Angels We Have Heard on High

In case there was any smidgeon of a doubt, it is still Christmas. There are Twelve Days of Christmas, remember? We're good until Epiphany.

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The Truth about Dragons

St. George in unstained glass.

A friend on Facebook recently posted an article on “Ten Natural Treatments for Depression.” As with most such articles, it is wrong and includes bad advice.

Beginning with the first paragraph:

“Depression is a mental health disorder resulting from chemical imbalances of the brain. It is not a personal defect, failure, or weakness. Rather, it is a medical issue, plain and simple. And, as with any other medical condition, depression requires diagnosis and treatment.”

It is meaningless, to begin with, to say depression results from “chemical imbalances of the brain.” The assertion tells us nothing. What cases the chemical imbalances?

This is like saying psoriasis is caused by a skin rash.

But it’s worse. “Chemical imbalance” itself is only pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. What might constitute a proper “balance of chemicals”? What does the phrase even mean?

Suppose some specific chemical were found in higher proportion in the brains of those experiencing depression than in the general population. This cannot establish cause and effect. Did the chemical cause the thoughts, or did the thoughts cause the chemical?

It is all only a survival of an ancient pseudo-medical myth, the theory of the humours.

“It is not a personal defect, failure, or weakness. Rather, it is a medical issue, plain and simple.”

This is the fallacy of the false alternative. There are not only two choices here, either personal defect or disease. Suppose someone runs into you with their car; is that either your personal defect or purely a medical issue?

It seems the reality is being deliberately avoided; otherwise why ignore one obvious possibility? Why is it impossible that depression be caused by environment? Isn’t it just common sense that it often, if not always, is?

“As with any other medical condition, depression requires diagnosis and treatment.”

This implies that diagnosis and treatment will help. Sadly, whether the current medical treatments for depression do is still highly debatable in medical or scientific terms. There is some survey evidence that people do better if they do not seek such treatment.

Realizing all this may well make you even more depressed. But telling lies is not going to help.

In fact, there are effective ways to fight depression. To begin with, depression is not “a medical condition.”

That is why the book The Truth about Dragons is about to appear.

Ave Mariah!

Censorship

There is a terrible poison infecting our society; the poison of censorship of ideas. We have seen it reach fever pitch with the “deplatforming” of people like Gavin MacInnis and Sargon of Akkad, YouTube stars.

Let us be clear: what we are seeing right now is orders of magnitude worse than McCarthyism, which some of us grew up believing was so terrible. This is a wholesale attempt to shut down discussion and control thought. The virus is also everywhere in society now, not just at the top: people are unfriending old friends and cutting all ties at a word.

This, terrible as it is, is a predictable consequence of a worse problem: a large proportion of the population acting in a consciously immoral way. It is in such circumstances, and only in such circumstances, that there would be a general push to have all dissent shut up and shut down.

And it also suggests the end is near. This is desperation.

The truth will out, and the truth will set us free.

Bethlehem Temperature

Bethlehem temperature last night at midnight was 8 degrees Celsius. It is usually higher,

I try to check every year because of the common claim that Jesus could not really have been born on December 25, because it would have been too cold for shepherds to be out with their sheep.

This year, for once, they have a point. It is at least a bit chilly.

I wonder if this bodes ill for the coming year?

A Good Hearty Carol for Christmas

The First Noel

Romanesque nativities from the Catalunya Museum, Barcelona. For some reason,  nobody looks happy. Especially Joseph does not look happy.

Maybe My Favourite Christmas Carol

Merry Christmas!

Egg Nativity.  St. Joseph's Oratory -- Oratoire St.-Joseph, Montreal.

Cashing Out and Crashing Out

On Brexit, I don’t think Theresa May bears any blame. Underneath the posturing, there is a simple reality. The EU does not want to make it easy for any member to leave; what higher government ever does? How sanguine was the US when the Confederate States wanted to leave? The UK, when America did? Not only does it involve an immediate reduction of power for the folks negotiating the exit on the European side, but an easy exit will encourage others to leave. No federation can survive if it makes it easy.

By this logic, it is probably inevitable that any deal on offer from the EU is going to be worse for Britain than simply “crashing out.” They have no incentive to make it easier.

And so crashing out seems to be the best option.

Once the UK is out, it makes more sense for the EU to play nice. The deed is done, the bluff failed. Now the economics make it in the EU’s interest to conclude a trade deal. If they do not find some accommodations in good time, there will especially be troubles for Ireland. In the meantime, Britain can be making trade deals with the US, the rest of the Anglosphere, India. She is a big economy. She is a desirable date. There will be other suitors.

A Real People's Party

For a Canadian, it is truly a revelation to see videos of what is going on in Westminster over the Brexit negotiations. It is spellbinding. This is how parliamentary democracy is supposed to work, and it does not work in Canada at all.

In Westminster, we see a genuine debate. Speakers keep raising new and important points. Everyone listens. What they say is instructive. The mood of the chamber alters as a result. They may or may not support a given position of their own party in the debate. At the same time, they tend to be courteous to one another. While sometimes meant ironically, they generally make a point of saying something nice about an opponent before disagreeing. By and large, motives are not questioned and insults not flung; debate sticks to the issues.

Compare any videoed exchange from Canada’s federal parliament. Hoots and cheers in chorus, as if either side is trying to drown out the other. You give everyone else on your side a standing ovation. Seats near the speaker are jammed with the faces the party wants the cameras to see, generally expressing party diversity; and preventing any view of empty seats. Everybody who speaks speaks for their party, and sounds completely scripted, not saying anything they have themselves thought. This means the gist of what they are about to say is predictable before they open their mouths, and nobody learns anything. No opinions are changed. It is only a matter of trying to think up some choice insult that could make a “sound bite” or a campaign slogan. The party opposite is always accused of criminal behavior.

In sum, no debate actually takes place; the Commons simply does not function. You might as well just have lists of numbers instead of real people: 157 votes for any Tory proposition, 165 for any Liberal one. The decisions are all taken elsewhere, out of public sight, and only brought there for a vote. The result of any such vote is foreordained. The general public need never know the reasons or the reasoning.

This is not a democracy at all. Canada today is an elected dictatorship.

Some of this is no doubt due to the Canadian education system, that criminally does not teach debate nor parliamentary procedure. Much of it is due, I suspect, to the fact that in Canada, the party leader must sign the nomination papers for all local candidates, so that all are bought and paid for in advance. And all Canadian parties have a strong and growing reputation for dealing severely with any internal divergence from the party line.

