Essays in Idleness

Not necessarily. Left to develop on its own, oldiness is a waste of time. Nothing is learnt, when nothing is attempted. My evidence is anecdotal, but consistent, over all groups and ages, then and now. We begin by learning nothing at home or in school. Having formed this habit, it continues later.

Among the most essential lessons for youth, is the art of saying, No — to things that shouldn’t happen, even when temptation is involved. Surely I am not the first to have observed this. Nor will I be the first to continue, scolding in this way.

Parentage is crucially important. Habits, once acquired, will be maintained, and will not be changed, by a law of spiritual physics, matching the rôle of inertia in the material science. The newborn may sport an individual nature. As a sometime rescuer of kittens in childhood, I became aware of this. Each appeared to have been born — conceived? — with a unique personality. It is not so wide as for human babies, however.

Without picking another fight with the Darwinoids, let me gently insist that this is where their first assumption is undermined. For kittens have much behaviour pre-installed; verily, all creatures come with “instincts,” as we awkwardly call them. And this behaviour irresistibly implies all kinds of foreknowledge. Some “instincts” do, and some don’t express themselves over time, with or without experience. It is a practical mystery, how they cut in and out, and how one interacts with another. And too, how they interact with learning: the gradual, or traumatically sudden, formation of “habits.”

But the newborn human hasn’t any habits, yet. These must be instilled. Chiefly they are instilled by example, though reward and punishment comes into this. Family is, for good and for evil, where the habits start, and the earliest are, unavoidably, externally imposed. I am using this term “family” very broadly here, so that the “family” of an infant may be an orphanage.

The first habits will prove the hardest to overcome, if, with the passage of time, the defeat of a bad habit appears to be a good idea. The longer it has gone unchallenged, the harder it will be. This is why I say parentage is crucial, and on closer investigation, we are likely to find that real love was crucial. By “real,” I cannot mean the “love” that permits anything — especially in children. I mean the love that includes foresight. Eventually, self-love must include this, for the formation of which Christians speak becomes, with growth, a conscious undertaking. It grows until it can govern and control the body’s mere pleasure-seeking.

Among the features of our society most visible to an adult observer, here in Parkdale for instance, is the proportion of children who never grow up. By sixty, they are still exhibiting habits they should have thrown off by six. Tantrums particularly come to mind, as I listen at my window. This “art of No” has never been absorbed. An adult should know he cannot always get his way, or demand that others provide him with services at no cost to himself. He should not be the seed for totalitarianism, as it were.

The political “culture” at the present day is “conditioned” by these personal failures. One might cite statistics on public and private debt, or in a thousand other areas where statistics are collected. This practice itself — of being guided by statistics — indicates a childish fatalism. We count things as inevitable because, “statistics show …”. We use them ludicrously, to do things like predict the future; we wish to participate in trends. The fact that numbers are invariably meaningless unless a great deal of context is provided, is not understood. If it were, the population generally would grasp that whether true or false, most statistics are unnecessary.

Rather, one might just look around.

The Amazon is one of the world’s centres for hype. It is perfectly placed, the interior a vast (rather humid) jungle. There are piranhas in the water, and uncontacted tribesmen with blowguns and poison darts. I have noticed all the pictures from the remote forests are taken from aircraft and passing satellites. You can say anything about the Amazon, and who will contradict you? This makes it an environmentalist’s paradise.

By the latest hype, the Amazon is burning. Not the river, for by tradition only rivers in Cleveland catch fire, but the forest, containing X percent of the world’s trees, undiscovered endangered species and so forth.

It is not, of course. The small proportion of the Amazon that has been cleared for farming (did you know that farms produce food?) is where the fires are. And only a small proportion of those are in flames. This happens every year, and has happened since time out of the modern mind. It is an agricultural practice, that we may disapprove, but there you go: environmentalists disapprove of everything. We could have had this year’s hype in any year of the last many.

