In the Bleak Midwinter

 

It is time for Advent music. 

Inthe real world, nothing else seems to matter as much.

Racism and Tribalism

 

Those on the left are these days portraying what they call “racism” as something permeating all our institutions. Most recently, the Salvation Army has endorsed this concept. It warns of “systemic racism,” “the well-institutionalized pattern of discrimination that cuts across major political, economic and social organizations in a society,” leading to “inequity.”

Historically speaking, “racism” is only a recent problem. The concept of race in the human context is more or less a product of Social Darwinism, from the scientism of the 19th century. Before that, people were aware of breeding, heredity, and culture—that is, social class—but not race. Nor, before that time, did the average person in most parts of in the world have any experience of people of races other than their own.

That’s too recent for anything like an original sin. Any structures that pre-exist Darwin, like the US Constitution, or the English common law, or liberal democracy, are necessarily innocent of the charge.

Tribalism—seeing only members of your own culture or social group as fully human—is an older problem. It is a universal and instinctive tendency, but obviously more thoroughly indulged in tribal societies, and less with a social philosophy or culture that claims to apply to all mankind. Accordingly, the best means to reduce the tendency to tribalism is to insist on the doctrine of universal human rights and support the major universalist religions like Christianity.

Yet this is exactly what the modern left want to tear down. They are quite openly pushing for a return to tribalism and group conflict.

The Devil commonly uses words to mean their opposite.

Hopeful News--or at Least, Hopeful Thought

 

While initial reports of the new Omicron variant of Covid were alarming, the news has more recently looked a little brighter. The South African doctor who first detected the strain says she has only seen mild cases. 

If Omicron is extremely contagious yet causes only mild symptoms, it may actually work like a vaccine, quickly inoculating large populations. 

Here’s hoping…

Armageddon Nervous

 

The news is coming in fast right now--about the new Omicron variant of COVID. It sounds as though it is far more virulent than the previous strains, as contagious as anything we’ve ever seen. Just when it looked as though we were about to come out of the pandemic, down we go again. I first heard of the new variant yesterday. Today, it is already reported from seven African countries, Belgium, Israel, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Hospitalizations in one South Africa province have doubled in the past day. The New York Times is running live updates.

Speculation is that it may be able to bypass the vaccinations, since it has mutated significantly. Nobody is prepared to say yet whether it is more or less deadly than previous strains. One doctor says lockdowns are not going to do much against this one.

Meantime, yesterday the abstract of a study was released suggesting that the mRNA vaccines significantly increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Stock markets are taking a hit.

It begins to feel as though we are in a downward spiral. It reminds me of the pace of Orson Welles’s radio version of War of the Worlds.

Shut Up and Think for Yourself

 

Christina Wyman has written a piece for NBC decrying parents who want to interfere with their children’s education. She laments that “parents think they have the right to control teaching and learning because their children are the ones being educated.” “It’s sort of like entering a surgical unit thinking you can interfere with an operation simply because the patient is your child.” After all, “Teaching, too, is a science. Unless they’re licensed and certified, parents aren’t qualified to make decisions about curricula.”

This is eleven different kinds of wrong. It is wrong on every point. And not list a little wrong on them. 

To begin with, overseeing their children’s education is the primary duty of parents.

"The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute." The right and the duty of parents to educate their children are primordial and inalienable. – Catechism of the Catholic Church

Wyman cites the analogy of medicine. Fine. Here the patient has the right to choose their own doctor, and then to refuse any given treatment—for themselves and for their child. Let it be so in education. Let parents choose the school and curriculum.

And make the teachers liable to be sued for malpractice, as doctors can be.

I’m good with that.

But unlike medicine, teaching is not a science. It is not evidence-based. There is no empirical—which is to say, scientific—evidence that certified teachers teach better than a random person off the street. In fact, the evidence shows the opposite. Those who are homeschooled do better than those who come up through the public schools on standardized tests and in university—literally, then, a random member of the public can do better. Those who attend private schools, where teachers do not have to hold professional qualifications, also do better. Sending your child to a “qualified teacher” is the worst available option.

Wyman goes on to assert that “An educator’s primary goal is to teach students to think.” This is an odd thing to say to justify refusing parents the right to think about their children’s schooling. The public schools deliberately repress this, and were designed to do so in the early 20th century. One of the great attractions to private schools is that they, unlike the public schools, do teach students how to think. That means teaching them philosophy, logic, rhetoric, formal debating. Subjects definitive of the private schools, and rarely seen in public schools. It would mean teaching using the Socratic Method. What public school does?

The question: is Wyman that stupid, or that corrupt?

And how stupid or corrupt are our politicians if they accept this?

Paper Freedoms

 

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

My Filipina wife agrees that one big problem with living in Canada is the lack of freedom of speech. She notes that one could speak more freely in Saudi Arabia. I have heard the same from Polish friends—that you could speak more freely in the old Communist East Bloc than you can in Canada. 

It is not just that saying the wrong thing can get you two years in prison. A slight misstep can cost you your job, your career, your family.

In Canada, you need to think very carefully before you say anything, and you are still liable to get into trouble. Because the goalposts keep moving.

It is ironic that freedom of speech is guaranteed in the Canadian constitution. But a constitution is only a piece of paper, if it is not honoured by the government and the courts.

We are doing this liberal democracy thing wrong.

Ivermectin--or Something

 

We may be seeing the end of the virus...

The Weimar States of America

 

With its reaction to Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, at least a large portion of the left has surely shown themselves to be delusional, and a danger to themselves and others. Neither logic nor evidence can penetrate their “narrative.” Even after the trial and verdict, many are insisting that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” who transported a weapon illegally across state lines in order to kill blacks. Assuming it was an expression of left-wing ideology—we do not know yet—what could be a more dramatic image of pure evil attacking good than the video of an SUV ploughing into a Christmas parade? It has become this stark. Now parents who complain about their children’s schooling are “domestic terrorists.” Anyone who defends the doctrine that all men are created equal is a “racist” and a “white supremacist.”

