Straight Talk on Annexation to the US

Reading local history makes clear how artificial the international border between Canada and the US is. Everyone had and has relatives in the States. A good number of men buried in the local cemetery fought for the Union in the American Civil War. American history is our history.

We are, by all accepted standards, the same people, culturally and ethnically, with the exception of Francophone Quebec. Not only do we speak the same language: we speak it with the same accent, so that I usually cannot tell, when I meet someone abroad, if they are Canadian or American. The same cannot be said of two Englishmen meeting abroad: they will know immediately by accent if someone is from Yorkshire as opposed to Cornwall. The same is true for France, or Italy, or Germany. They are far more regionally ethnically diverse than English Canada and the US.

The reason for Canada to exist as an independent entity was that some Americans at the time of the Revolution wanted to retain ties to Britain and to the royal family. That raison d’etre disappeared in about the 1930s. Canada now really has no more ties to Britain than does the US. The royal family is purely symbolic; just a face on the coins and stamps.

By all logic, English Canada should join the United States.

It is, in the first case, a matter of efficiency. It is costly to duplicate services. If Canadian Confederation was a good idea, joining the US is just an extension of the same good idea.

In the second case, it makes economic sense. A perfect common market would increase the prosperity of both sides by dropping significant barriers to trade and commerce. But it would especially increase the prosperity of Canadians, with greater access to the United States’ lager market.

But the strongest reason to unite is the Canadian Constitution. The passage of the Constitution Act in 1982 was a fatal mistake. It has turned Canada into a dictatorship by the unelected judiciary, it has enshrined gross inequalities, and it is virtually impossible to legally amend. The simplest course to change it would seem to be to join the US and come under the US constitution instead.

Unlike the US Constitution, or the prior Canadian Bill of Rights, the Canadian Constitution actually limits human rights. Citizens have rights “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” 

This vague phrase leaves it all up to judges. Who cannot be trusted—power corrupts.

The vagueness of the Charter generally gives the judiciary too much opportunity to interpret. The contrast to the clarity of the Canadian or the American Bill of Rights is striking.

Equality rights are denied by the phrase: “[this] does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

Any particular group can be declared disadvantaged, and thereby given preference. Indeed, this is the usual trick. Hitler argued that ethnic Germans were disadvantaged by the Jews. South African Boers considered themselves disadvantaged after the Boer War. Mussolini declared Italians disadvantaged after Versailles. The whites of the US South considered themselves disadvantaged by the carpetbaggers after the Civil War.

It stands to reason that any group given preferential treatment by government is not disadvantaged by definition. For “disadvantaged,” read “advantaged,” and the matter is clear. Discrimination is enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. It is not in the American one.

Equality rights are also violated in clause 25: “The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed so as to abrogate or derogate from any aboriginal, treaty or other rights or freedoms that pertain to the aboriginal peoples of Canada.”

This means there will forever be at least two classes of Canadian citizenship, and never equality. Aboriginals have special extra rights and freedoms according to the constitution.

And the gross mistake of “multiculturalism” is also enshrined in the Constitution, so that it cannot be corrected. “This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”

This commits the government to working against the shared Canadian culture—just the opposite of what a government is there to do. For “multicultural heritage” read “ethnic ghettos.”

The fundamental problem is that those who drafted the Canadian Constitution had no vision nor principles other than the partisan considerations of their day: keeping various special interest groups happy. 

It leaves us no way out but either revolution, or annexation to the US. Of those who choices, annexation is vastly preferable.

Why Rylie Is Unattractive

 

There is a lot of chatter online about Rylie, a girl whom no men were interested in on a reality-TV Mormon dating show. Women are all shocked and offended that no man was interested in her. Men are all in agreement that she was showing all sorts of red flags.

The clip is apparently from at least five years ago. That the discussion comes up now is a sign of current female alarm at men checking out of the courtship and dating scene: MGTOW. 

The fact that female commentators cannot see why Rylie is unattractive shows how alienated the sexes are.

It is not that Rylie is physically unattractive. The sexes are separated by a curtain on the show—they are choosing based on her short self-introduction, not on looks.

The first red flag is that Ryan volunteers to go first. She wants to take the lead. That is unfeminine. She will expect a husband to take the back sea.

The second red flag is that she talks only about herself and her interests. She sounds self-centred and unempathic. 

The third red flag is that her future plans seem to rule out settling down. She is interested in adventure and looking forward to a trip to Australia. The point of courtship is to start a family, not a fling. Especially for a religious guy.

The fourth red flag is that she has expensive hobbies: travel across the globe, scuba diving, sky diving, hosting parties. Is she expecting her husband or boyfriend to fund this?

The fifth red flag is that she likes to party—a party girl. She likes to meet new people. A man marries to have a home and a woman who is always there.

The sixth red flag is that she makes demands right up front: “someone I can trust in and is going to be there for me”; without saying anything about what she offers in return. It is all take and no give. 

The seventh red flag is that she speaks with the feminist lilt: a rising intonation at the end of many sentences. This is a signal that one is not finished speaking: women who use it use it to dominate the conversation and not allow others to speak.

Remarkably, the women commentators see nothing wrong with her pitch or her attitude, and blame the men for not wanting to put their necks in her noose.

And none of them note that one of the men on the reality show was also rejected by all the women. None of them feel sorry for him, or feel he was treated badly. Showing an utter lack of empathy for men.

It all shows why so many men in the developed world are giving up on women. And why nobody is having children any more.

Why Fantastic Four Is Flopping

 

Pable Pascal as Mr. Fantastic

The new Fantastic Four movie is dying at the box office. It is a bit of a mystery.

Some say it is because of “superhero fatigue.” People have had enough of superhero movies; the excitement has worn off.

But this does not tally: the first weekend, the Fantastic Four receipts were good. People wanted to see a superhero movie. There must have been some problem with this particular superhero movie, which turned those initial audiences off.

According to most critics, the movie was a decent production: good acting, good plot. If we can trust them, the problem was not quality.

That leaves wokeness. Although the movie was not aggressively woke, Pablo Pascal did not look like the Reed Richards of the comic book. He was presumably cast because he was Latino: current Oscar rules require DEI casting to qualify for an award. And they sex-changed the Silver Surfer.

I think the cultural climate has changed fast enough that the audiences are no longer willing to sit down for this nonsense even on a moderate level.

Why would they? The appeal of watching a live-action superhero movie is in seeing the familiar comic book characters come to life. You want them to be as close as possible to those you cherish in your memory. This was a big problem with the earlier Fantastic Four films—they could not get The Thing looking right. This one succeeds, then throws it all away by getting Reed Richards and the Silver Surfer wrong. 