Now, hype seldom operates alone. It is for a purpose, after all. Malice and greed are sure to come with it. By now, a substantial part of the general population in places like Canada and the Natted States have begun to twig to this. Scare stories are the eco professionals’ principal source of money and power. The polar caps are melting, the seas are rising, there’s an invisible raft of empty plastic water bottles (and drinking straws) ten times the size of Texas. The snails in Banff are running for their lives. If any of this were really happening, there is not a thing we could do about it, beyond banning things. But around the world, hundreds of billions are raised through taxes on the basis of these various “just so” stories.

There may be something to them, however. CO2 levels are in fact increasing, in consequence of which planetary green is spreading, and forest cover is expanding splendidly. Perhaps that will provide the scare for the next generation: Killer trees!

Some workmen are just cutting a big one down across the street from me. It’s a start.

Judging from Hollywood, and the imaginative works of every human culture, people do like to be (harmlessly) scared. There will always be a market for apocalyptic narratives, as well as the utopian ones, and I should think with global village meejah, hype is here to stay. Some further reflections on that, here.

One looks back to look forward. This is a paradox, to be sure, but on several levels, among which Cardinal Newman (soon to be canonized) captured the main thrust by his notion of walking to Heaven backwards. He explained this, easily. We “progress,” we finally succeed, through error. It is as if Heaven were always behind us, and we approach through what seems like moving backwards.

But more, through his Parochial and Plain Sermon (on “The State of Innocence”):

“There is a very much closer connexion between the state of Adam in Paradise and our state in childhood, than may at first be thought.”

For we are “surveying Eden” when we do this. To look back upon this state of innocence is also to look forward, as it were, to our unworldly return, when all things are passed, and all works and trials have been accomplished. For the time, however, we are wrapped, and constrained, through our own Fall. And yet through the squalor of a sinful world, and our sinful selves, we are “aiming to be children again.”

This is the condition of being a Christian, as we proceed along our dangerous pilgrimage: to keep our minds fixed on futurity, in recollection of a past that returns to our Creation. And we look back through error.

Often we are compelled to look back in sorrow, rather than in joy. But either is the opposite of “looking back in anger,” which, I would say, is what the Devil wants: fear, not of God, and an essentially hopeless anger. Atheism may be proclaimed, but insincerely, for I have often heard atheists cussing at their Maker, and the Fate they imagine He has in store for them. The divine is not something that can be avoided.

Let me venture into theology. God is not petty. He does not settle scores. That is a very human perception, of vengeance and retaliation. The first thing to know about God, in Christ, is that He needs no power. He is not the schoolyard bully, or a trial lawyer. He does not punish men. By their disobedience, they only punish themselves; cannot break the law but only break themselves upon the law. We can see this ourselves, looking back, in love not in anger.

God made us for His own. He made none of us expendable, as we may sometimes glimpse in this backward glance, to Eden. Our circumstances may be complex, and grow in their complexity as we age. Misery, even in childhood, and more often than not human-caused — even by our own parents — obscures the backward vision. Yet in moments it is clear.

Our task is to recover this clarity; to see what has become invisible to us, because we have ignored it; to confess and be absolved; to suffer, even to suffer injustice; and then, unburdened, to approach the Altar. This, anyway, is what I have been thinking:

That from the beginning to the end, and through the miracle of our freedom, Christ has been waiting for us to come home.

My fortnightly disquisition in the Catholic Thing is now published (here). One thousand words is a “disquisition” today, when anything longer than a topical aphorism will overreach the attention span of most Internet readers. But there are tiny minorities that should still be served.

The point of my piece is that, thanks to indoctrination, the great majority have “the environment” backward and upside down. They think it is about waste, pollution, endangered species, global temperatures, sea levels, the latest green technology, and so forth. True enough, we should avoid spoiling our terrestrial habitation, and I do not favour poisoning it. But that’s why I am generally opposed to massive environmental schemes. Each simplistic project, imposed by centralized guvmint “mandates,” will make things worse. But it prevails when the general public are intimidated by repetitive slogans. Prudence would require us to carefully examine, and reject, vast white elephant projects, that can be “sustained” only by ruinous taxation, both direct and indirect.

Whereas, my dated “conservation” ethic does not fixate on such imponderables as the health of Mother Earth. Rather it is focused on the human environment. It is implicitly local, and asks such questions as, What is it like to live here? Does this environment encourage man to his best behaviour? Will our proposal advance or subvert goodness, beauty, truth?

