Essays in Idleness

DAVID WARREN

On the Daesh strategy

There was so much ruined temple at the Palmyra site, that the Daesh are still blowing it up, I learn from news reports. (No one in the West even thought of intervening.) This leaves them less explosive with which to blow up Christians, Yazidis, miscellaneous Sufis, Mershdi Alawites, full Twelvers, Ismailis, Druze, various Shia and other Muslims, as well as the less zealous of their own, we might suppose. But they tend to kill those in more traditional, lower-tech ways; so I doubt there is any upside at all. It would be interesting to know whence the explosives came; or whence the biological and chemical weapons they also seem to have been using (though on a modest scale). I suspect the answers would give so little comfort to anyone, that we would have to dig for them.

Quite seriously, the opinion that Saddam Hussein of Iraq was plentifully provided with “WMD” was so universally held by Western intelligence agencies, prior to the U.S. invasion of 2003, that I still believe there was something in it. Moreover, I think the “rumours” that much of this stuff was parked in Syria for the duration of that war — and thus remained there after the Iraqi Ba’athist regime went down — may also have been credible.

And parked, be it noted, not with Syria’s government, which could hardly wish to risk making itself the next U.S. regime-change target, but with Syrian insurgents across a border they had already made porous.

To the end, Saddam thought the best way to defeat the Americans in Iraq was by bogging them down in an insurgency that would quickly wear the patience of the fickle U.S. electorate; not by upping the ante with WMD. While he did not survive himself, this reasoning proved basically sound.

Now, biological and many chemical weapons are subject to rapid decay, so it does not follow that what had remained potent even until 2003 (from programmes that had flourished much earlier) could still be potent in 2015. But the interesting thing here is the trucks the allies found, abandoned in Iraq, with the remains of mobile labs. Were any “live ones” moved?

I am curious, journalistically, about questions like this, because I should like to know more about the history of the Daesh, which is a Sunni insurgency, opposed to Shia Iran, and also to Syria’s Iran-supported regime. They did not come out of nowhere, but out of somewhere, well-armed, even before their capture of vast weapon and munitions stocks left by the USA. In fact they came out of Syria, where they had already forged their rather formidable discipline, opposing the Assad regime, and had already cultivated international connexions, through the Saddam regime, with Sunni insurgent movements in North Africa, West Africa, and elsewhere.

(I use “Daesh,” incidentally, in preference to the fuller Arabic, ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī ‘l-‘Irāq wa-sh-Shām, which is an eye and mouthful for most Western readers. It translates something like, “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,” but leads to long discussions about the concept of a “state” in classical or modern Arabic. I like “Daesh,” or Da’esh, or Da’ish, because that is what its Muslim opponents prefer, and because it conveys better the remarkably strange nature of the movement. A product of modernism it may be, indirectly; but of an ideological, revolutionary modernism slurred with ancient Islamic teaching that was also pathologically aggressive, violent, and totalitarian. Too, it is a practice of all totalitarian orders to make titles into propaganda statements — remember, “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” — and we should not feel obliged to accommodate them.)

Our failure to understand — even to study, intelligently — the origins of this movement, has much to do with the successful leftwing demonization of the Bush administration in USA, and the blind incompetence of the subsequent one. For it has become a principle of faith, now in government and media, that “Bush lied” about both the weaponry and the international terrorist connexions of the Saddam regime. He did not; and it does not help that even his own brother now disowns him for the purpose of sleazing ahead in U.S. politics. Read Dick Cheney’s new book (co-authored with his daughter, Liz) for better background information.

A false, and very foolish understanding of the strategic situation in the Middle East now governs our airwaves and thoughtwaves. In dealing with the Daesh, we are absorbing the legacy of Saddam, who in his later years turned to Sunni Islamism himself as his best bet to prevail against his accumulating enemies. The history must be better understood to grasp the nature of the current threat.

We have been repeatedly blindsided by our own ignorance of the growth of a “terrorist network” that has thrived in our media shallows and shadows, and benefited from almost every foreign policy decision of President Obama. Indeed, that is part of what the Benghazi congressional hearings have been about, although their politicization has confused the issue. Hillary Clinton made a mess, true enough, but the congressmen need to expose not only the scandalous misjudgements, but why she made such a comprehensive mess. It was because she was (and remains) so mesmerized by the “liberal narrative” that she had (and has) no idea of the enemy we are actually facing.

To my mind, the great fault of the Bush administration was its failure to communicate its own, flawed, but much better understanding of the circumstances. It could have explained, with calm but rather more candour, why the U.S. and allies went into Iraq in the first place; that the battle was not simply about Saddam, and would not end with his displacement. Had it done so, we might better understand that “al-Qaeda” is more like an errant branch of the Daesh, than vice versa; and that the “Sunni militants” the U.S. Marines faced in Fallujah and elsewhere were already part of a well-organized force that is the Daesh today.

(According to me, they went wrong soon after invading, in thinking it was now a job for the State Department, taking it out of the hands of the Pentagon. They went right again in the “surge,” by taking it back from State, and giving it once more to the soldiers. “Root causes” are a wash: they go back to Adam. We had enemies who needed killin’ then, and alas, they still need killin’ today.)

We — or more precisely, the Obama administration — walked out of Iraq leaving the Daesh bleeding but undefeated; and then subverted the forces opposed to the Daesh (including Assad’s unpleasant Syrian regime). By now, that administration is scrambling to make friends with the Ayatollahs — an even crazier scheme — partly for help in resuming Bush’s war on the Daesh, as if fundamental American and Western interests could be served by a Shia Islamist proxy. To which end, our old Israeli, Egyptian, and Arabian allies have been repeatedly stabbed in the back.

In other words, a tactic that is, essentially, insane, against Daesh tactics that are only “nearly insane.” For the Daesh learnt from Saddam that monstrous acts of inhumanity, very publicly performed, are extremely effective in commanding obedience. Such acts also work as wonderful recruiting tools for psychopathic elements now deeply embedded in Western, as well as in Islamic society. The Daesh are not squandering their advantage to their unchecked murderous impulses. Their murderousness is more calculated than that. Rather they are growing in power, especially in the vacuums the Obama administration has created for them in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and many other countries.

The good news is that Obama, Mrs Clinton, et alia, have now so thoroughly squandered the credibility of the United States not only in the region, but all around the world, that little more damage can be done, at least by them. Moreover, countries including Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, are now cooperating marvellously to defend themselves — against both the Daesh and Iran. (The Saudis partly by trying to help al-Qaeda revive, as a weapon against the Daesh, but that is another story.)

The bad news is that we are waiting for an explosion that will, once again, like 9/11 though on a much greater scale, come to us. Indeed, the current European migrant crisis, chiefly from Libya, gives a first, faint taste of what is already merrily on its way.

(My apologies for “merrily”; that was sarcastic.)

Spiritu ambulate

“Behold the birds of the air; for they neither sow nor do they reap, nor gather into barns, and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not you of much more value than they? And which of you, by taking thought, can add to his stature one cubit? And for raiment why are you solicitous? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they labour not, neither do they spin; but I say to you, that not Solomon in his glory was arrayed as one of these.”

Sollicitus is a word that clangs and wrangs through the Gospel in today’s (Traditional Latin) Mass. The English “solicitous” does not quite translate this for the modern English reader, whose first thoughts might be of soliciting, or solicitors. The Latin adjective means restless, anxious; agitated, disturbed, troubled, concerned, and in such sense, afflicted. In some contexts it conveys passion, excitement: going off one’s head. We are filled with anxieties about worldly things. Are we not?

I noticed, somewhere on the Internet, a very anxious discussion. Someone had got himself a tattoo with the phrase, “Don’t worry be happy,” translated into Latin, but not very well. Shyness of the imperative, perhaps; certainly poor attention to grammar, and mindless dictionary-sourced vocabulary choices had contributed to a phrase that could be retranslated: “I am not fatigued, one having rejoiced.” … I think the correct Latin might be, Nolite sollicitare, este beati; or, “es beatus” if addressing only one person. But don’t take my word for it! Go to some crack Latinist before you have your own tattoo permanently inscribed.

