Essays in Idleness

My Chief Argentine Correspondent (who is not the pope, incidentally) has advised me — through his blog Quod scripsi, scripsi — against taking Artificial Intelligence to heart.

He begins by citing David Berlinsky:

“An algorithm is a finite procedure, written in a fixed symbolic vocabulary, governed by precise instructions, moving in discrete steps, 1, 2, 3 … whose execution requires no insight, cleverness, intuition, intelligence, or perspicuity, and that sooner or later comes to an end.”

This, for those who are alert, will dispose of the cult of “Artificial Intelligence.” AI hasn’t a will, or any originality; it cannot invent anything (except what is not true); it is as limiting as algorithms, programs, and applications. At best (or worst) it can only magnify many, many tedious acts of human stupidity, and make them go faster and faster. But behind everything is a little man hidden by a curtain. He is the wonderful Wizard of Oz!

My faithful Cosmolater (Carlos Caso-Rosendi) writes:

“Artificial Intelligence cannot be because intelligent thoughts are the products of a mind. Since there is no such thing as an artificial mind, there can be no such things as artificial intelligence or artificial thoughts.”

It was the same revelation about artificial life, in the ‘sixties. This could not be generated in a laboratory. Some tyros are still trying. They will always fail.

Oddly enough, a significant achievement of “intelligent design” research has been to show the impossibility of creating life. For God has put odds of ten to the ten thousandth in the way of every single step towards abiogenesis; enough to keep us busy until the end of time.

Biological life is also finite. It ends in death. And mind may not die, but cannot be touched; the life of spirit is further beyond comprehension. The spirit that animates our “artificial intelligence” project is mysteriously dark; but not therefore necessarily good. Indeed, were we not warned against it?

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A COMMENTER COMMENTS. — What AI seems to lack is desire. “All men want to know” (said Aristotle), at least before modernity encraps them. AI desires nothing, not even what it’s told to desire.

Commercialism is at its most obscene when it is allied with a spiritual festival. This is most noticeably so at Christmas, throughout what was once Christendom. I am not referring to Christmas carols or carollers, unless the tinkling is piped in recordings, and set to “repeat.” The coarse iniquity is brought home to us in the supermarkets and shopping malls, by the repertoire of pert, vacuous numbers with catchy tunes. Many of these songs, through recent decades, do not even trill “Merry Christmas,” but a frivolous, shallow, and meaningless mirth. This follows one around, while fetching groceries, like filth in one’s mouth and ears.

A violent response, such as Christ offered to the merchants and the money changers during the cleansing of the temple, will perhaps be rejected as inappropriate, but only because no temple service could be imagined in a specialized shopping domain.

The idea of shopping for gifts is, for the most part, also morally wrong. There is a traditional season of gift-giving through the twelve days of Christmas, but the replacement of the Sacrifice of the Mass on Christmas Day, by a commercial vomitation, should surely be permanently ended. Neither commerce, nor cheap sentimentality, should have been let near this rejoicing.

Depends what you mean by art. I am aware of some that might be the opposite of redemptive, including all prostituted art, such as commercial jingles and corporate design. Sometimes even that rises to clever, although never to art. On the other hand, some very simple tunes and decorations, that do not even aspire to art, are redemptive.

I was fortunate in childhood, because after Rudyard Kipling and Jules Verne, I did not graduate to The Communist Manifesto. I think I actually resisted demonic inhabitation, when young, although not consistently. Instead, my ideological consciousness was occupied by Education Through Art (1943), by the anarchist, Sir Herbert Read. My father’s had been occupied by Art in Everyday Life (Harriet Irene Goldstein, 1925), and of course, like his father, too, we were all bowled by John Ruskin. Yet not even he (Ruskin) proposed things that were inevitable, and some of his excitements now seem dreary. Outdoor and still life Sunday painting also ran along both sides of my family.

So you could say that I inherited the propensity for being “redeemed by art.” It seems to work on children, and on the mad, as well. At least, the experts have accorded it therapeutic benefits, and it has launched a few schools of immuno-engineering. Moreover, education through art was recommended, i.e. by Plato, in The Republic.

