Essays in Idleness

Well, the summer is over, & that means I don’t have to read modern Chinese history any more. (I self-assign a topic each year for summer reading, & this year it was post-Ming China, crammed as if for a test on Labour Day.)

Now, technically the summer will not end until the equinox on the 22nd of this month; but up here in the High Doganate, we can know it is coming to an end when we find ourself under air attack. This happens without fail every year at the Labour Day weekend, when the Canadian International Air Show overflies beautiful downtown Parkdale, the aeroplanes often banking low over Humber Bay for review from our balconata; or else we may ascend to the roof for the full vista. It starts Friday, with the rehearsals, during which anyone quietly reading in the High Doganate could swear that each scrambling fighter intends a strafing run on our ivory tower.

Then wave after wave they come, in their agility & power, like a bad day in Beirut: the Trojan Horsemen, the Snowbirds, the Red Star & Dragon, the Lucas Oil Jumpers, the Corsairs. One might reach for one’s bedsheet, but it is useless to put up the white flag. The RCAF & USAF combine, & I noticed this year at least one ex-Soviet aircraft; further combined with squadrons from every earlier generation of mechanical aviation in a grand aerial ghost fleet — all come to assault the High Doganate. But fear not, gentle reader. Again this year we have survived, & from the relative quiet of this back-to-school Tuesday, I know they have relented; that the Battle of Britain is over.

*

Power, that is the thing. It is what I have been reading about, all through this summer: the use of Power to destroy a magnificent civilization. Power, verily in opposition to Authority. For it is Authority that holds a civilization together, Power that blows it apart.

I’m afraid this truth is little understood, in our age of Power Triumphant. Little Man has stood against the gods, & in the euphoria of his hubris, declared them to be overthrown. Henceforth Little Man will make the rules. He will no longer answer to Authority, to the philosophia perennis. By Power he has usurped the Authority, & need not listen to it any more. Henceforth, words will mean whatever Power will choose them to mean, in our looking-glass world. (Take for instance a term from time out of mind, such as “marriage.”)

In the famous passage by Lewis Carroll, Alice is the voice of Authority, Humpty Dumpty the voice of Power. The latter admits that verbs, especially, have a temper & are proud, but “adjectives you can do anything with.” (And an adjective can change the meaning of a noun.) He declares himself the master over all the parts of speech. Alice is puzzled, & has fallen silent. Tellingly, Humpty Dumpty admits to prosopagnosia — the inability to read a human face. He suggests it would be some help to re-arrange the face of Alice: to put, for instance, both eyes on the same side of her nose, or the mouth on top, to make her easier for him to recognize. That is the voice of Power.

We learn, from the Westlaw database via the commonplace Internet site, that the case of Humpty Dumpty has been cited in more than 250 judicial decisions in the USA, including two that went to their Supreme Court. The Law, wherever discovered, not imposed, reaches beneath the surface of nonsense. It seeks Authority. Or else it refuses to reach, & instead seeks Power.

And in the end, Authority is restored; the truth is vindicated by an accident of Nature; Humpty Dumpty tumbles from his Wall. For here is a mystery: that in despite of Little Man, the universe is held together by Authority.

Two of my (many) heroes became famous while suppressing the Taiping Rebellion, in China in the mid-19th century. One was the British reactionary, & devout Evangelical, Charles George “Chinese” Gordon (later “Gordon Pasha,” & “Gordon of Khartoum”), who took command of the foreign-officered Ch’ang Sheng Chün (“Ever Victorious Army”). It was a remarkably small, independent, mercenary outfit, fighting on behalf of the Ch’ing Dynasty in Peking, which “punched above its weight” by several orders of magnitude.

The other was the Hunanese reactionary, & devout Confucian scholar-general Tseng Kuo-fan. He raised the Hsiang Army (named for the river that flows through Hunan province northward towards the mighty Yang-tze Kiang), that took back Nanking.

Gentle reader should be apprised of what I have discovered this summer, while reading some modern Chinese history. It is that Wikipedia, & other Internet sources that depend upon it, reflect, or at least obsequiously respect, the official Communist Party line in most articles touching upon China. Therefore they cannot be trusted. There is indeed a background problem, for any “China expert” must maintain his Chinese visa & access to mainland archival & other institutions in order to keep his credentials warm, & flourish in his trade. This leads to careful self-editing, & by increments from discreet vagueness, to tendentious selectivity, to contextual misrepresentation, to calculated lying.

Bear this in mind when reading, for instance, that Tseng Kuo-fan was some kind of “warlord,” who ordered gratuitous massacres; or when he is presented as a stooge for foreign interests; or conversely as a “traitor” to “modernization.” Such views are artefacts of the old Maoist propaganda, only beginning to deliquesce. Similarly, broad accounts of the so-called “Tung-che Restoration” are ill-served by systematic smearing. This was an effort corresponding to the reign of the 10th Ch’ing emperor, 1861–75, to cope with modernity on Chinese terms. The dowager empress, Tzu-hsi (mother & regent of the child incumbent, who died at nineteen) was the remarkable figure behind impressive efforts in what proved a hopeless cause. Her struggle continued until her death (in 1908). The Chinese governing order this august Manchu former-concubine was trying to sustain finally disintegrated in the republican revolution of 1911. By Sun Yat-sen & his political successors, Chiang Kai-shek & Mao, that ancient & magnificent civilization was finally obliterated.

Another century or more will surely pass before the history can be told in a disengaged way. For now, the satanic ideologies of Progress are spread, like lava & ash over the whole vast territory. Even before the accession of the human monster, Mao Tse-tung, millions of Chinese lives had been extinguished in pursuit of progressive fantasies & illusions (“democracy,” &c), foisted on the world by the votaries of Power.

I am, by way of full disclosure, a Ming Loyalist myself — i.e. still attached by sentiment to the last fully-independent Han dynasty, prior to the (Manchurian) Ch’ing; whose capital fell to the barbarians in 1644 — for the same reason I am a Jacobite, & a United Empire Loyalist, & a Holy Roman, & habsbourgeois, & réactionnaire tous azimuts. These were all lost causes. Yet only from the position of defeat, before the forces of Progress, is it possible to see the Beast with clarity, or to appreciate its mechanical, steamroller aspect.

Let me concede, that no specific lost cause can, once flattened into the asphalt by Progress, ever be revived. No veterinary medicine can rejuvenate the roadkill; no garden is worth watering, once paved. Yet I have seen the freshets come, & the shoots & seedlings sprouting through the asphalt cracks. The cause-behind-the-cause, of “Restoration,” remains dear to me; the vegetable opposition, expressing its dissent. And likewise in society a Man may sprout, through the cracks in The People. Hail Mary full of grace!

In what remained of that old “feudal” China, the gentry organized the peasantry for the defence of their homes & fields, against the first waves of revolutionary violence. It was as ever the old, civilized aristocracy, standing against the new, plebeian, puritans & psychopaths. True leadership is thrust upon a man, never wilfully seized. But by formation & training he must be ready to receive it. True leadership requires moral & spiritual strengths, along with intellectual qualities grounded in them. It requires simplicity of life & outlook, indifference to popularity, freedom from vanity & vain attachments — including that final attachment to survival at any cost.

Alike, “Chinese” Gordon & Tseng Kuo-fan understood such things. They are entirely worth studying in that light. Neither was importunate for command. Both were called to duty by “events.” And they were allies in a heavenly cause, who spontaneously recognized one another across every cultural divide. (Read again, Kipling’s “Ballad of East & West.”) Neither attempted to build a private power base, or to derive wealth from his service to the legitimate governing order. Nor did either strut as a paragon of virtue. When no longer needed, each quietly retired; until called again by the bugle of duty.

It is with Tseng I most wish to identify. On ancient principles of Chinese recruitment, he chose his officer corps. This product of the venerable Han-lin Yüan (“Brush-Wood Court”) laid down the exemplary procedure by which candidates were subjected to long interviews. He would begin with a slight, “oriental” smile, staring at the candidate for a prolonged period, observing the man’s facial & bodily dispositions. Questions were then directed to his practical knowledge, his intelligence & capacity for independent thought; but at the back of these was also an inquiry into the man’s fundamental honesty & decency. Before risking betrayal by a self-interested officer, Tseng would assiduously watch for signs that the man was betraying himself: would eliminate the boastful, the coarse of speech & manner, & above all, the shifty-eyed.

As a journalist I had often to make judgements in the course of an interview; to decide on whom I could or could not rely. I was actually taught, young, the sort of ticks to look out for. In particular, the inability to return one’s gaze unselfconsciously; for shifty eyes are the very flag of devious low cunning. The ability to distinguish upright from dishonest was once taught, generally, as a survival skill. Today we are taught instead “not to be judgemental,” & to overlook what “isn’t important.” But to the wise, the large is revealed in the small. The skill of reading character is not in itself a cultural property, though it may take cultural modes; it is rather one of the universal properties of man. It is a human skill, in the acquirement of which we are constantly reminded that nobility is simple & direct; that the ignoble are complex & crooked.

The leaders in our public life today — our “politicians” — are more or less invariably ignoble, self-serving, crooked men & women; “complicated people,” who cannot coherently explain themselves; “passive-aggressive” as the current saying goes. They boast, they are coarse, they are shifty in behaviour. This has much to do with the way they are selected.

Perhaps I know less about photography than I know about music. It is hard to say, for my ignorance of music is formidable. I am thinking here of the sort of knowledge that can come only from practice & participation; not “academic” knowledge, which is quantitative, & cheap. The theatre critic, who has never tried to write a play, or act in one, is rightly dismissed as a public nuisance. So might be the critic of photography or music, whose participation has been desultory at best.