Yet as we learn, gradually, in the Confessional, what’s done is done. We have made a hash, and we may well have to wear it, publicly, for the rest of our earthly life. Only in Purgatory, can such inscriptions be erased. But this is what tattoos are for, after all: to make one humble in one’s old age.

In the meantime, we have this Mass, for the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, which one might call the “Don’t worry be happy” Mass from both Epistle and Gospel. Well, that is perhaps a little too confining. Every Mass of the year is more than its focus. Each, at least before the liturgical desecrations of the 1960s, is also an encapsulation of all other Masses. Each Sunday, the entire Christian teaching passes through the eye of another needle, and the stitching is renewed year after year.

As we are reminded from our Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians, there are dos and don’ts.

It is  best to avoid fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions, sects, envies, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and suchlike.

It is best rather to embrace charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency, chastity.

It were better, to give but one passing example, not to have put one’s faith in Ashley Madison, any more than in the Latinity of a tattoo artist. There is such a thing as, “riding for a fall.”

(And if this is so obvious, why isn’t everyone following through?)

Note that each of the activities in that first list is associated with anxiety. Note that each of the activities in that second list is not associated with anxiety.

Of course, “stuff happens,” over which we have no control, and we get anxious about that. For instance, a lot of people today who should surely have better things to be anxious about, such as whether they are going to Hell, worry instead about TEOTWAWKI. But what use is that? Do you think God is such a putz that He will speed or slow the End Time by one mile an hour, because of something we have done? We must in that case have an exaggerated impression of our own individual or collective importance. Our job is only to be ready when it comes, as it will come, and for that matter as it has come, in every human lifetime.

There may be the odd crime in the street we will find ourselves in a position to stop — perhaps even some catastrophe that can be foreseen, and could actually be prevented — without any further injustice on our side. But those present themselves to us; we do not present ourselves to them. There are times, as we should know, when “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” But why be anxious about that? Just do it. For remember, the worst they can do is torture and kill you, and even that can go on only so long. (And remember, the great Martyrs were joyful about it. And why not? For in faith, the door had just opened to them, directly into Heaven.)

For the rest, there is not much for the doing, beyond our immediate environment. Not one of my gentle readers has, for instance, to the best of my knowledge, had the misfortune to be elected Pope; and as even the secularoids could say, it isn’t your problem. Stuff will happen, sure enough. But note that we are explicitly told, God will take care of it. Which, in the fullness of time, He will. So why should we want to run interference on His plan?

We are told: spiritu ambulate, to “walk in the spirit.” Et desideria carnis non perficietis, which should be clear enough.

I get anxious myself sometimes; worry myself sick about one darn thing or another. Really, it is time that I thought this through. …

“Do not be fatigued. Rejoice!”

The duh chronicles

“When will capitalism end?” asks a correspondent for the New Republic. This begins an article entitled, “What if Stalin had computers?” — which in turn reviews (arguably) a book by Paul Mason with the title, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. I found the whole mess incomprehensible, and so will do my bit to clean it up by answering the first question.

So far as I can see, Capitalism ended sometime around the year 1847.

As to the second, if good old Iosif Vissarionovich had computers equivalent to today’s, his Soviet Union might have resembled contemporary North Korea. Though on twenty times the scale. And not only would perfect “scientific socialism” have been achieved in Russia; it would probably have been spread under Stalin’s personal direction the whole world around.

I have, in a sense, cheated on both questions by answering them honestly and straightforwardly; whereas, their intention was instead to mislead — or as my sometimes vulgar papa used to put it, “baffle the brain with bullshit.”

In the first case, like our current pope, the writer is under the hypnotic delusion that free markets govern the world today. They may have governed parts of England in the summer of 1846, and parts of other countries later and as briefly, but the principles of Adam Smith and David Ricardo have never been popular among those with vested interests to defend, and guess what? Those with vested interests to defend are, by definition, those with power.

And yes, gentle reader, that’s a Catch-22. It took me years — decades — of trying to understand basic economic principles to realize: That socialists are whistling in the wind. But libertarians are whistling in a vacuum.

In the second case, the “what if” Stalin question, the unstated assumption is that Stalin does not have all the computers. Had he not, something like contemporary Red China might be imaginable, that we could call, “Stalinism with computers.” But no, China has a dirigiste mixed economy (which increasingly resembles our own), whereas the author is dreaming of pure socialism somehow working all by itself with advanced computers to finally outguess, outperform, and defeat the natural law of supply and demand.

Now, Stalin wasn’t the sort of guy to whom the diffusion of economic, or any other kind of power, appealed. He would have made sure that the computers belonged only to his party apparatchiks, and like the Kim family of Pyongyang, he would have continued the policy of executing those apparatchiks, too, as and when they happened to displease him.

Stalinism works, incidentally. There is a myth that it failed; but whether or not poisoned, the man died in his sleep. The Soviet Union did not crumble on his watch, despite tough moments during World War II; and at the present day, many Russians look back on the reign of Koba the Dread, with nostalgia. It was the (inevitable) weakening of Stalinist power that fatally undermined the Soviet system. The management of everything — including famines — had been an extremely successful political order for thirty years.

I do not oppose either the theory of Capitalism or the theory of Communism any more than I oppose the theory that pigs can fly. Indeed, given time, materials, and access to the Internet, I think I could rig up a catapult that would make a pig fly for more than fifty yards. With rocket science, perhaps put the pig in orbit. But I do not think this would make the pig very happy.

The task of the political propagandist is to secure the pig’s cooperation, on the promise that he’s going to have a lot of fun.

Perhaps today’s Idlepost will seem, to gentle reader, a little more whimsical even than usual. Yet, paradoxically, my point is that we do not discuss political issues in a realistic way. Instead, we ask questions based on unexamined, and rather imbecile, assumptions.

Indeed, as I notice from the election campaign, happening around me up here in the Far North, all politics is conducted like that: with assertions, promises, and questions that are meaningless.

Phenotypic plasticity

One of the concessions I once made to the Darwinists was on microevolution. Adaptations to environment on the small scale might well, in many cases, involve random mutation and “natural selection.” But these happen within parameters that do not extend to the macroevolutionary scale. To transcend species barriers is a work of ages, beyond the ages known to man. It can’t be seen to happen, anywhere in the fossil record, which nowhere reveals messy fluctuation. Dead or alive at the present day, you have a sharply-defined species in every single case.

This isn’t, “God of the gaps.” The record would be a universal meandering slur if the Darwinian account were true. It is instead crisp — consistently and eerily crisp. And the jumps are frequently astounding.

But “Darwin’s finches” were acceptable to me (and apparently to the finches on my balconata, though I have not quizzed them exhaustively). I accepted it as an example of natural selection — on the microevolutionary scale, only.

This wasn’t an example from Darwin, incidentally, but looked so much better than any of his, that it invaded all the textbooks. When the man himself was on the Galapagos Islands, he missed the story. He didn’t notice that there were different finches on the different islands. He certainly did not match the beak shapes to the diets. He had no idea how any of the birds had got there in the first place. Those finches danced circles around Charles Darwin.

Two million years (the assumed time available, for whatever Latin American finch or finches to adapt to conditions on the Galapagos, at their leisure with no serious predators except that pesky Galapagos Hawk), seemed sufficient to explain the differences by minute, incremental change. It is one of those numbers settled on by repetition; the geological assumption underneath “two million” having been long since kicked away. Biology schoolbooks are full of fluff like that: often not because the authors are disingenuous, but because their ignorance is comprehensive.

But, hey: “Jolly good, Darwinoids, you can have that one,” was my attitude going back to later adolescence, when as a science kid with a minor obsession in biology I first came to doubt the secular evolutionary “unholy grail.” (As an atheist, then, by the way. I didn’t think the account in Genesis was plausible. I just thought the Darwinian account less plausible.)

Fortysomething years later, I would like to take that back. I know natural selection is nonsense, as an explanation for macroevolutionary metamorphoses; every intelligent person should know that by now. But I am no longer convinced it explains anything significant, or perhaps anything at all, on the microevolutionary scale, either. This is because I have continued to take a passing interest in biological discoveries.

