Essays in Idleness

Socrates in the Dialogues that depict him, and Plato in his Letters, give voice to the possible worthlessness of writing, two thousand years before Gutenberg, in effect, clinched the point. Yes, it is worthless, and note, always was. With the technocratic advance of printing with infinitely replaceable type, the printed word, which began as a way to preserve scripture, began deteriorating to the condition of journalism. That is to say, it became meaninglessly glib, and now it interferes with any sort of understanding, rather than accommodating it. Socrates, the worthy father of our Western dialectic, was a man who never wrote anything down. He raised philosophical conversation above the competitive prattle of the Brahmins of India, to resemble the sermons of the Gautama Buddha. Which is to say, above the cacophony of debate, to the settled tranquility of high seriousness.

But Plato was, even when he tried not to be, a poet and dramatist. He was different in kind from Socrates, who was a philosopher “by nature.” Plato wants his compositions to present themselves as sound and true; to lead securely to a place of wisdom. Whereas, Socrates is seeking truth, without the gorgeous decorations. Socrates will of course be punished for seeking truth, as is inevitable in a democracy, for the background condition of “the people” is to be fools, and the more foolish the greater the stakes. This is why I, for instance, dread the spread of democracy; for truth, to the democrat, means becoming more and more degraded.

Philosophers, in both East and West, have usually tried to escape this degradation, but fall into a trap when they write things down. The extraordinary genius of Plato was to understand why he must put things into writing, and quite ironically, if philosophy is to find a home in the world. But when once committed to writing, dialectic is displaced, and prevented, by sophistry; reasoning is quickly replaced by false rhetoric. The devil, as it were, is given words to play with.

Plato was well-placed to see why writing might be both necessary, and worthless. To comprehend the cosmos, or begin to understand what is given to man to be understood, we must devise a method for listening to God. This is much different from listening to prattle and reading journalism. Yet Christ was perfectly placed not to be a writer, for He was God.

Re-enrolled in Canadian schooling, circa 1967, I first became aware of our national anti-poetry project. This was when the childers were introduced to Shakespeare, tragically late in the day. For English class, teachers were assigned to show how boring he could be. By paraphrasing coruscating verse, the writers of high school textbooks could also show a more or less complete incomprehension, and criminal indifference to poetical effects. They did this on purpose, in the cause of crippling poetry, music, and art. Now, of course, they do it with “artificial intelligence.”

Fortunately for me, I had already encountered How To Read, by Ezra Pound, while living abroad. Also Homer, &c. This made Canadian schooling entirely unnecessary, except perhaps for the sadistic topics; chemistry, for instance. (To which class we brought a little song: “Nrmr, nrmr, nrmr, I’m a Bunsen Burner.”)

I was going to quote, for my colour, a flagrantly otiose paraphrase of “Blow, blow, thou winter wind,” Lord Amiens’ song from As You Like It. The meaning of this lyric is so clear, that any Shakespeare scholar should be able to understand it, even several days after being shot in the head. With the help of Google, gentle reader may compare AI paraphrases. But read such things much longer than it takes to get angry, and one will begin to see why violence is a necessary component of educational reform.

Let me confess that on more than one occasion I stooped to English perfessing, for money. This seemed to me not necessarily evil, if I could teach the subject well enough. This required that I frequently shock my students, and traumatize the slower ones. Attempts at singing and declamation were part of the instruction. I tried to speak like a visiting Elizabethan. Also, through his Histories, to communicate the fact that Shakespeare was a quite livid and admirable “fascist.” My teaching experience went fairly well; and I was never arrested.

While the cold wind blows, I am enjoying an act of gratuitous destruction. I am removing from the High Doganate all those beuks in which I find stupid paraphrases and “feelings.” C. S. Lewis once began a very useful beuk, The Abolition of Man, with a vigorous attack upon a typical textbook author.

We should be doing more to prevent the employment of useless teachers in our schools. It was a sound mediaeval principle that the incapable tradesman should starve.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — Rather than leave the impression that my Ontario high school was a dead loss, I should like to remember Mrs Glynn and Mrs Blaney, who heroically maintained the Latin department even after the Ministry of Education had stripped away almost all of their pupils — by making all difficult subjects into “electives” so that the provincial system could specialize in the educationally sub-normal. But it was paradise when the idiots disappeared from our Latin (and some other) classes.

Back in the old days, when I was ground-mobile and could even ride in aeroplanes, I suffered from an absurd curiosity about the truth. I asked, and have actually continued to ask, sceptical questions. This proved inconvenient for me when I was in high school, but career-limiting and potentially dangerous once I came to riper years. Questions like, “What is the real population of …?” (my favourite example was Indonesia) were interesting to me as a “developmental journalist,” for if this was substantially in error, none of its other statistics could be right. Verily, even chance right numbers at random locations would be misleading.

But my contemporaries were mesmerized by statistics, even when obviously fallacious, like Communist China’s. Consider the number of deaths caused by the Batflu virus. It was something between “normal for the flu seasons,” to ten-millions if you trusted the health authorities. Even the current population of China can only be given as “a multiple of 100 million but not of a billion,” as an old Hong Kong friend explained.

