Essays in Idleness

Gaudete! … Gaudete in Domino semper! … Iterum dico, gaudete! …

As a once-Anglican; nay before that, as an unreligioned boy who became utterly entranced by the Bell Anthem of Henry Purcell, I cannot look upon the Latin words in this morning’s Introit without the sung translation pealing forth, in my mind’s ear:

Rejoice in the Lord alway, / and again I say, Rejoice! / Rejoice in the Lord alway! / And again, again, again I say, Rejoice! / The Lord is at hand, the Lord is at hand!

Be careful for nothing, / but in everything / by pray’r and supplication of thanksgiving / let your requests be made known unto God;

And the peace of God which passeth all, all, all understanding / shall keep your hearts and minds / through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Rejoice in the Lord alway! …

All Catholics should know the drill. In the middle of Advent, a season of fasting and sobriety, of abnegation and renunciation, of penitence and preparation — for the Christ-Mass, the Nativity of our Lord — there is this sudden and seemingly unseasonal upswelling, of the Gloria. And the reason is, that we are half way to Bethlehem.

There is nothing more than that to say; but there is so much more to sing. It does not matter that the world is dark around us, and that it can expect only darkness, because it is without Hope. We, for our part, know what is coming; and our Hope is not for what might be, by some obscure intellectual postulation, but for what is, and has been always, and will always be.

And we can know that we are not abandoned: that in the pitch of darkness, cometh He.

Gaudete!

The world is full of blather. Some days I don’t want to add any more. I suppose the world has always been thus, but the blather wasn’t always copied and amplified. Gutenberg has a lot to answer for; but so do others.

In the New Yorker, or rather its website, I had just read a memoir of the Silicon Valley “CEO talk” that was given to writers and editors of the old American liberal magazine, New Republic. (Two-thirds of whom have quit, with their usual smug gestures.) The speech didn’t actually say anything, as I could judge from the excerpts. If I’d tried to write an old-fashioned précis, I’d be forever staring at a blank page. For it was just blather. Unwittingly, I’m sure, the Boss was “communicating”: that he had no interest whatever in the content side of his proposed new “vertically-integrated digital platform.” (Which means what? Turning the platform on its end?) But as his blather went on and on, his audience would have picked up a few hints. Chiefly, a patronizing insinuation that the way they’d been doing things, the last hundred years, was rather sweet, but must go into the trashcan tomorrow. For tomorrow, everything will be different. Executives like to talk this talk, when the troops are assembled. They are under the curious impression that it is inspiring.

And then, I followed a reader’s link to the Vatican website. There I found some kind of apostolic letter on the consecrated life, which I read with growing bleakness. For it was mind-numbing: page after page of “CEO talk,” in its current ecclesial form. Till I realized I should not be reading: it could only make one want to quit. (I see that the notorious Frenchman, Yves Daoudal, explains what is missing that should be present, and what is present that should be missing, here.) All the monks and nuns in the world were instructed, for example, to “go forth to the existential peripheries.” (If someone heard me say that, he’d know I was suggesting something rude.) Yes, it was all very sweet, that the Church had been praying in that outdated, pre-Vatican II manner, the last twenty centuries. Tomorrow we will all be tossed.

I should like to draught on this occasion some kind of apostolic exhortation, in six words. “Say the black. Do the red.”

My piece over at The Thing today goes back to China (here). I, as others going back perhaps to Matteo Ricci, if not to St Francis Xavier, see a natural fit between the Thomist account of heavenly things, and the Confucian account of things under Heaven. This link was explored and attempted, in the past, by the Jesuits of the China missions. For many explicable reasons, it failed. I am exhilarated to see that it seems to be under exploration again, however timidly and tentatively, now from the Chinese side.

It strikes me that my view of China is analogous to my view of the Catholic Church. I did not join the latter because I was impressed by its current activities. Far from that. Well before joining, and since, I have been under the impression that the Church is in a serious mess — one which may be traced to circumstances clearly preceding Vatican II; and one which can and will be righted only by divine intervention: by Christ. I was instead received, coming up to eleven years ago, with a view of the Church through all twenty centuries, and more fundamentally, in view of her Founder and His promise to sustain her. But let me, for the sake of my point, set that “more fundamentally” aside.

The China for which I have a consistent, very high regard, is the China of more than twenty centuries. This is a civilization whose achievements over time — even without the Revelation, and as it were, only by natural reason — have been extraordinary, and are in some respects greater than any other civilization known to history. China is gutted today; gutted by the worst effects of both the prevailing materialist ideologies, “socialism” and “capitalism.” Her own best traditions were abandoned in seeking false goods. Of course, many of the evils were done to her by vicious external agents; but much more by a destructive envy of foreign wealth and power. (So much of the damage to the Catholic Church has been, in a parallel way, self-administered.)