The same thing, of course, applies to race-swapping and sex-swapping in live-action remakes of the classic fairy tales. The principle is so simple, and so simple to understand, and yet they keep deliberately getting it wrong. This shows contempt for the original creation, like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. By extension, it shows contempt for the audience, the fan base. 

What did they think would happen?

Sane Canada

 

I first understood Canada had gone completely off the rails when Henry Morgentaler, the abortion doctor, was awarded the Order of Canada in 2008. And this was actually under a Conservative government. This was a declaration of war against morality, religion, and human rights. 

I will not believe that Canada has returned to sanity and freedom until I see:

• That Morgentaler Order of Canada posthumously revoked.
• All the statues of Sir John A Macdonald restored.
• Bill C-11, Bill C-18, and Bill C-63 or its successors, which censor free speech, repealed.
• Government funding pulled from the “legacy” media, restoring a free press.
• Tamara Lich and Chris Barbour cleared of all charges; with some form of reparations. Perhaps an Order of Canada for each.
• The Emergencies Act amended in such a way as to prevent a repeat of the Trudeau government’s actions in suppressing lawful and peaceful protest from ever happening again. One thought is that if invoking the act, a government must also fall, an election called in three months, with any members of the current cabinet not eligible for re-election.

Currently, we are still rushing in the wrong direction. But this poisonous red tide can turn--as it turned in China after the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. As it seems to be decisively turning now in the US.

Mad Canada

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it yet, but most Canadians are mad.

You might object. Who am I to make such a judgement? Isn’t it more likely, if everyone else thinks differently, that I am the insane one? Orwell said, “Madness is a minority of one.” 

And this is indeed how modern psychiatry tends to frame it.

An example of the current madness: this is the ad populum fallacy. Reality is not determined by popular vote. We cannot vote to make the earth flat. 

I believe I have some perspective on this, from studying philosophy, comparative religions, and history, and from living abroad in diverse cultures: China, Korea, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, not to mention across Canada and in the US. I also married into a Pakistani family. 

Surely this allows me to see beyond the common consensus, and judge it.

Canadians are mostly mad.

To be fair, not just Canadians. Koreans are also mad. Americans are mad. Brits are mad. Japanese are mad. Filipinos are sane. Arabs are mostly sane, if you step away from mentioning Jews or Israel. 

What makes the difference? Wealth seems to be part of it: rich people go crazy. And we have always known this: large manor homes are always haunted. There are skeleton closets.

But that, I think, is not the key. Wealth drives you crazy because, as the Gospel warns, wealth drives you away from God. It turns your focus towards the world.

And belief in God, the necessary first premise, is required for sanity. 

In Filipino or in Arab culture, the existence of God is taken as a given.

In Canada, Korea, America, Britain, Japan, even when nominally acknowledged, God is mostly ignored. He seems at most an abstract concept.

You will object that in America there is a distinct and lively evangelical element. There is indeed; that is why there is hope for America. But even in America, this is a counterculture. In the Philippines or Saudi Arabia, monotheism is the mainstream.

In the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles spend most of their time casting out demons. This is their initial mission. In the early church, exorcist was a common ecclesial rank. It was assumed that any pagan converts needed to be exorcised. The rapid spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire, the rest of Europe, and today across Africa, was due to its famed ability to cast out demons.

And the classical gods were demons, as the early Christians indeed identified them. Each was or represented an obsession that could possess the mind.

Broadly, what we now call mental illness.

Now that faith in Christianity is waning, the demons are returning.

God is not just the ground of being, but also the ground of reason; he is the necessary first premise from which anything else and everything else is deduced. This, I think, is evident in Descartes’ Meditations: our warrant that anything else is real is that God is real, and would not deceive us.

Pull that anchor, and we know nothing. We do not even know, contra Descartes, that we ourselves exist. Buddhism challenges this very premise.

This is why in Buddhist and Hindu Asia, without a strong tradition of ethical monotheism, everything is seen as illusion, a moving sea of dreams. Not just the physical universe, either; but chains of induction, systematic philosophy, do not form. Only gnomic aphorisms, bursts of insight.

And the rapid growth of insanity in the developed world is due to the collapse of faith in God. The demons are returning.

On a social level, to give an example of how we have come untethered—without the anchor of God, we no longer understand what human equality means.  Many—it seems most—now think it means people are the same, or even that they all deserve the same life outcomes. There is, for example, the feminist doctrine that men and women are the same and should perform all the same roles in equal proportions.

We can see this is obviously wrong, in athletics. Yet many deny it even here.

Human equality really means equal moral worth; equal worth in the eyes of God. And therefore equal treatment by the law. This is founded on Descartes’s reasoning: God exists; God is perfect goodness; God is just. It follows that God values us equally, in principle, judging us only on our own volitions. For this reason, for God’s sake, we must treat our neighbour as our equal.

Pull God from that equation, and it does not work. If we are not seeing it from God’s view, we are seeing it only from our own. Human worth, good and evil, is then based on our neighbour’s usefulness to us, or to the society as a whole.

One can immediately see how this has led to some of the worst mass murders and social upheavals of the last century and more; the worst cases of social madness.

Without the anchor of God, we similarly no longer understand freedom. Freedom is now just freedom to be selfish: self-indulgence, being able to do what we want, when we want.

Yet this is obviously wrong. The alcoholic wants to have another drink. Yet being an alcoholic is the opposite of freedom: it is enslavement to a want. 

So too with most other wants. There is a truth to the old joke, “everything I want to do is either immoral, illegal, or fattening.” Most wants are addictions that, indulged too often, soon enslave us and do us harm.

True freedom is freedom to do what God wants. It is freedom of conscience: the freedom to do what our conscience tells us we ought to do.

Because we no longer understand this, social policy has become warped. It has actually been suppressing freedom of conscience, for the sake of feeding addictions.

Without the anchor of God, we cannot even agree on what is real. “Once people stop believing in God, they will believe anything.” Science is breaking down, along with public morality and civil discourse.

America, at least, now looks as though it might be regaining lucidity. I credit this to that evangelical remnant in the culture.

The Myth of the Dying Indian

Hills and Angry Waters-- an old poem about Saint John, New Brunswick

Where bold the hills outjutting to the reef rough swept with spray,
And Whygoody's swirling water meets the tides of Fundy Bay,
An Indian Chieftain with his tribe had camped upon a day
By the coves and purling brooks of Managuashe.

Straight stood the chief outgazing o'er the billows flecked with foam,
Where the broken sunbeams wander and the shapeless shadows roam.
The south wind brought its message of the salmon speeding home,
To their river haunts beyond bold Managuashe.