How about a real People’s Party, that, as a matter of the party constitution, will never interfere with whatever candidate is thrown up by their local riding associations, beyond ensuring that a properly democratic election was held? In these days of popular revolt, it could be a decisive winning issue. Yes, some candidates might well be nominated whose views make head office’s hair curl. But so long as they take no initial responsibility, how does this reflect on them? Democracy is supposed to come from the bottom up, not the top down.

The Simple Trick to Great Filmmaking--Or Writing

Marisa Berenson

It seems to me there is a simple and obvious difference between a good movie and a bad movie. A good movie leaves you with scenes, visuals, lines, that burn into your memory. This effect is so profound that sometimes I fear going to see a new film by a certain director, because I know there will be a part of my consciousness that I will never own again. A bad movie may hold your attention while it is on screen, but a few months later, you can remember nothing about it. Perhaps not even whether you have seen that movie.

This is what the great directors do. There are always memorable lines and memorable images.

The funny thing is that this in itself is a kind of formula, and not that hard to follow. A big part of this—and it applies just as much to good writing—is that a bad film follows all the conventions, and gives you just what you expected. A good film—or piece of writing—strives to give you something you do not expect. This is always what is memorable. George Orwell put it well when he gave, as one of his rules of good writing, “never use an expression or phrase you are used to seeing in print.”

To give one example, a bad movie will cast actors who are conventionally extremely good looking in the lead roles. Obvious enough, surely.

A good movie will instead cast actors who have an unusual appearance. If someone is conventionally extremely good looking, they will cast him in a character role—like George Clooney in Hail Caesar!, or Brad Pitt in Burn after Reading.

Then they will cast a character actor in the lead role, like Tim Blake Nelson in Buster Scruggs or Frances McDormand in Fargo.

Stanley Kubrick, with his photographer’s eye, was especially good at selecting lead actresses who were, although not extremely beautiful in the conventional way, entrancing to look at: Shelley Duvall in The Shining, Marisa Berenson in Barry Lyndon.

Fairy Tale of New York

Nice job with this one.

Great Christmas song.

Repealing Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law is wrong, and dangerously wrong. I suspect intentionally wrong.

Or rather, to be fair to Godwin, the misinterpretation of Godwin's Law is wrong. For what Godwin actually said is correct and unobjectionable:

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Which is true, and actually necessarily true. Like a monkey at a typewriter composing Shakespeare.

But this has been commonly misinterpreted as “whoever first mentions Hitler or the Nazis has lost the argument.”

The problem with this reading should be obvious. It exempts any real Nazis in the ideological sense from criticism on that basis. What could be better calculated to promote Nazism?

It would be fine if Hitler were some sort of supernatural demon who could never appear again. But he is not. He has come again often. Right off the bat, this perverted form of “Godwin's Law” exempts from criticism the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Rwandan genocide, the Cultural Reolution and Great Leap Forward, and on and on, all of which were properly comparable to what Hitler did.

There is, on the other hand, a much easier and pretty reliable way to declare when someone has lost an argument in an email forum, a usenet group, or on Facebook. Human nature is human nature. Almost invariably, if someone loses any argument badly online, they will insult the winner--that is, go ad hominem. When reason won't get them what they want, the average person turns to verbal fists. Then they will unsubscribe, unfriend, or leave the group.

If they own the group, of course, they will instead ban the winner.

So whenever someone leaves a group, unfriends, or unsubscribes some member, the person taking that action can usually be assumed to be the recent loser in an argument. Of course, this is not a perfect rule; there are, it is true, good reasons to unfriend or ban. But it should be the default assumption if the person leaving the group, unfriending or banning themselves participated in the argument.

And this brings up the bigger issue of free speech; because the principle here is exactly the same. It is important because, without it, it will, just as online experience shows, invariably be the best and strongest arguments that will be most often banned. Nobody is afraid of any argument or position they believe they can easily refute. If some impolite speech is also banned, this serves only to mask the nasty reality. It is hardly a necessary thing. Truth is the real target of any attempt to restrict speech.

Is Paris Burning?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

What is happening in Paris?

It looks like one more stage in the general collapse of the left, following in the footsteps of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Granted, Macron's government is centrist, not leftist, but the nominal cause of these riots is high gas prices due to carbon taxes, and the protesters are apparently flooding in from the conservative countryside.

Gandhi supposedly said that fundamental change comes about in three stages. First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

This seems to have been the trajectory followed by the modern “right,” and we are at the “fight” stage. Or maybe now past it. Not long ago, in Canada and Europe, you just did not hear any but a limited set of “politically correct views” anywhere in the media. A vast range of possible views were simply and literally publicly unspeakable. Then voices like Rush Limbaugh began to be heard. And they were mocked and ridiculed. Then as they demonstrably gained a large audience, the Fox News and National Post stage, they were declared dangerous, racist, fascist, “far right,” alt-right, “white supremacist.” Leftists poured into the streets wearing black masks to disrupt. They began mobbing people in restaurants. They began campaigns of lawfare against rightists. They began strong-arming through a leftist judiciary.

This looks bad, but is actually a sign of desperation. Nothing else has worked. You would not need to resort to an activist judiciary, for example, or a rogue bureaucracy, if popular opinion was with you. You do not need to use force and intimidation if you can count on winning elections or arguments. We now seem to be at the stage at which an overall, if still slender, majority of the population in the developed world are actually “far right.” Making this description a contradiction in terms.

Probably it is already really more than a slender majority. The average person can always be cowed into pretending to accept and believe the socially acceptable line, out of fear of ridicule or other social consequences. If everyone else is using the Nazi salute, he does not want to be  seen not using the Nazi salute. If he is told that only racist bigots and uneducated antisocial egotists are against carbon taxes, for some time, he can be counted on not to express opposition to carbon taxes, no matter what his real views, for fear of being declared a racist bigot and an uneducated antisocial egotist.

But when allegiance is maintained by fear and intimidation, it can collapse quickly and violently.

And there, perhaps, we are.

Individualism vs. Community

Nuremberg shows its community spirit.

I think my leftist friend Xerxes has hit upon something in his latest column: the essential difference between the modern North American left and right. He speaks of joining his church choir as a transcendent experience:

“We have stopped being a collection of individuals, and have become a collective organism. A single mind. And in a sense, a single body – we even have to breathe as one, line by line.

