Essays in Idleness

The piece I wrote in Catholic Thing today (here), which had to be held over from my usual Friday (I had forgotten that yesterday would be Right to Life March in Washington), has already proved incomprehensible to more than one reader. Indeed, an editor described it as, “nosebleed high.” I was just rereading it, up here in my ivory tower, with my guest for morning coffee, who was Nicolaus Cusanus (1401–64).

It was he who wrote the treatise, De Docta Ignorantia (“On Learned Ignorance”), which says something similar but in at least 50,000 more words. The thesis, over-simply, is that our inquiries into nature and supernature must be girded about with real humility. We should pursue reason with every instrument in our toolbox, but we should also remain constantly aware of their, and our limitations. The truly learned man will be, because he must be, a learned ignoramus.

(There is more to it than this, for Nicolaus has built a system from his ignorance, but to go further I should have to fling about terms like theologia negativa, and coincidentia oppositorum, and names like Pseudo-Dionysus and Eriugena, and take more flak from aggressive lowbrows.)

Though a figure of the late Middle Ages, when scholasticism had deteriorated into verbal gamesmanship, he is generally counted as a Renaissance thinker, aspiring to wrap some flesh back around the driest philosophical bones. He personally enjoyed much preferment in the Church (becoming bishop and cardinal and a grand canon lawyer), which these days is a reason to suspect anybody. Worse, his works seem not even to have been very controversial, another bad sign.

But as he was saying to me this morning (between the lines) that is because his contemporaries were fools, and some of the brightest among them were emotional (warmed-over Meister Eckhart) “mystics,” straying into the genuinely irrational. They didn’t really care what he said, or what anyone said, who lacked the populist, “New Age” flavour (that led to the Reformation). We forget that the latter-day gnosticism that our own more sober heads decry, will always need thorough denunciation; that it offers an easy way out to any serious thinking, and is implicitly false.

That does not change the hard fact that in thinking through high theological questions (or “modern scientific” ones for that matter), we are boxed into our finitude. The most important things we can’t know, by our own efforts, whether we might ourselves be Thomists, Scotists, Post-Structuralists, whatever.

When it comes to something off every possible chart — God, specifically — we can only know what we are told. This is the point I was making; the point shared, I think, even by such encompassing thinkers as Origen, or Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, or every other Catholic Christian great. (Notice how I slighted that know-it-all, Luther.)

One may, of course, reject Revelation (and go to Hell for it). Or one may accept the Revelation of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on His own (“catholic”) terms, and act accordingly. But any way you look at it, the choice is finally between this Revelation, and the Total Cosmic Blank. Christian faith goes beyond — far beyond — the rational arguments of any philosophers. It is not on the level of an intellectual conclusion, but that of an all-encompassing premiss. Faith even precedes reason!

Ideas may have consequences, for all I know. (I don’t see many examples.) But this premiss has a consequence, that is life or death. It is not only on the question of abortion, but on every conceivable question, that we must Choose Life.

Here is a question I don’t understand, although I do know the answer. It is, elephants.

The question came up in some interview I was watching, with a certain Julie Fowlis, the Scottish Gaelic singer (and piper, and tin-whistler) on whom I have a huge crush. She was fielding questions from an audience of Gaelic music enthusiasts, and the last question was, in its entirety, “Pineapples or elephants?”

The lady needed no time to consider. “Elephants,” she replied.

Perhaps some reader will explain the matter to me. I hope not. I’d rather be kept in the dark, although I shall confess some secret curiosity about the intention of the question.

The singer comes from North Uist, from where my own mother’s people came, to the New World, and specifically to Cape Breton, thanks to the Highland Clearances — when the question was, “People or sheep?” Or let me be pretentious and call it Uihbst a Tuath, which from my extremely ignorant knowledge of Gaelic might be translated, “North Womb.” She was raised in a home where Gaelic was still spoken, as by a miracle it still is in those parts.

One could see Uihbst a Tuath from Cape Breton, were it not for the curvature of the Earth. It is just across the water. My Grandmother Annie (“Nana” for short) could see it, could see through anything like that, as she bounced me on her knee, whenas I was little, and she sang Gaelic songs. (Ascended, 1962.) She could see dead people, but what is more she could see live people, too: I shouldn’t doubt that she is watching now. (Indeed, my other grandmother could do this, even though she was English from Devonshire.)

Now, Nana would also reply to questions, without overmuch burdening her answers. I have mentioned before once asking her, “Nana, how many languages do you speak?” She replied, as a good Canadian, “I speak both of our national languages, Latin and Gaelic.” (Then when I observed that she spoke English, too, she fulsomely denied it.)

This is an attitude that is wrongly called, Celtic. It cannot be right because there is no such thing as Celtic, and there never was such a thing. It is an entirely imaginary race, invented by academics a few generations ago, who obviously did not have Gaelic grandmothers. Moreover, it was the opposite of a whimsical, Gaelic idea. Rather, it was deadly, like all race cults. The victims of this grave imposture still stalk our Celtic Studies departments, which are like Women’s Studies, only worse.

