Essays in Idleness

It was never clear to me, when I lived in England many years ago, what one was supposed to make of the 5th of November. The Gunpowder Plot was discovered on this date in 1605. It was a spirited, Catholic attempt at terrorism, the plan being to blow up King and Parliament together at the State Opening of the latter. It was pursued in an intelligent and practical way. The conspirators were able to rent cellar space beneath the House of Lords. Gradually it was filled with barrels of gunpowder. Unfortunately, for them, someone tipped off the authorities. Fawkes was found with his barrels, in flagrante delicto as it were; and so the plot unravelled. … Ah well.

They would all be there: not only His Majesty, but his whole Privy Council; with all the Lords — including the bishops of the Protestant church, and the top drawer of the Protestant aristocracy. Plus the membership of the House of Commons, if we are counting small change. Think of it!

A fine and brave soldier with much experience in the Low Countries, was our Guy Fawkes — or “Guido,” as he called himself. He had fought illustriously for the Spanish in what was ceasing to be the Spanish Netherlands. A dashing gentleman, of electric red hair, flowing beard, and magnificent moustache. Very tall. Dressed as a dandy, even on campaign. A man “pleasant of approach and cheerful of manner” — a convert, and an ornament to the Catholic cause. He was learned, too, and highly articulate; and did I mention fearless? But while he could talk a blue streak, he preferred the life of action.

With a dear old friend whom I should perhaps not name, I found myself discussing once a plan to overthrow the government. There were several of us reactionaries, drinking together, and whining about the political order. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention what country we were in, either. Suffice to say, one of our complaints was about the low level of military expenditure. Someone (perhaps it was I) joked that the only building in the country visibly secured was the Defence Ministry. Full not of soldiers but of wet bureaucrats.

“Now seriously, gentlemen,” the dear old friend proposed, at the end of a general belly laugh. “What will we need to perform a coup d’état?”

Solemnly he began taking notes.

Well, enough of that conversation. I am simply trying to imagine the moment when Fawkes, John Catesby, the Wintours, Percy, Keyes, Bates, Tresham, Digby and the lads — drinking the health not of the Protestant King but of his potentially Catholic nine-year-old daughter — switched from fantasy to planning. It was one of those great banana-peel moments, of which history is replete, and at which, from this distance, one has to giggle. Just think: had they succeeded, we would have had an Elizabeth II in the early seventeenth century, for at least a few weeks; and who knows what after that. With luck, we might never have had “the Whig view of history.”

The English, I found, back in the day, like the Japanese: another insular people. They are inscrutable. We think we might understand them because we speak a version of their language, but really, no one does. Not even themselves. But there are moments when one catches a glimpse into the soul of the nation that gave the world Parliamentary Democracy.

And they present themselves as cool and collected, as organized and understated, as imperturbable: the picture of sangfroid. The unpoetic legislators of common sense, and inventors of “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.” What an extraordinary Constitution they developed, over the course of many hundred years. There were moments when it was even working. But I’d swear the most joyous moment in their secular calendar is “Bonfire Night,” when they think how much they would themselves enjoy blowing it all up.

That, I believe, is the meaning of the 5th of November, in England. It is a moment of indulgence in the counter-factual; in the pleasure of tipping a table, long carefully set. It took centuries for them to damp down their inner Irish; and as I notice from London news today, it is still imperfectly suppressed.

Thirty-six barrels, if I am not mistaken. Enough to reduce the ancient warren about the Palace of Westminster to rubble. A memorable shoot-out at Holbeche House (in Staffordshire, I think), when the rest of the conspirators were run to ground. Survivors of that were in turn, of course, hanged drawn and quartered. (Fair cop, I suppose.) Except Fawkes himself, who managed to break his neck, instead, tumbling from the scaffold in a last, good old college try to escape the executioner’s ministrations.

Ah well.

[This item somewhat revised and extended overnight. My thanks to
correspondents who find the many holes in my daily Emmentaler.]

*

“It is plain to Us and to everyone that the majority of the poor, through no fault of their own, are in a condition of misery and wretchedness which calls for prompt and effective remedy. The traditional workmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century; no form of protection took their place; in its laws and institutions the State disowned the ancestral faith; hence, by degrees, we have reached a time when working men, isolated and unprotected, have been delivered over to the brutality of employers and the unchecked greed of competition. To make this worse, rapacious usury, condemned by the Church again and again, is practised still by covetous men who have changed its guise but not its nature. The giving of employment and the conduct of trade have passed so generally into the hands of a few that a small body of excessively rich men have laid on the teeming multitudes of poor a yoke which for practical purposes is the yoke of slavery.”

The statement above does not come from some half-crazed, half-Marxist, Jesuit incendiary in Latin America. Rather it was written by Pope Leo XIII, one hundred and twenty-six years ago. This makes it quite recent in the history of the Church. But if one checks back to Gregory of Nazianzen, for instance — his “Verses Against the Rich,” in the fourth century — one finds many parallel sentiments. Likewise if one consults Saint Isidore of Seville, “on the oppressors of the poor,” in the seventh century; Saint Peter Damian in the eleventh, “on the love of money”; my beloved Saint Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth, “on riches and poverty”; Bossuet in the seventeenth, “on the dignity of the poor”; and so forth. Trust me: I have references up here in the High Doganate for all the other centuries, too.

While the vulgarity of the phrase inclines me to violence, “the preferential option for the poor” is not a new thing in Holy Church. Our instinct has been to take their part, from the beginning — to an extent apparently greater than Jesus did. Indeed, I would be prepared to argue from the Gospels that Our Lord didn’t give a darn about the poor, in the sense of “low income.”

“You will always have them with you,” was His almost flippant remark, when Judas was putting up the long face on their behalf — for his own devious purposes. In one of those offensively hip post-modern translations, the remark could be paraphrased: “They’ll live.” He would not be tricked by Judas’ cunning, into putting the lesser above the higher good.

The Church in this world, more visibly than her Founder, is an institution traversing Time. She confronts the temporal in her passing — deals with facts and things that change over the generations; and then change back. The description of economic conditions by Leo XIII seems quaint to us now; that which Gregory Nazianzen described seems quainter, perhaps. And this is because we have missed their point.

Pope Leo went on to condemn socialists more viscerally than he had the robber barons of his generation. These political operators were exploiting the poor to advance a cause in which their little property could be impounded by the State; and their little freedom, taken. He saw, clearly, the monstrous evil of State power. Leftists and other demoniacs who had and have since infiltrated the Church, quote Rerum Novarum selectively. One must read the whole encyclical, attentively and thoughtfully, to fend against their lies and misrepresentations; as well as to discover that the Church carries no brief for robber barons.

For the tract does not look upon “the poor” in purely material terms — as some jumble of “low income,” with “poor access,” suffering “inequality.” The Church, until quite recently, did not present man as an economic unit or cypher; as an atom in the masses. The human dignity she espoused always involved independence, for the individual and his family. She takes man in the light of his Creator, not in the wording of some humanly-contrived “social contract” — man as man, and not as an abstraction.

But this is a complex matter; we are not seeking Utopia, but in consequence of original sin, making the best of a bad hash. Only within that earthly context does the Church make her public demands; and not for one political or economic system over another, but for some decency within the system, whatever it may be. (Over the centuries she has dealt with every kind of political order, and there is nothing new under the Sun.)

