Essays in Idleness

The author of these Idleposts is a psycho. This I deduce from the latest “study,” which claims to reveal the motivation behind all those not in lockstep with the latest therapeutic doctrines. (Here.) Specifically, while I outwardly obey the Six Foot Rule of social distancing (known in Canada as the Two Metre Rule) — for this is always wise in Parkdale where I live — I am inwardly rebellious. And this, although I have no therapeutic excuse. For as we are now told by the epidemiological authorities, one may utterly discard the Rule, but only while acting as rioter, arsonist, looter, race hustler, or “peaceful protester.”

“Ooh, a study!” as Sarah Hoyt says. “That’s almost as good as a computer model!”

Some of my remarks on scientism might perhaps be recalled. We had a “renaissance” of science in the 12th century (see the standard work by Charles Homer Haskins), arguably in the 17th, and some respect for science as late as the early 20th until the Great War, but have sunk back today into scientistic tyranny. The one exception is in applied technology where, because there’s money to be made selling high-end products, and competitive military goods, small corners of the economy are devoted to inventing them. We have scientific “gamers,” as it were. But these people are inclined to go mad, as we see for instance in Silicon Valley — whose genuine, apolitical nerds are under constant pressure to sign on to every left-progressive “talking point.”

This is one of several ways in which, to my view, the “masters of technology” are actually the slaves of it, whether here in the West or in Red China. But well fed, in both places.

As an old Cold Warrior, and once “science kid,” whose childhood developed through the 1960s, there is nothing that ought to surprise me. We have Antifa today; we had the Weather Underground then. We have parallels to every event I witnessed through the idiot box of adolescence, and vice versa. Even the destruction of American cities by riots and crime isn’t new; nor the supine response of our liberal leaders. The obvious left bias of news and entertainment was the same then as now, only less shrieking. The replacement of flatfoot journalists, with malicious ideological clowns from the universities, then a work in progress, was by the end of the last century, complete. The poison spread, through all media of information. We’ve reached an Age of Unreason to match Robespierre’s, and seem now to be waiting for a Napoleon.

Charlatans are the handmaids of paganry. That the charlatans slide into violent insurrection, even against the better pagan customs, is not something historically new.

The alternative is improbable: another Age of Faith. This would necessarily include a subsidiary restoration of faith in science — in the modest belief that if we follow the facts where they lead, as opposed to where we want them to go, a lost perception of cosmological order will also be, willy-nilly, restored. “Modern science” — an unambiguously Christian construct — depends entirely on one assumption. It is, that a universe God created will make sense. Logic, or the principle of non-contradiction, will hold up, and where it doesn’t seem to be doing so, it is not God, but we, who have got it wrong.

By the inversion of “values,” at the present day, the sane views are labelled as “psycho.” The truth is not the true, but what we (or our masters) want to call true. This “truth” is “settled,” from one moment to another; and is not to be discovered, but imposed.