Essays in Idleness

The term “infinity” was an invention of the Devil. This, gentle reader will understand, is my humble opinion. Or if the Devil didn’t invent it, he “evolved” it, from the more innocent usages that conveyed “unlimited,” or “countless,” or “unknowably” large or small. What is finite has an ending, can be finished, finis. What is infinite cannot be; it is open-ended. There is, where we look for an end, nothing there.

Nothing is quite the opposite of something. Perhaps this is a fact no longer taught in our schools: that “nothing” can do nothing for you. Whereas, “something” might. For in its modern usage, “infinity” has become a thing. It has become “virtually” an agent, a kind of god, demanding to be worshipped. The very Christian idea of Alpha and Omega — from the first to the last letter of the (Greek) alphabet, from beginning to end — is subtly replaced in our minds with the progressive idea, “from one to infinity.”

Which is where the human mind checks out. “So what is infinity plus one?” one asks. There can be no answer. Today we are hanging on a cross of “infinity.”

The mathematician Georg Cantor (1845–1918), in his lucid moments (when out of insane asylums), invented set theory. It may be found, lodged in the heart of post-modern reasoning. My hero Wittgenstein, among others, explained how pernicious it was. Scholastic theologians had already spotted the fly in the “infinite” ointment. It is pantheist, and in Cantor’s “final” posit of an infinity of infinities, it is a direct challenge to the unity or uniqueness of the revealed God. Cantor himself was under the impression that God existed, in the sense that God had communicated set theory to Cantor of all people. I, at least, am sceptical of those who claim direct communication with God, especially those who spend a lot of time in bat houses, and wonder with whom they were really chatting. (I don’t doubt that the mad can be brilliant, however.)

To Cantor, there is the infinity of zero. There is an infinity of points in a line, and of lines between any two points. And more infinities are coming, until we have an infinity of them. The non-algebraic constants (such as pi or Euler’s e) — very real in nature — become officious “transcendentals” that we must salute when we meet in the street. With Leibniz we can still breathe; with Cantor we are drowning.

While I’m in a position to deny being a mathematician or a physicist, I distantly descry the tragedy of string theories, “many-worlds,” and even the assumptions behind the standard model of particle physics. My intuition is that they involve the breakdown of logic and reason; that they create maths that “work” on their own premisses, but do not apply to anything. At some point, the “reality” of math takes leave of the reality of reality, and we find ourselves spending billions of dollars to equip the hunt for a “theory of everything” that can only be an artefact of a phantom.

And that is what our “infinity” has become: a thing, when it is not a thing. By those uncomfortable with the holy simplicity of God, a substitute has always been sought. In the days before Cantor it was sought in the belief, the “settled science,” that the material universe had no beginning and will have no end. Once that error collapsed in the empirical cosmology of the 20th century, the Cantor hypothesis kicked in. Except, it is not an hypothesis. It is the brilliant imposition of a “number theory” that reconceives math as an empirical science; that can intrude upon what is really only a tool or technique of science with the appearance of an absolute. Or in short: go get lost in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, and the others who have seen the contradiction in all worldly, absolute claims.

“Infinity,” when it takes on divine qualities, becomes an idol. The same might be said for the term “evolution,” which has conquered the realm of biology, and subverted all the social sciences and humanities by reckless analogy. It is the “infinity” of biotech. Anything for which the cause can’t be known, is assumed to have been caused by “evolution”; whereas, evolution isn’t a cause, and never can be. It can only be a trend.

Instead of the naïve, nursery notion of a great bearded father in the sky, we get “the theory of evolution.” Instead of the loosh habit of attributing anything we can’t understand to God, we get the mentally ill habit of attributing it to bushy-faced Darwin. Instead of the something of God, we get nothing, to explain everything.

There is money to be made supporting Trump, and all he stands for; and there is money to be made opposing Trump and all he stands for. As usual, I have found the “sweet point” in the middle, where there is no money to be made, and one is exposed to attacks from both parties. Vain creature that I am, I take pride in this position.

To be against “progress” is to be against “growth” (considered as some sort of public virtue). It is to be against “democracy,” “the peeple,” and all the rest of the moralizing bafflegab that shot Trump into space over the last three years, through which his enemies have done far more to boost him, than his friends.

Full employment at higher wages are not good things in themselves. A national income growing at four points a year (as opposed to say, two, or zero) is in many respects a nightmare of so-called “creative destruction.” To cheer on mere numbers is, strictly speaking, batshit insane, for the numbers do not speak to anything that might make life better or worse at the ontological level.

Example: a mother raising children has nothing, including her own life, improved by aborting all her bairns and working at a debilitating job, although that is exactly what she must do to push all the economic indicators the right way. Or on the plainest domestic level, it should be obvious by now that, above the level of subsistence, there is a nearly inverse relation between material wealth and inward contentment. Look around yourself if you doubt me.

(I am not a Republican anyway, as I’ve had to explain to several Natted States Merican friends; I am a Loyalist Canadian and therefore a Monarchist; and not a “conservative” but a “reactionary.” None of the ideologies currently on sale appeal to me.)