This poses an eternal problem for a liberal democracy. What do you do with a popular movement that itself denies liberal democracy? What happens if, as in Weimar Germany, it manages to attract a plurality of voters?

Ed Driscoll has put out a video, based on Harold Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, that posits that America was seeded with the same ideas as Weimar Germany beginning in the 1920s. It all came originally from German thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud—not to mention Marx. Bloom summarizes it as “value relativism.”

History tells us where that ends. It would seem to be an inevitability.

For heathen heart that puts her trust

   In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

   And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word—

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Letterkenny Problems

 

Nothing I love better than a classic Canadian small-town comedy, except perhaps for a classic Canadian coming-of-age film. Why is it these are the classic Canadian themes, and why is it they speak to me so deeply?

Having binged through Corner Gas and Schitt’s Creek, I am now on Letterkenny. All three share what is most characteristic about Canadian rural comedies: the rustics are the normal ones, and the city folk are the odd outsiders. I trace the trope back to Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, with at least an assist from Anne of Green Gables.

The characters on Letterkenny are deliberately two-dimensional. This means nobody really gets to show much acting chops. Even so, I think Evan Stern as Roald is a standout. Nathan Dales is also very convincing as Daryl. Reilly seems almost real.

On the other side, I find K. Trevor Wilson’s portrayal of Squirrelly Dan annoying. He randomly adds an “s” sound to the end of words, supposedly in imitation of a rural Ontario accent. To a linguist, and to someone who grew up partly in rural Ontario, this is gratingly wrong. The “s” should only be added to “you” to express the plural, and to verbs in the simple present tense, not randomly. Stupid city guy. Wilson grew up in Toronto.

Other characters I find a bit too cartoonish to warm to are Gail with her weird stance, Stewart with his hostile glare, McMurray with his mumble, and Dickson with his auctioneer shtick. 

But the show is just so full of wordplay and inside jokes that it is irresistible.

The Feast of Christ the King

 

Christ Pantocrator, from the interior dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Pilate said to Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?”

Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?”

Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here.”

So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

John 18: 33-37

Today is the feast of Christ the King, Catholic New Year.

Jesus does not say here that he is or is not a king. “You say I am a king.” 

But the last sentence says he is the king of everyone who seeks truth. The essence of being a king is that people do as you say. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate does not get this. He does not get it because he does not belong to the truth; as he reveals in the next verse:

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

Pilate is a zombie. To Pilate, the king of truth is not a king; he has no dominion, and no power.

This is definitive, conversely, of who is and is not a true Christian. Christ himself is truth, and king of truth. Accordingly, anyone who seeks and prizes truth is a Christian. Anyone who does not, regardless of whether he mouths the Latin name “Jesus,” in or outside of a church, is not.

And then again, I think whoever seeks and prizes truth, and sits down and carefully reads the gospels, is going to recognize the ring of truth. At the same time, those who do not seek truth are perfectly capable of reading them, and quoting them, and having no idea what it’s all about.

Friend Xerxes just yesterday quoted a Scottish theologian, John Macmurray, as asserting that the “kingdom of heaven” over which Jesus reigns is “friendship.”

“Jesus said contradictory things about it. That the kingdom could appear at any moment. And that the kingdom was already here, and known.

The only human experience true for both statements, Macmurray argued, was friendship.”

Friendship is for from the only human experience that can appear at any moment, yet be already here and known. Think about it for a moment: any possible concept we might have of the future fits, pretty much by definition. 

Reducing the Kingdom of Heaven, over which Jesus is king, would seem to require a willful misreading of the gospel.

Friendship does not require God to incarnate and die for us. Friendship is known to all mankind. The oldest known connected narrative, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is the story of a friendship, between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. 

Macmurray might respond that the Christian ideal is of friendship among all men. 

But try to reconcile that reading with the following passage:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

This cannot be a universal friendship, then, for it separates mankind into definite camps, and condemns one.

Consider too this passage:

And He said to them, ‘Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times as much at this time and in the age to come, eternal life.’

This places the kingdom about one’s commitment to family. If the kingdom of God is friendship, this places friendship above love of family. Most people would say family takes priority over friends: blood is thicker than water, and so forth. Is saying friends are more important than family a profound and worthy message?

The Greeks, of course—meaning Jews in Jesus’s time—recognized various forms of love, for which we have only one word. Friendship was philios, family love was storge, sexual love was eros. Divine love, of which Jesus spoke, was agape, sometimes taken as cognate with the English word “charity.” Not philios.

But charity in turn is not the kingdom; it is necessary to enter the kingdom. The kingdom is truth. Or, one might say, the real world.

The Canadian Dictatorship

 

Senator Batters

Conservative senator Denise Batters called this week for a review of Erin O’Toole’s leadership. Within a few days, Erin O’Toole had ejected her from the Conservative caucus.

This shows how dysfunctional the Canadian system has become. MPs and party members are supposed to choose their leader; the leader is not supposed to choose the MPs and party members. This is an innovation introduced, I believe, by Jean Chretien, based on the right of the leader to sign or refuse to sign the papers for parliamentary candidates to legally stand for office, and it makes Canada almost an elected dictatorship. It ensures that there is no serious discussion of issues in parliament.

We saw similar dictatorial conduct when Justin Trudeau rid himself of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott.

We must end this power.

A List of Extraordinary Popular Delusions

 

Sir Francis

Francis Bacon wrote:

For everybody … has his own individual den or cavern, which intercepts and corrupts the light of nature; either from his own peculiar and singular disposition, or from his education and intercourse with others, or from his reading, and the authority acquired by those whom he reverences and admires, or from the different impressions produced on the mind, as it happens to be preoccupied and predisposed, or equable and tranquil, and the like: so that the spirit of man (according to its several dispositions) is variable, confused… 

We are all, in other words, more or less mad, thanks to our upbringing. More mad if our parents or our culture did not raise us well.

