Essays in Idleness

We are told, by innumerable “websites” this morning, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Internet website, uploaded by Tim Berners-Lee on the 21st of December, AD 1990. This corresponds to a full generation ago, by a statistical convention. “Email” came along, less than three years later; then more unfortunate things.

I recall not the moment, but one shortly after, when a techie first explained this whole website business to me. He was “Eric the Not Read,” the volunteer who was frankly responsible for installing the first “networked” computers in the Idler magazine, then still extant. Too, I remember my response to him after listening quietly to his explanation. It was a variant on Marconi’s, “What has God wrought?” Ever the editor, I shortened this to, “Oh gawd.”

How was I to know that for once the hype was understated?

Gentle reader may be inclined to note, against my posturing, that I am writing on one of these “websites” myself. Having been fact-checked at a weekend Christmas party, on a fine point touching the murder rate in Finland — by way of sabotaging my delivery of an amusing anecdote, and insinuating that I am a pathological liar — I am not currently disposed to smile. It is now possible to obtain “facts and arguments” — true, false, or ludicrous — instantaneously, almost anywhere on the planet, from billions of soi-disant “sources.” (I inserted the word “almost” to protect myself against the fact-checkers.)

The reduction of human communication to the “virtual,” or sentimental-robotic, is an aspect of “progress” that cannot be blamed entirely on the Internet. It goes back to the invention of newspapers, if not before. What has been achieved, in the last generation, is only an extraordinary acceleration of this process, along with the imposition of a new horizon in historical time. Everything that happened before 1990 has become incomprehensible. Anything recorded after, is stale-dated within hours. But the supply of electronic digits grows, exponentially. (Or perhaps I am exaggerating.)

According to Received Opinion, “digital” — which we might date to Charles Babbage’s computer games in the mid-nineteenth century, but gets truly out of hand not until twenty-first — constitutes the Third Industrial Revolution. As Plato pointed out, the First one (agriculture) was a mixed blessing. To which let me add, by way of update, that the Second one (inhuman machinery) was very badly mixed, and the Third (this new age of worthless “information”) is a downright curse. I pray that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be delayed by some international catastrophe.

So why do I “blog”? Let us call it a post-modern irony.

To the mind that is not Catholic, we must climb Everest, land men on Mars, cure flatulence and so forth, “because it is there.” Similarly, we must enslave ourselves to every technical innovation. While curious in the better scholastic sense, the Catholic is content to observe “that it is there,” only. In other words, we must bear it in mind on our journey. We don’t necessarily have to go to the top of Everest. With patience, we might find a way to go round. But if no way presents itself, then yeah, over the top.

My alternative to blogation is to accept being silenced at a time when all Catholics are invited to shut up. Call me disobedient.

*

Which takes us to Saint Thomas Didymus (“the twin”), a.k.a. “Doubting Thomas,” whose Feast we celebrate today. It strikes me that someone should propose him as the Patron Saint of Fact-Checkers.

In the Gospels, and more in the early apocryphal works, he appears to come from poor fisher folk. And while he may not have been actually “retarded,” he was never the sharpest knife in the drawer. Of such stuff Christ made His Apostles — the foundation of that Church of which He is the cornerstone.

Thomas carried the faith East, ever East — according to uncheckable traditions — finally finding his martyrdom somewhere near modern Madras (er, Chennai). Along the way he was able to establish that Mesopotamia, Parthia, Persia, and various other places really existed, all the way to the Coramandel Coast. Indeed, southern India is where he established “seven-and-a-half” churches. (I’ve checked, that’s what it says.) A plain indication that he must have done some such thing, may be found in the evidence for Saint Thomas Christians in e.g. Kerala, going back many centuries before any other Christians caught sight of them. However, while we await further evidence (should any remain this side of Eternity), let us return to the start, and impulse of Saint Thomas’s journey, in the event that led him to declare, by the verification of his own eyes and fingers, Dominus meus, et Deus meus!

Saint Thomas, O doubting Apostle: now you have established that Christ was actually Resurrected, please pray for the rest of us simpletons!

The interpretation of Earth’s evolutionary history as a five-act play, with a farce tacked on the end as envoi, certainly appeals to my dramatic sense. As gentle reader may know, each grand period or biotic Act ends with a massive extinction event. We have the curtains close on the Ordovician, the Devonian, the Permian, and the Triassic, repectively; then finally on the Cretaceous, with a big dinosaur kill-off, just 66 million years ago — each of these events leaving more bodies on stage than a Jacobean revenge tragedy. The causes were “whatever,” as we say today. Asteroid, maybe; gargantuan volcano; little green men zapping noxious pink rays.

Look at the chart (it’s scattered around the Wicked Paedia) and the drama becomes less clear. It is constructed from current fossil knowledge, at the level of genera. It is founded on a statistical count of when the last species in each known genera disappears, permanently, off stage. We haven’t actually seen him die, but in each case, we never see him again. (Except, sometimes we do find him, swimming unselfconsciously in the Indian Ocean as if nothing had happened, in which case we must remember to adjust our extinction count, and make a poster for another “endangered species.”)

The presumed extinctions tend to bunch here and there, as waves may do at sea. For the play subdivides into scenes as well as acts, and lines within each scene. And even on the great acts, those curtains tend to close in “pulses” — as if the pulleys are jammed, and the stage manager must yank the cords again and again, and they never quite shut completely.

From the pop-science press I gather that “settled science” has moved in on the cause of the Permian/Triassic “boundary event” — the biggest of the big kill-offs. That is just where Shakespeare likes to put his climax: about the end of Act Three. This leaves him two more acts to sort out the mess he has created. In this case, the mess is now attributed to the Siberian Traps.

The Earth scientists now believe this vast region of igneous rock in present-day north-west Siberia (formerly northern Pangea) began tooting the greenhouse gases, big time, around 252 million years ago, and kept it up for over one million years. In addition they spewed more than one million cubic miles of lava — enough to cover the whole planet, more than thirty feet deep.

“Yikes,” will be our first reaction. Pump me full of greenhouse gases, and bury me under three storeys of molten lava, and I would consider going extinct, myself. And I’d be looking suspiciously at anyone who wasn’t. It sounds like a planetary Pompeii.

But note: “over a million years.” That’s less than one three-thousands of an inch per year; about what I expect falls on the cleanest city in the form of dust. Much less, in fact, because the rocks of the Siberian Trap are mostly basalts formed from lava that doesn’t much shoot upward; it just spreads and blobs on location. And note, another little fact I’ve not yet supplied: that the extinctions peak just after all this heaving. Then further note, that all of this depends on dating methods that can of themselves be plus-or-minus a couple million years; and cannot be checked against the actual sequence of events, until time agrees to move backward. (Only in my dreams.)