 
Then blazed the bonfires brightly on the hills from bay to bay,
And the Indian braves and maidens danced and sang in wild array.
The Indian Chieftain and his tribe feasted 'till dawn of day,
On the old and loyal resorts of Managuashe.

Again gazed Panamseguis o'er the deep on rushing tide;
Now, his eyes were strained in wonder, low he bowed his head and sighed,
And to his people thus he spoke, humbled his voice and pride.
On the forest camping ground of Managuashe.

 
My brothers, braves and children of the noble Malicete,
Your hearts will burn with anger at the sight your eyes shall meet.
Behold! Upon you swelling flood the vanguard of a fleet
Which shall take from us our rugged Managuashe.

 
Many moons ago a vision by the great Manitou sent,
Appalled mine eyes and spirit, and I heard my tribe's lament.
I saw a wondrous great canoe with glistening wings intent,
On harbour making here at Managuashe.

 
Braves of some mighty nation strange, and of a feature white,
With thunderous magic weapons which blazed upon the night;
My people, like the falling leaves, sadly in hopeless plight,
Were scattered from the glens of Managuashe.

 
The vision changed and clearly I saw with wondering eyes,
Habitations, huge and strange, of a mighty race arise,
People of marvellous ways, and deft of hand, and wise,
Swarming great trails o'er Managuashe.

 
Then came to on the spirit of the "Hills and Angry Waves,"
His footfall like the trampling of swift and countless braves,
His voice like surging breakers in the deep and rocky caves.
Along the shore of lofty Managuashe.

 
His features stern, yet kindly, were wreathed in vapor cold,
His garment as pine needles, woven with ferns of gold,
He took my hand and sadly, and now our fate is told,
He led me from beloved Managuashe.

 
LH.W.

This poem is a nearly perfect expression of the myth of the Dying Indian. You’ve seen it many times in movies. Everyone thinks it is true. Indians are always dead or dying. It is like the similar myth of the Magic Negro.

The Indians are not dead and not gone. They are living in Saint John. I see them on the public transit and in the mall. And I, and many of the other riders or shoppers, probably have Indian blood, even if they do not know this, or look Indian or identify as Indian. There are many more Indians in Canada now than there were when the first modern Europeans were sighted.

They have not moved anywhere. The truth is more the reverse. Before the Europeans came, they were always moving. Now they generally stay in one place. Maliseet (Wolastoqay) Indians moved their village about every two years; the Cree every two weeks.

Their lands were never taken from them. Eighty percent of New Brunswick, and ninety percent of Canada, is still wild, unsettled, and available for hunting and foraging. The rest was sold by treaty. There are simply better ways for modern Indians to make a living, less vulnerable to famine and starvation in a bad season.

Their eyes did not burn with anger at the coming of the Europeans. The local Indians, here as in most other places, welcomed the Europeans and urged them to stay for the opportunity to trade, for access to their better technology and system of government, and for protection against their enemies. There were no “Indian wars” here—wars in which one side was Indian, and the other European. There were wars between European powers, and between Indian groups, and they might have intersected, but not Indian versus European wars. The political divide was not Indian versus European.

And there was no vanguard of a fleet here in Acadia or the Maritimes. Starting at or before Estevan Gomes in 1535, there were occasional visits by one or two ships at a time, fishermen or explorers, for a couple of centuries. Gradually there were trading posts, and a few French families came to farm the marshes. The French were not here for land; they were here for trade and to spread the gospel. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did you get the first fleet of Europeans seeking to settle—the Loyalist refugees (some of them Indians) driven out of the US.

Why are we determined to believe the Indians are gone?

Because Indians represent to us the innocence of our own childhood. We see a trace of this in the poem: as the Europeans appear, the Indians are dancing and singing—just having fun. And then the annoying adults show up, and tell them it is bedtime.

Since our childhood is irretrievably gone, we must also understand the happy carefree innocent Indians to be gone. Since we miss our childhood, we also lament the supposed disappearance of the Indians. It is ourselves we are feeling sorry for.

The pre-Columbian life of the native peoples was of course not at all the idyll we imagine.

And neither was our childhood.

We all need to grow up.

God in Everything

 

Ouroboros, the cosmic world-serpent 

Friend Xerxes seeks to embrace all the joys of life. He sees God in everything. Even he says, the rattlesnake coiled to strike. 

It sounds like a good, cheerful and magnanimous philosophy.

It is, however, not possible for a Christian to see God in everything. That is pantheism, or perhaps panentheism, not monotheism.

To worship everything would be a violation of the First (or Second, but who’s counting?)  Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” That is, you must not worship nature. God stands apart from anything in the physical universe, on land, or sea, or sky. “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

One thinks also of this passage from 1Kings: 

“Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.” 

There are evidently many things in nature God is not in. He is in the whispers, the inconspicuous or invisible, the mustard seed, the leaven. He is more present where the physical is more absent.

All of this is based on the Bible. Authoritative for Christians, but does pantheism perhaps make sense on its own merits? 

It does not. As the later philosophers of India have pointed out, if you assert “God is in all things,” the concept God simply loses all meaning; as there is nothing other than God against which to define it. You have said nothing but “the universe is the universe.” “Things are things.”

Moreover, Xerxes choice of the rattlesnake image is telling, in a Freudian sense. The serpent is the standard Christian image of evil. If you hold that God is in all things, he must also be in evil: not just in natural evil, like rattlesnakes, cancer viruses, aging, death, and pain in childbirth, but also in moral evil, in murder and rape and incest. And he is in the ugly and defective, in offal and pollution and decay. This cannot be, for God is by definition perfect: perfect good, perfect truth, and perfect beauty.

You have simply turned away from God.

Nature has fallen. The prince of "this world" is, after all, the Devil.

On the other hand, one’s daily life can and should be understood as a conversation with God. If one is alert, and prayerful, little miracles are happening all the time, as well as little corrective messages.

The Princess and the Pea

 Nobody gets the point of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Princess and the Pea.” When I Grok for the moral of the story, its search of the consensus on the Internet brings up “don’t judge by appearances.” 

That is, the princess does not look like a real princess, but she is.

This misses everything. In what sense is she a “real princess”?

Follow the text. The hero’s conflict is the inability to find a real princess. “He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted.”

Now, how hard is it to identify a real princess? A king will be the most prominent and well-known person in the country. His daughters will be princesses. Merriam-Webster: “princess: a female member of a royal family.” 

Finding a real princess is about as hard as asking one question to anyone in the next country over. If somehow you don’t already know.

Andersen is plainly telling us that “princess” here is meant metaphorically.

“Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.”

Would a king go out personally to open the city gate? No king would, for reasons of national security and his own safety from assassins, even before any other considerations. Let alone an elderly king, on a stormy night.

