Essays in Idleness

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen of Canada, becomes this week the longest-serving monarch in British history. This will be on Wednesday, a little after noon our time, when Queen Victoria’s sixty-three years, two hundred sixteen days, will (Insha’Allah) be surpassed. I do not think she reads this Idleblog, but if anyone who does is speaking to her, please pass along my loyal and devoted congratulations.

I mention this on British North American “Labour Day,” as it is such an extraordinary work history. There is no question the Queen, now in her ninetieth year, has been among the hardest-working of all the people in the present and former British Commonwealth of Nations, through all the time since her sudden and dramatic elevation to the throne, on the untimely death of her beloved father, the 6th of February, 1952.

All of her prime ministers (and there have been hundreds of them) can attest, and most have attested, to the remarkable mastery of her brief; many have been embarrassed to discover that the Queen is better informed than they are, on the very topics they have come to discuss. Such is her presence that, regardless of political party, it is doubtful that any politician has gone back to see her, not thoroughly prepared, a second time.

We call her a “constitutional” monarch, in the sense that the power to make and pass legislation resides, in British realms, entirely with Parliament; and so she is obliged to give royal assent to their various, typically foolish schemes. The Speech from the Throne in every House, modelled on Westminster, is written in the office of the Prime Minister of the day, not in the Palace. This is a great pity, but is the result nevertheless of a long, mostly unwritten, constitutional history that cannot easily be undone, nor should be except gradually, with abundant caution. Happily no one, who is not insane, holds our Queen responsible for the nonsense she must read and sign.

Yet behind closed doors she has an influence that has grown with her experience over the years. In their memoirs, I think every British prime minister since her first (Winston Churchill), has credited her useful contributions, simply from asking questions or making suggestions that no one else had thought of. For she is in possession of a fine political mind, able to compass details that lie beyond the reach of most politicians.

A very intelligent, elderly, constitutional monarch is of inestimable value in this regard. She serves, in a sense, as a living institutional memory. Even a young one has the advantage of a family history, and an upbringing, of value as a corrective to men who can think only of immediate personal advantage — risen as they are from the gutter, up the greasy pole. She is there to remind, or even to teach them, in a place where their vulgarity will not be exposed: behind those closed palace doors.

Which is to say nothing of the worthy monarch as a living symbol of a nation in its breadth and unity, above the stench and sleaze, the deceit and corruption of the democratic process.

Discretion is a real virtue in government and diplomacy — human lives depend upon it — and so great is Her Majesty’s accomplishment, that no one is able to guess her private political views. From the left of the Labour to the right of the Conservative Party, each has been under the impression that she sympathizes in some obscure way with at least some of their views; but none can articulate what this amounts to, beyond a prudent, thoughtful, and general benignity.

Queen Elizabeth is immensely charming, except on occasions when it is not in the interests of civility to be charming. She is secretly capable of rather cutting remarks, among trusted friends; and of a sharp wit she is on guard not to exhibit publicly. Indeed, it takes great intelligence to learn how to be boring in the proper way, on all State occasions; and most of her waking hours have been, since 1952, tedious State occasions.

On the other hand, she has been straightforward in defence of what were, until very recently in the decline of our civilization, the “motherhood issues.” Those who have audited her Christmas and other public messages over the years will know the aggregate effect of the delicious phrases she is apt to repeat. My own favourite is, “My husband and I,” so often dropped in to avoid the “royal we,” without conceding its formality, and falling just short of droll.

My own loyal heart has beat the fonder since a moment in Canterbury, many years ago, when I watched her perform the duty of providing some light, extempore public chatter, right after the Anglican Primate.

“The Archbishop of Canterbury has just spoken to you on the subject of sin,” she began. “And he was, against. … I shall now speak on the subject of the family. And I shall be, for.”

Much more one could say about this gracious woman, who has truly earned the love and admiration of the great majority of her subjects, so that even the nasty republicans among them do not speak against her personally; and even the brutish Scots nationalists are careful to specify that they would keep the Queen. They will perhaps attack her children for their sometimes loutish, modern behaviour; or even her (magnificent) husband for his quaint habit of uttering truths that have become politically incorrect, but through her entire reign, so far as I recall, there was, outside Quebec, only the one moment of popular hysteria — after the death of Princess Diana — when the vicious mob turned briefly against her. This was over a question of protocol that they did not have the education to understand.

On which occasion she had the wit to break with protocol, and lower a flag that is never lowered in mourning, to assuage and calm them. It was done in the same alert serenity with which she once controlled the horse on which she was riding, that nearly bolted from a gunshot nearby — undistracted by any thought that the bullet was probably meant for her.

For this is the skill by which all monarchs should be judged, whether they be “constitutional,” or “absolute,” or something in between. The mob — “the people” — are like a wild horse: not evil, necessarily, or not always evil; but wild and, in emergencies, needing to be soothed and tamed. The role of the monarch is to prevent them from hurting themselves, or hurting each other, in the unpredictable moments of alarm. Her Majesty has shown positive genius through all the alarms of sixty-three years, and counting.

And verily: Long may she reign!

From the sermon notes of Blessed J.H. Newman, we learn the names of the pallbearers at today’s funeral in the city of Naim. They are Pride, Sensuality, Unbelief, and Ignorance. The burial of the Natural Man will proceed — through the city gate, to the cemetery beyond — accompanied by a large crowd of mourners, led by the keening mother of the deceased.

“He was so young!” … “And she a widow, and this her only child!” … “It is all so sad!” …

But what’s this? … Jesus and His disciples are approaching the same town. The two processions meet. It is a memorable day, for the Natural Man is about to be raised from the dead.

From the sermon notes of Saint Augustine: “If all men have eyes to see the dead rise, like the son of this widow spoken of in this Gospel, all nevertheless have not eyes to see men rise from spiritual death. For that, it is necessary oneself to have undergone spiritual resurrection.”

We are burying once again, in the West, the old Natural Man. In his millions. In Switzerland, for instance, they are burying them — the dead burying the dead, in the mountains. No Jesus in sight, unfortunately.

“Traddies” — i.e. faithful Catholics, like myself I dearly hope, tend to become vexed by news that Swiss bishops, along with a liberal selection from France and Germany, are endlessly meeting to prepare their strategies for the upcoming Family Synod at Rome. They have made their position clear. They claim to have Pope Francis on their side, but unlike the pontiff they are not proposing “mercy” for the divorced and remarried, for homosexual couples, for contraceptive practitioners and the like. Not at all.

They are demanding that the “official” Church recognize all these modern, essentially sterile couplings as a good thing. The Church must bless them!

Permission was hardly required. There is now on the books of no Western country of which I am aware anything to prevent them. The disapproval of the Catholic Church gets in no one’s way. Not even in the way of Catholics, today. They may continue copulating like stoats, and celebrating themselves in a kind of stoat glory, whatever Holy Church might happen to say.

So what is the Natural Man’s big problem? His medical “issues” are covered by the State, and when it comes to that, he hardly needs the Church to be buried or otherwise disposed of. The rebels from the “traditional” doctrines of Rome have got it made. It is as Philip Larkin put it:

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

These are bishops, mind, of the Catholic Church, making these demands. But as Sandro Magister points out, the German bishops especially — the ones we know as talking faces, such as Cardinal Marx and Cardinal Kasper — are conservative, and come across as prudes — when their views are compared to those of their nomenklatura. They may cite a survey done last winter of six thousand “professional Catholics” in Switzerland — of pastoral workers, catechists, parish councillors, the formal reps of women’s and men’s associations, groups and communities — who demand more, in unprettier language. The mitres are only the top of the iceberg: the bits we can see.

In Switzerland, as in Germany, registered Catholics pay tithes to the Church through the tax system. This helps to explain the extremely high production values in their latest publication (this one) in German, French, and Italian. The title could be translated, Diversity of Families in the Catholic Church: Stories and Reflections. It is their red flag for the upcoming synod. In the course of telling smarm stories about the latest new forms of family life, it simply ignores two millennia of Catholic teaching, and avoids mentioning such figures in the history of that Church, as Jesus Christ, or Mother Mary. Instead it celebrates “the way we live now.”

Far from merely tolerating, or forgiving, we learn that the Church must recognize this “progress” in our social life, encourage and support it. Or else: there will be an unprecedented “migration” out of the Church. All these modern people inside will just up and leave, we are solemnly warned. The way they’ve been leaving this last half-century, “in the spirit of Vatican II,” I should think. Well, maybe not unprecedented, but the ones who have stuck around will leave, too. Mark their words!

