Essays in Idleness

We learn from statistics (a magical formula) that the average American has taken a pay cut in each of the months since Mr Biden became president. It hasn’t been published, but I would guess that the same is true of Canada in each of the months since Mr Trudeau came to power.

European trends may be similar, and the European excuse is like ours: the world is awashed by inflation (and the public spending that is inflation’s cause). It does not reach the percentages that were achieved in the Weimar Republic (where one Papiermark became a tiny fraction of a pfennig), and probably won’t because in the cashless, digital economies of the future, the government will be able to push computer buttons, that will delete the currency holdings of everyone it doesn’t like, as was done experimentally with the cooperation of private banks in Canada last year. This is a wonderful, instantaneous way to restore a hard currency.

But there is no national politician who can match our little Justin for arrogance and stupidity, so I imagine this will take a few more years.

Is this, or will it be, a good thing?

I take for granted that it will happen, as I would take for granted that any aeroplane I was riding, with its nose pointed unambiguously to the ground, will soon become a recycling burden. But there is always the chance that we are in the power of a stunt pilot, who will pull out of the dive just in time. (And always the chance that he can’t.)

But objectively — taking a position that omits consideration of my own interest — it will probably be a good thing, at least in the economy. (I don’t think an aeroplane crash would be good for anybody.) This is because we are all overpaid, even those on welfare in Europe and America, and having less income will make us more frugal. In particular, the rising cost of goods and falling price of labour may encourage craftsmanship.

There is a similar view to be taken of the various leftwing environmental acts, such as those to prevent “climate change” (which of course is a chimera). The hideous expenditure, amounting quite literally to trillions, is entirely wasted, and makes the environment uglier and unsafer. But by simply depriving the masses of a larger and larger part of their earnings, frugality must emerge. Moreover, by destroying the industrial fabric everywhere outside Red China, it achieves something to which the Luddites always aspired.

And hey, I’m a Luddite. Who says that Luddites don’t have any fun?

Perhaps I have abused this term, Duodecimal, by using it out of the context of base twelve. This would be a shame. Since math class in childhood, I have adored base twelve, and have always recommended it — often even in preference to base sixteen. For if God hadn’t meant us to count in twelves, why did He endow us with eight fingers, two thumbs, and two feet?

Alternatively, in light of our further two ears, I could recommend the tetradecimal system — anything to sabotage our glib, metric-friendly, decimal arrangements.  An octal numeral system would be glib enough, doubling when expansive into hexadecimals (not to be confused with fine Babylonian sexadecimals). But I long for thirds as well as musical fourths. If we cannot partition the world neatly into threes, what can we partition it into? Fifths, or tenths, will not do, and I have never considered a frequency ratio of 3:2 (“Twinkle, twinkle, little star”) to be quite perfect, whatever the musicians say.

Binary can also be Godly. Think of the number of sexes. There are precisely two.

All of this is irrelevant to my current argument, however. It is about the prevalence of twelve-year-olds in the management of the BBC, and apparently, all other institutions. I am beginning to notice this, almost obsessively: that every modern, publicly educated human with progressive views has abandoned his spiritual growth, by age twelve (at the latest). He does not accumulate wisdom after that, and often he has already “terminated” at six, four, or three.

I don’t mean this literally, of course. So far as I’m aware, most of the younger sort of humans still pass through puberty, and then, all the later stages of physical maturity and decline. Indeed, judging from the present popularity of “sex changing,” and the universal addiction to recreational drugs, puberty is the terminal point.

I’ve been testing this theory in my walks about my native Parkdale (which the bureaucrats propose to rename “Taiaiako’n,” to confirm that it really belongs to the bureaucrats who administer indigenous people). Twelve years old would seem to be the emotional maximum.

Materialism, a wise Dominican once wrote (it was Walter Farrell, O.P., of River Forest, Illinois) invites a man to let himself go, to pieces. I would add that he will let go, in time, even of materialism, for it offers a kind of sticky, annoying discipline. It is the road forward, as this Dominican explained, while introducing John of St Thomas, the 17th century Portuguese philosopher; sanity and sanctity are the road back.