Andersen is telling us that “king” here is also metaphorical.

“It was a princess standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.”

Obviously, no princess in the dictionary meaning of the word would be out wandering in a foreign country alone with no place to go in a rainstorm.

Let alone “down at heel.” The rain is running into the toes of her shoes and out the heel. In other words, her shoes are worn out so that the heel is lower than the toe, and both have holes. She is literally not “well-heeled,” “down at the heel.” She is not someone accustomed to luxury.

So by what authority is she a princess? By her own. She says so.

Next, the elderly queen then puts a pea on her bed, and covers it with twenty mattresses and twenty coverlets. This odd old queen clearly has no maids nor ladies in waiting.

Were this not yet enough to make matters clear, how plausible is it for anyone, however sensitive and accustomed to luxury, to feel a pea under twenty mattresses?

“Princess” here means someone who demands to be treated like a princess; someone who will complain no matter what is done for her or given to her. A narcissist.

The next question is why on earth would any man want to marry such a woman? Yet the prince does exactly that, indeed searches far and wide for such a woman; with his mother assisting in the hunt.

And the clue is that his father is a “king,” and his mother a “queen.” They are both also narcissists. Andersen is showing to us why abused children come to be magnets for abusive partners. The “prince” has grown up with the experience of those he loves being constantly self-important and demanding. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, the family is the “school of love.” Seeking for love, the poor man will seek the same thing he knows in a mate. It will look like affection to him. He will feel unworthy of anything else.

And so he is trapped in a lifetime of abuse.

There, that is a true story.

The Really Stupid Party

 

Much can be explained by a simple premise: the left is stupid, and the right is smart.

This is more or less understood, at least by the right, in such sayings as “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.” 

Conservatives think the average leftist is naïve, not evil. Therefore, they tend to be more tolerant. The left thinks the right is not stupid, but evil. Therefore they will fight no holds barred.

One might object that the left is favoured by the expert class and by the professions. By the better educated. University faculties are all leftist. So surely this is the smarter side?

It does not follow. One cannot, after all, fail more than a relatively small number of students in any programme; especially when they are paying large amounts of money for the course. Necessarily,  therefore, academics are geared towards those of average intelligence. Granted that a somewhat higher level of intelligence will allow one to get through with less effort; but there is a ceiling. Too smart, and the plodding pace of instruction will, literally, drive one to distraction. The too-intelligent will lose interest, lose concentration, fail or drop out.

Education at all levels is essentially obedience school. Can you follow directions and submit to authority?

This might sound like sour grapes; but it is not. It is the observation of someone holding multiple certificates and degrees.

A better clue to who it smarter is who favours meritocracy. Obviously, the smartest will prefer meritocracy, on average, because it is in their self-interest.

That would be the right. The left wants equity. 

In a similar vein, quite visibly, really good-looking women tend to be conservative. Leftist women are rarely as attractive. It makes sense.

Successful politicians sometimes play dumb and folksy. Trump does; George W. Bush did. Reagan did. Ralph Klein did; Mike Harris did; Jean Chretien did. This is just good politics; it shows their intelligence. People often resent those more intelligent than they are. 

But notice that these supposedly dumb politicians are the very ones who manage to achieve a great deal of their agenda. The proof is in the pudding: they are smart.

By comparison, Democratic leaders seem genuinely dumb: Kamala Harris, the senile Joe Biden, John Fetterman. How is it they cannot put forward more impressive intellects?

Because intelligent people rarely join their party.

Canada’s Liberals do not have the same problem—but this is because they are the “Natural Governing Party.” They will attract top talent for purely cynical reasons: because they are the likeliest path to power. This is due to tribal rather than ideological voting, notably in Quebec. In the US, similarly, voting used to be more tribal, not ideological. In those days one did encounter more capable Democratic candidates.

The best proof that the left is dumb is that their basic ideological premise is dumb. They believe that government is protection from greedy and bullying capitalists, corporations and religious groups. It does not occur to them that governments or government bureaucrats could also be greedy or power-hungry.

And not even just as likely. We have a natural protection against greedy or power-hungry corporations: we can choose not to buy. We have no such protection from government. We cannot choose not to pay our taxes, or obey the law.

An amusing recent example: the NDP’s recent campaign blaming inflation on corporate greed. Their proof that Loblaw’s was price-gouging was that you could buy the same items for less in Dollarama. So why couldn’t they simply shop at Dollarama?

Even if the NDP leadership was smart enough to realize this, they were counting on their constituency not to see it.

What Faith Really Means

 

 

 

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.

3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

4 By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.

5 By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.”[a] For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. 6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

7 By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith.

8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. 11 And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she[b] considered him faithful who had made the promise. 12 And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. 14 People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15 If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

Faith is a commonly misunderstood concept. It is often presented as mere belief in the existence of God; or as mere assent to the proposition that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior. 

It has to do instead, as this passage seems to show us, with accepting the reality of the world we do not see—the spiritual world, the Kingdom of Heaven. This ties in with Jesus’s response to Thomas, who refused to believe in the resurrection until he saw and touched the wounds: “blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.”

Faith, according to the passage, is also “Confidence in what we hope for”; but we must distinguish it from the sister virtue of Hope: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The stress is on “confidence.” “Trust” seems like a rough cognate. Faith is prior, and the basis for hope.

It is not that we believe “without evidence.” It is a delusion to limit evidence to the physical senses. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in that philosophy. There is conscience, there are self-evident truths, there is reasoning from first principles, there are intimations, there are dreams, there are private revelations, there are emotional truths. You cannot see love, but it is real.

“What is seen was not made out of what was visible.” That is, the eternal, spiritual world, the Kingdom of Heaven—is prior to the physical world. See Plato on this: his “ideal forms.” Also see the modern scientific theory of the “Big Bang.”

“By faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.” The physical world is mortal, and all things in it fade and die. The spiritual, on the other hand, is eternal. See Parmenides on this. Memories are evidence of this.

“By faith he [Abraham] made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.”

In other words, the “promised land” is not any part of the physical world, not Canaan or Judea, but the kingdom of heaven. So long as we are in this physical world, we are exiles.

“All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised.”

So did God fail to keep his promise? Were they foolish to keep faith? No—the point is that the promised world is not this physical world. “All these people were still living by faith when they died”—that is, they were still alive when they died, and continue to live, in the promise. Death exists only in the physical realm.

“They were longing for a better country.” This has been taken as the motto for the Order of Canada: “They sought a better country.” Supposedly meaning that recipients sought to make Canada a better country. But this interpretation is shown to be wrong by the very next phrase: “a heavenly one.” This falsification of the Biblical passage seems to make the point that earthly powers are in eternal opposition to heavenly ones.