But as various of my contemporaries discovered, it is not a reliable source of income. And when it becomes a reliable source of income, it generally ceases to be art.

So much for nature. The supernatural source of redemption is Jesus Christ, who does not restrict his means of approach. He might even choose art. Ask and it shall be answered, so to speak. The redemption in art is like that in everything else, a religious phenomenon. The aesthetic dimension is, like every other aspect of beauty, sanctity, and truth, not to be sought in artistic fashions.

One of the claimed glories of our post-Christian world, is its cancellation of forgiveness. I was reading about this in an article by Laura Perrins, which I found in the (excellent) website, The Conservative Woman. She gives an account of the suicide of a young Oxford student, who had an awkward sexual encounter at the age of twenty, with a young woman who then announced that she had felt “discomfort.” His schoolmates called an inquisition, condemned him for “messing up,” and said they needed “space” from him. He appeared distraught, at this isolation. A couple of days later, he drowned himself in the Thames.

I thought of events that had happened, to me and to others, in a previous century: to men whose lives were, ever after, ruined; to several who were shamed into suicide, like rape victims, by things done to them. Already forty years ago, feminism had advanced to the point where reputations and livelihoods could be wrecked. Several persons known to me were slandered and destroyed by feckless accusations. (As Scott Symons said, back then, “There is no blood left to be shed in the battle of the sexes in Ontario.”)

Men have also done appalling things to women. (Did you know?)

But the revolutionary principle, now asphyxiating our neo-pagan society, gives the greater discomfort. It is the withdrawal of forgiveness, for all crimes — even those which were minor, or imaginary. For along with Christianity, mercy is nullified, and the world is consequently drowning in sleaze.

Once upon a time, when I was staying ever so briefly in Japan, I became confounded by everyday Japanese behaviour. Often it seemed neither rational, nor irrational; neither intelligible, nor mysterious, nor fuliginous. Reading their superb mediaeval literature in translation, especially novels from the Heian period (IXth through XIIIth centuries), I could speculate about their past and present attitudes and customs, and become lost among them. But while Japanese men were enigmatical to me, the women annulled my thoughts entirely.

Those were the days when “feminism” was at large in the West. This was supposed to be true in the East, too, thanks I suppose to neo-colonialism, or to another definition of feminism. For the Japanese woman, feminism apparently meant that women should be free of constraining tradition, and have what they want. But for the American or European woman, it meant they had declared themselves subservient to the totalitarian feminist agenda. This had made especially the young American women (“girls,” we used to call them) tedious and one-dimensional, although available for casual sex.

Whereas, when I told a “liberated” Japanese woman that I was married and had two delightful little boys, she replied, “Good men are hard to find. Women have to share them.”

It was a lyrical observation; or perhaps a deep, impenetrable flirtation. She was philosophizing, in an inscrutable way. This was a woman who had brilliantly observed that, “Democracy is impossible without slavery.”

By her inspiration I wrote a suite of poems, with the title: “Neither Monogamy nor Polygamy, but Origami.”

The Apostle, elder brother of Simon Peter, and patron of singers, fishermen and fishmongers, farm workers, and pregnant women, stands also before the gate of the new liturgical year.  (Tomorrow will be Advent Sunday.) He was the first disciple, the “Protokletos” to be called by Jesus. Saint Andrew left his nets by the Sea of Galilee to become a “fisher of men.” His earthly mission concluded on the Saltire Cross, at Patras in Achaia.

My apologies for being “down” through the month of November. Perhaps I am getting “up” again. Atypically, our weather has been glorious and warm, through the chill Canadian monsoon. But finally, we have received notice of winter.

My thoughts on the American election were published in the Catholic Thing, yesterday. They were pointedly inconsequential. I am not a democrat (upper or lower case), nor even not-a-one, but was mildly relieved by the defeat of the Woke Marxists. Also, mildly surprised, because I expected the fix would be in, again; apparently the Republicans mounted an effective ballot watch, at great expense. The Democrats spent their billion-and-a-half on Hollywood celebrities and other filth who, we learn, may not even have been voting for them.

As we have observed, previously, the future of our society does not depend on voting, but on the people. The task of Christianizing them remains urgent.

