the convenience of having a drive, even in a bus, instead of walking? One may try to calculate our expenditures on roads, directly and indirectly, and for all the vehicles and necessary services, now that we live in megacities and no longer in farms, villages, and towns (which now smear into conurban districts). Hint: a vehicle is the cheapest item.

The thing about the cost of convenience is that it mops up what we might spend, beyond the choices dictated by politicians, and the various other control-freaks. Cathedrals, for instance, used to be more common.

And let us forget about healthcare. For getting well is, too, a convenience, only “necessary” for getting back to work. Though usually it happens without the intercession of medicine; except “big pharma.”

Strive, instead, “Against the Bogus prophets of the Day / Chained to Corruption, Failure, and Decay.”

A correspondent reminds me that we have too narrow a definition of “noise.” As we had been discussing roads, and were considering traffic signs, and as Donald Knuth was mentioned (who once refused to move into a town whose signage was typographically vile), the need to erase unnecessary traffic instructions was raised. And all traffic instructions are unnecessary, or will become unnecessary when we have deleted the highway system.

My correspondent also included photographs of a selection of street signs, monstrously numerous, and viciously ugly, from around the city of London, Ontario (whose excess population now includes a hundred thousand cars). There were many satanic touches, such as the shrieking clash of competing illegible signs, replaced by the moronic bureaucrats who run that city with a single large sign incorporating all the little signs in every detail, so that the clash could be fully appreciated. These malefactors, and many of the other functionaries in that town, could benefit from vigorous punishment.

One of the advantages of closing down all (the typically asphalt-paved) public streets and highways, is that we can make a clean sweep of all the road signs. I suggest melting them down before randomly distributing the remains in junk yards. Alternatively, the wise riflemen of the remoter Ontario districts already use them for target practice, and they rust much faster when they are full of holes. No one should ever be reminded of this age of slavery to crude automotive and pedestrian commands, once we have been freed of them. And of course not just appalling road signs in point sizes some twenty times that used for Shakespeare. For they constitute an assault of aggressive bullyings that abridge our liberties.

The Internet tells me that truck-driving has become an issue in the United States. (Everything is an issue in Canada.)

In my view, which is obeyed throughout this website, nothing legal needs to be done about the truck-driving industry. All regulations and licensing requirements on the length, height, width, weight, and speed, of vehicles or drivers, should be abrogated throughout all constituencies. This should disapply even if they use enough wheels to float, or are piloted by centenarians or Somalis — so long, of course, as they do not make loud, distracting noises.

My one restriction would be that no vehicle over nine feet long, or unnecessarily ugly, may be displayed on a public road or driveway. But this could be enforced by extra-legal means, merely by defunding the upkeep for all roads. Indeed, this will save money, and discourage corruption. Anything that is oversize or awkward will have to go off-road; and of course, never faster than a horse. (Perhaps spiffy bicycles will have to be prevented; whereas ostrich tongas will not have to be.)

All this should apply only outside city limits. Inside, anything with a disagreeable motor must go deep underground.

The unemployed truck-drivers might want to look into “regenerative agriculture.” It promises a fulfilling hobby for all the empty spaces, created by the abandonment of our antiquated highway networks.