Essays in Idleness

During a recent, technologically-imposed Internet famine, I had the healthy experience of not knowing what was in the news for days. Now that it is over, I am again cussing myself for my habits. You see, gentle reader, my history as a news junkie runs deep. Habit keeps me reaching for “the papers,” even when there aren’t any left. I go into withdrawal.

A shameful life, addicted to the news.

By the age of six or seven I was hooked by the broadsheet typography. (Its editor had asked my father to propose a redesign of the Pakistan Times, which he then rejected; but meanwhile what could I do but watch?) I’m not precisely sure of the chronology, but by the time Pope John XXIII died (in 1963) I was saturated with the content, too. I had also started a little weekly myself, called the Comet Express, reproduced in about thirty copies from a gelatin tray, and sold door to door in the Park district of Georgetown, Ontario, for two cents a copy.

It is hard to recover from a tailspin like this. By fourteen I was reading European papers in German, French, and sometimes Italian, with enthusiasm if without competence. I was collecting odd numbers of periodicals from around the world, in any language, to study how they were done. I landed a job as a copy boy on the Globe & Mail (or, Mop & Pail to the insiders). By seventeen I’d reached the summit of my journalistic career, as Women’s and Social Editor of the Bangkok World. It has been downhill from there.

I mention all this by way of Lenten extenuation. Really this addiction to printed matter (or digital, now that I’m reduced to that) began by the age of three, with a fascination for the letter “g.” (A pair of spectacles turned sideways?) I taught myself to read on that account, but should have stuck to books. Journalism has proved a monstrous waste of time, and in the course of the last six decades or so, it has become, physically, very ugly.

My favourite newspaper was the “Fernausgabe” (i.e. foreign edition) of the Swiss daily, Neue Zürcher Zeitung — dull, grey, and ridiculously well-informed. (Then not now.) When men landed on the moon, they kept it off the front page — except an “Inhalt” reference to a longish piece about engineering for lunar gravity, on their “Forschung und Technik” page. There would be more current reports in subsequent days: the newspaper would wait until they were available, rather than print extravagant, sentimental fluff.

They employed more foreign correspondents than the New York Times; and far more specialized “stringers.” All seemed to be learned, and were often allowed thousands of words on obscure topics. The editorial staff was compensatingly small and overworked (I saw the inside of their office once). They did not “shape the news” like American editors; the writers shaped it for them.

An example from memory was a marvellous piece on cinema advertising in Cairo, revealing a guild of talented billboard painters. It offered a glimpse of artistic ideals and temperaments within this exotic bubble of commercial illustration. But if one read attentively, it also foreshadowed transformations in Egyptian society.

Pieces like that might appear somewhere in the Internet today, but we will have to look for them specifically, with some genius for search terms, and no confidence in their authority. Such articles seldom made the papers even then, yet as I say, there was a newspaper that ran them, the plurality of whose readers were German-speaking businessmen. And five paid subscriptions went into the White House, as one of their correspondents once boasted to me; and as many into the Kremlin, where the inmates also “needed to know.”

When the philosopher and scholar, Hans-Georg Gadamer, died in 2002 (at age 102), the good old NZZ devoted eight full (ad-free) pages to his life and thought. I remember this as a last hurrah. It was soon after that the paper was “updated,” to incorporate colour splashes, and progressively strip away whatever remained of unique value. It is obviously desperate to hold a few “modern readers,” who want their news “lite” and frothy.

It will become a sleazy tabloid, living off faded pretensions, like the Times of London; or it will become extinct. For in the absence of intelligent readers, there can be no intelligent journalism — in print, or anywhere.

My title this morning comes from Sir Alexander Fleming, and is one of several of that gentleman’s sayings which appeal to me. It might be taken as the Scots equivalent to, “Eureka!” It was what he uttered the morning he noticed that some fungus had killed off one of the staphylococci colonies he had left on a bench in his notoriously messy lab, when he went on holiday. (The others were unharmed.) Within the month he had isolated the “mould juice” that is known to us today as Penicillin.

As he recalled much later, “I wasn’t planning to revolutionize medicine that morning.” But so it goes.