A man should have the serenity that comes from living in his own home; should not depend entirely on some boss for his livelihood, and daily permissions; nor be entangled from adolescence in debt, nor constantly huzza’d by tempters. He should never be treated as cattle, or chattel, or “demographic target.” He should not be deflected from the life of pilgrim, sub specie aeternitatis; nor deprived of the freedom to make his own way.

Vastly more could be said about the “social teaching” of the Church, as it has been thought through over twenty centuries. Her interest has been in the whole range of human goods; and for the whole man in opposition to the worldly powers that try to control him, and appropriate his labour; to reduce him to a beast of burden, however comfortably stalled. She has thus been against big business and big government, in all of their protean forms; against raw power and thus against raw wealth.

She has opposed wealth, not in itself for its legitimate uses (cathedrals cost money), but as an instrument of power and oppression; she has opposed the corruptions that lead to quick wealth, and assist the cunning in their manipulation of the weak and meek. She has sought to feed the actually hungry, to nurse the actually sick, to teach the ignorant, to rescue the stranded, to visit the imprisoned, and comfort the oppressed; to provide without charge what is urgently needed, and come to emergency aid — in explicitly Christian missions of mercy. And these although each is a secondary, to her primary daily mission, in the administration of the Sacraments.

But “income inequality” was never her concern; nor any other vague, abstract, and ideological, social or ecological “issues.”

At least, not until recently.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. For additional clarity, a carpenter we know, off in the sticks, pings in this quote from Caritas in Veritate, the encyclical by our beloved Benedict XVI:

“In the list of areas where the pernicious effects of sin are evident, the economy has been included for some time now. We have a clear proof of this at the present time. The conviction that man is self-sufficient and can successfully eliminate the evil present in history by his own action alone has led him to confuse happiness and salvation with immanent forms of material prosperity and social action. Then, the conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from ‘influences’ of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way. In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social, and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise.”

My head is buzzing with the latest polls, to which gentle readers have directed my attention; and one I found this morning on my own, while checking the BBC to catch up on terror strikes and other horrors. I don’t think polls are useful, in the sense of practically good; but this does not mean I don’t think polls are accurate. Rather, they feed into something called “democracy” — an immensely destructive, de-civilizing force.

One learns that something like eight in ten nominal Catholics in America now think physician-assisted suicide is a fine idea. In this they reflect the general population, which is often consulted on the same. Physicians, not necessarily Catholic, are among the least likely to hold this view — less than half of them agree, it seems — but what does that matter? Once medicine has been fully “socialized,” they can be more or less told what to do.

Another email informant assures me that more than six in ten of my (nominal) co-religionists think the divorced and remarried (which is to say, people Christ specifically identified as adulterers) should be offered communion if and when they queue for it in church. But this is perhaps a little misleading, and not so pointed as first appears, for they also think anyone should be offered communion, on the analogy of aspirin when their heads ache.

Anyone? … I suppose they still mean any human; that they still draw a line somewhere. But as we have seen, when it is not defended, that line shifts.

The beloved British blogger, Father Ray Blake (see here, often), who must this morning warn readers that his post contains irony, recently patched, for National Cat Day (add it to your missals for 29th October), a sweet calendar picture of four cute, fluffy, expectant-looking kittens, sitting on a log.

“Look at these kittens,” Father writes in his caption. “Would you deny them the Eucharist?”

It was from the Beeb I learnt that four in ten Britons do not think Jesus was “a real person.” It does not follow they are monophysites, however. Another four in ten think He was resurrected; we are not told if there is overlap. But from other replies to poll questions, posed in a survey commissioned by the Church of England and others, one might gather that the primary mission of modern, public-sector education — that of inculcating idiocy in the masses — is now complete on both sides of the Atlantic.

I could go on. Oh yes, gentle reader, I could go on. The recent election of the Trudeau child in Canada makes any further polling in this country unnecessary. As outgoing prime minister Stephen Harper said in his concession speech, “the people are always right.” From decades past I know that he, too, is capable of irony.

The term “proggies” is supplied by yet another correspondent. I gather it is short for “progressives.” He explains, in light of yesterday’s effusion, that the work of broken homes is invariably completed by the auto-formation of addictive “behaviours” (I dislike this plural), of which serial murder would be just one. Sex, crack, and money, are three more. He cites for his example a musician who, while suffering more than one terminal disease, continued performing — only to collapse and be hospitalized — because of what seemed an addiction to approval. Once out of the hospital, it was on to the next town to repeat the cycle.

I added the term to this morning’s title, for euphony.

Also, to indicate that I do not think human stupidity is quite so simple or passive as may first appear. There is often something quite wilful in it. For as I have seen so poignantly illustrated among my fellows in Parkdale, here, such addictions are not confined to rock musicians. They are the background reality of post-modern life. The human metabolism is itself “adapted” (Darwinian allusion) to stupidity by various forms of dependence, or in the broadest sense, substance abuse. It is not a small matter to take their substances away. They will not mourn quietly.

Moreover, as my correspondent adds: thanks largely to liberalism, the whole modern world is oriented to the perfection of the addict’s delivery systems. This is expressed, statistically, as GDP, and worshipped in itself as our chief social good. To be fair, public education is only one of the delivery systems, for moral, intellectual, and spiritual Error.

This is why it will take something more than “better education” to resist the trend towards universal, abject, wilful stupidity. It will also take something more than the (now almost purely) secular idea of “mercy” or “forgiveness,” broadcast from Rome.

Should I happen to be elected the next pope (taking the name Pius II the Second), I would be inclined to declare a Year of Catechism, full of fasting and comprecation — directed not only to telling Catholics and the curious what the Church teaches (like it or not), and what the Church does not teach. For it strikes me, something more than conventional pedagogy will be required. Something really scary.

I think, in commemoration of Saint Jonathan Swift of the Ordinariate, I would be tempted to unleash a great and terrible wave of irony upon them.

“Stop me before I kill more,” was the famous line left on a victim’s apartment wall by the Lipstick Killer. This was in Chicagoland, back in the 1940s. Or rather, the message was, “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself”; but I prefer the crisper, edited version.

It is some time since I looked into the case of William Heirens (1928–2012), the gentleman who, for at least three grisly murders, was arrested, convicted, and incarcerated for sixty-five years. Nevertheless, I remember it in outline. Alas, the cops made such a bungle of everything they touched at the scene of each crime, and were so fiendish in their methods of interrogation, as to cast doubt on the confession they extracted from the man. Later, he tried his luck (unsuccessfully) by retracting it. The police evidence would fail on multiple technicalities, today. The contemporary press added details, sewn from whole cloth. They provided a Jekyll and Hyde retelling, and various other gratuitous psycho-thriller story lines, to enthrall their bug-eyed readers.

The cops probably had the right man, however. His own defence attorneys thought he was guilty, and (corruptly) helped the prosecutors get a conviction. In what seems to have been a farce of a trial, in which the police compounded the mess they had made, a compromise was hashed out, in which Heirens was put away in gaol “forever,” but not sent to the electric chair.

He was an interesting case; the perfect antinomian, had it not been for such traces of conscience as the lipstick message. Not a cold-blooded killer, as it were, but an idealistic one: perversely attracted to crime as “a calling.”

The product of a broken home, like most criminals, Heirens had begun wandering the streets to stay away from his feuding parents. Neither showed much interest in him, or what he got up to. He stole plenty, but never benefited from his crimes. He sold nothing he took, took nothing that he wanted, and often hid his loot where he could not retrieve it.

