Essays in Idleness

An email from a correspondent, who is not in Guam, reminds me to remind gentle reader of a truth I take for self-evident, but perhaps others don’t. We personalize the State. I do myself, when I refer to it as Big Brother, Big Sister, Twisted Nanny, &c. But this is a conceit. As anyone caught in the jaws of Big Shark should realize, it doesn’t think like a human. It thinks more like a mechanism. Of course, when the mechanism has selected one’s own person for food — I am thinking here of the Revenue Department, but government agencies are all much the same — little can be done. One might beg for mercy, but the thing is not designed to dispense mercy. That is not its function. Its function is to absorb protein.

Guvmint agents themselves — the cells and their switches — are task-oriented. Each signed off his right to make humane judgements when he took the job.

We used to have reactionary courts, to restrain the creature. Now we have progressive courts, to urge it on.

Among the foibles of democracy, is the notion that “the peeple” are somehow in control. The people, however, consist of persons, with their quite various moral flaws, which tend to cancel each other. They elect politicians for show. This helps them put a human face on the enterprise, so they have someone to blame at the electoral intervals. It is true that a government with a majority and a will can alter the course of history: usually by putting more sharks in the tank. And that the policy wonks are, arguably, human. But they are cells themselves, within Leviathan.

We live, I say from time to time, in an age of “total war” and “total peace.” The one condition resembles the other: a command economy, focused on results. We have, as it were, totalitarianism with a human face. It is a kind of smiley face, painted on the tip of the missile.

When, as yesterday, I give pointless advice to our political “masters” (themselves operating within greater constraints), I do not imagine it will be taken. I cannot even know what they know, in the control room they briefly occupy, trying to override this automated switch or that.

More fundamentally, I do not think that the morals which pertain to the individual conscientious human, can apply to Leviathan. This was never possible, though a simple absolute monarchy comes closer to the humanized ideal. Properly constituted, a State is only a protection racket, for a group of “citizens” legally defined. Its job should be to eat sharks and not men; or sheep and not men as Thomas More put it, noting in the first age of Enclosure that the attraction of fine wool was so great, that pasturage was erasing husbandry, so that in practice sheep were now eating men.

We’ve come a long way since then — five centuries long — in the art of Enclosure. Each advance of the so-called “capitalists” was made possible by extension of government fiat, to support the development of economies of scale. By now the supply of fine wool is assured; and all we ask is for sufficient “employment,” that we may fatten ourselves for the next cull.

I wish that we could ask for more; I wish we could be treated as more than livestock. But I am not under the absurd impression some politician can provide this liberation. Things are as they are. It is true I am something of a “libertarian” and a “distributist” — a goat in the sheepfold perhaps — but I do not think we can save ourselves.

My Catholic Sola is Our Lord: Christ alone can save us.

There are conflicts that cannot be resolved peacefully. Perhaps this does not come as news to gentle reader. By “peacefully” I mean with the consent of all parties. Not all wars, not all defeats or regimental extinctions, involve much bloodshed. The Soviet regime, for instance, collapsed with only a murder or two, by trigger-happy border guards; it was peace that allowed the Soviet Union to accumulate many million corpses. Did their defeat require a war? Yes, I would argue: that Cold War, which the Western powers remarkably fought and won. You stand your ground and it happens, sometimes, that your enemy loses his nerve. Reagan, Thatcher, JP-II and others contributed largely to that final act, in which the Communists embraced pacifism and appeasement. Let the other side do that, then magnanimously accept their capitulation.

Unfortunately the successor regime of Vladimir Putin has recovered some spunk. And Red China, having mastered certain economies of scale, under the aegis of its more deft Communist Party, can find no reason to retreat from its Stalinist (in the sense of a nationalism of convenience) aspirations to a permanent and central place in the world, to which China (with or without totalitarian rule) would be anyway entitled by size.

The Korean War was never resolved. We are still working with a ceasefire dated 27 July 1953. The line that divides the two Koreas is only an armistice, yet like the arbitrary line that divided Canada from USA (1783, with adjustments) it is sufficient to create two polities which will “evolve” in different ways, even if the people were much of a muchness. The “Martian” (in two senses) North Korean polity has weirdly been given sixty-four years, by Western irresolution.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick,” is the socially-approved Yankee approach to diplomacy. “Shoot the dog to scare the monkey,” is the nearest Maoist equivalent. “Wave the stick and shriek like a maniac” would seem to be Mr Trump’s current compromise in the interesting cultural exchange between Far East and Far West, as their interests collide across the Pacific. Except China, and of course North Korea, we have other Rim powers on our side, and the Russians merely fishing in troubled water — unable to rival the kind of subsidies from China that keep the Pyongyang regime afloat. (“Why don’t you shoot them to scare us?” is an eccentric approach not yet tried.)

