Broken China

 

Where did everybody go?

The world is changing.

Now something seems to be happening in China. There are now enough rumours to convince me that Xi is on his way out.

I thought the Xi style of government was a desperation move by the CCP in the first place. My Chinese friends had asserted long ago that the CCP no longer had any philosophical or ideological capital with the people. The general public was simply ready to ride along so long as everyone was getting richer. Why rock the boat?

But by 2012, it was probably clear to Chinese leadership that economic turmoil was coming. China was facing demographic collapse. Even without it, they were reaching the limit of what economic progress could be achieved by cheap labour: the supply of such labour was running out. It was also only too likely that much of China’s progress and economic strength was always a matter of faked figures and Ponzi schemes. Any system that relies on central planning and not market forces will breed faked production figures and official corruption. There is immediate incentive to do it, and no effective checks against it.

So, fearing what happened in the Soviet Union, the CCP took the opposite course: cracking down instead of opening up. Going back to Maoist tactics. Appealing to fear and ideology. That was Xi’s mandate. He was the guy prepared to try it.

It was bound to fail; now it has. Because it cannot solve the economic problem or the demographic problem, things have gotten worse for the population, and there are growing protests. At some point, the regime must fear the army revolting and refusing orders. 

This to me explains Xi’s sabre rattling. Otherwise, it is crazy to systematically alienate all your neighbours as Xi has. And, if you believe you are a rising power, it makes more sense to lie low and look unthreatening while your power grows. The only explanation for China’s growing bellicosity that makes sense is that Xi was eager to keep the people focussed on a foreign enemy to deflect anger from the central government. And, at the same time, to keep the military on the borders, instead of near Beijing, to reduce the risk of a coup.

But the upshot is that China is increasingly isolated internationally. And this has led  the rest of the world, especially Trump’s America, to play rougher on trade, intensifying the regime’s economic problems.

So now it seems the faction led by former leader Hu Jintao has regained ascendency, and are demanding a return to the prior policy of opening up. 

This too is risky; risker now than in 2012, when the Politburo decided it was too risky. We may see a sudden collapse like that of the USSR. 

But at this point, China is running out of options.

On Praying by Rote Like a Trained Seal. Not.

 

My Protestant pals, including friend Xerxes, generally scorn traditional prayers. They argue that people only say them by rote. They hold that real prayer must be self-composed, to express the emotion of the moment. Like talking to a friend.

For many years, I accepted this basic premise. I was educated for nine years, after all, in Protestant departments of Religion.

But what was the upshot of this belief? That I stopped praying. 

Too often, I did not feel I had anything in particular to say. And then, in those desperate situations, when I really did feel the need for God’s help, I was often too agitated in mind to form a coherent prayer.

Was I to petition God daily for some favour? This has never made sense to me. It sounds too much like a spoiled child, convinced that they are special, always saying “gimme, gimme, gimme.”

Surely God is in command, and he will give us what is best. And this must also go then for others. “Pray for the church?” Isn’t that presumptuous? God is already looking after the church. It all sounds like “my will be done, Lord, not thine.”

Of course, there are prayers of gratitude. Spontaneous prayers of gratitude suit me fine. But sometimes you are not feeling grateful, and it would just be lying to God. Spontaneous questioning of Go9d, arguing with God, also seems fine to me.

A couple of evenings ago, I read a sentence by Pope Benedict XVI, written when he was still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, which magically crystallized my misgivings about spontaneous prayer. Benedict is good at that. He wrote, without any special reference to prayer, “The mark of the Antichrist is the fact that he speaks in his own name.”

That has the ring of truth.

Especially to me, because it is just what I always tell my composition students—teaching writing is my specialty. My first word of advice is always that the self must disappear. It must not come from you, must not be about you, and must not be in your name. It comes from some divine beyond, it is about the story, and it is for the reader.

When you compose your own prayer, it seems to me, it is the same principle. You are making it about you: your thoughts, your feelings, your particular situation, your skill with language and your understanding of theology. Perhaps also about God, but firstly about you. Praying alone, you are saying “Over here! Look at me, God.” Praying aloud in public, you are saying “listen to me, everyone.” 

You are the antichrist.

Compare reciting a rote prayer. The self, your particular concerns, disappear. The prayer is saying itself. Perhaps the finest example of this is the “Jesus Prayer”: “Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.” You can say it under your breath ceaselessly; no matter the tumult about you. That is the intent. And the Bible tells us to do as much. See  1 Thessalonians 5:17.

And when you pray the “Our Father,” you are speaking the words of Jesus, of God himself. Do you really claim you can do better than he can at composing a prayer? Especially when he expressly told us, “this is the way to pray.”

When you say the “Hail Mary,” similarly, you are speaking the words of the Angel Gabriel, and of Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. Do you want to claim you can do better than the Bible, the Word of God?

Even in the case of traditional prayers not from the Bible, you are benefitting from something written by a great mind, preserved for its truth and beauty by fellow souls throughout the ages. The “Salve Regina” dates from the 11th century, the “Glory Be” from the 2nd century, the Nicene Creed from the 4th century; and the Apostles’ Creed is earlier. You are reciting it in communion with all the faithful souls in heaven.

The Third Great Awakening?

 

I think it’s time to declare it: a religious revival is underway. An American Pope could help.

Joe Rogan is the latest big celebrity to cross over. And his influence is great. He joins Jordan Peterson and Stewart Brand in publicly converting from atheism to Christianity. Other recent public converts: Candace Owens, Shia LaBoef, Denzel Washington, Gwen Stefani, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Add to this a number of prominent and intellectually able YouTube personalities making the case for religion generally and Christianity in particular: the Daily Wire crew, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh. Bishop Barron, William Lane Craig, Trent Horn, Matt Fradd, John Lennox. There is a public debate going on; there has been since the rise of the New Atheists. And in that public debate, the atheists are losing.

I note too the growing success of Christian media: “The Chosen,” Angel Studios. Hollywood is withering, pop music is withering, Disney is withering, at the box offices and on the balance sheets, and a Christian counterculture is rising.

