Essays in Idleness

It has come to my attention that Britain has a new prime minister, BoJo the Clown (known to his friends as “Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson”). I gather Mrs Maybe, previously raised to that office under some gender equality programme I suspect, didn’t work out. Mr BoJo has already been criticized for having unkempt blond hair (and small eyes, I have noticed). Too, he was educated at Oxford University, which is still somewhat élite. He was able to use the word anaphora in a sentence (here), and shares with Churchill (and Trump) an ebullience, a buoyant exuberance, that his enemies invariably discount to their cost. He is a reminder that one man (and I have named three) can change the course of history, and the fate of nations.

Not necessarily for the better, of course.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Member of Parliament for North East Somerset, is suddenly elevated from the backbenches to the front bench; from persistent articulate rearguard rebel, to House Leader in the Mother of Parliaments; and, Lord President of the Council.

Born to rule (the son of an editor of The Times), the now right honourable gentleman stands as a throwback to 1529, when the last indigenous Catholic was appointed to that office. (Though I am not entirely clear what were the Privy Council arrangements under Good Queen Mary, before the return to Erastian apostasy under Bad Queen Bess.)

Not merely a Conservative but a member of the party’s (“Faith, Flag, and Family”) Cornerstone Group, and a diligently practising Roman Catholic with forty children or so, Rees-Mogg has already made a mark in his new rôle, by imposing rules of style and civility upon his staff, if not the Tory caucus, the British nation, worldlings, &c. Extremely useful, and ought to be widely leaked.

Mr BoJo, too, was christened a Catholic, though it has not so far had much effect. He has rabbinical Jewish and infidel Turk antecedents, too, and learnt Anglican hymns at Eton. He is thus a kind of one-stop shop for nominal Abrahamic associations, but to the point, the Orangemen of Ulster are already calling him “England’s first Catholic prime minister” — and what’s good enough for Belfast is good enough for me.

So … (Rees-Mogg says never begin a sentence with this word.) … After nearly five hundred years of absence without leave, can England be walked back to Rome? …

Pourquoi pas? I ask you.

The young daughter of a close friend, watching some royal wedding on TV, asked her mother about the affiliation of Westminster Abbey. The announcer said it was Anglican, but this little girl said it sure looked Catholic to her. Her mother quickly explained about the Reformation; how the Abbey was built by the True Church, but expropriated by the demonic Henry VIII, &c.

After puzzling on this for a moment, the wee daughter inquired: “So why don’t we storm it and take it back?”

Another example, I should say, of ebullience; we can’t really know what is possible till we try.

Western Civ is in decline, I am told (plausibly). Our societies have been “secularized,” and the great majority of Europeans and Americans no longer even pretend to be Catholic.

So why don’t we storm them?

Curiosity, of the kind that kills cats, makes it impossible for me to ignore Pew reports on the “state of the meejah.” You see, I used to be in that disreputable trade. The report I just perused filled me with anxiety; the uncomfortable thought that I am an idler, wantonly wasting my time. Still, all work and no play would make David a dull boy.

Allow me to shock gentle reader by reporting that newspaper circulations are lower than before, and advertising revenues are shrinking. Single copy sales are down to 1940 levels in the Natted States Merica, it sez here. This doesn’t strike me as necessarily alarming for the owners, for a lot of newspapers were sold back then. Surely there are still profits to be made.

However, as I am reminded by consulting a copy of the Brooklyn Eagle from that year, three-quarters of the pages were ads. (I still read physical newspapers, but instead of newsstands I buy them in flea markets. I find newspapers aged at least half a century more informative and interesting than the ones published today.)

Moreover, the pages were wide: much space allotted to classified ads in agate type and yet, a lot of tightly-spaced “news,” too, and hardly any pointless “features.” In word-count, vastly more than any current daily journal, whose ad-free pages are mostly filled with large photographs and irrelevant headlines to serve as captions for them.

No journalist seems to have thought of it, but I suspect that a contributing cause of plunging sales might be that the market has perceived a total waste of money — now that fish is wrapped in cellophane. Even the reader hoping for soft pornography will find much better on the Internet, for free.

