Essays in Idleness

The French Revolution (remember that?) was, in some reckonings, the Extinction Event for Western Christendom. There have been quite a few since, but that one was memorable for heralding “populism”: the manipulation of great masses of The Peeple, chiefly through well-publicized lies, to form battering rams in support of small parties of Paris intellectuals. A national state (“France” with all her diverse regions) “progressed,” in a blink of historical time, from a constitution which balanced monarchy, aristocracy, and the commons, to one in which the Leftists of the day could order massacres of their more conservative rivals.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” as young Wordsworth declared. Young intellectuals across Europe were inspired, though most, like him, lapsed into reaction as they grew and matured, and as the consequences of this “progress” became clearer, in the Reign of Terror, then the Napoleonic Wars that engulfed Europe. With Nappie’s narrow defeat, however, a century of more-or-less peace befell the Continent: 1815 to 1914.

Politics continued, of course: war by other means. Stability returned where monarchies could be restored, but elsewhere, The Peeple were sometimes led to triumph in the establishment of “pure” if temporary democracies, governed by the lowest orders of society, with the passing support of the most gullible. Atheism was everywhere advancing. Christianity was also recovering, as it is wont to do. Contradictions were abounding.

We’ll leave later progress to another day: Communism, Nazism, Fascism, Maoism, and the succession of other “popular” socialist movements in the century since. Today this is all old hat, for the most part unknown to the half-educated and maleducated. The contemporary university student has, typically, no knowledge of history or historical time, and is a moral and spiritual vacuum, inflamed by passions he also does not understand.

My own view is not that it’s the end of the world; rather that we are entering, internationally, another of these progressive “dawns.” The latest ideology is Environmentalism, or we might call it Deep Ecology (a rejection of humanity itself, but using the conceits of a superannuated humanism). It is the new promise of a “liberty” detached from such old-fashioned restraints as human decency, and the sane. The century ahead should be very interesting, in the sense of the old Chinese proverb.

I watch today’s international “Extinction” marches with fairly lively contempt. It is a demonstration for — What? The young (including the compulsively senile) declare what they are against, but can never coherently explain what they are for. They will let Fate take care of that, meanwhile they make, once again, their quickly developing abstract demands, in little irruptions of malignity, currently symbolized by a strident Swedish teenager with Asperger’s syndrome. (Pray she will be cured!)

This overwhelmingly white “rebellion,” whose participants are inclined to accuse all opponents of “white supremacy,” is defined more generally by the abandonment of Reason. This follows universally from the abandonment of Faith: it is an old story.

As in the past, those responsible for public order look on with growing cowardice. This was my own second formative political experience: watching the custodians of order retreat and dissolve during the riots of 1968. (The first, was being caught in a bloody riot at Lahore, as a younger child, trying to get home from school.)

An auld acquaintance, with a gift for irritating me, tells me he is making (another) “documentary” with my tax money — a film about how the world is coming to an end, and how this is making people in Montreal unhappy. I imagine the Capitalists will be the culprits. They invariably are.

The world, as I mentioned, is not coming to an end, until God wills it. We are merely making it more miserable for ourselves to live and die here.

Perhaps gentle reader is already aware that I am a fervent Reactionary, and an enemy of all Change and Revolution that cannot lead to Heaven. A Reactionary must, after all, “accentuate the positive.”

The paradox is that these people can only be defeated by joy, and a love that cannot be reduced to lubricity. I invite gentle reader to look on joyfully: for notwithstanding the occasional inconvenience, the Kingdom of God is always at hand, today as yesterday and forever.