Essays in Idleness

On marriage, and its regulation by the state, I observe, that after we have reduced the state once again to its natural functions, and therefore its entitlement programmes to zero, and therefore its taxes to something people might voluntarily pay, we won’t have quite so many problems in family law. For in the absence of the state’s encumbering help, people won’t be able to afford to live so irresponsibly. However. …

This can only “work” (i.e. not involve mass starvation) if we have a society that is basically sane and stable, and can provide the welfare services the state is now supplying, once again through extended family and local outreach. And this we will not have without plain public recognition of Family and Church and Natural Order. (I mean, general recognition, but the state must reflect that general recognition.)

To my mind (which is going out in the snow in a moment with my body), we have totally, er, mucked the order of consensus we had before the hippie-commie-great-society revolution of the 1960s. Putting it back together will take a lot longer than busting it apart did.

Secular semi-libertarians — the actual rank-and-file of the conservative parties throughout the contemporary West — might be with me through a project to diminish the state, but as I plead, that would be irresponsible if we don’t have a plan to replace current state functions.

To, for instance, “de-regulate” marriage, when there is no other broadly recognized authority to regulate it, would be an example of “irresponsible.” I am not a libertarian, nor in principle even a “semi-libertarian.” I do want the state to be “involved” — but not so much in giving orders, rather in transmitting them wisely. That is to say, the state should be “involved” in obeying powers higher than itself, expressed in natural and divine law, and interpreting them in light of the diurnal.

The more thoughtful of “them” (the rank and file of my fellow rightwing loons) might be willing to tag along half way. Their problem, from my angle of view, is that while natural law can be rationally distinguished from divine revelation (yer Ten Commandments, &c), only Catholics or very “high church” Christians seem to get that (along with a few Orthodox or “extremely conservative” Jews). My explanation being that one must see at least some short distance into the “divine” to see where the frontier with “natural” is posted.

My problem is to enunciate the distinction to people who can’t possibly understand it.

In principle, the Church has always understood that only the natural law can apply to non-Catholics, and that it is morally wrong to molest them beyond, let’s say, a little holy teasing. (Or as the Mahometans say, in those poignant moments when they are forced into the defensive, “There can be no compulsion in religion.”)

In practice, I have often observed, Catholic politicians can go rogue. (And not only rogue “Pelosi,” but rogue “Torquemada,” which though it might be nearer to my taste, still lacks the wonted subtlety.)

So that in reconstructing “constitutions” we must not only recover what was often got right in the Middle Ages, but avoid from the experience of the last five hundred years what mediaeval statecraft often got wrong.

I’m not talking here, incidentally, about a Catholic takeover, which, I observe, is not imminent. I am talking about thinking through politics in light of my Catholic Christian being.

In this vexed and painful fight over the “definition of marriage,” perhaps the most difficult task is to convince not only the proponents, but also most of the opponents of any “re-definition of marriage” that it is not in their power. Most nation states long ago passed legislation in support of marriage, as they understood it at the time. In doing so they never imagined that they were  “creating” or “inventing” or even “defining” the institution: they recognized something that already existed, for all practical purposes since time out of mind.

Tax laws and the like can make it harder or easier to raise children. In recent times, short-sighted governments have done everything they could to encourage “double income no kids,” which offers the best immediate revenue propects for the state. I wrote “short-sighted” because we now have the harvest of that policy: not enough young to keep up with the “entitlements” of the ageing. But this, although extremely important, is a side issue.

Something much more fundamental is at stake. The state did not create marriage, but recognized it; and recognized it as something prior to the state. Marriage was naturally recognized in the explicit Christian form, throughout what was formerly Christendom. In doing so the state recognized a frontier to its own power. The children of marriages did not belong to the state. They belonged to families. Families were the building blocks of society: the lowest, most basic, and thus most powerful level of self-government, in a Christian conception of subsidiarity. And the state had no business intruding into the sphere of the family, except in the most extreme cases. (By measures as simple as compulsory schooling, the state’s intervention proceeded deeper and deeper into family life.)

What we are dealing with now is the latest development in a history of the growth of state power, that goes right back to the Reformation. As I’ve said again and again, “same-sex marriage” is only the latest issue. It cannot be understood except historically in relation to each issue that was raised before. Defeat that, and everything before remains undefeated.

There is no way around this confession: I am a Catholic Christian. I have no choice but to accommodate “things as they are,” and my own Church has had to accommodate and adapt to so many developments that were not to her liking, in the time since the Reformation. But history itself is transient, and I recognize, in the annals of power, a higher power than any which may rule on earth. Which is to say, in effect: I am a monarchist, and Christ is my King.

This may sound entirely romantic. Yet how many have died for that loyalty, over how many centuries — especially, in plain numbers, the last century or so. To them, and to the living faithful, this was and remains no pose, no joke. We have a duty to “live and let live” with our non-Catholic neighbours. We may even have learnt something permanently useful, about the importance of religious freedom, in the course of these last five hundred years. But we remain loyal, Catholics and by definition all other Christians, to a power higher than the state’s, and not to something vague, but to someone: Christ.

The state may assume too much about our complacency. It may try to push us too far. It may ask more than we can decently surrender, to the power of the state — as when it asks us to surrender our conscience, or our children. At that point everything is on the line, and must be.

A lawyer in Texas wrote to me:

“The problem, here, is that religious views got thrown into the law stew.  The state, at some point in the past, provided legal rights and duties to those whose unions had been sanctioned by religious authorities. Thus, sanctioning by the state became available to, and co-opted by, same-sex couples. … The solution is obvious: take the state out of marriage. No more marriage licences. No more involvement by the state in determining rights and duties flowing from marriage. No more performance of marriages by government officials. … If people want their relationships formally governed, let them enter into contracts. Then let the state apply the law of contracts.”

This is a vast topic, and I quote the suggestion as one of several now offered in politics for an easy way out of unavoidable conflict. The author may not be Christian, but is certainly well-intentioned towards Christians. Unfortunately, there are never easy ways out. Of anything, really (but that for another day).

He is under less delusion about the state’s primordial power, than most of the people on “our side,” as well as all of the people on “theirs” — who really believe that marriage is in the gift of the state — whereas all within its gift is tax breaks, and family law. He therefore thinks we should join his revolution, to stop the power of the state juggernaut, by taking all its powers over “marriage” away.

Can’t do that. We are men and women, body and soul. We are not Manichees. When we marry it is in sight not only of our co-religionists, but of the whole world. The two become one flesh which only death can part, and the state can like it or lump it. What we are is not detachable from what we are.

I’ve told this well-intended lawyer gentleman something which I realize is, on his terms, incomprehensible: “We don’t surrender our weapons to join your revolution.” (An ally who asks you to do that is anyway not to be trusted.)

The Sacrament of Marriage is among our most powerful weapons. (He may not know what a “sacrament” is; we know.)

This Sacrament was never legislated by the state. It was recognized by the state, as a barrier to state power. We must force the state to recognize it again. Not on the state’s terms, but on ours.

In this world that comes after the Candle Mass, I want to change my ways slightly. From a fairly good start in this anti-blog — my first posts were more numerous and often quite short — I have drifted by lugubrious habit into fewer, and longer. This would constitute a sin against Idleness. The long posts are all very well, or some people think they might be, and I will continue to publish them as and when they write themselves. But I need to do more towards the discipline of Idleness.

*

This morning, for instance, I was thinking about “arguments.” It startled me to see, from some decade-old newspaper clippings that had heaved up from my last pre-Catholic days, that I had expounded some particle of Catholic Christian teaching. It was a rational, and rationally defensible teaching, requiring no “Revelation,” no “mystical insight.” The question at issue was “same sex marriage,” brought to the boil (2003) by an essentially corrupt Ontario Superior Court decision, effectively overthrowing Canada’s marriage laws. (The chief justice behind this decision went out to party with the beneficiaries after it was done: a profoundly corrupt act by a judge, that to this day has not been punished; a complete and open breach of public trust. He is instead lionized, for having “delivered the goods.” His name is Roy McMurtry.)

What I had written was substantially correct: a reasonably good “journalistic” account of a biblical and doctrinal idea, which was also a natural and rational idea, and from which it could be seen that even “gay civil marriage” was a non-starter. Of course, it would help to be Christian to buy in fully, or arguably Jewish, since these two religions alone have, over the many centuries, tried to uphold the principle of rational consistency.

But if one could not buy in, or at least, if one could not pause to humbly consider the possibility that the contrary of current bafflegab even might be the inevitable Christian position, one could not then reasonably claim to be a Christian, as so many supporters of “same-sex marriage” were in fact claiming.

Indeed it was to them I was chiefly arguing: to those who at least nominally accepted the premisses I was working from, such as the possibility of a distinction between right and wrong; and facts on the level of “only women can have babies.” Hard leftists and atheists may not accept such propositions as in any way inevitable, but run-of-the-mill Christians and most decent people say that they accept them.

But if one rejects, and also rejects thinking about, something that one nominally accepts, what is one in fact claiming? That one is a cowardly fraud, whose obedience is not to Christ, nor to reason, but instead to every newly proferred idol of the Zeitgeist. Or alternatively, that one is a silly ditz, quite incapable of thinking through any position, and in anxious need of adult supervision and guidance. Or, as it were, a “typical Canadian voter.”

