Essays in Idleness

For a person who loathes statistics, and in particular social (including financial) statistics, one of my more eccentric interests is in weights and measures. This has relaxed over the years of my maturity: at age sixteen it was an incurable obsession. For, as with others who have obsessions (baseball statistics; alcohol), I have never entirely escaped from it, and even the slightest indulgence will lead me back into slavery, as it were.

An example occurred yesterday, while consulting an older edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (The eleventh, 1911 — always more reliable than the Wicked Paedia.) As everyone should know, the roundness of the world was known even to ancient man, especially the seafarers. The philosophers in Alexandria-by-Egypt even measured its circumference. They calculated by comparing the sun shadows at different locations. Mediaeval man of course inherited this information through Ptolemy; only in XIXth-century America was it lost (by Washington Irving, father of the Flat Earth).

Now, put this together with our archaeological record of Egyptian rulers. Not, their heads-of-state, but rather the marked strips of wood or metal used (e.g.) in schools. We have found plenty of rulers among the ruins, and the older (pre-Muslim and even pre-Christian) show that the Egyptian “cubit” was slightly over 20 British inches. So were the cubits in ancient Sumer, and elsewhere, apparently. Trade, after all, has been global for quite a few millennia. The Sumerians taught the Babylonians, who taught the Egyptians, and everyone else, the Joy of Sexagesimals.

Sexagesimals are written (invisibly) all over our planet, in for instance the lines of latitude and longitude. Indeed, the earth’s known circumference is precisely 21,160 nautical miles, which is sixty times 360 degrees. Only clowns, to my mind, would use the viciously decimalical metric system (invented in Revolutionary France) when we had a universal system of mensuration at the ready, all along. This was, and is, the nautical mile, its multiples and parts — in Babylonian, sexagesimal terms — not yet retired from shipping and aviation.

My realization yesterday is that the cubit is not merely the approximate distance from a man’s fingertip to his elbow, as the dictionaries insist. This ancient cubit is also, nearly precisely, the 60th part, of the 60th part, of the nautical mile. Everything fits together!

We may then reconstruct the “foot” as two-thirds of this, and break it down hexidecimally, as the classical Greeks, or classical Chinese, would do — into sixteen “digit” or “dactyl” units to replace the “inches” or (God help us) “centimetres” on our contemporary rulers. This longer foot (about 13.5 Anglo-American  inches) will prove more useful in ergonomic design. Trust me.

William Blake: “Bring out number, weight & measure in a year of dearth.”

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. — My cybernetophile son defends “metric” as a system of hard precision for use with machines, for the very reason that “base ten” is so fraction-averse. He concedes, however, that “beautiful sexagesimal relationships” are more appropriate for the humans, who think in fractions and approximations.

The poor and the feeble, the halt and the lame — the maimed, in body and spirit, the blind — all have been invited to the Feast. And many have made their excuses. Our task is, first, with those who will come; it is to feed His people. And second, to renew the invitation, to those apparently well, and sound, and otherwise occupied.

Ecce iam noctis. …

“To have mercy on those guilty of sin, to banish all distress, to bestow health and to give us the good blessings of everlasting peace” … let us beseech the Lord of creation.

I took the week off in a location remote from Vallis Hortensis, hoping to forget about the politics that had fragmented my attention recently, but upon my return to the High Doganate, I looked in the Internet again. My anger was restored. I can imagine many million Americans are very angry, too, though millions more exhibit smug satisfaction. The incident of course was the conviction of President Trump, on all 34 counts of invented felonies, by a kangaroo court in the rogue district of Manhattan, operating on instructions that came down from the White House.

The conviction will of course be overturned at the first appeal, but Trump will be called a “convicted felon” in Democratic talking points. This, and stuffing ballot boxes, is their only way to win. Worse, Republican hacks will assuredly take revenge at their first chance. President Biden, who is even more corrupt than he is senile, can be tried for innumerable crimes, along with all senior congressional members of his party.

