Essays in Idleness

All politics is essentially Socialist. It all works on the assumption that we can know what’s what, and can do something about it. Whereas, in a more candid analysis, we can’t.

The Law of Paradox is perhaps our most important scientific discovery yet to be made. It holds that what we get will be the opposite of what we were expecting, including all those exceptions that we were anticipating. It is the reason why, for instance, the present accelerating population decline came after a generation of tedious warnings about a population explosion; why nuclear war will never happen, even though increased radiation levels would have been a boon to human health; why a dearth of carbon dioxide threatens the world’s agricultural production; why microplastics and oil spills will come to our rescue; why global warming will end in a new ice age; thus why sea levels will fall, leaving huge seaside conurbations far inland; and why the Toronto Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup.

It is why the record of our material expansion is the tale of our spiritual diminution. It is why the “Internet of Things” is more disappointing than the sprawling “Internet of Nothings,” and “Artificial Intelligence” is so provocatively stupid.

It is because of my preternatural (though not supernatural) appreciation of paradox that I am generally right about most trends, and the consequences of events; whereas the experts tend to be wrong, or rather, are always wrong. For them to be wrong so consistently suggests they are taking supernatural hints, i.e. from the Devil. Indeed, what the Devil predicts is always the glib.

(My Iron Law of Paradox is incidentally closely related to my Paradoxical Law of Irony.)

A friend, who makes colourful predictions from his readings in the Book of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of the Apostle John, has also a success rate of zero-point-zero. He should give it up.

Saint Mark also recommends he desist, in Chapter 13:

“But of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father. … For ye know not when the time is.”

While I am not an expert on secret security services, I know that at least on this topic, as on most others, I know much more than Biden, Harris, Walz, &c; unless they are perhaps well-informed, in which case they are even more evil than I had imagined. My impression is that their post-Christian party worships Moloch, less subtly than before. (Moloch, mentioned in the Book of Leviticus, is the Canaanite “go-to” lord for child-sacrifice.)

My assumption is that the Democrat Party, from fear of the criminal investigations he might attempt, if he became President again, wants Trump dead. They would have preferred to jail him, on false charges, but have run out of options. For if they fail to murder him, there is always a chance he might win the election, and by so large a margin that he will overcome the millions of stuffed (“harvested”) and electronic ballots.

Indeed, American elections have become more predictable. President Lula has no trouble controlling huge opposition crowds in Brazil, and President Maduro won his election in Venezuela even though his opponent, Edmundo Gonzales, scored an estimated 73 percent of the vote. (Gonzales has now fled to Spain.)

On the other hand, the “far right” (i.e. economically literate) Javier Milei won the Argentine election by such a landslide that even the Peronists were moved (for the moment) out of his way.

The persistent, quite official, Democrat comparison of Trump with Hitler, should tell the observer everything he needs to know about that party; for their presidential candidates have been comparing their opponents to Hitler since Truman. Reagan was so Hitler-like they got someone to shoot him. They’ve had two shots at Trump so far, and there will be more, for they say he is really, really, just like Hitler, to America’s liberal supply of the unhinged.

The paradox is that Trump is not at all like Hitler, nor does he resemble a Nazi so nearly as the senior Democrats do, when they plot to shut Trump down. In no civilized jurisdiction would their legal manoeuvres be tolerated.

My advice to Republicans, watching the election being stolen from them, with the usual assistance of a poisonously corrupt “media,” is to remain calm and non-violent. Remember that the issue isn’t Trump: “put not your faith in princes.” Christianity is rich with instructions for defeating Satanic opponents. The trick is to remain uncompromised, in faith, come what may. A single saint can defeat them; be that saint.

My thoughts had turned to “eastern” (i.e. Central) Europe, where the climate alarmists were reporting terrible storms and floods, when I received this sensible report. It was from a couple returning to Moravia from Prague. They saw rivers and creeks that had overflowed their banks, including a marvellous sight on the River Elbe (“Labe”), but nothing to suggest the end of the world.