True enough, the maladapted animal gets eaten, and so becomes individually extinct. And certain niche environments disappear catastrophically — sometimes large ones — taking with them most, or conceivably all the creatures who once lived there. All living things on this planet die; and species, too, have their seasons. This much is truism. The puzzling question is how new creatures arrive, in environments to which they are — not more or less, but totally and invariably — wonderfully adapted.

Let us consider, for the duration of today’s Idlepost, the pupfish of Death Valley, our continent’s lowest, driest, and hottest environment. These pupfish are Darwin’s finches for today: nine species and sub-species, each taxon flourishing in geographic isolation from the others, in small, remote water habitats; a kind of archipelago in reverse.

How they got there in the first place can be easily explained by the recession of the last Ice Age. For, a mere fifteen millennia ago, Death Valley was a cooler and wetter place. It was at the deepest bottom of a very big lake through much of the Pleistocene epoch, and more recently part of a network of interconnected smaller lakes and marshes spreading across what is now the Mojave Desert — that dried up in a blink of the geological eye.

We are led irresistibly to assume that in this short time, a common ancestor “evolved,” and split into nine distinct lines, with variations in body shape and behaviour to match the demands of each of their respective niches — rather as the beaks of the descendant finches vary, island to island in the Galapagos. But in one-hundredth of the time.

*

Recall: we aren’t disputing that “evolution,” in the sense of temporal succession, occurs. Hardly anyone disputed that in Darwin’s day, either, for the notion of evolution was already a deeply implanted paradigm in biology, with a history going back to the Pre-Socratics. Indeed, Empedocles of Akragas in Sicily had proposed natural selection, in the fifth century before Christ, as had others, in the main. And, one full generation before the Origin of Species, the Scotsman, Patrick Matthews, had spelt out the whole Darwinian system in detail. (Alfred Russel Wallace may not have known about it, but despite his suspiciously sarcastic disclaimers, Darwin almost certainly did. His notes from the period went missing like Nixon’s White House tapes.)

Buffon, Lamarck, Cuvier, Charles’s own grandpa Erasmus Darwin, were all open evolutionists (not “closet evolutionists,” as the Darwinian textbooks falsely state). So, implicitly, were all the taxonomists, from Linnaeus back at least to the seventeenth-century John Ray. The notion that “evolution” came as something new and shocking to the Victorian educated public is — let us be clear — a bald, entirely purposeful, lie, designed to confuse people unfamiliar with the nineteenth century.

Darwin’s accomplishment was thus not in science, but in theology. He was a talented writer, and natural history buff, who rubbed in, subtly at first then more and more overtly, the atheist inferences of the scheme, and thereby advanced the High Victorian eugenics movement in which his family and friends had a major interest. (Malthusianism also comes into this.) It was part of an orchestrated, direct assault on religious resistance to tampering with nature, understood as such at the time. It was aimed primarily at Protestant biblical literalism, which is why Catholics to the present day have largely refused to take the bait, or for that matter show much interest in the devils. Darwin looms large only here in these White Anglo-Saxon Protestant realms; elsewhere he is just a name among many in the history of defunct biological ideas.

As recently as 2009, during the extravagant media celebration of the bicentenary of his birth, and sesquicentenary of his bestseller, I still believed Darwin was an honest man, if somewhat deluded or befuddled. What I’ve learnt since convinces me that he wasn’t.

But now I am wandering off-topic. The point here is not about Charles Darwin’s motives, but whether the hypothesis he plagiarized and popularized — his explanation of how evolution works — is true. Because in my crazy Roman Catholic universe, the truth is important.

So back to our Death Valley pupfishies. They get better.

*

In work over the past few years, researchers including prominently Sean Lema, have been playing games with them. Pupfish hatched in the Amargosa River were dumped into the seething conditions of Devil’s Hole; pupfish guppies from Devil’s Hole were transferred to a much pleasanter experimental refuge environment; and so forth. The wee fish took it in their stride, with significant adaptive variations showing within two — count ’em two — years. No new information had appeared in the guppies’ DNA; instead, the expression of the existing information had altered.

This phenomenon is known as phenotypic plasticity. As we have been quite recently discovering, it is built into all God’s creatures — an ability to change, often quite radically on multiple levels, when circumstances demand. It perfectly explains microevolutionary adaptations, though of course it does not preclude other factors which may work with or against this plasticity. And it does not require the tens or hundreds of thousands of years that “natural selection” would require, working with (usually counter-productive) tiny, random, genetic mutations.

Look at a little bat-faced Pomeranian, and then at a big happy Labrador. They are genetic expressions of the same species: variations on the theme of gray wolf. Humans bred them out that way, on purpose, over the short space of human history, in the course of which we have sometimes noticed the range of potentialities. But they haven’t been crossbred with any other species: that extraordinary range was built into just the one. Pupfish can, as impressively, but without human help, turn on a generational dime. They need not wait for a fresh DNA redaction: nature knows how to dance with the bullets.

Everywhere, the design of creatures involves anticipation. This is not the exception but the strict, unvarying rule. Biology thus requires an Aristotelian — a teleological — approach to gain genuine, provable knowledge. It always did. Even the Darwinians, to learn anything at all, must keep asking themselves the elementary question, “What is this for?”

The “neo-Darwinian synthesis” still tries to deny this: not on the basis of any experiment or proof, but because faith in Atheism demands this denial. Nature, to the godless Darwinoid apprehension, must be stupid, bumbling, uninformed and clueless. Their problem is: she’s not.

Note, I am not saying that our modern-day neo-Darwinian synthesis “has flaws.” I am not so shy. Rather I am saying that, so far as it is Darwinian at all, it is horse manure, wall-to-wall.

One may charitably understand the thuggish behaviour of the Darwinist academic establishment, towards any departure from their “settled science” party line, the better when one appreciates the desperation of their position. For they are meathead scientistic clowns, suspended on scaffolding that is visibly crumbling beneath them.

Yet, God made these meatheads, so they do half know it.

Moynihan’s scissors today

We are celebrating this year, if that is the word, the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the most inconsequential sociological study ever published. That was, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, by the brilliant American politician and thinker, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003).

Working then in the U.S. Department of Labour, Moynihan focused his attention on a counter-intuitive statistical fact. Unemployment among black males was falling, in 1965. But rates of welfare enrolment for black families was rising. This did not make sense. The two lines on this chart had always fallen or risen together. But they had crossed over in 1962. He had put his finger in what came to be called, “Moynihan’s scissors.”

A Democrat, Moynihan was part of the “brain trust” that has been a feature of every “progressive” or “reforming” political party, going back not to F.D. Roosevelt as the Wikipaediasts believe, but to the eighteenth century, if not the Reformation. These are the “public intellectuals” who generate the theories and policies to which society must then be made to conform. They consider themselves to be the Smart Party — in contest with the Stupid Party, that is always resisting change.

John Stuart Mill, whom I consider a typical modern liberal brain truster, or “brain trustee,” displayed the bottomlessly smug attitude of his class and kind when he observed, “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative,” by way of glossing a footnote in his book, Representative Government. (Compare the observation of John Foster Dulles, that, “If we’d had any more smart people at Yalta, we’d have given the Soviets England and France, too.”)

Moynihan was, however, an unusual smart man, or party theoretician, in three respects. First, he was genuinely intelligent and broadly learned. Second, he was not easily intimidated by trends or the consensus of his peers. Third, he actually cared what happened to the people and society for which they were legislating. And while his job was to contribute to the “let a hundred flowers bloom” of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, he had discovered something his smart contemporaries would not want to hear or know.

Verily, something they did not hear, and will never hear, thanks to the modern progressive intellectual’s formidable capacity for mental blockage. For while the “Moynihan Report” is famous, and at one time, everyone claimed to have read it, it contains something so obnoxious to enlightened post-modern thought as to remain invisible to all participants in the discussion.

This was Moynihan’s sociological and anthropological observation that the American black culture was becoming “matriarchal.” Whether without, or more likely with the help of welfare programmes, women were becoming the heads of households, and men were being removed from that station.