But these are not activities I have avoided, rather, subjects in which I may be unteachable. A music master in school — a man of beneficent calm & patience — was once driven nearly to despairing violence by my inability to grasp the “concept” of a choir. It wasn’t only my failure to sing in key. I could not be made to understand when to start singing, & when to stop. Nor was he my first victim; for in my earlier childhood a kindly Pakistani lady, who claimed that she could teach piano to anyone, withdrew the claim after trying to teach me. My own saintly aunt, an organist & choirmistress of considerable accomplishment, knew better than to try. She was happy if I would just keep some personal distance from her musical instruments.

But I love music. Whereas, I do not love photography. It provides, I strongly suspect, machinery with which to capture what is without substance in the scene before one. The more convincing the picture, the more empty & therefore false it becomes. Photography cannot be a substitute for any form of visual art. Worse, it is an extremely dangerous & distracting aid to artistic production, & a dubious method of recording — paintings, especially. This much, I think, can be judged directly by the employment of one’s eyes.

Too, it may be confirmed by the experience of the wise. An old friend, who happened to be a cinematographer, said he had often wondered whether movies could be considered a legitimate art form. He continued in confusion about whether the moving picture medium (with or without soundtrack) could ever express a coherent “aesthetic idea.” But he was quite certain that still photography could not. For art requires truth, even when it departs, into lying. Whereas, film is just a chemical reaction; & if I understand correctly, digital is not even that. The skills come down to point-&-shoot. We do not consider the product of a rifleman’s ministrations to be “art” in the strict sense — even if he has carefully tied up his target beforehand, to assure an intended result.

It is true that photographs can be pretty. But this is something genuine art eschews: the reason Impressionist painting is such a waste of canvas. It is like the difference between “sexy” & “beautiful,” or between rhetoric & reality. Nature is never pretty like that; & in being made pretty for the benefit of a camera she is manipulated against her will; & shall have her revenge in due course.

My father presented me with an old Brownie box camera when I was a wee lad. Most of the pictures I took with it — around Lahore, in Punjabi villages, up in the hills by Abbottabad, &c — are still in my possession. They were remarkably sharp & well-composed, if I do say so myself; but then, I depended entirely on the viewfinder, like Henri Cartier-Bresson; with the advantage over him that I was usually dealing with subjects that held still. A greater advantage, at age seven, may have been freedom from any kind of photographic “theory.”

Later, as a (very) young journalistic hack on my own in South-East Asia at the beginning of the ‘seventies, I acquired a camera again, or rather, two of them in succession. The first was a Nikkormat FT, along with several lenses. These required too much fussing, & I soon gave the whole kit away. The second was a Nikonos II “Calypso,” with one lens only (35mm). It was waterproof & as indestructible as the Hermes 3000 portable typewriter that travelled with it. The Nikonos could be used in any weather, above or below the waterline — whether for taking pictures, or if necessary as a weapon when swung from its strap. It was the workhorse among the more intelligent hacks, during the War in Vietnam. The mere possession of it conveyed the coolness factor required for self-recognition as a photo-journalist. Better yet, I liked its overall simplicity (the side-knobs for adjusting focus & aperture, which ceased to be counter-intuitive when the lens was installed upside down); the rewind mechanism (that compensated for my absent-mindedness); & the viewfinder (of the Albada type, showing the rectangle of the picture frame precisely). On the other hand, it was a pain to open & reload.

The preceding Nikkormat had led me into sin: into self-conscious artiness with the contact prints, from which I would select & crop obsessively. I would take multiple tries at almost every shot, sometimes dozens of what promised to be a “nice” composition. This was appallingly wasteful & wrong. Better, in the field, to prime one’s mind to the notion that one has one, & only one chance to get it right. Too, it is more useful to blame oneself than to doubt the camera.

I mentioned Cartier-Bresson above by way of self-aggrandisement. Though he used a Leica, he seemed to understand the moral conditions governing photographic reportage. As a well-trained painter, & constant draughtsman, he kept photography in its place. Let me count the ways, in which I purposefully or instinctively emulated his habits.

Most important, I never knowingly took a colour photograph. (It is necessary to insert the qualification, for I have several times agreed to snap a picture of some tourist, with his own camera, & who knows what may have been inside it?) I have said photography captures what is empty or false, but with colour it garishly fills the space, painting over what was nominally there. Black-&-white is crucial to any one-eyed essay in three-dimensional representation, wherein shape, texture, & the slighter variations of depth can be conveyed only through subtle shading. As a medium to record sculptural & architectural detail, photography can sometimes supplement or (rarely) even rival drawing. When the subject is living, it gives some hint of that animation: of the time dimension in the scene. It may even capture some spark of character in the depiction of a face: provided that the photographer has reflexes comparable to those of a good cricket batsman, for such visual effects are fleeting.

We could go on with this all day. I was just looking by chance at a colour photo of a tropical fruit stall. For all I know the semi-geometric fruit mounds came pre-composed by the costermonger, & were not instead carefully assembled for the photographer’s “artistic effect.” But assuming perfect candour on his part, in presenting each visual component, the photograph still lies, shamelessly. It omits, for instance, the fragrance of the guava, rising in the tropical heat. Or rather, it does not merely omit, but masks. I have seen black-&-white pictures of fruit stalls that do not impinge on the imagination in this way; wherefrom, at a glance, the scent of the guava is immediately called to mind.

No “special effects” should ever be tolerated, when photographing on the human scale. They may be necessary to resolve images at the microscopic or macroscopic scale, in scientific work. Indeed, colour film may be indicated, to the specialized purpose of showing refractive patterning in an animal, vegetable, or mineral specimen. But in environments that humans are capable of inhabiting, even the seemingly small issue of cropping the images comes immediately into play. For it is the first step down that slippery slope, to fakery.

The next is the use of flash, or any other lighting gimmick. The light available belongs to the scene, & any attempt to tamper with it necessarily involves a fraudulent intention. As I recall, Cartier-Bresson compared the use of a flash to shooting off a pistol at a concert. It changes the nature of the performance too much. It is frankly intrusive. And that is the opposite of what a photographer should be, in his function as a recorder. The man himself wrapped his Leica in black tape to make it look inconsequential. He snapped his pictures furtively.

That he understood the wrong in what he was doing was indicated by his own shyness. When speaking to groups, he would hold his prepared text directly before his face, to make getting a photo of him nearly impossible. And I was told by someone who knew him, that he was entirely sympathetic to the belief of traditional Muslims, & many rural & tribal of all cultural locations, that the camera is a tool for stealing men’s souls.

Fortunately, it cannot succeed without the active cooperation of the subject. But the proof that these “backward” people are astute may be demonstrated in the lives of fashion models; or worse, the behaviour of those engaged in endless self-portraiture with their cellphones & other hand-held devices. Imagine, a person so depraved, as to persevere in the theft of his own soul!

You know the type: expensive food & women; silk kimonos every day. Private carrying chairs for their wives. Music & card lessons for their marriageable daughters; drum lessons for their sons. Football, miniature archery, poetry contests. Constantly renovating their houses; downright addiction to the tea ceremony. Cherry-blossom viewing, boat trips, daily baths. Nights on the town. Gambling & litigating, sword-drawing & duelling. Participation in mining projects. Sake with the evening meal; then smoking, one pipe after another. Unnecessary trips to Kyoto. Carving small articles during working hours. Collecting gold sword-fittings. Borrowing money at over 8 percent.

What can I say?

The truth is I was never sufficiently appalled by these wastrels, bringing decadence to Tokugawa Japan. They were the nouveaux riches of the risen merchant class, whom Ihara Saikaku takes to task in his 18th-century novels. One generation makes the money with enterprise & thrift. The next just spends it. You get what you might expect, when peasants rise too fast: for most of these people came up from farmers.

Enterprise & thrift are all very well, but they lead quickly to extravagance. Peace is nice, but it only leads to war. And war is pointless, because it only leads to peace. (Once upon a time I had a Delhi girlfriend, who explained all this to me.)

We should try to cultivate some moderation.

From a recent item in the Catholic Herald, we see that Chuck Darwin’s great-great-great granddaughter has lost her faith in scientific materialism. The item has been travelling through Catholic media & blogosphere since June. By now it has appeared even in the National Catholic Register, which frees me to mention it here. For I take pride in being “last with the news.”

Laura Keynes is descended on the other side from the family that gave the world John Maynard Keynes (I think he was her great-great uncle). This is the innermost ventricle in the heart of Bloomsbury — which is to say, from the outlook of the High Doganate, the centre of enemy territory in the English-speaking world. Darwinism is the cosmology, Keynesianism the economic theory; & for more than a sesquicentury, Liberalism has been the product of this self-publicizing intellectual aristocracy. It is an extended family affair — one marries in, or marries out — with lines of descent traceable to generations even before the bearded sage of Down House. For he was himself conscious of an intellectual pedigree; of being from birth in the forefront of enlightened liberalism, with its attendant social activism.

The famous Oxford debate of 1860 between the Anglican bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, & Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, was itself an intra-family affair. Samuel was the son of William Wilberforce, the great slave emancipator, & both he & Huxley were in some intimate sense heirs to the evangelical tradition of the “Clapham Sect” — which emerged in all the majesty of its self-regard, at the tail end of the 18th century. Both were men of science, & Wilberforce no fool in his grasp of contemporary biology. Neither had the slightest patience for “mediaeval obscurantism.” But Huxley was trending “agnostic” on Christianity itself.

