Essays in Idleness

Not everyone today can understand Charles Dickens’s formula for happiness:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

This is because the currency was decimalized, to make it more simple to misunderstand; or as I would say, decimated. We might suggest, for update, national revenue twenty trillion, national expenditure nineteen trillion point nine nine nine repeated, result happiness. National revenue twenty trillion, national expenditure forty-three trillion seven hundred and fifty-eight billion four hundred million and spare change, result misery. This merely extends the Dickensian reasoning. But few get it, and of those, fewer would do anything about it, including no (zero) politicians.

Our intellectual decline since the mid-XIXth century may be discerned even on the streets of Parkdale, where almost no one uses money any more, and almost everyone uses computer cards. (I tried to proffer cash, yesterday, and the fleshy young cashier was dumbfounded. My attempt to teach her to count also failed.)

The best folk songs (composed, some of them, just the day before yesterday) were, fairly consistently, modal, or in a modal style. This was a direct inheritance from the Middle Ages, as, generally, the rest of our music. Not everyone understood these songs, but most could sing and dance along with them. This was not the case once the world went (via tonal to) atonal.

Similarly, with the (gold and silver) mediaeval pounds, shillings, and pence in Mother England (and livres, sols, deniers, in Canada, too, in the olden days). There was no inflation, for centuries at a time. This was only interrupted when the ghastly criminal, Henry Tudor, seized the fiscal powers of state during Protestant Reformation; or when, later, gold began to be “phased out” by Keynesian economists. Our economy became modern, “atonal.”

My experience of rural India was: the poor are happy. But the indebted, hoooo, they live in misery, even when they have no idea how much they owe.

Apparently, there is a “debate” on tonight between two of the contenders for the American presidency; it has been flagged by the media, all over the world. I can’t see that anything can be learnt from this “debate,” which will be even less like an intellectual exchange than all the other “video” spectacles since Nixon-Kennedy (which I also did not watch, in 1960; we didn’t have a television when I was a child, in Pakistan). An immense amount of honest goodness could be had by not watching television back then; and not watching items on the Internet has followed in that fine tradition.

I did, however, watch the manned landing on the moon (in 1969). I was pleased to note that the Eagle did not crash, which I feared it might do. But whether Mr Biden crashes does not approach my bucket-list of curiosities.

It’s like losing weight. The only way to do this is to stop eating.

Gluttony, to start with. We might consider this the hors d’oeuvre. But then drunkenness, meanness, hypocrisy, and the love of money are added, in an environment cloyed with ugly social pretensions. For there is also corruption in human language, and the perversion of our creaturely sexuality, in ways that have not gone out-of-style through the last eight centuries. It is a lament by Nature, presented as a grand allegorical figure. At first this seems grim prospect for an evening’s entertainment.

I was reading the De planctu Naturae of Alain de Lille, the XIIth-century Latin satirist and philosophe, who fell into my withered XXIst-century hands. I have the “Dumbarton Oaks” edition of Alain’s literary works, which provides a text with modern translation on facing pages. However, one is compelled to wrestle with the Latin, because the English does not supply the wit, the humour, or the provocations that Alain was happily known for. By his contemporaries he was celebrated as the greatest genius since Adam.

He was not a scholastic, but nevertheless in the mystical-rational centre of Western thought; getting a whole chapter in Gilson’s History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, where he is placed in the context of the thrilling XIIth-century Renaissance. For, thanks only partly to the Crusades, Christendom had come into living contact with Islam, with a flourishing Judaism, and with the Albigensians who appeared from southern France less as a heresy than as a wildly successful third new religion.

Alain’s Art of Catholic Faith pioneers a Christian apologetics “to the Gentiles,” in this world that seems about to disintegrate in contradicting doctrines. It is the situation we are enjoying still today. God alone could deal with our multiple confusions.

Who is He? … In description, He is the perfect sphere, perfectly motionless, and perfectly simple, at the focus and simultaneously at the limitless circumference of our dancing life of forms. That an external Nature would make Complaint to this silent Authority — a complaint touching chiefly on us — is less spectacular than the Neoplatonic imagery descending from the De Trinitate of Boethius.