That is how we should test our political opinions. If they are practical, and can be realized, they are on the road forward, and on “the right side of history” as it were. But we should be looking for the other way. An initial test is that one’s views should be whimsical and useless. They should, with courage, frankly acknowledge a cul-de-sac. (The medical effects of my stroke, two years ago, are my principal advantage, in better equipping me for this journey backward.)

Newman said, that is the way to Heaven. “There is,” according to the sainted Cardinal, “a very much closer connexion between the state of Adam in Paradise and our state in childhood.” Nostalgia for the deeper past has a spiritual, not material, significance, and is the source of our (motionless) growth. In time we must anyway return, to seedlings.

Of course, the journey back should not be arrested, at the age of twelve, as I was hinting last week. For that would be like moving forward, with all the ignorant enthusiasm of youth. Rather, as Margaret Avison suggested, we should aspire to be like the delphineal poplar: trembling with morning light.

Among my instructions to my contemporaries, back in the ‘sixties, was to, “Grow up!” Gentle reader will observe that I had yet to follow this instruction, myself, and that my contemporaries were under the same chronological impairment. Now that I look back in time, I recall many of the sports and frolics of childhood that I enjoyed while ignoring my own diktat. Yet also I recall my irritation at the disobedience of friends. They would act strictly according with age, and without embarrassment.

Mr Ed West, a wise Substack pundit to whom I have become accustomed since a kind reader created a subscription for me, writes this morning about Teen Vogue. He does not mean this literally, however, for he is making a comparison to the website of the British Broadcasting Corporation, in its present state.

He deduces, reasonably from the evidence, that the website is under the control of twelve-year-olds.

Often, I mutter sotto voce, “Grow up!” to the media that is impinging on my consciousness, today. In my later youth, or early manhood, I myself became entrapped in the gearwork of the media, and realized while being processed through its toothed wheels that nothing really changes. It’s all a machine. (A machine is the actual device which assures that all products will be identical; that nothing will ever change.) But the media types of the nineteen seventies did at least pretend to be adults. This pretence would evaporate, however, in exciting situations. In the course of media evolution, or more precisely degeneration, “tabloid” journalism spread everywhere.

If the exponents of capitalism would make candid arguments, they might note the universality of this phenomenon. A “trend” in the marketplace sinks all boats and, contrary to the naïve argument of the economists, a quality product does not survive as a minority, even of one. The same rule applies to media as to the manufacture and sale of toothbrushes, which must all now be designed to include Disney cartoons, and have supersonic shapes. The people who design them are, presumably, twelve years old.

Fortunately, my old boar-bristle toothbrush was made in the days before injection moulding; and the BBC is possible to ignore, along with all the newspapers, even the once commendable Neue Zürcher Zeitung (now remodelled to be fashionably cool).

“Food, fuel, fodder,” will be needed, to which an Aberdeenshire hippie has added, “fibre, and farmaceuticals.” (He calls these the “Five Effs.”) The quality of each should be self-correcting, when our monocultures are all ground into forest farms and fishponds, in the economy of tomorrow. For there were always better things to do with a coppice than to make it into “news”; and electronic pixels shouldn’t be wasted, either.

For, who needs all these childish machines?

Jonathan Swift is the least lascivious writer in the English language. (I make such statements after the slightest review of my critical knowledge.) His Journal to Stella, written under the highest condition of intimacy to a woman, should be an inspiration to post-Puritans everywhere. Or to candidates for the priesthood.

I say “post” because in its very shrivelling and shrinking from eros, Puritanism exhibits a lascivious tendency. Old-fashioned, prudish women knew exactly what they were shrinking from, and it was an explosive temptation; and the prudish men were like the old women. Whereas the Dean Swift, and to some extent I assume the Miss Esther Johnson (the behovely “Stella”), could descend into the scatalogical without the least transit of the lubricious realm.

The other side of Swift is frequently forgotten; his unromantic “compassion.” He was perhaps the most generous patron of his Yahoo contemporaries in Ireland, that they had ever seen out of England. He would moreover mix, with these quite unrespectable people, just where they would expect to be found; and he was noticed by them. After his death, the poor of Dublin proposed erecting a statue to Swift, to replace the idol to Marlborough. (Ah, when Ireland was Christian!)

