Essays in Idleness

“O my God!” was my reaction, when the news finally reached me, that morning a quarter century ago. I had a column to write that morning, but first some telephone calls to make, one of them to New York City. It was a social call I was finally returning. I found out about the Islamic terror attacks in that way, for a telephonic recording told me that all connexions to Manhattan were down at the moment. Why on earth would that be?

My then more primitive Internet service was also mostly down, and when I turned on my radio I had an interminable CBC “arts” interview to get through. (I had not previously used the radio attachment to my CD machine.) Finally, in my frustration, I found the Times of India, where, at one glance, I took in the picture of the burning Twin Towers. (After more than another hour, CBC “breaking news” was reporting that a “far right Oklahoma bomber” might be responsible.)

I, of course, was not as thick as a CBC newsroom. As at the last World Trade Centre bombing, in 1993, I knew instantly whose terrorists had done it. I was too old to believe, for instance, Mr George Bush Jr’s blather about Islam being “a religion of peace.” Having been a child in Pakistan, of all places, I knew from the age of six that Islam was a religion of war. That was when I had my first opportunity to witness an “incident” near my school in Lahore. Human slaughter makes an indelible impression on young minds, though in places like Palestine it turns them into enthusiasts, in that case for killing Jews.

I had a column to write, that morning in 2001; it would be my first on 9/11. I wrote it to discourage readers from freaking out. My first worry was that Christian America would retaliate mindlessly. Strange to say, when an old Hindu friend, a journalistic colleague called me from the Subcontinent, his first question was, “What is wrong with the Americans?” He was genuinely puzzled that reprisals against Muslims were not happening, coast to coast.

“If that attack had happened in Delhi,” was his view, “there would have been ten thousand Muslim bodies floating face down in the Yamuna by now!”

Well, yes, I had to agree: approximately.

It does not make sense to send me money any more (if you ever did), except from the purest generosity and kindness, for I don’t think I can “perform” any more, as a commentator on various miscellaneous and mostly stupid topics, except rarely while I am not seeing double. Even the beloved Catholic Thing has had to sign off on me, and if you sent me a cheque (or check — for most come from the United States) I would currently be unable to cash it. Indeed, the evidence is that the few of my fellow Canadians who notice me, despise me as much as I despise them. Meanwhile, all my past Idleworks will continue to be available gratis, in the hope of afflicting them.

I do not like to cheat anybody, even Communists or Muslims. So they may read me at their leisure.

This is because I am a convinced “Christianist,” who necessarily follows some eccentric doctrines. I think, for instance, that all contrary beliefs, without religious faith, are worthless, and potentially quite evil. Strangers may have been raised with alternative sincere beliefs, for instance Theravada Buddhist under the Pali canon, but as for the majority of liberals, leftists, socialists, progressives, … “for me, you may hang ’em, or drown ’em.” … (May God protect us from these atheist savages!)

The most superlative protection comes through making art. It is the natural expression (additional to prayer) of faith in action. The greatest threats come through bureaucrats and bureaucracies. I am for creative freedom, and voluntary acts, and against taxmen and oppressors.

But as I will continue to mumble my opposition to them, as long as I am able, please, some-time readers, pray for me.

Still moving, now that I have been slightly jostled by the by-election results, up here in “Canada,” where the Liberals have swept ridings in B.C., Ontario, and Quebec. They won by insuperable margins, after Carney intentionally picked a fight with Trump, again. Using such devices, his party has been able to laughably misrule our country for many, many years.

There are thirty-eight members of the OECD, and Canada is in dead last place. Yet still these low-intelligence mediocrities continue to win elections, just by telling lies.

An erstwhile Czech immigrant, and dear friend, who has returned to old Europe, notes, “I believe by losing the connexion to its real history it has in effect lost the right to call itself Canada. Perhaps it should now be called New Canada to distinguish it from what its people lived by, up to say the 1960s–1970s.”

Forty trillion dollars — an amount the U.S. national debt now exceeds — would not have struck me as a plausible number in the days when one lousy million would have been enough for an extravagant couple to retire on. To call it sustainable may be a fond little accountant’s irony. Bankers, and insurance adjusters, are notorious for telling jokes about bankruptcies, but this amount, in trillions — now rapidly ballooning with compound interest and fresh, reckless spending — seldom rises to the amusing. For no one is terribly concerned, as they might be by fouls in women’s basketball.

The Democrats, Republicans, and others among the unambiguously deranged, are incapable of grasping the concept that even government debts are potentially important, and must be repaid, to avoid the real costs of a default, which will not be just a number.