We transcend our individuality. And it feels wonderful.”

And he concludes:

“Worship also attempts to connect with the most transcendent reality of all – merging with the divine.

Granted, not everyone in a choir will reason that singing derives from a universal desire for transcendence. But they all know intuitively they’re part of a community.”

And that's probably the key to it all. To a leftist, this sense of losing the individual in community is a self-evident good. After all, it transcends “selfishness.” So it partakes of the divine. The group is divine.

But any rightist reads that first sentence with horror, and thinks of the tight coordination of the Nazi Nuremberg rallies or the North Korean mass choreographed displays in sports stadia. The solidarity bred by a choir? Like Jack's choir boys in Lord of the Flies? Community is the danger; individualism is what partakes of the divine. 

Pyongyang shows its community spirit.

And I am here to explain why the left is wrong and the right is right.

Individualism is no more “selfish” than community. Every community, by definition, excludes as well as includes. Not all sentient beings are members, or we would not refer to a community. If, then, the members of that community seek their own mutual interests, they are corporately acting as selfishly as any individual would be who did the same acting alone. So selfishness is unrelated to individualism. Either a group or an individual can act either selfishly or unselfishly.

At the same time, individualism means taking responsibility. If you surrender that moral responsibility to a community, and defer to their judgement, you are waiving any ability to act morally. You are, on the other hand, perfectly able to act immorally: if you do something immoral as a member of a group, you are still individually responsible. You cannot say you were “only following orders.” But if, conversely, you help the poor only because you see others doing it, or because it improves your social position, it is no longer a moral act. 

Jonestown shows its community spirit.

This is why “Community,” losing your individuality in the group, is in fact traditionally considered one of the great temptations to sin. “The world, the flesh, and the devil.” Following the social consensus, the community, is “the world.” First named.

Community was the whole idea behind Fascism. That's what the symbol of the fasces was meant to represent. And, of course, community was also the whole idea behind Communism, as the name declares. It was the community of the day who put Jesus to death. A sense of community is, in turn, the underlying essence of all racism, all discrimination, all prejudice. It is the reaction to one "not in our group."  Communitarianism has produced the worst human evils in history.

Community is indeed a human need, or at least a natural human want. Just like food and sex. Accordingly, we legitimately seek community. There is nothing wrong with that. But we do not idolize it, any more than we should food or sex. Bad things then quickly happen.

The important thing is that, when we seek community, we seek it on the basis of morality; we seek to belong only to groups engaged in moral behaviour. And retain our individual judgement.

Selma shows its community spirit.

Catholic Insight

Some may, like me, remember Catholic Insight, a feisty Canadian Catholic magazine edited by Dr. Alphonse de Valk. Father de Valk has passed on, and the magazine then officially folded.

But the good news is, it has been resurrected online.

THey just pikced up a piece of mine, on "The Holy Lands of Ontario."

Go and have a look:

https://catholicinsight.com/ontarios-holy-lands/

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen Brothers' latest film is out; The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. It is an anthology of short Western tales.

This review from Forbes seems to be dominating the early search results: “The Absent Women of 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.'” It pans the movie because it does not feature enough female protagonists. It counts one, out of six stories. I count two, making it not so far off from strict sexual parity. Big deal. And this is hardly an aesthetic issue. Would one object to the Mona Lisa for a lack of male representation?

Featuring women any more prominently would also be a falsification of history. There was a general shortage of women on the frontier.

Moreover, the Western is a traditional male genre, just as romance is a women's genre. As the real West obviously appealed more to men than women, and for the same reasons, so does the fictional West. Men crave freedom; women crave security. The Old West and the cowboy life was all freedom and no security.

So why fake history and lessen the appeal of your movie to its natural audience to please people who will not go to see it?

The reviewer herself plainly does not like Westerns. She refers to them as “problematic.” But it makes no sense to write a review panning a Western film for being a Western film. Moreover, to write a movie review on that premise seems purely self-indulgent. Those who dislike Westerns do not need her review to know they dislike Westerns, and those who like Westerns get no value out of knowing she doesn't. So what's the point? She violates the first rule of good writing: write for the reader, not yourself.

The Coen Brothers like Westerns. They relish all traditional American culture, and the Western is the great American genre. Buster Scruggs is, among other things, an appreciation of the beauty of the Western landscape and of its Western culture: its stories, its songs, its style of dress, its style of architecture, everything.

The first tale in the anthology, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” proper, makes this appreciation of artistic beauty plain: its hero assumes the existence of heaven on the grounds that, otherwise, “what are all the songs about?” That is, art is our glimpse of heaven. 

Something like the same point is made in the final scene of the second piece in the anthology, “Near Algodones.” About to be hanged, as the hood is pulled over his head, the protagonist spots a pretty girl in the watching crowd, and is distracted from his own death by her beauty. Beauty, then, can be our escape from present troubles, no matter how grave.

The beauty of the arts is represented prominently in the third piece, “Meal Ticket,” by a quadruple amputee who recites to small crowds in Western towns while his companion “the impresario” passes the hat.

But it is not art for art's sake, either, or beauty for beauty's sake alone. That is not the message. “Meal Ticket,” for example, clearly has a moral agenda. One of the pieces Harrison, the amputee, recites in his stock performance is the story of Cain and Abel. A moral lesson. And his relationship with his manager acts it out. His manager murders him when he calculates he can make more money with a chicken that can do sums. Art and the artist are associated now with morality. Moreover, bad people are people who cannot appreciate the moral lessons of art: the impresario obviously never took to heart the lesson of the Cain and Abel recitation. To him, art is only entertainment, like the calculating chicken, and only his meal ticket.

And, despite first appearances that the film is a series of unrelated stories, they are all tied together in the final piece, “Mortal Remains.”

Five characters are riding in a stagecoach. And some of them look familiar. One, a trapper, physically resembles the prospector we encountered in an earlier segment, “All Gold Valley,” played by Tom Waits. He also resembles him in his way of life, living alone with nature. Like the Waits character, he seems to have a tendency to talk to himself.

Another, a Frenchman, looks like an older version of a Frenchman we saw playing poker in the first episode, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” And this latter Frenchman indeed refers to his background as a poker player.

Two more characters, sitting together, are bounty hunters, accompanying a corpse. One of them is strongly reminiscent of the impresario from “Meal Ticket”: both are members of a team of two, both are Irish, both sing Irish folk songs, and they seem to share the trait of ruthlessness: he is the one who kills the criminal prey.