And will it do this concretely? Will what we build be better than what was here, or was once here? Or does it merely answer to abstract, inhuman, statistical criteria?

*

Richard Doyle, John Stirling, Neil Reynolds, Robert Royal. That is a complete list of good editors I have worked for, in the course of half a century of scribbling. The rest were glorified sub-editors. The good ones have promoted what ought to be said, and courageously defended the freedom to say it. A good editor has thoughts of his own, from personal experience and broad reading. He is a blessing to his environment. Bad editors have editorial “mandates.” They are just functionaries (often incompetent).

Rather than afflict me with obtuse fact-checker questions, the latest of these good editors responded to my most recent submission by grasping its key point. By way of acknowledgement, he ping’d back a quotation from “Le Cygne,” by Charles Baudelaire:

Andromaque, je pense à vous! Ce petit fleuve,
Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit
L’immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simoïs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,

A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile,
Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.
Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel) …

Yes, Old Paris is no more. The form of a city changes more quickly than the human heart, hélas!

Everyone knows that today is the Feast of Saint Hippolytus (I am joking); who, for his confession of the Faith, was dragged by wild horses. But not everyone appreciates that we also commemorate Saint Cassian, schoolmaster at Immola, disliked by his idol-worshiping boys. They put him to death by piercing, with their styluses. It was “long-drawn-out,” as the Roman Martyrology explains, with possibly unintended drollness.

Therefore he became the patron of — guess? — stenographers. As a (formerly) ink-stained wretch myself, who in his youth disliked several teachers, the story makes perfect sense to me. I, too, once worshiped idols. All the schoolboys did.

Do I believe it? Was Cassian actually slain in this way? I have no reason to doubt it. Truth is often stranger than fiction, and the whole of Christendom was founded on events the first listeners disbelieved. The Resurrection wasn’t plausible to them.

The idea of holy martyrdom itself is, today, somewhere out of reach. A little meejah tickle suggests, “Maybe he deserved it.” We want to know exactly what Cassian said to make his students so angry. Conditions during the Roman Persecution were, for people unexposed to history, quite unimaginable. Even conditions during Mao’s Cultural Revolution — when students also executed their teachers — are unknown to them. Everything becomes a mystery, to the thoroughly uneducated.

In a recent missal a man now styled Saint Cassian of Tangier, has been casually shifted to December. The backstory is also changed, to that of another Cassian in the Martyrology. The saint is identified as a court recorder, who at the pronouncement of a death sentence throws down his pen and declares, “I, too, am a Christian.” He is immediately arrested, and gets to share the martyrdom of his mentor. This is more plausible, for moderns, I suppose. But still, not plausible at all.

The latest version has Cassian of Tangier merely protesting the excessive use of the death penalty.

Glib plausibility is what we worship, today.

According to some poll, just published, 70 percent of living, nominal Catholics in the Natted States simply do not believe in the Real Presence. My first thought was, “No wonder they don’t go to church.”

But John Hirschauer, receiving this news, reminds us that some of them do. He recounts the reduction of the Mass, since Vatican II, to something glib, prosaic, tedious and painful. But let’s not go through the de-Catholicization of Holy Church again, it’s too depressing. Have Catholics been leaving the Church?

Often it looks more as if the Church has been leaving them. Many weren’t even told the doctrine, before they parted ways.

But give the last word to Mahatma Gandhi:

“If Catholics really believed that God Himself were present in the Eucharist, they would crawl towards the altar on their stomachs.”

No predictions are offered in these Idleposts, or if gentle reader is able to find one, he is instructed not to take it seriously. The question, “Where does this lead?” is often implied, but since matters must be considered one track at a time, or at most two or three, no safe predictions can be offered. Only facts can be attested (sometimes). When I look back over the “evolution” of any A into any B, this impossibility becomes obvious. Too many seemingly irrelevant factors come into the mix, and change it. One may say the whole trend was for the good or for the evil, but this involves blather.