(The background: All of the higher civilizations have been unambiguously patriarchal; matriarchy is associated in the prehistoric and anthropological record with savage, gratuitously violent, self-destructive tribes.)

Already, in 1965, one in four black kids in the USA were born out of wedlock. Today it is more than three in four, and levels of bastardy among the other races have risen in course. By the end of the last century (1990s), white children were as likely to be raised in fatherless homes as black children had been in the 1960s. “Progress” has been progressing rapidly.

The Nanny State has replaced fathers as the principal source of income for such families (bankrupting itself in the process), and the feminist movement has supplied the arguments — or more precisely, misandronist slogans and vindictive clichés — for the overthrow of “patriarchy” and its systematic replacement with a shrewish matriarchy in all facets of social life. The movement has been, moreover, so successful in achieving its objects — the emasculation of men, and degradation or actual inversion of traditional morality — that it has now moved on. For with the defeat of masculinity, new horizons of “gender-bending” or “transgendering” have come into view.

Now, part of the reason people can’t get their little heads around what has actually happened — first to the black family, then to the brown, then to the white — is the surviving, basically modern (i.e. pre-post-modern) belief that eunuchs behave much like fairies; that they become docile and effeminate, harmless and nurturing, sensitive and sweet; that their previously reprehensible “masculine” traits will quietly disappear. Some men do indeed respond to emasculation by becoming the pathetic, contemptible wimps that all women, including feminists, instinctively abhor. But some do not.

As a well-read student of social sciences and history, Moynihan knew better than this. The masculine capacity for violence (at all levels, spiritual as much as physical) does not go away. From Spartan Laconia, backwards and forwards through history on all continents, we see that eunuchs and other “homosexual” (the word is inadequate) guards and soldiers have been employed by the great warrior despots. This is because they make the fiercest fighters. Having no families, no heritage to protect, no women and children to feed and shelter in safety, they become a purely destructive force. They become men who do not care even for their own lives, let alone for the lives of others.

In addition to the fatherless children of the new black matriarchy in the USA, Moynihan could see that the prisons were filling with young black men devoted to crime. They had nothing else to do with their time; were unneeded at home once the State began rewarding the women they had impregnated for getting rid of them. And the black kids now had before them not the rôle model of the breadwinning, rule-enforcing father, but instead the “cool” example of the street gang.

A parallel may be easily found in the Arab and Muslim world, where terrorism has been fuelled by a similar social dynamic: men with “nothing better to do,” in societies where men have no economic or paterfamilial function, thanks in that case partly to Islamic family structure, which keeps children in the women’s harem; but lethally compounded in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere by the new welfare state of (essentially unearned) oil money. We think that “sexual frustration” comes into this, but as we should know from the interview records, the Muslim terrorist has no more trouble appropriating sex than he has appropriating Jeeps and Humvees from the USAID sheds.

Moynihan largely foresaw what the Great Society’s welfare programmes, as then being constituted, would actually achieve: the complete breakdown of patriarchy and thus, of the black family both nuclear and extended. He foresaw the consequences of it, and in other writings, foresaw the spread of this social disintegration beyond black society in a new era of “defining deviancy down.” He also clarified that governments could benefit beleaguered minorities best through some species of “benign neglect.”

We might call him thus the original “neoconservative” — loathed with a particular vehemence by his fellow brain trustees for having exposed the holes in their brain pans. His warnings were not merely ignored; they were attacked with a livid, semantic fury. How dare he use words in their plain meanings? How dare he suggest that certain hard-wired facts of human nature are not, in truth, “social constructs”? How dare he patiently and elaborately demonstrate the reality of this in empirical ways? How dare he defend his positions with such scintillating wit and irrefutable logic? And finally, how dare he be proved so consistently right through the next half century?

By comparison, his being “Irish Catholic” was almost forgivable.

The response of the progressive party to Moynihan and his ilk has been, ever since: “Full speed ahead!” And to his arguments has been, “Shout them down!” Which is why I call the Moynihan Report (the polite expression of those determined to retire the once respectful term, “Negro”) the most inconsequential sociological publication of all time.

How to raise children

We need to pay more attention to the neglect of children. They are not being neglected nearly enough, and the consequence is that they grow up neurotic, and with asthmatic tendencies. … Also, foolish. … And I’d mention narcissistic, but everyone does.

A model mother of my recent acquaintance boasts of the success of her own neo-mediaeval parenting style. For example, she would not help her children with homework, and left them to the consequences if it was not done. She would not drive them to more than one extra-curricular activity. She was more or less never at their beck and call.

“I was not their best friend or their chauffeur or their social secretary.”

She did teach them to read and write, since the schools don’t do that any more; and was able to inculcate clear thinking in that way. She did take them to church, and made sure that their Catholic faith was exact and articulate, since the priests no longer teach anything. She was reasonably careful to set an example of backwardness, and perfect indifference to passing fads. And she put wine in them from an early age, so they would not grow up to become alcoholics. For total neglect would be excessive.

The children turned out well, and judging from the blog the eldest is keeping (she has three children of her own now), they are proper reactionaries. In the olden time, most children turned out reasonably well — only a few juvenile delinquents, as compared with the overwhelming majority today. And while perhaps not all lived to adulthood, the demographics balanced out, for hardly any were aborted.

In dealing with my own pair of lads, I tried to imitate my father. He was a busy man. When I came to him with an interesting question, he gave all his attention. If I came with a dull one, he could not hear. He never came to me. He had no interest in sports, whatever. (I adored my father.)

My mother needed help in the kitchen, but otherwise I was left to read and roam. If I have a criticism, she was a bit of a soft touch: she could have worked me much harder. (I adored her anyway.)

Of course, I am so old that I was not subjected in childhood to many of the evil temptations of today. There were no computers, only books and periodicals. Pornography was not easily accessible, so I had to make do with D.H. Lawrence. I was not forced to join a club, or play soccer, or any other silly and demeaning games. I was allowed to collect stamps, at my own expense. Today, a child could become addicted to any number of low hobbies. But won’t if you resolutely refuse to buy him anything.

When I decided that I was bored with school, both parents would be happy to write notes. They were quite truthful, along the lines of: “The boy had something better to do last week, and so was absent from classes.” True, I would tell them if I was going out of town (defined as involving a bus journey). But usually I was just hiking within ten miles or so.

Children are naturally curious about their parents, and this is the basis of moral education. They want to know if you are proud or ashamed of their behaviour. Let them know by fairly subtle indications. (Always: make them reach.) And you may not even need to beat them. Help them thus to develop a profound sense of guilt, and low self-esteem.

God made each child the way he is, however, and it is unwise to tamper overmuch. Some, indeed, may benefit from beatings — God having designed them for beating into shape. One must take them case by case. But I can’t imagine how any can benefit from being crowded by their parents.

It is best to have so many children that there is not enough time to coddle, anyway. Children almost invariably turn out better in the larger batches.

One should begin to ignore their whimpering when they are in the crib. I am appalled by what I see all around me: an only child, or sometimes two “only children,” who get their parents’ attention the moment they begin to whine. And if they don’t get what they want, promptly, they sit there pouting, feeling sorry for themselves. When my children whined, I ignored them. If they kept it up, I mocked them, mercilessly. You can’t start early enough, undermining their nasty little egos.

While I am not opposed to corporal punishment, I think psychic punishment is more effective. Humiliate; teach them how to feel shame. Manners need not be taught, for those will be acquired by emulation. Well, a few hints might be dropped at the dinner table.

Do your kids come when dinner is called? They will if they are hungry enough. (It is amazing what children can do, once they discover they have no options.)

Do they go to bed at a reasonable hour? They will if they are sufficiently tired.

For having fed them, you can put them to work. Children are a useful part of any labour force — they are small and can get into the corners adults are too big for. Lots of energy, too. Minimum instruction, maximum responsibility: that’s how children learn to do things. Wait until they’re begging for advice, to advise. And never hesitate to disparage failure — for again, it is important to make them feel badly. Hitting just makes them feel aggrieved.

How proud I was when my elder lad read some newspaper story about an irritating boy in Alberta, who was leading some UN-sponsored campaign against the exploitation of children in the Third World. My boy said that for a school project, he might start a counter-campaign, promoting child labour.

