Essays in Idleness

According to the estimate of one of my correspondents, about one-third of the Alberta economy is gone, since the collapse of world crude oil prices began to engage with the regulatory destruction of the province’s fossil fuel industries. This is good news, to those who envied the province’s “excessive” wealth, and Calgary’s “corporate power.” (Per capita income in Alberta was until quite recently higher than that of any Canadian province or American state.) The decline is statistically masked, however, by the disappearance of imports (the “tar sands” required a lot of high-tech equipment) and the skid of the Canadian dollar: the trade balance has technically improved. Likewise, the unemployment rate may actually fall, as people give up seeking jobs entirely. It is only in reality that businesses are closing or radically downsizing; that the economic pilgrimage of labour to Alberta from Canada’s poorer provinces has turned the other way.

Decline is never distributed equally, and while the capitalists take so many hits, that it becomes possible to find “affordable housing” in Calgary, the government town of Edmonton is still visibly booming. This is where the new socialist government presides, in succession to the spendthrift “conservative” government held responsible for a downturn beyond its control. Albertans have long been known as decisive people. They decided that if they were going to commit suicide, they would do it properly.

In the same way, after years of economic stagnation across much of USA, Washington DC and its surrounding counties remain an island of remarkable prosperity. Nothing yet impedes their parasitical growth, and one may easily understand the horror with which a businessman like Trump is greeted when, as president-elect, he threatens to apply a form of chemotherapy to America’s metastasized bureaucracies. (In the recent election, Trump and Pence took 4.1 percent of the popular vote in DC: a minority of the 9.5 percent who did not vote for Hillary.)

There are no mysteries here. Wealth is generated by human work and investment, and the purpose of politics, like piracy, is to suck it dry.

I mentioned Alberta first, however, for the USA economy remains the world’s most formidable, and therefore complex, even in decline. Alberta’s resource-based industries make it simpler to understand. Before oil and gas there was beef and wheat, and before that, furs. The population is diffuse, and the conditions for the development of manufacturing and services — traditionally dense population, and thus a massive labour pool — only recently emerged, and only in the small corridor of the province that bridges its two dominant cities. (Warmer Texas, by comparison, has acquired far more population.) Live by the sword, die by the sword, has ever been the destiny of the resource-based, and the “blue-eyed sheikhs” are now suffering the fate of Arabia. For like Saudi, Alberta became a vastly inflated welfare state, which with the collapse of the oil price can be quickly deflated.

Every government’s first spending priority is itself. This becomes painfully evident as the revenue stream dries: the consumption of a nation’s lifeblood becomes more centralized. Paradoxically, what is bad for Alberta is, for a time, good for Edmonton; as what is bad for America is good for DC. As the body decays, the parasites flourish, though not indefinitely. Eventually there is no more lifeblood to be sucked, and we have an economic corpse like Venezuela. With that comes the last stage of societal disintegration, and violence in the throes.

Now, our times are more interesting (in the classical Chinese sense) for the technological developments I’ve touched on (here, for instance). Human labour is becoming outmoded. It is a problem that cannot be ignored — a consumer society must retain some money-earning consumers — yet can only be aggravated by government intervention. Human creativity might conceivably rise to the occasion, but inanition can be the only response to the palliative drug of welfare.

To this survivalist end, I think, the bloodsucking must stop. It precludes the very possibility of recovery.

At a recent meeting of a secret society to which I belong, the name “Raymond Chandler” came up. Gentle reader may know him for one of those detective novelists. I gather he’s been dead since 1959. But oddly enough his works, in the Library of America edition (two volumes), were then found lying in a flea market, like a pair of unclaimed bodies in a morgue. Although I have never been much of a hoo-dunnit fan, I remembered being quite entertained by Chandler in my youth; that Auden had good words for him; and that Oscar Wilde once provided an excuse for low behaviour. (“I can resist anything except temptation.”)

I was slanging “conventional” novels just last week, but will admit they have some historical uses. In this case, the books evoke an earlier generation of greater Los Angeles, and Chandler’s sharp eye for objects and interior decoration, for clothing and mannerisms of speech and gesture, beat anything that might whip by in a televised period drama. Indeed, one must read about these things today, because it is beyond the acting abilities of a later generation to capture what adulthood was like, before it began to phase out in the ’sixties. Old photographs are useful, too, in presenting faces one does not see today. This was a time when, even in Hollywood, a girl in her early twenties could have elegance and charm, and it was possible to imagine a virgin.

There are a lot of evil people in Chandler, as there always are in every generation, and the hoo-dunnit writer must, by trade, contrive a few murders. Gangsters, too, are a commonplace of society at all times, and seem meaner when they can provide a more vivid contrast with everyday life. The background dullness of the older and much smaller (but already sprawling) Los Angeles conurbation stands in for the dullness of all North American cities, or all parts built in the automotive age. The emptiness of all attempts at glitz was more striking against a greyer background, before glitz was normalized. By now it is enchanting, and for those of a certain age (moi, for instance) there are nostalgic pleasures. There was much of quiet, timeless beauty still in the countryside; the cities were aesthetic hell-holes already; but the ugliness did not yet scream.

Conversely, some things haven’t changed, and there is a certain immortal likeness in all human society prior to, or functioning outside, the Internet globalization. Let me call this “the universality of the local.” From my own memory, which now compasses a third generation, three stages can be discerned. In nice quarter-century increments, there is a post-War ending about 1970; a middling stage from then until about 1995; and now the “millennial” stage. The first and second have much more in common than either with this latest, in which those once accustomed to mere telephones and letters are necessarily rather lost. “Change” was accelerating all through, but speeds have been reached to which the human psyche was never in all history adapted, so that the very notion of “future” is slurred. Nothing holds still any more, for anyone to begin to understand it.

Chandler’s plots are entirely unbelievable; his characters, too. The “tough guys” he takes such delight in depicting aren’t scary any more, and probably weren’t when they first saw print. His women are unnecessarily gorgeous and sly; there is no relief from Hollywood cliché. The blondes are too blonde, though I must say there is a fine Aristotelian inventory of the species of blonde, early in The Long Goodbye, and other delicious attempts at cataloguing stereotypes. Philip Marlowe himself, our hard-boiled fictional private detective, could not in real life have survived all his beatings, though possibly his alcohol consumption, matched, I’m informed, by the author’s own. His much-celebrated moral code would not stand up to candid analysis, but then, it was not meant to. Entertainment only was proposed, and the literary flourishes are aimed at the first generation to absorb mass post-secondary education. In this sense Chandler’s novels are cloyingly pretentious, though relief comes from the occasional poetical image or simile that is thrilling in a comical way.