I find the pragmatism of the Chinese most encouraging. I’m sure they’d never trust Kim Jong-un with the sort of ICBM technology that might be accurate and effective. They’d rather stay alive, and in power. They will cling to North Korea for as long as they can find advantage in it. But they also have a lot of face to save, so I can understand the occasional American attempt at subtlety. The preferred solution is for Peking [stet] to puncture that little fat Kim boy [stet]. What, I wonder, is the best way to inspire them?

The North Korean missile inventory, which to my mind does not seriously threaten either Guam or any protected species in Alaska, is troubling for other reasons. They pass technology under the table with Iran, and worse, could incinerate heavily populated bits of South Korea and Japan in a hit-or-miss way. In diplomatic terms, the consequences of that would be “too unpredictable.” That little Kim is mad, goes without saying; most politicians are. Perhaps not all become quite so psychopathic; most lack the opportunities. Alas, Kim was never house-trained. Even the mad can be taught to beg under carefully-staged conditions.

The trick, to my mind, as a former international affairs pundit, to whom no one ever listened, is to rhetorically ignore China (Mr Trump: restrict your entertaining tweets to domestic affairs!) while keeping the usual secret channels open. Call in another aircraft carrier fleet, pile defensive measures into South Korea (get some “Iron Dome” from Tel Aviv), return a few nukes to their abandoned peninsular silos (that was Bush’s bad, not Obama’s); load the Japanese up with the same. (There’s money to be made in this, incidentally.) Aim so much at North Korea that their own generals begin to wet themselves, then shoot down a “missile test” to help them imagine a coup. Let the porous State Department leak the extravagant details to the U.S. media. I think the need for a regime change would then spontaneously occur to the other side.

Shrieking like a maniac is optional.

So is piously hoping it will end well.

There was a point to yesterday’s effusion, and let me write it down before I’ve forgotten what it was.

When we say, “Nothing is perfect in this world,” we do not mean perfection in the sense of “the perfect world of scientific socialism.” (I lived with a socialist once, and would goad him in the kitchen with remarks like, “In the perfect world of scientific socialism, that toast would not have burnt,” &c.)

The grammarians among my gentle readers will know that the past tense is “perfect,” when the action is complete. For it is in this that the perfection of the past consists: it is truly settled, unchangeably over. It is immortal in that way. That is what the word means to the wise; and this meaning survives in such locutions as “a perfect fool.” One might say, “a complete fool” and mean the same thing exactly, although in both cases some hyperbole is involved. But no hyperbole in the Christian (and classical) conception. Nothing living in this world is complete, and were we to understand anything completely (supposing our understanding were important), we would have to pass beyond our natural limitations into the supernatural realm, where the actions of this world are completed, and the justice of the Creation is fulfilled.

But the boundary of death lies in our way. We can, especially near the border itself, see a little beyond it into what we might poetically call that green and pleasant land, which cannot be literally so because it is unearthly. We can rather sense in moments, or in sanctity perhaps as a matter of course, that which transcends our human experience, and leads beyond to its completion.

We might say that, through appearances — by which I mean going beyond appearance — we can discern some good in each imperfect evil and discount some evil in each imperfect good, yet one hesitates to put this in a way that might be exploited by the administrators of the Dictatorship of Relativism, whose notion of “beyond good and evil” is devilish and inverted. What we see is “a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wildflower.” Blake, who wrote this, carefully avoided heresy in this instance at least, by his use of the indefinite article: “a heaven” and not the Heaven that lies beyond the possibility of human understanding.

In Augustine’s De Agone Christiano, or as we might say, Le Combat Chrétien (I am trying to read his earlier opuscular works in a pocket edition with Latin on the left, French on the righthand pages, and me in the gutter, somewhere between), the Saint of Hippo takes on the Donatist nutjobs of his day, whose paramilitary Agonisticici (“those who engage in the martyr’s struggle”) are not without some distant resemblance to our post-modern “martyrs” (of Manhattan, Madrid, Baghdad, Mosul).

As ideologists, they locate perfection in this world, and verily the next world in terms of this one, thus imagine that by simply killing a lot of people the good which Mohammad “commands” can be accomplished. This is true even for those Donatists/Islamists who do not kill but engage in what we might call the intellectual equivalent of global bisection. The Christian, Augustine says, must not be like that, and so he draws a colourful contrast between the catholic sane, and the uncatholic fanatical, while playing aggressively with the Donatists’ own propaganda terms.

We are engaged in a Combat, to be sure, which in moments seems to reduce to a streetfight, but is no streetfight in its ends. We have an Enemy, to be sure, but he is not human — not a physical person nor some abstract complex of human souls. We meet this Enemy in nature and in supernature, yet our “soldiers of Christ” will get nowhere unless they begin to understand what this Enemy is, and what he is up to.