I left him to it.

We learn by doing, and part of childhood should be learning to work. Especially, how to do unpaid work, since all the best work is unpaid.

Clabber

The cow I do not keep on my balconata, up here in the High Doganate, is a thirteenth-century animal. Some of these advanced breed cows they have today can squirt fifteen gallons of milk into your buckets, just after lactation. (Daily.) Half that is more common, however, and even that requires beasts that eat seventy pounds of hay, grain, silage, and so forth, a couple more of “protein supplements,” and drink maybe forty gallons of water. (Daily.) That’s too much to lug upstairs when the elevator isn’t working. A full-grown Holstein can weigh the better part of a tonne, herself, and should she lean against my railing, there could be a terrible accident.

Whereas, your typical high-mediaeval milch cow, which stood less than 45 inches in the whithers, weighed perhaps one-third of your modern monster cow, and would be a more manageable proposition for the apartment dweller. She would be something very like the Dexter, that survived in Ireland as the “poorman’s cow” into the Victorian era — whenupon she was spotted by the entrepreneurs for her remarkable domestic qualities, and bred with a vengeance all over the world.

Your Dexter will yield maybe two gallons a day, maybe more if she is in an expansive mood — but how much milk do you need? She is of a sweeter disposition than a Holstein, produces better milk of a higher butterfat content, and is, quite frankly, an easier calver.

However, one of her several eccentricities may complicate arrangements on an urban balcony: for when the calf is born she will try to hide it. But she is generally docile, and also versatile, doubling as beef for her retirement plan, and meanwhile happy to serve as a beast of burden. Young human mothers with small children will find that a Dexter will not try to kill them. Better yet, they can hitch her to a small wagon to pull the kids about, which frees up the hands while shopping. Awkward getting them on the transit bus, though.

Now that I think of it, keeping a cow might be easier on a homestead than in most modern urban environments. There will also be by-laws to contend with, or an unfriendly super in your apartment building. The liberal busybodies in your neighbourhood are sure to report you, the moment they spot your cow. (You’d think a goat would be easier to conceal, but no, a nanny-goat has climbing abilities, seems to know how to open doors, and in no time she’ll be stopping traffic in the most embarrassing locations.)

Still, up to about the Great War, plenty of cows were kept in the city.

Lord, I hate by-laws.

*

Now, I won’t say a thing against Louis Pasteur. He was a devout Catholic, and meant well in almost everything he did. (I insert “almost” as a precaution.) This is the man who died with a Rosary in his hands, having declared, “The more I know, the more nearly is my faith that of the Breton peasant. Could I but know all I would have the faith of a Breton peasant woman.”

Moreover, he is seldom appreciated for his actual discoveries and inventions, as the father of bacteriology, and much else. We say that milk is “pasteurized,” but the truth is that the methods he developed were for beer and wine. And those, too, were properly speaking rediscoveries, for the Chinese, we have since learnt, were using the same methods in the twelfth century to prevent their wines from souring. No: Pasteur’s accomplishments were much more in the “why,” than in the “how” of things, and it is interesting that he attributed all of his innumerable scientific advances to that Breton peasant quality. Which is to say: to a childlike religious Faith, in God and thus in the cosmic order.

The French government offered to put him in charge of vast industrial operations to which he could apply his technical insights. He refused, with something like disgust. He was a scientist, not a man of commerce. He felt insulted by the offer.

He did not think of his discoveries as his own. They were for anyone to use.

*

A great deal could be said against the modern dairy industry, little of it directed at the farmers. My diatribe against, for instance, government regulation of the dairy industry in the Province of Ontario could go on for years. And while I hold no brief for the pathogenic microbes that can proliferate in aging raw milk, nor for their effects (diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, brucellosis, Q-fever and the like), I am not under the naïve impression that the dairy conglomerates introduced what they called “pasteurization” (not to “honour” the man, but to cash in on his reputation) only for the sake of public health.

It was rather to delay milk spoiling, so they could take more time getting it to market, and thus ship it from farther away — making huge syndicates possible to enslave dairy farmers in the interests of Capital. (Do I sound like a Marxist? Pfft!) A bonus, discovered in this work, is that pasteurized, and better, homogenized milk is useless for the housewife souring it to the purpose of making the whole range of traditional creams, butters, and cheeses. Thenceforth she would have to buy these products separately as branded goods off the shelf at the supermarket, for an inflated price from the same large industrial concerns. And soon, she would need a refrigerator.

The diatribe against big guvmint I have omitted would mention all the laws put in place to protect the syndicates against small private enterprise, which extend finally to making it illegal for the owner of a cow to drink the cow’s milk; and quotas to prevent him from producing so much that the price might fall. Indeed, today, not only in Ontario but most other jurisdictions, your government is committed to making you pay at least double for a semi-sterilized product of inferior taste that will not elegantly sour, but putrefy. All in the name of progress and democracy.

In the name of regress and monarchy, let me point out that the health dangers in raw milk can be mostly obviated by keeping the source of your milk fresh and close at hand. And all you need for that, is a cow.

*

“Clabber” is the word I remember from my grandparents for what you did with much of the milk that came from your household cow. It is what was done wherever lactose-tolerant people lived on the planet, until the day before yesterday in historical time. With nothing more than the benign bacteria already in the milk, it could be left under recognized conditions of warmth and humidity to curdle into the thick, beautiful clabber that tastes something like (extremely high-end) yoghurt today. This could in turn be eaten as a glorious food in itself, used as leavener in baking, and … well, we’ll leave cheese-making to another day.

But practically speaking, you will need not only a cow, but discreet indifference to the dairy regulations. Which is why I haven’t installed a modestly-sized thirteenth-century milch cow on the balconata of the High Doganate. But might if I thought I could get away with it.

The roundest wheel

I mention cars so much because they occupy so much of my brain, such as it is. And this, although I do not own one, hardly ever ride, and would rather shut them out. (I still limp, slightly, from one of them that bumped me while I was road-crossing on a green light, ten years ago.) I am living in Car World, 2015; and if, as more than one gentle reader has suggested, I were to remove myself to the country, I would need a car. For it is now almost a century since the public transport systems of this continent — which could move one from almost anywhere to almost anywhere, urban or rural, with a short walk at each end — began to evaporate. Thanks to cars.

A reader who was once an engineer writes of a winter evening on the Long Island soi-disant “Expressway”:

“I was on a slight rise, looking at probably 20,000 pairs of headlights and taillights. Idly I added up the horsepower coasting at walking speed in both directions: roughly 2.4 million horsepower, just in my field of vision. Here then is one aspect of the tech-liberal paradox. The more autonomous we become, the more we are squeezed into a collective.

“The old alternative would have been the Long Island Railroad. But in the days of communal cars, before the great social atomization, people had to respect each other and dress in a reasonable fashion. Now a trip on a public conveyance is an iffy and edgy undertaking. Tattooed gangbangers and their legions of wannabes, the desperately sexualized, the purple-haired life-stylists (in goosestep with the other alternative life-stylists), the mutilated, the slovenly, the unbathed, the abusers of substance, the trans-gressives, the ear-budded. …”

He enumerates the maladaptive. Sometimes I think the adaptable are worse.

In Toronto, I’ve noticed that even in their absence, cars build our world. A “renaissance in downtown living” has pushed house prices, even for a dive, towards one million dollars; and skyscraper condominium apartments (“condoms” as I call them) have sprouted in glassy jungles around all the major rapid transit points. The same thing is happening out there in the satellite towns: the “sleeper suburbs” now going vertical.

This is not pressure of population, for Canada is fairly large. It is a concentration of population, now trying to avoid the rush-hours by piling into commuter trains. The density in a few blocks downtown approaches Hong Kong levels, and yet, … walk through at most times of day and there is little crowding on the sidewalks. Only the roads full, from the compression of cars, one human in each, trying to reach the ramps of the “expressways.”