We don’t make jokes about mass murder, either, or not unless we are progressively left. But a single generation after 9/11, when Muslim-hijacked aeroplanes were flown directly into New York City skyscrapers, the New York municipal government is in the hands of a freely-elected, and provocatively Muslim, administration. Believe this if you dare.

To be fair, all of the American Founding Fathers agreed that democracy could never work, and shouldn’t be tried as a form of government; for “the people” are just too crazy. True, one may find some sane voters, but they are always too small a minority.

The great pleasure of immobility, while some consciousness remains, and until the tax department catches up with you, is that you may read, more or less without interruption. Unfortunately, some of what you read may be what you wrote yourself in the past, and this can be an embarrassment.

For one discovers that one’s longest dithering philosophical essays could have been expressed in fewer words:

“From the impossibility of confining numbers to the constant and uniform prosecution of a common interest, arises the difficulty of securing subjects against the encroachment of governours. Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant …”

Note from the spellings, that this is from Doctor Johnson in The Adventurer.

I have fallen in love with Sophie Cunningham, even though she is a basketball star (I loathe basketball), and more than six feet tall (which is surely excessive, for a girl). She excels also in every other sport, beats the boys when they let her play with them, and can dance and sing and drink. Alas, I wouldn’t stand a chance with her, for I understand that she despises shorter men. (But politely.)

Sophie is fearless, and honest, and true, as everyone must have noticed by now. Yet as magnificently as she may sing “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue,” in Mizzou or wherever she came from, she is quite thrillingly, remarkably non-violent. And yet she plays for Idaho in the women’s professional basketball league. Or maybe it is Indiana.

Well, something that starts with “I.” This is a bloodsport, in which the women are all trying to kill one another.

It is that way throughout women’s athletics. For instance, though only if you have the stomach for it, I invite you to check out women’s field hockey. The girls are vicious, wherever they are playing — in Canada, England, Holland, Italy, Pakistan. Put a stick in a woman’s hands and, regardless of her ethnicity, she will immediately try to clobber another woman. I have seen this with my own eyes in each of these countries.

As Stephen Leacock wrote, men may be too crooked even for business; but women are, even for war, too violent.

My mysterious South Australian correspondent, writing from a location precisely north of the absolute South Pole, shares these comments from the esteemed Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud industriousness has extinguished the religious instincts, so that people no longer have any idea of what religions are about and, as it were, just register their presence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement. …

“How much naivety — venerable, childlike, and boundlessly stupid naivety — there is in the scholar’s belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above. … ”

This is from the 58th aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil, which began with a defence of idleness. How merrily he kicks away “the little presumptuous dwarf, and man of the mob, the brisk handyman of ideas, … of modern ideas!”

Grouse are “adapted” not merely to an environment, but also to being grouse. There is something remarkably grouse-like in their overall design, many constituent parts, and in each of their responses to stimuli. They even seem to know that they are grouse; to be contented with that identity, willing to live and even die in the condition of being grouse.

One may make no sense whatever if one takes them to be something else. They will persist in being grouse-like, and in point of fact grouse, even if we try to persuade them that they are cockatoos.

Some other creature may invade their peculiar environmental niche; might even do so successfully. The grouse will respond to that invasion implacably, as grouse. They will under no circumstances attempt to transform or metamorphose themselves in reaction to such an existential crisis. Indeed, they will not consider such a proposition. It is always strictly fight or flight, on unambiguously grouse terms.

They will, if shot by a hunter, even taste like grouse.

Should they flee, it will be to the sort of territory that they find agreeable to themselves, as grouse. They will even go in search of such locations, should that prove necessary. But finding no such territory, they would frankly rather starve than cease being grouse.

It would take a miracle for a grouse to develop or “evolve” some new characteristic. For as I’ve said, it would never occur to the grouse themselves. More likely it would occur to the Grouse Angel — the being assigned by God to look out for grouse interests. Yet even in such a case, the new character would emerge from the underlying grouse-ness of the former character, and appear as an extension of the grouse repertoire. It would be all of a piece with their ontology.