It is the “star wars” of metaphysics, that we have replaced with our humourless rocket-ships.

Toronto-Saint Paul’s is defined, among the political experts, as a “safe Liberal seat.” For one thing, it is in the middle of Toronto, where the Conservatives have no members. (The NDP occasionally wins ridings like Parkdale.) According to a pollster, who is (in my opinion) a Liberal party hack, if the Liberals were to lose Saint Paul’s, it would mean that there were no safe seats left for them in Canada. None is the same as zero, incidentally.

Late last night, we learned that the Liberals had lost Saint Paul’s.

It was just a by-election, however. Toronto’s electorate enjoys the kind of deep somnolence that is not permanently correctible. Its people are typical of urban voters everywhere: they are easily convinced by “progressive” fantasists, and environ-mental snake-oil salesmen. Hence, liberal-lefties control all the big-city municipal governments, and provide marionettes to all the national puppet theatres.  Those who voted against them will return to snoring mode after just a moment’s consciousness.

Put not your faith in men, to say nothing of princes, as the Psalmist anciently advised us. To trust in democracy is to have your faith in men, multiplied.

Yet we may hope for a breathing space, between “progressive” regimes. And as ever, we may hope for a good result in the end.

Along with toothache, the prospect for the West seems to have changed, slightly, with the European elections. I was surprised, not only by the media-reported shift to the “Far Right.” (This is media-speak for what is to the right of the Far Left.) In little country after little country (e.g. Germany, France, Italy) the composition of this “rightwing wave” has not-so-subtly altered, from past waves. The children who had (most recently) been voting Green, have now found another way to abandon the decaying socialist internationale; but also, to abandon traditional “conservative” allegiances (called “liberal” on the European mainland).

They don’t go to church any more, these “youff” — even to get married — and a worn, cynicized, observer might wonder if they have anywhere else to go, besides the occasional clown demonstration. They have opinions, to be sure, but these do not fluctuate within conventional categories. The semi-interesting thing is that the “youff vote” is politically expressed in trends of the TikTok culture. Party loyalty is replaced by personal “follows,” to the electronic acharyas, which crackle and go poof in the night.

More generally, the loyalty to institutions, whether of left or right, has evaporated with commitment to any church, let alone The Church. For this “agnosticism” is not a conscious choice, to abandon all the instruments of order. Rather, the “youff” are of a generation that has been raised post-institutionally, where even the institutions they have passed through are of no sentimental value. “History” — the near and the far, the local and the universal — has almost ceased to exist as background of daily life. An old-fashioned libertarian might think they have all become free agents. This old-fashioned Tory thinks they are lost in space.

The exploitation of “youff,” by the bureaucrats, in default control of society’s various agencies, has also become more cynical. They cling to power as an alternative to extinction. The “youff” no longer have inherited the experience that once moderated these agencies. They (and we, through them) have become the perfect victims, of tyranny.

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SIR LARRY SIEDENTOP, R.I.P. — “It’s the decline in the teaching of history and the knowledge of history that’s especially dangerous in the West at the moment, because there aren’t that many churchgoers any more, and philosophy as a secular discipline has professionalized itself in a way that doesn’t ask many of the basic traditional questions. And so there’s a kind of void when it comes to asking those fundamental questions. And I think the most important thing the churches can do at the moment is re-introduce them. Questions like: are we free? Should we be free?”

As there are people who take pleasure in murder, there are those who will find pleasure in toothache. I did not see this at first, although I should have, for you know, I have read Dostoevsky right through (though only in the fine English translations of Mrs Edward Garnett). But happening myself upon a most exquisite, indeed excruciating, toothache, developing at the back of my lower left jaw, I turned immediately to Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground.”