9/11 might have been the first move in this current cycle. It inspired the New Atheists, on the premise that religion leads to violence. This then provoked in response the rise of a new Christian apologetics, publicizing and popularizing all the arguments for God. Aided mightily by the existence of the Internet. Meantime, mass immigration and greater familiarity led to a popular perception that the problem was with Islam/Islamism specifically. Islam would not be satisfied with secular humanism; their beef was not with Christianity alone. Both would have to be replaced by Islam. It was thus not possible to be neutral between Christianity and Islam and pretend to be above the fray. Either you believed in Christianity, human equality, and human rights, or you went with Islam and sharia law. There was no secular third option.

Earth Angels

 

Somewhere during the 19th century, something strange happened that nobody else seems to have noticed. 

Before this time, angels in art were almost always shown as male. After this time, angels are always female. This can be confirmed by a quick Google image search for “18th century angels,” then “19th century angels.”

This seems to me to show a tectonic shift in our cosmology, in our sense of the sacred and the good. It corresponds to a shift from a spiritual religion to materialism. Women represent the physical world, the world of being born and dying. “Earth” is always a mother goddess, in every culture, “Gaea” or “Mother Earth.” “Nature” is always portrayed as a woman: “Mother Nature,” “Artemis,” “Demeter.” In the East, “Maya,” the mother illusion of diverse things, and “Mae Toranee,” Mother Earth.

This reflects and expresses the turn to Scientism during the 19th century, to putting our faith in “reeking tube and iron shard.” The turn to materialism is as well a turning away from moral values, represented by the “sky father,” the eternal order of the celestial spheres, the father within the family.

With it comes the worship of “nature,” “ecology,” “the environment.” Our eyes are directed downward.

With it also comes an elevation of women to leadership within civil society. Hence “first-wave feminism” and all that has followed.

Although “first-wave” feminism would hardly have predicted it, with it inevitably comes a breakdown in “conventional morality,” the many gentlemen’s agreements on which society peacefully functions. Nature knows no moral law; it is red in tooth and claw. Science takes no account of values or morality. Angels are just nice, and carry no swords nor trumpets. Like indulgent mothers.

Women and REvolution

 

Women's march, St. Petersburg, 1917

Here’s another example of our ignorance of history, like the one about continuing aboriginal ownership of Canada.

An Iranian feminist friend boasted to me proudly of the recent “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in her homeland that this was the first time ever that a revolution has been led by women. See the feminist progress?

This is pretty much the reverse of the truth. 

The Russian revolution was kicked off, most historians would agree, by a mob of women marching to the palace for International Women’s Day, with the cry “Bread and Peace.” At that point, members of the Palace Guard defected to the crowd.

Similarly, in October 1789, a mob of Parisian women marched on Versailles demanding bread—you will recall the comment attributed to Marie Antionette, “let them eat cake.” This event “is often seen as a turning point in the French Revolution, marking the moment when popular action decisively shifted power from the monarchy to the people.” By the time they reached the palace, the National Guard had reluctantly joined the women.

In the EDSA revolution that overthrew Marcos in the Philippines, nuns formed human barricades to stop the tanks. That seemed to be when government resistance broke.

Women usually play the crucial role in any revolution. When they rise up, in a body, the end of that regime is near. For several reasons.

First, women are temperamentally opposed to revolution; they are in favour of stability, docility, and continuity. Freedom means less to them. They only want bread; to live their lives in peace. For women to rise up, the situation must be dire. It means the regime’s natural constituency, its last support, has evaporated.

Second, men are programmed by nature to care for woman. A palace guard might obey orders to fire on a mob of men; but to fire on a mob of women is, to most men, unthinkable. Therefore, when a large mass of women rise up, the government has no defense against them. Men’s allegiance to women intrudes as a higher authority than their allegiance to any job or government or self-interest. If the women want a new government, the men must obey.

Revolutionaries generally understand this. This is why the Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose Rosa Parks to refuse to yield her seat on that bus. This is why Nurse Edith Cavill was so important to British propaganda in the First World War. This is why the group organizing the Freedom Convoy in Canada coalesced behind Tamara Leich as their public face. This is why the early suffragettes tried to get themselves arrested for defying the law and voting; why Emily Darbison deliberately got herself trampled at the Epsom Derby in 1913. 

Women have always had immense power and privilege, at least among developed nations.

History Should Not Be a Mystery

 

In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” 

As so often, he was prophetic. There has been a systematic movement, in our schools and in the media, to suppress history. Things disappear down the memory hole. This allows those currently in power to control the future.

A clear and present example is the public opposition by some First Nations officials to Alberta’s talk of an independence referendum. They claim that Alberta cannot separate because they are sovereign over the land. Such things are purely their decision. If Danielle Smith doesn’t like it, she should just move off their land.

Grand Chief Greg Desjarlais of the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations stated that treaties, which encompass most of central Alberta, cannot be dismissed by separatist ambitions, declaring, “Our nations do not and will never consent to the separation of our treaty territories. These lands were never ceded, nor surrendered.” Chief Sheldon Sunshine of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation and Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro of Mikisew Cree Nation accused Premier Danielle Smith of breaching Treaties No. 6, 7, and 8, asserting that Alberta lacks authority to interfere with these agreements. They demanded she cease separatist rhetoric, stating, “The province has no authority to supersede or interfere with our Treaties, even indirectly by passing the buck to a ‘citizen’ referendum.” Chief Troy Knowlton of Piikani Nation emphasized that separation requires First Nations' consent, saying, “Alberta lacks the authority to interfere with or negate those Treaties. Proceeding down a path toward separation cannot be undertaken without the consent of Alberta’s First Nations.” Chief Roy Whitney of Tsuut’ina Nation warned, “The province has no authority to try and separate.”

This is false. In the plain language of the treaties, the Indians (the legal term) surrendered all sovereignty and property rights to the Crown, its heirs and assigns, in perpetuity. Should Alberta separate, the treaties are simply transferred to the government of Alberta as the king’s assign, just as earlier treaties with Britain were transferred to Canada when Canada separated.