I can’t help it, gentle reader, I am one of nature’s sceptics. Show me a “theory” and I start feeling for holes. Often enough I find that it is a conjuring trick, some prestidigitation; a little hocus-pocus performed on the gullible, and information-starved. (“Modern science is like magic.”) The audience imagines thirty feet of lava falling all at once. The reality is a few specks of soot.

One might also note that the greatest devastation occurred not on land, but underwater. (The fact that sea levels appear to have been plunging at the time, makes a curious aside.)

I, like any clever scienticist, could fuddle with the data till my eyes crossed, then shrug and postulate various “events within the event” — weaves, turns, sprints, wrinkles, leaps, bobbles — plus an unknown number of additional “whatevers.” But I wouldn’t go on television until I’d found hard evidence of my purely speculative play-by-play. Smoking guns are all very well, but a coroner requires a one-to-one pairing between bullets and wounds.

As the wide-eyed propagators of the BBC put it: “The precise details of how this caused so many life forms to die out remain the subject of scientific discussion.”

Or as I would paraphrase: “They don’t have a chuckling clew.”

This leaves us with my promised farce, or “Act Six” in the programme. This is the one we are watching now. In this one we have, at present, more than seven billion “fully-evolved” humans looking for the next extinction event. Vain little creatures who, tired of waiting, think they can cause it themselves.

It is hardly more difficult to make chocolates than to cast lead bullets. I had never made either, truth be told, but there are instructional videos on YouTube for the curious, and there are more detailed, written instructions elsewhere on the Internet for those who, like me, might want to make their bullets in a more leisurely, contemplative way. (Too, the modern reader ought to be reminded, there are old books.)

“Have you ever had your eye on an unusual gun, but were put off by the oddball calibre and lack or expense of commercial ammo?” one such website asks. “No problem. … The bullet casting process can be easy, enjoyable, and in many ways, relaxing.”

On more diligent inquiry, the claim may be excessive. For should one’s arquebus, wheellock, snaphaunce, or other muzzle-loaded weapon happen to fit any standard-bore ammunition, modern mass-production will probably defeat your economics. It is the same with almost everything, these days. The commercial machinery has probably shot out a hundred thousand of whatever is wanted in the time it takes you to make six. If your time is worth anything, you may ignobly reason, it would be cheaper to drive to some wretched big-box store and have done with it. This will be especially the case if your weapon is itself of recent manufacture.

And then there are the safety obsessives who warn that the loading of your pre-Napoleonic, sentimental favourite, requires skills you may lack. Even if the balls are cast fairly symmetrically, you must get them to lie comfortably on the powder. Air spaces are the devil. Get it wrong, the musket blows up in your face, and where’s the fun in that?

Whereas, a chocolate may remain quite edible no matter what a mess it looks, and I have never seen one explode. This was the argument when, earlier this week, I decided to make chocolates in anticipation of Christmas. Or rather, just one of the factors, for I noticed no spare lead lying about the High Doganate, and though I am shy to admit it, no venerable guns. (There is however a small brass model of the Zam-Zammah in Lahore, “that mighty fire-dispensing dragon,” which with patience could be interpreted as a working piece.)

On the other hand, reviewing my gift stocks from the previous Christmas, I discovered an unopened jar of maraschinos, in a liqueur distilled from proper Marasca cherries (in Italy where they know how to do these things). Too, there were bars of baker’s chocolate I had never got round to using, nor could remember having purchased.

My better angel thus insisted I make chocolates instead.

This, gentle reader may know, is very easy if one has chocolate moulds. I have two, of ancient provenance, obtained in a flea market somewhere on impulse (they are delightful works of art in themselves), but these designed only for casting more bars (although with inspiring, Catholic decorations). I decided to leave them hanging on the gable of a bookcase.

My father taught me to be resourceful. I looked about for some substitute, found I did not own even an ice-cube trough, and eventually gave up.

By now I was determined to make chocolates, so melted my dark chocolate in my makeshift double-boiler, sweetening with buckwheat honey. Spreading parchment on a ceramic oven tray, I dropped generous dollops in an unsatisfying pattern, excavating cavities in each with my fingers and straightening the sides while the chocolate remained fairly soft. One cherry with liqueur was then spooned into each recess, and more molten chocolate spilt over the tops. Quick, solidifying refrigeration could be obtained by placing the large tray on my balconata bench (even mild Canadian winters are useful for this), and Bob was finally declared to be my uncle.

The result was quite appalling to the inspection of my eye; and in places where the liqueur had seeped out, there was an unpleasant sticky glistening. Some carving with a paring knife was necessary to make them at all presentable.

Worse, my good intention to distribute them among worthy souls during the Twelve Days of Christmas has been somewhat undermined by the failure of my own Advent resolution; for I have caught myself eating them on several occasions. But this does put me in the happy position of being able to claim they are very much more delicious than the kind one gets from the production-line capitalists.

And therefore, in the balance, as a moralist I declare that we should all revert to making our own chocolates — recipes for alternative fillings abound — and put an end to this shameful practice of obtaining inferior quality, “store-boughten” goods — that both of my grandmothers condemned.

The first of the O Antiphons, on the Magnificat in Vespers, telegraphs, as it were, the approach of the Nativity of Our Lord. We have entered the last week of Advent. In each of seven successive evenings, the promise of the Messiah is echoed in phrases of the Old Testament, succinct and discrete. It is a string of Titles in anticipation of our Unknown God: O Sapientia, O Adonai, O Radix Jesse, O Clavis David, O Oriens, O Rex Gentium, O Emmanuel. (“O Wisdom,” “O Lord,” “O Root of Jesse,” “O Key of David,” “O Dayspring,” “O King of Nations,” “O God-With-Us.”)

In a different, ferial order they are also, as it were, reprised in the antiphons of Lauds (by seeming convergence of two very ancient traditions), i.e. according to the weekday. Too, there are the (also ancient) antiphons on the Benedictus; and the whole series, or series of series of prayers in Advent, signalling approach, interplays within the rich polyphonic dance of the ages, rendered so deeply harmonious within the continuous liturgical traditions before they were smashed by the Novus Ordo. Yet like old stone or stained glass, where the record is kept, they are possible to restore and then re-animate.

One may, sometimes one must, meditate upon the meaning of the sung phrases, and of their relations, in time out of mind.

They are not cryptic, however. There is no scheme that will ever be found to explain how the phrases fell out, or fall out within their “inevitable” places. There are extraordinary poetic relations, different in kind from that of some tight numerical formula, because operating at once in all dimensions. These are simply as they are.

