Essays in Idleness

The triumph of Vulgarity and Ignorance — of the “mass man” as that learned Spaniard, José Ortega y Gasset, described him — or “progress,” as the vulgar and ignorant call it themselves, might also be considered, in conjunction, to be the pre-eminent sign of the times. Except, we must add Stupidity, which is its more active and interfering force. But within this revolutionary triangle of modernity — not liberté, égalité, fraternité, as it proclaims, but rather vulgarité, incapacité, stupidité — is the structure of our political life, of our democracy. The people are not satisfied with anything they have. They cannot rest until they have made “the environment” — and everything in the world around it — over again in their own dull image.

It would be very easy to avoid wars of all kinds, and while doing so also avoid every universal social problem, including most malnourishment and disease. This would require the majority of persons to simply mind their own business, and not try to fix anything — especially by voting. Something approximating to a paradise on earth could soon be achieved, on the reactionary principle of letting things be, and not getting started. Of course we would still have death, and some unavoidable pain, but these become much easier to cope with when political distractions and systematic “cures” are not proposed.

Sometimes one may find trouble without having looked for it, I grant. For politics is not the only game that attracts psychoticks, and other ticks. But elections are a sure way to encourage them. However, this is the exception. Trouble is normally the product of one’s own Stupiditas, when this has been (devilishly) mistaken for cleverness.

So, the paradox, that we need laws to protect the citizen against professional busybodies (i.e. “liberals”) who would homogenize them. As Ortega y Gasset said, a human society must be necessarily aristocratic, what is not aristocratic is not an actual society. Equality is bullfeathers.

The true, and the most wicked, enemies of mankind, are the people who think they know what they are doing. They should be spotted, tried, and condemned. For, the beginning of political wisdom is to know, with holy certainty, that you don’t know.

A close friend in Ottawa says, of our late Pope: “He was a man of his times, and a man for his times.”

And then, of course, he quotes Hamlet: “The time is out of joint.”

In Jerusalem, on the Dome of the Rock — situated on top of what is almost certainly the Holy of Holies, within the ancient Temple precincts — is an inscription, in their earliest angular Kufic script, on what was also the earliest monument the Arabs caused to be erected in a conquered land. It reads, in its most significant part: “Praise to Allah who begets no son and has no associate in power and who has no surrogate for humiliations.” The point is sustained by repetition, together with the contrary assertion that Mohammed alone can provide intercession on the day when the Muslim community alone is resurrected.

That is on the outside of the Dome. On the inside, there is a further long inscription, which mentions Jesus and Mary by name; states that Jesus was an envoy of Allah; that the religion of Allah is Islam; and that Allah will reckon with those who disagree.

Nearly fourteen centuries have passed since this challenge to the existence of Christianity was made; and indeed, we are still living in the fallout, not only of the Saviour who descended from Heaven to earth, but of the largest, most vigorous, and through all fourteen centuries, the most violent denial of Him.

Yet we have today, at least in the more progressive and nominal Christians of North America and Europe — most certainly including Catholics — the curious notion that Christianity is compatible with Islam. His Majesty King Charles III (the nominal head of the Church of England) gave voice to this betrayal in his Easter address this year.

He did not put Islam higher, but put Christianity lower, making it part of our “Diversity.” It was a betrayal of everything, reducing religion to something compatible with the Darwinian cosmology, and with frankly atheist materialism — using “faith,” “hope,” and “love” as throwaway terms.

To be candid, I am a Catholic. (“The worst kind, a convert,” as Marshall McLuhan used to say.) I get, or used to get, a lot of mail. And whatever our bishops and church bureaucracies may think they have achieved, in the way of teaching the Faith, I get to see their results.

For sure, some of the Catholics who write to me are well-educated and well-formed. But on inquiry, I find a large proportion of these are also converts; and that even among those who are not, most have learnt the Faith by their own efforts. Many of these are, as one can see by the way they phrase religious ideas, careful to avoid heresies.

