Essays in Idleness

The desire to leap to a conclusion, on the basis of some passing observation, which may not even be accurate, appears to be shared by all human beings. It is shared, too, with other members of that Animal Kingdom, of which we are the indisputable Monarch. It can be seen most clearly in the behaviour of the more intelligent birds & beasts, who obviously draw inferences, or draw obvious inferences, from what they can sense. For instance, smoke means fire means get out of there. For instance, food source lying undefended, get it while you can. For instance, tiny impossible-looking gap but I can fly through it without adjusting my cruising speed, for I am a swallow & swallows can just do that.

The art of hunting, before the invention of firearms & other dirty game-changing tricks, consisted mostly of the art of entrapment. As clever humans, we could outwit the lesser animals, & con them into taking our bait. They could infer step one; we could contrive step two.

In politics, the clever human uses similar tactics, at a slightly more sophisticated level — rhetorical “bait & switch” — to sucker voters into supporting schemes that could not possibly be in their own best interests; & thereby obtain the “food” of power.

Yet it is not power that corrupts, contra Lord Acton. The humans are corrupt to start with, & power is one of the things we want. The desire for it is not equally distributed, as nothing seems to be equally distributed in our kind. Some seem born almost indifferent to power; others think of little else, no matter what the environment or their circumstances. At an entry level, such as office politics, we may observe power hunger in action: persons of mediocre intelligence & skill nevertheless getting ahead by doing things others might think of, but would be too shy to try. Or in rare cases, too decent to consider.

The higher levels simply develop from the lower. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, were not corrupted by power. Not even slightly. They were what they were from the start. Power introduces temptations not available on the humbler scales of human activity, which is a good reason for preventing our corrupt fellow humans from getting too much of it. It may go to the head of a person who has never had much power before, but then, it is going to the head of a person who had that kind of head, & never made the effort to get it cured.

Similarly, it is not money that corrupts, per se. Observe the behaviour of the winners of lotteries, who are often, if not usually, destroyed by their sudden prizes. Money gave them the ability to buy what they always wanted. The problem was with what they always wanted.

The attribution of catastrophe to some inanimate “corrupting agency,” such as power or money, like the attribution of a stubbed toe to the malice of a bedpost, is itself an example of the point from which I began. We, even learned & thoughtful types like Lord Acton, are too easily satisfied by the proximate cause. And having taken that bait, we proceed ever more gravely through easily posited levels of abstraction to the worship of our various false gods. In Acton’s case, as for many other old-fashioned liberals, that god was Liberty. It blinded him even to the distinction between “power” & “authority.” He found himself explaining — brilliantly, but to my mind essentially falsely — all historical process in terms of the struggle for, & advance of, Liberty. (Thank God he was Catholic, or nothing would have restrained him.)

Not that such an account of history yields entirely useless results. Any light shined from an oblique angle may uncover truths invisible from other angles; & Karl Marx, too, found a few things out that weren’t entirely untrue, from his scopic device of dialectical materialism, & his obsession with class warfare. Even Darwin made a few serviceable observations, & not even Freud struck out.

There is a use for heretics, in the larger economy of salvation, perhaps. Still, we should beware the man of one idea, & be the more on our guard against what presents itself as pursuit of knowledge, but is a flight in the opposite direction. And always (to be Catholic again) one should start by turning one’s suspicion on oneself, & removing the timber from one’s own eye, before addressing one’s neighbour’s opacificities. (Christ didn’t say don’t do it; He said try it on yourself first. “Judge not that ye be not judged,” applies on another plain of Damnation.)

This takes us to the matter of wisdom. It involves (as my hero Aristotle knew) that “mysterious” quality of common sense: of seeing things in the round; of observing the tendency of facts “in the main” & not in partial selection; of avoiding dependency on the single filter. We must keep returning to our topic from new angles, & building from them a comprehensive view.

It is no accident that, as they grow older, & until they lose their wits, the sane become more “conservative” in this way; in the sense of, less apt to jump to conclusions. Pain is the great teacher in this respect; or more broadly, pain & failure. And the exception proves the rule: for those who have found success by chance, without meeting obstacles sufficient to “humiliate” them, tend almost invariably to be stupid jerks.

*

A member of the Commentariat has instructed us, up here in the High Doganate, to think faster about what should be done, since the present generation of politicians are multiplying our problems quickly, & enlarging them, past the possibility of retrieval. Yet all our Departments report back the same: that speed will only encourage them to Error.

I am reminded of a big fat irascible American who once worked with me in Asia, on the descending arc from an earlier career in advanced physics. Let us call him “Harold” for that was his name; a good man, with a lively sense of his own corruption, when he wasn’t indulging it. Like most people, he had a few prejudices, & one of them was against “Brits” — a category into which he would subtly insinuate me, by parody of my rather fluffy accent.

He had once worked with “the little snobs” on the Manhattan Project. And what he disliked most about them, he confessed, was their basically unAmerican patience. While the Americans were all queueing to use the latest super-advanced computer (the ENIAC, a room-filling device with the computational ability of a latter-day desk calculator), these Brits persisted in doing all their calculations by hand. It was time-consuming work to program the computer to find a result that could then be delivered at electronic speed; but laziness was not the Brits’ motive. At least one of them was familiar with the even more advanced British Colossus computer, which had been used to break German codes. They could generally understand the use of computers.

But no, the little snobs did things by hand so they could “get the feel of the problem,” & detect critical points where an assumption might be wrong. Harold said, by the time he left the project, the very sight of them would fill him with disgust, & the sound of their “nasal rat-like voices” gave him migraines.

I loved Harold, for he was an honest man — larger than life & twice as crass. Time & again, he added, these insufferable be-tweeded Oxonian creatures “saved the bacon” of their American colleagues. They kept finding overlooked flaws. And in the end, he thought Truman would never have had something impressive to drop on Hiroshima, had the Brits not been there slowing things down.

Not that H-bombs or A-bombs or any other letter-bombs are, necessarily, a good thing. Gentle reader knows what I think of Progress. So I would not have him jump to that conclusion; nor to the opposite, more intuitive one, that nuclear weapons are the work of the devil. We use them, up here in the High Doganate, only to illustrate a point.

Were I to characterize my current thinking on the economic order in a single word, I would choose, “bewildered.” I agree with the popes (a whole series of them) that socialism stinks, even in its mildest, most “democratic” forms. I also agree with them that capitalism is a good thing “up to a point,” but that a “capitalist ideology” by which society is entirely commercialized, so that we honour only what makes a profit, & devalue work & production in & of itself, also stinks — albeit less, because the capitalists don’t usually mind if you pursue quixotic noble schemes on your own dollar. They may find these schemes distasteful, but will generally leave off after short expressions of contempt.

Let me briefly advocate bewilderment as an analytical tool, among the more useful in the idler’s repertoire. I am tempted to elevate its status by referring to it as “Socratic bewilderment,” & then allying it with “Socratic irony.” That is, I think a good place to start, when you don’t have the answer, is to say (to yourself, principally), “I don’t know.” It’s amazing what can be learnt after making that assertion.

I don’t know how to proceed on the great economic issues. My tendencies are increasingly “distributist” — i.e. the widest possible distribution of private property, & the fine Catholic principle of subsidiarity in government, within a civilizational order that formally recognizes moral & spiritual truths — but no clew how to get there beyond, “Let’s everyone become traditionalist Catholics.” Meanwhile, no clew either how to disentangle the cat’s cradle of tyranny & deceit that would be necessary to understand what we have in reality, & thus, how to take it apart without using scissors.

Let me meanwhile note the death last week of the economist, James M. Buchanan, who tried very hard to understand that cat’s cradle better. We identify him with “public choice theory,” the basic notion of which was ingenious. Why don’t we use the same methods as economists do, in analyzing behaviour in a marketplace, to analyze behaviour in politics? We all know, or rather, assume without thinking, that each economic agent serves his own self-interest in the marketplace. And we are taught to assume that politicians & bureaucrats are there to serve the public good whenever we detect “market failure.” But what if politicians & bureaucrats also have interests? And what if the selfish motives of the marketplace also applied to them? Might that cast light on their own, supposedly benevolent, behaviour?