The central figure in this episode, however, seems to be an older woman, who does not remind me at least of anyone in any of the previous segments.

The vignette begins with one of the bounty hunters singing a song, “Has Anybody Here Seen Molly?” as the camera plays on her disconcerted face. The song he sings is an old English music hall song; but the original lyric is “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” It seems, therefore, to have been adapted to a feminine form for topical reasons, to refer to the woman present. In the song, “Molly” has gone missing.

During the trip, our “Molly” has some sort of an attack, in which she cannot breathe. The Frenchman beside her thrusts his head out the carriage window to ask the driver to stop. We see the driver's back, not his face. He will not turn around to show it. He is all in black, and keeps whipping the horses on to greater speed. The first bounty hunter explains knowingly that the driver never stops.

It seems apparent that the carriage ride is a metaphor for death; which relents for no one. “Fort Morgan,” their destination, is the afterlife, and the dark silent driver is the angel of death. The woman has died. Perhaps others in the carriage are also souls on their way to the afterlife, but she seems to have been pointed to in this regard. In the end, it is she specifically for whom the doors are opened.

Other passengers may then represent reflections on the meaning of life. The singing bounty hunter explains that, in his vast experience, at the time of death, the faces of the dying always suggest they are trying to figure it all out--trying to figure out what the point of their life was.

As soon as he finishes saying this, we see the woman's face, looking deeply concerned. As though she is trying to figure it out.

The journey ends at a hotel, seen in darkness, with no human forms visible either outside or within. When the characters open the door, there is a staircase visible, with bright light above: the afterlife.

And so each of the movie's episodes is presented in this final segment as a meditation on what life is all about. Their viewpoints are then recapped in the final episode by their representative characters; five characters, just as there were five episodes before this one.

The Frenchman gives the postmodern view, speaking for the first story, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs—postmodernism being, after all, a French concept. His idea is that life is a game. Everyone creates their own meaning, like a poker bluff, and nobody can know another's hand. One cannot judge nor draw any final conclusions. “We must each play our own hand.” A similar sentiment was expressed by the late Buster Scruggs himself.

Then there is the trapper, who holds that all people are alike--”people are like ferrets.” That is, life is all about satisfying our immediate animal desires, nothing more.

The impresario bounty hunter chimes in with the idea that there are two kinds of people: “hale and frail. Those difficult to knock to the floor, and those who wilt.” To him, then, life is a struggle for power over others. Very much the attitude of the impresario, it seems, in the “Meal Ticket” segment.

The woman herself expresses a religious view. For her too, there are two kinds of people: good and evil. This roughly echoes the attitude of the main characters in the segment “The Gal Who Got Rattled.” The protagonist is ultimately concerned with the morality of her own acts. When proposed to, her first question is whether her suitor is religious. In the original segment, the heroine is a deeply sympathetic character. Here, the Coens seem to be showing a less attractive side of religiousity, a sense of self-righteousness.

The bounty hunter who initially sang seems to represent the view of the pure aesthete, or the purely aesthetic appreciation of art. He loves to tell tales to entertain, but it is to distract so his partner can kill the listener. Not a flattering image of art. He makes no claim to truth, but only wants to observe for the thrill of it.

This does not seem to represent the Coens' own position on art. The figure is disturbingly amoral, and more than a little resembles the traditional portrait of Satan.

If there is a segment expressing the same point of view, it is “Near Algodones.” The protagonist in that story seems similarly purely aesthetic in his concerns, with no sense of any deeper morality. When, for example, about to be hanged for bank robbery, his final words are a complaint that the man who caught him was not playing fair in protecting himself with armour. When the hanging party is attacked by Indians, he ends up merely observing. About to be hanged a second time, he is distracted by a pretty face.

But the Coens do not seem to give us their own conclusion. Perhaps they do not have one.

There Is No "Good" Discrimination

My Liberal friend Xerxes writes that he rarely hears protests against “affirmative action” any longer.

That may be so. But it remains a grave injustice. He takes this instead as a sign of progress.

“Affirmative action” is a euphemism. The words “affirmative action” literally mean almost nothing; or might mean anything. Who can be against “affirmative action”? Like all euphemisms, it seeks to conceal an ugly reality. It is used as code for, literally, discrimination on the basis of sex or race. Discrimination on the basis of sex or race is always wrong.

Of course, Xerxes would justify it as “righting a previous wrong.” This is untrue. You might pretend it is significant and meaningful that someone else with the same skin tone or of the same sex as the person you are favouring now was discriminated against somewhere else in the past. But that is irrelevant. A skin color is not a person. Obviously, it is not the same person, and the person you are discriminating against now had nothing to do with the original discrimination. To argue “I am told a Jew once robbed one of my ancestors; so I have the right to take from any Jew now as a result” is extreme racism.

It is not justice to endlessly repeat a wrong with new people; a million more wrongs can never make one right. Each compounds the injustice.

And there are futher problems. Any claim of discrimination in the past is generally at least debatable, and should remain open to debate. How certain are we of our sources? Yet the present discrimination, by contrast, is beyond question; it is systematic, written in law, and openly professed. There is nothing we can really do about apparent discrimination in the past, at least past the death of the ones discriminated against. But we can end discrimination now. AS US Chief Justice Roberts put it, “The bes way to end discrimination is to stop discriminating.”

Historically, whenever and wherever discrimination has been widespread, it is always justified as “reverse discrimination,” exactly as is “affirmative action” now; there is nothing novel about this discrimination, and there is no special category of “reverse discrimination.” It is always advertised as helping out some group that has been previously oppressed. That, for example, was the standard justification for discriminating against Jews for generations. The Jews, after all, controlled all the banks and secretly owned everything, right? They were an international power conspiracy. Just like “Anglo cis males” supposedly are today.

That was also the standard justification for Jim Crow laws in the South: it was a matter of oppressed poor Southerners trying to protect their rights and their culture against an onslaught by the rich and powerful Northern carpetbaggers, who had crushed them militarily. If the main target in practice was local blacks, it was because they were feared as a fifth column. Almost exactly the same situation led to apartheid in South Africa. The poor Boers had been crushed militarily by the mighty British, denied their freedom, even herded into concentration camps. They naturally feared the African blacks as weapons of the oppressor to be used against them.