That discovery was made in September, 1928. It would have been useful in the Great War, when Fleming served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and battled the idiots (field surgeons) over their counter-productive treatments for sepsis, but ah well.

As luck wouldn’t have it, Fleming had unknowingly repeated the work of a certain Ernest Duchesne, whose brilliant thesis long before the War had been ignored by the Pasteur Institute in Paris, because he was young and a nobody. Some millions of deaths might have been averted, but there ye go.

We live in a culture of “research” and “planning.” I’m not against honest research (which is rare), but mortally opposed to “planning.” The best it can ever achieve is defeat, when its ham-fist efforts fail to prevent some beauty, truth, or good from emerging. Countless billions, yanked from the taxpayers’ pockets, and collected through highly professional, tear-jerking campaigns, are spent “trying to find a cure” for this or that. When and if it comes, it is invariably the product of some nerd somewhere, with a messy lab.

Should it be noticed at all, more billions will be spent appropriating the credit to obtain rentier status, or more likely, suppressing it for giving “false hope.” The regulators will be called in, as the police are to a crime scene.

For from the “planning” point of view, the little nerd has endangered billions of dollars in funding, and thus the livelihoods of innumerable bureaucratic drudges. That is, after all, why they retain the China Wall of lawyers: to prevent unplanned events from happening. But glory glory, sometimes they happen anyway.

We could go through my mental file of similar stories from the scientific trenches, then wander more generally afield through the corridors of modern “education.” But not inside my daily word allotment.

I think of Benson Snyder, the psychiatrist once in charge of hand-holding (“human relations”) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. About the time I was coming of age he wrote a saucy tome, entitled, The Hidden Curriculum (1970). It told what it takes to get ahead in places like MIT: the kind of institutional gamesmanship which, far from encouraging learning, drives the genuinely talented away, and makes the world safe for the credentialled.

I think of beloved old J. M. Cameron, who took me up as friend, mentoree, and “unregistered student” at Saint Michael’s College, back in those days. I once asked him directly, after he had been driven out by mandatory retirement, if there was anything all his best students had in common. He answered directly, “They were all self-taught.” In subsequent conversation I received a few mould-juicy anecdotes about how unwelcome they were in the universities, and how quickly most dropped out.

I think the reason our universities were so easily captured by the Leftist filth, was that they had already become institutes of planning; as opposed to education, which is risky and hard and in the fullest Platonic sense, personal.

Among the signs of our time is a poster mounted by a local “educational” institution. (One must use this term very loosely, these days.) The headline reads: “Check Your Privilege,” and in case you don’t know what the long word means, a definition is offered:

“Privilege: Unearned access to social power based on membership in a dominant social group.”

Naturally, one then wonders what the author means by “unearned,” “access,” “social,” “power,” “membership,” “dominant,” and “group.” But that’s only a beginning.

The graphic design is professional, slick, expensive. Underneath this frankly Orwellian statement, we have a “black list” (quite literally, white type reversed from a black rectangle) resembling a Canadian election ballot. There are nine entries, which the viewer is invited to mentally check off:

[  ]  Able-bodied physically and mentally
[  ]  Access to education
[  ]  Christian
[  ]  Cisgender
[  ]  Heterosexual
[  ]  Male
[  ]  Native English speaker
[  ]  Canadian citizen (at birth)
[  ]  White

The list pleased me greatly. I scored nine out of nine!

And here I’d thought I was just some impoverished old git, or rubby-dubby, drummed out of his hack-writing livelihood for sporting “politically incorrect” views, then pestered by leftwing cyberskunks trying to shut me out of the Internet, too.

I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to learn that I am superior to these people in every possible way.

It is instructive, sometimes, rather than tell people what they mean by a word, to ask them. A good example was from my younger son, whom I took on walks, when he was little. (Now he is turning thirty!) His term was waminals. A good father would correct this to “animals,” but I was a bad father. I decided that I preferred waminals, and to this day I retain the prejudice. Animals to you, gentle reader, are waminals to me. The point isn’t really arguable. Animals are; and waminals are just like them except, different.

I assumed, at first, that my boy meant wanimals as opposed to vejtabuls — the animal kingdom of beasts large and small, as opposed to the vegetable kingdom of fwowers, pertatoes, twees, and the like. But then I asked. He meant everything that has legs and walks. Thus to my lad (who is Down syndrome, incidentally), a bider (“spider”) was a waminal, but a fish was not — nor a worm, nor a snake, nor a bird except when landed.

