Essays in Idleness

If press reports are to be believed, the Toronto Argonauts have defeated the Calgary Stampeders in the 100th meeting for Lord Grey’s Cup, 35 points to 22. Notwithstanding our opposition to professional sport, our freedom from nationalism, & our regret that Canadian football deteriorated from something resembling rugby in the mid-19th century, to something not resembling by the early 20th, we get kind of giddy over such things.

Our Yanqui readers would be able to follow the game, once it were explained there are only three downs. Too, the field is 10 yards longer, & more than 10 yards wider. Canadian end zones are also much deeper, & when a field goal is missed, the ball may remain quite delightfully in play. We also allow open-field kicking, adding aerial drama to the conclusion of a close game. Our goal posts anchor on the goal line, too, so that the need to avoid hitting them becomes an issue in long touchdown passes. Each team has one more player on the field, behind the line of scrimmage; there are no restrictions on backfield movements, & our clock stays running, adding to the general sense of urgency. Until quite recently: none of these cissy innovations such as the “fair catch” rule. The Canadian arrangements force a more daring offence, some wild turnovers, & a big kicking game. The American version is more like an extremely violent form of chess.

It should be further explained to our southern friends that the Canadian game is not descended from the American. The degeneration from rugby happened contemporaneously on both sides of the border; & the differences are almost all the result of later U.S. innovations that were not copied here. The original Harvard v. McGill matches were played to rules that would now appear Canadian.

As to the earliness of the Canadian fixture, one may look to the weather at these latitudes which, even at this time of year, may border on inclement. (We start earlier to compensate, in June.) Among the more memorable Grey Cup matches was the “Mud Bowl” of 1950, in which one player nearly drowned, the pea-soup “Fog Bowl” of 1962, played largely by ear when passing became impossible, & the “Ice Bowl” of 1977, which explains itself. It was, as we used to say, a man’s game, before covered stadiums were invented, & other forms of girlishness prevailed in the culture at large.

Our ancient mama, then a young nurse removed by marriage from Halifax to Toronto, recalls an earlier visit of the Stampeders to Toronto, to win the 36th Grey Cup in 1948 (against the Ottawa Rough Riders). She was impressed by the tallness of the visiting Albertans, their magnificent hats, by the amount of meat they were able to consume, & by their propensity to eschew cars & instead ride horses. Indeed, we believe that was the year in which a classic Canadian question of etiquette was first raised: to wit, Should one ask permission before riding one’s horse into the lobby of the Royal York Hotel? The answer is of course, No, forgiveness is always easier to obtain than permission.

“We never expected that the collapse of Western Civ would be good for the economy.” This is a line we’ve been using for several decades now.

Today is the day when we turn to the Drudge Report to read such headlines as: “Gang fight at Black Friday sale. … Man punched in face pulls gun on line-cutting shopper. … Woman busted after throwing merchandise. … Thousands of teen girls & young women rush Victoria’s Secret. … Video: Insane battle over phones on sale. … Mayhem at Nebraska mall where 9 murdered in 2007. … Shoplifter tries to mace security guards. … Police: Man left boy in car to buy 51-inch TV.”

And so forth. While acquiring groceries yesterday, up here in the Canadas, we overheard several fat ladies plotting their Black Friday shopping strategies. They knew the hours at which various shops would open: this one at 5 a.m., that one not until 6 a.m.; & outrage because another was “refusing” to open until its usual time. Toronto, even without celebrating Thanksgiving on the U.S. date, aspires to match Philadelphia for the bigger event on the morning after.

It’s not that people don’t have brains. It’s what they use them for. We were impressed that these ladies, who might pass quite plausibly for drooling idiots on most other occasions, were suddenly so sharp, so well-informed, so “committed.” Is this ground for hope? No.

Suddenly we thought of all those people who in distant antiquity (say, 1975 A.D.) sat with their families through huge Thanksgiving meals. There must have been many retail workers among them. And today, all of those have their minds fixed on getting up for work in the middle of the night; & going to a workplace that will resemble a piranha tank when the meat falls in.

And yes, this is good for the economy: for as long as economic health is measured in current statistical terms.

Therein lies the weakness of any mediaevally Toryish political philosophy, whose referents are quality & not quantity of goods, & which seeks some intangible “satisfaction” in the product of human labour. Which mobilizes intuitively on aesthetic issues. Which holds (as our mediaeval ancestors once did) that even War must be conducted in a high style, & under all kinds of ethical restrictions, & must absolutely exclude non-combatants.

And again, let us think of those Chinese. As we all know, they discovered gunpowder a thousand years before we did. But until very late in the day, & alas under Western influence, they didn’t use it even against the barbarians. They made, instead, beautiful firecrackers. For the notion had been instilled in them, that if one were to use such stuff to blow up human beings, one would certainly incur the Wrath of Heaven.

How quaint!

We have been thinking a lot about China through the last many weeks, for our bedside reading has been historical & archaeological, about the old Chinese west: “Sinkiang” or Chinese Turkestan through the centuries. As Kipling could have said, “What should they know of China who only China know?” Just as the American westward expansion floods light on the nature of America, so too did the Chinese westward expansion. Or rather, pluralize that, for their own Wild West was won & lost many times over the centuries.

Now in the T’ang dynasty, in the court at Chang’an, there were bureaucrats who understood supply-side economics, kept taxes therefore low but spread them widely (which generates much more revenue than the opposite, covetous “stick it to the rich” strategy). There has been, to our knowledge, little scholarly work done on this by the economic historians, who remain occidentocentric; & let us admit we are inferring from things read beside the point.

But what we say appears obvious: a vast Empire, comparable in scale to the United States or greater in relation to the world of its day, in which “capitalism” is flourishing & generating the wealth for huge infrastructural schemes, to say nothing of the immense standing army that besuits a “hyperpower.” Where also, technology has advanced far beyond that of any neighbouring realm, & often seems almost modern. Through fire signals along watchtowers, for instance, Chang’an could know within hours about trouble a thousand miles away. At sea or on land, it had forces ready. Expeditions could be mounted even to far Afghanistan.