And you know what that means. They will no longer be paying tithes, and all those liberal German and Swiss bishops might, as the terrible consequence, lose their funding. They won’t be able to spread their “new gospel” around the rest of the world, any more. Not if they go broke. Maybe some of them will have to look for other jobs. I am trying to imagine it, as I write.

I think this would be great. The more post-Catholics out the door, the better. The expression is “make my day,” I believe.

Good luck to them all. …

Adios! arrivederci! tchau! au revoir! … Auf Wiedersehen!

Until we meet again!

Either in Hell, or on the road to Naim.

Saint John Paul II, of increasingly beloved memory, stressed so often these two angelic words, scattered throughout the Scriptures: “Fear not.” They are a counterpoint to another oft-encountered phrase: “Fear God.” I wrote “angelic” in the sense that, when not spoken by Our Lord, they are most likely to be spoken by angels, as for instance ad pastores, “Fear not, I bring you tidings of great joy.”

To the glib reader — and let me include myself, as I have discovered myself to be with the passing of the years — there would be some paradox here. To the contemporary, post-Christian reader, it is a flat contradiction. How can one be told not to fear, when one has been told to fear? The best he might gloss would be, “Fear this, and not that.” Which as so often with these godless folk, makes an excellent beginning.

In Thomas Aquinas, his Summa Theologica — II-II, beginning at questio 125, if you must know — the whole matter is dealt with. (Someone should perhaps bring it to the attention of Donald Trump.)

The Angelic Doctor deals with fear itself; whether and in what circumstances it might be a sin, or could even rise to a mortal sin; or under other circumstances might excuse from sin; whether it is necessarily contrary to fortitude; whether fearlessness is a sin; whether fearlessness might be opposed to fortitude; and so forth, into a rounder consideration of daring, bravery, and the virtue of fortitude considered in its several aspects or parts or as he puts it, “modes” — finally relating to the theological virtue of Hope. Let the serious reader found his contemplation on that, rather than this.

As I know from email, many of my readers are afraid. Few feel bound to exhibit the virtue of fortitude; and I should almost say that their fear of fearlessness is greater than their fear of fear. They are a gentle lot, compared at least to me. Also, predominantly, Christian.

My Czech buddies, with whom I used to drink, had as their motto: “If God is with us, who can be against us?” This might sound brash and arrogant, to someone who knows not Czechs; in fact they were the opposite of aggressive. It struck me that this saying from Saint Paul perfectly balances the two propositions: to fear not, and to fear God.

A paradox exists only on the surface. The key to the rational explanation of this one passes back, I think, from Aquinas through Aristotle even to Plato’s Socrates. It is that sin is worse than punishment; that for the man who has done wrong, being discovered, and being punished for what he has done, is in the happiest sense fortuitous. He should want to turn himself in, as it were; he should want to pay and be cleansed of evil-doing.

The two little words, “fear not,” themselves contain a great deal of information, once we know they are of God. They address us personally. They show that God knows our hearts: that when we fear, we fear for ourselves and for our own; that this is natural, when something is presented that makes us afraid. On the contrary, to be free of any temptation to fear, is unnatural. This latter is not fortitude, which requires some moral starch; the psychopath is fearless.

If we are not to fear externals — things like loss and pain and death — we will need the help of angels. As we see from Scripture, the angels come; and too, perhaps, from personal experience, the help arrives when it is meekly called for. (“Lord, get me through this!”) They are not merely an instruction, not to fear. They are a breath that fills us.

The expression, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” is, by contrast, pagan, and fatuous. It is an expression of bravado, and of the stoicism that is so often sold today, not as holiness but as an alternative to it. The hospitals and nursing homes, I have found, are full of old stoics breaking down, because the human spine can take only so much pressure, before it snaps. And the whimpering of stoics is especially unpleasant to the ear.

Of course we have more to fear than fear itself: fear of bombs and bullets is perfectly rational, and fully human; as is, too, the fear of a cancer, or of a trick heart, or in old age of an internal infection that may verily suddenly turn us into another of those corpses. The brave face holds up only until we panic. Fear of hanging is also quite reasonable in a man: the greater if he is close enough to God, to realize that Hell may yawn before him.

But we have, today, little fear of Hell. As I like to quote Czeslaw Milosz: “A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death: the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”

And yet, a personal fear that one may go to Hell, while admirable in some cases, may in others be much closer to a neurosis. (I think of an old New Yorker cartoon, of a businessman in a suit, on the clouds before Saint Peter. “No, no,” Saint Peter is saying, “that wasn’t a sin either. You poor man, you must have worried yourself to death!”)

For the proper fear of God consists not in the fear of punishment, but in fear of the sin that deserves it.

Or at least this is the case, in my callow understanding: that it is a “fear of falling,” out of God’s grace. A fear, in that sense, of the Eye of God, turned upon our worthless and disobedient behaviour. A fear and a horror of what we, like Adam, have done with the very gift of our life, displeasing to our Maker. It is, perhaps, properly considered, the most “objective” fear there can be, freeing us as it does from all our cheap “subjective” judgements.

*

A professor friend reports:

“I saw something yesterday that I thought you might appreciate. Daughter Margaret and I were walking back from ‘Dollarama’ on Vaughan Road last night, where we had been acquiring some school supplies, and we passed a police cruiser.  Climbing out of it (not being forced into it) was a youngish woman, ‘rebelliously’ dressed, with whom it seems the coppers had wanted a word.  They thanked her and sent her on her way.

“She walked along directly in front of us as we crossed St Clair Avenue. Right at the crossing is a shop called ‘Manila Foods’, which often has a sidewalk display of fruits and vegetables. The woman walked to the display and deftly scooped up a banana with her hands hidden by her bag. Then she walked on.

“I was contemplating whether I ought to tell her she had been observed, or just go back to the shop and reimburse them for the theft. But when we came to the next corner, she suddenly spun round, muttering, ‘Aw, shit!’

“She walked back to the counter, replaced the banana, and then turned back round again.

“It took me a moment to realize what had happened: she had just reached St Alphonsus Church at the corner of Vaughan and St Clair, and evidently she felt that she could not walk past it while carrying stolen goods. The last I saw of her, she was climbing the steps of the church and sitting down by the door.

“Perhaps Saint Alphonsus the Casuist was explaining to her that stealing wouldn’t ultimately be a satisfying way to get back at Toronto’s Finest.”

Young gentleman of my acquaintance refers to the Beatles and the Stones as, “nursing home music.” I remember the undying “swing era,” in the generation of my elders, and know what he means. The music seemed fresh, once upon a time, when “we” were all young, and easily entertained. Now we are old, and it is just as easy. The popular music of my youth had more breadth than the popular music of my parents’ age. Theirs was shallow and sentimental. So was much of ours; but ours also ranged to shallow and obnoxious.

Today’s effusion is not meant as a commentary on popular music; nor even on the sadness of nursing homes, and of the poor refugees washed up there, past their sell-by dates in commercial reckoning — no longer able to buy things for themselves — but not yet eugenically disposed of, owing to the prolongation of ancient taboos. It doesn’t seem right to put old mom and dad out with organic recycling in the new green bins. We can’t remember why (biohazard, perhaps?) — but we still don’t want to do it. It’s an emotional thing.

How many of the moral principles of the past survive today as sentimental adjuncts. They are that which feeds the feeler’s “feelgood,” or helps him to avoid the “feelbad” pain. The state, we thus feebly reason, should fund homes for the aged, and animal shelters for cute abandoned puppies. Alas, mom and dad have no chance, in there, of being re-adopted.

I am in rebellion against the fake, at all levels and in every aspect of post-Christian society. This theme is carried through many of these Idleposts. I do not like cheap substitutes for goods, and sentiment is a substitute for the good of a genuine moral conviction, so powerful that it will be acted upon. I think we should “pay extra” for the real thing.

*

Those pictures of Aylan Kurdi, the little boy dead, washed up on a beach in Turkey: I don’t trust them. Not that I think they were staged, like several of the big-impact images that have come out of Palestine. From what I can make out of background accounts, the scene was real enough — the poor little boy had actually drowned, after a dinghy capsized, along with his siblings and mother. Still, I am suspicious of any media presentation that looks too good for its purpose. Not staged, but nevertheless framed, carefully.