Does anyone understand this? (Do I?) In colloquial speech and writing, we easily assume foreknowledge, and intentions that began as no part of the story. Even if we could understand what one of the characters intended, we cannot understand the combinations. It is hard enough to read one mind, retrospectively; and minds change, so that prospectively, we have no information.

Who, for instance, could guess that a girl (and if so, which one) would “trigger” mass hysteria in a Malayan high school, with her own sudden onset of what we used to call “the vapours”? (Some piece I was reading on the BBC.) We know that such events occur; that they are more frequent in some places than in others; that the hysterics are overwhelmingly young and female; but sometimes they are male. The hysteria starts explosively, the contagion is immediate; then like most things, it fades. Meanwhile, hundreds or thousands have participated, showing real symptoms for what had no medical cause. For no accountable reason, normality returns, and people have leisure to construct their explanations. But no one saw the irruption coming.

The same with mass shootings, knifings, and other violent acts. No policeman, nor any psychologist can see the crime coming, even if he has been tipped off about unstable persons. We will have to arrest everyone in advance. Even Comrade Stalin would be at a loss. We can however say that some places are more likely than others to provide a spontaneous “terror” incident, or that the overwhelming number of perpetrators will be young and male; though some will be female. (An incident that is planned can sometimes be interrupted by diligent police work, but the plan itself was spontaneously conceived.) In some circumstances, wild rioting may follow, but in most cases, no. “Copycat” killings, including suicides may happen, but again, who can guess where?

Social conditions contribute to such acts, but who can fully understand them? Who can consider them impartially, for each explanation must contain presuppositions, any of which can be made controversial. Often, I think, those who analyze the batty event are themselves batty; and sometimes a microphone is more dangerous than a gun.

Among our modern “myths,” or imaginings, is the notion that we can know what, in reality, only God could know. We assign motives, and judge, to suit our own convenience, at a given moment. We cannot judge the way God would judge, assuming the Christian revelation is true. (This is the presupposition of Faith, which I have certainly bought into.)

But if there is anything resembling a traditional moral order, as in all known pre-modern societies, we can easily know what is good or bad. We can make sense of the moral order, especially if like the Catholic one it is intellectually coherent; and we may praise or blame according to it. We can distinguish what is sane, from what is quite crazy.

The alternative to moral order is disorder. This becomes inevitable when conventions of good and bad are refounded not on reason and tradition, but on our messy, contradictory “feelings.” Things become bad not because they are demonstrably bad, but because we personally find them icky. We make ourselves the judges, and of course our judgements will vary, from day to day. We may not be mad, but will be able to mimic madness effectively this way.

What follows from this can be prognosticated, but only vaguely. A society will fall into warring, emotional factions. But this is not a specific prediction, rather an observation, of how things are, today.

Two thoughts that I simply must share with gentle reader, after examining this morning’s meejah. One is bigger than the other, though I’m not sure which.

*

Item: David Whitlock, gentleman and chemical engineer, observed horses rolling in dirt, near the beginning of this century. (I observed this phenomenon earlier, incidentally, and saw that it extends to many furred and feathered creatures.)

“Why do they do this?” he asked himself.

Too, I noticed that horses hardly ever take showers, voluntarily, and even when they do, they never reach for soap, or “sham-poo.” (Ditto, cats and sparrows.) Surely, something worth pondering. Consider, too, the humans in “developing countries,” not yet visited by the sales representatives of Unilever, or Procter & Gamble. Water, yes. Ivory soap, no. And instead of using peaceful laundry detergents, they beat their home-spun clothing against rocks. (Pre-industrial weaving can stand up to it, apparently.)

As an experiment, Mr Whitlock stopped bathing. After fifteen years, he denies having any body odour. He has also subscribed to the theory, that the skin is stripped of protective oils by soap and detergents — whereas, it was designed (by God) to preserve a rich, microbiomic heritage. True, Mr Whitlock developed quite a pong at first, but that was before he invented his own bacterial product: soil from a local farm, juiced with a nitrate from ammonia. Now, I gather, he smells pretty as a horse.

There is, I learn from the Grauniad, a flourishing cosmetic industry for other soap disenthusiasts. But surely gentle reader may save his money and avoid this bourgeois, extravagant trade. Just get out and roll in the dirt, occasionally.