This was by no means a new insight, but by the early 1960s it had been forgotten long enough to appear quite new. While Buchanan & his colleagues were soft-spoken gentlemen, the edginess of their proposal caught some attention. Economic thinkers in the “Austrian school” had long argued that politicians & bureaucrats have insufficient information to make decisions that will be genuinely in the public interest, & that is why they (“almost”) invariably make a hash of things. But perhaps that was too gentle a way of sizing them up.

In the earlier 20th century, Vilfredo Pareto had already been there. A pioneer of number-crunching, he is famed today chiefly for his “Pareto curve,” & allied statistical “discoveries.” But in later life, surrounded by his cats, French mistress, &c, he drifted from economics into sociology. Unlike most economists, he became curious as to why his theoretical predictions of aggregate self-interested human behaviour never worked out in practice. He began to suspect that humans behave irrationally. He became obsessed with how they manipulate power to get the strange things they want, actually in defiance of “market forces.” He thought libertarianism would mitigate the effects of the tiny elites who always seem to corner the power; & in his final act of idiocy, thought that Benito Mussolini was a libertarian.

He meant well, of course. Don’t they all.

Buchanan must have been the world’s greatest expert on that political quid pro quo called “logrolling.” This was Davy Crockett’s old (1835) term for the process by which legislators trade votes so that, at the simplest level, “I’ll vote to fund your bridge to nowhere, if you’ll vote to fund my wind farm.” One might almost call this the essence of representative democracy: the system by which two or more wrongs may be combined to create an illusory right. But the principle of mutual backscratching — most familiar to me in literature & the arts — applies at all levels of society. The funny thing: it is not irrational, & will only so appear to e.g. economists postulating a human condition into which stuff like sin has not been factored.

Buchanan was also the author of a very nice distinction between politics & policy. “Politics” is the art of logrolling to determine the rules of the game; whereas, “policy” is how you play the game to win once the rules have stabilized. With this delicious insight he went on to found the sub-discipline of “constitutional economics.”

I don’t know enough about Buchanan to keep this post going much longer; but from the little I do know, a good & interesting man, & I’m sorry he’s dead, though at the age of ninety-three you must expect things like that to happen.

Back in the day when I was a Londoner, & becoming a Christian — to which I referred two posts ago — it was my habit to haunt, in addition to libraries, also museums & galleries. These were the happiest days of my life, the chastest & the poorest in material terms, & London was my Athens as a young man. There was free admission to all these institutions (even where a ticket was required, it was free), & I was living off the fat of the land. I mentioned Bible reading in that penultimate “Ask” post, & my mesmerization by the Gospel of John. There was another mesmerization, at the time.

At the National Gallery in London there is a famous picture, by Piero della Francesca, entitled The Baptism of Christ. It has extraordinary redemptive value, or so it then seemed to me. I would, at that time, go into the National Gallery almost daily, park myself in front of that painting, & stare at it, sometimes for more than an hour. The museum guards became aware of me, & worried about my strange behaviour. Several times I was told to move on.

Piero’s Baptism was the central panel of a triptych for the Camaladolese Abbey at Sansepolcro in Tuscany, his birthplace. It is unfortunate that with time & money (& the occasional act of rapine) these objects are pulled apart & scattered. In this case not only does one long to see the side panels, but also the original frame, & the triptych’s setting in the chapel sanctuary. There was apparently a roundel atop the frame of the central panel, representing God the Father, serving as common point of reference to integrate all three panels; there may have been other relevant “decorations.” But we will take what we have with gratitude, as we do with all Classics: any piece of them we can get our eyes upon.

This painting, tempera on wood, I will not bother to describe, for it is reproduced all over the Internet, often large & sharp. But I have never seen a reproduction, in pixels or on paper, that captures the atmosphere of the thing; its unearthliness, & paradoxically also its solidity.

Piero was a brilliant mathematician, & the internal geometry of the painting is complex, enfolding a symbolism richer still — all set in motion by the gesture of John Baptist. The trunk of the foreground tree demarcates a golden section within the picture, but this is only the beginning of the proportional relations. All seem to play a part, in combination with the colouring, to set the painting into what I can describe only as “a spiritual motion.”

The whole is greater than its parts, & the modern academic practice of drawing rectangles, diagonals, arcs, circles, & squiggles over the composition to demonstrate the relations detracts from this whole. We have up here in the High Doganate a learned work by J.V. Field, Pierro della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art, which though interesting in itself has added precisely nothing to our appreciation of any of Piero’s paintings. It is as if the better one “understands” them, the less one understands. This could be a reason why, perhaps, Piero’s Quattrocento contemporaries may have appreciated them less than we can; because they “knew too much.” They would have understood topical references to a movement then afoot, to reunite Western & Eastern Christendom. That accounts for figures in Byzantine dress towards the rear of the composition, obscured by the novice undressing on the right, & may point to other allusions.

The angels represented on the left — touching or holding hands, each dressed in a distinct manner — & with their peculiar expressions of wonderment — often held my attention. But every part of the composition leads one back to what we have dead centre: Christ. Somehow the painting has captured what theologians have struggled to convey: his “consubstantiality”; his manliness & his God-liness inseverably combined. Perhaps one reason for my fascination was my need to take this in gradually, for it is lost in any simple formula, necessary as that credal formula may be. It is part of the “impossibility” I was writing about, in that previous post.

The landscape itself is arguably Tuscan, & I’ve read that Sansepolcro itself is to be found, on the hill high on the left. Perhaps so. But every effort has been made, starting from the abstract presentation of the Jordan River, & the way it is taken to end at Christ’s feet; in the angels; & then through the “song” in the receding placement of the trees, to make the landscape itself in a sense “consubstantial.” It combines heavenly & earthly. Christ’s standing posture & His centrality make him dominant, but also serve to put the heavenly behind him. He is the gate: “only through Christ” do we come to the heaven; only through Baptism do we come into the Life that must pass through the eye of the needle.

There is much more to contemplate in this astonishing work of art. Piero was such a painter, that it is almost useless to consider his career — to place any of his paintings in a chronological sequence & think of what came before & after. His development as artist was of a different kind. There is little or no perceptible stylistic evolution, & he arrives & departs from history in one piece. Blanks are likewise drawn in his relations with other masters. This renders conventional art-historical analysis quite pointless. I have often suspected that “art history” serves Progress more than it can ever serve Art; that it is like a museum guard who tells you to keep moving.

And another thing: my fortnightly column for the Catholic Thing, electronic organ of the Faith & Reason Institute, in Washington, DC. It is on the joys, & also the moral imperatives, of book burning:

“Fires are welcome in our northern winter, up here in the Canadas, & dry softwood logs are the fuel of first resort. Books, by comparison, need a lot of page-turning attention to keep them alight, at least when roasted individually. This is why I recommend the books-plus-logs approach to an open fire. I might mention chestnuts, but this is to consider the matter in too superficial a way. …”

*

One of my little disappointments, on joining the Catholic Church, was to discover that the Index Librorum Prohibitorum had been discontinued. The last (20th) edition was published in 1948. Pope Paul VI formally abolished the Index in 1966, let me happily suppose because any further revision would have been too unwieldy. Granted, the Index was a passing thing, having been started only in 1559, & I generally oppose these modern innovations. But it did give readers some assurance that the Church knew what she was about.

It was always a little lax, however, compared to the licensing & censorship arrangements in the Protestant countries. This had partly to do with the Catholic practice of allowing authors of banned works to argue in their defence. They could often get around the prohibition with a few minor textual changes. For instance, books advocating the heliocentric cosmology were at first banned (as they also were in the Protestant north), but allowed if instead of “a fact” the heliocentric theory were described as “an hypothesis.” Moreover, you could get a dispensation from your priest to read almost anything; the books were all available in the towns. It wasn’t like England, for instance, where prohibited (mostly Catholic) books had to be printed abroad, & there were frightful penalties for smuggling them into the country.

The first couple of editions of the Index, in the 16th century, occasioned lively public debate among Catholic intellectuals, & the list was quickly much reduced. The discussion in itself was useful, of what should be condemned, & why. I should like to see something similar revived: a forum in which learned Catholics could dispute not merely which books should be avoided by Catholic readers, but more importantly, why they are pernicious.