Yet she is not dead. To my mind (and no other rules this Idleblog), the magnificent positives of the Confucian tradition are still accessible to some men; still comprehensible to them. The possibility of recovery is not quite extinguished. And my sense is that this — not foreign, in the end, but universal — “Thomist” or Catholic account of “the things of Heaven,” is the very stimulant that could raise what is most admirable in that “Confucian” or Chinese tradition out of its apparent grave.

A Catholic Christian China would, in this sense, become more, not less, “Chinese.” Her own Confucian tradition, wise and penetrating the heart of man, would be appreciated more, not less.

For reasons any Punjabi would likely understand (and as a child of Lahore I claim some modest appreciation), pork curries are comparatively rare. But up here in the kitchen of the High Doganate, the problem what to do with your leftover fried pork-belly rinds arose last night, and I set about solving it in a characteristically Subcontinental way.

More candidly, I should admit that my approach was somewhat “fusion,” and that the product of my galley labour might be more accurately described as a “White Trash Pork Dal Masala.”

From greater India we get the spices (very cheap), and the patience to let things bubble away at very low heat. From America come ingredients that may be discharged from cans. We (in the sense of, I) drowned the rinds in a tin of Habitant pea soup, then simmered for an hour with whatever came to hand at half-attention: ground cumin, coriander, fenugreek, blackpepper, mustardseed, and turmeric to be sure; and little dollops of garlic and Naga chilli pastes. Oh, and a crushed dried lime leaf or two. All they need is time, to mingle.

That’s it. Serve in an elegant flat bowl, with store-boughten chapati, or better, fresh bread of one’s own manufacture. … (It was delicious.)

True, I cannot hope to compete with Father Zed as a culinary blogger — I am terrified of anything that requires French skills — but I’m struck by how well one can eat in relative penury, here in the Greater Parkdale Area, if one will muck about. I have no sympathy for these poor people, often with feral-looking kids, hanging about the hamburger franchises, when they could do much better at home for much less than half the price. And raise those children with memories of a family dinner table, and civil conversation, after the Angelus, and grace.

A Pennsylvanian correspondent reports that one must have the experience of a supermarket queue, behind a fat lady with food stamps on guvmint “pay day,” to properly appreciate the welfare state. “It cures one of tolerance for the whining of the poor.”

Surely part of our Christendom Restoration Project should consist of catechizing the impecunious on the art of good living, within their permanently limited means. We should also revive the distinction between the deserving and undeserving of our charitable ministrations, on which Saint Paul was clear.

The phrase in my heading is from the Syllabus of Errors, whose 150th anniversary we also celebrated, yesterday. It was published quite intentionally on the tenth anniversary of the Dogmatic Definition of the Immaculate Conception — tacked onto the encyclical, Quanta Cura, itself a magnificent condemnation of the whole, unqualified idea of “freedom of conscience,” and related “human rights,” “pluralism,” “democracy,” and so forth. It was a riposte to anti-clerical governments and movements that had been sweeping Europe. Outwardly, they triumphed, so that today, among the intellectually debilitated, incapable of thinking beyond popular cliché, the other side of the argument is invisible.

Yet the intent and actual arguments of the encyclical were misrepresented, then as now. Example: parents already had civil “rights,” and the idea that education should be secularized might conceivably be among them. If they wanted to found or support secular schools, they could. But this was not what the anti-clericals were doing. Instead they were seizing Church property, including Church schools, and forcibly secularizing them.

The exponents of the “rights of man” have always been totalitarians. As Christ taught, the Devil is not only the father of lies, but was from the beginning a murderer. It is no accident that the great revolutionaries and liberators of history were all dripping in blood: for all have served the Prince of This World, and all have been inhabited by demons.

Pius IX was a liberal, or at least, all Europe was convinced of this at his election in June, 1846: a “moderate liberal” in the political parlance of today. Many cardinals were absent, and the conclave was somewhat rushed, to make him Pope before vetoes could arrive from Milan and Vienna. He was the last Pope to serve as sovereign ruler over the Papal States in central Italy, and one of his first acts in that capacity was to empty the gaols of political prisoners. This was like closing Guantanamo: for there was no gratitude from the other side, and most of the inmates went right back into the field as subversives and terrorists.

Worse was to come. We may hold Pius IX responsible for the introduction of railways to central Italy, and the provision of street-lighting in Rome. He advanced many other “forward-looking” projects and institutional “reforms” in the districts he governed. This could only whet the appetites of the progressives.