“If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return.” 

This seems to open the door to the concept praying to saints. For “the country they had left,” in context, refers to the physical world, and “they” refers to a series of dead patriarchs. If they think of the physical world, they can return at any time. 

Of course they can. Heaven is prior to earth. Heaven is perfect happiness, and any unresolved wish would prevent heaven from being heaven. Therefore, it must be possible to return, to intervene, or to communicate with the living.

But not reincarnation. Not ghosts.

Having achieved the Beatific Vision, one naturally would not want to turn one’s thoughts back to the soil. One might do so, like a Bodhisattva, in self-sacrifice, to help someone you love below.

Why the Canadian Government Seems to Hate Canada

There is an old saying, “never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by simple incompetence.” And Justin Trudeau was certainly unqualified for his job as Canadian Prime Minister. Nevertheless, some pundit recently said that the destruction Justin Trudeau has wrought on Canada over the past ten years cannot be accounted for by mere incompetence. It must have been out of malice.

And Carney, boasted of being particularly well-qualified, seems to be continuing many of the same destructive policies. Notably the “elbows up” approach to negotiating with the US and Donald Trump: sheer suicide.

It sounds mad, of course: why would someone want to be Prime Minister in the first place, if they hate the country? Isn’t patriotism, love of country, the natural emotion? 

Yet we can see it is true, not only of Trudeau, or Carnet, but of the left generally. Not only in Canada, but across the developed world. The Canadian “woke” left show open contempt of Canada: its history, its customs, its values. It is the despised patriarchy, a “settler colonial state,” guilty of imagined genocide against First Nations, and of an imagined history of slavery. Statues of its founders must be pulled down, their names erased from public places. Trudeau asserts, “there is no Canadian mainstream.” If not evil, Canada is nothing at all.

Trudeau’s policies are the natural expression of this. Canada must be beaten down and suppressed. And the fact is, this is a sentiment shared by enough Canadians to keep him in power for ten years, then vote in his chosen successor. With similar leaders and electoral successes in other nations.

Where does this weird hatred for established institutions come from? Commentators commonly cite guilt over the past; but I dissent. There is actually little in our collective past to feel guilty about; the guilt is mostly falsified and manufactured. It cannot be the cause.

It is often also described as “self-hate.” I almost used the term myself, and balked. That is not so. Nobody can plausibly accuse Justin Trudeau of having too little ego. It is not a matter of hating oneself, but of scapegoating others, either whitey or men or one’s own ancestors, in order to make oneself seem more important, significant, and virtuous. 

 I think narcissism is again, as so often, the answer. Across the developed world, thanks to modern pop psychology, “building self-esteem,” “self-assertion,” and the doctrine of “unconditional love” in childrearing, we have deliberately bred several generations of narcissists.

If you put a narcissist in charge of anything he has not built himself, he or she will try to destroy it. Why? Because he did not build it. Destroying it makes it fully his, uniquely his possession, and ensures no one else can own it. 

This simple explanation can account for nearly everything that has gone wrong in the culture. It explains the seemingly self-destructive “woke” ad campaigns we have seen in recent years: executives and ad agencies seeming to deliberately alienate their consumers. Like Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney ads, or Jaguar’s bizarrely sexually ambiguous ads. It explains Hollywood movies going “woke” and alienating their audiences by deliberately tinkering with and altering the characters that built their “franchises.” It explains the many “legacy” comedy TV shows that seem to have stopped telling actual jokes and trying to be funny. It explains the outrageous media bias of recent years, grand old newspapers and news organizations destroying their credibility with the public. As David Burge put it, “The Left doesn’t create institutions. It infiltrates them, captures them, and then wears them like a skinsuit, demanding respect.”

If a narcissist has not created something--and narcissists are never creative--they will do their best to infiltrate, capture, destroy, and demand respect for themselves. Trudeau is a classic example. 

Not incidentally, this is also true of the family. If a narcissist has children, he or she will do their best, openly or secretly, to destroy them. Abortion is the most obvious example. It expresses their complete possession and dominance. They will also tend to destroy the legacy of their parents, as Justin has marred the memory of his father Pierre. Like the mobs pulling down statues of the founders. Like Kronos in Greek myth, to the extent they can, they first castrate their own fathers, then devour each of their children as they are born.

Can Canada escape collapse? Perhaps. There are signs of redemption south of the border, at least. Canada always wants to do whatever big brother is doing, with a lag of about seven years.

But it will take several generations to repair the damage.

It's Good to Be BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Female

 Hollywood and advertising are not the only art forms that have lost their audience through DEI. The poetry world is probably worse, as a Vancouver poet has recently demonstrated.

The result, predictably, has been poetry nobody wants to read.

The Somali Experiment

 

The revolution is proceeding apace, at least south of the border. I was shocked recently to hear Matt Walsh call for the mass deportation of Somalis. Their culture, he says, is incompatible with American values.

I cannot imagine hearing this even two years ago. This goes sharply against the leftist dogma that all cultures are equal, and cannot be criticized, since good and evil are themselves culturally relative. And it goes against the leftist dogma that culture is racially determined, so that any criticism of another culture is racist.

If Walsh’s position becomes the American mainstream, everything changes. At least, if the logic is applied consistently—which rarely actually happens. Leftist “woke” thought has always been wildly inconsistent.

To begin with, of course, this makes mass immigration look far more dubious as a policy. And this seems to be becoming the consensus across the developed world. Ther have been mass demonstrations in England and Ireland, not just the US, and the governments have at least begun giving lip service to the idea that mass immigration is a bad thing. And for reasons of cultural incompatibility.

But more than this: if culture is not genetic, and cultures are not intrinsically equal, this kills multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is just holding people back and restricting them to ghettos. Obviously, everyone should gravitate to the best elements, the best solutions, the best culture; instead of living as an exhibit in a human zoo. Which is of course the idea the U.S.A. was based on: e pluribus unum, the melting pot.  And, of course, this is what Martin Luther King and the drive for desegregation was all about. We had lost our way.

This also kills accusations that teaching “First Nations” practical skills in the residential schools was “cultural genocide.” The reality is that “First Nations” cultures were, as we actually used to call them, “primitive.” The French explorers used to say, “sans loi, sans roi, sans foi”: without laws, without government, without religion or philosophy. They were less developed, and produced a less satisfactory life. A daily struggle for survival left no time to develop things like permanent structures, wheeled vehicles, writing, settled agriculture, and the like. Without writing, with the old usually dying of exposure or abandonment at a relatively young age, with epidemics wiping out most of the population about every two generations, any innovations discovered by solitary geniuses over the millennia were unlikely to be remembered and passed on.

