NEWSPAPER COLUMNS - davidwarrenonline.com

Exposing a sham - February 1, 2012

So, is "multiculturalism" dead now?

This is a question that might have come to anyone's mind, while reading through news reports and commentary on the Shafia "honour killings." And I don't just mean after the verdict was announced on Sunday, but from the beginning of the Kingston trial. For the indulgence of "multiculturalism" went right out the first window, on Day One.

Trial by jury is inevitably supplemented with trial by media in a free country. And the media, like their audience, are a hangin' judge. One did not have to be a lawyer to be vexed, while trying to establish what hard evidence the Crown had against Mohammad Shafia, his "second wife" Tooba Yahya, and his son Hamed Shafia, now convicted of the murders of three daughters and the "first wife."

As all three accused consistently and vehemently maintained their innocence, I've tried the mental exercise of looking at the case from the defence side. The evidence presented beyond the courtroom to the public struck me as persistently circumstantial. Which is not to say a huge pileup of circumstantial evidence doesn't make a case.

But, what if? What if the car in the Kingston Mills lock had, somehow, got there by accident? And while we're being hypothetical, what if the accused, and perhaps also their lawyers, had botched their defence from cultural misunderstandings?

The accused might understand "mainstream" Canadian sensibilities well enough to think they might be "framed," but not well enough to avoid compounding the case against them as they struggled to explain circumstantial evidence away. And their Canadian lawyers would then be at a loss to retrieve the situation.

While I'm still unable to fully assemble the Crown's case in my mind, I am nevertheless satisfied that, almost certainly, justice has been done.

Yet I am also left able easily to imagine circumstances in which, through cultural misunderstandings more complex than the term "honour killings" will ever convey, a miscarriage of justice could happen. The world view, not only of tribal but of urban Afghanistan, is so profoundly different from that of contemporary English Canada, that most of the conversation between us will be at cross purposes.

Reading Canadian media reactions to the trial and its verdict, I noticed one big thing. Journalists normally under the constraint of "political correctness," were granted a break, from the nature of the case, and from the fact that in the Canadian mind, "the rights of women" easily trump "honour codes." There was no way Muslims reasonably suspected of having committed honour killings, were going to be granted multicultural indulgence. And this left precious little room for any benefit of the doubt.

The defence quite rightly made the point that, simply by invoking the term "honour killings" in all reports, the media had stacked the case against them. This created an overpowering expectation of guilt, so that merely by showing otherwise irrelevant photos of the victims, dressed like typical Canadian girls of their age, the Crown could summon dark imaginings: "Yes, that's why the monster killed them, because his daughters wanted to become Canadians like us."

Yet we cannot even begin to imagine everything playing upon the mind of a man like Mohammad Shafia, or in the minds of other family members. We only think we can. Similarly, we only think we can explain - and in the darkest terms possible - what is in the minds of many Muslims across the country who are outraged by the verdict. For instance: those who have threatened violence to Imam Syed Soharwardy, in Calgary, for having denounced honour killings, and saying they have no place in Islam.

If it is the cultural and moral order of Afghanistan we are discussing, I have some vague idea about that from reading, and from having travelled fairly extensively in that country, in the days before the Soviet occupation, and therefore long before the Taliban. It had to be taken whole, to make any sense of its parts. Afghan ideas of honour were very different, then as now, from Canadian ideas of honour.

To call the former "twisted" is to announce in advance that one has no intention of examining them on their own terms. And therefore, no ability to confute or confront them intelligently.

Our difficulty increases because our own ideas about honour have fallen into chaos over the recent past. They are a bundle of contradictions, of which the most fundamental is that we do not know whether honour is something or honour is nothing. We cannot deal with any such ideas in a coherent way. We can only offer knee-jerk, "I feel" responses to what we imagine to be knee-jerk provocations.

And this is what made our erstwhile lip service to "multiculturalism" such a bad joke, such a dangerous sham. We lack the equipment to understand even our own culture at the moment, and are thus at a dead loss to interpret any other.

Making cars visible - January 29, 2012

Thought for the day: The railways were built by robber barons, i.e. capitalists. The highway systems were built by politicians. Henry Ford was depending, from the beginning, on the government to supply roads and parking spaces for his vehicles.

The statement above is a truly reckless caricature of the actual history. But note, I have presented it as any caricature: to find an angle at which light may penetrate a complex reality. "First simplify, then exaggerate," as the old style book of The Economist magazine counselled. For if you don't, you can make no sense of anything.

In fact, the robber barons could not have built their railroads except on land, and they depended heavily on land grants from the usual, inevitably corrupt, political sources. There is no large infrastructural project in history, known to me, that did not require main force to be accomplished. That applies to the Internet, too, incidentally, though its roads were cut through electronic space.

And it was partly from reaction to the corruption, that governments took over the highway-building business - typically solving a problem by enhancing it.

Those roads were built for everyone to use, or more precisely, everyone with a car, bus, or truck. By today we have reached the point where money is impounded, by tax and otherwise, to provide infrastructure directly to capitalist developments, for the sake of generating jobs and raising more tax revenue.

Notice the progression. The robber barons at least had to build the roads for their carriages. The auto barons could expect the government to provide this service, at general taxpayer expense. And now the mall barons expect the government to run infrastructure right to the entrances of their vast parking lots - the very size of these lots stipulated in turn by planning and zoning formulae. It is one big, integrated, public-private monster, in which the risks attendant on all human enterprise have been bureaucratically diffused.

My background loathing of ugliness comes into this, but my column today is more immediately inspired by the reading of an article by the superb hack journalist, Dave Gardetta, from the city magazine, Los Angeles.

Starting from an explanation of how the Disney Hall's seasonal schedule was dictated by the cost of its parking garage, Gardetta explores the whole neglected history of parking spaces. By the end, we are offered an astonishing vista of sprawling Los Angeles (or by analogy, other cities), shaped by public policy toward parking spaces. And not only the sprawl, but so much violently irrational human behaviour is explained in passing. To say nothing of the environmental implications.

Embedded in the article is this memorable observation from Rick Cole, the former mayor of Pasadena: "For 5,000 years we built cities around people, and they worked well. For 50 years we've built them around the parking lot - a ridiculous use of land, of money, and an intrusion into the intimacy of human scale."

We're at a dead end. How to return to the pedestrian status quo ante?