Meanwhile, it strikes me some money could be made with a new line of “Idleness” products. A woodstove specially adapted for book burning might be a start, & I invite the Commentariat to suggest other attractive products with which we might begin to make our fortune.

“Il ne dépend pas de nous de croire en Dieu, mais seulement de ne pas accorder notre amour à de faux dieux.” This is among my favourite pensées of Simone Weil: “It is not up to us to believe in God, only not to grant our love to false gods.”

Gentle reader is invited to keep thinking about that.

To my mind, we cannot think our way to God, we have not the brains for that. Therefore I will readily concede that the existence of God cannot be “proved,” empirically or even philosophically; only inferred. And an inference, even one that seems dead obvious, may be wrong. I will allow no man precedence when it comes to scepticism of human intellectual capacity. We are idiots, the lot of us, & our chief intellectual capacity consists in seeing what we want to see. It is a quality well expressed by the concept of “original sin”; & those who think they are sinless are not so much blind, as prey to ridiculous illusions.

“The future” was among the false gods Simone Weil had often in mind. She had passed through her youthful period of political radicalism, & walked away. There is no shortage of false gods. We are constantly adapting old & inventing new ones, & it is the limit of the natural human endowment to see that they are false, phantasms, disruptions of our peace. The best that we can do is to reject them; to refuse worship to self-created abstractions.

Whereas, belief in God is quite impossible. There is no logical path to Him: “you can’t get there from here.” His absence from the Creation is total. There could not be any such path, in the nature of things, for we may say with some confidence that the entire universe consists of things that are not God. His very impossibility saves us from confusion with a god who is false. At no point in history could any human being have “found God,” by any effort or science of his own. It wouldn’t have been possible even to create Him: for He is too absurd, too “other.” False gods at least answer to our more immediate desires.

Let me quote another, seemingly paradoxical aphorism from Simone Weil to enlarge upon this point:

“There are four evidences of divine mercy here below: the favours of God to beings capable of contemplation (these states exist & form part of their experience as creatures); the radiance of these beings & their compassion, which is the divine compassion in them; the beauty of the world. The fourth evidence is the complete absence of mercy here below.”

Glibness or cleverness will stand in the way of understanding this passage. The fourth proposition does not contradict the first three.

This, if you will, is why I became a Christian; not in spite of being an atheist, but because I was one. It was the complete absence & impossibility of God that impressed me. Perhaps I flatter myself in memory, but I do not recall being an “agnostic,” or ever having time for agnostics. It struck me as a foolish position, not self-contradictory but beyond self-contradictory. If something were possible, but unlikely, one might take an agnostic position, waiting for further evidence to come in. But when something is impossible, you don’t wait. Unless you are extremely feeble minded.

*

I became acquainted, quite young, with the conception of the “Big Bang.” (Verily, I was something of a “science child.”) Though I did not know it at first, owing to lies & misrepresentations in books of popular science, the “discoverer” of it was the Belgian priest & monk, astronomer & physicist, Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître. He called it, “the hypothesis of the infinitesimal Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the Creation,” a much better label (than Fred Hoyle’s). Contrary to what is still given out, by way of pop science, he also anticipated Hubble’s Constant — by two years on Edwin Hubble; & was from several other accomplishments almost certainly the most under-appreciated scientific mind of the 20th century.

Father Lemaître was mocked at first, including by Albert Einstein. (Though not by Arthur Eddington, who had had him as a pupil & been tremendously impressed by the clarity of his thought, & his mastery of mathematics.) His hypothesis included the seemingly batty idea of cosmic rays, emanating from the origin of the universe; & strange to say, that was the point that brought Einstein around, in a celebrated moment when it all made sense to him & he began to applaud wildly.

It took many more years for the physics establishment at large to cope with what many suspected was a theological invasion of empirical science. What made it even harder to assimilate: the notion that our universe actually had a beginning at a singular point of space-time, & an expansion rate that can be reasonably estimated. It is that finitude they found most distressing, & to this day they are looking for ways to wormhole out of it, into multiverses & the like, of purest speculation, impelled by a kind of ungodly claustrophobia.

I, as a budding adolescent in the later ‘sixties, had no problem with it, however. A “cosmic egg” is not God. Curiously, this is a point upon which Father Lemaître was also quite insistent, so that when Pope Pius XII referred to his “theory” as a validation of the Catholic faith, Father Lemaître corrected him quite sharply. No, it is a scientific hypothesis, on which no theological inference can be banked, for something more might be discovered & it could all be kicked away. Pin Nature on God, & not God on Nature.

This is all mentioned to dispel the notion that science can lead us to God. It cannot. And in my own case, neither my early embrace of Father Lemaître’s cosmology, nor my early rejection of the Darwinian explanation of the phenomena of evolution, had anything to do with my becoming a Christian.

Here is something that had to do with it. It is a passage from the Upanishads, which I can no longer trace, but find still in memory: “He is not a male. He is not a female. He is not a neuter. He neither is, nor is not. When he is sought he will take the form in which he is sought; & again he will not come in such a form. It is indeed difficult to describe the Name of the Lord.”

This did not convince me of anything, but was a mental preparation for accepting Christ, & Trinitarianism. Perhaps it only could be for me. Let me flag particularly: “again he will not come in such a form.”

The impossibility of getting to God, by any empirical or philosophical method, is what still convinced me. It struck me as odd, however, that almost every man or woman I tremendously admired — scattered over centuries — had got there anyway. My claim to be smarter & wiser than any of them began to pall. Conversely, the discovery that my atheism was shared by very few I admired, & mostly by the stupid & obnoxious, weighed upon my cocky self-confidence. Was it just possible I had missed something?

There was another source of weight, more purely psychological. Let us call this “a sense of sin.” It was growing on me, with the realization that, “objectively,” I had done a few things that were “bad,” as demonstrated by the fact that I instinctively concealed them. And too, felt inescapable shame, & remorse — not only for what I had done selfishly to the harm of others, but for the harm I had done more mysteriously to myself. Gravity, “pesanteur,” weight.

It would take too much space, & be awkward to reconstruct, my reading of that period. I have anyway written elsewhere about my Christian conversion; of an event on the Hungerford Bridge in London.  I am writing this evening only about intellectual preparation, not about “religious experience,” although the two will be joined. That preparation came down to: “We cannot reach God. But perhaps it is possible that God can reach us.”

One book is worth mentioning in this connexion, however: the Bible. At the time immediately before my conversion, I was reading it with great attention. I was already familiar with “the Bible as literature,” for I was by my early twenties more literary than scientific. And if you don’t know your Bible, English literature can make little sense, nor any other European literature. But to read something “as literature” is quite another thing from reading it as if your life depended on it. “Attention” is Simone Weil’s term. (She associates prayer with complete attention.)

In particular I became mesmerized by the Gospel of John, in which it seemed all strands came together. Either Christ was a complete fraud, or he was the Son of God. There really is no third option, for a conspiracy of all apostles & all other earliest Christians gets too far beyond the plausible. There were two possible answers, “yea” or “nay.” And more & more I felt, no place to hide.

The first time I asked, “Christ, if you exist, why don’t you just show me,” the tone was quite facetious. But it was a question I found myself repeating, in different ways. Example: “Christ, if you are there, why this hide & seek nonsense? Why do you play games? Why do you toy with people?” Gentle reader will note, it was becoming a conversation; but one consciously between a young man, very alone, & a Messiah, very absent.

The conversation ended, or was rather transformed, as I have written before. It was by the steps ascending that pedestrian bridge (alongside a railway), from the South Embankment. I think I must have asked, so many times, “Christ, if you exist, why don’t you just show me?” that I had finally managed to ask it sincerely. And in that moment I became aware of the presence of some extraordinary light, or flame, or radiance, that I knew to be a Person; to be Infinite Love. And of a voice that spoke one unmistakable sentence:

“I will cross this bridge with you.”

At the other side, as I turned to steps descending to North Embankment, this Person was gone. But as if in the air above & before me, I became aware of another presence, or Person, briefly but so vividly. I can recall trying to reason: “And that is the Holy Spirit, whom I have known all my life; known without knowing. Who stood over me when I was in the cradle.”