In our current culture, our perceptions are especially distorted. The proof of this is the upward spiral of mental illness, suicides, “accidental” deaths and overdoses. A recent study calculates that “overall, more than 50% of the general population in middle‐ and high‐income countries will suffer from at least one mental disorder at some point in their lives.” 

I rue the many years I spent struggling with the delusions imposed by the culture, before I finally had the courage to reject them fully and walk away. 

1. The delusion that the existence of a divine intelligence is dubious. There are actually multiple proofs—more proofs than there are of anything else in human experience. Why are we not told this in school?

2. The common delusion that the universe is meaningless. It is suffused with meaning. This follows almost automatically from the existence of God. But it is also true that science would not work otherwise—yet it does. Realizing this could prevent many suicides and overdoses.

3. The assertion that there is no objective right and wrong, but ethics is simply decided by society. Kant proved this wrong, and it is impossible to think rationally in these terms. Make the assertion, and you immediately go on to insisting that those who point out a wrong are wrong—a self-contradiction.

4. The delusion that it is wrong to make moral judgements, to be ”judgmental.” This is the self-contradiction just cited.

5. Intertwined with this, the notion that the majority has the right or the ability to determine truth or morality. That would mean, if we voted that the moon was plaid, it would be. Why does anyone assert such nonsense? A desire to avoid admitting their own sin.

6. The idea that morality consists of respect for authority, going along, and not making waves. A fine idea, if your goal is the full and final rehabilitation of National Socialism. Is it?

7. The delusion that the physical is the real; that only the physical exists. I recall first noticing the words of the Nicene Creed translated as “I believe in all things visible and invisible.” It hit me like a slap upside the head with a wet flounder. Prior to this, I had always heard it as “seen and unseen,” which lacks the clear implication that there is a world beyond the senses. Not only is there, self-evidently; Berkeley nicely demonstrated that the existence of the world of the senses is dubious.

8. The delusion that “science” means “truth.” In fact, science makes no truth claims, as Karl Popper pointed out, and Copernicus understood. “Believe in science” is the opposite of the scientific point of view.

9. The delusion that “science” means “reason”: that the scientific view is the only rational view. In fact, science is the rejection of reason in favour of experience. It has its place, as a check on pure reason, but it must not be allowed to supplant reason.

10. The nonsensical idea that imagined things “do not exist.” This is incoherent: if they did not exist, we could not imagine them. If we imagine them, they exist. They are simply not physical objects.

11. The Freudian idea that emotions or urges grow more powerful and fester if they are not acted upon. If this were true, the cure for alcoholism would be to have another drink.

12. The “Playboy philosophy”: the delusion that sexual gratification can be divorced from either genuine affection or procreation, and enjoyed for itself. If this is true of anyone, they should not be proud of it. It makes them animal, not human.

I submit that most people in North America currently embrace all of these delusions. This makes the average person significantly less sane than many diagnosed as “mentally ill.” A little “mental illness” may be the truth dawning.

I count it my great good fortune that I attended Catholic grade schools. Few can. This planted the seeds of dissent against some of these delusions, which survived many winters to at last be there when I needed them.

It would have been far better had I attended a high school that gave an early education in philosophy and logical fallacies, as some Catholic high schools do. For most of these popular delusions are simple logical fallacies, relatively easy to disprove.

I find it sinister that philosophy is not taught in the schools.

The Good News about the Bad News

 

I noted yesterday how all the established institutions we used to rely on to keep those in power honest have proven themselves unreliable: the media, the civil service, the church, the academy. 

That was a gloomy meditation. Here is a more cheerful thought.

Perhaps as a direct result, we seem to see a rise of new voices.

Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, Donald Trump—all have come out of nowhere to surprising prominence. What do they all have in common?

Sincerity. People can trust them to say what they think. Because we no longer hear this from the old institutions, it has become that much more valued. Listening to them is like balm.

Some might quibble at the inclusion of Musk and Trump. Trump is often accused of lying; and Musk is a businessman, not a communicator. Surely his prominence is due to his business skill?

But what is behind such spectacular business success? Why has Musk repeatedly succeeded in unrelated industries, where others have not dared venture? 

It is not because of technical expertise. There is no way Musk has sufficient technical expertise in software, hyperloops, auto manufacture, rocket science, accounting, investment, and banking, to have accomplished his business successes on the basis of technical knowledge. 

The secret is that he has been spectacularly successful at convincing investors of all kinds to fund his ideas. And the same is true, to a more modest but highly significant extent, for Trump. They are good at convincing investors. You cannot do that by slick salesmanship; that might work once, but investors will not keep coming back. You do that by keeping promises; by being relentlessly sincere.

And it is powerful when Trump or Musk use this penetrating sincerity in commenting on public affairs. Even if it is only in the odd tweet. Whatever either Musk or Trump tweets, people want to hear. They know they are getting an honest evaluation by a very bright man.

That is the same thing we see in Joe Rogan, or Jordan Peterson.

There are other names that come to mind, if names of lesser fame. Tulsi Gabbard, Jimmy Dore. Why of lesser fame? Not because they are less sincere; but because they are on the left. The left is systematically insincere and delusional now. There is no room on that side of the spectrum for a sincere voice. They will dissociate themselves from you; they will try to silence you. This forced Joe Rogan, Donald Trump, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Carl Benjamin, and Jordan Peterson, for example, originally all leftists, to suddenly find themselves on the right instead, at first without their willing it.

Andrew Yang took the other tack: he abandoned his sincerity to stick with the left. Bad move.

I suspect these sincere individuals will become the founders of our new institutions over time.

