Essays in Idleness

“O, when Degree is shak’d! …”

Thus spake the noble Ulysses, as he expounded the great chain of being in Troilus and Cressida. Slipping into that play now (and thus into the Grecian camp, by Agamemnon’s tent) — for perhaps the first time since writing my then-girlfriend’s master’s thesis in 1975 — I am reminded how slight and hopeless my commenting has been on the important topics.

Ulysses, via Shakespeare: “Take but Degree away, un-tune that string, and hearke what Discord followes: each thing meetes in meere oppugnancie.” Things that once pulled together, now vie with each other to pull apart. And, “strength should be Lord of imbecility.”

It has been some centuries now since the links in the great chain of being, the corresponding planes, and the cosmic dance, were universally acknowledged, as they still were among the Elizabethans.  The aristocracy is gone, or rather, it persists only as a superficial “elite” of power and wealth. It began to break up from the moment the mediaeval order, or the mediaeval conception of order, was trashed and replaced by the modern conception of “equality.”

For Christian man (or, “peoplekind,” as wee Clown Justin likes to say) had invested centuries in pursuit of political, social, and religious harmony, often failing. But these Catholic ancestors realized that they had failed by their sin. The very possibility of success is what we have since surrendered.

We hear, more and more frequently, about the population crash “that is coming,” because urban people don’t want to have children. By “urban” I mean those who live in vast conurbations, where most people live these days. It is only a century or two since this began to happen, and when only a city or two was so large that one could not walk out of it. Soon, there will be no country in the world in which urbanites are not in the majority, and very much in the majority of most. Moreover, an increasing proportion of the country bumpkins are not really rural. When they get money they buy pretty cottages with all the urban conveniences, including nearby supermarkets. They do not contribute to agricultural productivity, as the great majority of citizens once did. Almost everyone makes money either from the government, or by doing something that is “private” and equally unnecessary.

Note: this much could be said without even referring to statistics, the way city people do. My country-boy preference is for real things, not numbers. (Although I really live in a huge, and very ugly, conurbation.)

An incidental discovery of the government intervenors, who are everywhere, is that women can’t be bribed to have more children. Some poor immigrants can be bribed, but not for long. Soon, most Western countries will be filled with poor immigrants in cities, while the countryside is depopulated. Who has not realized that children are an unrewarding expense? Ah well, the welfare state will be vomiting more money into the problem, as it expands. And then, thanks to inflation, the welfare state will collapse.

My view of this is the same as my view of America, after Kommie-la and Tampon Tim have won the November election. The catastrophic effects of this are easily predictable, but as Mencken would say, the Americans will have got just what they voted for, good and hard. For urban people believe in words, not things, and prefer comfortable, and fanciful, lies.

But what does this matter if the world is depopulating? To a free people — inwardly and actually free and agrarian — this is a problem that will go away. Modern urban people will have exterminated themselves (how sad!), leaving the farmers and fisherfolk to get on with it.

It seems only fair that some Dutchman should have invented the microscope, but they are a disputatious breed, and their claims and counter-claims drive the inquirer to distraction. It is the compound microscope I am discussing, which has two lenses, not the single spherical lens of melted glass that Baruch Spinoza was polishing, in the XVIIth century. The Italians had been making spectacles from the XIIIth, because, really, the Italians invented everything; but the English polymath, Robert Hooke, made the first truly serviceable compound microscope, and started doing clever things with it — vastly extending the area of human observation, after 1700.

Indeed, he was a kind of British Galileo, for he identified the rotations of Mars and Jupiter, and came up with the inverse square law before Newton clinched it. He explained the refraction of light, and contributed the wave theory. He also manufactured the gas pumps for Robert Boyle (him of Boyle’s Law), and it would seem he was architect for half the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Indeed, his rivals found many reasons to hate him: over-achievers are generally despised.

In Hooke’s book, Micrographia, we first encounter the word, “cell,” which has had such a distinguished history through the last four centuries. More broadly, biology — in the modern, sterile, technocratic sense — only became possible with the invention of the microscope. (Think what Aristotle could have done with one!)

