Essays in Idleness

It makes no sense to send reporters to cover the Vatican who know little about how the Catholic Church works, & are entirely out of sympathy with her cause. What they report will be consistently wrong; crawling with factual errors & silly misjudgements & missed points. In the whole press pool, only one reporter was able to understand Latin. She was therefore the one who broke the story — while her colleagues mulled about looking bored. Nice “irony” there, for if there is one thing every modern journalist knows, with absolutely smug certainty, it is that you don’t need Latin.

The shock attending Pope Benedict’s resignation — not to the public at large, but specifically among journalists — condemns their incompetence. He had openly discussed the possibility of resigning on several occasions over the last three years, & described the conditions in which it would be acceptable. There were two: a moment of relative tranquillity in the government of the Church; when the Pope feels physically unable to continue. These conditions were met. Almost all the banter I have seen in mass media, & all the speculation about “what really happened,” is painfully ignorant & implicitly malicious.

In a farewell to priests in the city of Rome, yesterday, Benedict touched directly on this situation, in its public & political dimension. He spoke of the misrepresentation of Vatican II through mass media that contributed hugely to the catastrophe of the Church in the 1960s. (Not just “progressive” journalists, but “progressive” churchmen using journalists & their media.) Benedict inherited the government of a Church still under siege. Much of what he did through his office was designed expressly to meet the needs of a Church under siege, with limited options. It is a mistake to think the “modern world” is indifferent to Catholicism. It recognizes the Church instinctively as an enemy that must be destroyed.

Reciprocally, the faithful increasingly recognize — more consciously than instinctively — the foolishness in appeasement of their most deadly enemy. It is not Islam, although the rivalry with Islam is ancient & again boiling. It is the quasi-religion that calls itself “secular humanism,” & by any number of other names, each of which implies the self-flattery & self-worship of man in his animal nature, “freed” alike from his supernatural nature, & from God.

Press & popular judgement often fails to grasp that the papacy has always been a multidimensional institution, & is most signally, now. I have noticed from my own mail, & through the Internet, that there is a remarkably sharp “gender divide” on this. Among believing Catholics themselves, women are characteristically blind to the governing function of the Pope; men are characteristically blind to his pastoral function. Both seem to miss what a much older Catholic (by decades, perhaps centuries) would identify as the mystical function: the role of the Pope in prayer.

One of several interesting exceptions is “The Anchoress” — Elizabeth Scalia, an American blogress whose speculations may be overlooked for the sake of focusing on this spiritual acuity: that given the actual existence of God, in the stated relation to His Church, the prayers of the Pope are of very great significance.

And in retiring to a life of prayer, this man elected Pope may be taking upon himself a Gethsemane that only he fully understands, in light of his direct experience of Church government. The weight of the malice directed towards Rome, from the world outside but also from within many Church quarters, is something that must be dealt with not only pastorally, & politically, but in a mystical way, & thus necessarily out of public view. Benedict discerns that all his waning physical powers must be concentrated on that task, leaving the governing, pastoral, & other functions (iconic, liturgical, &c) to a successor. He took the name “Benedict,” which belonged to the founder of European monasticism. It is entirely possible that he knows what he is doing.

I used the term “Gethsemane” with intent. Benedict’s direct experience of non-cooperation, within the Church’s own hierarchy, is telling. He issued very bold instructions to deal with the priestly sexual  scandals, the banking scandals, the liturgical crisis — & has been stonewalled & bafflegabbed every step of the way. At the most intimate level, his own trusted butler stole important personal papers. I am not saying this so gentle reader may feel sorry for him. Rather, he has, with his extraordinary smile (something I once glimpsed with my own eyes from close: something truly unworldly), directly suffered the extraordinary evils now flourishing both outside &, more importantly, inside the Church.

The Church has always coped well with external persecution, & invariably benefited from it, however ghastly the experience. The enemy within is the real danger; & this has always been so. It is prefigured in the Gospel account of Judas. It is more complex than perfect good versus perfect evil: for Judas proved the ultimate “necessary evil,” through whose act the ministry of Christ was completed. These are not shallow waters.

Benedict is taking a grave risk which he clearly understands. The one point he added to the announcement of his own resignation, after the fact — & only this one thing — was an assurance that he understood the gravity of his decision. Sandro Magister, one of the few truly informed Vatican observers, described this in the Italian magazine L’Espresso as a “supernatural wager.” For just as John Paul II made possible the “miracle” of Ratzinger’s election by clinging on, Benedict XVI may by suddenly resigning have created the dynamic by which the College of Cardinals may choose a “miraculous” successor. That would be, I should think, someone other than any of the candidates who have been publicly touted, each of whom strikes me as fatally flawed. (I won’t go through the list with my reasons.)

Unfortunately the term “wager” will be misunderstood, as would my word “risk” — for this is not equivalent to rolling the dice, or flipping a coin. On the contrary, it has become a necessary wager, & its meaning is unmistakably bound in with this unprecedented act of resignation. Benedict is saying, in effect, “Lord you must act in these circumstances, which have passed beyond my power.” And praying thus, as he will continue to pray, with all the gravity of a man who has represented, as Priest before God, more than a billion living Catholics. He is taking the weight of this upon himself, as he has taken the weight of the consequences of his decision.

For his resignation is certainly unprecedented, given the circumstances of the modern world; appears more so to me, the more it is examined. It sets up an unprecedented election in the College of Cardinals, where no time was available for the usual offstage vetting, with the last Pope on his deathbed. In such a sudden gathering, with no “momentum” behind any of the “front runners,” it strikes me that the election of a little-known candidate is possible, even likely. That man might conceivably be the best, even the only suitable candidate. But we must leave this to the College & to God.

We are — we Catholics, & all Christians & other religious & even non-religious who recognize the unique role of the papacy in our world, as a power for good & an obstruction to evil — caught up in this. What can we do? The truth is we can do nothing but pray. But that is not a throwaway. If, as Christians must believe, the drama of this earthly life is real, & we are not random collocations of atoms, those prayers are also real. And God is indeed searching our hearts; & the prayers in question must be in very earnest.

It is the received view, up here in the High Doganate, that we do not know what we do not know. Granted, this is a peculiarly Catholic view, & may therefore smack of sectarianism; but we cannot find an alternative to it that is at all convincing. We puzzle upon Mysteries that were simply “given,” entirely beyond human comprehension. Not only “we,” but I. The little I know with any certainty has come mostly from that exercise, both inside & outside religion; for though natural mysteries are different in kind from theological Mysteries, they have a similar impenetrable quality. In fact, they deepen, the more that we learn.

This is not so simple a matter as not knowing the answers to empirical questions, such as by what means creatures of one species metamorphose into creatures of another. True enough, having rejected as glib the suggestion of “natural selection,” I have nothing whatever to replace it with; but that is only the beginning of my ignorance. And it is not something I need to know. People lived for centuries without knowing the Earth went much more around the Sun than vice versa, yet the sunsets were the same. They could even make accurate astronomical calculations, on a wrong model of the solar system. With the right rocket technology, but that wrong model, we could have landed a man on the moon. So who really needed Copernicus? (Well, he simplified the math.)

A more fundamental ignorance would be, “What is it that I need to know?” For this would involve cutting through far worse misdirections than were supplied by Claudius Ptolemy’s astronomy, & thus much harder mental work.

Faith comes into this equation, in the most elementary sense, because a few things I obviously do need to know come to me via “penny catechism,” the way the alphabet used to come to children through penny broadsides. I can’t think of any other way the most basic theological, philosophical, & even logical propositions could have reached me, than by flat instruction, for none could possibly be discovered through trial & error, by any isolated man working entirely from scratch.

And since one proposition depends on another, it is very much like the problem of the first biological cell. It involved a number of coordinated propositions, & could not have been assembled one bit at a time. (Only inanimate structures can be assembled like that, solid brick over solid brick, & even then one might be living in Christchurch where the ground liquefies from time to time.)

Instead, I am thinking of the “higher,” or at least, most complex propositions, in what seems like the No Man’s Land between what we need to know, & what we don’t. The perfect example, to my mind, is the apparent answer to a prayer. Is it God’s answer, the Devil’s answer, or just my own stupid projection? I will not vex the reader in this case with several dozen subsidiary questions. In only one, or perhaps two cases in the course of my life could I be reasonably sure. In the others, “I don’t know” would be indicated, together with its moral corollary, “Proceed with caution.”

An example might clarify what I am babbling about here. Once, just after the death of a very close friend whom I’d been attending, I pleaded with God to give me a glimpse of what happens immediately after death. And seemingly in response, I had something like a vision, of my friend Bob having passed through a door still slightly ajar, to a place that was like Earth, but with spatial & temporal dimensions transformed, & a light all-suffusing. And with that, a feeling of peace, that we will know the place; that it will not be entirely foreign to the human. But was this a genuine or a false vision? I do not know.

Note that I am not attempting some radical Cartesian or Baconian or Humean or Kantian critique of reason. As a penny-catechized Catholic, I accept reason more or less at face value. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, & has the right ambiance, it may be safely labelled. Should it turn out to be a swan, I will change the label, but it will take some work to convince me. Generally speaking, reason is serviceable, unless one’s own misconceptions (about ducks, for instance) get in the way. Generally speaking, the more checkable information one has, the more one knows. In this case, the more one even knows about how the duck looks back at you, & sizes you up. For I am not sceptical of the empathetic reason, though I know it can take us only so far. The Other is the Other after all, even when it is a duck. But ducks & we have a few things in common.

People should realize that the modern attack on Reason came with the Reformation. (Many previous attacks, but none so materially successful.) The notion that reason itself is twisted, & must be rejected as collateral damage from the Fall of Man, provided much of the theological fuel with which torchings of Holy Church were attempted. She had for her part embraced reason from the beginning, as one of the very tests for the “fallenness” of Man. Reason is of God; it is men who are unreasonable. Because we are unchaste, because we do not pursue reason chastely, because we twist it to get the results we want. This, however, is a problem with us. It is not a problem with reason.