My strategy with toothache has long been more material than contemplative. After having ignored it for as long as possible, I would counter-attack with the salt-water swish, with almond extract, or topical clove oil, or even an aspirin, inserted against the labial frenulum. This had always worked before, letting me do things like sleep. But this time I had a “wisdom toothache,” which would not be confined, for it had invaded not only the mandible but the maxillary sinus, and was enhancing the dizziness from my stroke. After a few days of escalation, I decided that something had to be done; for it is difficult to carry on with other human activities when distracted by such a toothache.

Well, alas, this is Canada, and as I did not have a “dental plan” with any employer, or the equivalent bureaucratic papers, I had to try my luck with the dentists of the neighbourhood, and find service à la carte. I spent a morning in this useless wander, during which I found each of the dentists had been privately isolated in a “family practice,” and couldn’t just see someone with a toothache, even if he had cash. But everywhere there is an exception, and I found him in the afternoon.

Thanks to modernity, in the form of 500mg amoxicillin capsules and 600mg tablets of ibuprofen — prescriptions so obvious, I could have ordered them for myself, but only if I’d first obtained a medical degree — I am now beginning to relax. (Perhaps I am already snoring as I write this.)

The pleasure in a toothache is, of course, the pleasure of moaning, when you can command an audience to endure you. To the nasty person, lacking respect for himself, so that he will make a spectacle of his degradation, it can be a voluptuous pleasure. But where the pleasure in a murder does not require an audience, the malignant pleasure of moaning by day and by night is pointless when it is performed solo.

I was thus unlucky, I could get no pleasure from my toothache.

That is why the eco-warriors and Hamasniks (&c) cannot allow themselves to be left alone. Not only have they not the capacity for the contemplative life, but they need someone who can be forced to listen to their despicable moaning.

My apologies, in passing, to all those kind readers who have been sending me donations via “PayPal.” This won’t be possible any more, because I have cancelled the account. Some mischievous persons have found a way to drain it (again). I was enduring the extravagant fees that PayPal subtracts from each donation, but the supplementary scams have made dealing with them intolerable.

PayPal, and its imitators, were successful because they made it convenient to ping money internationally. Most of my donations from outside Canada came through PayPal; and since most of my donations come from outside Canada, it will be sad to lose them. (See my “Donation?” page for the less convenient alternatives.)

This is the mechanism of modern capitalism: to offer visible convenience “free,” while transferring the costs invisibly. The Internet, in its vile commercialism, encourages this arrangement. But it is hardly new. Our political system — “democracy,” it is called — is also based on making others pay. You vote for “free” services. Someone else gets the bill. Democracy “works” for as long as there is a supply of suckers.

“I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating, and ‘modern’ furniture,” George Orwell wrote; he disliked “celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing over your head, radios all playing the same time, no vegetation left, everything cemented over.”

These words came back to me via (the splendid) Ed West’s substack, in which he celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is a reminder that “Orwell” (Mr Eric Blair) was an inner reactionary, not a defecting revolutionary at all; that he picked up socialism only to drop it violently on the ground, and smash it to pieces. He remains topical for that accomplishment, and secretly for that strategy.

While observing the Spanish Civil War, from within, he learnt that the modern “intellectual” was a creature of the Left, and in fact had been murderously so since some time before the French Revolution. He (the Leftoid) observed the world in the simplistic terms of Good versus Evil. As he matured, or aged, he might sometimes come to realize that it was his own side that is very Evil. (It does not follow that the Right is Good, however; just less Bad.) And so we will be “shifting to the Right,” without ever getting there, for ever.

It takes all sorts to fill the Allsorts bag, and despite my licorice suspicions, George Orwell has been worth reading, through the last century or so. He did provide the vocabulary for the understanding of modern politics.

An “ajumma” is the colloquial Korean term for an older woman. Or so I thought. It seems to be not the same as “grandma,” since even young women in Korea don’t have children any more. Rather it applies to women generally, who have reached their upper thirties. This is a class that once consisted very largely of respectable, politely-dressed, members. Past a certain point, after all, there is no reason to dress suggestively any more, although I may condemn myself for “age-ism” by this remark. (Or is it age-ist to suggest that women ever become respectable?)

