Essays in Idleness

On some Saturday evening recently, I gently suggested what I believe to be the most effective meejah strategy: “Don’t watch.” I was writing, of course, mostly to myself, as I often am. Since childhood I have been addicted to “the news”; by age ten was gobbling down the contents of two or more newspapers every day, engaging anyone fool enough to listen, in debate on “current events.” (Truly, I was an insufferable child.)

Though I mostly missed participation in the TV generation, I fell right into the Internet trap. This was on the 4th of December, 1999 — I remember and grieve the day. It has been downhill since.

Now, in the olden time, I also read magazines, to the point of subscribing to several. I also visited library periodical sections. I was a little policy wonk — many young things used to be. Though already leaning to the “conservative” side of the policy spectrum (absence of bias may be a sign of brain death), I read the “facts and arguments” from both sides. This is essential, to have any idea what is going on, for each side has an interest in telling only half of the story. But this was old-fashioned, as I admit. The Internet search algorithms quickly deduce what side you are on, today, then feed you only what their programmers think you will want to see. This they imagine to be good business: for when a contemporary sees anything he does not agree with, he tends to have a wrang.

Whether you are hooked into CNN, or Fox, you will be made crazy. Each selects and packages its “fake news” to provide a constant diet of wrath, and direct it to specific demonized targets. This is not exactly new in democracy — the daily newspapers were once party-aligned like that — but the son-et-lumière of technology has magnified it.

Canada is slightly different, for as David Frum once observed in the Idler: “Canada is a country where there is always one side to every question.” (And this was apparent in last week’s “great debate” up here in Greater Parkdale, when he took this side against the much-demonized Stephen K. Bannon, while our local Antifa types rioted against Mr Bannon’s having been allowed to speak at all.)

As the USA is progressively Canadianized, we get the same sort of thing down there: the Left casually adopting Brown Shirt tactics, to enforce the fluctuating decrees of “political correctness,” in the spirit of the Sturmabteilung (in the days before they “evolved” into the Schutzstaffel). Though on the other side, the Trumplings have mastered the Kundgebungen, or huge political rallies.

This is what the Scholastics predicted, when they considered the arguments for democracy: that while it looked plausible enough on paper, it could only lead to gang warfare, pulling apart each nation where it flourished. They could not, however, imagine the contribution of mass media. They were more concerned with the effects of politicization on the individual human soul, thus instinctively defended Church and Crown (or Republic, so long as it was not democratic).

Unlike us, they cared about freedom; but about “equality,” not at all — the concept itself being too ridiculous to consider.

My belated advice (to myself), not to watch “the news,” now that it has become a largely pornographic horrorshow, might be taken “literally.” It is the occasion of sin, but not sin itself. More vital, whether watching or not, is to be unmoved by it; to not let its crazy-making make you crazy. If there is nothing one can do about what is “breaking” — whether in Pakistan or around the corner — do nothing and be content with that. (Petitions and commenting campaigns don’t work, and are a pointless distraction from important household tasks, such as darning your socks and washing the laundry.)

Of course, should God suddenly provide something one can do, to defeat obvious madness, just do it in a calm and reasonable way. For He isn’t interested in your opinions, either; only in what your opinions are doing to you.

A correspondent in Alberta — Baggins the Pharmacist — writes on the subject of Joy. It has perhaps been overlooked, in the media and elsewhere.

He does not try to analyze Joy, in our modern manner, of formula-seeking. The subject is too simple for that. Everyone knows what Joy is, including those who deny knowing. I have written myself about this flip side of arrogance and wilful ignorance: for we not only claim to know what we don’t know, we also claim not to know what we do know, in this world around us. Examine the inside of your own head, and you may distinguish true Joy from its surrogates and proxies; quite easily, in fact.

Baggins is concerned with Joy in the choice of attachments. By attachments he might include everything from friends to consumer durables; to ideas and opinions and beliefs and commitments. His criterion for judgement is, “Does it spark Joy?”

I am reminded of my discovery of T. E. Hulme, in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a long time ago. Among his works was a “Critique of Satisfaction.” Hulme tries very hard to be vulgar; in some ways he succeeds; while breaking through various intellectual, verily philosophical, obstacles or alternatives to Joy. Each he confronts with the question, “In what way is this satisfying?” I (then an atheist) could see that his argument was leading straight to God. And that it was irresistible.

In the end we can’t do with half-measures. They are not, anyway, where we began, which was in an absolute state of Being. Birth itself is no half-way: we already Were. And the capacity for Joy was within us. We grind away at an indestructible whole; it is still there for all our grinding.

Baggins looks back in his mental closet, to his stacks of old shoe boxes, containing “the little trash and trinkets of past lives and past modes of thought, past judgements, and past sins.” Is it time to dispose of them yet? Need he continue to carry them along? Do they spark Joy?

For instance, the accumulated daily wads of his “spin and opinions”?

“So months ago, I unhooked from Satellite TV, and all news programmes because they were all a near occasion of sin. I simply no longer accept any form of “streaming” infotainment or fake news — which is almost everything that passes for ‘news’ these days. Yet I am no Luddite by any stretch.” … He now finds fairly joyful things, even on the Internet.

The young Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, Albanian as one might guess, felt one day that she was drawn to God, perhaps called to be a Catholic nun. Intelligent and sceptical, she went to an intelligent nun for advice, on what to make of her “feelings,” on how “a calling” might be discerned. She was asked a simple question, which might be translated, “Does it spark Joy?” (Off to Ireland, first. Later she became Mother Teresa of Calcutta.)

We live, most of us, the life of Hallowe’en, “secularized” or desanctified from ancient religious practice, with results that may be seen. But now All Saints and All Souls have arrived. There is much to put behind us — so much “Hallowe’en” for the trash — but looking forward, how shall we be guided? What of the criterion of Joy?