He is trying to lead us away from God, to a place infinitely apart (Hell). Our struggle is to prevent him from doing so. Our tactics must lead us to God, through or around every obstacle. Our advantage comes when we follow those orders, which originate in the Divine, and use our freedom and intelligence to discern this light from that darkness — with the calm exhilaration of the happy soldier who sniffs victory in the air.

For sure, this is war. But to win we must not conduct it on the Enemy’s terms. Like a terrorist, he actually wants us to hate him, almost as much as he hates us, just for being alive. Let us not be suckered; let us double down on Love.

As a pretentious young viper, I would sometimes pick fights with my mother over what she was reading. I would examine some paperback she had set down, and pronounce it to be trash. She would agree, with the qualification that “light reading” was the more genteel expression. I cannot now remember what many of the books were, but the genre of detective fiction was well represented, and then-recent novels which could be located on bestseller lists. Sometimes it would be a pop “major author” — say, D. H. Lawrence in one of his repetitive attempts to write sentimental pornography on the virgin-and-gypsy theme. Once I congratulated her on attempting something translated from German. “Oh, it’s your father reading that. I don’t read books by foreigners.”

She had the habit of reading, formed early, and could often be found lost in a book. To her mind literature was meant for an escape: from nursing, housework, and raising difficult children. So if the book was arduous, it was also useless. “You can’t be serious all the time,” she would say, “you have to take a break from it sometimes.” To which I would reply, “But surely you can be serious some of the time.” For I wasn’t only a viper. I was also a little jackass.

It was the same with music. She came home once, to say she could hear the Bach fugue I was playing, two blocks down the street. Dropping groceries and rushing to turn it down, she then swivelled to confront me. “Why can’t you be a normal child, and listen to rock music!” (Her sister was a church organist back in Cape Breton; she actually knew a great deal about Bach, including how to introduce jazz syncopations, to fly by one’s tone-deaf Presbyterian minister.)

Needless to say, I regret most of my earlier selves. But I can still understand them. My campaign against the de-civilization of the West began a decade before I thought it did. The idea arrived ready-made, that one ought to indulge in “self-improvement.” From the moment I discovered there was such a thing as historical time (via Kipling), I was determined to perform an investigation. To this day, I am still trying to fill the holes, in my head, but also in my knowledge of times and places; trying to see things whole, as Augustine was doing in his City of God. (Now there’s a fine weighty volume.)

There is a young gentleman whom I shall call “Z.” — for that is his initial. He is a lawyer who would go far, were he not also a Catholic. The product of Ontario schools, he has become starkly aware that he was cheated of an education. He has wife and childers now, and little leisure, but in each free moment he tries to “fill his gaps.” Alas, like mine, there are gaps within his gaps, and so he flits like a butterfly through the extensive meadow. Donate some duplicate odd volume of a Loeb, and he grabs it lustily — as another key to how everything fits together, another door in the treasure vaults.

I applaud this form of idleness, which, I should mention, my mother graciously encouraged. This is “the higher environmentalism.” We can’t save the intellectual, any more than the biological environment by teaching the ignorant to protest. We can do so, however, by teaching them to love: the books, the music; the birds, and all Creation.

“The organs of recognition, without which no true reading is possible, are reverence and love. Knowledge cannot dispense with them, for it can grasp and analyze only what love takes possession of, and without love it is empty.” (Emil Staiger.)

Rejecting what is bad, fails. We must teach ourselves instead to seek the good, which exposes the bad of its own; or as Augustine reminds, not merely seek but find it.

And that which is loved is spontaneously protected.

Jalapeño peppers come in many cultivars: some quite hot and interesting, others mild, dull and, you know, “Canadian.” I first encountered them in a hamburger joint, many years ago. They were then a “new thing.” These were fine, fiery jalapeños, unexpected from any purveyor of mass-market food. I gathered it was an experiment, so to tip the scale, I resolved to eat all future hamburgers in that shop. All continued well.

But one day something horrible happened. It had to do with the jalapeños. Some other variety had been substituted, that tasted more like lettuce. And I don’t like lettuce. I wanted an explanation.

And an explanation I received. Customers had complained that the “hot peppers” were hot. One said that her mouth was burnt off, another that his tongue had turned red, et cetera. Management found a new supplier, and there had been no complaints since. I thus took upon myself the moral responsibility to make as big a scene as I could, to compensate for all the silent types.

“So now you are offering hot peppers for people who don’t like hot peppers.”

“No, no,” the manager explained, “they want hot peppers, they still ask for them.”

“For hot peppers that aren’t hot.”

“Yeah.”

“So why don’t you tell them not to order hot peppers if they don’t like hot peppers?”