But here is a puzzle. The people who claim to be against Trump, whose frothing lends them some authenticity, also want full employment at higher wages, economic growth and the rest of it. The only difference is that the means to these things which they propose are rather less plausible.

On questions of “social policy,” the conflict is no more interesting. Democrats and Republicans alike, from presidents down, have pragmatically accepted essentially libertarian social, cultural, and moral ideals. All have been consciously “progressive” in the less-material, more-spiritual realms; none would stand, and lose, on a principle.

“Put not your faith in politicians” is one of my principles. Being an honest man, in that trade, is not compatible with winning. They can be more, or less, dishonest, however, and I do make individual distinctions. (Trump, for all his wild exaggerations, outright lies, and childish theatrics, strikes me as more honest than most.)

Within fading memory, the world — everyday human life — was stable and predictable, often even in war, or during natural catastrophes. It was also comprehensible, and quiet. E. J. Mishan (1917–2014) somewhere enumerated the very long list of daily anxieties that came with post-war discovery, invention, and economic growth; things that simply did not exist (or were exceedingly rare) in our world beforehand. Yes, it could be said, we were relatively poor, and sometimes close to starving; but generally unharried and at peace with the cosmos. Human decency was reinforced, and indecency punished, in reliable, unexperimental ways.

There were universal goods that today are almost impossible to remember, for they have been obviated by the rat race, in pursuit of affluence, gizmos, dubious pleasures. In the successive editions of his textbook on The Costs of Growth, and penetrating essays with titles like, “Making the world safe for pornography,” Mishan usefully supplied economic analysis of the serious moral and social questions that had been diverted into “morally neutral” technocratic channels; so that now even the “environmentalist” factotums think only in terms of statistics, proposing megaproject schemes that are as ugly and inhuman as any mass-industrial blight.

Reading Mishan again after a lapse of thirty years, I again recommend him for his insights into the economic and logical fallacies that guide us, which no mere election will ever turn around, or government programmes alter. For there are no environmental cures that do not require the spiritual cure of humans.

____________

See also, perhaps, this Idlepost from six years ago.

Among the best jobs I ever had, was in pre-Thatcher England, when I was young and poor and happy. It was a manual job. (All my jobs were, then.) A friend owned a small lorry, and did fairly minor haulage. He needed help for some deliveries, and one “signed on” for the trip. Almost anything might be carried, to almost anywhere in Great Britain, and sometimes even on the ferry to a place called Europe. Because my employer, the truck driver, and jack-of-all-trades, was of a thoughtful, philosophical disposition, the conversations were delightful. He would feed me along the way, and pay me in small banknotes, eschewing paperwork. Often the recipient of the delivery would add another fiver, for my help in unloading.

This Harold was a kindly man. He took on some jobs free, for instance transporting a piano for some old codger being moved from London to the upper floor of a council house (modern almshouse) near Norwich. The joy in that delivery was smashing up a wall. It was a new house, made of ticky-tacky, full of narrow spaces and right-angled turns, one of which, on the stairs, made taking a piano to the upper storey quite impossible. But Harold had a crowbar and a mallet, so he eliminated the corner. He reasoned that the old man would die without his piano, and that the council authority was used to making repairs, so that was the Christian thing to do.

God bless Harold. A non-churchgoing, very Low Anglican, he did his own moral reasoning, generally without scholarly research, yet many of his decisions were sound. He was also an Archimedean genius, and could devise ways to move very heavy objects without powered machinery of any kind, and almost without effort. The trick, he explained, is to think it through, and not be in a hurry.

Against an age that favours bigness, and speed, he was a rebel. Married, in the informal sense, though at least to a woman. To say his children were home-schooled would be an understatement. His dog was not trained at all. His house was a jumble of abandoned things he’d picked up here and there, and in a pinch he’d sell some of this furniture to the antique merchants. He read books, but only those he’d found in buildings he was clearing. One such was a defunct nunnery. The nuns had left an immense pile of battered volumes, mostly travels and adventures. Harold was acquiring a topographical education, and an impressive fund of colonial anecdotes. He was also working his way through the Cambridge Modern History, cutting the uniformly uncut pages as he went along. Lord Acton would surely have been gratified.

There is much to be said for an off-grid life, and let me add, much for the Labour government in the days before Thatcher. Its socialist policies tended to collapse the industrial economy, but its thrilling incompetence left everyone free. Goods and services were alike quite cheap, since hardly anyone was paying taxes, and there was a delicious atmosphere of gentle decay. Yet class lines were holding. Coalfield strikes, directed by communist provocateurs, were nasty, but nevertheless beneficial to the country at large, being weaned from electricity and its unfortunate downstream products, e.g. television. Happily, the museums and libraries stayed open, and admission was gratis.