All of which may be dismissed by any reader. An aberration; perhaps I was mad. But if so a temporary insanity, for nothing like it ever happened again.

*

Science, according to Simone Weil, offers three kinds of interest: technical applications; a game of chess with prizes; & a road to God. It would, she believed, find a source of inspiration higher than itself, or perish.

I still do not think it can possibly offer a road to God. I do however think it can be inspired, & that it will perish without this inspiration; that in light of God, we can see things, even make connexions between things, & seize upon remarkable evidence, to which by our own light we would be blind. It may even offer analogies, useful to poetry & art, philosophy & theology. But in & of itself it is nothing, a zero.

On a religious view, the scientist is examining the Creation, & thus a reflection of God’s glory. On a materialist view, he is examining hunks of dirt. But the phenomena of Nature are the same, either way, & science is only an accounting of them — more catalogue than theory.

God is not His reflection. He will not be found there, in that “Maya” (if you will), any more than a human person will be found inside a mirror, or shadow of himself. This is not where you turn to ask a question, or get an answer. For that, you must turn (as it were) away from the universe, & ask your question directly. Or so I have come to think.

Anyone who has tried to ride on the wing of an aeroplane — & I have entirely avoided the experience — will empathize with the scrub python who attempted this feat on a flight from Cairns, Queensland, to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. An account is provided by the Sydney Morning Herald, under the inevitable headline, “Qantas python’s flying circus.”

The scrub python, or by his more elegant Latin name, Morelia amethistina, is a handsome beast, the pearly sheen of whose scales would provide a temptation to vanity in any creature. Specimens grow up to twenty feet, longer in rare cases, & they are quite svelte compared with other pythons. (People who find shed skins think many snakes must have been much bigger, for the scale folds stretch in the course of moulting, producing a turned out “sock” often doubled in length.)

These “amethyst pythons” (as I prefer to think of them) are found both sides of the Torres Strait, through eastern Indonesia, & to the outermost islands of the Bismarck Archipelago. There are no subspecies, so if gentle reader will not suspect me of Darwinism, I’ll venture they often cadge a lift. They are not venomous, constricting their prey in the python way; often dropping upon them, but sometimes just waiting quietly & invisibly by a riverbank for when dinner comes to drink. They eat rats & rodents of all sorts, & are partial to fruitbats when they can catch them, & other small animals including baby wallabies, which is probably bad for their P.R.

The one in question, whose sex was not specified, selected what seemed a plausible perch up the landing gear to the flap assembly while the plane was on the ground. But he or she was soon airborne, in a very high wind at a very low temperature against a nastily vibrating smooth metal surface. Some people, including several ladies of my acquaintance, dislike snakes generally, but as one might guess all the passengers watching the drama from inside the cabin were rooting for the snake, as he clung on. And it was a good fight, for he held through the shakedown of landing, & was seen still moving when the plane came to port. But he’s an ex-snake now.

They are not philosophical animals, the snakes, & this one didn’t know when he was beaten. But he did know that he wanted to live, & through all the technology of flight, found that place in the human heart where we could understand him.

As quite a few American & foreign pundits have begun to grasp, the U.S. electorate has been voting consistently for two things, through many election cycles. First, they want a very large, comprehensive, & intrusive Nanny State. And second, they don’t want to pay for it. From the polls, which show strong opposition to raising the debt ceiling, we further learn that they don’t want their guvmint to borrow the money, either.

Readers of this website will appreciate that these are normal positions in any large, centrally bureaucratized, democratic polity, & the USA is hardly the only country poised atop some “fiscal cliff.” And let me add that the average U.S. citizen is no more stupid than the average Canadian citizen. Indeed, from what I can see up here, that would be impossible.

Northern Europeans pay much higher taxes; Swedes for instance about double what Americans pay, the French & Germans not much less than the Swedes. The British, who have by northern European standards a low tax regime, pay something like half again more than United Statists, & Canadians also pay more, by maybe a third. And we are all closer to balancing our budgets.

From this point of view, Obama & the Democrats are wimps. They say they want to balance the federal budget, fair enough. We know they oppose any significant cuts in spending, so we can forget about that. They are raising taxes, but not by nearly enough. If they were serious, however, they could balance that budget by higher taxes alone.

Start by simply doubling the latest tax rate on “the rich,” to around 100 percent. That won’t make much difference to the deficit, so double it, too, on all the other income brackets. Now, we are getting somewhere. Keep doubling across the board until revenues & expenditures level out. It’s that easy. Soon, everyone can be paying 100 percent, & by the principle of graduated income tax, the rich paying, say, 10 or 20 or 50 times what they earn. Given demographic trends, the rates would have to keep rising at an accelerating pace towards infinity, but hey, it’s just numbers.

The alternative, we now learn, is to mint trillion-dollar coins. This has been proposed with mock seriousness (but now increasing gravity) by several economic sages of what we might call the neo-Weimar school. There is a loophole in the coining regulations that will allow the U.S. Treasury to do this. Simply mint another one each time the debt ceiling approaches, & there will be no need to ask Congress to raise that ceiling again.

What puzzles me is the Republican response from Congress. They may have retained control in the House of Representatives, thanks to careful gerrymandering of districts, but really, everyone knows they lost the election, & that a solid majority of Americans (increased since November according to polls) believe Obama “understands” them, & is looking out for their best interests. For comparison, well over three-quarters of Americans abominate the Congress, & condemn it for being insufficiently cooperative with the Obama administration.

So why not give Obama & company whatever they want?

The Republicans hesitate in view of the likely destruction of the United States of America, to which they continue to cling, as to their guns & their Bibles, with an understandable sentimental attachment. And perhaps they feel the injustice, that many tens of millions who do not like the guvmint & are opposed to 9 dollars in 10 of its spending, if not more, should be compelled to pay for what they think is evil. But again, hey: they lost the election, & the majority in a democracy have always carried rape rights on the minority.

Why are the Republicans dithering, when there is work to be done? Why don’t Boehner & McConnell lead a little delegation over to the White House to offer a surrender? “You tell us how you propose to fix the problems, & we, by abstaining on every Congressional vote, will let it all pass through.”

Of course, poor President Obama would then have to fight with the Congressional Democrats who, when push comes to shove, actually agree with their Republican colleagues on most substantive issues. But a civil war between the White House & the rest of the Democratic Party would be, from a Republican standpoint, so much more fun than one in which the Republicans themselves step up to take the beating. It might even expose some part of the great American Obamanoid majority to aspects of the fiscal problem they had previously overlooked.

Meanwhile, let me propose that all you Yankee Rednecks move up here to Canada. You know, we could take over this place.

Good friends of mine are in Italy at the moment, pinging back words & pictures. They sensibly decided to winter in Venice, where thanks to Internet they can work as well as anywhere else, & explore day to day. Hotels are useful in transit, & for three weeks en route they used them around Florence, “visiting every church, seeing every fresco & all the pictures” they could; but better to take an apartment & settle in. They will “do Rome” in the homeward arc, come the spring. Sometimes I almost wish that I would allow photographs on this site. (But you know me. Backward.) The lady, once our art director at the Idler magazine, since married to an Idler writer, is already chittering away in Italian. Everything sounds better in Italian. In the latest message — magnificent photos — they have just arrived in Venice:

“I almost wept when I got off the train. There was part of the Grand Canal looking modestly beautiful. You can see a million pictures of a place, & even see it in a movie, but it is always just itself when you arrive.”

Verily. As a traveller reading obsessively ahead, as a journalist cramming background for an “assignment,” I found this again & again. Everything written is as straw, compared with what is revealed on arrival. In ten minutes, in ten seconds, all is transformed by the reality of the place itself; & none of the preparation was ever adequate. I remember Venice in the winter, under my own circumstances of almost forty years ago. I could not stay long, alas. Of a morning I rose to witness the city under a light fall of snow. This turned quickly to slush, but the enchantment will not leave me, until I develop Alzheimers or whatever. How could one ever become bored with Venice, & all her history in centuries compounded. And even for that history, the beginning of understanding was to touch that stone, & comprehend the incredible fact of stone & water.