Caught young, he was sent to a reformatory run by Benedictine monks. They discovered that he could pass academic tests at the genius level, so on release at age sixteen he was waived through high school and sent as a student to the University of Chicago. He was, by one account, quite popular, especially with the girls: a first rate ballroom dancer, and when he wanted to be, a charmer.

Formal learning bored him, however, and soon he was off marauding again. He had a flair for this, avoiding easy marks. I’ve met such people, including one some decades ago who burgled a refrigerator. He didn’t need one, but was excited by the challenge. It was all a game. He had started as a book-thief, culminating in the theft of a complete encyclopaedia. He could not help boasting of his skill and prowess. I wonder, today, what he did next; he thought hot-wiring cars would be too easy. (I tried to turn him in, but failed for want of evidence.)

By age eighteen, Heirens’s remarkable criminal career was over (thanks to his final arrest), but till then he was blossoming as an infernal artist, taking on ever more daring and ambitious schemes.

Doubts cast on his commission of the three murders (and suspicions of several more), began with their nature. They did not look like the acts of an interrupted burglar; no valuables had been taken when he left each scene, apparently at leisure. But they were not sex crimes, or otherwise conventionally psychopathic, even though Heirans was discovered to have the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his small but impressive home library. For again: it seemed all of his increasingly monstrous crimes were committed as ends in themselves; as “art for art’s sake.”

A kind of Raskolnikov in this respect. He thinks the moral law does not apply to him, only to other, lesser souls. He is above it, a “special case,” a Napoleon not bound by any received rules. Like Raskolnikov, he might decide that he is serving some higher cause; yet also like Raskolnikov, he cannot settle on a higher cause to serve.

My curiosity about the Lipstock Killer was aroused by that line, “Stop me before I kill more.” As a friend suggested, it is the cri de coeur of the modern liberal. He does things to see if he can get away with them, and when he finds that he can (individually or collectively) he tries to get away with something bigger. Yet he is an “altruist,” in the sense that he isn’t doing anything for himself. He is snobbishly above crass, material self-interest.

Often — given a society increasingly unable to recognize evil acts as objectively disordered — he succeeds. He has some real and growing impact on other people’s lives, for he is objectively inverting their moral order. He expects pushback; expects to fail, eventually. But this never seems to happen. It is as the Lipstick Killer scrawled: he cannot help himself. A tiny remaining glint of conscience perceives his ultimate destination: Hell. Secretly, he wants someone to care enough to stop him before he arrives there.

And this, not for the sake of his future victims, but for his own sake.

We misunderstand this mindset, because we assume it has some conscious end in view. Surely, Hell cannot be a conscious destination. I have found in my own conversations, that the liberal, however smart, can articulate no final end. It is as if the answer doesn’t matter; he has never really thought about it; about what the consequences would be if he actually got everything he wanted. He finds that an irritating question; it is beneath his intelligence, to identify some arbitrary point at which he would be satisfied. There is no such point, for a “progressive.” The next day he would have to “move on.”

Similarly, when I compare liberal demands of the 1960s, with those of today, I can account for them in no other way. It is like a Sisyphean pushing of the envelope. We have already surpassed the wildest dreams of the social and political idealists of that time, half a century ago. Disaster has followed each of the liberal advances; and yet the resistance of society to what I call “criminal idealism” is less and less.

It is important to note that a Lipstick Killer, or liberal, can never be happy. I mean by this that he will never derive pleasure from his accomplishments. Instead, each makes him more bitter, and leaves him with more scores to settle, against the people who failed to stop him. As the writing on the wall explained, he actually wants to be stopped, by some maternal, or better, “patriarchal” authority. But like his own parents, they always let him down.

Perhaps some amateur psychologist, such as myself, could say it all started with his parents, who couldn’t be bothered to restrain the lad, their attention having been entirely absorbed in their own “issues.” The kid is just a nuisance: let him find his own way.

It is — not always, of course, but usually — the unhappy childhood that makes the liberal. He campaigns with such passion to destroy the “traditional family,” and replace it with something strange, partly because he resents his own upbringing; and partly from the instinctive desire to replenish liberal ranks. For busted families mean more unhappy, disoriented children, who will grow up demanding political action; or at least, more crime to afflict the contented and well-adjusted, who characteristically resist “change.” It’s not about the money; it’s about the pain. The ideal of “equality” is to spread it around.

But we should care; and as the Catholic Church has so long taught, it is not only for our own sake, but for the sake of the liberal’s own soul. True mercy requires that he be stopped.

Red Chinese statistics are worthless, as intelligent statisticians know. The stupid rely on them anyway, arguing that nothing else is available. This is a typical manoeuvre of modern scientism: taking worthless information at face value, then constructing elaborate fantasies upon it. They call the result, “settled science”; then chastise the sceptics because they can produce no better statistics. In this way, any form of basic human intelligence can be condemned as “anti-scientific.”

The Communists have, eight or nine times since the Maoist revolution, completely “reformed” their statistical methodologies, starting again each time effectively from scratch. Therefore to compare their statistics over time, in order to extract trends, is, to write plainly, compulsively insane. And yet it is not clear whether false statistics are any less useful than true statistics. Which is my odd way of saying, neither is any use at all. They are just numbers. Whereas, in reality, every living person has a face and a name.

Bear this in mind, when considering the statistic I am about to provide; but not before I belabour gentle reader with further asides.

According to news reports, the Communists have just changed their “one child policy.” The source, so far as I can trace, is an item in Xinhua, their official news agency. It appeared yesterday. The totalitarian government will now allow all their female serfs to bear two (2) live children if they want. This should, by statistical principle, substantially reduce the number whose birth is prevented by contraception, abortion, and infanticide. Given known cultural propensities, it might proportionally increase, in particular, the number of female babies who escape murder.

To this day, China reporters rely, almost invariably, on their official handouts. They may, themselves, suspect they are all lies, but the modern journalist is comfortable with lies, so long as he can source them. I would want a great deal of further information before believing what they are handing on.

For one thing: this is news they have reported before, having been conned by the same sort of press releases, which seem instead to have announced only changes in the list of exceptions to that “one child policy.” This is China, after all, where in a sense nothing can be true, for like the statistics, the history itself may be rewritten day to day. Where do you start, when the past is no more predictable than the future? You start by lying.

Notwithstanding, the evidence that there has been a “one child policy” is overwhelming. And however it was actually imposed, upon whom, where, and by means of what punishments, it can be reasonably stated that, since the policy was originally announced in 1978, if not before, and as a consequence of its provisions, a very large number of Chinese children who would have enjoyed the light of day, have not.

Which takes us finally to today’s statistic. I have seen many estimates of the number of children whose birth or infancy was prevented. The lowest I have seen is four hundred million. As an old-fashioned hack, with a distaste for lying, and therefore seeking at least the possibility of truth, I would have expressed this as, “in the order of hundreds of millions.” And this in the hope that at least I was not contributing to the establishment of “four hundred million” as a journalistic cliché. Because such clichés are anodyne, helping to eliminate the pain of moral thinking. But let us grant that the (almost certainly false) number is in that plausible range.

*

It is a good question how to express this number in Roman numerals. I’ve never got the hang of them, over one million or so. I suspect the pagan Romans themselves, to their credit, never got the hang of them either. A million is CCCCIƆƆƆƆ, so I suppose one could copy that four hundred times. Alternatively, simply write M, four hundred thousand times, which for typographical reasons, I am loath to do. Each M equals one thousand babies. Or there is a trick with superscribed double bars, used as million multipliers, or other symbolic devices, reducing this to CD (which is four hundred) plus the selected graffito.