Pius IX was also the convenor of Vatican I. (Broken up, as gentle reader may recall, when the jackboots of the Risorgimento marched into Rome, and made the Pope “a prisoner in the Vatican.”) And, the definer of the dogma of “papal infallibility” (which is to say, the Pope who drew its limits).

He was our longest-serving Pope (thirty-something years), which helps to explain why he’d acquired the reputation of a reactionary by the time he died. It is called on-the-job training. But long before the end of his reign, he had appalled many of his initial supporters by proving that he actually was a believing Catholic, with an obsessive regard for the salvation of souls, and no interest in compromising basic Catholic doctrine. He set his neck against the lies — both philosophical and theological — upon which opponents of the Church depended, both intellectually and spiritually. He was a very brave man.

The Syllabus of Errors, among my favourite papal documents of all time, condemns eighty propositions that “nice, liberal people” are inclined to take for granted, and gives directions in the literature to where they are confuted. There is a wonderfully masculine flavour to the thing: there is no shirking from plain fact and plain Latin. The document could perhaps be restated in the language of the present day, to expose a few more of the conceits of post-modern sloganeering; but there is nothing in the list that would need to be abandoned, nor anything essential that was overlooked. For the idiocies which govern the contemporary mind have been with us continuously since the Enlightenment, and were prefigured in the Reformation.

One of the remarks isn’t numbered. Between items 18 and 19 we find a blanket condemnation of “pests of this kind,” referring to socialists, communists, biblical societies, liberal clerical associations, and so forth. It is merely a reminder that there are cockroaches about, or rats spreading plague. The ideas they carry are the same as those enumerated through the rest of the document; but the passage adds a useful warning that they are vectors for these spiritual diseases in their most virulent forms.

Thanks to the triumph of secular education, current critics of the Church and her teachings — in media, academia, the law schools, bureaucracies, and elsewhere — may lack the intelligence of critics in earlier generations. But alas, so do many of her defenders. The revival of Christendom will require the reanimation of the battle of ideas which Pope Pius IX fought, so gallantly.

“To create Oneself out of nothing is an impressive accomplishment,” said an atheist friend, who enjoyed especially making fun of Catholics. “But to turn around then and create your own Mother, is flabbergasting.”

Not to my surprise, that man is a Catholic today.

It is the 160th anniversary of the Dogmatic Definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, by Pope Pius IX. And of course, a holy day of obligation, so if you haven’t been to Mass, get there now! … And if you are a United Statist, as many of the readers of this Idleblog seem to be, get there double-quick. Because, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Conceived Without Sin, is the patroness of your country. And was so proclaimed, from Baltimore, even before this dogma was formally proclaimed at Rome.

And was so, even before the proclamation of those United States, for she came north with the Spanish missionaries, and was embraced by the Indians of the Borderlands, singing the Alabado:

Y la limpia Concepcion
De la Reina de los Cielos,
Que quedando Virgen Pura,
Es Madre del Verbo Eterno.

Which makes her, of course, both Spanish, and Indian, as well as United States American; yet even more than that, for she is Queen of Sky and Earth.

Indeed the dogma, that our Virgin Mother was born sinless — free from the sin of Adam, free from original sin — was formally proclaimed long after — centuries upon centuries after — it had already been accepted throughout the Catholic world; and by the Church both East and West. It was not something Pius IX made up on the spur of the moment (as too many Protestants were taught to believe). Read, if gentle reader will, that Pope’s own explanation, in his apostolic constitution, Ineffablis Deus (which may be found here).

Those who do not think the dogma biblical, should go and read the Book of Proverbs, or better still, just go to Mass and have it sung to you. From the eighth chapter, beginning, Dominus possedit me:

“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His ways, before He made anything, from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old, before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. …”

The United States, Canada, England, Australia and so forth — the English-speaking diaspora, “we” — were from our beginnings consecrated to Mary. Throughout Europe, in the later Middle Ages, England was known as the Marian land; and to this day it shows in the names of her parish churches. In the new (since 2011) Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, by which remaining faithful Anglicans may return to communion with Rome, along with their glorious liturgical heritage, this Marian tradition is again affirmed, restored and upheld.

To which I can only add: Ave, Ave, Ave Maria!

There’s a lovely cartoon somewhere, showing a policeman with a handcuffed Santa Claus, bent over the hood of a car. Saint Nicholas stands near, in full Byzantine episcopal regalia.

“All good, your excellency. I’ve arrested the man who tried to steal your identity.”

The original Saint (Bishop of Myra, within modern Turkey; born about 270 AD, died on the 6th of December, 343) was an exponent of tough love. His vermillion complexion came from beatings in the Roman prisons, under Diocletian’s persecution. His title, “Confessor,” means he kept the faith. He was among the surviving Christians, suddenly sprung under Constantine.