*

The Commentariat have been discussing words: which ones we put in “scare quotes” & why. “Renaissance” & “Enlightenment” came up for a fresh flogging. Let me carry the beating into this post, for which perhaps a new category is needed: “Philosophical Dictionary.” There is great confusion in the use of labels, & one must define terms as one goes along, to make any sense. This word “Renaissance,” with a capital “R,” & often preceded by the definite article, is a term that demands some brief, decisive expostulation.

We have, up here in the High Doganate, a copy of The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, by the beloved American scholar, Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937). It is, for the bibliomaniacal reader, the Meridian reprint of 1957. I bought it second-hand when I was in high school, & though scruffy then & scruffier now, it is precious beyond words. To this day I would recommend it to anyone as a point of departure. No later book of which I am aware does so good a job of providing a sympathetic overview, or handbook to the period. And while truly, as noted above, no book can replace the experience of being there, all my attempts to return to the 12th century have so far failed.

Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, a rather poetical account of the north-west of Europe two & three centuries later, was my other adolescent portal into the Mediaeval world; the world from which such beautiful things came down to us as Venice, & Chartres. “Poetical” in both better & worse sense; but Huizinga does something beyond what most historians even attempt. From the bells ringing through the opening pages, he tells the reader that he is now a long way from home.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” This famous opening of L.P. Hartley’s (recommended) novel, The Go Between, refers to a past at the turn of the 20th century, viewed from the position of 1953. That was the year of my birth, & in looking back upon my own childhood, now equally displaced in time, I, too, am remembering a foreign country, when they did things differently, even here in my father’s Methodist Ontario, or in my mother’s Calvinist Cape Breton. One must take that in, as one perhaps cannot help doing with advancing age. Two generations can be a long time; & by extension, twenty or thirty or forty generations require a formidable leap of the imagination. One cannot learn enough about so displaced a time, to avoid anachronism entirely; even if one is reading a history in the place where it occurred.

Part of my motive, for travelling in space, through as much of rural India as I could in the 1970s — when India was another country from what she is today — was to acquaint myself with physical conditions in, if you will, “a representative pre-Modern society.” That is to say, an India then still largely free of the gadgets & baubles of “modern life”; a land where the village was still the centre of being, & not yet a statistical insignificance, a bureaucratic anomaly, & an impediment to Progress.

In retrospect, I am very glad to have seen & touched pieces of an India not yet hustled out of herself, & to have felt my own Post-Modern cynicism & glibness being stripped away. For otherwise I might never have grasped some huge things. For instance, the sheer joy in the lives of people who were by any Western standard quite ridiculously “poor.” The intensity of their pleasure in God’s green earth. Their freedom from aesthetic & other neuroses.

The joy, for instance, taken by men & women alike in small children; & the happiness of women who were by contemporary Western edict grievously oppressed. Too, the contentment to be found in caste & station, among people who had not yet been taught to resent their circumstances, in the Marxist way; who had not yet learned to crave the phantasms of materialism. People who received the humblest gifts of life with a gratitude so simple & direct as to be inexplicable in any modern language.

One might almost say I went to India (or returned there, for it was part of my childhood) in order to visit the Middle Ages: to walk along ancient footpaths, & ride in bullock carts, mile on mile under the sun & under the stars through countryside without electrification. To be rained on, & feel my feet sink into the mud; to sweat & to shiver & to live, intensely.

India had her ages of spiritual & intellectual transformation, her own Renaissances now buried in deep time; her own succeeding catastrophes. They provide useful comparisons with our European history, & to the Italy to which we now return — the “superpower” through so many past centuries, & centre of our Christendom along with the Church’s first daughter, France.

*

There was indeed a Renaissance in the 12th century, as Haskins from the outset declares:

“This century, the very century of Saint Bernard & his mule, was in many respects an age of fresh & vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, & of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art & the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics & of Latin poetry & Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, & of much of Greek philosophy; & the origin of the first European universities. The 12th century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture & sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin & vernacular poetry. The theme is too broad for a single volume, …” & therefore he will attempt only a sketch of what we might call the “scientific” developments.

Much that we associate with our own modernity, traces to that Renaissance of the 12th century, if not back to the Ottonian Renaissance before it, or to the Carolingian Renaissance before that. Then looking forward, one may descry distinct “Renaissances” within the Duecento, Trecento, Quattrocento: not mere periods of time, but organic movements, with centres of activity: heart, body, limbs. Seen for what they were, they do not, as our “Whig interpretation of history” assumes, anticipate any later age. Each instead offers a treasury in itself, including maps to roads not taken. Each added to the accumulation of knowledge, & to the catalogue of artistic possibilities; & from each, much is lost. “Progress” lays claim to the accumulations, but only by appropriating them — this little pygmy on the shoulders of giants, who thinks he is so tall.

Consider this English word, “Renaissance.” It means rebirth, recovery, revival, renewal, restoration. There is no futurism in any of those words. The Renaissance of the Quattrocento, which we call “The Renaissance,” looked backward, not forward. It was proud of recovering what was thought to have been lost from earlier ages; to be restoring ancient clarities & standards. The same could be said of every other Renaissance.

Giotto, to use a ragamuffin prop from the old Whiggish bag of deceits, is habitually presented as “ahead of his time.” He, from his own master Cimabue, introduced “innovations” to the art of painting, including a technique of perspective that “looks forward to The Renaissance.” This is utter nonsense. Giotto was looking forward to no such thing. To view his paintings as if he were, is to stare right through them; to see only tricks. He was himself an embodiment of the Renaissance of the later Trecento. He is innocent of any Quattrocento intention. The Arena Chapel does not lead to anything. It is a place in itself; of pilgrimage.

The future does not exist. This is a plain statement of fact the Moderns began to lose their hold on, & we Post-Moderns have lost it altogether. Only the past exists. Giotto, like every other fully sane human being, was looking not to the future but to the past. So far as he may have been guilty of “innovations,” they were innovations upon the past. As Cardinal Newman said, of the spiritual journey, we “walk to heaven backward,” advancing not towards the future but in recession from error, towards truth. People trying to escape the monstrous fantasies of our progressive futurists should try very hard to get that.

When a man refers to “The Renaissance,” ask him which Renaissance he means.

The habit of dating our modernity from 1492 — from the discovery of America & all that — is an ignorant habit, though from its constant repetition, hard to throw off. It is like dating anything from the Moon Landing: a memorable but meaningless technological accomplishment. Or, dating “The Renaissance” from the technique of perspective. These are habits of the excruciating technological mind, which one might almost say is trained to miss the point. The Genoese, Cristoforo Colombo, is unambiguously a figure of the Middle Ages. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, were likewise men fully formed & functioning in the pre-Reformation environment of Catholic Christendom. Copernicus, too, was a Mediaeval man. Impressive they were, but they were not Modern. It is an act of theft to claim them for some later age; to drag them across the boundary into our Brave New World.

That boundary in time lies beyond them. Choose, if you need a fixed date for filing purposes, 31 October 1517 as one scrap of the frontier — that Hallowe’en when Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenburg; but most of it comes a generation later. It is the Reformation, & not the last Mediaeval Renaissance, that separates us from the Middle Ages; separates Catholic & Protestant alike, from every kind of Catholic who lived before. Everything that defines us as “Modern” descends rather from the destruction of the unity of Western Christendom.

That this Reformation had many Mediaeval antecedents should go without saying. Yet the Lollards & other Mediaeval heretics, to whom Reformation heretics looked back, were themselves not looking forward. They could see no Zwingli, no Luther, no Calvin from where they were standing. Those, in their turn, conceived their reforms for all Christendom; none quite intended to found an Ism on himself.  In that sense they, too, were Mediaeval men.

Indeed, no one can see the full consequences of his acts, for that is beyond the possibilities of human knowledge. Every figure, from every age, was living in a present that is murky to us, & becomes completely opaque when we read into his works the slightest reference to an unforeseeable future. We, who often think we can see into the future, are in every moment we attempt that, insane.

