Essays in Idleness

“Beauty will save the world,” we read in The Idiot, by Dostoevsky. The words are spoken by the Idiot, himself, Prince Myshkin, and as we gather throughout Dostoevsky’s major works, Beauty is also indistinguishably related to two other “absolutes” found in Plato and Aristotle — Truth, and Goodness. This is indeed something to know about Beauty: that it cannot be picked off a shelf. Therefore, in trying to define Beauty, I would be misleading the reader. That we all, however, know what “Beauty” means, even if we choose contradictory examples, I take for granted. More precisely, we often begin to know. We all know what “God” means, even when we are denying Him.

By being born, we came to the beginning of an understanding; and know, sometimes, that it cannot be lost, that it will not disappear. For Beauty is, Truth is, Goodness is. They cannot be segregated, or visited in compartments, the way “efficient” people claim to do. There is too much “thereness” in them.

Those who not only read, but think, are also in the habit of thinking about Beauty, and of considering it in its relations. We cannot help this, if we are open to human experience. An effect of humility is produced by the presence of Beauty, easily distinguished from the desire of ownership, if one has a brain that can be used. This is because we are placed, by Beauty, in the presence of the divine, and what belongs to the divine does not belong to us. A work of art might belong to me, but that cannot make it beautiful. It will communicate through contact, through being apprehended, but not through belonging to anything, and is transient, inasmuch as it can be destroyed. It can save us from destruction, but cannot escape our destructive urges.

One way to think of Beauty is not as a thing, but as a “wavelength,” on the analogy of light. To my mind, the presence of Beauty in nature, but also in a man-made thing, is a specific indication of divinity, or godliness.

When we live in a beautiful environment, we have reason to hope. The presence of ugliness is a mark of the opposite, or if you will, of the devil. Through ugliness we are constantly receiving reasons to despair. One see this, for instance, in the ugliness of our cities, and the vileness of our consumer and mass-market goods. Perhaps all machine production is essentially vile.

Among reasons we look to the past, and to ages before this mass market, is for relief from the oppression of ugliness.

A certain amount of peace may be had upon realizing that the whole world is screwed, as it were, and cannot be unscrewed within our lives or the lives of any of our children, down an indefinitely large number of generations. I have been called a pessimist, but if I had said this at any time in the past, surely I would have been proved right by now; so why argue?

Argument might get one killed, although, if one is Catholic, one may have the great hope of martyrdom. I, especially, need to be martyred, because it may be my only chance to get into Heaven. But it may still be a miscalculation, for only valid martyrdoms are likely to count, and everything else is mere accident, or reprehensible suicide.

There is, however, hope in the universality of Divine grace. God cannot be angry with us, really, except out of love. He can forgive many things we would not, ourselves, dream of forgiving — when His forgiveness is pleaded for. But Our Lord hasn’t promised Salvation to all, only that He — incredibly — loves us.

Indeed, these are among the many things that He has told His Church — personally. For He came down to earth. And we are like the woman caught in adultery: “Go, and sin no more.”

Our pope recently listed several things that are “priorities” for the Church, such as world peace and the environment; and all, he says, should come higher than sexual morality. In fact, none of the various things he mentioned are important, and no one, including no Roman Catholic (Armenian, Copt, Greek Orthodox, &c), has the slightest influence over the acquisition of, say, world peace, or how any of his other selected preferences might be, even unreliably, achieved.

These are collectivist, and plainly political aims; the stuff on which the non-religious like constantly to spread voluminous bullshit. Indeed, it is quite sad to watch a pope sink into secular preaching, and give the kind of advice to statesmen that even I could give.

One’s sexual behaviour is, however, among the several items that one can certainly do something about, if one is inclined to become a Christian hero. That is why it is infinitely more important than world peace:

For a Christian Soldier should be chaste.

One of the Signs of the Times is people telling the truth, but with the intention of lying. For examples, I will identify the prime ministers, chancellors, presidents, &c, who continuously bleat their disapproval of “Islamophobia.” The Canadian prime minister likes to sermonize about how Islam and Christianity are much alike, and nearly interchangeable. And so does the pope, it seems, when, as frequently, he is visiting abroad. A cheerful man, he is endlessly good-willing to his Muslim hosts.

