Essays in Idleness

I do not often praise elections, and tend not to delight in the results of them, but last night’s “Midterm” in the United States was unusually satisfying. As usual in America, there were (except for a few freakish “independents”) only two contesting parties. Neither party won, by media or any other standards; neither party fulfilled their most modest expectations; and verily, neither can claim a mandate. Neither could win even a technical victory, by the time of writing. It was like an interminable baseball match, gone into extra innings.

The politicians in Canada long ago ruined our preferable ancient electoral system, in which the voter was permitted to formally return his ballot, thus indicating “none of the above.” If this was chosen by the plurality, the election was thrown out, and a by-election called from which all of the original candidates were disqualified. In principle, we could continue rejecting all candidates for the whole term of the Dominion, Provincial, or Municipal assembly in question, though in practice no electorate was ever clever enough to do this. As I say, self-serving politicians, of all parties, removed this constitutional gem before it could be used.

Americans have not benefitted from a British system of government, for the last quarter millennium or so, but I see they still retain some instincts. Rather than have a “democracy” (government by sleazy politicians), they established a “republic” (government by miscellaneous madmen), but this reduced to the same thing. Mr Donald Trump should be praised for jeopardizing it. When his successor claimed that Trump and the party he previously controlled were a threat to democracy, I think he was giving us false hope. (Trump may go down in the record as the last partially honest man to occupy the imperial office.)

Monarchy is not on the ballot. It shouldn’t be, however, for there’s a chance it might not win.

“Imagine you woke up after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and found that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Michael Flynn for defence secretary, Steve Bannon for commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head, and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman,” … &c.

Yes, this would cheer me up.

It was how the (risibly sub-literate) Thomas Friedman greeted the victory of Bibi Netanyahu in the New York Times. Israel supplied Friedman’s latest threat to democracy; because the more conservative (and possibly saner) faction had won an election there. I had not been exposed to “Mr Flatworld” for some time. Alas, my earnest attempts to censor my own Internet feed have proven unsuccessful. An exuberant mess of garbage continues to seethe through.

While I do not “support” any politician, my dislike of the species (and their servants, in journalism) is neither equal, nor constant. The more a politician is despised by the Left, and the pompous thespians of smugness, the more easily I can endure him. My suspicious nature does not cease to be watchful, however. For what is this gentleman (or God help us, lady) doing in politics? Mr Trump and Mr Netanyahu can blame only themselves, for descending into such a trade.

Nothing good is likely to come of their best efforts. They only inspire their enemies, to opposite policies, unambiguously destructive of public order and security. The odd “great man” is invariably succeeded by a Biden.

On the eve of yet another cataclysmic election, in which the inhabitants of the United States will admit the disastrous mistakes they made in the last one, the media are distended with vacuous rhetoric. This is the compressor technology of our (false, imaginary) collective soul; and like every other form of technology, it exists for a purpose, and that purpose is bad.

Thomas Aquinas was right. Evil is rooted in nothingness.

During my minor ischaemic breaks from productivity, I have made it my habit not to “follow the science.” Of course, in this ischaemic condition, which I unscientifically call a “mini-stroke,” I cannot actually follow anything; and my perpetual dizziness limits rambling; but I have certain estimable advantages. What better time to observe the properties of mind and body, than when both are in process of slipping away? For once they have slipped, they will be in their most permanent condition, and static from the worldly point-of-view. Whereas, prior to this, they are restless and unpredictable.

Indeed, I would recommend my technique for time passage to Mr John Fetterman, as a better method of rehabilitation than by running for the U.S. Senate. For one is slightly less likely to make a fool of himself on national television, when one never appears on it. However, those who literally “follow the science” also obtain a reputation for foolishness; so as Voltaire would say, each to his own garden.

The sciences I don’t follow are the study of mind and, broadly, the weather. This is because neither of them can be shown to exist. Instead we have, as substitutes, brain surgery, and the collection of climate statistics.

This latter may seem a plausible subject for inquiry, until my reader notices that it excludes serious consideration of the sun. Various technocratic devices are proposed against the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere, and fertilizers in the soil. Gigantic, bird-slaughtering fans are erected in formerly attractive places. But the sun is ignored, except by those who think they can impound its mysterious photonic energies, by vast, quaintly temporary, solar panels.

