Essays in Idleness

To the evil man, everything is evil. To the good man, everything is good. For bad men, good fortune is bad; for good men, bad fortune is good.

Saint Paul may be consulted in Romans 8, or I Corinthians 2, but centuries before him, Plato was onto this. “Virtuous men possess beatitude despite pain and misfortune, while vicious men are miserable because of the condition of their souls, no matter how much wealth, sensual pleasure, or fame they enjoy.” (I think that was Augustine’s précis. The whole argument may be found in the Gorgias.)

Polus thinks Socrates is talking nonsense. The whole world knows that pain hurts, that money can buy stuff, that pleasure feels good. And, without being so invidious as to name them, he notes that many evil men seem happy. But as Socrates shows (I cannot improve on him), this happiness is glib. To say nothing of unsustainable.

It would be fair to say, that Socrates is one of my heroes; my fellow opponent of “democracy.” I like the way he addresses Polus, who’d like to put things to a vote. Socrates will accept this, in principle, but specifies there must be only one voter: Polus.

Let gentle reader vote, on divorce and remarriage.

“If thou have an evyll wife, take pacience, and thanke God; for all is for the best, well taken.” (I quote the preacher John Colet, friend of Thomas More and Erasmus.) It is something to bear in mind if one thinks that replacing one spouse with another will make things any better. Why try to improve on what can’t be improved?

Boethius, too, is very good on “blessings in disguise.” That is why those mediaevals adored him: because he could put it so well.

Now, some people are not that good. Take me, for instance. They may not be entirely evil, but they sure haven’t risen to the condition where they might e.g. joyfully accept martyrdom. And when a frypan falls on my toes, I cuss. I may have readers who are almost as bad as I am.

But I should think any well-catechized Catholic, or thoughtful Protestant for that matter, or sublime Greekie, should be capable of taking the point: that in the fullest view of Heaven, it’s “all good.” We need to aspire to fuller views of Heaven. It beats trying to fix what cannot be fixed.

It was a peculiarity of the teaching of Our Lord that He demanded Perfection. On the other hand, He was willing to provide the requisite Grace.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” He says. That was in Saint Matthew. In Saint Luke it gets even edgier: “Blessed are the poor,” full stop. And the hungry, too. Notice that he does not call them victims. He merely warned the rich that, while everything is possible with God, it is hard to fit through the eye of a needle. (Camels can’t do it; can you?)

The function of His Church was not to meet “the people” half way. It was certainly not to accommodate the world. Rather, vice versa: the early Church faced a Roman society in many respects like our own decadent society. Lots of abortions. Really kinky sex (read Suetonius and Cassius Dio). A whole Empire full of faithless unbelievers, to take this from the Christian point of view. Fifty or a hundred million of them. (And that was just looking in one direction.)

Were I Paul with my first converts — a couple of rather batty women — I think the idea of trimming my sails to the prevailing breeze might occur to me. But he looked to Europe, and the task before him. The confrontation was head on.

And he knew something I am still learning. That all the world’s problems can be solved by one man. It is a simple matter of putting one’s hopes in the right place. As opposed to, say, one of the wrong places, whence nothing good can come. Do what you should, and “let God take care of it.”

Of course, “simple” doesn’t necessarily mean “easy.”

Stop preaching compromise, resume teaching Hope. This is my free advice to Rome. We do not have a world to come to terms with; we have, as ever, a world to convert.

Were it not that my eyes had strayed into the Internet at large, I could have guessed from my own email that Pope Francis has “done it again.” The convulsion this week is his letter to Argentine bishops (the authenticity of which took some time to confirm), declaring that their “Buenos Aires directive” correctly interprets his views on Communion for the divorced and remarried, conveyed in Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia, and that “no other interpretation is possible.” They say the pope says they can now give Communion in unspecified cases where, objectively, the communicants remain in a state of mortal sin. The pope says that they understand him correctly.

For those who read such things, Canons 915 and 916 spell out the old rules with admirable clarity — not only on the controversial issue, but also on who is responsible for what. Read them, and gentle reader will discover the issue is not who can approach the altar to take Communion. Rather, it is to whom the priest may licitly give it. From what I (and at least one canon lawyer) can see, the pope’s affirmation of the Argentine directive slurs this vital point.

It is important because, in the Catholic dispensation, “conscience” may be a jade. One may sincerely believe one is doing something in good conscience. That is subjective. But what one is doing is right or wrong, regardless of one’s strongly held opinion. That is objective, and the priest is bound to follow criteria not of his own making. He has all the latitude in the world to consider what might reduce mortal to venial, in the cure of souls. He has, or had, no discretion to permit the re-elevation of that venial to a mortal sin, by letting his penitent take Communion. Except now, according to the pope, he has.

I am scandalized but not shocked by the pope’s letter. By now, I am not the only Catholic who has become accustomed to Bergoglio’s capricious playing at the edges of received Catholic doctrine and practice — which he is by his papal vows bound to uphold. There are by now many hundred examples of this mischievous playing at the edges. But in this case he has irretrievably gone over. He has put faithful Catholics, including all priests, in an impossible position, where they must choose between what this latest pope says, and what the Church has taught since time out of mind.

The way he has done so is also appalling. Rather than formally changing the wording of canon law, to make any “reform” explicit and comprehensible (and potentially reversible), he has gone around it. Some will argue that this is a good thing, for he has thereby limited the scale of the convulsion. It is a bad thing, because it creates a precedent for going around every other canon, without grave, formal restraints. He blemishes, thus, not one facet of Catholic law; he mars the whole thing.

Meanwhile, in recent days, he has delivered himself of an emotional harangue, condemning all those who through the “terrorism” of “gossip,” cause disunity within the Church. His wanton abuse of both words is noted. But more. To do something profoundly divisive — to tamper with fundamental principles on which that unity rests, while pronouncing anathemas on those who would defend them — is a tactic I associate with the lowest sort of politician.

