Essays in Idleness

Truth to tell, I do not expect the world to embrace the gargantuan “divestation” proposal I sketched yesterday. Nor will any other “distributive” scheme be wanted, to dissolve the power of vast, faceless corporations, methodically integrated with the vast, regulatory departments of Twisted Nanny State. Several gentle readers have written to advise me that any such plan is a non-starter, and if pushed, would merit the adjective “silly.” In the tradition of Plato, however, I continue to indulge mental exercises. His own were never very practical. The modern, university-educated reader, including the great majority of nominal Catholics and other Christians, are sentimental materialists. The moment these detach, the sentiment has to go.

Why do we, in various degrees of enthusiasm, buy into the “new world order” that emerged so triumphantly in the sixteenth century, and has been consolidating its authority ever since? And this so effectively that those who claim to be defending “Western Civ” are, in almost every instance, actually defending its avowed enemies? For we cite “reformations” and “enlightenments” that overturned the older order. That, we suppose, is what made us so great, in our power and prosperity. We rose above the “primitive superstition” that had governed all previous civilizations and cultures. By the aid of our Scienza Nuova, we were able to smash them all to pieces. And this so effectively that by now the foreigners rival and surpass us, in playing our own game.

The truth is, that the modern world of totalitarianism and material advance, is genuinely popular. It answers to that part of human nature which corresponds to animal nature. We want food, sex, indolence and sleep, and the less we must work for it, the better.

Modern men claim many things that were better ignored; in fact they are allergic to risk. We have no use for freedom in our zoo; we want security. Some of us do attempt a breakout, occasionally, but the majority would return to their cages were the doors left open. An impulse from our forgotten past might inspire us to slay the occasional zookeeper, even when he is bringing us dinner, but for the most part we accept a life in which none of our anxieties are real.

Humans are more sophisticated than the other animals, and our economic arrangements are thus more subtle. We have an open-plan zoo. It works well enough on indentured labour. We are secured by our debts and our paycheques. In order merely to obtain the credentials, that our world demands for the most trivial jobs, contemporary youth must obtain an “education,” that will leave them deeply owing. At a most impressionable moment of life, they must go straight to work in the silicon mines, and stay until they become accustomed to them.

“Wage slavery” involves working for a master (women obey bosses, not their husbands; men love bosses not their wives). This is the historical new normal. The very definition of a job, is working for someone else. If 100 percent of the able-bodied are wage slaves, we have full employment. Not everyone is able-bodied, or mentally capable, but even some who are can be carried by the pogey. We have a “social safety net” to prevent anyone being exposed to risk, or left with consequence of a human mistake — lest he learn, or become an example of, something vital. We even have the means to eliminate all pain, thanks to the recent legislation of euthanasia. By the centralized transfer and manipulation of debt, we can become a race of perfect zombies.

True, I exaggerate. That’s what caricaturists and satirists do. The zombies can’t cope with this, however, so their masters have made humour “politically incorrect.”

“Look at all the rugged individualists lining up for their Big Macs,” I once observed. My companion told me to keep my voice down.

Were I to declare myself an opponent of collectivism, I do not think it would occasion much surprise. My horror of socialism in all its many forms — Soviet, Maoist, Venezuelan, and so on — is not a secret I have tried to keep. My use of the term “Twisted Nanny State” (for decades I just said “Nanny State,” until I offered the new, improved version) extends my pathological hatred to “guvmint” in all contemporary forms. I love to mock the pretensions of “democracy,” snowballs at which I am pleased to hurl. Some have rocks in them. I deny being an anarchist or libertarian: implausibly, to some readers. Yet as “A Man of the Thirteenth Century” (TM) I am, after all, a moral authoritarian, and a papist so strident that the current pope never invites me to tea. My preference for science over scientism further marks me as a creature of the dark lagoon.

So yes, from all this, it may be concluded that I am not a collectivist, nor a semi-collectivist. Did you know I am not an individualist, either? For sometimes I drop lead on that toe, too. The idea of perfect individual autonomy strikes me as the Sin of Adam. Let Everyman, before God, take responsibility for everything he has done, including those things that no court could try.

But within the little realm of politics, and after all those who think themselves anti-collectivist have sent their regards, I will mumble my objections to usury, and limited liability.