We are too easily tempted to ask the wrong “Why?” — to ask useless questions about what lies entirely beyond our understanding. As the Scripture, the Liturgy is not the work of one human author. Nor is the working of the Holy Spirit some narrowly sequential thing, laid out as a course of legislation in response to our own “news events.” Things happen and we do not know how they happen. Only in moments, simultaneously in and out of time, and by that same mysterious Action, are we apprised: “Look and you will see.”

To our modern minds, this is inadmissable. We do not trust what we cannot manipulate, and try to reach “inside the machine” to re-order things to our own liking. We lack Faith; which requires humility.

We have destroyed so much, that our task now becomes an unimaginable Restoration of what we have destroyed. That is anyway one view of our task, while still inhabiting this world: to restore, and restore, as the Enemy smashes, and smashes. And by this “Enemy” I mean to expose the enemy in ourselves, which Christ came to exorcise.

In the course of this struggle — of our better angels against our worse — there is a cleansing that transcends time; and all things are made new in the light of Resurrection. Christ to us is returning, and returning, as in the yearly cycle of the Mass, through the few years accorded to each of us. In contrition we return there, and in returning, rediscover a joy that is unfailing.

The monastic orders — in which the antiphons are reliably sung in their appointed places through the daily Hours — can never, even in this world, be suppressed. When the monasteries are destroyed at one location, others pop up in other locations, as we may see with our own eyes today at Papa Stronsay and elsewhere. Always, always, even in this world, these monks and canons will be singing, with us, as we may do with them. There, in the heart of our surviving Christendom, restored perhaps on a distant island, old and new become indistinguishable again.

And we are reminded of something of which we need to be constantly reminded: that even in this world is the music of the Eternal, formed in the Heaven and interpreted to us in “the music of the spheres.”

We could, of course, interpret the final week of Advent as the last seven shopping days before Christmas, then Christmas Day as a vast opening of our vacuities, and the stuffing them up with poultry. This is one way to prepare, and in the “Dictatorship of Relativism” that Benedict XVI so economically described, it is as good as, “and therefore better than,” anything else we might be doing.

Or alternatively our preparation might consist of cleaning house and home — of making our souls ready for the arrival of the Christ Child.

I picture it in the latter way — the way of the Crèche — as parents do, and beautifully sometimes, their own blesséd children, knowing that “the baby” will soon arrive. Everything made new, the house washed down, the crib kitted out, and the Love made ready in our souls. There is no analogy too child-like and naïve for the exposition of this Nativity: when God, to the perpetual surprise of our human family, came to us dressed in our own flesh, so infinitely less sophisticated than we are.

The Child of Our Lady, our light and guide through this and all ages.

My Chief Texas Correspondent kindly pings me this link (here) on a backroom of the USA Republican Party. Several dozen of the leading “conservatives” in the party apparently met at a Virginia hotel, on the 7th of December, and after five ballots reached consensus on their preferred presidential nominee. Prayers were said in intervals between the ballots.

I believe this is called a “conclave.” Get a bunch of reasonably devout old Christian gentlemen, and lock them up until they come to a decision. Most admirable: to have a prayer group choose the President, rather than leaving it to some squalid, chaotic, pagan convention. I approve.

This arrangement has more or less worked for us Catholics, over the last twenty centuries or so. Nothing earthly is failsafe, of course, and I’ll admit our election process yielded less than desirable results in the years 189, 296, 352, 625, 896, 955, 1032, 1316, 1378, 1492, 1513, and then perhaps five hundred years later. (See Edward Feser on “papal fallibility,” here.) But that’s a failure rate of less than 5 percent, compared to well over 50 percent in popular presidential elections (USA or elsewhere).

Gentle reader may be curious to know who the winning candidate was. The conclave selected Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz, the junior senator from Texas.

(Yee-haw!)

Another idea, for our beloved southern neighbours. The winning candidate should choose a regnal name upon becoming President, such as “Abraham II” or “George IV” or “John V” or “James VII.” (We start by affirming the baptismal Christian names of the previous forty-three. Note that Mr Cleveland served non-consecutive terms, but is assigned only one regnal number, not “Grover I” and “Grover II”). And let’s hope our descendants will never see a Woodrow II, or a Barack II. (Perhaps such as these could be removed from the list, as “Antipresidents.”)

In my capacity as Lord Denizen of the High Doganate (closest living equivalent to the Holy Roman Emperor, I should think) I hereby approve the choice of this American conclave, and would also like to endorse my CTC’s recommendation for vice president. He named Cara Carleton “Carly” Fiorina (née Sneed), also of Texas, reasoning that she would “blunt Killary’s estrogen campaign.”

Fair enough, but to be clear, I do not think it should be necessary to have any popular run-off. Or that this would even be possible, after another of my constructive suggestions is taken up. This would be, to transfer the entire Democratic Party leadership to Guantanamo.

Chesterton, somewhere, memorably notes that the madman is not without reason. Verily, in the mental department, he has lost everything except his reason. I remember this every time I find myself arguing with an atheist: that it is best not to. The mere idea of “pure reason” enabled a certain Immanuel Kant to anticipate post-modernity, set the stage for some bizarre descendants, and reset all our metaphysical dials to an atheist default position. Not that he was intending this. He was only taking a step beyond Hume. “Fully autonomous reason,” shall we call it, is a powerfully destructive force. Perfection of the intellect is no more possible, down here on earth, than a life entirely without sin. The belief that we can elevate ourselves by the synaptic bootstraps of our wee tiny brains, has much for which to answer.

In Parkdale for instance: a district of this city renowned for its accumulation of “outpatients,” on and off their “meds.” They also illustrate Chesterton’s aphorism. Often they are reasoning, aloud; and seldom on my walks do I detect any logical errors. From the facts or premisses that they have supposed, their (often angry) mutterings to themselves flow quite naturally. I have even overheard some impressive hair-splitting; and have often thought that, with a little anger management, they could be candidates for tenure — at Ryerson, if not the U of T.

And yairs, vice versa, if you know what I mean.

“Pure reason,” as it were, uncritiqued. Yet it is not the reasoning that disturbs me, rather the premisses, and the judgements on fact, that strike me as intellectually wanton. We have what might be called “worldview issues.”

If, for instance, I believe myself a teapot, it does correctly follow that I may have a handle and a spout. The empirical observation, that I am lacking in these appendages, may be logically confuted. Maybe they broke off. Or from a Darwinian perspective, maybe they “evolved” into what I have now. Ditto with any missing lid and, of course, tea leaves and hot water prove nothing. Maybe the universe, too, “just happened.”