In this case, the pictures have quickly found their way to the centre of the Canadian election campaign. Apparently the surviving father had made a refugee application to Canada through his sister here, and it was not promptly approved. Therefore the prime minister, Stephen Harper, is being held personally responsible for the little boy’s death, by Harper’s political opponents, who include most of our journalists. Knowing what kind of men these are — the calculating mindless — I am hardly surprised.

The modern, mass-man, bereft of moral or intellectual substance, is left to operate entirely on emotion. The refugee crisis is thus presented in highly loaded emotional terms. Journalists who, only a generation or two ago, would have hesitated to roll with a scene that played on emotions in such a crass way, do not hesitate today. Being incapable of moral judgement, they ethicize mechanically in these terms: “If I don’t publish this, someone else will.” (Ethics are for people who have no morals.)

Were they at least partially Christian, as most were in the past, they would reason differently. “Even if another man may benefit from this evil, I must not.” And they would join to ostracize the journalist who had seized his opportunity, to make sure he did not come out ahead on the transaction. Today, it is a tip of the hat to the quickest operator.

But of course, the great majority will “justify” the sensationalist, by emoting on cue. Readers and viewers will rise to the bait, and consequences will follow. In approximately 100 cases out of 100, some new injustice will be perpetrated, to assuage our “feelings.” In almost every case, those who were trying to deal with the issue, to the best of their limited abilities — often at personal sacrifice, and under constraints far beyond their control — will be selected as the scapegoats. And seldom will the truth be sorted out, later, for the news cycle runs on, ever on.

True justice, as opposed to fake justice, requires the taming of emotion. It requires patience, and thinking things through. It refuses to jump to conclusions, however obvious they may be at first sight. Justice, where crimes have been committed, requires minds deeply tutored in principles of natural law, not shallowly briefed in the “how to” of “fix it.” True justice, as true charity or love, will not be rushed. Moreover, it is prepared to be tested.

*

Europe must take the refugees in, and we, in Canada and USA, must take our share, for a very simple reason. They are there, and they are desperate, and they have washed up in our view, and we have the means to help them. No Christian who has understood the Flight into Egypt can be confused about this. Nor can we, as Christians, choose whom we want to save. Our religion is radically different from Islam; we aren’t allowed to “prioritize” our own.

(See: here.)

What I have just written goes beyond emotion. It is in the realm of duty. There are things we must do whether it makes us “feelgood,” or not. We cannot watch people perish, when it is within our ability to save their lives. We cannot let people starve and thirst, when we have food and drink enough for their succour. We cannot look away. Or rather, we must not look away, hide our heads and our wallets, or we will deservedly go to Hell. Our “feelings” on this are beside the point: this is a moral imperative.

And yet these refugees have no “rights.” Indeed, one has little of anything, when floating across the Mediterranean in an open dinghy. We have duties. The whole situation is quite opposite to that presented by the talking heads, when they try, so feebly, to reason. We do not “owe” these people citizenship or anything of the kind. They are refugees, not immigrants: we do not have an obligation to confuse these categories. They are “entitled” to be grateful for what they get; and to wait, peaceably, for legal status, wherever they have landed, according to our laws. We do, however, owe them succour. Why?

Because they are Christ, washed up at our feet; because they are the Holy Family; because they are Joseph, and Mary, with their Child, fled from Herod.

At the moment, facing millions (actual, not rhetorical millions), all we can do is feed, clothe, and shelter. For the catastrophe has happened. The opportunities for hypocrisy are huge, and we will avoid them only by acting intelligently, in good faith. Those who demand action by the state’s emergency services are wasting their breath: of course these agencies have gone into action. The question for each soul is rather, What can I do? This does not depend in any way on “collective responsibility.”

Should we want to go there, we will, as I have argued recently, look plainly at our own collective role in creating this crisis. As I explained, several days past, “we” in the West have played the most significant role, except the Daesh itself, in creating the conditions by which it has flourished. We scotched, but did not kill the serpent. I think it is morally incumbent on us, collectively, to go back in with boots unambiguously on the ground, and finish the job we started. And this, even if we don’t want to.

For the cause of the refugee crisis must be addressed, and that is the Daesh; and only by annihilating the Daesh can the crisis be eventually resolved. Alternatively, it will continue to spread. It is on our heads that we allowed it, and on our heads that it will ultimately fall.

But in addition to American, I should like to see Canadian, Hungarian, Greek, German, Swedish, French, Italian, and many other styles of boots on the ground. For the Yankees are still carrying most of the water, and they are not our servants.

Consider, gentle reader, if you will, two ink colours. One of them is black, and the other red. My fellow Catlick traddies may be familiar with the motto: “Say the Black. Do the Red.” It is on one side of our coffee mugs. (And on the other: “Or Else.”) This alludes to the Roman Missal, from the days before fatuous “options.” It was printed invariably in two colours: red and black.

Or in some Bibles, mostly Protestant, the words of Christ are printed in red. This is especially arresting when one encounters them in the Apocalypse of Saint John the Apostle.

In the missals, and sometimes elsewhere, the parts in red type are called “rubrics.” This is because they are in red (Latin, rubrica, for a red ochre.) They give directions. Or if you will: red is for the blood of the saints; black is penitential. For it is, The Sacrifice of the Mass.

Consider, if thou wilt, the ancient texts of Egyptian scribes, written with stylus on papyrus. One finds two colours: red, and black. The scribes used them in a similar way. This was many hundreds, thousands, of years before Christ. Fragmentary examples are still washing up, from the desert sands. Unfortunately papyrus is excessively biological; and not as permanent as parchment or rag paper. For they are only the bits inscribed upon fragments of lime and plaster that still look as if they were written yesterday. Some give liturgical texts; with, as it were, rubrics.

And in Chinese brushwork, both calligraphy and painting in monochrome, we have black, always black. But completed by the red of a seal, or seals, as a conference of ownership and authority. The black could not be so black without that small square stroke of waxen red.

Ditto in the graphic works of many other cultures, displaced from each other is space and time. We did not need to learn from anyone that black goes with red in this way. It is written into our DNA: to say the black, to do the red. Were it ever suppressed, it would be recovered.

For every day, as from desert sands, babies emerge from their mothers’ wombs, already knowing the red and the black. It is hard-wired. You could not remove it without killing the child.

The red need not be glossy and sparkling. In fact, as every capable graphic artist knows in his bones, it should be toned down: matt, and earthy; ochre, not bright. Drill sergeants to the contrary, orders should never be screamed. Instead, they should be quietly obeyed.

I was myself first mesmerized by the typographical beauty of the red and the black, as a child with a newspaper. It was a copy of Die Zeit, borrowed from a neighbour. A teaser along the top of the front page, above the title, was in earth red. So were the kickers: short words or phrases above the headings, denoting topics. If memory serves, there was, too, a one-point line rule across four columns, separating a long feature article from shorter articles above. The memory is a little hazy; I must have been quite young at the time. But how vividly I remember the thrill, the deep existential thrill, of this earth red. For in consequence, the whole page was dancing.

Similarly, the red excise stamp, like a Chinese seal, on any ancient copy of The Times. It was a brilliant device, from the revenue officials. The page would look empty, so grey, without it. Everyone would want to pay the tax.

Today, I think, I would criticize the layout, not of The Times in the 1790s, but of Die Zeit in the 1960s  — for too much red. “One should sow with the hand, not with the whole sack,” as the poetess Corinna explained, to the young Pindar.

But, as Corinna would readily agree, no red would be too little.

Did you know? That Canada is not only the world’s leading exporter, but now the leading producer, of lentils? That we grow more than half-again the crop of all India? Verily, three-eighths of the whole planet’s ongoing supply?

What a fool I’ve been, never to have noticed a single lentil bush growing in an Ontario field — was my first thought upon encountering this fascinating piece of statistical information.

But then it all fell into place. Ninety-six per cent of Canada’s lentils are grown in the fine Province of Saskatchewan, which I was myself raised to think of as 60 million acres of wheat. But no! Nearly half of that farm space today is other crops, including, too, 99 percent of Canada’s “gram,” or chickpeas.

Canada; or more precisely, Saskatchewan; or more precisely, a certain Murad Al-Katib, is now the major player in the world trade for lentils, chickpeas, various other pulses and beans. Note that definite article.