We do not look directly at the sun, from fear of being blinded. We turn away from it into the dark, or seek enlightenment over our shoulder. We might call this the speleology of Plato, although, I am told, this is also not a science. (Hardly anything is.)

Brain surgery is, today, a technocratic art (as opposed to a -logy), which flourishes even in the absence of mind. The mechanics of brain operation is studied with indifference to causation. That aspect of life is inaccessible, except to the blinking eye of faith. But if one could assemble precise inorganic copies of every particle that is needed to make up a human brain, or even less ambitiously that of a salamander, it almost certainly wouldn’t work — even if you powered it with wind and solar.

The reader with an eye on the Catholic Thing, this morning, will have learnt from Mr Randall Smith how to distinguish the mediaeval reductio, from the contemporary reduction. The former is, from its Latin etymology, a “leading back” to sources and causes; the latter is instead a simplification, or reduction in size and complexity.

He (the reader) will have learnt from another Catholic website, or from life, the importance of his Latin lessons, when he was (or is) preparing himself for the Catholic experience. For as a Catholic, today, he will be increasingly on his own; and surrounded by a culture that is radically in opposition.

For philosophy, as well as religion, speaks Latin, albeit philosophy in translation from Greek. It is the wonderfully quick and well-steered getaway vehicle for our reductio.

My own current thoughts have been rather on downsizing, reduction, “less is more,” &c, in our modern sense. We should be wary of bigness, that is not of God. My own practice is to note this quality, “bigness,” but to run from it rather than approach it and be squashed. For only what is of God will not squash you.

Created nature (and all of it was created by Him) must be smaller than He by comparison, no matter how large it may be in relation to us. I refer only to the quality of sizeness; of course, the quantity cannot be measured. We should never be trying to make the big bigger, when it is not of God. Rather, in our reductio, we should follow it back, for all things finally originate in God. This is the heroic backwardness I have been advocating in these essays; the unity of a worldview that leads reliably from the small and smaller, to the large. We should not be distracted on our journey by objects which are big and empty, like politics or empires. We shouldn’t be satisfied by imitations.

We should ourselves be imitators, of Christ. For that is the one sure way, the positive reductio, by which our lives can make sense. Getting rid of the trash that we have assembled around us is merely the necessary housekeeping.

The Russian forces are big, but this does not mean they cannot be defeated. Nuclear weapons and the inheritance of socialist bureaucracy gives them the formidable power of intimidation, but it is wrong to fear them because they bring death. Russian empires have always brought death, and have prevailed among those who fear them, but as the new nation of Ukraine has discovered, this is only a conceit. The empire, like all other empires, will contract, from the moment the proper contempt is shown to it. As the contempt “evolves,” more and more of it disappears. The task of the free citizen is to effect this disappearance.

Lest it be thought I am showing my prejudice against the Russian, exclusively, let me add that there are many more empires I would like to make extinct. Largeness, in human affairs, is itself an evil. Every large secular organization that I have encountered, over almost seventy years, is by its nature monstrous, chaotic, and obscene.

Religious organizations have easily relaxed into poisonous secularity. It is a particular affliction of modernity, though the threat often appeared in previous ages. It is the essence of tyranny. As organizations, including the “capitalist” ones, become bigger, they embrace evil. Who can stop them?

Leviathan — he makes himself large. We make ourselves large to resist him. It is our counter-productive instinct. The ancient Babylonians conceived of the cosmic defeat of the great monster whose slain body became heavens and earth. Judaeo-Christian mythology advanced on this, towards the still, small voice. For what is gigantic, and not of God, is of the other persuasion, necessarily.

This is because there are two, and only two, cosmic forces out there: the smaller and the larger, as it were.

Critics of these belligerent and pugnaciously blameless, idle essays, have warned me, that in my low enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine, I stand to lose my carefully cultivated, decades-long reputation as a war-monger. And, not just for war in the abstract, as one of them argues. For if I won’t support a battle against Russia, what country would I go to war with? In the long view of history, would I have given a pass even to the Infidel Turk? Will I make a stand when we are invaded by Martians?

Well, I do like to pick my wars wisely. Some aren’t worth winning, and some (a smaller number) may not be worth even delivering a meaningless threat.

Was reading last evening, Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, by La Motte Fouqué — the glorious Prussian war-monger. I thought it might lift my spirits from this wan recumbent posture. Heinrich Heine wrote of Sigurd that he is “as strong as the rocks of Norway and as impetuous as the ocean that dashes upon them, he is as brave as a hundred lions, and has as much sense as two donkeys.”