Perhaps teapots have gone out of style. There is a Canadian gentleman named Paul, now “Stefonknee” Wolsch, father of seven, who announced at age forty-six that he was “trans.” His wife, who risks labelling as a bigot, told him to stop that or leave. He, now dressed she, lost his/her job as a mechanic, too. But after a rough patch, Stefonknee had a further revelation, becoming an eight-year-old girl, trapped in the body of a man now past fifty. He, become she, was adopted by what I take to be a very liberal family, and now spends his, or rather her days playing with the grandchildren. I should add that the youngest, age seven, decided that her new sibling should be the youngest instead of her, and that Stefonknee now kindly prefers to be six.

This has become a controversy in the transgender community, and an exhibit in the “politics of identity.” Over at First Things (here), Carl Trueman has written facetiously but astutely on the topic, proposing the term “heliocentrarchic heterotemporalism” to describe the latest form of bigotry, directed at the purported essence of Mister, Miss, Mistress, Mrs, or Ms Wolsch. (An aspiring heliocentrarchic heterotemporalist myself, I will just call it, “him.”)

We cannot confute him by logic. Gentle reader cannot disprove that I am a teapot, either. (And at the moment, a Brown Betty teapot.) For from a strictly reasoned, i.e. insane point of view, it may be argued that one premiss is as good as another. Therefore A equals A, case closed. (Please do not vex me with your tautologiphobia.)

Faith and reason are intertwined. If there is God, His creation may contain untransmutable particularities, and other things we may not alone define. But if there is only human reason, all bets are off.

It is not their fault, really; perhaps they will get over it, in time. Really they are very sweet, and kind, and nice, very nice, except when they are not. The kind thing is to be nice with them.

Often I am surprised by the young people. I am expecting something, and it does not happen. I am not expecting anything, and it happens: something. … Something is there, which I cannot quite put my finger upon. Perhaps it is the niceness. What lies behind it, I ask myself. Anything?

They have so much to say. Sometimes I am listening. On the trolley, for instance, all the young people are talking. But not to each other. Each has this “device,” and would seem to be talking to someone at another location. It is not my business to eavesdrop, but then, it is not my intention to eavesdrop, either. For I am trying to read, but my ears are too good.

What is it that they are saying, and what does it mean? I used to think I could follow an English sentence. Now I am less sure. Perhaps it is that we don’t have sentences any more, only stream of consciousness. How I yearn sometimes, for a subordinate clause.

But ah, sometimes, one of them says something coherent; or uses “irony” in a way I can decode. I think, oh, he’s a smart one; must come from a good home. I hear recognizable proper nouns. I hear verbs. The other day I heard an adverb with a verb; so sharp! Must have been homeschooled, I thought. For he looked less than thirty, yet was making sense. I hope that he is safe.

While trolleys seem local, to the Greater Parkdale Area, I have developed a notion that the condition (of niceness) may be universal.

“Zombies on the work days, werewolves on the weekend.”

This according to a young German correspondent, who has been secretly homeschooled. (It is illegal to teach your own children, in Germany; supposing, of course, that you have any. Apparently, someone tried it, and the feared Jugendamt — “Children’s Aid” — moved in.)

According to Birgitta, let us call her, while they retain certain German characteristics, such as a high degree of personal organization and punctuality (“like robots”), her countrymen are no longer a threat to anyone, “except possibly to themselves, while drinking, in their Werwölfe mode.” This is because, as a consequence of state schooling, they no longer believe in anything — good or bad.

“They do not even believe they are alive.”

“They have lost the distinction between pain and pleasure.”

They make, she added, “the perfect platonic lovers.” (I think this was intended as droll.)

And she, too, observed that they no longer talk, about anything, really, but only make sounds, “like heavy birds.” Happy birds; sad birds. Nice birds. Strange birds, who use a lot of consonants. Though they are not judgemental, as birds tend to be. Except when someone is judgemental.

Perhaps we are unfair.

Be that as it may, I call upon Saint Hilary of Poitiers, who, in the “Dark Age” of the fourth century, “could not tolerate that the specious plea of safeguarding peace and unity should be allowed to dim the light of the Gospel teaching.” (Saint Andrew Missal.)

Yes, Saint Hilary, Bishop and Doctor: pray for them.

From New Age Rome, to New Age Paris; from the monkeys on the wall at Saint Peter’s, to the monkeys in the halls of Le Bourget, this week — what a parade of vanity!

Through those latter, Mother Nature was taking her stroll, with the world’s politicians and arrangers preening in her train. She is demanding sacrifices, as is her wont; and her hierophants were demanding countless billions of the taxpayers’ cash, and pledges of emission cuts, and generally that we stop breathing, in hope this will assuage her.

Children, likewise, will be sacrificed on the pyre of “global warming” under the population control programmes. (Or, “climate change” as it is now called, to cover all contingencies.) Conscience, too, must go up in the smoke, as the world leaders pledge also to renew their belief in numbers generated by the gnostic computer models — elaborate quantifications from unknown, and for the most part, unknowable facts. Including real whoppers, such as the average surface temperature of the planet at a point more than two hundred years ago — the imaginary benchmark — when we cannot reliably calculate this average even for the present.

And if we sacrifice enough, they think She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed will behave as Dame Kind, holding the rise of her Thermometer to only 2.0 degrees Centigrade, for the rest of this century. If She is not fully propitiated, however, She could shoot it up by 6.0 degrees!

The assembled leaders of 195 countries must all profess their faith in this risible junk science, or suffer the lunatic wrath.

We had “settled science” like this in ancient Rome — the spooky scientism that followed the decline of the older, pioneering, sceptical, Hellenistic schools of inquiry. In the attempt to express, with fanciful precision, the unknowables of cause and effect, we had the origins of astrology, and a hundred other trades, each founded upon “sciences” that were settled in public: legislated, enforced superstition, with omens read daily. Paradoxically, engineering and technology flourished, by the same spiritualization of nature. Meanwhile emperors and kings were deified, for men could now create new gods.

A thousand years passed (more than a thousand, from the dimming of the lights at Alexandria) until the true sceptics of the Middle Ages began to restore the hard principles of science — as a means to knowledge, not a means of control. And now, again, this is being lost, as our “scientists” have again become a hallowed caste of High Priests and Priestesses, whose whimsical prognostications determine the course of all public policy.

Which returns us to the Rome of our own generation, and the obscene spectacle to which I referred in my Thing column yesterday. (Here.) On the very day of the Feast of Our Immaculate Lady, the Mother of God was displaced by that gnostic Nature Mother, in a spectacle projected upon the façade of the first church of Christendom. And this after Catholics had been commanded by the bien-pensant inside to pay obeissance to the strange new gods: to make a shameful sacrifice of their faith and their intelligence, to the beat of the monkey drummers at “COP21.”