*

Item: on tariff walls.

I was raised on the notion that “free trade” is a good thing, and that tariffs are bad, bad, bad. And true, I am still not a Socialist, Communist, or Democrat. But I do have a conservationist streak, and let me admit candidly that tariffs are good for the environment. Not only do they stop wasteful, carbon-fuelled, international shipping and transport. They should help close down innumerable, export-dependent, smokestack industries at home. A much cleaner Earth, and no more anthropogenic global warming!

Therefore I propose to nominate Mr Donald Trump and Mr Xi Jinping, to share the first Nobel Eco Prize.

Patience is a virtue, one of many I sadly lack. My father, a serious industrial designer and thus a critic of modern industry, decried its general absence. There is a hurry to get things done. This has, no doubt, economic causes, using that term broadly to include deadlines of all kinds — the hurry to get to market, compounded by the incredible mass of tax and regulatory considerations that create a shallow obstacle course through which the creative are compelled to stumble. They function, in effect, as spatial deadlines, intersecting the temporal ones.

Sometimes arbitrary rules are necessary, of course, but the more they are centralized, codified, then subjected to chop and change, the more destructive of human ingenuity, and the more they encourage stupidity, waste, and corruption.

Leisure — in the sense crisply expounded by Josef Pieper and other penetrating Thomists — is eliminated or lethally crimped by these “deadlines.” (See: Leisure the Basis of Culture, trans. Dru, 1952. It has a fine introduction by T. S. Eliot, too, and should be on every idler’s most accessible bookshelf, until he has memorized it.)

Pieper does not say this directly, but I will: the opposite of philosophical leisure is glibness. It has other opposites, but I mention this one because it is involved in almost every form of ignorance, atheism, and sin. Rather than think anything through, to first principles, we race through the equivalent of a hop-scotch course, our minds fully loaded with distraction. We must “touch all the bases.”

Our modern conception of science is a bureaucratic mechanism called “scientific method” which denies the existence of human intuition, and thus our humanity. It is never actually followed — no scientist ever discovered anything in a time-serving, methodical way; especially not on billion-dollar machines. But still we praise and believe in this method, or such derivatives as Popper’s “falsifiability,” because we are easily pleased, profligate, and hopelessly glib.

It is the same in every section of art and design. A few, a very few, independent and searching minds, take the leisure to “build cathedrals,” as it were. They remain conscious not of arbitrary rules, but of Nature and the God who is the source for emulation. The conception of God may take various shapes in the human imagination, but everyone fully alive will know what he means by “God,” even while denying Him.

God is not glib. As evidence, let me cite the extent of the universe, and the complexity of its parts. Yet to the mind of a Darwinist, or other tomfool, God is imagined as a random, non-teleological process; as movement with no end in view. God is conceived as if He were glib.

Ditto on the moral, and legal, planes. We appropriate the divine; declare ourselves authors of goodness and truth; draught standing orders and legislation. We legislate “progress” by intellectual oversight, replacing what is changeless with things that are changing. It is interesting that not only the Christian but the ancient pagan traditions were free of this arrogance, in which we assume that chance and destiny lie within our power. But all human power is illusory. In the end every one of us is dead.

Finally, on the plane of poetry — the embodiment of the beautiful — our poetical feet are caught in catch phrase, cliché. We are going through the motions, like bonobos or bigger monkeys. We perform jingles.

Unless: we stand back from our little games, and take whatever time is necessary, to consult with the ages and the Master of the ages.

Make a stand now, gentle reader! It is time that we staged a Revolt Against Glibness.

It is true, I have been dawdling, and am at risk of further dawdling, so long as this summer lasts. Hardly anyone reads me, though; who will notice?

Truth to tell, I have nearly lost my mind, so that it wobbles on the precipice of being, and I am under an arguably moral imperative to, if possible, fetch it back. But then, mental health is often overstated. For instance, I have caught myself taking “events” with untoward seriousness, and devoting an unconscionable amount of time to perusing such filth as the Main Stream Meejah. At the risk of contradicting Mr Trump, there is no genius who can do that very long, and remain “extremely stable.” Indeed, I attribute the fact that all of our politicians are mad, to their universal habit of following the news. How could anyone maintain equanimity, keep an even temper, even a straight face, in such circumstances? Invariably they turn into strait ones.

