Essays in Idleness

Often I am asked, “What would you do?” …

I think it is a fair question, for I was never in agreement with the late beloved curmudgeon, Auberon Waugh, who said the journalist’s job should be purely destructive. In this respect, I try to be impure, offering, for instance, frequent affirmations of Christian belief, to supplement my stock-in-trade of renouncing the Devil and all his works. Even on the plane of mundane existence, the occasional suggestion of what might make life more endurable should not be ruled out.

As a journalistic account is called “a story,” the journalist should stop to ask himself if what he is writing is a good story. Has he omitted useful literary devices, contradicted himself, skipped connectives and crucial details, or supplied some that were not strictly necessary and might be in blasphemously poor taste? Other questions to himself might have been overlooked, such as, “Will the reader be uplifted by this, or will he be dunked deeper in the contemporary slime?”

But Mr Waugh was right to hint that the journalist who proposes to solve the world’s problems is, at heart, a jackass. They cannot be solved. Sneering negativity makes more sense. My excursion in yesterday’s Idlepost into the cloud cuckooland of utopian ideals might be explained by the fact that I’m feverish at the moment.

A reader (no less than my Chief Texas Correspondent) wrote, “You seem to have been born in the wrong time.”

“So?” I replied, defensively. “Everyone makes a mistake now and then.”

An alternative explanation is that I am trying to show how we moderns are trapped in a blind alley of our own enlightened choice. We cannot make improvements in our lives, or win our freedom, by the methods that were devised to make improvements, and free us. And, we can’t get out of them, either. We are accroached progressives who have left ourselves only one path forward, and that leads into a brick wall. We can acknowledge only political solutions and … there are no political solutions. The only conceivable way out is backwards, but our car was designed to have no reverse. (Or brakes, or anything but an accelerator.)

Politics, as I like to say, is “the art of the impossible.” It is impossible even to imagine how, by a political process, any large modern nation state could devolve to the point where locals could have control of their own affairs. The vested interests for Large are too large. Big-league politicians, of any stripe, do not voluntarily part with their powers, whatever rhetorical roughage they may spew, and small interests will always be crushed or bought off — more often with lies than with money. This is why I concluded that with God all things are possible. They aren’t with men.

The limit of what we can do for ourselves through politics is seek ameliorations, none of which can possibly stick — unless something unforeseeable by any man happens.

Our foreseeable future is something like what “PRC” China is already achieving: using advanced surveillance technology to rank all citizens by obedience to the State’s commands, and arrest all those with failing grades. (Going offline and unplugging all appliances won’t hide you, as anyone with a techie son can learn; in our brave new world, even Jeff Bezos can be monitored.)

It is true, we still have some checks and balances in the West (semi-independent judiciary and the like), but note that they are all inherited from the distant past, and all are currently under unthinking attack from both Left and Right ends of the political spectrum. And while only one of those is demonstrably insane (guess which?) they routinely alternate in power.

Time, in my view, to revive the old-fashioned stratagem, for when you find yourself inside the belly of the beast. Complete passivity is not an option, so what you do is, pray.