What can we do about this? So far as I can see, nothing, except pray for the conversion of the pope; and pray that the next one will not also be such as we deserve.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make humourless. Or drive mad, which is the same thing. (These are not nice gods, as should be apparent.)

Verily, I have noticed in my walks around Parkdale, that a sure indication of mental disequilibrium is what Father Zed likes to call, “the spittle-flecked nutties.” With, or more often without, the plausible presence of cellphone and ear buds, the customer is ranting — usually about some wrong that he imagines to have been done to him. It is his whole life; he’s out there ranting every day. His cuss words may leave an impression of incoherence, but the nature of his complaint will be clear enough. It will take only a few seconds to “discern,” as they say in Rome.

I am thinking of quite specific neighbours, from the half-way houses and other domiciles in the immediate vicinity of the High Doganate, doing their spittle-flecked nutties as they pace the streets. None are accessible to irony, nor any of the Greek rhetorical figures. All are cheerless. (One thinks: “Poor soul, already in Hell.”) Each is fixed exclusively upon an obsession which, in his own disordered mind, makes sense. He reasons from his nasty premiss, logically.

Chesterton said ingeniously, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

I mention him less for the quote, than for the body of his life and works, which deal with the question of sanity in a comprehensive way. By word, and by jolly example, he set himself quixotically against the delusions of the modern world, in all their encyclopaedic range. While he was, in his maturity, identifiably Roman Catholic, much of his matter was in no direct way denominational, or even explicitly Christian. Rather it was “merely sane” (and consistently entertaining). He offered readers a guide out of the madhouse. He left it to others to write the guides into those unhappy public institutions which dominate our cities today. He does get to the point of Christ, but only at intervals.

A number of my readers have written to me recently, mentioning that the world has gone mad. I suspect they have been slow to notice.

True, more of life every day is determined by the rulings of the “spittle-flecked nutties” — increasingly in positions of power. A friend sent me this morning, for instance, an official poster from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, instructing all faculty and students, whether familiar with each other or not, to begin every conversation with her/his/their/zir/hir name, and preferred pronouns. (See here.) The humour, while real, is entirely unintentional; the instruction is deadly serious. Note that it makes sense, given the delusional premiss, that one’s sex is something that one chooses. That premiss is insane, and what follows from it becomes necessarily more and more strange, until it passes from laughable to frightening.

Or as I’m writing this, another email arrives, with links, and subject line: “What are they smoking in Indiana?” And another — this from Ottawa — about a proposal from the consortium of Canadian universities to expel from membership all that ignore their latest, bat-feathered, “diversity” guidelines, thus depriving them of all public funding and degree recognition. (See immediately above.)

Madness of this sort is contagious, as the history of the world attests; but as Our Lord advised, we must stay aloof from it. That is to say, do not allow yourself to be pulled into the vortex of evil, while it spins. (“Resist ye not evil.”) Item: do not let the spittle-flecked nutties turn you into a spittle-flecked nutty.

Sanity is precious. Someone has to laugh. The Saints and the Martyrs are all of them agreed, that we are not the playthings of the gods. We are in better hands, and should remain cheerful — come what may.

Are you “deplorable” gentle reader? I know I am. The estimate that half of Republican voters are deplorable strikes me as low. I would think nearer 75 percent would be more reasonable. I would put the deplorables at around 80 percent for the Democratic Party. In both cases, about 20 percent are excused by the usual Pareto distribution: too spacey to know what they are doing, and thus “not deplorable” on a technicality.

But then, as that logician, Bill Clinton would point out: it depends what we mean by “deplorable.” I tend to fall back on the dictionary definition, founded upon plorare (something like “wail, bewail, lament”), prefixed with the Latin (or Gaelic) preposition for “down,” in the sense of “going down” — to the bottom, into the dregs. One might imagine a stream or spillway, with six inches of muddy water, flowing over several feet of immovable sediment.

“You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic  — you name it.” By Mrs Clinton’s account, if one continues reading, the other half are merely losers, with whom she could potentially empathize.

A quick Internet check reveals that there is now a word, “generalistic.” The comparatives are, “more generalistic,” and, “most generalistic.” I would think it is a recent coinage, and I would add, most deplorable.

Is she — could we say? — “judgemental”? That is not for me to judge.

But I would think so. Speaking only for myself, I love bandying about numbers and proportions, especially those I have invented for the purposes of argument in a public bar. (“As studies have shown, 73.7 percent of statistics are made up on the spot.”) The economist Hayek once complimented the economist Keynes for being “always willing to guess at a figure.” There was some sarcasm in his observation, however. (Hayek was notoriously prim with statistics.)

A less judgemental view would post an estimate of 100 percent for deplorables in all parties, where the survey has omitted Our Lord — who, anyway, never voted. (Should we not follow His example?) But humanly, I don’t think it would be wise to consider everyone as equally deplorable, in view of our need to put some people in gaol. (Mrs Clinton, for instance.)

Wise, wiser, wisest: to my mind, it would perhaps be better, in the Natted States Merica as elsewhere, to let more things pass. It is probably true that most people are racially prejudiced (minorities are the worst), misogynist (especially the women), and “phobic” or fearful of pretty much everything. I know I am; and moreover, extremely unsystematic.

I try to take people one at a time. This is hard enough: in the mass, I find they are just too much for me.

Today, for those of the Roman persuasion, is our memorial of the Holy Name of Mary, within the octave of the feast of her Nativity. Once it was celebrated on the Octave itself, in accord with the original Jewish custom of naming a child on the eighth day from birth. As most Catholic venerations, it begins in the long murky pre-pre-modern past. The custom among religious of taking or bestowing the name “Mary,” among other given names, is itself of great antiquity. From what I understand (and I am neither liturgist nor Church historian), we might look to the Council of Ephesus in the fifth century, which met (at the Church of Mary) in that ancient Greek city, now Islamized as Selçuk within post-modern Turkey. That was the council where Our Lady was boldly proclaimed the Theotokos — the “Mother of God” — in defiance of Nestorians and others who would call her only the “mother of Jesus,” in light of their impoverished Christologies.

