Essays in Idleness

My first encounter with “demography is destiny” was as an adolescent, reading The Estate of Man, by Michael Roberts. This remarkable poet, mathematician, philosophical thinker, and mountaineer, died young, leaving the book as an uncompleted manuscript from which his (also remarkable) wife, Janet, salvaged seven chapters. It was intended as a general survey of planetary husbandry, and built upon his own earlier works, including The Recovery of the West, written in reply to general discussion of “the decline of Europe.” Roberts was a member of the Auden generation, in the 1930s — among the fashionable young Leftists in the decade before they all grew up and became reactionaries. But Roberts himself had a mind strangely unbefuddled by contemporary vogues, trends, and manias. He was able both to join and then get expelled from the British Communist Party during a single term at Cambridge — perhaps the record for quick learning. It is a pity we lost him, for he would likely have continued growing, into a fine complement for Christopher Dawson.

The statistics cited, from that antediluvian age, before the Baby Boom winked in the eye of the Blitz over London, seem oddly familiar today. Or rather, the trendlines are familiar, and public moaning in the ‘thirties about everything from falling European birthrates, to overpopulation elsewhere, the depletion of oil and coal reserves, the arms races, impending environmental ruin and the like, provide a useful reminder — that all statistical trends are Malthusian, and will show from any point in time that we are going irretrievably to hell. Roberts was an unusual public intellectual, for while he had an uncommon mastery of statistical methods and processes, he was not enslaved by them. Twenty years after his death, he became my teacher for the proposition that “all trends are reversible,” and for the insight that they tend to conceal rather than reveal their own causes. Most interesting, Roberts had a mind not only quick, but by disposition also faithful and chaste. Thus he was endowed with the power to see through momentary excitements and distractions.

He was beginning to see, like Dawson, the extraordinary role of faith itself in the sequences of history. Faith is the great life-giving force, and the loss of faith is death-dealing. By this we do not mean only Christian faith, for the same principle applies in all cultures, and has applied since time out of mind.

The classical example is “the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.” As the pagan Romans lost faith in their own civilization, they stopped having babies. They rehearsed almost all the features of our modern West in their own later decadence: the sophisticated rejection of religious observances; the confident smugness of the half-educated; the degradation of family life; the acceptance of public pornography, and openly perverse liaisons; couch-potato obsessions with circus and professionalized gladiatorial sports; the shift from pride in productivity, to a shameless consumerism; the aesthetic decline in all manufactures; the spread of dishonourable trade practices; the inflation of money, and in all other kinds; debt crises; the growing dependence upon immigrant slaves and other cheap labour for all unpleasant work, including everything required of the Roman armies; the appeasement of enemies, and extravagant buying off of the tribal savages, now being let inside their frontiers. In a word, “individualism,” or in another, “atomization.” Stage by stage, we watch the implosion, until finally we have that wonderful spectacle conveyed in the painting of Delacroix: “Attila the Hun, followed by his hordes, trample Italy and the Arts.”

A more careful historian would not present this decline as continuous, however. As we focus, we see the Roman hesitation. After taking steps back, they take steps forward. There were decades of recovery, when one could imagine the sage pundits of Rome saying, “What were we so worried about?” and boasting of the new Roman hyperpower after winning obscure bush wars. The sense of invincibility would seem to be returning, along with faith in Roman institutions. Then it falters again, because in prosperity the old Roman chests had been emptying out. They no longer believed in their own future, let alone in their gods. They had no mission any more, and could barely cope with even minor disasters. Still, they put off their fate for centuries, until the last legions scattered or ran home.

But here is the mystery of our human history, in which nothing is inevitable, except in retrospect. The modern West will not go the way of Rome. It will go some other way; perhaps even to a restoration of sense, and recovery of faith — in our own Lord, and by extension, in our own future as a civilization. For after all, not everyone has stopped having children, as the faithless diligently weed themselves out of the garden of genes. All the symptoms of decline are there, but also symptoms of the Western “exceptionalism.” The Catholic Church, for instance, is not dead in the West, by a long shot. (See the millions of kids at those papal “youth days.”) She wins converts regularly among the best-educated, and that regardless of what is done in Rome. In the balance the Church is wanting, but she has always been wanting, in a world that has always been in a mess.

*

What was the cause of the Baby Boom? The standard answer is, it came from the War: that after a good war, the population is restocking. There is some truth in this, and after the First World War I think the birthrate rose a bit. But not for long, and as I learnt from Michael Roberts, in countries like France it fell and fell. After the Second World War it kept rising — a phenomenon that extended into the early 1960s. And then it reversed itself, at the very height of our post-War prosperity, and has continued falling, mostly, since. What can explain this?

From what I am able to understand, faith explains it. There was a remarkable revival of Christian faith, and of all the trappings of it (including “family values”), which began in the horror of that last War, and persisted right through the ‘fifties. The phenomena are of course statistically complex, and cannot be reduced to some smooth curve. Nevertheless, a trend was reversing that had reversed before; and for centuries now Christianity in the West has been on its way out, and then improbably returning. The Catholic Church has, by now, been beaten into the prospect of extinction many times. The obituaries for her were being written a hundred years ago, and throughout the 18th century, and at key moments in the 17th and 16th as well. In the United States, evangelical revivals have been a repeating surprise. And today we have the unprecedented luxury of watching Christian converts from Africa and Asia, returning as missionaries to the countries from which missionaries once proceeded.

All trends are reversible, and I do not think the West can be counted out. Without the Christianity that formed it, and gives it meaning, it is of course stone dead. But we have, itching under our skin, a religion that is better than we are, and for all evidence to the contrary it will not simply go away. We evict Christ by the front door, but our servants keep letting him in the back. And in our hearts, and our worst misfortunes, we still instinctively reach for Him. Secretly, we don’t want to die.

Demography is not destiny, because the trends can change. In some parts of Europe the birthrate is such (Hungary for example, now below one child per woman) that a nation must surely go down the plug hole; in other parts, the numbers are beginning to rise again. As David Goldman (also known as “Spengler”) elaborately explains, something worse than what has happened in Europe is happening all around Europe. The birthrates in the Islamic countries (Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, Iran, &c) have plummeted to below Europe’s. In a single generation, Iran for instance has gone from 6.0 to 1.6 children per woman, and that birthrate is still falling. Similar drops may be tracked elsewhere in the “third world,” and in the “tiger economies” of the Far East. The demographic sepuku of Japan is stunning; but also through China and South-east Asia populations must fall; India is now following them onto the slide. By its comparatively gradual decline, Europe has been holding up relatively well, and over here in North America, we have held up a little better.

What was the cause? The explanation I will give is from my own experience as a traveller, and my habitual efforts to keep informed about the countries I have visited. It is, to my mind, a loss of faith: but a more profound loss than in the West. The particulars are of course different from location to location, but as a general rule, the alternatives to Christian faith have been found much less capable of surviving the onslaught of our so-called “secular humanism.” The raw materialism of capitalism and socialism has, even more spectacularly than in the West, hollowed out religious traditions everywhere. And this to such a degree, that the exceptions prove the rule: for wherever we find what looks like a revival, it is of a de-spiritualized religion, politicized in ethnic rivalries — almost entirely, from both sides, along what Samuel Huntington infamously (but accurately) called, “Islam’s bloody borders.”

Similarly, the violence within the Islamic world — proximately caused by “Islamism” — is the product of civilizational despair. That is, loss of faith. As I have written elsewhere, the cross-section of a Muslim terrorist displays religious fanatic on the outside, but atheist within. He is not killing people because he believes, but because he has nothing left to live for, having become inwardly convinced that his own civilization really is done for: that it has been badly beaten in a competition with the West that centuries ago it seemed to be winning, and that main force is all that remains. My clue in this has been, all along, the very calling of the suicide bomber. Traditional Islam in every sect condemned suicide unambiguously; condemned murder unambiguously. The people who claim to defend Islam by murder-suicide, cannot possibly believe its actual teachings. But it is not just them. The collapsing birthrates, in cultures that were intensely child-friendly, everywhere proclaim this abandonment of hope.

Whether in West or East, however, the mechanism of societal disintegration is the same. It could be described in one phrase as “the liberation of women.” The modern economy lures women away from home and family with (ludicrously false) promises of wealth, pleasure, and freedom. Industry required a more docile labour force, the State required revenues from double-income taxation. At a level more fundamental than economics, the times have offered atomizing ideologies — the promise of “democracy” in which everyone will be treated the same, whether man, woman, or some other thing. As Goldman has rather plainly shown (and Roberts showed long before him), we must cherchez la femme.

For women are, as they have always been, the bedrock of both family and religion. Men have, and will be by nature (whether this is recognized or not) the hunters and gatherers and bread winners. There is no point in debating this, for either one gets it or one is wilfully obtuse. A certain minority of talented women have always flourished outside the home, and perhaps a like proportion of men not flourished in the absence of any marketable skills — but the case is straightforward in the main. What we have been enduring, for a century now, is an attempt to change the order of the world by social and sometimes genetic engineering; with results clearly visible all around us, to say nothing of the grief and loneliness and self-pity that each of us is carrying inside.

Curiously enough, Goldman homes in on a statistical fact that Roberts elided. It is that a sharply increasing female literacy rate is a more or less infallible predictor of demographic collapse, in all non-Western countries. Or as I mischievously put it, on Twitter only last night, “statistically and objectively, the quickest way to destroy a nation is to teach their women to read.”

This remark would invite several gallant qualifications. The modern emancipation of women began in the West, where Christian teaching had always accorded women the greatest respect. The social changes were therefore slower and easier to assimilate, here. It is when what happened more gradually in the West, happens more suddenly in the East, that the transformation becomes catastrophic. The whole ancestral order of society comes down, in one generation rather than four or five. And they haven’t seen the worst of it yet, for the West had accumulated reserves of wealth, with which to pay some pensions and geriatric bills. The East will face a more dramatically ageing population, without the reserves.

It makes no sense to gloat, that “the other” is now perishing faster than we are. It should behove us instead to help him if we can. As prudent creatures, we should consider how.

Trying to think this question through, I have come to only one conclusion. Our attempts to export “democracy,” or “free markets,” or “socialism,” or our agnostic materialism whatever it is called — along the paths of rapine scythed by our ancestors — should cease forthwith. Our “secular humanism” has done nothing but undermine and smash, wherever it has landed in foreign cultures, at terrible cost in human souls. Carrying with ourselves a priceless treasure, we sold them what instead? And instead now of hoping we can buy it back, and somehow retrieve our old prosperity and domination, we should take stock of all we have achieved: Nothing. The virus of Christianity spread largely on its own: a few faithful priests tagging along with thousands of compromised traders and raiders; true Christian evangelists, often more repugnant to the colonial authorities than to the natives they first encountered. But that era is over, will not come again, and the circumstances now demand from us a new way of thinking.

Under these new circumstances we should, I think, throw all our resources, material as spiritual, first into re-Christianizing ourselves. And then, where any chance arises, throw what remains into helping our neighbours to Christianize themselves, against all the false promises of this world. For in my settled opinion, only Christ can help us; and at this point so late in the day, only Christ can help them.

*

And again, it strikes me, cherchez la femme. A woman comes into this in the figure of Mary, commonly venerated by the grace of God not only through what remains of Christendom, but also what remains of the Dar al-Islam. I think on Fatima, but more especially upon Our Lady of Zeitoun (near Cairo, 2nd April 1968, and multiple subsequent apparitions, before immense crowds, photographed and video-recorded from so many angles and by so many cameras as to obviate any possibility of a hoax). It is she, above all, in her own light as “Our Lady of Light,” upon the roof of her own church at Zeitoun — along with those “bursts of diamonds” and “explosions of incense” to which hundreds of thousands of witnesses attested — who calls upon this world. Before Muslim and Christian alike, she was seen standing, and kneeling, alone; then again and again, presenting the Child, cradled in her arms. It is she, to us all, who, I believe, points the only viable way forward.

For the last fortnight, not that anyone has noticed, I have been, as it were, enrolled in the Twitterversity, so that I find at the time of this writing I have ping’d some one hundred and sixty-nine “tweets.” I was put up to this by well-inclined people, at least one of whom argued plausibly that as I do still scan the Internet, as I once scanned newspapers and magazines, and I will make gratuitous comments on the sludge I am reading as I go along, I might as well post such remarks in a place where they can be a source of irritation to a wider audience — and a lure to these “Essays in Idleness,” where a fuller and more formal trial of gentle reader’s ability to withstand abuse can be administered.

Note that this my Twitter feed can be found here, and should be flagged or “bookmarked” by all masochists. I now consider it to be “my other website,” or if you will, a bonus offered to my subscribers — absolutely free! And whereas I largely eschew use of Uniform Resource Locators in the text of these essays, because they are crass, in Twitterdom they are much the whole point, and my tweets have been and will be full of them.

As an incurable old hack, this gives me an opportunity to point towards events the Main Stream Media are eager to avoid reporting, or to other items on the Internet that would not be to their taste; leaving the tiniest little space to explain what it is that I have found interesting. This makes an amusing exercise, given the limitation of individual posts to 140 characters, net. I am taken back to headline-writing days on the old dead-tree newspapers, where the trick was to fit, into an extremely confined space, as much honest mischief as one thought one’s superiors might allow or, since they allowed very little, fail to understand.