Nicholas was an orphan, but of wealthy parents carried off in a plague. Throughout his life he distributed his inheritance, discreetly, to persons in need. Most famously he learned of a single father, with three daughters and no money for their dowries, thus no prospect of respectable marriages, so that from sheer penury they were in danger of becoming prostitutes. Like a thief in the night, he came to the man’s window, and tossed in a bag of gold coins. (By another account, he dropped the bag down the man’s chimney.)

He gave presents to poor children. He would sneak his coins into the shoes of paupers while they were at prayer. He was very widely revered and adored.

Saint Nicholas (who “evolved” into “Santa Claus,” via his elided Dutch name, “Sinterklaas”) was present at the Council of Nicaea (325), where the Church disowned the Arian heresy. Arius himself was present to defend his rather complex, “simplifying” theological ideas. He was a rationalizer, heir to Gnostic thinkers who acknowledged Christ not as Very God, but as a kind of super-prophet, and who therefore declared the Trinity all bunk. (This would reprise as Islam, three centuries later.)

The doctrine of Arius was more subtle than that. He was trying to square the circle, or cube it, by making Christ the creator of the universe, but God the creator of Christ, thus “God the Father” the only full immortal, from the beginning. The Logos was not a person, Arius insisted, but instead the spirit of reason from this God, by which men could figure out everything for themselves. (This would reprise in the Enlightenment.)

Plus much more intellectual ducking and weaving, unsuitable to an Idlepost. In the Nicene Creed, we recite the formula by which Holy Church disowned not only Arianism, but all versions of Trinity denial, in a way that has now held solid through seventeen centuries.

But at the Council itself, back in the IVth century, a lot was on the line. While Arius was weaving his verbal and speculative tapestry, Saint Nicholas lost his temper. He went over to Arius in person, and decked him.

This was considered behaviour unbecoming in a bishop, and Nicholas found himself back in the slammer. He’d been stripped on the spot of his gospel book, and of his pallium (liturgical vestment), the two marks of his office.

We consult the Byzantine iconography to learn what came next. Notice behind Saint Nicholas the small figures of Christ, carrying the book, and of Mary, carrying the pallium. In the miracle, of which the Emperor Constantine must have been convinced at the time, Christ had come to Saint Nicholas in his cell, to ask him directly why he had behaved in such a violent way.

To which Nicholas had replied: “Because I love you so much.”

At which Our Lord and Our Lady restored to Saint Nicholas the marks of his office.

It takes a while, sometimes, for news to reach me from Kampala, Uganda. But a correspondent alerts me, this morning, to the result of the Review Conference of the International Criminal Court, declared on Saturday, 12th June, 2010. It is big news indeed: signatories have agreed to make starting a war into a grave international criminal offence. Henceforth, anyone who starts one goes straight to The Hague, to be disciplined for his improper behaviour. This means he could face years of hearings. Surely, knowing that will stop aggressors dead in their tracks.

How relieved one feels, to know there will be no more wars.

As my correspondent mentions, this may seem a small thing in the labour of ages. But it is a first step, a “baby step,” decisively in the right direction.

I entirely agree, and look forward to further efforts by the United Nations, on behalf of the ICC. For I think they should also have laws against earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes.

The Catholic Church is unique among institutions in the modern West, in taking women seriously — as women.

Parse that last sentence carefully and one will find less overstatement than one might have hoped for. I did not use “unique” to mean “exclusive”; and “modern” may be restricted to the last half-century or so. Focus, rather, on what is plainly intended: the italicized qualification after the long dash.

Many individuals, of both sexes, do in fact take women seriously (as women). In many jurisdictions, this is now against the law, but it happens all the same. Various other “faith groups” continue to recognize women as having their own distinct nature and identity — Orthodox Jews come first to mind, then Orthodox Christians. Lots of Evangelicals.

On the other hand, most mainstream Protestant congregations, so far as they have any members left at all, formally withdraw this recognition. Too, many “modern” or “liberal” or “recovering” Catholics (nominal ones who look upon Church teaching as merely quaint) reject the notion that women could be women. But the Catholic Church cannot always be held responsible for the views of those who contradict her. (Even if, in the long run, she probably can, as I argued here.)

Certainly, the post-Christian, post-rational “secular” authorities deny that women (or men) exist, and have gone to the trouble of eliminating “father,” “mother,” “son,” “daughter,” “brother,” “sister,” “uncle,” “aunt,” and any other terms that seem to imply a sexual identity, from all legislation — making much of it retroactively quite insane. Their attack on what they call the “traditional” (i.e. normal) family is unambiguous. For it was and remains highly sexed, whereas the new State-protected “alternative families” are invariably sterile. (Some wiggle-room is still left for “breeders,” however, pending the invention of new reproductive technology.)