“The choice is clear,” as Barry Bafflegab loves to say. … It is between putting our faith in the Word of God, and putting it in the hands of miserable, deluded, vain little men.

There was never a conflict between the Church, and genuine scientific inquiry. There will always be a conflict between the worship of God, and the worship of “science” (which is the definition of scientism). The two Lords vie for the same souls, and for the world that only God created.

But in the battle with that devil, Christ will win.

Remember this, gentle reader I beg, through the Gaudete Mass of His Advent, tomorrow: that the high gnostic priests will die away, and Christ will reign triumphant.

The siren call of Radical Islam is more likely to be heard by Muslims than by, say, Christians or Jews. It will be even more audible to Islamic converts, or “reverts.” Pat Buchanan, always worth reading for a view dissenting from the political establishment he believes to have gone insane, says something like this in a column I just read. It is in a list with other points made, defending a certain Donald Trump’s proposal for a moratorium on Muslim immigration to the USA, while the political class sort out what they are doing. I think it is Buchanan’s most cogent point.

Trump I am happy enough to dismiss as a “fascist demagogue” — like all the previous U.S. presidents who declared or maintained such moratoria, to block one definable immigrant group or another. The United States would have ceased to be a Western country, generations ago, had these fascist demagogues not drawn a few lines.

Basic sovereignty confers this right on any national legislator. Trump’s proposal to “do something” about Muslim immigration, is thus hardly an innovation. Their failure to even consider such a measure is the single biggest reason “mainstream” political parties are losing their grip across Europe, too. I should think many of the people who declare Trump himself to be “a problem,” secretly exult in watching his rise. They want something done, and even if they don’t want Trump to do it, they enjoy his success in making elementary realities discussable again.

In fact, Trump is a typical liberal, and his moratorium a typical expression of asinine liberal thinking. That is to say: “Let us call a time out, while we find a way to fix this cock-up in our social engineering.” His views on everything are off the top of his head, but liberal premisses are the only ones he knows.

I think the chances he will become the next President are not high, but rising. He climbed another eight points after his moratorium suggestion. About ten more like that, and his bid is clinched.

Or put this another way. The “mainstream” politicians think the voters will swing back to them, when they realize how scary the “alternatives” are. One might describe this as the optimism of despair.

Or another. The liberal mind believes the present “Islamophobia” has been whipped up by demagogic politicians. The truth, as ever with the liberal mind, is the exact opposite. Demagogic politicians are, now as ever, exploiting what is already upwhipped. For after many tens of thousands of Islamic-themed terror incidents around the globe, Joe Public is not well disposed to Muslims, here or elsewhere. Verily, I would venture that in many places, even Muslims have become ill-disposed to Muslims.

The term, with the usual -phobia suffix, is misleading. I would go so far as to say that it is less fear, than loathing, and that it includes among many in Muslim countries a dangerously unpredictable self-loathing.

*

I have lectured my poor gentle reader before on the primary issue, which has never gone away, and is thus unlikely to go away in the foreseeable future. Read your Koran, and you will find that the claims made by Messrs Daesh and company, to “speak for Islam,” are not entirely unreasonable. This is why the term “moderate Muslim” might have some relevance.

The great majority of Muslims, like the great majority of Christians today, do not take their religion that seriously. They prefer it watered down, often to homaeopathic doses. And yet there will always be revivals and, contrary to the hopes of liberals, the “core teaching” of each religion remains, ever awaiting rediscovery.

At the Reformation, Christianity was not “reformed.” It was jarred and split, but then it reassembled. The Catholic teaching did not go away. With time, even the most radically schismatic sects returned to something like the Catholic teaching, or left Christianity altogether. By comparison, Islam was apparently shattered, when it came into collision with European modernity. But it has been reassembling, ever since.

The idea of spreading Islam through violence is not a deviation. Indeed, the founder of that religion preached violence against all “infidels,” and set a personal example in spreading Islam through Arabia, by the sword. His successors continued thus, spreading the new religion from Morocco to India. Later Caliphs have honoured this precedent through fourteen centuries. Islam is not and has never been a “religion of peace.” It is a religion of war, and peace through conquest. Liberals may deny that anything in history really happened, but this is what did.

They may on the contrary insist, like the delusional Barack Hussein Obama Soebarkah, that Christians were sometimes violent, too. Darn right, but if he ever gets around to consulting his New Testament, he will find that this is not doctrinal. A Christian could remain doctrinally sound, and go through his whole life without killing, or even promising to kill should the opportunity arise, a single person. He might even proselytize, without uttering mortal threats. So could a Jew, for that matter; a Hindu, Buddhist, or Confucian — so far as I can see from my modest forays into comparative religion. The criticism is Islam-specific.

Which leads to the third liberal argument: that we are prejudiced against Islam. This is quite true in my own case, and that of every other observant Christian. But we also observe the Christian distinction between sin and sinner.

*

Muslims, as all other humans, should be loved (which is not the same thing as “tolerated”). They should even be respected, as autonomous human beings, and left in peace if they do not threaten the peace. Those already in the West have rights, that must not be stripped without cause. To legislate retroactively is to behave like the Daesh. Christians must not go there. But if it was a mistake to let so many in, it does not follow that we must continue to do it.

Note moreover that I am not, as most pundits, trying to tell liberals and atheists what to do; or Muslims, for that matter. I think all these people should convert to Christianity, in its definitive, Catholic form. My current political thinking is directed to what Christians should do; or to what Christian governments might do, if we still had any. All others may go to Hell, if they so choose. If Jesus did not compel them to choose Heaven, how can I?

It is the religion, Islam, that we have always condemned, so fulsomely; not our Muslim brothers in the flesh. I have met many fine Muslims, especially in those countries where I lived or travelled among them. I have heard or read many noble attempts to interpret Islam in a Sufi, spiritual way. I have observed that, “We have a religion that is better than we are, while they are often better than their religion.” I have admired the many, extraordinary feats in science, philosophy, and the arts, done by great Muslims in centuries gone by. I have also noticed that these accomplishments were sooner or later disowned, within the civilization itself, as being in conflict with Islamic teaching.

We have seen this happen among Christians, too — bold acts of cultural self-immolation — when puritanical and iconoclastic factions have risen to power. The Catholic teaching has often been overthrown; sometimes restored; sometimes overthrown again. This tension between creative and destructive urges exists, likewise, in every other religious tradition. What makes Islam “special” among the world’s great religions is the puritanical and iconoclastic impulse, at its very core.

*

Now, the difficulty for immigration departments at the present time, when vast numbers of Muslims are pouring out of the Dar al-Islam, and into what was formerly Christendom — mostly because their own countries are dysfunctional, and the West is an accessible honey-pot — goes like this. We want Muslims to be free to come, but on the condition that they do not take their religion seriously, and that neither they nor their descendants, once arrived, will ever be tempted to do so.

