Essays in Idleness

The final nightmare of modernism, foreseen by Nicolás Gómez Dávila, seems outwardly to be upon us, but the fact it was so clearly foreseen speaks against its finality. Dávila, the great Colombian reactionary, so perfectly foresaw “the trend in world events,” that with all his gifts of penetrating reason he embraced a knowing reclusiveness, his most extended work published in a privately printed edition of one hundred copies. My Joint Chief Washington Correspondent having now provided a link to a translation, I pass it along as a public favour. (Here.) Years, years, before names I will not bother to name, he captured that vain dementia which constitutes the post-modern mind, proving in retrospect its lack of development. Matthew Schmitz and William Randolph were, until last year, reposting Dávila’s aphorisms in English on Twitter, as a kind of tease. (Still archived here. I linked to a previous effort, here.) My purpose today is only to remind that almost everything I say, about the strange filthy world presented in our universally “fake news,” has been anticipated.

Take, for instance, only this one aphorism, apt to the present situation in Rome:

“Concerning himself intensely with his neighbour’s condition allows the Christian to dissimulate to himself his doubts about the divinity of Christ and the existence of God. Charity can be the most subtle form of apostasy.”

To which one may only add, that it has ceased to be subtle.

I differ from “Don Colacho” (as he signed himself), only in this respect: I think that we should keep up the teasing, through any media available to us; show the naked for what it is, and where necessary accept the consequences. In defiance of the principles of mass advertising — on this eve of the Conversion of Saint Paul — I think people can be reached only one at a time. Therefore strive to inform the last surviving reader. (“The soul you save may be your own.”)

What is true was always true, and what is now false was always so. Though everything seems to change, nothing really changes, and the essence of the “reaction” we espouse is to acknowledge what is actually immortal. Hence the preference of poetry to politics; for personal liberty over the activism of slaves; and the teaching of the God-man Christ over the trite and malicious slanders of the fashion coolies opposed to Him. The rewards for this can only be in Heaven.

Don Colacho does not stand alone, although he is unique in his genre. Without exception, all the great human minds were reactionary, or rose to that state in moments of inspiration, in none of which they ever pleased the crowd. Or that is my earnest belief, after sixty years of reading. Earthly power, rightly apprehended, is a tinsel that will soon blow away, and let us take contentment in its passing, for everything that it pretends to offer will also pass, and the powerful today are the dust of tomorrow.

[Updated irresponsibly, overnight.]

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Poetry should “make the visible a little harder to see” (Wallace Stevens), and should provide “a bombardment of proofs that the world is one” (Richard Wilbur).

This much is obvious, but there are more subtle services poetry should provide. It should afflict alike the comfortable and uncomfortable; shock in a sudden, startling music; it should violate privacy and mess with all routines; it should be generally invasive, racing through the reader’s cautious defences. It should take flight, as the falcon, while maintaining a profound coherence, embodying truths beneath the everyday.

It should be godly in this way. It should be elevated.

The decorator is mixing his plaster:
He’s lit an oil lamp on top of the step-ladder.
     It is the moon.
          It moves like an acrobat.
               Wherever it appears it causes panic.

(Vítězslav Nezval: some Czech commie, who wrote persistently better than he knew.)

Of course poems should always be in some recognizable metre, and remind us of that by their winking in the turns, while quietly breaking all the rules to preserve the appearance of the accidental. Overtly through metaphor, and subvertly through every trick of language, poetry should wash the reader’s sense of earthliness away. Whether rhymed or unrhymed, it should be repetitious, as the waves in the sea; but in the repetition, never exact. In should evoke common speech, almost as a parody, but no poem can pretend to be poetical that cannot be either sung or chanted.

Here, by way of example, is a cossante (a form invented for Gallician weaving women in the twelfth century), in which every rule is invisibly broken, by W. H. Auden in 1952. Notice that it is the perfect mediaeval cossante:

Among the leaves the small birds sing;
The crow of the cock commands awaking:
     In solitude, for company.

Bright shines the sun on creatures mortal;
Men of their neighbours become sensible:
     In solitude, for company.

The crow of the cock commands awaking;
Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding:
     In solitude, for company.

Men of their neighbours become sensible;
God bless the Realm, God bless the People:
     In solitude, for company.

Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding;
The dripping mill-wheel is again turning:
     In solitude, for company.

God bless the Realm, God bless the People;
God bless this green world temporal:
     In solitude, for company.

The dripping mill-wheel is again turning;
Among the leaves the small birds sing:
     In solitude, for company.

To revert: poetry should be heard not seen; so that if it must be read, it will be read as music, and played internally in the singing mind. But better it should subsist in the memory of the blind, and advance the cause of what I will call a holy blindness.

Art, on the contrary, illustrates the poetic, waiting for us to open our eyes again.

*

From the beginning, God so arranged the world to make poetry absolutely necessary. This is why it has existed in all cultures since the divine allocation of human speech. Before the paintings were added to the walls of Lascaux, our brutish ancestors were declaiming. And when, at the forefront of technology today, we are deprived of poetry, it reasserts itself, often in monstrous ways.

The poet Dana Gioia, whom I admire for dressing in a business suit when he goes to work every morning (or leaving that impression if he don’t), stressed this last point in some lecture I was auditing, probably on YouTube. Brilliantly, he mentioned the over-genre of hip hop. Into the vacuum for poetry it exploded, in English and in Urdu, and every other global language, from its abstruse origins in the South Bronx — with an insistence that left all of its detractors (me, for instance) powerless to deny. It answered to a terrible hunger, in the way that false religion fills a void of true.

Yet God sheds his grace on the worthy and unworthy; there is poetry, hip hop and rap, that is astounding and beautiful. Mostly in Spanish, I think. (It may help that I don’t really understand Spanish.)

Now Gioia, who is a model for openness and kindliness and public charity, is not responsible for my further observations.

The poetical is the political in an age like this. (So is everything.) Soon hip hop, in its developments, will have ruled for half a century, in the place behind the mind. It was the genius of, for instance, a certain ex-president to ride to power on its magic carpet; and all the tribal factions of identity politics may coalesce as variations on a single dance theme. He mastered all the aesthetic principles of em-ceeing and dee-jaying, of bee-boying, beat-boxing, and graffiting, with ineffable charm, and without any rational ideas, adapting or appropriating a background ideology from what he’d half-learnt at Harvard. Had he been a neo-con, it could not have worked as well, for neo-con is a hard, realistic, bean-counting religion. “Hope and change” works only with magic beans; it cannot hear arguments, or rather, is allergic to them. (The new guy hears arguments but, as we observed at the inaugural ball, has dance feet of lead.)