I had other brief jobs to earn cash (bricklayer’s mate on a semi-legal “lump,” building real, solid, individual houses, was another highlight), and comfortable accommodations in a Lambeth Borough squat. By means of chastity, I kept out of trouble. Even at the time, I knew that I was living in paradise. In lifting fog, in Suffolk once, driving with Harold down narrow country lanes, I spotted a bullock pulling an ancient single-furrow plough. I was in ecstasy.

Today we pursue the vanity of speed, practise endless mergers and biglifications, hardly bother with anything unless it is a megaproject. We want all the parts to be interchangeable, with computerized departments for the “human resources.” It is all happening in the wrong direction, and let me importune my readers once again: Backward, ho!

Maybe Corbyn is the man to vote for.

A friend of mine says he wants to go home — to the place where he was born, where he came from — now that it has been de-industrialized, de-agriculturalized, hotelled, and made into a tourist haven. Like me, he despises tourists. He reviewed at length the transformation of his home town, “from something that was precious in itself, into something to be visited, like a bathroom, or a brothel.”

“So why would you want to go home?” I asked him.

“Mostly for revenge.”

He was joking, of course. (You have to explain this to Canadians.) He was not really proposing an act of terrorism. It was merely an experiment in comic timing. We both laughed hysterically. I can see how an unedited transcript of our conversation could have got us both arrested by the Happyface Police.

Several correspondents have noted the “darkness” in articles I have written recently, and beg me to “lighten up.” As a member of the Pepsi Generation (a.k.a. Baby Boomers), one is not allowed to prophecize. “Don’t worry, be happy” has been the motto of those who secretly fear that they are going to Hell, but are hoping for mere extinction.

Yet, I agree with the cheerful, “whistling in the dark” approach, and commend, on principle, those Christian martyrs who “always looked on the bright side,” even while being translated from this world to the next.

My pessimism is a worldly thing. One remains prepared to be happily surprised, by some unexpected turn of events. Pity the optimist, for he can only be disappointed.

Among the legacies of the Catholic Church (currently at a high point in nominal membership, but a low point in most other respects), is the original of Hope. We, and our Hebrew predecessors, have known for centuries, millennia, that history is not in our control; that human enterprise does not end well; that men are fatally flawed, and the best that can ever be got out of them requires heroic discipline and labour. Our Hope is thus, peculiarly, not in men.

Hence paradox, and what follows, humour. Dark humour, especially. The joke is in the contrast between what we were expecting, and what we’re going to get.

Beneath the surface of what we might call the “creative outrage” that fuels our contemporary liberals and progressives, is a humourless frustration. It is “creative” only in that it finds something new in tradition and nature, to be outraged by every day. While their outward target may be people such as Christians, their real animosity is towards God, who refuses to surrender the Creation to them. Nor do they appreciate His occasional concessions. For they may get their sweet way for a while, as we endure their tyranny, but still they are not happy, and want more. It is a definition of the progressive that he can never be satisfied.

Now, gentle reader may ask, how does this have anything to do with the growth of the tourist industry?

Or let us make the question grander, to make it clearer. What has it to do with the overall Disneyfication (or Potemkinization, or virtualization) of modern life?

I refer to the disharmony between words and things; between what things are and what they pretend to be; to the constant replacement of the real by the fake. The scale is overwhelming and is likely to defeat even the imagination of any individual who seeks to restore the real, within his own environment. The “mass man,” as I and others call him, does not pretend to pilgrimage in a world not of his making. Rather he becomes part of the illusion, dressing up in costumes for the service industries. He becomes something a little worse than a slave: a ghost figure. He is “not really there.”

The progressive aspiration, to ban God from human life, or at least restrict Him to private venues, must necessarily fail, as all earthly projects. Like everything based on a lie, it collapses. For God can only be contained within the womb of Mary.

There is a children’s game that is played on this continent, and apparently on others. It is called “basketball,” and the object is to put an inflated ball through a hole, or hoop, that is inconveniently raised above normal human reach. Two teams bounce this ball back and forth on a court of some kind, towards the “basket” at each end.

The game was invented by a gentleman from Almonte, Ontario, and resembles an Aztec sport in which players had to use hips, not hands nor feet, to manipulate the ball. This must have made it very difficult to score a basket. Only one goal was necessary to win, however. The match must have been quite dull to watch, but some spectator interest could be derived from the post-game ritual, in which members of the losing side were put to death.

“Blood sports” — those involving human sacrifice — were a feature of pre-Christian societies from Meso-America to gladiatorial Rome to the farthest reach of Asia. A more encyclopaedic account may be found elsewhere; this is not the place to discuss the long history, for it is very long, and I am rather tired from having been kept up through last night by car horns and firecrackers.

It would seem that a basketball team of grown men from Greater Parkdale won some sort of continental championship. I have yet to consult the Toronto Scar to see if there were riots as well, as often happens after a major professional sports team wins or loses a deciding match. (I noticed from the same newspaper that our home crowd were wildly cheering the injury of a star player of the visiting team, in the previous game.)

Well, I assume they are cleaning up now.

