Essays in Idleness

True, I said that I wasn’t going to Idleblog this week, but today, Maundy Thursday, the 44th anniversary of the moment when I became a “born again” Christian, I will dispense a few more words.

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This year, I am one of the world’s 7.8 billion coronavirus bystanders.

I arrived at this number by taking the total number of media-reported covid-19 infections, multiplying by ten, then subtracting the product from the UN’s current estimate of the world’s population. (Which is 7.8 billion.)

Were we instead to go by the death count, the number of non-bystanders would shrink. As we now know, the proportion who die from the disease is less than 1 percent, and it falls as testing increases. But as most of those victims are elderly, and enduring other life-terminative conditions, the published numbers still overestimate the toll. The conventional winter flu pneumonias would have carried many of them away, had there been no coronavirus.

For my sins, in earlier life, I acquired a fascination for “policy wonk” topics, and continue to suffer from that today. I am morbidly interested in the demographic questions, in the disclosures of epidemiology, in the economic ramifications of moral action on both large and small scales. It is an addiction.

Even before I became a Christian, I was curious about the social implications of Christianity in its various forms, and likewise about the other religions. (I lived in Asia a lot.) What are, or what would be, the fiscal effects of living with belief? What are, or would be, the effects on public health?

Add what we call “secularism” to the list of religions — in its mild “agnostic” or stronger Atheist modes — and a murky but grander picture emerges. The phenomenon that we call, vaguely, “globalism,” comes into play.

What is globalism? I define it differently from most avowed globalists, or those who accept it as an irreversible trend. It involves, according to me, the attitude that the world may be judged by numbers. It is post-godly “secularism,” or a thoroughgoing worldliness, writ on the largest scale its upholders can imagine — “world-class worldliness,” as it were. It is a universal reduction of moral realities to “value-free” numbers, and thus implies obedience to those who manipulate them.

Whether these numbers are gathered and applied by “socialists” or “capitalists” is not important. The mud-wrestle of power determines that, as to some degree it has always done.

But as Red China has been proving (I hope for not much longer), the two systems — totalitarian dirigisme and crass wealth-seeking — are perfectly compatible. Scientistic numerology is their common language, and its opposition to the humane and religious becomes more and more explicit, everywhere. (Even in the Vatican the pope speaks in the “globalist” bafflegab.) It is the “trend,” verily, and in the world of numbers, trends have replaced God. The current pandemic has provided it with an unprecedented breakthrough. For the first time in all human history, the whole world can be “locked down,” and religious activities globally suppressed.

The “covid crisis,” to choose a label, might have spread gradually from a wet market in China under any system. We did have pandemics in the low-tech past. Once, they took longer to travel the Silk Road, cross the Sahara, float shipboard or (in the case of the Spanish Flu, apparently) come from Kansas.

But war, famine, pestilence, and wild beasts have been with us for some time. To the mind of the religious of almost any persuasion, they are facts of life, and quite possibly a poignant indication of the displeasure of the heavens.

To the “globalist” mind, however, they are a technical problem. The modern, progressive, habitually liberal mind can’t imagine a catastrophe as anything else. Its first instinct is to put a Dr Fauci on the job, and appoint a Dr Birx as Chief Nanny. This is also its last instinct.

I have nothing against either Dr Fauci or Dr Birx, by the way; nor against any of this world’s technicians. I am generally pro-life, and in the habit of granting breathing rights even to technocrats; even when their explanations of everything are in the habit of proving radically incomplete, or more simply, wrong; and even when they pull at the heartstrings of our empathy to engage our cooperation with their orders.

For these are true believers in the messages they project: a belief so sincere that they are willing to provide false and misleading information to clinch a point — such as reclassifying death certificates from the factual “pneumonia,” to the speculative “covid-19,” even when it hasn’t been tested for, to inflate the numbers. This is done almost without thinking, for to the modern almost unthinkingly, “the end justifies the means.”

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The giving of comfort is a more complex thing. It takes us from statistics to their opposite, Love.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta was sometimes criticized (by Christopher Hitchens and others who considered themselves, like Trotsky, “on the side of history”) for her ministry to the very sick and dying. While her nuns provided medicines, whenever they could, their approach was not essentially pharmaceutical.

Perhaps most scandalous, to their critics, was their acceptance of the fact that people are going to die.

Jesus, too, was going to die, and among the most powerful and moving statements I find in all literature are the words Mother Mary addressed to Him along the Via Dolorosa:

“I am here.”

This is not what the high-pressure ventilators say, within which the dying patient is segregated from a nurse, or his family, or from anyone. Within all the expensive equipment that contains him, he is left to die alone and unblessed. The priest for whom he might have called, for last rites — administered, we imagine, from outside the machine — may not even be admitted to the hospital, unless he is seriously ill himself. Perhaps he is in another ventilator.

Context is rather important here. We can see this from the fact that church services, Masses, are closed by the public hygiene officials as, usually, their first step. While the coronavirus was merrily cavorting through the high-class shopping venues of Milan, its churches were already sealed off. Those who think the presence of Christ is more important than their very lives, are not indulged. After all, they might become living vectors for the virus. (“Statistics have shown.”)