So why don’t we all — Christianists and Islamists — just get along, an observer might be thinking. Why all this violent threat and prattle? It is because we are killing each other, an unusually candid politician might say.

To be more precise, in virtually every one of the last fifty thousand incidents of multi-victim terrorism, we were not “killing each other,” but Islamists were specifically executing Christians and Jews, across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. To be fair, it wasn’t quite all, however. They were also slaughtering Hindus and Buddhists. That is how the term Islamophobia — “an irrational fear of Islam” — came to be invented.

But who could be perpetrating such a shocking, unpredictable crime? We all are — as every one of us, not himself Muslim, is given to understand. But in truth all those prime ministers, chancellors, presidents, &c, are among the guilty. They are frightened by the large Islamic populations they have let in to their respective countries — both legally and illegally — and they are terribly scared. For what if they don’t do what these Muslim voters demand? There are daily incidents to remind these politicians who is in charge.

Are these worthless, garbage people (the politicians, not the terrorists)? In the Crusading tradition, they should “grow a pair.” The worst the Mussulmans can do, after all, is continue to kill us.

So, down with Islamophobia!

When we say that God has saved us, though we are referring only to physical and historical facts, nevertheless, we should allow that God does, and usually has. He does this in a “conventional” way, or without grandstanding. (We cannot know which events are miracles, anyway, and which are not, as we cannot see events developing from Divine angles. We only acknowledge visible miracles because they are shocking.) The conventional way, that God arranges to supply benignities, is by the very design of this world.

But it is easy to make a mess of things, down here. Anyone who is evil can do this himself, without much effort. However, to correct for the errors requires — not Divine intervention, but a background Divine plan. This is because correcting errors is vastly more complicated than making them; and if, from the beginning, the errors had not been anticipated, we would be overwhelmed.

What if, to use yesterday’s example, as the result of foolish “democratic” policies, unmarried women have, in large numbers, gone completely mad, and in their lunacy, have forgotten to get married. But then, children will become very scarce, the population will decline, and many other horrors will be statistically demonstrated. What will God do about this?

He will do nothing; for He has already installed the desire to be fruitful and multiply within each woman in a unique, beautiful way, and within each man, likewise (although crazy male behaviour is also quite possible).

And God, Who created every living soul, did the installations. Eventually, after they have tried the various ways to become mental cases, they (and the men, too) will discover they still crave a peaceful, holy life; in which, for instance, most women get married and settle down, and those who don’t become nuns, or old maids.

Patience alone will guide us to this restoration, plus a few spontaneous virtuous acts by the heroines and heroes of our time. For God created a world in which there must be splendid behaviour, as well as nutjobs and psychopaths.

Readers of Canadian literature and history in college will all be aware that Stephen Leacock was an imperialist, racist, and deeply misogynist; for that’s the kind of “education” that is taught in universities these days.

I like to recommend, for starters, Leacock on “The Woman Question,” written while he was campaigning against the female franchise, and temperance, shortly after the Great War — while walking barefoot under a big straw hat with an open bottle of scotch, through downtown Orillia, daring the local constabulary to arrest him. He knew that he would lose this contest, and that the emancipated women would then vote to bring in the so-called “temperance movement,” to prevent the (overwhelmingly male) heroes coming home from battle, from having a drink. He wrote very effectively on the phenomenon of “the awful women,” then gaining influence, but you will have trouble finding it, for the awful women of today have had it banned.

The essay, incidentally, argues that women already have the “right” to practice almost every profession. The problem is that they can’t do it. Put them on one of the great skyscrapers then being built, and they will fall off, &c. It was an instructive and deeply amusing essay.

Helen Andrews (née Rittelmeyer) has recently improved the argument, making it more explanatory than my own observation that the women’s vote swung nearly every Canadian election in the last century. For instance, that is why we got the Trudeaux. Subtract the women’s vote, and we would hardly ever have been bothered by a Liberal government.