A good test of this — fanatic denial of the blatantly obvious — may be conducted by using the word “priestess.” Those demanding female priests (an unCatholic notion if there ever was one) are likely as not to freak at the use of that word. They do not like the connotation, and will declare that it is “sexist.” They want females to be priests the same as men. It would defeat this intention to call them “priestesses,” as well as calling attention (among the historically informed) to the very conscious decision made by the early Church to avoid the cultural and spiritual implications of the priestess function within ancient and pagan religions. For priestess cults, and their reputations, were something early Christians wanted to get away from.

I would have to lose most readers, including possibly myself, with a fuller discussion of a matter not immediately relevant to the question of the irreducible identity of women. Which is to say, the womanliness of them. Suffice, it was long recognized — i.e. universally and for thousands of years, as opposed to by a shrinking, beleaguered minority in the last few decades — and would have been a point of agreement between, say, every kind of Gnostic, and credal Christians. The Gnostics today differ from the ancient Gnostics, by denying what is tangible. In other respects, however, the views of liberal and progressive Christians are identical with those of the heretics which the Church somehow survived in later, decadent Roman antiquity.

So perhaps “sexist” is the best term to bring out this distinction, or rather aggressive refusal to distinguish. A person, male or female, who takes it that women are women (and men are men) is today called “sexist.” This is, as I say, a concept that would leave our ancestors (including most early feminists) scratching their heads. There are two (2) sexes, and those who dispute this were long understood to be deranged. Even the concept of an hermaphrodite confirms this, for what is he or she but an unusual mixture of these two sexes? Similarly with such current initials as L, G, B, T, &c: for regardless of any self-assigned “orientation,” the actual persons are detectably male, or female, or some riff on those two basic themes.

That men and women may also have much in common — opposable thumbs come to mind — I take for granted. I like to contrast both male and female humans with other sexually-paired primates, though this is another distinction that is becoming controversial. God made them male and female, in my frankly religious understanding, but this does not mean He did not do the same for other species. It instead points to a deeper profundity: Yin and Yang created He them.

Let us not be distracted by pettifog in this matter. Those who oppose, or even propose to persecute “sexists,” themselves frequently maintain a distinction between the sexes, but it is glibly statistical, when not incomprehensible. Consider for instance an argument I heard recently, amounting to a complaint, that the ratio of male to female saxophone players is too high. Why would this be so? “Because we have a male-dominant culture, and saxes are traditionally associated with macho.”

Both statements are lies, the first in a boring, but the second in an interesting way. Adolphe Sax invented the instrument (around 1840) to fill a hole between the feminine woodwind and the masculine brass sections in an orchestra. It was only after the fact that this gender-neutral horn itself selected for male players. And even feminists — who are seldom quite as obtuse as they pretend — can see that a woman playing a sax is making a “statement” in which she is paradoxically accentuating her “female sexuality.” The suggestion that this should be cancelled by sex quotas is thus demonstrably batty.

We could extend this by considering different aspects of masculine identity embodied in the voices of soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones, and then broadening to draw comparisons across the wind range, through the historical development of the heteroglottal reed, but that would make our discussion too lascivious.

As “diversity” is much prized today, let me mention that I am a sexist myself. Or, if I’m not, nobody is. I share the unreconstructed view of my diverse parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and other ancestors, back to Eve and Adam, on the existence of, and distinction between, the two sexes. Only one of them can have babies. Only the other can impregnate. But let me add that this is not the only distinction, and moreover, a large field of distinctions would anyway follow if only from that elephantine biological fact.

Now, there’s a point to all this, and perhaps I’ll get to it tomorrow.

A gentleman in Texas continues to heckle my effusions, pretending to correct me in small matters, such as my opposition to “democracy,” Darwinism, technological progress, the electronic media in which I operate and indeed, the whole modern world. He is an exponent of “Tea Party” values, which I find unpleasantly populist and liberal. Too, he persistently defends the American Revolution, and displays a bigoted resentment of British institutions, including our Crown. He has some sort of Yankee fixation on “George the Turd,” long dead and buried. Lately he has taken to calling me a “Thirteenther.”

The term will have to be explained. It originated during one of my rare appearances on television, when another guest called me, “A Man of the Thirteenth Century.” I took this for the finest compliment I had ever received in a public place, and added it immediately to my collection of Honours, the way Henry Tudor did with “Fidei defensor.”