But these Idleposts are short, or meant to be short, and we will fast-forward to anno 1683, and stand in imagination with the Polish king, Jan Sobieski, at the Gates of Vienna. In one of the most significant battles of history, he defeated the Infidel Turk, who had been for centuries constantly extending his conquests through eastern and central Europe. Had Sobieski’s badly outnumbered and outgunned “coalition of the willing” (i.e. the French wouldn’t help) failed on that occasion, all the rich, upper Germanies could have been overrun, and the Ottoman Sultan would have had his hands on the resources to sustain his westward push, farther. And, more millions of Christians would have been slaughtered, enslaved, or converted.

Sobieski’s improbable triumph — which turned the tide towards Christian reconquest of the Hungarian plains, and much of the Balkans — was accomplished on the 11th of September, 1683 (with mop-up extending well into the 12th). It was done explicitly in the Name of Mary. All Europe knew that at the time; though over the last few centuries our memories have been failing.

For the first anniversary, Pope Innocent XI extended this ancient feast or memorial — then associated mostly with the Spanish Habsburg realms — to the universal Church, in thanksgiving for the Victory of Our Lady. The “Name of Mary” remained in our calendars until the unspeakable Annibale Bugnini had it erased, as part of the liturgical “reforms” (or more accurately, “deforms”), after Vatican II.

But Saint John Paul II restored it in 2002 — coincidentally, the year after another memorable event, done on the anniversary of the great battle. Perhaps gentle reader remembers that news: which involved office towers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and a field in rural Pennsylvania. For you see: while we had forgotten the Gates of Vienna, the Musulmans had not.

Several readers of my Saturday post were puzzled by my mention of the Gates in question. My post for today is merely informational. I would drive you all to Mass, but, I don’t have a car.

A generation or more is necessary to see any large event in some historical perspective. That the fall of the Berlin Wall was a “large event” we could see immediately, but not what it portended. The political world would be transformed, but the New World Order that George Bush Senior foresaw was a mirage. Ditto with events since 9/11.

Several thousand were killed on that day in 2001 — the anniversary of the Ottoman defeat at the Gates of Vienna. This was a comparatively small number, by modern standards. The rich symbolism of this Islamist operation was lost on the West, which no longer cares for history or legend. A brilliant assault of “asymmetric warfare,” it fulfilled all of its objectives. The torch has since been passed from the more moderate al-Qaeda to the more fanatic Daesh, and will be passed again in due course. Osama bin-Laden personally lost face by being hunted down and killed like a rat, but his vision of a restored Islamic Caliphate survives him. It inspires still the young in heart and mind.

The immediate intention was to humiliate the “Great Satan”; to awaken the sleeping giant and make him blindly thrash; to goad him into self-destructive behaviour as he struck against an enemy he could neither locate nor understand. Beyond this: to expose him as a paper tiger, tilting a balance of power, and transferring initiative from the mightily-armed “Crusader” to the nimble “Jihadi.” Within the Muslim world: to show that only the radical Salafist faction could get results, could change the direction of history and, as it were, “make Arabia great again.”

As I suggested above, we are still too close to this event to grasp its full significance; but after fifteen years we in the West are in a much worse position than we were on the 10th of September, 2001. We showed, as the Islamists predicted, that we did not have the stamina to prevail, even against weak adversaries; that America and allies could only fight “Vietnams.” Our will is shaken, and to Salafist delight, we have by now expressed contrition for fourteen centuries of Christian defence against Islamic aggression. We bow respectfully, as our culture is insulted, and as versions of Shariah are imposed. In disregard of our own security, we have thrown our borders open to massive Muslim immigration. We follow, at every junction, the course of sentimentality, and adapt to the certainty of defeat. After each hit we call for grief counsellors.

It is instructive that, in the present circumstances, with Christians reduced to desperation through much of the Near East, we import Muslim refugees almost exclusively. The Christians flee to the protection of the Kurds; not to refugee camps in which they would risk massacre. Western governments take only from those camps; or in Europe, the flotillas launched from Turkey and Libya. The Islamists gloat at this demographic achievement; the Daesh now recruit from the disaffected young in the new Muslim ghettoes of Europe, radicalized in Saudi-built-and-financed mosques. Few directly engage in suicidal acts of terrorism; but those who do are lionized as heroes. Lesser, safer acts, such as rape of European women, and desecration of churches and synagogues, have become commonplace. We are, and we know that we are, as incapable of assimilating these migrants as the Romans were of assimilating the Vandals and Huns through their increasingly porous frontiers.

Crucially, in the mindless fantasy of “multiculturalism,” we refuse to recognize the contradictions between Islamic and Christian teaching, and look the other way, muttering fatuities about “the religion of peace” after each psychopathic explosion. This is just what Osama predicted: the harder the blows, the more docile we would become, and the more complacent in the face of the ancient Islamic demand for submission.

The genius of Osama bin-Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, was to know that the de-Christianizing West would respond in this way. Their propaganda spelt out, from the beginning, the argument for their methods. They called us chestless wonders; they said we would fold under any sustained pressure; that we had lost the confidence of our Christian identity. We are an aging society now, vitiated by abortions, needing immigrants to pay our pensions; a people addicted to drugs, from opiates to iPhones; lapsed in creature comforts, and spineless in the face of adversity.

Not all of us, of course. I am sometimes impressed by the number of remnant faithful to the old Christian religion, and its “Western ideals.” In moments of crisis, as we saw for some weeks after the Twin Towers came down, the rest of the population stirs. Yet by Christmas of 2001 they were snoring again, and again the liberal reflexes were twitching. Not al-Qaeda but “Bush” was already being blamed for disturbing the peace.