No Rudder, No Compass, Troubled Seas

 

WB Yeats, in Nineteen-Nineteen, saw the ordered, mannered Victorian world he knew in collapse, and mankind revealed by the First World War as no more than weasels fighting in a hole.

I get the same sense in 2021. The long moral decline continues, even as we improve our situation materially.

We used to be able to trust the Church as a counterweight to secular excesses, and a moral compass. It seems no longer—Francis acts like a politician with little interest in spiritual matters, presiding over a hierarchy preoccupied with covering up its scandals.

We used to look to the press, the “Fourth Estate,” to rake the muck and hold the high and mighty to account. No longer; the media are now an arm of government. All journalistic ethics have in recent years been abandoned.

We used to assume a neutral and professional civil service. Recent revelations in the US about the “deep state” and the Russia dossier make that now seem naive.

We used to think of the military as a place where ideals of chivalry persisted. No longer: the Canadian military is riddled with scandal, and the American military seems, on the evidence of General Milley, to have gone political.

Artists used to be a prophetic voice, speaking out when the secular powers had gone astray: George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, William Golding. No longer: all artists can be assumed to be on the partisan left.

Every institution and quarter has been subverted.

I think this comes because we have stopped taking morality seriously. We have called it “conventional morality,” and abandoned it.

Nice chickens. Nice roost.

Epic Fails

 

In Canadian federal politics, unfortunately, often the Conservative leaders also lack records of accomplishment.

As the situation in the US gets worse, I ponder: is it just me, or why isn’t it obvious to everyone that left-wing policies make things generally worse, seem even deliberately destructive, while right-wing policies seem to turn out better for nearly everyone?

I think of Margaret Thatcher turning the UK around after years under Labour governments. I think of Regan turning things around after Carter and winning the Cold War. I think of Rudy Giuliani turning NYC around after decades of the entire city being thought of as a no-go zone—and how quickly things are going back to rack under a Democratic administration. I think of how much better things seemed to be in Canada under Harper than under Justin Trudeau, or how quickly things went sour in Ontario when Bob Rae’s NDP got in, after decades of solid government under the PCs.

And now we see things sliding quickly under Biden, after general good times under Trump. Can’t others see this?

It seems to me as well that Republican candidates for office generally have solid records of accomplishment when they run. Democratic candidates have in comparison relatively scanty resumes. Bill Clinton was governor of the relatively small state of Arkansas, and had lost his first bid for re-election. Barack Obama was a first-term senator. Pete Buttigieg won the Iowa primary and briefly looked like the best bet to be the Democratic presidential nominee after only being mayor of South Bend, Indiana—population 100,000. And with no striking accomplishments in that office. Justin Trudeau was a high school drama teacher.

By comparison, Trump, although without political experience, had built a business empire. Mitt Romney had rescued the Salt Lake City Olympics, and managed to get elected governor as a Republican in the nation’s bluest state. Boris Johnson had been a popular mayor of London, famously a leftist electorate. John McCain had been a senator for 22 years, and was a war hero.

The Democrats seem to have a chronic problem here. Each primary season, they seem to lack candidates with actual records of accomplishment. 

This may be explained by the simple fact that leftist policies do not work. They go for the fresh face at least in part because any familiar faces are probably discredited by a record of failure.

Why do people persist in voting for parties and policies that do not work?

You can fool some of the people all of the time. Not infrequently, it is enough of them to form an electoral plurality. 

The Democrats and the left elsewhere concentrate on looking good, not on doing good. They promise people free stuff.

Puppets

 

German puppets burned the Jews

Jewish puppets did not choose

“Puppets,” from Leonard Cohen’s posthumous album, Thanks for the Dance. What’s he on about?

The same thing folks are on about when they talk of “NPCs.” Or Ionescu was on about in his play Rhinoceros. Or why zombies are all the rage in popular culture.

The truth is, more and more of us are aware that more and more of us have been turning into automatons. Something is making us lose our free will, our full awareness of our surroundings, and our sense of meaning in our lives. And then we do awful things. Nazism was one dramatic expression of this, but the process seems to continue into the present time.

Cohen takes it a bit further than Ionescu, with his “puppet” image. For this suggests not just an absence of free will and consciousness, but control by another.

And Cohen suggesting this is not control by some oppressive government, dictator, or cabal. The president, too, is a puppet. 

Puppet Presidents command

Puppet troops to burn the land

It is not just the Nazis who are puppets, either; the Jews are puppets too. The root is deeper than Nazism itself.

The ultimate puppet master is the Devil. As Bob Dylan said, “You gotta serve somebody.” And this is a real psychological/spiritual phenomenon. Once we embrace any vice, we gradually lose our free will and even our sense of reality. The vice controls us, and our thinking runs in smaller and smaller circuits, with more and more prohibited to us. The sense is captured by the old temperance saying, “first the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes the man.”

Cohen seems to suggest an escape from being controlled with the lines

Puppet lovers in their bliss

Turn away from all of this

But if so, he is perfectly wrong. It is actually addiction to sex that has brought us to this state of pinocchiohood. Starting in the Twenties, and mostly accelerating since. 

This is the way it always works: the addiction presents itself as an escape from the addiction. One gets drunk to forget that one is an alcoholic. Hence the downward spiral.

Although there is no question he has wrestled with such addictions personally, I suspect Cohen knows this. Otherwise this couplet would be at the end of the poem. Instead, in the poem, the puppethood persists past this. Puppet day is only followed by puppet night.

A bleak poem. 

Still in a Remembrance Day State of Mind

 

War

 

Dennis Copeland's monument to the War of 1812.

I have recently once again encountered the inedible horse chestnut that “war never solved anything.” I have seen it attributed to Oriana Fallaci. The argument is that the underlying problems will remain and resurface, no matter the outcome.

