Essays in Idleness

“If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you. …  If you had been of the world …” it would have been different.

You could have sold out quite profitably. It wouldn’t appear to you that you were selling out, for you would long since have been of the devil’s most popular party, and the commands and arguments of such as Jesus Christ would have drummed upon your deaf ears.

So it goes — among the thousands of Catholic parents who will come out today and tomorrow to protest the “Pride” flags that flutter above the province’s Catholic schools. The school boards approved them, and much other propaganda, from their desire to be fashionably demonic, or from cowardice in the face of their confident enemy.

Most know very well that this view is taken in direct defiance of consistent Catholic (and Christian, and all other religious) teaching through the centuries to the present day; and that the children over whom they have temporary legal custody will be twisted or scandalized. But they also know that they have the power to do what they please; that the funding has been appropriated from the parents themselves; that the legislation upon which Ontario’s Catholic schools were founded is a dead letter.

If Catholic parents want their children educated in Catholic beliefs, they must set up their own schools — again. And have them taken over or shut down, again, by the agents of progress.

The children graduate into a “brave new world,” where the traces of Christian civilization have been erased. They will be taught to hold their parents in contempt, and to rebel against all “old-fashioned” moral discipline. Their personalities become glib and smug — except where they have reasoned their way into older and wiser positions, against the peer pressure.

But there is hope in this. The “Pride” flag represents madness. It cannot sustain itself over time. There will be terrible wreckage, but in the end, sanity and goodness will hear its voice again.

Among the advantages of major cardiac surgery — in addition to the marvellous paranoid-but-amusing dreams you get, and time off work — is a more fatalistic and accommodating view of the squalor and wretchedness of one’s community (mostly outside the hospital). It is just as urgent as it seemed before, and likely going to Hell — but urgent for whom? And going to Hell on what schedule? One feels strangely aloof from the multiple crises, just as one is strangely attracted to the most transient surviving beauties.

I came out in an Ontario still “reeling” from the Batflu hysteria. The ability of politicians and their appointed public health experts to maintain the panic, and spread it through a majority of the population, is impressive, in a way. Their destruction of the Canadian economy will have real consequences, even for them. But what can an individual do about it?

For in a formerly free country, “the peeple” have no say that is not manipulated, or ignored. The individual expecting justice will not find it when the monopolists of justice have no interest in allowing it.

The Batflu is the most current of public obsessions. From what I can see, the Chinese dictatorship is responsible both for how it was distributed, and how we should react to it through lockdowns. Yet the exercise was so successful (China comes out of it hardly damaged), that it will surely be the model for their future efforts.

But it isn’t the project that will send us to Hell. The modern world predates the Red Chinese tyranny by several centuries, and did little beyond making very evil regimes possible. The opposition to them is subverted by the growing number of glib distractions also supplied by the modern world.

Against which, the power of the individual is reduced to the farcical and counter-productive. We have only that, and God, with us; that God in whom the modern disbelieves, and mocks in most characteristic gestures. From this side, the prospect of recovery is hopeless.

Whereas, from the other side, in which the emptiness of the godless is visible, the agents of modernity are nothing. They perish. We can reasonably expect God, with his servants, to prevail in time.

In minor news from the front of the Batflu hysteria, Greyhound has surrendered its bus service in Canada. It has withdrawn from the whole country, removing bus routes and bus stations. It formerly had sufficient government connections to enjoy monopoly privileges on most of these, but now the company will only retain routes from several large Canadian cities to the United States. These may reopen when the borders do.

The “temporary” shut-down began just after “Covid.” The permanent closure is one of many now occurring, in small and family-owned businesses generally, but also some large, specialized service companies. Frankly, I am not able to keep up with the liquidation news, which is not covered by Canadian media, which has focused on “happy news” and medical scare stories since the Trudeau government made subsidies for reporting more or less universal. “Unhappy news” is only available from Small Dead Animals, Rebel News, and a few other enterprising websites which refuse the subsidies. Business stories rarely interest them, if they lack the buzz of scandal.