I’m not finished with the Pew Research Centre yet. We also learn that passive television watching is in decline, and Internet news, too. Radio is ill. News reporting is overall fading away, except “cable news” channels, which seem to be holding their own for the moment, thanks to viewers who absurdly love Trump, or pathologically hate him. There are other indications: that voters are less and less informed, even of the lies, the empty bull and posturings that constitute our democratic life. News is now entirely a failing entertainment industry, that had replaced such bloodsports as cockfighting; though it has become more fully an outlet for the deadly sin of Wrath.

All good, so far as I can see. The belief in “progress” requires constant punishment, and people can be relied upon to do it to themselves.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Pew, we learn that the Catholic Church is losing members evermore quickly in Europe and America, together with all other Christian churches. My own guess is that this is for the same reason that newspapers are collapsing. Little of significance happens in a contemporary church; just the usual “politically correct” prattle from a pulpit, to a stripped-down auditorium without upholstered seats. Church attendance has fallen below 1940 levels: “daily and Sundays” both way down.

People aren’t much interested in the news from Heaven any more. But they aren’t much interested in the news from Earth, either.

More generally: people aren’t much interested, today.

The word “culture” is one of countless that have changed meaning over the years. From what one does for oneself — acquire something by one’s own assiduous efforts — it has instead become what is done to you. The culture is taken to install itself. Some variation on “the culture made me do it” is used as the presumptive excuse when overriding moral principles, which can be dismissed as “so yesterday.” Thinking things through is disparaged, and in a reverse of logic, false premisses are substituted for those that were demonstrably true.

Christopher Dawson made this observation — about the evolution of “culture” as a “cultural” term — in passing, about sixty years ago. I reflect that the phenomenon befits a “trend,” that has been passing through our “culture” from the French Revolutions of the 18th century to the French Revolutions of the 20th. A “culture” has become an animate thing, with a soul and a will, like a person. It has also become a vacuous, irrational force, such that a “multiculture” can also be a (singular) thing. Happily, the older use of the term has survived in some instances. One may still say that a person is cultured, or has acquired a cultural substance of some kind (such as the ability to read with attention). This, we might surmise, is a concession of “the culture” (now using the word in its contemporary sense).

What happens, gentle reader may ask, in a Petri dish? If one is a bacteriologist (or other real, ensouled, wilful person), one may use it to culture cells. The Petri dish itself, while real, is without soul or will. A culture can be said to form within the dish, but it is the product of chemical and physical mechanisms, which the scientist wishes to manipulate. The elevation of culture to a noun was illicit. It was a misappropriation of our intellectual resources.

I mention this because “artificial intelligence,” with all the misconceptions that it carries, has been sneaking into our cosmology. We claim to create something that, more carefully considered, pre-existed: the natural materials and forces that we manipulated. It may be that an advanced computer, specially programmed and focused over time, can beat Garry Kasparov in a game of chess. But the computer uses great electronic power, stored memory of innumerable moves, the means to search a vast database, &c — to defeat a guy with no “artificials” whose brain is functioning on one-fifth the power of a light bulb (less than 20 watts). Moreover, if he tried to do what the computer is doing, Kasparov would be disqualified for cheating.

The machine lacks soul, will, or consciousness, though it can be endowed with an appearance of such things — by human design. With the advance of technology the illusions grow. As I write, there are people cowering in fear of what Artificial Intelligence will do, including business lords of the tech sector, and by all means they should disconnect machines which they can’t philosophically understand.

But they don’t scare me — except in the sense that a crocodile or a skunk could scare me. A robot has no bad will, and cannot acquire one. Only its programmer can achieve the exalted state of malice. The robot may work on deterministic principles; the mad scientist certainly does not.

We live in an age of superstition and credulity in which, generally, abstractions from abstractions become gods, and even abstractions from them can be worshipped. The class politics of Marxism made this respectable among malicious intellectuals, but Marx was undergirded by Hegel and Hegel by the vaguely or precisely Cartesian project that undergirds modernity. History is taken to be governed by laws not unlike gravity, electromagnetism, or the strong and weak nuclear forces; except, thanks to their objective “material” existence, things like gravity are not actually worshipped, merely obeyed. The supposed fundamental historical forces — the gods who created the “cultures,” as it were — are, in the end, quite artificial spiritual constructions.

From the Devil, if you ask me.

By way of making a long Idlepost short, dreams — whether good ones or bad ones — are quite powerless. Work is what gets things done on this planet. Pharaoh didn’t get the Pyramids built on dreams. He employed, or more pointedly enslaved one hundred thousand worker bees, according to Herodotus. It is the same for our modern, democratically-elected “nation builders,” raising monuments to themselves. Someone has to do the work, someone has to pay.