And when they are not following the news, they are generating it.

“Monkey see, monkey do.”

Voters should demand that they take long, reflective vacations, for their frenetic activity is idle in entirely the wrong way. It should be philosophical. I propose that presidents only serve, and parliaments meet, once in a while. Their bureaucrats should likewise be encouraged towards indefinite truancy. By way of giving them the hint, we could stop paying them. Let them go to the fields to watch the food grow, and ready themselves to help come the harvest.

The French are good at this, or were. In France, by tradition, nothing happens during the month of August, and the government shuts down. I spent that month in Paris, once, and found that the city had become, except for a few abandoned tramps and lunaticks — and some critically necessary wine merchants — completely depopulated. Indeed, even the Sorbonne was emptied of its usual rioting communists. Even feral pigs had disappeared from the suburban arrondissements, in pursuit of their neighbours, to carry on their culinary researches in the départements. Finally, even I left. It was just too hot — that year as no doubt every other — and when the plumbing failed, the prospect of bathing in the Seine did not appeal to me.

I may still write one thing or another, now or then through the month, should I find myself present in Greater Parkdale, up here in the High Doganate, and feeling perversely industrious. For even my absences are unreliable. But gentle reader should ignore these things. He will find, if he shuts down his laptop, and any other devices he may own, past North American Labour Day, that nothing will have happened in this world, at all worth his attention.

Unless something does, but should that be the case, he is likely to be apprised, direc’ly.

It has come to my attention that Britain has a new prime minister, BoJo the Clown (known to his friends as “Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson”). I gather Mrs Maybe, previously raised to that office under some gender equality programme I suspect, didn’t work out. Mr BoJo has already been criticized for having unkempt blond hair (and small eyes, I have noticed). Too, he was educated at Oxford University, which is still somewhat élite. He was able to use the word anaphora in a sentence (here), and shares with Churchill (and Trump) an ebullience, a buoyant exuberance, that his enemies invariably discount to their cost. He is a reminder that one man (and I have named three) can change the course of history, and the fate of nations.

Not necessarily for the better, of course.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Member of Parliament for North East Somerset, is suddenly elevated from the backbenches to the front bench; from persistent articulate rearguard rebel, to House Leader in the Mother of Parliaments; and, Lord President of the Council.

Born to rule (the son of an editor of The Times), the now right honourable gentleman stands as a throwback to 1529, when the last indigenous Catholic was appointed to that office. (Though I am not entirely clear what were the Privy Council arrangements under Good Queen Mary, before the return to Erastian apostasy under Bad Queen Bess.)

Not merely a Conservative but a member of the party’s (“Faith, Flag, and Family”) Cornerstone Group, and a diligently practising Roman Catholic with forty children or so, Rees-Mogg has already made a mark in his new rôle, by imposing rules of style and civility upon his staff, if not the Tory caucus, the British nation, worldlings, &c. Extremely useful, and ought to be widely leaked.

Mr BoJo, too, was christened a Catholic, though it has not so far had much effect. He has rabbinical Jewish and infidel Turk antecedents, too, and learnt Anglican hymns at Eton. He is thus a kind of one-stop shop for nominal Abrahamic associations, but to the point, the Orangemen of Ulster are already calling him “England’s first Catholic prime minister” — and what’s good enough for Belfast is good enough for me.

So … (Rees-Mogg says never begin a sentence with this word.) … After nearly five hundred years of absence without leave, can England be walked back to Rome? …

Pourquoi pas? I ask you.

The young daughter of a close friend, watching some royal wedding on TV, asked her mother about the affiliation of Westminster Abbey. The announcer said it was Anglican, but this little girl said it sure looked Catholic to her. Her mother quickly explained about the Reformation; how the Abbey was built by the True Church, but expropriated by the demonic Henry VIII, &c.

After puzzling on this for a moment, the wee daughter inquired: “So why don’t we storm it and take it back?”