Reason, of just this chaste sort, plays a very large role in day to day religion. Let us now take the Sacrament of Penance — “Confession” — for an example, suitable to Ash Wednesday. Preparing for Confession, I may consult some standard list of mortal vices, under headings such as Pride, Envy, Greed, Lust, Wrath, Sloth, Gluttony. But often one is not quite sure, not merely what heading to choose, but whether what one did was really a sin. And from the best spiritual advisers, it turns out the next question isn’t, “What did it feel like?” That is Pride’s bottomlessly subjective dissertation, the one in which we all love to wallow, gluttonously. The question is instead much plainer & more objective: “What did it look like?”

For reason in this case involves a simple out-of-body exercise. Stand outside & look in, as if you were not you, but an impartial, external observer. If it looked like a sin, walked like a sin, quacked like a sin, & had the right ambiance, you have almost certainly got in nailed. The fact you felt badly when you were caught need not come into it.

(This is something I love about the Church’s teaching on sin, & all the liturgical & other practices that follow from it. It is not emotional & theatrical. It is instead logical & reasonable. Nor does it fantasize that men will, as a regular habit, make full & adequate confessions to God. Knowing what men are, the Church isn’t so easily suckered.)

There is plenty we can know by reason, even without the use of statistics. There indeed must be more that we can know by reason, than we do know, for new things are discovered in the same old data. That, incidentally, is how Catholic doctrines may develop, over time. It is the same old doctrine from the start, but from new experience we suddenly discover an implication we had not seen before. The doctrine in this case has not “changed”; it has instead been more completely comprehended.

The worldview, in which we try reason first, & fight our lazy fatalist habits, is different in kind from the worldview in which everything that happens is attributed to djinns. As Western men & women, we inherit this “rationalist” propensity, perhaps from pagan Greeks, who pioneered in this territory. But the Greeks themselves knew reason was not something they had made, rather something they had discovered. They also knew it was intrinsically divine.

Reason comes down to us, immeasurably enhanced, because the Church bought into it bigtime, from even before the Pauline generation. It is there in Christ who, directly in the Gospels, unhesitantly applies the sharpest reason to the clever people trying to entrap Him. And it has been taught, as part of the “core curriculum” through twenty centuries, so that by now the intellectual heritage of the Greeks — Plato, Aristotle, Theocritus, &c — is inseparable from our Catholic Christian heritage; spliced into the framing of the bark, so to say. (It wasn’t just the recovery of Aristotelian texts from the Byzantine Greeks through the Arabs; for such as Origen & Augustine had already been fully engaged.)

And I left out Socrates who, quite apart from the biographers & admirers through whom we try to “read” him — for like Jesus of Nazareth he wrote nothing down — comes closest to anticipating the Christian point of view, starting from reason. That we learn by direct inquiry; that we start by admitting what we don’t know; that the pursuit of truth requires not just the mind but the whole man. That, reason & unreason war within each human heart. Where, unreason masquerades as reason. That, ideas have consequences in life. Where, they are passed from man to man. That, “philosophy” being not merely thought, but lived — is something profoundly personal.

From a position of real acknowledged ignorance, & proceeding by steps of reason, Socrates was able to get a considerable distance. By pursuing such concepts as “justice” — ruthlessly, in a sense — he came remarkably close to the Christian idea of God. He did not get there. Nevertheless, he taught Plato, & through Plato, Aristotle, things that to outward appearance no merely rational person, even an ingenious Greek, had any business knowing. Being Socrates he stopped at what he could not know. But what he knew, he knew; & he drank the hemlock rather than agree to what he knew was wrong.

Revelation takes us well beyond Reason, yet it is reason that leads to revelation’s door, historically as well as in every other sense. For even in assimilating the content of “Scripture & Tradition” we need minds, to test. It could not be genuine Revelation unless it made sense; unless it was internally consistent & externally coherent; unless we could be sure that its consequences were not trivial or absurd.

From the beginning, the Church rejected such theological try-ons as “by faith alone,” unless that faith was consistent with reason; or “by scripture alone,” knowing the very canon of Scripture required prayerful reasoning to discern, & prayerful reasoning to interpret. For she began her work even before there was a New Testament; being founded not on Scripture, but in Christ. (But of course everything is in practice checked against Scripture, & has been ever since it was available. Every papal proclamation of which I am aware — quite a few by now, including many quite ancient — has been utterly crawling with scriptural references & allusions.)

The Old Testament served the first generation, & was pre-eminent for several more. The earliest Fathers of the Church, as the Rabbis before them, were fully aware that Scripture is replete with things crying out to be misinterpreted by the perversity of men — who aren’t Saints; whose reasoning is neither chaste nor humble; whose learning is seldom even skin deep; & who in the event are seething, not with charity but with anger. Scripture could be twisted against itself — it was often so twisted before their eyes. Every day, to this day, we may watch men turning the screws on reason: big-brained “reformers” who are puffballs of spite; making rules from which they are self-exempted.

And that is precisely why we read Scripture in light of Church teaching — the cumulative interpretive wisdom of so many hundred years. For two millennia now, the Church has had the delicate task of disowning her fanatics, & putting their djinns back in their bottles; of consolidating & teaching, instead, what can be known among reasonable men, who will consent to learn before they try teaching, & are of an instinct to reverence what they have inherited.

For Revelation, too, takes us only so far. It tells us what we need to know, but not everything we want to know. As human beings — fundamentally flawed, yet also strangely exalted in the image of Christ — we characteristically push at the edges. We ask for precision where only approximation is available to us, or analogy from what we have seen; we demand answers to questions that we cannot even formulate coherently. We ask, always, for more than we can get, & as a trading race, think we can negotiate. A proud race, too, we are always bluffing, especially to ourselves. We almost invariably think we know more than we do — until our ignorance is exposed, if not well after.

One of my own Lenten resolutions this year is to find contentment; not only in what I can eat & drink; in what I must do for penance, & give for alms; but also in what I can know. To shake off, if only for a season, this curiously modern neurosis, that aspires to superhuman knowledge, & blinds one not only to what can be known, but even to what is known already. (Or was this not the first mortal sin, of Adam?) To go, ideally, forty days & nights without trying to make any Faustian bargains.

“Should it happen that the Roman Pontiff resigns from his office, it is required for validity that the resignation be freely made & properly manifested, but it is not necessary that it be accepted by anyone.” (Canon 332, §2)

It does not really matter how one feels about such things: they are as they are. Those of us who are Catholic, or by tendency orthodox Christians, must orient ourselves to the largest of facts. The battle will be won, with or without us. Christ will ultimately prevail. This is the startling original for the rather cheap Trotskyite notion of being “on the right side of history.” The right side can look very much like the losing side, perhaps for centuries at a time. But a thousand years may be as one day, in the sight of God; & one day as a thousand years. In the light of Eternity, we must endeavour to avoid short-term thinking.

The news of Pope Benedict’s resignation was so stunning that I noticed the first media reports were straightforward, & without comment or insinuations. The reporters & editors must scratch their heads to think how this may be made into another scandal for the Church. As an old media hack myself, I grimace. Yet we may fairly ignore what is said, here today & gone tomorrow.

It has been about six centuries since the last Pope resigned — Gregory XII in 1415, as his part of an arrangement to end a schism in which there were two Popes & two Colleges of Cardinals. These were quite different circumstances from those of today; & indeed a reminder that things can get worse than we are likely to imagine. But, too, what seems impossible may be suddenly resolved, when men put higher interests above their own, & let Christ do His work.

Last before Gregory, I think, was Pope Celestine V, who resigned in 1294 after making a decree which clarified on what terms resignation was possible.  (We do not say “abdicated” because the Pope is not a worldly monarch.) There had been a number of papal resignations before that, going back to the first centuries. The precise number depends on historical speculations. But the possibility of resigning has been consistently acknowledged throughout Church history. Pope John Paul II left a letter of resignation in the hands of the Dean of the College of Cardinals to be acted upon should he become incapacitated in any of several ways. Pope Pius XII, during World War II, made provisions for his resignation to be published in the event of his imprisonment by the Nazis, & for the College of Cardinals to meet in neutral Portugal to choose a successor. This is the world, & prudence has always required such measures.

Our own Pope Benedict XVI — God keep this beloved man — gave the reasons for his resignation clearly. He is becoming enfeebled by age. He states the obvious, that “in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes & shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter & proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind & body are necessary.”

Something more is read between such lines, by this idle observer. The Vatican bureaucracy has been, in recent times, & perhaps inevitably, infiltrated by the very “progressive” forces it exists to fight. The Pope must be entirely on his toes in such an environment. A man of extraordinary humility but also astute, Benedict would be aware of the danger that members of this bureaucracy would exploit his mental & physical decline.

This has become, to my mind, the key practical issue for the Church to face in her immediate future. The Pope & his Bishops have real canonical power, but with the proliferation of bureaucracy within the Church herself, they are required to exert it forcefully. In the Church as in mundane government, the bureaucracies take their own lead. They become too large for detailed supervision; & through the normal operation of organizational politics — a fact of nature — they acquire their own internal directors & directions. Bureaucracy is in itself an evil I have long tried to oppose: it is by its very nature self-serving, & ruthlessly inhumane. I have often compared it to a cancer.

So much is published & taught & done, with Church resources today, that accords far better with contemporary “liberal” ideals than with Church teaching; which twists & compromises the most essential doctrines founded on the teaching of Christ. An impression of authority can be given when heretical statements are left unchallenged, that seem to bear the imprimatur of the Church. But those under holy vows, with the legitimate authority, get their hands so full of trouble they want to avoid “yet another scene.” Cowardice has many arguments; & exhaustion has some more.

At every level, from the parish priest up, the government of the Church must be taken back by those under holy vows, from those who are not, & never were nor will be. The Church must speak with one voice on behalf of Catholic doctrine, or the laity are left in great confusion, with terrible consequences to souls. We need great clarity about what is Catholic & what is not. Then people may decide with clarity whether they are Catholics or not, to live & act accordingly.