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POSTSCRIPTUM — The first thing I learn this morning, when cranking up the Internet to search for Saint Andrew, is that Catholic Online has been de-platformed by “Shopify,” one of the sponsors of Internet vileness. This was because they are pro-life, and thus not inclusive of child murderers. It is good to think that in the wake of the “far right” victory in the recent election, some retributive justice may be on the way. … Yesterday was Black Friday, which hardly matters with the Canadian post office on strike: I am anyway getting too old and feeble to beg for donations.

Perhaps I will take a little break from my Idleness, as it were, for a few days, or forever if my current illness develops unexpectedly into death. Less pleasantly, I, and we, are inundated by politics, via the American election, to the mental equivalent of a North Carolina flood. We will need some time to dry out, and make a few repairs, for instance to the buildings that floated off their foundations.

There is no point in commenting on the election. Nothing we do, or that anyone does, on our modest scale, can have an effect on “events.” It is all between cosmic forces of good and evil, and will be expressed in fresh human suffering. That is what politics can accomplish, in the Satanic strategy. Nor can the “misinformation” (or, lying) be overcome. I think the best way to understand the human dimension of this is in the Republican slogan: “No matter how much you hate the media, it’s not enough.”

In memory of “Baggins the Pharmacist.”

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All Souls is a day in which we commemorate the dead — our dead, our own death to come, and death generally. We celebrate these things joyfully. …

A most exhilarating spectacle came to me, on a card sent by a couple in Dunrobin, Ontario. I am privileged to receive not only generous donations, for my idleness, but often, to find the cheques and money orders enclosed in beautiful cards and letters. This one contained a watercolour reproduction, “Serene Bay,” by the California painter, Dennis A. Francesconi.

He became a mouth painter in response to a terrible water-skiing accident, which left him “C-5” quadriplegic at age seventeen. But dissatisfied with his “mobility issues,” and without use of his hands, he decided to master penmanship by mouth. Then he took up drawing. His artist-wife Kristi comes into this somehow, and his extraordinary sense of colour seems to have found itself. He also removed himself from public support.

Thanks to the Internet, I quickly learnt about him and about the Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists. It is an association that itself inspires, consisting of people making original works of beauty, rather than just whining for money. At their website one may review a catalogue of other such painters, in India, especially, and in almost every other country.

Dennis writes that by helping others in similar situations, “one begins to truly understand why all of this has happened in the first place.”

If Trump is a Fascist and a Nazi, then I certainly am, for I view Trump as a “Liberal.” Or rather, perhaps, I am to the Far Right of the Fascists and Nazis, for I find little in their party lines even slightly compatible with my reactionary views.

Verily, it would be more intelligent to call me, and people like me, Anarchists; although I fear we are not violent enough. Perhaps we may dissociate ourselves from Trump and company (even while voting for them), by exposing them as incorrigibly bourgeois; but then re-associate with anyone who is sincerely trying to be catholicly Christian, and thinks politics just a present for Caesar.

Hell, art is more important. (This includes poetry and pop-free music.) But the love of art, like the practise of religion, must be a genuine, and therefore a humble thing. For when it is presented as a fashionable pose, it is garbage.

We now have it straight from the lips of Michelle Obama, that anyone who does not vote for Kamala Harris is a sexist and a racist, and from Kamala Harris’s, that Donald Trump is a fascist. From me you have heard that anyone who votes Democrat (or has voted Democrat in the last sixty years) is a Woke Marxist. I prefer Republicans, and specifically two from California, and one from New York. (Nixon, Reagan, Trump.) My current pick for President of the USA is actually Trump, though I like J. D. Vance better. Trump has a basic understanding of how the world works, and appreciation of the American Constitution; he is theatrical, but sane. He appeals to me because I am pro-American, and somewhat interested in personal survival. This has nothing to do with democracy, of course.

My standards for politicians have never been very high. That means I am not opposed to them, absolutely. I do not look for the best, however, but for the least bad. I am radically opposed to those who will not tell the truth, except perhaps at gunpoint. Yet even in this stressful situation, they would probably lie, for they are, medically speaking, compulsive liars.