Nevertheless, biology, as a precise science, preceded the microscope in the West, and was the invention of artists. They were Italian, of course; but towards the end of the XIVth century the invasion of Burgundy, France, Flanders, and Germany by naturalism was rapidly proceeding. They — artists but also scientists by accomplishment — took interest not only in identifying the visible plants and animals (farmers and housewives could already do that, and city-dwellers already could not). The draughtsmen and painters observed and communicated from nature the perfect organic forms, in outline and in the minutest detail. Among their successors, too, only the artists have studied actual morphology, except in the spirit of engineering. Our botanical and zoological collections have likewise deteriorated, where statistical principles have triumphed, to match-box collecting. We collect death; the classical biologists depicted the living, in their “environmental” landscapes.

Biology — the major science of observation — became the principal stronghold of nescience when Darwin and the boys took over, with their (unrealizable) evolutionary obsessions. Prior to their triumph, a wonderful science had developed among nature-loving amateurs. (See, for instance, Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada, 1983.) For genuine “science” is (or was) not bureaucracy; it is done out of love.

We should discard the cloying propaganda terms, and restore the reign of Natural Philosophy. Let us start again with the Theory of Forms.

You are too late — if you were planning to get a free abortion or a vasectomy at the Democrat National Convention. Both services are gratis in Chicago this year, but all appointments have been snatched up. On the other hand, “Medical Assistance In Death” was not available, even for a fee. You will have to wait until the next DNC; or until Kommie-la and Tampon Tim prevail, and make death free for all the bright lights who are patiently waiting.

By this means, they will make more room for the illegal immigrants, … “all hopping through the frothy waves, and scrambling to the shore.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Labour Bureau has revised all of its employment statistics for the last year, downward, by one million. This means that all of the post-Batflu records that the Biden administration had claimed were, in fact, bare-faced lies.

The joke is that the socialist policies the Democrats are selling, with such enthusiasm, have a failure rate of one hundred percent, throughout history, and around the world. Yet they continue to be popular among the power-hungry, and their ignorant followers; not just economic failure, but the unambiguous evils that accompany it. For after child-murder, what can be left?

The “Left,” Democrats, favour political censorship, but they also favour extinction — like the Canadian Liberals, and British Labour, who would ideally join them in a grand extinction event. The Republicans and Conservatives could then bifurcate, into the Pretend Conservatives, and the Frankly Reactionary Monarchist Party.

Should the Democrats fail to (fraudulently) win the American election, or if dwarf female secret service agents succeed in preventing the assassination of Donald Trump, the gentleman will again become president of the United States. I certainly have no objection. But what will his cabinet be like? Perhaps I could suggest at least one appointment.

It is, to make Elon Musk the “Secretary of Defense,” (or “for Defence,” as we British imperialists would put it). I’m sure not only Americans, but all the allies of the United States would feel safer if the boss of SpaceX, &c, would assume responsibility for this task, instead of some woke cross-dresser. Today, defence requires more technological savvy than traditional diplomacy and bureaucratic management. Russia and China will also back off, I think, when they see the Trump/Vance/Musk combination — such a tight string of monosyllables! Of course, Mr Musk should have some say in this matter, and Trump would need the “advice and consent” of the Senate, but I don’t think Musk’s African-American identity should stand in the way, now that he has become an American citizen.

Of course my further advice to Trump should remain off the record, but I don’t foresee any serious objections. The biggest advantage of my proposal would be fiscal: a great deal of money could be saved by withdrawing clumsy floating targets like aircraft carriers, and the other conventional gear with which the military is saddled. And who needs the Boeing Corporation, when we have Lockheed-Martin’s “Skunk Works”?

The wars of the future are already happening, thanks to clowns like Biden, and they need drones more than supersonic fighters. Drones are also much cheaper, and can provide a more pointed, detailed assault. Laser is what we need to stop incoming missiles, and to melt tanks if these will not be impeded by European environmental regulations; mobile (including orbiting) laser and maser delivery systems may be a costly item — but Mr Musk has experience in negotiating price. And Mr Trump is apparently gung-ho for an American “iron dome” to match Israel’s.

While we admired the “asymmetry” (if not the morality) of Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington, our thoughts should turn to how we might use asymmetric methods the other way. I think Robert B. Spencer might have some recommendations on this, and I could provide his telephone number.

But I am quite opposed to thinking “outside the box” — it invariably leads to disaster. “Elon” offers reliable, inside-the-box mental processes. None of my ideas are especially advanced, and most will benefit from the kind of little improvements that SpaceX engineers are famous for. I have no idea how to spend all the money we will save — reckless spending is the specialty of Democrats — I suppose just give it back.