So now Orpheus is gone in the final serenade of a March for Death (an inversion or involution of the March for Life) — a kind of hip hop demonstration, repeated around the world, among crowds of batty people under pink pussy hats. Beyond any individual practitioner, this hip-hopsomeness is at the root of the phenomenon of “flipping” by which anything that is noble in a culture can be inverted, then rhythmically transformed, into something glittering and empty, if not poisonous.

*

We have seen this before, in the Orphism of the ancient world, which “flipped” the religions of the old Hellenic cities, and became in short time “the religion of the people.” Curiously it produced no lasting poetry, music, or art, and only a rather depraved architecture: sanctuaries that were holes in the ground. But it answered to the demand for the mysterious against a desiccated formalism in temple and state, overthrew reason, and retained its power until defeated by the “poetical dogmatism” of Saint Paul. One might say that with a greater, divine magic, he broke its spell; and by a finer poetry, re-inverted its precepts, returning to Hellas her confident sensation of up and down.

This, I think, is a chapter in the history of religion that needs to be more carefully examined. In history as in poetry there is recurrence, though never exact. For the moment, perhaps all that can be said is that modern man decided he could live without poetry, and poetry has had its revenge.

Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink. Admits to a germ phobia. Works twenty hours a day. This might be a crazy man.

Or possibly an android. But androids aren’t vain. And besides, he admits that he is vain, unlike the previous android. Prides himself especially on his “common sense.” He also seems to have a sense of humour, and to be capable of self-deprecation. But hasn’t made a habit of it.

Extreme self-confidence; comfortable among strong-willed people.

He is very smart, very sharp, with that kind of intelligence that was made for survival on a stage. Quick on his feet; knows when to duck. And unlike a politician, when not to. (As I mentioned in a recent post, the public are good at judging pretty faces on their TVs; not so good at estimating intelligence.)

Remarkably candid. Doesn’t mind if you don’t like it.

Likes people in uniform, from generals to hotel cleaning staff. Knows how to wear a tuxedo; or a babe on his arm. Decidedly heterosexual. Likes strong women, too. (Women are discovering that sometimes a man is okay, for a change.)

Can do business with anybody, both in his imagination and in fact.

Bit of a temper on him: retaliates for slights. Can recall, but does not nurse a grudge. People who have actually known him for a long time say he is a warm, loyal, generous friend, who remembers birthdays. (Certainly well organized, in that way.)

And I have seen interviews with him from years ago, in which his political views were solicited, before he became a professional politician. (Once a hack, always a hack: I can’t stop myself inquiring into “background.”) Those views have not changed: a “populist” then as now.

Doesn’t like wars. Knows they cost a lot of money. Would rather that no one got hurt.

Given to overstatement and wild exaggeration, but with enjoyment. Needs coaching on the understatement side.

Basically honest, in a businesslike way. Unlikely to commit crimes, once he knows what they are.

I have no reason to believe he is a gangster, apart from the fact he’s been in real estate, and often talks like a gangster. Also looks like a gangster, and dresses like one, and has a wife who looks like a moll, but I don’t think it’s fair to dwell on appearances. (Too, she looks absolutely gorgeous in powder blue.)

For that matter, most gangsters are refreshingly honest, when the stakes are low. Gratuitous dishonesty is for the general population, who never take big risks.

As protection rackets go, one is probably better off with gangsters than with minor-league bureaucrats, looking for something to enforce, if only to assuage their minor-league bureaucratic egos. Gangsters are happy to overlook the small stuff. They get big by focusing on the “bigly.” We get small by focusing on the small change. Fortunately for us, gangsters create employment, and don’t make a scene unless they have to. (However, little-league gangsters can be a pest.)

Moses gave ten commandments, by the way. Only three are currently enforceable, and those only in carefully specified cases.

But there are more than 10,000 felonies on the U.S. books today (I saw an estimate somewhere, of nearly 17,000) — from dwarf tossing (in Florida) to slow dancing (in a national park). They are currently increasing faster than 1,000 a year: a few by statute, the rest through regulatory codes. Goodness knows how many misdemeanours. Nanny State can always nail you for something.

Nineteen in twenty convictions are by plea bargain; 97 percent of charges stick in some form (approximately the level in Stalin’s Russia). And this despite sometimes slovenly police. Tens of millions of convicted felons; about 7 million currently in gaol or on parole; well over a million busy lawyers. Just think if they had proper trials.

So yes, the people in the inaugural crowd who shouted that Hillary should go to gaol, had a point. And Donald should surely go there, too. So should everybody. Indeed, it is conventionally Christian to observe, that we all deserve to hang.

I listened carefully to the inaugural speech. You had to be a foreigner to appreciate it. To such an one, it sounded as if the new Chief Executive conceives of Natted States Merica as one yuge protection racket. As I said: better to be in than out.

And on reasons hinted, I think this is for the best. The previous Chief was a fusspot, a nickel-and-dime man, lacking the strategic vision. He was never sure whose side he was on. He set some sort of record for new laws. High time to simplify things.

“Go with God,” my father used to instruct me, at each parting. This, he once told me, was what his own father had often said to him. Yet papa was lapsed from his family’s Methodist church-going past, and not externally even a Christian, let alone the Catholic his son became. Until, I think, his very last hours. But the phrase appealed to him, and so he kept it in his heart. Do good, and be on the side of good; be brave, and never deviate from the good cause. Be a soldier, as the knights of old.

He’d had firsthand experience of war (had been, for instance, a Spitfire flyboy), and thought that at some level life is war — a Crusade, through which we are called to be happy soldiers. He was invincibly cheerful. (“We may not win, but they will wish they never met us.”) An officer and a gentleman by disciplined habit, he could give as well as receive orders, and had trained himself to “be British” — it is a variation on Romanitas — and rule instinctively by example.

But to the point, I recall his principal standing order: “Go with God.”