The way there, according to Donald Shoup, who may be the world's leading authority on urban parking arrangements, might be as simple as deleting all municipal regulations which specify how many parking spaces each private development must supply. Instead, leave parking naked to market forces, and its true cost will soon emerge, creating denser urban environments like Manhattan, where you can't park your car, so there's little point in owning one.

While I love to ponder simple solutions, and quick fixes, I don't actually believe in them, and there are of course many more marbles in play. Cities that have adapted to cars over decades would anyway require decades to re-adapt to people. And what was painful moving forward will be painful moving back.

But again: the purpose of this exercise is not to fix the mess, but to shine light into it.

The railways weren't especially pretty, but they did get you roughly from A to B, and you could walk the rest of the way. Cars eliminate this walking, but while making a destination more accessible, they destroy almost everything that made it worth visiting. By putting every traveller in a heavy metal box, they atomize society, and obviate community. These are not minor criticisms.

Meanwhile we must work to pay for things like cars - adding quite visibly to the invisible costs. And in the twilight between visible and invisible, we begin to descry the extraordinary matrix of bureaucracy which we have engendered to diffuse and redistribute those costs.

Solutions to any problem begin with making them visible. And this in turn requires a conscious effort, to overcome the myopias that blind us to things as they really are. Often the hardest thing to see is our own moral failure: the way we ourselves incrementally ceded our capacity as moral agents to governments and corporations, in the course of becoming consumers of an illusory "easy life."

But that isn't to discount piecemeal solutions. And that takes us back to our robber barons. Let those who really want something, pay for it, as close as can be pushed to full market value. Let those who don't want it, not pay.

Harper at Davos - January 28, 2012

Apparently, we must go to Davos, Switzerland, to find

Aout what's on Stephen Harper's mind. This, anyway, is the impression given in Canadian media reports, which splashed his remarks to the World Economic Forum about yesterday as if they amounted to a blueprint for our national future. Yet I don't think any of the themes he touched upon were new.

The general problem of funding "entitlements" - and in our case especially an Old Age Security program which is the loss-leader among government services (funded directly out of tax revenues) - is shared by every other western nation. The political fix is also the same everywhere. Programs that no country could ever afford were launched in an era of unreasonable optimism. But only the first generation could be paid off handsomely for their votes.

Our "next" generation contains vastly more elderly people, and at this moment costs for the OAS are on track to double in the next decade or so. There is no national economy in the developed world that can keep up with that. And at present, none that can afford a heavier tax burden, which would compound upon an ever-smaller proportion of working-age people.

In the last drying wharks of the optimist generation, "immigration" was cited as the solution to this problem. The doors were thrown open - without much attention to the quality of immigrants, from a mean, self-serving, cost-benefit point-of-view. Suddenly we, like everyone else, want to be sure our immigrants are more likely to generate wealth than absorb welfare. So, suddenly we are competing for the same kind of immigrants with everyone else.

Harper will be condemned, even execrated, for what he must do, and what any government must do, in the national interest. For as we have seen from Greece, balancing the books is in the national interest.

I think everybody who knows anything, knows what I have written above, though not everyone will admit to knowing. Soft love is easier than hard, and the easiest thing is compassionate posturing. We elected Harper because we, the people, do not think like Wall Street occupiers. But the people who stand to receive OAS have no intention of being cut off, either.

The only practical solution, beyond nipping and tucking wherever possible, is to move the age of retirement sharply higher, while gradually shifting the actuarial principles to within sight of land. This makes sense, given a population not only aging, but living longer in relatively good health. Yes, one generation benefited at the expense of another, but so what? We'll live.

On another front, Harper came close in Davos to speaking aloud what he has been saying previously only in mute gestures.

For many generations, it made sense to count on the United States, alike for security and for our economic well-being. Trade with the U.S. has entirely dominated our foreign trade, indeed our whole economy. Long before Brian Mulroney's North American free-trade agreements, we had shifted from our dependence on preferential terms throughout the old British Empire.

Our dependence on the U.S. was paradoxically accelerated by Canadian nationalism; but in truth, we didn't have a choice. Britain abandoned us more than we abandoned Britain.

Today, it is the U.S. in economic decline, and abandoning us to turn inward, as Britain once did. Unfortunately, the old Left anti-Americanism of our chattering class blinds us to this reality.

The U.S. was already in trouble, but the new America of Obama is "exceptional" among western countries in refusing to address entitlement issues, in attacking wealthcreation head on, in vastly expanding government participation in the economy. Moreover, the U.S. military is now being slashed: a signal to all allies that the days of American "hyperpower" are over.

The natural comparison would be to Clement Attlee's administration in the years immediately after the Second World War, when Britain made an almost conscious choice to fold up as a world power, and selfimmolate as an economic one.

The recent Keystone pipeline decision - to indefinitely delay a huge and vital energy project on the basis of vague environmentalist neuroses - makes the situation plain. We need new trading arrangements, especially to sell our resources.

Security and economic considerations combine in making China less than an ideal trading or investment partner. My impression is that while the Harper government is waving China as a red cape, to get attention in Washington, China is not the principal object of our current outreach.

India and Europe are the alternative major customers, and our salesman-diplomats are further persistently cultivating Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, etc. - resourcehungry countries vividly aware of potentially catastrophic instability in the Middle East.

In addition to the tarsands, we have Atlantic coast resources, and customers in Europe currently illserved by Russia.

The wall we're up against is not insuperably high, but as Harper knows, and we must understand, there is no time to waste in climbing it.

Political theatre - January 25, 2012

Gentle reader will forgive if we persist in our examination of political developments in a neighbouring country. I ran out of space in my Saturday column long before I ran out of things to say.

And with people around the world watching the action, in the Republican presidential debates and Democratic preparations for what will surely be a battle royale, we see, vividly, features that are present in the contemporary politics of all western countries.

The focus of the Democratic campaign was already clear before Barack Obama's address Tuesday. The Democrats, from president down through Congress, will make "fairness" the issue, and present their opponents as fat, rich, selfish, ignorant, and mean; but most of all, "unfair."

I'm sure David Axelrod (Obama's ingenious tactical adviser) is telling him, "We have to get Romney nominated." If he can be badly wounded in the course of the Republican primaries, and leave the Tea Party constituency feeling cheated and abjured, so much the better.

But even if he could have been coronated, Romney is the perfect foil for an Obama re-election campaign. Rich, from what can be presented as vulture capitalism, and living off capital gains and dividends, he is tailor-made. The author of "Romneycare," he can be used to cancel popular outrage against the "ObamaCare" legislation that was partly modelled on it. A predictable and wooden campaigner, who depends on planners, he will hold still while Obama turns his rhetorical torch on him.