This will be unwise, however. It makes the United States unambiguously a “Banana Republic,” in which politicians retire only at death. They will cheat and brazen to avoid passing out of power and into the hands of their enemies. Peaceful transitions are impossible, in the chaos of public unlawfulness. This is, as I have argued in these Idleposts before, how all democracies have ended. A fourth American Civil War (1775–83; 1812–15; 1861–65; 2024–?) seems inevitable unless some angelic agency intervenes.

The United States was not a Democracy, in conception. It was founded explicitly as a Republic, under the Rule of Law, and Our Lord. “In God We Trust.” Voting was carefully tamed: basic rights could not be overturned by legislation. But agnostic rule, by the manipulation of laws, is dear to the heart of every progressive — and sadly, the USA is a full democracy now.

Democratic politics, in moderate, “civilized” States, should offer a perpetual choice between the Big-Endian Party, and the Little-Endians. At least, this is the theory. Alas, this sensible arrangement has never lasted more than a minute, in the long hour of human history. And then it disintegrates, as it has again and again, just when it seemed to be getting established, in la République française, lo Stato italiano, La República Española, das Deutsche Reich, &c, &c. For, to vary the Swiftian metaphor (Jonathan’s, not Taylor’s), the history makers then contrive to make an omelette, into which Big-Endians and Little-Endians are smashed. This “third egg” is the first cracked one. The playing field or table having become somewhat tilted, all the eggs roll off.

Of course, no good has ever come of this.

Reading, this morning, about the general election that has been called in the United Kingdom, I understand the general despair of the British voter. Neither the Big-Endian nor the Little-Endian Party is electable, and “Labour” will win only because the “Conservatives” are currently in power (while the rest of Europe is switching to the right).

This is a serious problem with democracy. We can’t have an election in which both sides lose, and the pleasure, that would result, of no government at all. The Devil abhors a power vacuum, and someone always comes along to fill it; for after all, there are taxes to collect. And what about law and order? Who will take care of that?

It is best if politicians do not take care of anything important. God arranged the world to be self-governing, even when there is no government, as there is not among all the non-human creatures. Each has been inwardly programmed to know, at least approximately, what it is about, and then to go about, eating or being eaten. Animals and vegetables: there is food to go around! (I’m a particular fan of the mushrooms.) And humans have (in each individual case) a conscience installed, to guide their behaviour, although this still small divine voice can only be heard when we are listening.

Of course, there are also big- or little- administrative details, arising from the complexity of human affairs, but for this reason, we have Monarchy. It appears atop the natural aristocracy that forms when the people are left to their own devices. Unfortunately, it takes time to mature, and democracy keeps setting us back at the beginning.

Glancing at a photograph, of Her Late Majesty and Prince Philip, being welcomed at Bonavista, Newfoundland, a quarter-century ago: one is surprised by the passage of time. They are in turn welcoming the Matthew, a replica of the little ship that brought John Cabot and eighteen sailors this way, precisely five hundred years before. She — unmistakeable with high sterncastle and three tall masts — had just made the Atlantic crossing, through the winds and the combers, from her re-assembly by naval carpenters in her home port of Bristol.

And now, 527 years have passed. Henry VII (Tudor) is no longer on the throne. Charles III (Windsor) has now replaced him. The replica Matthew is already rotting away.

The fishermen and traders of the Bristol Channel, and also the adventurous Basque mariners, had probably floated over the Grand Banks a generation earlier; and the Norsemen, we now know, came across a half-millennium before them. Cabot preceded Jacques Cartier by thirty-seven years. God alone knows the exact, true order, and the location of the first landfall in Newfoundland or elsewhere, but He does not fuss with the number of hairs on a man’s head, nor the minutiae of historical sequence.

It is only men who care, and will make war to dispute a priority. We are a savage lot, and continue to be savages to the present day, except where some elevated doctrine (such as the peaceful Christian) has checked our behaviour. And then we fish, and celebrate.

How marvellous it was, to be greeted by the Queen, and not by a wretched, self-serving politician.

Canadians, and subjects in the other fourteen British realms, remain disturbed and in shock at the most gender-bending event in our modern history. For, since September 2022, our beloved Queen has been replaced by a man. It is now the second “Victoria Day” since this appalling event occurred, and as I must use his preferred pronoun, His Majesty has begun to appear even on our (base-metal) coins — although not yet on our more valuable paper currency. Were it not for our incompetent bureaucracy, all continuity might have been lost.