But many other correspondents, declaring themselves to be “cradle Catholics,” are at no pains at all.

I often wonder what the Church is for such people. A nice venue for a wedding, to be sure; a bit of formal “closure” in a funeral. A building that may be worth including on an architectural preservation list, since no one is going to build another like it again. Beyond this, a vague expression of an ethnic identity.

“I was born a Catholic,” some reader frequently writes to me, “unlike you!” (Already in error: nobody is born Catholic). “Don’t you dare tell me what a Catholic should believe!”

The sense of some Catholic ethnicity — hyphenated Irish, Polish, or whatever — goes with other sentimental thoughts. But Catholic means “universal,” so there is a problem when we find nostalgic mush on both sides of the hyphen.

They may or may not dimly remember a cumbersome Catechism that they have never read.

But the whole thing may now apparently be reduced to a “bottom line.” It comes down to being nice to people, and trying (cursorily) not to notice if anyone is mean. It is about being open-minded, and accepting people as they are — unless they happen to be quite religious.

Indeed, whatever else Christ may have done, according to this very common view, He reduced all the Ten Commandments to just One Commandment: that “you mustn’t judge people.”

I wish that were a parody of what I’ve been told in email so often, by self-described Catholics — who then go on to judge me. Over the years, I’ve been told these things not only by the laity, but even by several “modern” Catholic priests, one of whom was clever enough to add the word “misogynistic” to describe my opposition to abortion.

“We should keep an open mind,” through which the wind may whistle. And we ought to look with especially open minds at those who chisel the words of Christ off public buildings; or who teach children in our public schools that the whole history of our Church consists of anti-Muslim Crusades, a Spanish Inquisition, and (let us never forget) the Trial of Galileo.

Likewise, we are asked to keep open minds toward those paragons of art and style who, say, put a Crucifix in a vial of urine, or display a statue of Mary smeared with cow dung. For these people are only “expressing themselves,” and ours is not to judge them — for Christ, I have been told condescendingly by a Catholic professional art critic, was all about “expressing yourself.”

There are quite a few places in the Gospels where Jesus says things that cannot possibly be squared with the smiley-face icon. But faced with any of the very numerous Gospel passages that will come as a surprise to the postmodern reader, he can always allow that Jesus had a right to His opinions. He was, as one “Catholic-born” atheist acquaintance put it, probably no more crazy than many of the people we see walking the streets these days.

There is quite a variety of points of view, and it has become policy in every progressive, formerly-Christian jurisdiction of which I am aware, never to insist upon one over another. For each is a valid statement of a “point-of-view.” And while the Catholic Church is evidently failing to inculcate its own “point-of-view,” the State has no difficulty teaching what it believes, and making us pay for it.

It simply is not possible — not humanly possible, and not possible in logic — to make every view equal to every other. So that if you have, as a governing principle, the proposition that “all points-of-view are equal” — in other words, the defining dogma of multiculturalism — you must perforce walk into the Hell in which that dogma is juxtaposed with the elementary facts of life.

I do not doubt that God will take care of this, and may even forgive, in the fullness of time. But for the foreseeable future, I would like to see some evidence that our bishops and bureaucracies lose sleep on the matter.

“O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark; … the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.”

I remember the first time, trying to explain, to an astronomer who actually knew less about Christianity than I, that Catholicism is the supernal form of it; that the sacred is written in the stars. And he would just have to be patient, with those starry fires — for they could not be explained briefly, using this word in its modern sense, so that it means rather, “explained away.” It is, in several senses, more mysterious than that, and would take more than one biological lifetime. That is why Christianity is compelled to confirm an extra-biological eternal life. Too, that is why, or rather another “why” — it observes so many paradoxes, all of which come to a head on “Good Friday.”

Consider, for instance, birth and death, and then, ask the question, what is their opposite? Do not confuse immortality with infinity, as is frequently (and quite plausibly) done. For these are not opposites, either, let alone synonyms. Infinity is rather a mathematical conception, of something that doesn’t exist, because it cannot exist. Think this through.