No “Renaissance” can offer so violent a division, as the Reformation achieved. We self-flattering Moderns seize upon “The Renaissance” as harbinger of our modernity, from the purest vanity. Nothing so beautiful is conceivable to us. It is out of our reach; it is of another age. We should like to think that our beginnings may be found in some fine perfume or mist. In fact we start in a monstrous breach of the order in which the flower of Mediaeval Humanism was nurtured; with a poisoning of that soil. Our modernity began in the statecraft of Henry VIII; in cold-blooded murder. In worse than murder: for it involved a declaration of the Right of Man to play God — the precise opposite of the humanist spirit in Erasmus & More & Vives, each a bold defender of Catholic Christendom.

And we have lived, since, not in a civilization characterized by rinascimenti & rebirths, but in one characterized by violent turmoil, amid corpses piled ever higher.

Which is not to say that the longing has been, or ever can be suppressed, for Creation, for creative Renaissance; or that it has not continued to burst, by freshets through our asphalt pavements. New life, & new Creation, follows through those cracks; then is again paved over. But eventually all asphalt must dissolve.

Let us therefore abjure Progress. Let us therefore seek Renaissance again.

The character of Orsino, Duke of Illyria in Twelfth Night, and for that matter the beautiful Countess Olivia whom he woos in his overstated way, are wonderful reminders that narcissism is not a modern invention. The parade of “feelings” — which begins in what might be truly felt, and ends in keeping up the appearances — has been wending through the City of Man since it was first incorporated. The narcissism isn’t in the feelings, of course. It is in the parade of them.

Things may have been worse in Shakespeare’s day, when people could more skilfully articulate their feelings, in dress and manner as well as words; when they could sing, and dance, and play upon musical instruments. Shakespeare gives us full in the face what today would slap noodling — stale and wet and second-hand. Our own narcissistic performances are cliché-ridden, seem almost taped. The Elizabethans knew far better how to emote for attention, wording for surprise. It was less like whining, more like physical attack.

Nor is the self-righteous Malvolio other than a character we still see all around us — differing only in facundity, his ability to express himself. He is humourless, officious, conceited, and a prig. It is evident his own creator hates him, and it is interesting to learn that the subplot, in which the story of Malvolio nearly takes over the play, may have been entirely of Shakespeare’s invention. The rest of the machinery he lifted from the usual Italian sources, making a few startling improvements; but the Malvolio subplot is edgier than that.

Malvolio is high steward in the young widow Olivia’s extensive household, but his like may be observed today in every government department, or mixing into any controversy as uptight spokesman for the “politically correct.” He is a person who brashly presents himself as a moral improvement on the rest of mankind; a man whose interest is excited exclusively by power. “The personal is the political” for him, and the focus is upon personal advancement. He is a character who flourishes in business, too — I’ve seen him climbing corporate ladders, and one cannot watch one’s back too carefully when the office politician is at large. I’ve even seen his like in the Church hierarchy.

At the other extreme, Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s drunken uncle, rowdy and careless to a fault, whose frolicsome nature is untainted by any ambition higher than a practical joke; and whose Sancho, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, would be characterized today as “a complete idiot.” The whole play, it seems to me, is about the art of making a spectacle of oneself, but Sir Andrew is presented as artless. He thinks he can do things like speak French, and boogie, but no one could take offence at his pretensions. His suit of Olivia is all but ignored. Still, he serves his loyal turn by Sir Toby’s side as the gloves come off, and the fight is starting.

The whole play turns, to my mind, on the scene where these two are returning to the household from the evening’s revels — the worse for wear already, but wanting more wine. They are confronted by the august Malvolio, there, as ever, to lay down the law. Maria, Olivia’s magnificent gentlewoman, has already warned our knights against what they are stepping into. Feste, Olivia’s Fool or Clown, is trying to run some interference. But the full horror of Malvolio’s Puritanism — and through Maria and Sir Andrew, Shakespeare drops the “P” word in plain sight — has commoved the household. Something must be done.

Sir Toby is still merrily singing when the Clown intervenes for his own good. Taking the Clown for Malvolio’s proxy, Sir Toby observes: “Out o’tune sir.”

Then taunts: “Art any more then a Steward?”

Then throws down the gauntlet entirely: “Dost thou thinke because thou art vertuous, there shall be no more Cakes and Ale?”

“Yes by Saint Anne,” saith the Clown, still perhaps trying to lower the temperature. “And Ginger shall bee hotte y’th mouth too.”

Malvolio tells Maria that her job is no more secure than his next report to her Lady, marching off in his highest dudgeon.

But Maria, clever girl, has conceived a scheme that will see Malvolio into the madhouse, and the others join heartily in. She has mastered her mistress’s handwriting, and will write a note to Malvolio, as if from Olivia. It will persuade him that Olivia herself would welcome his romantic advances, and tell him in ludicrous detail how he may dress and behave to please her. It will be a list, naturally, of everything the Countess most detests.

And Malvolio, easily seized by ambition, and totally incapable of smoaking a jest, takes it hook line and sinker. He makes a side-splitting fool of himself, after which he is carted away as insane.

The main plot — the usual Plautine round of twins and mistaken identities, comic love triangles, messages and messengers gone astray, nefarious manoeuvres dissolving into farce — with cross-dressing for additional sport — proceeds to a triple-deck ending, and happy marriages all round. Each character gets better than he deserves, and as the conspiracy finally unravels, even Malvolio gets released from the loony bin. By the tradition of the times, in England, the twelfth day of Christmas leading into Twelfth Night (eve to the Epiphany), was a jolly party. The play is in this spirit, & the subtitle, “What You Will,” promises only slapstick entertainment.

The big thrill is in the subplot; in the wicked glee with which the playwright drags Malvolio across the stage, and administers the kicking. Yes, Mr Shakespeare is declaring: we shall have cakes and ale!

*

Twelfth Night was first performed at Court (in Whitehall probably), and despite some cute references to the town — for instance to the Elephant, a Southwark pub (transposed to Illyria) — it was pitched to an audience that only ever went there slumming. Had it been played instead before the pit at the Globe, I doubt the author would have left in the tongue-lash Maria delivers on the Puritan “dogs.” This would have been equally acceptable to Catholic and Anglican at Court, for whom Puritans were the common enemy. But “out there,” budding Roundheads could be scattered through the audience, and looking for trouble. Things might not have ended so well. The Globe theatre cost money to build, and was made of wood entirely; you wouldn’t want to tease them.

In this respect we are in a parallel situation today, with our contemporary “progressive” canines. Behind their backs, we say what we think, but it would be unwise to say it to their faces, for their pride is incontestible, and sensitive to the slightest nudge, and they play for keeps. Prudence dictates Maria’s more subtle strategy of revenge: set them up to perform their own self-destruction.

Switzerland’s oldest bank, Wegelin & Company, whose foundation pre-dates that of the United States, is to close permanently after surrendering in a New York court battle against the U.S. Internal Revenue “Service.” The directors admitted to helping more than 100 wealthy Americans shelter their income from taxation. They were the last of the Swiss banks to offer this (actual) service, every other having been hounded “voluntarily” out of the business by the jackboots in Washington, DC.

Wegelin’s ability to resist was cracked last year, by a series of IRS moves against its directors which forced the bank to sell off its core non-American assets quickly, to protect the deposits of its non-American customers. The IRS prosecution tactics, against Wegelin & other Swiss banks, exhibit the lawlessness with which U.S. government agencies now habitually operate. They were able to exploit the honour of the Swiss banking system, in which directors still hold personal liability. They went after the directors individually, to get at a bank which itself had no U.S. branches, & was entirely outside IRS jurisdiction. As well, by publicizing their prosecution, they were able to wreck the bank’s business internationally: for few customers will take the risk of dealing with a bank that the U.S. government is determined to harm.

To his moral credit, the bank’s managing director, Karl Hummler — who is also incidentally the president of Neue Zürcher Zeitung, among the world’s oldest & most reliable daily newspapers — risked personal ruin to fight for the privacy of his clients. He pushed the Swiss government to defend banking customs & practices that had been recognized for centuries. Several of his fellow directors buckled, however, once their personal assets were attacked, & one at least has delivered a puling “admission” to the media that what his bank had been doing (entirely within Swiss law since time out of mind) was “wrong.” Perhaps he thought this would make the hard-faced goons at the IRS go a little easier on him personally.