The mass media have prepared us for some chaos in Washington today, to go with the Trump inauguration. It will thus be the opposite of spontaneous. They will play innocent on air, while reporting in loving detail any violence they can find, and conveying dark hints from the “anonymous sources” with which they are consciously conspiring. Their challenge is to present everything — including everything that went wrong in the preceding administration — as the consequence of Trump, and retroactive proof of his illegitimacy. To call them “biased” is exceedingly droll.

I have known this Fifth Estate from the inside, and through it, the Left mindset of academia and all their captured bureaucracies. To my disgust I have watched it spread among opponents, as media on the Right adopt the same malicious tactics, an eye for an eye. It is difficult for the bystander to avoid becoming engaged in an increasingly globalized contest between the forces of darkness on one side, and the forces of darkness on the other. So long as the electrical grids hold out, we may expect escalation.

As I argue elsewhere today (here), the solid ground of moral and intellectual authority is itself beginning to liquify, outward from an epicentre at Rome. We have the incredible scandal of a pope, actively undermining the foundations of Catholic faith and reason; after decades of similar “modernizing” efforts in the Church and all other Western institutions. Those who earnestly defend civilization itself, in all of its charted and uncharted fields, find themselves marching through mud and quicksand, and being shelled from their own rear.

War, too, is on many levels, and the Christian conception of its essential form (see the Spiritual Combat of Lorenzo Scupoli; or the interpretation of it by Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory) is more likely to eschew than to embrace violence; though it is never pacifist. Our war is against principalities and powers, and the front line strings through every human heart.

It is presented by the Prophet Nehemiah, as the condition of life on this earth, as he rebuilds the walls of Jerusalem: with sword in one hand and trowel in the other. Or as rephrased in Eliot’s Choruses from the Rock: “The trowel in hand, and the gun slightly loose in the holster.”

“O Lord,” we read, “deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”

Our world may seem to be crumbling around us, our purported friends our actual enemies, but it is important to remember that this is nothing new. Verily: one purpose in reading the Old Testament, with creative attention, is to allow this lesson to thoroughly sink in. To “go with God” is to go into battle, now, as always. It is to restore what is constantly being taken away,

Civilization is the action of building, barbarism a tearing down. Even in the most worldly terms, this is so. God, who made man capable of faith and reason, made him capable through those qualities of high civilization, as we may observe in our surveys of the past; made us capable not only of building, but rebuilding.

Therefore, Rejoice! … For seen from another and higher angle we have the spectacle of the false, dissolving in its own acids. The Devil can destroy, but cannot build. The same extends to all his earthly agents. This is why, in the end, our victory is assured, even if the whole world dissolves into chaos. For still, we may go with God; and in the words of the old flyboy song:

Oh Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?
Oh Grave, thy victory?
The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me.

Several correspondents who berated me (in fairly colourful language) for opposing Trump through the Republican primaries now congratulate me for “warming to him.” I find this odd, since most had said they wouldn’t be reading me any more. Too, I’m not aware of warming to Trump. Nor has my pleasure in the defeat of Hillary Clinton waned. (I did say from the start that Trump would win.) One of the two had to win the election, and while I was willing to concede Hillary’s particular merit — for corruption is a humanizing force, that works against leftish ideology — I could find no other. Perhaps the thought of having to look at her for another four years was another paradoxical plus. She might cure me of any remaining Internet addiction. There might also be peace and quiet, or at least quiescence from the progressive media, who only report on the scandals they invent.

Whereas, I have come to enjoy Trump’s turbulence: fat man waddling on the high wire. He may not represent anything resembling the sort of policies I could sincerely endorse, but he is hated by all the right people. Their gasps of horror suspend him aloft. And while he gives no promise of turning the clock back, in the manner I should wish it turned, his approach to the management of the Nanny State cannot be ham-fisted enough for me.

He is vulgar and offensive. That is my best argument for him. And while I am opposed to the existence of Twitter, I do appreciate his tweets. A surprisingly high proportion of them are true, which is what makes them so outrageous. He has found a way to get entirely around the “mainstream” newsmongers, thus hastening their extinction; and as a bonus he scares the bejeezus out of America’s enemies around the world. This is a happy change from Obama, who scared only America’s friends. As I once had the honour of explaining to one of George Dubya’s senior aides, I have nothing against appeasement: so long as your enemies are appeasing you.

The idea that Putin and Trump are in league is deeply frivolous. One has only to put oneself in Putin’s place to understand this. By all means tamper as well as you can with the Natted States electoral system — one must settle scores for Merican tampering in Ukraine — but it seems he failed to stealthily enter the Republican machine. Whereas Mrs Clinton, Mr Podesta, and friends, left the Democrat gates wide open. I have no idea who got in first — it wouldn’t have required much skill — but if the Russians did, they should have settled for blackmail. By exposing exactly what the U.S. media should have been exposing, for the last many years, they only helped Trump win.

And it wasn’t in the Russian interest to have America “made great again.” Far better to have four more years of Obamishing: of thrilling incompetence, mental enscramblement, and general retreat. Now they must deal with a man who can quite possibly do thuggery as well as they, and with better equipment. Trump they will not want to anger.

His cabinet comes from all over the map. All are big rich power players, who will pull confidently in quite various directions. We’ll have lions jumping through hoops, both ways! His government may not even need an opposition, being able to generate that service within. The Left, bewildered by their own bafflegab, think everyone on the Right is the same. But Trump’s cabinet is all on the Right, and its members sport at least sixteen distinct sets of priorities. My liberal-progressive readers (I seem to have some, weirdly enough) risk missing a chance to enjoy a spectacle that comes just in time to replace the Ringling Brothers; and in which there are still elephants, notwithstanding “animal rights.”

Of course it will all end in tears, but then, it always does. That’s what politics are for: to warn people away from the trite notion that human nature is adaptable. But with the Left determined to repeat all of their characteristic mistakes — such as blind, violent moral preening — Trump may still have a good run through Congress. (The sort of opponents who e.g. reflexively smear you for anti-Semitism, when you are the best friend Israel ever had, are a gift from the gods.)

Trump is a true American thinker, dedicated to the only philosophy we in North America were ever able to conceive. It is called Pragmatism, it denies all paradox, and given the naïve optimism with which it is gassed, real entertainment is fully guaranteed.

The greatest show on earth!