It is naturally with foreboding that I look to this immediate future, & to the inevitable tasks of the Church in cultures that are now de-Christianized, & increasingly, sometimes virulently, anti-Christian. I am confident that what must be done will eventually be done, one way or another; confident that in the end Christ will reign. I considered the election of Benedict himself a kind of miracle; the answer to very earnest prayers. And rather than belabour, let me now merely cite the old Catholic prayer during papal elections:

“Lord, do not send us the Pope we deserve.”

My latest column at Catholic Thing would seem to be on “False comfort” — or, comforts; I was unsure whether to use the singular or plural in the title I suggested. There is a Whole Earth Catalogue of potential false comforts, indeed:

“There are so many ways to derive false comfort from the situation of the Catholic Church today — in Canada, USA, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, &c — that one becomes bewildered sometimes, trying to choose between them. Each is so easy to kick away. …”

On reflection, they are all variations on the same old false comfort, & so the singular was more appropriate. One might call it “worldly optimism.” Those who put their hope in the things of this world are at an intrinsic disadvantage to those who don’t, in the prospect of Futurity. This is something clearly explained through the Gospels, & supported through Epistles, Fathers & Doctors, & in every other orthodox expression of the Catholic Christian faith. But it is not something people readily understand.

That, I suspect, is one of the reasons persons confronting personal, familial, or societal disaster so often turn to God. For that is what it takes for them to get it. There may have been a glimmer of understanding, but it took disaster to bring it home: that there is nothing in & of this world to which we may look with security for salvation.

Which is not to contradict the extraordinary beauty of this world, & the goodness & truth we may well have found here. These things are transient. They are our “intimations of immortality,” but not the thing itself. There are moments, even down here on Earth, when time stands still for us. Often they seem absurd, & thus irrelevant to the lives we are leading. From the “no nonsense” mind they may be dismissed as trivial, as “something I must have eaten,” the way Scrooge rejects his own visitation in the Christmas Carol. The word “sublime” has been used to describe the scenery in such moments, where the word “beautiful” seems no longer to suffice. They remain in the memory, from time but dislocated: as if with no before, no after, only a “during.” I associate them with the light of grace, which shines beyond space & time, into the little box of our creaturely nesting; through its walls. No human born was ever deprived of such glimpses of Paradise; I am convinced by both faith & experience that this is the case. But what do we make of it?

There is one way to turn: towards Christ, & with him through the Cross of Calvary to the Resurrection. But what is the alternative?

A close friend of a close friend recently committed suicide. To the mind of reason, this is “the ultimate subjective act,” in contrast to murder, “the ultimate objective act.” See: T.G. Masaryk, whose pioneering sociological work, Suicide & the Meaning of Civilization (Vienna 1881, translated 1970) was effectively plagiarized but mangled by Durkheim a decade later. Masaryk I think nailed the key feature in societies that were liberalizing, industrializing, & becoming “agnostic” & “post-Protestant.” It was the extraordinary spike in the suicide statistics, to levels inconceivable in any “traditional society.” This was the key indicator of “progress,” as it were.

It is the key indicator for hope in this world, as I have come to realize, thinking back over the list of people I have known, who succumbed to their despair when faced with a disaster beyond their capacity to assimilate: selbstmord, “self murder.” To the older Catholic mind, this was the worst form of murder imaginable. For no greater rejection of God can be imagined.

Conversely joy, & especially joy in real adversity, is the mark of true belief. (“By their fruits ye shall know them.”) We cannot possibly count on happy times, ahead of us in this world; or even on happier times, should they depend on our own contrivance. But if we set our sights farther, it might not be so bad.

Near the beginning of Lark Rise to Candleford — Flora Thompson’s trilogy remembering an 1880s childhood around & about a dusty hamlet of north-east Oxfordshire — the children in the stonemason’s house ask seven searching theological questions:

— Who planted the buttercups?

— Why did God let the wheat get blighted?

— Who lived in this house before we did, & what were their children’s names?

— What’s the sea like?

— Is it bigger than the Cottisloe Pond?

— Why can’t we go to Heaven in the donkey-cart?

— Is it farther than Banbury?

These are haunting questions, when a child asks them; which is why I class them all as “theological.” To the child, buttercups & wheat are known; Cottisloe Pond & even Banbury can be known; birds & beasts & donkey-carts are known. The mysteries within them may not yet be detected. But sometimes they have, & even the most familiar can become suddenly numinous: “Who lived in this house before we did, & what were their children’s names?” It is the sort of question recognized by the inspired writers of Scripture.

A few paragraphs later, a little girl has a leaf in her hand, from a flowerpot, & asks an old lady, “What’s it called?”

“Tis called mind-your-own-business, an’ I think I’d better give a slip of it to your mother to plant in a pot for you,” the old lady replies.

This is not, to my mind, the best pedagogical procedure. It is true that children will ask nuisance questions, questions to which they know the answers, to which they don’t want to know the answers, questions only begging for attention like an ostrich tapping on the window pane. But in the main, I have found from children — my own & other people’s — that there are benefits to be had, on both sides, when a grown-up truly listens to a child’s question.

I say, on both sides, because children teach as well as learn; not only through the questions we cannot answer, but from having seen things we haven’t seen. They start from being smaller & shorter, & that alone gives them another angle. Their minds are necessarily freer from preconceptions. But sometimes it goes quite beyond that. The smallest children seem sometimes aware of presences invisible to us, whose world-weary eyes are practised at deletion. And in their cruelty & their empathy, their dramas & their superstitions, their delight in rhythm & rhyme, they open & close many secret doors:

          Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,
          Your house is on fire, your children are gone,
          Except the little one under a stone,
          Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home.

There is something childlike in the innocence of the saintly & wise, though of course there is, too, something adult in them to our own childishness. In each consultation of the Summa Theologica, I am the more struck by both operating together — yoked, as it were, & in tandem — in the mind of Thomas Aquinas. He is, to a shocking degree, capable of posing the naïve question, from the one side; & from the other, capable of listening to it, with an unearthly calm. Again & again I am astounded by the richness & depth in replies which catch not only the subtlety I have missed in a question, but also the obvious I have missed. Yet this is the man who stopped writing some months before the end of his life, though still well, confiding to an old companion that after a vision he had received, everything he’d written seemed to him as straw.

Without vision, yet working from cumbersome analogy, it seems to me the theological questions disputed most rancorously, by myself & even by members of the Commentariat, are like the questions asked by children. That, perhaps all theological questions are like this — necessary as they may be to answer, or to decide, given the often horrific consequences of getting them wrong. For so often they have life-&-death implications. Yet some adult — some imagined person who has put the childhood of human life behind him, & gone on to his reward — might smile at the questions. For no, the sea is not larger than the Cottisloe Pond; nor Heaven farther than Banbury; & yes, you could reach it in a donkey-cart; & see by Whom the buttercups were planted.

In an old Scots version of the Lord’s Prayer, expanded or exploded as if to parse each phrase, & meant to be sung, “we children” are invoked in a wonderful way:

          Our father God celestial
          Now ar we come to pray to thee.
          We are thy children thairfore we call
          Heir us father mercifullie …

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I personally resolved never to buy a car — until I could afford a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, & a uniformed chauffeur. This resolution did not last. In the end I bought several cars, always second-hand & a bit rusted, at the insistence of a certain estranged wife. But in my defence, I never learnt to drive, & never piloted even one of them.

Well, that is only approximately true. My papa taught me how to drive his Volkswagen bug when I was ten or eleven (on an abandoned airfield, at first, & then right through Georgetown, Ontario). But at least let me claim, I have never had a driver’s licence, nor ever applied for one. My reasoning was entirely moral. It seemed cruel to me, to deprive servants of employment, & if one cannot at least hire a chauffeur, what business can one have owning a car? It is to prefer machinery to people.

Our views change over time, & with experience, & just last week my view finally changed on that Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. I don’t want it any more. Someone else can have it. Let me explain.

*

During moments of (arguably) divinely enforced leisure, last week, I found myself dipped in an old favourite Alexandrian poet. It was Callimachus: his Iambi, & Aetia. He is the kind of poet one might expect to appeal to me: royalist, traditionalist, elitist, Aristotelian. Bit of a religious nutjob, in moments. Too, he was the writer of wickedly cutting epigrams. His thirty-year feud with Apollonius of Rhodes — beloved topic of old Classics masters — once added another attraction, for I never much liked the Argonautica. (From what has since been discovered, in the way of papyri, I infer the two were in fact good buddies, who carried on their theatrical rivalry in public as a private joke. Since guessing this I have found the Argonautica much improved.)

Callimachus is master of the elegy, but more. Most remarkably, he turned the form away from lament, & its rhythmic reinforcement, by insinuating a certain sauciness of tone, & a new rather urbane range of interests; yet without sacrificing that beautiful background thrum of sadness & melancholy, that conveys the transience of all human life. He became Greek model to such Latin imitators as Catullus, Propertius, Ovid. …

In his dayjob at the Library of Alexandria, Callimachus also made himself useful by constructing the Pinakes: the very first library catalogue, & perhaps to this day the most entertaining & informative. Aheu, it only survives in fragments; & a tremendous quantity of his other prose writings — “notes & queries” material on authors & works the Library was preserving against the ravages of time — are themselves no longer extant. We get poignant glimpses of such enterprise, through stray quotes in later authors — themselves patiently copied & collated by the monks of Byzantium, & so on.

But that is not why I wanted to mention Callimachus; or then, Pausanias, to whom I referred for light on the statuary of Helicon; via the excellent modern British classical scholar, Alan Cameron (Callimachus & His Critics, 1995); & then Strabo, naturally (working the ancient tour guides, backwards); then Judith McKenzie’s fabulous new reconstructive work on The Architecture of Alexandria & Egypt (Yale, 2005); finally to land slap dab in the middle of the Deipnosophistae (Book V, around folio 200: the description of the famous Dionysian procession through Alexandria, which Athenaeus apparently cribs from a lost work of Callixeinus).

Why, you may ask, this Ariadnean thread? To what purpose?