My determination to “debate” what the media said was then being “debated” — the whole idea of “same-sex marriage” — guaranteed my gradual removal from the “mainstream” Canadian press. My newspaper column was progressively dropped, first from the soi-disant “conservative” National Post, and then from one CanWest newspaper after another. I could not be surprised by this, however. As the much younger David Frum once wrote, “Canada is a country where there is always one side to every issue”; and as I once added, if you get it wrong, the media will “unperson” you.

Still, an argument is an argument, whether or not anyone is listening. And in the end it can only be defeated by a better argument. (That is genuine dialectic.) Those not listening will never be able to provide one. I grieve not only for their souls, which so need praying, but also for their minds: for almost all of my former journalistic colleagues suffer from intellects crippled by an inability to grasp this simple, initial point. Whatever damage any might have done to me, they did much more to themselves through their panic upon being confronted with an unwelcome argument.

Nor can they begin to come to terms with their own, “politically correct,” tendency to panic. They would never see it as panic, but rather as a kind of spontaneous righteous indignation, confirmed in the jiggling throughout their outward layering of smugness.

Throughout history, so far as I have read, the vilest acts of prejudice and suppression have been committed by the party that considers itself more “enlightened.” And it is natural that this would be so. For without the intellectual humility to pause, and consider whether one’s own position is actually defensible, or whether one might have overlooked something (Thomas Aquinas was the very embodiment of this kind of raw intellectual humility), there can be no effective checks on knee-jerk behaviour. The belief that one’s faction is “enlightened” militates against intelligent or independent thought, and in effect creates the lynch mob. No one will ever be able to out-argue the proposition, “I am right because everyone knows I am right.”

For paradoxically, the “enlightened” party is blinded by its own light. The prejudices are founded on the very notion that “any other position must be prejudice” — so that those who have actually devoted time and pain to thinking through the question are accused of blindly following the prejudice of past ages. This is made plausible because they usually are — coming to the same conclusion as other intelligent men and women came to, over many centuries; to a position which, often as not, fully anticipated the latest “enlightened” novelty, and consciously rejected it for good, stated reasons.

*

As gentle reader will see, my issue today is not with “gay marriage” per se. It was a political battle, over what should never have been made into a political question; and as a political battle, it is currently lost. But it is hardly unique in that way. There is a piece by Fr James Schall, currently posted in the Internet, entitled, “Fifteen Lies at the Basis of Our Culture.” Gentle reader may go there to review the other fourteen. In every case, “the culture,” including its “media,” will shut down hearing, box up its ears, from the moment a rational argument is proposed against the widely accepted Lie. To put this in unambiguously Christian terms, the devil has us that well trained.

Rational argument, and the ability to cope with it, are crucial to the survival of any culture or civilization, and perhaps the reason why this one is so obviously crumbling.

This is also why every tyranny collapses in due course: the inability to cope with the truth — with home truths, with internal contradictions. The position of saying one thing and doing another can only be maintained for so long. Sooner or later comes the rending crack, and the whole edifice of lies collapses (as we witnessed, dramatically, at the Berlin Wall, but also many other times on less dramatic occasions).

As the Christians teach, freedom itself is bound up with truth, and a society that can no longer confront truth must necessarily and inevitably lose its freedom. (The loss of which is itself a survival issue.) Just as, to use an analogy I hope everyone will understand, a major corporation will come down, once it starts relying upon accounting tricks.

The tyranny itself began, as every catastrophe, in small lies, in lies of convenience, in lies that had to be told to support those lies, and lies to support those new lies in turn, so that the lies accumulate to large, and larger, until no internal “reform” can save the edifice: in a swoosh, it all comes down. That is what we in the West are working towards, and have been working towards for well over a generation, piling lie upon lie, to get farther and farther away from the ground of our being. It is our Babel.

But neither is that my argument for today, which is trying to reach a little beyond argument. I began with my surprise over seeing that in the fake “debate” to which I was once “contributing” I had got the “argument” basically right. And yet it did not satisfy me at all.

Looking back, it now seems that in some fundamental way, I was myself still not getting the point of what I was, correctly, arguing. I was still struggling to see, as it were, not a truth, but the truth of that truth. The argument I was making was still external to me. I was arguing as if I were in an argument — which, I suppose, technically, I was, even if my opponents were only arguing that I should be shut down, silenced.

A former prime minister of Canada (very briefly) once said, in the heat of an election campaign, that an election campaign was no place to discuss public issues. She was telling the truth, and alas, a truth that tells sharply against representative democracy. Of course, she was easily made to look a fool, and the fact that she otherwise behaved rather foolishly clinched the landslide by which she was defeated. She was not a politician I liked or admired. Yet for one bewildered moment she had spoken a truth — a quite defensible truth, incidentally — and I was quite impressed.

It is something like that I am trying to say today. I could phrase it in a parallel way: “A debate is no place in which to have an argument.”

But that’s a little too clever. I mean that, by our current understanding or tacit agreement, “a debate” is a form of public theatre. It never was meant to decide anything. It is a public clash between sides, in the manner of an old Punch and Judy show. Real questions cannot be discussed until we have established real premisses; until we have come to some real agreement on the nature of the ground. That a genuine dialectic can help us to that point, I would hardly deny; all truth-seeking involves some form of dialectic. But “a debate,” as the term is currently understood, means a Punch and Judy show — in which both sides have agreed to act like puppets, and follow a script in what they have to say.

What follows from this, I believe, is that where the truth begins to be apprehended, and the most essential facts become agreed (that we are male and female, in this case), it is not debate that follows. Instead it is affirmation. And insofar as we might sometimes be right, all that we can do is affirm. And, “as Christ is my witness,” everything that follows from that is out of our hands. (Punishment, most likely.)

Perhaps this sounds arrogant.

When I am reading history, it is always as a partisan. There is no war in which I have not taken sides. Indeed, figuring out what side one would have been on is part of the pleasure in studying the past, and a goad to intimate involvement. “You had to be there,” and since we are not, suddenly we must do everything we can to get there. We were called, invariably, by some little glimpse, some little scent, the sound of a distant bell. For a moment we have detected something that is really there. It has touched us, arrested our attention, stopped us in our riding by.

That partisanship is a natural mark of belonging. It grows from the encounter with the past. It arrives from beyond the era about which we are reading; it comes along with us, as it were. But now we have a connexion with that past, and in return, it has a new connexion with us. We are no longer simply looking and deciphering, as one might do with a fuzzy photograph. We have begun in some sense to participate. “All history is modern history,” and all of it contains people, places, things, capable of fully engaging our attention. There is a “ring of truth,” and we know that we are there.

As a late adolescent, reading Huizinga, my whole life almost disappeared into “the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth centuries.” It all happened in the first few pages of a book. I saw, smelled, heard, small but characteristic particles of the later Middle Ages. A very learned scholar had evoked them for me. It was the pilgrim’s call. Many have spent their whole lives as historians of such an era, or even smaller tracts of space and time. Many have also wasted their lives in this way, not realizing that a great scholar must not be confined to a speciality; that the understanding of the speciality itself requires a much broader learning; and that the very wisdom that is acquired through mastering the ability to communicate what has been found, is bound up in the finding.

At the root of that first enchantment — always I should think — is something real. Nothing comes from nothing, and the cynic’s belief that every noble thing is a “romantic illusion” is actually quite naïve. In the end I do not believe anyone, not a clinical madman, will die for a romantic illusion. (This is what, to my mind, Don Quixote was all about, and why it has the power to bring tears to one’s eyes, even at the richest and most satirical moments of farce.)

Chivalry is now our “for instance.” The whole cult, as any that is staffed by humans, was rank with posturing and hypocrisy. The “spirit of chivalry” was and is a fog. But venture into that fog, and we will sometimes encounter the real thing: acts of dramatic yet unselfish bravery, rising to sanctity. The person who does not expect that, will be hit by the horse flying by.

In a kingdom not of this world, I believe, things are the opposite of what we’d call “spiritual.” It is rather in this world that an aura of “spiritualism” surrounds hard truth. (Reverence and love were instead required.) Heaven is not a congealed fog; though “Heaven’s gate in Jerusalem wall” lies hidden in the fog. Only the partisan will seek it. And the faith that finds it knew where to look.

The whole morning, up here in the High Doganate, when I was intending to draft another of my long, rambling, tedious posts, was taken out instead by the quaint business of “catching up with email.” This is a punishment for trying to ignore it several days. It can’t be ignored. Try that, and some of your best friends will call “Missing Persons.”

We forget, though sometimes we remember, that the world has been totally transformed by “information” in half a generation; that in the time since this century began (according to some idiot statistical survey I saw on, maybe, BBC) something like one thousand times more “information” has been generated than in all the previous history of the world. And by now that is a fading cliché (the story appeared years ago): another meaningless piece of “information,” arguably searchable in the steaming electronic pile.

But those who admire “progress” are titillated by that sort of thing. Their measures are invariably quantitative — including their calculations of “the quality of life,” for the purpose of determining which humans need to be eliminated. The whole of Shakespeare is not enough information to fill a tiny corner of a Zipdisk, or whatever has replaced it now. (Keychain flash drive?) The NSA could suck it up in kilotuplicate, without even noticing. I am aware gentle reader may know this already. But telling us what we already know, a trillion times over, adds to the world’s stock of “information,” and thus formally counts as more “progress,” providing as it does further statistical proof that what we have today is almost infinitely better than what Shakespeare had, or we had in Shakespeare.