Truth told, I got constantly into trouble for the headlines I had written — usually the next morning, when some earnest colleague would explain the meaning to the publisher, with a comment such as, “Looks like Warren has done it again.” (Often I was charged with “obscurity,” when the problem was that my obscurantism had failed.) Between that, and my childish propensity to practical joking, I was not fated to rise in the journalistic world; especially in North America, where dullness is held among the categorical imperatives, along with conformity to the reigning ideological order.

That no one, under any circumstance, should stoop to reading or writing Tweets, might go without an argument. But like so many other things, starting with the practice of journalism itself, “the world’s second-oldest profession,” I do it anyway. (One must, after all, do something for a living, when one lacks talents or skills.) It seems a suitable medium to the age, in which everything is written on water, and I trust God to make the best of it. I, for my part, have only to disseminate so much of the truth as I think I may have grasped: not much, but something.

By way of belabouring my last post, and replying to an off-screen Texas correspondent, and other commendable tea-drinkers of his ilk, the “roadmap to Utopia” we are discussing at the moment could follow an itinerary like this: Henry VIII; Bacon, Descartes; Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau; Jefferson; Robespierre; Marx, Darwin, Freud; then Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, environmentalism, &c.  One could draw other squiggly paths — this list needs more Prussians, and adoptive Prussians. From American shorthand we are supplied with the term “Positivism,” in the sense of legal positivism. The word is in itself already an essay in reductionism, which involves anachronism, too. But it does give something of the Baconian bouquet, albeit with that ghastly Comtian finish.

When I defend USA to Europeans, I say they tried to get off the bus at Locke; but the bus keeps travelling towards the other camp destinations, often almost robotically. By now, a driver like Barack Obama is hardly aware that the road has two lanes; that one could, at least “in theory,” be travelling along it in the other direction. And this in turn is my excuse for Obama. I honestly don’t think he is “plotting” anything, beyond the commonplace political deceits which are the stock-in-trade of democracy. He just doesn’t know any better.

The same could be said about most of the somewhat-libertarian “conservatives” I know, whose purchase on what we have agreed to call “positivism” is Black-Friday reckless. For the background enemy position has been reinforced with centuries of tedious propaganda, and there they are in the Walmart.

And it is still coming. Having quickly perused the publicity blather for e.g. Daniel Hannan’s bestseller, Inventing Freedom (and on the other side of the sea, under the more explicit title, How We Invented Freedom), I can recommend it to all my “neo-conservative” friends. I can see they will like it. For it is a mishmash of all the tired old Protestant clichés, encrusting upon the stalk of Anglo-Saxon chauvinism. (Yes, Lincoln at Gettysburg was quoting Wycliffe, and that’s exactly what’s wrong with “of, by, and for the people.”) The old Whig pomposity survives, long after its historical account of itself was blown away by serious historical scholarship. People know so little history today, and these clichés are so flattering to their English-speaking ignorance, that Mr Hannan’s latest can be hailed as some boldly original Torch-of-Liberty blaze, when it is really the same old wet sawdust and a patient man with a Bic lighter.

I like him, incidentally. As politicians go, he is several cuts above mediocrity, and the fact he thinks at all is quite remarkable. Like Burke, he is of Irish Catholic descent, and comes to his British Imperial delusions as an immigrant. He has Hayek’s view that less government is better; along with Hayek’s view that some things ought to be against the law regardless of their profitability. I have chosen him for my example because he is the sort of political company in which almost any current political “conservative” would wish to be. I would certainly take tea with him myself, for “democracy” is what we have at the moment, and Christian irony requires us to enjoy what we have, with biscuits.

Notwithstanding, let me observe, that the “democratic” political battle today is between less-government Positivists who usually like foreign wars, and more-government Positivists who prefer domestic ones. This leaves little room for those against Positivism. I should myself have liked to get off the bus around the time of Henry VII, and would have been willing to walk home from there.

What I look for in a political order is all the usual mediaeval things: simplicity of conception, modesty of intention, stability, predictability, the fear of God, and the habit of staying out of our pretty faces. Texans may argue that the USA, thanks to some “inalienable rights” written into their Constitution, comes closer to delivering on this than, say, Canada or the U.K. or continental Europe. They are probably right, God bless them. But they have also missed the point.

The salient point is that the USA Constitution was itself triumphantly Lockean, or if you will, Positivist. It is the oldest such, and by now that Positivism has spread throughout the West, in many increasingly virulent forms, which incidentally wash back on the USA and get copied there. Healthcare for instance: no possible business of the guvmint’s on any soundly mediaeval scheme.

Killing babies: now that is the government’s business, because it is a form of murder, which ought to be discouraged by Law. Nor do we depend on medical expertise to discern that, though high technology has made the truth clearer to anyone who wants to look. Let me just presume that even libertarians might request State assistance against murder, occasionally.

The old States in former Christendom were generally concerned with the enforcement of the Ten Commandments, which they took as having unanswerably divine “thou shalt” authority, without the least need of an election. This is why, for instance, open atheism and heresy would have been a concern to them: because they were a direct attack on Everything. Atheist positivism has reduced those Commandments to maybe three, with qualifications; then added four hundred and thirty-two more, plus seventeen billion pages of regulations. My opposition to this depends in no way upon libertarianism, and I resent the suggestion that it ever might do. Please, if you’re going to use language like that, call me anarcho-feudalist.

The bus of progressive Positivism rolls on — over the Dantean tiers, if you ask me — and those who want to get off are themselves accused of “relativism.” That is because we keep asking to be let off the bus at different locations, whereas the desire is really perfectly consistent: just let us off your bloody bus! We find ourselves defending one or another status quo ante, each of which must be an ipso facto compromise with the prevailing direction of the bus. American conservatives, for instance, anxious for the honour of their own Revolutionary Constitution, want to turn the clock back only that far (“strict constructionism”), which would hardly be far enough back for a genuinely loyal Canadian. We sniff at all that Lockean and Jeffersonian madness.

The attitudes of my Loyalist ancestors, so far as I can discern them going back to the very first American Civil War in the 1770s, was itself shockingly “positivist.” Most had bought into the inaptly named “Glorious Revolution” in England, and all apparently into the Protestant succession. My ancestors were far from perfect, as I concede from time to time.  But they felt in their guts there was something wrong in pushing envelopes of “Liberty” and “Enlightenment” any farther. In that sense they were “conservatives” like Texans, saying with all its faults we’ll keep the constitution we have, which gives the colonial politicians scope enough (Texas today is a mildly rebellious colony of the District of Columbia); and wait for any solecism to be corrected in a constitutional manner. In that context, I would have been loading my musket with them.

What more interests me, however, is the Loyalists’ deeper “Crown and Altar” gut feeling, which one might characterize as a mediaeval survival: an instinctive reference to the anciently established order of Christendom. In Quebec this was gloriously Catholic to boot, and some of these modern “positivist” attitudes did not fully penetrate that province until well into the 20th century — whenupon the poor sods finally lost their courage, and went bat-feathering insane. Indeed, the remaining spiritual superstructure of French Canadian society disintegrated all at once in a specific year: 1960. That aspect is fascinating: for rural Quebec was, along perhaps with western Ireland and some mountain fastnesses in Spain and Italy, among the last of this world’s beautifully mediaeval backwaters.

My Loyalists and these Frenchmen — and believe me, we did not naturally take to each other in a spontaneous way — joined forces for a last stand, and actually pulled off “Canada.” That was something that still gives me a bit of the goosebumps: beating back the Yankee invaders of 1776 and 1812 (with some thanks to the Royal Navy).

There is a book by one of those Frenchmen named Lanctot on the improbable loyalty of his kind to His Britannic Majesty at the time of the Revolution — to say nothing of later when the alternative to the Crown was the prim and rather shrieky little Catholic-baiting James Madison, Jr. It is really rather moving, the way those Habitants joined up voluntarily, in gallant numbers, to fight for our royal British cause — while the sleazy English merchants of Montreal, protective of their delicate sons, were cutting sorry deals with the Yankees.

But my point was going to be: subscription to the old motto of the fine Province of Ontario (Ut incepit fidelis sic permanet; “Loyal she began, and loyal she remains”). The cause to which this motto specifically referred is long lost, according to the conventional view. Yet one still stands, in solidarity with one’s own oddly Calvinist ancestors, in the deeper memory of a legitimate and Christian order that was simple, modest, stable, predictable, God-fearing, and out of our pretty faces.

Locke hardly read Hobbes, denied having read him when asked, and among Locke’s surviving notes which suggest serious attention to a wide range of authors, there would seem to be only one mention of Hobbes, and that rather dismissive. So that when I casually remarked, somewhere the other day, that Locke developed certain ideas from Hobbes I was, strictly speaking, uttering nonsense. I often do that, and feel slightly embarrassed later. Curiously, it was the mere sight of the spine of Laslett’s edition of Locke’s Two Treatises that sobered me, afterwards. (If I lived off e-books, I’d have no such prompts.) It has a long and, in the best sense, scholarly introduction I suddenly remembered having perused.

But I’m a hack, a mere journalist, wandering ignorantly through space and time, and people like me do not bother with footnotes. We find them too confining; raw memory will serve. (My hero Kipling refused even to keep notebooks.) What I think I meant was that Hobbes appropriated various ideas about the nature of politics and the human condition from the plein air, as it was circulating in his time; and Locke developed the same in the next generation.

Locke himself, pillar of our modern Gringo world, and the Anglo bits especially, is a slew of self-contradictions and vague sourceless references (see Laslett, again). Yet he was, too, a meticulous, if ignored, reviser of his own manuscripts. Charged, for instance, with having no intellectual appreciation of the foundations of Natural Law, he would become very snooty and fix the text in which he had left that impression. It was not his fault that all his careful corrections were dispersed unread at his death, only to be rediscovered centuries later. Others among his eccentricities incline me to love him as at least a fellow hack, ducking and weaving through the mudfights of his time, inching towards the celestial castle on its promontory, far far away.

It was in realizing my own, typically Twitterish mistake, that I recalled what made Locke, even more than Hobbes, novel and frightening and exhilarating to his own first readers. Hobbes’s nastiness, brutality, and shortness, is conducted in a full view of actual history. He sparkles with classical and biblical allusion, with his sense of the development of civil law, with an insistence on cumulative human experience. His prose style itself — among the most magnificent exhibitions of the English language — designedly throbs with such particulars, and is fretted with the old poetical renderings of beautiful words such as “warre.” To my mind, he is the enemy, but a fine and worthy one. I could close a pub, drinking with that man.

Locke is an enemy of a different, and rather abstemious kind. He writes almost exclusively about politics and the human condition “in principle,” and with an indifference to heritage that makes him seem sometimes to have been born yesterday. This was the revolutionary thrill he gave many of his interpreters: who felt, reading him, the power of his tabula rasa — his notion that the human child arrives in the world with a blank slate, upon which almost anything can be written. This was the kind of liberation he offered. Henceforth the old Aristotelian order was truly overthrown, and the work of Enlightenment could proceed. The American Constitution, to give just one example, could not exist without Locke, written as it was in the belief that we could throw out everything and start again. Rousseau and Revolution were, if I may make another of my irresponsible assertions, communicated by Locke’s key from England also unto France. (The French will deny this.) And history, uncoupled from its former drivers, could slide with a new, gravitationally-assisted speed, towards the Finland Station.

Is this a wild overstatement? Do I take Locke too seriously? Of that, my learned reader must decide. I, for my part, am content if I have found no more than a means to justify my absurd, almost perverse love for Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. For he was arguably the last of our literary, i.e. readable, political philosophers — those who assumed that the moral of the story must emerge from the telling of the story, as from the life lived; and that it does not descend from the sky as a species of sterilized gezo or manna. Even David Hume can be seen as something of a reactionary in this light, with his great concern for an actual British history, and his backward-looking habit of writing well. Even Voltaire (as I explained once in some review of a book by John Ralston-Purina) could be presented as a soi-disant Tory in this light, oriented to the past, by comparison to his self-styled “bastards.” Though if a Tory, Voltaire was, like Hume, a rather glib one.

To put this another way, I feel more at home in a house with furniture. And this, even if the furniture is a little tacky. I like to be able to sit somewhere: to find a chair, then maybe a pot to boil my lentils. I do not like to conjure them from scratch.

What follows, on this Feast of Christ the King, is the slightly edited and contracted text of a “talk” I gave four years ago, in the “Scavi” of Saint Patrick’s Basilica at Ottawa. It was a pleasant evening, as I recall. Not one heckler, for a change, though many young people out from the city’s several universities, who were aware of me as the token “conservative” columnist on the editorial page of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper: the one whose job seemed to consist of making nice liberal people, each morning, sleepily munching breakfast at the start of busy days, suddenly spit up their cornflakes. The questions I was asked afterwards were intelligent and genuine, and I was amazed to be so well received by these college students once I stepped outside. What a contrast to the brownshirt demonstration one must expect if speaking at, for instance, the University of Ottawa! Where, notoriously, the slightest deviation from the current official party line will be drowned out by the resident chorus of howler monkeys.

My motto for this talk, incidentally, came from Saint Thomas More: “For in man reason ought to reign like a king, and it does reign when it makes itself loyally subject to the faith, and serves God.”

*

Let me begin by warning my audience that some of the things I say this evening may be controversial. At least, I hope they will be. In the event, I take my courage from Pope Benedict XVI in Rome. He is said to have told a confidante that, “Whenever I make a public statement, and it is not criticized, I have to examine my conscience.”