A very discerning question, gentle reader. You see, it started with a reference to Arsinoë, the Macedonian princess who became first wife to Ptolemy II Philadelphus, & is obscurely flattered by Callimachus as a kind of “tenth muse.” Her association with a bronze ostrich emerged from the commentary. And my reader will follow the spool perfectly if he realizes that my “search term” must have been “ostrich” throughout. And that the chase would lead back to Alexandria, inevitably.

(Be patient, gentle reader, I’m making this as short as I can.)

*

I have always loved ostriches, as much for their feistiness as for their delicious meat. (Some good recipes in Apicius.) Ostriches have been slandered by this “head in the sand” myth, for which we may blame Pliny the Elder. They are not so stupid as that; though from what I have heard, anecdotally, not all that smart, either. I am thinking of one notorious individual on an ostrich farm in Kenya who, having taken an irrational dislike to a certain tree, would not leave off charging at it, & then colliding with it, till substantially more damage had been done to the bird than to the tree.

But the standard, one might almost say instinctive ostrich response to a large enemy in an open desert setting, is more clever. It runs away fast (& an ostrich is the world’s fastest biped) till it has made some distance, then suddenly falls down flat against the ground — exploiting the distance, the heat haze, & its natural colouration to become utterly invisible. For it is now perfectly camouflaged as one among innumerable heaps of dirt. (The head goes onto the sand, in this instance, not into; in other circumstances it may go into the sand, but only because the creature is rooting for something.)

There are quite a few Old Testament references to ostriches, & together they paint a picture more accurate than Pliny’s. It is true an ostrich may be slow on the uptake, & careless. But God uses him as a warning to us against being plain dumb, & then trying to compensate with a bad temper. On the plus side, let it be said that the average ostrich, in the state of nature prior to the introduction of firearms (Theodore Roosevelt was astute on this topic), could live a good long time: decades, & in many cases to the full three score & ten. Moreover, they stay, typically, vibrant & healthy to the end. On the minus side, the end almost invariably comes through some conspicuous act of stupidity.

But he is not a coward. An adult male North African Red-Necked [sic!] Ostrich stands eight or nine feet tall, weighs in over 300 pounds, & should never be messed with. He has excellent eyesight & hearing, & should you seriously annoy him, he can chase you at over 40 miles per hour — dropping perhaps to 30 after ten miles or so, should the race become a marathon. Sooner or later he will surely catch you up, for he has an excellent ticker, & stamina like you wouldn’t believe. Let it also be noted, that when push comes to shove, he has a kick that can take your head clean off. Ostriches in nature have been seen killing lions, when very, very annoyed.

And verily, I have sometimes thought that Nature made the ostrich a flightless bird out of her basic sense of fairness. His wings, though useless for aerobatics, have 101 other household uses. Please, no one call them “vestigial” — it is the moa that has no wings at all. An ostrich can box with his wings, like a prizefighter; they are essential to temperature management for both self & eggs; & likewise in maintaining high running speeds. It is thanks to his wings that an ostrich can turn sharp corners at very high speeds, & sprint with 15-foot strides. A masterpiece of intelligent design; until he forgets to use the wings as stabilizers, whenupon he tends to run in circles alas, adding to his reputation as a rather dim bird.

His eyeballs are of a size with billiard balls, but his brain no larger than a walnut, which makes him, I suppose, something of an artist. That eyeball is magnificently constructed for desert landscapes. He can see what is coming very sharply at great distances, through the shimmer. But in the reading range, he would probably need glasses. Thus I offer this word to the wise: you may confound him by swishing a stick before his face. He will be entirely at a loss how to focus on this distraction, or what to do about it, & will promptly abandon any previous intention to, say, reduce you to a mincemeat pulp with his giant razor toenails (one on each foot).

A powerful bird, & notwithstanding his head so ludicrously small, capable of affection for members of other species &, within his intellectual limitations, of being tamed. There were several accounts from old colonial Palestine & Mesopotamia of ostriches which had adopted humans — with a partiality to British officers in full dress. Having picked their officer, they would follow him around everywhere, possibly to the amusement of native Arab spectators. Loyal to a fault (a comparison with Her Majesty’s Arab subjects would be invidious), they would trail after him outdoors & in. When shut outside, such an ostrich will then tap persistently for attention, with his beak on windows & doors. Endlessly, till you shoot him.

There are many more things to be said about the ostrich kind. I must somehow contain my enthusiasm. But let us finally consider: he is the only bird on our planet that yawns. Which suggests to me, less boredom than a real eagerness for employment.

*

Well, I’m sure gentle reader sees where this going: back to ancient Alexandria, & to that Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who, in addition to libraries & museums, temples, mausoleums, lighthouses & ports, was also keen on zoos. He kept a considerable menage, in the royal quarter, including aviaries of exotic birds. Monarchical government is generally good for that sort of thing. And Philadelphus loved a parade. Let us imagine, … or rather, let us skip over it, & refer the curious reader to Judith McKenzie for a comprehensive account of the very impressive public buildings & sights past which that Dionysian pageant would have passed, & the further spectacles of which it might have consisted. For I did solemnly promise to be brief.

It is the chariots I wish to fix upon gentle reader’s attention. They were pulled by ostriches, in teams & yoked pairs. The chariots themselves were, we can believe, finely decorated; but lo, the ostriches in their gorgeous attire! … That is style!

And it is the reason I shall be trading in my (imaginary) Rolls. Yes, it is an admirable conveyance, in a mechanical sort of way. But I’m tired of settling for wheel rubber, chrome, & grey polished steel.

A chauffeur I will have, the moment I can afford one; & keepers for my ostrich stables, too. And an ostrich yard, of considerable dimensions, for these animals are nothing if not free range. Confine them in an acre or two, & they will sicken & die. They need miles. They need nesting room. Nor will the cock be happy without a few pretty hens — & my Church does not oppose polygamous customs, at least in that species. Granted, this will all require more money than I currently have; more even than I can run up on Visa.

But I do long to ride through the Greater Parkdale Area in a Ptolemaic chariot, pulled by my exquisite ostrich team.

Among my most irritating traits — naturally selected, perhaps, by my participation in hack journalism over the years — is conducting intelligence tests in public bars. They would perhaps be more acceptable if I announced them openly, & set each in the format of a pub quiz. But my purpose is seldom to provide entertainment. It is instead, to find out whether it is worth arguing with any given interlocutor, about some topic he has raised. I ask apparently innocent questions, or make leading remarks, in order to establish if he has the fondest idea what he is talking about. For if he doesn’t, & by his manner shows no inclination to learn, there is really no point in arguing. Were I as wise as I am irritating, I would perhaps stop arguing when there is no point. Alas, too often, I take the bait anyway.

Out “drinking with the boys” last night (only one Tuesday left until Lent!) I was reminded of a test conducted elsewhere fairly recently. This was a couple of years ago, when I found myself being verbally assaulted by a pair of dreadful Darwinoids, to whom I had just been introduced. They knew me for the dreadful anti-Darwinian from the Ottawa Citizen, & had “a problem with that.”

Soon after our conversation began, for reasons too dull to recite, I became curious to know if either understood what the word “epigenetic” means. I wasn’t looking for a technical definition, along the lines of “an alteration in the genome that does not correspond to an alteration in the nucleotide sequence,” but something more fundamental than that. Did they grasp that genes can express themselves differently, & indeed so differently that a dramatically different creature could be constructed from exactly the same genes? (The point is important, because unless fully grasped, a great deal of deterministic nonsense about genes will be spoken.)

One of them rolled off something like a technical definition, but with a mistake to suggest it had been learnt by rote. The other, with no direct biological training that I could discern, was entirely clueless. He had incidentally been the more aggressive of the two in accusing me of “Mediaeval ignorance.”

But again: I wasn’t testing for rote acquisition of neo-Darwinist jargon. I was testing for elementary comprehension of biological process. Does the pupil in this case begin to understand the dimensional depth of his error when he glibly assigns, for instance, certain fixed traits to certain fixed genes? And if not, might it still be possible to explain the matter to him, so that he can, eventually, “get” the concept? In the event, “Darwinoid A” proved possibly teachable, “Darwinoid B” definitely unteachable.

A second line of intelligence testing was then administered. Both interlocutors asserted that the essential doctrine in some neo-Darwinian “consensus” is natural selection from random mutations. Now, this is unfair even to neo-Darwinism, which does flirtatiously wink at a few decidedly non-random factors in the production of mutations that must then pass through the “selection” filter. But more fundamentally: As avowed Darwinists, did they have any idea what Darwin himself had taught? For the old bearded wonder never asserted that mutation would be “random” in the coin-flipping sense. (He was cautiously vague.) Nor did he assert that “natural selection” was the only possible filter. On the contrary, he expressly asserted that he was not asserting that. (The man knew how to cover his backside.)

This is why I feel sorry for Darwin sometimes, & even for Karl Marx. Bad as they might have been, they did not deserve their supporters. Late in life, Herr Marx supposedly exclaimed, “I am not a Marxist!” while listening to French Marxists expounding his ideas. Likewise, we might imagine Mr Darwin in ye pub, exclaiming, “I am not a Darwinist!”

The specific issue at the 21st-century pub table became the book, What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor & Massimo Piattelli Palmarini. The authors are a couple of explicitly atheist, cognitive science types whose training was, respectively, more philosophical & more biological. It came out in 2010, & attracted the predictable hailstorm of abuse, mostly ad hominem. That I was physically carrying a copy of this book, & moreover, produced it visibly with a recommendation, perhaps contributed to my interlocutors’ spleen.

The book is worth keeping in circulation if only because it does actually provide a good summary of the case against basic Darwinism — against the idea that “natural selection” can explain anything at all about evolution — & then against the various ways neo-Darwinists have tried to extend the definition of “natural selection” to get around this obstacle. It is a summary only: so far as I remember (my copy of the book having since been passed along) none of the arguments were original. The genius was in gathering the arguments together, updating them with recent findings, setting them in concrete logical order, then placing this slab over poor Darwin’s corpse, in the hope it might stay buried.