The discerning will know I am a sceptic of “progress” (the scare quotes communicating, Progress to what?). They may also realize I am not entirely opposed to the thing; to saving lives by electronically-dispatched ambulances and so forth. But the limitations to the digital revolution are observed, then ignored. They need to be effectively presented in some way. Yet they cannot be effectively presented, no matter how many times they are repeated, from within the machine.

I know a pretty girl, assured that she was loved five hundred times in voice and text messaging. And, not one “I love you” directly to her eyes. (And if the boy should ever read this, he will know why he was dumped.)

Should one tweet from funerals? “But of course,” was the argument from an Internet etiquette specialist, consulted as part of a recent “debate.” Funerals, especially those for special someones who were very close, provide just the perfect moments for poignant twitteration. So that soon, I should think, we may clock each Mass, by the amount of Twitter traffic it is generating.

But of course, this is the end of the world. Which I add quite glibly, from a primal search for drama. The Greek dramatists would produce three tragedies, and then a farce for light relief at the end.

The uphillness of the struggle, for those who would restore a modicum of good old Western Civ anywhere, can be almost discouraging at times. I think decades ago we were already trying to roll our chariot up an inclined plane. By now the angle of ascent is formidable, and the need for genuine prayer has correspondingly compounded.

One thinks of e.g. catechism classes. The purpose of these, in my understanding, is to teach kids (of all ages) not previously much instructed, in the rudiments of the Catholic faith. I’ve known several smart and (often) well-intentioned young women — budding school-marms, if I may flatter them — who have reported to me on their classroom experiences.

Their kids are also reasonably smart and well-intentioned, if caught young enough. They have proved surprisingly eager to learn. The method of teaching sounded to me more old-fashioned rote, than what is specified in the public school system; and it works rather better than whatever the public school teachers are attempting, under whatever latest wave of “reforms.”

So far as the purpose of education is to instruct, the old ways are best. One feeds to the young blossoming rational minds by teaching “this is this and that is that”; the more pellucidly the better. It doesn’t have to be painful, unless one or another of the parties to the transaction insists on introducing pain. It can, with some sense, easily be made joyous and entertaining.

My point is here that the young learner knows where he stands. Either he is mastering the material, or he is not. What he may happen to think of the material is of no consequence. For the purpose of being instructed, his task is to play the game.

“Critical thinking” in the young should never be encouraged. Indeed, I have never seen it develop unless it was actively suppressed. To teach the kids to question everything they are taught is to sabotage their faculties, to idiotize them — and the savage, arrogant, drooling stupidity of the typical Ontario high school graduate today (or post-doctoral, when it comes to that) attests to the catastrophic error behind all modern educational thought.

I should like to put that more warmly. The corpse of John Dewey should be dug up, and then drawn and quartered.

But back to the catechism class. With those older, passing into adolescence, when the human capacity for rote learning begins to fade, and the small child’s seemingly miraculous ability to acquire languages and motor skills has been lost forever, so that all such tasks become a grind, the techniques of instruction must adapt. “Class discussion” becomes increasingly important, and the Socratic method begins to cut in.

One of my ardent catechism teachers seemed, at least by her own account, quite talented in handling this device, by which the kids figure out the answers for themselves. The teacher’s rôle now becomes keeping them on topic, steering them forward along a prescribed path; abetting curiosity where it can be useful, and crushing it where it cannot.

As she said, “Catholic teaching is by its nature quite appealing to teenage kids, from the moment the penny drops for them, and they realize that it all makes sense.” One principle leads naturally to another, the last helping to display the reasoning in the next. According to my informant, all she has to do is to continuously enforce, or merely remind of, the very first rational principle. That would be the principle of non-contradiction.

The premiss on which the whole argument began is, of course, not rationally demonstrable. It is a revelation. “For God so loved the world, as to give his only-begotten Son: that whosoever believeth in him may not perish, but have everlasting life.” Note that the Bible comes into this somewhere after the beginning: for this premiss was grasped before any Gospel was written. In the Catholic catechism, we are teaching not, in itself, the faith in Christ Jesus, but the ramifications of that faith. The faith itself is more primal.

Upon that revealed truth, unfolded in Christ’s own teaching, and all He came to fulfil, and all He assigned to the rock of Peter, the catechism is erected. It is a rule-book, in a sense. It is systematic and ordered, but it is not the thing itself. “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” The catechism itself takes note of this, in the letter. The rules of this rule-book are far from unimportant; they are vital to the foundation of wisdom. But the end of life is not to follow rules.

In this intensely secular age, I might as well draw an analogy to secular teaching. Physics is a bunch of vital rules, taught as laws and their application. But the pursuit of physics is not confined to rules. It seeks beyond them. It does not try to contradict the rules, but to develop them, where they follow. The student is not taught to have a critical mind towards, say, the existence of gravity. So long as he does not float up in the air, he takes that much for granted. The “laws” of physics are not altered, but refined, by each new discovery; apparent exceptions to them are patiently explained. They pertain to our universe. But that universe itself is under no obligation to obey the rules set by physicists. The teacher-pupil relationship goes entirely the other way.

Returning now to the life and soul of a human being — something in itself larger than the universe, for it is cannot be confined to the Creation we can sense — the question of how to live and what to do is guided forward. We need a rational understanding of the rules, but beyond this we need to take them, as it were, beyond the rational understanding, and into an intuitive or as I will today call it, a visceral understanding of what they are. It is not good enough to be able to recite chapter and verse. One must live the very spirit of the thing.

An example would be the sanctity of human life. Once it is grasped that it is wrong to kill people, as a way to solve your problems, and that a human is human from the moment he is conceived, opposition to abortion naturally follows. That is why it is incumbent on every faithful Catholic to oppose abortion, as he would otherwise oppose murder. This can’t be optional. It is incumbent, too, on every other one of us: on every Christian, and as it happens, on every decent human being regardless of religious affiliation. For in every other religious tradition of which I am aware, the sanctity of life is in some way affirmed. Even the Dalai Lama will tell you that abortion is evil, and against divine law.

Similarly, once some notion of the connexion between sex and babies has been grasped, it is no longer possible to dismiss moral guidance. Nothing so elemental to the condition of human life than our means of reproduction could be otherwise than shouting with moral significance; and far from being a side issue, sexuality is at the heart of all human relations.

The contemporary teaching that it is merely a source of pleasure — so incredibly crass — has consequences that are unambiguously evil. Consequences that can be spelt out rationally, step by frigging step. Which were in fact spelt out, very rationally, in Humanae Vitae, by the late Pope Paul. (I know this because as a clever young atheist, I read it through repeatedly, with the intention of mocking it; and could find in it not one connective that was logically unsound, and became thereby convinced, even as an aspiring young Helot, that contraception could not possibly be correct.) A rule remains a rule, and continues to be a rule, until someone can show an internal contradiction.

And in the depths, likewise, the principle of marriage must still be affirmed, no matter how many of the mad may oppose it. One woman and one man must be courageously vindicated. Deep, and deeper than that.

*

While it has entirely escaped media attention, the most massive public demonstrations on this continent are pretty much invariably the various annual marches against abortion — in which I have observed that females outnumber males, and the young outnumber the old, often by quite large margins. For the mainstream media, ten sign-waving feminist old crows can be important breaking news. But ten thousand marching young women, proclaiming Christian truth to their indifferent surroundings, does not quite rise to sending a junior reporter. This is how things are, and it is that craven media that impinges on public consciousness hour by hour, and day by day, de-moralizing and corrupting.

From my own experience on the pro-life “front line,” for instance walking along with fifteen thousand or more mostly young people in Ottawa a couple of years ago — and past e.g. the CBC television stand, whose cameras were trained on a small handful of old-crow feminist counter-demonstrators for the footage they would actually be using — I should like to make an observation.

First, a joyous observation, of how invigorating it was, to be in the company of so many ebullient and purposeful young. These were, in the main, the products of the catechism classes I was mentioning above: bright and cheerful young faces in contrast with the grim and cheerless I pass on the sidewalks every day. The same comment for events such as the Papal Youth Days, when quite literally millions of the children of good Catholic homes, or converts, are assembled. I wish to say about them nothing snide, but rather how much I love them.

At the Rose Dinner, in Ottawa, in the evening after the spring pro-life march, I had the opportunity to speak with quite a few of my much younger companions in arms. And again: they were impressive, case by case, as I was coming to see them not as a mass, but as many fine and particular faces, each already with a complex life story, and not one an interchangeable happy-clap zombie, of the sort the media stereotype portrays — though not entirely from malice. (In my experience, the overwhelming majority of journalists belong to a self-consciously brahmin, “progressive” social class, which eschews contact with those it considers “lower,” i.e. the worker bees and water-carriers of the “flyover country,” whose views could hardly matter to them.)

They were young, very young to my now ageing eyes, but in their ebullience we are all made timeless. Not only did I converse, I overheard them chatting about what “young people” chat about, as everyone chats: from out of the fodder of their daily lives. And in this mush, I heard so many of the clichés of the media also being mindlessly repeated, and saw the flip gestures that go with them. They, too, had inherited the wind from a godless society, and blew the wind on without even thinking. They had thought through their principles, and were basically obedient, as most young people are — whether it is to authority or to fashion. Still, do they have the deeper instinct, and the fortitude with the instinct, sometimes not to obey? To stand alone, under real and excruciating peer pressure, without external support, against the overpowering Zeitgeist?

And it was more in overhearing little unthinking remarks that I inwardly wept for them.