Gleaming and glittering with gold and wondrous surprises for young and old!

There was a sitting room in England, once, with a serviceable hearth. It was small, and in a house that was small. There was a small couch, and a couple of wooden chairs, both mended. Books piled everywhere, as normal. The walls were of a green horsehair plaster, one hundred and fifty years old; and a beam across the ceiling, supporting joists, had carved into it a favourite proverb: “The Tygers of Wrath are wiser than the Horses of Instruction.” This was slightly crowded to the right: I had botched the letter-spacing.

Often I think back on it: this workman’s cottage in Vauxhall, London, demolished thirty-nine years ago. I have mentioned it before: my happiest domicile. It was a portion of paradise, and should I ever go to gaol, I hope it will be an antiquated dungeon free of tacky modern fixtures, to remind me of this place.

One could build another just like it, I suppose, but then another century or more would be needed to acquire the patina. The wide floorboards, the short stairs, would require a century of walking on, for the living texture to be impressed; linoleum would have to be kept off it. The kitchen could be spared any “convenience,” such as a refrigerator, by the simple expedient of forbidding wires and plugs. Instead, an old cast iron cooker and its soot. Electric light would spoil everything: lanterns and candlelight cast the right glow. The sun streaking through mullioned windows in the glory of the day. Toilet in the yard; tub hanging from a spike in the stone of the pantry; running water through a single pipe, deliciously cold. Heavy brass tap; the jolt when it is closed.

But now I think of the darning, and therefore of a young lady, who came to visit me from time to time. She was from the West Country, mildly hippiesque. I had a darning egg, needles, threads, and yarns, but was myself no good at darning. What I did would unravel in a few days. But this lady, by name Betty, could repair not only socks, but stitch or patch any sort of clothing, and did so in subtle patterns, that adorned the fabric while gradually fading in. In return, she wished to be brought tea, and read one of my silly stories, or from my commonplace anthology of verses.

We were not lovers; we were friends. Somehow that was possible in those days, before everything had to be graphed, pointed, and delineated. We had little in common; I utterly adored her. Born to embroider; hating nothing except waste.

She could knit, of course; also draw, and paint; and to my lasting regret I have somehow lost the small painting she gave me the last time we parted, those many years ago. She was colour-blind, and produced as a consequence the most ingeniously counter-intuitive effects in water-colour. The picture was of two goldfish, turning together under water lit by a full moon. A turquoise that was quite unearthly.

Married, soon after: she went off to California. I went back to Asia, to work as a hack again. Decades have passed since the last handwriting passed between us, in envelopes with stamps and exotic cancellations. But I still have a photo she once enclosed, showing the husband I never met, and two wee childers, all bound together in a human jumble. The little girl in that picture has Betty’s face; her pointed nose, her merry squint, the joyful sparkling eyes. Somewhere life goes ever on, out of sight and comprehension.

My clothes are disintegrating again: socks, shirts, and coat; holes in pockets, and torn linings — time rubs it in. I feel helpless today. Yet I have what could serve as a darning egg, needles and threads, some canvas that could be cut for patches. None of this stuff has been touched for years.

Suppose, for the sake of having an argument, that gentle reader has his legs chomped off. We are to understand that this was not a voluntary action; or not entirely voluntary. He had foreseen the use of his legs for the rest of his mortal existence, and was sincerely committed to keeping them attached. He had done nothing more than dangle them over the side of his yacht, when the great white shark came along. The sort of thing that could happen to anybody.

Why can’t he have a new pair of legs? Surely this is an injustice. A man needs legs, to this way of thinking, and God must be mean and spiteful, to prevent him from growing replacements. It is so unfair: everyone else has legs, why not me?

The only way to get them back, is to make some incident on the yacht unhappen: to get it “annulled” as if it had all been a bad dream. An interesting bad dream, I think, if there are children not otherwise to be explained.

I have a long list here, of things I’d like to be unhappened, myself. But then I get lost wondering what happens after all those unhappenings have happened; or what else might require unhappening until I get back to the unhappening of my birth. At some point one becomes reconciled to the unhappening of all unhappenings, and starts thinking in terms of forgiveness and absolution, instead. And just living with it.

Which is to say, I’ve never had “a problem with” the Catholic teaching on marriage; my (intellectual) “problem” has rather been with the annulment of it. At root, I don’t “get” it. I can sort-of see the annulment of a coerced marriage; or even an unconsummated one; or a marriage somehow contracted between parties who were, um, batwhoop insane. I cannot sort-of see the annulment of an uncoerced, consummated marriage between two not in need of psychiatric intervention. But let me pass on that; there are lots of things I don’t get; I am rather slow-witted. Maybe some day the penny will drop, and the whole of Canon Law will be revealed to me. Maybe Holy Church knew what she was doing, even when it appeared she did not. …

Maybe it wasn’t the legs that he lost, maybe something else that was a part of him. Perhaps his head came off, while he was dawdling on the Internet, and he lost his mind. Or his heart: men often lose their hearts. “Lord, the woman thou gavest me to be my companion …” did one darn’d thing or another, and, well. …

“Moses, for the hardness of your heart, permitted you to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away. But from the beginning, it was not so. … God made them male and female,” et cetera.

If I am quoting from, or alluding to Genesis a lot, lately, it is from my sense that we, too, must go back to the beginning; that we have wandered so badly off course that we must almost start again from scratch. We are losing even the concept of “male and female.” But it is late in the day now, and going back to Eden isn’t an option. Can we still master the concept of “yes or no”? … (Can even our pope do it?)

The “problem” with the Catholic teaching on marriage is that it isn’t complicated. We rather wish it were. It is simple like having legs, or not having. “They two shall be one flesh.” It is not a mix-and-match proposition. There is, to be sure, serial monogamy in the world around us. And, serial polygamy I have noticed. But it is not allowed aboard the Church Catholic. If you want that, you will have to step off. For it is one of those “yes or no” propositions, like the Resurrection.

Rather, this is what we have onboard: “What God hath joined let no man put asunder.” … (I should think “no man” would include the participants.)

In case the meaning of this arguably abstruse phrase were to cause confusion, our Captain added: “Whosover shall put away his wife and marry another, committeth adultery against her.” And then He spelt that out, in words that would be hard to misconstrue. … (O ye bishops of Malta!)