But from the Beeb this morning I instead learn that ajumma means, or also means, “rude and obnoxious behaviour.” Well, I never claimed to speak Korean. The definition came up because a gym club in Incheon has banned ajummas, though presumably not older women, per se.

Some of these ajummas will “spend an hour or two in the changing room doing their laundry, and stealing items including towels, soaps, or hair dryers,” a spokesman for the gym company told Yonhap, a South Korean news agency. “They sit in a row and comment on other people’s bodies,” he added. (They do worse in Toronto.)

A sign declaring a “new rule” has been posted at the Incheon gym. It reads, “Off limits to ajummas,” and, “only cultivated and elegant women allowed.”

From my days in the Far East, now many years ago, I recall signs on the beaches which read, in English, “Cultivated and elegant persons do not throw trash into the sea” — and then something more concise in the local language. (I think signposting should always be droll.)

Today, however, there seems to be a populist revolt by exactly those ajummas whom this gym had previously served. They loudly object to their expulsion, and claim that the company directors are misogynist. Perhaps, in Korean, there is a specific term for prejudice against rude and obnoxious older women; or else that term is, simply, “ajummas.”

Perhaps we should adopt it. For I’ve noticed on the streets of Parkdale a surplus of women lacking cultivation, and elegance. And now they are all growing old.

We all know (I started an Idlepost in this way, just to be offensive) that homebody women and Catholic religious share an important economic virtue: they are underpaid. This has been true for long (going back to the Late Roman Empire), and — let me cut straight to the chase — made possible the growth of Western Civilization. It could never have worked without a constant supply of cheap labour.

Our educational, medical, and welfare systems were built upon people working practically for free. (“Room and board.”) All of it was Catholic, until modern times. The reader who has not spent time in a hospital, need only visit one to see what I mean. The entire operation is ludicrously costly. Imagine — whether we are under capitalism or socialism — paying nurses a competitive wage? Or taking doctors too seriously? And making extravagant investments, whether in computer tomography, or janitorial services? As my mama once said (and she was an R.N.), half the “health issues” in society could be solved by an attentive nurse, and a bar of soap. Half of the remainder might involve Dettol. (Attentive nurse is optional.)

Ditto-plus for “social workers”; and ditto-plus-plus for teachers and professors. Firing all the high-paid administrators would be a welcome start; then reducing salaries for the faculty would end the financial problems. Tuition could finally come way down.

Nun-like women should chiefly populate these charitable institutions, with a scattering of monk-like men.

It is said — by the usual empty heads — that the West is re-Christianizing. People are spontaneously abandoning their wickedly expensive ways, and returning to what works. I have seen some slight evidence at Latin Masses.

But to really give the Church an economic push, we must restore her exploitation of labour.

We are not visionaries. By “we” I include all those living, born of woman/women, but exclude “extraterrestrials” such as the Angels, and the dead who have perhaps gone to Heaven. I can’t deny that some of these may be visionaries, but when the claim to more than natural eyesight is made, especially by scruffy characters, all of my powers of scepticism are excited. For I insist, scepticism is not a “visionary” property; it necessarily excludes visionary apprehension. I am not sceptical of the Angels, for I have not been in a position to examine them. But men I know, from being one.

Those who have visions — such as, arguably, the beloved Kit Smart (1722–71) — suffer visions of a different sort from the “normal” men and women of industry and politics, and are sometimes privileged to receive the attention of such eleemosynary institutions, as St Luke’s Asylum in Kit’s case. Indeed, his most “visionary” work, the Jubilate Deo, was written almost entirely in there. I recommend it for its hebraic poetical thrum, and secretly sane passing insights, but note that he never presented himself as a candidate for public office.

Adolf Hitler should have been confined, however, once he began broadcasting his visions. This would have been better for him, and for the German-speaking peoples, everywhere. But he was perhaps a too-extreme example. The mental ward, today, calls out for those who have visions of “global warming,” and other alarming prospects, as well as extensions of the welfare state. They have in common with Herr Hitler the belief that we should do something, and a kampf, or militant programme. Nein should be our “particular” response.