The truth is that the folk of Brythony in Gaul, of Dumnonia, of Cambria beyond the coal fields, and Hibernia beyond the Pháil, of the Islands and Highlands above Caledonia, all came from faeries.

But returning to Julie Fowlis, I love the way she refers not to her people, but to persons in the inabstract. How she steps aboard nobody’s sleigh. I love the way she refers to her husband, and to her childers, and though a megastar in that “Celtic” infirmament, has a babe in her arms through an audio recording, who would not sleep otherwise. She held the wee thing carefully away from the microphone, lest it pick up the snoring.

There are still some women in this world, I reflect.

She is not spoilt, she is not puffed and “pleated” — I mean pucker’d and crimp’d — as some other stars. She is just herself. This is a quality I have come to admire, the more as it has become rarer, especially among those who deal with “the masses,” as we all must do in modern city life. A human is a Being and not a Becoming: somehow we have forgotten this.

We are elephants, and not pineapples, in that sense.

As I was just writing to my Chief Texas Correspondent: “Damn. Greater Parkdale has made the shortlist for the new five-billion-dollar Amazon HQ. We will have to do something to stop this. Or we’ll have another 50,000 aliens moving in, and no [impious expression] way to deport them.”

Imagine, having one’s city overrun by what are colloquially called [another impious expression]. Or having to move to, say, Ottawa, to get away from the Lefties.

Verily, we are the only remaining candidate not in the Natted States Merica. Perhaps we could send a delegation to Seattle, in case they have overlooked this fact. Recommend they build it in Atlanta, or some other city we utterly despise, such as Austin, or Chicago. We could point to the death-trap of Canadian taxes. Or the prejudice against bald people up here. I could include pictures of Inner Parkdale. Maybe organize a million-man commentariat of Greater Parkdalians to trash the company on Twitter. “We don’t want yer durty stinken jobs. We’re happy with our own single-payer system.”

Or why don’t they put it in the middle of any American city that has been governed by the Democrats for at least thirty years? You know, some real dive, like Baltimore, or Detroit. There’ll be lots of empty space, downtown, and they can buy off the councillors cheaply. (Unfortunately, those cities were among the first to drop off the Amazon list.)

Bring back FIRA! … (This was the “Foreign Investment Review Agency” that the elder Trudeau created, to stop foreigners from investing in Canada. I never realized how necessary it was.)

This is a serious environmental concern. Amazon is, after all, the major cause of climate change. Everything they sell exudes carbon dioxide, and as we now know, all this excess exhalation is bringing back the Ice Age. Which is all very well if you want to ice over Los Angeles, or New York, but please:

Not In My Back Yard!

There is a way to test your conscience, to see if it is working properly. Ask it repeatedly for judgements on such as, what you want to do tonight. If it decides, consistently, that what you want can be justified, it is not working. You must get it fixed — and soon, before it gives a dead reading on something important. Unless, tonight is important. Check local churches for availability of priests; but don’t wait till it is fixed to go to Confession.

I think my own conscience was working fairly well when I left home, decades ago; but it was a cheap post-Protestant model, which soon fritzed. Within a few years I was getting almost no charge from it whatever. I got it fixed, eventually — entirely overhauled with new parts — but it still gives me trouble. The alarm only sounds at audible volume in the most extreme cases. On many little daily challenges, it is nearly mute. I need the spiritual equivalent of a hearing aid to pick up the soft siren.

To the lasting regret of the more serious Catholics — however many are left — Rome Central has been telling us to follow our consciences, on one issue after another, using ripe old terms of art, such as “discernment” and “the  internal forum,” as opposed to e.g. the old hippie phrase, “If it feels good, do it.” Having worked ourselves into the inescapable corner, tied ourselves in the Gordian knot, we are invited to trust our heart for a way out of the mess we have created. But that is how we got into the mess in the first place. “For the heart is deceitful above all things,  and desperately wicked.”

“Who can know it?”

And what if you do know that your conscience isn’t working, but don’t want it fixed? Just want the setting moved from “No” to “Yes” with the help of a priest, so you can have things both ways, as you are used to having them. So you will not even have to queue for an annulment, which is so embarrassing. (Something might come up, that no one needs to know!)

Why can’t we just cut to the chase? Lots of other people do! And they, after all, aren’t nearly so holy as we know that we are, thanks to our “discernment.” We actually want to take Communion! Surely that should jump us to the front of the line.

But we have drifted to a place where no priest can help us, because none has authority any more. The priests themselves are instructed to “go along to get along,” and are more likely to be reprimanded for doing their job, than for neglecting it. Refusing Communion to unrepentant public sinners would be a good example of what that job once included, or in Canon Law, still includes.