It is some time since I tried to read Polybius (c.202–120 B..C.), the ancient historian. It was a memorably difficult, and fairly rewarding experience, which I kept mostly to myself. Part of the difficulty was from the man’s style. Though a Hellenistic Greek, he gives a good and admiring account of the Roman Empire that had emerged, and was still emerging, in the second century before Christ, and I was fortunately provided with the six little green volumes of Paton’s Loeb edition (with English translation en face), published just over a century ago. I say fortunate, for otherwise I would have been reading the Penguin, or some other mass-market paperback which is livelier and smoother and quicker-paced, as well as thoroughly unreliable. But if you haven’t mastered Greek or Latin, and do not intend ever to do so, you do not deserve anything better.

Only the first five of the forty books of Polybius survive in their entirety. Happily, the most enlightening passages are in the incomplete Book Six, which tells how Rome blended monarchical, aristocratic, and even democratic elements, and how this came to be.

Polybius is notorious for his asides, on matters from geography to constitutional law to biographies and seemingly irrelevant events (though possibly relevant if you have been following). The paperback translations typically make these intentional digressions into random footnotes in unreadably small type, or discard them entirely, lest they interfere with “the flow.” A modern may diligently read every page, and not realize at the end that he hasn’t read Polybius. Usually, he has just read the puff-piece on the back cover, and has anyway such limited intelligence and imagination that it hardly matters. However, the materials exist if he wants to study Polybius seriously, and these have not been pulped yet, in the more respectable academic libraries.

There is some kerfuffle at the moment about Anthropic and other “artificial intelligence” companies, buying up second-hand books, quite literally by the million, and feeding them into machines which chop off their spines then mechanically flip the severed pages, taking pictures that are sometimes in focus, before shredding everything that it has used. The pictures are then electronically manipulated to some mysterious cybernetic purpose, and may be spat back at paying customers, in various packages at elevated prices. (This is why it is so convenient for them to ignore copyrights.)

The machines do not benefit from this experience, because they lack intelligence, or indeed, consciousness. Verily, you have to be an “AI” executive even to attempt the evil this implies.

Too, you may be ignoring various other minute particulars, besides copyright laws, although you can always buy a “progressive” judge.

Balance this against the windfall profits of all the second-hand bookstores, who may now sell all the worthless junk that had been accumulating on their backroom shelves. At last, bookselling is profitable again!

For almost all modern printed matter is typographically rude, ugly, and worthless as the texts it encodes. You won’t find much published after 1970, if you visit the High Doganate: I lack the space to keep garbage. Readers apparently agree with me, because there is little evidence that even students read anything with the slightest attention. They have machines to do the reading for them.

Despite my near-allergy to Hawaiian shirts, and to those children born in the West since the fall of the Soviet Union, and even though I am fanatically opposed to abortions, regardless of birthdates, I have formed something of a male crush on Palmer Luckey, and his Anduril company. I am also, incidentally, disgusted by mullet haircuts, and male crushes.

But I am entirely in favour of winning Cold Wars, and every other battle against the “furriners,” certainly including the Communist Chinese, and revolutionary Persia. And this despite the fact that I admire much Soviet and Chinese and even Iranian engineering, while wishing to blow it all up without delay.

Too, recently, I have been coming around to enthusiasm for (the misnamed) “Artificial Intelligence,” apparently a minority position. For I am intrigued by the idea of (human-directed) unmanned submarines, that could cruise the oceans to any depth without giving anyone the bends, or for that matter by aircraft that could do 10G turns without giving the pilot a monstrous headache. To say nothing of inexpensive lasers and masers.

Of course, the point of war is to “make the other guy die for his country,” and this design aspect would not change.

Mostly, I am glad to see the Yanquis recover their desire to be … not the world’s policeman, but the world’s leading gun store. It is time collective “we” resumed shooting up the bad guys, or assisting those who will shoot them for us. Or just making the world very peaceful, by increasing the supply of lethal weaponry, too frightening for anyone to use. Alas, “peace through strength” continues to seem contradictory to wimps.

If I may be boastful for a moment, and I may, it was glorious to remember Roger Smith, although I could not be present at his coffee shop tribute in the dark interior of mountainous British Columbia recently. This dear companion of my childhood and youth left a musical and meteorological legacy among those lucky enough to know him, and not among those unlucky ones not touched, for instance, by his mirth. I think of the Kanlogian literary and hymnological tradition, launched from the abbreviation for “Kan I use logarithms?” in a high school math test. It came into being just a few years after Elvis, and I still sing it to myself:

You can hear everything through the air vents,
Especially if you’re eating from a gourd,
But if you don’t give praise to Batman
You’ll be eaten by the Armadillo Hordes …

Alas, few will grasp the metaphysical depth. It explains, for instance, Donald Trump, whom we both could appreciate as an explosively vulgar and transformative character, whether or not a divine gift to the world. In the manner of Batman, he has seized upon our political reality, and sought our praise, although it has not been forthcoming from the progressive constituency. And truly, they will be consumed by the armadillos.