But the Romans, generally, did not go there. Their preference was to leave very high numbers to the gods. They nevertheless proceeded on Domesday principles, for tax gathering, and to get some idea (district by district) of quantities of people in relation to livestock, crops, supplies of honey, butter, wool, or what have you. (Bureaucracy is not a modern invention.) Yet grand totals did not much interest them (as they did, to their shame, the Emperors of China); and even with the souls of engineers, they instinctively recoiled from treating people as numbers.

As did the Hebrews, whose God — He is ours, too, incidentally — took a dark view of headcounts, even, perhaps especially, when done for “purely administrative” purposes. Gentle reader may recall, for instance, the plague that followed King David’s pioneering essay in modern statistical analysis. Too, that even before he started, his census-taker, Joab, was wary of proceeding. He would do as ordered, up to a point, but let David know that he doubted the wisdom of counting all those heads. (See I Paralipomenon in your Douay Bibles, or I Chronicles in your KJVs; about the 21st chapter.)

Satan puts many ideas into the heads of our rulers, as surely we all realize by now. The destruction of children is surely among them. The destruction of children and others by class is surely a great evil; and the collection of statistics for manipulation, by class (starting from the notion of military conscription), is what we are to guess Satan had in mind, when putting his innovative census idea into the head of King David.

The modern mind, inured to statistics, cannot get itself around this. It cannot find a “problem” with counting, per se. It is slow to grasp that the problem is instead with why we are counting. Whose purposes are we serving? What evils advancing? Do we not trust God?

Our daily number, four hundred million, which may or may not approximate to the truth, is like other large numbers, hard to comprehend. Or rather, quite impossible, for the man of eight fingers and only two thumbs. Even a millipede would have trouble with it. Other large numbers come to mind: “six million” for instance, or “one million a year,” if gentle reader smoaks my allusions.

God, I often think, does not do numbers. He leaves them to do themselves. He alone might number the hairs on your head, but I cannot imagine how He would find the number interesting. Nature may count, to give us two and not three nostrils, but seldom does she seem obsessed with exact numbers, over a dozen or so. (The millipedes are an exception: she always counts the legs.) Above this, like the Romans, or this hack, she seems content merely with orders of numbers. Which indeed is what we are dealing with here, though perhaps unnecessarily.

And God might know the exact number, of Chinese souls missing from the current account. But I do not think the number would interest Him, any more than the number of hairs missing from the bald spot on a Jesuit monsignor. For in my understanding, in general, God does not do headcounts. He does names, hearts, and immortal faces. And each means the whole world, to Him.

After a storm-blowing day, figuratively but also literally, there is the making of tea, and the longed-for quiet in which to collect oneself. To be now warm, and dry, surrounded by my books; and kept, in the light and company of a candle. A hymn tune had been forming from dust in the air, but I could not place it; interwoven, it seemed, both plainsong and baroque.

Then it came to me, by slow deduction: that I was listening in my head to something by Monteverdi, that I had last heard decades ago. For with it the image came to mind of the interior of a beloved parish church, in England. Yet it could not have been that little place.

I am an illiterate: I cannot read music. Ashamed, I try to keep this to myself, together with the fact I cannot sing, either. I recall “songlines,” that come to me unbidden, and tease me, playing just beyond my ken. Perhaps I would have forgotten them, had they been written down and filed away; they remember me only from my own effort to remember them. The human mind makes compensations, and unmakes them; memory withdraws when it is no longer required. But it comes again out of the shadows, timidly when summoned. And tries, even when it does not understand what it has been asked.

Most certainly it was Monteverdi: famous Monteverdi. For on searching I found the hymn on disc: a John Eliot Gardiner recording from 1989. I had last played it, now I realized, when my children were very young.

It comes back to me in the memory of my flesh. My Down-syndrome child, listening with me; the sense of his presence in my arms and lap. One’s heart breaks sometimes, around such recollections: my child, Matthew, at age of two or three; so fragile and so perfect in his untutored love.

So I played the music on my little machine, just as I had then: the Ave maris stella. It has plainsong at the top, and the verses fall out of it, exchanged between choirs in alternating rhythms as a mystical dance. I love the music but not so well the recording, whose forceful instrumentation makes the Christian hymn too courtly. I had remembered it as choirs, only; with solos less poised. But it is still sublime.

We need to renew our appeal, to Our Lady, seen in the vision as star of the sea. For here we are in the chains of the guilty, in the darkness of the blind, weighed down, weighed under. Break chains, bring light, and purge us: O Mother Mary, meek and chaste. Lead us to thy Son.

That is what the song is saying: Prepare for us a safe journey. The words come out of the memory in a jumble, from a Latin that is untranslatable, following its own inexplicable thread.

It goes back at least to the eighth century, more likely to the sixth; and the melody to time hidden, within the envelopes of time. The hymn is associated with Saint Bridget of Ireland; the earliest manuscripts came to St Gall from there. And after a thousand years, it became the anthem — sung always in Latin, never in their native French — for the Acadian people of our Canadian Maritimes. For they, too, knew it could never be translated.

By then, the music had passed through the hands of a thousand composers, and re-composers, in churches by their tens of thousands. It is by now too much to assemble in mortal thought; too much for us to imagine. Yet ever, beyond the reach of our forgetting, all would of itself recombine. For always it was sung for one poor sinner, kneeling humble and broken in the stalls.

La Chiesa maestra non inventa la sua dottrina; ella è teste, è custode, è interprete, è tramite; e, per quanto riguarda le verità proprie del messaggio cristiano, essa si può dire conservatrice, intransigente; ed a chi la sollecita di rendere più facile, più relativa ai gusti della mutevole mentalità dei tempi la sua fede, risponde con gli Apostoli: Non possumus, non possiamo.

“The teaching Church does not invent her doctrine; she is a witness, a guardian, an interpreter, a mediator; and as to the truths pertaining to the Christian message, she could be called conservative, intransigent; to the one who asks her to make the faith easier, more adapted to the changing mentality of the times, she responds with the Apostles: Non possumus, we cannot.”

Non possumus: the expression goes back to the earliest days of the Church. It is what our first martyrs said, when the Roman authorities asked them to deny Christ, in order to save their skins. In their own minds, the Romans were being reasonable, the Christians blinkered and doctrinaire. “How can you say you cannot do what anyone can do?” Just spit on Christ briefly, and be on your way. But again the Christians would say: Non possumus.

To the death: Non possumus.

*

This magnificent quotation is from Blessed Paul VI, his general audience for Wednesday, 19th January 1972. The translation is my own little exercise. Gentle reader should be told, however, that like many of the bishops gathered last week in Rome, I do not speak Italian. I was trying to get a taste of their experience. They were presented with a long document, in Italian only, and told to show it to no one. They would have overnight to find any flaws.

Google translations are treacherous, as I’ve learnt the hard way. But given a dictionary, an Italian grammar, a few other reference books, and a month or so, I think I could get a good hold on a document the length of the final Relatio Synodi. The Fathers had a few hours.

Those who could read Italian would have noticed that more than a thousand amendments, proposed in the various linguistic committees over the previous three weeks, had been ignored; and that the content of the original Instrumentum Laboris had been largely reimposed, including paragraphs which had failed to get sufficient support for passage at last year’s preparatory Synod. In other words, the Fathers had been wasting their breath and jetlag for three weeks. And now, after whatever overnight fixes, the final document would be coming up for a vote on Saturday, paragraph by paragraph.