The path of least resistance leads to no resistance. The unaided, uncalibrated conscience will, pretty much invariably, find you an excuse. Or more precisely, you find the excuse yourself; the conscience merely lets it pass.

For twenty centuries it has been, or was, the position of the Church, that only a conscience correctly formed in the received teaching, from Christ through his Apostles, could be counted as reliable. We had (still have) catechisms and canons to spell those teachings out. They were manuals which could be used to test if your conscience were working; or in an emergency, to fix it yourself.

Yes, we are in a mess. But it was quite foreseeable. Verily, it was foreseen.

The replacement of generative married sex with childless mutual masturbation had been an issue for some time. This was the controversy over contraception. If even married “heterosexuals” are doing it, then what of the others? Fornication within marriage is what contraception sets up. This was nailed bravely in Humanae Vitae, yet even as it was published, it was being laughed off. If the door of “conscience” could be opened to fornication thus, it could be opened to fornication of every other kind, as the document itself anticipated. It is no surprise that, for instance, the “gay mafia” in the Vatican are so determined to displace Pope Paul’s one gem: for the “gay revolution” proceeds through the same doctrinal hole. Everything becomes “a matter of conscience.” And instead of “grace everywhere,” we have the laughter of hyenas.

But did you know? That mocking laughter, which echoes down the corridors from 1968, proves that conscience isn’t working, and hasn’t been working for a long time.

There is a silly controversy going on in the Province of Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, about the “minimum wage.” I would explain the controversy, as it plays around Greater Parkdale, but the risk of boring gentle reader is too great.

I wrote “silly,” because governments (like the one we have in the Province of Ontario), raise the minimum wage by legislation, knowing full well that this will sabotage the interests of the poor. Their more intelligent propagandists also know this. They price the poor out of the low and entry-level jobs, thus hurrying their replacement by robots. They push other wages down, towards the lowest common denominator. They dump people into welfare dependency (culling their numbers through subsidized abortions). Those who keep their jobs lose sundry benefits including working conditions as their employers try to soften the fiscal hit. Whatever costs cannot be recovered from the employees directly, are passed along to consumers. The inflationary pressure is thus focused upon just those cheap goods the poor buy. And so forth. Innumerable economic studies have demonstrated the effects, which are almost entirely negative for people, though closer to a wash for faceless corporations.

But you cannot be a successful politician without realizing that most of your electoral clients are slow in reasoning, and poorly informed; that they can be suckered with plausible-sounding speeches. “The peeple” are also morally degenerate, thanks to the collapse of family and religion, and thus easy marks for appeals to low motives, such as envy and spite.

Take, for first example, the millions who buy lottery tickets. They cannot afford it, and are betting against incredible odds. But the idea of getting rich, without effort, and thumbing their noses at their imagined oppressors, goads them on. It is an extremely effective way to tax the poor, and with their full cooperation.

A great deal of supposed “health” and “environmental” legislation is in the same category. It increases costs-of-living disproportionately for the poor, while subsidizing the smug who buy the “organic” and “sustainable” high-end items. The whole fraudulent business of “global warming” involves strapping down the poorest, while creating economic opportunities for investors in Big.

Every progressive income tax is shot through with loopholes, that benefit the richest, at the expense of the poorly-lawyered. A flat-rate tax, without gimmicks, would actually shift the burden upwards, as credible economists have repeatedly demonstrated.

Which is why every advocate for a position that would actually benefit the lesser-incomed, or widen their freedom actually to choose (goods, services, schools, medical, everything), gets smeared. And why fashion, not only in clothing but ideology — the “cool” factor animating each progressive generation — consistently assists the wealthy and secure, in their exploitation and diminution of their inferiors. (It is no accident that Wall Street and Silicon Valley vote overwhelmingly Democrat.)

The big negotiate with each other; the small seek scraps. This has been the way of the world, and will be. Large corporations do not lobby for the interests of small family-business competitors. Neither do big unions. Small companies cannot afford to lobby at all. Which is why the tax departments treat them like oatmeal.

Which is not to say little people are good, and big people bad. They are all bad, I am only saying that the small are smaller.

Contemporary life is made the more poisonous, however, by the standardization and professionalization of hypocrisy. Through advertising of many kinds at every media level, we are bombarded by something worse than “fake news.” It is fake empathy, dolloped by the self-serving.

Against which genuine, personalized charity is the only effective weapon. Use it.

It is often said that, in the event of total economic collapse, gold will be useless because you can’t eat it. Horde beans instead. I must have taken this to heart because, up here in the High Doganate, I keep a good supply of yellow split peas, lentils, dried egg noodles, rice, and most important, tea. Should the electricity still be running, I’d be able to last for weeks until help arrived from an unexpected source, that had been hiding behind the planet Neptune.