He is pulp fiction from beginning to end, where the attraction is in the props, and a “camp” effect is sought that might be as addictive as Sherlock Holmes. There is tension enough to keep us idly turning pages, but in the end a very modern reduction of human life to the condition of the movie or cartoon.

[In the hope of being better understood, I have extended my prologue.]

*

We have apparently in Canada now — as too, in many other Western jurisdictions — a legal “right” to suicide, together with something more consequential (for those with brains to think this through). It is what amounts to a “right” to be murdered. It is among the products of the progress of progressivism: that “transvaluation of all values” that Herr Nietzsche wrote about; or as I’d rather put it, the inversion of that moral order which, through human action by the grace of God, Christian civilization achieved. This strange, incremental but accelerating inversion, in which old premisses are replaced by new, becomes ever more openly demonic.

The premisses being overthrown — an example being the sanctity of human life — are not only moral but intellectual. What was grounded in nature, clarified in men’s minds by divine commandment, and carefully presented on the principle of non-contradiction through centuries by our most learned and wise, is replaced by arbitrary atheist assertions, in a chaotic jumble of self-contradictions. In the new totalitarian “rights language,” laws are rewritten ad hoc and holus-bolus, depending on what progressive fashion requires, each new “right” necessarily false because it will acknowledge no corresponding duty, as all classical reasoning required. The new premisses are one-winged, and tightly circular: “This is your right, therefore this is your right, therefore the world must be changed to deliver it, regardless of cost or consequences.”

We confront arguments today that operate on reason as the terrorist’s bomb on human flesh, or a bulldozer across a garden. Progressive thinking provides no principles to resolve contradictions beyond the vanities and whims of progressive commissars. It expressly denies the cardinal virtue of prudence, and all allied restraints; it expressly refuses to answer any question with the candour of a Yea or Nay; indeed mocks every demand for consistency, and seeks the punishment of anyone who asks.

Resistance to the constantly “evolving” progressive agenda becomes a pitched battle in which reason can, sadly, find no purchase — you cannot argue with howler monkeys. Each clash reduces painfully to: Can they do it, or can we stop them? For we are dealing with an Enemy — principalities, powers — who does not hesitate or relent. He has cracked the front line of civilized defences, and advances with an insatiable hatred, focused finally upon God. This Enemy does not intend to allow his opponents time to recover, or to grant them refuge anywhere.

I am not saying that the politically “progressive” are all inhabited by devils. Many are not, and the great masses only jounce in the contemporary moral and intellectual pandæmonium. I am saying that we have lost “politics as usual.” It is not a contest between adversaries who, in good faith, propose honourable means to honourable ends. It is a contest over the ends themselves; the kind of contest of which Our Lord said, “He who is not with me is against me.”

*

Through the casual review of polls, over the years, I have become aware that the general public can itself be moved from approximately 80/20 to approximately 20/80 (four fingers and a thumb to four thumbs and a finger) by any specious argument, if it is repeated constantly, and the Left are able to impose a fait accompli through the courts. Among intellectuals, the swings may be wider and quicker. They are not pendular, however, for once various civilized taboo lines have been crossed, there is no inevitable return, and the only way back is through a field of carnage.

Today, unlike “yesterday” (i.e. a few short years ago) there is 80 percent support for what goes in Canada under the euphemism “assisted dying,” and everywhere under the older euphemism, “euthanasia.” As loyal Christians (or Jews, and many others) we must never surrender to public opinion of this kind. Yet we must recognize that it is pointless to argue with the great mass who, in Canada as in places like Nazi Germany, can so easily be persuaded that down is up, and that words now have new meanings. They simply haven’t the equipment to follow a thread longer than the short slogans in which progressives specialize. Not if their moral schooling was defective, leaving consciences deformed.

People can be “educated” or “catechized” or awakened only one by one, and with their own participation. There is always hope, for as Thomas Sowell says, though everyone is born ignorant, not everyone is born stupid. But in practice, they are retrieved from catastrophic error, only by catastrophe.

At this point in our societal degeneration, “the people” are obedient to what beloved Benedict XVI called the “dictatorship of relativism.” This is understandable because few were raised in anything else. The very concept of a moral absolute (e.g. “thou shalt do no murder”) is alien to them. At the gut level, they may still individually recoil against an evil, but only if they have watched, and found the spectacle “icky.”

Hence what I noticed in the recent Planned Parenthood “debate” in neighbouring USA. People got quite excited about the sale of “baby parts” who had no strong objection to abortion. It was not the murder of the child itself, but the subsequent details that disgusted them. This was made the worse, for agents of the Left, because another fallen aspect of our human nature is ghoulish curiosity. The complete triumph of “tabloid” over “broadsheet” journalism was enabled by technology, but at a more fundamental level, by the exploitation of this sick human desire to (as we see on the streets) stop and gawp at the traffic accident, or the shooting aftermath, or whatever seems to be on offer.

A morality that depends on the perception of ickiness becomes a danger in itself. It may seem at first commendably anti-intellectual, but the loss of reason entails unpredictable developments, regardless of the direction taken — whether superficially Left or Right.

*

From my mail, on yesterdays’ Idlepost, I discover that in nursing homes where “assisted dying” executions are now taking place, management has a problem that was not anticipated. The executions must be performed in strictest secrecy because many of their staff want to get a look.

They want to be in on the drama. They’d like to watch someone die.

In the past, long before modern tabloid journalism, the State would exploit this human quirk, by making capital punishment very public. A beheading, a hanging, especially with drawing and quartering, would attract a large audience. This in turn would be good for business, too, as everyone from street vendors to pickpockets cashed in. The historians’ assumption is that the purpose of a public execution is to warn the general public against breaking the law. But I think often a larger purpose was the old populist provision of “bread and circuses.”