It sounds good, and virtuous, and consoling, but it is wrong. It is equivalent to saying that policing, or self-defense, never solved anything. That could be true if there were no evil in the world. In most wars, there is a right and a wrong, and if the right does not war, the wrong triumphs.

The Second World War prevented Nazism from taking over Europe, then the world, and killing all the Jews. It may not have wiped out the ideas underlying fascism and Nazism—they seem to stay with us, now masquerading as “postmodernism,” “progressivism” and “antifascism.” But note that they have to masquerade. It certainly wiped out the credibility of fascism or Nazism openly so-called.

The US Civil War ended slavery in the US, and ended the option of states seceding from the union.

The US War of Independence achieved US independence; and perhaps brought the ideals of liberal democracy, of human equality and of fully democratic representative government, to the world stage.

Some wars, it is true, end ambiguously. Perhaps there is an argument here that the war accomplished nothing. Conversely, you might instead argue that the peace accomplished nothing; that it might have been better to keep on fighting to some definite conclusion. The First World War comes to mind.

The First World War is indeed often cited as a pointless war. It seems pointless to us because the casus belli seems unclear, so little ground was physically fought over, and another big war with the same combatants started only a couple of decades later. But it is wrong to say it had no significant results. It ended the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire. It established American world dominance. It triggered the Russian Revolution. It ended the era of European dominance, European empires, European cultural confidence, and the days of monarchies. It established the nation-state as the international norm. It changed the world utterly.

And there is probably a good argument that, had the Armistice actually been refused, and the Entente continued to occupy Germany, no second war need have been fought. The “stab in the back” legend could not have arisen.

 Americans might be seduced into the notion that war is pointless by their experience since the Second World War. Since then, largely because of the nuclear option, they have been unable to fight any wars to a definite victory. The Korean War, for example, ended about where it started. 

On the other hand, it is clearly wrong to say that the UN and South Korea accomplished nothing by fighting that war. Just compare conditions in North Korea to conditions in South Korea today.

Vietnam seems to have been pointless. It gained nothing for the Americans or the South Vietnamese. For the North Vietnamese, it was about independence, but it seems dubious that America or France would still be there had the war not been fought. The economic and political doctrines that came with it probably held Vietnamese development back for a generation or two.

The wars in Iraq may seem pointless to Americans, but only because ultimate victory was thrown away. It recovered the independence of Kuwait and took out the most open aggressor since Hitler, preserving international law and almost certainly preventing future wars.

Afghanistan seems to have been pointless for the Americans, since they leave with the status quo ante. Not for the Taliban, who were fighting to preserve their religious culture against foreign influences. Time will tell whether they succeed.

War is intrinsically awful and a malum in se; that is a separate argument, or rather, probably not even arguable. It is possible for a war to be pointless, but this is the exception, not the rule. More often, to refuse to fight when wrong meets right is simple moral cowardice.

Peace

 

Nitobe Japanese Garden, Vancouver

In the wake of Remembrance Day, comrade Xerxes asks, “What is peace?”

He is right to point out that peace does not simply mean the absence of war. But we also need to go on and say what it does mean. To leave the meanings of words vague is an open invitation to the Devil. He will twist the word to his own purposes, to the extent of Orwell’s “war is peace.” This is why Confucius said that the first and most important task of government is to use terms properly.

If one consults the dictionary, the first meaning of peace is indeed not the absence of war. Oxford online gives it as “Freedom from disturbance; tranquility.” Hence “Mental calm, serenity.” I’m pretty confident the primary meaning of the Hebrew “shalom” or the Arabic “salaam” is the same.

As to what peace sounds or smells like, the experts on this are the Chinese. Feng shui is designed to bring such mental calm. The sound that most brings peace is that of gently running water; or the light tinkle of glass on glass, wood on wood, or metal on metal. The sights that most bring peace are those seen in a Chinese or Japanese tea garden: not roses in regimental order, and not random wilderness, but nature coaxed, a use of contrast always slightly off-balance. Always an odd number of elements. Never two things at equal distance, but also never at distances too dissimilar. Never two things the same size, but not vast differences in size.

Peace.

Armistice Day

 

It’s a hell of a way from yesterday

And all behind is burning;

We frog-march on to invisible dawn

From whence there is no turning.

Each human heart is blown apart

Six ways before September;

The whores of chance damn backward glance

And delicate lads dismember.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;

The bloody track leads back from where they nailed God to a tree.

Love a thing, and watch it die,

And only death’s forever.

In wave-swept graves, in parts we lie,

And death, too, is surrender. 

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;

Who was that raving charlatan we hanged on Calvary?

There’s no escape from sorrow, boys,

Between here and high heaven;

Just pray for once the guns may pause

On the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, as bells toll eleven.

-- Stephen Kent Roney

 

Rittenhouse Breaks Down on the Stand

 

Watching Kyle Rittenhouse break into tears on the witness stand today impressed me once again with the reality of evil. It looks like pure evil that the prosecutors brought this case to trial. It was obvious from the beginning that it was self-defense, and Rittenhouse, although just a kid, behaved admirably. It is grossly unjust that he must nevertheless stand in peril of his life once again in court. The prosecutors knew this, and they went to trial for political reasons. 

Go Fund Me was even worse. They did what they could to prevent Rittenhouse from raising funds to defend himself.

The experience of the pandemic has also opened my eyes. I thought that, faced with this crisis, we would put aside personal ambitions and pull together. My assumption, although I should have known better, was that we were all, or at least those in power were, basically good people who sometimes give in to temptations. This is clearly not so. To the contrary, the average person in power is apparently depraved. It seems obvious that the politicians, several drug companies, the deep state, saw instead an opportunity to exploit.

Was this always the case? Or have we, in recent generations, failed to inculcate our ruling class with the basics of morality? I think the latter.

Many Ingenious Lovely Things Are Gone

 

Pop!