As Mark Steyn has explained, Romney "made" Gingrich's candidacy by stoking the demand for a temperamental opposite. The Republican "base" - that vast range of persons in "flyover country" who feel increasingly disenfranchised not only by progressive Democrats but by the Beltway establishment of the Republican party - don't want smooth. They have been disdained not only for what they think, but for what they are - "clinging to their guns and their Bibles."

Gingrich the gladiator was perfectly placed, in the debates last week, to grasp that, "if it's red meat that's wanted, you might as well rip chunks of it from the flesh of the unctuous moderators and throw it right at the ravenous studio audience." (Michael Walsh's superb description.)

But as everyone knows, Gingrich is himself deeply flawed. He is a brilliant "ideas" man, who cannot settle on his own best ideas; who sets off march hare with new ones before the old have been fully parsed. (This was cleverly exposed by Romney in the Tampa debate, when he pointed out that under Gingrich's current tax proposal, Romney would have paid no tax at all.)

Gingrich is a charismatic force, in a situation where fire is actually needed to fight fire. He is the kind of opponent who could discombobulate Obama, and therefore deliver a Reagan-scale victory. Political pundits seldom consider, that if the Republicans had run a predictable, "moderate" candidate against Jimmy Carter in 1980, Carter might have served two terms.

Gingrich is also the kind who could wipe out totally, against a tightly disciplined Democrat machine, commanding huge and growing "entitlement" client constituencies, to say nothing of captive liberal media, the technophile "zeitgeist," and a billion-dollar campaign war chest. Flip a coin.

But behind the salesmanship, it is also useful to consider the product. Gingrich and Romney are more alike in actual content, than the Republican "base" yet wants to believe. Both are politicians who can pivot quickly. Rick Santorum, in his quiet, reasonable, even nerdlike way, made a devastating point in Monday's debate: that both had long political histories on the other side of each of the core issues that launched the Tea Party movement.

It is by no means clear that Gingrich is more "conservative" than Romney, and when the primaries are done, either one would pivot away from the stance that secured him the nomination, towards what he thinks "loose" Democratic supporters will want to hear.

Gingrich's strength is hardly consistency; it is rather his character as an old-fashioned barnstormer, of generous heart and humour, playing the game. He can tear the flesh out of a TV moderator, and then cuddle with the poor wretch after the show. He can put on a tremendous performance, on his good nights; and people do, sincerely, want to be entertained.

But that is the very problem at the root of mass democracy. The issues being discussed are serious, and need to be examined on their own merits. Political theatre gets in the way. It is the means by which huge numbers are induced to vote against their own core interests.

The winner will be, almost invariably, the candidate who can make them feel good about themselves.

And this is why Santorum, the candidate who has been consistently representing Tea Party positions, since decades before there was a Tea Party, is running third in a Tea Party crowd.

Female foeticide - January 22, 2012

God works in mysterious ways. And so much in human life and politics falls out unpredictably, by wild paradox, that the religious learn to pray for such mysterious interventions. This is implicit in the second stanza of our old royal anthem: "Confound their politics, / Frustrate their knavish tricks! / On Thee our hopes we fix, / God save us all!"

"All" in this text has traditionally excluded the corgis, and refers only to the human population.

This Christian notion of the sanctity of human life - shared by Jews and I would hope all other religious faithful - is at, or was long at, the very heart of the legal philosophy of (at least) the western world.

"God save us" has many, many dimensions, from the most obvious material, to the most subtle spiritual. But throughout, it implies some kind of redemption.

"Many dimensions," I wrote; but all one connected and ultimately comprehensible thought. I am stressing this because the post-modern mind (my own included) plays with disconnections. We live lives today so filled with distractions, and distractions to distractions, that it has become difficult for anyone to hold one single thought in mind for long enough to begin thinking through its implications.

That is in turn why we come to feel comfortable only with scattered, empirical thoughts. It is why, when faced with a hard moral or philosophical question, almost everyone turns as if by instinct to "science" for hints to an answer. But empirical research will never give us answers to non-empirical questions.

Nevertheless, things are connected, and in the end, even "science" will cast light on a truth that goes far beyond the empirical. My example will be the curious question of when human life begins - for legal or any other purposes.

For people living in the Middle Ages, this might have presented a puzzle (though in practice it did not). A woman would become pregnant, but at first there was nothing to it but the lump. At some point this lump was thought to become "ensouled." This coincided, rationally, with her first sense of it moving in her womb. There was a "quickening." The foetus "had come to life."

Do not despise nor condemn this as medieval "superstition," or credulity toward the "miraculous." It was after all founded on hard empirical observation.

Especially do not despise them when, at this day, we are with far greater information about the continuous development of the foetus, from the very moment of conception, debating where to draw the line on abortions. And, most doctors draw it informally at about 20 weeks - a statistical correlate for the same moment of "quickening." Before, they will abort. After, they will usually refuse, law or no law, unless there are extraordinary circumstances.

Modern technology, through sonograms and the like, can show us a foetus that is very obviously also a child, growing. This is why the state of Texas, and other "pro-life" jurisdictions, have passed laws to compel medical personnel to show the pregnant woman what is on the screen, and other things she "needs to know" before making a very final decision; including some plain epidemiological facts about the possible consequences of an abortion to her own future health and fertility.

This reduces the abortion rate most effectively. It thereby also reduces instances of terrible regret, which many women have suffered after "going through with it" - perhaps hounded in a clinic that profits from the "procedure," or by some other external pressure, such as an angry boyfriend.

Were the question not whether to have an abortion, but whether to remove some benign or malignant tumour, everyone would agree that the woman should be given as much information as possible. But here, where the issue includes another human life, we hear demands for ignorance.

The tables suddenly turn, now that the issue-du-jour is sex-selective abortions. It has been seriously proposed that pregnant women be kept in the dark about the child's sex, in order to prevent women who want a boy, from aborting a girl.

And yet in this case, the opposite tactic would be more effective. Let the mother not only see she is carrying a little girl, but who that little girl is. Let her decide at least temporarily away from a family which, for cultural or any other reasons, may be pressuring her to "get a boy." And if she still wants an abortion, after seeing what will be killed, God help her.

This is one of many "breaking news" fronts between "pro-life" and "pro-choice" ideological armies. The wild paradox here is that abortion-supporting feminists have raised an issue to prominence which utterly sabotages all their previous arguments about "a woman's rights." God bless them for doing so.

