The Carney Is in Town

 

Man temporarily dismounted from his white horse.

Yesterday, we wrote a little about the chaos among the Democrats in the U.S. over their leadership. A simultaneous crisis is underway among Canadian Liberals. They have just lost one of the three to five safest Liberal seats in the country, Toronto-St. Paul’s, in a byelection. Their polling is underwater somewhere in Hudson’s Bay. What can they do?

My own local MP, Wayne Long, has just openly called for Trudeau to step down. But the Canadian system is not like the British system. The party leader must sign the nomination papers for all local candidates. That makes him or her a dictator within the party: any sign of disloyalty means the local member is out at the next election. This is very unlike the way the Westminster system is supposed to run; properly, the party leader serves at the pleasure of his or her caucus. After all, the people vote for their local members, not the prime minister. This Westminster system allowed Britain to quickly replace Chamberlain with Churchill in the crisis at the beginning of the Second World War. It could instantly solve America’s problem with Joe Biden’s senility. Losing it also loses the entire point of having debates over legislation in the House of Commons; members cannot vote their conscience. They are just expensive trained seals. 

Something like the Westminster system has been revived in the Canadian Conservative Party, thanks to the efforts of Michael Chong. Without it, they would still be stuck with Erin O’Toole, instead of Pierre Poilievre, as leader,

As a result of this Liberal dictatorship, MP’s do not dare come out against the leader. Wayne Long was able to, because he is not running again in any case. And because he has an independent profile back home. Rumour has it that a majority of Liberal members actually want Trudeau to go. But they do not dare raise their hands. All they can do is vote against their own leader in a confidence vote—leading to an election in which they would be barred from running—or cross the floor and join another party.

Trudeau has no intention, it seems, of resigning. Rumour has it that he plans a cabinet shakeup to try to get the poll numbers back up. He wants to sacrifice his finance minister and deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, scapegoating her for the taxes and rising cost of living that has queered Canadians on him. This is, interestingly, a tactic favoured by his reputed father, Fidel Castro: blame the economists for supposedly giving bad advice. Then Trudeau’s rumoured plan is to bring in Mark Carney as the new finance minister, as part of a wider cabinet shakeup. Freeland, after all, had no background in finance, business, or economics; she was a journalist. Carney has sterling credentials, literally--as in ponds sterling-- a banker and a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England. He might calm the public and give the government credibility. Folks might believe better times were ahead, if they just stuck with the gummint.

Many have pointed out a problem with this plan. Carney has no seat in parliament. All the commentators I have heard or read seem to think this is a constitutional requirement for a cabinet appointment.

It is not. 

Senators can be appointed to cabinet. Justin Trudeau can appoint senators. Pierre Trudeau, wanting cabinet representation from the Prairie provinces, and lacking any M.P.’s, appointed Hazen Argue from the Senate as minister for the Canadian Wheat Board. Appointing from the House of Lords is fairly common in Britain; David Cameron is currently serving as foreign secretary from the House of Lords.

So Trudeau could simply appoint Carney to the Senate. Problem solved.

He does not even need to do that. There is precedent for appointing a member of the general public to the Cabinet, on the understanding that they will run for election within a reasonable time. Pierre Trudeau appointed Pierre Juneau to Cabinet from outside Parliament in 1975.

Since the next election is relatively close in any event, and there is no written law on the matter, only convention, Trudeau could appoint Carney to cabinet on Carney’s public promise to run in that election.

So the Carney plan could work. 

Would Carney want to do it?

Would it save the Liberals?

I think he wants it.

I don’t think it can save the Liberals.

But it may be their best shot. 

Mostly on the US Debate

 

Events are moving quickly; this is not a quiet summer. The Tories in the UK are in a panic. Reform is in a panic. The Republicans in France are in a panic. The Democrats in the US are in a panic. Things are almost moving too fast for commentary. What I say now may be obsolete in a few hours.

In the US, even all the left-wing commentators have turned on Joe Biden. His performance in the debate was historically bad. The best they can muster is the claim that, while Biden was incoherent. Trump was lying about everything. 