And so too with all the awful genocides in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Korea: all in the name of defending the poor oppressed proletariat from the rapacious rich and powerful.

On top of all that, it is almost self-evident that any government-enforced or legally-mandated or even strongly socially-enforced discrimination like “affirmative action” will automatically discriminate in favour of those already socially favoured, and against those already discriminated against. Is social pressure likely to pull two ways at once?

So any new social discrimination, however justified, will always make the existing discrimination worse, never better. But it is really insane to even have to point this out. Few propositions come closer to being self-evident.

Problems with Returning to Canada

Here's a Canadian YouTuber in Taiwan giving his reasons for staying in Asia. Along with the positives, there is one big negative about Canada. I share his concern.

It is the lack of free speech.

On this most fundamental question, Canada seems to have become one of the least free countries in the world. It was always bad, and this surely had something to do with my own departure, long ago now. But it has gotten far worse.

Amazon Now Offers Playing the Indian Card

After a crazy bureaucratic standoff that lasted nine months, due to haveing the book prtinted in the US, and published in Canada, while I lie in the Philippines, paperback copes of Playing the Indian Card are at last available on Amazon.

I hope to finally get my own copies soon ....

http://www.amazon.ca/dp/1775267814

And I have an author page up:

amazon.com/author/stephenroney

Boys 2 Men

Even though I went to an all-boys Catholic grade school, I did not get a male teacher until grade 6, my last year.

Every one of us loved Mr. Moore. He was like a revelation.

And it makes me wonder; was it all about Mr. Moore, or was it at least in part about having a male teacher?

Later, in high school and in university, there were more men. And my favourite teachers were always men. Female teachers might get the job done—or might not—but were never inspiring.

We make quite a fuss about the need for “role models.” So we insist that black kids have to have black teachers, and aboriginal kids are supposed to have aboriginal teachers, and so forth.

And yet we leave 50% of our students pretty much without role models at a young age.

I am doubtful whether it matters in the case of something so trivial as skin colour. But it surely does in the case of sex. Men and women are systematically different, not just physically, but mentally. And a boy does NOT want to act like or model himself after a woman.

If ever there was a place where affirmative action was called for, it is here.

Anne with an Eh?

Watching the second season of “Anne with an E” (Just “Anne” in Canada) with my kids. They love it. I am not happy with it. It is a travesty of the original.

The common observation is that it is darker than the books. That is not my problem. My problem is that it is so badly written. It shows no understanding of character, and especially of the original characters of the books. Plot turns often make no sense. It is often wildly historically inaccurate, although it claims this as something it worked especially hard at; historical authenticity. And it is prone to virtue signal, which is embarassing.

It regularly has characters do things without any good motive. Characters just fly of the handle, when it is useful to introduce some plot complication, without motivation and often out of character. In episode 4 (I think), they have a brothel madame toss one of her girls in the street, literally, in front of our heroes, just as the latter is about to give birth. Leave aside the stereotypical, melodramatic situation: where's the sensitivity to character? Right, so people are all black or all white, and the madame must be one of the bad ones, right? More than a bit hamfisted. The more so since there is, by comparison, no hint that the prostitute herself might bear any moral responsibility for anything. Trite and uninsightful as this is, this is not the worst. It is the absolute lack of suitable motivation. Narratively, why would any madame throw a girl out just as her water breaks, as opposed to once she has become visibly pregnant? It makes no narrative sense. And would the prostutite reallty have had no prior warning, so that she was unable to make any other arrangements?

Meantime, back in Avonlea, two grifters living at Green Gables have a falling out. One wants to take the money they've swindled out of just about everyone in town, the other wants to stay and use it to buy some land and set down roots.

What? So his neighbours are just going to forget all about his swindling their money?

And really, how plausible was it as a plot point in the first place to have everyone in Avolea give their money to a stranger for the sake of getting some supposed assessment of gold prospects on their lands? It's trite and implausible, surely. Even if there were gold, or likely to be gold, would the landowner really pay to find out, as opposed to some mining company doing so?

The series prides itself on being historically accurate—indeed, it claims this as one of its distinguishing features, in comparison to previous productions. Yet in a recent episode, it shows the young French Canadian farmhand, “Jerry,” offered alcohol, and refusing it, explaining, “We never drink at home. We're Catholic.”

Eh? Even given original invincible ignorance, shouldn't the writer or the show have checked whether abstinence from alcohol was indeed a Catholic practice? Would it have been so hard to Google it?

Another episode shows a scruffy, deperately poor Jewish pedlar who says he is from Germany, but had to leave because life is so difficult for Jews there. But this is happening in the last years of the nineteenth century. Jews in Germany at the time were fully enfranchised and, on average, better off and better educated than the general population. Jews from other lands were moving to Germany as a result. It is because of Jewish success and prosperity that Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitism in the Twenties and Thirties stuck. Jews were provoking envy and suspicion with their growing power. They were supposedly in control of banking and so forth. Hardly impoverished pedlars with big scruffy beards. This guy came straight out of some stereotype factory, from someone whose knowledge of European Jewry came entirely from Fiddler on the Roof.

The point of the character's appearance is apparently only to virtue signal. It shows the poor foreigner as generous, first, and then demonstrates Mirilla's racism, as she chases him off her property. Trashing Mirilla's character, in the process; another arbitrary and motiveless act. Predictably, in the series, any identifiable character who is non-white, non-Anglo, or an immigrant is entirely good. Anyone who is white, Anglo, and non-immigrant (Brits and Americans do not count here as immigrants; in fact, it is good and righteous to bash Brits or Americans) is basically bad and stupid. You can read anyone's character at a glance.

That's called racism.

Anne's character is also repeatedly violated: something especially vile for a character who has become so generally beloved. It is all like those illustrations of Mickey Mouse and Minne performing sex acts. Bad luck for her: she is white and Anglo, after all. Here, Anne has no consideration for the feelings of others. She frequently acts like a spoiled child, completely out of character for an abused orphan. She is shown exploding in anger towards the Francophone farmhand, Jerry, for example, who is a sympathetic character who has done nothing to her—as though only her feelings matter. And she is shown first opening and reading Matthew's mail, then, discovering he is getting letters from an old flame, writing love letters back to her in his name.

This is the sort of thing only a confirmed narcissist would do. It refuses to acknowedge either Matthew or his female correspondent as real human beings, with the right to exist as separate and apart from Anne's own fantasies. It shows callous disregard for their feelings. There is no way Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne Shirley would do such a thing. And worse, when this Anne does it, the series itself seems to show no understanding of how morally wrong and cruel it is.