Then, if you are ordinary (or tham-ma-daa, like my astronomer friend, who was Thai, incidentally), you must think it through again.

And far from providing an opposite, erasing the effects of birth and death will confirm the mundane. Like infinity, it will cease to exist. For eternally, if you live, you must die, in quaintly biological terms. It might be painful, but with luck, you will not be crucified.

We are, and in addition to having been, we are fated to will be. (Ironically.)

Of course this cannot be grasped, in the biological flicker of earthly existence. It requires more leisure than we can ever have here, and more horror. For, what is the flame we must pass through, on that starry night?

“The dripping blood our only drink, the bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think, that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood — again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”

And you were in the market for ecstasy?

In my Anglican days, when I was a parishioner in a very High church, the Tenebrae was sung on Maundy Thursday. I looked forward to it. The lights were extinguished one by one; and then the strepitus sounded in a tremendous clash, after the last candle in the sanctuary was extinguished. Polite Anglicans — having queued nicely for Communion — were instructed to leave the church “in disorder.” In the darkness, the parishioners would collide, trip, shove, step on each other’s toes — all in the proper liturgical spirit. One might wait the whole year for the opportunities this presented.

The symbolism is plain. Christ is no longer with us. Through the hours of Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, to the Easter Vigil when the lights come back on again, and the full Gloria is incanted — we contemplate a world in which there is no Christ; and no salvation, no absolution for our sins and indeed, no sins: only effrontery and cheek. We are abandoned to the ministrations of Nanny State, where, as Christians, we are already mocked, and may be punished unless we bow before the progressive gods (sodomy; infanticide; self-murder).

God is dead, as it were, or has gone Gnostic, and we were not made in His image. Instead, we are roadkill on the long highway. We are, according to “deep ecology,” one of ten million species on crowded Gaia, and taking more than our share of planetary resources. Shouldn’t we be ruthlessly, radically culled? The apes and dolphins and whales cannot replace us — they haven’t the capacity, after all. And so they wait patiently for the rule of Antichrist; for that reign of terror that will free them from subservience to us.

Even within quite “mainstream” Christian folds, Christ is abstraction. The Gospel Jesus is too particular — the times call rather for a generic Christ; for a Christ who will not be objectionable to the authorities; who will mind His own business and not make a scene. A democratic Christ, who will bless everyone equally, and preach multicultural homogeneity if He must preach at all. A Christ who will not have to come before Pilate, or be Crucified; who would know better. A nice Christ, who embodies the niceness we often proclaim, and has the good sense to look faithfully away whenever something might upset Him. Not man in the image of God, but God in the image of deracinated “man.” A Christ who has received a Harvard education, so that He does not talk about demons. For we are nice people, who do not want to hear about them.

And please, would this Christ not rise from the dead. For that is disruptive.

How often I have wished that public economic decision-making could be done in the manner of common sense, which is to say, in the opposite way to what most think necessary. Unlike me, for instance, the majority will consistently vote “forwards.” My own sensible preference for “backwards” never wins.

“We are all Keynesians now,” as Richard Nixon used to tell us, paraphrasing some genius or other. In other words, the habit of voting “forwards,” for progressive lunatics, has come to describe our habitual faux pas.

“Economic growth” should never be the ambition of the state, as opposed to the preference for “whichever.” Of course, this does not apply to private life where, owing to the mysterious phenomenon of “freedom,” individual people and their families may continue to grow rich, or begin to do so if they haven’t before, within the laws (as the state ought to prefer). Others might, by comparative good fortune, grow poorer, or begin to do so, more by fate than by choice: but within the laws. One may be fatalistic, or indulge in other adventures, but consistently within the laws.

The state, however, should always consider itself neutral, and need not care how much wealth its citizens have amassed, or failed to amass. It isn’t the business of the state to favour success, or failure. It is for “the citizens” to pursue such illusory and fictitious things.  Note: the keeping of statistics has always been vile and ungodly.