Notwithstanding, gold has a fine glitter, and even if I were feeling quite hungry, I might still idly stoop to collect some stray gold eagle or krugerrand that had fallen in the street; some little scattering of gold sovereigns; any old ducats or florins, mohurs or nomismata that some despairing coin collector had tossed; even malformed lumps of gold bullion. You never know, someone might want it.

Let it also be said that you can eat it. Visit a Bengali sweet shop and observe, that gold and silver can be beaten so thin, they makes edible wraps for candy. The Magic Oven in East Parkdale does a pizza with gold flakes for customers of a certain temperament; and I’ve read of a Manhattan truck that offers a “Douche Burger” for $666. This is Kobe beef with foie-gras stuffing, under gruyere melted in champagne steam, topped with caviar, truffles, lobster, and a kopi luwak barbecue sauce (made from the coffee-berry excrement of Indonesian palm civets). But where’s the gold, gentle reader is asking? It comes wrapped in a (gluten-free) gold foil.

Too much fuss and bother, I judge. Me, I will stick with ground lamb under oka, in a buttermilk bun. Condiments would ruin it.

Now, I’ve drifted from this morning’s topic, which is crypt currencies. These may be distinguished from crypto-currencies by their density. Gold is the chief one, to the point of being a satchel-carriage problem, at more than half an Imperial tonne per cubic foot. Even silver, at around seven hundred pounds, makes it hard to run when the cops arrive. And you’ll need lots of friends for a platinum heist.

Diamonds I leave out of this account, for although much lighter (at a half cubic foot, one could almost lift the bag), they are individuals. I want something that can be melted down.

It is true that the price-value of precious metals can be volatile. This became much truer when they were formally demonetized, and I could no longer exchange my small banknote earnings for real silver dollars. (You could do that dollar-for-dollar at any Canadian bank, when I was a kid.) But when monetized on a large scale (as gold, internationally, at the height of the gold standard) they become remarkably stable.

I am of the old school in several ways (more every day), and of course, people like me demand a return to that very gold standard, which did not survive the Keynesian circus after World War One. We think the ideal rate of inflation is 0.0 percent. We are extremely naïve.

In theory, I could accept a currency backed by some mixed basket of commodities, that honest bankers could adjust to maintain constant transaction values. This could be done over a long period, were men always honest, and their motives always pure. In practice, I don’t trust the creatures. The difficulty with any fancy proposal, is that it is fancy. Whereas, gold is so simple. You have it or you don’t.

Now, crypto-currencies are intentionally complicated, so that if you want to “mine bitcoin” on computers in your basement, you can also heat your house. They are ridiculously volatile, so that lottery tickets might be the better bet. Or Dutch tulip bulbs, now that the market for them has settled.

The Swiss Federal Council has ruled, that bitcoin cannot rightly be called a pyramid or ponzi scheme, because there is no promise of profit. They called it instead a “collective delusion.” Many of these work, while the delusion lasts. But all end in tears.

Whereas, crypt currencies could be exhumed from the grave, and go right back to work, status-quo-ante.

According to some talking head in a video, there are probably only a hundred people in the world today who can read, write, and speak Latin fluently. I am certainly not one of them. But as my mind wandered among my friends, I counted a dozen or so who can do that in Greater Parkdale alone. And I cannot claim to know everyone in this city. It contains so many ethnic neighbourhoods, perhaps one of them is Ancient Roman. There are several thousand Tibetan speakers within half-a-mile of the High Doganate; who says it is impossible? And note: Tibetan is a harder language to learn than Latin.

So I think we will have to revise the estimate upwards. True, Latin has been in decline, these last ten centuries or so, but as my hero Edmund Burke explained to that nasty whig, Edward Gibbon, there is a lot of rot in any civilization. It takes a long time to flatline completely. Meanwhile, let its enemies dread a revival.

My high-school Latin teacher, the beloved Jessie Glynn, and her colleague Esther Blaney — who prattled fluently in Latin in the corridors — taught as if it could happen tomorrow. One ought to be ready. Truth to tell, it still hasn’t happened, yet their shades would agree that the nineteen in twenty thousand who dropped Latin the instant it was reduced to an “elective” in the Ontario curriculum of 1968, made a serious mistake. Indeed, look at them now: tedious lives, inarticulate even in English, and cannot quote a single line from Horace.

The video, linked by Father Zed, was about the still-living Latinist, Reginald Foster, OCD, who has not given up, even though retired to an oldie home in Milwaukee after decades of service in the Gregorian at Rome, and as amanuensis to four popes. (“OCD” refers to the Discalced Carmelites, incidentally, not to “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” as the wags would have it.) A good eremite, he hates shoes and likes to sleep on floors. He is also inspiring. The clip shows a young Chinese girl who had some sort of epiphany when she met him, and had spent the last DLVII days studying Latin with an enthusiasm that is obviously contagious.

Father Reginald notes that even dogs can learn the language (he teaches them to sit, stand, and fetch in Latin), and when asked if he would like to see something done, says, “I am doing something about it. I’m going down to teach right now.”

