Essays in Idleness

Mr Carney and his NDP-Liberals, with the borborygmatic support of the Conservatives and all the other parties, share a belief in panic with the rest of the Western world. For various reasons — none of them cogent or thought through — they react to fears for the planet’s further existence. These range from “climate change” to falling population to Trump tariffs, and one panic can easily replace another in the election cycles. Curiously, all our problems are human-created, with causes that would simply go away were it not for politicians, except the environmental ones, which don’t actually exist.

Of course, the sudden return of the ice age, with the collapse of agriculture owing to the radical depletion of atmospheric carbon, while ice freezes many miles thick, and shrinks the oceans into salty slush at the equators, and the glaciers grind our cities away, would seem to be a problem — but only for human beings. I, for one, refuse to be panicked by this.

We should take it in our stride. For it has all happened before, in quite recent geological time, and what has happened before can happen again. We mustn’t be surprised.

From a universal point of view, we would be unnoticed collateral damage. The warm soft cuddly times might come back again, after enormous floods and tsunamis wash the gravel around, and if there were a tiny number of surviving humans we could then go about reinventing civilization, entirely from scratch, at our leisure.

For leisure, even in periods of discomfort, has always been the most important factor in the development of civilization. And leisure is the opposite of panic.

The hint I dropped yesterday, on the Eve of this Feast of Fools, was a distinction between the “holy fools” and the “unholy fools.” This extends much beyond politics and did not, in fact, originate in that. It goes back to the Garden of Eden, and the foolish behaviour of one tempted woman, and one tempted man, inclined to believe her. But it is my habit generally to avoid the theological depths, for fear that I might fall in.

The Celebrated Fool dates back only eight centuries, to Saint Francis of Assisi, who became Holy Fool of the West, “a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature, and with himself,” in the words of Pope Francis. In the painting by Giotto, he is feeding the birds, and in imitation of him environmentalist politicians have spent many trillions, feeding “Gaia” and the other gods of earth, sea, and sky — very foolishly.

Or there was the yurodivy, of Russia: outwardly quite eccentric but inwardly wise, who did not cost us very much; or even among the Muslims, the apparently mad. (I met one of these in upcountry Pakistan; he threw a brick at me.) The Christian accomplishment was to sort the many fools presented by abundant nature into holy and unholy, by their fruits. This was Christ’s analysis.

There are many other kinds of Fool, such as Royal Fools (consult Shakespeare on this, and the broad mediaeval tradition); it is a vast multiculture. Today, as we celebrate the Fools in our own past, present, and future, including ourselves in all of our seasons, I should like to append to Christ’s distinction a specific fiscal observation.

It is that Fools should not cost us extravagant amounts of tax money. For those who cost other than themselves are not only Fools, but tedious.