Yes, there are great beauties in Fouqué’s little tales, and great humour though none of it is intended. One enjoys him as one enjoys an ice-cold shower. It was Chesterton, I believe, who pointed long before the Second World War, to the earlier modern Prussians as the proto-Nazis. As I recall, he didn’t even use the clinching argument, that they were Protestants. He did mention their Puritanical disposition, however. And like Puritans, everywhere, they loved to dress very smartly in uniform, beat drums and so forth. With some imagination, you might convince yourself to march along.

But also with Chesterton, I favour defensive wars, and discountenance the offensive variety. Wars of conquest do not appeal to me at all, and never did. You must fight, and die, for love of what is behind you. Hatred, even of Prussians, will not do as an excuse.

I thought my “soft power” views on Ukraine’s current predicament would be apparent. By all means, they should blow the Russkies away.

Thanks are usually given for something positive, not something negative, like not being a toad, or not being a woman. This is because we live within limited perspectives. We cannot really know how joyful and satisfying it might be, to hop with the Bufonidae, especially the female ones, covered with gorgeous, wart-like bumps above their paratoid glands, secreting neurotoxins. Indeed, no one could want to eat us, were we a toad.

But the toads must have their own prayers of thanksgiving, that we know nothing of, and having avoided the scandal of humanity, must pray with every heartbeat. It is a permanent thanksgiving for them. So, I came to think long ago, through all nature. The animals are joyful from the moment of their creation, to the moment of their cessation, in the wild. Grim humans assume that they feel pain and other inconveniences as we do. But I had it on authority of my balconata finches (who did not return after works on my building) that life is one long continuous feast and adventure.

In particular, they do not experience fear as we do. A fright to them is a delicious thrill, as it can be sometimes to us watching movies. Death, to them, is incomprehensible. For all we know, they are immortal by way of “metempsychosis.” Their souls transmigrate.

They will be reborn as other finches, or perhaps may slightly “evolve.” For as nature abhors a vacuum, so too does the spirit of life refuse the blankness of extermination. It pops up somewhere else.

No animal is capable of despair, I think. Humans alone are “deep” enough to approach the proximity of Hell, in their free will. And yet we need not go there; it is up to us.

The attentive reader will have noticed that I have had nothing to say on the War in Ukraine, during the last few months. This, in addition to “no comment” on several other items of news. I propose to deal with one nothing at a time.

It is more difficult than it once was to tell what is happening upon the old Scythian plain. The effect of propaganda — the intention to deceive the captive audiences on both sides — makes reporting generally unreliable. The events will never be perfectly clear; and the right and wrong of battle depends on the interpretation of such news. The best we can hope for is a few indisputable atrocities; but most of these will be faked.

Ossetes, from one of a pair of ethnications within the blend of the Caucasus, are believed to be the nearest living descendants to the ancient Scythians (or Saka, Sacae, &c) who flourished three thousand years ago. They were in turn very far from being the first inhabitants. The latest “nation,” the Ukrainians, have just finished inventing themselves within the vast pool of Slavic peoples.

Human beings are not, in any political, moral, or historical sense, indigenous to any part of this world. In our arrogance we deny that we are creatures of God, whose past is as unknowable to us as our Maker. We demand science: a science which in nature cannot exist.

We read of ancient wars, between peoples long since dispersed, or annihilated, who left nothing but their orphaned children. Why did they fight? What could they gain? We cannot really know that either, for the past becomes incoherent as soon as any part of it fades.

In what way was their suffering redeemed? We don’t know.

Another of these grand and pointless wars is playing out, until one side or another acknowledges defeat. The fate of the victorious is often more poignant than the fate of the vanquished. We, who happen to survive (maybe there will be an exchange of nuclear missiles?) must confront the time ahead. We cannot know what that will be, either.

“Proper shame is now termed sheer stupidity; shamelessness, on the other hand, is called manliness; voluptuousness passes for good tone; haughtiness for good education; lawlessness for freedom; honourable dealing is dubbed hypocrisy, and dishonesty, good fortune.”

The speaker is Thucydides, and he is giving an account of the Greeks during the Peloponnesian War. It came to me this morning with Owen Barfield’s rejuvenating breakfast reading, his History in English Words. He was in the course of explaining how, in modern times, silly lost its old meaning of “blessed”; demure changed from “grave” or “sober” to “affectedly modest”; and the kindly officious came to imply “bustling interference.”