Remembrance Day is coming in two days. Remembrance Day, and the First World War, have always been special to me. The First World War is when the dream of inevitable progress died, when civilization lost its way. It has not recovered. 

W.B. Yeats, for me, captures it best, in his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”:

We too had many pretty toys when young: 

A law indifferent to blame or praise, 

To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong 

Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays; 

Public opinion ripening for so long 

We thought it would outlive all future days. 

O what fine thought we had because we thought 

That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned, 

And a great army but a showy thing; 

What matter that no cannon had been turned 

Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king 

Thought that unless a little powder burned 

The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting 

And yet it lack all glory; and perchance 

The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.

Yet by 1919 this confidence was shattered:

[We] planned to bring the world under a rule, 

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole….

Learn that we were crack−pated when we dreamed.

We, who seven years ago 

Talked of honour and of truth, 

Shriek with pleasure if we show 

The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste-Land,” from the same time, covers the same ground. Hell had broken loose.

Although I never knew it personally, I yearn for the beauty and sense of honour and order of the old Austro-Hungarian culture, or the Ottoman, or the Imperial Russian, or the Britain of the huge pink maps. Of course they had their own deep flaws, but the foundation was sound. Since then we have lost our civilizational anchors and our pole star.

I gather I am not alone; this seems to be the attraction to “steampunk.” 

It might have meant something, the terrible sacrifice and the cataclysm of the First World War, if it had indeed been “the war to end all wars.” That last hope was seemingly shattered by World War II.

But perhaps, in the end, it was the war that ended wars. Since 1945, we have not had another big one. If we take the Second World War as the continuation of the first, left unfinished, after a truce of twenty years, the prolonged holocaust ended with the atom bomb. And since then, terrified as we all are of the atom bomb, it has kept us on our best behaviour. Because any war between nuclear powers would now be mutual assured destruction, nobody has since started a big, total, war, and nobody is going to start one with another nuclear power. Although there is a risk of miscalculation, if more countries had nuclear weapons, we might have fewer wars. We seem to be replacing war with technological and economic competition: first with the “space race.”

If only we could now bring back what we have lost….

Beloved

 

The NYT has been trying to make censorship a left-wing issue by pointing out that Glenn Youngkin's campaign ran an approving ad in which a mother wanted Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, removed from her child's classroom because of some lurid scenes.

I think anyone who has actually read the novel would see her point. I certainly would not want my child reading it. Censorship over sexual content, in books intended for minors, is entirely proper and, indeed, necessary.

Terry MacAuliffe vetoed the attempt to remove the novel from the classroom.

COP26

 

The biggest news from the conference is that Biden allegedly farted. Next biggest is that he fell asleep...

Comrade Xerxes complains that the recent COP26 climate conference got too little accomplished.

I agree that COP26 was just a circus and accomplishes nothing.

The problem is the tragedy of the commons. Because the atmosphere is a shared resource, there is incentive for each country to grab what they can before the other guy does. It takes great altruism—or naivite--to cripple one’s economy for the sake of the group, knowing as soon as you do the next country will just grab whatever is left on the table. 

No such summit is ever likely to accomplish anything, and it is no surprise that none has. Surely the leaders know it. Surely Greta Thunberg knows it. They’re all conning us.

Xerxes goes too far in lamenting that “no nation” has reduced emissions. The US, the UK, and the EU all have. The problem is, this is because manufacturing has been relocating to China and other developing countries. Great stat to cite to get re-elected, but the real net effect is a rise in global emissions, because the finished goods must now be transported long distances. And energy production is less efficient in these countries. The move is also suicidal should war ever come with China.

Any further restrictions on carbon emissions in developed countries will have the same effect: more industry moves to countries with cheaper energy, and emissions rise.

The only real way to fight greenhouse gases is with improved technology. If world leaders were serious about the problem, they would fund promising scientific research: nuclear fusion, producing fuel with algae, more efficient solar cells, and so forth. Not including subsidizing solar and wind installations or electric vehicles, so long as these are not economically viable on their own merits—because this raises energy prices, and again drives industry to more polluting regions. 

And, realistically, the problem probably can be solved this way: by developing a better energy source. We probably already have the technology to move to safe nuclear power. There is no value but graft in wasting money elsewhere.

The conference’s agreement to end deforestation is another bit of empty virtue-signalling. Deforestation is going to end regardless of government action. It ended decades ago in the developed world, as marginal farmland, no longer needed, went out of production. The movement of communication online has reduced the demand for pulp and paper, and this decline will probably continue.

Xerxes has a different solution to all: depopulation. I am surprised anyone any longer believes in it. 

To begin with, depopulation by government action is unethical. I think we established with the defeat of Nazism that governments cannot legitimately tinker in the reproductive rights of citizens. Forced abortion or sterilization is not okay.

Ethical government means seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. Denying life itself to future generations is denying them the most self-evident good, and their most fundamental right. To deny life to some so that others can have more material comforts is patently unjust. It is a violation of Kant’s categorical imperative, that people must always be an end, not a means.

Even if that equation made ethical sense, it is fairly clear from the evidence that people’s happiness does not improve with more material goods. So it’s all downside.

It is not even clear that a larger population means less for everyone. Every new person is both a producer and a consumer. He or she will, on average, add more to the common wealth than they take out. Some of the richest countries are also the most densely populated: the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Switzerland. As the population of the world has been growing rapidly, the rate of poverty and of hunger has been declining rapidly. 

But, you may argue, we could run out of resources.

We could; but this is pretty theoretical. The price of commodities in general has also been declining. Over history, the individual human footprint keeps shrinking. The point of technology is that it allows us to do more with less.

So long as the politicians don’t mess us up.

A Near-Death Experience

 

As I rode down through old York town

I saw a maid with ravishing raven hair

All dressed in Spanish.