The authors did not argue for “intelligent design,” unless implicitly. Their point was that Darwinism — in any form at all — is absolutely useless for the purpose of explaining evolutionary developments. Its attraction has nothing to do with science, & everything to do with metaphor: it appeals because its believers desperately want it to be true. But by now we know too much biology by direct observation to entertain the notion that evolution could have any single material driver, let alone such a limply passive one. There are so many drivers — so many, many, many drivers — & such incredibly complex interactions between them — that no sequence of trial-&-error experiment, nor other empirical method, can possibly extract such a philosopher’s stone. Darwinism must perforce go the way of alchemy, astrology, phrenology, &c.

My favourite chapter in What Darwin Got Wrong was entitled, “The Return of the Laws of Form.” This is because it exhumed one of my own great heroes, the polymath Scotsman, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860—1948, & anti-Darwin to his dying day). His glorious book, On Growth & Form, used mathematical principles from physics to inquire into the phenomena of morphogenesis in biology — how living creatures acquire pattern & shape. At its heart is the knowledge that Nature is not “random” in any sense — that not even the smallest fleck of inanimate dust will or could behave randomly. And, that the “Laws of Nature” are necessarily coordinated: you can’t change one thing without changing another.

At the frontiers of biology today, these principles from physics & chemistry have come back into play, on a molecular & sub-molecular scale. Crucial things happen for comprehensible physical & chemical reasons not separate from, but integrated with, biological process — providing plain empirical paths to the destruction of materialist glibness. Yet nowhere — not even where simplicity is presented at its simplest — can we observe an isolated cause & effect. Too much is always going on for that. We are dealing with “machinery” vastly too intricate for mechanistic analysis; with “machinery” that is, simply, not machinery by the metaphor handed down from Descartes & Bacon.

That is what makes current science so interesting. The phenomena have themselves, as it were, broken from the Cartesian (& Darwinian) moulds. The Mechanical Fallacy imposed upon Nature something the evidence can no longer bear &, so far as it is honest, empirical science is left with no choice but to revert once again from smugness to wonder.

That this would be a source of distress to those deeply invested in the Mechanical Fallacy, is easy enough to understand. Their very faith in the meaninglessness of human life is threatened, along with often quite elaborate liberal-progressive (or fascist) views that depend on that faith. The most fundamental salvationist article in the Atheist creed — that through suicide one may always escape the consequences of one’s acts — is, ultimately, kicked away. Where is one to turn for certainty after that?

“Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

My favourite musical setting for this is Monteverdi’s from his Marian Vespers of 1610. Not his only setting of the Nisi Dominus; & apparently yet another washed up recently; I have yet to hear it. The opening of this one is however so decisively otherworldly & paradisal that it will perhaps always remain in my head as the default setting for Psalm 126 (or 127 Jacobean). The gates suddenly open — the castle gate, the city gate — on the cornetts & sackbutts, the dulcian & shawm, “the krum-horns, doppions, sordumes of jolly miners” in Auden’s imagination of the scene, when he closes his Arcadian eyes to escape the heckling of an angry Utopian. Or as his “Horae Canonicae” begin:

          Simultaneously, as soundlessly,
               Spontaneously, suddenly
          As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind
               Gates of the body fly open
          To its world beyond, the gates of the mind,
               The horn gate & the ivory gate …

Unless the Lord; for returning to the Psalm: “it is vain for you to rise before light: rise ye after you have sitten, you that eat the bread of sorrow.”

Handel’s grand version is also unforgettable, made I think for Italian patrons. England missed out on the Baroque, except in music; but even in music, the English (sometimes I use this word in an old Scots way, to mean “the English-speaking peoples”) were by the 17th century too far departed from Catholicism, too insular, too moated by the Channel, to enter into the spirit of the Baroque. To this day, I myself with my Protestant heritage fight a certain tight-assed quality that prevents me from fully enjoying, first, the extravagance of the Baroque. Then second, within it, the frank humility it expresses: the falling on one’s knees before Almighty God. Conversely, less noticed, the simplicity of means quite often employed, to express an invisible grandeur.

For Baroque could move both upward & downward through the scales; could turn inside-out & outside-in. It was not designed to accommodate mediocrity, & shoddy craftsmanship. It was continuing & adapting essentially Mediaeval notions of space, as sculptural & three-dimensional, in an age when everything was going stiff again, & architecture was returning to the old pagan façade — a big flat billboard, with a surface of marble; an appliqué of showy wealth with stuffed rubble behind it. Baroque was not “progressive” like that: not arrogant & empty of chest & brain. Baroque was reactionary. It was carved, in the round, & to be seen from every angle. It had nothing to hide; it had only to deliver.

Rubens is not loved, O gorgeous Rubens is not loved, & cannot be loved even in the resplendency of his colour, until one comes to terms with the Baroque. And this cannot be done until one overcomes one’s inner wincing at the Council of Trent, & the Catholic revival after all the defeats of the Reformation. The Protestant, Bauhaus sensibility shrinks from the Baroque as it shrinks from the Cross, when it finds the bleeding Man on it. (“Stand back! It might drip on your shoes!”) Rubens more or less intends the affront he offers to every pinched sensibility & soul: he was, after all, besides a painter, a diplomat & agent in the Tridentine cause, a welcome face at Rome & Madrid. He is the embodiment of “the Spanish Netherlands,” & God I love him for it.

We wince still, even at his fleshy women, having accustomed ourselves “progressively” over centuries now to our Northern, anti-Catholic notion of what a woman should be: thin, flat, & staring, like a boy; not curved & dynamic & fulfilled. By today, we inherit the anorexic runway model of post-Protestant capitalism: the perfection of onanism & sterility. But Rubens loved woman as woman: not hard & professional; but soft, round, & unashamed of her sex. There was nothing, as it were, “unisexual” about him. And his skies open, as the heavens open in the star gate; & his light shines down as from the Sun God. He will not be pinched; he will not apologize. He will not participate in the wince of the smug & self-satisfied — when confronted by their God.

There is a fine book by John Bourke, Baroque Churches of Central Europe (1958), should gentle reader decide to take a walk through southern Germany, Switzerland, Austria. I think that might be the best way for the Northerner — so long cut off from the light — to begin absorbing the Baroque spirit; to become acclimatized, & able to cope. Germans, even Lutheran Germans, could capture it (at least, outside Prussia), by constant exposure to the Catholic fact, which would not go away. And of course Bach understands it so well, that his Mass settings fit naturally into a Catholic church. He even used, pointedly, the old Latin Catholic texts, in his later settings. And his cantatas grow more Catholic as he ages. His fuges, too, are Baroque architecture.

My maternal aunt, Mildred Holmes — a Calvinist choirmistress & organist in Cape Breton — first called my attention to this. Bach grows “broader & broader, & ever more daring, & ever more certain what he is about.” (She scandalized her congregation by playing gratis at Catholic weddings; & then scandalized them again with her explanation that as there was only one Christ, there can be only one Church for Christians.)

But it is the Monteverdi that threw open the gate, for me, on this Psalm which has long been misread in our Northern climes. We take it, as we take everything, for a kind of hell-fire warning: “Except the Lord build the house,” … the sulphur will rain down. But no, it does not rain down, it is in us. For we have taken everything with a grain of sulphur.

Read the rest of this intensely, unambiguously pro-life Psalm. It is Baroque, Rubenesque. And it is addressed, as the Douay translation makes clearer than the old KJV,  to those who “eat their bread in sorrow.” Which would mean, us, for it describes us perfectly: our scowl in response to material wealth, our resentment of gifts, our childish cupidity & childless lascivity. Curiously enough, it tells us to have babies. “Blessed is the man who has filled his desire with them; he shall not be confounded when he shall speak to his enemies at the gate.” (At, for instance, the Gates of Vienna.)

This is joyous stuff. And yes, it is meant to affront the narrow, in their pokey little houses, in their mean cities, in which there is no room for God to reside. “Unless the Lord build the house”; “Unless the Lord keep the city”; unless we throw open our gates before the Risen Lord — we will live in the kind of environments in which we now live, in a world that is entirely man-made, & therefore very nasty.

It turns out I have written another column over at The Catholic Thing; & as it happens the first thing I have written on the Middle East for a long time.

So much has happened, especially in Egypt over the last half year. But nothing new has happened. The Muslim Brotherhood continue to consolidate their power, & by now President Morsi, who quickly gathered to himself as much power as President Mubarak had, has more. His constitutional coup, confirmed by low-turnout quick referendum, provides a wonderful illustration of how democracy is used to legitimate tyranny, all neatly ordered in a short sprint of time. Too, how it can be used to befuddle Western statesmen, who will grant a pass to anything that is arguably “freely elected.”

The Western media, which showed no understanding of what was happening in Egypt during the “Arab Spring,” have learnt nothing since. They continue to take protests against Islamism seriously, from Egypt’s very tiny secularized middle class. The threat to Morsi comes almost entirely from the other side: from the even more ruthless men of the even more fanatic Salafist party — who are delighted with any kind of street demonstrations, & as happy to exploit them as was the Muslim Brotherhood to exploit the “democracy rallies” against Mubarak. The idea that these convulsions have anything to do with the new “social media” is particularly obtuse. Cellphones are certainly used in tactical communications, but the planning of public demonstrations is in no way spontaneous, & they could easily enough have been directed by more traditional means. Western journalists, & the U.S. State Department for that matter, are simply unable to grasp that “technology” has no will of its own.

In my column for the Thing, I focus on the gathering fate of Coptic Christians. Throughout the Middle East, as Islamists come to power, or merely into a position to terrorize, ancient Christian communities are put to flight. They don’t leave casually; they leave because their homes & businesses & churches are firebombed, & their walls are decorated with slogans to communicate, “You’re next!” Most of Iraq’s million-&-a-half Christians are now gone; Syria’s Christians have started their exodus in anticipation of Assad’s fall. With the advance of Islamism throughout the Muslim world (including Bosnia & Albania), it becomes open season on them everywhere.