There is no free lunch, and there are no free pyramids.

I was dreaming this morning as I woke of some vast white elephant scheme for which I, apparently, was responsible. Needless to say it was turning belly up, and I was in receipt of criticism for my tendency to ruthless incompetence. There was something in the air about a Moon Shot, easily explained by today’s anniversary.

John F. Kennedy had a dream — plus the power to commandeer huge resources. Martin L. King had a dream — that hasn’t quite worked out yet, so far as I can judge from the American meejah. Someone else had a dream, according to an old snake-oil pamphlet I consulted yesterday. There are multiple dreamers in this morning’s news — all expecting someone else to pay. I predict, when they don’t, each dreamer will get very stroppy.

That’s why taxes were invented — to make the worker bees work, or pay for things they would never support, voluntarily. Some of those things might actually be for their own good, but such endeavours almost always consist of stopping someone else’s dream from happening. In retrospect, they are never appreciated, for no one gives points when something doesn’t happen. Alas, only the fully grown are likely to comprehend this.

Are there any grown-ups, today?

The manned landing on the Moon made a fine entertainment, and a poignant memory. (See here.) What it cost has now washed under the bridge. I would not dream of trying to change the past. At most I might wish to change the future: put some screeching breaks on it, perhaps.

I have no objection to anyone who would send astronauts to distant orbs, so long as his recruits know what they’re doing, and the entrepreneur has the means to pay. My approval might come a bit quicker if they want to launch less sexy, high-tech wee little unmanned probes, “to see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”

But if you want to spend fifty or five hundred or five thousand times more to put a man down there (and a woman won’t be any cheaper), I’m not standing in your way. Who knows what the return might be on an investment like that? The prospective space pioneer could do a whip-round at ye pub to collect his first billion or two; then see if the banks will accept his collateral.

Our own world will show some modest sign of maturity when the banks decline. Or later, when they foreclose on him.

The most beautiful coal mine in the world is, by general consensus, shaft 12 of the Zollverein works in Essen, Germany. Alas, it is no longer in production — the do-gooders closed it in 1993 — but now even Unesco counts it among “World Heritage Sites.” In 1932, near the end of the Weimar Republic, the architects Schupp and Kremmer achieved a glorious vindication of the “objective functional” design ethic, in poured concrete and tiles, red steel and trusses; the unforgettable façade of the Boiler House, and the sublime Winding Tower which became an international symbol of German engineering.

Gentle reader could, were he interested, dig out of the Internet (with some help from Google Translate if necessary) the whole history of industrial production along the Ruhr, going back deep into the Middle Ages; and centuries later, of the coal, coking, and steel-making enterprise “Zollverein,” named to celebrate the German customs union of 1834. (It helps if you were the son of an industrial designer, raised in appreciation of such things; and your mother was from the coalfields of Cape Breton. More still, if your first love was for a girl from Essen.)

Coal is a metal, and it is not a metal; both points can be decisively proved. Because it has been used almost exclusively as a fuel, through the centuries, becoming a cheap commodity associated with dismal work conditions and pollution, it is not held in much esteem. Too, since the strength and skills required to mine, refine, distribute and use this substance are unambiguously masculine, it is disparaged in our toxically feminist culture. It is considered “unclean” not only physically but new-age spiritually. The many millions of unambiguous males who still work in the coal-centred industries — for instance “stoking” a form of electricity generation that provides several hundred times more power than the output of our bird-slaughtering windmills — are themselves trolled by all progressive politicians, who gloat at every prospect of putting them and their families out of their livelihoods.

I love coal, as a material in itself, and long treasured a lustrous black nugget of nearly pure carbon polished anthracite, that came to me in a Christmas stocking — hung by a fireplace nearly sixty years ago. It was a lasting reminder to me that coal is an extremely precious thing; a divine gift. In chemical and physical analysis we are only beginning to understand its remarkable properties, and its potential for use far beyond building water heat to spin turbines. Notwithstanding, sans sulphur and the more immediate volatiles, slow-burned at high temperatures, it can indeed spin those turbines smokelessly; and can itself be spun in extraordinary carbon-fibrous ways.