Today we have the relatively bloodless alternative of professional sports. But as our society returns, by progressive increments, to its pagan roots, we may expect the emergence of something more gladiatorial.

Already, Islamic terrorism produces scenes that are horrible, and for that reason intriguing to the common man. Sooner or later the marketing people discover the sales opportunities. Indeed, through the medium of cable television, they already have found a way to monetize it. And like the pornographers, the newscasters come to realize that by posting “warnings” they can not only exculpate themselves, with characteristic hypocrisy, but also attract a larger crowd.

My point here is that by each “transvaluation,” or inversion, of the ancient received moral order, we do not get the new one we expect. We get developments beyond anything that anyone could have expected, as the various forgotten evils that lurk in the human breast come to engage with each other.

A Filipina, an Ethiopian, and a Pakistani walk into a nursing home. …

This is not a joke; instead a recollection from several years ago as my parents were exiting this world. The institution, providing a form of terminal care, with bed and board, continues around two corners in Parkdale here. It is “the last place on earth” for 128 patients at any given moment; never less, for there are waiting lists. It has a better reputation than some nursing homes.

The three in question stand out in memory because in two cases they were outstanding nurses, and in the third, an outstanding administrator. Each, in her particular role, had the grace of what I suppose our pope would call “mercy,” if he means by it the ability to go somewhere beyond the rules in offering comfort and fellowship to the dying. Two Christians and a Muslim.

I am thinking, partly, of their services to my parents, who had also the luxury of frequent visits from their children and friends, and the company of each other until my father died. We appreciated them; but other inmates of this nursing home were in a position to appreciate them more. For those had been more fully “warehoused,” by families with money, signing off on “a problem.” I knew several who were never visited at all; who had only the fear of death to interrupt the bleakness of their days; and memories tormented by those who, having acquired legal custody of their savings, left them there, and skulkily walked away. In age they endure something of the experience of a conscripted soldier on the battlefront — long stretches of debilitating boredom with short passages of terror for relief; and such new companions as they might find, dying all around them.

But there is no mud or cold in these trenches. Instead they find the sterility of a modern, hygienic, institutional environment, with distracted keepers — a professionally-trained staff. Anything resembling blood and guts will be cleaned up promptly; cadavers are removed with speed and discretion.

Under the state’s new “euthanasia” provisions, those who have decided on, or been persuaded to “assisted dying,” will be executed in a cool and professional way. A priest I know walked in unexpectedly on a rehearsal of this process. His spontaneous expression of outrage was condemned as an unconscionable disturbance.

So where was I? Yes, thinking of three nurses, each (by no coincidence) seriously religious according to her traditions; and each a conductor of kindliness, patience, warmth and concern — beyond the medically urgent or necessary. Their very presence on a shift, especially in the night, was a source of strength to many poor old customers; of that feeling of safety, founded in trust, that a soldier might have when he discovers that his superior officer is genuinely competent; that he also cares what happens to his men. Conversely, their absence could be a source of anxiety.

The word for this in English was once “condescension”; a usage that would be inconceivable today, for it acknowledges that people are and will ever be unequal in power. In any moment, you depend on persons “above”; those “below” depend on you. (I put these words in quotes to convey that the relative positions are not always fixed; they may even change at different times of day.) Trust is involved as a condition of every mediation. And when it breaks down we have the horror of equality: Hobbes’s warre of all against all.

I think of these three particular nurses, each to my knowledge a universe in herself, on this vexed question of “euthanasia.” I am reasonably confident that each would accept being fired, rather than participate in regulated murder. One might call them “selfish” or “rigid” in a very narrow, and sophistical sense: willing to part with career and livelihood, rather than agree to the dictates of Hell.

The post-modern mind cannot understand them. It asks, “But what about all the other patients who rely on you, who turn to you for such comforts as they have? How can you abandon them? Why can’t you just suck it up, the way we all have to do sometimes, and keep your religious opinions to yourself? Tell your ‘god’ you were just following orders.”

This is, all should see, a vacuous argument, to which only silence can respond. It serves only to reveal the void of conscience, that follows from law in which conscience has no place. It speaks of a future when all human decency will be driven underground, and every decent person will be isolated; and of a fleeting present when the response to evil was fluffy and lax, professionally accommodating, and demonically glib.

One thinks of the ultimate act of condescension: when Christ came down from Heaven. And of what He taught us: be rigid, hold your ground!

As these Essays are short, I like to indulge in oversimplification. Gentle reader should understand the plan. In the absence of omniscience, we look at the world from successive angles. The truth is sculptural, not a flat picture. Gradually one assembles the more comprehensive view, by tracking around, at various elevations, and moving closer then farther, in different conditions of light. Too, there are the phenomena of texture, and others corresponding to our senses five (really twenty-seven). It should also be allowed that this sculpture moves, in some ways that do and others that do not respond to human interaction. And that it is alive; and that it will outlive us; and that like every other, my analogy falls apart.

So back to oversimplification. An article ping’d me this morning by my Chief Texas Correspondent, from behind the paywall of the Wall Street Journal, touches on political developments in France.

François Fillon, the presidential contender, will find himself in the middle between the “far right” (meaningless leftish shorthand) Marine Le Pen, and whoever becomes the socialist standard-bearer in a primary later this month. Fillon surprised all the experts (as usual) by winning the soft-right primary, by a landslide in the run-off. It was thought he couldn’t win because he is an overtly practising, believing Catholic in the land of laïcité (the principle of ungodliness established in the French Revolution). He goes to Mass, quite publicly, and quite memorably went to the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes for the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, telling media afterwards not only to smell the coffee but also, hear the bells.

My European readers will be already familiar from their mass media with what the WSJ is now reporting in the USA. In short, the public profession of Christianity, in a political context, has not been heard in Europe for some time. It is shocking to millennials, especially. Among the old there is the distant but still audible tinkle of l’après-guerre.

It should be recalled that Continental Europe rose from the ashes under the political direction of overtly Christian, predominantly Catholic parties. The “Christian Democrat” movement was the means by which, in country after country, western Europe embraced anti-communism and NATO, free markets and deregulation, the baby boom and general reconstruction after World War II. The “economic miracle” that began in the late ’forties did not descend from the clouds; it was propelled by bold decisions made by consciously Christian statesmen — among the few politicians untainted by the immediate Nazi/Fascist/Collaborationist past. (Britain, which missed Occupation, instead followed her Labour Party in the alternative direction, delaying the start of her post-War recovery until 1979.)

