Essays in Idleness

The general consensus, in the rightwing circles that I electronically haunt, is that the world went permanently and methodically mad, a decade ago — coincidentally, about the time these Essays in Idleness were begun. It would be narcissistic for me to dwell on this relation; which, anyway, does not admit of an efficient cause. I suppose my “cancellation” by formerly bourgeois media employers, just prior to the launch of these Essays, could, after all, be mentioned. But this, too, would only be an effect of the descent into madness. I was “let go” from the Canadian press in the cause of Diversity, for I was the only remaining opinion columnist who did not agree with Diverse views.

Today, Canadian “bourgeois journalism” is a closed camp for the mentally ill. The same seems to be true in the other Western countries. It is impossible to buy a publication containing anything that resembles “news,” or opinions that deviate from the enforced Diversity standard. Some of these views are still uttered, however, elsewhere on the Internet. A test that sanity is returning might be, we suppose, the sudden return of bourgeois reporting.

Those confined in what we used to call (informally) “loony bins” will not be expecting things to improve. No efficient cause is conceivable. Myself, I look to divine intervention, which has been the normal means of our survival and endurance in the past (whether or not acknowledged). My reasoning is that, in the creation of the world, God equipped man with all that was necessary to become a reasonable creature. Thus random changes must eventually return us to the “old normal.”

Now, according to Paul Kingsnorth, “Western Civ” is not “declining, collapsing, dying or even committing suicide.” Rather, says Peter J. Leithart explicitly, it is dead. “The chickens of modernity (says Kingsnorth) “which the West created and exported, have come home to roost, and we are all increasingly covered in their guano.” But what if it is not “some chicken, some neck” (Winston Churchill) that we are greeting, but rather a dead parrot?

Hope may be invested in either of these points of view. The future does not depend on whether Western Civ is dead or alive, now or in time to come. Rather it depends on whether there is God behind everything. If there is, I should think, Christianity will resurface.