Mrs. Andrews’ thesis is not quite this, but that the feminization of our society is what has given rise, more recently, to “Wokism.” It is what happens when the “movers and shakers” in our society start thinking like women, or are actually replaced by women, whether by fashion trend, or sex-change.

“Suicidal empathy” is what Gad Saad calls it. It also explains why Islam is taking over in the West.

But American polling shows that married men, and married women, and unmarried men, voted the same way, by fairly wide margins, and for the Republicans in the last three elections. The problem is unmarried women, who voted more than two-thirds for whoever was running against Trump. Think it through, gentle reader. Mature, grown-up women are innocent of the charge that has been brought against them. Happily, only unmarried women are the demonic, whose vote must be taken away.

Sometimes, the nicest thing you can do for a dear old friend, is to lay him out. Perhaps he was drinking, and made a terrible fool of himself. Ideology is like that. Those under its fatal influence are capable of behaving in the most appalling and undignified ways. But like the old cinema trope, the answer to a crisp smack across the face, should be, “Thanks, I needed that.” By now, the Iranians are ready to thank us. It doesn’t matter if they do, however. We must continue laying out their government.

I travelled, modestly, in Iran, last century, in the later days of the Shah. At the time I was very much impressed, both by the monuments of ancient Persian civilization, and by the nation’s success in mastering modernity. It was a free and prosperous place, ahead, it seemed, of all the alternatives in “third-world” Asia, and the Shah’s prediction that his country would soon catch up with Western Europe was quite plausible. My adventures I told elsewhere; I wasn’t nearly as aware of politics and history as I am now. (I was scandalously young.) Indeed, part of my coming of age was to experience how totally freedom could be lost, at the savage fanatical hand of a very proud, evil man: Khomeini. And how naïve, stupid, and useless, were his opponents.

Iran should have been sharply slapped in 1979. That was the time for invasion, forty-seven years ago, in response to the taking of the American hostages. Done properly (with the “martyrdom” of Khomeini), two generations of Persians could have avoided their appalling subsequent fate. Alas, America was then in the hands of Carter, a smug moron. This was because America no longer knew anything about politics, and less than nothing about “Democracy”; and did and still does not realize the advantages that Imperialism, Colonialism, and Monarchy, confer.

By boiling and draining then mashing together some russet potatoes, and cabbage, with lots of haddock fish (perhaps poached in buttermilk), and a few square yards of butter, then tossing in a prawn or two for something to discuss, together with whatever comes to hand in the pantry, … one can be reasonably sure of a good time. Lent is over, I know, but who cares? We may continue to make glorious fish receipts and merrily pig-out in just this way, without delaying the American and Israeli bombings in Iran (and Lebanon! never forget to shell Hezbollah!) — that were promised for no later than eight o’clock p.m.

But darn that Trump. He has negotiated a ceasefire again, when all I was worrying about was that he might be running low on missiles and explosives. We will need these if China invades Taiwan, and there will be so many targets to hit on the mainland. (Always pack a few extra!)

As Edward Feser, whom I occasionally read with respect, assured me, the president’s Internet posts are quite deranged, and the war with Iran does not follow Just War principles for either cause or conduct. Francisco Suárez might not approve. My enthusiasm for the physical destruction of Hamas, Houthis, and whatever in Persia starts with an H, was almost restrained. The idea that they share an ideology, and that this ideology could be erased, are two which I hold dear. One need only continue bombing and shooting them up, as we did with the Nazis. Make Persepolis into Dresden: we can always build it back when Iran’s oil money starts flowing again.

The trick is not to leave anything standing, as we neglected to do with the Communists. Always go for the unconditional surrender, or like bedbugs they will infest us again. Our failure to completely kill off Communism had terrible consequences.

Too much War only leads to Peace; too much Peace only leads to War. I thank my former Indian girlfriend, who taught me that.