Consider Japan. The national income (“GNP” or “GDP” is the outrageous way they like to measure this) has been failing to grow for the last three or four decades. Before that, it was growing rather quickly, even though before that again, there was a nationalist firestorm and “the people” were rather seriously burnt. These things happen.

And very well: you work a bit harder to recover from disasters (almost all of which are instances of self-harm), and the population naturally recovers afterwards (when those people once again merrily resume reproducing, or at least, not being killed at such an untypically high rate). They eat more food, as those who are living become more numerous, and would, even if the quality of the food hasn’t improved. Indeed, the goodness of food is not only a question of wealth, but a case of real alimentary decision: some people like fine food they prepare, others prefer junk from cans. Let each of them decide, within his means. It isn’t a political question.

At least one clever Japanese economist points out, the overall population has been declining, even without a war, for several decades. But the income per person has nevertheless been increasing. “GNP per capita” is still rising, no matter what the government does. And when, owing to the very low birth rate, the country becomes extinct (apparently less quickly than China or Korea), all will continue to be well. For a people that has ceased to exist does not consume anything at all.

Truly, we live in the best of all possible worlds: whether we are moving forwards or backwards.

The universe is not as pliable and ductile as the scientifictionists suppose, including those scientifictionists who write for the New York Times, and Time magazine, as my Chief Texas Correspondent has just informed me. He mentioned their “reporting” on the Dire Wolf “de-extinction,” an entirely imaginary event curated by the Colossus Bioscience corporation, that is touted in their pages. These progressives are the same who advertise that a man can be turned into a woman, and a woman can be turned into a man.

However, “sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken,” as my Houston correspondent apprises.

The idea that something that has become extinct, whose previous existence necessarily depended upon innumerable factors, and that it can be resuscitated by the human will — is part of the naively malevolent modern belief in miracles. We cannot even define a species, let alone recreate one. The notion is almost as stupid (although slightly less malevolent) than the belief that humans can control the weather, or the economy. And yet these people confidently proclaim that they are the smart ones.

I turn from this to an essay on the size and age of the universe. Is it about 13.8 billion earth-years, or twice that, or really only a few thousand years? Have we any way to know with certainty even what came before what, or have any intelligent way to guess what comes after?

“He is not a male, He is not a female, He is not a neuter. … He neither is, nor is not. … When He is sought He will take the form in which He is sought, but again, He will not come in such a form. … It is indeed difficult to describe the Name of the Lord. …”

This quotation, which I’ve used before, and which I have been using since I first read it in an ancient Upanishad, as a schoolboy sixty years ago, will, I hope, help to bring my more scientific readers up to speed.

The “hard problem of consciousness,” as it is called, like our consciousness of other hard problems, must advance very slowly, and will never get anywhere. This is because our consciousness itself precedes space and time, not only in ourselves but in everything.

Of course, I cannot speak for you, who may not share my views on what is fundamental; but neither can you, to be strict about it.

“Cogito ergo sum” is a misleading theorem. This was because you were, before you specifically thought about it. You could not know how you were limiting the field of your knowledge, even before you accepted that it was limited. Your “basic Johnsonian” — to kick a rock down the street and say you have refuted Berkeley thus — involves no confirmation of space and time, either, only that they present a very simplified picture of reality which you probably need to avoid stumbling foolishly. You can accept this “for purpose,” without relying on it to explain anything.

Indeed, nothing can be refuted, including the notion that even rocks have feelings — though this is a truth that must be secondary, and would have to be externally supplied. God, we believe, or should I say “I believe,” is the formative external supplier, and there are surprising facts of geology, such that occasionally the rocks speak. But having a peculiarly human form of consciousness, we are, “in His image,” at least partially divine.

(If we exist at all.)