Yet look closely, and one will see that Trump is of no religious significance whatever. Even the faithful, of several confessions, do not waste their time on him during liturgical acts, and largely ignore him in their preces privatae. This, because he is, more or less exclusively, just a political phenomenon or agency.

If one is Latin-Mass Catholic, or Greek Orthodox (the two forms of worship that are theologically sound), one will notice something that the world does not. The victory of Left or Right, the trends in politics, have little or no influence upon the religious environment. There is only an effect vice versa: as genuine religion expands, politics reciprocally contracts. The contemporary disappearance of Christianity from our habits and thoughts, will not be affected by who leads in the polls, or has won the latest election.

All politics could go to Hell, and it would not even make the papers in Heaven.

Not having “believed” in the crisis of overpopulation, when it was in style back in the ‘seventies, I have little trouble not believing in the crisis of underpopulation now. Neither will make our societies any better or worse. Making them better has always been an end in itself, quite distinct from statistics. Without such non-statistical, transcendental concepts as the good, the true, and the beautiful, things can only get worse, but I am confident the God who is their ultimate author will still exist. The more we separate ourselves from Him, the more we make ourselves into waste material, but the quantity of this waste is not really interesting. Our solar system is 100,000 astronomical units around, and even farther afield, there is plenty more space once we have filled that up with garbage.

And with no God, Christ, Spirit, there is no reason to stop expanding our immense cosmic junkyard. Indeed, there is no reason for us to bother remaining alive, as many of us have realized who became briefly enrolled in our various assisted suicide programmes. Perhaps they do us living favour by simply getting out of our way. Then, those with a sense of purpose will freely occupy the prime real estate, here on earth, and may compulsively try to improve it.

The women I seem to have least trouble getting along with are intellectually and biologically fecund. They tend to have large families, which takes a certain wilfulness. They will continue to generate “excess population” through time to come, while those not generating will peacefully die away. True, there may be some excitement, as the welfare plans collapse, and their pension accounts run out, but there is no rule preventing the rest of us from taking care of them in their aged feebleness, even if they are still cussing.

The proportion of “remainers” with a sense of purpose will thus continue to increase, and kindliness will thus persist, also, defeating modernity. These are and will be religious persons (and, by inclination, joyful), and whether they subscribe to one religion or another, who can project?

With little or less compulsion, regardless which murder and suicide cults endure, how marvellous it will be! For Christianity will always eventually prevail, in open competition. Deus vult!

As an indigenous Canadian — my father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers were all born here — I am naturally ashamed of how this country is grossly misgoverned. This goes beyond questions of political party, for all parties, though especially the Liberals, have contributed to our dive into a seemingly bottomless “shithole” (a technical term in economics). But this will only change by a fraction of a percent if, say, Mr Poilievre, or some other ratty politician, becomes prime minister. Canada, one might say, needs a Trump. That is, a transformative ruler, brave, quick, and intelligent too, who would be worth assassinating from the leftwing point-of-view; a profound hater of worthless garbage, income taxes, and every species of “progressive.” Well, maybe Trump is too moderate.

Politics, in a democracy like Canada’s, is the art by which our various factions are bought off, and the nation as a whole is prostituted. It is not more complicated than that.

At least nine in ten of our municipal, provincial, and Dominion government departments should be retired, “with extreme prejudice” whenever possible. Everything but the military, cops, courts, prisons, and the Geological Survey, must go (and then eliminate extravagance and corruption in each of the survivors). The fact that this would lead to incredibly rapid “capitalist” advance is not the purpose of this. An embarras de richesses might offer some obscure problems, but it is one of the risks of freedom. The destruction of every one of our state bureaucracies — with violence only if necessary, of course — should be an end in itself. It would also drive our Leftists up the tree, where they will discover that the apes do not understand their interest in sharing the bananas.

Governments should exist only to prevent demonstrated evils, and not to be their chief cause. The Church, too, should be voluntarily supported; then she, too, should be left alone.

For as Saint Paul wrote to able-bodied Christians (in II Thessalonians iii), “those unwilling to work shall not eat.” Christianity was, from the beginning, radically opposed to welfare statecraft. This world must work. We should aspire to make our portion of America, even the glaciers, Godly again; and not quit until they are melted.