Essays in Idleness

I have not seen a lot of movies in my time, and most of those were in drab cinemas in Asia. But perhaps my favourite line in politics was heard in one of them. It was The Ugly American, as I recall, and among the stars was M. R. Kukrit Pramoj, the future prime minister of Thailand. He played the prime minister of the imaginary, oriental state of Sarkan, which was falling to the communists. Mr Marlon Brando played the American ambassador to this benighted country, and he is frustrated by Kukrit’s good-humoured composure, during frightful, fatal events. Brando asks how Kukrit can be so calm when his head will be mounted on a spike in the morning.

“If my head is to be on a spike, I want it to be smiling.”

Among my favourite politicians, this aristocratic, cultured man had something in common with Christ Jesus: he had an answer for everything.

Some similar reply to a “moral panic” is needed for the times. Not only on “climate change” issues, but in every political contention, the Left provides such a moral panic, giving drama-queen critiques to silence its opponents. With this goes its censorship campaigns, that extend through media and entertainment.

Our age is thus drowning in lies; like every other age. Reading Karl Kraus lately, I see that his world of more than a century ago was also drowning in lies. But he, like Jonathan Swift, and Socrates, was in the habit of confuting it, with gentle, mordant irony.

Man is a creature. So is an ape; so is a fish. A bicycle, on the other hand, is a machine. Can you tell the difference?

It is a distinction that may seem obvious, to those familiar with creatures (which are created living, by God, &c), but may become unpleasantly subtle to those who restrict their interest to machines. “Artificial intelligence” enthusiasts (and unenthusiasts) are the most recent Cartesians of this sort, in our discardable, historical progression. “Climate change” activists make another whole order; and there are, and will be, others.

The modern Cartesian, like the more ancient follower of Descartes (or the Englishman, Bacon), will focus attention exclusively on large, and very complex, “machines.” He uses the term in a poetic, or rather an anti-poetic way, for its allegorical value. He assumes, in the absence of God, that these large things are machine-like in their operations, and that they respond to human or random interference as a machine would respond. For instance, they cannot know what is happening to them.

Creatures die, machines do not. But machines can be broken. They can also be fixed (unlike dead creatures), but, they cannot fix themselves. They were born dead, as it were.

The atmosphere will be today’s example. At the University of California, Irvine, researchers have been investigating the electric field that surrounds airborne water droplets — in which hydroxide molecules appear, or are created. These were previously thought to be products of the atmosphere’s interaction with the Sun (as a lot of things ultimately are). The mechanism in this appearance or creation was not previously understood; nor is it now. It is however now observed a little more accurately. The molecules are a product of the special electrical conditions at the surface of these water droplets.

Why should this be significant? Because these “OH” molecules oxidize hydrocarbons, which would otherwise build up in the atmosphere, indefinitely (as the environmentalists fear). They are a signal part of the atmosphere’s chemical technique of self-repair, removing a variety of poisonous gases. This is among the many ways the world is invisibly cleaning itself, even without external interaction. For the world is not like a machine. It is like a creature.

This is the misconception at the heart of the “climate change” fraud: the assumption that the atmosphere is a machine; that when it goes wrong it must go wrong indefinitely; that if men do not fix it, it will not be fixed. But as we have, and will, discover, the atmosphere takes care of itself. Its telos, or fulfilment, was fully anticipated, before the first environmentalist was born. The arrogance of our environmentalists is unnecessary.

It sounds like a convenience franchise, now; somewhere you might go to buy cigarettes. The events of “Nine Eleven” have faded into cliché, and are used for cliché in our political environments. This is perhaps a bit better than an annual bathing in dubious sentimentality. But nothing approaching to an historical “lesson” has been learnt or is being assimilated. The history since has consistently painted modernity as a moral vacuum, and the West (once Christendom) as an empty casque.

This is disappointing, for a brief moment at the time I thought we had suddenly awakened. As late as November of 2001, there was a common attitude of defensive loyalty, before our leftish lunge resumed. By Christmas, however, it was obvious that the filth had resurfaced, and that if we carried the battle into Afghanistan and Iraq, it would be lost to Islamic fanatics. The only reason not to fight those wars was because they would be lost. And they were, one again, lost, as badly as we lost Vietnam to Communists.