I felt the pistol at my hip,

Still warm from the other guy.

But then a vagrant putto dodged out from some blind alley

Between two graffitied buildings

And took dead aim.

I awoke days later at Toronto Western.

The doctors told me I’d been lucky

The arrow was deflected by the poem in my pocket

Next to my heart.

-- Stephen Kent Roney 

The Beatitudes as Diagnosis

 

At the moment in the Catholic mass when the wine is consecrated, the priest used to say Christ’s blood was shed “for all.” Pope Benedict corrected this to say “for many,” in accordance with the Bible.

The difference is critical, Jesus did not come for all; all will not be saved. Nothing could be clearer in the gospels. “For all” was a bit of the “happy happy joy joy” Christianity I find so offensive.

Jesus announces in detail whom he has come for, and who will be saved, in the Beatitudes.

They read like a guide to what psychiatry commonly calls depression; almost like something from the DSM, the North American psychiatric standard text.

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Blessed are those who mourn,

for they shall be comforted. 

Blessed are the gentle,

for they shall inherit the earth.  

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,

for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart,

for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are those who have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake,

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are you when people reproach you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (--Matthew 5:3-122, WEB)

Meditate on this checklist:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. 

1. Are you poor in spirit? Does material poverty somewhat appeal to you, and ostentation make you uneasy? Do you fast?

Blessed are those who mourn,

for they shall be comforted. 

2. Are you often sad? Are you sad apart from circumstances? Are you sad for others? Do you feel the weight of the world’s troubles?

Blessed are the gentle,

for they shall inherit the earth.  

3. The word translated here as “gentle” is ambiguous: King James has it as “meek,” others as “powerless.” “Low self-esteem” is a reasonable approximation. Do you feel powerless? Do you avoid drawing attention to yourself? Do you prefer to step lightly in the world?

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,

for they shall be filled.

4. Is seeing justice done important to you? If playing a game, do you always follow the rules? Does it upset you to see others treated unfairly?

Blessed are the merciful,

for they shall obtain mercy.

5. Are you magnanimous in victory? Do you dislike having to impose discipline on others?

Blessed are the pure in heart,

for they shall see God.

6. Do you tend to say what you think, unfiltered? Or do you tend to have motives for your words or actions? Do you calculate their effect on others?

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they shall be called children of God.

7. “Blessed are the peacemakers” does not mean being diplomatic, and certainly does not mean pacifism. “Peacemaker” was a common title for a Roman Emperor in the First Century—most of whom were professional soldiers. A policeman is a “peace officer.” Do you foment and encourage conflict among others, or do you try to treat everyone fairly and keep the peace?

Blessed are those who have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake,

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

8. Have you ever been criticized or punished for doing what you thought was the moral thing to do? Have you been forced by others into moral dilemmas? Have you persisted despite such criticism or punishment?

Blessed are you when people reproach you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

9. Have you been falsely accused, accused of deeds or traits that are not your own? Has this happened often?

If you can answer yes to more than, say, three or four of these questions, you are a melancholic. 

It should be encouraging to hear that you will inherit heaven and earth. Keep that in mind when you are depressed.

Luke’s gospel goes on to give contra-indications. Being rich, well-fed, and happy are not signs of God’s favour. No happy-happy joy-joy here.

Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,

    for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

The surest sign of a good man is that he has adamant enemies.

Jesus goes on to advise actions. Consider this a prescription.

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

“Good deeds” does not mean the obvious, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and such. For these deeds, Jesus says later, are to be done in secret. Moreover, the poor and persecuted described here are not in a position to do much in this regard.

Rather, he means works of art; also commonly referred to with words cognate to “deeds”: "art," “works,” “plays”, “essays,” “opera.” He identifies melancholics as true prophets. Their work is to do what prophets do: to speak out. Just as salt brings savour out in food, just as the light of a lamp makes things clear, they shed light on the world, and, specifically, make the world more beautiful.

And that is what you are commissioned to do if you are melancholic. Contrary to crude popular opinion, true art is not “self-expression.” It is inspiration, speaking in a voice you do not recognize as your own. If you are a melancholic artist, it is the voice of God.

Root and STEM

 

When I taught in China back in the early 90s, I was appalled to learn that the university had no Department of Humanities. Purely a mechanistic view of the cosmos and of human life, it seemed. When the Berlin Wall fell, the countries of Eastern Europe understood the problem: their scholars rushed to the West to get a grounding in the Humanities. Unfortunately, they were disappointed.

I am alarmed to see that Humanities is now also no longer taught in high schools in Tennessee. A list of subject areas ESL students must be prepared for gives Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Science. 

A disease is spreading, and it is deadly. It is deadly not just to democracy, but to civilization itself.

If our culture were sane, Humanities would be the entire high school curriculum.

After the basic skills of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, taught to mastery in elementary school, the Humanities is the one thing everyone needs to study. It is the reason and grounding for everything else. If you do not pass it on, individuals despair and civilization dies.

Today, we waste our students’ time for four to six years, years when they are full of energy and desperate to learn. Many turn off at just this point. 

Math? It is a common observation, a truism, that we never use our high school algebra, trigonometry, or calculus again. So what is the justification for teaching it? Geometry would be useful—to teach logic. But it is never presented in those terms; just as a set of axioms that obviously do not relate to the real world.

Science as taught in the schools is the antithesis of science. It is taught as a body of knowledge; stuff to memorize. This specific knowledge, taught as certain in high school, is probably false and will probably be shown by science to be false in time. Much of it is already known to be false while the textbook is still in circulation. The essence of science is to doubt you know anything, and to test everything; it is the scientific method. That is not taught. If experiments are done, the result is always predetermined. Anyone genuinely likely to excel in science is only likely to be turned off it in high school.