The greatest disaster in education today, is the loss of that explicitly Christian conception of a God-created universe and planet. It enhanced the merely empirical reason, directing our attention to the very miracles that the modern, post-humanized world denies, and mocks. It provided a vision of the bottomlessly precious, from the smallest atomic scale to the farthest we can see, and was unquestionably the reason Christian, Western man took his commanding place in the world’s transformation. This had nothing whatever to do with geography or race. It had everything to do with a way of looking upon Creation — in Plato’s transcendental terms of the good, the true, and the beautiful; in Aristotle’s glimmering of a prime mover over-pinning logic; in the ancient Hebrew meeting-place of God and Man.

Let it be understood that coal is precious; that the ancient bio-matter compacted into coal was, and actually remains, precious; that all matter and much beyond matter, all life, is precious here below — under the titanic furnace of the sun. Then can we begin to see how precious is that Special Creation, beyond miracle, of every human soul.

Having been told many times that I’m not welcome here; that I should go back where I came from; that if I came from here I should nevertheless leave the country; or that I should recede in time, and go fix the problems of the 13th century; or move to any other century that will have me; … hooo, do I empathize with “The Squad.” They, too, were told they should go home (to Somalia, or the Bronx, or wherever) and fix the problems there. It was a very hurtful comment. And made by Donald Trump, on Twitter. He is worse than Hitler.

Me, too, was a victim of racism; including chrono-racism, the worst kind. (There has been a genocide against all those born before the 20th century. They’re all dead now.) I was utterly traumatized, let me tell you — so much that, in several cases, I attempted a witty rejoinder. In others, I didn’t react at all. I waited for my fellow panelists to defend me. But they didn’t have the courage. They just sat there, like grinning idiots, pretending that nothing important had happened.

I get so outraged by Donald Trump, when he tweets what most of the population are thinking; until he says it and they line up to condemn him. He is such a racist. An anti-Semite, and what makes it worse, a Zionist and an Israel-lover. A guy making jobs more plentiful for Blacks and Hispanics, just to buy them off. (What a corrupt person!) An Orange Supremacist. He even has an estate in Florida.

A Fascist, who wants to enforce immigration laws. There are concentration camps all along the Mexican border now, with millions of people trying to get into them.

Why do you think people elected Trump? Because Vladimir Putin told them to do so. That’s what made them think he’d be okay. But he’s a Russian agent. Probably an Iranian agent, too.

Trump is putting tariffs on the poor, innocent, defenceless Red Chinese, so that we can’t buy them at Walmart any more. His wife is from Slovenia. He must have bought her in the slave market at Ljubljana, and smuggled her in Air Force One.

Time to impeach him: before he wins another election. And don’t wait another minute! For it could be a landslide next time.

In the factories that I own — all of which happen to be imaginary — the managers are instructed never to pay our workers more than they could make if they quit. Not much less, however, and we do after all pay bonuses to, e.g., those who have lots of children, and modest extras to those experiencing bad luck, too. There are also worker dividends at year-end. But, “paying attention” is what we try to do better than other employers. Alas, all this is complicated by our endless fights with the guvmint Tax and Labour Departments, and the Inspectors from the Department of Redundancy Department. In principle, however, we try to pay less.

This is to be sure that our staff are loyal. Which means, we have to be loyal to them.

We pay monthly, on the nail, never hourly; salaries not wages, as the accountants say. Some of the jobs are in effect piecework, but this is for work contracted out. Inside, work is performed by teams. No team has more than a dozen people, and each has a captain or foreman, often as not elected by his mates. They, in turn, form teams at the next level up, and so on hierarchically. But the focus is on the factory floor, for that’s where production actually happens, as opposed to ventilation and careerism. Working hours are approximate, and shifts are exchanged informally, but deadlines must be met, and persistent slackers can of course be fired. We do expect our foremen to be a little inspiring, though, and paternal in just the right way.

No enterprise is without internal strife, but I’ve found that this can be minimized if morale is kept high. Hence, the elimination of “production lines,” and the emphasis we place on the design not only of our products, but on the physical surroundings in which they are made. It is a little known fact that there is a trade-off between quality and “efficiency” (as statistically defined). As nothing we make is for the low, mass market, and nothing is ever marked down in price, we reverse the usual assumptions about economies of scale. That which hasn’t sold is withdrawn, shipped elsewhere or broken up for recycling. A lot of thought has gone into eliminating waste, especially the human waste of boredom.