But it was the living Swift’s freedom from “sexuality” that puzzled me upon my first Maundy Thursday as a (conscious) Christian. I was young then, and in the fit of adolescent hetero-sexuality. The Gospels struck me as so wonderfully dry. Christ himself reached, through His Crucifixion, beyond the frame of human explanation, however extravagant. I knew from His words that, “When the dead rise again, there is no marrying or giving in marriage; they are as the angels in heaven are.”

It was a post-Puritan dogma, that He spake.  It separated that teaching from what had always accompanied the promise of paradise, before and after the Christian revelation. There would be no seventy-two virgins waiting.

Heaven, and Hell, are neither of them glib. It is in the approach to Good Friday, after the slow preparation of Lent, that we may begin to grasp this.

After nearly seventy years of seeking my fortune, or as I’ve come to realize, my “Fortunella,” I thought I had alighted in a field of Cumquats — under the roof of a supermarket yesterday. For these I have been seasonally seeking ever since I learnt to spell the word (though half the world insists on writing it with a “K”). For some reason, which I decline to recall, I identify these tart little miniature oranges (which are not Citrus at all, for they belong to the genus Fortunella) with the celebration of Easter; I would now be prepared.

Imagine my horror when, at the cash counter, I realized that I had purchased a box of Peruvian “Golden Berries,” sometimes called Cape Gooseberries, or Picchu Berries, or Aguaymanto, or Topotopo. They are not the same thing as Cumquats, and yet I, in my timorous foolishness, resolved to take them home, rather than make an unedifying scene.

“All that glisters is not Cumquats,” as Shakespeare might have said in the circumstance. Imagine shipping these sticky wee orange baubles the vast distance from Peru, to our northern wastes, for the express purpose of defrauding Cumquat purchasers. Unless, of course, no deception was intended. But I found these Golden Berries unnecessarily sweet, in a glib way, lacking in character.

I want Cumquats, as I might want Gold and Silver, much more than Dollars. This preference has become the more acute with the impending destruction of the U.S. currency. Communists, Arabs, and Brazilians have now conspired to denominate the world’s commodity trading in Chinese Yuan, depriving the Dollar of its almightiness. Worse, the bureaucrats in control of the North American economy have made their move to cancel it completely.

They are introducing a digital currency to replace physical money. The advantages, to our rulers, is that they may record and tax every economic transaction, no matter how small and how none-of-their-business. They will be able to eliminate savings and close bank accounts the way Justin and Crystia did during the truckers’ demonstration in Ottawa last year, but in the routine manner of the “social credit” schemes in Red China. We all become slaves, or “Cyber Uighers,” by this arrangement.

It is happening as I write, and is no exaggeration. It is awful, but it puts me in mind of a business opportunity.

An enterprising person, or persons, with access to wondrous amounts of gold and silver, should launch a private hard currency, or currencies, in response. He could open unofficial mints, in out of the way places, and stamp out coins of unquestionable value. These would probably be illegal, and would become certainly illegal once our governors found out, but hey. These coins would enable us to have a (tax-free!) informal economy, in the interstices of the official one, and thus survive imaginary global warming, and the other “crises” that are manufactured by the elect.

With time we could also organize an informal army, to be paid in cash, modelled perhaps on the Mafia. Weapons also, although proscribed by the politicians, would be freely available on the same terms.

The plan would be to shoot anyone who gets in our way.

I have a friend in another country who has a sister who can be a real problem. This is not because she happens to be insane. The doctors have put her on Clozapine, which is a popular anti-psychotic medication. Tests say that it discourages suicide, though I, a non-enthusiast for Big Pharma, wonder how the tests are tested. Its chief value, according to my friend, is that it makes the subject incapable of saying no to anything. So if she isn’t specifically asked to commit suicide, I imagine that she will put it off.

In the meantime, she will obey all orders.

Her recent acts of obedience have cost my friend not only his peace of mind, but also much of his property. I won’t go into it.

We, by which I mean I, should not mock such people as this sister. They live in a world that might resemble Hell, in some of its particulars. Had I such a sister I would, like my friend, endeavour to protect her, especially from her doctors. It is frustrating, however, when the girl is asked to sign on to some fraud. While one may argue, smugly, that fraud is illegal, and could surely be reversed by a court, the person who argues this is in the same position as a Clozapine user. He simply believes whatever he is told, and I daresay votes accordingly.