An amphibian, such as a frog (we shared a phoneme for this) was a waminal when out of water but a fish when in. The same for crocodiles. A bird was a waminal, but not in flight. Then it became a burd. Bipedes, such as humans or cats (when batting at things dangled from strings), were as acceptable as quadrupedes. (I’m told the plural is “quadrupedi,” but I don’t care.) Ditto, hexapedes, at least in principle. Of octopedes, he began to express doubts, but only once I told him that, unlike biders, the average octopus likes to stay under water. (We’d seen biders that knew how to walk on it.) Of centipedes, he did not want to know.

He had no concept of evolution by the age of six, and I was careful not to give him one. Instead, he freely accepted metamorphosis. This was especially obvious in the case of ducks, which may mutate from animal, to bird, to fish, at will, and within a few seconds.

I asked him about angels. This he considered to be a new category. “Angles are angles, dad,” he explained, with a theological confidence that left me in awe. And this, just as a fwower is a fwower is a fwower. Some things don’t change, the way my boy could, into a fish. (He won many swimming medals.)

More generally, in the child’s ontological reasoning, a thing is what it is, so that even a duck remains a duck through innumerable transformations. Thus, categories aren’t so important. What kind of duck might be, however, because that is about the duck.

The concept of what is and isn’t an insect had no importance to him at all. And this because he had no concept of “bugs” as a nominal category, only of bugs as an action, a verb. Indeed, as a bloody nuisance. But one should be wary of Wolf Biders, in themselves. It is true, they can both amble and jump (and so might be classed with kangaroos), but the significant point was, they might bite you. Moreover, if they were very large, they might chase you down, then finish eating you entirely. (Here I must admit that I had given him some wrong information about the maximum size of wolf spiders, in the course of a tallish tale.)

Of course animals are scary, or potentially scary, but that is part of the attraction: they are real. The idea of being captured by a Giant Grackle made smaller grackles the more fascinating. Whose babies would they fly away with? He had thought this through, but in a way not quite intelligible to me, because his category for “babies” did not, for instance, include eggs. When I told him there is a baby inside each egg, he took it for a revelation.

“How does the baby get inside?”

It was a good question. I couldn’t answer it. I might have said something stupidly reductive and false, such as, “the mommy makes it.” But my son would have seen right through that. It was eggs, not eggshells, he was asking about.

The outer shell is just so much calcium carbonate, formed to an incredibly high standard of engineering, with countless thousands of precisely gauged pores; the exterior, when decorated, with sublime art. But that’s the easy part. The hard question begins at the cuticle underneath, and grows until it becomes unimaginable. It is about the baby inside. How did it get there?

(By a miracle, of course!)

And there are so many questions, that a child has asked. As we grow older, we forget what they were.

There is no hydrophonic array, up here in the High Doganate, nor have I access to any elsewhere. The kitchen sink sometimes gurgles in an interesting way, but I find no fish in it, nor other signs of life above the microscopic scale. At least, no living fish, for I have overlooked several that were defunct. I think particularly of a tilapia which I dismembered recently. (Perhaps “filleted” is the nicer term.) It sang no songs, made no comments. It started from frozen; it never had a chance. But ah, to be an oceanographer!

I have never had a whale to tea, nor a porpoise, nor any other of that clade. Exigencies of space and altitude are such, that I have neither had the pleasure of those very low-frequency sounds when an ice berg scrapes along an ocean floor; nor the distant “bloops” of underwater ice-quakes; nor the mysterious “upsweeps” of presumed seismicity. I have heard not even one submarine vulcanogenic whistle, up here. Just the gurgle as the dishwater drains.

Hippiesque friends would sometimes import the whale sounds on audio tracks, into their home entertainment centres. Or sometimes, other undersea noises. These were typically “save the whales” types, which is to say, environmental tourists. Even killer whales tend to be shy, when they are not being psychopathically aggressive: either way one should leave them alone. When a marina customer gets attacked by one, I think we should rescue him. We must show some loyalty to our own species. Still, I can see both sides.