True, our competitors hate us. That is because everything we make is the best of its kind — “twice the price but lasts ten times longer; classic style that won’t go out of date.” People told us this was a self-defeating economic strategy, but I’m here to tell you it works. (In my imagination.)

It further helps that we are not trying to dominate any of the markets in which we compete, only to hold our own. The intention is to cultivate steady, really satisfied customers, who trust our workmanship and integrity, and will stick with our goods from generation to generation; who “buy into the brand,” as it were.

The reason I’m so rich (in spirit) is that I learnt, early in life, that hardly anyone works just for the money, unless he is psychotically greedy, or desperate. Most wish to be around friends, who value them for what they do and are. Most would prefer a workplace that is beautiful, and joyous, to say nothing of safe. These are among the perqs we try to provide in all our firms, at Dominion Holdings.

“Community” is often advertised, but seldom delivered in modern life. I think, for instance, of our big car assembly plant, at Lakebottom, Ontario. It has a choir and orchestra. There are several field clubs, the gastronomical workshop in a company cafeteria, the factory gardens with so many volunteers. We have a gym and the rooftop race track, our hockey and baseball teams, the reading circles that meet in our library. There is the med clinic that can handle anything, with its free pharmacy.

A factory is also a school, according to some corporate adage, and gentle reader should see our in-house nursery and kindergarten, our night and apprenticeship classes, the exhibits of models and drawings and even fine art that are scattered about. There are research facilities within the factory “campus,” and workers with bright ideas are quite welcome there (we have a very busy patent lawyer). Many are drawn to the attached garage, in which we restore old cars and trucks for a hobby, while rediscovering lost craft skills. The finest interior in the whole complex, according to me, is the Latin-mass church, dedicated to Saint Eloi (after whom the company was named); though some prefer the smaller meditative “non-denom” chapel for our Protestant, Buddhist, and Novus Ordo staff. One of our managers is also a rabbi.

It is not true that, if you build a better mouse-trap, the world will beat a path to your door. But neither is it true that advertising can save the inferior mouse-trap manufacturer. As any Trump could tell you, the trick is to get people talking, and the less it costs you, the more it pays back. Good faith, good will, and good humour are the watchwords of our publicity operation, and (in my imagination) it seems to be working well enough.

My readings in mediaeval economic history peaked when I was given an assignment, a few years ago, by some newspaper chain that happened to be employing me. They were planning a celebration of Capitalism to delight their pro-business readers, and wanted to regurgitate the cliché iteration of a much-disproved thesis about the “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” that Max Weber (1864–1920) never held. I, on the contrary, wanted to resist it. I sent in a draught manuscript on the development of trade finance, double-entry bookkeeping, brand management, and industrial production in mediaeval Florence and across pre-modern Europe, to make clear that this thesis, associating the birth of “capitalism” with the Protestant Reformation, was fanciful diddly-squat. My manuscript was neither returned, nor published. It was off-message.

A ludicrous belief in “modern progress” is shared by ideologues both Left and Right, and has been since the European Enlightenment. Both assume that “business,” and “science,” were inventions of modern people — freethinking, self-starting, emancipated — casting off the shackles of religious tyranny and dark superstition that had constrained all generations before. People much like themselves. By simply ignoring the evidence of history — rather as modern media simply ignore news unless it fits their agenda — an alternative world can be constructed. This is a world in which the heroes are all “liberators” of one kind or another, setting their necks against the ignorant, malevolent, self-serving villains, trying to sustain feudalism, slavery, tradition.

The end justifies the means, in progressive pedagogy, and so the endless repetition of bald yet mediocre lies can be justified. The progressive is by definition “on the side of history,” a cause so irreproachably good that pious fraud may be used to advance it. Naturally, the spokesman for progress accuses his opponents of doing exactly what he would do. Over time, realities are forgotten, progress triumphs over its foes, and a brave new world prevails until the catastrophe in which it collapses.

We are governed by superstition today. I realize this at each appearance of a new diet fad, each vomit of statistics, each announcement of the latest findings of one branch of scientism or another — that another progressive embolism has ensconced itself in a vein of the human body politic. A new witch-hunt is about to launch, against a new villain who deserves “zero tolerance.”

Our safety depends on the immediate rejection of anything that is presented as progressive. Suppress the contagion of Progress, before it kills us all.