In Canada if not the States, our political culture was relatively sane as recently as when our prime minister was Louis St Laurent (defeated, 1957). In the United States, I would celebrate Calvin Coolidge as the least bad president in the XXth century, and mark Woodrow Wilson as the most bad. He was the first (Yankee-doodle) “Woke Marxist,” to use that expression expansively. He was, in the most poisonous sense of these words, an academic and an intellectual. But in those days the government was so constrained — by the Constitution, which did not begin to be discontinued until Lincoln — that the amount of ideology it could impose fell short of comprehensive. Nevertheless, Wilson and his batty wife did what damage they could.

Listening to the Misses Obama and Harris, one feels nostalgia for the days when the modest voter would shy from termagants and madwomen.

Among my more indelible political memories was in an Ontario backyard. The provincial “conservative” party had recently swept to power in one of those “common sense revolutions,” and the gentleman I was chatting with had a plan to destroy the province’s municipal governments. He was also now the municipal cabinet minister, and thus at the head of the wrecking crew.

“David,” he explained to me affectionately, for he was arguably an old friend. “The local governments have been featherbedding.”

Astounding!

This I gathered is why they would be merged and centralized into bigger and bigger units, and put under more robust provincial control. Local governments would be losing power; the province’s local government bureaucracy would be vastly expanded. And after changing all the boundaries (so that, for instance, a unitary “City of Prince Edward County” was created to attract capital investment to a quaint, beloved, recumbent domain), very profitable automotive stripmalls could overspread the rural landscape.

I could not entirely blame my friend for these policies. He did not, after all, know what he was doing. Each measure, on its own, would pass the plausibility test for an incurious person. The rule of Chesterton’s Fence was being ignored. (Find out why something is there before you dismantle it.)

I fear that my anarchist expostulation, Tuesday, may have encouraged the fence-removers. But note that, while mentioning federal and provincial governments, I omitted municipal. Chester-Belloc’s further principle of subsidiarity applies especially to the smaller agencies. They should be comparatively ineradicable. (Call it “featherbedding” if you please.)

We need to totally exterminate socialism on its grand national, indeed international, scale. But capitalism should be demolished creatively instead. A huge multiplication of (scandalously independent) local governments, laws, customs, conventions, and rituals, is what I count on to drive the capitalists away.

One of the unfair advantages I have gained in life is that, at one point or another, almost everything I had was taken from me, by one injustice or another. Well, not quite everything. Towards the conclusion of my life I still retain hundreds of literary, artistic, and sentimental items, and have been able to replace many books. This, I have found, is a joyous thing, and I am much happier than I was in earlier life; much, much happier than when I had money and career prospects.

There is very little a Liberal or Woke Marxist can do to me now; perhaps imprison or shoot me; but I’ve had my “three score and ten.”

Nevertheless, I should like to defend others who are greedy, not only for a long and healthy life, but to be permitted to keep the money and property they’ve accumulated. As Thomas Sowell says, “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

It is up to the money-maker, or should be, how much he will surrender to church, charity, or favoured cause. Of course, if you are a Liberal or Woke Marxist you think he should be paying more taxes. (The top 5 percent already pay two-thirds of our taxes, incidentally.) I would give advice on how to deceive the tax-collectors, if I could, but like most little people I have no expertise.

The money the government impounds is almost entirely wasted, just as its costly regulations  are mostly unnecessary or counter-productive. The money that goes to “welfare” is quickly dissipated, and deprives others, especially family, of their opportunity and duty to help, as well as expunging humility in the poor. Let them feel honest shame if they are collecting pogey: “free money” is even more damaging to the poor than it is to rich people.

But the money of the rich “trickles down” carefully, from private hands. And when it comes to financing those eleemosynary things, the people will give them their own money, once the government withdraws. It won’t withdraw, voluntarily, however, because the government uses the money to finance its corruption, and power displays. In particular, all genuine cultural life is supplied by the rich, and also by poor individuals. What governments pay for is overwhelmingly false and ugly.

I would not recommend greed to individuals, lest it be bad for their souls. However, it is not the government’s business, and we would all benefit if at least 95 percent of the federal and provincial governments were permanently closed. Even the bureaucrats would benefit, as I did, from being stripped of their jobs and income.