I loved travelling, and travellers, in my prime; yet always hated tourists. The person who will immerse himself in the foreign culture, sketch, and try to speak a little of its language, always seemed admirable to me. The true Western visitor is an amateur of anthropology — an “Orientalist” in the smear of the last generation of leftist smuglies. But tourists are mere pleasure seekers. They act only as ambassadors of our post-Christian consumerism. Let me extend this analogy to the voyagers on seas.

Very well, I am being unreasonable. I often am.

The first thing one should seek is discomfort. It is the reliable path to a little understanding. Love is, I hold, the great teacher; but pain is the great teaching assistant.

Among the more intriguing icons of pop science audio is a whale that no one has ever seen. It is known as the “52-hertz,” for it sings above the pitch of any other whale. No one knows what species, either: for it has, as it were, the coloratura of a blue, but the timing of a fin whale. It has been tracked for decades across the North Pacific, and moves just as a whale, and entirely unlike an extraterrestrial object. It may travel a few hundred miles in one season, several thousand in another to Alaska then south, but can’t do bilocation. No one can know how (being a whale) it can hit those exhilarating notes, in the lower range of a tuba.

Were it seeking a mate, it has yet to find one. Perhaps it is deaf, as some deaf mutes suggest. It has been called the “loneliest whale in the world,” but I see no reason to credit this. I am not saying that a whale can’t be subjective, or might even be able to feel sorry for himself — which would not be a sin, in a whale. But loneliness is such a human presumption.

With equal authority let me aver that God endowed this “freak” whale with this wonderful voice, so that God could hear it from on high. And from the deep, it replies in joy.

“If all our medicines were thrown into the sea, it would be better for us, and worse for all the fishes.”

The motto, I believe, is from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior, not to be confused with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior. That is to say, the doctor and author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, and not the jurisprude. My mama, who was the daughter of Oliver Wilbur Holmes (and the illustrious Annie Graham!) liked to quote it. Now, she was a nurse, indeed a ward matron, and knew whereof she spoke. Avoid medication, she advised, and moreover:

“Never put anything in your ear smaller than your elbow.”

She had other bonmots, but they were more eccentric. The general purport was, leave well enough alone, and be patient in waiting for the heat death of the universe.

Another word for this is, “conservative.” As I have pointed out myself, the more one knows about a subject, the more conservative one becomes towards it. Conversely, the less one knows, the more liberal he becomes, and inclined to embrace “progress” and “reforms.” Even a Communist may prove a very conservative stamp collector, once he learns something about philately. It’s only economics he knows nothing about.

This is a universal principle. Everyone knows something about something, and is very backward on that which he knows. The one exception may be journalists, who know nothing about anything, and are therefore liberal all round.

Now, what has this to do with Welshmen? Very little, I suspect. But it is Saint David’s Day (a.k.a. St Taffy’s) though the fact isn’t mentioned in my Saint Andrew’s Missal. And here I am in your presence again, after an unwanted holiday, during which I passed through the various rings of cybernetic hell. I promised to be back by the first of March, and here I am with dragons: Bwahaha!

I will take the Dydd Gŵyl Dewi for a name day, though truth to tell, I was not named for a Cymri, but for King David of Alba, in the 800th year of his decease. (I would mention the Psalmist, but have no dates.) Everyone should have a name day, which is why it is so important to name your children after Christian saints, not stars of stage and screen. Too, one should try to spell them properly, in at least one language.

And everyone should be allowed some self-indulgence on his name day.

Truth to tell: I’m a little dazed after my recent experience of this world in which, “everything is changing.” Hence the incoherence of my philosophy today (with apologies to Al-Ghazali). But my main point stands, and pray for all the fishes.

I continue to be comprehensively indisposed. Yet I am resolved upon a return to fairly regular publication by Saint David’s Day, which is to say, Thursday the 1st of March. We will see then what my resolutions are worth.

Meanwhile, gentle reader is reminded that one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight earlier Idleposts continue to be archived. “Enjoy!” — as the uploaders of literary trifles like to say, in our smooth and smugly way.

Bear with me, O gentle reader, while I suffer a general computer breakdown, in both its hardware and software aspects.