To be sure, they had the rules down. I did not meet one who could not articulately expound why he (or more usually she) was “protesting” against abortion. Yet that very word “protesting” gave part of the game away.

Nor really do I think that there was one whose firm belief was not rooted in the connexion between sex and babies. Nor, possibly, even one who did not therefore follow the connexions on through a range of other Christian teachings. They’d been taught, well enough.

Yet still there was something that seemed missing from them; something that curiously had not yet gone entirely missing, even from the hippies who were my own contemporaries in youth — self-conscious “fashion hippies” who had inherited many more of the “social conventions” and “unquestioned beliefs” of their “square” post-war parents than they could ever realize.

“Rules” were being “questioned,” way back then. And yet, viscerally, they were still being followed. The profound idea of “one man, one woman” was often outwardly rejected, even volubly rejected, but it was still viscerally there. It would take another generation of media indoctrination, lewd commercial advertising, and the ministrations of Nanny State, to root the very instincts of Western Civilization out of their souls and bowels. All that my own generation had lost, in the first instance, was the power of resistance, founded ultimately on those old unquestioned rules that told one through one’s conscience when one was doing wrong.

But more than this: told one through the same conscience when one was doing right. And sometimes, filled the soul with some distant echo of a pleasure, that was our Lord’s pleasure in the creation of His world.

Conscience still exists, however poorly formed, or twisted. The propensity to guilt will always be there, so long as we are human. As well, the propensity to moral satisfaction, however twisted that becomes. But what one ought to feel sorry for, or badly about, or thoroughly ashamed by, can be quite substantially altered by the intervention of ceaseless propaganda, and ruthless fashion, and the inversion of a system of reward and punishment through the social engineering of the State.

*

Let me end this note, on sex. By which I mean what the heartless might call animal copulation. I am thinking now of overheard remarks, which touched directly on this subject. The rules guiding sexual activity were perfectly, or nearly perfectly understood. Yet in chance remarks, young men and women alike revealed that they had also bought into the pleasure principle. The killer, for me, was a young lady who spoke of “flirting” in terms of wearing a sexy little black dress. It was not flirting with a man, but flirting with men in general. And the terms of flirtation were purely sexual.

I must be clear on this, for what I am saying can be so easily misconstrued today. I’m not complaining about the dress. In fact I thought there was humour in it: a mischievous spirit going quite deliciously “over the top,” and very clear on the fact that she was a woman. (Fashion standards change.) What struck me was rather the way she used the word “flirting,” and everything implied by it. It wasn’t just youthful mischief, that is alive. It passed so casually over the boundary into “mischief with intent.” Sex, for this girl, was essentially unerotic. It was instead pneumatic.

Now, the “hippie chicks” of my own youth usually dressed more covered than their own mothers. I remember, and could prove from photographs, wild costumes that ran right up their necks, and flounced in almost Victorian skirting, right down to their ankles. (And the excruciating beauty of their bare feet.) And I can remember flirtation in the turn of an eye, a subtly directed smile, or a hand gently tapping my forearm, to get my full conversational attention. They were still girls, in some meaningful way, lost today not only on the soi-disant “liberated,” but on everybody. They had not reduced themselves to gym equipment.

As I say, I was hippie generation myself. Already in rebellion against the hippies, perhaps, but still of their world and frequent company; and therefore am qualified to speak for myself, as a representative boy of that age; for I knew many others like me. And I can remember my own, very highly charged, late adolescent male sexuality. I can remember: “I will sweep her up in my arms, and carry her off to be the mother of my children.” This was profoundly sexual, profoundly erotic. And note, at the heart of this passion, the instinctive connexion of sex to babies; instinctive and essentially pre-rational. It was visceral; it was not “just an idea” or a rule, which I could formulate as well as the next guy, and toss around whether I believed it or not. It was the very spirit that the letter killeth.

And this, it seems to me, is the challenge that comes to us today. How do we restore not only the moral principle as a matter of taught fact, but the soul of that principle? How, if you will, can we teach them to read the Song of Songs, without snickering?

My last essay on this website was a complete dog, as I came to realize when one of my Commentariat trained my attention on a single flippant word, and rubbed my nose in it. That word was “sell,” in the colloquial sense of “advertise,” and I was using it to construct a defence of Pope Francis’s efforts to pitch the message of the Church in a world where what the Church is, and what the Church does, must be incomprehensible.

And what is more, the very idea of offering a defence repeated my core error: that the Truth can in any way be sold, or advertised, or let us say, argued. My brief attempt to explain myself made my position worse, for I tried to read our excruciatingly modern idea of publicity backwards into the history of the Church, and to her Founder. This required in its turn a false distinction between “the inside” and “the outside” of what was imagined as a cathedral.

The truth is rightly “proclaimed,” and not argued. The very Truth, and the subsidiary truths which the Church proclaims — about the nature of man and the world, the moral and spiritual order, history and futurity — are in their nature not “arguable,” on worldly terms. They are explained in Catholic apologetic, and organized theologically, exhibited in myriad acts of sanctity and holiness, exhorted indeed, but all of these essentially prior to “argument” as it is understood in the marketplace. They are received in faith, or not received: no empirical science can either establish or refute what is prior to sensory observation. On empirical principles, the plausibility of Scripture and Tradition may be established, but that is fussing with externals. They are what they are, Christ is what He Is — revealed. Such things can’t be analyzed in our modern, post-Cartesian, “scientific” way, in which we shuffle bundles of attributes like sticks or straws or counters or cards, assigning each as we pass some face value, and totalling at the end.

I am trying to say something that is very difficult to understand, in the world as it is today — at least, so difficult that I have slipped on it myself — so bear with me if you will.

We have come to believe in a material reality that is less than a house of cards. Truth to us is a series of self-evident propositions assembled in a logically coherent order. The cards, as it were, lend support to each other, and stand or fall depending how they are stacked. We carry a mental picture of the world corresponding to the assembled house of cards, with all its physical properties and the technique of its construction. Effect follows cause in a natural order that we assume to be rational, or self-consistent. (It “works,” pragmatically, because nature is in fact rational, or self-consistent, as it would be if created by the God Whom the Christians proclaim; however, that is just another argument.)

But what if it were not? The house of cards falls down. It has been built entirely on the premiss that it could be built — in other words, “on faith,” beginning with our postulate of solid ground. It vindicates that faith by standing. But it cannot begin to explain that faith, or “predict” what is prior to cause and effect. Nor even on its own premiss can our house of cards be built very high — can it be made, as it were, a stairway up to heaven.

Or consider it as the Tower of Babel of which we read in the Book of Genesis: a fascinating story for us because it describes exactly the motive on which our own, integrated, “globalized” world order is being constructed, to the glory of mankind. It totters, yet we continue building, because the withdrawal of our faith — in ourselves, founded on the solid ground of what seems a self-consistent material reality — is unthinkable. We have built it so high, and who is to tell us we cannot build it higher?

We have faith, of a kind, shaken sometimes even by minor earth tremors. We have faith vested essentially in a political order; in the belief that, where problems arise, they can be solved, and our “human spirit” (which is incidentally no material thing) will ultimately rise to the occasion. We are, in the voice of every political commander, “the people of this great nation,” and we are repeatedly assured that we will prevail.

Failing which, we fall into utter despair. For we have no other faith to fall back on, when the earth indeed trembles and our artificial tower comes tumbling down. And, whether or not it is in our strictest modern sense “historical,” the story of Babel in Genesis tells us what will be our fate.

“About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.” This famous saying of Jeanne d’Arc will serve as a first dogmatic proclamation that is incomprehensible to us, and in its form, unsaleable. Given the faith we have placed instead in our Babel, we cannot possibly conceive of the Church, except as a humanly governed institution. It may even be impressive, as such; for we can accept that the works of humans can be quite impressive. A considerable propaganda affirms this within the political order, which by now has completely engulfed us.

The very possibility of a foundation in Christ, which Christ will not abandon, is inconceivable to our politicized “point of view.” Therefore, as humans, we imagine ourselves entitled to argue about the Church’s “message.” As a human institution, it could be better, it could rise higher, we could spread its foundation wider, this way or that. The officers of the Church should listen, weigh the arguments, decide on the best course. If “the old way is best,” fair enough, they should explain why they have decided to stick with it — make an argument, advertise, sell it to us. Or if they can’t, then it is back to the drawing board.

Christ, very God, and a “created” natural order, break all our rules. I have seen in the eyes of so many, that they are scandalized. On the charitable agnostic assumption that we, Christians, do actually believe what we are saying, they can only dismiss us as arrogant prospective tyrants, making undemonstrated “scientific” claims. There is no acceptable way for us to convince anybody.

And the truth is that we can’t — that no publicity campaign can do it. For the alternative faith, in God rather than man, does not come from man, cannot come from man, and therefore cannot come from us. It is Christ who converts, and we who merely get in His way, or get out of it. Of course, our modern instinct is to stand in His way: to say, “Listen to me.”

The Church herself cannot argue, can only be. She proclaims, “Take, eat, this is my body.” That is not a negotiable proposition. It cannot be “sold.” One may take, or one may not take, but what is being offered is not an argument. It is the thing itself.

“I am double-minded, actually.” The expression is among my favourites in Delhi English. It is not as easily translatable into standard mid-Atlantic as might first appear. It does not mean, for instance, “I cannot make up my mind between two irreconcilables.” Indeed, it has nothing to do with making up one’s mind, for it describes an enduring philosophical position. And anyway, the Indian mind is almost incapable of self-contradiction. It moves too quickly for that.