Bush made one fatal mistake. He “overmisestimated” his countrymen’s ability to stay what he knew must be a long and difficult course. His “flypaper” strategy — as I called it at the time — was to engage the Islamists in their native East; to let them go fight in places like Kandahar and Fallujah, where they would be irresistibly attracted to, and annihilated by, vastly superior American military discipline, logistics, and firepower. It was working too well: Americans began to feel safe again, resented the foreign bloodshed and expense, and so called the boys home. Now the flypaper hangs over the West.

Beyond this, the Bush strategy was to repair a disintegrating international state system. National governments must take sovereign responsibility; must patrol within their own borders. Regimes which exported violence would be confronted. Either they would end the sanctuary they had granted to terrorists, or a U.S.-led coalition of the willing would do it for them. He cited long-established international law, which entitles the victims of raids to “hot pursuit” across international borders. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq successfully, Bush could compel other regimes, such as those governing Libya, Syria, and Iran, to behave themselves. That, too, was working: until Obama suddenly evacuated Iraq, vindicating indeed those who had called the USA a paper tiger. And, flew to Cairo to deliver an obsequious apology from America to the whole Muslim world.

There had been, shortly after 9/11, a curious exchange in a Washington corridor between President Bush and the freshman New York senator, Hillary Clinton. Playing to the morning-after gallery as a hawk, she needled him. He was quite rude. He wished to assure the former First Lady that he would not be replying to the hit on New York City as her husband had done, to previous al-Qaeda provocations. He would not be merely firing a cruise missile up some Afghan camel’s derrière.

Bush delivered on his threats. He thereby earned the respect of his country’s worst enemies, who had become accustomed to American vacillation. But he became over-extended, as he began to fill the Mesopotamian bog with unrecoverable billions, in a lunatic scheme to turn Iraq into a “model democracy.” This was well-meaning American naiveté at its self-defeating worst: for what had once worked in Germany and Japan had no chance anywhere in the Middle East.

Notwithstanding, within two years, despite serial misjudgements, the USA held all the cards. America still enjoyed an unchallengeable and unprecedented “hyperpower” status. Within two more, Bush himself had started to drop them, for domestic political ends. But the Iraq “surge” demonstrated that he was not retreating. He was willing to expend his own diminishing political capital in the American national interest.

It takes some stomach, to stand one’s ground against a ruthless and implacable foe. Bush wrongly believed the West still had it. He paid for that naiveté, too. Tiring quickly of the inconvenience of battle, the public were easily persuaded to disavow Bush as captain, and make him their scapegoat instead. Osama bin-Laden, and not George W. Bush, had been proved more astute.

In my youth, I was amazed to watch the United States of America let itself be defeated by little North Vietnam — having, it seemed to me, agreed to fight blindfold, with hands tied behind back, and feet chained together. It was a failure of resolution, from which I hoped much had been learnt: you don’t fight a war by a ponderous extension of your domestic bureaucracy. You certainly don’t fight a war you don’t intend to win. Osama told the Muslim world it would happen again, and in retrospect, he was right. But Vietnam was made into a mere holding action within the larger Cold War. The consequences of defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan are much greater.

America was our champion, but the West as a whole has proved itself unequal to the barbaric will. Frankly, I cannot imagine a recovery that does not involve the restoration of our Christian identity, and the renewal of our Christian mission at home and abroad. As “nothing in particular” we are already buried up to the waist in the trash heap of history.

But of course: alternative futures are not precluded, just because I can’t imagine them. Maybe we’ll be saved by flying saucers.

My title this morning is another typical Warren conceit. Really this squib is not about beetles; really it is about something else. But this headnote is entirely between us, gentle reader. Meanwhile, please join me in pretending that we are discussing beetles.

After yesterday’s effusion, it occurred to me to consult my primary literary source on these little animals. It is a short book by Dr Jan Bechyně, published in 1961 (in the “Open Air Guides” series of Messrs Thames and Hudson). It is entitled, Beetles. By “primary” I mean, it first fell into my hands as a child, at a time when I knew even less about beetles than I do today. Originally in German, it is a good example of what is possible when a true expert in a field — in this case, beetle entomology — is commissioned to present the most concise possible outline of what he knows (short of specialist techniques), for people who know nothing, but are presumed to be intelligent.

The author does not try to be entertaining or cute, in the way pop-science picture books try so very hard, today. At no point does he patronize the reader, or try to spare him the effort of acquiring the conceptual framework and necessary jargon of the coleopterist. He simply explains the meaning of each new and terrifying word, as he comes to it; then leaves one to stare until the penny drops. On the other hand, there are six colour plates giving top views of several dozen fine beetles, next discreet size scales, with Latin names and page references to a systematic key, where one will find further line-drawn illustrations in black-&-white. Precise paintings on these plates: of extraordinary beauty, crisply reproduced. That key fills two-thirds of the 158 small pages, and could be your field guide, wherever in this world you might travel.

The child, or adult for that matter, who is enthralled by beetles, will be delighted by the book. It will be, to him, a pearl beyond price; on every page, he will find a revelation. No effort is made to proselytize, however. If you don’t like beetles, you won’t find the book interesting at all, and so, … off you go, bye-bye!

This, I think, is the right attitude to teaching. Give them the goods, straight. And if they are a little slow, as even the most interested students often are, help them over the intellectual mounds. A little unGermanic humour might be permissible, and a friendly atmosphere; a certain approachability together with that subtle hint of discipline from teacher that suggests, “Cross me and you are a dead man.” Or let us mention enthusiasm, which can be contagious. Too, we have this “grammar of beetle zoology” to fall back upon, as a kind of map when we are getting lost.