In anno 2001, none of us were growing lentils. (I’m still not.) And yet, then as now, much of Saskatchewan was as close to ideal lentil-growing territory as the planet could offer. (Except for the short growing season.) And — trust me, I’ve been around — a lot of that planet takes lentils with its rice or chapatis. (High protein content; delicious even before spicing; tremendous variety, and culinary range. Drought-resistant. High yield with machines, and higher still with human hands.)

For it was in 2001 that Mr Al-Katib — descendant of refugees, like the rest of us — started up as “Saskcan Pulse Trading.” This was in a room in the basement of his house. He had himself for an employee, and a very pregnant wife (twins), who wasn’t speaking to him after he quit a well-paid government job. “The love of my life,” as he still speaks, unabashedly and with a face-grabbing sincerity, of this ’Chewanian girl, Michelle.

But she is speaking to him now.

I love a love story. Murad was fat, and foreign, and had a big mouth, at the front of some class in the University of Saskatchewan. Michelle hated him on sight. But she was for Murad his muse. Eventually they worked out their differences; and he credits her for everything he’s achieved.

He had this clever idea, you see: “Feed. The. World.” And a trading connexion in Turkey he had chosen to trust. (You have to trust people sometimes.)

I like to shunt like this, from statistics to some little human story that is at the root of it all, like Adam and Eve. I was once a hack business journalist. This story was gold, I couldn’t resist it.

*

And now for the segue. Syria contains much rich, traditional, prime lentil-growing territory. It could feed itself with twenty million people, even under an unpleasant dictator. The farmers for the most part ignored him and got on with it. But the Daesh they cannot ignore.

Four million Syrian refugees in transit, currently, according to UN statistics — a scale that now well exceeds that of Rwanda in 1994. A very high proportion of them are Christian, and the overall numbers are rising at more than 100,000 per month. Gentle reader may have noticed that their attempts to get into Europe currently dominate the European news headlines. Sympathy for them — which was huge when they were a sentimental abstraction — is now declining rapidly. The proposal to “send them home” is being expressed, politically, with ever increasing candour.

Libya is the other principal source of refugees, at the moment — people risking their lives, quite recklessly, to get out of a country that the Western world decided to mess with on progressive principles, just a few years ago. We congratulated ourselves on the success of their “Arab Spring,” and declared that democracy had triumphed again. (All the liberals still speaking to me were gloating about how cleverly Obama had pulled off getting rid of Gaddafi.)

The number of Middle Eastern countries vomiting refugees will itself continue to rise. Though by the time it includes all of them, the phenomenon is likely to be concealed by the fact of another planetary war. For things are getting seriously out of hand, and the list of flashpoints in the tinder is growing.

It is a point I was reaching for, these last two days. The United States and allies could still go in with military, to bring Islamism to a conclusion, starting with its Sunni apparatus and form — as President Bush was attempting in light of 9/11. Alas, like Churchill, he was “ahead of his time.” (Murad Al-Katib also likes to quote Churchill.)

Or we can sit back and watch, dropping a few bombs meticulously here and there, to prove that we are not totally indifferent; and performing the occasional drone assassination. This has not retarded the spread of the Daesh; but in theory it was supposed to. (Liberalism is all about theories.)

We got a taste of what would be involved, in Afghanistan and Iraq, before our electorates came to their decisive, “no thank you.” Indeed, there is seldom thanks for good deeds, as military veterans across the USA are once again discovering. As to Vietnam, they were sent into the fire, for a cause that their masters would soon abandon. And yesterday’s heroes, with all their traumatic disorders, become as welcome back home as Syrian refugees. (Kipling once wrote a poignant poem on this.)

True, this is how the world works — its way from one catastrophe to another. That is why we put our faith in God, and not in men.

Air, sea, and ground military action, for all its horror, remains the only practicable solution to, among other things, the refugee crisis, so far as I can see. It is like stopping Hitler in the 1930s; or stopping Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, et cetera. It won’t be done with peace talks. Or perhaps we are hoping that, for instance, the Ayatollahs and their nuclear missiles will, like the Soviets, eventually fade away. Forgetting, perhaps, that they are crazier than the Soviets, and actually banking on Armageddon in their stated beliefs, having vowed to annihilate another six million Jews. Et cetera.

And just wait until Nigeria is emptying out.

For the moment, the choice is between going right in with boots on, to defeat the common enemy at source (we could still wipe out the Daesh without nuclear weapons); and continuing to absorb millions upon millions of refugees — among whom are many who will take their war to us.

We think we have stepped out of it. We haven’t, and we can’t. We have instead broadly surrendered influence over our own fate.

For serious military action — the kind that won’t relent till victory — is now unthinkable. We tried that, got bored, and slightly bruised; then walked away.

One might almost say it is a principle of democracy, to take unnecessary action, every day. But when it comes to necessary action, we leave it until there will be hecatombs and vast, unimaginable destruction.

Something, anyway, to chew with the lentils.

“I was returning on a flight from Vancouver, and as we waited to taxi onto the runway, I looked about at the other passengers. Not a one of them (excluding me) was looking up. They were all looking down at their cellphones/PDAs, busily processing innumerable bits of useless information. I say ‘useless’ because, as a former Canadian Forces military intelligence officer, I understand the distinctions between information, knowledge, and truth (wisdom) — in ascending order. Truly we live in a world looking down.”

This is why we need military intelligence; for an occasional “heads up.”

For some reason, having to do with “Afghoon” and “Raq,” and my own former employment as a hack journalist, I have made the acquaintance of various gentlemen over the years, who work in “signals.” The one in email quoted above now goes back some distance; he recently resurfaced. What I love about that trade, is the requirement it puts upon its practitioners to keep their wits about them.

Military, not civilian, intelligence is useful. The civilian agencies quickly fill with the Ivy League types. They worship their own brains, their own genius for “analysis,” their own imagined superiority and “aboveness” — which is why they’re invariably looking down, missing the forest for the root causes. Like all the self-important people in Business Class, they process innumerable bits of useless information.

(Make me President of your country, USAmericans, and I will shut down the CIA almost as quickly as I shut down the Environmental Protection Agency. For that matter, everything with an acronym, that I can find.)

Whereas, in military, especially when a war’s on, we have people oriented to finding out what is going on. And often, too, somehow finding a way to explain it to their civilian bosses, especially the politicians, conditioned by everything they’ve read in their papers, which is more or less uniformly false. I could tell some wonderful stories about encounters of this sort, between intelligence briefers and prominent politicians; “Annals of clewlessness” might be the title. But really I should not.

*

My effusion yesterday, touching on Iraq, seems to have drawn a few retired out of the woodwork. Some others could not see the point of it, and one complained that I did not mention God. But trust me, He’s always in the plot, somewhere. Indeed, the only character legitimately above it.

Overnight, I added a paragraph of parenthesis, to make my retrospect clearer. My views on that War (which has yet to be over) were and remain not quite identical with those of anyone else. I was gung-ho for the Invasion, then increasingly appalled by the follow through. But I did not agree with the people who thought our side should have made a quick exit after knocking off Saddam. I thought the attempt to “rebuild Iraq as a democracy” was ludicrous; that it was hearts-and-minds back to Vietnam. That part could certainly have been omitted, at a savings of a few hundred billion.

The Americans had done the people of Iraq enough of a favour by destroying the tyranny; let the Iraqis get on with the task of creating the next one in their own good time. Better yet, divide it into three countries, the way Joe Biden suggested; smaller, more homogenous tyrannies being better than larger and more ethnically various (usually). No objection to distributing food, water, and the odd candy bar. But we had not the stomach for old-fashioned Imperialism; nor should have bitten more than we could chew.

With the media satisfied, by a good quick war, and taking advantage of their short attention span, the next phase should have been mopping up, strictly. Arrogance, partly, was preventing Team USA from seeing at first that more needed doing, especially along the road from Baghdad to Damascus. The Daesh were already functioning in places like Fallujah, and it would be a considerable task to track and kill them all. … (Semper fi!)

And the less publicity for this, the better. People back home would not want to know what it takes to eliminate the sort of force that gloats over video executions. It might ruin their breakfasts.

Do not embed journalists. As the British in Malaya and Borneo, who defeated a Communist insurgency using modest commando resources — while the Americans were busy losing Vietnam, with half-a-million troops, to say nothing of the aeroplanes — the last place you want the modern journalist is in a war. Let the armchair specialists write the history, after the event. Let them say what you did wrong, after you have defeated the enemy.

