Essays in Idleness

Since Holy Week, up here in the High Doganate, we have been doing the most ambitious spring cleaning that we can recall ever having done, voluntarily. I say “we,” but I got no help at all from Bodo and Katrina (the pigeon couple I mentioned last week), my purpled finches have been absent without leave, and the fluffy cat (“Mildred”) who sometimes lodges here for vacations has stayed well away. (She is invaluable for dusting those hard-to-reach corners.)

Now, the High Doganate isn’t large: 600 square feet, including the balconata, where the plurality of its inhabitants seem to live. (A big infusion of illegal-immigrant mayflies recently; then the Trump spiders came to round them up.) Which is to say, just less than the seventieth part of an acre.

I know a couple who occupy 30 acres, at least one of which must be indoors, and they never complain about upkeep, so what am I?

One of nature’s whiners, I’m afraid.

Another friend, who has just moved as far away from Washington as he could get, consistent with keeping a job there, reports that he has also been shifting “mountains of books,” some of which he admits exist in two or more copies. His wife will surely have noted this fact.

Women, in my experience, hate books — they see them for what they are, a dusting nightmare — and I could back this assertion with innumerable anecdotes. Instead of a wife, I now have a French paintbrush — the wall variety, in badger hair — which has proved just the thing for cleaning the top edges. (The old practice of gilding the top edges of books made perfect sense: it prevents grime from working into the naked pages.) If women only knew this, so many marriages could be saved.

I have been accused of “book collecting,” but there is no truth in this. They merely accumulate, of their own free will. Indeed, while installing a few new bookcases, which necessitated the juggling of several old (and bookcases are hard to juggle, believe me), I was able to identify several hundred works that could be “recirculated.” Gentle reader may be shocked to learn that my principle parodies that of the abortionists: “Every book a wanted book.” Another principle is to avoid having them pile up on floors, which creates physical obstructions to peripatetic philosophizing.

From previous exercises in librarianship, I have found that one comes down in the end to the same clump of six redundant tatty paperbacks, which can’t be parted with, no matter how ruthless one is feeling. These six have followed one about since adolescence. Three are little art books, providing crisp, matt, colour reproductions of, respectively: Spanish frescoes of the Romanesque period; Russian icons from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries; and, Persian miniatures from ancient manuscripts.

Two others are Penguins: Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists; and Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind.

Finally, Céline, Journey to the End of the Night.

Many other books entertained my youth; a few stitched hardcovers also survive, but fade into the background woodwork. These six stand out because they are so obviously disposable, and have survived every purge through the last half-century.

I stare at them, together, and realize that an entire worldview could be constructed from them, and that it was my own, in formation.

One is often told “you cannot live in the past,” or, by way of self-contradiction, that one is doing so. I would if I could, though of course I should like to choose which past to live in. Meanwhile, what is one to say for those who aspire to live in the future? Can they do it? Should they wish even to try? (Consider: only the dead are “ahead of their time.”) For my part I am convinced that if I wait patiently, the future will come of its own accord. Too, I doubt my capacity to hurry it.

Some days time seems to move faster than others — I frankly prefer the slow time days — but I notice that events remain tightly coordinated, and the tune is the same regardless of the tempo. Many are the tasks I could perform more smoothly if I could will slow-motion. I often thought this as a cricket batsman. But if the opposing bowler could will it, too, I’d be done for a duck just the same.

Those who cannot live in the future would nevertheless like to see the movie. I understand the attraction — how curiosity killed the cat — but not what good it will do me. If I knew the day and hour of anything unscheduled, it would follow that I could not change it. I would find myself watching in mute horror. Only my powerlessness could be enhanced. Alternatively, I would have been shown only a hypothetical future, extending from present trends, in which case, what was the point?

Bad behaviour leads to bad ends, shall we say, and good to good. In which case I don’t need to know the end, only the means.

The children at Fatima, a century ago, were not told by Our Lady what would happen in the future. Or if they were, they were much too young to understand. A great deal was happening in the world of 1917, one did not require heavenly visitation to see that it was fateful. From what I’ve read, one would not even have required a newspaper subscription, to know that the West was turning from God. Not being the Mother of God, ourselves, we are poorly placed to understand Why she would come, to that then, to that there, to those particular children. We cannot “understand” the apparitions as we might try to understand the plot of a novel, or the narrative sequence in news reports.