Recently I was mocked for belonging to a tribe (Catholic Christians) whose primary sacrament involves (according to my correspondent) “symbolic cannibalism.” A typical liberal, he had the rest of his facts exactly backwards. The Judaeo-Christian tradition, culminating in the Mass, actually achieved the substitution of bloodless for the bloody pagan immolations of old. It is with the decline of Christianity that we may observe and expect the return of what might be called the pornography of violence. (The pornography of sex is fully restored, already.)

Humans, and bonobos (dwarf chimpanzees) for that matter, are notoriously given to this sort of behaviour. But while the bonobos are almost impossible to tame, humans can be improved by religion. It has to be a good religion, though.

Allow me to agree with Pope Francis that Holy Church owes the world some “outreach.” Of our 266 popes (plus or minus), I mention that one in particular because he has had more to say about politics than, possibly, all the rest combined. His views on social class, income distribution, imperialism, colonialism, general oppression, environmental issues, anthropogenic climate, immigration controls, and many other topics not traditionally considered to be any of the Church’s business, are broadcast constantly. Moreover, his neglect of her primary mission — the salvation of souls through propagation of the faith — has underlined this revolutionary contrast.

I am not a Church historian, but in my understanding her former political engagements were more strictly towards her own practical ends — chiefly the defence of her own independence — and seldom if ever involved the institutional equivalent of “virtue signalling.” In her earlier centuries she sometimes found herself ruling — chiefly when the profane authorities had run away from e.g. pagan Norsemen or invading Mussulmans at the frontiers of Europe; and within the modest sphere of the Papal States. She played the initial organizing rôle in essentially defensive Crusades against Cathars and Caliphs, and yet, she was ever eager to leave details of policy to free and self-supporting agents in the field. They would know much better what they were dealing with.

The principle of subsidiarity (making decisions at the lowest possible level) is among the gifts of Christianity to the world, though it has seldom been well-received. Those with power who embrace it will usually make exceptions for themselves. The Church herself has sometimes ignored her own principle, and the contrary one of micromanaging from Central is easily promoted when local agencies fail. The contrary behaviour — a central power devolving because it has failed — is relatively unknown. Those with power are loathe to relinquish it, as Scripture itself teaches; and human lust, greed, and arrogance make predictable hash of the best-laid schemes.

That is why the Church must preserve some aloofness from “secular” affairs. She must do so in order to remain the Church, rather than a faction. She takes sides, but as spectator not player. (In some historical moments, as referee.) Her occasional attempts to waltz or wade in, never end well; never ever, so far as I can see. (I will write another day in defence of integralism.)

Now, I love to defend a pope, whenever it is possible, and it must be said in Pope Francis’ case that he hasn’t tried to form a political party, or seize power in any civil realm. The worst that could be said is that he favours the wrong sides. He is a big fan of vast, centralized, bureaucratic organizations, which never achieve anything, or at least, never anything good.

The alternative is to use the moral suasion of a central institution founded by Jesus Christ to change people’s attitudes. The “social teaching” of the Church through the ages was to this end. It was, when it advanced any political cause, not to a political end, but for the sake of removing obstacles to holiness. It served the restoration of the natural moral order, itself instituted by God, and positively requiring human freedom. It (the social teaching) and she (the Church) favoured good, truth, and beauty, which necessarily involves opposition to what is bad, false, and ugly. But the way forward is not by diktat but through the genius of human goodwill.

The Church articulates what we already know in our heart of hearts, having been wired for it from conception. We supply the action, starting with our prayers. (Note: that Prayer is not an evasion but an action.) And by our witness to the Truth, we also provide … a regular supply of martyrs.

Today, the 11th of June, would be Miners Memorial Day in New Waterford (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia), where my mama grew up. It commemorates those miners killed on the job through the years; the many who died in the explosion at Colliery No. 12, in 1917; the miner shot dead by company police during a labour disturbance in 1925; all the roof-falls and the floodings. Coal mining has always been a kind of battlefront. But the war is over in New Waterford. The last colliery closed, twenty years ago.

Since, the town itself has been closing. The population has shrunk to less than half of what it was in the boom days, and I would think the average age is now twice as high. The only signs of life I can spot through the Internet are in guvmint programmes. These can create a brief illusion of “future,” but return in a decade and they’ll be gone, too — the votes they were buying having likewise departed.

The worst of the recent contractions was the Catholic Church of Saint Agnes, a splendid worn clapboard structure, once brimming with life; and a superlative architectural gem. The diocese merged six parishes into one, and had all the beautiful buildings demolished, so that the site in question is now another denuded scar upon the landscape.

I carry so many memories, still vivid, of “formerly industrial Cape Breton,” from summers now more than half-a-century ago. Things were sliding even then.

Most poignantly, when I close my eyes, the faces of other children, my playmates; of little Donna, on whom I had a crush; of my mother’s friends, and elderly worthies; of my beloved Aunt Buddie the church organist; and Great Aunt Alice, the folk painter. My maternal grandpa, Oliver Wilbur Holmes, “doyed” as they say, before my birth; has lain in the cold wet ground three-quarters of a century. (He was engineer on the S&L Railway.) The young grew up and all moved away; their elders stayed, to join grandpa in the graveyard. That whole world is depopulated now.