Only after this Christian tutelage had achieved great prosperity and societal peace, did the “Social Democrat” movements prevail at the polls, pouring the molasses back into what became fully-fledged Nanny States in the ’sixties. (This had been on the agenda of all Left parties since the beginning of the century.) At the same time, Christianity was itself receding as a social and moral force, partly in consequence of monied decadence, partly due to the hideous self-destruction of the Catholic Church in “the spirit of Vatican II.” And what began as a coal and steel free trade agreement, and was expanded into a Common Market, was itself transformed into the dirigiste pseudo-religion in the black heart of the European Union.

More detail might be supplied to expand this into a book, but my ambition for this morning is limited to sketching the broad outline of a post-War history which, I think, is widely ignored. Take Christianity out of the mix of factors — as the ascendant “secular humanists” have succeeded in doing — and not only antique but contemporary European history becomes incomprehensible.

In the spirit of the economist, Schumpeter, one might play with the idea that prosperity is itself the killer. Once people are economically secure, and the necessary minimum of civilized institutions are quietly ticking over, they are free to entertain bullshit again, and start undoing what they have accomplished. Schumpeter held that “liberalism” in the European sense — free markets and free inquiry — contains the seed of its own demise. One might even argue that, next time we have a chance, we should find a way to sabotage prosperity, without government help. Perhaps people need to stay a little hungry, to retain their common sense, and their appreciation of individual liberty. Or perhaps they need religion if only for the pragmatic purpose of keeping their minds off politics.

On some other day I might try to explain why I am not so cynical.

Let it be observed, nevertheless, by those whose minds are not disordered, that Europe once again finds herself passing through the stages of collapse — as in the “post-Christian” 1910s, and 1930s. The Islamic invasion, by way of open immigration to replace a contracepted and aborted generation of pension-funding workers, is only one dimension of this process. At every public level, throughout the West, bureaucratic micromanagement on “progressive” principles has lured us into converging blind alleys. For instance, our ideological “environmentalism” isn’t sustainable, either. Nor is the rampant consumerism it only pretends to challenge.

The experts, as I say, are defeated by any prospect of a trend reversing. (“All trends are reversible” was my old pundit mantra.) The apparent success of a François Fillon, as of a Donald Trump, is a nightmare to them; more because they cannot understand it than because they are mortally opposed. (Neither of those gentlemen has yet proposed to do anything truly radical or unprecedented; both propose to “fix” rather than to dismantle universal welfarism.)

Le Sens Commun (roughly, “common sense”) is the name of the grassroots organization that put millions in the streets to protest the French gay marriage legislation, and in defence of other life issues. They and Fillon have discovered in each other the means to a formidable campaign, to reverse the national political direction. Parallel events in other European countries are contributing to the revival of an explicitly Christian sense of ancestral identity — something a little more subtle than nationalism. I do not like to make predictions; we will see where it leads.

Would that all God’s pundits were like Thomas Sowell. My paraphrase of Moses is a little awkward. God made people, but pundits make themselves, with or without God’s help. They might nevertheless be prophetic, in a tightly limited way. Sowell being an exquisitely trained economist, from the glory days of the Chicago School, his prophecy took the form of economic reasoning. Both from “theory” and a broad experience of the world, he at least knew which economic policies had (and will always have) a one hundred percent failure rate; and he had the gift to explain why this is so to readers of average intelligence and modest attention spans; along with some aphoristic flair. (See here, for instance.)

Yet his opposition to socialism (or “liberalism” or “progressivism”) was founded not upon some mysterious professional or aesthetic dislike of dysfunctional bureaucracies, per se. Rather, the tyranny of statist micromanagement animated his resistance. Consistently through the decades, he has been one of those stubborn American champions of human liberty: most notably against the entrapment of blacks, other minorities, and all materially poor, in the cat’s cradle (-to-grave) of the Nanny State.

Born in the rural poverty of North Carolina, raised in Harlem, he remained personally acquainted with the fate of his race. A disciplined and unexciteable controversialist, he rose closest to exhibiting passion when discussing, for instance, the destruction of the black family by the Great Society of Lyndon Baines Johnson — how it arrested the social and economic advancement blacks had been making by their own efforts to overcome the monstrous history of slavery. By its “helping hand” the government rewarded unwed motherhood, punished enterprise, and promoted crime. In addition to family, it undermined religion, and finally helped instal the abortion mills which disproportionally reduce the black population. And all of this by legislation drumrolled from the start with pseudo-Christian moral posturing.

Sowell could understand this through the economic analysis of moral hazard. Reward people for making irresponsible life choices, for discarding prudence and embracing victimhood and dependency — the result may be predicted. The question whether the policies were the product of invincible stupidity or demonic inspiration is moot: for stupidity is among the devil’s excavating tools. He is a master policy analyst, to whom men are merely statistics to be crunched; and to the stupid man he proposes the job-ready shovel, by which to dig his own grave.

But this is my view; Sowell proceeded in the fixed habit of ignoring the diabolical intention, taking the enemy at his own self-flattering conceit, and accusing him of no more than ignorance and hypocrisy. In person, a true kindly gentleman. In thousands of newspaper columns, and thorough books, he expounded only natural causes and consequences. He has retired from that, and in his farewell column mentions that he will now turn his attention to the happier pursuit of photography. (Examples here.)

By “a few days” it seems I meant the whole Christmas octave: among my longer disappearances from the Idlesphere. I have enjoyed this absence, which did not constrict my writing, for I caught up with correspondence, pinging my last owed message on the eve of the New Year, indeed just at the stroke of midnight, so that I assumed the fireworks, car horns, and noises within the building were in celebration of my heroic deed. As an old hack, a man of deadlines, I was in fact racing to complete the tasks of MMXVI, and settle its debts, within the calendar year; with the exception of those debts which can never be settled, and for which forgiveness and absolution must be sought.