This morning the gentleman pings to me photographs of the British House of Commons in session. These included nine in which the members were debating important public issues, and in which the chamber was almost empty. Two more were attached, in which they were discussing MPs’ pay, and expenses, and in these the chamber was packed to the gills.

Needless to say, this could hardly surprise me. Gentle reader will be acquainted with my view of politicians, by which my views on “democracy” are explained. Democracy, or more precisely, crass demagoguery, will produce such results every time. It makes no sense whatever to put political power in the hands of those who want it, and will beg for it, and think they can benefit from it, when in fact worldly power is detrimental to their souls. It seems perfectly obvious, at least to me, that the public interest would be better served by inheriting Lords. Unlike “the people,” nature will not always select for charismatic head cases; and anyway, those who must take on solemn responsibilities should be properly apprenticed to their trade.

Thus I’m delighted to see my Chief Texas Correspondent coming round to my Thirteenther view of Parliament.

As a traditionalist, I’d be entirely opposed to abolishing such a venerable (and mediaeval) institution. But it should not be allowed to drift out of hand. The truth is that, today, we have considerable work to do, rolling back many generations of parliamentary “reform.”

To be sure, the House of Commons should meet, but not so frequently as to become tedious. And the sessions should be filled with pageantry, including long magnificent rituals in Latin or, if necessary, Greek. I have always been thrilled by the Opening of Parliament, but attendees should be restricted to those who look well on a horse, and there should be a matching Closing of Parliament, of at least equal splendour.

Too, the great majority of seats should be assigned to “rotten boroughs,” in which members are elected by very small cabals: a dozen or fewer old borborygmatics, who can be relied upon to return one of their own, or one of their flunkeys. The sort who will sneer and jeer at any proposal for innovation, and snore ostentatiously during debates.

And if they do manage to pass something clever in the House of Commons, it will be promptly crushed in the House of Lords.

And if it somehow gets past them, the Queen shouldn’t have to sign it. Or even read it, if she’s not in the mood.

And no member of either House should be paid. Rather, each will need a lot of money to pay his own expenses: for the ceremonial will be grand, and his clothes alone will cost him a caboodle.

My one concession to modernity would be ashtrays everywhere in the committee rooms. These rooms should be small, with low ceilings, and poor ventilation, leaving even the smokers choking and gasping for fresh air, singularly eager to conclude their business. And a very attractive, high-ceilinged pub should be set right across the street, with beautiful and flirtatious barmaids, and the press strictly banned.

On sober second thought, it might not be necessary to ban them, since most would be languishing in the Tower, out of sight and mind from the “working men of England,” who have lives, and families, and jobs to be getting on with.

Black Friday came early this year, to Ferguson, Missouri, with a major looting event that made the annual Walmart convulsion look almost tasteful. Yet while I do applaud people who avoid smashing glass, and stop to pay for their purchases, there is a generic similarity, such that the difference between looters  and bargain shoppers may not be outwardly apparent. In my own limited experience, one must wait patiently for the arson to begin, to distinguish one event from the other. I notice stores advertising discounts of 70 percent; what’s an extra 30? Patrons may become confused by nuance in such commercial expressions as, “Absolutely free!”

But shopping for bargains — something I’ve been known to do myself in e.g. secondhand bookstores — cannot be done with any likelihood of success, in an atmosphere of desperation. The person who is not psychologically prepared to decline any offer, is in a poor negotiating position. Unless he is willing to forego any good or service until the price is right, he is open to manipulation.

And “price” is a more subtle issue than is suggested in the sales flyers. This is so even in the restricted dimension of dollars and cents. Why, the ten-dollar book I obtained the other day — a bargain to me, for I would have paid twenty for this Compendium of the History of the Cistercian Order — was a trick of false accounting I played on myself. After adding the trolley fare, going out, and coffee stop with pastry in the course of walking home, I see that I had already spent sixteen. Moreover, I paid five for another book I wasn’t sure I wanted; and now that I examine it more closely I see that I have a disposal problem. Which leaves me a dollar over what I was willing to pay, before (remember, I am genetically Scottish) evaluating the time I invested.

The matter is of course more complicated than that. I enjoyed both the walk and the pastry. The latter was improved by the opportunity to peruse this anonymous work by a Trappist in Kentucky (published 1944). There were several moments during the walk in which extraordinarily beautiful effects of lighting were observed from winter-angle sun in back alleys. A full accounting could be done only by God, and I have no idea what the economists think they are up to in their pathologically reductive calculations.