Bear with me, O gentle correspondents, as my “unanswered” pile grows deeper.

Bear with me, O gentle patrons, as I endeavour to fix the banking arrangements.

Bear with me, O Lord, for reasons Thou knowest too well.

As a general instruction to observers: bear with me.

Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, as the Carthusians say.

A weaver woman will require five daughters; six if she is quick. This is the number of spinning wheels, to keep a loom busy. The information comes from my special correspondent, who qualifies it in an important way. Cloth-weaving methods have changed over the last two or three centuries, she tells me. (So the daughters can all be aborted now.) Truth to tell, the methods had “evolved” before that, and the spinning wheel itself was breaking news, to the hand-spinners of the thirteenth century. Too, it should be mentioned, there are different kinds, such as the charkas that enchanted me in my (Pakistani) childhood.

Well, that’s enough education for this morning, I can hardly keep up. The world of textile production is mostly closed to me, though my curiosity strays into unfamiliar places. Skills, I have none, as I was recently reminded, while trying to sew a button on a cardigan; a button that had only come off because I had put it on, the last time. Knitting — an admirable trait in a girl, if you ask me, and a fascinating thing to watch — remains beyond my comprehension. The darning of a sock, which my mama once explained, now seems a matter of metaphysical complexity. By embroidery, I am utterly astounded.

Hence, perhaps, my views will be received with a grain of salt. I am of the opinion that the hand-crafts of home and “cottage industry” were a terrible loss.

They are certainly “inefficient” by the modern definition, which assumes a pure cash economy, and infinitesimal divisions of labour, the way they have in Hell.

Quite apart from the heartache of which she sings, to the mesmeric rhythm of wheel and treadle, Gretchen am Spinnrade is wasting her time. Her Faust is lost, and she with him, but really it doesn’t matter any more. Everything today is replaceable — partly because the easiest way to increase production is to sacrifice quality. Why should pleasure be found, in any of the works of human hands? It can’t be quantified.

We have today those who still knit, as a tension-reducing hobby. There are even those who still weave, or I met one from an art school, thirty years ago. None would claim to be cutting corners on a household budget; which, when one thinks about it, adds a dimension of meaning that is also lost. Anything you want can now be had for cheap from Walmart, and the tee-shirts can be “personalized” with a funny message.

I’m sure that the inventors and investors of what we call for short the Industrial Revolution were not, or not always, bad men. I read, for instance, A Memoir of Edmund Cartwright (1843), in which I found myself almost cheering for the fellow. The power machinery he designed for weaving and combing was done on a whim. Someone told him it couldn’t be done, so he set to work. He knew, to start, as little as I do about this “trade.” The destruction of a way of life, across the north of England and then around the world, was no part of his intention. But having achieved that, he lost interest, and moved on to his next invention.

Let me say that I am haunted by the ease of it, at every stage.

A great deal of false history was written, by people who never strayed north of London, about working-class hardship in those parts. Yes, there was plenty, but what we get from the entrepreneurs of socialism is twisted to their agitprop needs. Rewriting the history, to make it more true, makes another nice hobby; and in the course of it we discover that the ugliest of the capitalists often did less damage than the philanthropists.

But all were involved in the extraction of joy from life, merely for the sake of diminishing some sorrow.

____________

While writing this Idlepost, I could not help but hear four loud cracks. Gunshots, I reflected; around here, one learns to distinguish them from firecrackers. And sure enough, the police eventually arrived. (Parkdale is not high in their priorities.) Was just chatting with one of these gentlemen in the hallway: very polite, and diligent in making his notes. And more informative than most. They have the smoking gun, as it were, and three spent cartridges (I had heard four, and insisted that I can count that high). But they seem to be missing both a shooter and a body — a serious inconvenience, I would think, when investigating a violent crime. Will have to check the hospitals, he supposes.

Not that any of this is directly relevant to what I wrote, above. But I do suspect an indirect relation.

′My chief Clan Donald correspondent reminds me that, in addition to Shrove Tuesday, today is the 326th anniversary of the massacre of the Jacobites at Glencoe. British soldiers, billeted by force of law, but received with generous hospitality, rose in the night to murder their hosts; and many women and children then died of exposure when their cottages were torched and possessions impounded.