The past is the past, and nothing can be done. Human memory barely lasts out the generation. The sorrows and the joys fade as if they had never been, and in the end there is nothing to say.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

As a man of the 13th century, I may not think it goes nearly far enough, but the present vogue for electric cars at least takes us back more than one hundred years. I am gung-ho: not necessarily for the cars, because the world has more than one thousand million too many, and they were only ever appropriate for remote and rural districts; or as limousines to relieve excessively wealthy persons of the burden of their money. Rather, I’m enamoured of electrical propulsion.

Though littered with unnecessary, high-tech gizmos, our private cars are actually rather shoddy. They cost too little, and do not endure. The “urbane” replace them with the latest (obnoxious) models every year or two, whereas any vehicle should be designed to last, for a quarter-century as an absolute minimum, and normally half-a-century or more. They should of course be functional off-road, like tractors and other farm equipment, allowing us to retire many million miles of (tediously) paved highways. (A street worth having will be attractively cobbled.)

Ideally, we might return to horses, and bullocks, but I am a practical man, and not opposed to mechanical contrivances, so long as they have a reasonable purpose, and can be made environmentally discreet. I make the classical distinction between town and country, urban and rural, but would have neither territory crisscrossed with multi-lane speedways, or pocked with sprawling parking lots. The roadsters that use these are themselves dirty, noisy things, as I have observed before, and let me add that they are very dangerous to children and animals.

How, then, should we deal with the problem of moving large numbers of people about (to say nothing of their baggage)?

We had this problem licked more than a century ago, when the overwhelming majority never went anywhere except on foot, and those with a need to travel grand distances could take the railway — which, incidentally, had baggage cars. Taking this Province for my example, and my wanderings through it for my research, I am constantly impressed to discover evidence of how well it was served by the railroads, back when it had a fraction of its present population, and incomes were much lower. One could get from almost any little place to almost any other along them.

The obliteration of our railroads did not happen by chance. Starting with Roosevelt, on this side of the Atlantic, and Hitler, on the other side, a grand concerted effort was made to promote the automotive and paving industries, and build autobahns, specifically at the expense of rail. Cars had already become too numerous by the 1920s, but the idea of what Trump and I might call “biglification” — the totalitarian impulse — was to choke the planet with “people’s” cars, trucks, and buses. It became the one big economic pseudo vision, as the Depression wore on. What had been fairly useful vehicles — very local extensions from the train stations — became the most awkward and wasteful mass-transport system imaginable. The intention of the captains and politicians of industry was, from the beginning, to compel everyone to buy and drive these voracious machines, and become permanently indebted thereby.

I doubt not the whole scheme was inspired by the Devil, though as usual, however obvious, this cannot be proved. It was part of his continuing project to reduce humanity to an interchangeable mass of human cyphers, who would readily exchange their freedom for the occasional dubious luxury or treat — to invent the “mass man,” the “man without qualities” who can be governed by statistical methods, and is always ripe for social engineering.

It is time to do this global megaproject in reverse.

As Ivan Illich argued, the average speed of private cars, once the total distance they cover is divided by the work hours spent in the range of (degenerative) activities to produce and drive them (from iron mining and oil drilling forward), is three miles per hour. This is about the same as walking. Horses, at twelve miles per hour — much faster at a gallop — were always more efficient, and sailing vessels, too, but the modern, mass man does not understand efficiency. He works from assumptions that are invariably false, owing to his intoxication with money.

He will, for instance, think that a 2$ loaf at the superstore is cheaper that the 6$ loaf I just bought in a farmer’s market. (It was a potato salt bread.) But the latter is nine times more delicious and nutritious. Gentle reader may check my sums: the 6$ loaf is thus three times the better bargain, and keeps a superbly independent baker in business. (And if you can’t afford it, just eat less.)

So it goes with transport. A journey that may cost as much as three times more, per mile, may be in truth a much better journey. The slower it goes, the more we can appreciate a magnificent countryside, and be humanized by contact with our fellow man.

Intelligent signalling devices could allow a great variety of railway stock — from single-car trolleys to long freight trains — to share narrow bands of track, carrying our busiest traffic along the tranquil line. And all we need is general agreement on etiquette and the track gauge.

A branching, mycelial, thread-like hyphae, spreading organically through the human arbour; meandering through the fields, bridging the rivers, tunnelling under obstacles and crowded city streets. Short, pleasant walks at either end. Carts and (electric) buggies to provide doorstep-to-doorstep for the halt and feeble. The odd electrical hay wagon.

No need to sacrifice even the automotive factories, which are anyway already being converted to the manufacture of private electric vehicles, in unconscionable volume. Divert the production to rolling stock, instead.

Everyone will be happier. Trust me on this.