They never cite any particular lie. That perhaps says everything.

I did track down a list on CNN’s web site:

Trump: “Hard to believe, they have some states passing legislation where you can execute the baby after birth. It’s crazy.”

Trump went on to cite to the former governor of Virginia, Ralph Northram. Here’s what Northram actually said, referring to his proposed legislation:

“The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

But that legislation was, in the end, voted down in the legislature.

There were other close calls in New York and California, but the bills were amended before being passed.

So Trump was not correct. Directionally true, perhaps, as his supporters often say, but an exaggeration. But it might also be unfair to characterize it as a deliberate lie; Trump was speaking without notes. He may only have been foggy on the details. “Have tried to pass” would have been correct.

Trump: “I say, let the states decide. This is — every legal scholar wanted this to be where abortion should be.”

And of course, not EVERY legal scholar wanted the states to decide on abortion. To begin with, obviously, the justices of the Supreme Court count as legal scholars, and a majority of them voted for Roe v. Wade fifty years ago. A minority voted to keep Roe V. Wade last year. 

But given that the strict literal sense of the claim was obviously false, surely it was clear to everyone that Trump was not speaking literally, but using the common exaggeration, as in “everybody knows.”

The network counts as a lie Trump’s claim that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency: “we didn’t have an attack for four years.”

CNN then cites an attack in New York that killed eight people in 2017, right after his election; and an attack by a lone gunman that killed three soldiers at an army base in Florida in 2019.

Another case of Trump being directionally correct, but exaggerating. He did not mean literally “none.” Just as we might say, “nobody loves a rainy day,” without expecting to be challenged with an example of someone who does.

They also count as a lie Trumps’ claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” or “stolen.” Which is, at a minimum, a legitimate opinion. 

And they counted Trump’s claim that Biden got money from China as a lie because it was presented “with no evidence.” There certainly is evidence of this; although it has not (yet?) been proven in a court of law. 

And the commentators never point out that, apart from not making sense, Biden told many lies. As, to be fair, all politicians do, pretty much all the time. Yet, mysteriously, it is only Trump who is ever accused of this. Biden actually claimed that there were fewer illegals crossing the border now than when Trump left office, and that the numbers are declining. He claimed to have gotten inflation down from where it was under Trump. There was essentially no inflation under Trump. He claimed that Trump initiated the policy of “children in cages,” which was inherited from the Democratic administration in which Biden was vice-president. He claimed that there were people wearing swastikas marching in Charlottesville, and that Trump had called them “fine people.” This has even been debunked by left-wing Snopes.

And so it goes.

Surely Biden now has no chance against Trump. And there is no good way for party insiders and powers to swap him out at this late date.

They did this to themselves, by forcing RFK Jr. out of the primaries and out of the party. Were RFK coming into the convention with a pledged minority of delegates, they could have plausibly coalesced around him at the last minute.

But even if the convention were to turn to someone other than Biden, the backroom powers have tied their own hands. The convention is scheduled for so late in the season that, if the nominee turns out to be anyone other then Biden, it will be too late to get them on the ballot in at least the critical swing state of Ohio.

Bottom line: Biden is not the only incompetent in power on the left.

Why We Are Here

 “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”—Genesis 2, verse 15,

This is the verse of the Bible in which we are told why we were created. We were created to be gardeners.

There are two kinds of gardens: vegetable gardens, and scenic gardens. There are gardens to produce food, and there are gardens to produce beauty.

There was clearly no need, in this case, to work to produce food. This was the Garden of Eden. All plants there, but one, were edible: “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” There was no reason to worry for the welfare of animals either. They too could, the next verse specifies, eat every plant, and did not eat one another. The lion lay down with the lamb. The need to labour for food, clothing, or shelter came only with the Fall: 

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
...By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,”

It would be tautological, in any case, to create man only to feed man.

Therefore, our life purpose must be to create beauty, as in a flower garden. Our job is to take the raw material God gave us, “nature,” and transform it into art.

We obviously do not do this by leaving it alone, as in a nature preserve. And it is not about advancement in material comforts. Life is about making beauty.