It was one of many similar incidents in Scotland and Ireland, as the illegitimate regime of William and Mary consolidated its power against the Stuart loyalists, but has been remembered as among the most satanic. There was some subsequent official inquiry, but this was limited when King William’s signature was discovered among the orders, and so the conclusion had to be that any Highland chieftains got what they deserved. They were “lawless,” by the official account, and although they had signed oaths of allegiance to the new Orange co-regency, they had not done so quickly enough. Moreover, most of those chieftains were Catholic, and thus held to be implicitly opposed to aggressive Protestant interlopers.

Of course, the story is told differently by the Orangemen of Ulster, and in the propaganda for that self-styled “Glorious Revolution” — to which I remain unalterably opposed, as to all worldly revolutions. But the facts speak for themselves, of the dark deeds by which the English-speaking world was put on the path to “democracy” and “progress” and all the other modernist fatuities.

The story of the Mort Ghlinne Comhann was revived in the spirit of Victorian romanticism, paradoxically in response to a cold retelling by that seedy old Whig, Thomas Babington Macauley — the primer of every raw English schoolboy, as Lord Acton called him. But I should like to depart at an angle from this.

The song I will flag instead this morning is that scarifying Gaelic number, O Nach Éisdeadh (performed rather jauntily, here). It conveys the frank “lawlessness” of the Highlands, most featly. Follow the words carefully, for they are of timely significance, and theological resonation — now, on the very eve of Lent.

____________

I append an interlinear translation, in case gentle reader’s Scotch Gaelic is rusty. The opening triplet repeats after each distich:

O nach éisdeadh tu ′n sgeul le aire
— (Oh that you would listen to the tale attentively)
Dh’innse ′n éifeachd tha′n réit′ na fal
— (To tell of the efficacy that is in atonement by blood)
O nach éisdeadh tu ′n sgeul le aire
— (Oh that you would listen to the tale attentively)

Chuirinn impidh ort thu ghrad philltinn
— (I implore you to turn back quickly)
M′am bi thu millt, o gabh suim dha d′anam
— (Before you are destroyed, oh take care for your soul)

Sluagh gun chùram, tha′n dorus dùint′ orr′
— (Careless people, the door is closed on them)
′S tha claidheamh rùisgt′ air a chùl dha′m faire
— (And there is a naked sword behind it to watch them)

Sluagh gun àireamh ′nan seasamh làmh ris
— (People without number, standing near him)
Ach ′s daor a thàinig thu ghràidh dha′n ceannach
— (But it was at great cost that you came, love, to redeem them)

Ni Nicodemus is a chéile
— (Nicodemus, and his partner)
′S Manasseh féin fuil na réit a ghlanadh
— (And Manasseh himself can be washed in the blood of atonement)

(REEL)

Faic an t-óigear rinn ′fhuil a dhòrtadh
— (See the young man who spilt his blood)
Do pheacaich mhór thainig beò tre ′ghlanadh
— (For great sinners who came alive though his cleansing)

Cluinn thu tàirneanach beinn Shinài
— (Hear the thundering of Mount Sinai)
Tha bagraidh bàis ′g iarraidh làn de pheanas
— (Death threatens, asking for full penance)

Ma tha thu ad′bhantraich, ′s e féin is ceann ort
— (If you are widowed, he is at your head)
Cur séile teann ann am bonn a gheallaidh
— (Putting a firm seal on the trueness of his promise.)

(REEL)

It is no secret, at least from me, that I have spent an unconscionable amount of time lately reading everything I could get my beady eyes upon, about the Uists. They are Isles from where such as my own maternal ancestors were launched upon the New World, in waves slapped by the Highland Clearances. The North American obsession with genealogy is not quite my thing. Rather it is an enchantment with these Isles themselves, which to this day aren’t entirely “modern.”

My (Presbyterian) people were from North Uist (as mentioned, here). Had they lived a few miles to the south — a short walk, but some of it across dangerous tidal quicksands — they would have been the other side of the Hebridean demographic frontier into Roman territory. And I, as a consequence, might have been a Cradle Catholic, instead of the Zealous Convert I became. Or rather, I couldn’t possibly have existed, nor my parents nor my children, so particular is the action of Providence.