According to the treaties, Indians/First Nations have no more say regarding the future of Alberta than any other citizens. As, of course, human equality and equal rights demands. Unfortunately, it is useful to the powers that be to perpetuate the myth that the First Nations, and aboriginal people generally, have some important residual right to control the land. This means those in power can pay off a small group to block the will of the people and leave them to do as they wish. In this case, of course, they do not want to lose control of Alberta’s mineral resources.

Other than their leaders being paid off, there is really no plausible reason for First Nations to object to Alberta separation. It does not affect them any more than any other citizen.

Those in power would not be able to get away with this if history was properly taught in high school. But when it comes to aboriginal matters, the real history has been systematically, almost hysterically suppressed. One must not bring up the fact, for example, that no mass graves of missing Indian students have actually been found on the grounds of the old residential schools—a claim that was outlandish on its face. It has come to the point at which one NDP Member of Parliament introduced a bill making any claim that the residential schools were not genocidal punishable by a prison term.

Examples of the memory hols and its consequences could readily be multiplied. We need to teach and study history.

Why the Ban on the Latin Mass?

 

Paul VI

Why did Pope Francis, or for that matter, Pope Paul before him, ban the Latin mass? 

With its many liturgies, in many nations, the mass is offered in any language you can think of, ancient and modern. Except in Latin, the traditional and official language of the church. How can that make sense?

Francis himself suggested that the Latin mass represented defiance of his authority; it was schismatic. But this is tautological: if he allowed the Latin mass, it would not be. He bans it because he bans it.

It is no challenge to the work of Vatican II: Vatican II never mandated mass in the vernacular. It expected Latin to remain the language of the mass. It was bishops’ conferences who took this step. It forms no part of the magisterium, no part of church doctrine.

Someone has said Francis’s ban came from the Italian bishops. They were alarmed that new priests all wanted to learn and serve the Latin mass. They foresaw, or saw, a shortage of priests for the standard “Novus Ordo.”

This sounds plausible. From the beginning, the “new mass” was not popular with the faithful in the pews. Popes John Paul II and Benedict opened it up again, and the problem recurred: faithful and lower clergy were abandoning the Novus Ordo and flocking to the Latin mass.

If the purpose of the church is to evangelize, if its mission is pastoral, if it listens to the works of the Holy Spirit, this should actually argue for encouraging the use of the Latin mass.

But Vatican II and the hierarchy introduced the Novus Ordo precisely for pastoral reasons: to make mass more popular, more accessible to the people. To admit the Latin Mass is still more popular is to admit failure.

Regardless of the motives of those who attend, in their own minds, the growth and spread of the Latin mass makes them look like fools. Fools and sellouts, shepherds following the sheep.

The hierarchy under Francis, or perhaps just Francis, have let their own interests supersede the interests of the church, of Jesus, and of suffering humanity.

I say this even though I am not, personally, drawn to the Latin Mass.

Loyalist Day

 

Loyalist Day used to be an important annual celebration here in Saint John, New Brunswick. The city traces its founding to the summer of 1783 when 17 ships arrived from New York and Boston harbour, unloading the losers in the American Revolution. They found themselves on a small rocky peninsula, an island at high tide. There was nothing here but rocks and trees, and the winters were severe. That first winter, most built tents insulated by spruce boughs. Someone had to stay awake at all hours to keep the fire going. There was an average of one death each day among them.

Only two years later, they had a royal charter for the first official city in British North America. Saint John, as we know it, had begun.

But in recent years, the city has refused to fund any special activities to commemorate Loyalist Day, the day the first ships landed. The memorial plaque and stone marking where the Loyalists came ashore, was pulled up and abandoned in a quarry on the west side.

When local historians complained, they were told by city council, “We don’t care about those English people.” And someone remarked “I wonder what the native people thought, when they came to steal their land?”

I find this callous, racist, and willfully ignorant. The whole reason Canada exists apart from the United States, is loyalty to the crown and the British connection. If we reject that, if we reject the Loyalists, we reject Canada. And there is no good response to Trump’s proposal for assimilation.

The people who waded ashore that summer were not, of course, English. They were American. Even then, America was something of a melting pot. Among them were 500 freed blacks who had made it to the British lines, for Britain refused to recognize slavery. Although not among the group that landed at Saint John, a significant number were native people, notably the Iroquois of upstate New York. There were Dutch from New York, which had been New Amsterdam. There were many Germans, including discharged Hessian soldiers. There were Jews among the group that landed in Saint John; and of course Scots, Welsh, and Irish. Don’t ever tall a Scot or an Irishman he is English.

But ethnicity should not matter. People are people. Suffering people deserve our sympathy regardless of their skin colour or language or race, and brave people deserve our admiration regardless of where they were born.

Especially when we are their inheritors. This is a question of filial piety: honour thy father and thy mother. We owe them a lot. They laid out the streets, established our forms of government, our first social institutions, many of our sports and pastimes, our cuisine, our arts, our folkways; although of course other groups have contributed since. And the city and nation they bequeathed us is, most certainly, one of the finest we could hope for in this fallen world. Travel a bit and you will see. People want to move here from most other places.

As for the local native populations, the matter is complex. Groups and individuals fought on both sides during the American Revolution; as they had in the French and Indian Wars. They were not passive victims, but participants, in these conflicts. Some lost, just as some Europeans lost. 

Broadly speaking, however, European settlers did not steal their land, at least in Canada. Everything was done by treaty, in principle by mutual agreement and with compensation. And the end result: Canada is still 89% unsettled Crown Land—over which, by treaty, today’s native people are free to roam, hunt, and forage as they always did. Only eleven percent of their prior lands have been given over to settlement—and of course, native people have been as free as any other citizens to take up these lands too. They own that eleven percent still in the same sense all other Canadians do.