It seems to me — a man who has read Adam Smith with admiration, but wonders if anyone else has — that the modern corporation is a collectivist enterprise. It begins with first ownership, often enough, and gets worse after takeovers and mergers, further compounded by the leverage and debt. What we call “capitalism” today is an incomprehensible jumble in which the legal fiction of “corporate persons” creates the dominant players on every stage. Joint-stock companies own companies that own companies in a parody of the Great Chain of Being, and only in tiny corner stores will one find a sovereign human being who can answer a question with a straight face.

Anything that requires “public relations,” or a “human resources department,” is Stalinist by intention.

But, “small is beautiful” is not my theme. (A sub-theme maybe.) I do not despise large companies, per se. I despise large companies that are owned by even larger parent corporations, pension funds, or other ontological shadows and geists. They behave as, because they are, collectivist entities.

Let a man (or a woman, if she has charge of her own purse) put down his golden ducats (or florins, should the vendor agree), and take possession. Should a partnership be formed, it will not vex me. Let the man, or the very same partners, by similar device, take possession of more than one company, in their own names. But let no abstraction invest, and should the owners acquire more than they can handle, let them rue the day. For in my view they should be personally responsible for business practices in any company they own, as they would be for the behaviour of an incisive dog. Let the rich be rich, and bankrupts be bankrupts, as the direct consequence of risks they have freely assumed. Let those who have broken clearly-written laws themselves be broken on the wheel of Justice. And let the taxes, too, be made plain and predictable, applying not to aggregates, but by transaction.

My scheme could be drawn out in tedious detail — I’ve hardly started — but let me jump to the conclusion that it would not increase any nation’s paper wealth. Indeed, it would have a condensing effect. But I think it more important that our relations be just — and investigably seen to be just — than that they be remunerative.

Down with capitalist collectivism!

“Yes, these days all the live-in girlfriends are Thomists,” I was writing this morning, to my Chief Buncombe Correspondent. (The county is in North Carolina.) I was commenting on his account of an Uber ride, with a nihilist doctoral candidate, who lives with a fan of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

“Someone in the household has to deny that effects precede causes,” I added.

“Indeed, someone has to put the kettle on,” my CBC replied.

Meanwhile, up here in the burglary-prone High Doganate, I gather that the superintendress has been sacked, and her son arrested. This is the consensus of various accounts from my fellow tenants, some dozens of whom had also been burgled over the past year or so. The downside: no one to open the laundry room in the morning. The upside: no one to collect our rent. And, security may actually have improved, now that no one is protecting us.

Inside every cloud, a silver lining.

Nothing was learnt from the two policemen (well, one of them was male) who visited, to ask if I could supply additional details, when what I was looking for was more of an exchange. This was surprisingly prompt. Only six months had passed since the crime was committed.

Had I noticed anything odd? Yes, that my nest-egg of cash had gone missing. But the good news was that the burglar, who must have had ample leisure from the knowledge that I’d gone out of town, had left all my books.

It could have been worse. Had the burglar been accompanied by a Thomist girlfriend, my Summa Theologica might also have been lost.

The news is often a mixed bag. Life, generally, is like that.

Take Trompe, for instance. Good news and bad news, all in the same package.

An avid selfie-taker explained to me on the weekend the advantage of keeping a record of where he has been. I suppose it was because he was taking selfies that he hadn’t noticed, himself. I bet if I lifted his iPhone, he would notice. For that would give him a direct human experience; he wouldn’t like that.

He also drives for Uber, I learnt. Thus has a live-in Thomist girlfriend, I assume.

“Has the world gone mad?” I wondered, recently, while observing street events from my balconata. A gentleman was shrieking obscenities, to no one in particular. Another was doing the same, but in a different direction. Surely, I thought, they should be shrieking at each other. Keep up appearances, you know.

But “look on the bright side,” as my mama used to sing. (Ironically.) No bloodshed, at least while I was watching. For if there were — oh bother! — I’d feel as if I had to do something. And I have no live-in Thomist girlfriend to tell me what.

It must have been about 7 a.m.
when a shrew-like mammal stumbled
out of his dark burrow
and peered nearsightedly
at the first flower with
an expression close to amazement
and decided it wasn’t dangerous …

The late beloved Canadian poet, Al Purdy, here describes the invention of flowers — by plants — “In the Early Cretaceous.” He was off by several periods, and a whole era. According to fossils recently found in China, they had already been invented fifty million years before that.

Nanjinganthus dendrostyla! … This is the name now given to an angiosperm, or if you will, flower. What is it doing in the South Xiangshan Formation? Minding its own business, I would say. But in finding it we toss yet another brick into the hornet nest of evolutionary theory. Instead of “just popped up in the Cretaceous,” flowers now pop up in the Jurassic; and in fossil slabs so abundant, it would be hard to hide them all.