Sin happens. This is nothing new. It has been happening for some time now; and if it’s possible to retrieve someone gone overboard, Holy Church is bound to try. She will need some cooperation from the drowning party, however. He (she, they) need to be “accompanied” back to the yacht. The sort of gooey, slobbering sympathy that proposes to follow them to some other destination will not do.

A person floundering in the water may have no clear idea what is to be done. The person trying to rescue him must have a clear idea, however. This is something I once learnt in lifeguard class.

Bad luck also happens. But you get used to it after a while. There are some things you, personally, can’t have (legs after the chomping were just one example), and the thing about things you can’t have, is that you can’t have them. So you might as well make the best of it. Better to have what’s left of you on the yacht, instead of in the water, is what I am suggesting here. (I think Christ said something similar.)

Yes, yes, it’s a mess, modern life. The teaching about “living as brother and sister,” offered by Saint John Paul, was for extremes. Now it is interpreted as if the hard cases were the commonplaces; to which is added, “Let’s be merciful and make it easier for them.” Let’s just allow the lady and the gentleman their death clutch, while they drown; and do this for the sake of their children, as they also go down. After all, the modern world is messy.

Verily, why do we need the yacht? Why don’t we all hop in the water, and swim wherever we want to go? For the yacht is so confining. Surely this will make everyone happier; and the sharks, too.

Better-looking people get higher marks in school. They are more popular than their peers, there and ever after. They get better jobs, earn higher salaries, glean more praise and are more quickly promoted. Their houses are thus bigger, and filled with better stuff. They commit fewer crimes, or if they do commit one, the courts will treat them more leniently. Complaints from the better-looking will be more patiently heard. They are naturally more contented with life, and perceived as wiser and more charming. When running for public office, in an election where little information is available, they are more likely to win. This is also true if plenty of information is available.

I am told all this in a thread of studies that began with one link on Drudge this morning. All purport to be scientific, and the rankings of subjects by visual attractiveness is perfectly objective. Pictures of them are shown to randomly selected reviewers who, knowing nothing but what they can see, rank them from, say, a ten to a zero. Eccentricities of judgement thus come out in the wash.

More, more. … Attractive people tend to be more rightwing, or “conservative.” They think the world is fairer than unattractive people think it, and because they make more money, and have a better time, they are less well disposed to governments appropriating what they have. Whereas, ugly people are more likely to be socialists, and whiners.

We (or at least, I) might take this as the first scientific evidence in favour of democracy. The people may have no idea what is going on, or what is at stake in any election. But at least they know to vote for the pretty face.

The findings also agree with my own observations, over the years, and square nicely with some studies I recall from the 1970s, which showed that rightwing types in every European country had more active and fulfilling sex lives. In England, for instance, the Young Conservatives were an agreeable social club, in which politics were discussed only during the election campaigns. Whereas, among the Labour youth, everything was policy, policy, policy, and the kids were all tediously discontented. As for the Communists, hooo! They offered a freakshow of creatures who would never get a date, and in the end would have to settle for each other.

Moreover, as we see in Canada today, the Liberal party is reduced to finding a pretty-boy aerohead with “nice hair” to serve as their nominal leader. Shows that their brains are in the backrooms. And that the exception proves the rule.

I have a further reason to accept these plain scientific results. Being correlation, not causation, they work both ways. They give a welcome indication that I must myself be a very attractive person for, after all, I am very rightwing.

According to the estimate of one of my correspondents, about one-third of the Alberta economy is gone, since the collapse of world crude oil prices began to engage with the regulatory destruction of the province’s fossil fuel industries. This is good news, to those who envied the province’s “excessive” wealth, and Calgary’s “corporate power.” (Per capita income in Alberta was until quite recently higher than that of any Canadian province or American state.) The decline is statistically masked, however, by the disappearance of imports (the “tar sands” required a lot of high-tech equipment) and the skid of the Canadian dollar: the trade balance has technically improved. Likewise, the unemployment rate may actually fall, as people give up seeking jobs entirely. It is only in reality that businesses are closing or radically downsizing; that the economic pilgrimage of labour to Alberta from Canada’s poorer provinces has turned the other way.

Decline is never distributed equally, and while the capitalists take so many hits, that it becomes possible to find “affordable housing” in Calgary, the government town of Edmonton is still visibly booming. This is where the new socialist government presides, in succession to the spendthrift “conservative” government held responsible for a downturn beyond its control. Albertans have long been known as decisive people. They decided that if they were going to commit suicide, they would do it properly.

In the same way, after years of economic stagnation across much of USA, Washington DC and its surrounding counties remain an island of remarkable prosperity. Nothing yet impedes their parasitical growth, and one may easily understand the horror with which a businessman like Trump is greeted when, as president-elect, he threatens to apply a form of chemotherapy to America’s metastasized bureaucracies. (In the recent election, Trump and Pence took 4.1 percent of the popular vote in DC: a minority of the 9.5 percent who did not vote for Hillary.)

There are no mysteries here. Wealth is generated by human work and investment, and the purpose of politics, like piracy, is to suck it dry.

I mentioned Alberta first, however, for the USA economy remains the world’s most formidable, and therefore complex, even in decline. Alberta’s resource-based industries make it simpler to understand. Before oil and gas there was beef and wheat, and before that, furs. The population is diffuse, and the conditions for the development of manufacturing and services — traditionally dense population, and thus a massive labour pool — only recently emerged, and only in the small corridor of the province that bridges its two dominant cities. (Warmer Texas, by comparison, has acquired far more population.) Live by the sword, die by the sword, has ever been the destiny of the resource-based, and the “blue-eyed sheikhs” are now suffering the fate of Arabia. For like Saudi, Alberta became a vastly inflated welfare state, which with the collapse of the oil price can be quickly deflated.

Every government’s first spending priority is itself. This becomes painfully evident as the revenue stream dries: the consumption of a nation’s lifeblood becomes more centralized. Paradoxically, what is bad for Alberta is, for a time, good for Edmonton; as what is bad for America is good for DC. As the body decays, the parasites flourish, though not indefinitely. Eventually there is no more lifeblood to be sucked, and we have an economic corpse like Venezuela. With that comes the last stage of societal disintegration, and violence in the throes.