I left. I cannot argue with people who reject the law of noncontradiction.

The experience was not a dead loss, however. For a half-dollar (which was the price of a hamburger in those days), I had received an insight into capitalism, and a glimpse of the collapse of Western Civ.

The Catholic Church comes into this, of course. In the time since, I have noticed that her managers have been redesigning what they must think is “their product,” for people who don’t like it. It began with a Mass for people who don’t like the Mass. Now we have doctrines for people who don’t like doctrines. Lettuce options everywhere one turns. For some reason the customers have been disappearing; perhaps the lettuce is too crunchy.

When I write a piece like my column today at the Thing (over here), I get “letters.” Some will argue for “the new evangelism,” which is for people who don’t like evangelism. They say we can only approach those who don’t like Catholicism, by being softer. Maybe associate it with football, or environmentalism, or something. Something they like. Maybe that’s how we will attract new customers, from places where not one customer can be found. “It can’t hurt to try!”

True enough, it doesn’t hurt to sell out. It is, generally, the least painful option.

But if there were people who might like hot peppers, we will never know.

My approach would be more confrontational. I’d go 20,000 Scoville — the way Saint Paul used to do.

Then if someone doesn’t like it, tell him he has an easier choice.

“What can I do instead?”

“Go to Hell.”

As the old Scottish jurisprudes taught, and other sages since time out of mind, one cannot break the law. One can only break oneself upon the law. They referred to that “natural law” which underlies all human legislation; or if it doesn’t, the human laws will perish. There are laws in physics and chemistry, laws implicit in the design of organisms, laws governing geometry and number, and all these laws are related. And there are laws of behaviour which govern the creatures, and govern man in a peculiar way, for man is granted wit with some small degree of freedom and wonder. The moral law is one with all the other laws of the universe, that we may dimly descry. Things could not be otherwise because the universe coheres. We may choose to obey or contest.

To that Scottish jurisprude (we are travelling back centuries here), raised in the genius of the Common Law, on its own and as embedded in Scots law with its complex antecedents, law is not essentially “written.” Rather, it is “discovered,” and the discoveries are accumulated. To this day, a litigious Scot will take you to court, “To see what the law says.” She (the example I had in mind was quite female) does not mean that the lawyers will simply look it up in a book, or use the algorithm in a computer program. Nooo. They will try the case. She means they will examine precedent, with a natural discernment of right and wrong, in light of the circumstance presented.

This is not the way revolutionary Frenchmen thought, who, in their perverse rationalism, decided we must all have a Code. Like the satanic metric system (designed for administrators, not makers and traders), the Napoleonic conception of law has apparently swept the world. With it travels that blithe arrogance with which the liberal and progressive mind solves its imaginary “problems,” under the illusion that it is “scientific.” There is still some resistance in e.g. the despised “Anglo-Saxon” realms, which have yet entirely to detach themselves from the old mediaeval sense of play. Americans (USAnians and Canadians alike) find themselves stretched between these poles — discovery by natural reason, and imposition by “theory.”

Realism versus nominalism, as we used to say.

We have “natural law theoreticians” which is a flagrant contradiction of terms. Nature abhors a theory, in the modern sense of that word. There is nothing experimental about her, and she sneers at those smug who claim to perfectly understand her. She has ever another trick up her sleeve, to surprise her investigators. Just as they declare her asleep, the bats fly out. We must take her at her own evaluation, with all the caution that must imply; or take the alternative, and die.

Her laws are not negotiable. All are instantly enforced, in every increment along our way. She lets us jump; she does not let us fly. She does not allow abstraction on abstraction. Pile one assumption on another and we are soon crushed.

To say that a human act is “unnatural” was, until very recently, to say it should not be attempted. There will be a cost, and the cost is very likely to exceed what the experimenter can afford. The cost may be displaced for a time, as the cost of our “gay revolution” has been displaced in the destruction of natural families. Governments may legislate such displacements of cost: they may tax A for the benefit of B. They are under the impression that they make the laws. But no such effort is sustainable.

For in the end, we will see what the real Law says.

My Chief South-Western Ontario Correspondent has got married again, after forty years. The children were in attendance, I gather, and the Church entirely onside, for you see, he made his commitment to the same woman. I recommend these churchings, these “renewal ceremonies,” to those whose first, “starter” marriage was performed in Las Vegas, or in front of some tedious provincial bureaucrat. They are like the conditional baptisms that become necessary these days. For it is not only a re-affirmation of now-distant vows, but a noble effort to sabotage any future request for an annulment.

One might even say they restore an aristocratic tradition, for in Europe over the centuries the high-born would (and could afford to) get married twice: first in a modest civil ceremony for the paperwork, then more extravagantly (both materially and spiritually) in the Cathedral, once that is filed away. Our contemporary ecclesiastical authorities tell you to get a civil divorce first, before applying for an annulment. This is the same idea, except, morally and spiritually upside down.