When we were tested, we wilted. The contemporary “Western man” abandons his frontiers.

Several of my friends would seem to have travelled farther East, even than I did on the weekend. They have congregated in Quebec City, where the (Dominion) Conservative Party is having one of its occasional conventions. The party is ahead in the polls (by more than ten points, last time I checked), and if the progressive N.D.P. can continue to split the progressive vote with the progressive Liberals, the progressive Bloc, the progressive Greens, and other progressive parties, they might sail home at the next election.

But the Conservative Party is also, like all of the “mainstream” media in Canada without a single exception, also committed to progress; although typically they would not spend quite as much of our money on it.

Party leadership (that would be a Mr Poilievre, speaking in French) has tried to focus national attention on his cheap shots, such as the cost of other party leaders’ jet aeroplane rides. Winning the next national election will require him to increase the party’s nine (of 78) Quebec seats, in most of which the competition is instead between the “séparatistes” and the “federastes.” … Bonne chance!

The Conservatives have won a plurality of votes in recent Canadian elections, and would win by a landslide if we only counted English-speaking men, but the Liberals, with the support of other progressive parties, generally squeak through to form another guvmint. Nobody minds, however, for Canadians, who are not very masculine, enjoy paying taxes, and are indifferent to free speech. We have an extremely low-intelligence electorate, especially in Ontario.

While I can’t be with them, owing to my own masculine indifference, let me take this opportunity to at least express my own policy preferences. That would be to close down all agencies of the Dominion government, except for the military ones, which I would transform (away from vegetarianism). I am particularly eager to cancel the Revenue Agency, or agencies. But I would allow a few symbolic institutions, such as the R.C.M.P. and the Geological Survey, that could be maintained with modest voluntary funding from a few wealthy citizens.

This need not excite the ambitions of our bureaucratic class, however. They would all be fired.

It is not possible to know very much about a person, except after time when one has parted from him, and through the “medium” of love. And here, unless the love is genuine, and not a mere sentimental extravagance, one cannot “see” another person, only some of his minor sins. To know oneself, under these conditions, is also very difficult, and impossible for many, I am convinced — today, but probably yesterday, too. There are too many distractions, and no attempt can be made to establish the privacy that a “free man” ought to establish. In particular, his every morning, awaking to his alarm clock, is an entry into public life. It must shake him away from the self that was sleeping. For public life is not limited to politics, it happens everywhere that one may go, “outside.”

At the end of summer I journeyed to the Far East (of Ontario), and years after being removed from family life myself, was surrounded by the family life of others. It was marvellous: the various generations congregated, in the old grand-parent home, in an atmosphere that was spacious and graceful. The long weekend of “Labour Day”; a time of potentially genuine leisure, between then and now; between any then, and any now.

It was an environment few “moderns” can experience today, because most of us come from broken and childless families (or else we have children who are essentially orphans: the most public life that is possible). Our society overall is badly broken by our autonomous arrangements, that ruthlessly enforce an interface with public life. Few can ever find a place to hide.

An extended family is almost a requirement, for privacy. It is needed to escape from the commercial life of “a job,” with “holidays” that match it: another form of work (called “fun”), with deadlines. A person may be alone, but this is not the same as private, for he is flotsam, bobbing in the polluted sea of popular culture, shifting upon the dirty tides of passing trends. He has no religion to anchor him, that was formed in a family; it is rare when a person discovers his own. Removed, both from family and God, our typical contemporary has no place where he can meet himself, and “talk.”

It is the private, and hidden, life I am considering: a life “within.” But this does not mean a life inside one’s noisome ego. For apart from family, and in a restricted sense, even from God, a person has a soul which cannot be abandoned. (The ‘modern’ is cut off from family and God, yet even he has a soul to return to. Parted from God, we can only return to God.)

It is a “fine and private” place, “inside the inside” as it were. Let us sound the retreat.

We are, some of us (including all the Catholics I know, the Orthodox, the Jews, and most of the Protestants), still enthusiasts for “art.” That is, we favour creative human forms over inhuman or non-human forms; and form over chaos, life over death. You might say that at the back of every humanized mind (as opposed to de-humanized) there is a Luddite, waiting to get out, and rehearsing his moves against that Machine, which is currently called Artificial Intelligence. We are backward (I hope this does not sound too proud); we continue to backwardly prefer Nature, to the Illusion projected by every progressive, revolutionary activity. For none of these movements are centred on the human; none are “inclusive” — of us.