I will mention here Mr Henry, an American biology teacher I once had in a wonderfully backward British private school, in Asia. (The Patana School, Bangkok, in its underfunded days.) Except that he couldn’t control a class, he was a pillar of authority. He would begin each lesson by drawing an elaborate diagram on the chalkboard; he was a superb draughtsman. By the end of that, only three or four boys would still be paying attention. He would then ignore the nattering at the back of the classroom, and tell us what the diagram showed. At the end of term the front-row elitists would be savagely competing for his highest mark; the other dozen or so would flunk. Their parents would then demand Mr Henry’s removal.

Niloy, Subash, Amitav, and I: we loved this man. And that was the ground for our love of each other. Our rivalries made us inseparable friends; and taught us mutual respect. We became, I suppose, a claque. With Mr Henry we went on exhilarating field trips. If only we could have shaken off the others. We could, I suppose, have contrived to drown them, but did not, thanks to our embrace of a strict moral principle: the sanctity of human life. As for the beetles, we were prepared to dissect them. (It can be done with a magnifying glass, other clever preparations, a very sharp scalpel and a steady hand.)

Ah, “human exceptionalism.” It saves us from so many awful crimes. Yet as I’ve noticed (here for instance) it is going out of vogue.

The author of the piece I linked is affiliated (still, I think) with the “Discovery Institute,” notorious among the sleepy science educators of America as sponsors of research into “intelligent design” — among other scientific interests. He and all others of his ilk are constantly smeared. They are accused of denying “evolution” (which they don’t), of subscribing to “young earth creationism” (which they don’t), of substituting religious for scientific explanations (which they don’t), and so forth. Worst of all, they recognize universal ethical principles which are, shall we say, humanocentric. Most (but by no means all) are Christians. Some are Jews. A few self-describe as “agnostic” or “atheist.” In common, they believe that the received “paradigm” for scientific study, especially in biology, is inadequate and obtuse. This makes them targets for academic persecution.

With Bechyně’s Beetles in my hand I declare, that, half a century ago, Mr Henry was already one of those. Like them, he taught that Darwinian selection is all very well, so far as it goes, but that it does not take us very far; that “the origin of species” is a mystery indeed, to the bottom of which we may never plumb, though we can dip deeper and deeper. And that, those who believe “design” isn’t “intelligent” have never properly observed a beetle.

“Which only a human is capable of doing,” Mr Henry explained. (And proved, with comic zeal.) Though it is evident that many humans do not care.

Let us flunk them.

Seldom do I feel much contentment when political labels are applied to me; but there are some I will own, and “stag-beetle Catholic traditionalist” is acceptable. We “stags” are now identified as a component of what is bottled together as the “Alt-Right.” Gentle reader might consult the Wicked Paedia to discover what that term aggregates. I deny affiliation with those Trumpistas. Except the Church, I am a non-joiner.

A beneficial insect (like most; or all, were our view sufficiently broad and catholic), the stag beetle is chiefly engaged in the recycling of dead wood. Alas, since some of this dead wood may be barns or fence-posts, farmers are not always pleased with them. But in the forest, their ecological behaviour is beyond reproach.

It is during their larval stage, as I understand, that these beetles chiefly feed on the delicious juices of arboreal decay, discovered by their boring. Living plants they leave entirely alone. By their fourth or adult stage, when the male deploys his glorious mandibles, I gather that (as the butterfly) he doesn’t eat much. When he does become a little peckish, his “antlers” may be used to steady, say, the piece of rotting fruit on which he may be sucking, to refresh himself and restore his internal liquid equilibria — rather as the philosopher must prevent the matter of his own assimilation from rolling away.

Or, he may engage against another stag beetle, in competition for a mate — the two clashing as miniature reindeer, or mediaeval toy soldiers. My impression is that these knights look fiercer than they are; that the contest is somewhat staged, like professional wrestling. In this age of psychopathic terrorism and “total war,” we forget that much of conflict in nature is bluffing and legerdemain, as so much warfare in antiquity was high-stakes, and visually grand, but low-casualty. Often, as I gather from descriptions, one could go and watch a battle like a football game. Still, the weapons are real enough, and I have never presented a finger to feel how hard these little animals can pinch.

Nature abounds in creatures with appendages of so little practical value that we are safe to assume they express the callistic joy, in the poetics of our Creator, who seems so to delight in beetles, that He brings a new species of beetle into being every day or two, with distinct and highly original decorative flourishes. I suspect this is especially so of the stag beetles — and more than a thousand kindred species of the Lucanidae (as elephant beetles, rhinoceros beetles, giraffe beetles, &c).

And I suspect, in consequence, that the stag beetle is vain. His instinct to remain motionless when approached by a large object is interpreted by the Darwinoids as a survival skill. A moment’s thought will confirm that this would be a very poor survival skill in a creature so conspicuous, and that the stag beetle is instead posing for the camera; perhaps hoping to be included in a selfie, or whatnot.

Or if it’s not a camera, simply holding his ground, as if to say, “Dare ya!” — and show some offstage stag-beetle maiden that he is stalwart and brave, very brave.

As we survey the species, we see that they are beautiful to an extreme, in their glistening black lacquers, or deep brown-reds — sometimes with bright accents, or heraldic patterning. And they are shocking in an ability which the naïve observer might not anticipate. For they can fly.

From ancient times, little boys have attached threads to them, as they did in my childhood in Lahore. And, flown them as prehistoric biplanes, with their sonorous, mechanical buzzing and slow, lumbering turns. The stag’s mandibles are no penalty to him when airborne, for given his armoured weight but slight speed, gravity not drag commands all his efforts. He hardly needs to be aerodynamic. He swings his great arms to distribute that weight like an elegant tightrope walker, strolling an invisible line of thrust.

A fine, a magnificent being, is the stag beetle; truly, an amulet in the great Catholic cause.