“Inhabitants of this land living fortunately in a place rarely visited by real natural disasters have developed a certain yearning for the excitement they believe such events provide. This time their hopes were pinned to weathermen’s predictions of apocalyptic floods. I suspect they were a little disappointed, although a few houses were destroyed beyond repair. However, this showed that only a fool would place his trust in a meteorologist.”

Here, in America, too, we must expect severe weather reports, and apocalyptic climate warnings, a few times each year. These seem more plausible in the hurricane season, although (did you notice?) we’ve had only drizzle this year. So the prognosticators say, “Don’t let the quiet fool you.”

They know what we don’t know: that they are only wrong 99 percent of the time. On the 100th occasion, they may correctly predict an inundation, over perhaps one percent of their reporting area; though nothing to compare with their boasting about it. Tsunamis and asteroids would make us much happier.

The Devil, who controls the media, promotes anxiety over the wrong things: principally those that seldom happen, which we cannot possibly avoid when they do. As a reactionary “mediaevalist,” I wish that we would spend more time laughing at the Devil, than he spends laughing at us.

Reading Czeslaw Milosz through the afternoon; and now I realize I cannot set the “L with stroke” that would be necessary to spell his name correctly, or that of any other poet in Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Wymysorys, or some other language wherein a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative might be required. Worse, I cannot set verse properly, in any language, owing to my own high-tech ineptitude.

One can, however, reading through the Collected Milosz Poems, come to appreciate how many were written in Berkeley, California, where he settled into a perfessership after exiling himself from Stalinism. (Read: The Captive Mind.) A magnificent translator, too, back and forth through Polish and English, he has that poetic quality of translating himself, into his original, as he wanders.

Now, the reader must pretend this is typeset properly:

“You who wronged a simple man / Bursting into laughter at the crime, / And kept a pack of fools around you” … continues as a sonnet until … “you’d have done better with a winter dawn, / A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.”

This from three-quarters of a century ago, about when he first landed in the United States, as the cultural attaché of a “People’s Republic.” He was also a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, whose life was saved from the Nazis by a nun, and various other crises of modernity, often parallel to Saint John Paul II. Their works yield many fine mottoes.

It is amusing to think that Milosz, and the father of Kamala Harris, were teaching at Berkeley about the same time — the one among the most learned and eloquent opponents of Communism; the other a moronic socialist activist. Indeed, Ms Harris was brought up in an academic household in Berkeley (and in Montreal), but has substituted working-class Oakland in the family tradition of lying. Her nature is revealed in her “joyous” cackle, … “bursting into laughter at the crime.”

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IN OTHER POLITICAL NEWS. — One of my most reliable correspondents informs me that Larry the Cat, about whom I wrote extensively (on July 13th, 2016), refused to be photographed with “Sir Keir” Starmer, the unlikeable current prime minister of England. He (Larry) would not participate in the latest cute publicity shot, for which he was called “a little shit” by the Scottish Secretary. (That was rich.) Too, Larry was slandered as “the most miserable animal you’ll ever meet,” and blamed for ten years of Labour defeats. But Larry despised Rishi Sunak, as well as Mr Starmer, and outpolls both with the British public.

Chatting with my priest, the late Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, about death — a topic on which he is so much better informed — I recall his warning. We, who have been in the habit of making a splash, whenever splashing was possible, look ahead to some glorious final play. We will be surrounded by our admirers or, almost as good, by the people who detest us as we are martyred. Either way, it will be a scene of victory.

But perhaps there will be no one watching, no living creature, not even a cat. No one will be in the least startled, not even the medical performers, who see this sort of thing every day. This is especially likely now, when family deathbed scenes have gone out of style, and the Batflu provisions (or whatever succeeds them) specify that everyone must die in isolation. Indeed, “Medical Assistance In Dying” is the only way to get an audience.

