Essays in Idleness

We (in the sense of “I”) drop hints from time to time that we are “reactionary,” or otherwise indisposed to the contemporary social, economic, and political order. (There are local variations, but it’s basically all the same.) Sometimes we even explain ourself. There was an example the other day when we extolled discipline over the pigsty consumerism that passes for freedom in what is described as an “open society,” … and duty over “human rights.” Indeed, our rights, if any, must be dependent upon our duties, and not vice versa. Or so we hold: a typically reactionary position.

Verily, I recently confronted a kindly, well-educated, dreamy liberal, by declaring that, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your axiology.”

He replied, smartly, “So now who is the totalitarian dreamer?”

Enflamed, I accused him of being a Kantian deontological goody-two-shoes.

He then rudely accused me of consequentialism. The matter was resolved by ordering another pint.

But will the ceasefire last? For while I’m counting neglected values, I am reminded that so many, buried since the time of the Second World War, must, like Elvis, have secretly survived. Today’s radically progressive factions have gone to the trouble of digging them up for posthumous execution again and again, as if they were the corpse of Pope Formosus. Dead, perhaps, but one can hardly say forgotten.

One might think, for instance, that such sanctities as those of life, and of the family, had been sufficiently slain by the overthrow of laws against e.g. abortion and sexual perversion, half a century ago. Nothing, or hardly anything was left to discourage open living on the wild side. But the body of Western Civ is now disinterred at intervals of a decade or less, to be freshly dismembered. We progress from tolerance of these evils, to “zero tolerance” for any who refuse to affirm them.

I read in the e-papers that a fourteen-year-old child in Scotland can now be expelled from school for maintaining that there are only two sexes. There are at least ten items like this every morning I descend into “the news”; for some reason this one struck me as memorable.

Perhaps it was nostalgia. I was almost hounded out of school myself, at that age — and by my fellow students — for arguing that children ought to be spawned in test tubes, checked for eugenic quality before hatching, and raised in state-of-the-art child factories. My colleagues in learning did not realize that I was attempting satire. My point was, this is the way the world is going. I did not yet realize that drollness is against the law in Canada. I was called down to see a vice-principal and asked to explain my views, and how they could not be a challenge to peace, order, and good government. But I was not expelled. The downside was that I wanted to be, for the school was very boring.

There are now government quizzes in Canada to expose “two-sex” believers. I recommend that those beaded try a pseudo-Jesuitical subterfuge. Rather than admitting the charge, say: “Yes, there must be as many sexual orientations as there are people, but still I have some difficulty with this, because I can only count to two.”