We take one thing as precursor to another, and well it might be. Or not be. For if the precursors keep jumping around — fully formed with all necessary parts taking backward leaps of half a million centuries — what can we know of our family tree?

We have no way of knowing, and no prospect of ever knowing, and the evolutionary presumption (the “idea of progress”) is simply read into the evidence. New species “just pop up” there, where we thought we had everything covered, and in the living record, too, every day. Some ancient species known to be extinct just pop up in a fisherman’s net, or are trapped wandering about in the bush.

Better yet: some creature we’d never seen ever, leaps straight from non-existence onto the “endangered species” list. How do we know it wasn’t created, at 7 a.m. yesterday morning?

We can’t check if our “molecular clocks” are working, or our carbon datebooks are correct, or the red shift of the stars has not been entirely misunderstood. I do think we have grasped the general idea, of our descent from a singular cosmic egg of infinitesimal size, and yet it wouldn’t surprise me, as a half-blind shrew, to learn that our temporal depth perception was dysfunctional, and that in fact the world began on the 11th of August, 3114 BC, as the Mayans calculated, or that The Flood happened in 2137 BC, as Varro the Roman explained.

Alternatively our world is much older. My Scofield Reference Bible gives it another thousand years.

What does it matter to us? For as the famous Shakespeare actor said, it’s not just the number of words, no, you must get them in the right order. And we don’t seem able to do that. Look microscopically into the human cell — into any cell for that matter — and you see that in order to work, things that must have come earlier depend on things that must have come later. To which one says, “Ho!” For our assumptions were all built on assumptions, that disappear as we move along.

God, like Obama, says: “You didn’t build that!” Only He who built it can remember when. It is not actually necessary to read evolution, or anything else, into the fossil record. Science is knowledge, and it is enough to accumulate what we have seen and can demonstrate. Leave science fiction to the specialists.

(Richard Feynman: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”)

And long live angiosperms!

I wonder which myopic shrew-like mammal made the first bouquet?

Let me take a moment to agree with all spinmeisters and talking heads, linked in my inbox this morning. Mister Tucker’s monologue on Fox News t’other evening (which I have now “watched” in video and transcript) was a “game-changer.” That is what we (present and former hacks and pandits) call a speech that outclasses the background noise. It makes listeners wonder, however fitfully, whether their sense of current history is right. It “galvanizes” those who, though they agreed with every proposition in advance, ne’er heard them so well expressed. (Gentle reader will find the thing on the Internet soon enough.)

As text, the speech is not so much argument as evasion of argument, with frequent appeals to the gallery. But as delivered, it is “fine talk,” and I was impressed by a sterling performance.

Gallantly, Mister Tucker has articulated the desire of the Right and Left-wavering to raise the tone of American politics to that of Bhutan. His most striking expressions called attention to the fact that material prosperity does not make people happy. Perhaps we should instruct the statisticians to replace their calculations of Gross Domestic Product, with Gross National Happiness, as they now do in Thimphu. The figure would still be meaningless, but might provide some modest, transient uplift.

In my humbly contrary view, material prosperity — i.e. getting filthy rich — does actually make people happy. Those who win the lottery do not cry from despair. But within a few months of scoring, and often within days, they have a new set of personal problems, to pile upon the old ones. Happiness, from material causes, does not last; not even for the poor. It is emotional catharsis. Something makes you happy; and then it fades away.

Only drugs can keep you happy, until you die. But the downside there is that they kill you.

In view of the current opioid crisis, I would observe that happiness is as fleeting as wealth, and should not be sought as an end in itself. I would rather refer to “a crisis of optimism.” People want happiness, seek it, win, then lose, and are left “more unhappier” than ever. We discover, if I may use an exceptionally rancid cliché, that “money can’t buy happiness” (it can buy spiffy yachts, however); and drugs only work while they are in your bloodstream. Were it not for the afterlife, drugs would be the better bet.

However, Mister Tucker is using the H-word (“happiness”) in something like the sense understood by those Merican Founding Fathers. Perhaps we might translate it “satisfaction” today, so to re-include the association with “contentment.” For there is a form of happiness that is not giddy, and comes with living well, regardless of income or other treats.

Politics can oppress people, but it cannot make them wiser or more sensible, independent of mind, or just. Happiness in the older sense has never required “political action.” Instead, it takes joy in friendship and community. One could be happy in a prison camp, or facing painful death. This has been done, I insist, though we are unlikely to have read about it in the MSM. A joyful happiness of this sort exists in a confident, i.e. faithful relation with God, and thus clarity in one’s prospect of a life that is eternal. Without that, the number of things to moan about grows and grows.