It was an Empire which, like every other in history, finally collapsed upon itself, defeated by nomadic & semi-nomadic peoples it vastly outnumbered & whose technological inferiority was laughable; but whose will was greater. Through political disunity, China destroyed herself, & we have distant glimpses of what will happen in North America, when our own brilliant high technology is suddenly of no avail. Demographic things, like the reduction of the population to a fraction of what it once was, as an immensely complex system of food distribution comes to pieces, & few are prepared for subsistence farming. Empty cities. Savage alien rulers. The learning curve rising once again, straight ahead.

Two points were made above: about supply-side economics, & about the Wrath of Heaven. In the heyday of the T’ang, both were understood. In the collapse, neither could be remembered. The world, of course, is more complicated than that, yet we refer perhaps through these two, to aspects of a single point: for the boundary of Heaven & Earth is never quite certain.

To be in accord with Nature, & master her jungle of “supply & demand,” we must also master another part of Nature: the jungle within man. In politics, it is given to us to find ways to choreograph, & harmonize, the demands of Earth with the demands of Heaven — working not against, but with the grain, from the lowest to the highest. Only thus can we ever rise out of our lazy hapless squalor.

We have been reading also Paul, particularly the Pastoral Epistles, in which he is writing not to churches but to individual men. There & elsewhere through the Pauline epistles one is struck again & again not only by the fire & fury of his Faith, but by his reason & common sense in every practical matter. Read him answering such questions as, What sort of man do we want for a deacon? What sort of women will serve the Church well?

In reading such things, we hear echoes of Confucius: of universal principles at work in the regulation of human life, or “religion” as such regulation is called, from the Latin. We need upright officials. We need persons free of scandal to fill these offices; we need persons sufficiently formed that they will not succumb to the many corrupt temptations of office; we need persons who will earn respect, because they actually serve. We need men & women who haven’t risen too quickly, who won’t let power go to their heads. We need people from stable families, who have formed stable families. “Geniuses” we can do without.

Whether Paul is telling Timothy or Titus, or Confucius is telling Yen Hui, there are moments when it seems all the same. An example must be set, for the common people will be ruled by this example. Tyranny will not work; “do what I say not what I do” will not work. That way lies revolution.

We see in Black Friday the collapse of this conception of Order. And the sad thing is, it is the only conception of Order. There are no easy alternatives to it; there are no easy ways out. Mere machinery will never work on its own; no Constitution can save us from ourselves. The machine must be operated by good & capable women & men; by humble persons who honestly fear the Wrath of Heaven. Or, whatever the machine, it will crush us.

Thanks to Internet, I have had more USA Mericans than Canadians reading my hack effusions, for more than a decade now. As a Loyalist, and not a Nationalist, I have welcomed that. To my mind, while we are separated by a very long border into subjects of two distinct Nanny States, we are all Americans. Our own immigrant ancestors landed more on that side of the line, than on this; and they and their descendants were only obliged to cross it in light of a Revolution which broke hearts and split families. (I have never liked schism.) Our hope of recovering our property Stateside diminishes with time. But you never know: I have Czech friends who never expected to recover their property.

It is a further misfortune that the day on which we celebrate Thanksgiving has become separated, by the statutes of the respective legislative assemblies. True, Canada is northward of most of those States, and so our harvests tend to fall earlier. But Thanksgiving does not fall earlier still in Alaska; and besides, the whole thing began on Baffin Island.

Our American Thanksgiving is a little different from the European harvest festivals, which were a little different again from the ancient Hebrew Feast of the Tabernacles.

Some forty-two years before the Mayflower, full of Puritans speaking “rights language,” was forced by winter seas to land not in Virginia but on Cape Cod; some twenty-nine years before the Jamestown landing, Martin Frobisher commanded the first British settlement attempt — in what we now call Frobisher Bay. With twenty/twenty hindsight, we can see why he was luckless. At the time his main problem was the ship carrying the building materials. It went down after hitting the ice. Alas, none of his intending settlers knew how to build igloos; nor how to distinguish fool’s gold from the genuine item, so that they loaded their remaining ships with worthless rock for the voyage home.

But they did know how to pray, and Master Robert Wolfall, their Anglican chaplain, “made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankful to God for their strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places.” And an Anglican Eucharist was celebrated, in Thanksgiving for that deliverance.

Take note: “Deliverance.” For as any of our earliest European ancestors would aver, just being alive is a cause for Thanksgiving. Things may not be going so well for us today, but consider: we have moved past breaking rocks in the polar wilderness. Life could be worse than the crowds in the shopping malls will be tomorrow for Black Friday: though morally it might seem more of a decline.

Frobisher’s old-college try was even twenty-six years before our great hero, Samuel de Champlain, sailed to New France in the path of Jacques Cartier with his own first shiploads of intending settlers. He it was who founded the Order of Good Cheer at Port-Royal; who commanded our first grand, unmistakably Catholic, Thanksgiving feast — sharing out food with the Indians who had come in their amazement to watch. (Malicious sceptics in post-modern academia like to challenge every detail, but observe: they replace our tangible records with hypotheses gathered from the empty air.)

Deliverance is thus an intrinsic part of our American Thanksgiving; Deliverance, in addition to pumpkin and squash and fine turkey birds; Deliverance, as any old mariner would appreciate, from the perils we have seen, and too, from the perils we have not seen. We thank God for what He has given, and also for what He has withheld; for what He has permitted, and what He has denied; for what He has forgiven, and what He has prepared, in the fullness of His incomprehensible Splendour.

One may argue for years with a man who gets almost everything right, except the key point. Such has been the case with our Chief Texas Correspondent (see his various comments). Though surrounded by Catholic influences, he puts up a stand, reminiscent of the Alamo. He is in fact representative of the best in the USA “Tea Party” movement (that would be iced tea, in Texas). And we are generally well disposed towards the Tea Party types. They are, in the main, good-hearted “populists” looking back upon what they imagine to have been a populist Constitution.

It survived, largely intact until 1829, because it wasn’t. The U.S. Founding Fathers rightly distrusted The People, & therefore put checks & balances to restrain them. But they created an opening for mass market party politics, & the cart drove through. In a similar way, the Fathers of our Canadian Confederation tried to limit the inevitable horrors of democracy, by creating an appointive, backstop Senate & so forth. But they left the stable doors open, & the horses were soon at large.

The degeneration starts with pride, envy & covetousness; with the discovery that the government’s monopoly on force can be used to appropriate goods & services; to settle all the old scores by spite; to advance one’s class at the expense of another; to free the citizen from his moral obligations — all demands spoken in the name of the demos, the mob, The People, “equality” — from astride a tall wild horse.