Instead the children, and by extension all the children of the Church, were told to pray, urgently. We were told to abandon our sins, make restitution, and look in Hope, liturgically, to the East (from where Mary came, and to where she returned, literally, in the memoirs). We were told, in effect, that the Kingdom was at hand, yet from the philosophical perspective, it is always so. We were told not what will happen, but what to do, and that immediately.

Prophecy must necessarily involve a breach in time, it seems to me. This, because our world in time comes in contact with a world beyond it. In this sense the daily Mass is invincibly prophetic. But it is not prognostic.

One does not go to the altar as to the weather report; or as the pagans did to a marble slab, to examine the entrails of birds. The childish human tendency, to ignore what we are told and ask instead what will happen, is exhibited in so much well-meaning reverence towards this anniversary of the Fatima apparitions.

With respect to God, and to all divine manifestation, I think we should grow up a bit — stop asking “Why?” and, “What is going to happen?” — and instead more simply do as we are told.

Good: Trump fired Comey. About time. I have nothing against the man, but he needed to be fired. Everyone should be fired, it builds character. I will draw the line at hanging, usually. But yes, turn them out on the street, make them earn a living.

That is incidentally my scheme for the improvement of all modern business and government. Fire everybody. For instance, fire Trump. By all means fire Trudeau. Get all their henchmen off the public teat. As gentle reader must know, I am opposed in principle to all non-hereditary office-holding, and employees who expect a steady cheque. This leads to being ruled by a certain class of pushy, noisome, interfering bosses. In particular, no one should take a management job, unless he is stuck with it.

Well, maybe keep Trump. He’s stuck with the job, and doesn’t need the pay. And besides, he seems to be good at firing people.

As a sometime reader of Fielding, I consider myself a connoisseur of the police functions. I think of the FBI, or its equivalent in any other national jurisdiction, chiefly as a public menace. They’re as likely to be in league with the malefactors, as against them. To be sure, there are some things that need to be investigated, to which end I propose an informal network of Chandleresque “dicks,” commissioned case by case. If they catch the malefactor, a big reward; and a pretty funeral should they happen to die trying. If they fail, let them beg for half of their expenses.

Spies, and counter-spies, ditto. They are only doing a private investigator’s work, in a more cosmopolitan environment. Don’t be a frayer; pay for results. This is what we used to do, and it worked much better. Salarymen, as the Japanese call them, are only there to collect salaries.

Most policemen do simpler work. They are night watchmen. In cities like Chicago, there are day watchmen, too. They should be big and burly and fairly well-armed. I’m not against hiring women, so long as they meet the height and weight requirements, and can run a five-minute mile. Watchmen should supply their own sparkling uniforms, as other tools of their trade. And they should collect their wages from the people by whom their services are required. (Bankers understand this.) A neighbourhood cop should report to the neighbourhood. If they find him sleeping, then, hail and farewell.

This is more or less my approach to everything. My favourite newspaper editor, who almost fired me on several occasions (Neil Reynolds, of blesséd memory), treated all his staff as if they were free-lancers. And free agents: he’d ask politely if you wanted the assignment, never taking that for granted. Only if you didn’t, would he dump you. He had no use for unions. He loved being sued. Everything around him was creative chaos. “People who don’t like this kind of work should try farming,” he once explained.

We live in an age of vast organizations. Even in the Vatican, it’s like that. I was reminded yesterday of sainted Pope John XXIII, asked by some newsman how many worked there. “About half,” he replied.

Of course, not everyone is suited to a frenetic life. The great majority are content to be poor. The rich are mostly happy to inherit. Why should we bother them with goods they don’t need? I have no prejudice against the quiet harmless poor, or birthright wealth, either. I don’t think it right to disturb such people.

I’ve been outsmarted by a pigeon, in the wee hours of this night. Rather, by two pigeons, of a single mind. They have decided to interpret an article of furniture briefly parked on the balconata (up here in the High Doganate) as a dovecote. They are trying to nest behind and under. While I appreciate that they are ardent young lovers, I find their cooing disruptive. In the daytime, I menaced them with a broom. They fled in panic: right through a small squadron of indifferent sparrows.