On other fronts, we find the whole range of "eugenic" issues raised by selective abortions; the horrible prospect of enabling people to do by "choice" what Hitler chose: to eliminate those groups he deemed to be "inferior." To order "designer babies" for a new master race.

All this was implicit from the moment the legalization of abortion was conceived.

And now, let us pray it is finally being confounded.

Entertaining at least - January 21, 2012

Seventeenth time lucky, for the Republican presidential debates, and with the field narrowed to four and the stakes rising, it was "fight night" on Thursday, in Charleston, that convinced me such television could be worth watching. The U.S. general electorate is just beginning to tune in to the ineluctable fact that 2012 is an election year. But at last, the show is ready for prime time.

The ancient Romans made politics into a blood sport, but they offered the circus to keep the masses entertained. The genius of the American Republic has been to merge these spectacles. It is gladiatorial combat, in the foreground of a "culture war" that has progressively engulfed the whole society.

When I last checked into this topic, quite recently, it appeared Newt Gingrich was mortally wounded, leaving Rick Santorum as the last "tea partier" standing against Mitt Romney, the suave candidate. Silly me.

Gingrich is on his feet again, and by sheer gladiatorial aggression has regained the field. He might actually beat Romney in the South Carolina primary. Which does not mean he can take Florida, or won't self-annihilate again, but I begin to think I, along with every other pundit, "misunderestimated" his peculiar strength: "creative destruction." Or more precisely, "creative self-destruction," as he rises stronger for each mistake he sheds.

The pairing of him with his old adversary Bill Clinton has been done before. Both men seemed to thrive on their own personal foibles, and almost to require sordid private lives to forge political invulnerability. There is a hint here to the media, for we never really understood why revelations of sexual squalor hurt neither of them in the polls. (It was party infighting that took Gingrich down in the 1990s; the ethics controversies were bogus.)

Let me try to explain this to ourselves. As the news broke that the ABC network would air the "revelations" of the man's (second) bitter ex-wife, this week, his poll numbers appeared to rise in response. That he had received a couple of useful endorsements must be taken into the account. But I think it was ABC which, quite inadvertently, made his day.

Everybody (who cared) knew that Mrs. Gingrich (No. 2) was going to say just what she already had to Esquire magazine, and to everyone else who has been willing to listen these last 15 years.

Gliberal (glib-liberal) moralizers forget that they, along with most of the adult population of North America above age about 30, have left trails of bitter estranged "partners" behind them, and these days, everybody "understands." Moreover, since the mainstream media went tabloid, everybody knows all the stories, too. It's only public policy they know nothing about.

By comparison, Romney, merely by becoming a little defensive about the taxes he'd been paying, did himself real damage. He went with foolish caution into both debates this week, and by now, everyone knows what taxes he's been paying, even though he hasn't released the files.

(Rich people who intend to run for president really ought to pay more taxes.)

But at the very moment any normal, sane, reasonable politician would be going defensive, Gingrich went on the attack. His opening salvo Thursday night against poor hapless moderator John King, who almost innocently raised the question on everybody's mind, left the whole U.S. media dripping in egg yolk. Gingrich hit that ball so far out of the park, they will never find it.

The Pajamas Media pundit, "Tatler," drew a passing comparison to Lincoln's famous general, Ulysses Grant, always under a cloud. But it was a cloud from which streaks of lightning kept crashing down upon his enemies. Tatler's point was that Republicans love a fighter. (In fact, most people do.) And that Grant went on to the presidency.

A man of casual personal corruption; a close observer and rather capable artist; a brilliant tactician, and a ruthless butcher - Grant won the Civil War for the North.

Gingrich reminds of him in each of these categories. The only thing he seems to lack is Grant's alcoholism.

That Grant was the worst U.S. president until Barack Obama, might be argued. (There are a dozen credible intervening candidates, and I wouldn't want to make a snap judgment.) But the U.S. system selects for stamina, sliding questions of character and competence almost off the table.

Certainly I'd rather watch Gingrich v. Obama, than Suave v. Suave. And certainly, Gingrich would make an entertaining president.

As a Canadian, my best argument for him is that America's enemies (who are also ours) would genuinely fear him, and the direction of appeasement would be reversed. And peace comes when enemies are cowed. Moreover, Gingrich the historian and close observer, is more likely than most to make impressive political and judicial appointments, which is two-thirds of the job.

But let us conclude by mentioning the economies. His mouth alone would be worth about six aircraft carrier groups.

Ship shapes - January 18, 2012

Anyone who travels takes his life in his hands, and this includes those who travel unadventurously in circles, aboard cruise ships, or to holiday camps.

A certain number must reasonably expect to end trapped in a sunken hull; falling from the skies in an airplane; lethally food-poisoned; fatally heat-struck; eaten by a shark; trodden by an erstwhile tame elephant; kidnapped and murdered by local brigands. Whatever.

It does not follow that the tour operators were remiss, although it might do. Nor that they gave insufficient warning of the perils to which human flesh is heir. Any kind of departure from routine involves risks; and routine is itself a great killer.

The cult of perfect safety is the ultimate cause of innumerable horrific accidents and deaths, because the technicians are so focused upon procedures and regulations, that they become blind to actual threats. (I once met a black-humoured insurance executive who collected examples of this as a hobby.)

The disaster by Tuscany, where the cruise ship Costa Concordia struck a rock, or perhaps only the sandbar, provides a grim, yet also ridiculous, memento mori. In this age of excess income, when so many have taken cruise ship holidays, the story has a huge grab factor. Hence wall-to-wall media for an incident in which the casualties are fewer than from the usual morning bombings in Pakistan or Iraq, or the average cattle raid in Southern Sudan - where "people like us" are unlikely to be among the victims.

At the time of writing, the first impression of farce has been repeatedly confirmed. Bodies are still being recovered below decks, and trapped survivors are still being sought, four days after the accident. The Italian police have a captain in custody who seems to have been among the first to abandon ship, along with many of his crew, leaving passengers to fend for themselves. Many of those saved themselves by swimming ashore.

As we approach the centenary of the Titanic disaster, we might observe that the laws of physics remain in force. I was struck, almost risibly, by a BBC sidebar headline, which asked, "How did this happen to a modern ship?" The answer would be: "Easily."