I also take this with the proposition that consciousness “precedes” — is more fundamental than — any physical reality, both in ourselves and in the broad, echoing universe. It precludes every one of our inquiries into how things started, and leaves “In the beginning” as a gloriously perfect, absolutely irrefutable fact.

And death is just an evasion.

The truth is, it is easier to explain the Why? than the How? of our existence, from the simple clues we find deposited in our human “operating machine.”

At least 48 percent of self-styled “liberals” can justify assassinating Elon Musk, and 55 percent now favour the killing of Donald Trump, according to the American polls. Actual bloody murderers, such as Luigi Mangione, are now folk heroes on this Left (and have been since well before Che Guevara). Murderous violence and affray inspires them.

Public enthusiasm for the satanic might be slightly less, up here: for Canadians are notorious “pussies.” (Pusillanamous?)

However, we share the “demonstrative approach” with environmental-case “liberals” in both the United States and Europe:

“Life on the front lines of climate journalism is the moral equivalent of war,” we are told, most recently at Columbia University, the revolutionary capital of American “fake news” (though once the scholarly King’s College of New York, in the days of British rule). Liberals began their deafening MEOW (the “Moral Equivalent of War”) more than a century ago, and it was the signature phrase of, for instance, the late jack-ass, Jimmy Carter. But now they actually froth at the mouth. Should we take them seriously?

As one Australian (Tim Blair) comments: “Fair enough. Nuking Hiroshima it is, then.”

I, however, take a more moderate position, and would be satisfied with round-ups, prison camps, and showing just a bit less restraint with the rioters.

The campaign to strip charitable status away from all Canadian churches and charities may well succeed through the present Canadian “federal” (once Dominion) election. Typically, it isn’t being seriously discussed. This is how “Liberals” work — along with flexible, spineless “Conservatives” who wet themselves when pressured. They present each radical, perverted scheme finally as a fait accompli, all resistance having been crushed in anticipation.

In each case, perhaps four in five voters would oppose the scheme, if they were asked candidly; but one in five are enthusiastically in favour. This “twenty percent” now includes all the political and media “elites,” and holds reliably woke-leftist views on everything.

Donald Trump, whom I admire more and more, has flipped the game and the bird on them, by consistently campaigning on “eighty percent” issues, exposing the progressives for what they are. That they are enemies of religion and decency — they are inhabited by Devils, after all — becomes apparent. Because Trump is a man (in defiance of the sexually crossed-over progressives), he has begun to prevail after only a decade in presidential politics. The self-styled “elitists,” who control a monopoly of low-intelligence Democrats in the USA and NDP-Liberals in Canada, have gone apoplectic in both places, but ho, truth is advancing.

It now goes without saying that the attacks on churches and charities have been halted in the United States. But there are no men in Canada, where the cause seems lost.

About seven percent of taxation is a necessary evil, to support our external and internal defences (the military, cops, courts, and prisons); the rest is an extravagant, unnecessary evil. Voluntary, religious charities should take care of it. Charitable exemptions for civilized behaviour would not be necessary except for our monstrous taxes. The progressive is the natural enemy of civilization, but the saintly Elon Musk is exposing him south of the border, by his relentless war on bureaucratic filth. Godspeed, Mister Sparks!

We can only pray that, by some miracle, his “DOGE” effort will eventually extend through melting glaciers into Canada and Greenland.

Mr Carney and his NDP-Liberals, with the borborygmatic support of the Conservatives and all the other parties, share a belief in panic with the rest of the Western world. For various reasons — none of them cogent or thought through — they react to fears for the planet’s further existence. These range from “climate change” to falling population to Trump tariffs, and one panic can easily replace another in the election cycles. Curiously, all our problems are human-created, with causes that would simply go away were it not for politicians, except the environmental ones, which don’t actually exist.

Of course, the sudden return of the ice age, with the collapse of agriculture owing to the radical depletion of atmospheric carbon, while ice freezes many miles thick, and shrinks the oceans into salty slush at the equators, and the glaciers grind our cities away, would seem to be a problem — but only for human beings. I, for one, refuse to be panicked by this.