There’s leadership for you: the “take charge” attitude one sees in impressive people, who do not waste their time and spirit moaning about things (the way I do). It is a quality closely allied with faith, in the broadest sense, but also in the narrowest. Faith can move mountains, and if the mountains have not yet moved, faith is not discouraged.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, according to the sage Lao Tzu. True, he did not speak Latin, but his Classical Chinese was beyond compare. Let us vindicate this ancient Chinaman, whose teaching was so strikingly compatible with that of Our Lord, by taking charge right now. (Whether the latter spake with the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, in Greek or Latin, I leave to speculation.)

The recovery of Latin Christendom requires the recovery of Latin, and it is in our power to do something about this.

There was a memorable moment in Paris, oh, some forty-something years ago. The late Mr Nixon had just agreed to depose himself as President of the Natted States. I was drinking coffee, from a pretty metal press, and ingesting a roll slathered with “cultured” (deliciously bacteria-infected) butter from the Norman north, and fig jam, full of the warm Provençal south of that large and splendid country; and reading Le Monde, the French national journal of Leftish unctuousness. Their reporters and commentators were puzzled; all of them it seemed. They loathed Nixon to a man, but were trying to get their heads around the fact that a President of the Natted States could be deposed for doing, perhaps just the once, the sort of thing French Presidents did every day, for sport even when for no political purpose. The news was good, yes; but it was also incomprehensible to them. This amused me.

I was, even in those days, a fan of this “Richard Nixton” (the misspelling of his name was a smug convention). I didn’t actually like him, but in the words of a Czech friend, “he gives those liberals heart attacks,” and that seemed a good enough reason to support him. For those were the days when I was just discovering that a lad with my views is not called a “liberal,” but a “conservative” instead. (I’ve since moved on, to “reactionary.”) It was a question of mere labels, “truth in advertising” as it were. An old-fashioned “liberal” like my father to start, I was already in favour of liberty and small government, against totalitarianism and thus, gung-ho on Vietnam. But I had also already noticed that most people who thought themselves “liberals,” were otherwise insufferable.

But I digress. Those were the days before Empörungsgesellschaft had established itself as the European and American cultural norm. Even in Paris, and even among the students still settling from their antics of 1968, there were many who could go a whole day without a single expression of rage. The millennials among my gentle readers will have to imagine that such an age was possible. The young could be reasonable, in other ways, too. Even the girls. I remember!

We are shocked, shocked to discover that men in power (including women more masculine than the men) are capable of self-interest and corruption. When formerly, we would have been shocked if they were not. Saints were believed to be the exception, not the rule. Only (from a Parisian perspective) in the strange and unaccountable lands of Anglo-Saxonia were there people who did not know this. But it scrambles one’s entire Weltanschauung, not to know.

Now, personally I carry no brief for corruption, in its myriad forms. Too, I do not consider myself to be an agent of the Devil. But I have come to recognise his existence, as a de facto power, constantly wheedling to make himself de jure. Indeed, it is a principle of my religion that I oppose evil in every form. This would theoretically include the little things, of which one makes a heap for each Confession.

Still, most sin is just sin. It seems almost nothing compared to the monstrous evil of presenting sin as if it were virtue; or virtue as if it were sin; or peccadilloes as if they were grave apocalyptic matters. For that is what unstrings a society.

Men in power are surrounded by temptation, and not being saints, they frequently succumb. Indeed, I should think the great majority of them are approximately half insane, from the cultivation of worldly ambition. I feel sorry for them, because they might go to Hell. But much of what they do is on the petty-cash level — embezzlements and pay-offs, break-ins and frame-ups, lies and rather wild exaggerations; that sort of thing. Surely our present-day obsession with such trifles argues the sin of scrupulosity in us, when there are matters of real moment — and in our own lives!

Read Ecclesiastes, if thou wilt, at least once every year. Learn how things are in this lachrymal vale, and cease to obsess about the Fires and the Furies. Coffee is good; buttered rolls are good; and fig jam, all good; including Le Monde — but for smiles, and not to be ingested.

Is it alright to express outrage against excessive displays of outrage? I ask this more in curiosity than in anger. And I am curious about the full range of outrageousness: not only the “spittle-flecked nutties” I associate with conventional left-liberal thinking, but the more passive-aggressive forms developed in Canada, by which the target of the original outrage receives the girlish “silent treatment,” then is quietly unpersoned.

Outrage begets outrage, until we remember that Our Lord advised against resisting evil with evil. It was a saying that might be misunderstood, because some forms of resistance are good, and should not be bunched together with the bad ones. There is a place in society for a good hanging; or in war for a variety of thoughtful ordnance; or other focused, decisive acts of problem-fixing violence. Justice may demand it; though let me hope I will not be thought too liberal by adding that justice also demands certain procedural regularities, unavailable in e.g. a Kangaroo Court or Human Rights Tribunal.