We (in the sense of “I”) drop hints from time to time that we are “reactionary,” or otherwise indisposed to the contemporary social, economic, and political order. (There are local variations, but it’s basically all the same.) Sometimes we even explain ourself. There was an example the other day when we extolled discipline over the pigsty consumerism that passes for freedom in what is described as an “open society,” … and duty over “human rights.” Indeed, our rights, if any, must be dependent upon our duties, and not vice versa. Or so we hold: a typically reactionary position.

Verily, I recently confronted a kindly, well-educated, dreamy liberal, by declaring that, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your axiology.”

He replied, smartly, “So now who is the totalitarian dreamer?”

Enflamed, I accused him of being a Kantian deontological goody-two-shoes.

He then rudely accused me of consequentialism. The matter was resolved by ordering another pint.

But will the ceasefire last? For while I’m counting neglected values, I am reminded that so many, buried since the time of the Second World War, must, like Elvis, have secretly survived. Today’s radically progressive factions have gone to the trouble of digging them up for posthumous execution again and again, as if they were the corpse of Pope Formosus. Dead, perhaps, but one can hardly say forgotten.

One might think, for instance, that such sanctities as those of life, and of the family, had been sufficiently slain by the overthrow of laws against e.g. abortion and sexual perversion, half a century ago. Nothing, or hardly anything was left to discourage open living on the wild side. But the body of Western Civ is now disinterred at intervals of a decade or less, to be freshly dismembered. We progress from tolerance of these evils, to “zero tolerance” for any who refuse to affirm them.

I read in the e-papers that a fourteen-year-old child in Scotland can now be expelled from school for maintaining that there are only two sexes. There are at least ten items like this every morning I descend into “the news”; for some reason this one struck me as memorable.

Perhaps it was nostalgia. I was almost hounded out of school myself, at that age — and by my fellow students — for arguing that children ought to be spawned in test tubes, checked for eugenic quality before hatching, and raised in state-of-the-art child factories. My colleagues in learning did not realize that I was attempting satire. My point was, this is the way the world is going. I did not yet realize that drollness is against the law in Canada. I was called down to see a vice-principal and asked to explain my views, and how they could not be a challenge to peace, order, and good government. But I was not expelled. The downside was that I wanted to be, for the school was very boring.

There are now government quizzes in Canada to expose “two-sex” believers. I recommend that those beaded try a pseudo-Jesuitical subterfuge. Rather than admitting the charge, say: “Yes, there must be as many sexual orientations as there are people, but still I have some difficulty with this, because I can only count to two.”

After rereading this, I rewrote it entirely.

*

Man the Rebel often complains that he don’t get no respect. This is the theme of innumerable stories in the mainstream meejah: demand for laws that will force silence on the critics of the Great Rebellion, and more, make them praise and give deference to the revolutionary vanguard, and their latest innovations. This is the deference of command, the Deference of Fear: show me respect because I can hurt you. Verily, Comrade must show the right attitude towards his progressive betters. Gentle reader will guess that I don’t approve of it or him.

To this I would juxtapose the Deference of Love, which is respect freely given. The recipient of this complaisance, “submission,” or in the old sense, condescension, is judged to be worthy. He does not become worthy for something that he does, such as expressing the correct political opinions. Rather he is worthy in himself, for what he is — say, a creature made in the image of God.

The appreciation of a relation between deference and condescension has been, so far as I can see, abandoned. It assumed hierarchy, which always exists in nature, including human nature. To the rebel against the Creator of nature, however, this cannot be right. Humans must be the product of social construction, or human engineering, so that by reverse engineering we can be taken back to zero, or re-purposed. Our ruler can make us, for instance, interchangeably “equal,” each one with each other. Through biological improvement, he can remove any impediment to our doing his will. We can become what Stalin called the “New Soviet Man,” except, the distinction between male and female has also been erased in the new party line, and those who still insist upon it are now eligible for legal punishments.

But as gentle reader may recall, I am a backward and regressive beast, who still recognizes things like “up” and “down”; and I retain the notion of a kindly regard towards my social inferiors, if I can find any. It was, according to the old system of consciousness, possible to show deference even to one’s servant, or a used car salesman. One did not have to elevate one’s inferior, or change him in any way. One had only to acknowledge a fellow human being.