Another really annoying addition is an amaterish computer-generated fox that keeps appearing as Anne's bush soul. This is gritty realism?

The good news is, perhaps it will at least inspire kids to read the books.

David Warren

Just a note. Lovers, like me, of elegant prose, owe it to themselves to bookmark and follow David Warrer's blog "Essays in Idleness."

A Bear in a China Shop?

A bit of sobering analysis regarding China: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/will-china-s-economic-slowdown-lead-to-a-major-crisis. This piece claims that China's current level of debt has always, historically, led to an economic slowdown, and 50% of the time to an economic collapse.

Underlying this is China's demographic time bomb. China was inevitably going to reach the limit of what it can do on the basis of cheap and plentiful labour. Labour has grown less cheap, and the supply has now been just about fully exploited. The one-child policy has guaranteed population decline. A smooth transition to some other model for prosperity is no simple thing. Japan started to stagnate when they hit the point of demographic decline.

And at the very same moment, I see news from a pair of popular YouTubers based in China that they are moving their main base of operations to Southern California. They say things have just become too difficult and dangerous for them as foreigners in China. There are sudden clampdowns on everything. This must be equally true for the Chinese. 

Putting two and two together, it looks to me as though the Chinese government itself expects public unrest. They are trying to put the lid firmly back on before the boiling point is reached. They are especially trying to restrict the internet and the media—the channels through which any opposition might organize.

This also explains China's recent sabre rattling, in the South China Sea, in trade with Trump, over disuted islands with Japan. Making these sort of waves is not in China's interests. If they can look peaceful and friendly, they keep getting stronger, until they become invincible. If they get hackles up, others may unite against them before they reach this point, while they are still vulnerable. The only reason they would be doing this, therefore, is for internal politics: trying to rally the people around the government by evoking an external enemy.

I suspect China's Communist Pary is haunted by the example of the Soviet Union's collapse. Facing a financial crunch, Gorbachev loosened things up in hopes of maintainin popular support. That didn't work; it did not keep the Communist regime in power. So, logically, the Chinese government is trying the opposite approach.

I suspect that Gorbachev was right, and this will only result in a worse explosion. Gorbachev was able to manage a peaceful transition. That was his triumph. The alternative would have been far worse for everyone. And civil rebellions in China have been known to cost lives in the tens of millions.

I am personally amazed that the Communist regime in China has lasted this long. When I was first in China, in 1992, it already looked to me as though it were on its last legs. That is, nobody took the underlying ideology seriously; everyone was cynical about it, and practicing a kind of passive civil disobedience, ignoring the laws when they could. A system nobody believes in is running on fumes.

My Chinese students a decade later on agreed with my suggestion that the Chinese people would continue to accept the Communist government for as long as the economy kept doing well—as long as everyone is prospering, why rock the boat? But the moment that stopped, the regime had no further legitimacy.

Just about everywhere else, once a certain level of material prosperity has been reached, once there is a strong and independent middle class, totalitarian governments either fall, or transition into democracies. The Chinese government has been doing what it can to prevent this by trying to prevent the development of any independent organizations which might form the basis for a political opposition. This is why they have been eager to crush Falun Gong, and recently the Christian churches, But this may be futile. Large successful businesses also become independent power centres. Wealthy Chinese with homes abroad, of the sort who have been buying up Vancouver, become an independent power centre. This kitten is not going back in the bag.

Tiananmen in its time was already a close run thing. The umbrella rebellion in Hong Kong a little while ago looked as though it might spread. When the Middle East rose in the “Arab Spring,” China saw a concurrent “Jasmine Rebellion.” There is a lot of dry cordwood lying around.

I see a sea of chaos coming.

Corporate Welfare Bums

David Lewis in much younger days. 

The first time I was eligible to vote in a Canadian election was back in 1972. I voted for the NDP, well to the left. That might sound odd; nowadays I find myself apparently on the right. But given the same issues, I would vote the same way today. My politics have not changed. The position of the goalposts has. Or rather, the position of centre field. Or rather, the teams have changed ends.

The Liberals, in government, had imposed martial law two years earlier, during the “October Crisis” (non-Canadians may need to Google this). This may or may not have been justified, but it was an extreme step, and should not have been done without paying some price at the polls. Such a thing must not be allowed to become politically easy. As a liberal, I could not vote Liberal.

The PCs, unfortunately, the main opposition, on the right, had supported the move. So I could not vote for them as an alternative. Worse, the main plank of their platform was to impose wage and price controls, extreme government interference in the economy. Big government to the max, almost to the level of, yes, Fascism.

Leaving the NDP, the one party to have opposed the imposition of the War Measures Act in peacetime. But that's not all. They campaigned on lowering taxes. But even that was not all: the central plank in their platform was to end “corporate welfare”--handouts and breaks to big corporations.

They were then the small government, civil libertarian party. This shows how much things have changed. In those days, the left was not the party of big government, and the right was not the party of small government. “Conservative” used to mean big government, elitism, and nanny-stateism. “Liberal” used to actually mean liberal.

This reverie is brought on by the recent announcement by Amazon that it is building a second headquarters in Washington and NYC. And they are being given huge tax incentives to do it. Corporate welfare.

This is as noxious now as it was in 1972. Governments should never be in the business of favouring one business over another. This is an obvious violation of human equality, as well as lousy economics and a waste of money. It is obvious, too, that it is graft—the politicians give money to already rich corporations, and the corporations can be expected to remit back to their re-election campaigns. The elite help one another out, perpetuating themselves, with the money of the poor.

Does the payout mean more jobs for Washington or New York? I doubt it. The money paid to Amazon is necessarily taken from higher taxes on all other local businesses, money they then cannot use to hire more workers. Paul grows flush as Peter grows poor.

And it distorts natural market forces, reducing overall profitability or raising consumer costs for everyone. Is it a good thing if it really does attract Amazon to locate in a place where their infrastructure or labour is going to cost them more? With the difference paid for by the general public?

Of course, a smart businessman is unlikely to be so influenced. Trusting in future government policies is a shaky proposition. Without the tax break, one may in the near future suddenly be unprofitable.

Which means, then, that the tax break does nothing but hand over money for no public benefit.