The key point here is, strangely enough: God or Man? Will the order of a nation depend on God’s immutable commandments, or on “evolving” conceptions of right & wrong, & human decisions made day to day? From the start, in both countries, there was a tension between these two incompatibles. In United Statist terms, “One nation under God” was in play against “We the People.” To our view, in the end, the self-worshipping People have won; & perhaps Christ has left them to get on with it. Our theory is that Christ goes where He is wanted, & leaves when He is not. He has gone, perhaps to Africa.

We put it that way in the full knowledge that we will be treated as mad, by the atheist Enlightened. Their reaction might be, “Have you been to Africa lately?” To which we might reply, “Have you checked on those Vandals & Huns?” The Europe that was raised by the Church from savagery to the highest pinnacles of civilization started with unpromising tribal material. It took centuries to Christianize them; centuries through which heresy often flourished within the Church herself. Some centuries from now, we may look to Africa again, as the centre of our human world; to the magnificent cathedrals of Africa  — Europe having returned to its barbaric condition, & America with Europe. Already, we are in more need of missionaries from Africa, than Africa is in need of missionaries from us.

Back here in the 21st century, let us not pretend that democracy can save us. The voice of The People is not the voice of God. Humility, not arrogance, offers the only way forward; meekness in the face of both God & our neighbour.

For “secular” political instruction, we could turn to the Chinese. Not, however, to those of the last few centuries, but to the sages of the Han, the T’ang, & the Sung Ch’ao. They were blessed with the wonderful Confucian doctrine that, when political life has degenerated, we need 正名. In English we call this a “Rectification of Names.”

That is, we must return to using words correctly, to mean what they mean, to infer what they infer. We must escape from the imperium of Humpty Dumpty, wherein words mean what we want them to mean. Proper use of language has in itself the power to restore customary order & relations between persons; & therefore obedience from below, & benevolence from above, within the natural human hierarchy; a place for everyone, & everyone in his place. Take such words as Confucius himself flagged. On marriage for instance: “husband” & “wife.” Then, “father” & “son.” Then, “elder” & “younger.” Then even, “ruler” & “subject.”

And let us recall, as Confucius himself, that the truth is liberating. For this we do not even need Christianity: only the will to rise out of our depravity again.

Granted, we are of a paranoid disposition, though most of our expectations are realized. Our current dread runs along the plot line of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a movie watched in our distant youth. Except, in our paranoid fantasy, it is not giant melons that are invading the Greater Parkdale Area, rather long thin wiry vanilla beans. We haven’t actually seen any of these lately, except the one we keep stuffed into a wee narrow bottle with rum, for culinary purposes. We checked our cupboard, & it appears to be still safely under cork.

But in the last week, three eerie things have happened. First, we were offered a blended Canadian rye, curiously branded “Spicebox,” whose maker claims to offer the palate “notes of pepper & fruit, complimented with hints of vanilla & dried spices.” In our humble but aggrieved opinion, the only flavour “hinted” was the rye. The rest of the suggestion list vanished behind an overwhelming vanilla flash, of the kind we associate with artificial extract. The colour was also suspiciously rich. Well, that wasn’t our first unpleasant experience while drinking whisky. And the label gave fair warning.

Next, we ordered a cup of coffee with a hot liver sandwich in a local greasy spoon. It was a day later, & we were still trying to efface our Spicebox memory. Now, this is a reliable Inner Parkdale establishment, whose cooks & waitresses change only with death. Neither liver nor white bread nor gravy, nor the tinned vegetables on the side, were unusual in any way; but the coffee seemed to be laced with vanilla. On enquiry, we found it was indeed some novel brand, & that the proprietor thought he had gone slightly upmarket. It wasn’t our imagination: everyone had complained.

Lightning may strike twice, but with tea this evening, up here in the High Doganate, we heated then buttered a scone. This was from a respectable bakery, in another part of the GPA, which could be forgiven for no longer understanding that scones are not meant to be cake-like in consistency. No one in the Province of Ontario seems to get that any more; our British heritage is leaching away. Ask for a “tea biscuit” & one will get something closer, but still not near. What can we do but offer it up? Yet again, we weren’t prepared for the shout of vanilla that came out of the innocent-looking thing.

As we used to say at the Idler magazine, “Once is misadventure; twice is coincidence; but three times is enemy action.” We wonder if gentle readers have had similar experiences. If so, & in light of recent electoral indications that zombieism may be on the march – to say nothing of what we’ve seen on the streets throughout Greater Parkdale – it may be time to sound the alarm.

The clincher is this report from National Public Radio on the latest Mars mission. It seems scientists are working to confirm a major discovery by the Curiosity Rover. They won’t say what it is until December. But if what they’ve found resembles stalks of vanilla, we’re done for.

Our column yesterday in the Catholic Thing (cliquez ici pour la version française), on the general slouchment, seemed to touch off a discussion on the disinclination of Catholics to be Catholic. This was expressed statistically in that Yanqui election, wherein government healthcare proposals that will create a crisis of conscience for every faithful Catholic, & end inevitably in the destruction of Catholic charitable institutions, were greeted by Catholic voters in this way: about half voted for the party that would bring on the Persecution, & half voted against. Let us expand on what we said in comments to the comments, over there.

When we were writing for a certain daily in Ottawa, we were often warmly criticized by the secular humanists for persistently mentioning Christianity in a family newspaper. And as if that weren’t irresponsible enough, we would go farther, & specify Catholic Christianity. One of the complaints to the Ontario Press Council against our habitual tendency to political incorrectitude stated that we “openly admitted to being Catholic.” But not only the secularoids were disturbed by our experiment; for we took heat from self-identifying Christians, too, & usually from “Catholics” among those. Dragonfire came regularly from a fellow columnist, who accused us of espousing “Benedict Catholicism,” which she seemed to equate with child molesting. By other Catholics we were frequently dismissed as a “mere convert,” as an upstart or arriviste, for taking some doctrine or other “too literally.” On several occasions, we were even condemned by a self-identifying Catholic priest.