Unlike Western politicians (all of the others, so far as I can see), Mr Trump understands this, and actually prefers peace, for some reason. He likes to use tactics, including some good ones, and knows how to scare people. (Especially his allies.) You don’t have to actually kill everyone to get your way; that would be too time-consuming. Even Germany was left with a few people still breathing, after World War Two.

These are words I am still trying to make sense of: “He is risen” goes so far beyond what is acceptable to common sense, as to put the very idea of common sense into scandal. Everything that you have seen or heard dying, stays then dead, for as long as you watch or listen. Or is revived, perhaps, by a medicine man or other miracle worker; but does not revive himself. If he did, it would be fair to say that the world has been transformed. This is what happened.

That He was and is God, I can accept, yet it is the least surprising of His theological aspects. What is more shocking is that this God, who evidently exists — one God, I should think, in no more than one universe — has deigned us worth the conversation. For that universe is large, and I think we can prove it is large; and we the tiniest speck in that immensity. Our size alone would make us worth ignoring. The very existence of life, on any scale, for instance this thin film around one isolated planet within this immensity, seems small, exceptional, and proportionally very close to nothing. To us, the comparative may seem quite extreme. But to God. …

We cannot know what remarkable things exist, and will be found, eventually, later. But we can know how astounding it is for us to be here. And too, how astounding the love that has touched us.

Christ, in His Crucifixion, calls us away from the simpering that is not prudence.

My friend notes that in his book, The Contemplative Hunger, Father Donald Haggerty mentions that Dorothy Day kept by her bedside a quotation from Dostoevsky — “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

Perhaps today we should begin to grasp this; that Love is never a fully “romantic story.” The world may think it is, but our world has had its mind formed by television and the Internet. This world cannot even remember why this Friday is called “Good.”

Unlike the Vatican, one tries to avoid political topics in Holy Week, and generally to conceal one’s more aggressive opinions. But with the Iran war in progress, and with it perhaps the best prospect of annihilating psychotic Islam since Pope Urban II agreed with Alexios Komnenos (to invade and take back the Holy Land, March 1095), it is hard to shut up. There were problems, during that First Crusade, and even during the defence of Europe by Charles Martel, but one has to start somewhere, and it is important to persist.

Among the chiefmost modern problems for us, is that the secular media of “Christendom” have overwhelmingly betrayed us, along with other godless institutions. This, as I have argued, is the case since the later XVIIIth century, although seldom as vulgarly and maliciously as now. Indeed, from the BBC to the Wicked Paedia, our “trusted information providers” are unambiguously on the other side, and too, shameless liars. They rattle on and on about the wreckage in a place like Gaza, where the Israelis do not intentionally kill except when they are being shot at, while holding their silence (for instance) on the five hundred thousand Christians who have been massacred by Muslims, in Nigeria alone. President Trump would be, I think, clever to ignore the media, except when he can do them some crippling injury. For as William Blake observed, in a Proverb, “The busy bee has no time for sorrow.” Or more explicitly, “Drive your cart or your plow over the bones of the dead.” We, or should I say he, is at war, simultaneously with the Mullahs and the “Democrats.”

There will be casualties, such as among my readers; someone goes hysterical whenever I uncap my pen. It is the Age of Bafflegab, as my papa used to say, and anyone who writes will find that he has alienated a few more former allies, when he drifts into the truth.

As the pope was speaking, to my ears and the gallery of ears, through the Internet this morning, I felt I did not disagree with him, so much as I could not understand what he was saying. Yes, we Christians are in favour of peace, as a general rule; and opposed to violence, as Christ Himself rebuked the person who used a sword to resist the officer arresting Him. But as a further reading of the Bible, even on this Palm Sunday, would reveal, the opposition to violence is not the end of the story. The account is more complex than even an American pope, or president, will understand, though I do not accuse either of insincerity or dishonesty. It is, strangely enough, a judgement to be made “case-by-case,” on whether to be violent. Christ Himself, in the Temple, took out the whip when violence was called for.