The Swiss are under attack from foreign tax departments on several fronts. Their government had just come to an arrangement with the German tax authority, to turn over a large proportion of the “hidden” assets of every German national with a Swiss bank account. Unsatisfied with this act of rapine, the German Bundesrat (upper house) has refused to ratify the agreement, & now the German authorities are pushing for more.

Nanny States everywhere, themselves surpassing bankruptcy from incredibly irresponsible fiscal behaviour, are working both directly & in consort against all “offshore” locations where banking privacy is still maintained, & where they consider the tax rates to be too low. In previous generations, they tried to “make the rich pay” with ruinous graduated income taxes. The rich escaped by offshore accounts, by leaving the country themselves if necessary, or through the loopholes their lobbyists were able to get the politicians in their pay to write into tax legislation. This latter remains the American “compromise,” & the (grievously mislabelled) “fiscal cliff” deal struck two days ago contains all kinds of new loopholes & subsidies for the sort of corporations that contributed generously to the Obama campaign, especially Hollywood & media & “wind farms” (in the broadest sense).

The whole promise of democracy, as the Athenian mob quickly discovered, is the appropriation of wealth. As a great Scotsman said (Alexander Fraser Tytler, in one of the few quotations that can be traced to him on paper): from its Hellenic beginnings democracy consisted of servility to demagogues, who “maintained their influence over their partisans by the most shameful corruption & bribery, of which the means were supplied alone by the plunder of the public money.”

We (the living) now witness an advanced stage of this development, in which cooperative international efforts are directed to removing the last places on Earth where wealth might be preserved from the demonic grasp of “progressive” tax collectors. Once this object has been achieved, the agents of “democracy” may impound whatever they wish, from anyone, utilizing that monopoly of power which they have achieved by the reduction to impotence of every agency in civil society not already under the thumb of the government bureaucracy.

That is what Obama is about, & all that Obama is about, though let us say in his defence that he is only the latest demagogic embodiment of “progress” to enjoy the support of an idiotized electorate, & hardly among the more intelligent of the political operators. Woodrow Wilson might be presented as the first U.S. president to openly espouse “progressive” totalitarianism, articulating the ratcheting principle that has not changed from his day to this. One century after he first won election, the last restraints of the old U.S. Constitution are now being overturned, on Wilson’s own expressly anti-Constitutional argument.

It is also the centenary of the ratification of the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This was required to enable the central government to impose income taxes, supposedly to offset tariff reductions. The basic rate was set at 1 percent; but only a tiny fraction of the population made enough money to pay even that. Who could object? The top rate of 7 percent applied only to income at a level beyond the dreams of their avarice. So why shouldn’t people who were that rich pay “a little more”?

The real significance of the income tax system was that it gave government agents the ability & right to pry into every aspect of any citizen’s private life, in search of “hidden income.” The graduated tax rates could themselves be jacked up later: the progress of progressive “progress,” as it were.

This speech, by the intelligent American pundit George Will, to a student audience in Washington University at St Louis, does a fairly good job of twirling the strands together. Will, who has no religion, is speaking in defence of the citizen’s right to practise his religion. But hear him out, O ye agnosticks, for by extension he is also defending that citizen’s right to be anything at all, outside government control; & he is defending the original American Constitution on grounds which every True British Tory happens to share. He exquisitely “pins the tail on the donkey” — showing that by “progressivism” he does not mean anything vague; & if he associates it with the Democrat Party he is not merely expressing an opinion. From Wilson to FDR, to LBJ, to Carter, to Clinton, to Obama it has been, demonstrably, their constant theme.

Why do I defend the rich? Not for their own sakes; God knows they have done me no favours. It is because they are used by the politicians to excite that public envy & greed, by which the liberties of all the people are ultimately undone. For what can be brought down upon the rich — who can afford lawyers for good fellowship — can then be brought down so much more easily upon you, gentle reader — who face the hard-faced goons of “progress” & “democracy” all by your lonely little self. And with the fate of your children bundled nicely on the table.

We are told, in a series currently being aired on BBC Two (“Queen Victoria’s Children”) & by a book flaunted on their website (Jane Ridley, A Life of Edward VII) that the home life of Victoria, Albert, et famille, was not an embodiment of perfect bliss; that paintings & photographs projecting “an image of a virtuous, devoted young couple surrounded by obedient, fair-haired children” may have been misleading.

This can come as a surprise only to the television audience, not to those previously exposed to a little history. Victoria’s temperament may be construed from her letters, & the anecdotes were circulating in her own day; though at least then the newspapers had the decency not to print them. That her relations with everyone around her were tempestuous, & those with her first-cousin husband compounded by a barely hinged sexual infatuation, were among those things “everyone who was anyone” knew, & none of them needed to know.

At Queen’s University up here in Kingston, Ontario, we have a huge collection of the letters of the late Benjamin Disraeli, novelist & sometime prime minister of the United Kingdom. Their number is astonishing — he turned them out like emails, sometimes thirty at a sitting, & of course in the good old days they were delivered around London at almost the speed of emails by the Royal Mail.

The late John Matthews, who was editing them (they will continue to appear in great thick annotated volumes for centuries to come), used to regale us at lunch with items illustrating the flirtatious tension between Disraeli & the old-widow Queen. A smart, but incredibly wilful woman, with an eye ever fixed on the trivial irritation, she adored Disraeli a little too openly, & hated his arch-rival Gladstone with a compensating serpentine passion. At one point Britain neared constitutional crisis, as she told her advisers that, election or no election, she would not have Gladstone as her prime minister. An ill & despondent Disraeli, loser of said election, had to be brought into the Palace to explain the situation to Her Majesty, & continue explaining until she scrawled a note to the effect that she was appointing Mr Gladstone, but only on the advice of her dear friend.

A little black-clothed bundle of crackling fire, through the decades after Prince Albert’s decease, she became almost ostentatiously reclusive, & left the impression she had no remaining interest in worldly affairs. In light of her correspondence & the anecdotes however, this will be seen as the opposite of the truth, & her meddling in the lives of her unfortunate children was among her many tracks of interest.

“Bertie,” later to become King Edward VII, was the first of her nine acute disappointments (four sons & five daughters). He was slow with his tutors, & she thought him a halfwit, referring obsessively to his narrow pointed head, & saying she shuddered at the sight of him. He had inherited her temper, & perhaps also her sexual intensity, but without her capacity to bottle them up, so that he lurched from scandal to scandal. But the flip side, also shared between them, was an inability to give anything up, so that the relationship between them remained constantly, & explosively, close. He made, in retrospect, as fine a King, as she made a Queen.

Some clever feminist should, by now, have written a biography of Her Late Majesty depicting her as the original “shriekie sister.” (Perhaps one has & we missed it.) Through all her pregnancies she remained revolted by the biologically distinguishing facts of womanhood, & later referred to her own grown daughters breastfeeding their babies as “cows.” She took inordinate relish in putting men down, & often reduced her own sainted husband to shoving gibbering apologetic notes under her door. Her “royal we” in conversation & correspondence has about it an air of the White Goddess, & when stipulating royal household arrangements she could leave her courtiers wincing from the blows of what felt like misandry; or perhaps, sudden emancipation from the female repression of the last ten thousand years.

As we hold, a magnificent Queen, all four-foot-eleven of her (at her accession; she had shrunk four inches by her Diamond Jubilee). To our mind her only flaw, besides not being Catholic, was her curious notion that she should hang the royal family up as an icon of “family values.” This had never been part of their job description, & was bound to lead to misunderstandings, & even muted suspicion of hypocrisy. She bequeathed this modernizing, public role to each of her successors (except Edward VIII), & through her progeny & example to many of the (mostly ill-fated) monarchies of the Continent. Add the paparazzi media, & we have these “democratic” monarchs today, with their offspring crushed under the burden of celebrity.

Whereas, a monarch should be remote; & journalists who get too close, for pictures, should be barracked in the Tower. People should mind their own business; & royal families should mind theirs.