Back in the day, in 1783, the presence of the European settlers was generally welcomed. It granted the native people security in possession and use of their lands—before this, before treaties and redcoats, warfare was more or less constant. If you encountered a member of a different tribe in the forest, you feared violence. You feared violence at home in your sleep. The presence of Europeans, especially in a place like Saint John, at the mouth of a long river, offered opportunities for trade that made native groups located near a European settlement rich. It gave them military advantages over distant rivals: not just through alliance with the Europeans, but by trading for iron knives and hatchets, guns, horses. And perhaps most importantly, having Europeans nearby protected native people from the ever-present danger of famine: crops, crop storage, and ships arriving with cargo from overseas were far more reliable food sources than the rivers or forest.

Not such a bad deal.

I have not a drop of English blood, so far as I know. I do not believe any of my ancestors were UE Loyalists, But happy Loyalist Day.

Francis and Mark Carney as Abusive Fathers

 

Two unaccountable and unpredicted things have happened recently. I think they are connected.

First, everyone thought the successor to Pope Francis would be a progressive “Francis 2.0.” After all, Francis had appointed 80% of the voting cardinals. Yet Leo XIV is so far signalling traditionalism. How did that happen? 

Second, having just won an election, Mark Carney’s cabinet and caucus seems rife with dissent. This shouldn’t happen right after an election win. Liberal MPs live in fear of their leader: he gets to veto their nominations if they alienate him. And Carney just saved the party’s bacon. Until he stepped in, they were headed for a historic defeat. Why the dissatisfaction?

In the case of Rome, I think we all missed the dynamic in thinking the divide in the hierarchy was between “progressives” and “traditionalists.”

The first sign was a report that, as they gathered for Francis’s funeral, the cardinals demanded the opening of a repository of traditional vestments kept under lock and key by Francis. Were they all secretly traditionalist?

Then reports of an elevated mood in the Vatican—shocking at the death of a pope. Now someone is quoted as saying, for the years of Francis’s pontificate, they were all living in fear. “It is like we are escaping an abusive father.”

And that, I think, is the key. Not left or right, progressive or traditionalist, but abusive.

Francis gave no moral direction. He seemed annoyed by those who followed the traditions of the church; yet offered no clear alternative either. This left everything up to the will of Francis. 

Take, for the most obvious example, the Latin mass. Francis suppressed it, on the grounds that wanting the Latin mass was an expression of opposition to his authority. That was a tautology: if he did not suppress the Latin mass, wanting it would not be an expression of opposition to his authority.

I(t was all about the exercise of power. Francis was a narcissist. Narcissists worship their own will.

When a parent, or a superior, acts in this way, one lives in constant fear. You can never know whether you are doing right or wrong, you can never relax or feel good about yourself; you never know when the hammer will fall. Francis’s position on any given matter was unpredictable: he blew hot and cold; it seemed to depend on how he was feeling that day. He had arbitrary favourites, and punished others arbitrarily.

This is the essence of abuse. The sense of disorientation this causes is the font and source of virtually all spiritual distress, which we commonly and improperly call “mental illness.”

Francis was driving everyone mad.

And Carney seems to be in the same mold. What is his true stand on any issue? He campaigned on imposing tariffs on the US, and standing up to Trump. Now he has quietly suspended the tariffs. He endorsed the carbon tax, then set it to zero. 

In personnel matters, word leaked out that Chrystia Freeland was being dropped from cabinet; then she wasn’t. I suspect this was not a false rumour; Carney changed his mind. A more public example is Nate Erskine-Smith. In Carney’s first, stripped-down cabinet, he kept Erskine-Smith. Only a month later, in his greatly expanded cabinet, he dropped Erskine-Smith. This seems inconsistent, arbitrary. This is clearly the way Erskine-Smith experienced it; he got blindsided. Carney kept Stephen Guilbault in Cabinet, and promoted Anita Anand, seeming to signal a turn to the left; then publicly adopted much of the Conservative platform. This seems like a mismatch; he seems to have blindsided them too. It is as though Carney is just enjoying imposing his will. Another narcissist. L’etat, c’est toi.

A dysfunctional caucus, a dysfunctional church, or a dysfunctional family, is the result. “Mental illness” is the result.

Happy Happy Joy Joy

 

It is the usual state of the world that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum; that, as Jack Kerouac put it, the cream sinks to the bottom.

This must be in the divine plan. If we did good only to achieve worldly success, there would be no merit in doing good. It would be mere self-interest. 

We must do our best knowing that, given the ways of the world, we are as or more likely to be punished for it than rewarded. We do good, or create beauty, or seek truth, because it is right, not for reward.

We have hopes for the next life. But this requires the virtue of faith. We trust in God.

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

This makes the “happy happy joy joy” sort of Christianity profoundly sinister. This life is the vale of soul-making, of testing and trial. If you are having a very good time here, something is gravely wrong. You have given in to the world’s temptations. “Blessed are those who mourn.” “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.”

Why the Arts Suck These Days

 

The arts in general have been moribund since the mid-seventies. If you ever wondered why, the answer is simple. They declined as “political correctness” rose, now metastasized as “cancel culture” and “wokeness.”

The imagination must be free. It cannot judge or play politics. It must seek truth. But since the mid-seventies or so, everyone has had to walk on eggshells, think carefully before saying anything. Truth is dangerous.

It becomes too dangerous to say anything new. You cannot predict who might take offense at what; and end your career, take away your livelihood. The safe thing is to do only what has been done before. And so the arts become bland and monotonous. Mere mindless entertainment, at best. One song sounds like another. One film looks like another. One novel reads like another.

But even this is not enough, either. The Overton window is a moving; one must then add something to virtue signal, to be truly safe—throw in a trans character, make the hero black, and so on. And make sure they are entirely admirable, without human flaws. Condemn the groups you are currently supposed to condemn: the Jews, Southern whites, the religious, men. Making the product even more shallow and predictable.

And unethical; just as good art must insist on truth, it must also insist on morality. Yet these current productions are obviously small-minded and cynical. You feel dirty watching, or reading, or listening.