The Western media are not interested in this story; & the West more generally doesn’t want to know. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is almost alone among Western politicians in trying to call attention to this international crisis, as well as the consequences to European countries where these poor benighted refugees are trying to pile in.

I fear that the fate of the Copts will be worse, than that of others who got a head start on them, & behind whom the doors now close. There are just too many Copts for the West to assimilate, given shrinking immigration quotas everywhere: something in the order of 10 million Christians, in a country of 80 million Muslims, actually hungry for Shariah & becoming unhinged by the Islamist propaganda.

For here is another huge fact, that we in the West are incapable of acknowledging. “Islamism” — a fanatic, violent, ideological & very modern cult of a religion in which “church & state” were never separated — is not being forced down the throats of the unwilling. By now, great masses are crying for it. Among the ruling classes, it has filled the void left by the failed nationalism & socialism of a previous generation, but it is larger than that. It has struck broader & deeper because of its religious affiliation. And it is far from having been played out: all the evidence is of a transformative crisis within Islam itself. Westerners naively hope for some “Reformation” or “Enlightenment” moment within Islam. They do not realize that this is it. The Christian world was transformed in one way; the Islamic in quite another by its collision with modernity. I do believe it will finally burn out, but can only do so in a cataclysmic way.

But back to the Coptic Christians of Egypt. They have no place to go; & they are being demonized. Wherever the slightest altercation occurs between a Muslim & a Christian in rural Egypt, a massacre of Christians is quite likely to follow. The Copts are among the poorest of Egypt, but also among the richest: resentment for the latter, & avarice for their wealth, provides meat to the demagogues in a culture already accustomed to blaming “the other” for every domestic failure.

And of course, the Egyptian economy, such as it was, has been disintegrating since the Arab Spring began. It is a country without oil money to fall back on; & now without tourism, or any other way to earn the foreign currency it needs to import basic foodstuffs, as well as fuel & the luxuries to which its elites have become accustomed; a country whose limited stock of arable land is already dangerously over-burdened; which is approaching ecological catastrophe on several fronts. The Nile Valley, since the Aswan dam, no longer benefits from the replenishment of soil; the great river now only washes it away. (That, & not global warming, accounts for the accelerating recession of the Mediterranean coast: the Nile Delta is gradually dissolving.)

Someone must be blamed, & since Nasser, there have been no Jews left to kill. This leaves the Koran-denying Copts for the historical role of scapegoat. Lord have mercy on them.

There are 63 states, provinces, & territories scattered across the 4,600,000,000 or so acres of our American estate, which is to say, north of the Rio Grande. (I have excluded the larger bodies of fresh water, but included adjoining islands. Greenland, however, I leave to the Danes.) These in turn are gathered under two federal governments, as the consequence of unfortunate misunderstandings, 2.37 centuries ago, which resulted in a breakaway federal government.

There are approximately 3,400 counties, county-like municipal aggregations, or census county equivalents, across this area. They are hard to count. The Yukon, for instance, is just one big, seriously underpopulated, “census division.” Delaware has only three counties, but these are divided into county-sized “hundreds.” And across the American West, county lines were drawn at a time when everywhere was like the Yukon, minus Whitehorse; for even the native Indians were not so numerous.

Gentle reader may have his own aesthetic preferences, but I flinch at provincial, state, & county lines that were drawn with a ruler; to say nothing of that long monotonous mark along the 49th parallel. The lot lines followed, as smaller polygons within these, & the human enterprise was thus shaped by the ruler, as opposed to hoof, hand & eye. One may fly over Saskatchewan, for instance, counting the quarter sections from the wingtip of the aeroplane against the second hand on a watch, to determine one’s ground speed. For that matter, one can do it in a bus. This will get me a beating from Kate McMillan, perhaps, but I think it is sinful to ignore the natural contours in the land, even where they are subtle. For did you know that even Saskatchewan contains irregularities? That rivers & creeks craze the flattest Prairie?

The roads followed, straight. Here in Upper Canada, in a human landscape constructed by hurried surveyors generations after the Thirteen Colonies had been sorted & countified, one cannot help but say Aves for the late road builders. They pushed the line roads through the most discouraging obstacles, as if to vindicate the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Then died before they could add a few diagonals, for fun. Even the Romans would alter the trajectory of a road, to avoid a cliff or a swamp. Not our guys.

Along the Atlantic, where settlement came earlier, & followed European models by habit, the counties are much smaller, & rather more “organic.” Within the first thirteen United States, Vermont, southern Quebec, & the Canadian Maritimes, the county units are almost invariably smaller than the old counties in England, or the shire equivalents under the Continent’s ancient regimes. I think the reason is that the European units evolved over centuries of human habitation. Whereas here, cutting through the great primaeval forests, distances seemed greater than they were. But also our first settlers, coming from lower strata in the European pecking order, were accustomed to greater coziness.

Jefferson wanted the surveyors to parcel the American West into townships six nautical miles square. (He miscalculated the nautical mile, incidentally.)  Eight statute miles square (i.e. 64 square miles) seems to have been the ideal of the Loyalist surveyors taking possession of Upper Canada, pulling their mental strings through the wilderness of “killer trees” — & their killer roots, & the killer stones, that the pioneers then danced with.

Out on one branch of my family tree, I have “Late Loyalists” who spent 20 years manually clearing an acreage of wood to make farm near Zanesville, Ohio; only then to discover they had no freehold, just a lease. Simple people, & easy marks, they had not understood the fine print that progressive city folk like to insinuate into contracts. The bank having taken back the land they’d cleared, they started up again — near Sudbury, Ontario, on lots generously donated by Her Majesty. Readers who have never seen exposed igneous rock on Precambrian Shield will be unable to appreciate how optimistic they were. Or how thick.

Man being the measure of all things — hence the “fathom,” halved to the “yard”; the feet & inches, the pounds & ounces we find throughout pre-modern cultures, East & West — let us observe that the centre of a typical North American township is in reasonable walking distance from its boundary; that of a county within horse-riding distance, allowing plenty of time for business & return on the same day. So that, now we have discovered horses, I would say a county is probably small enough.

It has something like a natural size, usually in the doubling range of 16 to 32 miles square (256 to 1024 square miles) — bigger when there is wasteland to distribute, much much smaller in the case of tightly packed urban “boroughs.” The unit or its equivalent is traceable through many settled cultures, & probably for this reason: that it is big enough to fit dozens, even hundreds of parishes, yet, no part of it is unreachable from any other part, by pre-mechanical means. And therefore it can be fully imagined by its inhabitants, & identified with, at the autochthonic level, anchored deep below the winds of nationalist & chauvinist abstraction. It is “a country,” as our ancestors often called it.

*

I have been presenting all this in purely “secular” terms. A County is of course the domain of an Earl or Count; technically to be distinguished from the Duchy of a Duke, the Marquisate of a Marquis, &c — these latter of superior importance on account of their Lords, but still in the same range of sizes.

In the episcopal polity we have dioceses, subdivided into parishes. The dioceses & parishes of North America today are a fine mess, having been laid down usually before the natural patterns of settlement were established; & when rejigged, by bureaucratic committee. In later Mediaeval England, the dioceses & counties roughly corresponded, putting a magnificent Cathedral at the heart of each. There were 27 dioceses & thus 27 cathedrals (which is to overlook grand abbeys & other major churches) on the eve of the Reformation, by my count. In France there were 136, but France was four times the area, & back then, five times the population of little England. Looking over the rest of 15th-century Europe, we get some notion of natural scales, once society has settled. I think I can recommend the county/diocese as a “natural unit of governance”: the scale on which to build our new, Church-obedient, “nation states.”

Parishes corresponded to villages, with their surrounding fields & commons; or to neighbourhoods within the towns: the scale at which everyone once knew everyone else by name. The idea of a parish would be very hard to improve upon, as the basic unit of self-government below the county & above the family level; which indeed it was in that older & more civilized Christendom. It is the only scale at which direct democracy is even possible; for as the Greeks knew, beyond a certain maximum number, integral social relations break down. Five thousand inhabitants was their ideal for a completely autonomous city state; but as Christians discovered, this is too large. Think dozens to hundreds for a parish, or one thousand at the outside urban extreme. Think what will fit into a single parish church.

The natural size of a parish I learnt from walking around England, & across Europe (often along the footpaths & rights-of-way, that descend from the Middle Ages, & are likely as not to take you from one parish church directly to another). The parish will be one, two, three miles across; four or five in a remote area. In a city, of course, densely populated, it will be much smaller: a couple of dozen parishes or “wards” within a single square mile, inside the boundaries of old city walls. Modern cities are contorted by car-borne urban sprawl, apartment & office towers. But nobody really likes these things, which all depend on central planning, & are unsustainable without complex infrastructure; in time they will all go away. And meanwhile, they can be stripped for useful materials: huge inventories of steel & glass, re-usable brick & so forth.

France had some 60,000 parishes, as I mentioned in an earlier post (average population around 400) — & thus 60,000 parish churches — up to the time of the French Revolution. No two of these parishes were governed quite the same; each had its unique customs & traditions. Overnight, during the French Revolution, the timeless boundaries were amended (so many went back to the Romans), in order to create 36,000 new de-Christianized “communes” — identically governed by dictation from Paris. That evil continues to the present day, in the heritage of French secularity — founded, unambiguously, on slaughter.

England still has more than 11,000 parishes, little reduced from the Catholic era, but rendered likewise powerless under the heel of the Nanny State, & its procrustean bureaucracies. These, in turn, continue to be legitimated through a schedule of “general elections,” in which people vote for disembodied heads that they have seen talking on their televisions.

In North America, our bureaucracies are constantly at play with the municipal units. Occasionally one is subdivided, for unusual reasons, but mergers into “regions” are the norm. This is done to guarantee that the citizen remains deferent to the state. Constant disruption prevents him from creating anything resembling a settled local community in which he might have a voice, or join in the recovery of civil society.  “Crowd control” it is called at major public venues; but the principle of treating humans as herd animals in a stockyard — of assigning numbers to them, & calling them up by number to be audited by the tax officials & so forth — has been at the root of all progressive thinking & legislation. It was hatched by the butchers of the Directoire.