The late Phyllis Schlafly was (and remains) a heroine in my eyes. For as long as I can remember, she has been a model of feminine insolence and good cheer: fearless against the enemies of Christian faith and universal reason. Our side (that of the good, the true, and the beautiful) has needed female as well as male soldiering, especially along the front line. The two kinds are not interchangeable, however, as this lady understood. Men do not give birth in their trenches; women do in theirs; and only the two together are equal to the pain of mankind’s exile. We can win battles without them, but need women to win wars. We need daughters resolute, chaste and brave.

Perhaps Mrs Schlafly’s greatest public service was by her tireless work defeating the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, back in the ’seventies. This monstrous congressional enactment was stopped at thirty of the thirty-eight States it needed to be ratified (after it had reached a high of thirty-five). Her campaign, with acronym STOP (“Stop Taking Our Privileges”), was both nervy and brilliant. Generals, and general-lasses, need both qualities; one without the other makes a lost cause.

As Mrs Schlafly clarified, women have traditionally enjoyed many privileges in Western society including — in the day — dependent wife status for tax benefits, separate toilets, exemption from the draft, &c. The feminists of NOW (the fanatic “National Organization of Women”) were campaigning to have all privileges revoked.

From an early time, when it was unforeseeable to others, Mrs Schlafly correctly anticipated the implications of feminist success — that it must necessarily lead not only to the drug and rape culture, and the holocaust of abortions, but specifically to gay marriage, transgenderism, and beyond. (She was mocked for these predictions by the “sisterhood.”) In other areas of politics, including foreign policy, she was as clear-sighted.

Her gift was the masculine one, of cold logical reasoning, combined with the warm feminine one, of prowling, psychological inquiry. She could see how shifts in traditional premisses would twist people, and show just how they would be twisted — how both women and men would be tokenized and demeaned. Her defence of privilege as necessary privilege — her conception of “rights” as according with actual human station, as opposed to some board of abstract automata — took her to the heart of social understanding. It is no accident that the most penetrating anthropological thought has so often been provided by women (from Mary Magdalene forward) — standing, as it were, aside from the “control” functions, exercised by men. For women (the responsible ones, not those sunk in liberationist imbecilities) are not instinctively reductive. Even as observers, they are multi-taskers: seeing what men habitually omit. (They have compensating flaws, and male strength is necessary against the mothering tyranny of women. But we needn’t go into that at the moment.)

Much more should be recovered. As several of my female correspondents insist, it is a terrible insult to the dignity of women that (since 1920 in USA) they have been expected to vote in popular elections.

The influence of women on society — holding together what would otherwise fall apart — is not and cannot be exerted through such deviations. The Nineteenth Amendment (as parallel legislation in other war-ravaged countries) reduced women to the status of participants in a brutish and abominable men’s game, to which women are entirely unsuited (as evidence the number who become unhinged). Over the course of the last century, the consequences of that tragic error have become so obvious that they are taken for granted: the expansion of statecraft into aspects of intimate and domestic life that were never any of the state’s business; and by inevitable consequence, the undermining and incremental destruction of human families.

Yet as political observers, women have often been superb. They look over masculine affairs from a heightened, feminine perspective. By standing above the mechanical processes of politics, they are able to appeal to the masculine capacity for disinterested justice, in a unitive rather than disunitive way. And in doing this they uphold the priority of the homely and religious, over the moral vacuity of state institutions. Men are called to defend that realm in which women are dominant by nature. It is the man’s role to shelter. Take this solemn responsibility away, and it is no wonder that, as today, the great majority of men never pass emotionally, or intellectually, beyond a callow adolescence.

To redefine women as smaller men — to equate the roles and thereby make the mother “theoretically” interchangeable with the father — is to pervert all natural order. It can be done by legislation, only within certain boundaries. When these are crossed, Nature takes revenge; as she has been doing. Mrs Schlafly was eloquent on all this.

More fundamentally, her genius was to be obstinate as a woman, and insolent in the face of the demonic. This involved, in the politics of the post-War, intervention in that formerly male preserve which had been turned topsy-turvy — an unavoidable concession to the times. This mother of six, who for many years could only think and write about public questions in the time after her last and youngest had been put to bed (for she refused to demand the emasculation of her husband), accomplished miracles of persuasion. Until the day before yesterday, she was physically present in the struggle for the best obtainable political results — a voice of extraordinary resolution.

*

I have had the honour to know, since childhood, many strong, independent women. I think particularly of several who made their way, towering alone. Their example inspires me to the present day: I think of such women and remember, if not my courage, at least what courage is.

I wrote once an essay on “The Modern Spinster” — a class to which I added women who had (by war and accident) long outlived their husbands. Born, typically, before the turn of the last century; widowed perhaps in the Great War; some had survived into the 1980s. They were impressive figures of pedagogical authority. We had, even here in the once admirable Province of Ontario, women I would rank with empress-dowagers of China. They were irreplaceable pillars of a society that I have watched disintegrate, over the decades since. Not one of them was a feminist, or could be interpreted as one by any fanciful act of the imagination. Each was fully a Woman.

Two converging points: First, that their power can be neither appreciated nor understood, in a society that has so far degenerated that sex (not grammatical “gender”) is dissolved in an androgynous slurry. Second, that there can be no such thing as an independent woman, who would exchange her position for that of a little man. Who could anyway wish “equality” with any of these strangely unnatural, mole-like creatures we have today — whining, whingeing, whimpering from the “safe spaces” in the hollows of their heads?

*

It is true that Mrs Schlafly endorsed Donald Trump, earlier this year. I note the view expressed by the (still living) Father Zed: that against Hillary Clinton, he would vote for the corpse of Millard Fillmore. I’m with him there; it is only at the prospect of “the Donald” that I hesitate. However, I’m prepared to make a concession. In commemoration of my late heroine, Phyllis Schlafly, I will permit one (1) of my USA readers to vote for Mr Trump in the coming election. (You know who you are.)