Now, any self-respecting sparrow can out-manoeuvre a waving broom, and he knows it. Whereas, a pigeon isn’t sure. Moreover, sparrows are pert little creatures, wise for their size, and I find they have generally thought through their responses in advance. In ground-feeding, for instance, a sparrow has no difficulty stealing a pigeon’s crumb. He takes the pigeon for a big fat cumbersome oaf, and knows he won’t retaliate. Indeed: that is one of the things I find most Christian in pigeons, or “rock doves” as they’d prefer to be called. Too, I might credit them with a kind of idiot fortitude.

A pigeon might strike one as a slow thinker, a sparrow as a quick one. This is the reverse of true, and itself an example of contemptibly quick thinking. Sparrows are outwardly sharp and bright, but take their sceptical time on all questions of policy. Whereas, a pigeon will quickly settle on a stupid idea, then stick to it come what may. In this respect, it is a liberal bird. The idea of nesting on an inhabited balcony was an especially stupid one. By now the young couple has been twenty times whisked away. But they keep coming back, having selected an utterly indefensible poke hole.

However, one of them — the female, I suspect — has conservative tendencies. She has reasoned that I am less likely to come out with the broom if she just shuts up. This night, I discover that she has pushed her nest to the place farthest from broom-reach; and that her man has been told to do all the panicking for her. She remains silently incubating her eggs, as he alone flees in a great commotion — circling back to the other end of the balcony to make another commotion as I again drive him off. Surely, it was the female who thought this tactic through.

For the female is the slower thinker, in most species. That is why each is able to reproduce. The males think faster, and are thus prone to error. The female, though physically weaker, manipulates for his own good.

In human society, under current social conditions, the females are thinking quicker and quicker. It is an issue that was taken up some years ago by my poet friend, Robert Eady, in his disquisition, “On the maximum speed of women.” I notice they now make the sort of perpetually adolescent, repetitive mistakes in which the males used to specialize — acting on those ideas which “seemed good at the time.”

Indeed, I was awakened by a pack of female juvenile delinquents (human), cavorting in the street below. Though I was rewarded with a glorious view of the Flower Moon, at the full. And offered this latest contest with my pigeon squatters.

“You think too fast,” is among the more tedious criticisms with which I afflict my most liberal acquaintance. They are so clever, and they always get it wrong. They belong on television, where the quality of thought doesn’t matter, but the speed of it is vital. None, it seems, can be taught the Iron Law of Paradox which, among its many corollaries, holds that “if it feels good, you should hesitate to do it.”

We’ll see if my pigeons can learn this in the morning.

The latest thing in Europe is “to have an existence.” I noticed this phrase often coming up while half-following the French election campaign. They now have a thirty-nine year old technocrat for president, named after a diacritical mark in Latin and Hungarian. That makes him, I think, a long vowel, or a heavy syllable. I shall think of him poetically, with breves on either side. On checking, I see that he may also have an existence in Livonian, Samogician, school Arabic, and various Polynesian languages.

Indeed, I wondered why they declared him the victor with the vote from Tahiti not yet in. Have they no existences there, too?

His wife is sixty-four, as everyone must know. They’ve been “an item” since he was fifteen. That would be when she was thirty-nine, I calculate. But they are married, now: him for the very first time. He and his step-daughter were classmates; “Ms Trogneux,” as she calls herself, their teacher. Drama is what she taught, I gather. And in a Jesuit school. She says that Macron was “precocious.” She was an heiress to a wealthy chocolatier, married to a banker at the time. (They had other children.) A lot of interesting things are possible under French law. Here in America, she might have been prosecuted, instead. One sees that sort of thing a lot in Fox News.

Suddenly I remember a girl of fourteen. Her surname is lost to memory, but she had the same given name as this new first lady of France: “Brigitte.” Long tumbling auburn hair, sun-bleached, tied into a ponytail while working. Sharp features, and a beautiful slight assymetry. Piercing blue eyes. We were picking grapes together in the Médoc. (You could get these jobs easily, during the harvest, even if you were an illegal like me, just travelling through.) The girl looked older; “precocious” I would say. I was myself already an old man, some months past twenty.

Everyone drank wine, from big tumblers, just to quench our thirst; all ages. This in a shack in the fields, to which one retired, thirsty and exhausted. Good red “table wine,” as I recall; better than the stuff they export. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

Confusing myself with Henry V, and the young lady with Catherine of Valois, I asked if we could be married. My French was as bad as Henry’s. (It is worse now.)

It turned out that we could, under French law.

But she said that her father would not approve. (He didn’t like “Anglo-Saxons.”) And as she was plentifully supplied with big brothers, I decided not to press my suit.