Now, our times are more interesting (in the classical Chinese sense) for the technological developments I’ve touched on (here, for instance). Human labour is becoming outmoded. It is a problem that cannot be ignored — a consumer society must retain some money-earning consumers — yet can only be aggravated by government intervention. Human creativity might conceivably rise to the occasion, but inanition can be the only response to the palliative drug of welfare.

To this survivalist end, I think, the bloodsucking must stop. It precludes the very possibility of recovery.

At a recent meeting of a secret society to which I belong, the name “Raymond Chandler” came up. Gentle reader may know him for one of those detective novelists. I gather he’s been dead since 1959. But oddly enough his works, in the Library of America edition (two volumes), were then found lying in a flea market, like a pair of unclaimed bodies in a morgue. Although I have never been much of a hoo-dunnit fan, I remembered being quite entertained by Chandler in my youth; that Auden had good words for him; and that Oscar Wilde once provided an excuse for low behaviour. (“I can resist anything except temptation.”)

I was slanging “conventional” novels just last week, but will admit they have some historical uses. In this case, the books evoke an earlier generation of greater Los Angeles, and Chandler’s sharp eye for objects and interior decoration, for clothing and mannerisms of speech and gesture, beat anything that might whip by in a televised period drama. Indeed, one must read about these things today, because it is beyond the acting abilities of a later generation to capture what adulthood was like, before it began to phase out in the ’sixties. Old photographs are useful, too, in presenting faces one does not see today. This was a time when, even in Hollywood, a girl in her early twenties could have elegance and charm, and it was possible to imagine a virgin.

There are a lot of evil people in Chandler, as there always are in every generation, and the hoo-dunnit writer must, by trade, contrive a few murders. Gangsters, too, are a commonplace of society at all times, and seem meaner when they can provide a more vivid contrast with everyday life. The background dullness of the older and much smaller (but already sprawling) Los Angeles conurbation stands in for the dullness of all North American cities, or all parts built in the automotive age. The emptiness of all attempts at glitz was more striking against a greyer background, before glitz was normalized. By now it is enchanting, and for those of a certain age (moi, for instance) there are nostalgic pleasures. There was much of quiet, timeless beauty still in the countryside; the cities were aesthetic hell-holes already; but the ugliness did not yet scream.

Conversely, some things haven’t changed, and there is a certain immortal likeness in all human society prior to, or functioning outside, the Internet globalization. Let me call this “the universality of the local.” From my own memory, which now compasses a third generation, three stages can be discerned. In nice quarter-century increments, there is a post-War ending about 1970; a middling stage from then until about 1995; and now the “millennial” stage. The first and second have much more in common than either with this latest, in which those once accustomed to mere telephones and letters are necessarily rather lost. “Change” was accelerating all through, but speeds have been reached to which the human psyche was never in all history adapted, so that the very notion of “future” is slurred. Nothing holds still any more, for anyone to begin to understand it.

Chandler’s plots are entirely unbelievable; his characters, too. The “tough guys” he takes such delight in depicting aren’t scary any more, and probably weren’t when they first saw print. His women are unnecessarily gorgeous and sly; there is no relief from Hollywood cliché. The blondes are too blonde, though I must say there is a fine Aristotelian inventory of the species of blonde, early in The Long Goodbye, and other delicious attempts at cataloguing stereotypes. Philip Marlowe himself, our hard-boiled fictional private detective, could not in real life have survived all his beatings, though possibly his alcohol consumption, matched, I’m informed, by the author’s own. His much-celebrated moral code would not stand up to candid analysis, but then, it was not meant to. Entertainment only was proposed, and the literary flourishes are aimed at the first generation to absorb mass post-secondary education. In this sense Chandler’s novels are cloyingly pretentious, though relief comes from the occasional poetical image or simile that is thrilling in a comical way.

He is pulp fiction from beginning to end, where the attraction is in the props, and a “camp” effect is sought that might be as addictive as Sherlock Holmes. There is tension enough to keep us idly turning pages, but in the end a very modern reduction of human life to the condition of the movie or cartoon.

[In the hope of being better understood, I have extended my prologue.]

*

We have apparently in Canada now — as too, in many other Western jurisdictions — a legal “right” to suicide, together with something more consequential (for those with brains to think this through). It is what amounts to a “right” to be murdered. It is among the products of the progress of progressivism: that “transvaluation of all values” that Herr Nietzsche wrote about; or as I’d rather put it, the inversion of that moral order which, through human action by the grace of God, Christian civilization achieved. This strange, incremental but accelerating inversion, in which old premisses are replaced by new, becomes ever more openly demonic.

The premisses being overthrown — an example being the sanctity of human life — are not only moral but intellectual. What was grounded in nature, clarified in men’s minds by divine commandment, and carefully presented on the principle of non-contradiction through centuries by our most learned and wise, is replaced by arbitrary atheist assertions, in a chaotic jumble of self-contradictions. In the new totalitarian “rights language,” laws are rewritten ad hoc and holus-bolus, depending on what progressive fashion requires, each new “right” necessarily false because it will acknowledge no corresponding duty, as all classical reasoning required. The new premisses are one-winged, and tightly circular: “This is your right, therefore this is your right, therefore the world must be changed to deliver it, regardless of cost or consequences.”

We confront arguments today that operate on reason as the terrorist’s bomb on human flesh, or a bulldozer across a garden. Progressive thinking provides no principles to resolve contradictions beyond the vanities and whims of progressive commissars. It expressly denies the cardinal virtue of prudence, and all allied restraints; it expressly refuses to answer any question with the candour of a Yea or Nay; indeed mocks every demand for consistency, and seeks the punishment of anyone who asks.

Resistance to the constantly “evolving” progressive agenda becomes a pitched battle in which reason can, sadly, find no purchase — you cannot argue with howler monkeys. Each clash reduces painfully to: Can they do it, or can we stop them? For we are dealing with an Enemy — principalities, powers — who does not hesitate or relent. He has cracked the front line of civilized defences, and advances with an insatiable hatred, focused finally upon God. This Enemy does not intend to allow his opponents time to recover, or to grant them refuge anywhere.

I am not saying that the politically “progressive” are all inhabited by devils. Many are not, and the great masses only jounce in the contemporary moral and intellectual pandæmonium. I am saying that we have lost “politics as usual.” It is not a contest between adversaries who, in good faith, propose honourable means to honourable ends. It is a contest over the ends themselves; the kind of contest of which Our Lord said, “He who is not with me is against me.”