The reason civic freedom was the unique invention of “western,” Christian society, is this peculiar notion that all humans are not equal, but immortal. There is much to be said for caste systems, but in principle we have no untouchable, or subhuman classes. For Christ is all in all, and as He indicated, what ye have done to the least of the brethren, “ye have done it unto me.” This was a very shocking view, to the ancients, though it did follow naturally from the older, Hebrew teaching. The Pagans generally thought it was crazy; and they’re beginning to think it is crazy again.

So very well, we’re crazy. The arrogance with which we appropriate from the least of these brethren counts not against them, but against us. Deference to persons necessarily extends to what belongs to them. (This is why, exempli gratia, “planning authorities,” with the power to expropriate, are an unmitigable evil; at least according to me.)

Deference, I think, has been dying in our society, to the degree that we recognize only the deference of command — saluting our superiors in worldly power, and that out of Fear. But our command from Christ was actually, “Fear not.” For rather it is the Deference of Love, that underlies all harmonious order.

Speaking with a gentleman who vends in a neighbourhood farmers’ market, I learnt something interesting, and probably true. Surviving family farms usually lack “organic” credentials. This is because getting them, from the bureaucracies that dispense them, is an immensely time-consuming process, and involves costs that would erase most of the little farmer’s profits. You have to be a big, faceless, industrial concern to afford the official “organic” labels that sucker big city consumers into paying double for essentially the same goods. That the whole system is massively corrupt, can almost go without saying. It was designed to be.

By coincidence, the same day my eye caught, by accident on the Internet, the announcement of a Green Award to a big car assembly “park.” They had changed all the light bulbs in their factory buildings, thus saving themselves a few thousand dollars on their multi-million electric bill, and seem to have installed new toilets, too. This sprawling high-tech carriage works remains three hundred acres of unspeakable aesthetic horror, in which human beings are enslaved to machines. But now it is “Green.”

Gentle reader may find his own examples of this sort of systemic fraud: they are everywhere. Conversely, he may look for integrity under every stone, and sometimes I hope he will find it. But big business and its enabling big guvmint are a cynical affair.

The environmental business — currently buoyed by unprovable, often fatuous claims of anthropogenic global warming — is perhaps the most cynical. It has spawned vested interests on a global scale, that will not be overturned by occasional exposure. At its heart is the manipulation of statistics, and scare-mongering through compliant mass media. The general public are hypnotized by repetition. I have noticed in desultory dips into the news that e.g. anomalous weather will invariably be attributed to “climate change,” when more plausible explanations are easily at hand.

This zombification extends to most other areas of reportage: invisible bogeys blamed for imaginary trends. Solutions to “environmental problems” are proposed that will not make the slightest dent in them.

A leading example is electrification. It is true that fossil-fuel burning contributes significantly to whatever — chiefly plant growth through increase in planetary carbon dioxide. We want “clean energy” instead, and propose to get it through megaproject, bird-killing solar and wind arrays. To date, these virtue-signalling technologies have contributed a share to the world’s electricity generation that works out to well under 1 percent. With technical improvements, by the end of the century, perhaps this may rise to 2 percent, though on the face of things I doubt it.

But nuclear power, most easily in the form of molten salt reactors (on which research was killed fifty years ago), could replace most uses of coal, oil, and gas within a decade, through much smaller facilities eliminating huge transmission costs. It would be the cheaper because the fuels are readily available to start in the form of recycled nuclear waste, and the raw materials would be abundantly available thereafter.

On the question of safety, the death toll from mining, drilling, hydro dams, &c, is quite considerable — in the tens of thousands at least, post-War. Except for Chernobyl (one of many Soviet-era environmental disasters), the death toll from nuclear accidents remains about nil. No one died at Three Mile Island. Not one death was caused by the flooded Fukushima reactors (though well over twenty thousand were killed by the tsunami that caused the difficulty there).

In short, “clean energy” is not a problem. It had to be made into one by the fright campaigns of the environmentalcases, whose own power and income depends on sustaining the problem, and preventing the most obvious solutions.

Notice that I have shut up this year for Dominion Day. One might know what I think of the splendid anniversary, since it was shallowly renamed “Canada Day,” by reading any of the dozen or more items I wrote for appearance on the 1st of July, over the last few decades. Or go read George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965), which still approximates to my point de vue, and will likely approximate to it forever.

And my heart will leap for the Canada into which I was born — a decent, Christian country — et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae — from the days before it was occupied by aliens from some passing asteroid.

God save the Queen.