Saint Peter, a pope in Rome before him, is reported in the Gospels to have failed not once, but thrice in this respect. He was put in a position where he would have to make a very controversial remark, to the effect that he did, in fact, know Jesus personally. But noticing himself surrounded by a howling mob, out for blood, he decided the politic thing would be to pretend he was someone else.

We gather from the same account that he was rather seized by conscience after employing this stratagem. The denial of Christ would not count in any Catholic view of the universe as a minor oversight, or venial sin. It would instead go to the heart of what our Lord is, in His Triune majesty — the fact that Christ is Son of God the Father, even while he is Son of Man; and Very God, even in the kenosis or self-emptying of his coming down from heaven.

This goes to the heart of what we are: God’s creatures. For according to the latest inferences of natural philosophy, this is the same Creator God whom we encounter in physics at a date currently calculated to 13.7 billion years before the present, in the “Big Bang,” from which our universe issues, and time itself. That is, if we are to take Him not as a “god of the gaps,” in the neo-Darwinian sneer, but more singularly as God of the Singularities.

It is the same who, from out of the primaeval muck of this planet, raised life, as Lazarus — just a few of those billion years ago.

The same who formed man out of the materials of His creation, mysteriously in His own image — the day before yesterday, in biological or geological  terms.

The same who sent his Son, within historical memory, to be born in humility at Bethlehem — to live, teach, work miracles, exemplify — to suffer and to die — in an act of cosmic condescension, and redemptive mercy, that we are still trying to assimilate, or even begin to comprehend.

The same who, in the person of the Son, deigned to be Crucified on the mound of Golgotha by Jerusalem — and at the crossroads of the world. Who descended into Hell, then rose in Glory.

In the prophet Isaiah is a passage about Our Lord that I take as a pendant to the entire Old Testament:

And to old age I am he,
And to hoar hairs will I carry,
I have made, and I will bear,
Even I will carry, and will deliver.

For our purposes, as we try to look ahead, towards the end of the time in which we have lived and had our being, this is the same Christ who is living still. The same who reveals himself in the Apocalypse, radiant, and in the sound of many waters.

As Saint John reports from Patmos: “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying, Fear not; I am the first and the last. … I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of Hell and of Death.”

“Fear not” is one of the most carefully repeated messages of our New Testament, and in this backward glance upon the Church which He founded, Christ tells us, “Fear none of those things that you will suffer.”

*

So here we have walked into our first controversy, by asserting that the Catholic Christian account, of God, man, and the universe, is the correct one, and that the guiding principle of heroic action, which is never to deny Christ, should be obeyed. Saint Peter himself knew it would not do to deny Christ, as ditto our Holy Father today, and we in our hearts.

A very interesting thing happens in the upshot of Christ’s crucifixion, and let us for a moment follow where that leads. In faith and works, Saint Peter proceeded to Rome; as did other original disciples, to Rome and to the ends of the earth — all now imbued with the certainty that they must serve “unto this last.”

Now, Peter could hardly have been alone, in wishing to make himself scarce at the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth. For alongside Mary, there is only one disciple in the composition, at the feet of Christ on the Cross, and that is Saint John. The rest have all cut and run, rather than risk joining their master, on the next tree. How is it that, in the end, many years after that trial and execution, and with innumerable intervening opportunities to run and hide, each one goes willingly to his fate — through interrogation, torture, and death, as required — to affirm the same Master?

Peter himself, our first pope, ends up tacked to his own cross at Rome, hung upside down at his own request, the better to see his Redeemer. We retained his relics right under Saint Peter’s Basilica (then forgot they were there, then suddenly remembered) — the earthly throne of our Church is built upon them. “Upon that rock.”

Other bones were scattered, so far as I can follow in traditional accounts. Matthew was slain by sword in Ethiopia. Mark, dragged to death by horses through the streets of Alexandria. Luke, hanged in Greece. James, son of Zebedee, beheaded by the Romans at Jerusalem. James, the Just, tossed off the south-east pinnacle of the Temple at Jerusalem, and when he survived that, beaten to death with a club. Bartholomew, flayed alive in Armenia. Thomas, run through with a spear in India. Jude, shot up with arrows. Matthias, stoned then beheaded. And finally Paul, our “twelfth man” — beloved patron of all converts — tortured then beheaded at Rome.

Yes: the refusal to deny Christ has long been controversial.

The exception, perhaps suggesting that martyrdom is not always necessary, is Saint John — by tradition, and I suspect in actual fact, the author of our Apocalypse. He, uniquely among these first evangelists, died peacefully in his old age, though after many scrapes. His affirmation of Christ never faltered, as we have seen, even before the Resurrection. Nota bene.

Something must surely have happened to explain why all the rest of those good men, with intimate knowledge of Jesus’ earthly mission, and their own various ideas about what the term “Messiah” might mean — went from trying to save their own skins, to offering them up. And that something was the Resurrection itself: the Archimedean moment, the lever, that moved the whole world.

*

This is where we start, ourselves, in considering our own place in the world, in our own time. I am stressing the Resurrection, because I think without its light, we can make little sense of our mission. For without its light, the disciples themselves could make little sense.

I am not sceptical of that event, and see no reason why any Christian should be. To my own reasoning, suggested above, it is proven fact. Men may kill for an illusion, but they cannot wish only to die for one, in obscurity and excruciating pain. If the circumstantial details are in order, the only possible explanation of that strange Christian custom of accepting martyrdom, in preference to denying Christ, must be left to speak for itself.

The alternative argument I find lax: that if God really exists he would never have allowed a whopping lie like this to pass down the centuries, and become the very touchstone of faith, in by far the largest and most widely spread of all the world’s religions. That argument is glibly reversible. For the God who allowed that might well not exist.

“Modern biblical scholars” — by which I mean a procession of mostly Protestant biblical scholars, down the centuries immediately behind us, and especially since what is called the Enlightenment — have scourged the faithful. The very premiss of their work was, that the Traditions of the Church cannot be taken at face value. And while they may have begun by disputing Catholic claims alone, they had tacked all Christian claims across their table, by the 19th century.

As Catholics, we ourselves long accepted, and should continue to accept, the rôle of the “devil’s advocate,” in testing for mistakes; just as we invite secular medical doctors to examine miraculous claims at Lourdes. There is nothing that our faith in God requires us to hide. On the other hand, we must remind that there is a distinction between honest scepticism, which seeks the truth humbly, and an arrogant and destructively posturing scepticism that proceeds in a Humean circle, from the premiss that no miracle can ever happen, to the conclusion that no miracle ever did.

In reality, biblical scholarship has long been infected with this Humean spirit, and biblical scholars have often and even habitually inserted their theories into every blank space within each narrative, and between narratives, for the purpose of reinterpreting the content of the Gospels in what they imagine to be a more “scientific” and “objective” way. They take, in other words, what presents the image of Christ, and amend it in their own image, having appointed themselves “the gods of the gaps.” Except, to be fair, there were also many believers, who found their faith rewarded with some of the largest discoveries in the same field.

But I am not telling the history of Bible scholarship this evening, a road too long and winding even for the dimensions of a big fat book. I am concerned here only with the large and obvious.

To this day, if you go online, to Wikipedia or any other common source of spotty, unreliable, heavily biased information; or into standard reference books, edited to reflect currently received opinion — you will encounter again and again this smug little term, “modern scholarship.” As in: “People used to believe X, but thanks to modern scholarship we now think Y was much more probable, if not Z.” As opposed to: “Here are the arguments for X, Y, and Z, respectively.”

Built into that smug term is the notion, casually taught in our public schools, then drilled into freshmen in college — including many of the formerly Catholic colleges — that the New Testament is to be read as a kind of children’s book, full of fairy tales only children can believe; and that faith itself is “naïve” in its nature. Likewise, we are supposed to have outgrown the Bible’s simplistic moral teachings.

I have myself greater respect for children, who, I have noticed, very early in life, acquire the ability to tell a statement of fact from a fairy story. Indeed, you have to become a very sophisticated intellectual, to lose this ability.

There may not even have been intellectuals that sophisticated, around the time of Christ, for in that ancient world every factual assertion of the Bible was noted and somewhere challenged — yet with no discernible confusion between facts and fairies. The notion that people were somehow like children then, and very easily fooled, collapses upon the slightest acquaintance with classical literature. The smartest of the ancients had minds as sharp as the smartest of ours.

Scepticism towards claims of divine authority was no more invented in the 17th century, than sex was discovered in the annus mirabilis of 1963. The claim that Christ had been not metaphorically, but actually Resurrected, was met with howls of derision and mockery, as loud in the ancient world as in today’s. Louder, perhaps, because the claim was more of a novelty then.

*

Those “modern scholars” — like the “modern scientists” who pretend to explain the whole descent of living creatures from random twists of chance — have done an unwitting service. Though irritation may prevent our seeing, they have been chiselling away at the barnacles encrusting the hull of our old Christian ship, in the absence of which she will sail the faster. In the course of attacking our “ancient myths,” they have re-exposed our ancient veracities.

The most modern archaeological research has, for instance, consistently moved the dating of the Gospels earlier; has progressively uncovered the circumstantial particulars of those Gospels, in the soil of the Holy Land; has consistently and progressively validated the integrity of what the modern, atheist, and reductionist mind fully expected to fall apart.

More than a century ago, in the time of Ernest Renan, there was serious argument over whether “the Jesus of history” had even existed as a man; and if he had, over whether we could learn anything more about him from the historical record than that someone by that name may perhaps have existed. Amusingly, Renan juxtaposed the life of Muhammad, which he considered to be quite historical by comparison. Today, the situation is reversed. We have a detailed knowledge of events and circumstances in the Jerusalem of the 1st century; and there is less and less of which we can be certain in the Mecca of the 7th century.

The testing continues. Even as I speak, archaeologists for the Israeli Antiquities Authority are publishing details of a synagogue recently discovered at Migdal beach, on the Sea of Galilee (the ancient Magdala). As these professional diggers themselves explain, it is among synagogues in which Jesus very likely preached.

Not far from there, at Capernaum, I have myself stood near the remains of such a synagogue, and over what is quite unquestionably — from both the Biblical account, and the dating methods — the House of Simon Peter, known to later history as “Saint Peter.” This is the actual house, as we know from the Gospels, where Jesus lodged, and in effect the headquarters for his early missionary work, among the fishermen of Galilee.

We may reconstruct the scene with great precision. For instance, we can see how a stretcher, bearing a paralytic, would have been carried down the short, narrow, and crooked laneway, to that house. We can then back out that lane, to the main street — which was also the road from Jerusalem to Damascus — and up the short distance of a block or so, to another synagogue where He preached.

One little detail of this excavation stabbed me to the heart. It is the solution to that problem of getting the paralytic, on his stretcher or board, down the laneway, to put him before Jesus. The angle is too tight and the door too narrow. But the wall would have been low, the roof section a mere lean-to, and the solution is to pass the stretcher over the top, or as it were, through the roof. Which is just what we read in Mark, chapter two.

Now, I happened to remember, while visiting this site, having read in a commentary on Mark that certain modern scholars had proposed an emendation to this very text, since they thought the “passing through the roof” bit must be a scribal error. They proposed to fix it: to have the paralytic carried through the door, instead — thus inserting an error in the text, where there had been none.

Remember this whenever you see other scholarly emendations, and pray: “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.”

This is a very minor point, one of the innumerable minor points in “modern scholarship,” and I’ve mentioned it only because it opened my eyes. As a journalist, I am ever looking for the telling detail, the unintended detail, that gives the ring of truth. Or alternatively, gives the game away. In this case, it was exactly the sort of minor detail that would have impressed itself on an actual observer of the event.

What I’m saying here is something that should not be controversial, and yet somehow is. I’m saying that again and again the outward particulars of the Gospels are shown to ring true. A lawyer could say, “all your evidence is circumstantial.” And of course it is circumstantial: as abundantly circumstantial as the evidence for the life of Augustus Caesar. For even in a court of law, circumstantial evidence can become overwhelming.

One more point from my little example, to press upon you. It is how the archaeologists spotted the House of Simon Peter in the first place, before they had done things like examine the shards of ancient clay oil lamps, and dated them decade to decade by their style. The house was revealed to them because it was surrounded by an octagon of stone. A very early Byzantine pilgrim church, itself forgotten, had been erected right over the house in question. Unknowingly, the ancients showed the moderns where to look.

What does that tell us? That Christians in the earliest centuries knew perfectly well where the relics of their faith were to be found, and made them into sites of pilgrimage, in times of which we have no other record.

This is how we have established the likeliest site of the Crucifixion — just outside the walls of Jerusalem as we now know they then were; and even the topography of ancient Bethlehem — and the probable cave of the Nativity. Beneath the present churches are earlier churches; we follow the evidence straight down the shaft, to within touching distance of the events themselves. We make a great and terrible mistake, as scholars, by assuming that the Christians of the earliest centuries lived in the same sort of abstract fog that the professors in our universities live in today. And indeed, archaeological and historical scholarship on the origins of Christianity would have proceeded much faster, had the good faith and careful veracity of both Scripture and Tradition been assumed.