This also makes the European enterprise of colonialism look less sinister. The argument at the time was that the European powers were tutoring less developed societies, introducing peace and prosperity, orderly systems of government, commerce, and accounting, building schools and railroads and hospitals, and keeping the peace. Was this altogether wrong? Was it really all about pushing other people around and stealing their resources? If so, how account for the fact that European colonies usually cost the present country money, rather than making them money? How account for the fact that most former colonies took a financial hit post-independence, and many sank into conflict?

Somalia being a case in point. Independence has not worked well for the former Italian Somalia and British Somaliland.

Lucifer the Freedom Fighter

At a writers’ meeting I attended recently, the challenge was to write some familiar story from the point of view of the villain. One did Wile Coyote. One did Voldemort. Someone did Pontius Pilate. Someone tried to write about the fallen angels from the Devil’s point of view. Nothing especially shocking about that; Milton did the same. I do not recall the details.

But then someone piped up, “That’s not the way it really happened.”

“What actually happened was that Lucifer was God’s first son. Before Jesus. He was God’s favorite. But he objected to angels not having free will. So God threw him out of heaven.”

Someone else across the table raised an objection: “No, that’s not right.”

And she responded firmly. “You can’t dispute that. It’s the real history.”

The meeting just moved on.

I too was in no mood to challenge something so mad. Especially since she was so adamant. But I was left wondering where this came from, and how she could possibly feel such certainty. 

Of course Lucifer’s fall from heaven is not “history.” No historical account is beyond dispute, saying something is history does not end an argument, but even so, history is based on written records from the relevant time. No one was present at the war in heaven, taking notes. It is supposed to have happened at the beginning of creation, before the first man.

Nor does this woman’s account of Lucifer’s motive make any sense. If angels lacked free will, how could Lucifer himself rebel against God?

The Bible says Lucifer rebelled seeking to “make himself like the Most High.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, para 392-3:

“This ‘fall’ consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter's words to our first parents: ‘You will be like God.’ …

It is the irrevocable character of their choice, and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angels' sin unforgivable. ‘There is no repentance for the angels after their fall, just as there is no repentance for men after death.’”

Lucifer and the fallen angels rejected God’s authority while in his presence. Just as the damned each individually and consciously choose hell at death, in the divine presence. This makes it unambiguous and irreversible. And for the reason Milton gives: “I would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.”

So, this strange idea does not come from history, as claimed. It is not from the Bible. It is not from Church tradition, and it is not a logical thought. Perhaps this woman was getting her “facts” from some gnostic tradition? But I can’t find anything like it in the gnostic texts. There do seem to be references to Satan as God's elder son in some Mormon scripture; but not the part about free will.

How can someone be so certain of something so strange and counter to traditional understanding, something she might have read somewhere once, that she would assert it adamantly to a room of perhaps twenty people?

Was I dealing with a madwoman? Yet some at the table knew her well, and nobody thought her insane. 

It seems to me a symptom of the present age. We have generally become untethered from any sense of truth or reality, so that anyone is free to believe anything, and impose it on those around them by strength of will. 

Thus men can decide to be women, or women men. People can continue to believe debunked claims like the mass graves hoax, or the January 6 insurrection hoax, or the Charlotte “fine people” hoax, or the Russia hoax. When you do not believe in God, you can believe in anything, and people believe what they want to believe. Or become paranoid.

This idea of Lucifer as the righteous rebel does sound like something someone might want to believe, if they wanted to deny sin, deny the authority of God, and claim the right to do what they will. 

Using Blogger's new AI tool to insert relevant links above. It appeared just today, and trying it out.

Who Exactly is Obsolete?

Elon Musk has recently expressed the opinion that soon, thanks to AI, engineers and programmers with be obsolete. 

It stands to reason. These are jobs involving systematic reasoning. Thinking in a straight line. That’s what computers do best, and better than humans.

I believe that, truth told, medical doctors are already obsolete. AI can diagnose more reliably than any human. And that is what doctors, other than surgeons, do.

Accounting, too, is systematic reasoning and surely easily automated.

So what does this mean to all those parents, and all those government and other organizations, who have been pushing STEM?

A dead end. As usual, the experts were wrong.

The one thing AI cannot do, and will, I warrant, never be able to do, is to think creatively. It can only reshuffle what is already there.

What we need are the humanities, the fields that tell us why and where we ought to be going. We want philosophers and ethicists and people who know the lessons of history at the controls, asking the right questions and keeping AI on a leash to ensure it serves humanity.

And beyond that, it is the creatives, the artists, poets, inventors and entrepreneurs, who will inherit the earth.

The Death of the Churches

An Anglican priest commented to me yesterday that the Anglican Church in Canada, on present trends, will disappear in fifteen years, by 2040. There are only grey heads in the pews now, and they are dying off.

My friend Xerxes, who is United Church, estimates 2035-2040 for their extinction date.

These are the two largest Protestant denominations in Canada.

The decline has been going on since about 1960; but apparently there was a big drop with COVID. Sources also blame the residential schools scandal, or, as I would call it, the residential schools hoax.

The Catholic Church is not doing that much better. Extinction not in sight, but affiliation and attendance is definitely declining, mostly in Quebec. I cannot find figures for Canada outside Quebec, but for the country as a whole, in ten years from 2011 to 2021, the Catholic population declined from 12.7 million (38.7% of the population) to 10.8 million (29.9%).

One should, perhaps, not worry. “Let go and let God”; He will manage affairs. On the other hand, one thinks of Sodom and Gomorrah. We cannot assume He loves Canada unconditionally. It does not help that we have embraced child sacrifice and various sexual perversions, the stated reasons that he obliterated Canaan and the cities of the plain.

It is true that more evangelical denominations, collectively, have shown “stability or slight growth.” But this does not make up for the mainstream decline.

On the brighter side, these figures may be unnecessarily alarmist. They seem to be based on census figures, so that the last year for which figures are available is 2021-- the height of the Covid pandemic. If Covid was responsible for a large drop in numbers, as is said, and certainly put people out of the habit of going to church, it seems possible there has been some recovery since, or will be over time, which will not show up in these figures until 2031.

The culture may also have been turning since 2021. It has politically, after all, with the resurrection of MAGA and the striking failure since of wokery in advertising, in the media, and in Hollywood.

There are signs of revival since 2021, if largely anecdotal, among Catholics and evangelicals.  Record numbers of adult baptisms, celebrities publicly converting, reports of miracles, and of descents of the spirit at mass prayer meetings.

When I turn my head at my local Catholic church, most of the heads are not grey. There are many children, young families. 