I realize that not all marriages work out. Hooo, do I realize. I favour allowing some separations, though regret that no one seems to seek ecclesiastical permission for them. This is not an Age of Faith, unless we count faith in technological progress, which, by comparison to Christian beliefs, is so recklessly naïve. The idea of seeking permission from anyone for anything is largely in abeyance. It does not surprise me that, for instance, as annulments are now available with almost the ease of transit tokens, the number who seek them is falling. Why bother? The consequences of riding the trolley without a ticket would be more grave; so that fare you pay.

We have odd ideas about which way is up, and for a legalistic culture, strange notions about the Law of Contract.

My S-WOC preceded his wife into the Church, by decades. It is an impressive story, but not my business to tell. He was first lured, as so many of my convert and revert friends, by reading the works of such as Messrs Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien, Muggeridge. Oddly, Muggs was the only one of those I’d read, before I converted, and him not for religious edification. So how did I wind up in this place?

On the intellectual side, I think it began wrestling with Aristotle’s Organon: with the possibility that the world might make sense. Aristotle delivered me into the hands of his commentator, Thomas Aquinas. I have a gift for finding the hard way home. Eventually I learnt the correct question to ask, of Jesus Christ — “Are you there?” — to which in due course He replied, Yes.

But as He may lie in ambush down every path, I think, all roads lead to Rome.

Our current pope reminds me that among the Holy Fathers I most admired were Borgias and Medicis. (And among my biggest crushes, that on Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of a pope — a girl with even more style than Ivanka Trump.) Even in those days before conversion, I gathered that the popes’ job was to backstop on doctrine and liturgy; but if they could add by glorious patronage to the inventory of Western Art, the more power to their respective right arms.

My views have developed over the years, mostly by expansion. I continue to think we can survive bad popes, and that there might even be some value in them, obscure to us because we cannot see things whole. But setting that observation aside, it is of the greatest possible importance to us — in the care and feeding of our immortal souls — that we continue in the practice of the liturgy and doctrine, upholding not only the law, but the spirit of the Law, regardless of personal convenience.

And marriage, we can know, is sacrosanct. This does not mean it is always convenient. It could not mean anything like that. It means: hold the oar, keep rowing.

It has come to my attention that David Warren has died. Indeed, he has been dead for seven years, according to the forwarded information. I refer to David Ronald de Mey Warren, the Australian inventor of the Black Box, who is sometimes wantonly confused with me. I missed all the obituaries, published in late July, 2010. I had wondered why congratulations for this invention were fading.

My own view of aviation safety was (and remains) somewhat different from that of my deceased namesake. I think anyone who steps into an aeroplane has taken his life in his hands, and shouldn’t complain if it crashes. To be fair, few of them do. There is little so effective as the impact, after a fall of many thousand feet, to cure a whiner. The cause of death should be clear enough. No doubt the flying machine crashed for a reason, but as Hillary Clinton says, “What does it matter now?”

This other David Warren took a more hopeful view. He thought the causes would be easier to determine if a mechanical record of the flight’s last moments could be made and somehow retrieved from the wreckage. His own father had died in a plane that had descended too quickly into the Bass Strait, and he had been curious to know why. Just before that unhappy flight, father had given his nine-year-old son a crystal radio set, together with the enthusiasm for electronic communications he had acquired as a missionary in remote Australian locations. The son became a ham radio addict. Later he took an interest in chemistry, too, and became an expert on aviation fuel.

The pilots of the 1950s were against him. They considered his flight-data recorder to be an invasion of their privacy. They were especially opposed to the voice recordings, and their unions fought the introduction of Black Boxes tooth and nail. Finally they were persuaded to accept the things, on the condition that the recordings be wiped after every successful flight. (Promises, promises.) At the time, the new Comet jet airliners were exploding in the sky, and otherwise falling out of it, with distressing regularity. This is normal when new technology is introduced; one engineering feat leads to another.

I flew on one of these Comets with my own father (a WWII flyboy) as a small child, New York to London (via Gander). I still remember the wild fluctuations of cabin temperature and pressure. Even a five-year-old could tell that more work was needed. Had I known a Black Box was mounted in the tail, I’m sure my anxieties would have been assuaged.

Soon after, some friends of the family went down in a Comet over the Tyrrhenian Sea — to a place so far under the Tyrrhenian Sea, that the Black Box was never recovered. A wonderfully charming young newlywed couple, setting out in life; dead now, I realize, for three metonic cycles. I was relieved to learn that they had left their dog at home.