My neighbour went off for the long weekend. She must have the same small Bose CD-player as I do. It has an alarm function, and I hear precisely the same repeating note that comes from mine when I set it. The sound would get anyone out of bed. Even at low volume, it fills one’s head, allows no other thought. Then it increases to the full volume, until it is tupped. The machine is plugged into the wall; there is no battery to go dead, eventually, as in cars when their burglar alarms are interminably sounding. (It does shut down after a few hours, then resumes next morning.) At intervals I must remind myself that my neighbour is a very nice person, who innocently “forgot”; that homicide would not be justifiable, in this instance.

Begin with a button off your best shirt.
Or: your mate, car, children
born and unborn. Someone steals your luggage,
a kind of rape. The first time is the worst. …

These lines open a poem by an old friend (Fraser Sutherland), entitled, “Forms of Loss.” It seems I published them in my Idler magazine, thirty years ago. Somehow they capture the essence of modern life.

One might bore gentle reader with other recurring instances, on this morning of our North American “Labour Day” (like “May Day” in Europe, less the overt Marxism). Traffic is light, today; but the din of half-a-dozen “home improvement projects” instead fills the air, and a ghetto-blaster has now cut in. Soon the annual airshow will be resuming (supersonic jets passing low overhead).

For there are three things with which our contemporaries cannot cope, even for one minute: stillness, silence, and simplicity.

An answer, I suppose, is to move into a log cabin, so far away, that only the tax collector will find you. But that is to forget the bears, the mosquitoes and black flies, and the Canadian winter. Alternatively, there may be an unoccupied atoll in French Polynesia.

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.”

That, I suppose, would be God’s merry greeting to us on Labour Day — the ancient, repeating message, that there is no way back to the garden, of Eden, or of childhood; that the arrow leads only forward, through death. The forms of loss are progressive, cumulative, and finally, comprehensive.

“Loss is given us, and we take it.” (Sutherland, again.)

Notwithstanding, one is reminded — especially on Labour Day, for some reason — that most of our work is counter-productive. Most of what I hear clamouring around me goes only towards making the world noisier, more perplexing, and more vile. It is thanks, I suppose, to our need for labour-saving devices, that we are caught in an unprecedented course de rat.

To the surprise of many Christians, Christ turns out not to be the sort of leader who promises stuff for nothing. He is not a politician looking for votes, who will deliver what the people want, on pizza trays. (In baskets, once, but that was an unusual case.) He says uncomfortable things to His supporters, such as, “Shape up.” He says this especially when He gets them alone; but does not hesitate with crowds, either. The “empathy” is there — or rather an unearthly, almost inapproachable kindliness, which is not as advertised in the brochures. He is more like a Marine commandant, than a grief counsellor; He does not seem to hear our excuses.

(“Rise, let us be on our way.”)

He sends us into battle, and not against a pretend Enemy. And did you know that the Saints who truly love Him, cuss at Him sometimes?

An earlier Mother Teresa — of Avila, not Calcutta — was capable of repeating the old mediaeval saw: “When I see how you treat your friends, Lord Jesus, I don’t wonder that you have so few.”

The Mother Teresa who will be canonized tomorrow (a little too soon after death, in my view) was, in my own brief sight of her, not only physically small and wiry, but tough as nails. She was a school marm, on top of her other virtues; she had been principal of St Mary’s convent school, in Calcutta — which is why she got respect even from such as Indira Gandhi (who attended St Mary’s convent school, in Allahabad). She was officer-class: could command obedience. I interviewed once Sister Nirmala, her successor (who died last year, age eighty-one). She assured me that our twentieth-century Saint Teresa was no putz. Her nuns had to deal with lepers, with the dying, with abandoned babies, and hard-case orphaned kids. This is entirely unlike a vacation.

To this day, and even round the corner in Parkdale here (for I’m three blocks away from the local Missionaries of Charity franchise), many of their customers are charmless. Why, just this morning I was looking at one. Not the sort of person with whom I should like to share a flat.

Teresa’s love was of the Christian kind, which is to say: burning. There were eyes and — sometimes, not always — a smile that could put you on your knees. She was infallibly polite, I should mention; but I would not have called her a “nice” person.

One of her nuns once fetched me a glass of water. I feel as though I were still sipping it.

My favourite, of all her wonderful sayings, is: “I wouldn’t touch a leper for a million dollars!” (This is an American translation; originally she had indicated, “a thousand pounds.”) Said, with almost the flippancy of a Valley Girl. This caught one’s attention admirably. And with perfect, Bengali comic timing she would add, “I only cure him for the love of God.”

A minor observation, to be sure, but I think this is also worth mentioning: that she had, for some occasions, a “wicked” sense of humour. She was thoroughly equipped, to stay sane. Feet on the ground; no floating angel. Even though she was very light. Not an inch over five feet; thin, and somewhat crook’d in old age, for if she had wings, they weighed upon her.

(And by the way, she was aggressively “pro-life.”)

We perhaps underestimate the need for sanity in our leaders. Most of those we select appear to be not only humourless, but mad. This is not surprising. For the successful politician, in a progressive democracy, makes his living as a salesman, by flattering people. If he’s very good at it, he may go to the top. (Ability and experience are unnecessary.) The people must be flattered; they must never be told the truth about themselves. Especially while they are waiting for their pizza.

Perhaps it is the effort to sustain the lies that uncouples them from the golden chariot; leaves them running to keep up; desperately pounding. (“Don’t hop on the Great Chariot,” sage Confucius told us in his Book of Songs, “you will only be covered with dust.”) Finally they collapse in uncomprehending exhaustion, gasping for oxygen as the political lifeguards carry them away. Being a Saint can be quite hard work; but being a fraud is probably harder.

(“For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”)

Nobody elected Mother Teresa. The only permission she got was from her (male) superiors. Having got this permission, she then went, precisely where the Spirit led her: from the modest office in her nice clean school into the darkest, dankest slum.