It is also perhaps natural that mainstream Protestantism is dying. It is perhaps not so much that the people have left the churches; it is more that the churches have left the church and abandoned the people. I went to grad school with Protestant ministers; the faculty was almost entirely Protestant ministers. They tended to scorn traditional belief; it was uncool among them to profess faith in anything. The people on the pew were ignorant peons, clinging to their superstitions. Anglicanism and the United Church preach no consistent doctrine, seeking only to reflect back to the congregation whatever they think they want to hear. Religion bores them, or frightens them; they have pretty much shifted their interests to politics and vaguely “doing good” for the poor or otherwise supposedly disadvantaged. 

This makes them redundant: why belong to the United Church instead of the local NDP constituency organization, or the local Red Cross or soup kitchen? Indeed, aren’t you just wasting time and effort by comparison?

The remaining reason to join a church, surely, is to hang out with people you know and like; as a social club. This gives little reason for anyone new to join the organization, or this organization instead of another; when the present cadre dies off, that will be the end of it. 

And as a social group, a weekly Sunday meeting, these churches face new competition for everyone’s free time and interest: endless streaming and reading on the internet, social media, video games, online conferencing, AI companions. All voluntary organizations, from the Masons to the St. Andrews Society to the bowling league, are bleeding members. There is too much else to do.

The mainstream Protestants, I think, aew doomed. Yet there is a path for Catholicism, and a crying need, if Pope Leo and the hierarchy have the wisdom, let alone the piety, to seize the times. They need to emphasize what makes going to mass most different from an ordinary day, a Catholic life most different from just living your life. That is, they need to give a solid reason to spend your time in Church instead of somewhere else. The very opposite of the direction things have been going since Vatican II. 

Catholicism has a secret weapon here: the eucharist. It requires your physical presence. It cannot be replaced by anything online. It significance and its infinite value should be emphasized by surrounding it with as much distinctive ritual as possible: more bells and smells, more organ music and choir, more reverence in its handling, and yes, a return of the option of a Latin mass. 

I am encouraged to see that my local cathedral, last Sunday, started reserving the front row of pews and kneelers for those wishing to receive communion on the tongue. This is, in effect, a return to the communion rail. I asked after the mass where this innovation came from. The celebrant said it was from the bishop; he did not know if it came from higher up.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit.

At the same time, the evangelical groups also demand physical presence for their celebrations, with the electric presence of the Spirit and laying on of hands. Catholicism shares this in the charismatic movement, and this too should be leaned into.

All this is desperately needed, by the many souls abandoned by their own churches, and to restore Canada to God’s grace.

Lolita and the Hellfire Club

I have long suspected that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, was blowing the whistle on some kind of Hellfire Club going on among the prominent and wealthy.

Revelations since about Jeffrey Epstein and P Diddy and Hillary Clinton’s Russia hoax seem to confirm this. There really has been some sort of immoral cabal at the top running much of the society. And this explains many things, like large corporations seeming to act against their own self-interest, politicians going against the popular will and fearing free speech, and, not least, Trump Derangement Syndrome.

But for how long has this been going on? Is it new, or are we only hearing about it now?

 Kubrick’s far earlier film, Lolita, 1962, might also have been a blow on the whistle. It deals with ephebophilia, which seems the dominant obsession of the Epstein cult. That is, having sex with young, but post-pubescent, women. An obvious attraction for the rich and powerful: all societies and cultures see youth and innocence as highly desirable in women. So it is reasonable to foresee this as an ideal commodity for a corrupt blackmail cult.

Kubrick filmed Lolita as his first independent production, after breaking a multi-film contract with Kirk Douglas. The two had a bitter falling out.

In the opening scene of Lolita, James Mason asks Peter Sellers, “Are you Quilty?” And Sellers responds, “I am Spartacus. Why, have you come to free the slaves, or something?”

The film is relatively sympathetic towards Mason as Humbert for his obsession with underage Lolita. It is a natural enough desire. But Quilty is the real villain. As the movie’s plot unfolds, he kidnaps the underage Lolita and takes her to a “dude ranch” full of his “weird friends.”

It sounds so much like the Epstein arrangement.

Spartacus, in Kubrick’s previous film, was played by Kirk Douglas. By saying “I am Spartacus,” Quilty/Sellers is identifying himself with Douglas. And implying Douglas in some sense kept slaves, as Quilty does. Perhaps young female slaves, as Quilty does.

In 2021, soon following his death, Douglas was accused by the family of Natalie Wood of having brutally raped her when she was a child star of sixteen. She and her family had kept silence all these years due to fear of his power and influence.

There are suspicions around another starlet, Jean Spangler. Not underage; but she disappeared. Her purse was found, with signs of a struggle, containing an unfinished note that read “Kirk: Can’t wait any longer, Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away,” She was three months pregnant. Like the pianist in Eyes Wide Shut, there has been no sign of her since.

Whatever his experiences with Douglas, as soon as he was able to get out of that contract, Kubrick decamped to England for the rest of his life, a very strange move in terms of career. Although Lolita was set in the US, Kubrick awkwardly filmed it in England, using what American or Canadian actors resident in the UK to get the accents right. As he did for all the rest of his films. Surely a striking eccentricity. As if there was something in Hollywood he feared or needed to escape.

Kubrick’s wife has said he had wanted to make Eyes Wide Shut for years, but felt he was not ready to yet. Not ready? What held him up? It was not an expensive story to film in terms of special effects, like some of the other films he made before it. It did not require great historical research, like some of the other films he made before it. And as soon as he did make it, he suddenly died. A heart attack in his sleep, age 70, six days after the film’s final cut.

Did they get to him?

Did he let go and die knowing he had finally said what needed to be said?

Did he die of the stress of possible reactions from powerful quarters?

I hope one day we know.

Jesus Was No Socialist

Why are haunted houses never small or modest?

First Reading: Ecclesiastes 1: 2; 2: 21-23

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities!  All things are vanity!Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill, and yet to another who has not labored over it, he must leave property. This also is vanity and a great evil.

For what profit comes to man from all the toil and anxiety of heart with which he has labored under the sun?

All his days sorrow and grief are his occupation; even at night his mind is not at rest.

This also is vanity.

Second Reading: Colossians 3: 1-5, 9-11

1 Therefore, if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above; where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God:

2 Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth.

3 For you are dead; and your life is hid with Christ in God.

4 When Christ shall appear, who is your life, then you also shall appear with him in glory.

5 Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, lust, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is the service of idols.

9 Lie not one to another: stripping yourselves of the old man with his deeds,

10 And putting on the new, him who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of him that created him.

11 Where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. But Christ is all, and in all.

Gospel: Luke 12: 13-21

13 And one of the multitude said to him: Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me.

14 But he said to him: Man, who hath appointed me judge, or divider, over you?

15 And he said to them: Take heed and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life doth not consist in the abundance of things which he possesseth.