 Artists must do this, editors must do this, producers must do this, gallery owners and art critics must do this. Or have no career.

Any good art must be suppressed immediately as dangerous.

Suppressed not only by the galleries, the publishers, the theatres; also on the Internet, where independent producers might otherwise shine through.

Humour is perhaps the most obvious example. Any good joke requires a surprise, a reversal of expectations. That becomes too dangerous in the atmosphere of political correctness. It is safest not to try to be funny.

And everyone can see the result. Whatever happened to Mad magazine, Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon, Monty Python?

That was the Sixties, and the early Seventies, when almost all the arts were blossoming.

 Blossoming because there was an atmosphere of anything being permitted. This was, notably, just as the old pornography codes had been lifted, on movies and TV; and the Supreme Court had struck down much other censorship. Moreover, the speech codes of the McCarthy era had just been discredited.

Result: a great flowering of the arts.

You can trace similar periods throughout history.

We need another burst of freedom. We are overdue. And I feel it is about to happen. People are chafing at the absurdities of wokeism. Major figures are bucking it, and seem to be starting to break through rather than being ruined.

Such eras of repression are mostly sustained by general cowardice. As Solzhenitsyn once said of the old Soviet Union, if any one person had resolved to get up one morning and only speak the truth, the whole structure would have collapsed. An exaggeration, but it is generally true that evil by itself is powerless: what is needed for it to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

If it falls, when it falls, it will collapse quickly, and there will be a great flowering of the arts. I hope soon; I hope I live to see it.

Boer Refugees

 

A boer family, circa 1910

Don Lemon has objected to taking in South African Boers as refugees because they own land and are relatively well off. So how can they be considered refugees?

This is a Marxist misconception. Groups that are poor may be oppressed, but they are not necessarily poor because they are oppressed, and they are not necessarily oppressed because they are poor. And when it comes to genocide, it is a conspicuously successful minority who are most at risk. Few feel driven to kill someone else because they are poor.

This is of course the eternal story of the Jews. In Weimar Germany, they were more successful than the average German. They were too prominent in business and the professions. So were the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, leading up to the Armenian genocide. So were the kulaks wiped out by the Soviets, causing the Ukrainian genocide, the Holodomir. So were the “bourgeois” and “intellectuals” targeted by the Red Guards in Maoist China, and by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It is why the Knights Templar were massacred in the Middle Ages. It is why South Asians were dispossessed and expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. 

It is profoundly dangerous to be a recognizable minority materially more successful than the majority.

First, it is an obvious temptation to take your stuff. Especially if you are a recognizable minority, the majority can do this without supposing their own property might be at risk. That said, raising taxes on “the rich” to make them pay their “fair share” is invariably a winning slogan in a democracy. The rich are ready scapegoats. 

Second, this is the deadly sin of envy. No other sin is more dangerous to society.

Guilty because their ancestors practiced apartheid? That's "blood guilt." The Jews know something about that too.

The South African Boers have a greater claim on our sympathy and our sanctuary than perhaps any other group in the world today. More broadly, “whites” are in danger almost everywhere for this reason: they have been too successful. We ought to be alert to the danger—and act before the Holocaust begins.

The Art of Editing

 I miss the grand old magazines; you trusted their editors to give you some perspective. 

I miss The Economist, as it once was and is no longer. I realized they had lost it when they abruptly switched from referring to Jean-Marie LePen as “that thug” to “that wily old paratrooper.” He had become a legitimate contender for the French presidency. So I realized they were subject to influence. Then I started noticing a feminist slant. As a comment online has it, “You’d think that a magazine called The Economist would understand something about economics — but only if you hadn’t read The Economist in the last 15 years or so.”

I miss the old Time magazine, which used to have such editorial style. It used to delightfully break the rules. Everyone knew you sold more copies with a photograph on your cover; for years, Time insisted on being artistic, and having a cover illustration. It made its own rules: it introduced, for example, the "interrobang." I realized they had lost it when an article described the Nazis as rejecting progress; as if that was the problem. This was the opposite of the Nazi concept. They were the “progressives,” the “futurists.” This mischaracterization struck me as deeply sinister. They were apparently trying to identify the Nazis with modern conservatives. 

I miss the old Free Press Weekly; now long gone. I expect few will know what I am talking about. I cannot even find it in any archives online. A publication of the Winnipeg Free Press. It was supposedly a farmers’ paper, but the editorial selection was wonderfully quirky. Crazy things like experiments in ESP; but not sensationalist. Not like the Weekly World News. More like listening to Joe Rogan today.

I miss the old Hit Parader. The title is misleading; it was not just a fan magazine. It was musically literate and excellent on insights into the best in current popular music. The editor, whoever it was, just had great taste.

National Geographic: I used to love it in my youth. Many did. At one point I bought all the back issues on CD. Great photography as well as great, informative articles. Now if I pick up an issue it is all politics, and nothing you couldn’t predict without bothering to read.

I miss the old National Lampoon. It was the product of fine creative minds. I assume, as is usually the case, its success depended on one particular editor, and when he moved on, he could not be replaced.

Alberta Report was once great. But the founder and original editor, Ted Byfield, retired from it, and it did not last much longer. Catholic Insight used to be great, but the editor, Father de Valk, retired, and it quickly withered to an online publication of irregular bland articles.

Harrowsmith was once great. But the original editor lost control in a divorce settlement and it soon spiralled downwards into trite politics.

A similar thing happened online with Arts and Letters Daily. It used to be the place to go for everything new in arts, culture, and ideas. Now it’s not worth bothering with.

Drudge Report is another striking online case: it used to be a place you had to visit regularly in case you missed something. It broke many stories. Then something happened. I don’t know what—supposedly Matt Drudge is still editing it. But I suspect he has secretly retired and delegated editorial decisions. Or maybe he just got lazy.

Conclusion: a great managing editor is a rare and invaluable creative talent. Bad editors tend to cover for lack of judgement or imagination by going political. And for some reason, always leftist politics. If their politics are on the right, they remain unpredictable and interesting.