No scandal followed the buses. The market had been dying out, thanks to the proliferation of private automobiles, and passenger-sharing schemes. The value of a rural bus, to make single users independent and car-owning unnecessary, is never mentioned. There is a shrinking official train service, the passenger part of which burns money wildly.

But actual “environmental” policies cannot be considered. Each invariably “impacts” a very small portion of the population, and in a modern democracy, the individual has only theatrical rights.

Before being released from the Ontario hospital system, the medical authorities did me the favour of diagnosing several supplementary conditions. I have for instance “Diabetes Two,” and Cataracts. That way I assured them of return visits; and with the cardiac surgery itself, there was already the promise that my relationship with doctors would not consist of sheer gratitude.

It almost did, and in my view, the Toronto General is, despite many government efforts to merge it into mediocrity, among the world’s greatest hospitals. But there comes a point where its customer has outstayed his welcome; and then, he must be loaded into a panel truck without suspension and delivered to some other hospital — where his treatment can be more tedious than in the halls of the General’s ICU.

Cardiac restrictions ban salt; diabetic restrictions ban sugar. Plenty of other things are denied — alcohol and tobacco hardly needed to be listed — but diabetes adds more or less constant blood-sugar testing, with the prospect of being poked with needles. Still, salt and sugar alone between them can devastate eating habits; so can the prospect of a diabetic coma, and the promise of further strokes.

But it is not clear, from the Canadian “lifestyle,” why death should be so neurotically avoided.

As I was reminded on the outside, the medicalization of Canadian life had already achieved unpredictable accomplishments. The Batflu Hysteria had advanced as far in Ontario as in Cuba, or Red China, and our simpleton premier was in a panic, locking down businesses and cancelling public events for the Third Wave. In most other, non-Canadian jurisdictions the panic seems to have passed after only two waves, but Canada is special. The demand for freedom here does not exist, except from a few hotheads in Montreal.

But medicalization certainly exists, as one sees from within the cocoon of professional medical treatment. It continues everywhere. “Safety first” is our national motto, and it enters the human animal with his nutrition.

That the “personal is the political” was a piece of leftwing bafflegab that was first presented to my ears in High School — now more than half a century ago. It is what I would call, awkwardly no doubt, “a revision.” The word will be generally misunderstood, and might be taken as a revision itself. To revise something sounds like a harmless activity, and carries an implication of improvement. To tamper with the meanings of words and common phrases is to be “progressive” in some way.

Yet what one is doing is not. One is not replacing one definition with another, that has for better or worse a new meaning or nuance. (This may be necessary when circumstances change, and what one is describing has itself changed, however subtly.) In such cases, the old meaning survives, as a kind of ghost within the new machinery. Rather, one is negating the old meaning; sabotaging, or cancelling it.

Let it not be replaced. The word itself comes to mean anything. Slowly it is transformed not only into the opposite of its “narrow” previous meaning, by linguistic habit with a memory of what it meant, but a neurotic compulsion to turn it over. But eventually it assumes the opposite of meaning, altogether. It now means “whatever.”

By linguistic habit, the “personal” was previously the opposite of the “political.” This could be easily grasped, by the sane. The opposition of the two terms created a barrier between them; it was an invisible wall or border. Tear it down, and you don’t have a wall in a different place. You have no wall.

Most of our modern innovations are like this, even in manufacturing. Where once we, more or less, universally subscribed to contrasts and oppositions between things, reinforced “by nature,” we are now just as universally at sea.

Consider “male” and “female.”

These two categories are still accepted by most people who understand English, or other languages; but they are accepted as meaningless or (another word that has been “revised”) “controversial.” The distinction is being actually suppressed. But it isn’t being revised to something — new and strange — but instead erased. Girls, for instance, continue to be girls, but aren’t, simultaneously. They have become “whatevers” — something else. But nothing specific. The same sort of thing happened to boys. For that matter it goes for mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, daughters, sons, and so forth — distinctions now formally taken out of laws.

