Essays in Idleness

We are not visionaries. By “we” I include all those living, born of woman/women, but exclude “extraterrestrials” such as the Angels, and the dead who have perhaps gone to Heaven. I can’t deny that some of these may be visionaries, but when the claim to more than natural eyesight is made, especially by scruffy characters, all of my powers of scepticism are excited. For I insist, scepticism is not a “visionary” property; it necessarily excludes visionary apprehension. I am not sceptical of the Angels, for I have not been in a position to examine them. But men I know, from being one.

Those who have visions — such as, arguably, the beloved Kit Smart (1722–71) — suffer visions of a different sort from the “normal” men and women of industry and politics, and are sometimes privileged to receive the attention of such eleemosynary institutions, as St Luke’s Asylum in Kit’s case. Indeed, his most “visionary” work, the Jubilate Deo, was written almost entirely in there. I recommend it for its hebraic poetical thrum, and secretly sane passing insights, but note that he never presented himself as a candidate for public office.

Adolf Hitler should have been confined, however, once he began broadcasting his visions. This would have been better for him, and for the German-speaking peoples, everywhere. But he was perhaps a too-extreme example. The mental ward, today, calls out for those who have visions of “global warming,” and other alarming prospects, as well as extensions of the welfare state. They have in common with Herr Hitler the belief that we should do something, and a kampf, or militant programme. Nein should be our “particular” response.

By contrast, there is no vision in downsizing. The politician, who wields a toy buzz-saw while on campaign, may be colourful, but does not need locking up. To accuse those who categorically oppose gleaming statist ambitions, of nursing statist ambitions, is unreasonable. For downsizing is the opposite of upsizing, and requires no visionary enthusiasm.

Ludwig von Mises was not, to my mind, strictly an economist. He was a moralist, and a practical philosopher, his chief object being the destruction of bureaucracy. It is not a “necessary evil,” but necessarily an evil, done like the others under cover of good. Mises is understandably hated by all socialists and progressives. In addition to its rhetorical attack, his book Bureaucracy (1944, revised 1962) documented the rise of bureaucratic agencies controlling public life throughout Europe and America. It showed that the “profit motive” paradoxically advances the public interest, in almost every case; that the “non-profit motive” is not only counter-productive, but apparently, politically ineradicable. Over time, bureaucracy stifles not only individual freedom, but the adaptability of society itself, leading to its decline and ruin.

This, and Mises’ chef-d’oeuvre, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, fell into my hands as a teenager, and made me an exponent of the “Austrian School.” Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) was another guide along the road not taken, or rather taken only briefly, by the allies after World War II. Such books helped to make me continuously unpopular, among budding Leftoids, from the age of fifteen. Since, I have done some supplementary reading, to make my attitudes more ghastly to them. My preference for liberty, beauty, goodness, truth, have cost me many popularity contests: for the “progressives” invariably prefer plausibility, subterfuge, and lies.

But there are rewards for resisting them: for instance, the satisfaction one feels that Javier Milei is eradicating the bureaucracy of Argentina (where it had been laid on especially thick), and others in their stations (Nayib Bukele, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders) dispatching bureaucracies elsewhere. This is encouraging, as is the rightwing sweep in trans-European elections yesterday. Note: the method of “cutting back bureaucracy” consists not of a few minor trims, but of the permanent, outright closure of entire government departments.

Even more I enjoy subtle developments in “science,” where bureaucratic takeover has made most public scientific enterprises dishonest and innately alarmist. The international “global warming” climate fraud continues to be Exhibit A; the Wuhan Batflu event, Exhibit B. Both monstrosities are the product of self-interested government strategy and funding.

More generally, the “non-profit” pursuit of academic science produces crooked, fund-grubbing results in the overwhelming majority of cases. I am delighted to see that the big American publisher, Wiley, has had to shut down nineteen of its scientific journals, and withdraw 11,500 scientific papers, to cut its losses from lawsuits. For it is, sometimes, still possible to expose falsity in the courts.

We look forward to an age that follows “follow the science.”

The best defence is a good offence, I was told by an ice hockey coach when I was learning the elementary ice hockey skills. As I had been cast as a goaltender, it seemed to me that with the best defence, a good offence wouldn’t be necessary. Unlike fussball, and other team sports, the game that ended in a zero-zero tie was generally the most exciting to watch; even when it was decided by a single goal in the fifth overtime period. By then, one would have had one’s fill of hockey, no matter how well the game had been played.

But it appears one can’t get one’s fill, any more, for I just checked, and the NHL playoffs are still running, in June. It goes without saying that the Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t in them; I gave up on them, shortly after the late Johnny Bower retired. This was just after his forty-fifth birthday, which made him the oldest player in the NHL whom I had ever loved. His last game was in 1969 — coincidentally the same year the Americans landed men on the moon. (I suspect they released some cosmic demon, thereby, who flew back to earth with them, and has caused no end of trouble since. So many things went to Hell, after 1969.)

As the Swiss have taught, the best sort of military defence is impenetrable. Imperial powers take a pass on invading, once they see how the Swiss have their mountains rigged. This arrangement has preserved their neutrality for the last five hundred years; and even though Switzerland is between Germany and Italy, France and Austria — which take turns having the best offence. I am a reactionary myself, or a “fascist” according to some of my correspondents, because I favour a domestic policy of rule-of-law and maximal freedom. But my foreign ideal is to be left alone. And so, even very small countries ought to invest in goalie-pads.

I once wrote a column on an anniversary of the Battle of Verdun (February through December, 1916). This was a memorably destructive event in the Great War, in which Germany and France combined to eliminate more than 300,000 of their respective soldiers, and maim another half-million or so. The Germans struck first; the French eventually “won.” I was defending, not so much the French, but the willing sacrifice of French youth, fed into a (highly efficient) German meat grinder.

It would have been better if the generals on both sides had not been so wasteful of human life. But they were very wasteful, and as “Jerry” ascended the Meuse Heights — at incredible cost — “Marianne” replied, not for liberty, equality, and fraternity, but for everything.

Our Canadians on Juno Beach in Normandy also understood the meaning of, “No price too high!” They also triumphed when they had no option, among many incidental deaths.

Readers of the newspaper with my Verdun column (the Kingston Whig-Standard) were scandalized, as they often were, by me. (It’s a commie town.) How dare I advocate for the deaths of so many, especially when an Iraq war was approaching, and “NBC” weapons might be used? Not for the first time, I was hazed on the street, by pacifist ninnies. Perhaps I encouraged this by calling them “poofters.” All had missed my delicate reasoning; I was not defending war for the sake of war. I was not half-cracked, like them.

There are times when you just have to fight. There may even be times when you are in the right. Operation Overlord was a good example; we must be ready to go there again. For there are times when the man who is running from danger lives a worthless life, compared to the man who gets killed.

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.”

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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?