I think the same thing happens in academics.

The Stigma of Mental Illness

 

Friend Xerxes has written a recent column arguing that

1. There should be no stigma around mental illness.

2. People who are mentally ill should get professional help.

However, on the way he raises something else, which I think is more important. He argues that mental illness is really sin. Which explains the traditional stigma. But there should be no stigma around sin either. Sin is just a matter of “being different.”

“A medical issue,” he writes, “is probably better than lynching people for being different.”

This is a radical and a philosophically untenable position; ask Kant. Right and wrong are not arbitrary or random categories.

We should not condemn someone for rape or murder? They are just being different? 

How about, say, Hitler? 

And if there is no right or wrong, how then can you condemn anyone in turn for condemning anyone? They too are just being different. You have no basis to judge any action, to act or not act.

So is mental illness sin? Does this explain the stigma traditionally attached to it? 

The argument is plausible. 

A “mental illness” is self-evidently or definitionally spiritual—the mind is the spirit. This means, to begin with, that to refer them to medical science or a physician is obviously wrong. Spiritual illnesses are the preserve of the priest. And indeed, psychiatry and psychology say they cannot cure these things.

There are two forms of spiritual illness. Firstly, sin, a wilful turning away from truth and good, and secondly, being “dispirited,” a loss of meaning or understanding of what is true and good.

Most of what we call mental illness is the latter, a loss of meaning: a disorientation, a lack of confidence in what is and is not real or of value. 

There is nothing shameful about that. So why is shame attached to it?

The shame and guilt that is being concealed by pretending there is no sin and that it is a medical issue is in this case the guilt of the family, those around him or her, not the sufferer. It is pretty well established and understood that such “mental illness” is caused by childhood abuse and neglect. So sin is involved, but the “sufferer” from “mental illness” is the victim of the sin, not the perpetrator. It is in this sense that the Bible say that “the sins of the father are visited on the son, unto the third or fourth generation.” It is this that is implied by the concept of original sin.

This being so, the worst possible treatment for “mental illness” is the one currently always prescribed: to leave treatment to some family “caregiver.” This is to condemn the victim to a lifetime of torture. All to conceal the corporate guilt. They are, in effect, designated scapegoats.

This truth is complicated because other things we class as “mental illness” are indeed sins—or more properly, vices. These are the psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists, the “Type B personality disorders.” These are the guys who shoot up schools and drive cars into crowds. 

It’s all pretty straightforward, and solvable, “treatable,” once you accept the reality of sin. Lamentably, as Xerxes says, only “white American evangelicals” any more believe in sin. Properly speaking, Catholics do to, as does the Lord’s Prayer. But the torrent of the world has caused this to be suppressed even within Catholicism. I balked at the curriculum and pulled out of teaching Catechism class for the local diocese because the curriculum prohibited any mention of sin. “The message has to be only that God loves you.” Nor will you hear any mention of sin from the pulpit; for all that they still have the sacrament of confession, more recently renamed “reconciliation.” The core message at a recent “Life in the Spirit” seminar was “we are born to love, and learn fear.”

So the problem is not sin, but fear of punishment.

As a result, we have a growing epidemic of “mental illness,” suicide, addictions, and mass murder. 

Art Museums

 

Why do we need art museums?

I visited the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa.

I saw parts of it, perhaps fifteen feet away, over the heads of the crowd. 

I would have done better to stay at home in Canada and view it online. Then I could even zoom in and examine small details. The point is in the image, the design. If you see it, you see it. Why do you need the original object? It almost seems like some kind of superstitious magic to imagine this is important. It almost seems philistine. Like a community showing off wealth.

Granted, it’s not quite the same. There is something about seeing the thing in real light.

But we could do that. We have the technology to make exact reproductions, up to matching the topography of the brush strokes. Too expensive, no doubt, for individuals to own, but not for a public institution.

Why not have a local art gallery in every town as we have a local library? Cycle through reproductions of the great paintings? This month Vermeer; next month Dali? Wouldn’t this be better than filling them with second-rate art? 

Would this kill the market for artists? It should do the reverse; developing the printing press hardly killed the market for authors.

But it would greatly enrich the average life, and develop a greater appreciation for the visual arts.

Bitter Truths about Canada's Folly

 

Pope Anonymous

 

The subhead to this blog is “Catholic comments on the passing parade.” So regular readers have a right to expect some comment on the recent election of Pope Leo XIV. 

Yet my unbending principle here is that I will never write unless I have something to contribute: unless I can say something no one else is saying. Otherwise it is just about me.

I have no special insight regarding Pope Leo XIV. I see only what others see. The indications are mixed. As Cardinal Prevost, and Bishop Prevost, he has not been outspoken on many issues.

Perhaps this means he will be measured and moderate as pope; a change from Pope Francis.

He has recently rebuked US VP Vance on the latter’s interpretation of the ordo amoris. On that, I think Leo, and Francis, are right. Agape, caritas, cannot play favourites. We owe no greater love to our family than to the stranger. We have a greater responsibility to family, or to country, because we owe them a debt, or have voluntarily taken on responsibility for them; but no greater love. We owe hospitality to the stranger in need. How this translates into practical policy on immigration may be subject to honest debate.

But I digress.

Even those who know what he has written, and his stance on the issues, do not necessarily know what Leo will be like as pope. Heretofore, he has been obliged to work with the team, under a vow of obedience. Now the final call is up to him. 

This has produced surprises in the past. Leo XIII was elected as the modernist candidate in that conclave. He turned out to be the great opponent of the modernist heresy. Pius IX was elected as the liberal candidate, but turned out to be quite conservative. John XXIII was elected as a traditionalist, but convoked Vatican II. 

So I do not know. We do not know. The spirit leads.

All I can say is that I have a good feeling about Leo XIV. I had an immediate bad feeling about Pope Francis, when he emerged on the loggia. When Benedict emerged, I was on the one hand delighted, knowing him already. But on the other, I had a sense of unease. I felt he was miscast as pope. If I remember correctly, I had a good feeling about JPII, knowing nothing of him. I felt eager to see what he would do. 