But again, we are governed by a liberal mindset, both post-Christian and post-logical. It thinks such a commitment could be guaranteed, or anyway should be taken at face value, whether or not sincerely professed. It thinks religions are capable of changing, even retroactively. No genuinely Christian mind, or even a moderately intelligent one, could abide such nonsense; and the whole idea of a “moratorium” is wrong. The ban should not be temporary.

Permanent settlement should be denied, though “safe passage” should be regularly granted to those visiting, or passing through. Long residence should also be granted, for purposes such as trade. There are precedents for all these things, after all (on both the Christian and the Muslim sides), and courtesies to be restored.

However, we should never have dreamed of letting probable followers of Mohammad settle in any significant numbers within the West. It could never end well, especially in a time when our own Christian civilization is weak, and their religion will encounter little resistance from our defenceless chicks. One does not invite the cuckoo to leave eggs in one’s nest.

Note that this view implies no animus towards Muslims, whatever. The Christian opposition is to Islam itself. I repeat this because, simple as it should be to understand, it is not understood by the liberal mind which, thanks I suppose to original sin, is extremely murky. People are born in Muslim lands, and into Muslim families; this cannot reasonably be held against them. And most people go with the flow; we should all know that. Our task cannot be to convert them at gunpoint. It is instead to inspire in them, by the use of reason and example, the realization that Mother Mary points not to Mohammad as the embodied saviour of mankind — but to her Son. If that is called proselytizing then yes, we are guilty as charged. But trying to save people involves no necessary “hatred” towards them.

These most recent refugees have made a claim upon our charity, in present and not past circumstances, and I for one do not hesitate to recommend the use of irresistible military force, to secure their safe return to their homelands. Most, anyway, express a desire to go home, and insist that they cannot do so. Indeed the majority, who are single, young, able-bodied males, might wish to volunteer as soldiers to help liberate their respective homelands. They could be enjoined to do so. (Under competent Western officers, of course, and after thorough Western training, with pay.) I would imagine them especially eager to do this, after the alternatives were explained to them. Those being: to be returned to whichever country they have claimed to be from; or to live permanently confined under guard in a camp at an obscure location.

These “armies of the displaced” would also include Christians (and others) who had continued to live, from time long before, in the lands of the Islamic conquest — and whose ancestral properties have now been taken away. In their case, too, I think decency requires us to annihilate their murderous oppressors, with their young, single, able-bodied males leading the charge. By such means, their lands could be recovered; and some Christian witness remain, in what were once Christian heartlands.

We have, after all — supposing that “we” to be Christian — the sheer military power to correct much serious injustice. For instance, beyond replacing evil governments, or quasi-governments, we could establish that there will be no more dhimmitude in the East, for Christians or any others; just as the Royal Navy once established that there would be no more slave trade on the world’s high seas. They did not accomplish this good work by “moral suasion,” to be sure — that only works on men who are moral — but by decisive military action, in the spirit of our old Crusades. By all means, let us revive that spirit.

But we are not sufficiently Christian; just post-Christian nancies; and so we allow terrible injustice to be done to the world’s most defenceless folk. Rather we should be real Christians, and real men.

Mercy and charity alike demand, however, that we look to the safety of our own, first. And Christianity requires that we should do what we can to convert those not already Christian, while we have their attention in our refugee camps — and this not only for the safety of Christians, but for the immortal good of their own souls. If these converts will be endangered on their return, then we have an obligation to protect or shelter them.

Saint Francis of Assisi could tell you all this. Genuine love for one’s Muslim neighbour requires us to seek his conversion, not merely to prevent his wrongdoing. And then, should he sincerely choose to convert, to welcome him joyously into the common safety of our homes, our Christendom. For he will now be a refugee, truly.

These Idleposts are rapidly descending into a dream journal, in which the dregs of night from one day become the fresh material for the morrow. Birding comes into this, too, and hummingbirds are among the littlest, so small that I haven’t actually seen one in waking life for several years now. But they are easily discouraged by our northern climate, and only three species — rumours of four — ever make it to the Greater Parkdale Area (and those among the plainest looking). Or rather, past the GPA into “cottage country,” farther north, for I’ve never seen even one in the city.

In my slumbers of the night before last, I had “awakened” to discover the High Doganate full of them. One had lodged in my back trouser pocket, and I was struggling to free, without harming him. More, I was panicked because, I recalled, it is illegal to keep hummingbirds as caged pets in Ontario. (“But who said they were caged, officer?”) Nanny State might suddenly break in and bust them all. Along with me, for all I could expect. Too, I feared that with so many hummingbirds humming about, the chance one might get out the hall door and be trapped in a stairwell concerned me deeply. They need feeding every few minutes, you know. Alas, the genuine bird-lover must be more laid back; but darn if I wasn’t totally out of wingless fruitflies.

Well, perhaps I should explain about those. Most hummingbirds love them, in the culinary way. But they are more trouble to raise, as pet food, than gentle reader might think. A small jar of banana-flavoured infant moosh from your nearest baby-food store can launch a fair colony. But when confined they suddenly start breeding wingless, and shrink in average size. Your hummingbirds will still take them, I allow. Released, they soon start sprouting wings again, and bulk up a bit. The hummingbirds like them better that way. (And they can’t just live on sugar, any more than we can.)

Most fruitfly-gobbling hummingbirds can eat hundreds of these even smaller critters every day. They may be little batteries of energy, but they (the hummingbirds) need frequently to recharge. That is why it is so odd that one species (I’ve forgotten which) follows a migration route from Central America to Florida that involves continuous flight over five hundred miles of the Gulf of Mexico. This is of course, like so many things that happen daily in nature, that are quite impossible, and no one, not even Alexander Skutch has figured how they do it — although he did observe them truly pigging out before they departed. (Give up, gentle reader: for doubled in weight, they then present an insuperable aerodynamic problem.)

Yes, nature is full of stuff like that. We might smoak the trick, in one case or another. But in the course of discovery we are apt also to find a hundred other gobsmacking tricks, within design complexities formidably layered. (Yes, you heard me right, gentle reader: I wrote “design.” But not, “intelligent design,” because the works of God are infinitely beyond mere smart.)

That Skutch I mentioned (1904–2004), my hero among ornithologists, though his style gets hippiesque at times, was a great hummingbird enthusiast, having a selection of many more species to watch in the obscure jungle valley that was his own habitat in Costa Rica for much of the twentieth century. In one of his works (alas misplaced years ago) he describes their conventions in choral song. Not only different species, but different tribes, had, to his direct observation (he had some musical training, too), “evolved” wonderful systems of plainsong and counterpoint. Skutch was a great chronicler of things done in nature, especially by birds, that confer no survival advantages, whatever. Indeed, many of their joyful little games are rather the opposite; but so much fun that the birds just wing it anyway. Humans, by comparison, are probably much more averse to risk.