Among the advantages of being a “Far Right” person (apparently about three-quarters of the population) is that, short of some splash that will be recorded in “the media,” no one cares what happens to you. This means that, whether the audience is present or absent, you will be under no obligation to entertain them. This makes the impending conversation with Christ something on which you may focus entirely.

The more devastating if all He has to say is, “I do not know you.”

Note: one may not get His attention by “making a splash,” for instance by much moaning. Holiness doesn’t work like that.

Part of prudence is to care what will be the result of one’s ministrations. For if you don’t care, the results will be nearly opposite to what you are promising. Of course you care, but you are more careful about yourself, and to take credit, and so forth. In the course of which, your care for the results of your ministrations shrinks to the zero it usually does among politicians.

It would be unreasonable to expect perfect sanctity in public life. This is why only very, very stupid people, like President Biden, say that Kamala Harris “has the moral compass of a saint.” I don’t even think Donald Trump has the moral compass of a saint, and to their credit, I don’t think any Republicans do.

But does Trump, in addition to his narcissism and whatever, care for the results of his political actions? Is he actually trying to “make America great again”? (Or at least a little better?) Or is he largely indifferent to the pain and death he spreads about him, except for the personal political consequences? Yes, Trump is, along with his personality defects, above all but a few American politicians. And Ms Harris is well below them.

Politics, with its elections, comes very close to a “zero-sum” game in which such comparisons are necessary. It is also zero-sum long after the election. All a politician can do is negotiate some kind of trade-off, in which he will ideally try to get as much good as possible, in exchange for as little evil. He cannot deliver any absolute, and this is why all (not most, but all) socialists, “liberals,” progressives, &c, should be absolutely dismissed.

“The people” know nothing about how to run a state, and that’s why, in a democracy, we must have such foolish politicians. Their idea of a trade-off is more services for less taxes.

From this you may guess that I am not an “idealist” in politics, or in anything else this far away from God. The world works within the constraints that the world works within. Note the tautology. These constraints are real.

A German, Father Bruno of Cologne, founded the first holy brace of Carthusian monasteries. One would usually say, of this XIth-century saint, that he was “founder of the Carthusians,” except, I don’t think that’s how monasteries work. They may be started by anybody, and indeed, back in the East, many monasteries were started by Buddhists. But in Christendom they have been, necessarily, under the patronage of Our Lord. This we can know from the many miracles that have attended their foundation. And what depends on God only lasts until God’s patronage ceases. I think that is what happens in Buddhist monasteries, too, for as Christ said, “I have other flocks,” and will have these “gentiles” brought into His fold.

Father Bruno was among our greatest saints, and if you will, a model for how to be a saint in all ages. He was surrounded by famously good men, and some famously bad ones, had pope and cardinals as his pupils, and various passing rôles in the Church, yet was consistently humble and aloof from power. He had courage and decision; without hesitation boldly sacking the corrupt, declining an episcopal appointment for himself, and in many other ways “being his own man.” Within the Grand Chartreuse, and other enclosures of the Ordo Cartusiensis (we call them “Charterhouses” in English) his spiritual echo is still heard, after a millennium of adventure, including violent persecutions in “Reformations” and “Enlightenments.”

They were warmly hated. (But, “Know that the world hated me first.”) Their priories were the source of much charity, and of course this led to multiple conversions.

What appeals to me in Saint Bruno and the Carthusians is an unhurried focus on contemplation and art. They do arduous toil, too, in silence, and they do not intersect with “the community.” They are not missionaries or preachers, except perhaps through their works, for they have been the manuscriptorialists.

They are opposite to what is promoted today, through apps and Internet. They are not a virus or infection.

O ye of little faith, and much stupidity! … There are atheist assumptions in modern atheist science and philosophy. I cite a scientific and philosophical tautology. I include the self-proclaimed “agnostics,” who also study the world from behind blinders, blacking out or censoring evidence of the Creator, and the miraculous in everyday life (such as, that people get up in the morning). For the moment I pretend to be a “theist,” which is to say, the opposite of an atheist. By me, and the other theists, the evidence for God is received.