There is, however, no place for ill-considered revenge; and the possibility of defeating hatred with love need not be dismissed out of hand.

“I am outraged by your outrage, sir,” is a line I have tried in several situations. Or, “ma’am,” as the case may be — spoken in the voice of unturbulent irony. It worked once, as anything might, calculated to make one’s assailant laugh. The trick is to undermine his self-importance, and this is easier to perform while it is over-exposed. Mere escalation will not have this effect, nor any other form of competition in which spectators are left to vote on which party is the greater lunatic.

For God, in His infinite foresight, has so arranged the human condition that reason has at least a chance. The Christian yoga of self-containment puts anger to its proper uses. Or, should gentle reader prefer: the principles of balance and leverage in judo. The winner in any pugilistic match, including those which are conducted with firearms, is most likely to be the contestant who is thinking more clearly. Anger may serve to inspire us to action, but makes a poor formulator of tactics. (We do want to win, don’t we?)

In the Empörungsgesellschaft of our times (see penultimate Idlepost), it is well to remember that outrage never works for long. It makes a dramatic opening for conflict, but can only be sustained with the sort of acting which, as we are beginning to see in Natted States Merica and elsewhere, soon wears on any audience. “Yes,” one might reflect to oneself, “it is quite outrageous that they are crazy and we are sane.”

But it is important that we manifest sanity.

I was not surprised, nor hurt, not to be invited to the Golden Globes this year. I’ve got used to it. I wasn’t invited in any previous years, and quite frankly, I do not own a fancy black dress. Nor a nice black tuxedo, any more, should I have decided to come as a heterosexual, instead of a hetaera. I used to have one: classic 1964 James Bond with narrow Thai silk lapels, handed down by my father. But in a mere half-century it had become somewhat ragged, so I passed it along to the Sally Anne. (Always thinking of the poor: they love ragged and broken things.) Well, these days I’m hardly invited anywhere; which is something I have in common with Harvey Weinstein.

Another thing is that I was accused of sexual harassment, once. This was by a young woman I fired, after she tried to seduce me. Fortunately some other girls whom I had not sexually harassed rode quickly to my defence. The little vixen dropped her rumour campaign; though not before it had seriously annoyed me. (Another guy I know was not so lucky; lost his big job and good prospects in life under the cloud of claims that were never brought to court, nor would be, as they were possible to disprove.)

“Amusement” would not describe my response as I watch the current phase of the “sexual revolution.” The paradox is that it made casual sexual advances commonplace: the very sort for which the guillotine is now being sharpened. I don’t blame second-wave feminism for this, but something larger that includes Playboy and, I’m sorry to say, James Bond; and has an ancestry that goes back to first-wave feminism, and the boulevardiers of the Gay Nineties. (Those would be the decadent eighteen-Nineties). A certain, civilized “atmosphere” between the sexes became seriously polluted around then. By now it is a grave environmental problem.

My motivation for today’s little Idlepost is however something I read in “Page Six” of the New York Post. I don’t usually go there, except when something is flagged on the Drudge Report. And I saw such a thing this morning. Having not read much about the Golden Globe party I missed, I was nevertheless fascinated to learn about others who were not invited. These included women with the surnames Arquette, Argento, McGowan, and Sorvino. They were among the first to turn on the sleazy Mr Weinstein, and laid charges including rape that may actually go to court. But as the tabloid explains, “Victims are not glamorous.” The Golden Globes are, after all, a winners’ circle.

“Bandwagons are for climbing on, not starting.” This Lord Chesterfield advice was given to me young, and quite facetiously, by the father who handed me down his tuxedo. I say facetious, because he was incorruptible himself; and too, the sort of man who would start the horses. He was also inventive, and as an industrial designer, designed several products that made other people many millions of dollars, but left him a few hundred out-of-pocket. He truly lacked the skill for cashing in. So that, as he also facetiously noted, inventors, original designers, and pioneers of any sort, tend to die poor. If you want to die rich, do not waste time inventing things for the good of mankind. Focus instead on marketing.

This principle applies to every field with which I am even passingly familiar, including all the arts. Granted, there are exceptions: “Inventors like Edison or Picasso, who were also ruthless entrepreneurs.”

Laying bold criminal charges is likewise a mug’s game. Even if you win, you lose. Others will grab the advantages. These do not come from sticking your neck out, but from piling on, once the defendant is safely down. Third-wave feminism has mastered this principle, of ruthless entrepreneurialism. The glamour comes from cashing in; and strutting your stuff with virtue signalling.

The longer I live, the more I identify with losers. Even Hollywood losers.