Apparently, this Macron’s parents didn’t approve, either. But I would guess he is more wilful than I.

Everyone “has an existence,” as I have said, from my attentive reading of the European fashions. This includes everyone I’ve mentioned. And they have a philosophy, called Existentialism, over there. It says that everyone has an existence, and develops through acts of will, not only by thought but by “feelings,” in a world that is perfectly absurd. Ah, Europe. (Perhaps Existentialism is out of date, I must check.)

It doesn’t really matter who is President of France. The country has never been governable. I didn’t like her much, but thought that “Marine” Le Pen would have been more entertaining. I would not go so far as to say that she doesn’t have an existence any more; only that it must be diminished.

Everyone has an existence, you know. And a will, too, that’s what I’ve found. And these days anyone can marry anyone, it seems. That’s because they “have an existence.”

It’s all in a book I was reading, back when I was picking grapes: L’Être et le néant, by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Goes well with big tumblers of wine.

Often, correspondents ask me what to read. I assume they mean, in addition to my own pellucid works. They leave me at a loss. If I knew them better — had met them personally, known them over time — I might have some suggestion. But one cannot seriously know an email correspondent, try as one will to read between lines, then read the lines again. Nor, unless one is saint or politician, can one hope to be on intimate terms with hundreds or thousands. I am happy with my small sprinkling of true friends; on whom I try to force books, constantly. In this anti-blogue I sometimes mention titles, and unless I have said specifically that they should be burnt by the public hangman, I am recommending them.

Here is an unlikely choice for the book club: The Diary of an Old Soul, by the Scotsman, George MacDonald (1824–1905). Today’s Christian reader has probably heard of him through C. S. Lewis, and he is also praised to the point of extravagance by Chesterton, Tolkien, Auden, de la Mare. Indeed, his first disciple was Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”), and I wonder if the conception of Alice would have been possible without MacDonald’s inspiration.

For he was a poet in a rather prophetic sense: a master of Myth. (Note the capital.) His sermons are hard-going (Lewis extracted many good aphorisms from them for a short anthology), but in the range of his prose fantasies and fairy tales there is a view of things behind conventional sight. Few, even among the poets, have this gift, which at its richest belonged to Dante. For much more than a century, imaginations have been shaped in childhood by The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind, Sir Gibbie, Lilith, Phantastes — all of which repay later adult reading. MacDonald said he did not write for children, but for the child-like, which I think is true of all the classic “children’s writers,” without exception.

Children are, as they have often called themselves, “the people in the playground,” and must be addressed as people. From age seven, at latest, they are capable of reason and thus independent thought. They must not be treated as pets, or lied to.

This is a point worth dwelling upon, briefly. There is a vast and remunerative “child market” which the capitalists are exploiting. As I have discovered reading to children myself, these specialized, “niche” works are all nauseating; like the Harry Potter books they stink with some subliminal Gnostic agenda. Children are addressed not as child-like, but as permanent mental and moral defectives.

Lord, what I once had done with youthful might,
Had I been from the first true to the truth,
Grant me, now old, to do — with better sight,
And humbler heart, if not the brain of youth …

Now the book I am recommending may come as a surprise, to those already familiar with MacDonald. He described it as “a book of strife,” and conceals nothing of the debility, crankiness, discouragement, and disintegration of old age. Yet he does not complain. He wrote it in seven-line stanzas pulsating with rhyme, in twelve monthly sections. Like a child, he looks consistently forward, and presents the theological virtue of Hope in fresh and startling turns.

It will be hard to read for a person of contemporary miseducation, who is taught to flinch at a Thou, a Thee, a canst, or a dwellest. When I’ve had students I have told them to read more, until they get over it. Those raised on the Romantics will be mildly distressed by an unexpected distance from them. Often, for instance, MacDonald begins to bound in a Wordsworthian way, but without Wordsworth’s stamina. We mistake, in some late Victorians, what is drawing from a deeper historical past; they are actually avoiding what we take for clichés; instead making allusions, like Browning. The ghost of Edmund Waller is among those being quietly acknowledged, and set to rest:

The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d,
Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made;
Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become
As they draw nearer to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.