The Revolution Has Begun

Things are coming unglued for the ruling elites. People no longer trust them. This is largely due to the growth of social media: they can no longer force discussion and information within prescribed bounds. This is of course why they have been censoring so openly recently. But that has always been a rear-guard action.

We saw a somewhat similar ungluing back in the 1960s, prompted I think by the nuclear threat and the Kennedy assassination. People began to suspect that idiots were in charge. Or dark forces.

And that, for those of us who remember, was a time of chaos. Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II put things back together.

But this is bigger.

The evidence coming out that the establishment and establishment media lied about everything during the Covid pandemic seems to have been a watershed. Yes, it did leak from a government lab. Yes, it was lab-created. Yes, it was funded in part by the US government. No, wearing masks was not effective. No, social distancing was not effective. No, the vaccines did not stop the spread. No, they were not safe and effective. Yes, ivermectin did work against the virus. Yes, the jump in mortality rates since is due to the vaccine.

Even at the time, the pandemic seemed to me like a flash of lightning showing us all where the zombies were.

Who will ever trust government again?

Now all heck is breaking loose. The woke are waking up.

Mass immigration used to be a third rail issue. Nobody dared object, because they would be called racist. Trump broke the seal with regards to illegal immigration in 2016. Now it has spread to legal immigration as well. It is a key issue in Europe, looking as though it will bring down the governments of the UK and France within the next few weeks. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre has finally calculated it is worth saying, in French and in Quebec, that he will lower immigration levels. Until now, he had been sidestepping the issue. 

“It's going to be much lower, especially for temporary immigration. It is impossible to invite 1.2 million new people to Canada every year when you build 200,000 homes. That's impossible. There is no room. Quebec is at the breaking point.”

People are now also speaking openly against multiculturalism, defying the inevitable accusations of racism. Only a few years ago, Don Cherry was fired for saying everyone should wear the poppy. Now Rishi Sunak is being condemned everywhere for leaving D-Day ceremonies early. How could he? That is some measure of how much how quickly the political climate has changed. 

Even though, awkwardly, disastrously, multiculturalism is enshrined in the Canadian constitution.

“Climate change” is the next likely pin to fall. It was always an improbable claim. It was always based on “computer modelling,” not scientific evidence. Thirty years ago, when the average member of the public still imagined computers were magical, this sounded compelling. We are more sophisticated about computers now. The general public is also realizing that “fighting climate change” through ever growing taxes and regulations is costing a lot of money with no visible results, in a difficult economic time. It increasingly looks like it always really was: a power and money grab by the government bureaucracy.

I think the edifice of feminism is crumbling fast as well. It is now unfashionable on the left, who want to sacrifice it to trans rights, with which feminism conflicts. Others are seeing the effect of feminism in declining birth rates, declining marriage rates, men opting out of all relationships, and growing legions of bitter middle-aged women feeling deceived. There is worse yet to be uncovered.

Confidence in the public school system is already gone. Confidence in the academy is crumbling. Confidence in the objectivity and reliability of science itself is going. Peer review, we discover, does not work. Only certain areas of investigation get funded. Experiments are never reproduced, and when someone tries, they can’t be. Scientists are no longer looked on as semi-divine beings and moral examplars above suspicion of ulterior motives.

I suspect most importantly, atheism, which had become increasingly fashionable over the past 150 years or so, is crumbling. Darwinism, its modern intellectual underpinning, is crumbling. Freud and scientific psychology, religion’s intended “scientific” replacement, has already been pretty well discredited. This is the biggest and most far-reaching revolution currently underway.

Or maybe it is just me.

The Rage in Our Hearts

 

Asmodeus, the Demon of Wrath

I had been asked to review two short story manuscripts recently. Both had the same odd and disturbing flaw: they had the main character slaughter an animal, gratuitously, and in detail, early in the story. 

This did nothing to further the plot. Either incident could have been removed without affecting it; in fact, they distracted from it. 

If it was meant to establish character, it was bad practice: it alienated the reader from the protagonist. If the reader does not identify with the main character, they are no longer interested in what happens to them, and tune out. Even if you want to tell a sympathetic story of a killer, you start by showing them being nice to a puppy.