Musicians are perfectly useless people, or at least, they can be. (I am droning on about the “Useless Man” — or woman, to extend my flattery.) Of course they can be useful to someone, or to themselves when they seek fame or fortune. (I, perhaps alone in Western society, do not wish to flatter Taylor Swift.) Rather, I think, to be able to sing one’s part, and be a voice from the chorus of the Requiem, is surely to be living a blessed life.

The musician is also free to marry and to have children and (in one case I am aware of) to have beautiful daughters with curls, who can also sing. Whereas, not the priest, nor the monk, nor the serious literary artist, although some liberals dispute this. Bach, as we know, had many dozen children, and went through several wives. It did not seem to distract him from composition, just as Martin Luther did not distract him from his Catholicity.

We define philosophy very narrowly, or else not at all, and I would tend to contrast Bach, and Mozart for that matter, with Immanuel Kant. This is not to despise Kant absolutely, for he did deliver an insight, that it is wrong, perhaps categorically, to use another person purely as a means. In this respect he acknowledges our souls. But he abuses everyone, including God, in the course of making atheism the default position in modern Western thought.

By comparison, Johann Sebastian used music to explain the working of God through nature, and Wolfgang Amadeus was privy to the principle of life — to put this in another way. Whereas, the accountant of Königsberg, in the worst moments of his critical philosophies, comes closer to being an angel of death. (He makes up for this in the best moments of the Urteilskraft, however; in my unqualified opinion.)

From these examples alone one begins to see what I am getting at, in my account of the “Useless Man” (which is hardly original with me), and even how this man differs from Lao Tzu’s “man who achieves everything by doing nothing,” although I would stress the similarity. He also has this triumphant, Godly quality, in East or West.

It is the primary virtue of the Useless Man: that he cannot be used.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — I do not like to link anything, but an exception must be made for this, “just in.” It is a brief documentary on the opposite of a riot. It was the Marian Congress, at Ottawa, in June 1947, when half-a-million “useless” men and women descended upon what was then a town of 100,000 — a few short decades ago, when Canada was a Christian country.

Generally speaking, I am against rioting, though I would not want to make this a cumbersome rule. I would not say, as a Christian, that violence is never permitted. For instance, there was the example of Our Saviour (beating on the blasphemous money-changers). But for “secular,” political purposes, rioting never works, and the kind of violence that does is practised almost exclusively by the Left.

On the other hand, I don’t think “democracy” can deliver political change, in the form of any practical improvements; or that, in principle, political change should be encouraged any more than rioting. All appropriations of power should be opposed, and all attempts to perpetuate power should be resisted. This, especially for the “smelly little orthodoxies,” that stink as awfully as the “influencers” who advance them. But this is the world. You may be honest yourself, and behave graciously; you ought to be generous slightly beyond your means; but if you expect such kindness from others you will be frequently disappointed.

Our ambition, I declare, is to be Useless Men — as Christ was, in every sense, Useless. This has been a theme of my secret conversations, recently.

In my one encounter with an O.V.S. (“Official Vatican Saint”), I noticed that she was a tireless worker for useless things. (This was Mother Teresa of Calcutta.) For instance, food and medicine for the impecunious, and attention to the dying; her unceasing prayer. How do you build an economy on that? The G.N.P. will be almost unaffected.

Going to Heaven is not, in any worldly terms, a useful procedure, for as we recall: “My Kingdom is Not of This World.” Getting there is, in the highest sense, escapism.

The Chinese instruction on being raped, I am told, is to “lie back and enjoy it.” But how do they enjoy being murdered? Myself, I would find it painful and inconvenient, but much worse things happen in this world, and there are advantages to being out of it.

My contemporaries (God bless them!) fear God, but in their own, contemporary way. They are not, for instance, Christian. But they do know, instinctively as it were, that God is all-powerful, and also that He is all-good. (Note that I have set aside all-beautiful, for the moment.)

They know this, and it is what they secretly fear, to the point where they will always deny it. For they think that God is out to get them, and they don’t want to give themselves away. He must be; for my contemporaries are not powerful, at all, and they also sense this.