This does not mean it is quackishly insisted upon. Natural theology does not offer only “proofs” that God, or any other person, exists. It is instead quite comfortable with reality. It is a game we sometimes play, idly, with God.

Faith is not formally rejected in modern, high-tech-pagan investigations. Neutrality on belief systems is assumed, as if the investigator had no stake in his inquiries. He has the higher indifference to his fellow beings. But it is not complete indifference, for what makes him atheistical is that he expects, eventually, to be freed from all irritations, and not even to remember the divine. God will not be necessary for him to get up in the morning.

But meanwhile, he has, like the Marquis de Laplace, “no use for that hypothesis.”

The advance and proliferation of neuroscience and artificial intelligence gives the children of Laplace, and the rest of nature’s behaviourists, a fond hope. Christian and all other theistical beliefs are necessarily vague, as scientific statements, and logic can attack them with sharp precision. They may be used to throw the believer into doubt and confusion.

But they may also be used the other way.

As Auden observed: “Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.”

The “arts” of printing and typography, of paper-making, and inks, and book-binding, have been delighting and distracting me since my father first slipped into my hands an edition of Pookie, some time ago. The page was abnormally large for a two-or-three-year-old (though now, measuring it, I find it was only ten inches high); so I paid it abnormal attention; especially I attended the letter “g,” which resembled my grandma’s eye-glasses, turned sideways. Within less than a year, I had learnt all the other letters. (Perhaps I am prideful.) Within two, I had written my first book, in manuscript.

John Ryder’s very tasteful (illustrated) manual for amateur printers (only seven inches high) came out in the same era. After seventy years, I do not think I can do it much good by reviewing it, but I would like to mention a point made in the introduction. Mr Ryder recommends that the amateur not take up printing as a money-making sideline. This, like most money-making, is drudgery, and a distraction from the pure pleasure of type arrangement. Indeed, he recommends the production only of ephemera, because setting line after line for hundreds of pages can get boring. Instead, have the ambition to make each item very beautiful.

To be practical, could two or more poets share the cost of some type-setting and printing machinery, and set their respective texts from it? No, definitely not! They would never get along.

The idea of doing things, which count as labour, and not charging for them, which counts as business, has been lost on the contemporary world. (In this respect alone, we are too masculine.) At least nine in ten advertisements I see on the Internet, for instance, are for “products” that should never have been made, let alone advertised. There is a great noise about things that are “free,” and are not, or are available too cheaply.

We should try to annihilate all the producers of such goods.

“O, when Degree is shak’d! …”

Thus spake the noble Ulysses, as he expounded the great chain of being in Troilus and Cressida. Slipping into that play now (and thus into the Grecian camp, by Agamemnon’s tent) — for perhaps the first time since writing my then-girlfriend’s master’s thesis in 1975 — I am reminded how slight and hopeless my commenting has been on the important topics.

Ulysses, via Shakespeare: “Take but Degree away, un-tune that string, and hearke what Discord followes: each thing meetes in meere oppugnancie.” Things that once pulled together, now vie with each other to pull apart. And, “strength should be Lord of imbecility.”

It has been some centuries now since the links in the great chain of being, the corresponding planes, and the cosmic dance, were universally acknowledged, as they still were among the Elizabethans.  The aristocracy is gone, or rather, it persists only as a superficial “elite” of power and wealth. It began to break up from the moment the mediaeval order, or the mediaeval conception of order, was trashed and replaced by the modern conception of “equality.”

For Christian man (or, “peoplekind,” as wee Clown Justin likes to say) had invested centuries in pursuit of political, social, and religious harmony, often failing. But these Catholic ancestors realized that they had failed by their sin. The very possibility of success is what we have since surrendered.