Or as MacDonald, who can never lose that child-like wonder, shrives us:

Love will not backward sigh, but forward strain
On in the tale still telling, never told. …

God designed our world to be extremely inefficient. I daresay this was intentional. In all the seeding and spawning functions, we see that one in a hundred, one in a thousand, one in a million, take root or otherwise grow to maturity. The rest goes to feed the birds and the fishes and the pigs. Almost everything they consume is in turn wasted, spewed away. And this is true down the line from biology to geology. Fossil fuels and the better building materials take countless centuries to form. Now, look up to see that a trillion trillion stars went to the making of one habitable planet. He (God) takes His time, and makes the necessary sea room.

“And yet it moves,” as Galileo didn’t say. It works, and in glorious moments we glimpse some aspect of how it fits together; how every particle is cycled and recycled — from the bloated cow to the wee dung beetle rolling his gleaming pellet away. There is extreme inefficiency, and no waste at all. Often I am staggered by the scale of the thing; by the universal attention to microscopic detail; by the adaptability of every constituent part; by the constant interweaving relaxation and restoration of a purposeful order.

Humans, on the other hand, are efficiency freaks. We are always looking for a way to slash the costs, to eliminate redundancy, control the outcome, guarantee success. And in the course of this we bind ourselves in tangles.

Let us take milk for today’s example. We have a little crisis at the moment, up this way, because we are producing it too efficiently. In an effort to secure their votes, our politicians created marketing boards to assure a price to dairy farmers. Perhaps it did not occur to them that other jurisdictions might do the same; that each would create immense competing milk lakes of surplus. That they would have to enforce quotas to limit over-production. That they would then have to subsidize the milk for which they were overpaying, to sell any of it abroad. That such nonsense would result in e.g. the current feud between Trudeau and Trump, over who’s cheating whom. Verily, as in all government schemes, everyone is now cheating everybody, and consumers are paying not a small extra amount, but double or triple what they would otherwise be paying for a pint of tasteless homogenized cream, or a hunk of tasteless pasteurized cheese. And that’s before taxes.

An immensely cumbersome and self-defeating apparatus has been created to advance the cause of efficiency. It soon includes sprawling commercial networks, in which even if there is no technical monopoly, the large buyers squeeze out the small ones. And the system cannot be peacefully dismantled, because by now it is inhabited by vested interests throughout, each with the expense of maintaining a lobby. And after every negotiation the arrangements become more complicated, and the authority expands, until the last independent operator becomes a piece of the machinery.

One could spend one’s working life trying to master these complexities, in the invariably disappointed hope of making the system more responsive and “humane.” Or one could do what Mr Trump appears to be doing, which is to march in with a sledgehammer, and make a mess of it. I think that the best and most godly method.

There is a subtle difference between guilt and shame. We ignore it today. Both involve “feelings,” which is good enough for us. For guilt, we must do something wrong. Infamy, disgrace, shame, is getting caught, whether we did it or not. And shame can be shared. The idea of “collective guilt” is rubbish. You either did it or you didn’t. It has naught to do with your precious self-esteem. Guilt requires atonement. Shame is just a form of social conditioning, that doesn’t seem to work any more. There is more, but let that stand as the start for some other essay.

Gentle reader may be aware that I have taken, and take, a dim view of old hack journalists (including, shamefully, myself). But I also feel a great affection for them. The older the flatfoot, the better. There was a time when most were at least fairly honest, before something resembling ideology swept the trade, and journalists became willing slaves to the “politically correct” conventions. I think of Charles Lewis, for instance.

“Charlie,” as he is known, spent decades filling the spaces between the advertisements in daily papers. He has a gift for plain prose and the telling detail, which puts him in the ninety-ninth percentile. He has principles, which are essentially Catholic. Latterly he became the religion reporter for the National Post, until disabled by his spine a few years ago. Rising through prayer above the question of excruciating pain (“Why me?”) he has since devoted his talents to the fight against “euthanasia.”

Lots of things drop into my inbox, but I found this item (here) exceptionally invigorating. Lewis comes to terms with polls that show the great majority of people who self-identify as Catholics — in Canada, as elsewhere through the contemporary West — have no idea what the faith entails. In Canada, for instance, the most recent poll showed seven in ten Catholics support “euthanasia” — a position that is absolutely impossible for a Catholic to take. Rather than quibbling with the way the question was phrased, or the counting was done, Lewis accepts the reality behind the numbers, and the implication.

If we do not get our house in order, our influence on the society around us will continue to be nil.