The builders of these immense floating pleasure palaces declare they are safe because they are loaded with technical gizmos, helping us forget that their extraordinary size is the weakness. The weight of the thing is sufficient to rip any hull apart, when it hits anything immovable; and the oceans are full of things like that. The bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled, thanks to the destructive power of this weight; yet the less manoeuvrable she becomes.

Cruise ships are anyway not built as solidly as, say, the Titanic. When airliners took over the North Atlantic run, the fast tough passenger ships designed for its heavy seas went to the scrapyards, ultimately to be reincarnated as these holiday vessels. Cruise ships are built structurally lighter, for moderate speed and moderate seas; then loaded to ever larger economies of scale. They are resort hotels, posing as ships.

As a correspondent with some knowledge of shipbuilding explains, "They are eggshells without proper keels, and they have lots of little propulsion pods below that would each leave quite a hole if rubbed off." Luck alone may explain why none has yet gone down, a little farther from shore, with losses on the scale of 9/11.

In writing about the sinking of the Titanic, a hundred years ago, Joseph Conrad called similar attention to the fatuity of builders' claims. They said she was unsinkable, while wantonly overlooking the size issue.

One of the associated perils is human. The captain of a ship must carry crew, passengers, and cargo "in the hollow of his hand," but above a certain size this becomes impossible. The Titanic herself was too large to be integrally sailed, let alone evacuated; modern management practices were already in place, in which responsibility is diffused, and authority mediocritized. And yet she was tiny, compared with a modern cruise ship; and her crew far better trained.

Conrad compares the Titanic's fate with that of the packet steamer Douro, which had sunk within 15 minutes of being broadsided in deep water, a generation before. She was one-tenth the size of the Titanic, yet the proportion of crew to passengers was much the same. In the available time, it was possible to save all the passengers but one (who clung in a death-grip to a railing). All crew required to pilot the lifeboats safely embarked, and all the rest went down. No one had paused to reflect upon his duties.

That was an age, as Conrad noted, before the "ineffable hotel exquisite" had come to demand spacious and luxurious accommodations, and when a ship was still a ship. And long, long before those accommodations were themselves adapted to the chintzy requirements of mass leisure.

But death, like physics, remains just the same.

Escargot - January 15, 2012

While I am not entirely against progress - for instance, progress toward sanctity strikes me as a desirable thing - I am against most forms of progress on offer in the public do-main, and pretty much everything that is labelled "progressive." The word reaches my ear as it would that of a patient, hearing a doctor's prognosis on the advance of some hideous cancer.

Thus, contra correspondents who say I am some sort of "libertarian" or "neo-conservative" - or "laissez-fairy" as one of the wittier opined - I am not merely against "government interference in the free marketplace." The terms "fascist" or (more modestly) "Falangist" don't quite capture my position either, for all such supposedly "extreme right" causes are founded upon my twin bêtes noires: bureaucratic socialism, and jingo nationalism.

"Mediaeval Catholic" gets closer to the nerve. I was reading, the other week, someone named "Mark" lecturing me on some blog about medieval backwardness; about how, in my critique of modern repetitive labour, I failed to appreciate the drudgery of life in preceding ages. Standard, schoolroom clichés about the Middle Ages were scattered through his remarks, as if they might come as news to me.

But my technophobic point was missed: that the wage-slave on an office or factory assembly line is abstracted from nature, and access to joy, in a way the ox-driving, row-planting feudal peasant could never have been.

That longer life is preferable to shorter, I accept along with the rest of my species. I even prefer pleasure to pain. But those are essentially quantitative considerations, where-as I was making a qualitative observation. Alas, "progress," in the form of an encroaching, desiccated, secular materialism, appears to have prevented many readers from following this.

Let us construct our formula in paraphrase of our former prime minister, W.L.M. King. "Not necessarily Ludditism, but Ludditism if necessary." Or call it, "situational Ludditism," as another blogger does.

For this week's example, we turn to England, where the "Conservative" government (note sardonic quotes) announced it is going ahead with the "HS2" high-speed rail link between Birmingham and London. By travelling at speeds up to 400 kilometres per hour, it will cut travel time between the two towns, around the year 2026, at a cost to the British taxpayer of only a few trillion pounds.

The current estimate is actually 33 billion, but as Tory voters all along the indicated route riot Ludditically against the destruction of their precious countryside, more of the thing must be put under-ground, at an additional cost of something like 150,000 pounds per cubit. And . well, everyone knows about government cost estimates.

I'd been following the controversy through the corner of my eye, reading all the standard arguments for technology from the adepts of "progress." Britain is arguably lagging behind France and/or Germany in several isolated areas of transportation statistics! This spells ruin for British economy and trade! Solution: a high-speed rail link that will get the managerial classes to their appointments in London half-an-hour quicker, provided their journey originates in Birmingham.

To which one is tempted to reply: this is England. You can walk from Birmingham to London. I have done it myself. Maybe some ox-carts for the oldies, and a quick horse carriage for the first-class mails. But no, they had to build one of those noisy, filthy railways, circa 1838. And they are still not satisfied!

We've had proposals for high-speed rail links in Canada, too. Fortunately the advocates confront Canadian politicians who have be-come stone-faced to white-elephant schemes. We should take pride in being the only G8 country that, God willing, may never dig this particular kind of bottomless pit.

Do you know that, around the turn of the last century, there were people who were implacably opposed to the legalization of automobiles? And do you know that their dark prognostications about a future in which these "mechanical horses" had proliferated have been fully vindicated?

For sanity we turn, as if by tradition, to Greece. A feature item in The New York Times focuses upon a couple in Chios, now raising edible snails for export. Urbanites before-hand, with some technical agricultural training, they discerned the writing on Athenian walls. So, apparently, have many other Greeks who, in the face of that country's fiscal meltdown - all of it triggered by "progress" of some sort - have been clearing out of the cities, or making preparations so to do.

The young are flocking into agricultural and maritime training colleges. Those not heading back to the land, point out to sea. It is a wonderful story of human adaptation, which incidentally applies whether technology is moving backwards, or forwards.

I am unconvinced by any of the environmentalists' arguments for human-caused "global warming." But I pray for global warming, all the same, for it would be a real boon to farmers.

And as for those Greeks, good luck, and God bless you! And I really hope those Germans like your snails!

Burmese glasnost - January 14, 2012

When a regime such as Burma's releases hundreds of political prisoners, it is crumbling. The matter is always delicate, for it may not realize it is crumbling yet, and may think, the way Mikhail Gorbachev perhaps once did, that it is bidding for survival through long-necessary reforms. But simply by making them, the regime undermines the public fear upon which it had depended.