A “hack journalist” to be sure (I love the biblical redundancy in this term), and a graphomaniac, from years of habit. For in the middle of a peaceful week, which I might have devoted more constructively to drinking, I wrote a long short story, or short novella. Verily: I was tempted almost to post, here, what I would describe as a “modern” ghost story — in which none of the characters die, or are dead, but succeed nevertheless in haunting each other. My title was, “The Curse,” and the whole piece could have been read as a chapter of memoir by anyone who knows me well enough. Fortunately, no one living knows me that well.

Of course, one changes names, locations, small details, to protect the guilty and the innocent alike; skips particulars irrelevant to the story, inserts events which might improve it, and both consciously and unconsciously toys withal. A story is a story, and in defence of those who tell stories not strictly accurate to events, they may not be merely trying to purvey “fake news.” They may also be trying not to bore the reader with facts he neither needs nor wants to know. Homer’s “angle” on the Fall of Troy would disintegrate under the ministrations of a professional fact-checker, and the wanderings of Odysseus which enchanted my youth beggared “literal” belief even then.

Yet it fulfilled the requirements of a tale, “which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner.”

Stories, “myths,” are in this sense truer than life, or easier to remember. Life is just a mess, and in trying to recall, precisely, what happened (in last week’s case) thirty-six years ago, and in exactly what order, for the purpose of retelling in an ordered way, I found even old notes of limited utility. Some have better memories, some worse; some, as I’ve discovered in conversation with old friends, have almost no memory at all, and I pity them on the Day of Judgement. For as I tell my students, it is good to be at least partially prepared for an Examination. Notwithstanding, earthly recollection is through a fog of emotional interests, seen and unseen, and by evidence that is quickly lost.

Much of what we attribute to “tradition” goes back only to the last century, or at best the century before. This has always been so: authority is sought by fathering our whims on imaginary ancestors. The next British Coronation — which I fear to be approaching — will be presented as an impossibly ancient rite, when in fact the model was cut from whole cloth at the accession of the late King Edward VII; and the wrinkles later ironed out for his son. Or so I was once told by a supposed expert on this topic. A nation state is inherently unstable, and must constantly recast not only its present but its past in order to keep up with the times. (How very human.)

Indeed, every attempt to subtract God from our proceedings, and insinuate our own profane needs, involves fraud. That is among the uses of Scripture, or other historical documents for that matter: to correct our fluctuating notions of “the record.” Writing was worth inventing for that cause.

The same is so in the history of our storytelling. Prose narrative had, by the early Victorian era, moved against deep truth to nature in the direction of the narrow veracity of “realism.” In the hands of a Dickens or a Dostoyevsky, the new genres could be turned to old effects; but the contemporary “realistic” novel does not descend from Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes. Instead it descends, or might be said to degenerate, from the periodical journalism of the eighteenth century. It was and remains a bastard form, much closer to journalism than to poetry. It must always entertain in a cheapened way.

The legitimate form is that of the tale, which eschews the mundane, and aspires instead to the elevation of poetry. Beowulf, among the unexpected miracles of literature (the manuscript recovered less than a dozen generations ago) is noble; any attempt to recast its essential content in the plausible environment of an historical novel would fail ludicrously. Grendel would shrink into a case study.

Aristotle understood this, and the catharsis he represents is not the Freudian thing we have come to prize. Moreover, he grasped that the plausibility of a tale does not rest on our everyday experience, remembered or projected; instead upon an invisible order that is true to life in the manner of music. Each of the sensible Greek terms he employs — crucially mimesis, hamartia, melos, peripeteia, anagnorisis, dianoia — escape simple English translation, and require serious contemplation to be retrieved.

Modern scholars admit that Aristotle’s categories are largely irrelevant to modern literature, but this is a condemnation of the latter. He is not presenting a “creative writing” formula for successful authorship, incidentally. He is describing how “the tale” works, in its mysterious movement. It is, if gentle reader will, a spiritual organism. Mythos and opsis (too easily translated as “structure” and “spectacle”) are not, as for a modern, the same thing. They are different organs for different functions. The world is not being transformed into “myth,” nor stylized, nor appropriated in any other way; it is instead being visited, Told.

I have never wanted to be a novelist, any more than I have wanted to be a journalist, and in writing my oppressively realistic novella I realized that while it might (or might not) amuse others, I was actually indulging in a therapeutic act that pertained to me alone. As I passed through layers of ethos and lexis, I was discovering for myself how little the protagonist (who was really and inevitably moi) understood about the events in which he once participated. It became an exposé of his selfish blindness, his ham-fisted tampering with hearts, and the consequences not only to others but finally and comprehensively to himself. Had I been writing such garbage from the beginning (I have a talent for describing erotic tension), I would probably be rich by now.

The modern novelist deals in phantasms of the living; he projects himself as if onto a cinema screen. Gentle reader might offer the pop-psychological “narcissistic,” but this word is also widely misunderstood. The image of Narcissus was reflected in water, and “discovered” by him there. But to understand the myth one must understand his tragedy: that Narcissus did not recognize himself.

Up here in the High Doganate, we have decided to check out of Idleposting for a few days, and leave gentle readers to their Christ-masses, not in privatized and monetized “facebooks” but in the familiarity of living human faces, and the ghostly memory of all our dead — time past, time present, gathering together. I have my own little agenda of things to be done and caught up with, especially with regard to God, and this swirling world of souls. It need not go without saying, that I feel a special gratitude in this season to those who have been reading these humble essays, and writing such encouraging and instructive notes, and lately, sending money unbidden to support my idle cause. I am incidentally far behind in mail: please be patient if you are waiting for a reply, and ask again if it seems I have forgotten.

I have never sent out Christmas cards. This is shameful behaviour on my part, the more because I so enjoy receiving them. Especially this year — for what at first might seem a shallow reason. The majority of them, on a side table in my sight now, are hand made, “dripping with religion,” strikingly beautiful, indeed graphically superior to any “store-boughten” cards; patient labours of love. At a time when our Church and her people are experiencing perhaps more than the usual demonic turbulence, it is wonderful to behold such subtle indications that Christians are themselves taking charge; taking matters into their own hands. This is what Christ commanded.

“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am come not to destroy, but to fulfil.” This is the line of text (recalled from the grand old regal KJV) that has been on my mind: that we must be builders not destroyers, in emulation of Our Lord. That we are called to be artists, and that the traditions, or shall I say, The Tradition, must be carried in the marrow of our bones.