And what an odd thing for two random stories to have in common.

I suspect this shows what lurks in the hearts of men currently. When you compose a story, you start by letting your imagination run free. When these two authors did so, this is almost the first thing that came up.

Pent up male rage? That sounds plausible on its face, given how men are repressed currently. Both authors were young men. 

But rage does not work that way. It does not get stronger if not expressed. That’s Freud; Freud has been disproven. If you repress an emotion, it goes away. If you express it, it grows. Over time, it can become a settled vice—or virtue. 

Once it becomes a vice, it becomes part of our programming. When we let our minds go, it will come out, unbidden. Even, eventually, against our interest. It begins to seem to have a will of its own, which is why vices are traditionally imagined as demons. 

This is why, to be a good writer, you need to have nothing to hide; you need to be a fundamentally decent person. Artists are, in my personal experience, always naive innocents in person.

Yes, there are all those stories about bohemian types being libertines. I suspect this is to discredit the enterprise.  And often the writer or artist will play along with it, for cover. Jim Morrison was supposed to be the ultimate womanizer, for example. And yet—no paternity suits. I go with W.B. Yeats, who said you can either live the life of a poet, or be a poet, but you cannot do both. 

I think our society as a whole these days is nursing the demon of anger. It is behind all these claims of victimization and oppression. It is also nursing the demons of lust and pride. There are even parades.

The gravest sin any more is pointing out someone else’s sin.

The next worst sin is not sinning yourself.

And this may explain why the arts are moribund.

Tory Win in St. Paul's

 

I awoke this morning to the shocking news that the Conservatives had won Toronto-St. Paul’s. I had gone to bed thinking the Liberals had it in the bag. This is not good news for the Conservative Party.

They probably did not want to win it. The top Liberals flooded in to the riding to campaign. Pierre Poilievre stayed out, campaigning in Quebec instead. On the day of the vote, top Conservatives were all telling the media they had no chance. They clearly expected to lose; and Poilievre might have stayed away so as not to be personally tarnished by the loss. But this was also likely to depress their vote, making it more probable that they would.

Why woud they want to win in St. Paul’s? Perhaps a morale boost for the troops. But it would not change the power balance in the House. The danger is that it will force Justin Trudeau to resign as Liberal leader. I think the Conservatives are right if they think Trudeau is their biggest asset. Canadians are generally desperate for a chance to vote against him. I know I am. He should not be allowed to retire without a truly humiliating defeat, to discourage future prime ministers from following in his autocratic footsteps.

A new leader is unlikely to help the Liberals electorally. But this is almost a secondary consideration to me, and perhaps also to the Tories. Psychologically and on principle, they want the chance to defeat Justin Trudeau.

Were the Nazis on the Left or on the Right?

 

Notorious right-winger

There is a battle online currently between people asserting that the Nazi Party was left-wing, and people asserting it was right-wing. The latter is, of course, the more conventional position.

The argument that it was left-wing, however, is obvious: the name of the party was the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” They claimed to be socialist. Surely the ball is in the court of those who say they were not.

The response on the left is apparently that they were lying. It was a trick to sucker in the working class.

This shows much disrespect for the working class. It also violates the current leftist principle that we must accept everyone’s self-identification. If an apparent man says they are a woman, we must accept this. If they want to be called indigenous and not Indian, we must accept indigenous as correct.

Marxists object that Nazis were not socialists, because socialism means collective control of the means of production, and the Nazis did not nationalize industries.

But ownership is not control.

What they did was change the legal definition of property, so that, while private individuals might technically own things, they did not control them. Everything was subject to the needs of the state. Control was in the hands of the state, including the ability to set wages, prices, levels of production, and dividends—removing the free market and the profit motive. It was socialism in all but a legalistic, technical sense, and then only if you accept only one of several definitions of socialism.