If you want to die at home, my advice would be, don’t go to a hospital. Perhaps this will strike gentle reader as a remark overweighted on the side of the obvious; but there is some method in some of my madness. So I will begin with a careful qualification: my advice holds for Canada, and the United Kingdom, but not for all of those Natted States. (I realize there are other jurisdictions.) And even there, the impossibility of fixing “Obamacare,” without further extending its unrepealable “entitlement” provisions, shows the end is coming, soon. But in Canada and UK, the future has been here for some time.

The reason, of course, is that at these higher latitudes we have so-called “single-payer” “healthcare” systems in which, as we have been reminded lately, all decision-making is concentrated in the caring-sharing State, or as I prefer to call her, Twisted Nanny. Once the paperwork is complete, and the customer has progressed from the outer to the inner waiting rooms, he is entirely in her power. He may, after reviewing her apparatus (both surgical and managerial), want to go home and die there. But she is unlikely to release him, and it will require the assistance of loyal friends and family to effect the equivalent of a prison break. (Tip: staff tend to be at their least attentive during the conventional sleeping hours.)

You see, Twisted Nanny likes to watch people die. She can become quite annoyed when others appropriate this privilege. She also likes to kill people, and has gone to considerable trouble to establish a monopoly in this regard. And given her latest powers, under legislation for “euthanasia,” she prefers to do it in her own facilities. She doesn’t make house calls, the way they do in Red China.

My objection to her end-of-life facilitations is actually two-fold. On the one hand, I should rather not be slain before my time. On the other, I’m not sure I would like to have my life artificially prolonged, with the help of Twisted Nanny’s machines.

For “nutrition” and “hydration” I am prepared to beg; perhaps even for the odd pain-reliever. I might happily try a cure, if one happens to be on offer. But I am otherwise in favour of letting Nature take her course. For while it is true that Nature is a mass murderer, she does not provide that individual attention for which Twisted Nanny is so feared. No fluorescent lights to stare at on the ceiling; nor tubes nor syringes; nothing to distract one from one’s prayers.

Note a certain “synergy” here. Modernity may have hatched doctors willing to kill you, having dead-lettered the Hippocratic Oath. It has also hatched patients eager to die.

It is a little-known fact, at least to the current generation, that there was a time in history before modern bureaucratic hospitals existed — when the Church provided the equivalent services, but on a purely voluntary basis, sans formalités administratives. The nursing sisters were Christian; so were the doctors with any luck.

Life was shorter in immediately previous centuries, but this had little to do with medical treatment. I refer particularly to the time before Lister and Pasteur, when (for instance) surgeons had not yet discovered the advantages of washing their hands, and public health measures were possibly even less well-informed than they are today.

We won’t go into it again, just now, but let me remind gentle reader of the interesting product of researches into life expectancy, through the mediaeval parish books. People lived longer in those days when they were in the cultural habit of washing frequently, before the Renaissance idea came into vogue that water was the principal carrier of disease, so that perfuming made more sense to them than bathing. People began to live longer again when the earlier modernist assumptions were overturned.

The idea of “killing someone for his own good” is distinctly modern; or should I say “post-modern”? (It existed in embryo with the concept of a hanging.) It requires someone other than the customer, or his closest relations, to be calling the shots. I think it will be necessary to rethink this proposition. But that may take some time, to say nothing of unpleasant experience.

In the meanwhile, my advice would be, stay away from hospitals.

Lahore, the city of my early childhood — my romantic city of Kipling’s Kim, and of the Emperor Jahangir (“Seizer of the World”); of Anarkali his courtesan, her tomb, and of the Anarkali Bazaar; of The Mall and long-demolished Nedous; of the zoo, and Saint Lawrence gardens, where the bats flew out at dusk; of Mrs Abassi’s kindergarten (where the Persian alphabet was forced upon me), and Saint Anthony’s school (deadly Latin inflections) — was “ethnically cleansed” some seventy years ago. In my childhood, it was little over a decade since that had happened, and the memories, still fresh in adult minds, were never discussed.

This was, I learnt as I grew, one of the interesting characteristics of adults. They seemed to remember only what they wanted to remember. Yet what they tried to forget could not be forgotten, only gradually sanitized. The phenomenon is not peculiar to Lahore, and the greatest traumatic events of history are “cleansed,” along with their victims, in surprisingly short periods of time. They are fit back into a bottle and labelled: “The Plague”; “The War”; “The Holocaust”; “Partition.” Life becomes easy again, for the survivors; and often, the sins of the fathers are not visited even on the fathers. For they are “the fathers of their nations” now, bejewelled in myth.

Lahore, a city that was half Muslim, and the rest Hindu and Sikh, Catholic Christian, “Liberal,” and even Buddhist, became fully Muslim almost overnight. Those who did not make it through the massacres to the new Indian border near Amritsar, passed across another threshhold. Those who made it through the massacres, the other way, soon occupied all the cheapened real estate. The rail to Delhi, once among the busiest in the world, now ended at a severed bridge.