For instance, when we indicated opposition to the practice of abortion in one column, we received a memorably intemperate email from one urbane priest in Quebec, accusing us of misogyny & intolerance & giving Catholics a bad name. In retrospect, we regret not having pushed “Send” on an email forwarding his note to his Bishop with the query, “From what seminary did this man graduate, & have you closed it down yet?”

Ottawa is an ex-Catholic town, Toronto more ex-Protestant, & so the flavour of Catholic anti-Catholicism is different between the two. Toronto ex-Catholics (& we are using this term presumptuously) tend to be more laid back. The Ottawa ones can be virulent, & even when of the Irish heritage, to have adopted post-modern French Canadian attitudes towards Holy Church. That is, there is nothing a Pope could say that would not inspire them to do the opposite. For which reason we have sometimes thought a Pope should send a special encyclical to his flock in Quebec & Ottawa, instructing them to discard every teaching in the Catechism & never to attend a Latin Mass. Within weeks we would have seven million new saints, & the streets of Montreal cluttered by pilgrims saying their Rosaries & singing the Angelus at the stroke of each hour. (In Latin, to the consternation of Quebec’s language police.)

Yet, conversely up here in the Great White North, we have found that lapsed Roman Catholics may take great umbrage at the employment of such terms as “nominal,” “cafeteria,” or “lapsed.” They, who apparently go back generations, will not be told what’s what by some upstart, or arriviste, or as one high-toned older Catholic woman called us, about ten times in a five minute rant, a “Baby Catholic.”

In thinking about this we have come to realize that we are using the term “Catholic” in quite different senses. For us, it refers to something like a religion. For them, however, it is a tribal thing, an ethnicity: often qualified for precision as, “Irish Catholic,” “Polish Catholic,” “Italian Catholic,” & so forth. That is what makes them “authentic” & therefore qualified to speak on behalf of all the other Catholics — in the same way as, say, only women may speak about women, or only blacks may speak about blacks.

They all have “feelings,” & thanks to those, they are able to apprehend Catholicism in its totality without any reference whatever to its intellectual premisses.  Christ, because He can never be surprised, would not be surprised to learn that they have “felt” their way into a better understanding of what He meant by all the things they haven’t read in the Gospels. In particular, they “feel” that they are good people, who have never done anything bad & have therefore no need of Confession. Some even feel themselves to be “traditional” because they were married in a church & attended a “very traditional” Novus Ordo Mass at Christmas; to say nothing of a funeral which they found “very comforting.”

In a similar way, the lapsed Scotsman has sometimes been seen in a kilt, & singing “Auld Lang Syne” at New Year’s. (Few go as far as to eat the haggis.) In an age of cultural desiccation, one clings to decorative fragments of the past.

There are some who do, however, consider Catholicism more a religion than an ethnicity; or more precisely some kind of opiate, or brainwashing cult; & these self-identify as “Recovering Catholics,” omitting the ethnic tags. Ottawa seems especially to be crawling with customers so self-styled, & we imagine rooms set aside in government & corporate offices where these people hold their alternative rituals.

Yet one should not only mock. For we have encountered, among these “recovering” & “tribals,” people who are haunted by priestcraft in more telling ways.

We think at this moment of a lady on her third marriage, suddenly provided with her first child. Further provided with her fourth drink, she expressed concern about the fate of this child. She wanted to get him baptized. To this end she had several times stolen into a church, to attend some portion of a Mass with the intention of collaring the priest afterwards. In each case she had lost her nerve & fled. In her cups she made an extraordinary statement: “I know that I’m going to Hell. Sometimes I think I’m in Hell already. But I don’t want my child to go there, I want him to be saved!”

Here was a woman who could easily pass, in daylight hours, for a glib lapsed Catholic.

Her confusion about the Church was heart-rending. Nor did it seem possible to set her straight. She was actually convinced a priest would decline to baptize her child because she’d been remarried; or for some similar solecism – of hers. She wanted help in finding a priest who would perform this baptism “illicitly,” without being told who the parents were. And more; & more.

This story does not have a happy ending, so far as we have been able to follow it. We suspect the lady “solved” her terribly misunderstood problem by putting it progressively out of her mind. The failure of the Church to teach or guide or console this woman, herself born into a Catholic cradle, was apparent in all her pain. Our own failure to compensate for this larger failure counts within that. Perhaps most discouraging: the indifference to her fate, & that of so many like, from the bleary world of the diocesan bureaucracies, compiling their numbers. Baptized herself, she counts as a “Roman Catholic” for demographic purposes. But her son will not, unless Christ intercedes.

At last, people begin to understand. It’s not just some abstract end of the world. It’s the end of Wonder Bread. It’s the end of Ding Dongs. It’s the end of Twinkies. Hostess Brands Inc. have shut all their factories. Many thousands of employees who decided to strike a company that had twice filed for Chapter Eleven protection also begin to understand. They may now wave their little signs in perpetuity.

Except, not so fast. Those bidding auction-room prices on eBay for “the last box of Twinkies” may soon find that the liquidators have sold the brands, together with the industrial recipes. Twinkies may rise again. Maybe they’ll start making them in China. They are imperishable after all. One could ship them from anywhere.

One hardly knows what to think. Up here in the High Doganate, we are shockingly indifferent to the fate of Twinkies. Our view was that a person who puts that in his mouth needs the rest of his head examined. But not by us. We are snooty and elitist up here. By the standards of the Greater Parkdale Area we probably count as a foodie. We did eat a Twinkie once, or something very similar; just as we once tried Beondegi, the popular Korean snack, made from steamed silkworm pupae (and not from maggots as commonly supposed). You only live once, and not long at that, as the philosophers have observed. In neither case did we finish the serving. Given starvation, and a choice only between the two — between a tin of Beondegi and a box of Twinkies — well, we preferred the seasoning of the silkworm pupae.

But we are not Mayor Bloomberg. We wouldn’t try to discourage members of the urban proletariat from buying Twinkies, or soda pop in gallon jugs, or any of the other products of post-modern capitalism. We would drop the ridiculous health messages he and his ilk now propose to stipulate. We have never liked half measures.

No, we would do nothing of the kind. At least, not until we have the vice squads in place for the Aesthetic Division of our new “Rapid Reactionary” model police. This paramilitary force, which we have often imagined, would conduct dawn raids on the supermarkets, removing from the shelves everything deemed ugly, purely on the basis of external packaging. Even the milk would go, if our cops found it being sold in these 1.33-litre plastic “bladder bags.” Indeed, anything sorted into metric portions would be a candidate for our Lists.