My Islamic contemporaries feel themselves under special protection, perhaps, regardless how they behave; but when they begin to sense that they are not, they defect to Christianity. (And they make better Christians than the moderns who fear God in their own “unique,” individualist way.)

“My dear!” as the sage of Mrs Colaço’s Guest House (in Janpath Lane) used to say. “It is all very simple. God is not out to get you. Even if you deserve to be gotten!”

At least, He is not out to get you in the grimly scary way.

It is a delicate thing to understand how God is to be feared, if you have it wrong. He is to be feared with very sincere awe and wonder. He is not to be feared lightly. But He isn’t to be feared because He is out to get you. Truly, God has better things to do. Such as love, which fills the Creation. But this is not a light, sentimental sort of love. It is the real thing, as they say.

Note that “beauty” may invite us to approach. “Truth” may also be an invitation, but it is harder to see when you are looking for it, too urgently and expressly. First, as Négovan Rajic (of Trois-Rivières) used to say, you must consent to become a Useless Man. And then, beauty will be “just there” — when you were looking, perhaps, for something else.

Alas, after a few consecutive days without an Idlepost from me, some readers have concluded that I am at Death’s Door. But really, I am only on the verandah.

Saint Lawrence, whose day this is, would anyway be special to me, for he was born on December 31st — the day I was formally received into the Catholic Church, though quite a few centuries later. And it is precisely fifty-five years since Lawrence’s saint day, back in 1969. I did not realize at the time, however. (There were quite a few things I did not realize, when I was sixteen; and even today, I am fairly stupid.)

The fox knows many little things that the hedgehog doesn’t know, but I knew one big thing, like the hedgehog in Archilochus. What it was, I will not tell you, today.

Pope Sixtus II had made Lawrence, his fellow Spaniard, archdeacon of Rome, a job which entailed minding the Church treasury, and conducting alms into the hands of the poor — especially the hungry, old widows, and consecrated virgins. But the Emperor Valerian (also memorable) had Sixtus martyred in early August, 258 AD, as part of his policy to have all the Catholic bishops, priests, and deacons rounded up and executed. Sixtus was caught red-handed, celebrating Mass in the Cemetery of Saint Callixtus.

Lawrence was also immediately surrendered to the prefect of Rome, who instructed him to turn over all the riches of the Church, thought then as now to be extraordinarily wealthy. He said he would need three days to collect it all. The saint used this time to distribute the loot among all the indigents of the Urbs Aeterna, before returning to the prefect — with a little delegation of the blind, crippled, and so forth.

“Here are the treasures of my Church,” he declared. “As you can see we are much richer than your Emperor!”

This annoyed the prefect, as it would any humourless bureaucrat or tax collector. Lawrence was prepared atop a great gridiron, with lighted coals, to be toasted. (This account is disputed by “scholars,” whose job is to doubt everything they have learnt.)

After he had been toasted on these coals for awhile, but as he was still lively — thanks to Christ’s intercession — he cried out, that he was entirely done on one side, and should be turned over. That is why Saint Lawrence is the patron of cooks, and comedians.

Except for superficial changes, the world remains the same as it was in the works of Sedulius Scottus — grammarian, scriptural commentator, and poet — writing in the IXth century, Anno Domini. He is travelling on the continent, and writing his elegant, though sometimes slapstick, verses, in Latin, from Liège. (We might call him an Irish colonialist, and indeed, we owe our civilization to this Irish colonialism, or the “spiritual imperialism” of the Gaelic sphere. Western Christendom was an Irish invention.)

The familiar, IXth-century Christian world of Sedulius contains Germans, and French, as well as Irish; and there are Slavs, Greeks, and the Holy Land, stretching into Asia, and Scythians and Indians somewhere beyond. Formative Europe is threatened with violence — from Moors and Saracens to the south, and from heathen Northmen on the other side.

Indeed, Islamophobia begins in the largely Christianized and Judaized Arabian peninsula, with the appearance of Islam, in murderous waves of conquest; and we might call the other enemy “Borealophobia,” which began when the Northmen first arrived in places like Dublin. It also took the form of murderous waves, and monks were its first victims.

The Boreal savages have been replaced by Marxists, as numerous and various as the Northmen once were. They have faded into our white-ish societies, because so many of them are palefaced themselves; but they are dedicated to advancing profanity. They have infiltrated our schools, and all other public institutions, and are constantly plotting to “cancel” Christianity, often in association with the barbarians of the “global south.” (And Ireland has been lost, again.)