We should take it in our stride. For it has all happened before, in quite recent geological time, and what has happened before can happen again. We mustn’t be surprised.

From a universal point of view, we would be unnoticed collateral damage. The warm soft cuddly times might come back again, after enormous floods and tsunamis wash the gravel around, and if there were a tiny number of surviving humans we could then go about reinventing civilization, entirely from scratch, at our leisure.

For leisure, even in periods of discomfort, has always been the most important factor in the development of civilization. And leisure is the opposite of panic.

The hint I dropped yesterday, on the Eve of this Feast of Fools, was a distinction between the “holy fools” and the “unholy fools.” This extends much beyond politics and did not, in fact, originate in that. It goes back to the Garden of Eden, and the foolish behaviour of one tempted woman, and one tempted man, inclined to believe her. But it is my habit generally to avoid the theological depths, for fear that I might fall in.

The Celebrated Fool dates back only eight centuries, to Saint Francis of Assisi, who became Holy Fool of the West, “a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature, and with himself,” in the words of Pope Francis. In the painting by Giotto, he is feeding the birds, and in imitation of him environmentalist politicians have spent many trillions, feeding “Gaia” and the other gods of earth, sea, and sky — very foolishly.

Or there was the yurodivy, of Russia: outwardly quite eccentric but inwardly wise, who did not cost us very much; or even among the Muslims, the apparently mad. (I met one of these in upcountry Pakistan; he threw a brick at me.) The Christian accomplishment was to sort the many fools presented by abundant nature into holy and unholy, by their fruits. This was Christ’s analysis.

There are many other kinds of Fool, such as Royal Fools (consult Shakespeare on this, and the broad mediaeval tradition); it is a vast multiculture. Today, as we celebrate the Fools in our own past, present, and future, including ourselves in all of our seasons, I should like to append to Christ’s distinction a specific fiscal observation.

It is that Fools should not cost us extravagant amounts of tax money. For those who cost other than themselves are not only Fools, but tedious.

Democracy is a sick joke, as the prosecution of Trump in America, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Salvini in Italy, Georgescu in Romania, and now Le Pen in France, has displayed, unambiguously, to the whole world, if the world were capable of noticing, or thought. Each of these candidates stands accused of being a “populist” — i.e. likely to win an election, unless they had already won. Marine Le Pen is being put in prison, where the Democrats tried to put Trump (for up to 300 years on twisted and absurd charges), using the United States’ corrupt progressive judicial system. The specific charge brought against Le Pen was that she embezzled from the European bureaucracy. As all mainstream European politicians are constantly and obviously guilty of this, it was a convenient charge.

The parrot gallery is all singing that she is “far right,” this morning.

I am not your political reporter, and will not take the extravagant amount of space required to explain the detailed particulars of each case, when all are essentially simple. Democracy is a viciously corrupt system, in which the powers-that-be in each electoral district do what they think is necessary to maintain their dictatorship. Power is the only thing they care about, because with power, money can be appropriated. Truth is something they all despise. This has been my own experience, both here and abroad; and one must be a fool (though with some practise, a “holy fool” perhaps) to stand up to a political establishment, for it will own even the opposition parties. (Your homework assignment: Find out what commands all-party agreement.)

To know what is afoot in each place, you need only to read the news media, but with the sort of background that requires genuine experience. Journalists are dead easy to buy off, as Canada’s fully bought media notoriously shows. If you aren’t a tame, obedient, “progressive” journalist here, you aren’t being paid. And if you aren’t being paid, you are not employed. Though literally, the NDP-Liberals buy off the journalists, with tax money, individually and collectively.

Rarely is it a formal political party that calls the signals. The Devil can happily work through those, but feels more comfortable in the darker backrooms. But when democracy seems to work towards some just and happy result, the Devil is enraged. He must organize violent and destructive demonstrations.