By contrast, there is no vision in downsizing. The politician, who wields a toy buzz-saw while on campaign, may be colourful, but does not need locking up. To accuse those who categorically oppose gleaming statist ambitions, of nursing statist ambitions, is unreasonable. For downsizing is the opposite of upsizing, and requires no visionary enthusiasm.

Ludwig von Mises was not, to my mind, strictly an economist. He was a moralist, and a practical philosopher, his chief object being the destruction of bureaucracy. It is not a “necessary evil,” but necessarily an evil, done like the others under cover of good. Mises is understandably hated by all socialists and progressives. In addition to its rhetorical attack, his book Bureaucracy (1944, revised 1962) documented the rise of bureaucratic agencies controlling public life throughout Europe and America. It showed that the “profit motive” paradoxically advances the public interest, in almost every case; that the “non-profit motive” is not only counter-productive, but apparently, politically ineradicable. Over time, bureaucracy stifles not only individual freedom, but the adaptability of society itself, leading to its decline and ruin.

This, and Mises’ chef-d’oeuvre, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, fell into my hands as a teenager, and made me an exponent of the “Austrian School.” Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) was another guide along the road not taken, or rather taken only briefly, by the allies after World War II. Such books helped to make me continuously unpopular, among budding Leftoids, from the age of fifteen. Since, I have done some supplementary reading, to make my attitudes more ghastly to them. My preference for liberty, beauty, goodness, truth, have cost me many popularity contests: for the “progressives” invariably prefer plausibility, subterfuge, and lies.

But there are rewards for resisting them: for instance, the satisfaction one feels that Javier Milei is eradicating the bureaucracy of Argentina (where it had been laid on especially thick), and others in their stations (Nayib Bukele, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders) dispatching bureaucracies elsewhere. This is encouraging, as is the rightwing sweep in trans-European elections yesterday. Note: the method of “cutting back bureaucracy” consists not of a few minor trims, but of the permanent, outright closure of entire government departments.

Even more I enjoy subtle developments in “science,” where bureaucratic takeover has made most public scientific enterprises dishonest and innately alarmist. The international “global warming” climate fraud continues to be Exhibit A; the Wuhan Batflu event, Exhibit B. Both monstrosities are the product of self-interested government strategy and funding.

More generally, the “non-profit” pursuit of academic science produces crooked, fund-grubbing results in the overwhelming majority of cases. I am delighted to see that the big American publisher, Wiley, has had to shut down nineteen of its scientific journals, and withdraw 11,500 scientific papers, to cut its losses from lawsuits. For it is, sometimes, still possible to expose falsity in the courts.

We look forward to an age that follows “follow the science.”

The best defence is a good offence, I was told by an ice hockey coach when I was learning the elementary ice hockey skills. As I had been cast as a goaltender, it seemed to me that with the best defence, a good offence wouldn’t be necessary. Unlike fussball, and other team sports, the game that ended in a zero-zero tie was generally the most exciting to watch; even when it was decided by a single goal in the fifth overtime period. By then, one would have had one’s fill of hockey, no matter how well the game had been played.

But it appears one can’t get one’s fill, any more, for I just checked, and the NHL playoffs are still running, in June. It goes without saying that the Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t in them; I gave up on them, shortly after the late Johnny Bower retired. This was just after his forty-fifth birthday, which made him the oldest player in the NHL whom I had ever loved. His last game was in 1969 — coincidentally the same year the Americans landed men on the moon. (I suspect they released some cosmic demon, thereby, who flew back to earth with them, and has caused no end of trouble since. So many things went to Hell, after 1969.)

As the Swiss have taught, the best sort of military defence is impenetrable. Imperial powers take a pass on invading, once they see how the Swiss have their mountains rigged. This arrangement has preserved their neutrality for the last five hundred years; and even though Switzerland is between Germany and Italy, France and Austria — which take turns having the best offence. I am a reactionary myself, or a “fascist” according to some of my correspondents, because I favour a domestic policy of rule-of-law and maximal freedom. But my foreign ideal is to be left alone. And so, even very small countries ought to invest in goalie-pads.