If, from my frankly barbaric and alien distance, I can grasp the true meaning, it would be something like: “You are trying to reduce a both/and proposition to an either/or, and I am on to you.” Now, add to that some sportive and humorous Punjabi self-deprecation, which makes Indians of the north and west more lovable than any other people in the world, except of course Italians.

I am double-minded, actually, about our current pope, and equally about his critics. By now, we Traddies all know the rap. He is playing to the gallery: using street-media language in a reckless way, to make the sort of statements that will appeal to the masses, arguably at the expense of the Mass. He’s a showman who, by abbreviating “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” to “Blessed are the poor,” is letting the liberation theologists back in the pantry door. He says, “Who am I to judge?” when that is exactly what he is paid for. He seems to be appointing the very sort of people we thought we’d finally seen the back of; and generally encouraging, whether or not by intention, the happy-slappies everywhere. Having rightly condemned the phenomenon of “airport bishops,” making casual sound-bite pronouncements on the fly, he is too often being one.

Let us be more pointed. A man who plays to the gallery — speaking in applause lines to an audience easily pleased — may appear to be soliciting praise for himself. And the voluble praise he is actually receiving, from various rather worldly sources, is vitiated by deprecation of his predecessors, and mockery of faithful Catholics. I’ve seen enough at first hand to know the people he most pleases are not well-disposed to received Catholic teaching. In particular, Benedict XVI is frequently held up to invidious comparison. The pope cannot intend this; but should study cause and effect.

I am myself a Johnny-come-lately, of only ten years’ standing in the Church, but all my adult life I’ve had friends who were battle-axe Catholics, enduring with our Lord the humiliations to Him and to them that were imposed after Vatican II, through liturgical “reforms” that desecrated the Mass. For those with some culture and literary refinement, the awkward and illiterate translations of the ICEL committees made attendance at Mass in English exceptionally painful. Many, many were driven out of the Church, as the integrity and continuity of the Roman tradition appeared to have been compromised. But many others grimly watched it out, refusing to leave the Desolate City. Through decades, those seeking permission to sing the Old Mass, endured further humiliations from unsympathetic bishops, who looked upon their most faithful as rebels to the bureaucratic order, and upon jackasses with their clowns and guitars as the vanguard of fashion.

An outsider can only begin to imagine the joy that was felt, when Benedict published “motu proprio” his Summorum Pontificum in 2007 — freeing priests around the world to sing the Old Mass wherever it was wanted, and putting it on a par with the post-Vatican II vernacular — “two usages of the one Roman rite.” The notion that the usus antiquior was wanted only by geriatrics suffering nostalgia can be easily dismissed. After half-a-century most of those who could remember it as the norm were dead, anyway; it is actually the younger and the spiritually hungrier who thirst for restoration of reverence in the Mass, and for the recovery of the long and very deep musical, poetical, and artistic traditions which once held all the Roman peoples together.

The new pope’s off-the-cuff remarks to the effect that this thirst is a kind of idolatry, struck a savage blow against a wound yet unhealed. His prompt action to forbid the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate from singing the Old Mass — some eight hundred denied for the alleged extreme traditionalism of perhaps six members — set a precedent for actually rolling back what Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum had unambiguously promised.

Yet what the new pope is doing, in addressing the outside world, is to my mind actually a good thing. If he has the charisma — in the old sense — let him go out and sell. The Church is in the business of the salvation of souls, and not a club for the elect; and Christ is not King of a religious denomination, but in Eternity. His message is to every man and woman born, and if Pope Francis has the gift to communicate His message to people otherwise unable to hear, he is doing the work of Heaven. Christ himself sent off his Apostles to the ends of the earth; and the task of evangelism was never restricted to them. Every Catholic carries it as a duty, to spread the Word.

Moreover, the pope is quite right that this should not consist of proselytizing, in the narrowest sense. There is a place for apologetic argument, and of course for catechizing those who come to us. There is a place for compelling language and gesture, directed personally to those whom we love. But banter and argument will never win over souls prejudiced from the start against the Church and her teachings. It is the power of prayer and holiness, instead — in more worldly terms, the power of example — which alone can break through. And here I think Pope Francis is exemplary; and the spontaneous way in which he sets his examples is thrilling, at least to me. There can be no possible question of his sincerity and earnestness, as a player upon the public stage. Moreover, he is joyful: a very sure sign of Christian integrity. He loves, and he wants to tear down obstacles.

One focused point I want to make about this pope. It seems to me he understands that gallery he is addressing, in a rather subtle way. He knows the issue is faith, not belief, and he knows this at a specific wavelength. He knows that people are troubled. He knows, as they often do not in their own self-understanding, that they fear God in their hearts. He knows that, behind outward show of empty pride, they are seeking forgiveness. He has actually been pointing, not first to the Mass, but first to the Confessional. I don’t think my traditionalist friends have given him their hearing on this.

So I am doubly double-minded.

There is an inside and an outside to the Church in this world. Conceive this as a Gothic cathedral, in which the two are communicating by light. The world is outside, but inside the Host. The spaces are communicating, but not interchangeable. The whole narrative of the creation and the salvation is arrayed in the statuary of the outside; on the inside the line of sight is conducted towards the altar. The teaching and “belief” of Christianity are subsumed in the mystery of the Cross. As in the ancient Temple at Jerusalem, and its orientation towards the Holy of Holies, our universe enfolds, turning from the large outside into smaller and smaller spaces. We are looking from the expansive finitude of this world, as if towards and through the eye of a needle, to an infinitude beyond. We are looking from our mortality into immortality.

Too much from the outside came inside after Vatican II. Too little inside has gone out again. It was not simply the Old Latin Mass that needed to be restored, but as Pope Benedict plainly said, the very reverence to the sanctuary it taught by its example. The New Mass itself needed reforming by juxtaposition with the Old, and the “reform of the reform” of the New he set in motion has indeed been bearing fruit.

There is no room inside for a gallery to play to; the homily itself is not meant to preach like that, but rather to explain in the simplest possible terms. Exhortation belongs to the commotion outside; we, the people who have come to participate in the Sacrifice of the Mass, no longer need to be exhorted. The pope, to this way of presenting the matter, has a two-fold rôle, in his evangelical part addressing the world, in his priestly part defending that altar. This is not an either/or proposition. Outside, he must turn to the people; inside, he must turn, with us, towards our Lord.

If there is one use for the calendrical New Year, it is provided, unintentionally, through the media, and through the accidents of social life. Towards the end of the old year, and bleeding into the new, we are exposed to a higher density of “signs of the times” than at any other time of year. Partly this is a by-product of the media habit of looking backward and forward: precisely twelve months back and twelve months fore. It is an arbitrary thing, but usually their cycle is twenty-four hours, or less with the advance of consumer electronics. Christmas, now for many years an essentially secular holiday, with little pretense of Christian thanksgiving but a modicum of “traditional” good cheer, adds more to this density. In some moments, even for those whose Christian affiliation evaporated before childhood, there are juxtapositions, contrasts.

In the media, or if you will, at a Christmas Party, or on New Year’s Eve, a lot of human experience can be compacted into a very small space, and much quickly passes before our eyes and ears. One has glimpses of the radical opposition between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, the true and the false, exhibited as if on signboards that anyone can read.

There is, especially in cold northern countries, a kind of post-partum depression that sets in after the holidays have passed. The weather plays some part in this: we who live in the vast conurbations do not look with relish on the next few months. In the countryside, a fresh snowfall can be uplifting; can be the making, for instance, of a “white Christmas”; in the city it can only mean service delays, traffic hell, dangerous sidewalks. The let-down after excessive eating and drinking comes into this, too: the sense that the party is over, and it is back to work for us.

But I think something deeper also contributes to our sense, however mildly it is taken, of emptiness, loneliness, hopelessness.

Even if we were not looking, we saw something in passing, and it haunts us still. Perhaps it was a vision of old age, in a season when long past memories were rekindled, and people were remembered who are no longer here. For that memento mori becomes a part of the “twelve days of Christmas,” as the years pile on. And with the summoning of memory comes the summoning of sorrows, especially sorrow in irretrievable events. (A woman weeping outside the nursing home, six months ago: “How many stupid last words I said, when all I wanted to say was, ‘I love you’.”)

But for the present the experience of “density” is enough. Something has passed by that we did not act upon. Something happened that we did not prevent. Something didn’t happen we had the power to make happen. Somehow, we missed it, when we had our chance. I would call this a form of “survivor’s guilt,” that exists within us at the metaphysical level, though confirmed in events, day after day.

To put this most plainly: we have seen good and evil, and not chosen the good; we have seen beauty and ugliness, and not chosen the beautiful; we have seen true and false, and not chosen the truth. We have chosen instead, with a grieving resignation, to “get on with it”; to play it safe; to avoid any kind of overreaction. Or as Christ put it, with spectacular poetry: we have taken our places with the dead, and are the dead, burying their dead.

It wasn’t a choice, according to most people. Just what were they supposed to do? “Most people” (the phrase itself makes me think of an ethnicity) did their bit, exactly as required. They weren’t late for work, even in the snowstorm. They did their shopping, bought their presents in time; they did not overlook anyone. Did not get hammered at the office party. Did not say anything to seriously regret. Suffered a few indignities without freaking. Blew the diet, perhaps, but they’ll soon be back on it.