16 And he spoke a similitude to them, saying: The land of a certain rich man brought forth plenty of fruits.

17 And he thought within himself, saying: What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?

18 And he said: This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and will build greater; and into them will I gather all things that are grown to me, and my goods.

19 And I will say to my soul: Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years take thy rest; eat, drink, make good cheer.

20 But God said to him: Thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee: and whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?

21 So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich towards God.

These mass readings for this Sunday amount to a clear rejection of the left-wing idea of “equity.” Justice, Ecclesiastes asserts, requires that a man keep what he has earned from his labour. Not just his physical labour, but also what he has earned from his wisdom, and knowledge, and care. No doubt it is legitimate for government to take some in return for services rendered. No doubt it makes sense to provide a “social safety net” as group insurance. But for a government to get into the business of wealth redistribution is, in the words of Ecclesiastes, “a great evil.” That should settle the matter.

If not, the Gospel conveys the same message. Someone comes to Jesus demanding that his brother divide their inheritance equally. And Jesus refuses.  So much for Marxist equity.

Jesus says “who hath appointed me judge over you?” This is odd, and commands our attention, because Jesus is the rightful judge of the deeds of all. No one has to appoint him. How is it he has no authority in this case?

Because there is no moral issue involved. In an inheritance, neither party has earned the money. Neither has a moral right to it. So it is an administrative issue, a matter for king or Caesar: what does the law say? 

Jesus then goes on to address the moral issue: demanding equity is the sin of covetousness. 

This is not to let the rich off the hook. This is not to praise the rich. As the second, epistolatory reading tells us, their pursuit of riches is idolatry.

I worked for some years in Toronto with and among the “mentally ill.” Some of the names of these street people might surprise you. You might recognize some of the family names. A striking proportion of the severely mentally ill come from prominent families. Few seem to emerge from wealthy families with psyches fully healthy and intact. Most large old houses are haunted, and have closets full of skeletons. We know this, as a folk truth.

Thoe who are rich are likely to be covetous; for those who are covetous are likely to grow rich. This is obvious on the simple and self-evident principle that when we try to get something, we are more likely to get it. The same will be true for those who strive for social prominence. They are almost inevitably idolators.

Mental illness is spiritual illness. Mental illness naturally comes of growing up in a family with values askew. And the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons, unto the third and fourth generation.

The rich are not to be praised or admired; at the same time, it is folly to envy the rich. 

Are the Times Still A'Changin'?

 

I recently inadvertently uncovered the essential difference between right wing and left wing perceptions. 

In a poetry group, I was given Dylan’s “The Times, They Are A’Changin’” as a prompt.

My immediate thought was that, if that song is still relevant today, times have been a-changin’ since at least 1964. Over sixty years. And yet, all the things we wanted changed then seem still to be with us, or back with us, or many claim are still with us—notably those on the left, so I thought this point was uncontroversial. We have endless foreign wars; we have rogue government; we have continuing racism and discrimination. 

The only difference, I thought, is that we now lack the same enthusiasm for change that we had back in the Sixties. Nobody is singing any longer. Which stands to reason, after sixty years barking up the same tree. We are exhausted; we need transcendence.

I wrote a prose poem to this effect. I read it to another poetry group to which I belong. I thought my sense would be universally shared, among those who knew the original song. 

I was wrong. Most folks who style themselves poets these days are leftists, and from them I got, unexpectedly, immediate pushback.

First, according to the left, the arts today, including most specifically popular music, are just as vital and vibrant and popular today as they have ever been. The quality of art is a constant, regardless of time and place.

So there was nothing special going on in Greenwich Village in the early Sixties, nor in Haight-Ashbury in the later Sixties, nor in Paris in the 1920s, nor in English poetry during the Romantic era, or Italian painting and sculpture during the Renaissance, or English drama during the Elizabethan era. The perception that it is so is all just prejudice.

I id not expect this; I would have thought the assertion mad. It is as if there is no such thing as quality in art, no standards. 

Yet this actually makes sense from a left-wing perspective. It is consistent and in fact seems to follow necessarily from their contention that all cultures are equal. Moreover, that all women are equally beautiful. 

It then seems necessarily so that eras in a culture must also be equal. Indeed, one could extend this: the works of all artists are equal, so that one chooses for a gallery or a publication only for proper ethnic representation. Which is pretty much how it works these days. I would see a decline in quality as a result; to the left, apparently, this is not possible. 

But that was not the strongest objection. The leftists in the group also objected to the assertion that we are facing all the same problems, in essence, that we did in 1964. 

They must believe this, I suppose--despite also insisting often that nothing has really improved in non-white lives since the days of slavery, indeed since the days when European empires controlled the world. Despite the contradiction, the inexorability of social progress is after all the core of their belief system as “progressives.” The left-wing agenda is to them after all, as an article of faith, the “right side of history.” Even if that left-wing agenda once included such failed ideas as prohibition, eugenics, pacifism in the face of Nazism, or segregation. Progress has to be a given.

“At least,” one fellow insisted, “You have to agree that society has become more tolerant.”

This floored me. Growing intolerance is my strongest impression. Back in 1964 there was no political correctness, no deplatforming, no cancel culture, no shouting down the other side. The Fifties saw blacklisting under McCarthyism. The Sixties had thrown off that yoke. Now we have it worse than in the Fifties. 

You might cite sexual freedom. After all, nowadays men can walk around wearing women’s clothes. But this is not the whole story. Things were freer for heterosexuals then. The Sixties have been called “The Golden Age of Porn.” Now that is largely shut down by fears of disease, “me too” and the like. And the growing legal requirement to pretend that men are women is, for 99% of the population, a decrease, not an increase, in freedom and tolerance.

You might point to the civil rights movement. But that was a fight for the 1950s. It was already capstoned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the year the song came out. I recall Martin Luther King adjusting his program accordingly, to focus on poverty instead of race; that war was won. Since then, the movement seems to have been in the opposite direction: towards greater segregation, now often by black demand; in most recent years, greater hostility among the races; and even a higher poverty rate among black families. If whites are more tolerant of BIPOCS, BIPOCS are less tolerant of whites. There seems an even greater and more clearly binary us-them divide than ever.

And antisemitism is now at a level I would not have imagined possible after WWII.

It feels absurd even citing these matters—they seem obvious. 

Yet apparently they are invisible to the left.

To my mind, the left is trapped back in 1964, and cannot get out.

To be fair, when I held firm to my opinion, even without getting into detail or citing evidence, the leftists in the group seemed to back down.

They had to, I suppose. All opinions, after all, are equal. [sic]