____________

A reader asks if I’m aware that railway trains make a terrible clatter, to which I reply, that there are ways to make them much quieter, which I am prepared to divulge for a modest fee. (My suggestion of electric is gratis.) Note, too, that the clatter is only heard while the train is passing; that children and poets turn excitedly to watch it pass; whereas a busy car highway is no fun to watch, and emits a numbing, unending, and unmerciful, audio drone.

One forgets — purposely in my case — that a large part of the general public cannot cope with wit, drollness, or rhetorical conceits, is rendered apoplectic by dark humour, couldn’t get facts straight if they tried, and cannot read with attention. See the angry comments on almost any website. The Internet encourages not jolly debate, but the lynching behaviour that has come to dominate our political life.

To write at all, for public consumption in the world today, is to expose oneself to the myriad unhappy, and lately I’ve been feeling their wrath.

The Devil, too, lacks a sense of humour, except for sarcasm; but it is not a form of sarcasm that can pretend to be funny. Instead it is invariably bitter and cynical. He cannot bear to be mocked or teased, is constantly demanding “safe spaces,” and encourages the masses to worship idols. (These might be considered his masks.) His own mockery comes with a sting: he wants his targets suppressed, and punished.

Among the stratagems of the High Middle Ages, and of the Catholic Church through all times, is to laugh at the Devil’s expense. I try to play my part in this holy mission.

The Devil’s strategic response is to sponsor factions and political parties. From his point of view it would matter little what they stand for — so long as they are violently opposed to one another. He does play favourites when he can, however, strongly preferring the “culture of death” to the “culture of life,” and promoting all those who will take a bold lead in the advance of what is ugly, evil, and false, in the long game of subverting God’s intentions. We can’t defeat him on our own but, fortunately for us, he can be distracted.

Sometimes, so far as I can see, the Devil becomes so absorbed in the performance of some short-term mischief, that we can dodge or make end runs around him. (The image of the matador comes to mind.) And when the Devil is confronted by positive Sanctity he tends, like his followers, to “freak” or panic. I’m all for giving him a bad day.

The Adversary of God is our adversary, too, and through our freedom, God has given us a rôle in the fight. This is a great honour, though sometimes, in parallel with the ancient Hebrews, we might wish that we had not been Chosen. But we were, and are. We may fight on, as happy soldiers, or cut and run. We may even change sides, in the same freedom, from good to bad — or from bad to good. Count on the Devil to use all his wiles to make those choices murky.

At the moment, I notice that his efforts are directed to making every choice a political issue; to help us forget about God, and especially about Jesus, as much as possible. (This is why we should mention Him frequently.)

If, for instance, one has consciously taken God’s side, the Devil gets us so immersed in the political struggle, between Left and Right, that we can only imagine the fight in those terms. This, I think, is why when I or others write specifically on spiritual questions, we are answered with indifference, even from our co-religionists. But put, say, the word “Trump” into it, and there will be a series of explosions. These will come from both his supporters and his opponents, and it will lead only to cacophony, never to the still silence of Our Lord.

The $64.00 question: What do we really care about? For our salvation, and our neighbour’s salvation, or only for settling some scores?

*

Another puzzling Idlepost to leave my gentle reader, while I abscond. I shall disappear for a week or two, returning, should God will, in early June.

In a frontal attack on my manliness, Kate McMillan, the sweet songstress of Saskatchewan, once revealed to her Small Dead Animal readers that I did not have a driver’s licence. I protested that she was insinuating I can’t drive a car.

“Licences are for cissies,” I replied.

My father taught me how to drive at age five, on an abandoned airstrip. The car was a 1956 Volkswagen Beetle which, as I recall, was taupe in colour. Owing to being small at the time, I had to sit on my papa’s knee while steering, and enlist his help when pressing gas and gears. It is true I don’t drive cars any more, but this is only because I retired from the hobby, at the age of nine.

For I decided there were better things to do in life.

Papa was an industrial designer, to which I attribute my continuing delight in mechanical engineering, including a love/hate fascination with motor vehicles of all kinds. But my attitude towards them is that of the Chinese court officials of the later 16th century, when the Jesuit missionaries first showed them European clocks. They were mad for the things, to start with, and soon opened two royal workshops to manufacture clocks for themselves — to the highest mechanical and aesthetic standards. From the Emperor down, anyone who was anybody had to have a clock, and keep it on display. But the fashion passed, and they soon lost interest in clocks entirely.

After all, what are they good for? Can a man really spend all day watching the arms of a clock move around? The Chinese are, or were, a sensible people, and soon got back to more dignified pursuits.

It is the same with cars. I am delighted with Fiat 500s, for instance, and would love to own one, and take it apart. The external body shape is to die for, and the leathery interior looks good, too. Truth to tell, I prefer the speedometer in a Mini Cooper, which is more deliciously retro. But the idea of driving one of these things on the open roads strikes me as vain and showy. I think, keep it secretly in your garage.