We have never felt comfortable telling people how to live. Not when we can reduce their options by direct action.

Valerie Eliot, the widow of Thomas Stearns Eliot, died Friday in London, a little less than half a century after her husband. We caught a glimpse of her once in the London Library: a magnificent dowager empress of a woman. She donated a substantial part of the huge copyright earnings from Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical, Cats (based on Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book) to an expansion of that most Alexandrian of all private libraries, in the north-west corner of St James’s Square. But at the time we saw her, she was there only to borrow books.

Eliot had once been president of that library, founded by Carlyle in 1841. We resented the expansion, unreasonably, because it involved the destruction of the old philosophy bunker, many floors up top of one of the newer columns of an extraordinary three-dimensional labyrinth. To find it required first locating a succession of three different staircases (two of them helical) through meanders in which one glimpsed, through iron floor grates, book stacks over stacks dropping many storeys down.

“Bunker” was the word, for that particular column of the library was built of poured concrete, & the room at top housed numerous ancient folio volumes, many of them with shrapnel still embedded from a German bomb in the last World War. One long shard had passed all the way through An Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, with supplementary treatises by John Locke, pinning it permanently shut. (Who says there is no God?) No one ever seemed to visit that room, & for several years we appropriated a little oak school desk, on runners by a south-facing window. We visited almost daily, leaving our notebooks & other low-value equipage in a bottom drawer, never to be disturbed. Our heart seizes up with nostalgia when we remember that room, & so many others in the London Library, including the rather grand, high, L-shaped formal Reading Room, where magnificent old toffs slept in wide cushioned armchairs, with the old broadsheet Times covering their faces, rising & falling with their snores.

How often, in London, we preferred the Luftwaffe’s alterations to what was rebuilt post-War, in a 1950s style one architecture critic dubbed, Late Georgian Bomb Damage. But the London Library expansions all happened the day before yesterday. Money is a terrible destroyer of character. The buildings are now climate-controlled & wheelchair accessible, if you know what we mean. When we last walked in, we hardly recognized the place, & a new generation of PR-trained, smileyfaced staff had replaced all the high-collared ghosts, who looked at one disapprovingly, & were pellucidly unhelpful. We had stepped into the future, where everything is “nice.”

Not that we blame Valerie Eliot. Instead we blame Margaret Thatcher, for making Britain prosperous in an ugly age. It was still such a beautifully decaying & dysfunctional, class-ridden ruin in the 1970s. That much we can say for socialism. By the 1990s we had people with truly vile accents, dripping with their gains from the most vulgar imaginable economic activities.

This piece in the Daily Telegraph, by an unusually well-informed hack, celebrates the passing of literary widows. Mrs Eliot, along with Sonia Orwell, Natasha Spender, Kathleen Tynan, & Mrs Cecil Day-Lewis, were among the formidable legion, all now finally dead. As Peter Stanford writes, they were mostly second wives (the first having conveniently predeceased), decades younger than the famous men they married. Each lived on, tenaciously to fight for her husband’s reputation, & to fulfil the actual requirements of his will. The idea of a devoted wife became in the meantime so alien & unbelievable, that they were made into “pantomime villains,” to whom the lowest motives were casually assigned. But in the case of Valerie Eliot especially, a formidable woman who could hold her own against the filth.

Her greatest accomplishment consisted of decades of implacable opposition to biographers intent upon invading T.S. Eliot’s private life, & thereby depriving him of his dignity. A capable scholar, she took control of the editing of the poet’s letters & manuscripts; & shrewdly managed the estate to raise the considerable sums with which to endow not only the London Library, but the English department of Newnham College at Cambridge, & many other arts & literary institutions. A figure of the Establishment she was, & as her husband once became — among the more remarkable accomplishments of a man who was essentially a chain-smoking bohemian. For he was also a Christian; one who could still conceive Christendom as an Establishment, to be inhabited & served.

We do not like Daylight Savings Time (why would we?) but can say this much for it. Once every year, it gives us a publicly-recognized opportunity to set all our clocks back one hour. While this is hardly sufficient to erase centuries of Error, it is a satisfying gesture. Voting no longer gives us that sort of thrill. “Those bastards never set the clock back a single minute,” as Evelyn Waugh explained, to some dimwit or other, who asked why he wouldn’t vote even for the Tories. (No doubt apocryphal; the best quotes usually are.)

Our American readers are reminded to set their clock backs this morning, if they haven’t already. And as it is now the first Tuesday in November of a Leap Year, “vote often & early for James Michael Curley.” Had we the energy, & a car, we might be tempted to drive down to Ohio, & impersonate dead Americans in a dozen voting precincts. But then, we would probably overcome the temptation.

As a former newspaper pundit, we are ashamed to say, we would be capable of talking gentle reader’s ear off with comments on polls, their background assumptions, the underlying demographic facts, the partisan trends & their causes; the conclusion of which would be that we’re not sure who will win. Without enthusiasm, we support Mr Romney’s “Mormon-Christian coalition,” or at least, have long been on record against the Obama Nation that makes desolate.

But the Archbishop of Phila, the estimable Charles J. Chaput, makes a more sober point. Read this. And do not weep, for as he says, “it has always been this way.”

Verily: our Kingdom is not of this world.

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To which we might add, that His Grace, in the item linked, touches upon vast history, through Brad Gregory’s recent book, The Unintended Reformation, which we have promised ourself to read. In our experience, people (a term we use to include Catholics) know little to nothing about the Reformation, & this mite floats on the breeze of centuries of half-remembered sectarian propaganda.

Consider this remark:

“Late mediaeval clergy too often preached one thing & did another. Greed, simony, nepotism, luxury, sexual licence, & schism in the hierarchy created an intolerable gap between Christian preaching & practice.”

True, but note the qualification. Let us distinguish between “too often,” & “always.” The point here is that the Protestants did not finally focus upon the greed, simony, nepotism, &c, rather used it to support attacks on the doctrine itself, by which such crimes were ultimately defined. (How often, back in the days of the Cold War, we found ourself painfully obliged to defend corrupt & hypocritical allies in places like Vietnam, against supposed “morally pure” Communists, who would not merely depose them, but impose a tyranny that turned morality itself upside down.)