Vietnam was a formative experience for me (I was there in the early 1970s). Very young, and unsure of myself, I was astounded by the bureaucratic scale of the U.S. enterprise. It impressed me in one way, and then in another: I had never seen anything so counter-productive. Nor could I believe, till I’d had a good taste, how malicious and untruthful my fellow journalists could be, filing stories from the rumours they had told each other in the safety of the Saigon bars. Or taking what they’d been told at the “Five o’clock Follies” (the daily official press briefing at MACV), and simply inverting it.

An essential component of military intelligence, is distinguishing friend from foe. American military intelligence had somehow failed to notice that the journalists were working for the other side.

*

God does come into this. At the frontiers of every civilization, there are savages to be dealt with. Christian civilization is unique, in our belief that these people may somehow be converted: Christianized, by untiring missionary labour, over time. But Western Christendom, at least, was never in confusion about the hard, underlying fact of barbarism. We are up against men who murder, rape, and enslave. This must be stopped. You don’t stop it by talking about it.

To the point, Western Christendom did not survive wave after wave of Islamic conquest by “turning the other cheek” in surrender. One does not adopt a superior moral posture, for oneself, while the innocent are being slaughtered. One adopts, rather, the spirit of the Crusades. We turn to Jesus for the shriving of our souls, then follow Saint Michael into battle.

There was so much ruined temple at the Palmyra site, that the Daesh are still blowing it up, I learn from news reports. (No one in the West even thought of intervening.) This leaves them less explosive with which to blow up Christians, Yazidis, miscellaneous Sufis, Mershdi Alawites, full Twelvers, Ismailis, Druze, various Shia and other Muslims, as well as the less zealous of their own, we might suppose. But they tend to kill those in more traditional, lower-tech ways; so I doubt there is any upside at all. It would be interesting to know whence the explosives came; or whence the biological and chemical weapons they also seem to have been using (though on a modest scale). I suspect the answers would give so little comfort to anyone, that we would have to dig for them.

Quite seriously, the opinion that Saddam Hussein of Iraq was plentifully provided with “WMD” was so universally held by Western intelligence agencies, prior to the U.S. invasion of 2003, that I still believe there was something in it. Moreover, I think the “rumours” that much of this stuff was parked in Syria for the duration of that war — and thus remained there after the Iraqi Ba’athist regime went down — may also have been credible.

And parked, be it noted, not with Syria’s government, which could hardly wish to risk making itself the next U.S. regime-change target, but with Syrian insurgents across a border they had already made porous.

To the end, Saddam thought the best way to defeat the Americans in Iraq was by bogging them down in an insurgency that would quickly wear the patience of the fickle U.S. electorate; not by upping the ante with WMD. While he did not survive himself, this reasoning proved basically sound.

Now, biological and many chemical weapons are subject to rapid decay, so it does not follow that what had remained potent even until 2003 (from programmes that had flourished much earlier) could still be potent in 2015. But the interesting thing here is the trucks the allies found, abandoned in Iraq, with the remains of mobile labs. Were any “live ones” moved?

I am curious, journalistically, about questions like this, because I should like to know more about the history of the Daesh, which is a Sunni insurgency, opposed to Shia Iran, and also to Syria’s Iran-supported regime. They did not come out of nowhere, but out of somewhere, well-armed, even before their capture of vast weapon and munitions stocks left by the USA. In fact they came out of Syria, where they had already forged their rather formidable discipline, opposing the Assad regime, and had already cultivated international connexions, through the Saddam regime, with Sunni insurgent movements in North Africa, West Africa, and elsewhere.

(I use “Daesh,” incidentally, in preference to the fuller Arabic, ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī ‘l-‘Irāq wa-sh-Shām, which is an eye and mouthful for most Western readers. It translates something like, “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,” but leads to long discussions about the concept of a “state” in classical or modern Arabic. I like “Daesh,” or Da’esh, or Da’ish, because that is what its Muslim opponents prefer, and because it conveys better the remarkably strange nature of the movement. A product of modernism it may be, indirectly; but of an ideological, revolutionary modernism slurred with ancient Islamic teaching that was also pathologically aggressive, violent, and totalitarian. Too, it is a practice of all totalitarian orders to make titles into propaganda statements — remember, “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” — and we should not feel obliged to accommodate them.)

Our failure to understand — even to study, intelligently — the origins of this movement, has much to do with the successful leftwing demonization of the Bush administration in USA, and the blind incompetence of the subsequent one. For it has become a principle of faith, now in government and media, that “Bush lied” about both the weaponry and the international terrorist connexions of the Saddam regime. He did not; and it does not help that even his own brother now disowns him for the purpose of sleazing ahead in U.S. politics. Read Dick Cheney’s new book (co-authored with his daughter, Liz) for better background information.

A false, and very foolish understanding of the strategic situation in the Middle East now governs our airwaves and thoughtwaves. In dealing with the Daesh, we are absorbing the legacy of Saddam, who in his later years turned to Sunni Islamism himself as his best bet to prevail against his accumulating enemies. The history must be better understood to grasp the nature of the current threat.

We have been repeatedly blindsided by our own ignorance of the growth of a “terrorist network” that has thrived in our media shallows and shadows, and benefited from almost every foreign policy decision of President Obama. Indeed, that is part of what the Benghazi congressional hearings have been about, although their politicization has confused the issue. Hillary Clinton made a mess, true enough, but the congressmen need to expose not only the scandalous misjudgements, but why she made such a comprehensive mess. It was because she was (and remains) so mesmerized by the “liberal narrative” that she had (and has) no idea of the enemy we are actually facing.

To my mind, the great fault of the Bush administration was its failure to communicate its own, flawed, but much better understanding of the circumstances. It could have explained, with calm but rather more candour, why the U.S. and allies went into Iraq in the first place; that the battle was not simply about Saddam, and would not end with his displacement. Had it done so, we might better understand that “al-Qaeda” is more like an errant branch of the Daesh, than vice versa; and that the “Sunni militants” the U.S. Marines faced in Fallujah and elsewhere were already part of a well-organized force that is the Daesh today.

(According to me, they went wrong soon after invading, in thinking it was now a job for the State Department, taking it out of the hands of the Pentagon. They went right again in the “surge,” by taking it back from State, and giving it once more to the soldiers. “Root causes” are a wash: they go back to Adam. We had enemies who needed killin’ then, and alas, they still need killin’ today.)

We — or more precisely, the Obama administration — walked out of Iraq leaving the Daesh bleeding but undefeated; and then subverted the forces opposed to the Daesh (including Assad’s unpleasant Syrian regime). By now, that administration is scrambling to make friends with the Ayatollahs — an even crazier scheme — partly for help in resuming Bush’s war on the Daesh, as if fundamental American and Western interests could be served by a Shia Islamist proxy. To which end, our old Israeli, Egyptian, and Arabian allies have been repeatedly stabbed in the back.

In other words, a tactic that is, essentially, insane, against Daesh tactics that are only “nearly insane.” For the Daesh learnt from Saddam that monstrous acts of inhumanity, very publicly performed, are extremely effective in commanding obedience. Such acts also work as wonderful recruiting tools for psychopathic elements now deeply embedded in Western, as well as in Islamic society. The Daesh are not squandering their advantage to their unchecked murderous impulses. Their murderousness is more calculated than that. Rather they are growing in power, especially in the vacuums the Obama administration has created for them in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and many other countries.

The good news is that Obama, Mrs Clinton, et alia, have now so thoroughly squandered the credibility of the United States not only in the region, but all around the world, that little more damage can be done, at least by them. Moreover, countries including Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, are now cooperating marvellously to defend themselves — against both the Daesh and Iran. (The Saudis partly by trying to help al-Qaeda revive, as a weapon against the Daesh, but that is another story.)

The bad news is that we are waiting for an explosion that will, once again, like 9/11 though on a much greater scale, come to us. Indeed, the current European migrant crisis, chiefly from Libya, gives a first, faint taste of what is already merrily on its way.

(My apologies for “merrily”; that was sarcastic.)

“Behold the birds of the air; for they neither sow nor do they reap, nor gather into barns, and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not you of much more value than they? And which of you, by taking thought, can add to his stature one cubit? And for raiment why are you solicitous? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they labour not, neither do they spin; but I say to you, that not Solomon in his glory was arrayed as one of these.”