But prison camps and painful deaths are not good, in themselves. To want them, for ourselves or for others, would be a sign of psychic disorder. To this end, guvmint should at least be on the side of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That will not take us to Utopia, but is as close as we should go.

I notice that Mister Tucker, in his eloquent “take” on populism, turns instinctively to politics with his plea for relief. He, like the rest, thinks there is something the guvmint should be doing, other than what it is doing now. So do I, for that matter: I think the guvmint should be leaving us alone.

Rather than the State, I think the Church should be getting its act together, to instruct us once more on how not to be mendacious, self-destructive clowns. The worst thing about ecclesiastical scandals, sez I, is that they block Christ’s messaging. Indeed, that is more or less the definition of a scandal.

But politics is a game that everyone can play; an exceptionally nasty one. Rather than play, we should just grow up.

*

[My fortnightly Thing, on sanitary engineering, may be found here.]

“Call me a Reactionary, but I will make common cause with all those who have been unpersoned then murdered by the stinking satanic soft-liberal establishment.”

That, for what it’s worth, was what I gave when asked for my New Year’s resolution.

Context is sometimes important. Mention had been made of the unknown number — more than one hundred million, but there is no precise total — of those killed at the hands or on the orders of utopian irreligious ideologues, in the time since the Armistice of 1918. These were in addition to those who had died in wars of any description, or otherwise under arms. I wish to count only the defenceless. And in deference to my interlocutor’s soft-liberal views, I was not at first counting abortions and infanticides, although the victims were quite defenceless, and had surely been “unpersoned” in the prelude to each crime. Add them, from around the world, and the toll rises, to more than a thousand million.

The word “murdered” was queried. Why would I accuse comfortable soft liberals and miscellaneous progressive types of such dastardly deeds? Because, by their silence and inanition, in their tolerance and their diversity, they had participated. For under old principles of common law, those complicit in murder may be fairly charged. Malice must be proved, to get a conviction, but all those who had played along, from the stage of “we didn’t know” to the stage of working for the beasts, were accomplices in the demonic malice, and remain so. (Immortally.)

A pose of naïveté, as a cover for indifference, is the defence usually offered. Who could guess that the rise of a Lenin or a Hitler or a Mao would end in such vast, pointless carnage? Who could foresee that the modern, inverted ideals of materialism, from Marx and Darwin through the many convolutions of eugenics, would make the triumphs of such men inevitable? For it must be admitted that only intelligent and perceptive people, with decency and the courage to stand their ground, would oppose them: a small minority in any polity. The invincibly ignorant have their excuse.

Yet the characters named hardly killed anyone with their own hands. And the executioners they employed — also in the millions — were “only following orders.” One might even say that the woman demanding that the child she is carrying be brutally destroyed, is only giving orders. Or that the doctor giving the final injection to a patient so old and confused and unwanted that she has ceased to want even herself, is only doing as instructed. Like Dr Mengele’s nurses, or the prison camp guards, they go home at the end of each shift, to their bourgeois lives; and some have violins to play Mozart.

I do not share the happyface view of a world from which Christ has been extracted; in which responsibility for one’s own acts is boundlessly diffused.

My hope for the New Year is that all who are complicit — finally every one, of course including me — will recognize their sins, confess them, and seek absolution. And that, having done that, we will all change sides.

Even before the spread of social media, I recall being aware that I was missing out on some of the excitement of New Year’s Eve. Actually, for the first so-many years of nominally adult life, I wasn’t missing out at all. For six or seven of those year-ending nights, I was swept into something, in a place I’d never been before, among people I had not previously met. At least two of these involved physical danger; though I didn’t realize how much trouble I was courting, at first. (Never flirt with the mistress of a Thai army general!) I should think if I had been connected to social media in those days, I might not have lived to thirty.

Then came the year I decided to stay home and read. This was when the FoMo began, though it eventually subsided. In retrospect, I blame women. To this day, I find them attractive, and am more likely to do stupid things in their company than elsewhere. It is the classic male propensity towards risk-taking, for no higher purpose than to impress a pretty girl. One enters the room, spots the pretty girl in question, and an alarm sounds at the back of one’s head. “Time to make a fool of yourself,” it announces.