The ideal solution would be a law at the federal level, in either the US or Canada, that prohibited such tax breaks and corporate welfare. This would be of benefit to everyone; so long as there is no such law, it is politically difficult for New York politicians, for example, not to offer tax breaks, knowing that Texas or Michigan will. And then, if Amazon locates in Detroit or Houston, they will be blamed. A similar rider could be written in to all free trade agreements, to prevent it from being done at the national level.

Amazon is pretty profitable. It does not need a taxpayer subsidy.

How about it, Jagmeet Singh? The pundits say you Dippers are struggling because you cannot find an issue to distinguish yourself from the Liberals. Corporate welfare in Canada is extreme and shameless. The Liberals won't touch it, because they are deep in that trough. They all retire from politics to jobs with Bombardier or Power Corp or Canada Steamship Lines. This issue could appeal to a wide base. Rediscover the heritage of David Lewis!

Stan Lee the Narcississt

Stan Lee

Showing the new incivility that has swallowed our public discourse, I see that hatchets are suddenly out for Stan Lee, the moment he can no longer defend himself. He is charged with

1. being a sexual predator 
2. being racist and anti-gay 
3. not being the real creator of the Marvel universe 
4. being a narcissist who hogged undeserved credit. 

As to the first charge, this is apparently based on a complaint by a home nursing company he employed recently.

That means the charges are that a 94 or 95 year old man was a sexual predator.

This sounds inherently unlikely, simply in terms of physical ability. Also unlikely for someone to become so only in his final years, if there had previously been no such record. If he really was, it was probably a symptom of senility, which can make people randy, and something that ought to have been easily managed by a physically healthy young woman without involving anyone else. What's the point of being a nurse for the aged if you cannot manage the symptoms of senility?

It sounds, more plausibly, like an attempt at extortion. Anyone rich and famous is going to be a target: make an accusation, and they may pay you off just to silence you. And the insane doctrine of “believe all women” makes it more attractive.

As to the second charge, this is based on a clause in a contract with Sony specifying that they must, among other similar conditions, portray Spiderman as Caucasian and heterosexual. These days, such a concern apparently makes you racist.

But surely we can all agree that it would be an act of vandalism to paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Why? Is that being sexist and anti-male? Same principle here.

Any work of art, for its effect, depends on what Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief.” We have to look at that canvas, in the case of Da Vinci's painting, and see in our minds not globs of paint, but the illusion of a human person. An imaginary character is a work of art, like any other. Altering it in a way that would be improbable for a real person destroys the illusion that gives it life, or at least severely damages it; damages the art. Changing skin colour is an obvious example, like having a woman grow a moustache. Making a heterosexual character with a prominent history of relationships with women suddenly turn gay is not much better.

Stan Lee is not being racist or anti-gay; he is only giving a damn about his business and his work as an artist.

As to the third charge, the claim is that Jack Kirby had at least as much to do with the “silver age” of Marvel as Lee. This is true, and not denied, certainly not by Stan Lee. Kirby's artwork was a big part of the appeal for me personally. He is, as Lee named him, “The King.” But the claim here is, specifically, that it was really Kirby who created the characters and the plot lines, and Lee just took credit. 

There is a simple way to test this hypothesis. How did Lee make out when working with collaborators other than Kirby? How did Kirby make out when working with collaborators other than Lee?

When Kirby left Marvel for DC, to work on his own, his projects for them, although they have their audience, broadly failed, lost money, and were a general disappointment. Lee, for comparison, did Spiderman entirely without Kirby, and it is probably his single most successful creation. Kirby was a great artist, perhaps a good plotter, but the spark that made the Marvel tales marellous must have come from Lee.

As to Lee hogging the credit, this is literally false: he invented the tradition of conspicuously crediting the artist on the first page of the comic book. He even credited the inkers and letterers; creating a fandom for previously anonymous comic book artists. He gave regular reports to readers about who was in “the bullpen.” He is as responsible for Kirby's fame as his own. Lee was not about self-promotion; he was about promotion. He was a brilliant marketer and salesman.

And so the charge of narcissism is also false. As is the far more common claim that Donald Trump is a narcissist. It seems to be a common misunderstanding of what narcissism is. It is urgent that we begin to understand what narcissism is better than this indicates. It is not simply a matter of saying “look at me”; otherwise anyone who makes their living as an entertainer or performer of any kind, or in sales, would be by definition a narcissist. And it would equally mean that any actor playing a character is that character. Both Lee and Trump are showmen; it is a performance art. Dave Nichols or P.T. Barnum or Walt Disney were similar showmen.

Real narcissists are by nature not creative; they fear the sort of introspection necessary to come up with new perspectives or new ideas. It can mess up their delusions. Accordingly, anyone who, like Lee, is conspicuously creative simply cannot be a narcissist.

Real narcissists are easily wounded by criticism; they crave constant adulation. They fear abandonment. As a result, they are people-pleasers, full of charm. They will say whetever they think those listening want to hear. This is the very reverse of Trump, who seems to enjoy scrapping with the media or political opponents; who seems fearless in the face of criticism; who will say anything. He cannot, on this basis, be a narcissist.

Real narcissists do not honour their promises; they say whatever they think the listener wants to hear, and then will do whatever they want. It follows from being self-centred. As president, Trump has not been like that at all; he seems to have done a better job than the average pol at trying to keep the promises on which he was elected. There have been no surprise changes of direction—as we have seen, for example, with Justin Trudeau in Canada, dropping his promise of electoral reform. If Trump has not kept all his promises, he seems to have tried to keep all his promises.

It is worrying that the popular imagination so often seems to get things exactly backwards. This is not a symptom of a healthy society.

Stan Lee Has Left the Baxter Building

Illustration by Lee's longtime collaborator, Jack Kirby.

A salute in passing to the great Stan Lee.

One should not lament. He died age 95. He got his innings in. Time to try something new.

But he was a major presence in my childhood, and probably is still a major influence on me.

He was, of course, the editor and writer behind Marvel Comics, back when it was becoming Marvel comics, the “silver age,” the creator or co-creator of the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Iron Man, Thor, X-Men, Hulk, and the rest. Back when Lee was in command, I used to buy every title of Marvel comics every month, as soon as they came out: all the superhero comics, plus Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandos, plus their three Western comics.