That testing, contact tracing, and the quarantine of likely cases should be done, I take for granted. The quarantine of everyone is an innovation, however. In the past, people needed not even to be told about social distancing; they figured it out for themselves very quickly. (Read Thucydides on the plague at Athens, &c.) Such obvious points, as that crowding speeds infection, have been grasped since time out of mind. That cities tend to host contagions has been known since cities were invented. That travel is dangerous is not a new discovery, either.

When they do not have a cure, the “experts” do not have a cure. The best they can do is try to find one, or a way to reduce pain, failing that. But despair is not something that technocrats can “solve.”

I think of Mother Teresa and her nuns, going into the leper colonies. They took whatever precautions they could, but as their saintly mistress herself had said, “I wouldn’t touch a leper for a million dollars. I do it willingly for the love of God.” (She lived to age eighty-seven, incidentally.)

Beyond this, the facts of life continue to obtrude. Our medical experts cannot account for the ways bacteria and viruses disport themselves, often even in retrospect. They are constantly taken by surprise in sudden outbreaks: the where and why and intensity of them.

The hygiene authorities are actually trained to discount the power of a human soul to resist afflictions. The extraordinary efficacy of placebos demonstrates this narrowness again and again. That people are more likely to live, when they want to live, is shown in diminishing life expectancy in the most technologically advanced societies. Opiates announce this. In the West, suicides still outstrip “covid” deaths, defining suicide in the strictest, most immediate way. (Check the numbers; the hygiene specialists count it as a disease.)

Yes, covid-19 is a killer. It is one of many, and they all work. Death is almost unique in our world, in being 100 percent efficient. Perhaps that is why, at some level, we worship, propitiate, and appease, death.

But Christ not only died. He died for us, on Good Friday. For, having descended from heaven to earth, He then went farther, down into Hell. And was raised — Resurrected. And was dead, and behold, is alive for evermore. And has the keys of Hell and of Death.

For this is the Truth that, in defiance of the technocrats, we must shamelessly proclaim: that in light of these unalterable facts, death shall have no more dominion.

Has anyone noticed that the darkest days of our pandemic, if the epidemiologists are right, will coincide with Holy Week, the darkest days in the Christian calendar. And these are now upon us. The first statistical indication that the pandemic is lifting, having done its worst, may well coincide with Easter.

But the churches are “locked down.” A week from now, they will still be closed, by order of the civil authorities, for a good hygienic reason. Perhaps on some South Sea Island there is one still open, under the palms. We aren’t allowed to travel, or even be out of doors under the virus-bleaching sun in places like Italy. The spring itself we may still glimpse, up here in the Northern Hemisphere; through windows.

Or I from my sumptuous concrete balcony, to which my sweet housefinches have returned from the far south. They must have heard the news, about social distancing, for they fly off if I come within six feet of them.

From the Internet I learn of sheep, and other farm animals, seen wandering into towns and villages, puzzled about where all the people have gone. They probably assume that someone will still feed them: there is no rebellion in their blank faces. But their pasture has been indefinitely enlarged, thanks perhaps to some keeper who left a gate open. At first they didn’t surge through the gate; they are not, after all, libertarian by nature. But there is always one sheep to find the gate open, and he will have many followers.

Another picture, from one of those countries which lives closer to nature, shows a jaguar taking his paces. I’ve never seen a real Jaguar on a high street, only fake motorized purring metal ones. But give it time, and all the world would be closer to nature. And then we would be wise to stay indoors.

Except for the sirens of some first responders, out there somewhere, the world is at peace. The Son of Man, descending from the Mount of Olives, has come to be glorified.

Astride farm animals, comfortably saddled upon disciples’ cloaks, he will pass through Jerusalem Wall. He will be greeted by the palms, from those who now have reason to suspect that He is exactly who He says. The news has been circulating. There were witnesses. Bodies so advanced in decay as that of the entombed Lazarus do not normally rise from the dead, as they know. Not even when they are told to.

Something remarkable has happened; the occasion for Lazarus Saturday to the Orthodox, and through the Eastern Churches; where they have read the Gospel of John.

The season of death and resurrection is upon us. It has come, from Bethany. That donkey and that colt — they have now entered Jerusalem Town. Oddly, they carry Christ. If it was through what later became Saint Stephen’s Gate that they passed, then they passed into what later became the Via Dolorosa. But who can know about these things, before they have happened? For all the rich symbols that are converging, the world cannot yet know.

I saw a man on the steps out in front of Holy Family, here in Parkdale the other day. He was saying his Rosary. I’d often noticed this man at his devotions in the church itself, through all the various seasons of the year. I imagined him for a moment as the last Christian, in a world where the streets were empty, and a fresh spring breeze was blowing dried rubbish about. A sorrowful statue of Our Lady was his last companion.

There is more than anyone can say; through the coming week I shall keep my silence. I have anyway said too much over the last several. Let us wait and pray.

On a walk I took yesterday (you still can’t be arrested for that in Ontario) I passed the nearest licker store (or, “liquor” as some people spell it). The line to get in was spaced, I estimate, at one Roman pace between persons. (That’s five Imperial feet.) Two policemen rode by on bicycles. The more garrulous of the pair saluted this single file, congratulating its members for, “Good spacing!”