I do hope I am using this neologism, “FoMo,” correctly. I gather it stands for, “Fear of Missing out.” A very large part of the postmodern economy seems to depend on it. The marketing professionals know that it is easy to manipulate, and always was. The social media have radically increased anxiety among the young; but there was always something there to work with.

From a demonic point of view, social media are a godsend, or “devilsend” as it were. But the demons were hardly sleeping through previous generations, when a bit more effort was required of them. (I notice the animals have mating instincts, too, though happily for them, not the fear of embarrassment.) And Lust is not the only driver: there are six more Deadly Sins to choose from.

A significant purpose of religion, in former times, was the cure or alleviation of FoMo. To the mind oriented to a continuum, that extends beyond this world, passing events can be taken more calmly. Conversely, the fear of missing out on anything but Heaven will infallibly disorient the religious sensibility. It is more effective than the fear of Hell (the fear of God is quite a different thing), or the perfectly material fear of death, which can itself be negated by that fear of embarrassment. I should think many acts of heroism owe their lustre to the desire to avoid shame; though others are rooted in the call to sanctity.

There are many dimensions to the “here and now” that asserts itself each New Year. One’s location in time is seldom so apparent. One makes New Years’ resolutions in acknowledgement of the fact. They will mean nothing — the unaided human will is powerless against temptation — but the sense of a new beginning stirs briefly within.

Fifteen years have today passed since, on the Eve of anno MMIV, I was received into the Catholic Church, and after many years of hesitation, finally became a Dogan. That really was a new beginning for me: a kind of surrender, after half a century of sin and error. For through all the sin and error since, my anxieties have been fundamentally altered. Worldling I have necessarily remained, but there is no better place I could wish to be.

One of the more laughable claims for “democracy” is that it is government by the people. As I’ve mentioned before, perhaps too many times, it is rather government by the politicians. True, the masses — ever inchoate — have the luxury at intervals of tossing them out; of replacing one batch of politicians with another. This begets dangerous illusions. Occasionally, a demagogue arises who may seize power in a fluctuation of the public will. But he will have his own agenda, and the chance that a demagogue will restore timeless constitutional norms, thus free a people from under the weight of accumulated bureaucracy, is nil. That would dissipate his power. By overturning such checks and balances as stood against him, he will adapt society itself to his own preferred ideological ends.

This may sound the ranting of a political pessimist. It is. Too, I am a “cynic” in these matters, according to the common (and fallacious) definition of that word.

For their part, the people think well of “democracy” when they are able — beyond the usual Pavlovian adherence to such abstract propositions as “democracy” itself, “equality” and so forth — to calculate that they can get the best of the bargain. The majority assume they can get more benefits out of the system than they put resources in, and a minority assume that the majority can be bought off with their own money. The poor vote to “make the rich pay,” and the rich have accountants and lawyers. Massive public borrowing fills the inevitable gap.

Was this always so? Yes, though on a more modest scale. I find no historical record of government by saints (elected or unelected), and prefer monarchy by inheritance because it subverts the will to power, at least until a monarch goes rogue, forgetting his place in the Great Chain of Being. There is an art to ruling, and an art to being ruled as Wyndham Lewis suggested, and better to master arts and be ruled by ancestral custom than have everyone chafing. The ancient Greeks, and mediaeval Venetians, filled many offices by lot. I think this might also be recommended.

And there has always been a legitimate place for voting: where the polity is so small that electors and candidates are familiar with each other. Above the parish or ward scale, it is ripe for trickery, corruption, and abuse.

In a recent essay (here), Angelo Codevilla presents what I think the most coherent view of the revolution now unfolding in the Natted States. His trope of “elites versus people” has been taken up by many other writers, as an explanation for why La Trompe came to power. There is little in Codevilla’s essay I could contradict. I think it is largely true, and am myself on the populist side, for the moment. In the longer run I am on both sides. I share the elite’s view of the people, but too, the people’s view of the elite.

Again, as a spiritual monarchist, and Christian restorationist, who pines for the recovery of Catholic Christendom, I think the key constitutional challenge is to keep both “the people” and “the elites” away from power. With Codevilla and most, I require the consent of the ruled, in all their interests and factions, if for no other reason than to avoid combustions of violence. My only deviation is from the notion that democracy was ever likely to obtain this; or that any balance at all can be achieved without centuries of appeal to the divine.

As that is unlikely to begin in any foreseeable future, the fallback is “waiting on God.” No matter how confused and murderous the times, our hope can always be in a time beyond time, death, and even taxes, and the promise we’ve been given that it will arrive. In addition to our guns and our bibles, we should cling to this.