For there is no community. The public spaces are sterile, the surfaces all designer-paved, and elaborate by-laws prevent anything human from growing in the cracks. Restaurants outnumber groceries; each is a fake, in menu and decor; the groceries flog ready-made microwave meals. The people themselves are permanently “in transit,” many throughout their lives, on a journey that is the opposite of a pilgrimage. They have allowed themselves to become almost pure economic factors, with a job and a place to sleep, plus free time for demeaning entertainments. It is an environment in which there are more dogs than children — especially those small, yappy, and spoilt, on which the females ladle their maternal instincts. (On one recent walk I counted specialized retail outlets: eight for pets, and two for children.)

More fundamentally, Christ is not welcome there. It is hard, anyway, to see Him in the city glare; just as it is hard to see the stars. But the flip side of social atomization is the extraordinary peer pressure it brings to bear. The place is religion-free, as it is germ-free. Look from the window of the rush-hour train over any new patch of sprawling suburb, with thousands of balloon-frame, ticky-tack houses, and you will see not one church spire; only the occasional minaret. For the white people (often my least favoured race) to acknowledge Christ would be to lose one’s defensive anonymity. It would be to acquire some personhood, of the most inconvenient kind. It would put one in a church, surrounded by the weird, united in a mysterious “body.” It would take one out of oneself. It might expose one to germs.

Cars: one of my happiest memories was of a Saturday morning, decades ago, riding down Oxfordshire country lanes in a little, rusting one, packed with six people. I was thrown in with a family of amateur musicians, and they were all singing — in baroque counterpoint, too.

People today want solutions to their problems, and I think this is the first step.

The longest spoon

Let me extend yesterday’s effusion; for judging from th’email, my point was incomprehensible. And this was not quite my intention. Let me restate the argument in a slightly different way, thus providing a stereo effect.

The point was not about cars, but made through cars. They are a physical nuisance, to be sure; a source of noise, distraction, and invasive ugliness in our material landscape. Imagine men chained to big metal boxes, and one begins to descry the reality. They are a means of “access” which, to be McLuhan about this, change everything they touch. Our cities are now built for cars; the most remote shrines can also be turned into car lots. And in the example with which I began, so ancient and human a thing as a serious conversation, while walking, must be sacrificed to awareness of them.

Driverless cars are the coming “game changer.” The full implications will not be thought through. For instance, most moving cars have only one passenger, who is also the driver. This creates urban sprawl, and rush-hour phenomena that are horrendous. But with driverless cars we will now have many more in motion, without even one person aboard — summoned to fetch a person or a thing from a distance. We will also have increasingly sophisticated drones and so, the effect of cars in three dimensions instead of two.

Cars are an instrument of control. This is brought home by the transition from drivered to driverless. The hands-on “freedom” associated with hopping in a car, and driving off wherever (itself purchased at the cost of more basic freedoms), will now have to go; for drivered and driverless cars don’t mix. Clearing the former off the public roadways will require legislation, that will be negotiated between the large commercial interests and government departments. “The people” need not be consulted; they’ll adapt.

Note that our whole way of life was already out of our hands, and now becomes more so; that our dependence on the benignity of the masters of technology has dimensionally increased. And that, as with the Internet, every movement, every keyboard stroke, becomes susceptible to computer tracking and recording.

Forget “privacy” — we are talking about Control.

By these masters I hardly mean the inventors. Those are harmless dreamer types, unless like a Tom Edison or a Bill Gates they have the drive to become rich and powerful. The myth of capitalism is in the “get rich,” an innocent enough ambition. But that is a fuel, not the machine. You don’t get rich by inventing something; more people get poor that way. You get rich by controlling the invention.

The sort of person who gets rich, in the “real world” as presently constituted, will be ruthlessly focused not on “creativity,” as the promoters of capitalism tell us, but on the opposite act of appropriation; on the “corporate takeover,” in its many overt and subtle forms, starting with the takeover of the corporation by oneself. The person who wants to become a “success” must live for that: be every hour alert to the possibilities, and constantly manipulating to his ends.

It is a game of nerves, which usually begins with a confidence trick, and continues with forms of leveraged finance that closely resemble kiting. The successful entrepreneur has the face to borrow and apply large amounts of other people’s money, to a project that may or may not earn them a return. (Usually not; but then he tries again.) The “trust” of investors and lenders is in his very cockiness. His “idea” might well be cracked; it certainly need not be original. But he has the “charisma,” the “fire in his belly,” the willingness to do “whatever it takes.”

Similarly, in politics, power is to the ruthless and cocky; the “take charge” types who say, “follow me.” It has little to do with where they are going. Indeed, the very destination is adaptable: a pragmatic assessment of what the “follower” types can be persuaded to buy. In this sense, capitalism and socialism are interchangable: both founded on the will of men, emancipated from humility and deference; and both in their nature revolutionary.

At the top of our contemporary “mixed economy” is that nexus of commerce and government. They are bureaucracies on both sides, the one usually more efficient than the other, because more responsive to accounting conventions, but that’s beside the point.

They interface. The deals are struck, through the lobbying process, very little of which involves controversy. Market territories are negotiated: Who gets control of what? It is hardball, but the players can benefit by remaining sane. It is not usually in their interest to destroy or impoverish one another — so long as everyone continues to play by the (constantly “evolving”) rules. We call this, “enlightened self-interest.”

High tech is not about whiz-bang gizmos; that is just advertisement, for show. It is instead about granting and withdrawing access; about controlling the machinery to which the great mass of society are connected, through things like those metal boxes. At one remove, it is about controlling lives. The captains of industry and the captains of government are alike the human, ego-driven creatures who get their satisfaction from being in control.

They are not in it for money alone, but for the broader power: the satisfaction of “making things happen.” A shopping mall or skyscraper can come into being at their command; so can a huge new wing of a hospital, or a mandatory pension plan. Too, we have the phenomenon of “total war” — a continuation of this “total peace” by other means.

Here we are far beyond cars, but still in our earthly terrain. We have a machinery tremendously complex, that makes comprehensive management seem necessary, creating the argument to perpetuate itself, along with the lure: for the prizes of wealth, power, and fame are made extremely visible. Yet freedom always lay in the simple.

Too, we have a system that is vulnerable to catastrophe on an apocalyptic scale, for everyone depends on the machine working. Yet real security always lay in personal independence — of a kind for which modern management has no time. No time at all: for little people getting in the way.

With material arrogance comes moral arrogance. Perhaps the most frightening thing about Donald Trump was revealed in a remark that he “doesn’t ask God for forgiveness.” Trump is unusually candid; such things are seldom baldly said. Yet that is the attitude of most men today, not only those of wealth and power. They “believe in God,” but “don’t ask forgiveness.” In other words, they don’t believe in God; or they would be down on their knees.

I am neither prognostick, nor prophet. In mentioning, yesterday, that “Carrington Event” — an inevitable, recurring fact of nature — I was pointing to the ease with which the whole machine could be smited. In a moment our worldly masters would be disarmed of their means of control, leaving only their legacy: a population of abject dependants, unable to feed themselves.

My worldly hope is not extravagant. I do not think I am in a position to “warn” anybody, let alone assemble a “back to the earth” Crusade; only in a position to help each gentle reader rethink his relationship with the worldly powers.

For they are tin men. Their works are not beautiful, and their technology is not impressive. They control us only so far as we agree to be controlled. So many are, knowingly or unknowingly, agents of the Prince of This World, who must not be served, but rather avoided; or when we are trapped, directly resisted. One might almost say that, “living simply is the best revenge.”

The highest tech

Some years ago, as we prepared to cross something called Maple Avenue in a small Ontario town, John Sommer and I were nearly run over by an ebullient young driver. We were too deep in conversation to notice the muscle car gunning down (quiet, residential) Charles Street behind us; it swerved with a tremendous screech of rubber onto Maple about two feet ahead of our toes.

John, watching the car recede, said, “Beautiful things, some of these cars. Too bad they will not be with us much longer.”

Neither of us has ever operated one, though I had the privilege of paying for a couple in my days as a bourgeois paterfamilias. John, a remarkable man from Germany who founded the late (and lamented) Gallery House Sol in Georgetown, Ontario — of which more, perhaps, some day — is old now. All his life, like me, he has preferred to walk, or if the distance is great and the need urgent, take some public conveyance. (And there were coaches and ships two centuries ago.)