Conversely, he flatters the Roman character, for their word “simple” did not come to be used as a term of contempt, as it did in all other civilized languages. This, I speculate, is one of the mystical reasons that Latin became the (Catholic) liturgical language; it has the power of not changing. It is what it is, such that when the meanings of words are changed, they cease to be Latin.

Whereas, our words slip and slide. A moral degeneration will occur — within Greek, say, or within English — yet the language carries on glibly as before. Thucydides, the hero of political realism, lived in the fifth century before Christ, but his account of the way his contemporaries “slipped” does not appear dated. For moral decline is, in some sense, the same in all ages.

(This column has been recycled, against the threat of climate change, from the age before the Batflu, in line with the proposed nitrogen cutbacks of Justin Trudeau.)

*

Today is again Michaelmas, the feast of Saint Michael and all the Angels. On this day, precisely ten years ago, I wrote my first “Essay In Idleness,” on the Internet, citing the detached, mountain-dwelling, 14th-century Japanese monk Kenko, his Tsurezuregusa, as my model. I acknowledged that I would no longer be appearing in print, in my native Canada.

It happened that my last “mainstream meejah” employer had found enough money in his budget to make me go away. It hadn’t been his first retirement offer; but as the money would be seized by competing government departments (long boring story) it was not the principal issue. Rather, I had tired of being ever on the defensive, against sleaze and liars; and having people promise to defend me, who would disappear when required.

Perhaps I shouldn’t let the devils shut me up so easily, I thought; it seemed I still had many loyal readers. But then I thought again. My columns in Canadian newspapers were “politically imperfect” — I was frequently accused of expressing “conservative” views — and as one complainant to the Ontario Press Council alleged, I “openly admitted to being a Catholic.” (They let me off on that one, however, though I pled Guilty.)

Over my last decade in the “respectable” meejah (ah, the irony), I had attracted more than nine hundred formal complaints of one sort or another, tying my editors up in red tape. (This is a longstanding Leftist tactic: “the process is the punishment.”) Verily, I could understand why those editors would want to shake me off, even if they sympathized with my opinions.

That they didn’t, could be guessed from the number of newspapers that carried my column. It shrank from more than a dozen to just the one that was contractually stuck with me. But that last paper was in Ottawa, “the city fun forgot,” where “liberals and progressives” are most lawyered up.

The world is as the world is, and one shouldn’t bemoan it, too often. We are commanded by the Lord, to deal with it for a season. Shrieking injustice, lewd wickedness, and vicious tyranny are commonplace down here, and it isn’t always possible to hide from them. In boxing terms, offering to resist is “leading with the chin.”

By contrast, the best way to deal with the Devil is not to antagonize him openly. It is to afflict him with poetry and laughter. Such whimsicality triggers all of his “efficiency experts.”

As gentle reader may have discovered, I particularly enjoy triggering Satan’s little minions. The conceit of writing these brief Essays, as if with an Oriental brush, then posting them on the walls of my cabin in the mountains, is perhaps too ambitious. For often I descend, downhill, as if drawn towards squalor.

But now it is irretrievably ten years later. The end is surely near.

Once upon a time, I had an amateur interest in economics, particularly development economics. Luck, or its absence, had landed me in a series of vaguely journalistic jobs with partially reputable commercial institutions in Asia. We, who worked there, used such terms as “monetary,” and “Euromoney,” and “investment,” to affirm our respectability.

We were advocates of wealth. If the “third world” nations on which we were reporting were to become good and modern, they would cultivate wealth in preference to all other intentions. Technology and speed were among the means.

My father, also — an “industrial designer” with an appreciation for craft — got caught up in this. In the generation before mine, he, too, sometimes worked in Asia. A more honest character than I, he discerned in less time that the well-intended tasks he had taken up were essentially destructive. He was paid, for instance, to analyze domestic handicraft industries, and suggest ways in which the craft skills they had refined could be transferred to modern industry. Success meant native and foreign investors would become rich, wage labour be increased immensely, and the cash economy expanded into places which it had never previously violated. Countless formerly free people, who had been living happy, honourable, lives, would now be placed under various kinds of mortgage. Note, it was not financial, but cultural impoverishment that made them ciphers in an immense, metastasizing, inhuman machine. It gave them the chance to die without love.