According to one estimate, two in five visitors to the Internet are now “bots.” The proportion is growing, quickly. Advertisers (has gentle reader noticed I have none?) sometimes complain about the multiplication of them. Unlike the backward old print media — that were banking up carbon in the world’s landfills to save us all from global warming — the Internet now conceals how many eyeballs they are reaching. Bots cloud and pad this information, that could once be guessed by checking print-runs and so forth. Bots are no use to these advertisers; only human consumers buy their goods. But bots can now fake clicks, mouse movements, logins, and do everything except place the orders, although they are starting to do that, too: fake purchases that result in real invoices to the human recipients of unwanted goods.

Something similar has been happening on the world’s stock exchanges. Markets shoot up and down, but thanks to machines working on algorithms, the buy and sell decisions are greatly magnified, or sometimes “microfied,” by these non-, or inhuman actors. There may be spikes and crashes that have nothing to do with demand or supply.

I refer to a dimension of fakery unique to our times, though as I often argue, there are other dimensions. In politics, administration, academia, media, the telling of “just so” stories — plausible but untrue — is among our oldest tricks. The lesser animals fake, as a means to survival; we tell lies for self-aggrandisement and sport. Power requires the manipulation of “perceptions.” Leaders need followers, and storytelling is used to keep them in line. Rivals must be slandered, to prevent people from considering alternatives. Guilt by association replaces reasoning. Still, I prefer the warmth of human falsehood to the intersteller coldness of machines; until the two modes combine in a conniption of science, technology, and moral evil.

Human motives lie behind them, but the bot contingents add what cannot be foreseen. While there will never be “artificial intelligence” in the sense provided by science fiction writers — machines capable of personal malice, or able to do more than mimic human consciousness — there will be, as there have always been, machines that go haywire. A fully-integrated, automated environment is, as it were, programmed for catastrophe. Charity, too, requires human overrides, and a system that cannot be shut down, then put back under human eyes and hands, is ultimately neither sane nor practical.

Bots, without the slightest intention in themselves, are nevertheless subverting this. We come to depend on them, as we have come to depend on government intervention to save us from ourselves. We lose, by increments, control of our own lives, and our facility for intelligent thinking. We no longer know what the bots are doing, for it is beyond the ability of any individual to comprehend who put them there, and why. We are travelling blind, through a very busy landscape, and will surely hit something we did not expect.

One of my proofs of a loving God, is in the provision of catastrophes, especially those man-made through lapses of prudence. We learn from experience. Or we don’t learn, in which case we have the benefit of catastrophe, again. One generation replaces another, and perhaps we never learn; but the potential is always there.

The bottom-up arrangement of distinctly human family, neighbourhood, custom, religion, remains as a return to the default position. The human soul can relocate itself, after it has strayed into no-man-land, by means of an innate cosmic “GPS.” All we need do is disable the false indicators. But with their multiplication, this becomes hard.

Indeed, we should be working on this all the time, as a balance to our technical innovations. We must keep coming home from work, in order to stay married to reality.

… and season’s meet-and-greetings to the grinch constituency. Yes, we might moan on about the commercialization of Christmas, and the increase of direct attacks upon it. Parkdale thugs have desecrated the statue of Our Lady in its little grove outside my church — again. A priest was patiently performing the restoration, as well as he could; he keeps all the necessary solvents in stock. Christmas seems to bring the little devils out. ’Tis their season to be spray-painting, and finding ways to disturb the Mass. The liberals do their bit in the media, on their more sophisticated level.

Lest I be tempted to fulfil my Christmas shopping obligations, I was sternly corrected for saying “Merry Christmas” to a shop clerk last week. I thanked her for the warning, by way of confusing her. Money’s hard to come by, why would I spend it there?

A stateside friend (link) was advised by an upscale saleswoman to buy a “quite adorable” tea set for a little boy. She expressed her preference for a cap pistol. … Another friend, observing a progressive household in which an incompletely degenderized lad had embarrassed his parents by interpreting a walking stick as a rifle, softly whispered to me, “My children have been fully armed since birth.” …

I’m not sure how far we get by affirming the contrary of everything we hear, but farther and farther with each passing year.

Still another friend pings a photo of some Moravian figurines upon a Scandihoovian-modern tabletop, over there in Zlín. They have been arranged to accent the Three Kings in procession, the last swinging his gift as if it were a censer. Cradle, herald, and a sheep, wait to receive them; but Mary and Joseph stand like dancers — twirling, their arms flung out — before a stylized manger. With the same familiar elements the crèche can be arranged in so many loving ways. And to the utter delight of innocent children.