But life goes on, in a city for which the British left an infrastructure for half a million people, which with patchy repairs now serves ten times as many. With wealth and technology, all the problems will be solved. Human optimism is clear on this point.

“Indopakladesh” is my collective term for the successor states which replaced that extraordinary British compilation: the largest India accumulated since the age of Ashoka. It is, and was to start with, too large for anyone to make sense of. The Subcontinent, as it is also known, already has a population much exceeding China’s (in less than half the area), and roughly equal to that of all Europe (from Atlantic to the Urals) plus North and South America. The Republic of India alone may soon surpass them all.

While the biomass of humans may not exceed that of ants and termites, the people are all buying cars, and the crowding of huge cities, including Lahore, has become impossible to believe even for those who live there. A fertile paradise of nature (perhaps twice China’s arable land, multiplied by tropical climate) has been transformed.

And yet as recently as my youth and early manhood, I was able to travel across a landscape almost empty of mechanical traffic — a landscape of villages not yet electrified, emerging from the dark of night only by the light of the moon and the stars, and spookily silent; with broad regions hardly populated at all. I have not seen rural India in decades; am told by a Bengali friend that I would be impressed by the progress — impressed, and “quite deploring.” It is unlikely I will ever return.

The remarkable variety of the Lahore that was extinguished — before my time — is known to me through books and pictures. The Subcontinent contains more nations than Europe, and nations within each nation; unofficial castes within castes, and very official tribes within tribes. It speaks innumerable languages, so that the alphabets present a carnival to the eyes. Its power to resist “globalization” is formidable. Yet the cities — rather, conurbations — are powerful melting pots within. The tourist today will find very little that has not been tricked up for him; the heat will keep him mostly indoors, where air conditioning seals off all contact with the living past.

From this distance, the receding British Empire is “one with Nineveh and Tyre.” The India they hastily abandoned belongs only to the historians, now; those born into “freedom at midnight” have reached three score and ten. Indopakladesh today looks only to the future, where we can all see the same: a world that has been fully sanitized.

There are, as the old saying goes, two kinds of people in this world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not. Let us call the first group binarists, and the second, multists, or as I prefer to call them, “whateverists.”

I belong consciously to the former group, and the smugness of the saying helps confirm me in my binaristical propensities. The pope, too, has had a hand in this recently. I mean our present one who is, as I calculate, one two-hundred-and-sixty-sixth of the papal component of our Roman teaching. The stated opposition of his self-appointed henchmen to the “binary thinking” of e.g. the Dubia authors, puts me more on the latter’s side. (I began almost totally on their side, wanting a few straight answers.)

Binarists accept both either/or and both/and propositions. Multists, as I have often been reminded, cannot cope with the first set, and may fail to understand the second, even as they giddily embrace it. For a both/and is a binary proposition.

Truth, to my duplexitatious way of thinking, is binary at heart, for a proposition may be true or not true — unless it is “partially true,” in which case it is false. The problem of philosophy is, whenever possible, to carefully move the line — to appropriate the true, disappropriate the false; to put the good with the good, and clean it (notice the binary division) — to draw, as patiently as we can, an infinitely squiggly but perfectly exact line, between ourselves and the people we can’t stand. Or so said my hero, T. E. Hulme, when pressed to an explanation by Bertrand Russell, or some other bug that needed squashing in the Cantabrigian universe before the Great War. Yes, I realized when I first read it, that is what philosophy is all about.

Good fences do not necessarily make good neighbours; but if they’re high enough, you can keep the buggers out.

— Je suis là, vous êtes là! I remember a Frenchwoman explaining to me, after I had for the second time unintentionally nudged her in a queue for the Calais ferry. I marvelled at her distinction between two definable places, both shifting, less than two Paris feet apart. (Which is to say, twenty-five-and-one-half English inches, before the Revolution decimated everything.)

It is a wonderful word, là. It could mean “here,” as I understand; or it could mean “there”; but it will never mean “whatever.”

Years had passed, since I had seen “mock chicken” offered in a grocery cooler, in any form, let alone the tight-wrapped thin-sliced “baloney” packaging of my childhood. (See here.) But there it was in the No Thrills supermarket, and I seized a package, noting with pleasure that the price was half that of other “luncheon meats,” by weight. And sure enough, on return to the High Doganate, and after devising a strategy to break into the package, I discovered it was the “real deal” — as bland in taste and texture after all these years. Truly, a madeleine moment out of Proust.