He is, in short, the portrait of a Canadian voter, or to be more fair, an urban voter in Ontario, for I understand that there are different propensities among voters in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and other remote places. I myself live in a neighbourhood of Toronto where I have noticed that most of my fellow residents are mad, prescribed drugs if they are not self-prescribing, and vote very reliably for the Liberal Party. They simply cannot say no, and believe everything they are told by their political masters. (Alternative messages are administratively suppressed.) Indeed, I wonder if Clozapine is now in the water supply.

The essence of democratic capitalism is theft; the essence of revolutionary socialism is murder; and then there is democratic socialism which is approximately halfway between theft and murder. Given the choice, I am partial to being robbed.

The (“democratic”) Canadian government has published its annual fiscal showpiece, in which spending will be increased by $67 billion and taxes by $12 billion. Both numbers may be considered “conservative” estimates.

Mr Stephen Harper, the last formally Conservative prime minister, noted that the current deficit is in excess of his last entire budget. (He was thrown out of office in 2015.) In other words, had he eliminated the income tax, sales taxes, customs, excise, and every other source of revenue, and merely spent what he proposed to spend, he would still have run a smaller deficit than his much-photographed successor, Mr Justin Trudeau.

Some similar observation may be made on behalf of citizens in most other “democratic” states. This is what happens when government is put in the hands of persons of cruelly limited intelligence, but narcissistic charm. We have no reason to envy the Americans, or the British, or the Dutch, or the Germans, or the French, &c. I currently except the Italians and Hungarians, but only until their next election.

Spending is out of control throughout the West, with inflation following, and economic self-destruction has been redoubled by phanatic environmental legislation. This is not a summary of the deceit that underlies all liberal politics: I merely indicate where our hopes should not lie. The old Churchillian argument, that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others, prevails chiefly among its elected beneficiaries.

As today is Lady Day, there must be about 280 shopping days left until Christmas. Thanks most recently to the Internet, however, it shouldn’t be such a rush, for by almost any website you will be bombarded with shopping suggestions, and provided with the instantaneous electronic means to order the advertised products — for yourself, or perhaps for delivery to another. The current very high inflation rate need not discourage you, for consumer credit is available to practically anyone, and legally to most.

Clearly, any difficulties that could obstruct a thoroughgoing materialism have been confronted, by our political and economical masters, and eliminated. That is why governments — working through captive media on frightening environmental contentions that are almost entirely false — are able to justify their rôle in placing restrictions. (Nature used to do this without government help.)

The world is not, in fact, running out of any key commodities; nor is it threatened, at least in the West, with any significant pollution issues (unless we count general vulgarity as an issue). But through their pretence that only they can save us (a claim previously monopolized by God), comprehensive regulations are now placed on everything we used to buy and sell. The invention of the Wuhan Batflu provided the last link in the chain of our biomedical dictatorship.

Now, not everyone will agree with my characterization of recent modernity; indeed, some might argue that I am exaggerating. To make my argument in telling detail would require more time on the Internet than I am prepared to spare; and so I will be satisfied with the mere gist of an argument.

One material innovation more than any other has perhaps been responsible. I’m inclined to demonize sliced bread. Or perhaps it was computer digitalization — which I regret because I am an analogue kind of guy. Whichever the case, the advance of technology has made possible an incomparable decline in the quality of our lives, if the human soul is entered into the equation. An inverse correlation with material progress may be observed across the cultural spectrum; for instance the consistent decline of educational standards when spending on schools is increased.

While subsidiarity may be presented as the opposite of extravagant central planning, it can also be misunderstood as the parsimonious material alternative. The general diffusion of property, such that each may own three acres and a milch cow, does not quite represent it. The spiritual dimension must be considered. It assumes that humans let more into their brains than prospects for material acquisition.

It is this fashionable drive for money and power that makes us — both capitalists and socialists — inferior to the animals.

Mother Mary, pray for us.

One of the incomparable advantages of being overweight, about Shrove Tuesday, is that you have acquired enough body fat to last through Lent. And one of my personal advantages, as your nutritional adviser, is that I have myself received enough unsolicited dietary advice in the last two years to rotate a horse. I’ve been told all about keto, and “pre-diabetes,” and a dozen more technical terms, and have listened involuntarily to some of the dullest credentialed specialists in our (surprisingly mediocre) healthcare system, who got my number from a hospital directory and won’t leave me alone.