But leave all little things aside. A big picture has emerged, fairly clear, to anyone who wants to look upon it, grown mosaically from its constituent parts, many of them only recently assembled. It is perfectly compatible with the traditions of the Church. And it is interesting, living as we are in this very material age, to see so many material relics from the Life of Christ emerging from the soil of the Holy Land, now. Our Lord knows what we need.

*

My point has been, to insist on the Resurrection not as parable but as fact. I insist that the fact of the Resurrection alone can explain other features of early Christian history. And by extension, I will insist that it is the only way to explain the ultimate triumph and spread of the Christian religion, of our Catholic Church, and all that follows from them. To my mind, everything hangs on this Resurrection, and without it, everything falls.

So when I say, “He is Risen,” I do not mean it only, or “merely,” as part of some abstract, mytho-poetical narrative, as the so-called “modern scholarship” tells us to pretend. Nor do I mean we must pretend the opposite, because the cost of not pretending is too high. Let the whole Earth go to Hell if Christ is not Resurrected: as it surely would. I mean that Christ was bodily Resurrected from the human flesh, and that the larger account given in Scripture and Tradition deserves to be taken as received.

For I am in complete agreement with my Calvinist ancestors; and alike with the Anglican minister who inducted me by baptism into the Christian vocation; and with Saint Paul whom they were quoting: “If Christ be not Resurrected, then our preaching is vain, and your faith is also vain.” As Catholics we take this from the same page in First Corinthians.

If Christ be not Resurrected, then our faith is not only vain, but stupid. We have been conned. If, as Saint Paul reasons, the dead cannot rise — and the man had a very clear, and very well Greek-educated mind — then Christ did not rise, and your sins can incidentally never be forgiven.

If Christ did not rise, the dead are just dead, and so are we. We, the dead, have buried our dead, together with the rest of our strange human race, that has been burying its dead instinctively and compulsively and mysteriously, for about thirty thousand years.

For as Saint Paul also notices — in a wonderful anticipation of the centuries to come — even if there is a God, but Christ is not Risen, the account we have given of God is false. For we say that God raised Christ, when God did not raise him. It follows that everything else we have said about God, might as well stand corrected by e.g. the Koran.

*

In Jerusalem, on the Dome of the Rock — sited very conspicuously right on top of what is almost certainly the Holy of Holies, within the ancient Temple precincts — is an inscription, in their earliest angular Kufic script, on what was also the earliest monument the Arabs caused to be erected in a conquered land, by impressed Byzantine labour. This inscription reads in its most significant part: “Praise to Allah who begets no son and has no associate in power and who has no surrogate for humiliations.” The point is sustained by repetition, together with the contrary assertion that Muhammad is God’s envoy and can alone provide intercession on the day when the Muslim community is resurrected; and the Muslim Jesus comes to throw all us stubborn Christians into Hell.

That is on the outside of the Dome. On the inside there is a further long inscription, which mentions Jesus and Mary by name; states that Jesus, too, was an envoy, and therefore no Son of God; declares that the religion of God is Islam, and that God will reckon with those who dissent. Nearly fourteen centuries have passed, since this direct challenge was laid down to the existence of Christianity; and indeed, we are living in the fallout of it today.

Yet we have today, at least in the more progressive and nominal Christians of North America and Europe, the curious notion that Christianity is compatible with Islam. That it is likewise compatible with all other religions. That it is compatible with a Darwinian cosmology, and therefore with atheist materialism. And that the Church becomes ever more “relevant,” the more we admit she is defunct. Defunct — and yet still outwardly turning over, and available at a discount, in the post-modern spiritual flea market. For she still has a certain decorative and nostalgic value.

The Church makes, for such people, a nice venue for a wedding; it may offer a bit of formal “closure” for a funeral. The building may be worth including on the architectural preservation list, since no one is ever going to build another like it. And that is all very nice, and it goes with sentimental thoughts on the teachings of that religion.

The whole thing may now apparently be reduced to a “bottom line.” It comes down to being nice to people, and trying not to notice if anyone is mean. It is about being open-minded, and accepting people as they are, unless of course they happen to be religious. Indeed, whatever else Christ may have done, according to this view, he reduced all the Ten Commandments to just One Commandment: that “you mustn’t judge people.”

I wish that were a parody, of what I am told in email almost daily by liberal critics, who describe themselves as Christians, who tell me exactly what I just told you — and then go on to judge me. I’ve been told these things not only by post- and quasi-Protestants, but by many self-described “cradle Catholics,” and even by several “modern” Catholic priests, one of whom was clever enough to add the word “misogynistic,” to describe my opposition to abortion.

To them, I dare say, Christ was not really Resurrected, and so it follows that He is not really Very God of Very God, Begotten not Made, and so forth. Not that he isn’t, of course, for we “should keep an open mind.”

And we ought to look with especially open minds at those who chisel the words of Christ off public buildings.

Or those who teach our children in school that the whole history of our Church comes down to the bloody Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition, and … let us not forget the Trial of Galileo.

Likewise, we are asked to keep open minds towards those paragons of art and style who, say, put a Crucifix in a vial of urine; or display a statue of Mary, smeared with cowshit. For these people are only  “expressing themselves,” and ours is not to reason why, or otherwise to judge them. Ours is just to hork up the taxes to pay for their arts grants. For Christ, I have been told condescendingly by a self-described art critic, no less, was all about “expressing yourself.”

There are quite a few places in the Gospels where He says things that are very hard to square with the smileyface icon, and one memorable place where he takes out a whip. But faced with any of the 99 in 100 Gospel passages that will come as a surprise to the post-modern reader, he can always allow that Christ had a right to his opinions. He was, as one droll atheist acquaintance put it, probably no more crazy than many of the people we see walking the streets these days.

I myself often ride the Queen Street trolley in Toronto, and there’s a man who regularly boards it proclaiming that he, in point of fact, is the son of God: not only on his way to outpatient services at Queen Street’s famous mental health centre, but also on his way home to Parkdale. Clearly, by analogy, Christ is to be tolerated, for his own unique “point of view.”

There are quite a variety of points of view, and it has become State policy in every jurisdiction of which I am aware, throughout the Western world, never to prefer one to another. For each is a valid statement of … a point of view.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself facing a leading “human rights” lawyer, speaking on behalf of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, which he feared was being persecuted in the media, by people like me. In one curious moment, he admitted that, in fact, there may be a certain amount of incendiary material mixed in with the religion-of-peace messages in the literature of Islam. In the context, I was gobsmacked by this concession — did he mean something Mark Steyn had written in Maclean’s magazine might actually be true? But he quickly recovered by explaining that you can find that sort of thing in any religious literature.

“Huh?” I asked.

For instance, those Evangelicals in the United States. You could easily make a case just as prejudiced as Steyn’s against the Muslims, if you were to pick through what those crazy Evangelicals have to say.

Gobsmacked again. Being unrecognized by the chair, I was unable to utter, except as a mild heckle, the remark, “No you couldn’t.” Not quite as loudly as, the other day, Representative Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at the President of the United States. My remark was anyway beside the point, for suppose, after smoking a lot of marijuana, we actually found the Evangelical literature was full of bloodcurdling calls for terror attacks on the secular humanists, and suicide bombings against mainstream Presbyterians, and pogroms against Muslims, Confucians, and Jews, the issue would then become: “But why are you defending the Jihadis, and prosecuting the Holy Rollers, if they’re doing exactly the same thing?” I mean, why don’t we have a level playing field here?

This is a question with which I will not detain anyone for long. Surely we all know the rôle hypocrisy plays in public life, and in the selection of victims by the exponents of progressive ideologies. That is to say, they consistently pick on the party that is less guilty, or the least guilty if there are three or more.

It simply is not possible — not humanly possible, and not possible in logic — to make every point of view equal to every other. So that if you have, as a governing principle, the proposition that “all points of view are equal,” and that nothing normative may be imposed — in other words, if you have the defining dogma of multiculturalism — you must perforce walk into a moral quagmire, in which that dogma comes into conflict with the elementary facts of life. And the more you try to wiggle out of that quagmire, the deeper you squelch in; along with all the persons you are holding captive to your one, ludicrous, moral certainty.

This is something I learnt from my own “secular humanist” and liberal parents, in the days before “liberalism” became what it is today; back when the law of non-contradiction was still given some lip-service, as a memento of our good old “Western Civ.” Today, I find it harder and harder to distinguish the reasoning behind ideas presented as “liberal” and “progressive,” from what I hear on the Queen Street trolley.

*

Ah, “Western Civ.” According to the counter on my laptop, at the time of first drafting, I had got 5,426 words into this evening’s talk without mentioning it yet. Except that, without mentioning it, I have been talking about nothing else. For when we clear away all the rubbish that has accumulated at the surface of our society through recent decades, what is left? Underneath it all lies the same old, same old, Western Civ. It is as much still there as the House of Simon Peter.

It is true that moral relativism is a threat, that multiculturalism is a threat, along with feminism, homosexualism, environmentalism, repackaged socialism, and various other isms of the past and future. Each constitutes an attack upon, and implied alternative to, the Christian civilization that tickles under its exponents’ feet. But the reassuring thing about all of these quasi-religious belief systems, is that they are asinine. They can be used to attack, and to destroy; to express anger, and demand redress; but they cannot be used to build anything. They offer no credible inspiration; no excuse for being good or brave or honest; and finally, no truly convincing reason to get up in the morning.

Great human suffering may still be entailed, as the Age of Ideologies continues. More than 100 million were murdered by the precepts of atheist ideologues in the last century — many times the combined casualties from all the religious wars in history. And many more millions, or hundreds of millions may, for all we can foresee, follow them into the mass graves of this one. Yet at the end of the day, each atheistical ideology fades, in the mists of its own internal contradictions. A new one then congeals out of the aether. And one ideology must perforce replace another, until a solid religious civilization is restored.

*

Islam, because it is a serious religion, is a more credible rival and enemy to Catholic Christianity, and has been so through many centuries. My views on Islam — and if you call it a monolith I will say it is not; and if you say it is not I will say it is — are not universally shared. They might even be considered a little controversial, but I advance them confidently all the same — from an experience of, and thinking about, Islam and Muslims, that goes back to my early childhood in Pakistan.

To be shockingly brief, Islam suffered a major defeat some centuries ago, when it lost its superior military power. The religion has not been without real merits, and is still competitive against the atheist ideologies I have listed. Against an entirely de-Christianized West, it might well prevail, for it presents an account of the world, and a moral order, that is at least more plausible than anything the atheists have thought up. It has, for the moment, the demographic advantage of higher birthrates, and until recently fairly open immigration to a Europe which, for its part, has been intent on committing demographic suicide.

Unlike other observers, who have predicted an Islamic takeover of Europe — an ambition openly espoused by many on Islam’s most cutting political edge — I don’t think that will happen. I think it is one of those trends which, alarming as they may appear in their tide, have within them the principle of their own recession. Europe does not want Islam; many of Europe’s Muslim immigrants don’t want it either; and all demographic trends are reversible, as all trends generally. The Muslim ghettoes of Europe have become large, and are still growing, but they remain ghettoes, and the people within them exclude themselves, or find themselves excluded, from the power of influencing the world around them.

I feel sad for them, because they have in most cases escaped one dysfunctional society, only to land in another. Having lost a place in their old social order, they have found a place instead as exiles; as “guest workers,” and now as “guest unemployed.” They may very well riot under provocation, including the integral provocation of their circumstances, but like the atheist ideologues of the West, they have only destruction to offer. There is no staying power there.

We think of Islam as confident today, even arrogant and swaggering at its visible extremes, but in my view this is an illusion. I have read and heard very intelligent Muslim observers despair at what they imagine to be their own fatal flaw. This is not excessive violence, or on the other side any failure of nerve. It is instead that, wherever there is open competition, for the hearts and minds of a new generation, the Christians seem to win the battle. They are appalled by the rapid, mostly peaceful spread of Christianity in Africa and Asia; and by the enterprise and comparative success of the new Christian communities. They are aware that the Christian torch is no longer being carried by Western missionaries, but is now lit from within. It is no longer an external influence that could be somehow cut off.

In many ways they feel compromised by the Muslims in Europe, who absorb more Christian ideas by osmosis than Muslim ideas by instruction. They are distressed by the sight of churches in Europe, once nearly empty except for the old, now sometimes filling up with young people of obviously Muslim backgrounds. They fear that their own young are more attracted to the flag of a revolutionary violence, than to the spiritual heart of Islam; that old-fashioned imams have no influence on them.

And it is quite reasonable to argue, that in the longer view of things, the very existence of anarchically violent forces within Islam, such as the death cults of Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and revolutionary Iran, are a symptom of steep decline. When little is left to hold your religion together except the threat of death for apostasy, you are not, after all, in such a good position. There are diminishing returns as you hike up the threats; but if you withdraw them you may lose everything. Bad as things may seem for Christianity, when we look at the contemporary world from the least attractive angles, things look worse for the Muslims.

But again, I am not saying we can escape carnage, from people who have effectively lost their faith. Indeed, that is the very thing to fear — not believing and practising, loyal Muslims, often better behaved than common garden Christians. But rather, the post-Muslims, on the analogy of post-Christians. They cling to a bad parody of their ancient faith out of a faithless desperation. An atheist inside, who is a fanatical Muslim outside — that, to my mind, is the cross section of an Islamist terrorist.