This is what it has come to, I thought. He spoke as if they were kindergarten pupils, waiting patiently for their licker in the approved way.

My own supply is ample, incidentally. Kind visitors have brought me several bottles of single malt, over the last year, and I don’t quaff it. There are several tins of beer left over from the last meeting of the Borborygmatic Society. I’ve just checked, and have two bottles of wine. As a Christian Survivalist, I like to do inventories of these things.

That the policemen should be on patrol, is a shocking development. Normally, police are not seen in Parkdale (perhaps it is too dangerous for them) — except in squadcar convoys with ambulances and fire trucks. Bicycle patrols are for the tourist parts of the city, currently closed down. Sometimes, rarely, a pair of policemen may intrude into a far section of Parkdale, mounted on horses, which leave their “calling cards” for souvenirs. I saw such a marchpast in 2017. Made me think of India and the Raj.

There are two things in life, at least. One of them is Freedom, and the other is Comfort. The second is more popular than the first. Often, one must choose between one and the other. I generally choose Freedom, which makes me unpopular, too. Even so, I like to obey laws, so if the authorities tell me to space myself in the queue outside the Liquor Control Board, I give it a miss. I would rather do without licker.

Lord Sumption comes into this somewhere. Britain’s high justice (retired), he is also a distinguished mediaeval historian. He is a controversial figure just now, because he gave his private opinion of the Derbyshire police, who now use drones to film people who may have overlooked the “stay home” instructions, by hiking in the Peak District. (They also have hotlines, so citizens can rat each other out.)

His Lordship’s whole interview on Radio Four has been much criticized. His point was that tyranny is usually imposed, not because some tyrant decides to go for it, but because a frightened public demands it. In such moments, by tradition, only snooty old aristocrats like Lord Sumption and I are apt to resist. And I don’t give interviews to Radio Four.

There are people who declare, “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” I find them irritating, but that’s beside the point. Instead I have a question. Where have they gone during the Batflu Crisis?

We (not in the sense of “I”) may know something about the transmission of the Red Batflu (TM) towards the end of this month, when we have the results of serological surveys. These are done with blood or saliva tests, conventionally, on a representative sample of the population, statistically extended to the population at large. They will tell us what portion of the general population, by arbitrary class, has developed antibodies to the virus, and are presumed to be immune. This is a different kind of test from the one now popular, which is only good for telling who has got a fresh infection; a method of triage. By now, or if not within a few weeks, much of the population may already be “home free” — but of course we do not know that yet.

It is a pity that we don’t, for by the end of April, events may be sliding out of hand. It is no use to have answers if no one is listening to them.

What we do know, at present, is numbers that are posted every day in the media for their sensational value, but are irrelevant. The numbers of infected and dead in mainland China, for instance, have been made up, for propaganda purposes, themselves inconsistent. They are nevertheless taken by our media at face value. But the numbers for such countries as Italy, Spain, Canada and the Natted States, are merely anecdotal.

The Trump Team has trained, experienced, capable epidemiologists, as do the teams in other developed countries. But they are only guessing from such fleeting (and often wildly inaccurate) field reports; and adapting while those change dramatically overnight. Their projective charts and graphs are like those which support “climate change” theories; which is to say, a terrible waste of print-out paper. Only their assumptions are fixed. While it is demonstrably true that “social distancing” will slow any pandemic, it does so in the same way that mud will slow a car. It does not point us to the road home.

And in the meantime the economy — our livelihoods — are being destroyed. While I might facetiously say this is a good thing — we all had too much money — April Fools’ is now over. With economic collapse we lose social order, and all plunge into hell. It is said that crisis brings out the best and worst in people. This is quite true, and I have seen good, virtuous, even heroic behaviour. But from my close analysis of Parkdale, and judicious remembrance of other locations, I have concluded, mostly the worst. There are certain observations of Thomas Hobbes that remain permanently valid.

The idiots (i.e. self-identifying “smart people”) who wish to launch rhetorical broadsides against Wall Street, for instance, should be polled again when their retirement funds vanish, for that is what they are actually advocating. The smart people who would seize on the crisis, to advance social policies only they want, should be removed from our vast regulatory bureaucracies. This would empty them out. (The overwhelming majority of politicians are smart people. Worse, most of them are personally quite charming.)

Unfortunately, however, even the stupid people are playing along. The majority, as it gets more and more frightened, agrees to shut down almost everything, in the belief that if they don’t they will soon find themselves needing a non-existent ventilator — and then rebel against the closures when they don’t. But while people are scared, it is easy to manipulate them, and politicians of every complexion are hugely empowered, to do what they have always done in an emergency: create a larger, more consequential, emergency.

Should we live long enough, we will watch this play out. No one can predict what will happen, and as the churches are closed, we had better pray at home.