Our task, as I understand it, is to reverse this process: to make our world human again, in the least violent way possible. I specify this last on arbitrary, Christian principles. Were I a pagan I might give different advice. Verily, it would be prudent to make sure that our allies have been Christianized before putting them into action, & those of splenic temperament pacified through their Rosaries, & frequent attendance at Mass. For as I have found, it is a challenge to maintain the necessary serenity, while contending with devils in human flesh, & the machinery of their Progress.

*

It strikes me that a way backward might begin with a map. Or rather, more than a map: a kind of Doomsday Survey of the whole American estate. We could, for instance, gradually assemble the materials, geographical & historical, from every location, with which to comprehend the entire landscape; & from which to produce what might even be considered an “ecologically sensitive” redivision into natural counties & parishes, attractively & imaginatively named. We might even use such tools as the Internet & GPS, so long as they remain up & working, to help us in envisioning & re-envisioning what America might be, were she humane. It could be made into a large cooperative project, on the analogy of Wikipedia, once the principles of the thing were laid down.

What I have in mind is a set of general indications, of the sort any geographer should understand: drawing boundaries by the lie of the land, following the natural contours along the high ground to distinguish riparian districts, while bearing constantly in mind the pattern of existing settlement, & where possible distributing arable land with something resembling equity between the counties within any geographical region. And for each new, or redrawn old county & its parishes, an archive could be assembled, of what is known about its past, its genealogies, its roads & buildings, its natural history, its drainage & soils; even such information as can be found about what lies under hideous sprawl, with hints on how it could be scraped, cleansed, & restored to farmland.

Large parts of the continent remain almost uninhabited, because almost uninhabitable, & could be apportioned in “districts” of fairly large size, governed from any existing frontier population centre. Should population grow, such districts would later be subdivided, with new counties hived off from them. Meanwhile, in the absence of the Nanny State (having crashed under the weight of its own extravagance & tyranny), our aboriginal peoples & those of adventurous spirit would be welcome to roam, entirely at their own risk, away from the pressures of settled life.

*

I am suggesting all this as a project, only; as a place to start. I could go into much greater detail, but won’t for today. Nothing too terribly ambitious: just a voluntary, cooperative project, by which we might gain a better understanding of how things are & came to be, & what would be better. A “virtual” world, to be sure, but founded upon an actual landscape, & posited directly against what is now there. And again, it would (provided of course it had been printed out in enough copies) be of practical use when the existing economy collapses, the infrastructure goes down, Nanny State has little left to parasite upon, & her agents become fairly easy to defend ourselves against. For county by county & parish by parish it would be full of instructions on what to do next, & how to do it, as a means of survival. It would amount to a vade mecum for a functional Mediaeval civilization, to be built on the ruins of “Canada,” & “USA,” with the greatest possible life-saving speed.

And it would illustrate the principle of subsidiarity. For all the powers of Washington & Ottawa & the other capitals would be transferred immediately to the parishes. All they could not handle, referred upward to the county level by their actual request. Any question requiring adjudication between parish & parish, likewise raised to the county level. And as for the universal issues of criminal law, & common defence — well, those could be referred upward, too, to what we might call the “Holy American Empire.”

Reading the pundits, on the second Obama Inauguration — that imitation Coronation, performed out of church at fixed intervals — one might think that half of America was attracted, & half repulsed. That impression would be wrong. The pundits’ minds are supersaturate with politics. They do not understand their fellow men, whose minds are not. At most, I should think, one in ten was attracted, one in ten repulsed. These are the people who “engage” with politics. The rest looked upon the Inauguration, if they looked at all, as on a Superbowl, or a blockbuster Hollywood movie.

Emperor Obama invited the United Statists once again to “come together, right now, over me.” … He invited them to join him in advancing the great unifying causes: gay rights, climate change, the need to defend every penny of Entitlements. … “He say, I know you, you know me, one thing I can tell you is you got to be free.” … But America was discussing his wife’s new hairdo. (Thumbs down.) Some were remarking on how his daughters had grown, since his last Coronation. (True.) There were various opinions on Beyoncé’s rendition of the national anthem. (Mostly positive.) A few asked who James Taylor was. (An outpatient from the late ‘sixties.) And everybody loves a parade. (Well, almost everybody.)

“Got to be a joker, he just do what he please.”

It is amusing how representative democracy works. There is not a policy on Obama’s sleigh that enjoys widespread popular support, if polls are to be believed. Opposition to things like gay marriage, tax-funded greening, open-spigot welfare, Obamacare — & now arbitrary gun control & “immigration reform” — has been overwhelming. Even among Democrats in Congress, it is hard to buy majorities for any of those things. But Americans voted to get it all, & get it hard.

Why? Because they liked Obama better than they liked Romney. In fact, after one billion dollars of media effort (plus ten-billion-worth that was free), the Democrat machine was able to convince Americans that they didn’t like Romney at all. He murders people, & his running mate pushed his own grandma off the cliff in her wheelchair. That’s the sort of message that goes to the heart of The People. Whereas, public policy leaves them yawning. Axelrod & the boys got this: they know voters are stupid, & they proved it.

As to the pundits: many were appalled by an inauguration stump speech, which vowed to continue overthrowing every value enshrined in the U.S. Constitution; which promised to eliminate the last vestiges of Reaganism, & of Clintonism, too; which heralded perpetual expansion of centralized government under bureaucratic czars, to snuff the last embers of civil society. And many pundits were delighted by all this. But the majority were somewhere in the middle.

I disagree with those radical rightists who say America won’t be America any more. It isn’t America any more. Those who think the old Norman Rockwell can still be restored are, as the progressives say, “living in the past.” Likewise, “American exceptionalism” is not going, but gone, for the last few things that made America exceptional are passing into extinction.

Even American military might is superannuated. A correspondent in Texas observed, after consulting a little history, that FDR — out of his Yankee chauvinism, his Wilsonian idealism — did everything in his power to undermine & sabotage the British Empire. This destructive enterprise was at the heart of all his disagreements with Churchill. And Obama has carried the enterprise further, to bringing the American Empire down.

He is in that sense the American Gorbachov: after him, the deluge. The very premisses upon which U.S. power was projected to the ends of the earth, have been withdrawn; & the means to do so must necessarily follow. Should some future administration wish to re-assert “hegemony” within the old American sphere of influence — the Arab world, the Far East, the Americas, western Europe — they will find that it isn’t an option any more. They will be like Putin, trying to restore the Russian Empire. It is gone, & cannot be rebuilt on the backs of drunkards & punks & the frightened.

One of the oddest things I find, in surveying the pundits through Real Clear Politics & the like, is general agreement that American society is now characterized by decadence. This is often lamented on the Right with gnashing of teeth; on the Left it is casually admitted; but the “perception” is shared. Confirmation comes by every statistical indicator. At bottom, the birthrate is now plunging to European levels. There is even some general understanding that the Nanny State is unsustainable; that the Ponzi scheme, by which each new generation paid benefits for the last, collapses as each new generation shrinks proportionally — the quicker as the young are increasingly unemployed, & becoming basically unemployable. The only thing that varies is willingness to confront this hard reality, & its unambiguously moral causation: little on the Right, & almost none on the Left.

Yes, “fracking” & cheap domestic carbon energy may give a statistical appearance of recovery, a dead cat bounce. Such hopes are cited by the well-intentioned progressives of the Right, from an outlook as materialist as the progressives of the Left. It is the current variation on “technology will save us.” Look around you. Technology cannot save anything. (Even the digital links go dead after a few years.)

I myself loved the old “exceptionalist” America, for all its theological flaws; for all its strange trinity of “We the People,” & “In God We Trust,” & “E Pluribus Unum.” Moreover, I know how I feel about the destruction of my own Dominion of Canada. I am not being cute or insincere in expressing my heartbreak, to see that old United States of America likewise die, leaving a desiccated shell. As an old Loyalist, it was my country, too: the same language, the same fundamental attitudes shared by Loyalist & Patriot alike. The same pioneering spirit; the same self-reliance. The same egalitarianism, of an older kind: the kind that looked your neighbour in the eye; that looked your woman in the eye; that looked your children in the eyes. There was so much noble in that old America, replaced now in this “new era” with bullshit & sleaze.

But everything in this world must go, into that trash heap of history. “O dark dark dark, they all go into the dark, the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.” And shining in that dark is Christ, whose Kingdom is not of this world. And nobility, too, is not of this world; is unkillable, & will take new forms. And consider: the last fond hope of the Enlightenment has now gone under the hill. That leaves us nothing to rebuild, but Christendom.

“Humanism” is a funny old term. It is used today to denote the extraordinarily high regard in which politicized Atheists hold themselves. It conveys the evolutionary notion, that some pigs are more equal than others. In particular, those who deviate from the scientistic doctrines of Movement Atheism, & resist jackboot orders to remove themselves from public sight, constitute a lower life form, & must be eradicated in the name of Progress.

Perhaps I overstate their views. Having read key passages in Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, &c, I don’t think so. To be fair, let me recall that I’ve read several Atheist debunkers of Dawkins in particular, who complain of the viciousness & ignorance of his position, & how it makes them feel ashamed to be Atheists.

Too, on this other hand, I can supply a much longer list of “nice, tolerant Atheists” which includes, among living & dead off the top of my head: J.G. Ballard, Theodore Dalrymple, Carol Ann Duffy, Terry Eagleton, Oriana Fallaci, Seamus Heaney, Clive James, Philip Larkin, Stanislaw Lem, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Pynchon, Italo Svevo, Fernando Pessoa, Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg, Lucian, & Aristophanes.