*

Beyond the Islamic world, there is some life yet, even the odd flash of proselytizing zeal, in several forms of Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism. I am inclined to make the same remarks about these: that the motive power is no longer essentially religious, but has more to do with ethnic chauvinism, with communal antipathies and rivalries. Samuel Huntington famously said the Islamic world tends to have bloody borders, and that is chiefly where you will also find the phenomena of Hindu and Buddhist revival: in the very places where Islamist terrorism has become a threat, and as a mirror to Muslim nationalisms and ethnic chauvinisms.

But they have themselves subscribed to religions that are not fully competitive with Christianity; which did not create the modern world, for all its flaws, and which are therefore unable to explain it. What they face from the West may be a post-Christian “secularism,” but that very secularism carries within itself the Christian virus — an exposure to conceptions of faith and freedom, of purpose and self-improvement — founded in Christian attitudes of mind. What we call “globalization” is itself a suspiciously post-Christian phenomenon, and might, to grant the Leftists their deepest suspicion, be called the continuation of Imperialism by other means.

God works in mysterious ways. And from what I can see He has never been ashamed to grow a garden out of the devil’s own spadework — as He hung His own body on the devil’s own tree. Indeed: faith teaches us to watch, constantly, for just such transformations.

“Western Civ” did prevail, in the definitive clash of civilizations, which began about five hundred years ago. I am therefore not waiting for this clash to begin, nor even for it to end, for I think that happened when the Ottomans retreated from Vienna. What we see in our political and diplomatic foreground is superficially a clash of civilizations, but one in which we are pitted against opponents who are doomed. The worst they can do is kill us. And in the long view of things, we are used to being killed.

*

“Western Civilization” would be a hard thing to define, according to yet another of the persons I’ve had a verbal rumble with, recently. He added for good measure that the term appears to be a euphemism that white people use, to distinguish themselves from people who are brown, or some other colour, and that it is therefore an example of the vocabulary of “racism.” It also had something to do with sexism, as I recall. It goes without saying he was himself a white male.

Strange to say, I have no difficulty whatever defining the term, “Western Civilization,” and will attempt to do so in my next sentence. It is the civilization created in the wake of the Catholic Church.

Only by reversing cause and effect, can we make the definition difficult. The Catholic Church created Europe; Europe did not create the Catholic Church. This is a plain matter of historical fact, without subtlety. It therefore requires a remarkable diffusion of historical ignorance to refute it. The Europe that the Catholic Church civilized was — except for the collapsing civilization of Rome, which she in some respects re-animated — a continent of savages. Long before the Protestant Reformation, it had been raised to the condition of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims; of Rome, Florence, and Paris; of Saint Francis, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante.

A little more needs to be added, to make clear how much cultural or civilizational freight Europe was carrying when opportunity beckoned and we took to the high seas.

The civilization forged in the bosom of the Catholic Church had, to a remarkable and unprecedented degree, developed a power of assimilation, an inclusivity, that made it capable of weaving into Catholic experience the best it could find from all non-Catholic sources. It was from its beginnings, and on sound biblical reasoning, open to “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good report.”

The same was made the bedrock of our modern civilization, founded directly on that of the high mediaeval Western Church, founded in turn upon the rock of Peter. In our openness to every claim of truth, we have been repeating and extending the principles worked out in her monasteries, her universities, among her clerisy, and in the Catholic civil life of country and town. With all its ragged claims to independence and cultural neutrality, modern science is itself an artefact of the mediaeval, Western Christian, or Catholic mind, reaching out towards God along every available pathway.

I am not selling a nostalgia for the Middle Ages. That became woven into the Romantic movements of the late 18th and 19th centuries, which are themselves shopworn. To start with, the spirit of the mediaeval Catholic civilization was, to use intellectual shorthand, much more Classical than Romantic.

The outward face of the Middle Ages, the physical landscape, could we revisit, as we can in factual imaginative reconstructions, was extremely beautiful; but also poor, and technologically backward, by any modern standards, even those of rural India. Life expectancy was lower, and every other statistical indication of what we call prosperity today, is in our favour. But we benefit only from cumulative material progress, itself depending on civilizational continuities, and thus founded upon mediaeval antecedents. Spiritually, we are inferiors in every respect; intellectually they were broader, and it is remarkably easy for a person knowledgeable about the philosophical life of the Middle Ages to draw the whole post-Renaissance Western world as a narrowing of mediaeval vistas.

I do not want to discount cumulative material progress, for that would mean denying the Renaissance of the 12th century. One must be a formidable idiot, as well as an aspiring tyrant, to draw a line at some arbitrary point in the past and say, “that was quite enough technology.” The Catholic tradition has never been Luddite, any more than iconoclast. We have a very long history, not only of accepting technological developments, but of incorporating them promptly into our religious life.

Mechanical clocks, for instance. They were independently invented in both Europe and China, though on different schemes. In the East they were taken as toys, played with for a while then discarded and forgotten. In the West, they were hung on the steeples of churches, and made the centre of monastic life: a means to choreograph the Hours of Prayer.

No concession whatever is owed to the propagandists for the many sciences that, after all, we invented. For at the heart of all scientific enterprise has been, and always will be, that utterly Catholic doctrine of the self-consistency of Our Lord, and of His creation. Our understanding of God is such, that we expect to find causation and order and sense, wherever we look in nature. And having looked for it, we have always found it.

A Catholic Christian civilization of the future will be just like any of the past — Catholic at the heart — but outwardly and materially as different from the mediaeval Catholic civilization as our world today is outwardly different from the world of the 15th century. Moreover, it must in principle seek to preserve within itself everything of value from the intervening “Modern” period.

Many centuries from now, could we somehow fly forward, North Americans like ourselves might be surprised to find an extraordinary and flourishing Catholic civilization, centred chiefly in, say, Africa. And this would be no greater surprise for us, than it would have been for the first Greek and Hebrew Christians, to imagine a Christian civilization seated in the dark continent of Europe, even beyond the Alps. Catholic ideas created our high civilization, and not vice versa. And Christ himself goes where he is wanted, and moves on from where he is unwanted. Geography is not destiny.

*

That, verily, is what we must seek to recover, in our ambitions for this world: the practice and presence of Christ. We do not seek to discard this good in order to obtain that one; we are not iconoclasts or puritans. We most certainly do not seek the impossibility of turning time backwards. Rather we seek a way towards what we already know to be good, and true, and beautiful, that can again be assimilated and coordinated within the temporal dimension of the Body of Christ, in the light of his Resurrection. This is something different from a political task; for a civilization is built not within the city of man, but within his soul.

To my mind, it would be a terrible waste of time — an expense of spirit in a waste of shame — to pursue the ambition of a Catholic civilization by any political means. The purpose of politics should be entirely negative — to provide remedies against specific evils that afflict all men. We may need police, we may need courts, we may need defences against potential invaders, we may need a few by-laws, especially in towns, and some readiness to cope with natural disasters. We need laws to prevent men from enslaving each other. We most certainly do not need laws to tyrannize and goad us towards some crackerjack plan for an earthly utopia.

The politics in Christian societies of the past were minimal. They will be minimal again if a Christian society is restored. The basic scheme is to keep the government out of people’s faces, and let them get on with their lives; while similarly preserving the independence of the Church, and the sanctuary she offers. These are the politics of “live and let live.” In the well-ordered commonwealth, the State is reduced to something almost decorative, and the ancient Catholic principle of subsidiarity — that problems are to be resolved by the smallest, lowest, and least centralized competent authority — becomes a way of life.

There, I have said enough about politics.

*

“Christ,” wrote Cyril of Alexandria, “has dominion over all creatures, a dominion not seized by violence nor usurped, but His by essence and by nature.” This quote is lifted from the encyclical of Pope Pius XI, entitled Quas Primas, published in 1925. It was the encyclical that introduced the Feast of Christ the King.

The encyclical, in its day, was not without a political subtext. But this was transient. It served as a reminder to the people of Italy, at least, that their ultimate allegiance was owed not to the fascist, Benito Mussolini, but to Heaven. And this point is made while expounding references to the Messianic kingship, through both Old and New Testaments. Being no ecclesiological expert, and in an environment where several of them may lurk, I tread carefully while adding that this encyclical attests Christ’s reign, not only over what is left of Catholic Christendom, but also over the world that He made. It is to an otherworldly Kingship we owe our deepest loyalty; not to a nation, nor to a race, nor to an ethnicity, let alone some jackboot punk, “dressed in a little authority.” The Church in her nature can represent no particular worldly interest. She serves no Caesar, and answers to no Parliament — only to Christ the King.

In the Dominion of Canada in which I was born, there could seldom be any serious conflict between one’s loyalty to Her Majesty the Queen, and one’s loyalty to Christ the King. For I had the inestimably good fortune to be born in a free country, an open country; and in no mean city. Alas, that is not the usual state of affairs, on this planet, and where it exists it cannot be relied upon to last.

Through history the common people have often been vexed by tyrants; and in our time the ever-growing and ever-more-intrusive powers appropriated by the Nanny State have stripped us of many ancient freedoms. Each in turn is replaced with some novel, intrinsically dubious, and invariably non-Christian so-called “right” or special privilege: ranging from a mother’s right to kill her unborn child, to the pornographer’s right to corrupt public morals, to the fanatic’s right not to have his delicate feelings hurt. Indeed, all these new rights have required Orwellian inversions of language, to make an unambiguous evil smell like a plausible good. And, each is a “group right” — the essence of true fascism — designed to obviate hard-won individual rights, often going back beyond that very mediaeval Magna Carta.

As I hinted above, we face, for the foreseeable future, a variety of atheist, post-modern ideologies that are not only asinine in themselves, but are metastasizing through quasi-legal bureaucracies. Catholics are, for reasons we should easily understand, the primary target of these ideologues; though Evangelicals and all other sincere Christian believers are usually our fellow targets. That the bureaucrats themselves hardly know what they are doing, should also go without saying.

As a priest of my acquaintance put the matter: “We live in the golden age of the professional bureaucrat, of constant expansion of paper-pushers, especially in government, but also in private business and the Church. It is a mixture of a very few idealists, with careerists, manipulative ideologues, lazy and incompetent freeloaders, and pure charlatans. They regulate everything, in order to make a necessity out of themselves, bilk anything that financially moves, disdain those whom they claim to serve, and corrode the fabric that holds society together — while claiming to be indispensable to its operation. And most people actually believe their lies.”

They are the manipulative ideologues in this priest’s list that most distress me, because in my experience, not only of Canada, a large bureaucracy provides the ideal environment for such persons to flourish.

The tactics of our ideologues are quite similar to those of the Arab conquerors of the formerly Christian countries of north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Reckless pogroms were usually avoided. For centuries, long after the conquests, Christians continued to be very numerous within the Muslim domains; it thus made no sense to provoke them into revolt, especially after the Crusaders had touched down in Palestine. Instead, the policy was to ratchet up the cost of remaining a Christian, in a gradual but constant way, until the Christian community had finally been reduced to a small and cowering minority. It was the achievement of a thousand years. That is also the method of our ideological adversaries: to ratchet up the cost of remaining a Christian.

I am fairly optimistic, however, that they lack both the opportunities and the skills to prevail in this. Ratcheting requires the virtue of patience, and confidence in uninterrupted power. It requires that you never push too far or too fast: for the most complacent frog will begin to react, if the temperature of his water rises too quickly. Our tormentors today are too impatient. Their tactics are unsound.

*

Under which circumstances, all that is required of us, is to stand our own ground, with greater patience, and greater courage, than our tormentors. A Catholic Christian civilization can be restored, over time, by the same methods that were used to create one in the first place — not by violence, and not by usurpation, but by consistently refusing to deny Christ. That is the trick the disciples used, at a time when Christians numbered only in the thousands. They recognized Christ as their King, and served like soldiers.

And a Catholic Christian civilization can be built no other way, than soul by soul, until the balance tips. It is in this way, alone, that we allow Christ to build it. The alternative approaches inevitably fail; they are all merely squalid.

So that is what I propose we should do, to restore our Catholic Christian civilization; the only plan of action that can possibly work, or has ever worked. We must stop denying Christ in our lives; stop ignoring his Resurrection; stop recognizing any spiritual authority that is not Christ’s. Stop refusing to act at His command. Stop encumbering His way.

*

Let me conclude with a few quick hints: ten specific practical suggestions, on how to advance the Kingdom of Christ in this world.

The first is, absolutely refuse to give obeisance to the various idols which the “politically correct” specially define, and then demand that we worship, such as “equality,” “fairness,” “human rights,” and  the other specious abstractions to which they attribute a gnostic and mystical power. And symmetrically, refuse to worship in the temples of the gods of money and power and coolness.

Second, make conscious, reverent references to God — even to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — an audible part of our lives in the world, and love God in our hearts. Conversely, carefully avoid speaking of any divine thing in a cute or irreverent way.

Third, unfailingly attend the Mass, each Sunday, and daily where we can; and let the Mass do its work upon our souls. (Non-Catholics should likewise be punctilious in their own religious observances.) Let the enemy see our churches filled. Observe and participate in all other sacraments, which includes, for Catholic Christians, the crucial one of making a good Confession, frequently. In any event, prayerfully ask God’s forgiveness when we fail.

Fourth, defend our families, by keeping as aloof as possible from the bureaucracies of Nanny State. Do not neglect the needs of our parents in their time of sickness and old age; do not fail to instil in our children, by our own upright and sincere behaviour, the respect they owe to us as their parents.