On the faith-notion that anything which allowed me to exist were a Good Thing, I might as well take the history as it stands, and even the vicious Clearances as felix culpas. (Catholics were often targeted. The detested absentee landlady of South Uist, Emily Gordon Cathcart, prim Protestant of Aberdeen, when she ran out of sheep, had the Catholics of Askernish evicted for a golf course at the world’s end; others elsewhere cleared from family tenancies they had held since MacAdam to make hunting parks, where there was no game.)

Nothing can justify the evils of the past, let alone the fresh ones. Nor can history authoritatively guide us on how to do things, for the best.

Or perhaps it can. Perhaps there are good ways to put things in God’s order. Perhaps sometimes we get an example. For here is one that has come to my attention, thanks to my idle reading and correspondence.

In the ’fifties, the British Ministry of Defence proposed to turn most of the Hebridean Isle of South Uist into a missile testing range. This was naturally opposed by its Catholic inhabitants, who had resentments enough stored over the centuries, yet were only a couple thousand left, against the monstrous power of a centralized, bureaucratic State. They convened informally, in prayer and discussion, until they hit upon a response.

Putting all their small moneys together, they commissioned an immense granite statue (30 feet high) of Our Lady of the Isles, from the sculptor Hew Lorimer. … (Brilliant!)

The face he chose as his model for Our Lady was that of a local crofting woman: a magnificent face, conveying love, and defiance. And the baby Jesus rising in her arms, making a sign of peace which, from the rear, might be mistaken for a rude gesture. It was erected on the west slope of the mount, Rueval, to face down the site of the MoD barracks. … (Take that!)

We cannot know what the bureaucrats thought. We can only know what they did. The missile range was adjusted, to preserve ancient local villages and habitats, but still went ahead. Many soldiers were brought to the Isle (which had a man shortage, as many fishing communities do) for the missile testings. But many of these rough, unwanted tommies fell in love with Uist, and with its maidens. They married, settled, Poped, learnt the Gaelic (the Uist accent is exceptionally soft and musical).

They still test missiles there, but politely. And the word gets out so the people can gather, and watch, and have a big cèilidh. Everything turned out well for everyone.

In the words of my informant, “Our Lady did as she was asked.”

Peter Hitchens is one of the few pundits to whom I am addicted. His backhanded praise, and forehanded dismissal of Jordan Peterson in the Spectator (here), is the best thing I’ve seen on Greater Parkdale’s now world-famous cult leader. He purports to envy Peterson’s many YouTube successes, and laments market failure in his own persona, as Prophet of Doom. I have long regretted the greater attention given to Peter’s late brother Christopher Hitchens, whose bestselling brand of Trotskyite Neoconservativism was remorselessly shallow. Peter has occasional depths.

I have been repeatedly asked for my own opinion of Peterson, and have repeatedly offered what I call “enthusiastically faint praise.” That is, I celebrate his courageous, in-yer-face resistance to the witches and warlocks at the local University, and love watching him destroy his enemies in electronic gladiator duels. I would gladly bestow a “KC” on him (my award for “kamikaze of the culture wars”). I would not call him a Reactionary, however: my highest decoration. (Below Saint and Martyr, but I leave those recognitions to Holy Church).

And this because, he is actually a liberal. A good old-fashioned one, to be sure, with much sensible advice I remember from my own late beloved father. Should we peel his outer porcupine layer, as we might shell a rambutan, we find soft and delectable meat inside — just the thing if, like a contemporary university student, one is lost in the woods and searching for a survival food. (Awkward to handle but easy to catch; I have a campfire recipe for porcupine, with chestnuts.)

He is not, and does not claim to be, Christian. His lectures on biblical texts are Jungian blather — the man was after all trained as a shrink — but not maliciously so. He is a diligent independent reader, however, of a shortlist of standard Western classics, who can be no more intimidated by the Lit majors than he is by the campus gestapo, and this is hugely to his credit. He is a man who sincerely seeks truth, wherever he finds it lurking, so I wouldn’t say he won’t end up Catholic; but for the foreseeable future he is a good old-fashioned liberal, fallen upon these evil days.