Skutch described, from his tireless self-concealments in shore and forest “blinds,” shockingly unexpected examples of inter-species cooperation, to that survivalist end, also. He found birds looking out for other species’ predators, and sounding warnings when they appeared. (Themselves being at no risk from the predator in question.) He watched them combine in “multicultural” migratory groups, to benefit from each other’s sensory specializations. He saw them bring comfort and food to each other’s injured. Of course, some couldn’t be bothered to offer any help; but it’s the same with humans.

And sometimes they egg-sit each other’s nests; or bring food they don’t themselves eat to feed their neighbour’s young; or mind them while their mommies are out shopping. And rather more than that. Our mental picture of nature “red in tooth and claw” is highly selective. Most of what we find in nature, if we look intently, is cooperation. Even creatures who sometimes eat each other will be found in affectionate relations — birds of prey, for instance, protecting the song birds in their own territories, from other birds of prey who don’t know them personally.

Skutch is a fine source, too, on avian aesthetics. They seem to enjoy each other’s songs, and often try to mimic or join in. Species at large, but also individuals, develop partialities to colours, shades, textures, compositions. (I had a purple finch on my balconata this last summer who was studying to become an art historian. He became quite censorious when a seed dish was set out for him, of a new colour. Clearly, he was offended by loud cobalt green, preferring ivory and off-white in a ceramic.)

“Proper” academic ornithologists often wondered if Skutch had all his marbles correctly sorted, but generally they had less field experience, by a factor of more than one order of magnitude. What bugged them most was his seeming indifference to (exhaustively pointless) statistical studies. He preferred careful observation, which the academics consider to be “unscientific.” Instead they do “experiments” on their captives, often sick and cruel.

Skutch did, however, scatter evidence of prodigious reading through all of his hundreds of papers and books, which included comprehensive “life studies” of more kinds of birds than, I should think, by any other animal born human. One might go to his volume on The Life of Hummingbirds (1980-ish) to discover rather more than I will ever offer on the mind-scoffing range of hummingbird behaviour. And that book was only a light overview of a topic he pursued through many large, thickly-printed, formal tomes in which he went, case by case, into much greater detail about his Costa Rican feathered friends. (An ideal observation post, because such an extraordinary variety of birds pass through, in the course of their hemispheric migrations.)

Ah yes, physiological and behavioural “adaptations,” as the Darwinoids call them. … Skutch, incidentally, never wasted an afternoon, contradicting these purveyors of dull pseudo-science. He was too busy with his birds. What he observed was sufficient contradiction.

Now, I don’t think I observed very much in my dream, my mind being occupied only with “the idea of hummingbirds.” But I think that was a wonderful idea, in the mind of God.

“The reading public has learned how to consume even the greatest fiction as if it were a can of soup. It has learned to misuse even the greatest music as background noise. Business executives can buy great paintings and hang them on their walls as status trophies. Tourists can ‘do’ the greatest architecture in an hour’s guided tour. But poetry, thank God, the public still find indigestible.”

Anyone who says he has chosen a random passage is lying. I picked this one (from W.H. Auden, Prose, volume V, 1963–68, ed. Edward Mendelson, just published along with volume VI) because it was on page 119 — the last I was reading before passing out last night. It is thus my “reasonable facsimile” of a random passage.

The books (V and VI both) I lucked out on. They are very expensive, but some professorial type must have got review copies and dumped them in the BMV, where I found them while out walking, earlier last evening. Or else they have already been remaindered. (I walk a lot, and cannot stay out of bookstores, even those like Greater Parkdale’s BMV, which specialize in glitzy, never-touched, radically discounted, mostly second-hand copies of upmarket paperbacks and coffee-table volumes for the urban booboisie.)

And they are a pressing reminder, of just how wonderful Auden was, not only as poet but in almost every sentence that he wrote, including a frightful bulk of book reviews, other journalism, discursive essays, obituary orations, forewords, afterwords, and — all the other stuff poets write because, since the High Victorian era, they’re sure not going to make a living from writing poems.

He is one of those writers who seems, like the greats of old, or all Italian architects to the end of the Baroque without exception, incapable of producing anything genuinely ugly. Indeed, for me as for him, one of the motives for occasional retreat into the Middle Ages, and other expired cosma, is that ugliness itself was an (unnecessary) by-product of the Industrial Revolution (which, as Auden eagerly averred, also produced plenty more “useless beauty” on the side, such as canal and railway tunnels).

By beauty I mean to include “meaning.” That is to say, one cannot write a beautiful sentence that does not mean something, although a given reader may not know what on earth it means. Yet if he sees that it is beautiful, he knows something.

The world fits together in that way. The secret joins, or bridges, between the Platonic transcendentals (the beautiful, the good, and the true) carry traffic, and a writer of true genius as Auden, for all his (many and sometimes appalling) foibles, often and accidentally writes better than he knows. This is how he can read himself later, with admiration and thanks only to the grace of God, who has, for His own unaccountable reasons, spared him from the usual human ground condition of malicious idiocy.

Auden himself, in his exhilarating commonplace book, A Certain World, explained this by citing Lewis Carroll’s “Logical Exercises,” all of which I might be tempted to transcribe, were my wrists not aching. But let us make do with the first:

1. Everything, not absolutely ugly, may be kept in a drawing room;
2. Nothing, that is encrusted with salt, is ever quite dry;
3. Nothing should be kept in a drawing room, unless it is free from damp;
4. Bathing machines are always kept near the sea;
5. Nothing that is made of mother-of-pearl can be absolutely ugly;
6. Whatever is kept near the sea gets encrusted with salt.

It took me fifty years to make it from live birth to reception in the Catholic Church. This, I admit, was slow. At the latter time, twelve years ago, I set to work on a little autobiographical essay, that quickly swelled to a few hundred pages. It was of at least partly a religious nature, under the provisional title, The Half Life: Fifty Years of Sin and Error. Wisely, I discarded this manuscript some nine years ago. Being no Augustine, I found that I could not raise the contents to the level of the morally and spiritually edifying. Moreover, those contents were “true, too true” — which is to say, often dreadfully embarrassing; and what made them worse, rendered in the correct chronological order. I would rather recount my life more selectively, and in a random order, distracting as much as possible from questions of motive. Not that I am entirely opposed to the spirit of Italo Svevo.

Nothing more can be made of this admission, than my own discovery on reflection, twelve years ago, that fifty years as a bloody fool, is a long time.