Fifth, do not participate in any way in what a recent pope so eloquently described as “the culture of death.” Do everything in our power to streetproof ourselves and our children against its demands, and do not hesitate to spell out the basic facts of life, behind all life issues. Be sure our children understand them, and that they grasp the sanctity of all human life.

Sixth, reject sexual liberation in all its insidious forms. Do not even think about fornication and adultery. Truly respect and accommodate the opposite sex.

Seventh, be consistently honest and honourable in all business and social transactions, with everyone, regardless of race colour or creed, even when it must be at some cost to ourselves. Do not play with temptations to corruption. Yet, assiduously avoid being “holier than thou.”

Eighth, be truthful in speech, fair and even charitable in speaking of other people, and look constantly for whatever good we can find in them. Be encouraging rather than discouraging by habit, and most important, do not spread personal gossip and lies, even against our worst enemies, and even when we think they deserve it.

Ninth, be content with what we have in our family and religious life, make ourselves happy with the homes we have to return to, and do not look covetously upon the Joneses. Accept with humility our station in life; have ambitions, but make them unselfish.

Tenth, be content with our fate more generally, and trust in God to deliver His justice in the fullness of Eternity: “Thy will be done.” Take only what comes our way, including all knocks, and use what we have been given, including all talents and skills, generously to God’s glory. Indeed, give, according to our means, a little wildly. See and sympathize with need. And rejoice, always, in the life we are given, and in the knowledge that what we leave upon the face of time can only be our example.

There would be a very long post, if I tried to tell the history of second-hand book-dealing in Toronto, if only from my own temporally limited point of view. It is too early in the morning for whisky, however, so I will skip to the end.

Booksellers’ row along Queen Street West is now finished. There were thirteen of these “antiquarian” shops a generation ago, roughly in the stretch from University to Spadina. Steven Temple’s, now up steep stairs at 489 Queen West (pushed half-way to Bathurst), is the last. He opened in 1974, and will soon close forever. If gentle reader is currently present in the Greater Parkdale Area, he must go there immediately. The sell-off will end on St Andrew’s, next Saturday, during which any book 25 dollars and down will be 5 dollars, and those above, half price. Also, you must go to acquire one last loving glimpse of what a second-hand bookstore looked like — at how 50,000 mostly hardcovered books, many of considerable antiquity, could be fit into rooms without level floors, by the organic extension of makeshift shelving.

Steve himself is an old buddy of mine. He’s a crusty character, with a crusty wife: both magnificent souls. Modern book retailing, generally in decline, has no use for such people — who love what they sell, and know a great deal about it. Who work on guild principles. For whom competition is good news. Who take personal risks, and would rather starve than work in a cubicle. Who do not eschew hard physical labour: for endless lugging about of books, in big heavy boxes, is among the tougher proletarian vocations.

He’s an old Lefty, and Yank, from the Vietnam era, who kicked me out of his store for one good reason or another many years ago. I think it was something reactionary I said. Then meeting me a year later, gave me another tongue-lashing for not having visited his store recently. With advancing age Steve has mellowed some, and if I am not very mistaken, he has found God. (This usually makes a person easier to live with, but not always.) His wife Jennifer can scare even the people Steve can’t. She is completely lacking in hypocrisy, and allied soothing social qualities. Her scary ones are loyalty, truth, grit, fierce humour, and real charity. She neither speaks, nor listens, with the half-attention to which urban and suburban people are accustomed. Neither does her husband.

Steven Temple Books began a few blocks east, at street level. Four decades have suddenly passed. I think this has been his fourth location, as rising rents have pushed him westward ho, ever closer to the sunset. His specialties have long been Canadiana, and modern first editions. Neither is my bag, especially, but from his general stock in classics, philosophy, modern literature at large, travels and topography, I have always found prizes. One could spend hours making discoveries in any one section — at intervals dragged out on the sidewalk when Steve wants company for a smoking break.

He will retreat to Welland, Ontario, pension-free and laden with debt as all other retiring booksellers, and no doubt continue selling books through Abe & the Internet; but it will not be anything like the same. It will instead be “books for collectors.” (Spit.) It was that general stock — the presence of books for actual reading, including the obscure and the hard to find — that made second-hand bookstores what they were through the last many centuries. They were the meetingplaces of the literate — their agora, market and trading ground. In the strangest city, one would find such a bookstore, and it would be like an embassy from home.

“Anyone can translate Chinese,” according to the beautiful lady who was teaching the use of the brush. This was in a backward little British school in Bangkok, wherein I was enrolled at age eleven, almost half a century ago. The class met in a small, yellow-plastered room, that opened on the side of a narrow klong, or canal. Seldom used, this klong had become clogged with water lilies. It contained catfish, who were tumultuously grateful for the occasional modest lump of sticky rice. Like everything else in Bangkok, it is now paved over; but I remember it — the room, its decaying plaster, the low weathered wooden benches, the stone slabs they rested upon, the miracle of water and the bubbles from the tippling fishes — as a premonition of paradise. The elements assembled themselves in that way.

The name of this teacher has escaped me, and it is her own fault. She used different names in different situations, quite fancifully it seemed. This is a Chinese poetical conceit. But let me settle on “Miss Ping.”

I vividly remember her long face, her willowy and thus curving form, her extremely narrow eyes, and shy laughter (always covering her mouth when she giggled). The class was hardly mandatory, and was for the benefit of several Chinese students, but anyone could attend. One might call it a drop-in clinic for victims of Communism, which the parents of these children all seemed to be. It met once or twice in a fortnight. Miss Ping had regular employment elsewhere — I think as a translator in a bank. This, because I remember from her remark, that while anyone can translate from Chinese, the translation of commercial documents into Chinese was nearly impossible.

She engaged in calligraphy and decorative painting in order to maintain her sanity, I believe. She studied the old poets. She would carry around, in an Indian choli bag, cumbersomely large books, printed in Shanghai a long time ago and in advanced states of disintegration. These provided her with “text.”

Anyone can translate Chinese, as I learnt, thanks to the genius of the language. Or rather, no one from the West can hope to do it, until he has not only mastered a few characters, but thrown off some rather Western expectations of how they should arrange themselves. Greek and Latin made the barbarians of the far, far West instinctively attentive to grammar. But there is no grammar in Chinese. There are no tenses, either, nor number nor mood; or at least that is the first impression. Everything is contextual. One might construct a sentence in Chinese without realizing one had done so. But it would likely be a silly sentence, saying only one thing, at most. Miss Ping would giggle at it, and cover her mouth. A good Chinese sentence says something new every time you look at it. It does not need subsidiary clauses; they move along with it, as a train of ghosts.

Life at dusk, in careless quiet.
The tasks are done, my mind turned free:
No more career to plan for,
Only the hills have work for me.
Pine-winds blow on my loosened sash,
Moon lights upon my lute-plucking hand.
You asked about duty. All I know:
A fisherman’s tune drifts up from the river.

This would be the latest of many attempts to translate this reasonably famous poem by Wang Wei (701?–761?) composed, or so it implies, soon after his retirement from the court life of Chang-an. I tried it myself after consulting several previous versions, and looking up characters in Karlgren. I wanted to be sure that anyone could translate Chinese, before recommending this hobby to others.

For so I remember being told: “Anyone can do it.” But first he must put all the habits associated with not doing it at a distance from himself.

Gentle reader should not imagine I can read or write Chinese, and I’ve always been defeated by the tones when speaking. For the language is not spoken but sung. This eliminates the very possibility of rhetorical emphasis, or rather sublimates it, still deeper than French. For the words must be sung, while whispered. Only some kind of northern barbarian would pick words from a sentence and fling them in your face. Only a newspaper would desecrate a text with question and exclamation marks, to say nothing of those fiendish arabic numerals. It was my impression that Miss Ping was so gentle and soft because stepping through a world that was rife with barbarians; that she nevertheless giggled to herself, because we were so funny.

Classical Chinese is sung, and whispered, but also painted. The brush is the thing. “It grows from your hand.” Whereas, a pen is a crutch, held always at an angle. One must lean against the stalk of a pen. Step one: learn to feel the tip of the brush, as it dances on the paper; as the tip beyond your fingertips; as it stands, and kneels, and bows, and twirls, and leaps from one character to another. You are the mind and the brush is your body. But not in any Cartesian sense, since the mind and the body are one.

Perhaps it is only one of those falsely “recovered memories,” for I have just been looking at an old book containing translations from that Wang Wei, and it has suddenly reminded of the character, hsien. It is a visual portmanteau: framed with the character for a “gate,” with the character for “moon” inserted in the open space between the two “doors” and under the “bridge” of that “gate” character. It is one of several plausible words for “idle” in classical Chinese. The dictionary adds: “at ease, sauntering, leisurely, quiet, unoccupied.”

I love this word. I have always loved this word: Hsien.

I could even draw it with a brush. (Not here: I do not have the technology.)

I did draw it once for the benefit of a Western-educated Chinese scholar, who assured me that everything I explained to gentle reader, just above, is rubbish. I’m working from a “romantic” theory, he said — having bought into the sort of nonsense that could only be subscribed by e.g. Wang Wei, along with all the other poets. It is mere chance that many, if not all, Chinese characters are evocative. In reality, this PhD averred, they merely “evolved” in a random way, from bone scratches — like animals according to Darwin’s theory. There is no logic to them. All the meanings they have are arbitrary, and have been “assigned,” by chance.

“They are assigned, by Heaven,” replies my inner Wang Wei.

See the I Ching on “chance”; or Stéphane Mallarmé.

On this much we were agreed: that the moon, glowing through the city gate — beckoning the poet from the griefs of the city, in a Keatsian sort of way — is an idea containing no logic at all. Poetry does not work like math; though it would be true to say that math sometimes works like poetry. Both are essentially incomprehensible, because they reach beyond human comprehension. But I have come to the conclusion, alas contra Miss Ping, that there is a certain class of idiots who cannot follow language even to the poetical equivalent of two plus two. They cannot see the point, & thus, anything they touch comes apart in their hands.

*

Really I am responding to a criticism posted to some squib I wrote elsewhere last Saturday. A gentleman who signed himself Adeodatus — a name he chose meaning “gift of God” — complained that my columns always ramble. He repeated several of my points, with mild sarcasm, then said he could not see the connexions. “I’m just picking at a few threads that I see in this essay,” he reports, “but they unravel if I try to pull at one for a coherent progression of thought.”

One might reply that it is a function of prose, to ramble. Too, if one starts pulling at threads, any composition will come apart. This is equally true of silk gowns, whether of fine or coarse manufacture; and as Whitehead and Russell eventually discovered (to Russell’s horror and Whitehead’s delight), also of the Principia Mathematica. It is moreover true, that if you pull the legs off ants, they will be unable to make any coherent progression; and that if you pull the wings off flies, it will be seen that they are incapable of flight.

Sometimes we see things, according at least to Wang Wei and Miss Ping, by seeing them — and not by some other method. We see them, as it were, when they are shown — arranged, perhaps, in relations like a painting, where the eye moves from one thing to another, then returns upon itself. Not a syllogism, but what the Greeks called a “syndrome” — things that go together because they belong together (tautologically enough). Painters, like poets, do not argue but arrange. Of course, one may be shown something and still not see it. One thinks, for instance, of a moon in a gate.

The modern, analytical, reductionist mind is “just like that” — like the boy who pulls the wings off flies. It has no use whatever for literature, or art. Nor, I have noticed, for klongs and water lilies.

As Wallace Stevens — perhaps the most Chinese of American poets — openly confessed in “Gubbinal,” his own point of view could be easily confuted. “That strange flower, the sun, / Is just what you say, / Have it your way,” the little poem begins. And concludes: “The world is ugly, and the people are sad.”

Toronto, or “Toto” for short, is once again in world news, thanks to our beloved mayor, Rob Ford. It is nearly a year since I mentioned him in a post I should have deleted by now, for being merely topical. I explained why every left-thinking person in the Greater Parkdale Area had been teased to apoplexy by the contemplation of this gentleman. This because he was: 1. fat, 2. colourful, 3. rightwing &, 4. freely elected by a large margin over some gay leftwing establishment darling. (Some other reasons have accumulated since then.)

Turns out, the police have recovered some video in which — it is alleged — our peerless mayor is shown doing crack with local low-life. Whether smoking or snorting or otherwise ingesting, we do not know, & neither apparently does our splendid mayor, who now says he was actually too drunk to remember the occasion. Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures.

I am in receipt of several emails querying the judgement of the fine people of Toronto for having elected this giant of a man. And as, despite my distaste for democracy, I voted for him myself, I feel some sort of reply may be indicated.

Quite frankly, we tried mayors who were not crackheads. They didn’t work out. Also, the last one didn’t drink enough. That’s why we elected Ford. He’s doing great: slashing through the city bureaucracy & privatizing everything he can. He even holds the civic unions in subjection: not one has dared to strike. And ho, he’s trying to build subways. Anyone who has attempted to ride a trolley across this town will understand our need to tunnel. So what is the problem?

As our good, excellent mayor told his Police Chief: bring on your video! Ford says he’s curious to see it himself, & that the rest of Toronto would surely also like a chance to catch it on YouTube.

Gentle reader knows I am a traditionalist in most things, & a loyal Canadian. Our very first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a magnificent drunkard, who managed to hold office for nearly twenty years. There is an Arabian Nights of anecdotes that our primly officious historians have been too shy to tell. Verily, half of Macdonald’s Cabinet were awash most evenings, & the debates in Parliament were enlivened thereby. Almost all the damage ever done to this country was by sobersides.