I wrote the other day about the “axial moment” in history; that everything before looks forward, and everything after is a consequence of it. May that wee Child in Bethlehem restore to us this knowledge, and make it animate.

One of my kindest and most attentive readers writes to contest the account of Envy in my Thing column today (here). She distinguishes a venial from the deadly mortal sin, in this way:

“I am not sure that Envy is simply the inclination to feel sorry for oneself because everyone else seems to be having a better time of it. That might be mere Jealousy. I have always understood Jealousy to be the venial sin that sees the desirable thing which the other possesses and wants it. I find if I work at it, then with a little imagination (and a lot of charity) I can usually turn Jealousy into Admiration for the success of the other.

“On the other hand, I think of Envy as the mortal sin that sees the desirable thing which the other possesses and then seeks to deprive the other of it. Dante understood Envy as deadly: witness the second storey of his mountain. It is almost as if there is a negative energy in Envy that prevents me from transforming it into something positive, an energy the source of which is Hell.”

In my view, they are a continuum, and there are many venial sins like that, which act as it were like liveried footmen at the doors to Satan’s hotel. Or, I could compare what our latter-day hippies call “recreational drug use” to the full, lethal, opiate addictions. Or, cite the difference between “sounding off” in web Comments, and shrieking obscenities in the street. One does not necessarily lead to the other. The little angelic voice still within says, “You are being lured to your death, don’t go there!” Pride, self-interest, and bourgeois hygiene are still on the side of hesitation. The little demonic voice makes his last pitch: “You can always come back!”

Jealousy turns to Envy in many ways, as we search through our excuses. Let me use the example of sexual infatuation, to be very odd. Many young, and many older, too, form the (characteristically powerful, but silly) notion that they are “in love,” with someone unattainable. The hunter wants to possess the prize — in this case a human being — even steal her if necessary. The interesting thing here is that Envy is contorted — an Envy of whomever might be the rightful possessor — yet the thing to be ruined is the object itself. For Satan’s hotel (my trope for “hell on earth”) does, after all, offer a full-service brothel, and in our contemporary media phantasia, crawling with pornography, there is constant advertising for the pleasures of a false and drug-like sexual and emotional bliss, waiting to be focused on any passing “babe.”

Of course the deadly sin in this case is nominally Lust, but the psychic mechanism is often indistinguishable from that of Envy. We begin by perceiving something worth having — perhaps some sparkle of innocence and beauty — then by increments resolve to snuff it out. Jealousy was the first indication: of that desire to possess what does not and must not belong to us. This does not always end in murder, to be sure; more often only in the “spiritual equivalent” of murder. Or in our current drug-laden environment, in which virtues such as chastity are held to no account, the commonplace of constructive rape. (Or its feminine equivalent in a bold seduction.)

My point in the Thing article is that the motive of Envy is there, from the beginning; and with that the desire to destroy. Indeed our entire welfare state is built on the emotional attractions of “equality,” the moral essence of Leftism. It is true that everyone can’t be rich (in the broadest possible interpretation of that word), but on the other hand, there may be ways to bring the rich down to our level. We begin by wanting what they have; we end (as in Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, &c) by making sure that no one can have it. We’d rather starve than let them flourish.

(“Islamists” have something so similar as to be identical with the motive force of Socialists and Communists. They would rather starve, and bring cruise missiles down on their own heads, than miss a chance to harm the subjects of their Envy.)

Or else we go Catholic and Christian, and learn to take pleasure in another’s achievements, and be content — even take a thanksgiving joy — in what we have. Too, we agree to submit to the frequent reminders of the Church, that whether mortal or venial, sin is sin. “Everyone does it,” but the task before us in temptation is to forget about “everyone” and “stop it here.”

Christmas is coming! Everyone to the Confessional!

It was Karl Jaspers (I think) who borrowed the term “axial moment” from structural engineering to describe the Christian “philosophy of history.” He refers (of course) to the intersection of Eternity with historical Time, in the person of Christ.

A good geometric diagram of this is presented — intentionally, I think — in the famous fresco of The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca (here). There is the equivalent of a horizon line, inscribed along the top edge of the sepulchre in this painting, and against a descending side, four soldiers are presented, sleeping in what we might call the “old world.” Christ rises into the “new world” above them; but is also the unifying centre of the whole composition.

The geometry is as striking as the anatomy of the lance-bearing soldier. There are two vanishing points. One is at the centre of the sepulchre line, the other directly above it at the centre of Christ’s face; so that we have the curious effect of looking down from up, and up from down, simultaneously. There is a further transformation from left to right, in the blossoming of the landscape, which completes the quartering divisions of a sublimated Crucifix.

The commission was for the Residenza of Sansepulcro, in Tuscany. In this location, the fresco served to bridge the sacred and profane. It was placed to be the focus of prayer before town hall meetings. It represented this intersection between supernatural and mundane. It presents the living history of the world, as a man of the fifteenth century would understand it; and as any Christian would have understood it through many centuries before, and several after. Yet few, even among Christians, or art historians, can make sense of it today. We can see what the picture contains, but not what it means.

Everything “below,” or previous to, that temporal line, looks forward to it, as the Hebrew Prophets to the Messianic Age. Everything above is a consequence of the descent of Christ, from Heaven.

Though I have had a chance only to peruse, there is a new book by Richard B. Hayes, which continues his remarkable work on what the writers of the New Testament meant by so pregnant a phrase as, “According to the Scripture.” From what I can see, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (here) is a sharp dispersal of the pettifog obscurantism that has always been, in effect, the credo of “Biblical Criticism” — which presumes the Evangelists were “spinning” the Old Testament passages they quoted. It is clearly a brilliant book, of theological inquiry, casting light just where the shadows of modern scholarship have fallen most thickly.

But what has it to do with Christmas?

It is this sense of the meaning, not only “of life” but of history, that we must recover; and Christmas will do merrily as a time to struggle for it in our minds. We are not part of some meandering and essentially pointless “evolution.” We are not accidentally smart apes. We are instead part of a cosmic drama which has a Beginning, a Middle, and an End. And if this could be comprehended by the simplest people, many centuries ago, we are capable of comprehending it today.