No weapons in that scene, nor in any other presentation of the King of Kings, the seat of all power, come down to Earth as a defenceless baby. This paradox is hammered home in the Gospels. It will be incomprehensible to the world; thus it requires their repetition — that meekness should be the final reserve in a world at war, that is always at war.

Let the world be the world, waiting. Let it be as it has been, hardly knowing its Saviour has arrived. Let it be obtuse, unable to grasp its own contradictions and incongruities. Let it be corrected.

That redemption comes by a mother and a child: “Who’d have thought it?”

Only God would think of a paradox like that.

It has been Science Week up here in the High Doganate (which quickly becomes “HD” in my correspondence with neo-conic sections of the American intelligentsia). My love of nature and biology as a child has not yet been killed off, and I enjoy frequent relapses into the starry-eyed condition I recall, when it seemed that each new animal or niche came as a revelation of Beauty and Design — words I have capitalized to increase the irritation. Being a science child made me the more an artsy child, and vice versa. And a polemicist: for how could men in their extraordinary surroundings expend their mature years in pursuit of glibness, and the task of explaining the inexplicable away?

Something like this growth experience happened across Western society, as we read through the histories of the empirical sciences. We find record of the recurring avalanche or landslide of natural discoveries; with behind or following each, a world stripped bare. Without fail, old areas of wonder and inspiration became new areas of aesthetic and spiritual famine. The process keeps repeating itself.

In Canada, for instance, one might almost date social conditions “BD,” and “AD,” for before and after Darwin. Before, natural history had been immensely popular among all classes privileged with free time, and immense collections were gathered of fossils, shells, leaves and flowers, butterflies and insects and every work of that Lord who was taken as their artist. Clubs were formed in every village, with hiking expeditions led by clergymen and others who took nature as a second sacred book, complementary to, and illustrative of, the Bible.

After Darwin, life came indoors. Natural history was largely spurned, or rather turned over to the specialists and lab-men of the science faculties. Society was turned towards popular entertainments, beginning around the family piano, then degenerating with the advances of technology. The child would have to discover nature for himself — but would soon be taught that it was boring. “Natural selection” and the “survival of the fittest” could reduce each remarkable creature from a design to a meaningless industrial process. That cows came from milk, or rather milk from cows, was someone else’s concern to the urban child, who had seen the one but not the other.

We need teachers and precursors, as I have argued passim, and I had the extraordinary good fortune to have as my guide in biology the Mr Henry I mentioned in a previous Idlepost (here). Indeed, these days, we need courageous as well as brilliant teachers, as Mr Henry showed, in later unemployment. Though neither noticeably Christian nor religious otherwise (except in his devotion to his subject), he embodied that pre-Darwinian enthusiasm, plus all that could be added through high-powered microscopes. He was also a very precise and honest draughtsman of all that he could see, down to slightly below the cellular level. Were he still alive he would be exploring the incredible cosmos we now find inside each cell — design within design within design.

Mr Henry was not a Darwinist, nor neo-Darwinist, nor anything but a seeker for truth. He had already been driven twelve thousand miles away by the academic establishment in his native land (USA), for though polite and modest, he did not conceal his non-evolutionary views. He had himself been awakened by the works of D’Arcy Thompson, the ingenious Scottish mathematician, classicist, and investigator of “intelligent design,” who had held Darwinism in contempt until the generation before.

I am myself still under Mr Henry’s influence, no more a subscriber to “intelligent design theory” than to the “random design theory” enforced in our academies and our courts by intellectual thugs and charlatans. The origin of our species will remain scientifically unknowable. That there was and is and will be Design, no intelligent observer can doubt, but the identity of the Agent (outside the universe we’re within) belongs to Faith. Apart from revelation, He can be known to the living only as He was in those days “BD,” and back to Aristotle, as the final, Final Cause.

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[See also my Thing piece yesterday, here.]

In Heaven, of course, the journalists don’t make mistakes. Up there, I infer, paper is pricelessly expensive, so everything is composed in the writer’s mind beforehand, dictated then copied in the finest scribal hands. Sentence after sentence is hung with knowing craft and confidence, so the proofreaders need only read with admiration. Too, the choirs never do rehearsals.