Elsewhere in the world, including the many other countries governed by ideological fantasists (Canada, for instance), population figures are often made up: expanding or contracting at the whim of narcissist-bureaucrats. Proportions, especially of Muslim populations, tend to be inflated everywhere on theological principles. Urban and immigrant populations are often impossible to count, even when the statisticians have honest intentions.

Mortality estimates tend to vary radically, from the truth. In Iran, currently, the number of citizens recently butchered is consistently underestimated by liberal media (“dozens; … up to 1,000 …”). But the kill was 12,000 on the night of January 8th, according to the independent Persian-language news service, Iran Internasnal.

Robert Heinlein famously guessed the population of Moscow — officially five million in 1960 — was actually 750,000, based on his observations of barge and railroad traffic, and the absence of vehicles on the roads. Well, socialism will often have the same effect on appearances. While it now has officially many more zeroes, Heinlein’s wife, the demographic amateur Ginny Heinlein, was among the first to notice that Russia’s population was positively shrinking.

Or did you know? That Greenland’s remote, tiny population would have been larger had their Danish colonial masters not sterilized half the Inuit women to save themselves money?

Scott Symons observed, one-third of a century ago, that, “There is no blood left to be shed in the battle of the sexes in Ontario.” In the time since, it has continued bloodlessly. I am reminded that this apocalypse is also playing out around the globe, and is at its worst in the more exotic places, such as California.

Finally, even Persia has rejoined the battle, although I think they are pushing the other way. It is one of those rare countries where relations between men and women are being re-established. Now the ladies are lighting cigarettes on the burning mullah posters. They had apparently tired not only of Islam (Persia had never been a reliable Muslim country), but of having their worldviews condensed into the interior of a potato sack, and then painted black. The women were actually very broad-minded, when I last visited, nearly fifty years ago; not fusty, like trendy modern women.

However, shallow feminism, together with the glib reign of statistics, has continued, almost everywhere, except the few surviving religious neighbourhoods. It has been two centuries, or perhaps three, since men in East and West ceased to understand what was happening around them, and became engrossed instead in number games. Numbers have since been all that we could handle.

The latest two surprising, yet meaningless, statistics, should help to mystify conditions on the ground. I obtained these numbers by accident, while trying to follow an Internet discussion. According to the first, by the age of thirty, more than fifty percent of males are virgins. That would be an increase of five times from when I was young.

Also, I have learnt, approximately seventy percent of females are now copulating with twenty percent of the males who remain, or at least, were while the survey was being conducted. (Perhaps they haven’t gone homosexual yet.) This would be the exact reverse of what pertained during my junior years.

Each sex progresses towards what now comes into view, with males already half-way there. Since men remain the physically stronger sex, we may expect them to keep their virtue.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — I had to rewrite the above, in order to remove some of my excessive drollnesses. I’m sure the numbers are accurate, though. They always are.

In defence of the harmlessly mad, and of the not-very harmful, I argue that the world is terribly prejudiced against them. However, I join in the world’s sometime prejudice against the unambiguously evil, and will recommend it to public subscription. Since the evil tend to be easily confused with the innocently bababulah (a useful term in Thai that I am trying to transfer to English), there is controversy about what kind of madman, or madwoman, we should be trying to discourage. For surely, we should suppress some of them.

Even common-garden leftists, who tend themselves to be quite mad, generally do not classify Hitler as harmless, although they may have trouble naming another, unless he is the most recent Republican or Conservative candidate to win an election. Nevertheless, I hold that there are objective definitions of crimes, which the many harmful tend to commit (not just Hitler), and which, until recently, were given as grounds to arrest, try, and imprison them; or, in the old days, even to withdraw their right to get up in the morning. But now that “human rights” have been extended, towards fierce animals for instance, such as polar bears — who may be impossibly cute when there is not too much blood on their mouthes and faces — the situation is confused.

Now that I have become old myself (harmlessly?), I argue that the best thing we humans can hope for in this world is the restoration of some civilized habits. These might consist of a return to “not-very harmful” public life, and the participation of the relatively innocent in our ceremonial government; rather than their habitual indulgence in fiendish corruption and evil-doing. To this end, I would think the perfect, or complete, elimination of the “welfare state,” and any form of government assistance to any social group whatsoever, would be indicated. Friends, family, churches, and batty old ladies with surpluses of inherited money, could be restored to the eleemosynary functions. However, their philanthropy should be voluntary, not forced on them by taxation. (Note, that this would also solve our public debt crisis.)

We might make a list of other acts of incivility to be prosecuted, or government actions to be entirely eliminated, but shouldn’t become too ambitious. For that might lead us, paradoxically, back to what Saint John Henry Newman identified as the ur-crime, of liberalism.

Among my more memorable rides on the College streetcar in Toronto, was one I took past the “Clarke Institute of Psychiatry” (as it was then called). Outpatients were picked up between St. George and Spadina, and these included, on that day, a woman with a dazzling head dress, who was wearing a magnificent gown, and spake with a powerful, dramatic voice. It was rush hour, and the trolley was packed full, yet with apparently little effort she commanded the attention of everyone aboard.