Bishops both Italian and non-Italian had one more chance to look at the text, now slightly revised but still exclusively in cumbersome Italian. So far as I can see, from translations since available, each one of the paragraphs contains multiple complex and arguable propositions. Any one of them might be hiding, and on past experience might well be hiding, clever legalistic tricks, designed by the liberal draughting committee to spring open doors that for twenty centuries the Church has kept methodically locked and bolted. For this has been the usual method of the “reformers,” since Vatican II: planting deceitfully ambiguous language in Church documents, or half-truths that can provide escape hatches later on.

(It is a tradition that goes back to the Serpent in the Garden.)

And those who spotted them could themselves expect to be impugned for “legalism,” and “paranoia” — for obsessing on the letter over the spirit of the law — a criticism the Holy Father is constantly repeating. And this when, in fact, their Church had always previously required them to observe not “either/or,” but both the letter and the spirit. What were they to do?

I could understand the temptation to drink a bottle of wine, then simply vote Yes, ninety-four times.

Or if it were me, two bottles, and then No, ninety-four times.

Three days after that vote, I was still trying to decide whom to trust, to get a correct understanding of it. On this fourth day, I have given up. I have concluded that the document is as was intended. It is like a banana republic constitution, that makes little clear, leaving everything significant open to “discernment” — i.e. lawless tyranny.

There are some eminent and well-connected pundits; they say different and sometimes contradictory things. None of these could be present in the hall, when the questions were thrashed out, to no purpose; let alone in the back chambers, where the official text was actually composed. The account of Roberto de Mattei is the boldest, providing some facts not reported elsewhere. (It is here.) As an old journalistic hack, I take note when facts are stated boldly: the reporter is either right, or he is wrong. If wrong, he can be corrected. This is not possible when what we have is only interpretations, synthesized from other interpretations. One cannot correct bafflegab.

If de Mattei is correct, another coup was attempted, much like last year’s. The draughting committee, itself in a great rush, and dominated by very liberal papal appointees, whose basic honesty was already in question, tried again to impress their predetermined template.

Friday morning, in the hall, and in the presence of the pope, dozens of the Fathers rose to speak. The Holy Father was made to understand that the document as written would not pass. As the day progressed to night — and the possibility of a catastrophic conclusion to the Synod became clearer — select curial “conservatives” were allowed to overwrite parts of some of the most controversial, “liberal” paragraphs. This had the effect of reducing attempted heresy to murk, that might mean anything. It suited the Kasperites almost as well as what they had originally draughted; they were gloating afterwards.

But now both sides could declare victory — one to have opened, and the other to have stopped up the holes — leaving the pope with the free hand he had from the start, to act unilaterally, in due course (as he did recently with his “fast-track” nullity process, creating a de facto “Catholic” arrangement for quick and easy divorce).

And so it came to be, that in the hall, Saturday, the Fathers voted Yes to the paragraphs, ninety-four times.

And then the pope spoke to them, in what was widely reported to be a bad mood. The Synod was meant to advise him, freely, and yet he had gone to the trouble of stacking it with forty-five of his own, overwhelmingly liberal nominees, to guide that advice towards what he wanted to hear. The most controversial paragraph, No. 85, dealing with the divorced and remarried, required as all the others, 177 votes. Even with the stacking, and after the last-minute sludge had been inserted, it barely passed with 178. He made quite a few remarks, calling into question the motives of those who had resisted his spirit of innovation: very low blows against his most distinguished cardinals. He then received the customary standing ovation.

The document as a whole is written in post-modern gobbledegook: a compound of sociological bosh with ecclesiological cliché. It is the opposite of inspiring. At a time when the Church is desperately in need of a great trumpet blast in defence of the full Catholic conception of the family, it confines itself mostly to “relationships,” weaseling through the ground for invisible prey. In my opinion it is trash.

If there is good news, I find it in the fifty or more Fathers of the Synod who seem still to comprehend the statement of Pope Paul with which this essay began; and which has been indeed the view of the Church, since the Apostles. It is morally, intellectually, and spiritually wrong, to tamper with Christ’s own doctrine; to look “jesuitically” for ways to get around or through the teaching of twenty centuries, which is Christ’s teaching. Yet all the faithful Fathers can do is resist, from a delicate position. They can oppose the shameful works of the many ill-formed liberals now spreading rapidly through the hierarchy of the Church, and acting deviously to advance an agenda that is “post-Catholic,” based on a modern and false account of “mercy.” But they must stop short of observing that their pope is appointing them.

*

Or to put this another way, I am hopeful. For it is only when an evil becomes perfectly visible, that it tends to be addressed. And that is just when, on past experience, the Holy Spirit intervenes — God, the Holy Spirit; not some verbal pretence — to prevent utter ruin and damnation.

In the course of digging out that vaguely remembered quote, I came across another translation. This was on a website that cannot be sufficiently praised. It is called, The Denziger-Bergoglio (and may be found, here). It is the effort of a few learned, anonymous priests, first in Spanish and now in English, to retrieve the actual Magisterium of Holy Church.

The tactic is to take various innovatory statements from Pope Francis and, using “Denziger” and other standard reference works for search, juxtapose them with authoritative statements of Church teaching through the centuries. In this way the scale of the breach with Catholic tradition is revealed. I recommend the site to every gentle reader. With all references capably linked to sources, it is an opportunity for all of us to more thoroughly catechize ourselves. At a time when Catholic Truth is under attack, not “from the peripheries,” but from Central, it gives us something useful we can do.

For paradoxically, the very recklessness and foolishness with which we are confronted, creates this opportunity. In the face of the challenge, Catholic teaching must be recovered and revived. Our task is to learn first ourselves, and then teach; to find what the true teaching is, and proclaim it; to bring it back into action, in our lives.

This is an exciting prospect, after fifty years of moral lassitude “in the spirit of Vatican II.” For as we soon discover, we still have within our reach, the most profound instruction that this world can ever know; and it remains the very means to our salvation.

At a time of encroaching darkness, let us know the Truth, that the Truth shall make us free.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. … I was not there, of course, but I have received, overnight, a couple of corrections to the above account from people who were. They challenge the (otherwise admired) Roberto de Mattei’s account of the Synod’s conclusion, one as “frothing,” the other as “fantasy,” and both as “fiction.” In particular, I am told that many of the “modi” were incorporated in the final text, voluntarily by its writers, and that non-Italian-speaking bishops knew the arrangements in advance and got plenty of help in translation from the Synod staff. They do not dispute that, “We’re still facing a mess, but it’s not because of the imaginary process he described.”

Other correspondents suggest that, from the number of toys thrown out of their prams, since the Synod, at least some of the liberals’ plans must have been frustrated.

If the Viking priests from the age of the Orkneyinga Saga (composed eight centuries ago, about matters through centuries before it), returned suddenly to their old haunt on Papa Stronsay, they would have lively conversation with the current inhabitants. As they could not speak English, nor these new monks Old Norse, the chatter would be in Latin. The Mass they would celebrate together would also be in Latin, of course, and the Vikings would have no difficulty in following it. For it was their Mass, too.

The gentle reader who does not already know about the Transalpine Redemptorist presence in Orkney may inform himself (here, and perhaps also, here). For it is more than the “romantic story,” of a genuinely counter-cultural adventure. In some sense one might say that the living centre of the Catholic Church is now more on that bleak, and beautiful island of Papa Stronsay, than in the heart of today’s pagan Rome. This seems especially so in light of the recent Synod; as to me, after reading the current pope’s latest remarks at the conclusion of it — full of his characteristic slights and insults towards traditional practitioners of the Catholic faith.