I have just learnt a new word, from a Swabian friend. She is a liberal, in the old sense — which is to say, stable, sane, empirical, Continental. Perhaps not a genius, but very smart. Impossible to provoke (I’ve tested this). A liberal from Europe does not allow herself to be confused with a socialist, a feminist, or other insane person. Regine (let us call her) is a reader of Die Zeit, which remains at least a half-sane paper. (How I wish we had something like it in English.) As a good liberal, she tirelessly instructs me, for my own good. She suggests that I become more moderate. (I hesitate to suggest that a German should become more reactionary.)

Well, Empörungsgesellschaft may not be a new word to Germans, but it was to me. Like many of their other concepts, it cannot be translated adequately. This is especially true of their innumerable compounds. The whole is invariably greater than the parts. Empörung could be many kinds of disgust, or indignation; or resistance, or revolt. Gesellschaft could be many kinds of society, company, class. It might even suggest a form of dress. All these meanings are intended. We might wish to translate this term simply, as “outrage society,” and that would get us, superficially, near. But the pregnant ambiguities on either side of the fused appellations conduct a lot of electricity through the matrix, in the absence of a circuit-breaking hyphen.

We must thus incorporate Empörungsgesellschaft into English, whole, as we have done with Weltanschauung, Zeitgeist, Übermensch, Kulturkampf, Gemütlichkeit, Weltschmerz, Schadenfreude. To say nothing of, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

From what I can make out, the new E-word assumes the floundering of the Fourth Estate (or “legacy” journalism) before the invasive “fifth force” of social media. Crazy bloggers, twitterers, facebooklings, and so forth, are able to impinge upon the public consciousness in new and historically unprecedented ways. “Facts” are concocted to order, and subsequent “fact-checks” are concocted, too; opponents thus label each other constantly as liars. Discussion of every topic is politicized, in the lynch-mob spirit of shrieking moral outrage. The old-fashioned newsman’s criterion of “relevance” is replaced by cross-links to imaginary events and conspiracy theories. Attention is suddenly focused on the most unlikely details. The Internet itself is configured to encourage bizarre confirmation subcultures; users can funnel a round-the-clock supply of whatever “information” might please them. This provides them with a Wundpflaster against their aching kognitive Dissonanz. All public policy must be determined not only in live time, but in the full knowledge that at any moment, anyone can become the object of a Scheiße-Sturms (“shit-storm”).

Well, there is more to it than that; I have merely picked out the bullet points. But I think those Germans are onto something.

Empörungsgesellschaft. … You read it here first.

According to a certain Syrian gentleman — from the Patriarchate of Antioch, one of the Pentarchy of “first churches” going back to the Apostles, specifically Peter and Paul — Christ was baptized in the waters of the Jordan. And not on His own account, strictly speaking, but for mysterious reasons, having to do with the Sacrament of Baptism itself. He was, as it were, “baptizing Baptism,” and making holy the waters. This was a manifestation of the Trinity — done in the name of the Holy Trinity, and by the Trinity, for the purposes of the Trinity. God the Father acknowledges, “this is my Son”; the Spirit descends in the form of a dove.

“There they are, all Three. How can anyone miss it?”

He was alluding to another gentleman, a certain smartass from California, who’d said he had read the Bible right through, but hadn’t found the Trinity mentioned in it.

But of course one can miss anything, if one is sufficiently obtuse. It is what makes our modern, happyface, deist unitarianism possible; along with atheism and a few other things. And as my Syrian informant said — decades ago — this was so in Damascus, too. Syrian Christians were already “promoting themselves to the glory” of a post-religious, middle-class life, with osterizers and toasters. So, for that matter, were their Islamic friends, “going rogue” from the Muslim point-of-view; losing all interest in observance, and by extension, in belief. (Verily, this opened the field to the fanatics.)

Denho, the Syriac term, can be translated “Epiphany,” or “Theophany.” It is the same Feast as we celebrate “todayish” in the West, though if I’m not mistaken it omits specific reference to the Magi. Yet it stresses a first appearance to the Gentiles. It carries the etymological implication of a light-burst, a moment of revelation. But so does the Epiphany in our Western feast. The Syrian rite combines gospel events on several planes, as ours does; while focusing upon action through John the Baptist. The miracle of Cana, and of holy marriage; of Magnificat, and the baptism of children: all this is carried into the Manifestation — alike through Greek Testament and Peshitta. East and West, the Epiphany recalls that moment when the sublime, very ancient and long enduring Hebrew faith “explodes” into the World Religion, for the salvation of all men.

From the little I was able to understand in my own readings on “comparative religion” — back in the day — I was struck most forcibly not by the theological differences of the Eastern churches, but by their familiarity, across the board. Separated, as we have often been through many generations, the pattern of Liturgy remains the same. It seems to lie discernibly beneath each refinement. It is like reading alternative translations of the same original poem. That Poem being Christ.

Something mysterious has been working against syncretism in all the wandering strands of our Faith. Everywhere the idea of Epiphany remains. The accretions through the centuries seem to follow from the source, more than from external influences. There is that “Jewish” quality — for although we are not united by tribe, we are bound by calling.