Another example, I should say, of ebullience; we can’t really know what is possible till we try.

Western Civ is in decline, I am told (plausibly). Our societies have been “secularized,” and the great majority of Europeans and Americans no longer even pretend to be Catholic.

So why don’t we storm them?

Curiosity, of the kind that kills cats, makes it impossible for me to ignore Pew reports on the “state of the meejah.” You see, I used to be in that disreputable trade. The report I just perused filled me with anxiety; the uncomfortable thought that I am an idler, wantonly wasting my time. Still, all work and no play would make David a dull boy.

Allow me to shock gentle reader by reporting that newspaper circulations are lower than before, and advertising revenues are shrinking. Single copy sales are down to 1940 levels in the Natted States Merica, it sez here. This doesn’t strike me as necessarily alarming for the owners, for a lot of newspapers were sold back then. Surely there are still profits to be made.

However, as I am reminded by consulting a copy of the Brooklyn Eagle from that year, three-quarters of the pages were ads. (I still read physical newspapers, but instead of newsstands I buy them in flea markets. I find newspapers aged at least half a century more informative and interesting than the ones published today.)

Moreover, the pages were wide: much space allotted to classified ads in agate type and yet, a lot of tightly-spaced “news,” too, and hardly any pointless “features.” In word-count, vastly more than any current daily journal, whose ad-free pages are mostly filled with large photographs and irrelevant headlines to serve as captions for them.

No journalist seems to have thought of it, but I suspect that a contributing cause of plunging sales might be that the market has perceived a total waste of money — now that fish is wrapped in cellophane. Even the reader hoping for soft pornography will find much better on the Internet, for free.

I’m not finished with the Pew Research Centre yet. We also learn that passive television watching is in decline, and Internet news, too. Radio is ill. News reporting is overall fading away, except “cable news” channels, which seem to be holding their own for the moment, thanks to viewers who absurdly love Trump, or pathologically hate him. There are other indications: that voters are less and less informed, even of the lies, the empty bull and posturings that constitute our democratic life. News is now entirely a failing entertainment industry, that had replaced such bloodsports as cockfighting; though it has become more fully an outlet for the deadly sin of Wrath.

All good, so far as I can see. The belief in “progress” requires constant punishment, and people can be relied upon to do it to themselves.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Pew, we learn that the Catholic Church is losing members evermore quickly in Europe and America, together with all other Christian churches. My own guess is that this is for the same reason that newspapers are collapsing. Little of significance happens in a contemporary church; just the usual “politically correct” prattle from a pulpit, to a stripped-down auditorium without upholstered seats. Church attendance has fallen below 1940 levels: “daily and Sundays” both way down.

People aren’t much interested in the news from Heaven any more. But they aren’t much interested in the news from Earth, either.

More generally: people aren’t much interested, today.

The word “culture” is one of countless that have changed meaning over the years. From what one does for oneself — acquire something by one’s own assiduous efforts — it has instead become what is done to you. The culture is taken to install itself. Some variation on “the culture made me do it” is used as the presumptive excuse when overriding moral principles, which can be dismissed as “so yesterday.” Thinking things through is disparaged, and in a reverse of logic, false premisses are substituted for those that were demonstrably true.

Christopher Dawson made this observation — about the evolution of “culture” as a “cultural” term — in passing, about sixty years ago. I reflect that the phenomenon befits a “trend,” that has been passing through our “culture” from the French Revolutions of the 18th century to the French Revolutions of the 20th. A “culture” has become an animate thing, with a soul and a will, like a person. It has also become a vacuous, irrational force, such that a “multiculture” can also be a (singular) thing. Happily, the older use of the term has survived in some instances. One may still say that a person is cultured, or has acquired a cultural substance of some kind (such as the ability to read with attention). This, we might surmise, is a concession of “the culture” (now using the word in its contemporary sense).

What happens, gentle reader may ask, in a Petri dish? If one is a bacteriologist (or other real, ensouled, wilful person), one may use it to culture cells. The Petri dish itself, while real, is without soul or will. A culture can be said to form within the dish, but it is the product of chemical and physical mechanisms, which the scientist wishes to manipulate. The elevation of culture to a noun was illicit. It was a misappropriation of our intellectual resources.

