Essays in Idleness

“Fate dominates the lives of men,” — I have this from Hilaire Belloc this morning — “though Will is a corrective of Fate.” In the item I was reading, Will is employed to escape the Fate of conversing with an excruciating bore, whom Belloc (gratuitously) suspects is Hungarian. Some clever manoeuvring in a railway eating car, and they are soon separated by “two commercial travellers, a professional singer, and a politician,” terminating the recitation of an improbable tiger-hunting story.

Belloc had some Will, to be sure, and so had various others in history, including a fair proportion of the Christian martyrs, or rather I should think, all of them. In the end, death is certainly a way of concluding an interminable conversation — the death of either one or the other — though of course, it is an extreme move. Accede, instead, to the wishes of one’s interlocutor, agree to obey his Will at the start, and the conversation can go on forever. I mean this literally, for in Hell it may continue in perpetuity.

Several of my correspondents have begged me to comment on the latest developments in the “gay agenda.” I must confess that I find that conversation boring. In this Province of Ontario, for instance, we now have a new scheme for “sex education” to be imposed on our little ones in the public schools, beginning in September. They will be instructed from an early age, in addition to what they learn already, not only that every imaginable sort of lubricity and coupling is “natural” and “good”; but too, that anyone who denies this is a “hater,” and therefore potentially eligible for punishment under our constantly evolving laws. Various parents’ groups are resisting, with little effect against the forward march of the homosexual and now “transgender” alliance — activists who have come to command a nearly closed camp of government, bureaucracy, academia, the media, and the courts.

Defeat, we are facing, on innumerable fronts, as the Gnostic powers advance against us, to consolidate their previous victories, and then conduct their mopping-up operations.

Example: I see from my inbox this morning, that Toronto is soon to host a massive public orgy for the disabled, to coincide with the Parapan Am Games this summer. (It is not yet an official Olympic sport.) In a news report, from a nominally “conservative” newspaper, this is presented as another “barrier” about to fall. An organizer, who is a “disability awareness consultant,” herself bound to a wheelchair as well as to the rubbish “science” of sociology, moans in the usual way about past oppression. Non-disabled people have been guilty of denying accessibility to sex among the disabled, she speculates, owing to the reactionary assumption that they have less libido. All this must change.

Nothing easier than to change public assumptions on sexuality, as we have observed over the last decade or two. There is little left to shock the bourgeois, and we cannot expect the avant-gardes to encounter much resistance, as they proceed on the remaining fronts of paedophilia and bestiality.

I used the term “Gnostic” advisedly, for that is precisely what we have faced, as many alert Catholic and some other Christian writers have begun to realize fully. Go read Making Gay Okay, by Robert Reilly, for a summation of the recent history; then go read Eric Voegelin for the deeper history. Verily, there is nothing new under the sun; and through history, those who have denied the natural and supernatural order, have not rested until their own attempts to change reality itself, have blown up in their faces. In the end, the revolution always eats its own, and already we observe the conflicts between e.g. advanced feminists and the latest “transgenderism” — which denies that “women” have any standing at all.

To the Gnostic, in his quest for self-justification, material reality itself is the oppressor, and therefore material reality must be altered. We say that God made us male and female, and in an objective sense, He did. In effect, the Gnostic does not deny that a quick glance at the newborn’s genitalia will sort them nicely. His (or her, or its) critique is directed ultimately against God. The response is, How dare He? How dare He imprison us in our bodies?

We are gods ourselves, imprisoned in human flesh, according to the basic Gnostic thinking. We must act as gods, and correct Him. We shall impose Our reality over His, and this must necessarily involve the destruction of all those taking rearguard action on God’s side. In the end this is not materialism, at all — an innocent creed compared to what we are facing. It is finally an extreme form of spiritualism, demanding the triumph of the “spiritual” over the “material.” More exactly: the triumph of something purely (and viciously) spiritual, over the combined material and spiritual of God’s creation.

And as Saint Paul taught — and as Christ taught, before him:

“Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers; against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in high places.”

It is not a new fight, and we are wrong to imagine there is anything novel in the present contest of Wills. Look back to earlier centuries to find glaring examples of Gnostic antinomianism. This has instead been a Christian fight all along — the essential Christian fight, all through the centuries, against the powers of darkness, surrounding and often penetrating into Holy Church. Consult the Scriptures, and we are given fair warning of what happens the moment we let down our guard.

We know that the assault will not end voluntarily. The activists will always want more, and more. One cannot reason with them, because the very premisses are disputed, on which we might argue. As we have discovered in practice, there is no “debate.” Every word, from “tolerance” forward, has a different meaning for us and for them. The battle is not even a dispute about ends, but over reality itself.

Prayer makes perfect sense in this battle, personal prayer and the aggregation of prayer, for against a spiritual enemy we must summon spiritual allies. In material terms, we must stiffen our spines.

It is a little-known fact that the Devil is a colossal bore. He began the present round by querying contraception, asking us in our charity to “tolerate” this and that, and even begging for what he presented as minor concessions. Now we have a taste of the Devil’s toleration, on the minor concession of leaving our children alone. We made the mistake of allowing the conversation, and letting him incrementally advance, from one tedious little demand to another.

At the beginning, we could wisely have done as Belloc suggested. It was a simple matter of putting between us “two commercial travellers, a professional singer, and a politician.” We are beyond that now, fully fixed in his trap. Greater acts of the Will, will be required to avoid him.