Sollicitus is a word that clangs and wrangs through the Gospel in today’s (Traditional Latin) Mass. The English “solicitous” does not quite translate this for the modern English reader, whose first thoughts might be of soliciting, or solicitors. The Latin adjective means restless, anxious; agitated, disturbed, troubled, concerned, and in such sense, afflicted. In some contexts it conveys passion, excitement: going off one’s head. We are filled with anxieties about worldly things. Are we not?

I noticed, somewhere on the Internet, a very anxious discussion. Someone had got himself a tattoo with the phrase, “Don’t worry be happy,” translated into Latin, but not very well. Shyness of the imperative, perhaps; certainly poor attention to grammar, and mindless dictionary-sourced vocabulary choices had contributed to a phrase that could be retranslated: “I am not fatigued, one having rejoiced.” … I think the correct Latin might be, Nolite sollicitare, este beati; or, “es beatus” if addressing only one person. But don’t take my word for it! Go to some crack Latinist before you have your own tattoo permanently inscribed.

Yet as we learn, gradually, in the Confessional, what’s done is done. We have made a hash, and we may well have to wear it, publicly, for the rest of our earthly life. Only in Purgatory, can such inscriptions be erased. But this is what tattoos are for, after all: to make one humble in one’s old age.

In the meantime, we have this Mass, for the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, which one might call the “Don’t worry be happy” Mass from both Epistle and Gospel. Well, that is perhaps a little too confining. Every Mass of the year is more than its focus. Each, at least before the liturgical desecrations of the 1960s, is also an encapsulation of all other Masses. Each Sunday, the entire Christian teaching passes through the eye of another needle, and the stitching is renewed year after year.

As we are reminded from our Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians, there are dos and don’ts.

It is  best to avoid fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions, sects, envies, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and suchlike.

It is best rather to embrace charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency, chastity.

It were better, to give but one passing example, not to have put one’s faith in Ashley Madison, any more than in the Latinity of a tattoo artist. There is such a thing as, “riding for a fall.”

(And if this is so obvious, why isn’t everyone following through?)

Note that each of the activities in that first list is associated with anxiety. Note that each of the activities in that second list is not associated with anxiety.

Of course, “stuff happens,” over which we have no control, and we get anxious about that. For instance, a lot of people today who should surely have better things to be anxious about, such as whether they are going to Hell, worry instead about TEOTWAWKI. But what use is that? Do you think God is such a putz that He will speed or slow the End Time by one mile an hour, because of something we have done? We must in that case have an exaggerated impression of our own individual or collective importance. Our job is only to be ready when it comes, as it will come, and for that matter as it has come, in every human lifetime.

There may be the odd crime in the street we will find ourselves in a position to stop — perhaps even some catastrophe that can be foreseen, and could actually be prevented — without any further injustice on our side. But those present themselves to us; we do not present ourselves to them. There are times, as we should know, when “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” But why be anxious about that? Just do it. For remember, the worst they can do is torture and kill you, and even that can go on only so long. (And remember, the great Martyrs were joyful about it. And why not? For in faith, the door had just opened to them, directly into Heaven.)

For the rest, there is not much for the doing, beyond our immediate environment. Not one of my gentle readers has, for instance, to the best of my knowledge, had the misfortune to be elected Pope; and as even the secularoids could say, it isn’t your problem. Stuff will happen, sure enough. But note that we are explicitly told, God will take care of it. Which, in the fullness of time, He will. So why should we want to run interference on His plan?

We are told: spiritu ambulate, to “walk in the spirit.” Et desideria carnis non perficietis, which should be clear enough.

I get anxious myself sometimes; worry myself sick about one darn thing or another. Really, it is time that I thought this through. …

“Do not be fatigued. Rejoice!”

“When will capitalism end?” asks a correspondent for the New Republic. This begins an article entitled, “What if Stalin had computers?” — which in turn reviews (arguably) a book by Paul Mason with the title, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. I found the whole mess incomprehensible, and so will do my bit to clean it up by answering the first question.

So far as I can see, Capitalism ended sometime around the year 1847.

As to the second, if good old Iosif Vissarionovich had computers equivalent to today’s, his Soviet Union might have resembled contemporary North Korea. Though on twenty times the scale. And not only would perfect “scientific socialism” have been achieved in Russia; it would probably have been spread under Stalin’s personal direction the whole world around.

I have, in a sense, cheated on both questions by answering them honestly and straightforwardly; whereas, their intention was instead to mislead — or as my sometimes vulgar papa used to put it, “baffle the brain with bullshit.”

In the first case, like our current pope, the writer is under the hypnotic delusion that free markets govern the world today. They may have governed parts of England in the summer of 1846, and parts of other countries later and as briefly, but the principles of Adam Smith and David Ricardo have never been popular among those with vested interests to defend, and guess what? Those with vested interests to defend are, by definition, those with power.

And yes, gentle reader, that’s a Catch-22. It took me years — decades — of trying to understand basic economic principles to realize: That socialists are whistling in the wind. But libertarians are whistling in a vacuum.

In the second case, the “what if” Stalin question, the unstated assumption is that Stalin does not have all the computers. Had he not, something like contemporary Red China might be imaginable, that we could call, “Stalinism with computers.” But no, China has a dirigiste mixed economy (which increasingly resembles our own), whereas the author is dreaming of pure socialism somehow working all by itself with advanced computers to finally outguess, outperform, and defeat the natural law of supply and demand.

Now, Stalin wasn’t the sort of guy to whom the diffusion of economic, or any other kind of power, appealed. He would have made sure that the computers belonged only to his party apparatchiks, and like the Kim family of Pyongyang, he would have continued the policy of executing those apparatchiks, too, as and when they happened to displease him.

Stalinism works, incidentally. There is a myth that it failed; but whether or not poisoned, the man died in his sleep. The Soviet Union did not crumble on his watch, despite tough moments during World War II; and at the present day, many Russians look back on the reign of Koba the Dread, with nostalgia. It was the (inevitable) weakening of Stalinist power that fatally undermined the Soviet system. The management of everything — including famines — had been an extremely successful political order for thirty years.

I do not oppose either the theory of Capitalism or the theory of Communism any more than I oppose the theory that pigs can fly. Indeed, given time, materials, and access to the Internet, I think I could rig up a catapult that would make a pig fly for more than fifty yards. With rocket science, perhaps put the pig in orbit. But I do not think this would make the pig very happy.

The task of the political propagandist is to secure the pig’s cooperation, on the promise that he’s going to have a lot of fun.

Perhaps today’s Idlepost will seem, to gentle reader, a little more whimsical even than usual. Yet, paradoxically, my point is that we do not discuss political issues in a realistic way. Instead, we ask questions based on unexamined, and rather imbecile, assumptions.

Indeed, as I notice from the election campaign, happening around me up here in the Far North, all politics is conducted like that: with assertions, promises, and questions that are meaningless.

One of the concessions I once made to the Darwinists was on microevolution. Adaptations to environment on the small scale might well, in many cases, involve random mutation and “natural selection.” But these happen within parameters that do not extend to the macroevolutionary scale. To transcend species barriers is a work of ages, beyond the ages known to man. It can’t be seen to happen, anywhere in the fossil record, which nowhere reveals messy fluctuation. Dead or alive at the present day, you have a sharply-defined species in every single case.

This isn’t, “God of the gaps.” The record would be a universal meandering slur if the Darwinian account were true. It is instead crisp — consistently and eerily crisp. And the jumps are frequently astounding.

But “Darwin’s finches” were acceptable to me (and apparently to the finches on my balconata, though I have not quizzed them exhaustively). I accepted it as an example of natural selection — on the microevolutionary scale, only.

This wasn’t an example from Darwin, incidentally, but looked so much better than any of his, that it invaded all the textbooks. When the man himself was on the Galapagos Islands, he missed the story. He didn’t notice that there were different finches on the different islands. He certainly did not match the beak shapes to the diets. He had no idea how any of the birds had got there in the first place. Those finches danced circles around Charles Darwin.

Two million years (the assumed time available, for whatever Latin American finch or finches to adapt to conditions on the Galapagos, at their leisure with no serious predators except that pesky Galapagos Hawk), seemed sufficient to explain the differences by minute, incremental change. It is one of those numbers settled on by repetition; the geological assumption underneath “two million” having been long since kicked away. Biology schoolbooks are full of fluff like that: often not because the authors are disingenuous, but because their ignorance is comprehensive.

But, hey: “Jolly good, Darwinoids, you can have that one,” was my attitude going back to later adolescence, when as a science kid with a minor obsession in biology I first came to doubt the secular evolutionary “unholy grail.” (As an atheist, then, by the way. I didn’t think the account in Genesis was plausible. I just thought the Darwinian account less plausible.)