To my mind, entering any shopping mall or big-box store would be a substantial cost in itself, and if I had to elbow a thousand other customers to get at some glitzily-packaged item that could only disturb the aesthetic peace of my domicile — well, there are holes not worth digging. I see “poor people” struggling home with these huge packages, and it is hard not to pity their Sisyphean efforts. Or to feel heartbroken for their squalling little ones: being trained by parental example to believe that, say, a big-screen TV could be worth owning, regardless of the mark-down.

*

The old year is ending. With Saint Andrew we begin the new liturgical year, tomorrow, in the season of Advent. It is a season of joyful abstinence, fast, self-denial, gratuitous acts of charity, bejewelled by several glorious feasts, all in anticipation of the Nativity of Our Lord.

That is one way to live, and the other was heralded by Black Friday. Indeed: I spotted an editorial congratulating businesses for reducing the rush, by starting their sales on the very day of American Thanksgiving. To the depraved, post-Christian mind, I suppose the capitalists could display their public spirit by starting their Boxing Day sales on Christmas morning.

This is our world, and the challenge to all Christians is to be in yet not of it. With each passing year we should resolve to make fewer concessions to the depravity. This cannot be done without the fortitude of the Sacraments; but meanwhile, help is on the way.

*

While outwardly the Church appears to be collapsing, making more and more concessions to the progressive, materialist, populist, enslaved, “Black Friday” way of life, God is repairing her. My piece at Catholic Thing, Friday (here) was succeeded by a better piece today (here) on the unaccountable revival of Catholic vocations and worship in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Lately, I am getting such news from all over, and also witnessing it in my own tiny corner of “defunct” Christendom. It is a phenomenon of the last decade or so: an unexpected development of this XXIst century.

The call to priesthood, and more broadly to obedience and holy living, is being heard especially by many of the young. By no coincidence, this is closely associated with the revival of the Old Mass. To that, in its Latin, and its otherworldly beauty, the young are attracted, even as the old and weathered, in their constantly diminishing numbers, cling nostalgically to the Novus Ordo. The Church of twenty centuries is gradually recovering from the despoliation of the nineteen-sixties.  Christ is rebuilding His Church, even as liberal bishops make their last geriatric stands on behalf of the “Spirit of Vatican II.” Much remains to be endured, but the light is returning: the candle of reverence. Christ has not abandoned His Church.

The phenomenon is recent, but I am convinced it will not be snuffed out. One man of stalwart faith can easily prevail over a hundred who are chestless. As the alternative of serious Christian commitment becomes more visible, others will join. The persecutions that will inevitably come, from that world of ideological “progress,” will themselves help to fill our ranks. Our task becomes simpler when, as now, the Prince of This World reveals his nakedness.

(I think of those Norwegians who, in the darkest days of the Hitler occupation, painted a message on the road for our allied flyboys to read: “Vi Vil Vinne!”)

It is the eve of a New Year: to each of my readers faith, hope, and love. Fight the good fight, and for all the moral stench and darkness of our “secular” surroundings, do not doubt the light will prevail.

“Professional, David?”

This was my boss speaking, thirtysomething years ago, when I was deeply implicated in “professional journalism,” editing an Asian business magazine, and allied tedious publications.

I had used the word carelessly, in the conventional way, to suggest that some of the habits and practices of the company were not fully “professional,” and might be amended to make them more so. But what I actually meant was things could be done to deliver “more quality,” as an end in itself, quite apart from any calculation of market demand, now that we’d aced the competition. I granted that my proposal was eccentric. I mentioned “ethics” at some point, thus digging my grave a little deeper.

“Professional, David? … You can’t even spell the word.”

This was unfair. I had made a special study of the spelling of “professional,” carefully noting the double-S, which, for a mnemonic device, I associated with the Schutzstaffel, and imagined in Armanen sig runes.

We fell into a debate on the meaning of the word “professional,” which was promptly decided by rank. “Professional” turned out to mean an operation that proceeds smoothly; that is impersonal; that is free of temporal distractions and unnecessary costs; and in which everyone does what he’s told without thinking. (This last is called “teamwork.”) It is product-oriented, and the important thing is that the product should preserve market share, while remaining profitable. Let the philosophers decide whether it were any good. The product should rather be, in itself, smooth and mechanically predictable: anything warmly human in the packaging to be carefully faked by the experts in a professional advertising agency. Costs and benefits should be enumerable, and transparent to management at every stage. “Quality,” by contrast, “is purely subjective” — a question of fashion, for those specialists in hype.

“This is a business, not an art form,” I was told. (To be fair, this boss would himself have preferred to be an artist; but the art form would have been acting, and so he played his rôle.)