Aung San Suu Kyi herself famously put it this way: "It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."

The reforms in Burma began nominally in 2010; yet in retrospect might be dated to Cyclone Nargis, in May 2008. This exposed not only the regime's inability to cope with a natural disaster, itself, but its inability to deal with those offering help, from both home and abroad.

It was a tragicomedy: of course "tragic" with respect to more than 100,000 unnecessary deaths, and the suffering of survivors. (Millions were left homeless.)

But paradoxically it was the "comic" aspect of the dictators' response that was more deeply politically telling. This quite literally, in the case of the most memorable arrest that followed. "Zarganar," a prominent theatrical star, and satirical comedian, was locked up.

(His stage name means "tweezers" in Burmese.) Already banned from performing, thanks to his genius for wordplay, and airbrushed out of public life by media censors, he suddenly surfaced in the chaos after the storm, wickedly mocking the regime's efforts, while organizing troupes of popular entertainers to bring aid to some of the most isolated villages.

Zarganar was arrested when his remarks were splashed in foreign media; he was sentenced to decades of imprisonment in the farthest north. Indeed, our western media have a track record for publicizing heroic acts by "dissidents," in ways that compel totalitarian regimes to locate and crush them. In Zarganar's case, the words and acts became impossible to ignore, because they were now "officially" news. In Burma itself, such news carries underground, in ways long practised to keep policemen out of the loop.

This week's large prisoner release was not the first. Zarganar was among many set free in October. And some time will be needed to sort out who has now been released, and why. In addition to supporters of Suu Kyi's opposition party (the National League for Democracy, which swept a fairly free election in 1990), and other pro-democracy types, there were former members of the military hierarchy, who fell out in power struggles; plus, "dissidents" associated with the country's numerous ethnic secessionist movements (for Burma is a federation of several cultural "nations," occupying quite distinct geographical regions).

About 700 were officially released, from all these backgrounds, in order to make the maximum impression on European and American diplomats and "human rights" organizations. But there were lists of political prisoners in Burma running into the thousands.

In addition to the prisoner releases, election laws have been withdrawn that had prevented any party harbouring former prisoners from running even candidates who weren't. Scheduled by-elections are thus thrown open.

Too, negotiations are proceeding with leaders of several of the country's ethnic insurgencies, and the regime says a formal ceasefire has been brokered with the Karen. And, humanitarian organizations have been promised access to the country's tribal areas.

Suu Kyi, released from house arrest more than a year ago, has been working with the regime directly.

To both western and domestic observers, she is the guarantee that changes are more than show. The regime thus now depends upon her, more than she upon it.

"Daw Suu," as she is popularly called ("daw" is the gentle Burmese honorific for "auntie"), has a dynastic position in the history of Burmese independence which, from the beginning of her political career, has helped to awe the authorities.

Her father, Aung San, the "father of independent Burma," was also the architect of the original military regime, so that he has a position in public mythology like that of Sun Yat-sen in China: the nationalist revered by all parties. To this his assassination, just before independence, added the title of "martyr."

While the extraordinary story of Suu Kyi's rise to leadership, instantly upon her return to the country in 1988 after a life abroad, is generally well-known, its significance is under-appreciated.

We speak of "democracy," but around Asia and the world, it is this dynastic principle, and the quality of awe associated with it, from which personal power really springs; from that, and from some quality of personal charisma, which Suu Kyi certainly has, clinching that sense of legitimacy. Without her, the current events would be unimaginable.

The Burmese regime has lost confidence in itself. Outwardly it is responding to pressure from statesmen in the West, setting conditions to lift sanctions. Inwardly, it folds before domestic opponents, to whom it no longer feels equal.

Crack of light - January 11, 2012

What do they mean by, "We need another Reagan"?

This is the plaintive cry I have heard from American "Tea Party" types whose casual acquaintance I have made. Even they find the Republican presidential race embarrassing, as one after another alternative to Mitt Romney keels, above dissolved feet of clay.

This column couldn't wait for the results from New Hampshire last night, but there was no need. Unless Romney somehow lost it, there was no news. The significant battle is in South Carolina, after which the field definitively narrows. So where is "another Reagan"?

I think the meaning of this plaintive conservative cry, is that they need another politician who can, with some dignity in the face of the inevitable liberal media onslaught, articulate basic "Tea Party" notions to some interesting portion of the electorate that is not Tea Party. (No need to explain to the tea-drinkers themselves.)

Having resolved that Romney is a robot, Paul a godless ideologue, Huntsman a diplomat, and Perry can't tie his own shoelaces, they are left in the unusual position (especially for the Evangelicals), of choosing between two Roman Catholics. Or maybe one, since it turns out that Newt Gingrich didn't, actually, achieve a personal transformation in his time away from power, and has come across as the same old, deeply flawed guy, with a mouth on him too much like mine.

That leaves Santorum, who can at least articulate, knows what he is articulating, and can smile, against Obama, "who can articulate lies." (I put that in quotes, because it is not a statement of fact, necessarily, but of conservative belief. Needless to say, I share it.)

The conventional view, from inside such media centres as New York and Washington, is that Romney must win for the good of the Republican party, because he is the "moderate" who can appeal to "independents." His very lack of deep conviction on anything at all - even his Mormonism, which he shrugs off - makes him the most reliable politician. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and Romney swings left or right, as required.

Indeed, "they" - the seaboard Republican managerial class - take the need for this kind of "moderation" to be so self-evident, that disagreement must expose some mental deficiency.

I disagree. In my (admittedly somewhat jaded) view of democracy, independents aren't "moderates." The great majority of them ignore political questions. Lacking their own political ideas, they are highly suggestible. Obama, an unusually radical left-liberal Democrat, won last time, because he was suggestive. He suggested hope and change. This sounded good to independents.

Reagan won over the independents by articulating, in terms almost anyone could understand, concepts like "the government that can give you everything you want can take everything you have away." He was articulating genuine convictions that made some sense. He came across as authentic, thanks as much to his acting skills as to his beliefs; but he was authentic.

The likelihood is that, by de-animating the Republican "base," Romney will throw the election. He can't match Obama in political posturing, and he can't match any Republican opponent in conviction. He wins only if the "independents" decide Obama must go. He cannot win on his own account.

The conventionals don't grasp this, because they live in places like New York and Washington. And because, deeper than their affiliation to party, is their affiliation to political machines. They live and die by polls which show only what people think of what has been offered; which cannot show what people will think of something not yet offered.