The original Fête was meant to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birth, which actually happened on 24th May 1819, although Canadian politicians had tampered with this date to make it fall more “conveniently” on a Monday. (God rest their souls deep in forgetfulness.) Elizabeth II reigned for more than seventy years, Victoria for a mere sixty-three (despite an earlier start). We may hope Charles III will reign forever, but it would be more appropriate if he had not changed his sex. Of course, the royal ideologues insist, he was always a man, and I will observe they have a biological point. But all my life, and that of most others who were born within British North America, we have had a Queen. I cannot get used to so much “chopping and changing,” as a certain close relative used to complain.

If there is one advantage of private over public tyranny — arguably — it is that private tyrants need only be obeyed voluntarily. The State, in its august moderation, writes laws to prevent private agents from acts of theft, for instance, reserving this right exclusively to government agents. But as “the peeple” are generally willing to be robbed by the tyrants of “capitalism” — in return for goods and services that will be exposed as worthless the moment they try to sell them again — the difference disappears.

Convenience is the primary tool of tyrants. They use it even when it is not strictly necessary, for instance, in withholding taxes on wages, which conveniently strip the citizen of his income. They might, as in the past, compel him to put his wealth into heavy commodities and lug them to the tax office. But under democracy, convenience prevails.

Recently, wearing ludicrous masks and maintaining a fathom’s distance from one’s neighbour, was the convenience enforced by “public health” — against a gain-of-function virus that was launched, conveniently in China.

But in civil, profane life, convenience is what makes the sale. “Convenience stores” pockmark the urban landscape, and “consumer credit” relieves the customer of having to awkwardly surrender his cash. The children who are marching for Hamas, currently, have no idea what things cost. They have been raised in the “credit” (and debit) culture in which someone else always does the math.

Convenience is the tyrant’s soporific. It is what bureaucracies (public and private) are created to advance. The freedom-loving man, by contrast, welcomes inconvenience, and whenever he is not prevented, does things for himself.

If you were planning to vote in “the world’s largest democracy” — a.k.a. “the Republic of India” — you might be following an “avatar” of one of the major parties. The Indian political scene has now slightly evolved from the standard we were accustomed to, in the United States, where dead people have long filled the voters’ rolls (though I expect the U.S. will catch up shortly). For in India, the actual candidate may be dead, or the “influencer” speaking for him may have perished — some time ago. A certain “Duwaraka,” for instance — the young daughter of a Tamil Tiger chief, who died in an airstrike back in 2009 — now reappears as an articulate middle-aged lady in Tamil election videos. Prominent politicians, not previously noted for their musical or bunny-hopping skills, adeptly sing and dance (and in athletic costumes); and there are other surprising achievements.

These are all current features of “artificial intelligence,” reported to the Beeb. I have elsewhere read commentaries on the “brave new world” that AI has made possible.

But really, one need only look at the performances of Justin Trudeau, or Joe Biden — two  miracles of the older technology — to see that democracy is not especially threatened. For these and other men (and women!) were also avatars, probably from birth, created by expert political projectionists. Only the naïve could think that they were tangible.

The new, entirely electronic avatars are only slightly more sophisticated than the old ones they replace. They bring just a little bit of technical progress to our governing estates.

Economics, at its best a non-partisan game, or “science,” is not the same thing as capitalism, although the extremely ignorant confuse these terms. Capitalism is an ideology, like socialism or communism. Whereas economics simply tells you, “If you do this, the market will do that,” everything else being equal (which it never is). But even when everything else is unequal, it still gives better results than any ideology.

The world builds skyscrapers, from what it imagines are economic motives. Minarets, pagodas, and campaniles need not pretend to be profane, but the Burj Khalifa or the Shanghai Tower pretend. They are, of course, also impractical, but their designers assume they will make money, which they might do in our spiritual Disneyland.

Across Humber Bay from the High Doganate I have had the dubious pleasure of watching a pseudo-Manhattan rise in formerly smalltown Mimico. It consists exclusively of vertiginous apartment blocks, without businesses, and provides a “sleeper suburb” for Toronto. Aesthetically, it is impressive, the farther away you stand. At the typical reader’s distance, it must be quite beautiful.