And a godsend to his students, if only for the example he puts before them of a man with brains and guts. My own impression, of the generation he is teaching, is of heartbreaking loss. Even those who don’t come from broken homes, give the impression that they do, and the few who come to higher education with any store of basic education were self-taught. Many are quite smart, of course, but that is a gift of nature. They can be outwardly annoying in their hormonal attraction to various activist lunacies, but if you get one separated from the mob, you may find some touching humility. Even the worst are often not really bad. Lost, rather. But by the time they are processed to the mortar board, too many have been found, by the devil.

I do not wonder at the avalanche of fan mail under which Peterson groans. (He looks sleep-deprived.) He is playing father to thousands, especially of these orphan-boys, and sometimes also to the orphan-girls. They’d never seen a man before, and now that they have, they would like to meet another. This is all to the good.

He is a light, I gather, chiefly to the males; to the females less directly. The modern girl has little use for the modern boy, except to fetch things; she rightly condemns him for being both a wuss and an insensitive oaf (while remaining blind to her own deficiencies). She longs for something more like a knight, though may settle for a worm or a thug in frustration. She wants a man, and Professor Peterson is at least trying to increase the supply. God must love him for that.

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From a former Peterson groupie in California: “He is building a cargo cult. He looks at Christendom and wants meaning back. He is ignorant of where it came from. So he tries rebuilding the symptoms without the cause. He rejects nihilism but has nothing solid to put in its place. So bamboo runways and air traffic control towers spring up. Young men deprived of the civilization we have lost think it is great, but unless they turn to Christ, it will be as useless as a bamboo runway.”

Among the more difficult acts for a contemporary Catholic is to pray for the betrayers of the Church, in places like Rome. Cardinal Zen, the retired bishop of Hong Kong — one of my living heroes, for his honesty and steadfastness — put this well in a statement about Cardinal Pietro Palorin, the Vatican secretary of state; and the papal press spokesman, Greg Burke. Both had glibly “spun” Cardinal Zen’s powerful words against the accommodation the Vatican is now making with the regime in Peking — in the course of which they defamed him.

“Yesterday not a few individuals came to see me or telephoned me to offer me some comfort, following the accusation made against me by the spokesman for the Vatican. But they have misunderstood, because I do not need to be comforted. It would have been better for them to have gone to comfort that spokesman. He is the one who is a caged bird, forced to perform such an embarrassing rôle.”

The Vatican is currently betraying its own faithful bishops of the clandestine Church in China. In order to improve relations with the Communist dictatorship, they are being publicly “retired” and replaced by appointees of the regime, who had been excommunicated under previous popes. Now, those faithful are instructed to bow before these sell-outs. This, in my view, is an obscenity. The excuse from Rome is that it will make life for Catholics in China more comfortable. True, they must live in a cage; but the cage will be larger.

Cardinal Zen asks: Who is in the cage? Is it the man who speaks the truth, and worships in freedom, at risk of arrest? Or the man who parrots sophistries, from a position of luxurious safety? (Zen called Parolin directly, “A man of little faith.”) Those who have never endured real suffering in this world, pretend that they are doing the persecuted a favour, when it is their own convenience they are serving.

It is not the sort of favour Christ ever did. He expected persecution, and told us to endure. “Before they hated you, they hated me.” He promised that the Comforter will come, in our hour of need: “Even the Spirit of Truth.”

From Rome, we must also listen to Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, who after a quick mainland tour as guest of the Chinese politburo, has praised the regime for implementing the social doctrine of the encyclical Laudato Si’, and supporting the Paris Climate Accord — drawing invidious comparisons to the USA where there are shantytowns, the young are on drugs, and President Trump is manipulated by multinational oil companies. One can only wonder if this comical stooge is on drugs himself.

Here is the Christian paradox: that real comfort comes from a clean conscience, and discomfort from a dirty one. And the greatest comfort, for a life well-lived, is to part it without the burden of grave sin. We pray to be relieved, ourselves, from temptation — something profound that is lost on the faithless. We do not pray to get away with sin, or be “accompanied” by priests in our wrongdoing.

And so it makes sense to pray for our enemies, particularly those within the Church. They need help which only Christ can give. Our condemnation of them is little use to the self-condemned. Pray rather, that they wake to their peril.