The present is seldom (if ever) a guide to the future; except, that part of the present which never changes. If he is reading this antiblog, gentle reader is probably able to accept this proposition calmly, though he might resist some of its corollaries. One of them is that we can’t predict future events, even though, in retrospect, none will be surprising, and with time, fewer and fewer will actually surprise us. That “bad things happen” certainly should not startle anyone; or bad things out of good intentions; or good things out of bad — are platitudes of the sort that invariably catch us off guard.

They are a confutation that anything in politics can be achieved, for longer than the moment. What was made will be soon destroyed: even if what replaces it is given the same name. We hear this, for instance, in the sarcastic tone used to repeat proud old slogans. “Mom and apple pie,” for example. It was intended to describe something utterly uncontroversial. For this very reason it is controversial now, and a person can be “triggered” simply by the phrase. (Never miss a chance.) The little trolls on campus will freak right out. But even for a person who is sane and intelligent, the concept of mom and apple pie needs serious revision, to bring it “up to date.” Often it is a good, if uncomfortable thing, when what was once obvious needs rethinking through. It is a recapitulating operation, like sharpening a knife.

The reason I have been writing so much lately, about what I’ll call today the “CCP Bat Virus,” is that once again everything is changing, without changing. New platitudes emerge, that were once old. After however many months of “social distancing,” or whatever else is imposed, things will go back to “normal.” This will be so no matter when or if the virus returns, after whatever number of mutations.

But the bubonic plague, as noticed in London, returned in much the same form, seventeen times between 1348 and 1666. It had already visited Europe in the time of Justinian, and returned frequently between 541 and 750 AD, each time carrying away thousands and millions of those late Byzantine-Romans, and bystanders throughout and beyond the Mediterranean. We still have no vaccine, incidentally; and it is still not dead. Only Communism can approach the aggregate body count.

Have we learnt anything from either? The question is rhetorical: it answers itself.

That the world was transformed by the greatest of Black Deaths, is a banality of the historians. More than half of the population of Europe was erased; in some parts most of it. The archaeologists have tracked so many villages wiped out, but it was worse in the cities. The economic historians gleefully review the advantages. A lot of property was inherited, and wages went up. Many overcrowding problems were solved. As an environmentalist recently put it: “Coronavirus is the solution, humans are the problem.” That our most profound ecologists are devils in human flesh, I take for granted.

But nothing changes. Had there been no bubonic plague; had the bacterium never travelled the Silk Road; had this or that not coincidentally happened, other things would have. Think of all the pestilences that, in the course of history, never got properly started. Think of all the asteroids that never hit.

My own impression of the 14th century — regrettable in various ways — is of continuity. The dramatic social changes after the Black Death were visible before. Boredom with the stable Christian order (which was always more fragile than appeared), would have led to other, essentially parallel disasters. (Perhaps the Reformation was the least of these.) People always get bored at some point, and then they do something revolutionary, and incredibly stupid.

Get used to it.

Among the pleasures of the “lockdown” or quarantine, when one tires of all the breaking tedious news from the present, is to stretch out and read — about great plagues and catastrophes of the past. They put us cosseted bourgeois to shame. As pandemics go, ours is a luxury that few other societies could afford, and on which none until recently would have much remarked. Contemporary, or near-contemporary accounts, from Procopius to Boccaccio to Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, are among those I happen to have on my shelves. They will have to do while bookstores and libraries are closed. There are Internet editions, of course, but one must not read them, or one will go blind.

Until recently (say, the last few centuries), there were no official instructions to deal with plagues. Things like “social distancing” evolved on their own, very very quickly. The idea of “infection” sprang from easy observation, and is therefore quite ancient. Then, as now, you lived or you died.

I mentioned Defoe especially because he is like a modern journalist: he makes everything up. But he has gone to some trouble to find good sources, and is consistently plausible. Older writers are slowed by their obsessions with fact and accuracy. In this respect, we might say there has been a continuous decline from Herodotus to the New York Times, except, it was more like a sudden precipitous drop, wherever it occurred. In past times, even rulers needed some reliable information about their (much smaller or less populous) domains; today, as we see most starkly in Red China, a totalitarian dictator has only to give the themes, and vast departments of his loyal scribes will copy and embellish, in both Eastern and Western media.

Defoe, too, marks a boundary. In the 18th-century, at the flourishing of the Enlightenment, the novel and hack journalism were born, as twins. They separated generically, but not in spirit. The ancient entertainment of “the tale” was replaced by the modern “narrative.” A new cult of empathy and sensitivity were part of the afterbirth. The idea that we should feel “as if we were there” anticipated television by two centuries or so. The replacement of reality, by virtual reality, did not, as we assume, require advanced technology. Instead it required only a desire to fake it. By now, almost all human experience is fake. The body has, as it were, flipped over in its grave.

Let me reveal the secret. It could be condensed in the phrase, “with freedom comes responsibility.” This latter necessarily involves a humble appreciation of truth, as something external to oneself, which cannot long be manipulated. I am a clinger to this essentially mediaeval view, upon which our conception of civic liberty used to hang. The free man, as opposed to the serf or slave, is under an obligation not from his master, but from God, to behave well. Those who do not believe in God, or who perhaps think they do but would never allow it to be tested, look to a human master, instead.