*

That was my aggiornamento — the pretty Italian word for “bringing up to date,” that we associate with Vatican II, and which has been imported into many other languages — mostly, I think, because it is pretty and Italian. Pope John XXIII used it in prospect, and Paul VI in retrospect, for what the Council was trying to achieve. Only as the 1960s progressed, did the word come fully to acquire its happy gas associations.

To the contrary, it began — so far as this non-expert can make out — as the more conservative alternative to such a term as the French ressourcement (“return to sources”).

Be warned, gentle reader, I am being counter-intuitive here. The idea of catching up with the times, and the idea of going back to origins, may not at first seem conservative, and liberal, respectively. Yet the latter is more radical. It involves more unknowables, and is Protestant by disposition. It is a war cry Calvinists and Lutherans could have raised in the sixteenth century: a means to turn not only the Scholastics, but the whole Middle Ages into “flyover country.” It peeled and scraped the paint off a vast mural, in comparison to the “reforms” of the Council of Trent, which could be described as merely touching it up. (All analogies are imperfect.)

To my own (imperfect) understanding, these were not exactly factions among the “reformers” embedded within the Council of 1962–65, though they sometimes looked like factions. They were instead reciprocating “category errors.” And one did not prevail over the other. Instead, they both eventually “won,” in the aftermath of the Council, becoming the two heads of “the spirit of Vatican II,” each dedicated to the destruction of whatever the other missed. Or perhaps my description is insufficiently polycephalous.

*

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Paul’s address, closing Vatican II, and affirming the aggiornamento, declaring:

“Never before perhaps, so much as on this occasion, has the Church felt the need to know, to draw near to, to understand, to penetrate, serve and evangelize the society in which she lives; and to get to grips with it, almost to run after it, in its rapid and continuous change.”

The confident notion that the Fathers had been moved by the Holy Spirit, was conveyed in that address: itself a departure from “traditional” Catholic rhetoric, which is seldom so upbeat. We do not know whether we are saved. More broadly, we do not expect any new revelation to be vouchsafed to us, the old “Deposit of Faith” being sufficient. We follow Christ and do not “run after” anyone, or anything, unassociated with Him. We beckon the world to come our way, and yet, in the full knowledge that the world is not inclined to do that — having its own agenda, as it were, of sin and error.

Since, the winds have blown hot and cold. We are now in the thirty-fourth month of a new and “heroic” (or “appalling,” depending on one’s point of view) experiment in aggiornamento, into which the ressourcement has been infused, quite strangely. The casual way in which, for instance, our Pope redefines heresies, or words such as “mercy” with specifically Catholic applications, is unprecedented. The way in which these statements are “tweeted” compounds the effect. We are not returning to the teachings of the Fathers of the Church in the first centuries, but to something more free-form: a new “vision” of the Catholic faith in which we make up the teaching as we go along, under the inspiration of what we might think is the Holy Spirit, but is more likely the Zeitgeist (“spirit of the age”).

All of which things are above my station. I do not doubt that the Holy Spirit is operating, continuously in all dimensions known to us. I not only doubt, but deny that we are capable of discerning these actions. And my best hope for the “Year of Mercy” that begins today, is that in the course of it we may return to the prayerful study of what this word “mercy” means, has meant and will always mean, in light of authentic Church doctrine. After which we may again rigidly embrace it.

*

It is more fundamentally, today, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Though instituted in its present form by Pius IX, only one hundred and sixty-one years ago, when he defined the dogma, it is really much older. It enlarges upon the Magnificat; it echoes the liturgical celebrations of that Conception through the intervening centuries both East and West; and it looks forward in Revelation to our Immaculate Lady, “Clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”

It proclaims, “Thou art fair!”

This is something contemporary man has all but lost in his transactions: that ability to pause in amazement before unstained beauty. It is an “attitude” that goes beyond arguing the doctrine. It is something that we can only proclaim, because, no “analysis” can approach it. There is no agenda except the worship of this beauty, Immaculate and beyond the power of anything in this world to soil or corrupt.

May I propose that in preparation for the Mass gentle reader think on the words of the Epistle, which are from Proverbs (8:22–25). And then, from the antiphons of second vespers, this calling from the Song of Songs:

Trahe nos, Virgo immaculata, post te curremus in odorem unguentorum tuorum.

I.e., let us “run after” changeless Mary, in the height of her Wisdom. And not after the changing world, a mirage that isn’t there when we arrive.

Politics is an interest of young people, and perhaps older people who have not spiritually matured. This is why positions of leadership should be reserved, as much as possible, for geriatrics. We need an old man on his last legs, who has lost his intestinal fire and ambitions, except for a certain flickering resentment towards the young. It should be a man who longs for the quiet life. He should be a gentleman, with other hobby interests, and better things to read than state papers; he should be easily irritated by the distraction. Nevertheless, he must be from a good family, with some minimal sense of public duty, or he will not be willing to accept an office that has been forced on him — usually because the alternative candidates were too young and lively. The job will then kill him within a few years at most, during which his rivals will be growing older. Meanwhile his concern for the fate of his own immortal soul will be growing. He will fear taking any decision that might condemn him to Hell.

(It should go without saying that he will be a “rigid” Latin-Mass Catholic traditionalist. … The more rigid the better.)

Vanity is possible even in the old, however. Should he perk up, once in office, the answer is for his doctors to prescribe a course of vigorous physical exercise. This will hasten him along.

Some old men are sprightly, however, and almost unkillable, so the electors must remain always on their toes. Ideally, of course, there will not be so many electors: the seven of the Holy Roman Empire struck me as quite adequate. As a compromise, perhaps we could simply lift the minimum voting age from whatever it is now (eighteen?) to, say, seventy-six. At that age it might even be safe to allow the vote to women.

I should admit the flaw in hereditary monarchy, which otherwise I prefer to appointive systems. If the successor is doddery or suffering from one of the many dementias that come with age, very well: the forgetful are easier to ignore. But some of these kings and queens rise to a throne very young. They may not yet understand why they should avoid all the roads down which they are tempted. (Details are unnecessary once the main point is subscribed.) They are unlikely to have learnt, by cumulative observation, that nothing men propose is ever going to work. Therefore, seek only divine guidance.

There is a saying, “That government is best which governs least.” I find this too activist a proposition. Revise to: “That government is best which consists of immemorial custom.”

Old ways are best. In a pinch, should any revolutionary party appear, invite the leaders to dinner. Then have them all arrested and hanged.

There were a number of political issues and personalities I was eager to comment upon, while surveying the news this morning. But after a full pot of tea, I think, better to leave gentle reader with a vague generality. That, it is time for everyone to grow up.