They were both from the evangelical, progressive milieu that had “freed the slaves,” & founded Freetown in West Africa, among other knightly acts of Christian philanthropy. They had brought the thunder of moral earnestness into the British Parliament, & carried the drumroll of progressive Victorian self-importance to the ends of the Earth — from Little England to the farthest Imperial shore. For they founded, too, the Church Missionary Society, the British & Foreign Bible Society, & almost every other outreach of Anglican evangelical fervour. They were “muscular Christians.” But what we now call the “Bloomsbury” component slid into a sophisticated, quizzical agnosticism, passing by degrees of scientism & socialism into the bitter atheism of today — yet without sacrifice of fervour, or any acquisition of self-doubt.

It is a fascinating history, perhaps too often traced, but never with sufficient irony. In addition to his campaign against slavery, William Wilberforce & his entourage had campaigned against domestic immorality, founding innumerable societies for the reformation of manners & the suppression of public vice. Not only slavery was outlawed, but through high-toned beseigement, Parliament was persuaded to pass various proclamations against “excessive drinking, blasphemy, profane swearing & cursing, lewdness, profanation of the Lord’s Day,” & other “dissolute, immoral, or disorderly practices.” (I am inclined to call this, “Christian Shariah,” reflecting as it does the old Koranic, if not also Presbyterian admonition, to “command the good.”) They installed the “nanny” in our Nanny State, with that heroic commitment to perpetual Reform & Improvement that seized the imagination of the Victorian Age — & which still echoes in the battle cry for Progress, long after their Protestant God was held to have died. (So that now I call it, “Progressive Shariah.”)

For through Darwin, Huxley, & their avant-garde, they also discovered Evolution, or perhaps more exactly, Evolution discovered them. What on the Continent was received as a tentative scientific hypothesis, full of holes, was in England — & then throughout the English-speaking world — taken for a refutation of Scripture. The Bloomsbury set were the vanguard of what became in effect a new secular religion. Darwin’s Origin of Species became the foundational document for the new scientistic faith — its replacement for Genesis. Evangelical religion was not so much abandoned, as transformed. By the more talented of Bloomsbury it was turned into aestheticism & “art for art’s sake.” The moral earnestness continued with polarities reversed. The old obsessions over sexual vice, for instance, flipped into sexual experimentation. Meanwhile, the science types assembled their New Inquisition, hunting down & eliminating from the possibility of employment those who strayed from Darwinian orthodoxy in the academic worlds they increasingly controlled.

These were people long habituated to identifying wherever they were standing as the high moral ground. With that goes the habit of demonizing anyone not standing with you, & the technique of substituting defamation for debate. To my mind, the nasal tone of today’s “political correctness” owes as much to descent from the Clapham Sect, as to later Soviet inspirations; & the catastrophic relaxation of intellectual standards, to that refusal to debate.

Feminism & homosexualism were never something new, but the political edge they acquired for their slicing action was honed in Bloomsbury. The knife of the new sexual politics was thrust into the body politic with the zeal that had once propelled campaigns “for the Encouragement of Piety & Virtue, & for the Preventing & Punishing of Profaneness & Immorality.” (I allude to the title of a Royal Proclamation advanced by the Wilberforce party, back in 1802.)

“The world decays, sir, as it ages” — or rather, it is made new in every generation, from the seed of the generation before, & it is wonderful to behold the metamorphoses. I have now lived long enough myself to watch the liberalism of my parents’ generation mutate into the liberalism of my own, & to see it again mutated in the liberalism of my children’s generation. What was unthinkable in one, becomes thinkable in the next, de rigueur in the one after. What is presented as the jet of Progress flies not with time’s arrow towards some pre-determined goal, but rather arcs & twists in wild spirals, forward then back in upon itself; rolling, pitching, yawing in its sport; finally spinning, tumbling, & cartwheeling until it hits the ground, in a magnificent explosion.

*

My own retreat from Progress, into the Catholic Church, was a complicated thing. It began I suppose at age six, when by father put me in a school named for Saint Anthony (of Padua) in Lahore, Pakistan. He did this with no religious intention whatever, being Methodist post-Christian himself, but from the same motive as so many across subcontinental India, of diverse religious strains, who entrusted their children to the missionary Catholic schools because these had (by far) the highest academic standards. If I was uplifted by the experience, it was only by the ears, for to this day I flinch at the memory of such as Brother Berg, come to punish me for writing with a blunt pencil.

Not even my conversion to Christianity quite pushed me into the Catholic Church, though it put me very near. I came within a trice of joining at the age of twenty-three, & would have, had the Church’s local representatives (in the England of 1976) not struck me as rather more Progressive, than Christian. For it was from Progress that I was fleeing — at first into the rafters of High Anglicanism.

What brought me finally home was the contemplation of history. It was the gradually increasing shock of realizing that this Church was teaching, in her catechesis, precisely the same doctrine she had begun teaching nineteen centuries before, & was still doing in her 20th century. She had strayed often in her behaviour, she had tilted & sometimes tipped, but she had kept righting herself again, returning to her original course; indeed, never quite abandoning it even while taking on water. No other institution on the face of this Earth, crewed as each must be, by humans, could make anything resembling such a claim. In the end I became convinced that God would never abandon her; that Christ was at her tiller, & the Holy Spirit in her sails. There could be no other explanation for this unearthly consistency.

*

But this piece was supposed to be about Laura Keynes, our latest convert from Bloomsbury. A brilliant girl, at least by the standard of academic attainment, & by personal accounts; & an unusual refugee, given all the advantages of family connexion that she is — in the slipstream of John Henry Newman — now consciously leaving behind. She intends, from what I can read, not only quietly to attend on Sundays, but to become one of those “Catholic apologists” the Bloomsbury set have always particularly despised.

As Huxley once said of the Roman argument, it is “carefully calculated for the destruction of all that is highest in the moral nature, in the intellectual freedom, & in the political freedom of mankind.” Richard Dawkins says pretty much the same today, without the old jowling sonority, yet still with a certain shrieking pomposity. For if there has been one consistent theme, through the Bloomsbury generations, it has been reviling the Catholic Church — first from one side, then from another, & another. This, in turn, is what links it back to the Reformation, & the larger Protestant heritage: for though erratic in their own doctrines, the descendants of the first schismatics have been absolutely consistent in their condemnation of Rome.

Welcome aboard, Miss Keynes.

What fascinates me is the suggestion that a significant impetus to her conversion came from actually reading the aggressive “New Atheists” of her own (former) tribe. She describes, “the strange mix of angry emotion I encountered there: anger at the thought of God; anger at any restrictions on behaviour; anger at thwarted will; pride in the exertion of will; pride in feeling intellectually superior; contempt for anyone who reveals human vulnerability in asking for the grace of God. It’s important to remember that where there’s anger, there’s often pain. I see a lot of pain there. I think it stems from clinging to the idea that we’re in control, that we have autonomy.”

More: “The question of whether the existence of God is demonstrable by rational argument has kept philosophers & theologians busy for centuries. I’d ask the claimant to explain how closing this discussion furthers the cause of reason. So I’d respond gently, but if I really lost my patience, I’d tell them: ‘Just go & read Aquinas!’ ”

Consider, if you will, gentle reader, what is implied in these remarks. It is that far from leading young intellects astray, the legion of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens (& Grayling, Krauss, Shermer, Stenger, et alia) have actually been doing the work of God. They have been doing it involuntarily, to be sure, but that is the miracle of the Holy Spirit, who stays at least one infinity ahead of the quickest human minds. In this case, they have finally made the argument against God so plain, so obvious, & so symmetrically the reverse of the truth, as to win souls over to the One Holy Catholic & Apostolic Church — in effect, chasing the intelligent over to Christ’s side.

Let us now utter a little prayer of thanksgiving for every one of these dark little expostulators; & hope that Our Lord will reward each in turn by the same “mechanism” of conversion.

The horrifying violence in Egypt — well, I have been reading about it from this very safe distance, from where we see what we have been shown. In this case, we have been shown a lot of tear gas & rat-tat-tat from two locations in Cairo, with cuts to statesmen deploring it all, & calling for “peace, peace.” The chorus declares that violence is “not going to solve anything” (which is a lie), that Egypt must return to “inclusive democracy” (which was the cause of the violence).

Elsewhere in the country, there is more violence, that is not being shown. The Muslim Brotherhood, presented as victims of brutality in the vicinity of the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque, & Nahda Square, have been attacking undefended government buildings, Christian churches, Christian monasteries, Christian schools, a Christian orphanage, & Christian homes. Through such Internet sources as MidEast Christian News, I have seen multiple accounts from Alexandria, Assiut, & at least seven other governates, in each of which Islamist devils have responded to viciously demented propaganda blaming Egypt’s defenceless Copts for the Muslim Brotherhood’s loss of power.

The destruction of Mar Girgiss (Saint George), the cathedral church for the diocese of Sohag, was among these many “incidents.” From my travels among the Copts in Egypt, all the details were familiar. The church was thoroughly firebombed by the jihadis, after they had made helter-skelter with the icons & statuary inside. By the time a fire truck arrived, more than an hour after the flames went up, the church was gutted. The jihadis then hijacked & wrecked the fire truck. They made no special effort to conceal their identities; & no arrests were reported. If there ever is an arrest, the police will need an army brigade behind them to perform it. In the meanwhile, it is likely local Christians will be dragged to a “reconciliation” session, in which they will be physically humiliated & made to pay indemnities to buy a break from the persecution.

That is Christian life in Egypt today. When Mohamed Morsi came to power, things became considerably worse for them than under Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian military at least had the decency not to join in the attacks; local police were unpredictable. While Morsi delivered the usual blather about “peace, peace” to the cameras, his brownshirts were going to work on the Christians, & on many secularized Muslims, too. Pogroms are intrinsic to the Islamist conception of Shariah: religious minorities are to be exiled, enslaved, or exterminated. Attacks on them are celebrated as holy acts, & any assailant who manages to get himself killed in the course of the carnage is hailed as a martyr.