Surely, it would be wrong to turn it on for more than a few minutes. Cars are very dirty. The electric ones are especially foul, as I’ve learnt from an environmental expert, who calculated the carbon expenditure over the whole lifetime of the vehicle, from mine-shaft to junkyard, including all the shocking things that come out of an electricity generating plant (unless it is good clean nuclear power). Give me a horse-drawn cabriolet any day — a Hansom, or a Tonga. Or a quadricycle-framed boda-boda, pulled by ostriches.

Internal combustion is too brutish for me.

The Church is not in crisis, as Cardinal Sarah was saying the other day. We are in crisis. The Devil wants us to think that God has abandoned His Church. He hasn’t. In fact, He can’t, if I may add my theological understanding of the matter. I like to quote Joan of Arc: “About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.” It is only when we redefine the Church, to be something it is not, that complications arise.

In separating, generally, wheat from chaff, observe: there is wheat. From what I hear, we have some very bad priests (to say nothing of the bishops), but I know some good ones. The same may be said of the laymen. A friend, who has been in Rome recently, almost looking for corruption, mentioned this surprising thing. Much of what goes on in curia and seminaries is what always went on, including prayer and daily work. Why would it not? Men and women have jobs to do, and often they do them. Even those in whose hearts the Church is subverted and betrayed, have the Mass to get on with, and many other things they are paid and were trained to do. They may not be particularly malicious; rather, slovenly in mind and spirit. Their learning and their homilies may be mediocre, but there are deadlines which may be less trouble to meet than to ignore. Always, somewhere, the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Even going through the motions has value, when the motions are in service to a cause that is divine. Inspiration is anyway for special occasions. The Mass is valid, when we go through the motions; it was actually designed to be hard to invalidate. We needn’t bother our little heads with whether the priest is worthy. That is his business. We need only ask if we are in any way adequate to receive the Host, for the consequences of my not being worthy do not fall upon anyone else, except tangentially; and neither can my guilt be transferred to my neighbour.

Plausibly, it can be said that “the Church has failed,” in one way or another. Gentle reader will know what I think of plausibility. The Church has never failed, even once. Men fail the Church, constantly — both from outside and from inside her — and they’ve been doing so since her earthly beginnings. The cock was crowing on our first pope. In our blindness we think, “Christ isn’t there”; that He has (quite understandably) “walked.” Only in the sense that He goes where He is wanted, can this appear to be true. Have we looked for Him? Is He hidden in plain view?

I was also sent, the other day, some screed by a man who said he doesn’t go to Mass any more; that we should continue to be Catholics without the Church. Spot the contradiction. The man was an intellectual; his screed was incoherent. The poor fellow may have some religious inkling, because he still feels the Sunday obligation he rejects. Somehow it had meaning “for him” when he attended; somehow it has no meaning now. He invites others to beclown themselves, by his example.

Christ hasn’t walked. The writer had perhaps noticed that others have walked, and now he follows the Zeitgeist through the narthex, or out the windows, into the Godlessness outside. He is, in other words, too well satisfied with himself, to reason the matter through. Has he lost his faith? He did not say he had, and I don’t think he has, either. As the priest of Ambricourt observed of his parishioners, no one loses his faith. It is there, or it is not, in every cell of the person. It is not like a wallet, or your car keys.

Has he lost his faith or has the faith lost him? Since neither is possible, I will assume he never had any; for a faith that is conditional must be some other thing.

I am speaking in absolutes, but about absolute things. Our modern man is very shy of absolutes. The Dictatorship of Relativism does not allow them. It only allows, at best, “if … then” propositions, which are quite useless to analyse an Is.

Asked recently to define my technical term, “Twisted Nanny State,” I replied, “The Gillette company.” Their unctuous, misandrist advertising campaign from last winter got my attention, but that was only a symptom of what I had in mind. I was referring to the company itself, though soon I learnt that it doesn’t exist any more, having been swallowed by the still larger fish, Procter & Gamble, which split its operations into related P&G divisions. Gillette is now just a brand, its reputation as much for sale as any of its products; there is no “there” there, any more. The manufacturing itself can be moved from one labour market to another, and the management enjoys a kind of extra-territoriality in which personal responsibility is progressively dissolved.

Gillette had previously swallowed I don’t know how many smaller companies, one of which was Braun of Germany, once associated with high standards of industrial design. (Their famed designer, Dieter Rams, master at the marriage of art and engineering, remains one of my somewhat numerous heroes.) But Braun, too, had absorbed smaller companies in its turn.

Gentle reader may object that none of these entities is a government department, except insofar as it is the subject of taxes and regulations, and as it grows larger, an ever more formidable force in lobbying for subsidies and legislation favourable to itself. Objection sustained. Verily, this is just my point.

Each entity made its way until the gobbling by means of mass consumer advertising, in which morally illegitimate methods of persuasion — principally hype, actual lies, irrelevant claims and endorsements — are instrumental to sales success. Honest advertising (e.g. catalogues with exact descriptions) is theoretically possible but practically extinct; campaigns are based on the tawdry manipulation of human “perceptions” — behaviourist psychology at the level of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, but elaborately quantified, with financial and pricing arrangements factored in.