I suppose the best thing that could be said for cars, is that they are totally unnecessary. But not useless, I fear. Some, as John noted, are rather attractive feats of engineering and styling; and I can see the fun in racing them. In a sane and stable society, they would of course be banned.

As to the proposition they will be not long with us, two practical observations. The first is pedestrian, indeed.

From what I understand, “driverless” cars, trucks, and buses will replace the drivered kind in the near future: much sooner than we realize. (“Ten years,” a self-styled expert told me.) Truck and taxi drivers will all be out of work. Those who actually enjoy driving will find that the practice is now illegal, and their old roadsters will be legislated into extinction. A large part of the population will not know what hit them, but there will be no vote, any more than there was when motor vehicles first came into the world. The new laws will be worked out between the large commercial interests and government departments, and “the people” duly taxed to pay for vast new infrastructure. Those opposed will be laughed off as “Luddites.”

This is the way business is normally done in a modern, progressive democracy. Some may organize, and if their numbers merit, they will be bought off. If their numbers don’t, they can be imprisoned.

But there is a second proposition, to which the first merely contributes. All motorized vehicles will now be vulnerable to a universal computer crash, which will come with the inevitability of the subduction earthquake that will sooner or later level Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and, by extension through known, charted faults, SF and LA. But that will be a local story, compared to the next “Carrington Event” — a reminder of which I was pleased to see flagged on the Drudge Report this week.

The last one happened in 1859. The Earth was hit by a cloud of magnetized plasma from a “coronal mass ejection” — something that our Sun often does. Most fly off in other directions; the last that barely missed us was in July, 2012. (You can tell it missed from the fact that the Internet still exists.) The last bullseye on our beloved planet was named after the brilliant English amateur astronomer, Richard Carrington (1826–75), who, in the course of figuring out what happened, demonstrated the existence of “solar flares.”

He was trying to explain why telegraph operators all over the world, on the 1st of September, 1859, were suddenly getting electric shocks; and then, prior to the whole cable system going down, why some had been able to send and receive messages even after disconnecting their power. Too, why auroras had lit up the night sky at temperate latitudes so bright people could read newspapers by it; or why those at higher elevations near the equator could enjoy the aurora borealis and the aurora australis — simultaneously.

Now, the world a sesquicentury ago was not so dependent upon electricity as it is today. And the system of telegraphy was so ridiculously simple, that it was soon repaired. I daresay Morse Code is worth learning in preparation for the next Carrington Event — which, when it comes, we will be able to predict, at best, a few hours in advance. (Other cosmic events might impinge on our lifestyles meanwhile, but I like to consider my apocalypses one at a time.)

Gentle reader may do a mental inventory of the gizmos in his environment that are connected directly or indirectly to the power grid. Then add in anything that contains a computer chip, whether it happened to be “on” or “off” when the Earth’s magnetic field was impacted. For I assume it will all turn “on” of its own, for a brief but memorable interval.

The “beauty” (as they say in Cape Breton) is that we have no back-up system, and moreover, there can be no back-up, except what we can rig from horse, or paddle. For we have made ourselves totally dependent upon sparks.

On the plus side, the environmentalists may exult, because the quick reduction of the world’s population to post-Plague mediaeval levels could prove a lucky break for the other endangered species.

It will, even more happily, improve national security for the survivors in USA. For the same magnetic storm that makes the cities (and towns) of America uninhabitable will also have disabled the military capacities of Russia, China, and Iran. If they want to come at us they will have to do so in sailing ships. Moreover, the depopulation of Mexico will probably reduce the invasion threat from there, whether or not Donald Trump is President.

But most visibly, the congestion problem will be solved, from all these cars. For even if we have the chance to enjoy a Carrington Event before the changeover to “driverless,” I should think only those motor vehicles made before about 1970 will ever again start. And then, only after chance stores of petrol have been carefully ladled into their tanks; and for as long as their spark plugs hold out. (Unless, of course, they’ve been fritzed, too.)

Perhaps this effusion was not really about cars. Perhaps it was instead about the arrogance of post-modern man, who turns to technology, where more sensible people would build with stone and, rather than to Progress, direct their more important petitions to God.

Sister lived long enough

Today, within the Mass of the Ages, we commemorate Jane Francis Fremiot de Chantal (Saint, 1572–1641), whose husband died on her when she was twenty-eight. It was a hunting accident: the Baron of Chantal failed to duck when some clutz aimed an arquebus in his general direction. This left Jane, who had already lost a mother, stepmother, a couple of kids, and sundry other close family and friends, all “out of season” — and was rather attached to her late husband — to cope with a large but vexing estate, and four kids half-orphaned as she had been. Over the next decade she acquired a big reputation for her management skills, and as a home educator.

She also met Father (later Saint) Francis de Sales, visiting Dijon from Geneva, in the course of his remarkably successful campaign to retrieve (innumerable) Calvinist schismatics for Holy Church. In fact, as readers of the spiritual classic, Introduction to the Devout Life, already know perfectly well, he became her spiritual director.

Jane just wanted to become a nun, but Francis persuaded her to put off that decision. The vow of chastity she had already made; it is clear from everything about her that she was an extraordinary character. Also, incidentally, extremely beautiful, and given the wealth, I can imagine one of her vexations was importunate men.

“Whatever,” as the post-modern saying goes. Jane used the decade well, to raise and settle her children, and put all her worldly affairs in good order. And then her Separation from that world finally came through: she took religious orders. Under Saint Francis’ “gentle but firm” direction, she founded, indeed, what would become a new Order, at Annecy in the Rhône Alps — the first house of what by her death had blossomed into many convents for her Visitation Sisters.

God, I am sometimes given to observe, gives not only spiritual but rather worldly talents to his children for a purpose. Saint Jane Chantal had a very practical genius for organizing things, that she applied to a kind of “human gardening.” A “green thumb” for that, if the simile is not too coarse. This necessarily requires a more than natural humility — “poor in spirit” in the phrase of Our Lord — and a capacity to listen to the inward beat of the human, thinking heart, for the rhythms of the Sacred Heart. While forgetting not one detail of the schedule and accounts.

Jane is buried at Annecy, near her spiritual director. The two of them were a pair such as the Catholic Church has discovered on other occasions, to do her work through both sexes. One thinks of John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila; of Francis, but also Clare of Assisi. Too, one thinks of Jesus of Nazareth, and also of his Mother, Mary. “Male and female, created He them.”

Saint Jane Chantal lived long enough to accomplish amazing things: to found those Visitation Sisters on the hard rock of Faith. To this day they are performing favours which the world can never appreciate, not least those of intercession, between errant man and his Maker, both this and the other side of the boundary between our country, and the Far Countrie.

There is for instance their monastery of Mont Deux Coeurs, in Tyringham, Massachusetts — one of a couple dozen convents of these cloistered, contemplative nuns, hidden beneath the life of North America, and a couple hundred scattered around the world, “to give to God daughters of prayer, and souls so interior that they may be found worthy to serve His infinite Majesty and to adore Him in spirit and in truth.”

Sister Anne-Marguerite was — verily, is — one of these nuns; the former Sally Anne Potchen, of Philadelphia. I never met her or knew anything about her, until a reader of this website drew my attention, yesterday, to her recent death from cancer, at age only fifty. She was quite widely known, however, and very much admired, in a world that flourishes “under the skin” of what we have mistaken for the real one. Many, many souls indebted to her, for act and example; many saved through her.

And many would think that she died too young; that the world needed her more than it needs some others; so why would God take her away?

My correspondent has forwarded the letter of thanks that went out on behalf of the Sisters at Tyringham, and of Sister Anne-Marguerite’s own parents and family, in response to many gifts and inquiries. It assures all that, “She loved us in this world; she will not forget us now that she is in Eternity.”

It also replies to those who, like most of us, glibly and without thinking, regret that so fine a lady died so young, and painfully. Who imply, without thinking, that perhaps God made some mistake.