Language Arts? The grammar of English should have already been learned in elementary school. As to other languages, if it is a matter of learning to speak them—our current emphasis—the classroom is the worst place to do so. The place to learn a language is by speaking it regularly, something the classroom is designed to prevent. Language, when taught as a Humanity, is an exercise in logic: the old grammar-translation method. It is no longer taught in such terms.

Social Science? A mathematician back in the fifties made the observation that anything that has ever been discovered by the Social Sciences is either trivial, or it is wrong. This is still true, and will forever be true. Rather than adding to our knowledge, the social sciences have subtracted from it, by introducing serious errors to the popular mind. Human beings are not objects, and cannot be studied as objects. Even if this were possible, it would be morally offensive. And teaching Social Science is therefore teaching immorality.

The wealthy and the upper classes pay huge sums to educate their own children at private schools that do concentrate on the Humanities: on logic, philosophy, rhetoric, debate, history, classical literature. They know what they are doing. The British Empire was built on the quality of its private schools. The modern public school systems of North America were intentionally designed, in the early twentieth century, to produce cogs for the industrial machine. What they teach is submission and acceptance. The Humanities teach leadership; for they teach how to think. As Confucius said, “a superior man is not a tool.” Without the Humanities, the schools are turning out workers, meant as a means, not an end.

The world may need more STEM. But the problem with STEM is that whatever is taught today is obsolete tomorrow. To teach it at the high school level is a waste of time. Even to teach it later, at university, when specialization is possible, is probably too soon. It needs to be taught continually, over one’s professional career. Something now entirely possible, with distance education.

But what is needed even more than STEM, and all the more so in times of rapid change,  is minds that are adaptable, have initiative, and know the ultimate goal.

A Little Trouble in Big China?

 

Peng Shuai

Xi Jingping did not attend the recent environmental summit in Edinburgh. This is responsible of him: airplane fuel generates a lot of greenhouse gases, and no agreement reached at such meetings is ever acted upon.

But Xi has not left China for any reason for over a year and nine months. This suggests something else: that he is at risk of losing his position. 

When Mao Zedong died, he left Hua Guofeng as his designated successor. Reportedly, Hua lost his primacy to Deng Xiaoping while he was on a foreign trip. When the cat’s away … Xi may feel himself vulnerable to something similar.

My Chinese students long ago said there was a sort of social contract in China: so long as everyone kept getting more prosperous, nobody was going to shake things up. But there is no residual good will. The Chinese economy looks shaky; it looks as though a real estate bubble is bursting. On top of COVID and a string of natural disasters.

I have long thought China’s sabre-rattling also suggested some power struggle at the top. A retired Australian general notes that, if China wants to take Taiwan, they are pretty much obliged for strategic reasons first to take out the US bases in Okinawa, South Korea, and Guam. But if they do this, surely, as with Pearl Harbor, they are going to have a Big War, probably sucking in not just the US, but Japan, South Korea, Australia, and NATO. It seems to me improbable that they would risk it. Or risk trying to take Taiwan without it. The threats are for local consumption.

In possibly related news, former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli has been accused online by tennis star Peng Shuai of having forced her into a sexual relationship.

It seems unlikely that Peng would have dared to post this unless she thought she had some high-level protection. Accusations of corruption are a standard tool in Chinese power struggles; Xi Jingping has done this systematically. But the gravity of the sexual charge, against someone at such a high level, is unprecedented. 

Since he is retired, it seems unlikely Zhang himself is the real target; more likely someone who is his current sponsor or mentor. I do not know who that would be, but either way, it seems to speak again of a serious power struggle at the top.

Turtle Island

 

Turtle Island (the cosmos) as traditionally depicted in India. The Chinese use a similar turtle image.

Contrary to popular belief, Canada’s “First Nations” did not themselves traditionally claim to be aboriginal to the lands where they currently live. No doubt many do now, but probably only for political reasons.

Origins, a Canadian history textbook, justifies the claim with a Blackfoot creation myth, that has mankind created by the god Napi on Turtle Island.

The problem here is the common modern misinterpretation of “Turtle Island” to mean North America.

If the myth is ancient, those who composed it would not have such knowledge of geography. They would not understand “Turtle Island” to mean one of seven existing continents. To them, it meant “the cosmos,” the ordered universe. The story means only that man appeared in the physical world.  The waters surrounding it are, just as for the Chinese or the ancient Greeks, the waters of chaos.

Vine Deloria, the celebrated Sioux historian, mocks the idea that Indians had no recollection of coming from elsewhere: of some tribes, he claims, “they remember that we came across the Atlantic as refugees from some struggle, then came down the St. Lawrence River, and so forth.” Father LeClercq discovered such a legend among the Micmac. Alexander Mackenzie discovered a legend among the Chipewyan (Dene) that they had come from afar across a “vast lake.” And of course the Inuit/Eskimo retain ties across the Arctic.

In any case, virtually no aboriginal group, excluding those in the Pacific Northwest, has remained in the same general area even since the beginning of European settlement. They were, after all, nomadic cultures. The Blackfeet, who have the Napi creation legend cited above, are known to have arrived on the prairies in the 18th century, coming from an earlier home in the northeastern United States. They are less aboriginal to Canada than the French or English.

Almost certainly, all Indians are, like all European Canadians, originally immigrants from somewhere else. And in recent times.

Global Warming Is Global

 

Nigel Farage argues that the impressive reduction in carbon emissions that the US, UK, and Canada boast about is actually due to moving manufacturing to other countries, notably China. The probable result is a net rise in global carbon emissions, as we must now also burn fuel to transport the goods to more distant markets.

What we have is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. Nobody is ultimately responsible for the atmosphere, and so we will never get coordinated action.

The only real solution to the problem of global warming is improved technology. I expect it will come: nuclear fusion, generating fuel with algae, carbon capture technologies.

The most useful thing the Canadian government could do, perhaps, is to offer funding for such research.