Through our modern cult of leadership, master tells us what to believe. He may not even believe it himself — in fact, he usually doesn’t — but he has seized the monopoly on human responsibility. He knows that his subjects are depending on him, and that if he were to die or be overthrown, the entire universe would come to an end. That is why he considers himself so important.

In this we detect the root of our modern political alignments, first formed in the later Middle Ages, in the battles between “realists” and “nominalists.” To oversimplify recklessly, the first group is persuaded that certain things are true, because they are true, and therefore we have to live with them; the second group, that our truths are of human manufacture. That is why words have ever been crucial to this “Left” — because words connote meaning, and finally create it. Something that didn’t exist can be made into “a thing.” God, by comparison, has a pro forma existence, at best. If He made the world, He left it to us, promptly; by now He is not The Word, but words. If we take away his name (“the separation of church and state”), He will evaporate.

But this is what I like about the great plagues and catastrophes of history, and like to read about them. They are our assurance that reality is real; that it always has the power to impose itself, in disregard of our planning. That we didn’t make it up.

And beyond this, disaster is our assurance that in the long political contest, between freedom and slavery — between those who ask to be left alone, and those who demand power — the latter are the garbage.

According to Karl Mannheim, foolishly condensed, ideologies come in four flavours. There are 1. chiliastic, millenarian, nutjob ideologies. 2. There are liberal, humanist, “progressive” ones. 3. There are conservative, often babbling individualist versions of the same. 4. And there are commies. In each case a utopia is conceived, towards which our society should aspire. A Christian, this patriarch of sociology nevertheless bought into Marxist analyses of class and condition to explain the preference for each in its culture and time. Marxists did not like Mannheim, however, because he wasn’t essentially a commie.

I’ve been clearing out books during the lockdown, and came to Ideology and Utopia (1929). It was “in my face” more than forty years ago. I decided to keep it, as I do with many old books which were once important to me, as their spines remind me not only of old times, but of what remains as a constituent of my own outlook on things. I like to be staggered by the news that I wasn’t born yesterday. (Next to Mannheim is Masaryk.)

We have lived in, though we have largely passed through, an “age of ideology.” It came with the Enlightenment, according to me, and goes out with it. When the half-educated children of Harvard, Yale, and the drive-in universities espouse socialism today, they have nothing like the elementary self-knowledge that Leftists of the past exhibited. “Half-educated” is of course an over-estimate: their utopias are filled with so many contradictions that they have “evolved” into something else. (“Post-modern.”) They are incoherent even by the traditional standards of madness, and have no arguments unlikely to be reversed.

And yet something remains of what used to strike me as the contrast between an ideological and a religious view of life. That the ideologists (including chiliasts) cannot understand the religious view, might almost go without saying; they put it in another ideological category, so that it can be easily dismissed. They would not be interested in, for instance, the comparative study of religions, which shows the same moral and even spiritual features arising again and again, in societies centuries apart. This is because they are only explicable as evidence of Grace — of realities intrinsic to the universe, yet external to human thought and planning. There is God, in other words.

With an apprehension of God comes the possibility of what the Protestants call “humble access”; of humility in the larger view. This is also at the origin of genuine science, where the truth is sought as something outside us, as opposed to control over nature, or over our fellow man (which is the basic impulse of magic). We know, as it were, what we don’t know, and that fate is not finally in our own hands. The orders we are willing to obey may come from priests, bishops, imams or bonzes, but only because they are believed to represent an order beyond normal human powers.

Politics, to such a view, are of a strictly limited, merely transient significance, and the “visions of utopia” are of no significance at all. Any idea of human progress must necessarily be false.

My principal, practical hope from the present viral medical crisis — a light affliction as these things go, but heavy enough to get everyone’s attention — is that it will help people think. For everywhere I turn, I see plain lessons, especially for Christians, including lapsed ones. It is as if the Creator were reminding us how to tell what is important from what is not. It is interesting to me how the infection has suddenly shut down almost everything in the latter category, and made the world quiet for a moment.

But paradoxically, He has also let His Church be publicly closed, as a much-deserved scourge, cutting her off from all routine sources of income. Yet she is living within. At the place I attend, for instance, the Fathers are singing eleven Masses each day, to empty, often locked chapels. These are sung on behalf of the people, while they are “away.”

Am I saying there could be something godly in this; in this systematic confutation of all received “ideological” views? Gentle reader will guess that I am saying, Yes.

A trillion here, a trillion there, it all adds up. Penny-wise and trillion-pound foolish. Time to float. I give gentle reader a choice of clichés this morning. He may already have caught my drift.

Like most making poor use of their time, I have been reading more Wu-Flu-related meejah through the last few weeks than I could possibly justify — and at a time when the churches are closed, so that I cannot confess it. Approximately none of it has done me any good, except in one instance, by checking if they were open first, I spared myself a long walk to a store that sells curtains.

All I (or anyone) needed to know was to wash my hands, and keep my distance, from crowds especially. But I already did that, from creative misanthropy; and had already learnt how to wash my hands in the philosophical manner. For, even without computer modelling, I already knew that the secret of modern longevity is soap. Everything else is incidental, by comparison; and in the case of the modelling, counter-productive.