I would have thought drug abuse would give our esteemed mayor credibility with the Left. After all, the Trudeau boy proudly announces that he’s been toking marijuana around Parliament Hill, & the media kiss him for it. And how is a man to maintain his Chestertonian girth without beer & bacon? Moreover, it appears that our accomplished mayor was altering his consciousness in the company of bona fide members of Canada’s celebrated multicultural communities. Indeed, visible minorities if my eyes do not deceive me. They may have been wanted by the cops, but at least they weren’t bourgeois, tedious, white scolds. And note well: our admirable mayor has single-handedly brought the smug levels in this city way down.

Alas, even the Toronto Sun — the tearsheet of “Ford Nation” — is now calling on the poor beleaguered fellow to resign. (Not my fault: it is one of the large media organizations I do not presently own.)

Don’t do it, Robbie! Stand your ground! … And here’s hoping the wheels break off, when they come to cart you away!

One of my upcountry correspondents wrote this in response to my “All Souls” column (published this morning at Catholic Thing):

“Whenever our choir performs the Mozart Requiem, with its magnificent showcasing of the Dies irae, we sell out. Up here, in redneck country-&-western Grey-Bruce, we sell out: 700 tickets for a one-night stand. People are hungry for the truth that their decisions, their conduct, their lives, have eternal meaning, even if the only way they can enunciate that truth is by buying a ticket to a concert.”

It is just so, & I have long noticed that as the post-modern (or more precisely, post-conciliar) Church has been putting her legacy out in the trash, the secular world has been picking through the pieces. The incomparably magnificent musical heritage of Holy Church survives, for the most part no longer in the churches, from where it was banished after Vatican II; but outside, on things like CDs. It has become “classical” music, & against all expectations, holds some considerable ground in competition with the “popular” music of the street & the gutter. Churches that have been emptied out by the liturgical “reforms,” fill up again for secular concerts of the music that was discarded.

There is mystery in the thing itself — the mystery of evil, & its defeat — but no mystery in a phenomenon that has been known throughout history. People are drawn to beauty, but also often repelled by it. In either case, they know what beauty is. Indeed, public authorities in many cities have discovered that they can drive thugs & vandals out of dangerous passageways, simply by piping in Bach & Mozart. Conversely, raucuous noise can be used to attract the same to locales for drugs, violence, & fornication.

Beauty, truth, goodness, are allied; as too, their opposites. It is important to remember this in a Christian way. In a difficult passage (Matthew 12:26 et seq., but parse the Greek carefully) our Lord warned that spirits not working for him were working against him. But speaking of people (in Mark 9) He turned this around: “those who are not against me are for me.” Bear this constantly in mind, when speaking with non-Christians: that the unchurched sheep still hunger.

We needn’t judge what we do not understand. But we must be fiercely on our guard against what is very plain to the understanding. For we live in a fallen world, in which the good, the true, & the beautiful, need defence.

That extraordinary sequence, Dies irae, going back I now learn to the 12th century, & not the 13th as I previously understood, gathers together the strands of a Catholic teaching now half-remembered. It presents the reality of Purgation, in an appropriately visionary way. That trumpet makes no uncertain sound. It calls us to battle. It flies upon Satan’s greatest lie: that our lives are inconsequential. It attacks all the corollaries of that lie: that we are helpless in ourselves, that we cannot help each other, that we cannot bolster one another in prayer; that our dead lie beyond the reach of our love, & we beyond theirs. It provides a vision of the Last Judgement in which all of the consequences of our acts coalesce. And by necessity, it is terrifying: because life is not a dream, & death is not its ending.

This is the truth, to be accepted or ignored, to be lived or hidden from. It was the wisdom of the Church through the ages to teach this with great clarity. Yet today she prefers to teach in a half-hearted way, as if to children who must not be frightened, omitting or disguising the scary bits.

Without the Black Mass, without the black vestments, without the clarion call to repentance, of course the churches empty out. Why bother listening to preachers who are not sure what they have to say? Who dress a part they cannot play? Who, standing even before the altar, turn their backs towards our Christ. And play their nursery tunes, & speak as if we were a kindergarten class.

But take heart. The little men cannot keep the Rex tremendae majestatis out of our chapels. They haven’t the strength. They cannot hide our Lord from us, for we can look past them. For consider, that the trumpet will sound, through all the sepulchres of this earth; & the sheep & the goats will be parted.

I wake this morning to find that some Texan has littered my electronic inbox with pictures of “Will & Kate,” in the bath suds with Prince George of Cambridge (age three months). A quick Internet check, to the filthy Daily Mirror, yields the explanation: “The pictures were taken by artist Alison Jackson who is renowned for her spoof reproductions of palace and celebrity life.”

In other words, they were faked.

This little joke was perpetrated for the day Prince George was to be christened. (Today.) It thus creates an association in the public mind, between this Holy Sacrament, & nude royals cavorting in the bath. I do not know whether this was the conscious intention of the “artist.” Nor do I need to know.

For reasons mysterious even to me, I continue boffering with email correspondents. (The term “boffer” refers to a foam weapon, used in simulated hand-to-hand combat.) In this case, adjusting the argument to the mentality of my opponent, who is viscerally contemptuous of British royalty but earnestly respectful of Tea Party media stars, I compared the case to that of Sarah Palin. She was brought down from a suddenly powerful political position by a series of foolish quotes & gestures. Each was actually scripted for Tina Fey, “spoofing” her on the television programme, Saturday Night Live.  Anyone could see the “joke” being played. But in little time the lines were being mockingly recited as if they were genuine; & soon after, in the settled conviction that they were.

Please don’t try to correct what I report from first-hand experience. This included an impromptu “debate,” on one occasion, with graduate students from a Toronto philosophy department. One young woman in particular had the Alaska accent down, & persisted in repeating the Tina Fey lines (“I can see Russia from here,” &c). Her friends were equally convinced that these fairly represented Ms Palin’s point of view. There was no correcting them. Their indifference to fact was too perfect.

Ms Palin is herself a mass-market politician, & neither genius nor sage. Yet I admired her for common sense, & a refreshing detachment from the cynicism that plagues our political life. She was reasonably honest & straightforward, unlike her rivals. On this ground alone, I thought her worth defending. Had she not been attacked so unworthily, I might myself have dismissed her as a lightweight. But in the context of the U.S. presidential election of 2008, it was worth noting that she had more native smarts, saner attitudes, more impressive personal accomplishments, & rather more executive experience than, say, Barack Obama. The one thing she lacked was the “cool” factor. She was too “authentic,” too salt-of-the-earth, had too much starch & integrity, to survive long in democratic politics. The gliberal infotainment media went urgently to work on trashing her lest she appeal to voters (women especially) over their heads. They had little trouble scoring points, however: for they can invent & widely publicize specious charges faster than anyone can refute them.

But back to my philosophy majors. On reviewing the preceding discussion, before the name Palin had been gratuitously raised, I noted that their whole view of Western intellectual history was of the same quality: cheap & extremely misleading parodies of thinkers vastly beyond their understanding, delivered with the same smug self-satisfaction. For these unpleasant children were the shallow products of our “democratized” higher education — against whom one finds oneself defending even David Hume.

It would be wrong to hold them responsible for public opinion; they are symptoms not causes of the disease. It would be wrong to assign to any human being (Obama certainly included) the responsibility for contaminating our public life with lies & misdirections. There is not & has never been a plot on any significant scale. Sleaze has never required much calculation.

“For our wrestling is not against flesh & blood; but against principalities & powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.”

Note that by “high places,” Saint Paul was not referring to Caesar’s court at Rome.

*

The replacement of aristocratic with democratic forms of government, & with that the politicization & depravation of every dimension of human life, is an old story. We have been on this slide for well over two centuries, arguably for much longer. The basic egalitarian notion, that “I’m as good as you are,” plays to the vanity of the peasant class, that has provided the bulk in every human society: whether in their old agricultural, or in their newer industrial & post-industrial masses. Jacob Burckhardt was astute in attributing the success of the French Revolution to this: you win the peasants over by promising them the rich man’s possessions. It’s not the vote they crave, nor intellectual freedom; the peasants were never so stupid as that. The rich man’s possessions are the allurement. But more, too, the chance to get even with men so spectacularly superior to themselves, & bring them down to the common level, by means of riot & the guillotine. This is so much easier than raising oneself up.

The politician must appeal to the vanity of low human nature, through the flattery implicit in all demagogic speech. The class resentment, that is unambiguously at the heart of Marxism, is also at the heart of democracy in its less violent forms; the demand for equality because, “I’m as good as you are.” Finally it pulls down not only the rich from their stations — the landed, the responsible, the titled — but with them every noble aspiration a natural hierarchy exists to serve. In its place, & to assuage their iconic longings, the crass are provided with a theatre of “celebrities” instead; of the morally worthless, “famous for being famous.” Monarchy, where it survives, itself descends to the Hollywood level, in the vagrant hope of appeasing this mob.

Après eux, le déluge. One returns to the Age of Enlightenment to recall the prescience of those not in the bag. In for instance his old essay series, entitled The Idler, Samuel Johnson explored from many successive angles the exploitation of human vanity, at the root of all politics — the putting of one’s betters in their place, by the presumptuous, acting upon others both above & below them in actual social position. Jane Austen was another subtle student of the means, in her elegant Toryism, examining the matter at the sparkling microcosmic scale; rather than at the macro, where we see only the crudely homogenized results. Pressing against the natural order, was the spirit of “whiggery,” or Cain. To the mind of those infected by the lust for power, all nobility of aspiration is hypocritical affectation. It cannot be quantified. They have no use for it.

Families rise & families fall, over time, maintaining a balance within the larger society which, undisturbed, would last for long ages. No hierarchy depends on any individual member, in such an organic order. It would be wrong anyway to expect too little, or too much, from the representative of a moment. It is enough to keep up the pressure for improvement — by setting good example from wherever one may stand; by putting obstacles in the path of bad behaviour. Then let the failures fail. It will never be necessary to smear individuals, to make one’s envious, egalitarian point. There will always be real examples, if one has the low journalistic impulse to seek them out; or even the slightly higher impulse to expose a fraud.

I am expounding a view of society almost incomprehensible to the present day, accustomed as it is to social engineering, & organization by written law. The idea of an order legitimated by nature, of acceptance in the vicissitudes of life, of the freedom that comes with this acceptance, is foreign to us. Let me put it in terms likeliest to ignite the gasbags of equality: “A place for everyone, & everyone in his place.” For this is what I have seen in every backward, essentially joyful community, East or West.

My Loyalist ancestors were not unaware of foibles among the British ruling élite. Yet they held it better to endure, what would be resolved in the course of nature, than to turn the world over, & deliver the government into the hands of the ideologues of a humanly-engineered “Enlightenment.” It made more sense to get on with one’s life, than to meddle systematically in the lives of others; hence their old saying, “Better one tyrant three thousand miles away, than three thousand tyrants one mile away.” They were defeated, of course; but they did put up a fight for their lives & their property, before they were dispossessed. In their bones, but also in their neighbours’ eyes, they saw the menace of “Revolution.” They knew their Shakespeare; their Wat Tyler & Jack Cade. I like to think they could see Obamacare coming.

But alas the Revolution followed them everywhere, & in our contemporary world there is no place to hide from the arrogance of “democracy.” It is globalized now. The principle of unhappiness has been made universal.

*

I cheered myself the other day by re-reading Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse — by Nirad Chaudhuri, written in 1997, in his ninety-ninth year. There is a wonderful rant against Princess Diana, published just moments before she died. He says she never had the class to be a royal; then extends his remarks to the rest of the Spencer family, whose decline into unspeakable vulgarity he adumbrates (witness her brother, &c). It is really quite forceful.

Chaudhuri, as I have surely mentioned in the past, was pretty much my favourite Subcontinental. This is because he was an extraordinarily perceptive teller of home truths, who would never give his persecutors the satisfaction of shutting up. He had also been a member of India’s rising political class, personally familiar with all Nehrus & Gandhis, & able thus to tell us, with considerable precision, just what was wrong with them.

He waited until he was almost my age to have his first book published: The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). It is a penetrating account of the stages by which India was suckered into misery & destruction by the adepts of Progress. The book was hardly read, but from the sharp promise in its splendidly paradoxical dedication (to the departed British Raj), it was immediately attacked. Chaudhuri was blackballed, pursued, stripped of livelihood & pension by India’s new democratic champions of “free speech.”

There is more to it than that, as always in any book by Chaudhuri. He makes me weep with nostalgia for the Calcutta of a century ago, upon realizing I had seen its ghost, three generations later. He makes one see the utterly unwestern beauty in the flat, sodden, village-ridden landscape of the vast Gangetic delta, so intensely green, sky blue, & river grey. He makes us love the very people he chastises, & chastise the very people he loves.

Altogether, he spent about seventy-five years making enemies by telling the truth about India, the whole truth & nothing but the truth; plus about twenty-five telling the truth about England, from his Bengali sense of fair play.

My personal acquaintance with him — after he had migrated to England in old age — was too brief. He was among the most inspiring men I have met: for his learning, as much as for his courage; for the poetry in his reasoning, as well as the scathing wit. He embodied, to my mind, a real nobility of spirit, formed in a very broad acquaintance with the Classics, both Eastern & Western. Perhaps only an Indian, in his position, could see the secular realities of our world with such clarity. And nothing & no one could buy him off.