Notwithstanding the pusillanimity of our statesmen & media, & the veil of political correctness that we draw over our own heads, most people in the West know the score by now. We’d rather pretend that we did not know, but we know. All Egyptians most certainly know it. The great majority are reasonably decent people. Only the usual minority of thugs, who exist as a proportion in every society, join in the rampages. For the rest, as for the Germans under Hitler, the best thing is to look the other way. Why intervene, & thereby make yourself a target? Perhaps, make your whole family a target? And when it is all over, & the shame descends for what was done, & the truth begins to rise from the ashes, there is nothing else for it but, “We never knew!”

Sohag (soft “g,” also spelt “Sawhaj” & “Suhaj”), in a verdant plain on the left bank of the Nile, about ten miles north of Abydos, was formerly known as Girga (soft “g”s again). The town is seldom visited by tourists, for it has little to offer by way of Disneyland spectacle, & while its museum is full of interesting things, there are bigger & better air-conditioned museums elsewhere. It has been a town since at least the 11th Dynasty — for more than four thousand years — although one cannot see this beneath contemporary squalor. Archaeological fragments in the district go back to the 1st Dynasty. It was an important agricultural & industrial centre in Roman times, known internationally for the quality of its pottery.

It was a significant cultural centre before the Islamic Conquest, in the heart of the ancient Thebaid: a landscape once cluttered with highly productive monasteries. Christians from the earliest generations lie buried in its necropoles. The Girga Road led to the Kharga Oasis, another rich centre of early Christian civilization. Papyrus fragments still wash up, in Coptic & in Greek, from the libraries that were once part of a sophisticated civic environment. Two ancient monasteries remain on the outskirts of the town — to my knowledge not yet gutted by the Islamist savages; their monks not yet slaughtered. Christians remain a substantial minority in the town, for the time being.

*

The restored military regime — for that is what it is regardless of what the U.S. State Department cares to call it — remains popular, even as it butchers the very people whom “the people” so recently voted into power (by a tiny margin). The Western media, so enchanted by the scenery of the Arab Spring, lost interest in the follow-up. Now they want numbers, just numbers, for how many have been killed. If they have a good number — hundreds is good; thousands is better — the “story” could be front-paged for two or three days. Then it goes back to Iraq-level coverage: a dozen here & a dozen there, from one Islamist bomb or another. Hardly big news. That is what “democracy” is about: numbers.

John Kerry is tied up with the latest vanity, using what’s left of American clout in the region to force unwilling Israelis “back to the bargaining table” with unwilling Palestinians. The Israelis were pushed into releasing more bloody murderers from their gaols, as a “sweetener” to lure Mahmoud Abbas to the table. The first of these have now returned to the standard heroes’ welcome in Gaza & West Bank — where every Jew-killer is a hero.

Again, the “two state solution,” on “the road to peace.” Kerry is full of it: “peace, peace.” Twenty years have now passed since the Americans strong-armed (or “jet-planed,” the old Maoist term) the Israelis into turning over the occupied territories, & with that the Palestinian people,  to Yasser Arafat’s terrorists. That was “Oslo I,” the “interim agreement”; the “final status” deadline was 1998. All the little details, such as who owns Jerusalem, would be worked out by then.

If Arafat’s successor ever signed on to a genuine “two state solution,” he would be lynched. The Palestinian authorities — now essentially Hamas — will & can accept nothing short of a “one state solution” in which every Jew is removed from greater Palestine, just as Jews have been removed from every other Arab country; & as every last Christian may be removed, one day.

And still the State Department goes through the motions, along with all the other Western diplomats, muttering “peace, peace.” These are profoundly cynical men. I am incapable of believing they do not know what they are doing.

Through history we have learnt, again & again & without exception, that nothing comes of negotiating with psychopaths. Or rather, worse than nothing. When they are strong, they resort to force without hesitation; when they are weak, they play for time. Nor does the dumping of billions in aid, & all the baubles of modern commerce, change the outlook. The ruthless take it all in their stride, without the slightest gratitude, as an admission of our weakness. It enables them to be more obdurate.

Peace comes, & comes only, in this world, with the strength of enforcement. It does not come from prattling with the psychos; it comes from rendering them powerless. The Egyptian military understands this from intimate dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood; & now the fickle Egyptian public, from first-hand experience of Brotherhood rule. You do not go half way with these people: you destroy them, or they destroy you. Turn your cheek & they slit your throat.

It would be more merciful, all round, if we stopped trying to appease our mortal enemies, to see if it might somehow work this time. Whether dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood, or Hamas — as with Communists or Nazis in another generation — nothing is achieved by pulling punches, or offering to “jaw.” What works, what has always worked, is unambiguous: “If you do this, we will do that.” And then deliver on the nail, as promised. The choice is not between war & peace; it is between little war now & big war later.

The Egyptian military did what it had to do. They told the Brotherhood to remove their camps from the middle of Cairo, or have them removed. The regime acted exactly as it threatened to act, when the Brotherhood did not move. It should continue to act, with resolution. There is no mealymouthed advice the world can give, to which the officers should listen; none to which the Israelis should listen. They, not we, take the consequences of irresolution.

In Egypt, we should note that the fate of ten million Christians is on the line. Either the Muslim Brotherhood will be uprooted, or the Christians will be uprooted. There is no “third way,” & those who speak & act as if there were have effectively taken sides, with evil.

The coarse word condemns the sin; the refined word excuses it. This is the secret relationship between Victorian Bowdlerism, & the postmodern politically correct. My thanks as so often recently to Mr G.K. Chesterton for pointing this out, while I was waking this morning. Our conversation, which has grown much rounder since I joined Holy Church, derives in this instance from a book he wrote in 1913, one nice & precise century ago. He was still an Anglican then, nearly a decade before he would himself be Received (at something like the age at which I was). The book was The Victorian Age in Literature, a little volume in the Home University Library lent me by one of those priests who haunt Parkdale, & which turns out the most astute assessment of its topic I have seen. This is not light praise: for I have several times been mistaken for an English Perfesser, & own the regulation tweed jacket.

Chesterton’s epigrammatic remark, on the coarse & the refined, is characteristic of him: plain, simple, & powerful enough to bring down the curtain wall of the castle. Moreover, it was one in a series of densely-packed epigrams, their fuses connected in unimpeachably logical order. Having made his hole, he then charges through, & up the towers with grappling hooks, taking in due course the crenellated turrets of George Eliot & John Stuart Mill. From there he surveys the keep. But he does not deny they are towers, did not belittle them while climbing, has not hesitated to show what is best & most impressive in their works. Nor, what is completely missing. For example: the curiously telling observation that George Eliot has humour, & everything else required of great literature, except “glamour.” Or, that Jane Austen could do something none of the Victorian woman novelists who came after her could do, which was, look at a man coolly. And a hundred more remarks as startling & revealing. Chesterton makes me appreciate the best in authors I am inclined to abhor (Carlyle, for instance), & assures me that he appreciates the merits in those I love but find nearly indefensible (Ruskin).

Almost invariably, there is real depth beneath the surface glitter. Chesterton attributes the polite (but anxious) discretion of the Victorian Age to the emergence of women as writers “equal” with, even greater than the men, in the remarkably original genre of the Victorian novel; then clinches this by observing that whereas no woman could have written Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), a woman could perhaps have written Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852). And this thrown off, in the course of developing a larger argument about the “Victorian compromise” — the bastion of a semi-official Utilitarianism, absorbing shocks on every side, from literary, artistic, & religious rebels, & being in some sense reshaped by them. Too, mutual absorption with an accommodating background religious tradition, long since undermined; ending finally in deadlock when this Christian faith refuses to disappear.

The 20th century began on the 28th of June, 1914, & was as Solzhenitsyn declared, godless, in the main. Yet the peculiar nature of the godlessness of that short century (which ended in 1989) was not its own creation. True, it is prefigured in the French Revolution; in the French, German, & Scottish “Enlightenments.” But it is moderated & systematized in the Victorian literature that Chesterton has analyzed in this little book, & presented so clearly that we, who were creatures of the 20th century, can see ourselves in the mirror. Our essentially Victorian scheme of Progress, on the Utilitarian model, marched triumphantly forward through Auschwitz & the Gulag, into a world quite unlike that which the Victorians inhabited; a world they could not have imagined. But they provided the moral callousing with which we endured it.

“Progress” in itself means nothing — for what are we progressing towards? — unless given the direction which Utilitarianism gave it, at first explicitly, later implicitly. Chesterton demonstrates what Utilitarianism is: the old Puritan impulse, stripped of its Christian dogmatic content. Through the Victorian age, & great Victorian minds, it was able to assimilate what it initially lacked as an alternative religion. The genius of the age was to make armed & dangerous a worldview which, left only to its own resources, was merely boring & asinine: to provide it with the cosmology of Darwin, & the psychopathology of Karl Marx. But it was more than the triumph of scientism. Through brilliantly agnostic novels, for instance, it reduced the poetic to the mundane.

I see that Dale Ahlquist already flagged a note the publishers affixed to the front of this little, century-old volume. It explains that the book is not an “authoritative history of Victorian literature,” but only a “free & personal statement” of the “views & impressions” of its author. In other words, no author with “views” can be an authority. This is something I have been forced to accept about the world in which we have been living, ever since: that authority can come only from a committee; that “the personal” is inherently invalid; that unless vacuity can be guaranteed, no moral or intellectual argument has standing. In a further prefatory note, Chesterton himself is made to apologize for the way his religious beliefs may have contaminated his judgement. But with that out of the way, he proceeds to tell something that must have made his publishers feel awkward & uncomfortable: the truth.