Fortysomething years later, I would like to take that back. I know natural selection is nonsense, as an explanation for macroevolutionary metamorphoses; every intelligent person should know that by now. But I am no longer convinced it explains anything significant, or perhaps anything at all, on the microevolutionary scale, either. This is because I have continued to take a passing interest in biological discoveries.

True enough, the maladapted animal gets eaten, and so becomes individually extinct. And certain niche environments disappear catastrophically — sometimes large ones — taking with them most, or conceivably all the creatures who once lived there. All living things on this planet die; and species, too, have their seasons. This much is truism. The puzzling question is how new creatures arrive, in environments to which they are — not more or less, but totally and invariably — wonderfully adapted.

Let us consider, for the duration of today’s Idlepost, the pupfish of Death Valley, our continent’s lowest, driest, and hottest environment. These pupfish are Darwin’s finches for today: nine species and sub-species, each taxon flourishing in geographic isolation from the others, in small, remote water habitats; a kind of archipelago in reverse.

How they got there in the first place can be easily explained by the recession of the last Ice Age. For, a mere fifteen millennia ago, Death Valley was a cooler and wetter place. It was at the deepest bottom of a very big lake through much of the Pleistocene epoch, and more recently part of a network of interconnected smaller lakes and marshes spreading across what is now the Mojave Desert — that dried up in a blink of the geological eye.

We are led irresistibly to assume that in this short time, a common ancestor “evolved,” and split into nine distinct lines, with variations in body shape and behaviour to match the demands of each of their respective niches — rather as the beaks of the descendant finches vary, island to island in the Galapagos. But in one-hundredth of the time.

*

Recall: we aren’t disputing that “evolution,” in the sense of temporal succession, occurs. Hardly anyone disputed that in Darwin’s day, either, for the notion of evolution was already a deeply implanted paradigm in biology, with a history going back to the Pre-Socratics. Indeed, Empedocles of Akragas in Sicily had proposed natural selection, in the fifth century before Christ, as had others, in the main. And, one full generation before the Origin of Species, the Scotsman, Patrick Matthews, had spelt out the whole Darwinian system in detail. (Alfred Russel Wallace may not have known about it, but despite his suspiciously sarcastic disclaimers, Darwin almost certainly did. His notes from the period went missing like Nixon’s White House tapes.)

Buffon, Lamarck, Cuvier, Charles’s own grandpa Erasmus Darwin, were all open evolutionists (not “closet evolutionists,” as the Darwinian textbooks falsely state). So, implicitly, were all the taxonomists, from Linnaeus back at least to the seventeenth-century John Ray. The notion that “evolution” came as something new and shocking to the Victorian educated public is — let us be clear — a bald, entirely purposeful, lie, designed to confuse people unfamiliar with the nineteenth century.

Darwin’s accomplishment was thus not in science, but in theology. He was a talented writer, and natural history buff, who rubbed in, subtly at first then more and more overtly, the atheist inferences of the scheme, and thereby advanced the High Victorian eugenics movement in which his family and friends had a major interest. (Malthusianism also comes into this.) It was part of an orchestrated, direct assault on religious resistance to tampering with nature, understood as such at the time. It was aimed primarily at Protestant biblical literalism, which is why Catholics to the present day have largely refused to take the bait, or for that matter show much interest in the devils. Darwin looms large only here in these White Anglo-Saxon Protestant realms; elsewhere he is just a name among many in the history of defunct biological ideas.

As recently as 2009, during the extravagant media celebration of the bicentenary of his birth, and sesquicentenary of his bestseller, I still believed Darwin was an honest man, if somewhat deluded or befuddled. What I’ve learnt since convinces me that he wasn’t.

But now I am wandering off-topic. The point here is not about Charles Darwin’s motives, but whether the hypothesis he plagiarized and popularized — his explanation of how evolution works — is true. Because in my crazy Roman Catholic universe, the truth is important.

So back to our Death Valley pupfishies. They get better.

*

In work over the past few years, researchers including prominently Sean Lema, have been playing games with them. Pupfish hatched in the Amargosa River were dumped into the seething conditions of Devil’s Hole; pupfish guppies from Devil’s Hole were transferred to a much pleasanter experimental refuge environment; and so forth. The wee fish took it in their stride, with significant adaptive variations showing within two — count ’em two — years. No new information had appeared in the guppies’ DNA; instead, the expression of the existing information had altered.

This phenomenon is known as phenotypic plasticity. As we have been quite recently discovering, it is built into all God’s creatures — an ability to change, often quite radically on multiple levels, when circumstances demand. It perfectly explains microevolutionary adaptations, though of course it does not preclude other factors which may work with or against this plasticity. And it does not require the tens or hundreds of thousands of years that “natural selection” would require, working with (usually counter-productive) tiny, random, genetic mutations.

Look at a little bat-faced Pomeranian, and then at a big happy Labrador. They are genetic expressions of the same species: variations on the theme of gray wolf. Humans bred them out that way, on purpose, over the short space of human history, in the course of which we have sometimes noticed the range of potentialities. But they haven’t been crossbred with any other species: that extraordinary range was built into just the one. Pupfish can, as impressively, but without human help, turn on a generational dime. They need not wait for a fresh DNA redaction: nature knows how to dance with the bullets.

Everywhere, the design of creatures involves anticipation. This is not the exception but the strict, unvarying rule. Biology thus requires an Aristotelian — a teleological — approach to gain genuine, provable knowledge. It always did. Even the Darwinians, to learn anything at all, must keep asking themselves the elementary question, “What is this for?”

The “neo-Darwinian synthesis” still tries to deny this: not on the basis of any experiment or proof, but because faith in Atheism demands this denial. Nature, to the godless Darwinoid apprehension, must be stupid, bumbling, uninformed and clueless. Their problem is: she’s not.

Note, I am not saying that our modern-day neo-Darwinian synthesis “has flaws.” I am not so shy. Rather I am saying that, so far as it is Darwinian at all, it is horse manure, wall-to-wall.

One may charitably understand the thuggish behaviour of the Darwinist academic establishment, towards any departure from their “settled science” party line, the better when one appreciates the desperation of their position. For they are meathead scientistic clowns, suspended on scaffolding that is visibly crumbling beneath them.

Yet, God made these meatheads, so they do half know it.

We are celebrating this year, if that is the word, the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the most inconsequential sociological study ever published. That was, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, by the brilliant American politician and thinker, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003).

Working then in the U.S. Department of Labour, Moynihan focused his attention on a counter-intuitive statistical fact. Unemployment among black males was falling, in 1965. But rates of welfare enrolment for black families was rising. This did not make sense. The two lines on this chart had always fallen or risen together. But they had crossed over in 1962. He had put his finger in what came to be called, “Moynihan’s scissors.”

A Democrat, Moynihan was part of the “brain trust” that has been a feature of every “progressive” or “reforming” political party, going back not to F.D. Roosevelt as the Wikipaediasts believe, but to the eighteenth century, if not the Reformation. These are the “public intellectuals” who generate the theories and policies to which society must then be made to conform. They consider themselves to be the Smart Party — in contest with the Stupid Party, that is always resisting change.

John Stuart Mill, whom I consider a typical modern liberal brain truster, or “brain trustee,” displayed the bottomlessly smug attitude of his class and kind when he observed, “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative,” by way of glossing a footnote in his book, Representative Government. (Compare the observation of John Foster Dulles, that, “If we’d had any more smart people at Yalta, we’d have given the Soviets England and France, too.”)

Moynihan was, however, an unusual smart man, or party theoretician, in three respects. First, he was genuinely intelligent and broadly learned. Second, he was not easily intimidated by trends or the consensus of his peers. Third, he actually cared what happened to the people and society for which they were legislating. And while his job was to contribute to the “let a hundred flowers bloom” of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, he had discovered something his smart contemporaries would not want to hear or know.

Verily, something they did not hear, and will never hear, thanks to the modern progressive intellectual’s formidable capacity for mental blockage. For while the “Moynihan Report” is famous, and at one time, everyone claimed to have read it, it contains something so obnoxious to enlightened post-modern thought as to remain invisible to all participants in the discussion.

This was Moynihan’s sociological and anthropological observation that the American black culture was becoming “matriarchal.” Whether without, or more likely with the help of welfare programmes, women were becoming the heads of households, and men were being removed from that station.