Feminism is often blamed for this. But while I would not endorse feminists in any way, I don’t think they can be held responsible. After all, feminists were ideologues who favoured women; but this is a movement that erases women.

I wouldn’t speak with confidence about intentions. If the definitions were being replaced, even systematically, I would suspect a “revolutionary” movement. But it is easier to have a revolution — which is after all something purposeful — without tampering with such phrases. It leaves everyone confused about what you are demanding.

The intention of “revision,” in my limited sense, is deeper. It goes towards the bottom of human experience — indeed, beneath the bottom — and touches on the insane.

My mother visited me in the hospital. I was delighted to see her, but not what you would call surprised. This was soon after my by-pass operation, when the anaesthetic had not worn off. Mama had died eight years before, as I was vaguely aware. She was with my aunt, Mildred, who died thirty-two years ago.

The nurse, Harvey, came to say they were here to see me. He would clean me up first, for I was rather a mess. In fact, I seemed to be in a giant wheelchair, with bedding, my hands pinned; and I was at the edge of a steep tunnel. All the people below me — doctors and nurses and “support staff” — were moving about busily, but walking sideways as if the walls were floors, or upside-down as if the ceilings were. Those in my vicinity were correctly oriented, however.

Eventually I was wheeled to my mother and aunt. They were chatting cheerfully with each other; almost ignoring me. But then mama turned to me, with words of advice. These didn’t make sense to me, for I’d asked to have my hands released, and perhaps for a sip of water; not for what sounded like passages from Origen and Augustine. Could mama get me out of here? Apparently not.

There were so many questions I would have liked to ask, but I could not think of them. For instance, how did they get in?

The episode was made the more plausible because the staff were all wearing the muzzles, headbands, and plastic face covers of hospital gear in the Batflu regime. My mother wasn’t, nor was my aunt. Yet, they were not self-conscious. Upon leaving, they seemed familiar with hospital corridors that puzzled me.

Reading Jacob Burckhardt at my leisure (enforced by physical and mental decline), together with other idle writers of history. I seem to have drifted to the view that we live in an Age of Revision. Not an Age of Revolution, as previously advertised, or at the forefront of Progress, as optimists continue to aver. Indeed, Burckhardt could be said to have partially predicted it.

Of course, it is difficult to know any history, and impossible to grasp universal history, for we would have to know where it begins and ends to say anything intelligent about it. As we depend on “outmoded” religious conceptions of why we are here, “theories of history” are the best we can do. These are uniformly silly, and more so as they become sophisticated. They are woven into the Age of Revision: the constant fluctuation of meaning. We can be “freed” of this only by accelerating the change of which we have an unwanted surplus.

Burckhardt pioneered the conception of our collective life, as consisting of three principal entities: the State, Religion, and Culture. (“Science” is a cultural thing, like pop or Gregorian music.) The more lively and recent historical sages (I think of Christopher Dawson) have largely worked within this scheme. It is serviceable, for it includes almost everything, and these are independent strata. None is permanently dominant.

In our Age of Revision, all three are in flux. Nothing can be relied upon. The task of making even transient sense of events, or facts, is sabotaged when even these become “relative,” or a matter of opinion. I have or had a general idea of what was going on in the world, but my scepticism even towards trusted sources has been growing, as I learn more about them.

For a fortnight or so I had the experience, in hospital under powerful drugs, of an Age of Revision in myself. I had dreams such as I had never had, including some which were frankly paranoid (though most contained comic reverses, which were fairly entertaining). Little fragments of real events and persons were worked into the narratives, often rather cleverly by my plot-composing mind. These dreams were different in kind from most, that are forgotten after waking. I still remember them, vividly, including those so plausible that I am still at pains to dismiss details and anecdotes.

This seems to me analogous to our present social (political, religious, and cultural) situation.