This list could be made much longer, while sticking to my own preferences alone; but I would make two general observations about it:

First, in each & every case I’ve considered, Atheism has undermined the expression of profundities of which I thought the author capable, & cut across the grain of a formidable talent. And since this remark will be misunderstood, let me make clear: I am not referring to passages evocative of grimness or desolation when confronting human fate. (The religion of the Cross is not “happyface.”) I mean the absence of a spiritual lyricism that could have raised such passages. This is why there are no Atheists of the highest literary or philosophical order: the Atheism itself precludes, introducing a smallness of interpretation when the great questions of life are suddenly at stake. Yet in the best, there is a certain gritty stoicism.

Second, I expect each will appear on the Index of the Bright Inquisition, along with the Bible, Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, & all other literature that indulges imagination too freely. For the more creative sort of Atheists were no more safe than believing Christians, under previous aggressively Atheist regimes. You lick their boots, or you are a dead man.

The odd thing is, the title “Humanist” was appropriated from a religious vocabulary. Before being put directly at the service of Satan, during his Enlightenment, it referred to an explicitly Catholic intellectual movement of the later Middle Ages, in opposition to Scholasticism.

My own view of the original Humanism — starting from Petrarch in the standard academic way — is ambiguous. The term is applied to many who never applied it to themselves, which makes it dicey from the start. Sometimes it is little more than fashion. Yet one may easily discern a Humanist movement, beginning from urban Italy, crossing over the Alps, & settling into those Netherlandish parts through the 15th & earlier 16th centuries. It is also easy to blame it for the re-intrusion of an unthinkingly worldly pagan sensuousness into art, music, philosophy, &c. But at its more serene, it is pedagogical by disposition, classicizing, reactionary in its aspiration to recover skills & standards from a lost past; & thus attractively inimical to Progress.

Its ultimate exponents — men like Juan Luis Vives, Desidarius Erasmus, Saint Thomas More — were among the most eloquent opponents of the Reformation. Fine & good, & More is of course my greatest political hero. These, & others like them were men (& women: one thinks of the saintly & learned Catherine of Aragon, for instance) of uncompromising faith. Their own projects of “reform,” within the Catholic Church, were desirable: to improve standards of education for men & women alike; to increase religious observance; to bring churchmen back to a recollection of their vows, & the public at large to moral sobriety; to challenge heresy & apostasy. There was among them, & among so many of their predecessors, a very Christian & elevated view of the nature of Man, & therefore of our possibilities: a belief that much better could be got out of us.

To my mind, they went wrong in opposition to Scholasticism, too wantonly satirizing not the thing itself, but the decayed version of the thing on offer towards the end of the Middle Ages. They implicitly confused the thing itself with what amounted to a cheap imitation. This mistake would be corrected by such as John Poinsot (“John of Saint Thomas”), who might be considered a Humanist of a later Catholic generation. After an erratic course through that self-styled “Age of Reason,” the fine heritage of Scholasticism, with its Aristotelian foundations, has been largely recovered through the great “renaissance” of Thomism that accelerated in the later 19th century, & continues within the Church to our day. One might say it has been cleaned up, dusted off, & is ready to be put back in action.

But all this gets beyond the purpose I had in mind for today’s lay sermon. For I wanted to comment on what might be called the “ur-Humanism”: that form of the humane that was written into the human condition, by God. And further, to invite gentle reader to speculate on what a recovery of true Humanism might entail, especially in the sciences.

Consider this, from a news report:

“Australian archeologists have studied the burial site of a paralyzed young man who lived in northern Vietnam between 3,700 to 4,500 years ago. He lived into his early thirties thanks to round-the-clock, high-quality personal care including regular bathing, toileting, massaging, & turning to avoid pressure sores.”

The article is almost as thrilling for its explanation of how the archaeologists could infer these facts, as for the facts themselves, & the light they cast on a “primitive hunter-gatherer culture.” I have seen many similar reports, from the world of empirical archaeology & anthropology, & have flagged this one only because it is current & available & the moral is spelt out. Again & again we are reminded, of what we have in common with our most primitive human ancestors; of what “humanity” means.

Humans may be considered as one animal “evolving” by random mutation through natural selection along with all the others. This is the cosmology of our contemporary, self-styled “Humanists.” It is an atheological imposition upon the evidence that no theologian could match. It imposes throwaway “survival of the fittest” explanations upon nature’s rich store of cooperative behaviour. It is casually adapted to explain away mounting contradictory evidence, & to distract from the huge bald fact of incredibly complex, genetically specified design — in every example of every known creature. The speed with which this grinding, Victorian “just so” story is retold, before each new discovery has even been unpacked, reveals the incuriosity of its exponents. They exhibit the very gross credulity & bigotry which they falsely impute to Mediaeval Man. And all for the sake of spitting in the face of the Divine.

But there is an alternative to this intellectual zombieism; an alternative within empirical science itself. It is to look at the evidence without preconceptions. Moreover, to look at the evidence broadly, in the older Aristotelian spirit, with a view to cataloguing it on its own terms. Nature herself is helping to compel this, for at the front line of biology today we begin to read the genetic codes. The family trees used to illustrate Darwinism, & make it appear plausible to the schoolchildren of the past, are being merrily blown out of the water. They are replaced by new ones that leave us scratching our heads. More deeply, we find nothing to meet the criteria for random drift; & the desperate further speculations about “selfish genes” & the like will not save an account of reality that is, at its best, wilfully obtuse.

Nature herself is forcing us back — to the close observation & categorization of creatures in a scala naturae, or “ladder of life,” or “Great Chain of Being” — & upon the teleological wisdom that follows from this frankly Aristotelian enterprise. Nature does not reward ideologues; she favours rather the industrious inquirer, who remains humble & reticent on the theoretical side. She punishes those who ignore the obvious, humiliates those who jump to conclusions. Indeed: this is one of the things I love about Nature.

It could be said that the original Humanists set about replacing a basically Aristotelian with a basically Platonic approach to science. That was enough of a mistake. Our contemporary, self-styled “Humanists” — or, “post-Humanists” — kick both kinds of epistemology away. They sport a “Humanism” that denies humanity itself, & a knowledge that denies the possibility of knowledge. We may well protest the nihilist tyranny in such a view; but through the grace of our benevolent Creator, Nature will eradicate it in due course.

One wonders if God is any more interested than the rest of us in hapless moaning. There’s a lot of it about. In the course of “researching” this article — i.e. glancing over a few Internet links — I have just acquired my fill of quasi-highbrow European journalists, bemoaning fate. It seems the Internet has eaten their lunch. All this hype “they” — often the same writers — were feeding us twenty years ago, about the marvellous future emanating from Silicon Valley, is now being unselfconsciously revised. I never expect them to remember what they used to say. For years I have marvelled at the ability of the smug progressive types to “get on the right side of history,” not only prospectively, but retroactively.

At last the full horror of their situation is sinking in, as their quasi-highbrow rags burn away. It is impossible to sustain any kind of serious-looking publication in this “new economy.” Papers like El Pais in Spain — the voice of The Future only ten years ago — discover that their stock is now worth so little that their hated bankers casually soak it up, then start writing the op-eds. The paper recently disemployed one-third of its workforce, hitting editorial staff disproportionately. Many names renowned in Spanish progressive journalism went out with the bathwater. This helps make space for the new, owner-sensitive points of view.

In France, the winds of change blow in the opposite ideological direction. The French secularizing state has long had its fingers in every journalistic pie, through shameless subsidies, & courts promptly responsive to executive displeasure, & a culture in which all the important people in government & media are closely affiliated through old school ties. Now that the government is socialist again, & the newspapers are no longer worth much, the one dissonant, mildly anti-statist voice is getting choked. The chief editor of Le Figaro was disposed of, after the paper’s military-industrial proprietors were advised that his liveliness could jeopardize their every government contract.

Unsurprisingly, it is a conservative, once deadly serious business newspaper — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — that most clearly discerns the trend, & its cause. “Freedom of the press” depended, quite entirely, on the profitability of the press. A paper losing money can only beg, & must listen politely to the whims of its donors. The FAZ correspondent Frank Schirrmacher observes the growing acceptance of the idea that commercial interests should not merely sponsor, but supply their own news. We may thus look forward to a near future when, “Apple reports on working conditions in China, & Coca-Cola on the benefits of globalization.”

This is an old story, for me. When I published the Idler magazine, the advertisers left me alone. For though the Idler soon had more paid circulation than other papers in which they did advertise, & rather finer “demographics,” we lacked the correct “market placement.” It was nothing personal: we simply didn’t provide a medium in which, they thought, rank consumerism would show well. A couple of times very rich men offered to “save us” from our constantly impending financial doom, on the one modest condition that we overhaul the magazine, to reflect their views & tastes more faithfully. The choice was finally between extinction & prostitution. Being the curmudgeonly sort, I picked extinction; most publishers would swing the other way.

That was then, this is now. In 1984, when we started up, it was still possible for such a rag to limp along, on subscription revenue alone, with the occasional toss-in from a small-scale “angel.” We continued limping for nearly ten years. Given current economic & technological realities, even that feat would be inconceivable; for the most vulgarly commercial papers cannot be made to pay. And the number of profitable Internet media operations, around the whole world, is very close to zero. It is not a case of “adapt or die.” This is now a both/and proposition.

My brilliant elder son reports to me from the frontiers of the cybernetic economy. Yes, he gathers, industry might return to North America from the cheap labour countries, thanks to technology that eliminates labour almost completely. That is to say, industry may return, but not jobs — except for a tiny, specialized elite of techies, themselves obviated every few years.

The path from free lunch to no lunch has been short in all ages, but greed interferes with our capacity to learn. I mentioned pain & failure as the great teachers in my last post; & would tack on hunger except, it motivates more than teaches. My guess is that, being hungry & having no prospect of employment, the “market correction” may motivate people to grow their own food.

Let me recommend that to young aspiring journalists, who wish to surf ahead of the wave. Small farmlots may seem a muddy way to earn a living, but consider: you can eat what you can’t sell. You might also want to acquire some formidable assault weapons, in light of “the lessons of history.” But do yourself a favour & buy nothing high-tech. For while they may look convincing, these state-of-the-art automatics spray state-of-the-art ammunition, & the fools buying them don’t realize how quickly it will run out.