When the electricity cuts out, after the next Carrington Event, the latest inmates of Mimico and the office blocks downtown will get good exercise walking up and down from the 40th floor, and across town looking for food. But this may come to seem the least of their troubles. For unlike snails, or cockroaches, blockbuster real estate projects cannot adapt; and their corpses are very large and inconvenient.

This is being discovered in the United States at the moment. Huge skyscrapers are hitting the second-hand market at a reduced price. I was just reading about the 44-storey “AT&T Centre” in St Louis, which sold for more than $200 million when new in 2006. With the AT&T decals removed, it has resold for $3.6 million. That’s more than forty flights down. The Chinese property market has done somehow worse, and I look forward to the prices in the Mimico “clearance sale.”

But why should we expect such sites to be cleared? For what will the land underneath these giants be worth, when the worldlings come to their senses, and decide they don’t want new skyscrapers any more?

The problem for Galileo, so far as it was theological, was that the earth is not in heaven. This it would be, by the mediaeval model, if the sun were put at the centre of the universe, as the Copernican arithmetic seemed to indicate. But in contemporary Ptolemaic cosmology, the earth, being at the centre, was the farthest one could be from heaven. It did not participate in the dance of the spheres, and so, could not hear the music.

Of course, it turned out Copernicus, the Catholic canon, was wrong, along with everyone else. For the sun is not stationary, either, even though the wonderful aurora displays over the weekend made us think twice.

Can you believe it? That the earth is revolving around the sun?

“I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown me,” said Cardinal Bellarmine, quite typically. This brilliant Counter-Reformation cleric got bad press out of the Galileo affair, even though he judged carefully. (The Protestants up north were much less cautious in condemning heliocentricity.) He thought that scripture and the better homiletic passages, along with common sense, seemed to endorse the Ptolemaic model. For it sure looked like the sun was rising every morning. But one must be circumspect about such things.

We now know that the professoriate were Galileo’s real enemy; not the Church. They were narrowly Aristotelian (instead of broadly Aristotelian, like Thomas Aquinas) and quite censorious. Aristotle was “settled science” for them, and Aristotle wasn’t a heliocentrist. Galileo had too much enjoyed defying “settled science,” and twitting the professors at Padua. They wanted him punished “as an asshole,” and Church officials were persuaded to play along.

There are Galileos in every science, always, and like their original, they generally jump the gun. I appreciate the “zen” Galileo, patiently polishing lenses for his telescopes, rather than the alarming controversialist looking for trouble. But the real hero of the Galileo affair (according to me) was Robert Bellarmine, then, perhaps, the most learned man in Italy. He subscribed to truth, at every level, and at all times.

Ontario is governed by a party that calls itself the “Progressive Conservatives,” and has a peculiar Canadian national history. The title is rather appropriate, however, even in a philosophical sense. It helps explain why I hate the current “Ford” party almost as much as I hate the Liberals and the N-D-Pee. (Of course, it is not humanly possible to hate them equally.)

The word “progressive” is not absolutely decisive here. I am a Reactionary and a Traditionalist — as readers may have guessed by now — and neither a progressive nor a conservative, except that I use that latter word colloquially, sometimes, to mean “reactionary” and “traditionalist.” The philosophical distinction was neatly made by Karl Mannheim, and others.

Indeed, the word “conservative” was a modern invention, made by that delicious Frenchman, François-René de Chateaubriand (who came from Saint-Malo, the way Canada did). In the early XIXth century, he launched a journalistic movement for the restoration of French civilization. It was a political movement, in opposition to what we would now call the progressive revolutionary movement. The word, “conservative” caught on, first in Germany and then in England, in the mid-1830s.

Now Chateaubriand, who wrote a magnificent, romantic defence of Christianity, may be recommended to the reader who is getting tired of C. S. Lewis, though it will help if he reads French. He will be taught that catholicism is not anything “mere.”