I know that many faithful are hurting, or quite understandably angry; that they feel violated and betrayed. That is why I am writing like this, reminding that Christ will bind wounds; that He will not betray us.

Christ goes where He is wanted, and under present circumstances that is far, far away, “to the peripheries” — or rather, let us cut the cheap sociological blather and say, “to the ends of the Earth.” He is in love with the bright-eyed peoples of Africa; and with those suffering under murderous tyrannies in Asia and the Middle East. By contrast in Europe, and here in the Americas, in our life of fat and consumption, we now have little use for Him; and so He leaves us to find our own way, progressively, downward.

Yet in many rural and remote places, and even sometimes in little neighbourhoods within the huge, fraught cities of these once-Christian realms, His Church is flourishing. The numbers may be tiny in proportion to the general population, but wherever that old Latin Mass is sung, there are vocations, and there is revival. Where it is not, the Church is dying out; and yet here, too, where the Mass of the Ages, and through it the teaching of the ages, is no longer made available, individual novus-ordo Christians still wait and humbly pray for relief.

Christ is there, forever in the Eucharist; and wherever it is taken by the shriven with real faith and the childlike understanding, the power of the Redemption is felt. (And where it is taken by appropriation, unworthily “by right,” the power of Judgement is visited instead.) He is present in the sincerity of all private prayer and petitions, extending from that Mass, and every good and virtuous deed, done in the communion of the Saints. Christ is crucified, dead, and risen; He is alive. Try as they will, His detractors will ever fail to kill Him.

This is simply how things are, and how they always were and will be. Within every cell of the true Church is the relation between that small Christian soul, and this Tremendous Lover. (See here.)

We have often before been abandoned by priests and bishops, with their own private agendas, or strutting their fake “humility” for the adulation of crowds. We have had bad popes; we have had every sin of which men are capable, done in sacred places. This is the world, and this is what men are: fallen. Let them seek forgiveness, and pick themselves up; do what they can to rectify the damage they have caused, the pain they have gratuitously inflicted. Let them open their eyes before Our Lord closes them forever. It makes no sense to choose the road to Hell.

There is nothing new under the Sun, and I see that Saint Peter Damian’s Liber Gommorrhianus, or “Book of Gomorrah,” from ten centuries ago, is once again circulating, in English translation. (Can be ordered here.) It is from another age, when clerical corruption, including rampant sodomy and pederasty, was threatening the integrity of holy orders. Damian was an ascetic, at home in the remote Italian hills, but as I recall from a previous translation of this book, he can be unpleasantly modern in his forensic descriptions of what priests and monks descend to, when they become depraved. He turns, with a form of mercy that is excoriating, upon the most common crime: then as now, the satanic tampering with adolescent boys.

He provides, too, the context for this corruption, through cross-allusion to simony and careerist self-advancement (his Liber Gommorrhianus ought ideally to be read alongside his Liber Gratissimus) — directing fearless, full-bore attacks on the princes of the Church who make themselves comfortable, and hide the crimes. The book made its author extremely unpopular, and the defence of him, by Pope Leo IX, though brave at first, became increasingly lukewarm. But the scandals it exposed were quietly acknowledged and gradually addressed. The shame that this saint had helped to reawaken slowly triumphed over the filth of this eleventh-century liberalism.

This is not the whole story of Petrus Damiani, some of whose miscellaneous writings on the spiritual and contemplative life are also known to me through the excellent translations of Patricia McNulty (1959, here). These are precious, very positive works, curiously contemporary with that saga of conversion in the northern wilds. This lonely Benedictine would likewise be at home with those monks on Papa Stronsay, so far away from him in space and time.

It was beloved Benedict XVI, incidentally, who through his motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum, brought the Transalpine Redemptorists back into full communion with Holy Church. They were a product of the SSPX reaction against the liberal innovations that followed from Vatican II, and the account of their relations with Rome is complex and often vexed. So it must be in a generation when the Vatican bureaucracy is more easily alarmed and scandalized by the persistently faithful, than by the faithless and glib. But that generation is already passing into ashes.

Our task is to keep our moorings in the true and unchanging Magisterium, clinging, as it were, “to our guns and our Bibles,” or to distant treeless islands as the case may be. For wherever Christ is — however cold, windy, and wet — we are at home in the breast of Our Saviour.

It seems that Tony Blair and I were wrong about Iraq — at least, according to Tony, who made a less than complete confession to some other talking head on the weekend. Jeb, the brother of Dubya Boosh, says something similar from time to time, by way of securing his reputation as a wimp in his own run for the U.S. presidency. In the clear light of retrospection, maybe they wouldn’t have thrown that particular rock into that particular hornet’s nest from that particular angle. All the same, they’re glad we got Saddam.

They may speak for themselves. (I permit it.) But speaking only for myself, given better information from the intelligence agencies (and so forth), I’d do it all over again — the way I wanted it done in the first place.

Gentle reader knows my opinion of “democracy,” and might trust I would not have spent thousands in blood and billions in treasure trying to install “democracy” in Iraq. Let the politicians apologize for that mistake. No: I would have picked a plausible Arab Strongman, who understood the regional facts of life, in just the way we had remodelled them: “You’re with us, or you’re with them, and we have the missiles.”

In other words, proceed from the “invasion” phase to the “surge” phase, without the long intermission.

Call me a bloodthirsty warmonger, but I thought the operation was military in nature, and the quicker it were over, the better. This, moreover, because, as I was aware then, and am even more aware now, the Western television audience has a short attention span; and voters, though enthusiastic at first, tire of foreign wars quickly. Focus, therefore, on wiping out anything that looks like an enemy in short order; then leave a few discreet bases scattered about to repeat the operation when and where required. Do what you can to avoid “collateral damage,” but don’t fuss it: more lives are saved by a drama that, so far as humanly possible, observes the Aristotelian unities.

This is hard nasty geopolitical stuff in a fallen world. One does not waste punches, nor bluff. I admired President Bush because, while supposedly inarticulate, he was able to communicate the notion, “You do this, and we do that.” By showing that he meant it, to Kabul and Baghdad, he had, by May of 2003, everyone’s complete attention. America was the hyperpower, and everyone understood. (Twelve years later, that hyperpower has folded.)

More lives are saved by clarity and simplicity. The Daesh were able to flourish because so much wiggle room was supplied to them. Tony is right that the movement technically originated on the Syrian side of the border; but that was so largely because it had been driven there. The Daesh began to amount to something with Saddam’s surviving assets, mostly in capable personnel. For, whether or not sporting “ABC” weapons, Saddam did have international terrorist connexions, and considerable experience in manipulating them. He did have a plan for what to do if the Americans invaded; and though he may be posthumous, himself, it is still working.

I would go so far as to say that he outsmarted people like our Tony. For the Americans and British and all their other allies have gone home. And his Sunni-faction Daesh are still very much in business.

Put this another way: Why did we stop at the Syrian border? There were several unanswerable reasons to cross it in hot pursuit, of which only the first was to hunt down and kill escaping enemy forces.

Another was to win the Assad family over to “cooperation” with the USA, or failing that, to let them join their old Ba’athist allies in extinction.

To which end, many logistic problems could have been resolved by coming at them from two sides: from the Mediterranean as well as from the Persian Gulf. For Assad’s Hezbollah confederates — the Shia Iranian proxy — were also in need of inartistic pruning.