Reading of the latest “Allahu Akhbar!” attacks (so far this week) in Germany, Turkey, Jordan, Libya, and Switzerland, one is struck by the politicized incompetence of the authorities. This is true both East and West, but in plainer view to us in the West. News reports carry information that even I know they should not be carrying, about police suspicions. We learn that — at the usual frightful expense — additional security measures are in place at e.g. Christmas markets in several hundred cities, including a couple of miles away in this one.

The idea is to put the general public back to sleep, as quickly as possible; to restore what President Harding called “normalcy”; to make the people feel safe in their beds, or waking, busy with their toys and pacifiers.

Apart from the enemy, however, I do not know who can benefit from such information. Too, unnecessary “editorial advice” is provided to the news agencies, not only to keep their language ideologically hygienic, but more systematically to slant and select what is presented. In particular: doubt must be cast on the motives of the perpetrators, and Muslim celebrations of the attacks must be ignored. The general public see through this, partly, but are by now accustomed to the many little lies that shield the big ones on which our liberal-progressive “values” are based.

The people want numbers. In Switzerland, for instance, people were shot, but no one died. That makes it a non-story. The two bombings in Libya of which I am aware happened against the background of a larger terror war, and thus don’t count. The shooting in Ankara made the grade because the dead man was the Russian ambassador, and we know that Putin takes things like that very seriously. Jordan has no background war (yet), but Muslim countries don’t count unless the carnage is very large; a death toll like Berlin’s would be dismissed as mere “local news” from Morocco to Indonesia.

On 26 February, 1993, a slight miscalculation defeated the first attack on New York’s World Trade Centre. Had that massive truck bomb succeeded, in tipping the North into the South tower, fifty thousand would have died that day. Instead it only blew a big hole at the foundations, killing only six. Therefore hardly anyone remembers. But everyone does remember 9/11, because three thousand corpses were created.

The people want numbers. And if they are sufficiently patient, they will get them.

Stuck with the consequences of their immigration and refugee policies (in response to the demography of contraception and abortion), governments across Europe have found themselves in a political pickle. People haven’t become used to terror hits quite yet; and while the numbers are only modestly rising, they are still at the stage where they wonder if something effective could be done. For that and a dozen allied reasons, they threaten to throw all the “natural governing parties” out of power.

There is a real threat to the “smuglies,” as I call them (short for something more rude). Things like Brexit and the Trump win in America have wiped the smiles off their faces. Across the Continent, once secure politicians are asking, “Could it happen here?” They’d be happy to write off a few hundred a year, like traffic accidents. But now something infinitely more important is at stake: their own careers.

From their view, the whole order of the world is threatened, as a direct consequence of their assumptions about it, and they have nothing in their intellectual arsenals to defend it except smears and slanders. This is what we have learnt since the Hillary defeat, on this side of the great salt river. She was no flaming leftist herself; but she found herself surrounded by a party machine long since appropriated by the hard Left, now succumbing to the comforts of lunacy. They have been working to undermine Western Civ for decades, finally forgetting that the parasite needs a living host. They manoeuvred her, or she vacuously manoeuvred herself, into a position where the Trumplings are more credible. It is the same for the “mainstream” politicians in Europe.

Calling people “fascist,” “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” or just “deplorable,” no longer works. It does not inspire them to vote for you, once it becomes clear that these terms must apply to more than half of the electorate. We now have hyperinflation in such terms, and of the phantasies that underlie them: the final extension of the old Communist agitprop. And as the cussing loses its effect, the cussers can only reveal their bewilderment. The tree these beavers were felling is falling on them.

I am not editorializing. What is coming will come, regardless of my opinions; I try only to draw the scene, from one angle after another. We have never known what the future will hold, and the only advantage of the present situation is that, for a moment, we understand this. Our entire political swamp seems not draining but overturning; and everywhere we notice the changes, not necessarily for the better.

*

For a precedent I would turn, most optimistically, to the eleventh century. Europe was transformed — by a collapse of security from multiple invasions (Vikings from west, north, and east; Muslims from east and south; roaming tribes within, &c) — into small feudal statelets. Even (and especially) within the descendant Charlemagnian realms, local and regional “warlords” took charge:

For why? — because the good old rule
Sufficeth them, the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
     And they should keep who can.

The result was exactly the opposite of conventional expectation. It was the emergence of an unprecedented trans-European unity; of a coherent Catholic Christendom made without human foresight; of a vibrant and self-confident, a chivalric sense of belonging to something beyond the authority of any local ruler. Yet this is something that is not studied, because it strays beyond the comprehension of any modern academic discipline, requiring a synthesis of political, military, economic, social, intellectual, and religious history. I think Christopher Dawson (1889–1970) was the last to expound it worthily.

Surprisingly much of Europe remained unChristianized, on the eve of this “cultural revolution.” Christianity infilled the pagan pockets, and passed over the pagan frontiers, because it offered the very universals for which people longed. It could do so again, for it still offers the only possible groundwork for civilizational recovery in the West, whatever the outward events. (We can see where “secular humanism” has got us.) Or rather, the only alternative would be an Islam, that could only be imposed by force and fear.

China, too, became coherent in this way: through successive disintegrations into feudal statelets, under the hammer blows of barbarian invaders. The principle at work is not formulaic, but can be glimpsed by the mind that is not a prisoner to purely material causes. It is a natural process, but one so broad that we may look through it only to the stars. It reflects the mysterious fact that the universe itself is ordered, at each level on every scale.

The formation, and reformation of a civilization is not done by planning. It does not depend on the efficiency of the police. It happens under no political regulation, but by a trillion trillion tiny acts of human decency. By faith.

Which is the only way I know to proceed: by faith. Stop wrecking and scout beauty again; reject evil and embrace the good; withdraw your support for the false gods, and seek only the True. This is in fact the central message of Advent. It is a voice crying in the wilderness: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

The introitus of Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor, changes everything. In the midst of what I call “techie hell” — let me not favour you with the details, gentle reader — I let it fill the room. And then, after the introitus, the rest of that “extraordinary” liturgical composition (set for the Vetus Ordo, as all our greatest music, waiting to be restored). And in a version of the Choeur Arsys Bourgogne (Pierre Cao directing), if that makes any difference. (I think it does, for Cao is steeped in music older than Mozart’s. He will not be too loud, too brassy or “operatic”; he will not be hurried.)