We do not need any more politicians. Every one of them fails. We need leaders, instead. It is more than that: we need real leaders, and the only reliable ones are sent by God.

(Saint Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us.)

Really, I don’t care whom the Americans elect as their president — so long as it isn’t Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump. From correspondence, I gather many of my USA readers feel the same. (Others are harder to follow, through the obscenities.) They won’t be voting, and refuse to be intimidated by the argument that if you are against one, then you are ipso facto promoting the other. It is possible to be opposed to both; and while there may be jurisdictions in this world wherein one is compelled to vote, even those must contend with spoilt ballots. To vote “tactically” is to enmesh oneself more threadily in the selection of poisons.

The worst argument I have found for supporting Trump, specifically, or any candidate in any election, is that he will provide “hope” for some downtrodden constituency. As I opine in my Thing column today (here), “I think Trump would do for unemployed, blue-collar American whites, what Obama has done for the ghetto blacks: make their position considerably worse, within a society more fatally divided.”

Liberal mass media (not only in USA) make me want to support Trump, and may well help him to the presidency. Were I his political adviser I would tell him to bait them remorselessly. Happily, I am not. The media smears and misrepresentations of that candidate; their suppression of news unfavourable to the other — are an open goad to an electorate ever more inclined to do the opposite of what the media tell them. But I do not think one ought to be goaded, one way or the other, by writers of so low a moral and intellectual height. We should try to ignore them, even though, like pornography, their “journalism” is everywhere in our faces.

Given a choice only between two evils, one may be obliged to prefer the lesser one. But here there is no compulsory choice. The idea that one must vote in a democratic election is like the idea that one must choose between flood and fire. (Of course, once the firemen arrive, you may have both.) One might choose instead to prepare for either, and endure what comes.

And besides, an extremely low turnout can serve as an electoral statement.

Hope, in this world, is misplaced. The (attempted) appropriation of “hope” by politicians can leave only deep scars. The real choice is between religion and politics: ultimately between the teaching of Christ, and profane teaching. To be drawn into the political “narratives” is to be drawn out of the “narrative” for salvation. The good is available to direct, selfless human action; it cannot be delegated to class representatives, nor enforced through political coercion. Whether to Heaven or to Hell, no one goes involuntarily.

Thus, I do not advocate revolution, which can only be another political act. Instead I recommend an ever more conscious aloofness from political processes.

Verily: the exact opposite of what I am now reading from Rome, under the title, Humanam Progressionem.

We are all foreigners here; we are all the equivalent of “undocumented immigrants,” so far as this world goes. So far as we are Christians, we were baptized into another order. We must not allow ourselves to be tricked, by the flash hand of any politician, into pretending that we are citizens here.

We see that the Australians who specialize in spotting fossilized slime in early terrestrial rock have performed another coup in Greenland. One might need to be a palaeobotanist to fully appreciate a stromatolith bouquet, but there it is (see here), inscribed into the Isua greenstone belt through the hills behind Nuuk, where volcanic rocks of 3,700 million years’ antiquity are to be found (by radiometric dating). We have pushed back the frontier of life on Earth another 200 million years plus, from similar findings in Western Australia, according to pop-science media — moving ever closer to some imagined evolutionary interface between physics and biology.

Alternatively, we are looking at ancient mineral accretions from evaporating sea water; but there you go. It could be biotic slime, of the sort we can observe today, microbially cementing layers of sediment to construct stone pillows in exotic shapes. And it might do for an image of the primordial gunge which, ever since Darwin, has served for a quasi-explanation of how Evolution got started.

The Earth is hypothesized to be 4,600 million years old (give or take a few ten-millions). Our proto-planet was bombarded from space continuously, and is supposed to have collided with another spinning proto-planet about the size of Mars, creating the mess that was finally resolved as Earth-and-Moon. Tranquillity was not to be had for some time, according to this cosmology, and metamorphic processes within the planet continue to the present day. All trace of life prior to, say, 4,000 million years ago, will have been cooked beyond the possibility of recognition.

The find in Greenland pertains to a little patch exposed by melting snow, smaller than a football field, which hypothetically escaped the intense baking, and floated through all later geological subductions. Well spotted, indeed!

A human body contains many trillion (millions of millions) of fairly cooperative living cells. Each of these cells contains a few million protein-coding genes. The microbial life imputed in this case is simpler, to be sure, but still incredibly complex. The degree of this complexity is under-appreciated.

We are often told that we share 98 percent of our genes with monkeys; but did gentle reader know that we also share around 60 percent with their bananas? I mention this otherwise pointless little fact, and compound it with the observation that genes can express themselves in myriad ways, to suggest the amount of choreography required to get anything reproductively genetic. As Nutman et al. acknowledge in their Nature piece, the ancestral slime imputed to their Greenland stone would already need to have been so biologically sophisticated as to require a very long previous evolutionary process.

Alternatively: the metamorphoses can happen rather quickly. This would be consistent with the entire known fossil record, in which we nowhere find creatures that are awkward. The closer we can investigate any one, the more we find it beautifully adapted to its spatial and temporal niche — coming into the geological record as a distinct item for aesthetic contemplation, and then making off; each with its entrance and its exit, from the cosmic dance. Here is its curtsy, there is its bow.

It was an Australian — a certain Lance Endersby from Hobart, Tasmania — who first introduced me to the powers of a microscope, and the thrill of examining smears of slime from the pond in his tropical (Bangkok) garden, whenas I and his two sons were wee boys. I saw things there, on the microscope slides, that blew my little head clean away, and I cannot say it has since had a chance to reassemble.

Later, I encountered this passage from Isaiah:

For thus saith the Lord that created the Heavens,
God himself that formed the Earth,
And made it, the very maker thereof.
He did not create it in vain:
He formed it to be inhabited!