Similarly, on “disownership.” We have been trained, indiscreetly, about owning things, by the socialists who have put themselves in charge of our education systems. Agreed, we only own things while we are biologically alive, and even by hereditary law, as Isaeus could tell you, it is touch-and-go whether your successors may claim anything that belongs instead to the cosmos and always will. You may, for instance, claim to own the water, personally or through your estate, but the water can evaporate. By convention we recognize the private ownership of things we never made (which is everything), and it is up to us to own and protect what is ours, or to give it away. Only in the most extreme circumstances is it up to the civil power to take it: your life for instance; or however much cash the State feels it is entitled to impound for your protection. It goes without saying that I am opposed to most demands of the political protection racket, but I think they may reasonably lay claim to perhaps one dollar in ten, so long as they continue to provide the services that States like Canada no longer provide.

Rather than argue for the precise amount and who should be exempted, I take it for granted that what you own you own. Civilization requires you to acknowledge this. But in charity, it is your call what you choose to give away: it is not for the government, or other gang of thugs. It is, or rather should be, an entirely voluntary act, and it will be, if the world is to remain peaceful.

The same for everything else that is owned, in addition to money; one’s freedom for instance. … Javid Shah!

If you wait long enough, most of the world will come around to your “point of view” (or “POV” to cite the standard abbreviation), on the largest and most important things. Even the belief in God — that there is one, that He is not dead — has come to be lazily subscribed by whatever proportion of the population constitutes an insuperable majority. Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, &c — the main articulations of satanic atheism — have become much more dead than God, although their mechanisms and tenets continue to be used by very evil people. For practical purposes, the chief one is the principle of non-ownership.

There is God and there is you. God’s ownership is very subtle; it comes from having created Everything, or rather, everything that can be identified. That he did not create Nothing is something we can know, if we have a brain and a penchant for thinking. The most disgusting creature in nature — and we may disagree on its identity — will at least realize that it is alive. That death “has no dominion”; that there is no such thing as a dead man, only a decaying body; this can be observed.

I am curious to see even a computer wizard, specifically Steve Wozniak (who has a genuinely creative mind), grasp the capitalist implications. If you do not own something, you have nothing, or at least, not that thing. Under contemporary rules of ownership, a corporation can take away anything you have paid for. “Big Tech” in effect owns you. Google, or any other supplier, charges monthly fees directly or indirectly, which are deducted ultimately from your credit card, and can arbitrarily cancel anything that you paid for. Once anything is transferred to a cybernetic “cloud,” it belongs to them, and like a cloud, it can disappear.

Under the old arrangement, that pertained even to computer companies, you owned what you bought. Wozniak: “For the first two decades of personal computers, you bought a product, you owned it, you set it up your way, and it always ran that way. … It was yours.” You did not have to pay for it again and again; it was not a rental.

But the consumer, being stupid (or “braindead” as we say), is not even slightly bothered by this. He knows that our economic “progress” depends on increasing enslavement, and he buys in.

Here is a text I first encountered, and memorized in both English and French, more than half-a-century ago when I was learning French in Paris. It is by Charles Baudelaire, and in his Salon of 1846 he says this for everyone:

“If ever your idler’s curiosity has landed you in a street brawl, perhaps you will have felt the same delight as I have often felt to see a protector of the public slumbers — a policeman or a municipal guard (the real army) — thumping an incendiary. And if so, like me, you will have said in your heart: ‘Thump on, thump a little harder, thump again, beloved constable! for at this supreme thumping, I adore thee and judge thee the equal of Jupiter, the great dealer of justice! The man whom thou thumpest is an enemy of roses and of perfumes, and a maniac for utensils. He is the enemy of Watteau, the enemy of Raphael, the bitter enemy of luxury, of the fine arts and of literature, a sworn iconoclast and butcher of Venus and Apollo!’ …”

(Here I’ve used Jonathan Mayne’s touching translation.)

Of course, this rule does not apply internationally. In Islamic societies, such as Shi’ite Iran, the rôles of constable and street brawler are generally reversed, and thus one is cheering on the incendiary.

I suppose this observation makes me guilty of relativism.