We hear, more and more frequently, about the population crash “that is coming,” because urban people don’t want to have children. By “urban” I mean those who live in vast conurbations, where most people live these days. It is only a century or two since this began to happen, and when only a city or two was so large that one could not walk out of it. Soon, there will be no country in the world in which urbanites are not in the majority, and very much in the majority of most. Moreover, an increasing proportion of the country bumpkins are not really rural. When they get money they buy pretty cottages with all the urban conveniences, including nearby supermarkets. They do not contribute to agricultural productivity, as the great majority of citizens once did. Almost everyone makes money either from the government, or by doing something that is “private” and equally unnecessary.

Note: this much could be said without even referring to statistics, the way city people do. My country-boy preference is for real things, not numbers. (Although I really live in a huge, and very ugly, conurbation.)

An incidental discovery of the government intervenors, who are everywhere, is that women can’t be bribed to have more children. Some poor immigrants can be bribed, but not for long. Soon, most Western countries will be filled with poor immigrants in cities, while the countryside is depopulated. Who has not realized that children are an unrewarding expense? Ah well, the welfare state will be vomiting more money into the problem, as it expands. And then, thanks to inflation, the welfare state will collapse.

My view of this is the same as my view of America, after Kommie-la and Tampon Tim have won the November election. The catastrophic effects of this are easily predictable, but as Mencken would say, the Americans will have got just what they voted for, good and hard. For urban people believe in words, not things, and prefer comfortable, and fanciful, lies.

But what does this matter if the world is depopulating? To a free people — inwardly and actually free and agrarian — this is a problem that will go away. Modern urban people will have exterminated themselves (how sad!), leaving the farmers and fisherfolk to get on with it.

It seems only fair that some Dutchman should have invented the microscope, but they are a disputatious breed, and their claims and counter-claims drive the inquirer to distraction. It is the compound microscope I am discussing, which has two lenses, not the single spherical lens of melted glass that Baruch Spinoza was polishing, in the XVIIth century. The Italians had been making spectacles from the XIIIth, because, really, the Italians invented everything; but the English polymath, Robert Hooke, made the first truly serviceable compound microscope, and started doing clever things with it — vastly extending the area of human observation, after 1700.

Indeed, he was a kind of British Galileo, for he identified the rotations of Mars and Jupiter, and came up with the inverse square law before Newton clinched it. He explained the refraction of light, and contributed the wave theory. He also manufactured the gas pumps for Robert Boyle (him of Boyle’s Law), and it would seem he was architect for half the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Indeed, his rivals found many reasons to hate him: over-achievers are generally despised.

In Hooke’s book, Micrographia, we first encounter the word, “cell,” which has had such a distinguished history through the last four centuries. More broadly, biology — in the modern, sterile, technocratic sense — only became possible with the invention of the microscope. (Think what Aristotle could have done with one!)

Nevertheless, biology, as a precise science, preceded the microscope in the West, and was the invention of artists. They were Italian, of course; but towards the end of the XIVth century the invasion of Burgundy, France, Flanders, and Germany by naturalism was rapidly proceeding. They — artists but also scientists by accomplishment — took interest not only in identifying the visible plants and animals (farmers and housewives could already do that, and city-dwellers already could not). The draughtsmen and painters observed and communicated from nature the perfect organic forms, in outline and in the minutest detail. Among their successors, too, only the artists have studied actual morphology, except in the spirit of engineering. Our botanical and zoological collections have likewise deteriorated, where statistical principles have triumphed, to match-box collecting. We collect death; the classical biologists depicted the living, in their “environmental” landscapes.

Biology — the major science of observation — became the principal stronghold of nescience when Darwin and the boys took over, with their (unrealizable) evolutionary obsessions. Prior to their triumph, a wonderful science had developed among nature-loving amateurs. (See, for instance, Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada, 1983.) For genuine “science” is (or was) not bureaucracy; it is done out of love.

We should discard the cloying propaganda terms, and restore the reign of Natural Philosophy. Let us start again with the Theory of Forms.