This last would in turn not only have improved everyday life in Beirut and Damascus; it would have clinched the “you’re next” message to Tehran. It would have mightily impressed our old NATO friends in Turkey; and have left Israel with one fewer front line to lose sleep over. And all for a fraction of the cost of the four lost years before General Petraeus and company “surged.”

Gaddafi never needed replacing. After all, when he’d had a good look at what Boosh had done about Saddam, he became quite reasonable, happily surrendering his own nuclear programme. Mubarak might still be in power, too, as the conditions for the Arab Spring (power vacuums) would not have coalesced. And I daresay the ayatollahs of Iran would be welcoming our nuclear inspectors, by a treaty less negotiated than dictated. There would certainly be no ever-mounting tide of refugees on European shores; and several million Christians would still be living in comparative peace in the locations where they were born.

“Peace through strength” is an old adage; or by way of preparation, “Peace through war.” Instead, we have been working on the idea of peace through shuttle diplomacy which — have you noticed? — always ends in failure. It is a failure by which vastly more lives are lost, or ruined, than by the success of prompt and decisive military action.

This, anyway, is where I disagree with Tony; yet still agree, in principle, with the proposed solution to the terrorist problem of that Dubya Boosh. It was, if gentle reader will recall, that each and every sovereign state will “deal with” (in the sense of, extinguish) the threats originating within its borders. Or, failing that, get a visit from the USMC.

Further to yesterday’s effusion, and to round out my comments for a week through which I have tried, Lord have I tried, to avoid “news,” “views,” and unpleasant speculation from the Synod at Rome; … well, I’ve been chatting with some fellow hack on a phone, and he said he had some questions for the bishops. “So have I, so have I,” it occurred, and the first seven questions come to mind were these:

1. Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing pow’r?
2. Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?
3. Are you walking daily by the Saviour’s side?
4. Do you rest each moment in the Crucified?
5. When the Bridegroom cometh will your robes be white?
6. Will your soul be ready for the mansions bright?
7. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

If I had a single criticism it would be that the old guys have nae clew on this topic of “the family.” They give a poor impression of old celibates altogether; especially the Aryans. They have missed the whole point, and it was left to some Romanian woman (here), and to some Russian with a beard (here), to remind them what’s what, and how it fits together.

’Tis not just from the beginning of the Christian faith, but as Christ said to Moses from the start of this world: the man and the woman, created He twain. And it is by this arrangement that His world is peopled. The family is not about young divorcees and old perverts, Your Eminences, nae; it is about the bairns. And more, if ye be patient, … gentle reader. It is about the childers of thy childers, playing in the dust when thou art old:

I was told by me aunt, I was told by me mother,
That going tae a weddin’ is the makins of another;
Well, if this be so, I will go without a biddin’
O kind providence, won’t ye send me tae a weddin’ —
    And it’s O dear me, how will it be,
    If I die an old maid in a garret?

I can cook and I can sew, I can keep a house right tidy,
Rise up in the mornin’ and get the breakfast ready:
There’s nothin’ in this wide world would make me heart so cheery
As a wee fat man to call me his own deary —
    And it’s O dear me, how will it be,
    If I die an old maid in a garret?

Among my favourite pop-Protestant hymns is “To Be a Pilgrim,” as sung by the empyreal Maddy Prior. This partly at least because she sings the salty original words of John Bunyan, and not the fey Edwardian rewrite that is to be found in Vaughan Williams’ English Hymnal. Bunyan did not hesitate over terms such as “hobgoblin” and “foul fiend”; and can carry a pronoun through three stanzas. (In the churchy version, “he,” the Pilgrim, migrates to “we,” and “I,” as if Annibale Bugnini had been advising the Anglicans about the year 1906.)

Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend,
Can daunt his spirit;
He knows he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away,
He’ll fear not what men say,
He’ll labour night and day
To be a Pilgrim.

A delicate Catholic question might be raised whether the Pilgrim’s confidence in being saved is a presumption upon Our Lord, or a manifestation of the theological virtue of Hope. The prose understanding would require the former, the poetical understanding the latter interpretation. I note that the passage is cast in verse.

It happens I was reading last night a collection of prayers by the late Thomas Dekker (c.1572–1632): playwright, pamphleteer, invincible Cockney, and all-round pioneering journalistic hack. It is entitled, Foure Birds of Noahs Arke, and I have a delicious facsimile of the little book, reset in hot metal (edited F.P. Wilson, 1924). The original was written and published in 1609, during the worst of the plague outbreaks in Jacobean London, when all the theatres were closed, and all the acting companies fled upcountry — or onto the Continent, where they first found that peasant German audiences could be enchanted by the works of such as Shakespeare, reduced to a kind of mime-show.

Dekker is among my beloveds, even though the two of us would not have got along; for we are hyperbolic in opposite ways. His prayer book is a prize, the more to be appreciated by anyone familiar with his plays. The man is salt-of-the-earth to start with, and quite often a rogue, but in offering prayer-texts for the common folk in their so several walks of life, he drops and loses his bag of conceits. Nothing could be plainer; the Faith that rings through those prayers is shorn of affectation.

We think of Bunyan as the finest face of the old Puritanism, but in his allegorical “excess” (for the modern reader, who has been alienated from allegory), he is Catholic in spirit. Too, he is so by his rigid adherence to Biblical teaching, which takes one ever home to our same common Christian place. But he is so, too, in the comparison that emerges to a writer like Dekker, who is strait-laced and po-faced when providing his moral instructions, setting the pleasures of this world in too strict opposition to the pleasures of Heaven — if he has a fault. Bunyan, by comparison, could belly-laugh like a Catholic, and took it for granted that, for instance, people joy in a little earthly splendour.

He (Bunyan) is all of one piece, where Dekker will race from one cliff-edge to another. But that starkness is also Dekker’s strength:

“Christ the Sonne of GOD, is the Pellican, whose blood was shed out to feed us: the Physician made of his owne bodie a medicine to cure us; looke upon him well, and beholde his bodie hanging on a crosse, his wounds bleeding, his blood trickling on the earth, his head bowed downe (as it were to kisse us),”

… and what follows is a vision of worldly corruption to curl your toes. All set in almost casual juxtaposition to the unheroic, quotidian life of the city.

Whereas Bunyan is our holie knight and Pilgrim. Combine these two aspects of the old English puritanism (itself a product of the later Middle Ages), as if uncrossing one’s two eyes, and the old Catholic Christianity seems fully restored: of an otherworldliness that can still be strangely comfortable in its own skin; that is secure and balanced on its both legs.

We are not “universal tourists” in the decadent manner, but Pilgrims all. We must revolt against a post-modern world that stands, not on the one leg or the other, but on nothing and nothingness. And I should think, together on our march to Heaven’s Gate in Jerusalem Wall — with both Bunyan and Dekker in our re-assembled, universal (“catholic”) entourage.

There are men I would trust with my life; men I would trust with my bags; men I would not trust with them; and those who need hanging. Using the hundred or so adult inmates of the Greater Doganate for my statistical sampling, I’d say it is one of those Pareto curves, in the common “rule of thumb” ratio, of 1:4:4:1. But only until I had thought about it. Take in the rest of the street, and the distortions become more apparent, towards the gibbet end. That is city life. Were I on a small yacht, however, sailing through the Roaring Forties in the Southern Ocean, I would want to be crewing exclusively with members of that minority first class.