That, to my mind (when I was a comparative religionist, many many seasons ago), was the intellectual significance of Jesus Christ, as compared with, say, the Western (not the Eastern) notion of the Buddha, or Karl Marx. The future revealed to us by Christ was unquestionably a human world. We would strive, in our incremental human way, through life and into death. This world in which we have found ourselves should be made, in our characteristically incremental way, more and more human.

Artificial Intelligence, as an ambition or ideology, presents the most striking alternative. For it will homogenize everything, and make it a great bore. (We will be “bored to extinction,” as a French girlfriend used to say.) Previously, we had to depend on low-tech Marxism to do that for us — to drain all interest from our future; to make us not necessarily eager to die (for human instincts still impede us), but indifferent in the matter. To make us perfectly objective and unbiased, with regard to ourselves.

Is the earth good for humans? This is a Christian rhetorical question, with echoes in each of the other “world religions.” It assumes the answer is, Yes.

It has been replaced by a question of the environmentalists, that is also asked by the digital technicians, in their sleep:

Are humans good for the earth?

And this is equally rhetorical. To reply is to assume that the answer is, No.

“After more than two years of legal wrangling,” I read on the Internet, “Alberta Crown prosecutors intend to ask the court to acquit Pastor James Coates and Grace Life Church of all charges that were laid during the pandemic.” This, because the court recently ruled that the provincial Batflu orders were outside provincial powers, i.e. invalid.

Well, that’s nice, and perhaps we can expect a meaningless apology (eventually), for political behaviour covered in the Nuremberg trials. (For instance, compelling people to take experimental vaccinations against their will.) More than three years of oppression by bureaucrats, policemen, politicians, was just — we will be told — an administrative error. “Me bad.”

I might believe we had rule of law in this country if senior health officials, and all their enablers, were charged and (eventually) gravely punished for what was a compound series of criminal acts, breeching (among other things) freedom of worship. We’ve had much-publicized “truth and reconciliation tribunals.” Surely now we need neo-Nuremberg trials, against our public health bureaucrats.

That their orders were miscalculating, and systematically incompetent, thus killing more than they saved, is beginning to be appreciated; but this has been the story throughout history when governments have asserted their arbitrary powers. It cannot be said in their defence, however.

Instead, those accused of giving them will say: “We were only following orders.”

Consider these two quotations, on the Internet, and lately found, by me:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

The first comment was from Marcia Angell, in 2009: she provides her credential up front. The second, quite recent, is from Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet. These are two out of the two most prestigious medical journals in the world. Elsewhere, I have seen, attributed to peer-reviewed articles in general, estimates that four in five are quite worthless.

I leave gentle reader to hunt for these. As he will imagine, it is not in the interest of our scientific “authorities” to publicize such remarks, or make a big issue over them. I expect gentle reader will encounter many implausible refutations for each claim, and this will slow him down. Will such an investigation ever be peer-reviewed? I think not.

Why are so many (probably the vast majority) of medical doctors and other “scientists” dishonest? When we remember (Biblically) that all human beings have a propensity to dishonesty and cheating, this does not surprise. But those who do not lie consequentially will seem to be a professional elite. They invariably take umbrage.

Moreover, many people lie with an excuse; and these days, largely for professional reasons. They depend on government subsidies (directly and indirectly) for most of their income, and their lying is designed to grease the flow. It includes, for instance, “evidence” for climate change, which is as plentiful as it is remunerative.

When we create the conditions in which corruption can occur, it will. This is, of course, a relatively useless observation, for it is insuperably difficult to create conditions in which corruption cannot occur. But the universal government habit of redistributing cash — from individuals to individuals — invites corruption in 100 percent of cases. It is at the heart of our political system. Every cheque you receive from government is thus (reliable) evidence of corruption.