The great majority of Catholics today, half-a-century after the Church embraced modernist innovations, are not really Catholic. They pretend to belong, and the Church pretends to accept them. They have never been catechized, and live in a state of moral, intellectual, and spiritual squalor. Few ever see the inside of a church, let alone the inside of a confessional. None in this state should be taking communion, for it can only compound their sins.

Lives and immortal souls are at stake: we must stop being nice about it. Bishops who can’t handle the heat of the front line, should find other jobs. We must all stop blathering pretty lies about “mercy,” and start telling people the truth. Christ came to save us. He did not come to approve our life choices.

And as for the people, it would be useless to “shame” them. Guilt is the issue. Either be Catholic, and throw yourself on the mercy of Our Lord. Or, stop abusing the term.

My mind wanders through reading. Currently I’m in the sixth century, and somewhere in the East of Christendom, in those happy days when we were rid of the Arians, holding the Sassanids at bay, and hadn’t faced the Arabs yet. Well, things look rosier from a distance. (This was God’s plan, to lift our spirits.) The closer one gets, the better one focuses, the worse things appear. I have come to the view that at every moment of history — if you are there — everything has gone to hell, and the end is near for the world as we know it. Too, Holy Church is in crisis. And yet life goes on.

Pannonia is where I am, in mind. It is the old Roman province tucked inside the great southward bend of the Danube, sufficiently spread to cross seven modern national borders as it squiggles towards the Euxine (Black Sea). Ethnically, it is the usual mess. Huns, Ostrogoths, Avars have settled and (God help us!) here come the Slavs. These are the days long before the great schism, East and West. The pope is in Rome, we think, but the emperor is definitely in Constantinople. Sirmium, the ancient provincial capital, has seen better days. Ammianus Marcellinus, who seldom wrote promotional copy, had called it “the glorious mother of cities” two centuries before. Now it is a dive.

One thinks of shepherds in the pastoral vein. The ancients, like us, were given to romantic Arcadian fancies, and their urban folk loved to depict the shepherds piping. But if one lived down on the farm in Pannonia, one was more likely to think of them as marauders; as delinquents and barbarians — latrones — and perhaps illegal immigrants, too.

In the spirit of Gibbon, we dream of the Roman Empire, ever falling, and the troops out at the wild frontiers, lonely and afraid. The reality was usually different. They minded the borders, but mostly they were employed in police functions, on the near side of it, trying to enforce some civilized order. This was true not only for the pagan Romans but for the Christian Byzantines who succeeded them. Both had a lot of “West Texas” to defend. Pannonia was a bit like that, and by the sixth century, becoming more so. The people there did not like to be ruled, preferring to select their own vigilantes. Often it was farmers versus ranchers (“shepherds”).

I have never entirely trusted the police — I have lived in too many countries — but I can see the need for ordering force, paramilitary if it comes to that. Dress anyone in a little authority, and he will be tempted to personalize it. Humans are like that, we tend to appropriate things. And as Paul Valéry explained, “Power without abuse loses its charm.”

My reflection for this morning is that this is always so. There can be no permanent security, only expedients of time and place. It follows that justice comes and goes, and is often rather murky. The Byzantines sent irenarchs (beautiful word): peacemakers to knock a few heads. They changed them frequently, if they survived.

Overlooking questions of race, creed, and colour, the world is divided between traders and raiders, between villagers and pillagers: enterprise will never be confined to one side. And though we live at the heart of Empire, our children will find themselves at the frontier. I have before me an old postcard with the Delacroix painting: “Attila the Hun and his Hordes overrun Italy and the Arts.”

Among the conceits of modern agnostic nominalist positivist scientism is the existence of facts. Mea culpa: for through inattention, I am often guilty of falling into this trap. “Facts and arguments,” or “facts and theories,” are phrases that convey a false opposition, yet are the tradestock alike of people who call themselves scientists, historians, journalists. They imagine there are “facts” on which everyone must agree (on pain of punishment), and that once they are “settled,” the fun starts. We can then explain them, or if we are technophiles, put them to work.

There is, I am persuaded by religious faith, such a thing as reality, and it is possible to distinguish what is external to ourselves. But I will not be reduced to a cogito-ergo-sum. I am also part of this reality, and in self-apprehension I become ever more aware that it is unified by the pre-existence of God, who made us, body and soul, out of nothing — as we may demonstrate from the evidence of a time before we were born.