Now, ethics do come into this. A company that is flourishing will have clear “policies.” A lot of money could be lost if the company were caught cheating, on taxes or whatever; and secrets, as we know, can only be kept between two people if one of them is dead. Therefore, various “options” that might further streamline a profitable operation must be rejected on sight, as adding unconscionably to risk. But ethics cannot extend to any background worldview, that is agnostic on the fundamental human virtues, and thus essentially exploitative and sleazy.

As I have long observed, ethics are for people who have no morals.

I think “professionalism” came in, to the marketplace, about when craft standards were going out. It was discovered that a mass market had come into being, as a consequence of the technological innovations of some Industrial Revolution. Products were no longer made for specific buyers, but for demographic groups to purchase “off the shelf.” Souls could now be counted in the Gogolian manner, as “consumers” in terms of heads, eye-balls, little feet, &c. Broad-franchise representative democracy was a parallel development, and finally, the principles of marketing could be applied across the board. Far from consideration as an immortal soul, the individual could now be denominated as a capricious cypher: a one or else a zero at the “cashpoint.”

One thing I learnt from the marketing gurus: there must never be humour at the cashpoint. A financial transaction is a deadly serious thing. Jocular and amusing advertisements are permissible, but the cashpoint is no joke. It is the holy of holies for the capitalist, the place where his soul is weighed, and his worth determined. I was once told, by one of the moneybags, that I should lighten up about clowns in the sanctuary, during the Catholic Mass. But solemn he became when I suggested clowns at his cashpoints.

Words do change in meaning and flavour over the years. Like every other concept in our Western, breaking-news environment, “professional” descends from the experience of the Catholic Church. The original “professors” were of religion, and if I am not mistaken (and how could that be?) the word “professional” itself was coined, in English, at the tail end of the Middle Ages, to mean a person who “professed.” That would not have been a business man.

Mind: the idea of doing things well, does not come into this discussion at all. Saint Cecilia was, I should think, a capable as well as inspired musician. Again, craft standards preceded the “professional” ones, and what once came from the choirs of our Church was in no way inferior to the congregational karaoke we usually hear, today.

Nor, strictly speaking, would this XVth or XVIth-century “professional” have been an “employee.” The nature of his obedience was different in kind: to God in Christ Jesus. For that matter, the “managerial revolution” — which has brought us everything from Twinkies to Bergen-Belsen — was still some centuries off.

The survival of ancient, monastic ideals, in the modern, cubicled office environment, should be easy enough to discern, once we realize that the ideals have been twisted approximately 180 degrees, so that what was down is now up, and what was up is now down.

Opposing the “professional,” in still-current usage, is the “amateur.” We all know the etymology, from those who do something for the love of it. But this has come to mean, people who do things in an “unprofessional” way, which is taken as untrained, unqualified, inexperienced, and klutzy. Whereas, under the old regime (Catholic and mediaeval), Love was acknowledged as the great Teacher, and those who acted from love would (immortally) succeed.

By now, gentle reader should realize how backward I am. While I have no hope whatever in our capacity to wormhole into the past, I am given to invidious comparisons.

All this by way of expressing my lament, upon discovering a notice in the lobby of my apartment building, that the magnificent and beloved “Scottish harridan” who was the superintendent of this place (she thrilled to be called that behind her back) — the Cardinal Burke of Maynard Avenue; the lady who from sheer uncompromising will, inviolable common sense, strident intolerance for evil, and blank indifference to all professional creeds, raised this to a paradisal island of peaceable humanity in the midst of Inner Parkdale — has been “retired.” And that her singular authority has now been transferred to a “professional management team.”

Where is the High Doganate to move, I wonder?

One should not write at all when one is very, very angry. Several past Idleposts have been deleted on that ground. Much better, I admit, to delete before posting. But best not to write them at all. I count it as a serious character flaw, on my part, that in such situations I seem unable to take to drink, and indulge immoderate writing, instead. Yet even drink can provide no reliable cure: for I have known several angry old men who were not improved by alcoholism. Supplicatory prayer would then be the last resort.

It is worse if one pretends that one is not angry, for the purpose of making one’s anger count. Indeed, one of my most reliable sources of anger is people I catch doing that: who strike the Olympian pose when their motive is quite obviously the settlement of a personal score. To the crime of unconscionable wrath is added the vanity of being above it. Lucky am I, that as one of nature’s hotheads, I am almost incapable of pulling that off.

For the combination of anger and self-esteem is lethal.

This is a general observation: that while the Seven Deadly Sins may be formidable, each of them in its own right, their combination can provide real throw-weight. Add pride to any of the six others, and one has constructed a ballistic missile, aimed infallibly at one’s own soul.

There is such a thing as righteous indignation. There are occasions when it needs to be used. But it is not a weapon for amateurs.