Let us take a brief moment to laugh, sarcastically, at the idea that freedom consists of obedience to the laws of supply & demand. John Lukacs quotes Wendell Berry: “Rodents & rats live with the laws of supply & demand. Human beings live with the laws of justice & mercy.”

Berry I may never mention again, but to Lukacs I keep returning. The quote is in a diary entry, within a footnote, within a chapter, within the latest but one, of the last books Lukacs has been writing — “waving adieu, adieu, adieu,” through the last quarter century. It is entitled, Last Rites. He is approaching ninety now, & one always fears that his last, last book may be his last. This happens with people: they come & they go.

It was my friend George Jonas who called my attention to Lukacs — “John, not György” — some years ago. Were it not for Jonas, I would hardly know about any Hungarians. Jonas is a “liberal,” but in a sense of that word that died in the 1960s, & is now incomprehensible to anyone not historically learned. We say “1950s liberal,” but that doesn’t really tell us much, beyond the chronological fact that the last throatsome & abdominal wharks of traditional liberalism were heard around 1956. Lukacs is a self-proclaimed “reactionary.” It is typical of an old-fashioned liberal to appreciate an old-fashioned reactionary; & vice versa. But this can hardly matter when we are both dead.

It is typical of contemporary liberals & conservatives to abominate one another. By Lukacs’ account, the Left is governed more by fear, the Right more by hatred, but there is fear in the hatred & hatred in the fear. They are the two faces of contemporary Populism, & may be found in every one of our contemporary democracies across America & Europe, although the flavour of the mutual antipathy varies from, say, USA to Hungary; & for historical reasons.

It is typical of Lukacs to have e.g. little patience for Ronald Reagan: to describe him as a divorced movie actor, who spent World War II in Hollywood, & was sentimental about the armed forces. It was Reagan who began the puerile practice of saluting to soldiers when not himself (thank God) in a military uniform; a practice copied by each subsequent President. This was, let gentle reader understand, an unconscious yet vile extension of the concept of “Commander-in-Chief,” mentioned in a list of presidential powers in Section 2 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution, but not there dwelt upon.

It is typical of Lukacs to mention that when a President now goes abroad, he takes a retinue that would dwarf that of Genghis Khan or Louis XIV. It would be typical of me to add, that the limit of American conservative ambition today is to find “another Reagan.”

And as a parenthesis to this, I have been coming to realize, especially in the time since wandering away from my last extended job as a newspaper pundit, that I made a terrible mistake in aligning myself with contemporary “conservatives” in order to avoid the even worse mistake of aligning with contemporary “liberals.” It was a vulgar error, requiring confession & shame. My apologies to the people of Afghanistan & Iraq. You had enough problems already.

Tocqueville noted that the character of a people is more important than their institutions. Lukacs’ writing on his adoptive America (three score years in one house in greater Philadelphia, outliving two American wives, now married to a third) has focused repeatedly on that character. I alluded to his masterpiece, A Thread of Years, when I last mentioned him (March 3rd). He mentions autobiographically the transformation of the township in which he has lived. Outwardly, it is hardly spectacular. Neither the housing stock, nor the demographic, is much changed. Inwardly, people who once knew each other by name have been replaced by people with no idea about, nor interest in their neighbours; people who will themselves most likely move on to a new location within four or five years.  Outwardly, the institutions have not much changed, either — except for the gradual disappearance of everything that corresponded to “civil society.” The character of the people has changed.

Kierkegaard: “People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for instance, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation.”

In the time since he wrote that (1845?) we have considerably extended the domain of “freedom,” to the point where we can now put quotes around that word, too. So much of what Kierkegaard wrote is truer today; so much of the cheap Hegelianism he opposed is even more false, although triumphant. As Lukacs observes, women, blacks, homosexuals, abortionists, & pornographers have all been emancipated, but liberalism itself (in that fine old classical sense) is dead. This is hardly surprising, for as Lukacs also reminds, it is harder to be free than unfree.

On reading his penultimate last, last book (which appeared in 2009: I’m running four years behind the publishing season) I feel able to correct my previous criticism that he is “too Anglophile, too Churchillian.” His successive writings on the duel that took place, between Churchill & Hitler about May 1940 — not the moment when World War II was won, but when, more importantly, it was not lost — makes more sense to me now. Indeed, Churchill makes more sense, in the latest light cast upon him by Lukacs.

We forget that Churchill’s sudden rise to power was almost anti-democratic; that he displaced Lord Halifax in something like a Parliamentary coup; that he was despised not only before, but after taking office. Without him, Britain would almost certainly have negotiated a peace that recognized Hitler’s conquest of Europe. The war was actually won by Roosevelt & Stalin, on the grand logistical principles of modern Total Warfare, requiring the sacrifice of millions. But it was not lost by Churchill, fighting essentially alone.

It was not lost, because the old, deceased, frankly aristocratic (or as Lukacs insists, bourgeois) notion of “character” prevailed, & could still be communicated. Yet it came down to one extraordinary, wilful person. And because it was not lost, by a man whose profoundest commitment was not to “democracy” but to Western Civilization, we are to this day living in circumstances that do not quite approximate to total savagery. To this day we have preserved a few precious options. We have lost, however, our gratitude for them.

Churchill himself was operating beyond the close of the Modern Age (it ended in 1914), but was still essentially of it. He was a man of the 19th century, somehow functioning in the 20th. His accomplishment was more astounding than we realize. Lukacs, ditto, is now functioning in the 21st.

At the front of Last Rites is a very useful demolition of the popular concepts of “subjectivity” & “objectivity.” They cannot be disentangled. No purely selfish nor unselfish position is possible to an inmate of our world. The only position possible is a “personal” one. Nor can “detachment” mean “separation.” There are no innocent bystanders on this planet. “Materialism” & “idealism” are among other false dualities mentioned, that offer some fleeting illusion; we must live with the real. The chapter is a manifesto on the conditions of historical knowledge, which are the conditions of human life. Our history is as imperfect as our own memories, but it is all we have to work with in an evanescent present, towards a future that cannot be conceived. The rest of the book is a good read, but this first chapter, entitled “A Bad Fifteen Minutes,” is the fist in this little comet. It requires very careful mining.

Curiously, it leads forward instead of back, to an even later last, last book that has yet to fall into my hands: The Future of History (2011). From reviews, I gather that Lukacs is directly addressing the collapse of his profession into a miasma of academic fads, relieved by popular escapist “infotainment.” The actual number of history graduates has fallen to less than a quarter of what it once was, & the standards continue to slide. (Yet as Lukacs also knows, there are very bright, self-educated students, who can still get the gist of the discipline, & are not so easily intimidated by “political correction” as the despairing might think.)

A hostile review by the current Regius Professor in the University of Cambridge shows what Lukacs is getting at. Vulgar & fatuous, the reviewer cannot engage with Lukacs except on the level of calling him “a blast from the past.” He proposes to correct the old guy by taking him out for a few beers, & perhaps bringing him up to speed on “gender studies” & the latest Google-search methodologies. We have, in what were the humanities departments of our universities, nearly complete moral & intellectual degeneration. And yet, to my mind, this is beside the point, for none of that can last much longer. Nothing of value is produced, & the fads themselves negate one another. The kids they graduate are totally unsuited to material survival, let alone cognition; & the subsidies are running out.

Lukacs will instead be useful to those trying to rebuild the study of history, as a serious & consequential enterprise. This will require restarting from scratch, in the circumstances created by the actual death of that “Western Civ” we were recalling above, or more precisely of its Modern Age: the one in which this “history” was invented. For as Lukacs understands, the end of it is not something we are living, but something that was lived & is over now.

Among my favourite places to lunch in the Greater Parkdale Area, is in the vicinity of the Robarts Library, downtown. There are food trucks parked along Saint George Street. Several offer quite extensive Chinese menus, & one a Slavic interpretation of American junk food, distinctly superior to the original. By my estimation, the town’s top hot dog vendor is also there, offering a good variety of sausages & an exceptional range of condiments. One may dine in splendour for well under ten dollars, & often under five.

It is a fine ambiance. There are various places to sit, in shade or sun, none provided with tables. Avoid conventional lunch hours, & there are no crowds. Though I must add, these days, as the avians will attest, the students in the University of Toronto are gentle. Part of the reason is that they are now, in substantial plurality, not only girls but Oriental. (I refer to the students, not the birds.) It was a brilliant stroke, on the part of the politically correct, to eliminate aggressive young males from the student body, together with males of every other description. It was perhaps the only way to neutralize the campus, as a source of violence & revolutionary zeal.

And as I say, the birds in that district appreciate the change. I have long judged the inhabitants of city neighbourhoods by the behaviour of the animals who live among them. Happy, well-adjusted animals, such as we have in truth through most of this city — animals that do not flee in terror when a human comes near — are the reflection of reasonably tame people. Along Saint George, we have not only pigeons, but sparrows who will (sometimes, after careful consideration) eat out of one’s hand; who actually expect their share in a banquet.

They have accordingly developed a broad multicultural diet: will take rice flavoured in any way, breadcrumbs in all dippings, fries with or without gravy. The chief joy I have found in lunching there has been in making the acquaintance of an equally broad range of contemporary urban sparrows, & observing their personalities. For they come smart & silly, bold & timid, gregarious & shy, gallant & rude, formal & obtuse, jolly & morose. Too, male & female, & what would appear twin syndromes of behaviour in some respects the mirror of man. That is to say, they are like us, but with the “gender rôles” partially reversed.

