Essays in Idleness

There is nothing new, certainly nothing exciting, in my view of controversial matters. For when the brain-fog of illness disperses, I find that I am pretty much the same. I am still a Royalist in politics, a Classicist in literature and art, and a Catholic in religion; and I still need leisure and space to explain each of these terms. My abstract sense of “loyalty” is to such propositions as these. It is more difficult now than in the past, to be loyal, for the modern person is raised and “educated” in perfect ignorance of civilizing principles. To some degree, it is not his fault that he can’t understand them.

My gentle reader will note, that I didn’t mention “freedom” in my short-list of very desirable, commonplace things. This is not because I neglect it, or fail to see its necessity. But I refer only to higher societies: the lower are conducted by violence and bullying.

To my mind, it should not be necessary to specify that “men” (a term that includes women) will enjoy considerable freedom within the order that grows from civilized laws. The individual liberties need not be spelled out too exactly, because telling the citizen what he is free to do has the effect of limiting his freedom. It will always be greater than any legislator can imagine, and by making excessive laws he abridges.

Yet it is order, not freedom, that is hard to supply; for a dictatorship is a disorder. It is held together only by compulsion, and it disintegrates when the compulsion is relaxed. “The Left” do not realize that, all the violence and bullying they advocate, to achieve their programmes, will not last. It will fall apart when they lose their zeal, and leave behind only a memory of unpleasantness.

Bureaucracy is the primary method for bullying in societies today. It is thought to be a “necessary evil,” although it is an evil, unambiguously. It comes as a rhetorical trick, with “democracy,” along with other imponderables, such as “fairness.”  Our political judgement is vitiated by a vocabulary that is a slurry of vague, but loaded, terms. These words, which may or may not have meant something in the historical past, now only serve as gravelly mud-balls.

My own ancestors had a lively disposition towards “responsible government.” The idea was that its officers, when in power, should be held personally responsible for their acts. They were not an anonymous bureaucracy; they were not shielded.