A piece of technology, from another electronic machine, let me candidly admit. I have not the gift of my late theological hero, Hans Urs von Balthasar who, in his old age, parted with his entire classical record collection, with the happy thought that he had all of Mozart memorized, anyway.

Or of my living theological hero, Joseph Ratzinger, who needs only a piano and can do his own arrangements — in his head, should the piano disappear.

At best, I can replay a few Bach fugues in my head; and do, on long walks. But I’m a prisoner to my craving for the actual sound of the music (much more than so in poetry I have memorized).

To be able to switch tracks, in mid-stride, is something I’m still learning. To turn not gradually but “on a dime” from some pointless anger, or other lust, to a subject for delightful contemplation, is perhaps in the “skill set” of many saints. According to the priest whose penitent I am, it starts with mastering a few simple prayers; the Rosary is especially helpful. Or, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Or, if you fear seeing so red that you’ll forget, you may carry the text on a card in your pocket. Or use the shorter form, in one word, “Jesus” — softly addressed.

Contra mundum — and afflicted by the world in retaliation — the alternative is to respond by the kind of internal “shadow boxing” which is among my worst habits. I know I can’t get back, may never have my chance to even the wretched score; may never accomplish anything in this theatre of the absurd, beyond keeping myself aloof; and that only with divine assistance. Yet there are still techniques to dodge all the blows, and I think of them as the spiritual “martial arts.”

One may have real grievances. These make no difference and will provide no exception to the rigid instruction of Our Lord, which was, to love our enemies. (Note that He said love them; He did not say flatter them, or capitulate to them.) This was Him who taught us to communicate in the binary, “yea” or “nay,” rather than in the complexity of twaddle. Even loving one’s friends is not always easy; loving one’s enemies is seriously hard — until by grace humbly sought, one somehow gets the hang of it.

But at the least, switch channels. Light a cigarette, perhaps. (“If you have ’em, smoke ’em,” your army sergeant would say.) Or pour a stiff shot of Laphroaig. Toggle, in this case from “techie hell” to Mozart, and let the hairs stand on thy foolish little head.

As we know, Mozart died before quite completing this Requiem commission, at age thirty-five. He had a premonition he would do so; that he was writing his own strange obituary. This adds to its poignancy. For in addition to others, we ourselves will die. The tumult of this world will be over, and the technical issues will be left behind. Whether they be large or small, we can’t take them with us. Not through that holy fire.

There are many canaries in the coal mine of modern life. Not all of them are dead yet. Some have merely stopped singing and might conceivably recover if their cages were removed promptly from the shafts.

The same might be tried for a person trying to kill himself by piping carbon monoxide into his car. (I am told it is a painless way to commit suicide.) He might not be dead yet, merely passed out; one should try opening the car doors, or if they are locked, smashing the windows. This would be an act of corporal mercy, though like many it might not bring thanks. As we know from the enthusiasts for “euthanasia,” some people would rather be dead, and any of them might also prove litigious.

I gather (I am no expert on this) the old practice in the coal mines involved more than one canary. Should one suddenly drop off its perch, the miners could find their way to safety, or potential safety, by following the sound towards the noisiest surviving canaries. This would generally correspond to the best route towards the surface. This is what made canaries better than white lab mice as “sentinel animals” in the circumstance, for while mice sometimes squeak, few are so robustly choral.

The famed Scottish physiologist, John Scott Haldane (1860–1936; father of J.B.S.), first advanced this proposal. Mice and canaries alike have very quick respiratory metabolisms. This makes them ideal for the detection of a wide range of the toxic gases, which killed far more miners than the coal dust explosions which often preceded their emission. Haldane was also the brilliant man who realized that a miner’s safety lantern could be used to determine not only the amount but the kind of toxic gas, by careful observation of the shape, height, colour, and trend of its flame.

Such lanterns are still used to this day, as I understand, but the advantage of canaries is that they lack subtlety, and get right to the point.

I assume there are gas detectors in all modern coal mines (methane is also an issue), so that quality of life for canaries has improved. But as with so much technical progress, one must bear in mind that the canaries were infallible. Whereas, the modern gas alarm might not be working; or, like the average apartment smoke detector, it may be giving so many false alarms that it is eventually ignored. These aggressively advertised devices are expensive, too; and one must remember to turn them on, whereas canaries were relatively cheap, and stayed “on” until they expired. There may be animal rights issues, however, so that the choice between the life of a canary and the life of a coal miner is no longer so obvious as it once was.

On the other hand, the canary in question has become a cliché so that, for instance, almost anything can now be a “climate canary,” with no need to invoke coal mines. I blame Kurt Vonnegut, the pop writer who created a vogue for this metaphor in the late 1960s. (I am now so old, that I can remember a time before Vonnegut’s style of unctuous moral posturing became the “canary” for lethal asininity throughout post-secondary education.)

All of this interests me as the son of a New Waterford girl. The Canadian Maritimes had their share of grievous coal-mining disasters, thanks to the cost-cutting of miserly owners and managers, though more often to bad luck. In either case, and regardless of the law, the punishment for these accidents was also sometimes fatal.

*

Speaking of the Maritimes, I have noticed that our nine Catholic bishops in those parts, and their archbishop in Halifax, have issued a Pastoral Reflection on the new Canadian law for “assisted dying.” (Here, for those with the stomach to read it.) In “merciful” Bergoglian bafflegab they justify “pastoral accompaniment” and the prospect of nice “Catholic” funerals for those intending to “off” themselves. (Many of whom may leave valuable estates.) The page of their signatures reminds me of the document signed by all the English bishops, except John Fisher, in 1534. (Him who observed: “The fort is betrayed even of them that should have defended it.”)

Comments on the Atlantic bishops’ effusion have been posted at all the usual “trad” websites, and may be easily searched. I see no need to add my own, beyond expressing agreement with a point raised at Vox Cantoris about “the very real probability that each of these cowardly, emasculated, heretical apostates will end in Hell.”

Yet, unlike their self-murdering “penitents,” they might live to repent.