How many people have said, “I am basically a good person,” without noticing that no one ever asked? And it is true that real monsters are a small minority, though I often think they are closer to being saved.

What we haven’t confronted, is that very emptiness, that loneliness, that hopelessness — together with the self-pity that explains it all away. For the modern man is a childless orphan, and the modern woman is a modern man, and this goes double when they are married to each other.

It is not that we did not see. I don’t think that excuse will hold for anyone. A policeman, from a former generation on the mean streets of New York, put this very nicely with his pet aphorism: “There is no such thing as an innocent bystander.”

And what is true with any subtlety is true in the overt, as I’m reminded by a video from the New York Daily News. It shows people stepping over the expiring body of a man freshly shot in a shop doorway, and the cashier continuing to process his sales, through the five minutes before some Good Samaritan decided to call emergency services on his cellphone. …

But what of that? Such events elicit attention only because they turn up the volume on our background noise.

And that is anyway not what we saw, or even if we did see it, only part of what we saw. Instead, there is something larger: how can it be described? For we saw it as if in fragments, glimpsed it as if through pickets in a fence, somewhere to the side of where we were looking as we went along our way. Our mind was elsewhere, and it remains elsewhere: saddened, and yet we don’t know why. (For there was light there, too, it wasn’t only darkness.)

I had a dream like this, the other evening. A baby was lying in the snow and slush. He’d been left there, accidentally discarded. People were busy, they were passing him by. I thought, he is cold, he has fallen on the sidewalk. Some woman must have dropped him on her way home. She’ll want to have him back, I must get him to her. But it was Christmas, there were legs on all these shoppers; the baby on the sidewalk kept sliding out of reach. I was trying to tell them, but no one could hear me; I could not even hear myself. Why can’t these people see there is a baby? A living baby, right at their feet? Why does no one stop for this baby, why doesn’t someone pick him up? And I awoke, thinking, “Jesus!”

But what I refer to is not a dream.

The question in my title is rhetorical. Of course democracy is not Christian, how could it be? No system of secular government, no Caesarean Constitution, could possibly be Christian, except insofar as it tries to reflect divine and natural justice (which are not finally detachable from each other). Are a bad people more just than a good king, or a moderate junto? Are a good people better than a bad king? Et cetera. These are meaningless questions. The Church herself has had to cope with all regimes, and will not be replaced by one or another. Justice is as justice does, and in the complete absence of any instructions at all from Jesus Christ, on how we should organize ourselves politically — it is really quite astonishing, the lengths to which he went to avoid this question — we might almost stop our thinking there. And yet, thanks to democracy, we can’t. We are obliged to vote on it. We are asked for our consequential opinion on something most of us know nothing about, and which does not touch on the most important matters. Tyranny comes in this door.

Or perhaps we can and do ignore the issue. The number of people genuinely interested in political questions is itself, from what I can see, a small proportion of any population. Many of these few are obsessive, however, and so make their weight tip far above “equality” on the scales, enlivened as they are by the aphrodisiac of Power. For the great majority, politics are not something in which they participate, but something that happens. What does democracy really mean to them? They receive unearned money, or have the money they’ve earned taken away; but also, there is a huge and constantly increasing burden of form-filling to do, plus security checks, body searches, elaborate signage and warnings, and in cities especially, the occasional sudden take-down.

If the diktats came down from kings and royal courts, rather than from politicians and departmental bureaucrats, it would make no difference to the citizen’s level of “empowerment.” In either case the influence of the “man in the street” rounds out to zero. The State expects him to do what he is told, promptly; and to take his punishment should he hesitate, or talk back to any government official. In a small kingdom, or a small town, he might represent perhaps a visible power of inertia. Perhaps even in a vast people’s republic there is cellular resistance to being pushed around. But to say that the citizen of a democracy, today, is governed by his own consent — when items of legislation fill ten-thousands of pages in Kafkaesque obscurity, with serious penalties for non-compliance, to be enforced or not enforced at the government’s whim — is at best silly. Should the citizen be charged with any crime, the conviction rate, at least in the United States, approaches that in Stalin’s Russia (to be fair, it is far lower in Canada and Europe), and his only hope is to “confess” and agree to a plea bargain.

This is the normal working of democratic government today. Anyone who has had his taxes audited knows how much power he has against the State, and what kind of people the tax department hires. He knows that his very livelihood depends on their “judgement calls,” and that he had better adopt a cringing subservience before his masters. He knows that “innocent until proven guilty” is a pious fraud, and that unless he has millions in his war chest, no court will help him. Such abuses are of just the sort the old Common Law served to prevent, standing for centuries against the arrogance of power on behalf of the common man. Today, in his terrible anxieties, he can only turn to prayer.

Elsewhere I have written about the inevitability of the Nanny State, once the “ideal” of democracy is established. It is as socialism has proved, when proposed as a programme for economic efficiency: for it is not something that seldom works, but something that can never work at all. Democracy, in its modern, representative form, appeals to people at the level of what they want, or are told they might get by voting in blocks together. In that lies the divisiveness which Thomas Aquinas and other mediaeval critics of democracy foresaw, long before anything like modern democracy emerged to illustrate the points they were making. Democracy factionalizes a society that might otherwise have remained contented and peaceful; it keeps class envy and the hope of retribution constantly upon the electoral table, and eventually they get out of hand.

Yet the real significance of a citizen should not be what he wants, but what he is. As an ensouled human individual, he is an irreducible thing. His natural liberties begin with his right to life, and corresponding duty (not right) to defend himself. Insofar as they were recognized under previous systems of government, rights corresponded generally to duties — duties which can never be identical, from person to person, until Procrustes has finished his savage work.

This, I allow, is no longer understood, and therefore cannot be said without wide misunderstanding. The entire conception of human liberty, with which Western man started, has been trickling away, along with the religious order which gave it meaning, and the foundation of human within natural and divine law.

The laws must be obeyed. But we cannot understand this concept unless we also understand that the moral laws will be obeyed — as surely, in the end, as the laws of physics. Human legislation itself may err, and ultimately any law that is written in defiance of the divine and natural order will, necessarily, perish — for in the end, evil does not triumph. The true law, written into nature and men’s hearts, was never created by men. Rather it is discovered by them, often by means of trial and error, and thus over long periods of time. Yet in a coherent system of doctrine, internal contradictions are eventually exposed, and mistakes and misdirections corrected.

Hence, the Scottish jurisprude who said: “We do not break the law. We break ourselves upon the law.”

The contrary notion that law is whatever the government decides, and therefore in a democracy what the people decide their government should impose, produces law that becomes progressively more and more incoherent, and thus ever more arbitrary and unjust. My rightwing friends like to point to hypocrisies they find in leftwing schemes of social engineering. Examples are very easy to find. And yet these hypocrisies did not require malice to come into being (much though they may be enhanced or compounded by ill-will). It is sufficient to have a system in which decisions are made not in light of precedent, and gradually settled by experience; but according to the passions of the moment, expressed in electoral fluctuations, manipulated by polling and publicity specialists.

Parliament itself has changed in its nature over time. Outwardly it has been transformed from a gentleman’s club of the landed and privileged, in which members were well known to each other, and by inclination resistant to change. By increments it became something genuinely responsive to paid lobbies and current fashion trends. The quality of thinking and debate has been in consistent decline, and Parliamentary declamation now consists almost exclusively of playing to the gallery. Envies and resentments are openly exploited, by Members who themselves could not hope to be elected except with the help of big party machines, and by going huckster. Much depended, in the past, upon the dignity and prestige of Parliament. Little of that survives.

This was not some natural decay within the institution itself. Institutions may be organic in the sense that they develop historically, but they are not biological entities fated to grow old and die. Like buildings they survive so long as they are competently maintained and repaired; are kept in proper use. What happened to Parliament, gradually over the course of the 19th century and more quickly after the Great War, was an ideological transformation. Abstract demands for “equality” and “democracy” and “liberty” amounting to licence, transformed a gentleman’s debating club into the cockpit for crude factional battles. The franchise was spread without qualification, and in the strictest sense, Parliament became vulgar. In appearance it is now a circus or professional sports arena: the party leaders prancing before the cameras, and their competitively ranting fans.

*

Somewhere or other I once described modern representative democracy as, “England’s poisoned gift to the world.” By this I did not mean to criticize the legal and political institutions which had evolved in England — from unambiguously mediaeval roots. Nor was I necessarily referring to the notion of “rule by the people” in itself, for that kind of nonsense has arisen independently in many other countries — is endemic within barbaric tribal cultures, and is everywhere the cause of gratuitous bloodshed.

Rather I meant to denounce a peculiarly English success in packaging. The English genius, first clearly exposed in the Industrial Revolution, and now copied around the world, was for making shoddy goods seem temporarily respectable. The trappings of the (ancient and reasonably impressive) English constitutional order were used to frill and decorate something quite opposed to its spirit. “Representative democracy” emerged as a new industrial product, associated in the dreamy public mind with the delivery of abstract incompatibles — “liberty” and “equality” being the most obvious mutually contradictory terms.

It was a most remarkable development, in the end much like the gimmicks used by property developers and manufacturers of cheap goods. They use poetical terms from a vaguely-remembered past to brand products utterly unlike their descriptions. I remember as a child looking at a fresh suburban street sign which identified “Mountainview Boulevard,” and asking myself where is the mountain. Soon I learnt that the whole point of mass advertising is to associate a product with what it is not; and that “honesty in advertising” is not really obtainable. It is against this background, but also contributing to it, that “representative democracy” has flourished. For in a real democracy, the electors vote directly on public issues which they themselves have framed; whereas, in a “representative” democracy, they do not.