Before Lee, comic book superheroes were cut from cardboard, with no distinguishing features, it seemed, other than their specific powers. Otherwise, Aquaman was interchangeable with Superman, Flash, or Green Lantern. Lee gave them personalities, issues, struggles, and had them bicker with one another. Often they found themselves rejected by the public, or wanting to quit being a superhero.

While this was revolutionary in comicry—so much so that Lee thought it might get him fired, and only did it once he figured he was fed up with the job anyway—it was not really the innovation it seemed. What Lee was really doing was telling hero legends properly at last. He was returning to their origins.

For that is just what “super heroes” are or were: heroes. If you care to look, all classical or Medieval heroes had super powers. It is not some recent innovation. Perseus had winged sandals, and Medusa's deadly head. Herakles had a lion skin that made him invulnerable, and arrows of hydra poison. Bellerophon had a flying horse, Pegasus, which kept him out of harm's way, beyond the reach of Chimera paws. Achilles was invulnerable except at the heel. Arthur had his magical sword Excaliber. Solomon had a flying carpet, the mysterious shamir that could cut through anything, and could command demons. Generally, in the old stories, these were gifts from the classical gods or God, rather than the result of radiation or mutation—gifts from the great god Science.

And, unlike the DC superheroes of the Fifties, traditional heroes always had serious real-life problems. Herakles, for example, like Peter Parker, could never get a date. Worse, he now and then went mad, like Hulk. In one such fit, he killed his wife and children, thinking they were attacking aliens. Remorse over this drove him to become a hero, just as remorse over the death of his parents drove Peter Parker to become Spiderman.

Jason's wife was a witch, who killed their children. His king was out to have him killed. Perseus was betrayed by his grandfather, his stepfather, and his father-in-law. Samson also had significant women problems, as you might recall. And so did King Arthur. Moses was an outlaw, then rejected by his public.

Lee just reinserted this essential element to the mix, retoring to the stories their mythic power. Daredevil was blind, Thor in civilian life walked with a cane. The Hulk could not control his transformations. The government was out to get him. The Thing was repulsive to women, and taunted on the street. Iron Man's super suit was needed to keep his heart going.

Lee's advantage was probably that, being Jewish, he had been schooled in Torah. It includes all the classic stories. Other kids no longer learn the stories; they were all new to them. Lee simply mined them. The Fantastic Four, his first and to my mind greatest creation, seems based on Jewish demonology. Each of the members has one of the powers traditionally attributed in Jewish legend to demons: the ability to stretch at will, the ability to become invisible, being able, like the Muslim jinn, to burst into fire; and the Thing visually resembles the golem. This dark subtext gave great imaginative power.

Sub-Mariner, aka Prince Namur, appears in one of the earlier FF stories. Although he is the rightful ruler of an undersea kingdom, he is suffering amnesia, has forgotten who he is, and is living on the street as an alcoholic. Great story. It is one of the stories of King Solomon in the Talmud. There is also an echo of Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel.

Daredevil's blindness echoes Samson's. Ant-man extended the parable of David and Goliath; his ability to control the ants is shared with Solomon.

Lee's famous burst of creativity in the Sixties was probably based on this mining of the Talmud. This is why it did not last into the Seventies; at a certain point, all the good stories have been told. I suspect Lee himself felt this coming, and this is why he turned to Norse mythology as well, with Thor: in search of new material. But here Lee himself had not yet digested the stories. He mostly told them verbatim as a second feature in the Thor comics. He was learning on the fly, and so the stories were not integral to his new character. Thor, as a result, comes across as wooden in a way his other heroes do not.

Since then, since Lee left, the comics have been wandering aimlessly, with no idea what the formula is. They learned nothing from Lee. They have gone for gimmicks: hey, let's make Captain America African American! Let's make Hulk female! Let's get political, and justify ourselves by taking all the “right” positions! Let's try celebrity tie-ins! Or worse, they make a phony splash by supposedly killing off a character, and then reviving him or her. These are all just so many sharks lined up in a row and jumped.

And one shark in the line generally gets a free lunch.

Gospel

Forwarded out of the ether from friend Eugene Campbell, who says it brought tears to his eyes and he just had to share it.

Gospel music is the heart and soul of America. It is that African spontaneity that makes US culture different from European culture.

Not incidentally, this is where rock and roll comes from. At base, rock and roll is secularized gospel music. If you don't believe me, look up a video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Actuslly, never mind. Let me do it for you.

Remembrance Day Gallery

Hell and Damnation

A further thought on how many go to Hell; mentioned here some time back as a current controversry between Church Militant and Bishop Barron.

The meaning and purpose of life is not obscure. It is to seek the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. This comes in the West from Plato; but it also seems to correspond to the Hindu trinity of sat, sit, ananda, usually translated, inaccurately, as “being, consciousness, bliss.” Sat is the Good, honesty; sit is Truth (true knowledge); ananda is aesthetic appreciation. These three things, at minimum, are of intrinsic value, and their presence gives value to all else.

Although this seems self-evident once pointed out—the real or true is of more value than the false, and the good is of more value than the bad—it is also true that some people—many people—do not seek the True, the Beautiful, or the Good. Some will insist the Truth is socially determined, or the Good is up for grabs, or our idea of Beauty is purely a matter of taste. The whole Postmodernist thing is to deny the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. And a huge proportion of people are assertively postmodern in this way.

This is ultimately cynical. The advantage of rejecting Truth and the Good, even if self-evident, is that it leaves you free to do or believe whatever you want.

Heaven is Good, True, and Beautiful to a maximum degree. To seek these transcendent values is to seek Heaven; and to seek God, who is a perfect being, so perfect Goodness, perfect Being, perfect Beauty. The immediate presence of God is definitive of Heaven. Those who are not seeking them are, therefore, rejecting God, and choosing to turn from the path to Heaven. They are declaring in favour of Hell, and against Heaven, as their intended destination.

And this makes sense in Catholic doctrine: God, being all-merciful, wants no one to end up in Hell, but some of us choose Hell for ourselves. Anyone who is not seeking the Good, the True, and the Beautiful has quite expressly chosen not to go to Heaven.

Sin, in turn, is when we choose anything else before the Good, the True, or the Beautiful. For example, immediate physical pleasure, or social status, or self-regard. These are the three great temptations: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

Any of us can slip up in this way at any time. The difference between the saved and the damned, however, is that the saved will understand this as sin, feel regret, and eventually repent. The damned will refuse to accept this, and deny they have done anything wrong.

They may instead protest, like Pontius Pilate, “What is Truth?”