The secret of defeating a pandemic is the immunity, which spreads among survivors. That is one of those incidentals, and it helps explain why Buddhist monks drank snake venom, back in the day. (Found through Google.) The concept of a vaccine is older than modern science, but like the rest of it, steeped in the arcane. This includes the (shockingly effective) placebo principle, which, long before the invention of sugar pills, relied on the feathers of the witch doctors. In order to impress the patient, you must make a show and dress the part. This explains the lab coats of practitioners, today. At some point the stethoscope replaced the wand.

I am not denying empirical science. I am merely noting that no one takes it seriously. It is scientism that wins the accolades, and collects the big budgets. A truer understanding of this than we have, would view it as part of the entertainment industry — and of our modern superstitious faith in matter over mind. We think, or are actually browbeaten and brainwashed from early childhood, that this is “the age of science,” unlike all the ages preceding. There has never been such an age, by the way, and never will be.

Ours is rather the age of electronic toys. Our ancestors had better things to play with.

Moreover, electronic toys confound us. The incredible piffle that supports “climate change” is entirely based on computer modelling. So are the projections of infections and deaths from the coronavirus. At the Imperial College in London, the number of dead pending in Britain went down overnight from half a million, to twenty thousand. That, to my mind, was an unconscionable number of resurrections.

While I try never to disagree with God, I have sometimes wondered if He was wise to let the worldlings learn about exponentials. Didn’t He know it would go to our heads?

It is by the use of their electronic toys that the Americans are about to spend two trillion dollars that they don’t have, then try unsuccessfully to tax it back later; each of our other Western countries in proportion. The politicians ask, What is the alternative?

That would be to tell everyone to fend for themselves, and be charitable with their neighbours. This is the “fiscal policy” compatible with civic freedom. All the others are incompatible.

They might add that, when this is over, people should try to recover from their losses, but they may think of that without being told. In the meantime, they should beat their electronic toys into ploughshares.

Bankers make jokes about bankruptcies, footballers about own-goals, doctors about grisly deaths. The world is a merry place, and there is a funny side to everything. That the humour, however dry, is in bad taste, goes without saying. Several the sages who have averred that humour always is.

Recently, perusing an anthology of “classic” Japanese death poems, I began to giggle. Involuntarily, I assure gentle reader. I had perused too many, and they were beginning to read like a samurai version of the “Darwin awards.” (There are few tasks as thankless as that of a translator.)

But I am unable to see the fun in the present vogue for “Do Not Resuscitate” orders. Most, as I learnt from my late nurse-warden mother, are decided unofficially. Those who practice medicine know that they are not necessarily made by the patient himself. The safety of staff has sometimes come into it, during events like pandemics. Should the Hindoos turn out to have been right about metempsychosis, I hope not to be reborn as a bio-ethicist.

The vogue, or “viral trend,” almost certainly began in Red China, where for ideological reasons, “pro-life” attitudes are actively discouraged; but like the real virus, it spread to Italy quickly.

For reasons I have sometimes given, I tend to avoid arguing over statistics, but in this case it may be justified. We are told the death rate, which is fairly high, but also how the numbers are gathered. Anyone who dies after being tested positive counts as a coronavirus victim. So if you just flunked the test, and then get hit by a car, you will make it into the coronavirus statistics. We are also told that not most, but almost all who die with the virus in a hospital bed had “other conditions,” often more than one. The great majority are octogenarian or better, and so the cause of death could be plausibly reassigned in those cases.

That does not make the patient any less dead, however; or in cases I can imagine, the deaths less horrible. Fear of contagion, from hospital staff, may have sped the death sentence. Had a “negative” experienced heart failure, for instance, they would have swung into action. This is how the world works, and will be working in New York, once the danger is accentuated by a bed shortage. Other hospital equipment already runs short, so that sadistic intentions need not be alleged.

My question will be a characteristically unpopular one. What happens when what is done under extreme pressure during an emergency is formulated as a policy by bureaucrats? What, when given our generally mindless modern conception of the “rational,” when something that had been defended as a “necessary evil” is officially imposed?

This has been our experience from legal abortion forward; or more precisely before that, in “birth control.” I don’t approve either under any circumstances at all — there are moral lines we should refuse to cross — yet know perfectly well that they are crossed by individuals, and have always been crossed. Too, I know about winking.

“Euthanasia,” to use the time-honoured euphemism, is now policy in many realms, and as predicted, it has spread to many forms. Legislated, compulsory euthanasia would inevitably follow. It might be interesting to predict what follows after that.

Not “merely” human lives, but a whole civilization is finally desacralized in this movement. The human being, whether unborn or dying, and ultimately everyone in between, becomes interchangeable with farm animals, to be put down when sick or otherwise unwanted. Should he become a medical threat to others, he is put down “on principle,” once our principles have been reversed — and they have been.

One could make a joke about painful ways of dying, though by social convention we do not make it too soon. But now we are “progressing” into Holodomor or Holocaust territory, where innocent people may be killed on what are presented as ethical grounds. One is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic, as Stalin (supposedly) said.