Products must be sold aggressively. Any salesman can tell you that being shy about it won’t land the contract; that the whole point of salesmanship is to push the customer a little beyond where he wants to go. The abstract “democracy” in the venerable “Parliamentary” box, whether or not it was an organic development in its land of origin, was sold abroad with chutzpah.

English-speaking chauvinism — whether it comes in British, North American, Australian, or other provincial forms — has been a moral danger to ourselves, but a source of tyranny to others. We present ourselves as a “chosen people” when in the event we were never chosen, except by ourselves. The arrogance has come to be embodied within our English language, through four centuries of special pleading for what I will call the Protestant State; and the chance success of British colonial and imperial endeavours. Today the mindset has degenerated into atheist and State post-Protestant posturing, yet the myths behind the propaganda endure — supporting the rather quaint assumption that we, who acquired our English from the crib, are “the best and the brightest,” with much to teach and nothing to learn. The word “exceptionalism” could be bruited here: a received term for the “American way” that seems to have floated over on the Mayflower, and still communicates the Puritan’s “holier than thou.” Yet the whole scheme originated earlier, and in England, not in some exalted “separation of powers,” but in the State’s appropriation of the Church.

Nowhere is this idea of “exceptionalism” better expressed than in the notion that the English-speaking peoples were trained through history and social development in the functioning of democracy, and in its various components — civil society, rule of law, individual responsibility and all that. In other words, we do not affirm our luck or our unworthiness, but a conviction of our own superiority. And if democracy fails elsewhere, as anything suddenly imposed will tend to do, then this is because those foreign peoples were not ready for it. (Or in the extreme: might never be ready.) When we look at what we have actually achieved — the features of the Nanny State that I was ticking off above — our claim to maturity is not only proud, but risible.

The people cannot form a government, and never could, in England or anywhere; democracy did not even work for long in ancient Athens, where only a small part of the adult male population had been enfranchised. It is not physically possible for “we the people” to do such a thing. We can elect our rulers, or even at that, a tiny proportion of them. Under any system of government, the great majority of office-holders will be appointed, to sinecures often outlasting those who appointed them. The calibre of appointments depends ultimately on the character and astuteness of the men or women who make them. Who can seriously believe that people voting in the mass, to choose between demagogues known to them only through sound bites and the glaze of mass media, will alight upon candidates whose judgement of persons and policies is sound?

And then we must consider the decadence of public religion. I am using the word “religion” not in a mystical sense, but in the classical, as the bond of common belief and assumption, that holds a society together; which governs man by custom, and by the education of his conscience teaches him to govern himself. Christianity has been almost consciously discarded as our common ground, and replaced by a secular religion on whose tenets man will write, as opposed to discover, what is the law. Spiritual qualities have been transferred from divine to human agencies, in the false belief that they were being abandoned. Magical properties become associated with words that once had specific meanings, chiefly “democracy” itself. We come to think that simply by introducing “democracy,” to a cesspit of conflict, every problem can be solved; and then we are utterly puzzled when the conflict is exacerbated.

Let me draw this together, for today if not for the year, by quoting that fine old Austrian sage, Eric Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–99). A broadly learned man (who travelled everywhere, and read in twenty-five languages), his political thought became focused on the rise of the Left — which, since the Enlightenment, has been filling the vacuum of a retreating Christianity. He grasped that the Left (or to my view, “politicization”) flourished precisely in a modern environment where political thought has become abstracted, and religious teaching is replaced by “ideals.” The book from which I will quote is, Leftism: from de Sade & Marx to Hitler & Marcuse. I select this early passage because I think it brings home, at a practical level, the consequences of democratic smugness, both in ourselves and in our imitators abroad:

“It is precisely the unwarranted identification of democracy with liberty which has caused a great many of the recurrent tragedies  of American foreign policy (as well as a number of internal American woes). We have to remember all the wars, all the propaganda, all the  pressure campaigns for the cause of democracy, how every hailed and applauded victory of democracy has ended in terrible defeat for personal liberty, the one cause really dear to American hearts.

“This is by no means a new story. Even Burke welcomed the French Revolution in the beginning. Eminent Americans praised it. But it all  ended in a forest of guillotines. Mr Woodrow Wilson enthusiastically welcomed Alexander Kerensky’s government which was to make Russia  ‘fit for a league of honour’. But how long did it last? The Weimar Republic, the near-republican Italian monarchy, the Spanish republic,  the ‘decolonized’ free nations from Haiti to Tanzania, from North Vietnam to Indonesia, Latin America from Santo Domingo to Buenos Aires — all have been grievous disappointments to ‘progressive’ Americans, all terminating in dictatorships, civil wars, crowded jails, confiscated newspapers, gallows and firing squads, one-party tyrannies, sequestrations, nationalizations, ‘social engineering’.”

One might redundantly add the Arab Spring, developments in Burma, or within the last few weeks, the fruit of our attempts to impose “power sharing” and “democracy” upon the new nation of South Sudan — thousands and thousands of unnecessary corpses, and we, through our pink filters, unable to see the blood on our own hands.

*

It is important to be clear, however, that for all these objections to the actual operation of democratic “ideals,” I am not against elections and Parliaments per se. Elections of some sort are among the many ways to choose a government, or have one chosen, without the need for succession massacres and routine civil wars. I am against unqualified “democracy” because it is what Doctor Johnson called a “canting term.” But I do not propose to overthrow the government (at least not until I have my ducks in order); and I recognize that we must start from where we are, and make the best of what we have. Even where we have made terrible mistakes, we should find ways to reverse them gradually and through existing law, carrying the common people along with us, as even monarchs in the end must do. And while the restoration of the principles of mediaeval monarchy in a revived Catholic Christendom would be a good thing, I do not anticipate this in the foreseeable future.

The limit of my instruction is therefore: “Stop using ‘democracy’ on banners.” Start thinking the consequences through, including the consequences to our own souls of excessive participation in politics.

There is a Frenchman named Jean-Luc Marion, student of Derrida, who wrote a book entitled God without Being. It is one of those horse texts (er, “hors-texte,” or outside-the-text) we rightly associate with post-modernism, and gentle reader may be aghast if I don’t run it down. Marion himself is celebrated in all the wrong ways, in all the wrong circles, from my seethingly provincial point of view. He has, to my uncertain knowledge, never been quoted with approval by a single member of the Tea Party. On the contrary, he was elected an immortel to the Académie française (taking the seat of the late Cardinal Lustiger), and that should be that: … Dismissed!

Some fifteen years has passed since I first acquired a copy of this book and attempted to read it. I found it exhilarating. In my nutshell, it argues that if God is Love, then in some sense “Love” is prior to “Being.” The theological implications of this mischievous notion are then teased out. What begins as apparently a wildly irresponsible, deconstructionist attack on the received Christian theological tradition, turns persistently on dimes, until we find it merely attacking Heidegger. Or, put another way, by the time Marion is finished with the modern conception of “Being,” there is nothing left standing except God. As I say, exhilarating. Had I been working in that publishing house, it might have appeared with the title, “The Incredible Caducity of Being.”

We then discover that (the more ferocious Catholic traddies should avert their attention for a moment) — Marion is also a disciple of Danielou, Bouyer, de Lubac, von Balthasar, under each of whom he seems also to have studied. And that, in God without Being and subsequent books, he seems to be trying to square his doctrines with those of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and other scholastics. His presentation of Christ as “pure gift” is moreover a hinge between what we imagine to be plain traditional teaching, and what might otherwise appear to be “no longer in Kansas.” His dangerously Neoplatonic notion of the “saturated phenomenon” — let us say for shorthand, truth so dense that it overloads truth — wends us back to Saint Augustine. Marion is an unfamiliar train taking us through some very familiar stations.

Would I put him on the Index? … But of course, I would put everyone on the Index for at least fifty years. To rotate Marion, I think that love should precede being, for authors spouting novelties. We may be able to see, in another half-century or so, whether Marion was a flash in the pan, or if another generation entirely can find some use for him. My own suspicion is that there is something in the love-before-being thesis, of real value to Christian faith.

Let me put it this way. In juxtaposing e.g. Thomas Aquinas with Martin Heidegger and the boys, on the question of Being, I find they are not speaking quite the same language. On the other hand, when moving from Saint Thomas to, say, the Vedanta, or to the Bible itself, I find that they are speaking the same language. “Being,” including that which presents as I-Am-That-I-Am, is a kind of action. By contrast, in the modern philosophers — and by this I mean almost everything since Descartes — “Being” is a kind of lump, or physical solid, described abstractly. It doesn’t really do anything, it is just there. Whereas, to oversimplify Marion, it is not there at all, it is instead doing something.

But Christ is there, to be sure, as what have you — let us say, “pure gift.” And His there-ness, we are to understand, was from the beginning, before all worlds. “In principio” means not only in the beginning but also “in principle,” or “prior” in the philosophical sense. We might also supply “at” or “on” as alternative prepositions of place. I am not writing this to restrict the meaning of the opening of Saint John’s gospel, but rather by way of opening the star-gate. Our temporal notion of before and after may be viewed as a trap. To say of God, that He “was there, in the beginning,” i.e. the beginning of time, might lead us into a very confined, or constrictively modern, and finally atheist, apprehension of the Creation itself.

