Essays in Idleness

The reduction of Charity to Niceness has done wonders, to eviscerate the Church from within, and her cowardly response to e.g. the Batflu “crisis” has accelerated her retreat, from existence. I could laugh, though only malignantly, at the ruinously expensive reconstruction of parish churches in obedience to the last set of instructions from the Public Health Stasi. But now the faithful are told, by the nominally “conservative” guvmint in Ontario for instance, to close down the Mass entirely again — leaving the suckers only with the bills.

Yet there is some backwash. In the churches, as in the society at large, my sense is even Canadians have had nearly enough. My evidence is as ever anecdotal, and drawn almost entirely from the Internet under present Lockdown conditions, but I’ve noticed hints of rebellion here and there.

Those correspondents who feed me “database” observations (I have some good ones) find the reason for it. The authorities are ignoring even the information they have about the Batflu; such as church congregations are far less likely to spread infections than supermarket shoppers; or that muzzles and social distancing are counter-productive; or that massive testing and contact-tracing, tell them nothing useful. (The real questions are, who gets sick, how sick, and why. But the answers are often politically incorrect.)

The politicians’ house-pet epidemiologists are themselves transformed into sleazy politicians by the need to keep up appearances.

“But we have to do something!”

As one medical correspondent writes, her car may need oil. She will have to “do something.” But if what she does is to pour in corn syrup, her engine won’t work any better.

If there is one thing to know about a sleazy politician, it is that he cannot admit to a mistake; especially a catastrophic one. It is the one area where he will stand his ground. He must double down on what has been exhaustively proven not to work; he must pour in more corn syrup. He can’t afford not to, if he is to survive in politics, on which his personal wealth depends. It follows that he has a vested interest in a low-information society.

Or put this another way. “Common sense” is something with which all sane humans were naturally endowed, though most lose it. The absence of it voids the whole mind. But it does resurface, in the most unlikely places, like old socks. You don’t even have to be looking for them.

The replacement, in our public theology, of Charity with Niceness — part of the de-Christianizing process — has, for the moment, rendered Canadians febrile in the least creative way. But I do not think it is possible to survive a low-information diet for a prolonged period. Paradoxically, the “progressive” effort to coat all our surfaces with lies, blisters and cracks. At some point, people notice that they can’t breathe, and then you need a more aggressive dictatorship, to stop them breathing altogether. We’ll see how it goes.

Yankees can be a more feisty lot, even today. Consider a new administration under the Biden zombie. While the man himself may have trouble remembering his wife’s name, a flood of major appointments is now coming through his handlers. They seek to reanimate the Deep State, and quickly re-attach any tentacles that may have been severed by the Trump regime. In a country where almost half the electorate is convinced (correctly, I believe) that The Election was stolen, this is a promise of disaster.

The genuine popularity of “Trumpism” — not just the man but the swamp-draining tasks he (often inelegantly) promoted — bodes for the future. (Note I did not write, “bodes well.”) It suggests that a larger reckoning is coming than the one Americans have just been through. Having had a taste of the benefits that the Deep State had been denying, we might expect their next backwash to be Trumpism squared.

But Niceness and Charity are not communicating jugs. Such genuine Charity as our old, vaguely Christian society supported, will need to be regrown, as the Niceness jug empties onto the ground. The “progressive” campaign was to damage or, if possible, eliminate what was left of the Church. It doesn’t refill on its own, however, once they have smashed the vessel.

Our re-Christianization, or return to civilization — if that happens — will depend not on a vacated Niceness, but on something more muscular: namely, the Divine. Nor will it occur within any discrete electoral cycle. I would expect it to be, eventually, as continuous as our descent into barbarism has been.

But slower.