For the “English” sort of physicist (descending from Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton), Representation and Explanation are the same thing. This, anyway, was Pierre Duhem’s view, and Duhem (1861–1916, author of a splendidly full history of cosmological doctrines from Plato to Copernicus in ten volumes, in addition to his many scientific discoveries in thermodynamics, &c) was not only neglected by English universities, but banned from the academy in Paris, by secular liberals at the beginning of the last century, uncomfortable with the man’s Catholic views. Duhem, whom alas I cannot honour with complete understanding, but am inclined to worship, was in particular berating the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), whom he accused of an addiction to models. (Scottish and English are of course interchangeable in the French model.)

Now, these models were not attractive females on fashion runways, of the kind that decouple the heads of perceptually challenged males. It was scientific modelling that distressed Duhem, which abstracts and generalizes from information that can never be complete. The “English” sort of physicist in fact does not advance a theory at all, but composes a model, which he uses to satisfy his aesthetic requirements. Popular science loves models of the most reckless, oversimplified kind; “official” science inserts complications.

The official, “climate change” fraud has graduated to models of models of the weather, and models of these. This is inevitable in an age when computers are available, to process numbers at which one formerly had to sniff. For instance, we were told the other day that we had experienced the hottest day ever on our planet since records were first kept (i.e. approximately yesterday), on the basis of averaging unreliable readings of surface temperatures at numerous arbitrary points. … The coldest day in history will follow, the day after tomorrow.

You have to be an “English” physicist (i.e. an atheist) to believe this sort of thing. In other words, you must have faith in what is demonstrably untrue.

Maxwell used the verbs “to explain” and “to represent” interchangeably; but the physics he practiced deals with representation, only. It is the modern science, par excellence. For as Duhem explains, a theory that is explanatory must carry physics into the realm of metaphysics, in which real things are considered. It must give an account of what is really true.

“Science,” by comparison, doesn’t even try to do this. A mathematical model, or a mechanical model for that matter, cannot be real.

Democracy and freedom are in polar opposition. At the heart of democracy is the “ideal” of equality, or “equity” as Kamala Harris says. These are loose, Humpty Dumptitious words which, from the mouths of moronic politicians, mean just what they choose them to mean, neither more nor less. And what they mean tends to change, from nine o’clock to ten in the morning. But avaricious voters will go along for the ride.

One must retreat to Periclean Athens, to assess the profound wickedness in this heart. It is thus that one begins to understand why the founders of the American republic were so unwilling to use this term, even before the atrocities of the French Revolution occurred. Twenty-five centuries ago, the evils of democracy were already apparent, under Pericles.

Burckhardt: “A permanent terrorism was exercised by the combination of sycophants, the orators, and the constant threat of public prosecution, especially for peculation and incompetence, as well as the ever present risk of being accused of asebeia (impiety).” (It was a capital charge.)

To defend oneself from this, and make counter-accusations that would stick, in the perpetual assemblies and trials, meant having “star” influencers and a democratic “party” on one’s side. Lively public interest was easily raised to hysteria.

Mister Trump, the former USA president, is being prosecuted now that he has been removed from office, in just the way President Bazoum is being prosecuted (for “high treason”) in the République du Niger. We shouldn’t be surprised.

Satirical commentators like to compare American democracy to the Latin American kind, or to the “Democratic Republic of the Congo,” or to the murderous Communist “people’s democracies” that continue to oppress. But declaring that America has “a democracy” is, in itself, sufficiently insulting.

Freedom comes, as it did to America, generally through violence; George Washington et alia took up arms, against their sea of troubles. They did not want democracy, which had satisfied the colonial politicians. For it was as corruptly meaningless as what we have today.

In the first chapter of his work on Poetic Knowledge, Professor James S. Taylor uses the delightful expression, “drill and kill,” to describe the methods of mechanical education. The student is made to repeat his lessons, until he has developed a hatred for the topic. Fear, including the fear of tedium, but really the fear of punishment, will inspire him to continue on this battlefield. The penalties, should he withdraw from it, must necessarily be harsh.

Once those who have proved themselves sufficiently bored, and/or frightened — have in other words developed humility and respect for Cartesian tyranny — they matriculate. The full graduate then rises to a position of power in the economic and political bureaucracy, as a “professional,” creating unpleasantness for others. (A well-trained professional can create a huge quantity of unpleasantness all around.)