I had always assumed that mock chicken was an industrial by-product, containing traces of poultry for flavouring, in a crumbly rind probably coloured with orange textile dye. I supposed that live chickens had been harmed somewhere in the manufacturing process, which had included the mocking operation. I guessed the managers at the industrial abattoir hired underemployed professional comedians to mock the chickens, prior to slaughter — doing satirical imitations of the way they walk, try to fly, express enmity towards those who steal their eggs — while taunting them with demeaning imprecations such as, “You’re not a real chicken,” &c — ideally in dactylic hexameters.

It turns out I was wrong. Unless the ingredient list on the package is fake news (I have just retrieved it), our contemporary mock chicken contains miscellaneous “and/or” meats, possibly but not necessarily including winged animals; plus potassium lactate and soy protein; sodium phosphates, erythorbates, diacetates, and nitrates; glucose solids; maltodextrin; “spices”; and of course my favourite, monosodium glutamate. The mouth waters even while trying to descry the five-point, all-cap, extra-light sans-serif, in white against the shimmering transparent plastic background. (You can do it with a spy-glass once you get the lighting angle right.)

Imagine my surprise, upon deeper research, to discover that the traditional product was constituted of finely ground pork, and veal, in a slurry of mushroom goop and secular cornmeal, with turmeric, paprika, and that sublime umami, isolated by German chemists in the nineteenth century and affectionately abbreviated, “MSG.” Urban squab might be the homemaker’s alternative or perhaps, leftover swan from the park.

For you see, in the depths of the Great Depression, or through the various great depressions, recessions, and financial panics that preceded it, chicken had been unobtainably expensive. Pork and veal were much cheaper. And in the days before “mechanical separation,” the little woman of the household would chop the less favoured scraps of those meats, marinate them in I don’t know what, then moosh them into a bun by way of anticipating the invention of hot dogs. This, I gather, is how mock chicken started, though at first it was called spiedie.

Gentle reader will remember that before the Great War, Americans liked their food much spicier than they have since, and indeed, it was in the interests of the big capitalist syndicates to tone down their enthusiasms, in view of their own cost/benefit analyses while developing economies of scale. They also found a way to make chickens not only tasteless, but very very cheap.

For sake of completeness I should mention Chinatown, where one finds another conception of mock chicken, that comes in a tin along the same shelf with mocked ducks, pigs, abalones, and other unlucky creatures. So far as I can see from those labels, all are made from tofu and dragonflies. The tins also mention “vegetarians,” but I think even in Red China there must be laws against using them as a food ingredient.

My Chief Texas Correspondent supplies this morning’s reading, which he found at City Journal (here). Very well put, by this Magnetic gentleman. I was getting at the same point in the style of my Saturday effusion (“An argument against arguing”) and will be returning to it. As ever, after posting that piece, I sat back to receive various mealy-mouthed comments from readers who say, “You will attract more flies with honey than with vinegar!” To which my boilerplate response is now, “I’m not trying to attract flies.” (And when I am, I will use flypaper.)

The part of Christian teaching that is most obscure to contemporary Christians and pseudos is the frequent reference in the Gospels to Demons, and Demonic inhabitation. Christ is Himself the source of this curiously unmodern “point of view.” Then Paul carries it the further nine yards. If you haven’t noticed this, you weren’t reading carefully enough. (Or maybe you haven’t read it at all?)

There is Devilry in this world, as most will admit at least in moments when it touches them, to their harm, and they ask some stupid question such as, “Why, Santa, why?” But in the moments that are more numerous, the idea of The Devil becomes a symbol, a parable, a narreme in the narratology, a simile, a meme, an “idea” — something to be taken not too literally for fear we will ourselves be taken as fanatics. The Resurrection is likewise not taken as fact, rather as some poetical way in which the Apostles and their chums expressed their “feelings.”

Ditto, finally, the rest of Catholic doctrine.

Modern biblical scholarship is full of this tosh, from the vaguely Christian, but squeamish. It would be convenient for them if Christ had taught more like a college perfesser, and been fastidious in his choice of words — instead of putting everything on the line, as if he were the Son of God, or something.

There are Demons, we must fight the Demons, starting of course with the Demons in us. We are up against Dark, not up against “misunderstandings.” The Devil of course thrives on stupidity — which is what makes Democracy so attractive to him — but his intentions are not merely stupid. He is actually trying to Destroy us. Without an active and vivid conception of evil (founded in opposition!) we become his playthings: agents and participants in our own Destruction.

Christ did not preach cornmeal.

We have “well-meaning” intellectuals, of course, who are genuinely embarrassed by such candour. Their attitude is, “Please, dear, put on some clothes.” (You can’t argue with prudes, either.) For words either mean what they say — even in the Bible — or they mean nothing.

You cannot argue with people who do not accept meaning. All you can do is reiterate, proclaim: “This is this and that is that.” And should that prove unacceptable, then, “Get thee behind me.”