Not to give away the plot, but the Three Horsemen are taken to be Individualism, Nationalism, & Democracy. Death would be the fourth, but Chaudhuri leaves it out as self-explanatory.

Don’t worry, I’m “fiiiiine,” as me mother would say. (Several have inquired. As I mentioned in the Comments to my last post, she died peacefully on Thursday: Requiescat in pace et in amore.)

My particular gratitude for the surprising number who have paid hard cash to have my mama remembered in a Mass. I do not present myself as a priest or an expert on these cosmic things, but I would think if it were possible to get someone into Heaven by main force, mama is there. Knowing her as I do, I’d guess she is likely to be embarrassed by all the attention. (As she once observed, “guilt” is for acculturated Catholics & Jews. Whereas, “embarrassment” is the Protestant thing.)

(Any word italicized in this post, is to be pronounced in an exaggerated Scottish manner.)

Please note her name, as entered on her birth certificate back in 1920, is “Florrie,” which is Scotch. She would correct anyone who called her “Florence,” which is a Limey name. As she was for many years a nursing matron, of the old starched-apron school, she had to make this correction often. The other name to avoid, if you want to stay on mama’s good side, would be “Flora,” which is Scottish enough (her grandmother carried it), but in an Anglicizing way (Fionnghal would be more correct). My paternal grandpa tried that, as a kind of Lowland compromise. He was no match for her will, however.

My sense is that what could be done was done, in the human way, & God knows that’s not good enough, but hey.

Death is anyway for our benefit. As lessons go in spiritual biology, it is the great teacher. And as a great teacher, it commands one’s attention.

I am naturally opposed to the glib school, among our modern behavioural hygienists. Guilt, regret, & mourning: all good. Even an occasional round of embarrassment. There’s a lot of crap out there on “closure” & the like: pop psychology from the moral & intellectual goons, embedded now in our statist, institutional psychology. Death is a great teacher, & should not be shut up.

It makes a rich field for humour, because it eliminates the “happyface” attitude, or better, reveals it as an exceptionally idiotic form of psychosis. For what the devil & the “happyface” have in common, is the inability to find anything funny, especially the ridiculous in their own behaviour. Laughter is their scourge; it stings them like holy water. And it is deepened in the presence of death, when the apprehension of the comic stands, often strangely reverent, just where it finds the intersection with the “tragic view of life.”

There are no eulogies at Catholic funerals, or at least, none were tolerated before the “happyface” reforms were made to the liturgy in the wake of Vatican II. The “uncertainty principle” is also a part of the “all good” in this case. We cannot know, except through miracle (recognized by the Church in the beatification of saints), that any one of our dead has been translated to Heaven. Not one of us, however intimately we knew the deceased, can speak with authority on such matters. “Thy will be done” is, to my mind, the hardest part of the Lord’s Prayer, harder than the forgiveness of transgressors. For it is His will, not mine. The theological virtue of Hope is not so easy for us humans as may first appear; & like Faith, & Love, may require more stoicism than the Stoics ever offered to dispense. It cannot be a theological virtue, except by proximity to the divine mystery, which is bottomless. It is not even thinkable, without Grace.

Notwithstanding, our Lord was given to paradox: “For my yoke is easy, & my burden is light.”

And this is certainly true of death, which, conversely, may look hard, but is actually quite easy. It requires, indeed, no effort whatever on our part. It is breathing that requires some effort. My poor mama feared death terribly, but was also the kind of guardian spirit who could keep up a front. For as she said herself, in a moment of shaking from Parkinson’s symptoms, & an internal disorientation that must be worse than pain:

“What’s the worst that can happen?”

Knowing my mother’s mind, I replied, “You will perish from it, in which case, you are well out of this ghastly nursing home.”

“I suppose you are right, dear.”

She was nevertheless irritated when I began to recite, from schoolboy memory, the reflective sonnet of Musidorus from the fifth act of the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia:

“Since nature’s workes be good, & death doth serve / As nature’s worke: why should we feare to dye? / Since feare is vain, but when it may preserve, / Why should we feare that which we cannot flye? / Feare is more paine than is the paine it fears,” … &c, &c. For there is something about even Sir Philip Sidney’s rationalism that misses the whole point.

*

It is a paradox of Love that, like God, those who truly know another character must necessarily know them at their weakest. Yet only by knowing a person at her weakest, can we see & appreciate her at her strongest, too, as high mountain above low valley.

I was spooked, on Friday morning, when my telephone went off very early. “It must be my mother,” I thought, without thinking, while leaping out of bed. (At the time, she had been dead for less than eighteen hours.) We had a kind of ritual, early many a Friday morning. She would call me to announce, “I’m dying, I’m dying.”

This was less melodramatic than might seem. My sister often went up to her cottage Thursday night, & this was mama’s way of informing that I was now on call. As week followed week, it became more Gaelic. I was expected to reply:

“Oh poor mama, please don’t die today. For if you do, I will have to make arrangements.”

At which we’d laugh. For she had taught me to say that, by example. (“You must never take death lightly, my dear. There is a lot of paperwork, & you must make arrangements.”)

She taught other people much different things, for she looked upon each as a unique sensibility, requiring almost a new vocabulary. But me she took as the direct inheritor of that droll line, which passes back to North Uist in the Western Isles, from where (via the harbour at Stornoway, of course) our people floated to the New World. (Had they come from Benbecula, the next island south, across an easily swum channel, if the tide is out, they’d have arrived as Catholic refugees from the Highland Clearances, not Presbyterian refugees from the same.)

Each character a new challenge, to be dealt with in a different way.

This included a bottle to the head of a man who was violently assaulting his mistress, on one occasion; & on another, talking down a prospective rapist by persuading him she had an incurable disease. At age about six, I witnessed one of her more brilliant bluffs, that got us both out of serious danger at a remote location in Pakistan.

Likewise, during the Halifax riots on V.E. Day, back in ‘forty-five, she helped save the virginity of several young nursing students by getting responsible sailors from the Royal Canadian Navy to throw them — quite against their will — into the back of a truck. (There was no time for explanation, & they had to be driven immediately to safety, ten miles out of town.)

Alternatively, she could be very sweet, with very sweet people.

It is worth perhaps mentioning how she became an Atheist, as a nurse in training at the age of nineteen. Prior to that she had been a hard-praying, God-fearing, zealous though perhaps over-literal Calvinist girl. There was a boy in her ward, in great pain from a horrible spinal injury. She prayed & prayed for him every night. His condition got worse. So she prayed & prayed again, harder. Finally the boy died.

And to that she responded not by praying more, but by becoming very angry with God. She accused Him of conning her, of setting her up, of having lied to her throughout her childhood; of just ignoring her prayers because maybe He had better things to do. She was so angry, she told Him that He did not exist. Seventy years later I could still detect the outrage; even as I reflected that so many acquired their Atheism from some event in adolescence, which they had never outgrown.

She was taken aback when I argued, that anger with God at that level of intensity might itself be taken as sincere prayer. (One thinks of St Teresa of Ávila who said, to Jesus, that she didn’t wonder at how few friends He had, when she saw how He treated them.)

It is a mistake, a huge mistake, an unforgivable mistake, a millstone mistake, to the uttermost depths of the sea, to teach a “happyface” religion that seeks to avoid all the horrors of this world. And in this sense, I could argue that my mother was a victim of “happyface” religion, even in 1939.

To nearly the end, mama was arguing that religion is good, if it gives anyone some comfort, & makes them behave a little better than they might otherwise do. But she said it didn’t give any comfort to her, & that the only thing she knew that would make her behave any better was will, pure will. For she thought one ought to be a good person, God or no God; & that that involved refusing to do bad things, even when tempted. Moreover, that being good is not “a tight-assed proposition” — that it requires a bit of creative imagination, & that sometimes, just sometimes, doing the right thing means lie, cheat, & steal.

*

“Be bwave, mama.” This is what she wanted to hear from her son. She said I’d said it to her when I was a wee thing, & my father was apparently dying of a tropical disease in a very foreign country, leaving us penniless, or rather, anna-less & starving. So I pronounced it always in the small childish way. (And without mama praying, papa survived.)

She was bwave, because she was told that was the right thing to do. Sometimes one takes orders from little children, hearing no orders from above. And mama, as I said, adjusted words & behaviour alike to her interlocutor.

So here is some ground for a sneaking confidence, to put some green on the hillside of Hope. What, I have wondered, would my mama do if she suddenly found herself, not in some duet with the undertaker, but to her inordinate surprise, in the presence of Christ Crucified & Resurrected?

I daresay she would adapt her conversation, accordingly, & rather quickly acknowledge her error, as she had taught both her children to do.

For there is one teacher who is greater than Death.

Readers of this anti-blog may notice that I am more than usually idle. This is because I have a mother, one Florrie Alice Warren. She has not been at all well these last few years, & now, approaching only her ninety-third birthday, is certainly on her deathbed. The doctors gave her up last Thursday, but she is still, characteristically, fighting along with us, nearly five days later: unable to talk, or to see, but communicating by hand-squeeze gestures. I learn from a knowledgeable nurse that the most anyone has done in her condition is three weeks. So I would think in my mama’s case, five weeks is possible. Or five minutes: we shall see. But any way you look at it, her son will be distracted, & comments may wait some time to be posted.

This is the same mama to whom I may have alluded, as one of the Gaelic persuasion from Cape Breton,  Nova Scotia. Her grandmother spoke Gaelic only; her mother “both national languages” (Gaelic & Latin); my mama alas only Gaelic enough to handle standard Presbyterian hymns. (A magnificent mezzo-soprano voice, in her prime.) She has been an Atheist since the age of nineteen; of a peculiarly Calvinist sort. Her view of Catholics has always been a generous mixture of affection & pity.

So that now she cannot shut me up, we are learning to pray our Rosary together, & play some fine Catholic music for the Mass. I do the speaking.

She lost her husband five years ago (& I my father at the same time). They were a very successful couple, perfectly complementary, with nothing whatever in common. Wit I absorbed from the example of my father, but the dark Gaelic humour from mama. It was she, for instance, who taught me on leave-taking to say, “Now don’t you kill anyone!” … Then add, “Unless they are on the List.”

It was in fact her mother, who doubled as my grandma Annie Graham, who taught me from a very early age, while bouncing on her knee, the importance of song, & within that, the importance of recognizing our tribal enemies, & terminating them whenever possible. The old Scotland, much like Afghanistan in many ways, enjoyed a phase of human experience that preceded nationalism, & was really much more attractive. “Another for Hector,” as we say.

I could say more, but not now, for I am busy. I have a little request for gentle reader — Catlick, Prottie, even Chews & Muzzies if it comes to that. Pray for her. She fears death, which is why she fights it so wilfully, notwithstanding her present condition. I understand that, for I have often tried to avoid death, myself. But her denial of Christ is eccentric & unreasonable, & for all my reservations about “democracy,” I am still hoping to overcome it by sheer force of numbers.

Trust me. If you knew her you would like her. She is a character, & I am really very seriously hoping they make special arrangements for characters, up there.

Let us applaud sheer genius in those United States. With concealed but effective bipartisan consensus, the President & Congressmen have succeeded in the ultimate patriotic act: shutting down most of their counter-productive Government. True, there are messy bits in the arrangement. Obamacare has not been completely annihilated, & there is some confusion over national parks. But the attention to detail is otherwise superb. For instance, an arrangement was found to continue paying the military. This is wise, because unpaid soldiers can be trouble; as Harry Truman used to say, “Read your history.” And you may need them to discourage zeal in those less well armed.

It is not really a shutdown, but a “slim-down,” according to the cooler heads. “Essential services,” including the goons who mind the borders, are left in place. There’s probably room for additional savings in Homeland Security & the like. But in broad outline it would seem the U.S. Government has been downsized to what it should have been all along, in a single brilliant stroke.

Democrats generously credit the Republicans, Republicans generously credit the Democrats, for this impressive accomplishment. For years I’ve been moaning about the Nanny State. It took a century to build, I reasoned, it might take half-a-century to dismantle. But ho: the American politicians have done it in a day. I must have been wrong about them. Let me therefore praise them now, & cheer both parties to stand their ground. Keep that “slim-down” going for months, years, decades, until everyone has forgotten what the “fat-up” was about.

The histrionic reception in gliberal media is also to be celebrated. Anything that makes the devil shriek is good, & the very foulness of their language assures us that the news has not been faked. For a few weeks they may shift the polls, but the longer the slim-down can be kept in place, the more their purchase slips on public opinion.

Verily: the demonic power, alike of journalists & terrorists, depends upon the human disposition to panic. Refuse to panic, & they are suddenly enfeebled. “Fear not,” as our Lord saith.

I should salute, too, the framers of the U.S. Constitution. On our Westminster model, no slim-down could be so easily obtained in Canada, or Britain, or India, or Australia. It required the exceptional American system of “checks & balances,” in which the checks disturb the balances, & then the balances stop the checks. The Europeans might pull it off, somehow, but even they lack the constitutional means to “mutually assured destruction.” Across Asia, Africa, Latin America we find governments that would require impossibly strenuous & purposeful acts to close themselves down. Only in America (& arguably Somalia) can it be done by casual impasse.