Quite recently I had the opportunity to make a moral assessment of eight sparrows I invited to share a box of fried rice with me. That would be four farthings, by the accounting in Saint Matthew (10:29). I say “eight,” for within the half-hour I could distinguish each with the confidence to count them (others may have escaped my attention). I say “invited,” for I refused an intemperate starling, explaining to him that I was only serving the smaller customers that day. (At which he squawked.) This prejudice was probably unnecessary on my side, for a sparrow has no difficulty in outwitting a starling, or most larger competitors for handouts, & is a master of petty theft.

By my observation, two of these sparrows were inclined to Heaven, five likelier to require Purgatory, & one was definitely bound for Hell.

This last persistently dominated the meinie for clumps of rice she showed little interest in eating; provoked a fight with another clearly trying to avoid her; & shamelessly beat up on her fellow females. (I named her “Judy,” after a prominent Canadian feminist.) Nor would she leave when told she was unwelcome. Her “ch-chur-ch-churrit-ch-chu-churrit-chu” in response was most unbecoming in a lady: for that is swear language in a sparrow.

Whereas, in contrast, the two heavenly sparrows, one of each sex, were as persistently gracious in surrendering to the first comer, & were accordingly rewarded. Both exhibited fine table manners when eating, & were melodic in their conversation. (A certain shrillness reduced the charm in the discourse of several others.) The female struck an especially philosophical attitude, contemplatively studying her benefactor with many slight tilts of her head to take in the full visual spectacle. (I tilted my head in imitative reply.) Darker above, & paler below, in comparison to the other females, I concluded that she was the eldest, & named her “Thérèse.”

They are a monogamous bird, jealous on both sides, though some conduct affairs away from their nests, & the eager helpfulness of the unmated may create the appearance of a ménage à trois. One of the challenges at lunch was to see if I could guess who was married to whom. While none were wearing rings, I supposed the heavenly sparrows to be a couple. My interest also settled on a young, purgatorial pair, who ate mostly together, & who flit almost simultaneously with fairly large clumps as if they had children to return to.

One, & only one, condescended to take not out of my hand, but from my fingertips. This was the boldest, except Judy, & also the smallest, with the shortest tail feathers. (“Madison,” I called him.) Sociable, & fearless, I would have ranked him with the heavenly except, too much of a thief. For in my judgement, it is perfectly acceptable for a sparrow to steal from right under the beak of a pigeon or gull. But there was plenty to go round, & whipping food away from a fellow sparrow betrays impatience & poor breeding.

It will take about seven years, according to mass media sources, for the United States to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil exporter. We are told that large harbour projects designed for the importation of gas are being redesigned for export. That voluble & entertaining billionaire, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, irritated by the leucophlegmatic attitudes of his fellow Saudi royals, has been lecturing them to be afraid, to be very afraid of the “fracking revolution.” Their kingdom has depended for decades upon holding the world to ransom through OPEC; almost all their revenues are derived from oil wells. Diversify or die, he is telling them: for “light-tight” shale will obviate crude sucking — is already doing so — & their game is up.

The future of North America might seem to be assured, as a supplier of cheap commodities (oil, gas, wheat, cotton, whatever) to the increasingly diversified & technologically sophisticated economies of the Tiers Monde. Combine this with our mounting debt, & one might easily predict the global feudalism coming to a home near you. Our job as Americans will be to export, at constantly falling prices, an ever-increasing quantity of raw materials, in the vain hope of working off that debt, while it compounds indefinitely. Or call it reverse colonialism if you prefer: the same old same old, but now with the shoe on the other foot, kicking our posterior. But do not waste energy in paranoia, fearing invasion & conquest by an alien power. We would only be invaded to enforce contracts.

Let us indulge this line of prognostication a little farther, in case it is over-optimistic. The world seems awash in fossil fuel resources, once we have the means to extract them. If fracking works for us, it may work for them, too, & our slight initial advantage in technology & geology will soon go away. They won’t need our oil. That would leave us to fall back on our manufacturing base; except, it was progressively abandoned. We can do “services” perhaps, under some form of indentured labour, once we have learnt to accept wages competitive with those in rising sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile the combination of the ever-continuing “green revolution” with falling populations suggests market reliance on the subsistence model in food: for us.

Now, that’s why readers come to me: all twenty of you. I can supply the pessimistic analysis when no one else will. I do it as a public service. It is not because I think my prediction will come true — no one can predict the future, for all trends are reversible — but because glib optimism is a danger to our souls. So would be glib pessimism, but that is not the sin to which “technological man” is tempted. He thinks instead that technology can solve his problems. But it solves problems only of its own choosing, & creates more as it goes along. And it does both entirely without a brain, or any anticipation, unlike clever Nature in which the acorn foresees not only the oak, but what it will need to grow, & the requirements of its neighbours.

While we no longer have the advantage of being Christian, in the West, we still have the fading benefit from having been Christian. We have, therefore, a vestigial suspicion of technology that is not yet necessarily shared in that Tiers Monde, & a dissatisfaction with ourselves that is incomprehensible to most external observers. As an atheist might put it, centuries of religion twisted us, & freighted us with a peculiarly Christian sense of sin. It is the flip side of the “personal responsibility” that still seems to weigh on some of our better citizens. We remain spooked by a morality that makes no sense at all, once we have admitted that man is just another animal, with appetites to satisfy by any available means.

The truth is, everyone is spooked. It would be ludicrously wrong to assume that men & women of other cultures had been living like animals, these last few millennia. All had religions. And even if Christianity honed a certain edge to the old flint, the basic moral notions have been shared in every culture — the more exacting the higher in civilization we go.

Still, we (& those Jews, hence “Judeo-Christian”) are spooked at a prophetic level I think the non-Western — or more precisely never-Christianized people — seldom visit. It was a point that kept coming home to me, as a young atheist travelling in Asia. And curiously, it came home less in contrasting my fellow travellers with the natives, than in contrasting Christian with non-Christian people who were Asia-born. It was a wavelength thing — this peculiar sense of the brotherhood of man, that comes from the acknowledgement of a common Father. In their case, it was a conscious acknowledgement. In my own case at the time, it was more subconscious: something “merely cultural.”

*

I used above the French original of the term, Tiers Monde, because the English translation into “Third World” has come to misrepresent Alfred Sauvy’s intention in coining it (around 1952). I think this French demographer — a Leftist, but an interesting one, who was for instance generally opposed to “population control” policies  — was communicating something more subtle than “backward” in describing the countries that were then neither members of NATO, nor members of the Warsaw Pact. “Ignored, exploited, scorned” they might have been, but also, ambitious to make something of themselves.

The Soviet Empire is mostly gone, the Red Chinese Empire is transformed; various countries have risen out of the abject material poverty of the immediate post-War, China most spectacularly in consideration of her size. The term itself remains useful, for it distinguished between territories governed by Western “ideologies” — which I would define here as “deformations of Christianity” — & those colonized by the ideologies but dreaming of escape.

Most were governed, at first, by variations upon one Western ideology in particular: Marxism. To my mind, their first dictators bought into socialism from training in the fashionable schools of London & Paris; but in the sincere if false belief that it could lead quicker than free-market capitalism to industrial wealth & power. The idea was, omit the capitalist phase & move directly to the smokestacks. Their peoples were seriously bruised by their mistakes, starved & often butchered. But we are wrong to suppose that the motive of the first generation of Marxist dictators (whether or not nominally elected) was ideological purity. Even in the case of the unambiguously demonic Mao Tse-tung, the underlying intention was pragmatic; monstrously pragmatic.

In a sense, Sauvy anticipated China’s later adaptation of the “capitalist road,” along with many other parallel developments. “Maoism” was an incredibly brutal, self-destructive phase, or phases. (The principles behind the mass killings of the Great Leap Forward, & the Cultural Revolution, were rehearsed in Yenan during World War II, when ten thousand or so were killed off by way of experiment.)  But eventually Mao died, & his successors, tired of murdering people pointlessly, resolved to try something that might work. In China, as elsewhere in the Tiers Monde, the inheritors of the Revolutionary State struggled to maintain “revolutionary legitimacy,” while also to feed their people. The trick was to grant carefully managed economic freedom &, if possible, no other kind.

Wealth, of course, is a means to power, & therefore attractive to any class that worships Power. Power in turn can appropriate wealth. The challenge has always been how to make a colony of human beings as efficient as a colony of ants, given the eccentricities of humans. From ancient Assyria at least, & forward, the worshippers of Power have been working on this. It now appears that the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party has come up with the best solution so far.

I brought religion into this earlier, in my usual apparently gratuitous way. Religious faith & counsel helps a society self-organize, from the family up, but is out of the question when the leadership intend to maintain control from the top, down. The “meta-narrative” of an ideology offers a fallback, for a while. When that fails, hands-on pragmatism remains as the means of maintaining a secular dictatorship, free from the religious “sentimentalities” of the past. The modern answer is the “mixed economy,” in which the power of socialist envy is married to the power of capitalist greed, to keep people’s minds from straying back to religion when Power begins to bore them.

In my view (which tends to monopolize this website), we have been approaching that from various angles. America, Europe, India, China are “evolving” towards the same thing — bureaucratic management of envy & greed, in the service of a genuinely godless political order, on a scale intrinsically inhuman. But in the moments before the Chinese system finally collapses, it must take the prize for efficiency. The Politburo in Beijing could indulge fresh thinking, of the most purely “unsentimental” kind, thanks largely to the pioneering work of Mao, who “let a hundred flowers bloom” & then cut them down, repeatedly. (The death toll was in the tens of millions.) This gave them the cleanest slate, & most docile population, on which to build “communist capitalism in one country,” & thus to beat the rest of us on efficiency alone.