But back to Mannheim, the movement of conservatism is what marks it as an exception from instinctive traditionalism, “the original reaction to deliberate reforming tendencies … bound up with magical elements of consciousness.” In other words, traditionalism is not a movement. It is as old as time, and essentially undefeatable. The most revolutionary characters are (typically) set in their ways; they are only stimulated by “the programme.” Paradoxically, the political conservative will often be progressive in his private life.

The secret of tradition is those “magical” things, which the progressive is always jawing against. The most humans can achieve, individually or collectively, is a trade-off. Something worth keeping must always be sacrificed. The idea of progress is that of continuous, accumulating good, without trade-offs. It is an example of the fallacy of perpetual motion.

“There is a great deal of suicide in a nation,” said Adam Smith of General Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga. I paraphrase. In fact, the ur-economist had just been told that the United Kingdom was ruined, not that it had committed suicide; for there had been no intention to beget the United States. There was “a great deal of ruin” in the homeland, Smith said, at which he then sniffed. After all, the British hadn’t finished acquiring India, yet. But the Whigs — and I hate them yesterday as today — had generally settled on a policy of self-destruction, varied with romantic, Imperial arrogance. They might be compared to an over-dramatic teenager, who attempts suicide a few times before she finally gets it right. It took Britain until the XXth century to elect socialists, and finally do herself in.

Adam Smith was, intellectually, a “liberal”; but a fiery Scotch moralist under the skin. Nothing wrong with that; liberals (unlike Whigs, the prototype Leftists) tend to be thoughtful, convivial people, who avoid making scenes. But no empire is won or lost because of their advice. The perfect liberal is a benevolent cricket umpire, I once thought, while he ignored my l.b.w.

“Play up! play up! and play the game!” is the contrary advice of the “Vitai Lampada.” To take one’s knocks, and one’s outs, and even the existential defeats with tranquil serenity, is not even slightly in conflict with this. In Mr. Smith’s drollness I detect the glimmer of the true Tory lightening rod. That’s why I still condescend to read him.

“Here is the Church, here is the Steeple,” my maternal grandmother would say to me, illustrating her thesis with manoeuvres of her clasped hands. … “Open the door, and there’s all the People!” … It was my first instruction in Church history, which, I soon learnt, must overlap with world history. But whereas the Church is unipolar, focusing its prayers on the one God; the world, by contrast, has multiple poles. Or, to simplify, it is bi-polar, in relation to the divine; half pointed this way and half the other.

Shrinks used the term to replace manic-depressive, out of a desire not to moralize. But, penetrating the skull scientifically, we have discovered there are right and left hemispheres, not only in every human cranium, but in those of many animals, too. (The reader should consult Iain McGilchrist — somewhat Scottish, just like my grandmother. You will find him all over the Internet, even if you are not looking.)

But I am curious this morning about another form of bi-polarity, that between Russia and America. Of course, the full, wide world is multi-polar, as we might imagine a person who had nuclear weapons, and was very, very, very, mad.

We have perhaps had “nukes” over-explained to us, although they remain, as it were, over our heads. The modern, high-tech, progressive, hydrogen, thermonuclear weapon is a miracle of sophisticated engineering and design. It combusts by fusion, a big improvement over the fission bomb that was good enough for Hiroshima. Indeed the latest thermonuclear bombs, though of smaller, more convenient size, can blow up on many times the scale.

And, they don’t spread radiation nearly as much as the old-fashioned A-bombs. Properly detonated, a little above the ground, they don’t produce fallout at all — although that danger was overstated. (You can walk right through Hiroshima with a Geiger-counter, less than a century after that blast, and you won’t get any reading at all.)

On the other hand, the new, improved nuke can obliterate most of a large city, and vaporize millions.

Will Putin use nuclear weapons when he finds himself bungling the war in Ukraine? For, he is hampered by munitions sent from Biden, and we know he is impatient. As any Democrat could tell you, he must really want Trump to win the next election.

He could interfere, by ordering surprise strikes against the United States, with those hypersonic missiles he’s been boasting about. He need not fear retaliation while the American command is distracted by gender issues, and Biden, who is senile, has probably lost the codes.

The electoral balance reflects urban-rural divisions. Regardless of State, if the County is urban, it is Democrat for sure. If rural, it is probably Republican. By targeting only big American cities, Putin could alter election results. Trump would now almost certainly win.