Corruption there was in many places, but also, exemplary works. In England, for instance, on the eve of Henry VIII’s sack of the monasteries, it is necessary to go through them case by case. Some were in an appalling condition; some were shining lights; & many were somewhere between. We should not easily accept a caricature, in which the worst cases are taken as typical. (Read Eamon Duffy, for instance, & through his bibliographies, find much more.)

It should also be remembered that the arguments of the Reformers were themselves the product of the later Middle Ages. Reckless anachronism recasts them, through eyes that are looking through the history backwards.

“Our side” did not consist of perfect little choirboys. No side of anything ever did, for this planet is diseased. Conversely there was good in the worst of the Reformers; the good that God had put there. And while there is plenty of better & worse to argue, the argument itself leads us astray. For the issue was not the assignment of Brownie points, but the integrity of Christendom.

Here are some aphorisms of the Colombian thinker, Nicolás Gómez Dávila (“Don Colacho,” 1913–1994), whose compendium, Escolios a un texto implícito, is among the significant documents of the 20th century. His work had been translated into many European languages, but not English; a gentleman named “Stephen” in Irving, Texas, is remedying this defect by posting his own translations in a searchable weblog. (He cannot be adequately praised.) We have shamelessly stolen every one of these items from that marvellous blog:

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There are two kinds of men: those who believe in original sin, & idiots.

Humanity is the only totally false god.

Reason, Progress, & Justice are the theological virtues of the fool.

Either man has rights, or the people is sovereign. The simultaneous assertion of two mutually exclusive theses is what people have called liberalism.

Liberalism proclaims the right of the individual to degrade himself, provided his degradation does not impede the degradation of his neighbour.

Under the name of liberty, man conceals his hunger for sovereignty.

To refute the new morality, one needs only to examine the faces of its aged devotees.

Envy is the key to more stories than sex.

Without a hierarchical structure it is not possible to transform freedom from a fable. The liberal always discovers too late that the price of equality is the omnipotent State.

Those whose gratitude for receiving a benefit is transformed into devotion to the person who grants it, instead of degenerating into the usual hatred aroused by all benefactors, are aristocrats; even if they walk around in rags.

Ingratitude, disloyalty, resentment, rancour define the plebeian soul in every age, & characterize this century.

The necessary & sufficient condition of despotism is the disappearance of every kind of social authority not conferred by the State.

Natural disasters devastate a region less effectively than the alliance of greed & technology.

Science’s greatest triumph appears to lie in the increasing speed with which an idiocy can be transported from one location to another.

Religion did not arise out of the need to assure social solidarity, nor were cathedrals built to encourage tourism.

The reactionary does not become a conservative except in ages which maintain something worthy of being conserved.

Thought tends to be a response to an outrage rather than to a question.

The root of reactionary thought is not distrust of reason but distrust of the will.

Metaphysical problems do not haunt man so that he will solve them, but so that he will live them.

An “explanation” consists in assimilating a strange mystery to a familiar mystery.

By replacing the concrete sense perception of the object with its abstract intellectual construction, man gains the world & loses his soul.

A dentistry degree is respectable, but a philosophy degree is grotesque.

The impact of a text is proportional to the cunning of its insinuations.

Literary skill consists in keeping a phrase at the right temperature.

Classical literature is obviously not prelapsarian, but happily it is pre-Gnostic.

Every work of art speaks to us of God; no matter what it says.

A good painting cuts short the art critic’s lyricism.

Goya is the seer of demons, Picasso their accomplice.

Civilizations enter into agony when they forget that there exists not merely an aesthetic activity, but also an aesthetic of activity.

The Muse does not visit the man who works more, or the man who works less, but whomever she feels like visiting.

Even though history has no laws, the course of a revolution is easily foreseen; because stupidity & madness do have laws.

History is full of victorious morons.

In history it is wise to hope for miracles, & absurd to trust in plans.

To proclaim Christianity the “cradle of the modern world” is a grave calumny.

There is some collusion between scepticism & faith: both undermine human presumptuousness.

Wisdom comes down to not showing God how things should be done.

Reason is no substitute for faith, as colour is no substitute for sound.

When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples.

My convictions are the same as those of an old woman praying in the corner of a church.

In the future, anyone opposed to the open society will be arrested, in the West. In the Middle East, perhaps only those who oppose the Islamic open society will be arrested; & in China, only the opponents of the Politburo’s.

A big talk piece by David Rieff in National Interest has prompted this observation. Rieff, the product of Susan Sontag’s earliest liaison, with the Freudian sociologist Philip Rieff, could almost be said to have been born an avatar of societal openness. An anarchic vagabond, caressed by the liberal intelligentsia, he has been undermining their claims to authority in ever less subtle ways. He is member, fellow, or senior fellow of various prestigious fora of the self-celebratory great & good, from the World Policy Institute, to the Council on Foreign Relations, to Human Rights Watch. Yet he now hints that the heroic project to bring the open society to the whole planet is a chimera, & that its leading exponents are titched. He is saying this cautiously; but read the article. Surely, finally, he can be disowned.

We may not have to wait long for the arrests, especially if Barack Obama is able to bestow upon America the incomparable blessing of four more of his invaluable years. For the idea of the open society is itself open to evolution, & we are about one Supreme Court appointment from declaring the U.S. Constitution entirely open to keep up with it. The open society now requires vigorous universal welfare arrangements, centralized policy control by czars, & ceaseless bureaucratic punishment of the non-cooperative. It is Obamacare writ large; & the sceptic of the open society, whose conscience will not row to its command, already finds himself exposed to what Austin Ruse has called, “the ugly claws & bared teeth of the pelvic Left.”

But we mention this only to be melodramatic. It is from want of courage that opponents of the open society agree to go silent & stand down. We have the spectacle of some rookery of alarmed penguins, fleeing the transgressive sea lion, who catches & flails them at his leisure from their rear. After each round, the surviving penguins congratulate themselves on reaching safety. Yet sometimes, rather than fleeing, one spritely little proximate penguin with his razor beak stands to announce, “the hell you are going to eat me,” & we have instead the spectacle of a blinded, bleeding, panicked & retreating sea lion.