*

As ever I am making a wild stab at a general understanding of our current situation. This necessarily involves history. But in public political consciousness, we are working from a history that has been reduced to “political economy” by both Left & Right, in Western academia over more than two centuries. To the European mind, post-Enlightenment, wealth & power are the only relevant things: “income” & “rights.” The rest is silence. The nature of the ancient religious “sentimentalities” — whether Eastern or Western — came to be less & less understood, until it is comprehensible only to the tiny minority who still refuse to buy in. The religious underpinnings of every social order were dismissed as irrational, as accidental, in the Enlightenment project to replace the living God with an abstract Man. They were taken to be arbitrary cultural obstructions to our material advancement. “Progress” had bulldozed, & would continue to bulldoze these obstructions — albeit with some “welfare” infilling behind, as the State appropriated the traditional educational, medical, & charitable functions of family & Church.

It was not appreciated that these cultural obstructions were purposeful; that many of the inefficiencies were purposeful; that in every society limitations on the creation of wealth were intentional, even when only instinctive. (Parenthetical segue to Elizabeth Anscombe’s magnificent long essay on Intention, 1957 revised 1963, where such concepts as “purpose” & “intention” are sorted out.) The obstructions had a function that is inconceivable to the modern observer. It was to keep Mammon in chains.

Starvation is a real evil, as everyone will guess, & worth doing something about. The ambition to eat & live, decently, is not a surrender to Mammon. But bloat is a surrender, & the intention towards bloat is a deadly sin (“gluttony”). This, anyway, is one way of describing the Christian construction. Gluttony, not the worst sin in the pléiade, until we make it so, is perhaps the sin most laughed at today — an indication of how poorly we are defended against it. (We reduce it to over-eating, for which we assume the cure is dieting & exercise.)

To my mind, the great evil in European Imperialism did not consist of economic exploitation. Instead that “exploitation” was merrily spreading wealth (until squandered in many cases by Marxist dictatorships). The great evil was instead exporting what was of no value in our Western culture — the how-to of gluttony — by the extremely bad example of our rapacity. What we had, or once had, was a religion worth exporting, because it was actually better than any other. Our extremely bad example restricted its spread.

Our missionaries, almost everywhere, worked at cross-purposes to the secular colonial authorities. They worked, whenever wisely, with the grain of native cultures, enlarging & redeeming rather than destroying. Tremendous effort was expended in the intellectual enterprise of meeting each culture half-way: in mastering languages, customs, comparative religion; in establishing means of communication at the deepest possible level. It was a mindset for which every individual soul counted, & in which, for the purpose of Salvation, no price was too high. They — not all the missionaries, of course; some were mere outriders for the State — learned as well as taught. (Conversely, some colonial officials were themselves deeply & very purposefully Christian.) Indeed one cannot teach without learning, & it could be observed that the great bulk of what has been preserved of the world’s cultural history is the direct or indirect product of that missionary enterprise.

But alongside it came an immense destructive force, the true exploitation, which consisted of undermining native religious & cultural traditions, & replacing them not with a “higher religion” but with the ideologies of Western nationalism & materialism. We re-programmed the world for “economic progress,” as the end for human striving in & of itself; & for its delivery through agencies of the State. This was the means by which, I think, many of our ancestors were able to reserve for themselves a lower place in Hell than any of the pagans they so casually oppressed, manipulated, & despised.

Today we are harvesting what we sowed. We “freed” people from native traditions which should never have been sneered at, while preventing the deep-cultural infusion of our own best traditions. We evangelized for an empty materialism. And now, the countries of the Tiers Monde embark one by one on entirely pragmatic enterprises, burying our materialism under theirs.

*

This would in turn provide the basis for my own worldly optimism. For while it is true that we made a hash of our Christian mission, hope is not extinguished. In the face of vacuous materialism, & under long-neglected angelic direction, it is now finally growing without our help from tiny seeds once planted — seemingly everywhere outside the West. Here alone is it shrinking, together oddly enough with our material power — as Christ leaves us to go where He is wanted. Even in the terms of this world, we have got what we deserved. And as Socrates argued, a just punishment should be welcomed.

“Dearth of civil courage” is a phrase from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor & theologian, anti-Nazi dissident & conspirator (martyred 9 April 1945). He used it to explain the failure of German resistance to Hitler, before, during, & after his rise. Hitler was a special case, but “dearth of civil courage” is not an exclusively German trait. Lies, including very big lies, are in circulation &, for the duration of our world, will be in circulation from the Father of Lies. They will likewise always enjoy cover behind some form of “political correctness” — behind the drapery of fashion, if you will. Not everyone even knows that they are lies, or cares what the truth is. No courage should ever be expected of the careless. But there are people who do know perfectly well, have & will always know which end is “up” — & these remain silent. Their motive is dead obvious. Speaking up would cost them.

A latter-day disciple of Bonhoeffer’s, & a friend of mine, is Uwe Siemon-Netto. We never met in Vietnam, but go back to similar experiences there: rather more intense in his case. He was & remains an unusual case: a hack journalist by trade & yet, a Lutheran pastor by training. He has played a part in various intra-Lutheran debates that is interesting, but largely beyond me. His prolonged survival on some outer limb of the journalistic “mainstream” is, in itself, a noteworthy accomplishment. His job, as he has understood it, is to act as witness, & report what he has seen. Unlike most journalists I know, who falsely present themselves as “objective” & “disinterested,” Uwe imagines this calling to be pregnant with moral significance. It most certainly involves speaking up for truths that no one wants to hear; telling whole truths, not partial; being the messenger &, if it comes to that, the messenger who gets killed.

At age seventy-six, however, it must be said that Uwe is very much alive, & that his fate was instead to be ignored. He covered everything from the building of the Berlin Wall to its fall, & was present for almost every world crisis from the 1960s forward, on various continents. But Vietnam was where he left his heart most conspicuously. His recent book, Duc (his nickname in ‘Nam, shared with a street urchin he befriended), may stand as his definitive memoir of the forgotten & ignored truths of that conflict. But it is also what the subtitle promises: A Reporter’s Love for A Wounded People. Though very grim in passages, it is often entertaining. Many anecdotes are hilarious, & his evocation of life as it was in Vietnam, now pushing half a century ago, is undimmed & exact from what must have been obsessive note-taking. The reflections scattered through the book, including Uwe’s reflections on the journalist’s calling, are beautiful.

If for no other cause, I would recommend the book to gentle reader as the best account I know of the massacre at Hué, during the Tet Offensive in 1968. Played down by the functionaries of the Western press, excused by many, & denied by some (Noam Chomsky, &c), it was a manifestation of unambiguous evil on a convincing scale. No honest appraisal could fail to expose the nature of the Communist mind that had planned it in attentive detail: three thousand political executions, against a background of general carnage in which defenceless non-combatants, including large numbers of women & children considered to belong to the “class enemy,” became the intended occupants of mass graves.

It is hard for me to write about my own experiences in that country, partly for the rage I still contain against smug, liberal journalists who critiqued the allied war effort from the safety of the bars in Saigon. It is a disproportionate rage, for they were malicious idiots, not murderers in the first degree. Few had the intelligence to see the sometimes direct relationship between what they were filing & what would ensue; some did, & exulted in their power.

Uwe, with far greater experience in the field, as well as in Saigon, has done something very impressive. He presents his account calmly, by infusing it with love. What he is presenting is in accord with my own understanding of the history, & my own cursory witness. To his as to my mind, the fall of Vietnam into the hands of the Communists was among the great horrors of the 20th century. Those from the West whose vanity, wilful ignorance, moral indifference, & deceit served the Communist conquest, I have yet to forgive. So many went on to dominant positions in the world’s second-oldest profession.

The most memorable incident in the book is, perhaps, Uwe’s brief recruitment as a nurse in a German field clinic for civilian wounded. A doctor was working alone, after the Viet Cong had kidnapped the rest of the medical staff. Uwe’s tasks included, for instance, holding the spilt guts of a Vietnamese woman in place while the doctor tried to stitch her back together.

Years later, he found himself proposing an angle to a “conservative” German newspaper, looking for background historical features during the reunification. The major rôle East Germany had played, as an arms supplier to North Vietnam & the Viet Cong, & as an agitprop supplier to the West, was recalled.

“Here is an idea,” he said. “How about producing an in-depth report on the East German manufacturers of PPM-2 mines, the remnants of whose victims I saw all over Route 19 in Vietnam? How about searching East German archives for material about the propaganda mill that accused West Germany of complicity in the Vietnam War, probably resulting in the death of our doctors and nurses in Vietnam?”

He was met with an explosion of hostility from his younger editorial colleagues. Graduates of the student revolution of 1968, they had been taught to glorify Ho Chi Minh. This could not surprise him. Nor, alas, was he entirely surprised by the silence of his older colleagues, who knew more than the puppies, but “found it imprudent” to come to his support.

*

Hitlers come & go, but moral docility remains a constant in Germany, as here. I could fill this anti-blog with Canadian examples, witnessed first-hand. And I have seen it inside the Church, as well as outside. Would it make the slightest difference if our society, in the main, were still “nominally” Christian, & not as highly “secularized” as it has become through my lifetime?

On the simplest pragmatic level, I think, yes it would. I think the great majority would be, as ever, timidly unwilling to express themselves at personal cost. But I also think the constant liturgical reminder, that better is required of humans, would provide us with more heroes & heroines; that the constant recollection of Saints & Martyrs, who made stands when stands had to be made (often enough against the Church’s own bureaucracy) would help impart some starch. And in the background, I think there would be a greater capacity to discern the ring of truth. For in telling right apart from wrong, constant reinforcement should in fact work better than no reinforcement.