*

Through the casual review of polls, over the years, I have become aware that the general public can itself be moved from approximately 80/20 to approximately 20/80 (four fingers and a thumb to four thumbs and a finger) by any specious argument, if it is repeated constantly, and the Left are able to impose a fait accompli through the courts. Among intellectuals, the swings may be wider and quicker. They are not pendular, however, for once various civilized taboo lines have been crossed, there is no inevitable return, and the only way back is through a field of carnage.

Today, unlike “yesterday” (i.e. a few short years ago) there is 80 percent support for what goes in Canada under the euphemism “assisted dying,” and everywhere under the older euphemism, “euthanasia.” As loyal Christians (or Jews, and many others) we must never surrender to public opinion of this kind. Yet we must recognize that it is pointless to argue with the great mass who, in Canada as in places like Nazi Germany, can so easily be persuaded that down is up, and that words now have new meanings. They simply haven’t the equipment to follow a thread longer than the short slogans in which progressives specialize. Not if their moral schooling was defective, leaving consciences deformed.

People can be “educated” or “catechized” or awakened only one by one, and with their own participation. There is always hope, for as Thomas Sowell says, though everyone is born ignorant, not everyone is born stupid. But in practice, they are retrieved from catastrophic error, only by catastrophe.

At this point in our societal degeneration, “the people” are obedient to what beloved Benedict XVI called the “dictatorship of relativism.” This is understandable because few were raised in anything else. The very concept of a moral absolute (e.g. “thou shalt do no murder”) is alien to them. At the gut level, they may still individually recoil against an evil, but only if they have watched, and found the spectacle “icky.”

Hence what I noticed in the recent Planned Parenthood “debate” in neighbouring USA. People got quite excited about the sale of “baby parts” who had no strong objection to abortion. It was not the murder of the child itself, but the subsequent details that disgusted them. This was made the worse, for agents of the Left, because another fallen aspect of our human nature is ghoulish curiosity. The complete triumph of “tabloid” over “broadsheet” journalism was enabled by technology, but at a more fundamental level, by the exploitation of this sick human desire to (as we see on the streets) stop and gawp at the traffic accident, or the shooting aftermath, or whatever seems to be on offer.

A morality that depends on the perception of ickiness becomes a danger in itself. It may seem at first commendably anti-intellectual, but the loss of reason entails unpredictable developments, regardless of the direction taken — whether superficially Left or Right.

*

From my mail, on yesterdays’ Idlepost, I discover that in nursing homes where “assisted dying” executions are now taking place, management has a problem that was not anticipated. The executions must be performed in strictest secrecy because many of their staff want to get a look.

They want to be in on the drama. They’d like to watch someone die.

In the past, long before modern tabloid journalism, the State would exploit this human quirk, by making capital punishment very public. A beheading, a hanging, especially with drawing and quartering, would attract a large audience. This in turn would be good for business, too, as everyone from street vendors to pickpockets cashed in. The historians’ assumption is that the purpose of a public execution is to warn the general public against breaking the law. But I think often a larger purpose was the old populist provision of “bread and circuses.”

Today we have the relatively bloodless alternative of professional sports. But as our society returns, by progressive increments, to its pagan roots, we may expect the emergence of something more gladiatorial.

Already, Islamic terrorism produces scenes that are horrible, and for that reason intriguing to the common man. Sooner or later the marketing people discover the sales opportunities. Indeed, through the medium of cable television, they already have found a way to monetize it. And like the pornographers, the newscasters come to realize that by posting “warnings” they can not only exculpate themselves, with characteristic hypocrisy, but also attract a larger crowd.

My point here is that by each “transvaluation,” or inversion, of the ancient received moral order, we do not get the new one we expect. We get developments beyond anything that anyone could have expected, as the various forgotten evils that lurk in the human breast come to engage with each other.

A Filipina, an Ethiopian, and a Pakistani walk into a nursing home. …

This is not a joke; instead a recollection from several years ago as my parents were exiting this world. The institution, providing a form of terminal care, with bed and board, continues around two corners in Parkdale here. It is “the last place on earth” for 128 patients at any given moment; never less, for there are waiting lists. It has a better reputation than some nursing homes.

The three in question stand out in memory because in two cases they were outstanding nurses, and in the third, an outstanding administrator. Each, in her particular role, had the grace of what I suppose our pope would call “mercy,” if he means by it the ability to go somewhere beyond the rules in offering comfort and fellowship to the dying. Two Christians and a Muslim.

I am thinking, partly, of their services to my parents, who had also the luxury of frequent visits from their children and friends, and the company of each other until my father died. We appreciated them; but other inmates of this nursing home were in a position to appreciate them more. For those had been more fully “warehoused,” by families with money, signing off on “a problem.” I knew several who were never visited at all; who had only the fear of death to interrupt the bleakness of their days; and memories tormented by those who, having acquired legal custody of their savings, left them there, and skulkily walked away. In age they endure something of the experience of a conscripted soldier on the battlefront — long stretches of debilitating boredom with short passages of terror for relief; and such new companions as they might find, dying all around them.

But there is no mud or cold in these trenches. Instead they find the sterility of a modern, hygienic, institutional environment, with distracted keepers — a professionally-trained staff. Anything resembling blood and guts will be cleaned up promptly; cadavers are removed with speed and discretion.

Under the state’s new “euthanasia” provisions, those who have decided on, or been persuaded to “assisted dying,” will be executed in a cool and professional way. A priest I know walked in unexpectedly on a rehearsal of this process. His spontaneous expression of outrage was condemned as an unconscionable disturbance.

So where was I? Yes, thinking of three nurses, each (by no coincidence) seriously religious according to her traditions; and each a conductor of kindliness, patience, warmth and concern — beyond the medically urgent or necessary. Their very presence on a shift, especially in the night, was a source of strength to many poor old customers; of that feeling of safety, founded in trust, that a soldier might have when he discovers that his superior officer is genuinely competent; that he also cares what happens to his men. Conversely, their absence could be a source of anxiety.