So I will trust my instincts. Perhaps you can only trust yours.

Monasteries

 

St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai

A friend—two friends, actually—have recently casually condemned the monastic life: “Faith without works is dead. Self-awareness without action is….? a retreat to the monastery.” And: “At this point in time [nothing] is worse than a retreat to a monastery - it is an abdication of responsibility as an enlightened human to help Earth and to be an active part of Earth.”

This especially perturbs me, as I believe monasteries are of great value, and the solution to many of our urgent problems. 

When one retires to a monastery, one is of course not withdrawing from Earth. One is withdrawing specifically from the social life. One is withdrawing from at least one, presumably three, of the great temptations: “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” We are told to be “in the world, but not of it.” That’s what the monastery offers.

Recall too the example of Martha and Mary: in calmly worshipping rather than puttering about, Mary had chosen the better part. “The wicked will not rest.”

Nor is one withdrawing from good works by withdrawing from social life. Monasteries perform many good works.

The greatest value of the monastery, and the reason we have urgent need for them, is as a refuge for the persecuted. Many families are dysfunctional. This is, I submit, on the evidence, the cause of most if not all of what we call mental illness. At least, more broadly, bad life situations, bad social situations, are the cause of “mental illness.” Unfortunately, especially for the young, we have nowhere to go—to escape, to get a little quiet, a chance to get away from the incessant noise and sort things through. Mental hospitals failed at this—and in any case, have all been closed down. As have the orphanages.

As a result, many lives are lost, many live in unending torture, many are unproductive who might have given much. Many explode, lash out, and cause further harm to themselves and others in chain reactions unto the fourth genertion.

In earlier times, there was a safety valve. “Get thee to a nunnery.” It was so obviously valuable that it emerged independently in most societies: in the Buddhist East, in Sufism, in the Hindu ashram, as well as in Christianity East and West. We need that desperately. Society needs that desperately.

We need it for social justice.

Justice means everyone gets their just desserts, what they merit: meritocracy. “Social justice,” a Catholic concept, amends this by pointing out that all humans deserve respect and a decent life, even if they are not contributing to society. 

Monasteries provide this element: the poor can always find a home and respect in a monastery. Monasteries have automatically taken in the disabled, infirm, orphaned children, or the congenitally incapable; and given them a purpose and a community. Monasteries were the first hospitals. They are also the only successful “communist” or “socialist” societies.

Monasteries are also centres of learning. The life of the mind is not just a good work; it is an exponentially better work than merely feeding the poor at your door, or in your neighbourhood—which they also do--on the old but true saw that, if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day; but if you teach him to fish, he never goes hungry. They teach and preach, give meaning, and they preserved civilization itself through the dark ages when the Roman Empire collapsed. They are the one place where an artist can make a living at his or her art. They are responsible for many scientific discoveries and civilizational advances. They were the original libraries, and the original universities.

In this, as a centre of learning and study, the monastery is still a better option than the university. The modern university is plagued with politics and careerism. The university has gone astray without its religious mission. The monastery preserves the necessary detachment and objectivity, and the absence of the profit motive. 

And the downside is—what? As an individual, if the monastery turns out to be abusive or unpleasant—you just pack up and leave. This is why, uniquely, they work as communist societies. Because they are purely voluntary.

Monasteries have shown that they can be self-sustaining. They don’t have to take tax money. They don’t cost the government anything. In fact, their great financial success is why they are now rare. Governments worried about their growing power, and coveted their assets. The same problem encountered by the Knights Templar, and the Jews: the dangers of success.

How can we revive them?

That Woman in Minnesota

 

A woman was lately videoed admitting she called a child “the n-word” at a Minesota playground. For what it is worth, she claims it was because she caught him rifling through her child’s diaper bag. She was doxxed online. The local police opened an investigation. The NAACP opened a GoFundMe and raised $340,000 for the black child and his family. 

Rather than apologize, the woman opened a GiveSendGo and appealed for donations to help her and her family relocate to safety. She has raised, at this report, $750,000.

The situation is insane, and a measure of how bad racial tensions have become in the US. Let’s try to restore some perspective.

“The n-word” is not inherently an insult. It is an insult only because we have arbitrarily decided so. It simply means the colour “black” in French or Spanish, a bit distorted by an English tongue. If it is an insult, this implies that there is something gravely wrong with having dark skin. Do we want to concede this?

Further, those of African ancestry commonly use “the n-word” among themselves, to refer to themselves. To say that a given act is fine for one racial group, but wrong for another, is an obvious example of racial discrimination. This should not be acceptable.

It is also now wrong to refer to East Asians as “yellow,” or to Native Americans as ‘redskins”—if apparently much less so—but there is nothing wrong with referring to anyone with fair skin as “white.” This again is obviously discriminatory. If it is wrong to refer to someone by their skin colour, it is wrong for everyone, or you are a racist.

Finally, free speech is free speech. Even granted that this was legitimately an insult—surely in this case an insult was intended—anything more than a verbal punishment, as was administered immediately on site without video being required—is clearly disproportionate.

All the tumult is madness. But at least let’s hope that the fact that the woman actually seems to have profited in the end for her small transgression, rather than having her life ruined, as intended, may go some distance in restoring balance.

Pope Donald I

Apparently, as a Catholic, I am supposed to be offended by Donald Trump’s retweet of an image of himself as Pope. Cardinal Dolan, the Vatican, and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops have all objected. A left-wing friend was eager to hear my condemnation, expecting this would be the final straw to turn me against Trump.

Nope. I find it only mildly amusing.

Something I have always admired in Buddhism, and in Judaism, and wished I saw more of in Catholicism, is a sense of humour and a tendency to joke about religious matters. I love St. Theresa of Avila, because she did joke. For God is in laughter. Laughter is a proper response to revelation. 