To say that we “evolved” out of pre-existing matter is a grand evasion; an attempt to reinstate that material infallibility in which the Victorian agnostics put their trust. On misunderstood instructions from Kant, they constructed an imaginary universe from which only the Creator was excluded, because He was “unknowable.” Everything else could be known, at least potentially, through the dogmas of a sceptical empiricism.

From this they came to believe in the most extraordinary rot: the “settled science” of that age, long since blown away. Huxley, Stephen, Clifford, Spencer, Cockshut: the legion of High Victorian respectables. They were the fathers of a British Agnosticism which tried to omit the violent consequences of a more Continental Atheism, by creating something churchishly snug and bourgeois. They were seldom vicious. Their ambition was to save the world for “facts,” through disbelief in the monsters that revolutionary Frenchmen and other Europeans had summoned. Verily: their chief reason for denying Christ was that He preached the existence of demons. “Everyone knows better today.”

Not bad men — they were obsessed with the preservation of sound ethical behaviour, and all the good manners that could be lost through irreligion. Each was his own little sack of anxieties, but in the aggregate they were nothing at all. No one could want to read them today, yet we repeat their mistakes in a lazier fashion. For a belief in “facts” atomizes the consciousness. It makes us very boring. We need to be warned where it leads.

There is a marvellous book by Michael Polanyi, that does the “objective” fact-world in. Published in 1958, I think it among the great unacknowledged classics of twentieth-century thought. The title is, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. It is more than four hundred pages of continuous exposé, by a man who was himself among the greatest physical chemists, with a hold on all the other formal sciences that was remarkably broad and deep. He refuses to separate “scientific facts” from the arts by which they are known, or the purposes for which they are gathered, like flowers from the field to assemble our bouquets. He shows how the genuine scientific advances of our age refute the premisses from which they started.

We claim there is a “scientific method,” and teach some witless version to the young and naïve. Yet we know that, in practice, it is never followed. This is because it will never work. The world isn’t “facts.” It is not organized that way. No insight can be had by counting hairs or atoms.

Anti-blogging has been light, these last few days as, notwithstanding my dislike of business, I have been busy. As ever, it has been in a neglected cause. I consider a birthday the equivalent to a New Year, and thus the approach to my own as a time to clear decks. Rather a lot of unfinished tasks to sweep overboard this year, owing to my habitual procrastination. Still haven’t quite caught up, and soon after midnight I turn sixteen for the fourth time. Too, I might take another irresponsible holiday tomorrow, because it is my birthday.

Meanwhile, anyone suffering from a perverse hunger for additional David Warren Thought might consult the Catholic Thing (here), where I weigh in with my considered opinion on the first one hundred days of Mr Donald J. Trump. Actually, he is older than that, and like other commentators I’ve restricted myself to his first hundred days in presidential office.

I do wish the Americans would shift their inauguration date from January 20th every fourth year. They may not have considered that the hundredth day from that might clash with my birthday. I think this inconsiderate of them. Formerly they waited until March 4th, the anniversary of the invention of Congress in 1789. (Unless it was a Sunday.) And that year, Mr Washington wasn’t sworn in until the 30th of April, as I dimly recall.

Some time in May would be better. It would give the new gentleman most of the summer to repeal the previous gentleman’s fondest achievements, while people aren’t watching with overmuch attention.

We learn, from an article in Atlantic magazine, that the idiots have published 129,864,880 old-fashioned printed books. And this was as of August 2010; there must be more by now. By “the idiots” I of course refer to humankind, and express the view of all the other animals, who inwardly laugh at our madness, though not all the time. (Alone with a human in a confined space, they may instead be terrified.)

Apparently, Messrs Google got the idea of digitally copying every one, and making each available “at one click” through the Internet, for a modest fee. They got 25 million books and 400 million dollars into the project, before the lawyers stopped them, and now this linguistic stargate is locked away, like the chemical weapons in Syria, waiting for a more appropriate moment to come out again.

Thank God for lawyers. They went to work on behalf of that unsilent class of over-literate intellectuals, who were happy enough for Google to pay, but outraged that they might benefit. They were demanding a vast new tax-paid bureaucracy to regulate everything, and redistribute the income from dead authors to live ones (i.e. themselves). Having cost Google a few more million in legal fees, and having won the support of the malicious clowns in the Obama Justice Department, they tied the project up in so much tape and string, that the corporation finally cut its losses.