In my days of wandering — even before I became a Christian myself, when I was motivated instead by anthropological curiosity — I was fascinated by Assyrians, Copts, Ethiopians, Malabars; … all the “exotics” I encountered.

The Portuguese, on first landing in India, were surprised to find among Hindu-looking temples, some dominated by large granite and quite unmistakable Crucifixes. It was a shock of recognition, between two Christian peoples, separated since the first Christian century. But in the old Syriac word, “Nasrani,” they could hear what these people still were, and of their long descent from Saint Thomas the Apostle.

I read (still own) a history of the Christians in China, long, long before first contact with the European missionaries of the Renaissance; was impressed, in Japan, by the fact of underground Catholic survival through centuries under the threat of hideous torture. Or of the Korean Confucian converts to an unimaginably distant Nazarene — “self-taught” Catholics (from the Jesuits at Peking) whom the Jesuits arriving in the Hermit Kingdom had known nothing about. Then, as now, everywhere we go, including Antarctica in one Anglo-Argentine anecdote I could tell, there are Christians to greet Christians.

No other religion has travelled like this. But to the theophanic point, none has maintained its integrity over vast, “multicultural” isolations of space and time. And through the wormholes come the ministers of renewal. Christ does not forget those who have not forgotten Him — mother and child, through the generations.

It is easy enough to lapse, especially when every worldly advantage can come of apostasy, as has been the case through nearly fourteen centuries for Christians in the Muslim realms. The hard thing to understand is rather, why there are people who have not lapsed; who continue to die, sometimes, for their refusal to relinquish a promise that was made to their fathers, dozens of fathers ago.

The historians must explain how all of this was possible, through the “normal” or “natural” progression of events. Indeed, they have a lot of explaining to do.

“A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth even gets its pants on,” or something like that, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, though if he did, it was hardly original. The attribution has circumnavigated the planet many times, without the correction ever catching up. But the falsehood can be proved. Jonathan Swift in the Examiner (1710): “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” That in itself gets us closer to Adam, but from Swift’s tone I would guess that he had found the proverb elsewhere. He (and Shakespeare, incidentally) liked to pick sayings off the street, like spilt farthings; save them and then, put them to good use. Often the genius is more editor than writer. (Alexander Pope almost specialized in this insight.)

And let me add, from my shallow reading of history, that the tortoise does not necessarily outrun the hare. Or when he does, no one is still watching.

I think I wrote once, at dribbling length, about the Flat Earth. The joke there was, that no one believed the Earth to be flat — at least, no one with a modicum of education — through all the centuries until 1828. That was when Washington Irving’s quite fictional biography of Christopher Columbus was published. It has a scene wherein Catholic bigots challenge Columbus’s assumption that the world is spherical, claiming scriptural authority to refute him. But the sphericity of the Earth was never in question, when he was planning his voyages. Instead, the issue was, the Earth’s diameter. (Columbus miscalculated by assuming that Arabic miles were the same as Italian; among other little oversights. He knew the sphere was large; just not how large.)

In fact, scripture presents our planet as round, and Isaiah describes it hanging in space. Irving’s playful (and genuinely bigoted) account is thus double nonsense. But shameless Darwinists bought into the story, to smear opponents of their “progressive” (and unproveable) evolutionary theory; and ever since, the progressive types have been using the “Flat Earth” as a mud-ball. Meanwhile, American fundamentalists, not to be outdone, provided much-needed credibility to the slur, by buying into the Flat Earth themselves, and standing up for it courageously. (God bless them: fundamentalists can be coached to believe all sorts of things are in the Bible, that ain’t.)

Sometimes, in moments of desolation, and sometimes in moments of elation, I think of our world in the manner of Isaiah — but with lies buzzing round it like flies around a dung ball. You can’t kill them all. They’ll still be there after global cooling.

The piece I wrote today for the Thing (here), touches on this matter: of public stupidity and its relation to sin; of public beliefs that are bass ackwards; and ever promoted by the malign, for purposes they will never fully understand.

The truth is that there are many lies, and that they assemble themselves in buzzing constellations, that disperse then regather after the wind blows through. Till the world ends, they will never be permanently blown away. New generations of the grossly ignorant arise to replace the fallen; yet within each soul, falsehoods can be corrected only one at a time.

Listening to Rome today, one might easily form the (wrong) impression that the Church has given up on lie-swatting. It is as if she admits the task is hopeless; that she must now make her compromise with the falsehoods of this world, through the magic of “accompaniment” and “discernment.” But as Christ is her Founder, she is not entitled to do so: not with every living soul at stake, and every single one to be fought for.

In a world full of lies, long and always full of lies, it is the function of the Church to remind what the Truth is. And to do so even if the masses are indifferent, or mock her as they once mocked Christ. It is to shine the disinfecting Sun on sin and error. For us, the task is complementary. It is to seek that Truth, and to apply it.