I mention this because “artificial intelligence,” with all the misconceptions that it carries, has been sneaking into our cosmology. We claim to create something that, more carefully considered, pre-existed: the natural materials and forces that we manipulated. It may be that an advanced computer, specially programmed and focused over time, can beat Garry Kasparov in a game of chess. But the computer uses great electronic power, stored memory of innumerable moves, the means to search a vast database, &c — to defeat a guy with no “artificials” whose brain is functioning on one-fifth the power of a light bulb (less than 20 watts). Moreover, if he tried to do what the computer is doing, Kasparov would be disqualified for cheating.

The machine lacks soul, will, or consciousness, though it can be endowed with an appearance of such things — by human design. With the advance of technology the illusions grow. As I write, there are people cowering in fear of what Artificial Intelligence will do, including business lords of the tech sector, and by all means they should disconnect machines which they can’t philosophically understand.

But they don’t scare me — except in the sense that a crocodile or a skunk could scare me. A robot has no bad will, and cannot acquire one. Only its programmer can achieve the exalted state of malice. The robot may work on deterministic principles; the mad scientist certainly does not.

We live in an age of superstition and credulity in which, generally, abstractions from abstractions become gods, and even abstractions from them can be worshipped. The class politics of Marxism made this respectable among malicious intellectuals, but Marx was undergirded by Hegel and Hegel by the vaguely or precisely Cartesian project that undergirds modernity. History is taken to be governed by laws not unlike gravity, electromagnetism, or the strong and weak nuclear forces; except, thanks to their objective “material” existence, things like gravity are not actually worshipped, merely obeyed. The supposed fundamental historical forces — the gods who created the “cultures,” as it were — are, in the end, quite artificial spiritual constructions.

From the Devil, if you ask me.

By way of making a long Idlepost short, dreams — whether good ones or bad ones — are quite powerless. Work is what gets things done on this planet. Pharaoh didn’t get the Pyramids built on dreams. He employed, or more pointedly enslaved one hundred thousand worker bees, according to Herodotus. It is the same for our modern, democratically-elected “nation builders,” raising monuments to themselves. Someone has to do the work, someone has to pay.

There is no free lunch, and there are no free pyramids.

I was dreaming this morning as I woke of some vast white elephant scheme for which I, apparently, was responsible. Needless to say it was turning belly up, and I was in receipt of criticism for my tendency to ruthless incompetence. There was something in the air about a Moon Shot, easily explained by today’s anniversary.

John F. Kennedy had a dream — plus the power to commandeer huge resources. Martin L. King had a dream — that hasn’t quite worked out yet, so far as I can judge from the American meejah. Someone else had a dream, according to an old snake-oil pamphlet I consulted yesterday. There are multiple dreamers in this morning’s news — all expecting someone else to pay. I predict, when they don’t, each dreamer will get very stroppy.

That’s why taxes were invented — to make the worker bees work, or pay for things they would never support, voluntarily. Some of those things might actually be for their own good, but such endeavours almost always consist of stopping someone else’s dream from happening. In retrospect, they are never appreciated, for no one gives points when something doesn’t happen. Alas, only the fully grown are likely to comprehend this.

Are there any grown-ups, today?

The manned landing on the Moon made a fine entertainment, and a poignant memory. (See here.) What it cost has now washed under the bridge. I would not dream of trying to change the past. At most I might wish to change the future: put some screeching breaks on it, perhaps.

I have no objection to anyone who would send astronauts to distant orbs, so long as his recruits know what they’re doing, and the entrepreneur has the means to pay. My approval might come a bit quicker if they want to launch less sexy, high-tech wee little unmanned probes, “to see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”

But if you want to spend fifty or five hundred or five thousand times more to put a man down there (and a woman won’t be any cheaper), I’m not standing in your way. Who knows what the return might be on an investment like that? The prospective space pioneer could do a whip-round at ye pub to collect his first billion or two; then see if the banks will accept his collateral.

Our own world will show some modest sign of maturity when the banks decline. Or later, when they foreclose on him.