This, so far as I can see, is the only use for the progressive Left. By bundling every one of their crazed, idealistic schemes with minute, Kafkaesque requirements, they eventually defeat themselves. All Google’s opponents spastically declared in favour of the project “in principle.” But it would have to be done to their unworkable specifications. A beautiful “own goal” by the devils.

Whereas, I would oppose the principle itself. Nine in ten books should never have been published (at a very conservative estimate), and cannot be forgotten quickly enough. I note that merely turning the pages, to feed the cameras, required an army of the unskilled, working at sausage-factory speed. Clever algorithms were written to correct their sloppy work, and straighten the images of the pages. Lorry-loads of books from the participating libraries were driven through — innocent books that had never disturbed the peace of the world, quietly serving their turn as interior decoration, were subjected to this indignity. How many lovely old leather spines were cracked in the process?

Books should be treated with care. They contain innumerable errors, of doctrine and of fact. Incarcerated in physical libraries they may seem harmless, these days. Hardly anyone goes there. But caution is required in the use of them, and all those currently in vogue should be handled with tongs. Were it up to me, we would restore the Catholic Index, and ban all newly-published books without exception, for at least fifty years, allowing any heat in them to cool. Then, a committee of hoary and senescent elders could let a few through, having determined that they constituted no threat to public morality.

Though to be fair, making every book ever published easily available to anyone, is perhaps the next best thing. For it would reduce a grave public danger to just another desert of pixels.

Beware the salesmen who say, “It’s the soap in Duz that does it.” The statement is plausible, and therefore suspicious. The word itself may be noun in Azeri, verb in Luxembourgish, a numeral in Mauritian Creole; I am referring to the North American cleaning product, vaguely remembered from earliest childhood, more precisely recalled through the commercial jingle.

It was a lie. Duz wuz not a soap at all. It wuz an amphipathic detergent: one of those technological innovations of German laboratories, tasked with getting around the national shortage of oils during the late Great War. They found a surfactant more efficient than soap; one which did not waste effort binding the limestone and chalk in hard water to the dirt scum it was separating. Or so I understand.

Now, I do not propose to bring Messrs Procter and Gamble before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I can’t afford the lawyers. There is evidence in the Internet that the product was a powdered soap before it became a powdered detergent. Yet I distinctly remember that slogan, from a time well after the soap component must have been retired. And I have found confirmation for this memory on YouTube.

Quite frankly, such avowals are in the heart of modern life: assertions that are plausible, but not strictly true. I could give other examples. In some, such as the whole concept of “government investment,” they are not even slightly true; and in many fields, such as that of insurance (public or private, it makes little difference) a bottomless pit of moral jeopardy is concealed by the surface claims.

We have not truth, but approximations to truth, that will not bear investigation. This is what makes us so different from our mediaeval, or other pre-modern ancestors, whose circumstances freed them from what I will call (with apologies to Ratzinger) the “dictatorship of hype.” Or rather than fall into hype myself, I should say they simply lacked the machinery by which hype of this sort could be generated, and poetry abused.

For the line in question is poetry indeed: “The soap in Duz that does it.” But it is poetry degraded. Somewhere near the beginning of his penetrating commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Thomas Aquinas notes that poetry and philosophy share an origin in the apprehension of the wondrous. I say they expound, yet neither can “explain” the mysteries, including that mystery of an existence (our own) that comes out of nothing.

Yet upon consulting the Wicked Paedia I find that the operation of detergent is no wonder at all. It can all be explained to any specialist’s satisfaction, in words of twelve syllables or less.

Which takes us, naturally, to the stain of sin. How is it to be eradicated? Clearly, we must begin by understanding what it is, and there we encounter a modern “problem,” carried forward through all human ages. The very existence of sin is mysterious, and can be casually denied, for as we sin we become less conscious that sin is sin, and slide by degrees into the modern glibness. If the German laboratories cannot invent a product to wash it away, why don’t we just ignore it?

Macula, guilt, is left over. We are soiled; it will not go away. Freud and other shrinks thought they could isolate it in their laboratories — explain it away — yet after more than a century of attempts we still feel it, like the itchy pyjamas that Duz promised to soften. Drugs may suppress it, temporarily, but at an hideous cost. For even when the sense of sin is gone, the guilt obstinately remains. Paradoxically, we have reduced this “problem” to the mystery again.