It took me, scandalously, many more wasted years to reach exactly the same conclusion as my father about what I was doing there.

The inhuman machine in which we are “taken care of,” back here in the West, malfunctions, usually from politically-programmed failures and disorders. “Inflation” is one example of the sort of thing I mean. To a modern, Keynesian economist, the oil in the machine lubricates the works, and the only question is whether it has been applied too excessively. But if it is too little, they recommend “quantitive easing,” in which we squirt more oil in. The economists have settled on 2 percent as adequate to their purposes. Just now it is riding high, to a level much above adequate. Interest rates rise to “flatten the curve” as we did for two weeks with the Batflu. This doesn’t, and has never, worked, of course, and the pain continues for months or years, as economic activity progressively ceases.

High interest rates are only a problem for people who borrow money. It is, for them, what usury has always been. Yet, those trying to save some fraction of what they may have earned, don’t mind it at all. I, for instance, adore high interest rates. For I like to give valuable things away; or to take other measures to prevent my wealth from falling into the hands of thieves and governments.

Inflation is incidentally one of the chief, though fairly subtle, methods of taxation. But one would have to be tedious to explain this obvious fact.

As I am not into statistics, I find it difficult to think of my new monarch as “Charles III.” But he is not only the son of his mother, who was our Queen, and became so even before my birth. He is also the son of his father, who exhibited all the characteristics that Her Majesty loved in a man, starting with being unambiguously a man. Of course, this was an easier prejudice to master, when she married in 1947. Charles, born in the fashion of those times (after the marriage, and “legitimately” as it were), came into a world where such conventions, together with other traditional proofs of sanity, would be set aside.

Not having been born so long after Charles, however, and of loyal parentage, I became aware of the heir in my own childhood. I still think him a bit young for the job — monarchs must need at least a century of training — and, quite inevitably, subject to the notions and whims that decorate or deface our common generation. This cannot be entirely to his credit, or to his fault. There is what the clever Germans call a Zeitgeist, a spirit of the times, for better or worse (mostly worse). We are all brainwashed in this stream of consciousness. Only a tiny fraction, of each generation, swims free of the great sinking wreck of ages. They have what my physician has diagnosed as “attitude problems.”

Charles, more than any other member of the Royal Family, clearly earned most of his eccentricities. Glancing in the amusing comic book, entitled Harmony (2010), written by Charles with a committee of his friends, I found many signs of this. It is, as one might guess, against the Disharmony we have created under the guise of “revolutionary progress.”

By coincidence, reading in the century-old tiny volumes of my Edmund Burke, especially from his last few years, I find him a spokesman for the same harmonies. That is what makes him a conservative — a radical conservative, like our new, gracious King.

He (Charles, like Edmund) has a preternatural attachment to reason. Also, a discernment of the limits of reason, not only in the present, but through all time. Still a third eccentricity is his characteristic modesty, with instinctive courage, for he does not impose his views but presents them for discussion, and listens as well as speaks. (My generation forgot how to do this, and the generation after mine is, for want of a better term, “Woke.”)

Charles is unlikely to make a fool of himself as our monarch; though judging by the careers of most politicians, this will be hard for him to achieve.

The reader will know I am a “constitutional monarchist,” who would keep the Royals in their — current, illustrious — positions, but eliminate the rest of our — incompetent, and generally malignant — bureaucracy. Having witnessed (through the BBC) how brilliantly the British can manage an unprecedented state funeral, with millions of voluntary guests, I am the more convinced that Charles and his advisors can be trusted in command.

Let us sing with heart and voice, all five stanzas: Long live the King.

A French newspaper that came before my eyes today both cheered and disheartened me, when it described Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as “the last Christian monarch of Europe.” This may in fact be a fair representation of “public opinion,” but God in these matters ought to be consulted.

Her Majesty died yesterday, which was September 8th. That is Marymas, in both the Roman and Anglican calendars; and in the Byzantine Rite, and through Syrian and other Eastern churches, it is also the birthday of Our Lady. We count nine months from the Conception, which we celebrate December 8th. (Of course the Julian calendar runs almost a fortnight behind the Gregorian, where it is still observed.)

In other words, as the knightly Andrew Cusack points out, God took the Queen on His Mother’s birthday, thus reminding all those in the English Realm that they are still the Dowry of Mary.