Young people are trained to blame Wall Street and the Capitalists for everything that is wrong in our society. Our schools turn out armies of resentful, spitball socialists every year. They all know how to remake the world, condensed into five hysterical slogans. They agree that the rich should pay. Like their teachers, they are constantly protesting.

Well, maybe not all. I tend to exaggerate.

Sometimes, however, I wonder if what they need is not a Revolution, just an extra five points of IQ. Perhaps, quite apart from the Capitalists, their Customers could benefit from some critical attention.

We have a new, family-owned, mildly ethnic supermarket in Parkdale. It is almost excessively clean, fully staffed, and well-organized. Generic brands are packaged simply and sharply. Everything appears to be in stock. The prices are not higher than at the other supermarkets, except for luxury and high-end items. The food is noticeably fresher: it takes about one glance. The place is quite empty of customers thus far, so you may walk right in. The cashiers don’t charge for plastic bags.

Or you can go to the slightly nearer, “cut-rate,” mass-market foodstore. There, you must queue to enter, for more than a block, six feet apart. It is surprisingly dirty, for a store in a “developed country.” The atmosphere of crisis is palpable. The prices are sneaking up. Lots of shelves are bare. The customers are rude, loud, vulgar, and aggressive. Their children are wild and sneezing. These little ones seem to have been taught to handle all the merchandise, before rejecting it, having squeezed anything that might be soft. The staff try to be polite, but only till 10 o’clock in the morning. The stocking clerks like to run people down in their gigantic carts, and block the more popular sections. Notwithstanding, the place is crowded.

I’d mention that everyone around here votes Liberal, but that would be political. Besides, some of them vote NDP.

I had noticed before that, in the days when we had restaurants, there’d be huge crowds competing for the attention of the “servers” (who don’t serve), willing to pay higher prices for hamburgers that were half the weight of those available from quiet family restaurants, right across the street. I could sit peacefully in the latter and puzzle over the perversity of human nature; or the phenomenon of obedience to crass mass advertising. I could work on my personal theory, that humans are not “rational economic actors,” but more like kittens being led about by string. Or in an emergency, tangling themselves in loo rolls.

Perhaps, if we were attentive to Our Lady instead, we wouldn’t need that extra five points. Perhaps even with five points less of IQ, the methods of evaluating even the smallest things would mysteriously improve.

Good luck with those Capitalists, kids.

And to the backward, a glorious, if invisible, Annunciation.

Is gentle reader bored with pathogens yet? At some point in the proximate future, death will lose its sting. While there are plausible economic reasons for people to return to work, there is also a dark secret. The most restless society since the invention of restlessness cannot cope with “downtime.” This is what gives me my monopoly on Idleness. Without the “events” which help to distinguish one day from another, we will need to start a war.

Had we books, and to have developed the habit of using them, we might read history instead; and even a bit of poetry on the side. But now, at loose ends, we are inspired to do something. Also, please note, the doctrine of original sin. I’m a big fan.

My political dogma has surely been established by now. I am against “doing” anything. Fight for a world in which nothing exciting happens, other than the pursuit of beauty, goodness, and truth. Fight relentlessly — by example.

Here in Parkdale, Toronto’s go-to centre for the criminally insane, there is always entertainment. From my balconata I can spy several half-way houses, and for variety, a Tibetan temple. The streets get quieter every day, especially the throb of the superhighways. It has been softening, as the economy bleeds away; and there are clear days with no contrails in the sky.

The “Green Nude Eel” is being accomplished. Superficially, this might seem like a good thing.

But because Parkdale has been unable to start a war with our bourgeois neighbour — Liberty Village, where the childless young professionals live in sterilized apartment blocks — we have had to look for excitement elsewhere. By calling 9-1-1 frequently, the Vallishortensians (demonym for “Parkdale”) are able to keep the sirens blaring, and little knots of emergency vehicles collecting, to no definable purpose here and there. Due to my Scottish genetic endowment, I follow these skits as I would a taxi-meter: How much have we cost the taxpayers today?

In theory, once the assiduous Left has succeeded in regulating everything, we may achieve that perfect state of placid bureaucracy in which, without ever having voted for socialism, it has arrived. In practice, it never lasts long.  Some new inconvenience is discovered.

Take “racism” for instance. It is now considered “racist” to withdraw flattery for the Red Chinese politburo. Think this one through: it is the real bat contagion. Nice liberal people can now say “racist” to anything, without even running a fever. The upside is that you can give them a stroke by saying “Woo Flu,” or my current favourite, the “Xi Letter.” (I await the arrival of the Sensitivity Police, all suited up against the threat of an incorrect opinion.)

The victory of Body over Spirit is confirmed in the Church. A correspondent forwarded a particularly obnoxious, but catatonically glib, remark by one influential ecclesiastical hierarch. He and others say that “keeping people safe” is their “highest priority.”

As another priest explained — this one a believing Catholic, unlikely ever to suffer advancement — the hierarch in question probably didn’t think he was uttering Catholic doctrine, just mindlessly repeating what he had learnt by rote. If quizzed meticulously, he would probably realize that Christ was not a gym instructor; and that the salvation of souls is in many ways unlike a public health operation. He was just going with the flow, as the trivial consequence of being an idiot.