It follows that the Republicans might well have a better chance with, say, Santorum, than with Romney. This is because a politician like Santorum, who can unquestionably animate that Red State "base," can also articulate Red State ideas - especially well into such swing states as his native Pennsylvania, or Ohio, where he speaks out of a life experience that (unlike Obama's) is "real world." There is nothing effete about him, and the contrast with an opponent who is truly effete, could be quite telling.

Santorum can also touch the God Thing, in the American psyche. It is there to a degree greater than in any other western country, and it crosses party lines. Here, again, the contrast could be telling.

But to have a chance of displacing first Romney, then Obama, conservative Republicans must not only swing decisively behind Santorum, but do it fast. If he can't take South Carolina, I'd guess the game is up. They can't afford to let any nominee be presented as the "not-Romney" tea bag. He'd need the same luxury Obama had at the last election: enough time to build a "presidential" impression, after his anointment. He'd need party infighting to be behind him.

I'm predicting nothing here; only saying that, from a conservative view, I can't see light through any other crack.

American Loyalists - January 8, 2012

There is more to Canadian history than United Empire Loyalists, as any Wild Rose of Alberta might tell you, or any Blue Flag Iris of Quebec. Canada herself, even "the white man's Canada," is much older than Confederation; much older than the American Revolution from which our Loyalists fled. She has a history to which the migration of those Loyalist refugees was an accretion.

An extremely important one, however, and one which has everything to do with the nation that was subsequently shaped. True, I have Loyalist ancestry myself, and am therefore an interested party. But it grieves me more broadly that young Canadians today are squeezed through our dysfunctional public school systems with no under-standing whatever of our side in the American Revolution; no finer appreciation of the Loyalist cause than that it is "irrelevant today."

For Christmas, a Texas friend put into my hands a book which should have received more notice up here, when it appeared last year. It is Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, by Maya Jasanoff. It is readable popular history of the best kind, documented and solid, and it is part of a larger American effort to understand their own roots more broadly.

Several other books have appeared over the past few years in something amounting to a mildly revisionist historical genre. Alan Taylor's focused account of the "western front," in the book he en-titled The Civil War of 1812, is an-other example of this intellectual effort to represent the British-American clash, in a way that is free of the old jingo mythologizing: to downplay British Empire versus American Republic, and in-stead emphasize the civil (or rather, uncivil) dispute between two fairly similar conceptions of human liberty, held by one and the same people.

As those who dipped into The Clockmaker series, by the great (and still funny) yarn-spinner, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, once knew, the inhabitants of Nova Scotia were always as much "Yankees" as their cousins in New England.

And as the readers of Maya Jasanoff will discover, from her admirable pillage of archives around the world, so were tens of thou-sands of other Loyalists who, deprived of their property and livelihoods in the Thirteen Colonies, scattered elsewhere through the Empire - to Britain, the West In-dies, Africa, India, and beyond.

Her book is primarily about this diaspora, and for the Canadian reader already acquainted with our national history, it is wonderfully eye-opening.

It places the Canadian Loyalist experience on the cosmopolitan stage, and by showing the struggles of individual refugees, whose life stories she traces, it shines light in-to attitudes unmistakably "American" that travelled with them. These influenced the Empire as a whole, contributed to its triumph-ant recovery from the American debacle, and to its flavour as an agent for constitutional liberty in so many remote places where human enslavement and arbitrary rule had been "normal" since time out of mind.

This is a very proud story, but it is lost today on students who are taught their mite of history backwards: who become steeped in anachronism, from the bigoted habit of sitting in judgement on the past, and applying to it only the latest, politically correct standards. One will never understand what an extraordinary achievement it was, to end slavery for instance, if the whole struggle is cast mindlessly in purely racial terms, as "white versus black."

And to use just that example, one will never appreciate such delicious ironies, as the role of black Loyalists in the American Revolution. Jasanoff has a gift for opening obturated windows, with little passing shimmies of fact. Did you know, for instance, that George Washing-ton lost a handful of his own personal slaves, who ran off to freedom behind British lines? That a more sizable contingent of Thomas Jefferson's escaped slaves managed likewise to join up with our Loyalist forces?

A cheap shot, but a good one against the "Champions of Liberty." Of course, many Loyalists also owned slaves, and the evacuation of this "property" was a large part of the logistical nightmare of British disengagement. On the other hand, the contradictions it exposed - some blacks free and equal, others in legal bondage - contributed powerfully to the acceleration of the British campaign against slavery everywhere. (In all the world, it was first outright banned right here in Upper Canada: this fine province of Ontario.)

In the background of Jasanoff's book, and several others that have appeared lately, we get a better idea of a struggle that was more like a civil war than a revolution. And that is part of the reason America turned out differently than France, or Russia, which had real Revolutions.

To understand this is to grasp that for two years after the famous surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown (defeated as much by typhus as by Washington's Patriots and the French Navy), Loyalists continued fighting in the bush, completely abandoned by their supposed British "masters." One hears something of their frustration echoed, in desperate Vietnamese appeals for American help, after they were abandoned in the 1970s. The message of: "Hey, we're still fighting, send us some frigging ammunition."

The page turner - January 7, 2012

The publicity slogan this time is, "Turning the page." In the early 1990s it was, "The peace dividend." U.S. President Barack Obama announced this week a radical downsizing of U.S. armed forces, including the elimination of perhaps half-a-million soldiers. The U.S. army and the Marine Corps are to be eviscerated; the Navy and Air Force will be maintained, though with slowdowns to their hardware procurements.

There was posturing about maintaining the U.S. presence in the Pacific and Far East, but it was sleight-of-hand. U.S. forces had already been taxed in the Pacific to supply logistical needs in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that "maintaining strength" actually means locking in the diminished presence. This in turn counters a Chinese military presence that is increasing quickly, and projecting outward.

Two large fiscal facts complete the picture. The first is that the president's half-trillion of cuts is in addition to the half-trillion that must be found to satisfy an act of Congress. This was automatically triggered by the (predictable) failure of the bipartisan committee charged with finding emergency cuts throughout the federal budget.

The second is that neither Obama nor congressional Democrats have yet to agree to the sacrifice of a single dollar in budgetary "entitlements." National defence alone takes the hit.

From the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates have long gone. Obama at first retained the Republican Gates for political cover, because he was known to be weak on defence. But in Leon Panetta, he has had since last year a reliable party hack, who earned his stars as president Bill Clinton's chief backroom "arranger." Panetta's job now is to keep that Pentagon "on message" - to provide the justifications and excuses that Democrats and sympathetic media will need, to drown out the military critics.