I was reduced, during open-heart surgery in Lent 2021, to skeletal dimensions, and whimsically diagnosed with whatever disorders the doctors find most commonplace in their rounds. Oddly, notwithstanding what they had concluded, I did not have a sugar addiction (as my oldest comrades will attest), nor other alimentary self-abuses going into surgery; and have only developed wicked cravings since I came out.

But my combined proficiency in the principles of religious fasting, and pagan dieting, can now be drowned together in a glass of vinegar. The trick, according to the wisest of my nutritional examiners (who came from Sri Lanka, where everyone is now starving by government policy), is to mix a shallow ladle of pretty much any kind of vinegar into enough water to be able to swallow it, and swill this back. Frequently repeated, it will cover for a host of dietary sins.

This lady had other hints, for instance a counsel against nudity. You’d be wiser to eat what you instinctively want, from the list of attractive starches and carbohydrates, after they have been dressed in virtuous clothing, such as healthy fibres, fats, and proteins. This will prevent scandal in your digestive system — the most judgemental, Puritanical part of your physiological order.

But vinegar is my chief recommendation, for the days preceding Good Friday. Not only will you lose weight. You will be reminded, every day, of the Passion of Our Lord.

Though I have never acquired credentials as a “development economist,” for the same reason I did not acquire Grade XI, the field has sometimes mildly interested me, and I did once teach the stuff to university students (in South-east Asia). Indeed, my father and I took jobs, in our respective generations, in what Mao Tse-Tung called the “Third World”; and these jobs involved fussing in economies (on of course the infinitesimal scale). We both came to the conclusion, partly poignant and partly tragic, that as “Western advisers” we had been giving the most destructive and counter-productive advice. We were contributing only to the Westernization (or, “modernization”) of Eastern societies, and like the much-criticized imperialists of old, we were parsimonious in our gifts.

At least I, if not papa, concluded that the great colonial masters, especially the English and the Dutch, did not bring Christianity to the natives, if they could possibly help it. It got in the way of their economic transactions, including the frequent frontier wars. The natives were left mostly to extract the Christianity for themselves. Recall, if you can, that for the most part Sub-Saharan Africa was converted by native African evangelists, both Catholic and Protestant, not by missionary white men. It is to Africa that we now turn to be converted ourselves.

Development economics has followed a path similar. We do not export the example of our better angels. The marvellous traditions in the West of freedom and aspiration to holiness might as well have stayed home: our adventurers were almost exclusively concerned with getting rich. The many colonial administrators were expert in laying down bureaucracies, that would survive their departure and continue to oppress the general population, indefinitely. It is an irony that “globalization” has come back, as it were, to bite our ass.

But there are exceptions in the theatre of development. One of them is my hero, Lant Pritchett, from Utah, if you know what I mean. (By way of MIT and Oxford.) He is perhaps best known for proposing “smell tests” on foreign aid policies: simple statistical measures to test their actual effect over time.

He has made old-fashioned, Adam-Smith arguments for letting things happen. These include allowing the tired, huddled masses to emigrate, and therefore to immigrate, where they can make new and happier lives. This, as an alternative to the introduction of evermore sophisticated technology, both here and there, to exclude human beings from the processes of production, thus creating unemployable masses. It is not wrong to allow people to feed themselves, through their own labour, or even to live unharried; and I might add that simplicity is an aesthetic improvement on vroom, vroom.

Too, Pritchett (notoriously) recommended the export of our most polluting industries, along with our mountainous waste and trash, to the poorest countries. This will unfailingly cause an economic renaissance in each place, as each is provided, for free, with new raw materials. Those who have lived in some of the most impoverished environments will have observed human inventiveness at its finest, which invariably follows the most trying circumstances.

But among Pritchett’s creative suggestions (some as part of the “Copenhagen Consensus” of Bjørn Lomborg and associates), perhaps the one most exquisitely clever was his insight into demographics. He argued that the most accurate way to predict trends in childbearing by the average woman, was to ask her how many children she wanted. For better or worse, men get what they want, when they are allowed to pursue it; and it turns out that women have this power, too. The means by which they achieve it may vary, between good and evil; but women, like men, are not universally naïve.