This is not what Rieff is getting at, however. His position developed through his opposition to the U.S. military enterprise in Iraq, when George Bush & not George Soros was his target; but he is moving towards a fuller understanding that these two Georges, while opponents in any imaginable democratic ground game, were working all along from the same background assumption: that “democracy,” “civil society,” & the gamut of Western, post-Christian schemes for universal emancipation, are the inevitable destiny of the world; that every obstacle to this emancipation must be levelled & paved; that nothing in the end must obstruct the view of the open society. This was exactly the position Francis Fukuyama advertised in his famous “End of History?” piece in the same National Interest, nearly a quarter century ago. It was a useful article because it generously revealed the fatuity of his own position; & he has spent the rest of his career trying to recover his poise.

History has since continued, taking the usual unpredictable turns, & yet the astoundingly glib proposal that we must all work towards the inevitable triumph of the open society weaves ever more tightly into the progressive consciousness, along with freedom marches & “the American Dream.” The segue of blissful Hegelian fantasy into breaking-news nightmare may yet cause the sleeper to wake, but meanwhile he remains in a kind of moral & intellectual coma, perfectly convinced that he can fly.

Freedom cannot be imposed. Nor can one man define it for another; nor one society liberate another. We can work against a discernible evil — slavery, say; or abortion; or some specific tyrant, individual or corporate. We can resist a specific evil, by prudently framing a specific law. But in contradiction of the essential tenet shared by radical Islam & the secular Left: we cannot “command the good.” For the good does not answer to human command.

The paradox is not that the open society imposes a new, quasi-religious doctrinal order. Its demands are anyway constantly morphing, so that today’s categorical imperative will be tomorrow’s capital crime. The paradox is rather a cheap imposture: that glib claim to inevitability & foreknowledge, against a background of history that offered constant surprise. That is what links the open society to Auschwitz, & to Stalin; that idiot self-confidence. The open society delegitimates every opponent, & strips every minority of its peace. Having foreseen an end, it can when necessary justify any means. It goes beyond any Pope, or Caliph, or Caesar, in claiming the monopoly on both force & virtue. It is restrained, at every turn, by some “irrational” sense of decency; but that decency is external to itself.

One hundred & four is not a bad age for a human to attain, though it seemed to us that Jacques Barzun was much older. America’s leading public intellectual was, from what we can make out, already quite mature when he came to the U.S. at age thirteen — put into prep school there by his Whitmanesque, Americanophile father. His family’s circle of friends in Paris included Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Duhamel, Marcel Duchamp, Edgar Varèse, Stefan Zweig, & the little-remembered but remarkable vagrant typographer, Lucien Linard. These were Utopian people, but from the age before Lenin. They were crazy artists, with an outlook on life that simply cannot be translated into any language comprehensible to the present day. For instance, each had strong political views, but of a kind we might classify today as utterly apolitical.

Barzun remained French while becoming entirely American. His mind was logical in the French way, & it was stocked with French things; but he used it for American purposes. He went to Columbia University, & stayed there for the duration of the 20th century, without ever becoming an “academic” in the narrow sense. His field was civilization, & together with Lionel Trilling (his contemporary, now dead for decades) he created a little cell of civilization in this most unlikely place (Columbia University). As recently as half a century ago, there was a significant community in the U.S. which aspired, in a humble, decent, republican way, to acquire & promote high culture. These were the sort of people who launched “great books” programmes, & begged European intellectuals to cross the Atlantic & teach them everything they knew. Barzun found & ministered to them.

His several dozen books are without exception addressed to “the common reader.” They cover an extraordinary range of topics, & each is solid in its learning. Barzun was at home in art & music, as well as literature; in history, & also in the sciences. We have used the “C” word (for, Civilization), & he was among the last men living who understood that it is all one thing. Specialists are always welcome, but the specialist who is not backed up with a broad general knowledge — who has not read widely, not remained alive to arts & sciences at large — is a subversive influence, & in his nature an enemy of civilization whenever he pretends to serve it.

Some years ago we overheard a worthless little professor of “philosophy” in the University of Toronto sneering at the reputation of Jacques Barzun, for his very range. We asked him, sneeringly back, if he knew what the word “university” meant. He made it abundantly clear he did not. He was a “specialist” at war with those “generalists” & “popularizers.” It struck me that even in his own recondite area of specialization (“analytical philosophy”), Barzun could have tutored him, by explaining e.g. the breadth of topics that Wittgenstein was addressing; for the little man had no idea. The whole, very tenured career of this soi-disant professor had consisted of teaching the young & impressionable to sneer at things beyond his or their understanding.

Barzun was “civil” as well as civilized, yet never pusillanimous. A large part of his work consisted of serenely articulated anger, focused chiefly upon the teaching profession. The phenomenon that is glibly called today “political correctness” — a far stronger term is needed to convey the stench of it — has been a feature of North American intellectual life for a long time. It is in fact the contemporary expression of the Puritan theological outlook, that landed with the Mayflower; & it has everything to do with cults of specialization, & with heresies (i.e. deceitful half-truths) both within & beyond the formal perimeter of religion.

The Puritan spirit is iconoclastic; it seeks to cut things down, to smash the beautiful, to rule inconvenient truths out of court; to promote witch hunts. Barzun had unerringly the scent of this enemy, & could be annihilating in response to it; though as a correspondent reminds (see comments) he could also spy positive features in the Puritan heritage, & deal with its exponents quite charitably on their own terms, for he was never a witch hunter himself.

He was a nominal Catholic, not a church-goer, & by his own account at sea in the ecclesiastical life of America. He associated the Church with culture in the modern French manner, without vexing himself on any doctrinal point. He was allergic to the enthusiasm of “converts”; & found American Catholicism too Protestant for his tastes. Paradoxically, he observed that a typically American “high-church Presbyterianism” — with its choirs & processions — was closer to the European “semi-Catholicism” in which he was reared. And this was compounded by his genius for not committing himself, even to the inevitable logical consequences of his own assertions.