A new "strategic vision" was required for this purpose, and supplied this week. America is "turning the page" on ground wars, such as the ones it just fought, and focusing instead on drones, cyber warfare, and other high-technology.

Behind this, is the fatuous notion that there is a technological fix for every problem - a notion that has already cost the U.S. dearly, not only in defence.

This is a core "progressive" dogma, which I characterize as the "labour-saving fallacy." It holds that, as technology advances, the "dirty work" that humans were once compelled to do can be either eliminated, or "outsourced." In both government and big business - in the U.S., Canada, much of Europe (except arguably Germany), even Japan - the clever people have decided that we can be the managers, inventors, designers, investors. Little things like manufacturing - or soldiering - can, when necessary, be farmed out. We shouldn't have to do stuff like that any more. (We have labour laws!)

In economic terms, we have bled away whole industrial sectors, while piling up unemployment and debt.

In military terms, the "vision" is now of warfare as a computer game. As for Bosnia, or Libya, or Abbottabad, we keep the assets to attack from the skies. We can rectify imbalances on the ground by pushing a few buttons. From the Oval Office, the president may decide who needs killing this morning, and be back on the golf links in the afternoon.

What we found, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is what we have been finding again and again through a century of horrified surprise. We can accomplish a great deal of destruction from the air. But "war" still involves holding ground - as surely as "economy" still involves making things.

Even at the high-tech end of warfare, military accomplishments in Iraq and Afghanistan depended entirely upon special forces, inserted behind enemy lines, to identify targets. From the air, and with incredibly sophisticated satellite technology, we simply do not know what they are. With the highest technology in the world, the CIA could not tell what was waiting in Iraq; or what is now waiting in Iran or North Korea.

These are the crucial human skills that Obama finds no longer important. And he wantonly confuses the issue, by insinuating that "boots on the ground" were only needed for the long, wastefully bureaucratic, and mostly failed "democracy-building" operations, on which he has now "turned the page."

Such reckless stupidity further depends on another "progressive" conceit: that the U.S. and allies get to choose which wars to fight, and which to pass on, as if we were looking through the offerings in an IKEA catalogue. This is not how the world works. The wars you least want, come to you.

Allied with this conceit is a corollary - shared by right-wing libertarians like Ron Paul - that if we reduce our aggressive military posture, our mortal enemies will reciprocate by reducing theirs.

Against which, we may oppose the entire history of the world. Tyrants, "bullies," are attracted to weakness. And there is no more effective form of war mongering, than advertising weakness.

Hope, not optimism - January 4, 2012

My happy holy days have been spent, apart from church and family, in characteristic retreat. When there is an opportunity to read and think without distraction, it should be seized. I have been reliving what we might call the Civil War of 1776: My "Loyalist" ancestors versus those Tea-Party types who called themselves "Patriots" (more Sunday).

But also, joining in the Counter-Reformation with Bernini, Rubens, and Cervantes. I have named these gentlemen in reverse chronological order; they were about one generation apart. Each was, in addition to a maker of high art and a participant in "events," a kind of amateur philosopher, creatively embodying a view of life while finding his way through a world of glorious wreckage. Reading through their times, one glimpses heroic flares against a background of encroaching human darkness.

And then one returns to the world of Iowa caucuses, eurozone crises, mad mullahs straddling the Strait of Hormuz, a new psychotic Kim, and - so forth.

Yet the background conditions have not changed, and man is still man. Regardless of our circumstances, we must still choose between faith and faithlessness; between good and evil acts; self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement. And the struggle for power continues among the ruthless.

In all the generations of which I am aware, through art and history, there has never been peace. Such peace as has been established, in any corner of communal life, has always, eventually, been wantonly disturbed.

There have been no countries without contentions, and no centuries without wars.

I signed off the old year with a column of not entirely serious prognostications, ending, "let us pray that in the coming months, not much will happen." Signing into the new, my hopes are slightly buoyed from visiting the past. Perhaps the most encouraging thing is to hear, in every generation, the most earnest minds declare that things were never so bad, that the world is morally decaying. (Which of course does not mean, logically, that things do not actually get worse and worse.)

Hope is not optimism, as I have tried to argue from time to time. Worldly optimism can be a virtue, in some contexts, but Hope, with a capital, can only refer to a sequence of events passing beyond time.

Within time, progress can be only towards our own dissolution. Hope vested in children is similarly misplaced: They, too, will grow to be fully human, and we can count on them to make a mess in their turn.

But while I am sounding the bells for Ecclesiastes, let me add that the contentions, because inevitable, are worthwhile. And even if failure is certain in the end, something in us remains undaunted. This is why it is so important to turn our attention, whenever we can, from smaller things to larger, and beyond paltry accounting to high art.

Even in politics, with which we are stuck through the mixed blessings of our representative democracy, our ambitions should rise higher. In the clash of parties, there are purposes above party to be served, and we need to review what they are. The cultivation of envy, and the sludging about of material resources to reward one constituency at the expense of another, cannot be the whole point.

In returning to the Counter-Reformation, which from another angle is called the "Renaissance," one is brought up sharply against another view of communal life. For all the horrors and tyrannies of past times, we become aware of ambitions that go beyond our own.

The aspiration to make of one's city and of one's country a thing of beauty, in the broadest sense, is mostly lost on us.

The idea that we should each participate, in our own way and according to our own talents, in the creation of what amounts to a collective work of art, strikes our "ironicized" minds as irresponsible whimsicality.

And we look almost groggily upon urban landscapes dominated by the spires of churches, instead of the faceless towers of our banks and bureaucracies.

We look upon streets animated by human social life, in which the people are not enclosed within rolling metal boxes; upon rural landscapes everywhere tilled by a very personal human husbandry; upon vistas that lift, instead of depressing the heart.

Yet the oppression of tyrants we still have, rendered the more frightening by the reach of a levelling technology which, four centuries ago, Cervantes was already damning.

Familiar with war, he called attention to the horror of artillery, which cuts down the brave and the cowardly with indifference; which has "democratized" the battlefield in his time, and brought into view the prospect of mass, gratuitous slaughter.

One need not be a Luddite to observe what has been lost: And along with the old hard labour, also the joy in things well-made, and in direct participation - as opposed to mass voting, on the analogy of contending artillery.

How, from our very different circumstances, are we to recover that?