Now, there are few circumstances in which statistics are of interest to me, but this might be one. From my (necessarily) limited observations, I do not think the curve applies universally, any more than the waves are the same upon all the world’s seas. Call me politically incorrect (and you’d better not because the term is now marked as discriminatory), there are cultural and subcultural variations which, though fluid, alter the proportions.

Among the more absurd myths, of contemporary public thinking, is that people are basically the same everywhere; that you can put them all on some standard curve. This may be, or not, true of human nature, in some (imaginary) pre-cultural condition, but the living creature has more range. Better and worse can be got out of him, and this is where “culture” deeply matters. To say that “one is as good as another” — the premiss of current multicultural policy — is, whether knowingly or not, to serve dark forces.

Some vexation comes from the leftwing convention of using words, for the purposes of propaganda, in the exact opposite of their original meanings: in this case, “diversity” is used to describe enforced conformity. Such words are then used as if they were things, so that reality is entirely negated. But it is important, as one discovers living in Parkdale, to ignore fools and the mad.

The original terms have many meanings, each of which depends on context, but at some primary level the acceptance of “cultural inequality” distinguishes right from left, the conservative from the liberal, the reactionary from the revolutionary, or as I like to put it, the friends of Jesus from the friends of Lucifer. This, and not folderol about “free markets.” Men are trouble — we are all trouble — in the more ancient view; and it is hard work indeed to get anything good from us. Success does not come by laissez-faire. And anything that is done to raise civilized standards, creates a cultural distinction.

Read no more than the Koran, and the Gospels, and gentle reader will see that even after discounting the range of individual temperament, the human product cannot be the same. Look through centuries of comparative history, and the point is illustrated. Mohammed, and Christ, are not interchangeable prophets. There is some overlap in their teachings, but the centres of the resultant cultural and spiritual realms are radically displaced. Many of the differences are both unsubtle, and consistent over time. Either may be judged at its best, or at its worst; but neither are they like at the extremes.

Having put God aside, for one hypothetical, pragmatic moment, we might judge only from the behavioural effects. The same is possible between any two “cultural constructs,” at a given scale; and prior to the post-modern triumph (itself a manifestation of culture), there was little hesitation in making the comparisons at every level of sophistication. Read any old Baedekers to see what I mean; note that they were written by more intelligent authors than those who supply the copy for the glitzy tour guides of the present day.

We are almost all wealthy tourists in the West, in the last couple of generations, but the conditions of the journey have changed: less than one in a thousand is an old-fashioned traveller, exposed to anything outside his quotidian sweep of experience. We fly from one resort to another for aptly-named “vacations.” We have Internet, too. It is for this reason, perhaps — the reduction of the human to the incurious, pleasure-seeking beast — that the post-modern, smug, ignorant, addled, and vacant “universal tourist” makes up the overwhelming majority on all our voting rolls.

I am making, once again this morning, an extremely obvious point, and to a plain purpose, crossing all boundaries of politics and religion. No scoring system will ever work, and no policy prescriptions could be based on it: for what I have written is far too general.

My point is rather the reverse. Neither can policy prescriptions be based on the opposite, and entirely absurd position, that cultural differences are of no consequence, and can be overlooked. Yet this is exactly what is done by all of our progressive parties.

There are at least two tables, within pubs in the Greater Parkdale Area, where, notwithstanding I was once quite welcome, I am not today. Some think this is because of my opinions, which are those of a rightwing fanatic and religious nutjob. But no: it is because I am willing to express them. This is a form of incontinence, one might argue; and like other forms, it may accord with increasing age. Yet I do not think that silence is invariably golden.

To hear me tell it — and whom else were you expecting, gentle reader? — it goes like this. In years past, I would sit quietly and ignore nonsense, especially political nonsense, spoken by my fellow imbibers. I can still do this. Many of the most ludicrous remarks, on any passing issue, are not actually opinions of the speaker. He simply echoes or parrots the views of the media and his own social class. I’ve been absorbing this “background music” for years; why revolt now? The noise is anyway not arguments but gestures.

Say, “Stephen Harper,” and watch the eyeballs roll. Say, “George Bush,” and still, ditto. Say “Richard Nixon,” however, and you don’t get much of a rise any more, for memories out there are short, very short.

(A Czech buddy, in the olden days, once performed this experiment in a pub. “I just love that Richard Nixon!” he declared, in his thick, Slavic accent, loud enough to afflict the Yankee draft-dodgers at the next table, who’d been prattling about Watergate too long. “Gives those liberals heart attacks,” he added. … Some bottle-tossing followed from that, and we were all banned together, so ended up as friends.)

On the other hand say, “Barack Obama,” and they will focus like attentive puppies. Or, “Justin Trudeau” to the ladies, to make them coo.

It is a simple Pavlovian trick, and might be done in reverse in a rightwing bar, except, there are no rightwing bars in big cities.

Yet everyone knows there are rightwing people, even in Greater Parkdale. And they are welcome anywhere they want to buy a pint, the more if they’re buying for the whole table. The one condition is that they must keep their “divisive” opinions to themselves.

My weakness is for retaliation. I will ignore “background music,” but will not sit quietly being needled, when the remarks are addressed specifically to me. I might endure a cuteness or two, from someone perfectly aware of my opinions, but by about the third time I find the Leftoid checking for my pulse, I’m inclined to show it.

This is never expected. If it’s a man, he will generally go pale, silent, stunned. If it’s a woman, she may burst into tears. And yet nothing I said required raising my voice; nor uttering anything factually untrue. It is instead the use of plain language, with which the post-modern cannot cope. Raised as he has been in a bubble, he may never have been contradicted before.

What interests me, as a “sign of the times,” is that the needling is, in every case, both rude and open. It is like the rocks thrown at the Jamarat, in Mecca. It seems not odd, when everyone is doing it. The malice is like that of the Palestinians, directed towards the Jews. It happens every day; everyone expects it. Only when the Jews defend themselves, does outrage suddenly boil over. How dare they respond in such a “disproportionate” way? How dare those Jews strike back, when all we were doing was knifing them?

I mention this by way of qualifying something I wrote yesterday: “His acceptance speech last night was sort-of sweet; it showed him still quite damp behind the ears.”

Perhaps “sort-of sweet” gave the wrong impression. In the speech, our prime minister-elect congratulated himself and his colleagues on what he imagined to be their moral superiority:

“We beat fear with hope. We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together.”

The rest of the speech extended this theme: what good people Liberals are; and by easy inference, what bad people the Conservatives they defeated. There was nothing gracious or magnanimous for relief. Yet it sounded so sweet, so innocent, so naively “damp behind the ears.” The young cherub actually does not realize that he is promoting: fear, cynicism, and negative, divisive politics. That he is expressing himself in a passive-aggressive way.

Had Harper won, as he might have had he had the wit to make the campaign shorter, he would, as in the past, have avoided this kind of moral posturing, simply because it is ugly and crass — as it would have appeared, coming from his mouth. He would have spoken well of his opponents, and congratulated them on a good fight. He would not have continued kicking the opponent he had defeated — because he is an adult, and has some decency. For that matter, Martin, Chrétien, Mulroney, Pearson, would not have done it either. (Of the elder Trudeau, one could never be sure.)

Charity and civility alike require that these “innocents” be admonished — in the hope that, eventually, they will acquire the first glimmer of self-knowledge.

To my mind, it is often wrong to let the moment pass. We should prick their bubbles. Stop trying to play “nice” with people who do not play “nice” with us; stop conceding their self-conceits. This might even be a moral imperative: to stop confirming the crazed in their delusions.