It is easy to make an idol out of the Pope. He is our father, in the spiritual sense, and it is no more proper to idolize him than it is to idolize our biological father. “Call no man father but your father who is in heaven.” He is a man, not God, and may be as flawed as the next man. We owe him respect, for his office, but not reverence. That is for God.

Trump’s meme is apt, and funny, because it reveals this deep truth. 

Which is akin to this Buddhist truth: “If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him.”

Which, I hasten to dd for those who lack all sense of humour, is not to advocating killing the pope, or anyone else in any literal sense.

So Long, Canada

 

My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?

I am not over the trauma of the Canadian election. The result was, on its face, the worst possible. Four more years of the Liberals with their growing totalitarianism, growing censorship, growing immigration, deliberate hobbling of the economy, growing taxes and deficits, supply management and trade war.

Worse, with a minority. This means they do not have a mandate to negotiate with Trump. There is no unified front. Sooner than expected, but just as I expected, Alberta is talking of secession.

Has God abandoned Canada?

He might have reason to love America more. America has after all been at the forefront of advancing human rights and human liberty. And it has assumed the task of defending it. What, by contrast, does Canada’s existence do for the world, for mankind, for human progress, by existing apart?

America is also at the forefront of reverence for God, of religious faith. Granted that there is much religious fervour in poorer nations, America stands without parallel as a rich and successful nation that nevertheless has preserved its faith. It shows the path forward, then. Within the Catholic Church, America is now seen as the home of the resistance to modernism. And reports are growing of a general revival, a new Great Awakening.

At the same time, Canada has been blindly arrogant. On the one hand, we have looked down on Americans, imagined we are superior. We have not been grateful for their decency and generosity as a neighbour. Instead, we show contempt. “We burned down your White House.” Which, of course, we did not. “We won the War of 1812.” Which we did not. We object to their new tariffs, and ignore our tariffs on US products, as though America owes us something.

On the other hand, we in Eastern Canada, the bulk of the population, have arrogantly ignored the concerns of Alberta and the West. We have looked down on them. We have expected them to send us regular tribute, and expressed no gratitude for it. We have treated them like a colony.

We have deserved some chastisement.

But have we been so awful that we deserve to be destroyed? Surely we have still been on the whole a moral people, better than most.

Yet God perhaps knows best. Carney promises the destruction of Canada. Poilievre promised a chance to hold the enterprise together.

Maybe it is best for all if Canada dies fast so that the suffering is not drawn out. The great apocalypse everyone fears is simply Canada being assimilated into the United States—a fate that most people in the world would consider the best thing that could happen to them.

Canadians can then expect greater wealth, lower taxes, more career opportunities, stronger guarantees for our freedoms, more security, more life choices. 

Will we feel nostalgia for the old Canada? There is no real reason to, as we can and no doubt will preserve our traditions. Just as Texas remains distinct within the US, or Louisiana, or New England.

The Dispossessed of Gaza--and Canada

 

Mahmoud Darwish

In a poetry group, as a prompt, one member quoted a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, which ends:

You stole my forefathers' vineyards
    And land I used to till,
    I and all my children,
    And you left us and all my grandchildren
    Nothing but these rocks.
    Will your government be taking them too
    As is being said?
So!
    Put it on record at the top of page one:
    I don't hate people,
    I trespass on no one's property.
And yet, if I were to become hungry
    I shall eat the flesh of my usurper.
    Beware, beware of my hunger
    And of my anger!

To which I responded, before submitting a poem: 

Being dispossessed of one’s livelihood and land is a rather common human experience. It is especially common among those who have populated Canada. We are, in Cohen’s phrase, “Beautiful Losers.” The Acadians were expelled from their lands in Tantramar, in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The Huron were expelled from their lands by the Iroquois, and found refuge in Quebec. Then the Iroquois were expelled from their lands by the Americans, and sought refuge in Ontario. The UE Loyalists were expelled from their lands and possessions in the 13 colonies, and landed mostly penniless and without shelter in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec. The Irish, my own ancestors, were expelled from their lands: “to Hell or Connaught!” Many did not survive the passage; many died on the docks. The Scots were expelled from their lands in the Highland Clearances, so that today there is more Scots Gaelic spoken in Cape Breton than in Scotland. The many Jews came here from Eastern Europe to escape pogrom; they risked loss of life as well as property. After the Second World War, there was a great influx to Canada of what were then called “displaced persons” from the shifting boundaries and regimes from that war.

Many of us have, at some time in our lives, lost everything. Many of us can thank God there is a new life here in Canada. This was a common vision of our founders: of Louis Riel, of Wilfrid Laurier, of John A. Macdonald, of Guy Carleton. “A home for all the world’s peoples.” A home for the homeless—for, notably, English orphans, the “home children.”

The sine qua non was to be prepared to start again. Gregory Clark suggested there should be a monument erected on Grosse Ile, outside Quebec City, with the legend “Leave all your hates behind. Bring us only your loves.”

This was of course a dig at the Palestinians. Their grievance is the creation of the state of Israel. That happened in 1948: 77 years ago. Longer than a human lifetime, in that part of the world. Few living Palestinians have been dispossessed; yet as a group they have not moved on. Surely by now they bear some responsibility for their state?

This is not to address the Israeli claim that no Arabs were actually dispossessed by the creation of Israel; that it was their choice to leave. Twenty percent of the Israeli population is still Arab.

The guy who posted the original poem did not take this disagreement well. He declared me a racist and an imperialist because, in my list of the dispossessed in Canada, I did not mention the Canadian indigenous people dispossessed by settlers.

Which is ironic. The indigenous people are arguably the only group in Canada who have not been dispossessed of their land or forced to move. That is what “indigenous” means. 

Were their lands stolen? What lands? 89% of Canada is still crown land. By treaty they are free to roam and hunt and scavenge all over it, just as their ancestors always did.

As for the other eleven percent, they sold it and were compensated for it. It was not seized.

But the poet of the Palestinian prompt did not wait around to hear this. He had already quit the group, because in conscience he could not be in the same poetry group with a racist.