Verily, Christians have become a shrinking minority throughout what was once Christendom, and serve our “new” masters, their mad philosophies, and their Godless gods. We survive so long as we obey the whims of this political “Left.” But apart from that, life goes on (until it doesn’t).

So, instead of heathen Vikings, we have the heathen Left. This makes the world slightly different from what it was in Sedulius’s time.

Another subtle change is that Christian writers are no longer optimistic — hopeful towards the future, and building and illuminating beautiful things. Their notion that, “With God, all things are possible,” has receded. Today, their outlook is sad and grim, and what we build and illuminate is overwhelmingly “pagan,” and usually very ugly.

There are expressions that strike so adjacently to the bone that a cowardly, “sensitive” politician won’t use them. They instinctively know better than to stir up “sensitivities,” thus making an easy target for their unimaginative opponents. To tell the truth is to concede an easy target, and perhaps has always been since the “Enlightenment” granted the Devil direct entry into our political affairs, under the party designation, “Left.” (This was when sensitivity first prevailed). That colourful expressions can create such excitement is a proof of their accuracy, revealed in the explosion of pious, hypocritical rage. As elsewhere in the use of language, we have gone beyond literal description.

Oddly, I admire such practising politicians, and among those not practising, the talent and ability to invent, and the courage to use, such “politically incorrect” phrases. But then, I know better than to run for political office, and probably prefer to the successful in politics, the failures. Show me a man who easily wins an election, and I will show you a contemptible soul. Meanwhile, I continue to take delight in the “controversial” expressions themselves, and in transcribing them into my copybook.

“Childless cat ladies” says more than was ever said by a sociologist, or any self-styled “social expert,” in three words or less. The cat-lover must applaud the use of felines, to clinch a point. For the “childlessness” is clinched, in such a way that a modest number of innocent old maids can be excluded. Curiously, it shows innocent intention, for if an arguably female and childless cat-keeper — even one who dotes upon her animals — comes forward, she will just be laughing. (I myself love women, almost as much as I distractedly love cats.)

Note, that we the people should laugh when we are accused of Nazism, Fascism, and Far-Righteousness; and not take offence when atheistical morons utter or display squalid blasphemies. “They” are just being what they are. But the progressive types go squirrelly when we merely mention their pets. What could better distinguish the “normal” people (probably a minority at the present time), from persons who are, indisputably, “batshit insane”?

Most easily verifiable things are presented by the Left as “conspiracy theories,” so that if something is flagged in the media for having marks of a dark, far right, conspiracy theory, I tend to believe it is true. There may be no contest over many, multiplying facts, so these are not reported. For instance, the background of the assassination attempt on Mr Donald Trump. No one who is at least partially sane doubts that this happened. Thus the event and its colourful details are now being “memory-holed” by the commentariat. What the Democrat Party cannot benefit from (or the NDP-Liberal coalition in Canada), disappears quickly from the news.

A poll has meanwhile shown that one-third of eligible Democrat voters believe the assassination attempt was a sham, and that Trump used a ketchup packet, or whatever. But none of these people are partially sane.

Trump himself, in my delicate judgement, is also somewhat batty — as a person must be who wants to become president when he has already had that miserable experience. He is rather extravagant with his facts, and yet, still more accurate than, say, 99 percent of Democrats. This makes me willing to ignore the exceptions. His opponent, Kamala Harass, is so laughably inadequate (she was a “diversity hire”) that his election now seems inevitable; but that is not to count the Left out, or to underestimate their malice. Generations of “progressive” brainwashing, on the least intelligent, has made straightforward elections unpredictable.

“They tried to coup him, impeach him, remove him from the ballot, they ran show trials against him, tried to bankrupt him and his family, put him in prison, and assassinate him. They’re OBVIOUSLY not done,” as Mollie Hemingway explains.

This is why a “reasonable” prediction for the U.S. election is that Trump will finally be murdered. The only reason to doubt this is that the Secret Service, FBI, Homeland Security, and about seventeen other national “security” departments are — individually and collectively — so extremely incompetent, that none of their members can be relied upon even to holster a gun.

May God continue to protect Donald Trump.