It will perhaps be easier to list things, sold to the world with fraudulent claims of efficiency, than to find more delightful examples of inefficient things. One might include (for proposed retirement) almost everything that has been invented over the last five centuries, starting with sliced bread.

Looking up from my balconata, I would continue with aeroplanes. The amount of infrastructure that is required, to support just the few aeroplanes we see littering our skies, is astonishing. A glimpse may be had in any large airport, or small one, or aerodrome as it used to be called. There are a thousand, mostly grounded, human slaves and processors for every one who gets to be a pilot.

It is the same in the air force; and the excitement of flying these planes aggressively into each other, and dropping glamorous big bombs, takes up just a few moments of the average air force’s time. Plus, even when they are doing nothing in particular, these civil and military aircraft are noisy; and according to the environmentalists — well, I don’t care.

At a more mundane level, we should consider housekeeping. In one of these amateur science magazines (I think it was Scientific American), I read, a few decades ago, that an old time-study had been repeated. It compared how much time the “average housewife” (a creature known only to America) spent on household cleaning and chores, around (I think) 1972, with the aid of i.e. washing machines and vacuum cleaners, versus the amount she spent in 1872, with brooms and elbow grease. To no one’s surprise, or at least not mine, she was now more occupied by these trivial pursuits, which had come to include various mechanical preparations.

The dwellings, one could argue, might be marginally cleaner, and the work easier even while taking more time, but these are additional downsides, for they make the housewife more neurotic and lazy. This might be apparent if we repeated the study in 2023. It might be an efficient way to depress ourselves.

For this statistical woman had more free time in previous centuries. And when we add the hours she must now spend holding down a paying job, as a cog in someone’s efficient bureaucracy, we begin to see why she should become sterile. For feminism and the income tax require her to waste her days in this way.

Perhaps these three examples will serve for this morning. Or I could go on and on. For we would have more leisure, in addition to more children (and much happier, too), if we would give up our efficiency obsessions.

God, according to Josh Alexander, and sundry others including all Roman Catholics for the last two thousand years (excepting a few heretics recently), created man in male and female versions. These two sexes may also be found elsewhere in nature, indeed in all those creatures visible to us; and even attempts to name some hypothetical third sex has resulted in much unintentional comedy.

Mr Alexander is (or was) a Grade XI student in the publicly-funded St Joseph’s High School in Renfrew, Ontario — by reputation one of the more conservative and rural parts of the country.

The lad gained the quiet admiration of many of the girls in the school, and I should think many of the townfolk, too, by protesting the admission of biological males to the girls’ washroom. These would be soi-disant “transgendered” males. Several of the girls had told Josh that they felt uncomfortable, being displayed before these intrusive voyeurs.

The school board, however, took a different view, and told Mr Alexander to stay away, in November. When he continued to report for classes, they had him arrested — apparently for bullying, which, in their view, is identical to expressing an opinion. It is a low-intelligence environment. They have cited a policy statement by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, to complete the absurdity.

Mr Alexander explained to media inquirers: “They encourage anything that goes along with the woke ideology that they’re pushing in the education system, but if you dare speak out with anything contrary to it, there will be consequences.”

I recall my own experience of Grade XI, in a low-quality (but extravagantly funded) Ontario high school, more than half a century ago. I tried several times to get myself expelled, by skipping classes, &c; but failed, apparently because I was too polite to the administrators. The truancy laws prevented me from leaving until my 16th birthday. When that came, I promptly left not only the school but the country.

Of course, in those days the majority of teachers, students, administrators, and even members of the school board were at least partially sane. My departure thus required a “judgement call,” which, in retrospect, still pleases me.

The world had not yet gone mad, in the way we see exhibited in Renfrew; although there were signs that its hold on common sense was relaxing.

Now there is a boy old enough to be my grandson. He has disappointed me by trying to get back into the school, but in other respects, he wins my admiration. Felicitations!

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. — One of my most faithful readers counts that school as his alma mater, “back in the age of slide rules, typewriters, and the Sisters of St Joseph.” He has sent me “before and after” photographs, of his fellow students, then and now. The Sisters instilled a spirit of redemptive Catholicism, around which they still congregate, all these years later, to “lick their wounds” and to be assuaged. I was invited to be with them in the Ottawa Valley, Friday for St Paddy’s Day; what a paradise that would be.