We did not want the year to pass without lamenting the loss of Robert Bork, who died 19th December age eighty-five. Among the greatest American jurisprudes, he is alas more remembered instead as a verb, for what was done to him. President Reagan managed to get Antonin Scalia onto the Supreme Court (its finest mind to the present day), but the Democrats who controlled the United States Senate in 1987 had long been chafing at Reagan’s rightward judicial course. A Nixon appointee was now retiring, whom the Left had come to appreciate for his mediocrity & pliability. The last thing they wanted was another Constitutional “Originalist” to replace him, with fire & spine. (The Originalist position is to discover what the Constitution “originally” said, & apply that; rather than “creatively” misreading it to get what progressives want & Congress won’t give them.)

And so the campaign to bork Bork began before he was even nominated. It would be a vicious campaign of personal smears & slander against “fill-in-the-blank.” Upon Bork’s actual nomination, Joe Biden quickly draughted a brief in which Bork’s views & career were caricatured with scurrility; the Democrat politicians & progressive lobbyists primped their outrage for the cameras; & the liberal media went dutifully to work amplifying each insinuation.

The most memorable part of this performance was the late Senator Kennedy’s theatrical denunciation, of “Robert Bork’s America.” It was a succession of very bald statements, each a knowing & malicious lie. Bork & his allies were taken aback; they were not prepared for the full stench of what was venting into the Senate chamber from Teddy Kennedy’s soul. Even for a man among the most disgusting ever to demean American politics, it was an unprecedented performance. And yet, in the sight of millions of zombified television onlookers, it succeeded in its object. Robert Bork’s honest reputation lay buried under Kennedy’s steaming pile; & the honour of the Democrat Party went into total eclipse, where it has remained for the past quarter century.

Bork himself, a very decent & learned man, normally quite courageous, was shaken to the point of resigning his appellate-court seat, to become an independent legal scholar. During the Senate hearings, he often seemed amazed by what was being said to him, & asked of him — abandoning legal arguments half-stated, not from any apparent desire to pull his punches, but from the pointlessness of explaining anything to Gadarene swine. His own decisive arguments against e.g. the construction of “civil rights” principles out of thin air, or of the “right to privacy” that justified Roe v. Wade, trailed off into silence. One must go to his books to find them completed.

His book, The Temptation of America (1990), offered powerful insights not only into the techniques but the mindset of several generations of judicial activists, going back to the New Deal if not Woodrow Wilson, rewriting laws with which they did not happen to agree, for the sake of abstract conceptions of justice that were incoherent. He carried this farther in Coercing Virtue (2003), which surveys judicial activism throughout the Western world; for everywhere self-confident liberal judges are putting such cracks into the edifice of law, by means of grand & preening acts of moral & intellectual vandalism.

Bork wrote Slouching Towards Gomorrah (2003), & edited A Country I Do Not Recognize (2005), about activist legal assaults on the commonly-held moral values that serve as the glue for our civilization. Everywhere, liberty is being redefined as licence, & individual liberty confined to the expression of the vile & obscene. Yet throughout Bork maintains a voice that is calmly & cautiously working within the parameters of the old American constitutionalism, often candidly admitting that little or nothing can be done.

We met him a decade ago, up here in Toronto, at a moment when we were both moving into the Catholic Church. Bork’s second wife, Mary Ellen née Pohl (his first died of cancer) led him gradually into the fold, by example he said — a very charming & kindly woman. Alike, Bork & his wife were of the old neighbourly school of America, who took the world for a small town, & greeted everyone in passing. On parting, they casually invited us to stay with them, on our next jaunt towards Virginia. We should have leapt at the opportunity to continue what was already an exhilarating conversation.

Our impression was that, in addition to the spiritual substance of Catholicism, Bork was attracted to the light of Natural Law, in its ancient Catholic exposition; that he was mulling in this light his own implicit legal positivism (that is, the view that the validity of a law depends not on its merits, but on its sources). This followed, too, from revisiting his own earlier “revolutionary” thinking in The Antitrust Paradox (1978 & revisions), where he argued that the law was meant to protect the interest of consumers, which might or might not actually be harmed by any given corporate merger, & must therefore be considered from more angles, less by rote & with more common sense.

He was, we speculate, developing a position more Harry Jaffa than Harry Jaffa — or as we like to think, moving towards what could be labelled, “Originalism Squared.” Where the U.S. Constitution gives only vague, ambiguous, or even contradictory indications of right, it nevertheless points back to natural law principles from which a clearer indication might be constructed, which could then be shown consistent with Constitutional instruction. Bork was endowed with a mind self-critical & intellectually humble; his gift was to stop short, as he thought judges should always stop short, of pushing beyond a demonstrable cusp of clear understanding. But he began to look beyond, towards territory quite different from what activist judges had imagined.

There is never enough time, in this world, & a man grows old before all the implications of his faith & belief & knowledge have truly begun to unfold. As Bork said to me (paraphrase): “Your instincts may be sound, & your argument may be self-consistent, but then your realize the foundations on which you are building are too rough, & you must explore the deeper foundations.”

“Old men should be explorers,” as T.S. Eliot said, “still & still moving,” towards “a further union, a deeper communion.”

In the end Bork was grateful to have been borked. He would have had to spend his last years corked in the bottle with eight other judicial scorpions, joining hapless minorities on the Supreme Court bench, writing opinions on cases themselves misconceived, taking heat for ideas he had never entertained, & yearning for personal freedom. Instead, by luck, he was allowed to roam. “Defeat is the great liberator,” we said apropos another matter entirely, & noticed the sparkling approval in his eyes. Conversely, victory in this world is the usual prelude to disaster. It is a wonderful grace of God to be spared it.

A member of our Commentariat complains about our misuse of the word, “issues.” But it is part of our “Gangnam style.” It is among the demotic expressions in which we delight. It casts light, or can do, into deep wells of unhappiness & misfortune. We heard once a young lady speak of an uncle who languished on his deathbed. “He has cancer issues,” she explained, as if it were some little fuss putting him out of his humour. Perhaps we should explain that she loved this uncle, & visited him almost every day. And that, to the end, he never approved of the way she dressed. (At his funeral, she appeared in Goth. )

Another for example is the word, “whatever.” We have heard it abused with real genius, & this excites the spirit of rivalry in us. The applications in theology, philosophy, & the other sciences, are downright stupefying. From how many mantraps could we have been sprung by the judicious insertion of this word, “whatever.” The mind buckles!

There are also complaints, in our email, about our promotion of pop videos, can you believe it?

We have a Moravian friend, Aegidius, who is, or at least was before he seemed to lose his television, our authority on pop videos. A man of learning, gravity & grace, he assured us that these videos must be seen; that they were hilarious. In truth, perhaps YouTube is too much of a good thing. But Aegidius kept that television only for the MuchMusic channel. It was thanks to him we discovered, those years back, so inspiring a video as this one.

Of a mediaeval disposition of mind, Aegidius is disinclined to condemn anything. As Dante, he is moved instead to arrange the phenomena of history, lovingly, each into its correct hierarchical position; thus in the Divine “Comedy” making use of all the rungs in Hell. Or lest we be taxed for too narrow a focus upon the heritage of Christendom, let us adduce the wise counsels of that Yogin of Amdo, Shabkar Tsodruk Rangdrol. Follow in the steps of this “laughing philosopher” through the fields & footpaths of a mediaeval Tibet (actually early 19th century), & one will hear echoes of our own wandering scholars, & their laughter in the face of the dangers of the road. And feel with them the great beauty of a world without cars, or televisions; only low-tech highwaymen.

We have lost, as a consequence of that Reformation, & in the scowls of the Puritans, that wonderful mediaeval sense of humour, so simple, even childish, & yet so profound. Verily, we have heard the echo of that breach in Christendom, in the excruciating feminist motto: “That’s not funny.” We have even lost this sense of humour ourself, & would be trying to recover it.

They had parades, for instance, in which they celebrated Fools, & the Lord of Misrule.  Confronted himself with a Gay Pride Parade, our Moravian friend did not flinch. He laughed heartily. He found the whole thing hysterically funny.  “Let us not be sombre, in the presence of a farce.”

Rabelais could laugh merrily at the spectacle of bad men getting their just deserts, even in this world, through some trivial accident or miscalculation. We read him today & are appalled that he could take such pleasure in great human pain; we scowl. But there was none of this modern censoriousness in Rabelais.

Meanwhile, do good & abjure evil. But not as the Pharisees, or the Pagans.