Indeed, one may link most disastrous marketing decisions to the decline of intuitive reasoning, as statistical reasoning takes its place. The manager who knows in his gut, from experience, what might work and what won’t, or can’t, is displaced by the young analyst with computer modelling skills and all the jargon of “science” to express the platitudes he was drip-fed in school.

But here, too, “private” and “public” enterprise are fully integrated. Both are adapted to the “planning” paradigm, and each is utterly dependent on the other, in what is misleadingly called “the mixed economy.” The critics of abstract Capitalism, on the one side, and abstract Socialism, on the other, draw a false contrast between two administrative orders, when they are both bureaucratic in nature, inhumanly oversized, and habitually dedicated to the pursuit of monopoly.

Several of the readers with whom I correspond are under the immovable impression that I am against making money, or improvements in technology, per se. In fact my outlook is cutting-edge mediaeval Catholic. The moral questions are instead such as, How is the money made? And, for what are the improvements to be used? As I must remind e.g. my Chief Texas Correspondent, I am not against electricity or indoor plumbing. But I am against worshipping such things, or making them the criteria for high civilization.

“Progress” in this kind is an empty achievement. Every supposed “advance” requires the sacrifice of something, that ought to be carefully examined. The real question is not who makes the decisions, but whether the decisions are good. We get lost in technicalities. The ultimate human decision, whether to opt for Heaven or Hell, does not involve statistical analysis.

“Welcome to manhood” was a long-term marketing campaign, in which sample packs of Gillette products were sent to presumed males on their eighteenth birthdays. One could imagine the immensity of the commercial bureaucracy required to “target” this ultra-specific demographic “group,” and giggle when the packs were mailed, mistakenly, to little old ladies. But it is more than a joke when we see that the company, along with the rest of Twisted Nanny State, is trying, in their more recent campaigns, not to sell their irritating products to men, but to redefine manhood.

It is said that old men repeat themselves, and as I proceed to my 817th birthday (a man of the 13th century, I count my age in moons) I become the more convinced of our need for constant repetition. This is partly because, like most humans if not all, I am stunned, stunted, stupid. If I were not constantly rehearsing the little that I know, it would evaporate. (Quickly, in my case.)

This is true on the civilizational, as well as the personal level. If we did not repeat the Mass, daily, we might lose it, and then where would we be? There are parallels in all areas of decorous activity. If we didn’t teach the facts of life, mind, spirit, to each new generation, all over again, our descendants would lapse into hapless savagery.

Hence the importance of the classics: “We can never be free of the ancient world, unless we become barbarians again.” (Jacob Burckhardt.)

It is a point that bears constant repetition. Unfortunately, because our schoolmasters have been slipping, it is not getting the attention it deserves. More largely, what might be called the “principle of tradition” is now universally discounted in our demented passion for novelties. The new is by definition untried, unproven. Unless consonant with tradition, it will always fail. It will be unharmonic.

Consider this carefully. Life requires continuity. A man (or woman for that matter) might live to three score and ten, but only if he does so continuously. Should he die — even once in the interim — he will not. The same is true for those who would live to one thousand (lunations; that’s about eighty-one solar years). If he stops breathing, or his heart stops, or another vital function ceases — just the once — he will utterly fail in his ambition. Like tradition, the rôle of unconscious activity is underestimated.

The phrase “culture of life” is well steeped in tradition. Although popularized for a new generation by Saint Pope John Paul II in encyclicals only a generation ago, it confirms Catholic commitment from time out of mind. For the present we are against contraception, abortion, euthanasia, suicide, murder, unjust wars, and embryonic stem cell research. And more: for the sanctity of human life is being upheld against Life Deniers in many other areas. Of course, several of these may require four minutes of thought. (Twenty seconds for the above-average intelligent.)

But there is more to life than escaping death, or helping others to do so, for the moment. By this I make no allusion to “the quality of life,” which could be rather grim. The sanctity of life is a true principle, entirely non-negotiable. A life may not be intentionally taken except for legitimate cause, and for what that might be we are (unless we have become savages) beholden to tradition.

“Thou shalt not” is fairly easily understood; “thou shalt” can be a little more complicated. Notwithstanding, there is what is positively conducive to life. Mozart, for instance, in whom (despite an early death) the life-force was articulated, and ran strong; contemplation of the night sky, for instance; Love in its myriad forms, and all manifestations of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. I realize that all of these are controversial, today; the more reason to storm through with them.

For instance, the authorities at the Bathurst Subway Station were playing Mozart for the express purpose of driving nasty bad loitering people away. Rap music, on the other hand, would attract them. This discovery, made in transit systems around the world, was purely empirical. The Greeks knew all about it, under the heading of “syndrome.” Certain things go with other things, not always but almost always. To deny this is perverse, and — one perversity will lead to another.

But we won’t remember this unless we repeat it.