For the record: Catholicism does not keep people safe. Verily, Christianity is dangerous, which is why they are tearing churches down in China, and why, when the progressive authorities want to clamp down on public gatherings in the West, churches are the first thing they think of — even though their mental lives are spent in vast crowded shopping precincts. Closing those was a sad, regretful afterthought.

By all means follow their pandemic instructions, until you get bored and have to start a war. But the most dangerous life is not licking doorknobs. It is trying to become a saint.

While my own advice can be generally ignored, and is, I would like to play Trump for a moment, and give my instructions to the American people. This includes the British North American people, who would disappear into the same averages. Pretend I’m surrounded by superannuated delinquent punks — yelling, “Gotcha!” — and have a bunch of doctor-looking people behind me.

I say:

What’s wrong with you? According to three years of headlines in the rightwing blogs (it isn’t mentioned in progressive meejah), you have been passing through a period of unprecedented prosperity. Except for some obscurely isolated places, like Parkdale or maybe Guam, you’ve been making money hand over fish, and have experienced some of the lowest unemployment stats in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. And you haven’t saved enough to get you through a few weeks of idleness? And you’re waiting for the guvmint to save you?

That’s your job. Go buy a gun in case someone tries to steal your toilet paper. If you’re really as poor as you claim, fetch a rock from the park.

Special instruction to deeply indebted students. Consider yourselves expelled.

Up to a point, I will empathize with those whom luck consistently passes by, but in 97 percent of cases, you have no excuse. The other 3: see if mommy will help. You had every opportunity to prepare for a nasty surprise, while you were running up the totals on your credit cards. It is time you were cut off.

Now, illness and death would be an imposition, but not an enormity. Those of you eighty years and older have had a good run. Those younger probably won’t even die. So what is your panic?

Okay, there was a crocodile in a picture someone sent me, and it was ignoring the social distancing rules. But for all you know, it tested negative.

Meanwhile, you’ve been given a free pass to read and take naps. (An exemption for those who have real jobs.) It is your signal, to get your life together, even this late in the day. And you are whining?

Speaking as your Trump, I would like to say, go fry a bat. Alternatively, I will give you permission to shut up and leave me alone.

“Do I really want to get on that?” I was asking — myself, of all people — as one of our new, $2 million, state-of-the-art trolleys, pulled up to a transit stop in Parkdale. It was crowded, and the subway would be crowded, too, though not as much as before the pandemic began.

I love to discover that I am wrong about something, for it means I will have to rethink not only the issue in question, but all subsidiary questions, including several that may freshly occur. Lately, the question of urban density has provided me with just such an opportunity. (I’ve also been reconsidering single-use plastic bags.)

Until recently, I took the superiority of public mass transit to automobiles for granted, along with innumerable “urbanist” platitudes. But let us entertain the possibility that after Sars, Swine Fevers, the “Kung Flu,” &c (we must thank a leftwing journalist for circulating that last term), we are in a new era of public hygiene. From the wet markets of China to the cowboy West, we must now plan for pandemics as a routine feature of modern life, just as they were known to the low-tech ancients, but with this difference. A virus is now able to travel with the speed and efficiency that we are, intercontinentally.

By chance I was already reconsidering the oeconomics of public transport, these last few years. It costs much more than plausibility would pretend, requiring another vast package of those subsidies that bind The Peeple to The Taxcollectors in perpetuity, and thus the enforcement of various yuge diseconomies of scale.

Several years ago I wrote a meejah column that inspired the usual outrage and incomprehension. I proposed that we re-privatize all transit systems, but nationalize car manufacturing, as a solution to urban transit problems. This would have the effect of making mass transport relatively cheap and comfortable. But if you wanted a car, there would be a long waiting list for the standard rustbucket government jalopy, which when it eventually arrived would promptly fall apart. Unfortunately, as I now see, this would only alter the density problem by increasing it.

Whereas, “social distancing” would now be in vogue. Compressed thousands hanging like Wuhan bats from trolley straps must be among the most effective ways to transmit an infection, yet devised by man. We even have, or had until a few weeks ago, aeroplanes that transport the little people as if they were airborne sardines, with a covid chilli in every tin. And have you heard of “cruise ships” for recreation? I’d rather holiday on a cruise missile.

Now, I never was an enthusiast for modern life, more generally. My idea of a city was like any in the world, prior to what is called the Reformation, or still closer to the Aristotelian ideal for a city state — about five thousand souls or so (plus, of course, slaves). At ten or twenty millions, it becomes awkward to walk around them, or escape for a picnic in the surrounding hills.

Such “urban distancing” would actually be possible today, if we were differently organized. Technological advances might actually make small, self-supporting, city- or town-states quite practical, but getting from here to there might offer difficulties, and all those who dream of America-sized polities with themselves in charge (i.e. liberals), would tend to be opposed.

But crowded trolleys, maglev trains, and sexy vacuum tubes, were only an interim solution. Better, I think, to divide the conurban megalopolis into a thousand municipal pieces, and spread them around. That might allow us to take pandemics at our leisure.

And as for mechanical transport, we could phase it out entirely.