Essays in Idleness

My head is buzzing with the latest polls, to which gentle readers have directed my attention; and one I found this morning on my own, while checking the BBC to catch up on terror strikes and other horrors. I don’t think polls are useful, in the sense of practically good; but this does not mean I don’t think polls are accurate. Rather, they feed into something called “democracy” — an immensely destructive, de-civilizing force.

One learns that something like eight in ten nominal Catholics in America now think physician-assisted suicide is a fine idea. In this they reflect the general population, which is often consulted on the same. Physicians, not necessarily Catholic, are among the least likely to hold this view — less than half of them agree, it seems — but what does that matter? Once medicine has been fully “socialized,” they can be more or less told what to do.

Another email informant assures me that more than six in ten of my (nominal) co-religionists think the divorced and remarried (which is to say, people Christ specifically identified as adulterers) should be offered communion if and when they queue for it in church. But this is perhaps a little misleading, and not so pointed as first appears, for they also think anyone should be offered communion, on the analogy of aspirin when their heads ache.

Anyone? … I suppose they still mean any human; that they still draw a line somewhere. But as we have seen, when it is not defended, that line shifts.

The beloved British blogger, Father Ray Blake (see here, often), who must this morning warn readers that his post contains irony, recently patched, for National Cat Day (add it to your missals for 29th October), a sweet calendar picture of four cute, fluffy, expectant-looking kittens, sitting on a log.

“Look at these kittens,” Father writes in his caption. “Would you deny them the Eucharist?”

It was from the Beeb I learnt that four in ten Britons do not think Jesus was “a real person.” It does not follow they are monophysites, however. Another four in ten think He was resurrected; we are not told if there is overlap. But from other replies to poll questions, posed in a survey commissioned by the Church of England and others, one might gather that the primary mission of modern, public-sector education — that of inculcating idiocy in the masses — is now complete on both sides of the Atlantic.

I could go on. Oh yes, gentle reader, I could go on. The recent election of the Trudeau child in Canada makes any further polling in this country unnecessary. As outgoing prime minister Stephen Harper said in his concession speech, “the people are always right.” From decades past I know that he, too, is capable of irony.

The term “proggies” is supplied by yet another correspondent. I gather it is short for “progressives.” He explains, in light of yesterday’s effusion, that the work of broken homes is invariably completed by the auto-formation of addictive “behaviours” (I dislike this plural), of which serial murder would be just one. Sex, crack, and money, are three more. He cites for his example a musician who, while suffering more than one terminal disease, continued performing — only to collapse and be hospitalized — because of what seemed an addiction to approval. Once out of the hospital, it was on to the next town to repeat the cycle.

I added the term to this morning’s title, for euphony.

Also, to indicate that I do not think human stupidity is quite so simple or passive as may first appear. There is often something quite wilful in it. For as I have seen so poignantly illustrated among my fellows in Parkdale, here, such addictions are not confined to rock musicians. They are the background reality of post-modern life. The human metabolism is itself “adapted” (Darwinian allusion) to stupidity by various forms of dependence, or in the broadest sense, substance abuse. It is not a small matter to take their substances away. They will not mourn quietly.

Moreover, as my correspondent adds: thanks largely to liberalism, the whole modern world is oriented to the perfection of the addict’s delivery systems. This is expressed, statistically, as GDP, and worshipped in itself as our chief social good. To be fair, public education is only one of the delivery systems, for moral, intellectual, and spiritual Error.

This is why it will take something more than “better education” to resist the trend towards universal, abject, wilful stupidity. It will also take something more than the (now almost purely) secular idea of “mercy” or “forgiveness,” broadcast from Rome.

Should I happen to be elected the next pope (taking the name Pius II the Second), I would be inclined to declare a Year of Catechism, full of fasting and comprecation — directed not only to telling Catholics and the curious what the Church teaches (like it or not), and what the Church does not teach. For it strikes me, something more than conventional pedagogy will be required. Something really scary.

I think, in commemoration of Saint Jonathan Swift of the Ordinariate, I would be tempted to unleash a great and terrible wave of irony upon them.