The word for this in English was once “condescension”; a usage that would be inconceivable today, for it acknowledges that people are and will ever be unequal in power. In any moment, you depend on persons “above”; those “below” depend on you. (I put these words in quotes to convey that the relative positions are not always fixed; they may even change at different times of day.) Trust is involved as a condition of every mediation. And when it breaks down we have the horror of equality: Hobbes’s warre of all against all.

I think of these three particular nurses, each to my knowledge a universe in herself, on this vexed question of “euthanasia.” I am reasonably confident that each would accept being fired, rather than participate in regulated murder. One might call them “selfish” or “rigid” in a very narrow, and sophistical sense: willing to part with career and livelihood, rather than agree to the dictates of Hell.

The post-modern mind cannot understand them. It asks, “But what about all the other patients who rely on you, who turn to you for such comforts as they have? How can you abandon them? Why can’t you just suck it up, the way we all have to do sometimes, and keep your religious opinions to yourself? Tell your ‘god’ you were just following orders.”

This is, all should see, a vacuous argument, to which only silence can respond. It serves only to reveal the void of conscience, that follows from law in which conscience has no place. It speaks of a future when all human decency will be driven underground, and every decent person will be isolated; and of a fleeting present when the response to evil was fluffy and lax, professionally accommodating, and demonically glib.

One thinks of the ultimate act of condescension: when Christ came down from Heaven. And of what He taught us: be rigid, hold your ground!

As these Essays are short, I like to indulge in oversimplification. Gentle reader should understand the plan. In the absence of omniscience, we look at the world from successive angles. The truth is sculptural, not a flat picture. Gradually one assembles the more comprehensive view, by tracking around, at various elevations, and moving closer then farther, in different conditions of light. Too, there are the phenomena of texture, and others corresponding to our senses five (really twenty-seven). It should also be allowed that this sculpture moves, in some ways that do and others that do not respond to human interaction. And that it is alive; and that it will outlive us; and that like every other, my analogy falls apart.

So back to oversimplification. An article ping’d me this morning by my Chief Texas Correspondent, from behind the paywall of the Wall Street Journal, touches on political developments in France.

François Fillon, the presidential contender, will find himself in the middle between the “far right” (meaningless leftish shorthand) Marine Le Pen, and whoever becomes the socialist standard-bearer in a primary later this month. Fillon surprised all the experts (as usual) by winning the soft-right primary, by a landslide in the run-off. It was thought he couldn’t win because he is an overtly practising, believing Catholic in the land of laïcité (the principle of ungodliness established in the French Revolution). He goes to Mass, quite publicly, and quite memorably went to the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes for the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, telling media afterwards not only to smell the coffee but also, hear the bells.

My European readers will be already familiar from their mass media with what the WSJ is now reporting in the USA. In short, the public profession of Christianity, in a political context, has not been heard in Europe for some time. It is shocking to millennials, especially. Among the old there is the distant but still audible tinkle of l’après-guerre.

It should be recalled that Continental Europe rose from the ashes under the political direction of overtly Christian, predominantly Catholic parties. The “Christian Democrat” movement was the means by which, in country after country, western Europe embraced anti-communism and NATO, free markets and deregulation, the baby boom and general reconstruction after World War II. The “economic miracle” that began in the late ’forties did not descend from the clouds; it was propelled by bold decisions made by consciously Christian statesmen — among the few politicians untainted by the immediate Nazi/Fascist/Collaborationist past. (Britain, which missed Occupation, instead followed her Labour Party in the alternative direction, delaying the start of her post-War recovery until 1979.)

Only after this Christian tutelage had achieved great prosperity and societal peace, did the “Social Democrat” movements prevail at the polls, pouring the molasses back into what became fully-fledged Nanny States in the ’sixties. (This had been on the agenda of all Left parties since the beginning of the century.) At the same time, Christianity was itself receding as a social and moral force, partly in consequence of monied decadence, partly due to the hideous self-destruction of the Catholic Church in “the spirit of Vatican II.” And what began as a coal and steel free trade agreement, and was expanded into a Common Market, was itself transformed into the dirigiste pseudo-religion in the black heart of the European Union.

More detail might be supplied to expand this into a book, but my ambition for this morning is limited to sketching the broad outline of a post-War history which, I think, is widely ignored. Take Christianity out of the mix of factors — as the ascendant “secular humanists” have succeeded in doing — and not only antique but contemporary European history becomes incomprehensible.

In the spirit of the economist, Schumpeter, one might play with the idea that prosperity is itself the killer. Once people are economically secure, and the necessary minimum of civilized institutions are quietly ticking over, they are free to entertain bullshit again, and start undoing what they have accomplished. Schumpeter held that “liberalism” in the European sense — free markets and free inquiry — contains the seed of its own demise. One might even argue that, next time we have a chance, we should find a way to sabotage prosperity, without government help. Perhaps people need to stay a little hungry, to retain their common sense, and their appreciation of individual liberty. Or perhaps they need religion if only for the pragmatic purpose of keeping their minds off politics.

On some other day I might try to explain why I am not so cynical.

Let it be observed, nevertheless, by those whose minds are not disordered, that Europe once again finds herself passing through the stages of collapse — as in the “post-Christian” 1910s, and 1930s. The Islamic invasion, by way of open immigration to replace a contracepted and aborted generation of pension-funding workers, is only one dimension of this process. At every public level, throughout the West, bureaucratic micromanagement on “progressive” principles has lured us into converging blind alleys. For instance, our ideological “environmentalism” isn’t sustainable, either. Nor is the rampant consumerism it only pretends to challenge.

The experts, as I say, are defeated by any prospect of a trend reversing. (“All trends are reversible” was my old pundit mantra.) The apparent success of a François Fillon, as of a Donald Trump, is a nightmare to them; more because they cannot understand it than because they are mortally opposed. (Neither of those gentlemen has yet proposed to do anything truly radical or unprecedented; both propose to “fix” rather than to dismantle universal welfarism.)

Le Sens Commun (roughly, “common sense”) is the name of the grassroots organization that put millions in the streets to protest the French gay marriage legislation, and in defence of other life issues. They and Fillon have discovered in each other the means to a formidable campaign, to reverse the national political direction. Parallel events in other European countries are contributing to the revival of an explicitly Christian sense of ancestral identity — something a little more subtle than nationalism. I do not like to make predictions; we will see where it leads.