It is standard practice on the left, of course, to exclude any political tendency that differs from their own from their definition of socialism. Maoists insisted that the USSR was not socialist. The Stalinists insisted that Trotskyites were not true socialists. The Bernsteinists insisted that the Bolsheviks were not true socialists. Especially whenever socialism fails to produce desired results, the claim will always be that it was not true socialism.

Another counter-argument is that the Nazis were on the right because they were “nationalists.” This was not socialism, this was “national socialism.”

But if nationalism makes one right-wing, and internationalism makes one left-wing, then the British Empire was left-wing, while Mahatma Gandhi was a right-winger. The IRA was a right-wing organization; in Canada the NDP is right-wing; Washington and Jefferson were right-wingers, and George the Third was the leftist; and Kim Jong Un is on the far right. This defies the common understanding, and amounts to an idiosycratic use of the terms. Nationalism is perfectly orthodox as a part of some leftist ideology.

The modern North American understanding of the political distinction between “left” and “right,” although somewhat ahistorical, is that “left” means increasing the powers and responsibilities of the state and the collective, while “right” means reducing the size and scope of government in favour of the individual. On this scale, even if considered right-wing in their time and place, when “right” and “left” might have had different meanings, Nazism and Fascism stand on the extreme left in our terms.

Another common way to understand the distinction between left and right is that the right is conservative, that is, primarily concerned with conserving, keeping matters much a they have been. The left wants change. “Hope and change.” You know the thing.

By this standard, again, the Nazis were far left. They did not stand for preserving the Weimar Republic, the then-current sysem of government, nor yet for replacing it with the earlier form, the monarchy, that preceded it. They wanted a radical reimagining of society, of the entire world, of conventional morality, even the development of a new human species. They were “futurists.” “Tomorrow belongs to me.”

But the most telling argument that the Nazis were on the political left is that it is the established wisdom that they were on the far right. Here, as everywhere, the rule of thumb is that anything “everyone knows” is true is probably false.

To Those in Peril on the Sea

 On that day, as evening drew on, Jesus said to his disciples:
“Let us cross to the other side.”
Leaving the crowd, they took Jesus with them in the boat just as he was.
And other boats were with him.
A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat,
so that it was already filling up.
Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion.
They woke him and said to him,
“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
He woke up,
rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet!  Be still!”
The wind ceased and there was great calm.
Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified?
Do you not yet have faith?”
They were filled with great awe and said to one another,
“Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?”

This, the gospel reading at today’s mass, strikes me as uncannily resembling the traditional image of Vishnu asleep on the cosmic ocean. The universe we know is a dream he is having. Once every kalpa, every aeon, he awakens from the dream, and the universe ceases to be. Then after a time he goes back to sleep, and a new cosmos begins. The turbulent waters on which he sleeps are the stream of time, with its changes. 

Is the Bible story a borrowing from Hindu mythology? Possibly; or possibly the other way around.

Or perhaps this is evidence for Jung’s theory of the archetypes. Jung traced certain motifs and images, like this one, across world mythology, including cultures with little or no contact with each other, and then again in the dreams of his patients. He posited these represented structures in the mind, which he called archetypes. Ultimately, for the materialist Jung, these ended up expressing structures in the brain. Evolution has deposited them there somehow.

Jung’s disciple Marie-Louise Von Franz specialized in Jungian interpretations of fairy tales. Someone once challenged her with the question, “How do you know your archetypal psychology and development of the ego through individuation is the real story being expressed obliquely through these stories, and not just one more fairy tale like these others?”

Her answer was unsatisfactory: “It is the fairytale I believe.”

Are we left with no way to choose among fairy tales? Do we just arbitrarily decide to place our faith in Vishnu, or Jesus, or Jung, or Mother Goose?

Suppose, instead, that there is a God. This is not a stretch; it the fundamental premise of the text. As a philosophical proposition, monotheism has been proven seven ways to Sunday.

If there is a God, the repetition of this motif in unrelated texts is a proof of the reliability of those texts. God must have dropped it in there.

God must have created us for some purpose. He would have programmed us with a built-in user’s manual or operating system. He would have embedded in our psyches certain images, concepts and narratives expressing his plans. This, the sleeping God waking to calm time and change, can be assumed to be one of them.