I used to say things like this to a Marxist acquaintance, of the old school, with whom I shared a kitchen. We would compare utopias, I with recitations from the Horae Canonicae of W. H. Auden. When he in his turn sang of “scientific socialism,” I would accompany on my metaphysical hurdy-gurdy. A smell of smoke being in the air, I might comment that, “In the perfect world of scientific socialism, that toast would not have burnt.”

He was a Polish-descended mathematician, but with the surname Kaiser; of short stature, with wolfish hairy ears, matching grin, and strangely infernal eyes. I do not know which identifier he made least attractive. I do know he was the usufructuary of the house, in consequence of which I was soon evicted.

The eviction was so entertaining, I cannot resist a telling. It happened of a Friday evening, while he was screening Cuban movies for his comrades, in the living room downstairs. They were raucous in their frequent applause, and drinking a great deal of beer. The toilet being next to my room atop the stairs, the comrades kept choosing the wrong door. To help them select the right one, I painted a red hammer-and-sickle on a large card, but with a tilted thunder-box substituted for the hammer. This I attached to the correct door. On my own, the simple legend: “NOT the bog.”

There was a girl in my room, whom I was sheltering from the communists. She opined that I was doing an unwise thing. But I was quite headstrong in those days, and had barricaded the door.

Dr Kaiser, uttering obscenities on the other side, to the effect that I was an insolent person, summoned several of his mates, and was attempting to stove the door in. We inside were, by way of contrast, trying to pry open a window, with the intention of getting out.

Years later, I returned to the alley behind the house, to see if my memory had accurately reconstructed our escape. It had, and I was pleased with myself. How well I had recalled the precise path, along eave and trough to the roof of the kitchen extension. My girl-friend, an apprentice ballerina, did an elegant leap and roll from there. Mine was more awkward, and I was limping as we ran.

Perhaps gentle reader will wonder what became of my possessions. The room had come furnished, so I did not much care. Some battered books were recovered, by a friend of my friend, but they were few, and several were anyway leftist trash I had obtained only to refute. I did regret what the scientific materialists had done to both volumes of Schweitzer’s Bach, however.

Well, this is perhaps a trivial anecdote, but so are most, and at least it points a moral. Never taunt your enemies; especially when they are more numerous and have been drinking. I have tried to bear that in mind, ever since.

“No, you have to stop now, you’ve run out of space.”

This is a remark I make to myself each day I write an Idlepost, after filling both sides of a foolscap sheet, in the manner of the essayist, “Alain.” But unlike the author of Propos, I cheat. I fill the margins with insertions, especially missing connectives, and when I transcribe my little pieces into a computer, I revise and correct — sometimes even after they are posted. Let me blame the technology, for making this possible.

Yesterday’s Idlepost, for instance, was a foutoir, … une vaste blague, … or as we say in English, a dog’s breakfast. I came within a keystroke of deleting it several times, and was still trying to fix it the next day (i.e. this morning).

An honest man, like Émile-Auguste Chartier (whose Propos d’un Normand was appearing daily in La Dépêche de Rouen, a century ago), would not allow himself to revise one word, once he had written it down. These were “improvisations” after all. Imagine a piano player who repeatedly stops, to back up a few bars and try again. The manager of the bordello in which he is playing will soon replace him.

My hero Doctor Johnson, writing a Rambler essay while a courier waited, was asked by a house guest if he could read the paper before it was taken away. Johnson told him no. “I will not grant you a luxury I have not enjoyed myself.”

Deadlines are deadlines, but beyond them, it would be helpful if paper were a lot more expensive.

Such are my revisions while retyping into the (outrageously free) electronic aether that I cannot even be sure I haven’t shot over the space limit. I look at a sentence which seemed to mean something in script, but by the time I have sorted what I think that was, it has spread to a paragraph. I see it “in print” then realize that two paragraphs were needed; then spot discordant rhythms that have crept in. And that is before I find embarrassing mistakes in spelling and grammar.

But if God had meant me to get anything right on the first try, He would have endowed me with presence of mind. That He didn’t, I have numerous anecdotes to confirm.

Somerset Maugham, whom I could never read for more than one chapter, was memorably generous with writerly advice to the young hacks. As an old one, I still remember, “Spontaneity is what you add in the seventh draught.” At least, I think he said this (I am allergic to looking things up). And, “Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.” Bless the man, for giving me these comforts. But it would have been better to live without them.

In a recent Idlepost I regretted my constant failure to follow my own advice. If one is not on television, or Twitter, he has the opportunity to think first. I should make use of it.

But it could be worse, gentle reader. Were it not for the two-page rule, I might drone on forever. And if I weren’t revising, all the posts would be like this.