And she declaimed, to all of us:

“The Army is my son! … The Navy is my son! … The Air Force is my son! …”

And then, turning for some reason specifically to me, she asked: … “Are YOU my son?”

I should be proud, I suppose, of my disproportionate success in attracting the attention of eccentric persons. This was a prize instance, though it ended when the lady suddenly disembarked, at Bathurst. Still, I have been ruminating upon her question, ever since, without yet coming to a satisfactory answer.

But next best is attitude, and a way of life, like this exceptional lady. I was thinking this just this morning, after having posted this email to my perfectly sane and responsible elder son:

“My position, as a luddite reactionary diehard troll, is that we should always be ready for a Carrington Event, with low-tech back-ups for every high-tech system. … That we should build everything to last for at least a century, or better for a thousand years. … Too, I am an enthusiast for labour-intensive, regenerative agriculture, without combine harvesters; of splendid fresh foods and fine cheeses, beer and bacon; and for the punishment of poor craftsmen. …”

(I should have mentioned that the army is my son, &c.)

Gentle reader does not need me to provide reporting on the glorious Trumpian capture of Venezuela’s chief socialist drug lord; or the bombings of Muslim terrorists in Nigeria; or the next intervention in Iran by the United States and (blesséd) Israel. All were, are, or will be acts of self-defence by civilization and the West, and I certainly subscribe to Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of justifiable violence. One should never be a coward when attacked (and will be attacked less frequently once one has established this reputation). Then if, like the overwhelming majority of men, one has not the discipline or patience to stand still while being murdered, at least one should not run away. It is important to defend oneself in “kill or be killed” situations, and when possible bring each to a victorious conclusion. Gandhi was not a wus.

Moreover, we should rejoice that at last America has an intelligent president, not a moronic “liberal” like every other president since Clinton. Trump understands that removing a foreign political leader should be done quickly and decisively, and not in a languid and “democratic” way. Too, the wise ancient Chinese, particularly Sun Tzu, understood that one should cause the minimum of casualties, not only for one’s own side, but for either. Zero casualties would be the Taoist ideal, though even Taoist sages recognize that this isn’t always possible.

Practically, it makes no sense to replace one foreign regime with another that one has designed. Rather, one should specialize in removals of governments that are Communist or “Islamist,” &c. By more involvement, one will become entangled in politics one is ill-equipped to understand, and make rushed, messy calculations. Also, don’t waste time. Let the inmates of the invaded state decide whom they should install, to replace the défunte, and avoid another invasion. The same assumptions should apply here as to all other forms of entertainment; the showman should “leave them laughing,” or indeed “wanting more.” Mr Trump seems to understand this, perhaps because he is the first president since Reagan who received professional theatrical training.

If one does not have the power or might to knock off an enemy quickly, i.e. in a few hours or days, perhaps the idea of having a war was not a good one. (Consult Vladimir Putin, if you will.) Of course, the enemy may have a say, about how prolonged the war should be, but this will not be an issue if he was removed promptly. Do not delay until tomorrow what must be done today.

“Only the silent hear, and those who do not remain silent do not hear.”

The quotation comes from Josef Pieper, a most valuable Thomist from the last century; a man whose wisdom and learning deserves to go unchallenged. This perhaps over-obvious and irrefutable remark seems the best way to enter a New Year.

Herr Pieper, who is of course now dead (1904–1997), might be considered the practical inspiration of this Idlework, for his beuk, Leisure the Basis of Culture, fell into my hands very early, and is still falling into them after many decades, together with his many other works, each quite succinct.

Should any young person reading this feel in need of an education, I would think Pieper, and the scholarly Frenchman Étienne Gilson (History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages), and Gilbert Keith Chesterton, are the places to start upon a course in philosophy. That all three of them are Christian and Catholic is no coincidence. These authors will in turn supply you with others to read, ranging wide, but they are the best schoolmasters for immediate purposes. To assign lengthy reading lists right from the start, especially to young people who may not be reading habitually yet — or at all, if they graduated from a progressive high school — is too much bother. Moreover, bear in mind that the way the Greats are presented in the universities today, makes university truly worth not attending.

One should not be impatient to read a lot of beuks, only intelligent ones, and comprehensible only to a person who is awake. They should be read no faster than you can take them in. On the other hand, you should not waste time by not reading. At the present day, as your German teacher says, “the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.”

In other words, “Artificial Idiocy,” and the “Wicked Paedia,” should be among the first distractions to silence, with extreme prejudice as it were. Use your own brain to explore things, it craves some exercise. Learn to sit still. Don’t merely shut up: become silent.

For the world, especially in view of the technology that is now unfolding, has been re-designed to make you not only unphilosophical and unleisured, but to an extraordinary degree, stupid and obnoxious. We are easily addicted to things that cause unnerving and repulsive noises, and are big, red, and shiny — even on New Year’s Day.

False optimism kills, having left its garish marks on all its victims.