Of course, this consequence is inevitable wherever modernized classical “schooling” exists. By contrast, true education is conducted by human beings, normally one-to-one. (This is why “home schooling” vastly outdistances “public schooling” in results.) What must transpire in a classroom of thirty pupils will be a tiny fraction of what can exist between human beings — especially when both are paying attention.

Upon turning the legal drop-out age of sixteen, I decided to abandon the Canadian version of this treadwheel, and seek my education in some other system. For unlike most of my friends, I hadn’t lost my eagerness to learn. It was one of the few sensible things I ever did. Even today, I am still leaving school.

The alternative to the treadwheel would be some version of “education through art,” in which the student indulges a natural mimesis. Education through art was Plato’s system, and by extension, Greek.

“Poetry” in Prof. Taylor’s sense is not restricted to literature in verse. It includes the sciences, for instance; or all the pure sciences, which are kept clean by their contact with philosophy and, through philosophy, with God.

Love might describe the developing relationships among the neighbours — students, and teachers, “in solitude, for company” — where the joy in genuine learning is allowed. But I shouldn’t present this as a fixed “ideal,” which like most secular ideals, will encourage falsehood. It would detract from the ideal of self-discipline, and the student’s acquisition of the moral law (in the singular: for there is only one) — key products of a Godly education.

Lothar Ledderose was the author of one of the West’s most formidable Sinological companions, sub-entitled Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, below the title Ten Thousand Things. It surveys the entire cultural experience of the Far East, in the course of establishing that Chinese arts are different in kind from Western arts, though equally dynamic. The modernist (XVIth-century?) initiation of mass production in the West might be seen as uncharacteristic.

The Chinese had been “doing modular” since time out of mind, and produced most works — bronzes, terracottas, carvings, lacquerworks, enamels, other laminations, lattices, porcelain jars, architectural fittings, printed texts, paintings, calligraphy, other brushworks, &c, &c — in multiples and often large numbers. The pieces were seldom identical, however, and minute variations (which a Chinese might consider substantial) were apparent in all these series. For this is what modular production entails, and what it denies. There was no established “fine art” in China, except where it was imposed for sales purposes by pioneering Western dealers. Panicked individuation had yet to come, see, and conquer. But there was never any shortage of “art.”

This German gentleman has written several hundred other books and papers in the modular style of the Western academy, for which he probably received many prizes. Herr Professor Ledderhose is remarkably still alive (in his eighth decade); and so, arguably, is China — though now producing copious manufactures, on the modern model, that excludes art. For the genius of the Middle Kingdom formerly ran parallel to ours; the intentions ever embracing beauty.

East and West, the intention of modern life is instead economic. We are occasionally interested in industrial design, but this only from an economic motive. For what is designed will be, barring error and invincible stupidity, identical pieces, made simpler and easier to operate than something that was assembled randomly, by a moron.

As the son of an industrial designer, I can attest that only his economic reasoning was tolerated by patrons. Except, some aesthetic appreciation in Japan.

This is progress, yes? … (Salve nos, Domine.)

Neither Judaeo-Christian nor Heathen Chinee would have thought the economic motive uniquely worthy, before. For what we once had in common was a craving for the beautiful result.

A friend forwards a website-full of little displays showing simple and natural “crafts,” being made in some pleasant place. I “leaf” (i.e. ping) through them. Curiously, it was like going back to Bangkok for me, in the days of my childhood (centuries ago); when I was surrounded, everywhere, by talented natives making things, out of materials that just seemed to grow. The colours were of bamboo and teak, in this streetside intarsia.

An old friend, in Bangkok itself, has attached a few photos of the current high-rise glitz. But surely all these skyscrapers will sink into the mud, for the city was built on the water table, and liquifies in the monsoon. Street-level views reveal an environment much neater than the one that came before, thanks to universal paving. Intense commercialism easily prevails. The signs and all the buildings are advertisements. How to know if one is actually in Bangkok?

Today, of course, if one goes there, the making of complete things, as nearly everyone was once occupied in doing, has been obviated; except for one vendor of noodles I spotted. But everyone else must have a miserable job, in an office or factory or shopping mall, as in Communist China. For modernity has definitively arrived, and pasted its obscenity.