My empirical evidence for this is, however, only cumulatively anecdotal. It consists of the real heroes I have encountered in my life. Again & again I have found they were animated by what is today a highly unrepresentative religious faith; that this was very plainly the source of their courage. And that the few exceptions (such as my own unreligious father) nevertheless acted in ways that were stereotypically Christian. In principle, of course, anyone can be a hero. In practice, it is not so glib.

Uwe is one of my Christian heroes. Not a Saint, by any stretch of my imagination or his, but an honest man, willing to call a spade a spade, which is half way home already.

We see, on perusing the news this morning, that the BBC have lifted their deathwatch on Nelson Mandela for the moment, & shifted to birthwatch on a lady they identify in their headline as “Kate Middleton.” I think they are referring to the Duchess of Cambridge, & that the child will be, according to received laws of succession, third heir to the throne of Canada, after his or her father Prince William, & grandfather Prince Charles. We pray all goes well.

My views on monarchy have not been concealed, & though Jacobite I must say that I am finally reconciled to the Hanoverian succession. In light of the performance of (apostate) Catholic figures on the world stage, I might almost thank God they are Protestant. And I pray for Canada, & for the other remaining British dominions, & for Little England, too, that we will continue to deserve our Queen, & her successors. Lord give them strength & wisdom, to do the little that remains in their charge with elegance & exemplary panache, as a constant reminder of noble order in a world given over to, … well, look around.

My formula for the rectification of powers between Church & State was stated somewhere on an idiot box. Multiply those of the former by ten, & divide those of the latter by ten, & the State will still have too much power. As to rebalancing between Crown & Parliament within the State, I would employ approximately the same arithmetic. But of course our system is not “and” but rather “Crown in Parliament,” so the whole thing should be done invisibly. We’ll leave Commoners & Lords (within the Parliament) to another day.

Patriots & Loyalists alike should be reminded that the little tyrannies against which we both railed, back in the 1760s & ’70s, originated almost entirely in the Parliament at Westminster, & not, as certain propagandists alleged, in the household of his late majesty, King George III. The attacks on him were cheap shots, & typical of self-serving politicians. Now that my republican friends have had a good taste of the despoliations of their own Congress, perhaps they may finally agree to review the mistakes that were made.

In the meanwhile all I can say is, God save our Queen!

*

Afternoon update: IT’S A BOY!

We had, up here in the High Doganate, succeeded until this moment in resisting the temptation to mention Detroit, a city which does not seem able even to declare itself bankrupt successfully, now forty-six years after it should have begun processing the papers. For the entire city resolved to surrender to rioters in 1967; to not even clean up after them. That was when they should have declared complete public incompetence, & submitted their collective application to be enslaved.

Looking at the pics the media have exhumed of the decay & abandonment, it struck me that the ruins of Detroit are more haunting & beautiful than Motor City ever was. And yet part of this beauty is in the ache for that lost past: for the men & women who made “normal” lives here, once upon a time — who went about their jobs & housework; raised whining kids, made their mortgage payments; watched movies & television; pressed their noses into the shop windows; ate hamburgers, & macaroni with processed cheese. And see the pride of the world in these gutted mansions, where the more successful accountants used to live. How grand they must once have been: the turrets & the gardens & the servants bringing iced tea!

(Of course, there is always more to it than that, more in every life, even among the most craven materialists. And perhaps that, too, is easier to see when the people are ghosts, & nothing can be concealed any longer; & even the houses are ghosts, & we can see right through. We know, that because they were human, these people who lived & died in Detroit had joys & loves, fears & hatreds, precious memories & precious things. We know that each was a secret universe, shared only in moments with his neighbour, & then only partly seen. We know, or should know, that each life was worth living, regardless of the externals. But here I am only discussing the externals.)

Detroit embodied our North American promise of “equal opportunity” — wealth in return for willingness to work. Arbeit macht frei. The promise was empty, as all such promises are empty, that turn on the wheel of fortune. The city was built on false promise. It died. It is true that you could once get a job, in return only for docile behaviour; that you could once get rich, if you had the right sort of insolence, & luck. But even those promises stale-dated.

And now that part of Michigan is a suburban encampment of economic refugees; a ring in space around a black hole. From the Google height, of low orbit, one may detect the crescent of malls & parking lots, the spread of docile labour in their ticky-tack boxes, & of gated management in their monster homes — all of it pushing outward in search of fake freedom, or spinning inward to the expanding hole. And rather ugly, except the flowers & trees.

The term that stabs is “equal opportunity.” The rich & poor had always lived together, everywhere else in the world. One might argue that America’s chief export has been “the gated community,” at the crown of a system of segregation or “apartness”; of by-laws enforcing neighbourhood by class. It works with retailing by market stratum, & “lifestyle” advertising to postal location; everyone within a given neighbourhood having tastes & wants much the same. By increments we have become a continent gerrymandered for “democracy” — for the purposes of mass marketing, & mass politics, also much the same.

Detroit developed this product of the Industrial Revolution. It went beyond what Birmingham & Manchester had achieved. Race was added as a self-organizing factor, & another poison to hasten its demise. The city became an array of non-communicating cells, a “multiculture.” European cities survive to the degree that they do not import this disease, & people of different classes still mix. But each is now under siege, being ghettoized by unassimilable immigration, into mutually uncomprehending sheikhdoms.

London we may still have, for some years yet, because after the riots two summers ago the neighbours came out in solidarity with their brooms, the morning after — in Hackney, Brixton, Chingford, Walthamstow, Peckham, Enfield, Battersea, Croydon, Ealing, Barking, East Ham. It was as if they were confronting the rioters, by turning the other cheek. I was deeply impressed by that spontaneous response, from Londoners I thought had nothing left in them; by all those “middle class” petit-bourgeois types (of quite various races), actually taking responsibility upon themselves, & not waiting to blame the politicians they had elected. And when the Mayor turned up to deliver a little speech, his constituents drowned him out with, “Where’s your broom?” — until he stopped blathering & started sweeping.

The “white flight” to the suburbs — not only in Detroit — was, it seemed to me even at the time, the domestic equivalent to the American surrender in Vietnam. Ditto the surrender of college administrators to over-indulged, rioting students; & a hundred other indications that defeat was now being accepted by the “silent majority,” wherever it was made available to them. They would vote for Nixon, & leave it to him. They would meanwhile retreat inside their (literally or figuratively) gated communities. Having lost round one, they would now wait, patiently & apart, until they were entirely outnumbered. They would, when required, pretend to like it, & give lip-service to anything the Zeitgeist now ordained. They would even agree to be called “oppressors,” when in fact they were simpering cowards.

It is almost half a century since Americans (including Canadians) decided that our habits & values were not worth defending, that in the larger Darwinian view we ought to be extinct. Everything from Roe v. Wade to “same sex marriage” declares, in one ascending voice: “We are not worth saving.” And now we discover that even some fey Europeans have more spine: one vertebra still connected to another, among people not yet isolated by class; a moral order not as fully disintegrated, & therefore less amenable to arbitrary change. (Though pretty darn amenable notwithstanding.)

*

I noticed several Detroit photographs were spoilt, aesthetically, by the sight of glass office towers in the distant background — erected, as I understand, thanks to the major subsidies, insider tax breaks, & focused planning corruption of urban regeneration schemes. They are, or were, Nanny State’s way of saving the city — big business & big government in partnership to provide gleaming anthills of fresh bureaucracy. And now they ruin the harmony of the ruins. But they will fade in when they, too, are abandoned in due course.

Detroit was marked for self-destruction from the beginning, by the grand scheme. It was Henry Ford the Soviets so admired. Good old Henry “Bunk” Ford provided their model of industrialization: smokestacks, not spires. The Red Chinese in their turn have done a better job of exploiting the history-is-bunk worldview, building instant cities, starting from Shenzhen — perhaps the ugliest urban agglomeration ever assembled by compelled human labour, until it was overtaken by a dozen more in the same country. They have created, on the improved Detroit model, fantastically large conurbations in which “the people” may work & sleep, eat & defecate; skyscraping concrete hives for their worker bees. Cities built yesterday; without history, without flavour, without “soul.” And now, strange to say, I gather Chinese planners have begun to fear these omissions, & seek some “spiritual” component they can somehow plug in, before the whole thing blows up in their faces.

The desire for bread alone will never keep people working. It will only keep them working until they get the bread.

This is a principle of economics that Joseph Schumpeter partially discerned, or saw more clearly than the other Austrian economists — that liberal democratic capitalist materialism is, in its very nature, self-defeating. It cannot generate anything but decadence. It decays inevitably, in meandering welfare socialism. At heart (not according to Schumpeter but to me) materialism is boring. In a sense, Detroit died of boredom. It made money, lots of money once upon a time. But it had very little use for the money. A few nice museums, & churches while there were still Christians, but the rest was all production & consumption of essentially worthless goods. That is to say, goods that are merely the means to some end that was never thought through; not goods of any intrinsic merit. Production line goods, like cars: faster & faster ways to get nowhere.

Decades ago, the high-paid workers began welding beer cans inside the fenders on the automobile production lines. They were dying of consumption. They couldn’t be bothered competing any more. “These jobs aren’t good enough for Americans.” They were only good enough for Asiatics, who work desperate & cheap. (And now they are welding beer cans to the fenders in Shenzhen.)

That, I earnestly believe, is where the “opportunity” society checks out: at the Dollarama. Man cannot live by bread alone, nor on empty abstract expressions: “democracy,” “progress,” & all the other cant. We need another reason to live, as an older, & quite explicitly Christian, Middle America once had. As even Detroit had, before religion & family bled away.

You can’t kick start an economy that has burnt itself out, as the Japanese have also discovered, through the generation since they caught up with America, materially. You can’t regrow a world without children, or rekindle belief without belief. But let me not get carried away. Eventually hunger will kick start us again: hunger alike for bread & for meaning.