Or if you will, it will lead us back into the fatal Cartesian bifurcation, by way of various post-Cartesian imbecilities, in which God winds up this clock, then leaves it ticking till the end of time, perhaps dropping in Christ as a kind of daylight-savings-time mechanical correction. The machinery of Nature is allowed to be miraculous, on this view, but only just barely. For sure, it is something, or if you will, “not-nothing.” Being, against the atheistical background of non-being, comes as a surprise. Something appears to come out of nothing. (To which the atheist adds, “ho-hum.”) …

Observe, that it is “pure gift.”

The Creation is not like that clock, and cannot be like that. The temporal “in the beginning” continues as we speak. God has created, is creating, and will create and sustain in every moment, in perfect transcendence. I would add, too, in perfect immanence, except that notion is too easily misunderstood — thanks, I would say, to our received modern notion of Being as an abstractly-described physical solid; or if you will, that blockhead notion that comes from drinking too much empiricism and not vomiting enough.

For conversely, the very somethingness of God eliminates the possibility of nothingness. That somethingness may be beyond comprehension, but cannot be denied. I think of a mukhya Upanishad — composed long before Jesus, before even Buddha — in which I once read: “He is not a male. He is not a female. He is not a neuter. He neither is, nor is not. When he is sought he will take the form in which he is sought; but again he will not come in such a form. It is indeed difficult to describe the Name of the Lord.”

And the Messiah came in a form we were not expecting.

It will be noted that Christmas begins tomorrow night. In the crèche, in the holiness of the Nativity, we contemplate an astounding metaphysical fact. Our Lord has come to visit us “in person.” All the prophets have arrived in Bethlehem, in the humblest of rock-solid caves, with the animals, the sheep and shepherds of the fields, and too, the angels of the Creation. Not “elsewhere” but in the order of our own Being. Unbelievers may make of this what they will — some sweet little fairytale I suppose — but for me it cracks open that whole order of our Being. For everything that could be said about this world, it was not as it appeared.

The Love, the “pure gift”; the mystery of fatherhood in the person of Joseph, and of Mary the Mother of God; the fulfilment of all prophecy “from the beginning” — it is all there, in the crèche. The “ideas” that will be presented in due course, in the Life, the Teaching, the Crucifixion, and Resurrection, will be of necessity perfectly astounding, as they follow from this. But really I find even more astounding the bottomless simplicity of this question:

What child is this?

Once upon a time, when I was still employable in the Main Stream Media, or at least by the newspaper chain which owned the Ottawa Citizen, I had the pleasure of attending to the whims of a very public-spirited Publisher. An enthusiastic partisan of “enlightened self-interest,” he led each year our corporate campaign to promote Literacy. We, his editorial serfs in contractual bondage, were not directly ordered to sell subscriptions to the paper on streetcorners for the duration of this event. That was a “voluntary” activity, which I quietly avoided. Nor were we ordered, but rather “advised” to do, each in his (or her!) own station, whatever we could to promote the ideal of universal Literacy, if not literacy itself.

By way of acknowledging this advice, I contributed an annual column, either opposing Literacy, or extolling the virtues of illiterate people. If that didn’t help the cause, nothing would. The subtlety of my attack on compulsory education — for it reflected Alexander Pope’s dictum, “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring” — was ignored by my usual counter-attackers, focusing as they invariably did upon my own illiteracy and “one-figure IQ.” As I explained to this Publisher, when queried, I was doing my part. For what could I write that would more effectively inspire his goons to go spread the gospel of Literacy among the unlettered masses of Ottawa, Ontario?

My argument often consisted of memoir. It would be of one or another encounter with illiterate farming peasants or hill tribes from my earlier days of wandering in Asia. In them I had found happiness and purpose in life, and a supporting contentment with family and possessions, that in modern city life I had not detected. Also, I had found intelligent full attention: a capacity for observation and learning that was not characteristic of our urban slums. But most of all, I was impressed by their memories.

This last point was brought home to me by an old lady in a village of north-eastern Thailand. By chance I came to visit that village twice, at a remove of some years. My “central” Thai never rose to the level of “appalling,” and my command of the tones was winceingly comic, but here I was trying to make myself understood among speakers of another dialect of Thai.

The old lady in question — something of a sooth-sayer, but that is another story — greeted me on my return with what could have passed for affection. I listened while she delivered some kind of welcoming address. But as she spoke, other villagers began giggling softly, then more loudly, until they would split their sides. Whereas, I remained good-naturedly puzzled — wearing, I’m sure, that gormless, gently grinning expression which nice liberal people wear when they are out of their depth and beginning to be fearful for their lives.

Gradually it dawned, what was so funny. It was not what she was saying, but the way it was said. The old lady had remembered, it seemed, every word I’d spoken, or rather tried to speak, on my last visit — so precisely that she could now do an elaborate parody. The sun shone when I heard what sounded like my own voice, played back as if on a tape-recorder. She had my number. I did not have hers. Her mind, uncluttered by the impedimenta of literacy, had taken everything in.

One of the delights, in reading the old European travellers, as well those so recent as Redmond O’Hanlon, is to follow them into territory where all the “advantages of civilization” disappear, and they are now at the mercy of the natives. Perhaps only in such circumstances, in the natives’ own environment, can one hope to acquire the kind of respect which they in turn will require of their visitors. This would include respect for their technology, insofar as it may consist of things like blow-darts, or jungle traps for the most alert animals. But some modestly graduated version of this experience is available to any city boy, who drifts away from his own social and ecological niche.

I could rehearse here other parts of an argument that will already be familiar to the more than half-educated: e.g. the astounding range and subtlety which the anthropologists and linguists have found, embedded within languages never committed to writing, unless by some industrious Protestant missionary turning out elaborate parodies of the Bible. And here I am not referring to old clichés, such as how many words the Eskimos have for “snow.” (About the same number we have in English, but with a much greater range of modifiers.) And of course not to such tropes as the one about the New Guinea tribe that gets by on a word-list of less than two hundred. (For as I recall, the next visitor found they had more than that in their ornithological vocabulary alone; that most of them also spoke five or six other tribal languages; but that they restricted themselves to a kind of tribal Esperanto when dealing with visitors from farther away.) Modern, urban people are easy prey for almost any nonsense about “primitive tribesmen” — or anyone else not modern and urbane.

Rather I am referring to the scholarship that has accumulated over the last century or two on the extraordinary range, complexity, and grace of oral literatures. This began with the realization that the Iliad could not have been composed by a literate man, nor the Odyssey nor, once the lesson sank in, the Vedas, the Eddas, or any of the formative “texts” from ancient civilizations. Yet these works show every sign of having been “composed” — as opposed to the narrowly literate idea of “redacted.” To this day, one is compelled to smile (contemptuously) at “biblical textual scholars” presenting the Hebrew Genesis as if it had been assembled in drafts by a college committee.

Plato knew better, and though himself a sophisticated cosmopolitan, warned against the dangers, moral as intellectual, of literal-mindedness. The sincere man does not write, but teaches; the wise write only as an amusement, or for the sake of laying down a few reminders in case memory fails them in their old age. Aristotle, likewise, does not assume that the “cultured” depends on the “grammatical,” since the former is in every sense prior. And among my own Gaelic forebears on my mama’s side, there was a clear understanding that the content of books is only “known of.” What is actually known, can be recited.

They were unfortunately the first victims of a Literacy Crusade, sprung in Reformation Scotland, by Calvinist fanatics animated by the demonstrably insane idea that everyone must be forced to read, so they may then be forced to read the Scriptures, then forced to subscribe to the Calvinist interpretation of them, and finally forced to declare that they had come to these Calvinist conclusions entirely on their own. Scotland became the first benighted country in the history of this galaxy to achieve universal literacy, from a system of compulsory state schooling that, in its descendant form, remains an affliction upon every North American child. It is the great enforcer of dark ignorance and servile conformity — or, “democracy” to use the more common term.

A progressive lady of my acquaintance has characterized my statement in the last post, that “a certain minority of talented women have always flourished outside the home,” as — and I quote — “Baloney!” She notes that prior to the Great War, women were not admitted to British universities, or practically anywhere else in the English-speaking world.

To this, one must inevitably reply, “Bologna!” — alluding of course to the ancient Italian town, whose university, developed from a law school, has been admitting students of both sexes from across Europe for at least one thousand years, and rather more if we take it back to the foundation by Theodosius in 425. One remembers among its professors for instance the learned (and very beautiful) Novella d’Andrea in the 14th century; or Laura Bassi, the illustrious mathematician and physicist; or Signora Mazzolini, the incisive anatomist; or Clotilda Tambroni the poetess, philologist, and Greek classicist.

It is true that a major feature of the Protestant Reformation consisted of closing women out of academic and other areas of public life. One thinks of John Knox, and his pamphlet, First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and other expostulations of that kind from the old anti-Catholic propaganda. But as Catholics we can hardly be held accountable for it: his was the very sort of narrowness we were fighting.

As the former prime ministrix of France, Édith Cresson, pointed out to reporters back in 1991, there has always been something of a problem with “Anglo-Saxon men.” Asked what she meant by an American reporter, she explained that, “They aren’t really men, they are all homosexual.” (As there was some surprise at this remark, she then qualified it by saying, “Well, not all the Anglo-Saxon men, of course. Perhaps only 35 or 40 percent. But you know what I mean.”)