Let me excerpt from this letter, below:

*

“Sister was here just long enough for all of us to ‘get used to the idea’ and come to terms with illness, and then just long enough for most of us to come to the greater understanding that she would be leaving us soon.

“Sister lived through her health crisis exactly long enough to provide a Godly example of what it means to suffer in the truest meaning of the word.

“Sister lived exactly long enough to reach and touch the hearts of a number of folks who might have never known her, had she not been ill and her story not shared with countless others.

“Sister lived exactly long enough to release numerous souls from the pains of Purgatory each time she ‘offered up’ her suffering for their intentions.

“Sister lived exactly long enough to enkindle even greater compassion among caregivers, long enough to enkindle deeper relationships with the Lord in prayer, long enough for an increase in Faith among those who might have felt crestfallen, long enough to nurture a belief in a merciful and loving God, long enough to bear witness to the Truth, and long enough for many more to hear or recall Sister’s beautiful voice, see her beautiful smile, or admire her great beauty that radiated from the inside, out.

“Sister lived long enough for her parents and loved ones to fondly and indelibly remember tender and other memorable moments of Sister’s short but very full life, including her positive response to God’s call for her religious vocation.

“Sister lived exactly long enough according to God’s will but admittedly, the timing of her death may have fallen short of our own private expectations. Any measurable sense of loss may have more to do with the dashing of personal hopes or the erroneous belief that if anyone is ‘entitled’ to live a good and healthy, long life — surely if anyone has the ‘right’ to live — it must be someone like Sister who has so much potential to do even greater good here on earth.

“Sister lived exactly long enough for some to embrace the profound realization that God’s schedule/timetable doesn’t always align with ours; that life is a precious gift; that God is still the ultimate decision maker when it comes to matters of life and death; that God always knows what is in our best interests, even when we try to persuade Him to see things ‘our way’.

“Sister lived exactly long enough for some to realize that when we try to hold on too tightly out of our own selfish desires, we risk even greater hurt or greater pain.  God Our Father, knows that, of course, and gives us comfort and encouragement through the words of Jesus who said, ‘Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light’.”

Pigeon digest

There are days (today would be an example) when I file these modest Idleposts late, usually because I had something else to write, teach, or otherwise deal with, earlier in the day. By noon, I have lost confidence in anything I could say, on any topic, and so fall into “Schopenhauer mode.” That is to say, whatever topic I propose to myself, the only thought that comes to mind is along the lines of, “Whoo-hoo-whoo.”

By Schopenhauer, incidentally, I refer not to the author of the Parerga and Paralipomena, but to a pigeon who has been following me about. He is a darkie: deep indigo entirely, even across the tail bar and to the tips of his feathers — the classic “Andalusian chicken.”

I cannot be mistaken about his identity; I have seen no other like him around here, even among the crowd attending Parkdale Collegiate. I have wondered if he might be an escaped breed bird, who prefers human to avian company. But I don’t think there are any pigeon fanciers, in Parkdale.

Distinctly a loner. Or perhaps he is in bad odour with the rest of his flock; possibly because they find his aphorisms insalubrious: febrile and ungodly. Or maybe they are racists.

While I’m no expert in pigeon sexing, the one rather commonplace city pigeon who sometimes joins Schopenhauer on my railing is obviously a young hen. Willena, I have called her: “Willena Zumleben.” A sad case. She seems quite infatuated with Schopenhauer. He doesn’t care. The more he ignores her, the more she pines. And the more reckless she becomes, lifting her tailfeathers to get his attention. In disgust, he looks away.

I have pled her case: “A nice girl, Schopenhauer. She could make you happy.”

He only wobbles his head.

Why, gentle reader must wonder, has he attached himself to me? I have shoo’d him off repeatedly; he keeps returning. I have contrived to feed my finches in a pigeon-unfriendly way. The rest of the tribe have taken the message; but Schopenhauer will not be discouraged. I have even waved a broom at him.

But it isn’t food he wants. No, it is conversation. He considers me to be his intellectual equal. I’d swear he is manoeuvring to land on my shoulder, to get a closer look at my brain.

So what can I do?

We talk about books. For the most part, I talk and he listens. He seems especially interested in my views on “the art of not reading.” They are Schopenheuristic. Life is short, and a precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones, I explain.

With age and wisdom one finds more and more things not to read, including Schopenhauer (the author). I flattered Schopenhauer (the pigeon) by observing, that in the wisdom of his age he has achieved a kind of perfection. For he reads nothing at all.

His only comment on this was: “Whoo-hoo-whoo.”

A Trifluvian philosopher

There was a man named Alexis Klimov, who lived in Trois-Rivières. He was of Russian ancestry, but Belgian birth, if memory serves. More importantly, he was a contributor to my Idler magazine, in its heyday of the mid-to-late ‘eighties, when it appeared that pre-industrial, mystic Toryism was going to work out. (By Christmas of 1993 we were “liquidated,” as the accountants say.) I liked this man very much, even though he was not a conventional Christian. But then, I was an Anglican myself, at the time. Still, more Thomist than Klimov; more Aristotelian; and less Existential.

His first essay, within the old Idler (April 1985), was entitled, “In Praise of the Useless Man.” It had been self-inspired by the confusion he created when, in an effort to honour the Serbo-Canadien mathematician and storyteller, Négovan Rajic (also an Idler contributor), he had called him — publicly — a useless man; a truly superfluous man; a man who is, in some cosmic sense, unemployed and relentlessly unemployable.

Rajic himself was abashed by such high praise; but others in the audience did not understand it. Thus it fell to Klimov, in the tradition of the half-mad, prophetic Russian thinkers, to explain. The terms come, I believe, from Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919), who died of starvation in a monastery soon after the Bolshevik Revolution.

“Will it be Shakespeare, or a pair of boots?” as Klimov echoed.

His essay for us (a whole book in French) surveyed the history of uselessness in modern man, and in particular the eschatological nature of this uselessness, from Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus to the clairvoyant dwarf in Fellini’s Juliette of the Spirits. It ended with a noble cry for pointless activity, even in academia.

I mention him now because I learnt, by old-fashioned hand-writ snailmail letter over tea this morning, that Alexis died in 2006, age short of seventy.

“What a useless thing to do!” was my first thought.

The second was to recall his use of the adjective, “Trifluvian,” which he made into a bilingual portmanteau on “tri-fluvial,” and on “trifle” or “trivial,” in honour of both his residence in exile, and his ideological stance. He referred to himself as, “a Trifluvian philosopher.”

The third was to cross myself and pray for the repose of his soul: one of us moderns, or post-moderns, trying to find some sense in this world that is directed to purposes above “efficiency” and “planning.” Or rather, does not look only above, but around and through, under, and behind, these irritant obstructions, to purposes that are not purposes like those purposes.

This had, when I was last following, taken Klimov back through Berdyaev and Dostoyevsky to his Orthodox roots; though I lost track of him. I pray he ended not only uselessly, but well.

And in commemoration I have brewed a fresh pot of smoky Lapsang Souchong: in a small clay pot, for multiple infusions; made of Yixing purple clay, and warm like a little being. Perched squatly on my plank bench, like a soulful silent bird.

*

Tea, I would tell the Klimov called before me — in a rather pagan, whisp-bearded, and squint-eyed sort of Way (recalling that of Taoist sages) — is non-efficacious. For the fact appeals to me, that the proteins and carbohydrates in tea leaves are not water-soluble. It is useless, thus, for nutritional purposes: a scientist would be lucky to find one calorie in the whole cup. The vitamins are also destroyed by the boiling. Anything of dietary value can come only from the adulterants some people put in.

On the other hand, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of other chemically-detectable substances in the drink, including a wee galaxy of amino acids.

It thus falls in that category to which Christ alludes, in His recollection of the Prophets: “Not by bread alone.” … Or, inside the outside, in that category which is outside the inside of the outside, as it were.

Not by bread alone; but by every word, by every “useless” word, that proceeds from the Father.

Here, it seems to say, at the head of the chapter on the chemical components:

“The act of drinking Tea must be appreciated for its own sake, without seeking any other justification, for only thus can the tea-drinker taste the sunlight, the wind, and the clouds.”