The closest we can find to a credal statement from him is, “Nature is conscious of itself, in & through man.” A lot would follow from that, but Barzun wouldn’t follow. His dislike of “converts” extended to ideologues & reductionists of all sorts. His book, Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941 & revisions) — the continuation of research & arguments begun much earlier — is an inquiry into the nature of modern superstitions. He shows convincingly how capitalist notions of free competition & survival of the fittest were repackaged as a Victorian cosmology, & acquired the power of sorcery; how they were presented as quasi-religious doctrine; how the substitution of Natural Selection for Providence came to be defended with a warmth that never belonged to empirical science. The book brilliantly depicts the personal evolution of Thomas Huxley, that earnest & honest man, haunted by the real possibility that he had championed ideas which compromised the moral order, without yielding secure empirical results, or being able to do so. The book continues through the strange, quaintly Victorian world of Marxian political scientism & Wagnerian romantic egoism. It shows the hollowness beneath the crust on which our post-modernism has strutted; the excavation & discarding, beneath our own feet, of everything that supported us except, “might makes right.”

Barzun was a modern. Perhaps with his death we bury the last living modernist, like the last Great War veteran, or the last recipient of the Victoria Cross. His cultural history of that modern age, Dawn to Decadence (2000), makes a fine textbook we might recommend to serious private schools. Published when he was a nonagenarian, it shows no diminution of his powers, & embodies an erudition that is scintillating. He is a terse writer, but never an obscure one; his books are all accessible to any intelligent, attentive reader. And the quotes with which he decorated the pages of this one are an education in themselves: one well-known author after another saying something one might not expect him to say. Barzun represents the history of five very Western centuries with the freshness almost of an eyewitness; & while there can be no mistake about the moral & intellectual decadence into which we have fallen, he is hopeful throughout, & ends sure that something new must inevitably be stirring in our ashes. He is perhaps most Catholic in allowing God’s will; in that optimism which expects some good to come of evil, without ever commending the evil.

Given the choice between a car & a baby, which would gentle reader pick? We are supposing, of course, the “right to choose,” & it is your call entirely. Let us try not to be too utilitarian about this, for use is often in the eye of the beholder; let us consider the matter in a much broader way. And please do not be too hasty. Cars may be more expensive than one thinks, & babies less so. The inconvenience of operating cars may be underestimated.

True, babies eat & drink, make a mess sometimes, & while overall they generate less noise than a car, that noise is sometimes painfully concentrated. Moreover, the baby will take time & attention to raise; & while much of this effort may be sloughed off on the State, there may be social or even legal consequences if one fails to collect it after daycare. And, those who have raised a child will know that as it grows, it will cause other headaches. By the time it is seven or so, one may seriously regret what one got oneself into. Whereas, a car might still have some trade-in value, & the State puts fewer obstacles in the way of selling it.

The comparative cost of car & baby depends on the method of accounting, but also on one’s attitude towards them, respectively, so that on the pure money question it is hard to decide. One could easily spend more on either. But to be perfectly Scotch about this, the minimum expenditure for a baby is probably less, for it can be clothed out of the Sally Anne, & fed for as little as, say, a large dog or pampered cat, & kept in as small an area. It is true these costs rise as the child increases in volume, but the smallest car is heavier than the largest child, & there is no way to cut corners when filling the gas tank. From this side, babies start to look economical.

However, thought should also be given to the comparative benefits of car & baby ownership. The consensus of polite dinner-table conversation, we have found, is that the baby will give more emotional feedback, over an extended period. But again, that’s not always a good thing. Against the car, one might argue diminishing returns. It’s a bit of a thrill for the first few days, but afterwards it tends to become just a mode of transport, & a depreciating asset at that.

In either case, one might tire of looking at the thing. Cars, to be fair, may be easier to ignore, or abandon. Indeed, so biased is the State that, in the case of the child, if one fails to kill it before it is born, the law prevents one from killing it after. Whereas, the car can be eliminated at any time, provided that environmental regulations have been observed.

But now we should mention the “overpopulation” problem that we find at the back of many urban minds. The great majority of people living in vast conurbations apparently believe that the world is overcrowded. They live in big cities not so much by choice, as because that is where the jobs are. And one needs one of those to get to the point where one may choose between the car & the baby. Some can afford both, but if one already thinks the world has too many people, the car looks like the better bargain.

Several times we have been told, by some horrified urbanite, that the population of the world has doubled within his or her lifetime, as if this fact settled every argument. Therein, we think, lies the positive enthusiasm for abortion & the various other techniques of “population control” – if not for oneself, then generously subsidized for others. These city folk are usually too distracted by the pace of city life to think anything through; but as a general notion they imagine it would be better if most of the excess population could be put down — in a humanitarian way, of course — to create more elbow room, & less pressure on finite resources.

As a city boy ourself, we have observed that city life is made less pleasant by the 80 percent or so of city dwellers who don’t really want to be here. If they could go to where they’d rather be, it would be better for the rest of us. Yet as we saw above, they may not have alternatives. Though we may find them irritating, & often in our way, we are personally opposed to having them euthanized or, more patiently, sterilized. We are willing to entertain more “optimal” solutions.

For instance, we are told that if all the world’s inhabitants were assembled contiguously at Tokyo density, they would fit into less space than France, or Texas, or may we suggest Afghanistan — thus leaving the rest of the planet clear for outdoorsmen. The people thus moved wouldn’t be any more or less happy than those in Tokyo, or any other conurbation, so what’s holding us back?

In much of the world, rural population is actually declining, so that space may be opening faster than suburbanization can fill it. From this we see the crowding is an illusion, & of choice: for most of the world may be getting less crowded. It must be admitted, however, that as the city folk get money, they buy up the countryside & spread their urban junk around it.

Consider: in the time the human population of the planet completed its last doubling, the number of cars increased more than 15 times; a trend that is continuing. Consider further, that a car occupies a much bigger surface area than a pair of human feet. And that, thanks to cars, what used to fit into one square mile of city is now spread over many square miles of bungalows, front yards, back yards, swimming pools, roadways, shopping malls, & parking lots. And, the people who drive them feel crowded because the cars take them to places where everyone is concentrated at something like the old city densities; & put them through traffic jams along the way. People have the illusion that people are everywhere, when really they are being shifted about by car to glom in just a few over-subscribed places. If they walked, they’d find lots of unoccupied space, albeit somewhat cluttered & despoiled.

There are some moral & spiritual considerations here that we have overlooked. We might wish to recall them briefly, while contemplating our “final solution” — the sanctity of human life, & all that. Granting that the world appears to be crowded (even though it isn’t), what should we do about it? Kill off all our babies?

Or might we focus on killing off the cars, instead?