(The background: All of the higher civilizations have been unambiguously patriarchal; matriarchy is associated in the prehistoric and anthropological record with savage, gratuitously violent, self-destructive tribes.)

Already, in 1965, one in four black kids in the USA were born out of wedlock. Today it is more than three in four, and levels of bastardy among the other races have risen in course. By the end of the last century (1990s), white children were as likely to be raised in fatherless homes as black children had been in the 1960s. “Progress” has been progressing rapidly.

The Nanny State has replaced fathers as the principal source of income for such families (bankrupting itself in the process), and the feminist movement has supplied the arguments — or more precisely, misandronist slogans and vindictive clichés — for the overthrow of “patriarchy” and its systematic replacement with a shrewish matriarchy in all facets of social life. The movement has been, moreover, so successful in achieving its objects — the emasculation of men, and degradation or actual inversion of traditional morality — that it has now moved on. For with the defeat of masculinity, new horizons of “gender-bending” or “transgendering” have come into view.

Now, part of the reason people can’t get their little heads around what has actually happened — first to the black family, then to the brown, then to the white — is the surviving, basically modern (i.e. pre-post-modern) belief that eunuchs behave much like fairies; that they become docile and effeminate, harmless and nurturing, sensitive and sweet; that their previously reprehensible “masculine” traits will quietly disappear. Some men do indeed respond to emasculation by becoming the pathetic, contemptible wimps that all women, including feminists, instinctively abhor. But some do not.

As a well-read student of social sciences and history, Moynihan knew better than this. The masculine capacity for violence (at all levels, spiritual as much as physical) does not go away. From Spartan Laconia, backwards and forwards through history on all continents, we see that eunuchs and other “homosexual” (the word is inadequate) guards and soldiers have been employed by the great warrior despots. This is because they make the fiercest fighters. Having no families, no heritage to protect, no women and children to feed and shelter in safety, they become a purely destructive force. They become men who do not care even for their own lives, let alone for the lives of others.

In addition to the fatherless children of the new black matriarchy in the USA, Moynihan could see that the prisons were filling with young black men devoted to crime. They had nothing else to do with their time; were unneeded at home once the State began rewarding the women they had impregnated for getting rid of them. And the black kids now had before them not the rôle model of the breadwinning, rule-enforcing father, but instead the “cool” example of the street gang.

A parallel may be easily found in the Arab and Muslim world, where terrorism has been fuelled by a similar social dynamic: men with “nothing better to do,” in societies where men have no economic or paterfamilial function, thanks in that case partly to Islamic family structure, which keeps children in the women’s harem; but lethally compounded in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere by the new welfare state of (essentially unearned) oil money. We think that “sexual frustration” comes into this, but as we should know from the interview records, the Muslim terrorist has no more trouble appropriating sex than he has appropriating Jeeps and Humvees from the USAID sheds.

Moynihan largely foresaw what the Great Society’s welfare programmes, as then being constituted, would actually achieve: the complete breakdown of patriarchy and thus, of the black family both nuclear and extended. He foresaw the consequences of it, and in other writings, foresaw the spread of this social disintegration beyond black society in a new era of “defining deviancy down.” He also clarified that governments could benefit beleaguered minorities best through some species of “benign neglect.”

We might call him thus the original “neoconservative” — loathed with a particular vehemence by his fellow brain trustees for having exposed the holes in their brain pans. His warnings were not merely ignored; they were attacked with a livid, semantic fury. How dare he use words in their plain meanings? How dare he suggest that certain hard-wired facts of human nature are not, in truth, “social constructs”? How dare he patiently and elaborately demonstrate the reality of this in empirical ways? How dare he defend his positions with such scintillating wit and irrefutable logic? And finally, how dare he be proved so consistently right through the next half century?

By comparison, his being “Irish Catholic” was almost forgivable.

The response of the progressive party to Moynihan and his ilk has been, ever since: “Full speed ahead!” And to his arguments has been, “Shout them down!” Which is why I call the Moynihan Report (the polite expression of those determined to retire the once respectful term, “Negro”) the most inconsequential sociological publication of all time.

We need to pay more attention to the neglect of children. They are not being neglected nearly enough, and the consequence is that they grow up neurotic, and with asthmatic tendencies. … Also, foolish. … And I’d mention narcissistic, but everyone does.

A model mother of my recent acquaintance boasts of the success of her own neo-mediaeval parenting style. For example, she would not help her children with homework, and left them to the consequences if it was not done. She would not drive them to more than one extra-curricular activity. She was more or less never at their beck and call.

“I was not their best friend or their chauffeur or their social secretary.”

She did teach them to read and write, since the schools don’t do that any more; and was able to inculcate clear thinking in that way. She did take them to church, and made sure that their Catholic faith was exact and articulate, since the priests no longer teach anything. She was reasonably careful to set an example of backwardness, and perfect indifference to passing fads. And she put wine in them from an early age, so they would not grow up to become alcoholics. For total neglect would be excessive.

The children turned out well, and judging from the blog the eldest is keeping (she has three children of her own now), they are proper reactionaries. In the olden time, most children turned out reasonably well — only a few juvenile delinquents, as compared with the overwhelming majority today. And while perhaps not all lived to adulthood, the demographics balanced out, for hardly any were aborted.

In dealing with my own pair of lads, I tried to imitate my father. He was a busy man. When I came to him with an interesting question, he gave all his attention. If I came with a dull one, he could not hear. He never came to me. He had no interest in sports, whatever. (I adored my father.)

My mother needed help in the kitchen, but otherwise I was left to read and roam. If I have a criticism, she was a bit of a soft touch: she could have worked me much harder. (I adored her anyway.)

Of course, I am so old that I was not subjected in childhood to many of the evil temptations of today. There were no computers, only books and periodicals. Pornography was not easily accessible, so I had to make do with D.H. Lawrence. I was not forced to join a club, or play soccer, or any other silly and demeaning games. I was allowed to collect stamps, at my own expense. Today, a child could become addicted to any number of low hobbies. But won’t if you resolutely refuse to buy him anything.

When I decided that I was bored with school, both parents would be happy to write notes. They were quite truthful, along the lines of: “The boy had something better to do last week, and so was absent from classes.” True, I would tell them if I was going out of town (defined as involving a bus journey). But usually I was just hiking within ten miles or so.

Children are naturally curious about their parents, and this is the basis of moral education. They want to know if you are proud or ashamed of their behaviour. Let them know by fairly subtle indications. (Always: make them reach.) And you may not even need to beat them. Help them thus to develop a profound sense of guilt, and low self-esteem.

God made each child the way he is, however, and it is unwise to tamper overmuch. Some, indeed, may benefit from beatings — God having designed them for beating into shape. One must take them case by case. But I can’t imagine how any can benefit from being crowded by their parents.

It is best to have so many children that there is not enough time to coddle, anyway. Children almost invariably turn out better in the larger batches.

One should begin to ignore their whimpering when they are in the crib. I am appalled by what I see all around me: an only child, or sometimes two “only children,” who get their parents’ attention the moment they begin to whine. And if they don’t get what they want, promptly, they sit there pouting, feeling sorry for themselves. When my children whined, I ignored them. If they kept it up, I mocked them, mercilessly. You can’t start early enough, undermining their nasty little egos.

While I am not opposed to corporal punishment, I think psychic punishment is more effective. Humiliate; teach them how to feel shame. Manners need not be taught, for those will be acquired by emulation. Well, a few hints might be dropped at the dinner table.

Do your kids come when dinner is called? They will if they are hungry enough. (It is amazing what children can do, once they discover they have no options.)

Do they go to bed at a reasonable hour? They will if they are sufficiently tired.

For having fed them, you can put them to work. Children are a useful part of any labour force — they are small and can get into the corners adults are too big for. Lots of energy, too. Minimum instruction, maximum responsibility: that’s how children learn to do things. Wait until they’re begging for advice, to advise. And never hesitate to disparage failure — for again, it is important to make them feel badly. Hitting just makes them feel aggrieved.

How proud I was when my elder lad read some newspaper story about an irritating boy in Alberta, who was leading some UN-sponsored campaign against the exploitation of children in the Third World. My boy said that for a school project, he might start a counter-campaign, promoting child labour.

I left him to it.

We learn by doing, and part of childhood should be learning to work. Especially, how to do unpaid work, since all the best work is unpaid.