God is God; he can do what he wants. He can implant the images in our consciousnesses, and then act them out in history to demonstrate that he is with us, and to clarify their full meaning. 

We are not to be troubled by the madness all around us. We are not to suppose that God is not in charge. Keep calm and carry on. Soon he will wake—or we will—and all will be as it should be.

No Particular Place to Go

 

You can't say Chuck Berry is underrated; but his musical talents can lead people to overlook just how good he is as a lyricist.

She's a Lady

 

John Sebastian is underrated as a songwriter, because his songs are too cheerful. But he is a master lyricist, and his melodies are also good.

This is sheer poetry.

It is also painfully sad.

Spider Sense

 

Friend Xerxes has recently returned from a group tour of Southeast Asia. As one of the exotic experiences the tour company laid on for their charges, they got to see a woman hunt tarantulas, defang them, and let them crawl over their arms. Then she fried the spiders, and the tourists could opt to sample them.

Xerxes was upset that the tarantulas were killed. Aren’t we humans arrogant, he asks, to assume that only we are sentient? 

I wonder if he has ever been to a slaughterhouse.

“Sentient” is not the word he should have used here. Sentient means responsive to the physical senses. Everyone believes that spiders are sentient. 

So why are we any better than spiders? Are we indeed simply being arrogant, or “speciesist”?

Dating back at least to Aristotle, animal and human souls have indeed always been understood in to be fundamentally different. There are different words for them in Greek. Humans have psyche. Animals have anima.

What’s the difference? 

A common answer is “reason,” or “free will,” but that may not be right. Animals can figure out simple puzzles, and this has always been known. See Aesop’s fable of the crow and the pitcher. Dogs can be wilful, and understand when they have been a “bad dog.” 

On the other hand, I read somewhere that when the behaviourists and the linguists teach higher apes to talk using sign language, the one thing they cannot do is answer questions in the conditional. They cannot understand hypotheticals.

Animals, even those most closely related to us, cannot retain narratives in the mind of what is not present. This suggests the faculty that makes us human is the imagination. And this seems to have been understood throughout the ages:

“Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! 
The present only toucheth thee: 
But Och! I backward cast my e’e, 
On prospects drear! 
An’ forward tho’ I canna see, 
I guess an’ fear!” – Burns, “To a Mouse”

Now consider the account of the creation of man in Genesis:

Genesis 1:

“So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.”

Genesis 2: 

“Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

God created man “in his own image”; and what does that mean? Not to look like God, for God is a spirit. What is a spiritual image? Literally, or rather, etymologically, “imagination.” God is the great architect of all, the creator: creation is his image. Creation is in his image.

He then created man as a potter forms a pot. That too reveals his image: the human potter, the artist, acts in the image of God. In creation, God breathes his spirit into us—literally, or etymologically, he “inspires” us. 

What is the point of man’s creation? To tend the garden. As with pottery, this is a matter of taking the material God has created for us, and forming it by art. The intended end result, according to the Book of Revelation, is a celestial city, the New Jerusalem, one great work of art, a collaboration between God and man.

“One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. 11 It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. 12 It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. 13 There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. 14 The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

“15 The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. 16 The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. 17 The angel measured the wall using human measurement, and it was 144 cubits thick. 18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. 19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. 21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.”

For this reason, a human life, and a human soul, is of infinitely greater value than an animal life.

We commonly understand a further distinction between plants and animals. Animals are sentient; plants are not. Plants are not conscious. They do not have the five senses. An animal life is therefore of greater value, their death of greater meaning, than a plant life. So vegetarianism.

There is another traditional distinction. There is the Christian pescetarian tradition: during the Lenten and Friday fasts, you are to eat no meat, but are allowed fish and seafood. Buddhist monastic “vegetarianism” follows similar rules: one is allowed seafood. Why is this where the line is drawn, and not at vegetarianism?

Because cold-blooded creatures lack emotions. They do not feel anger or love or fear. 

How do we know this?

Because they do not nurse their young.  Any creature that does not care for its young apparently has no emotional life. This is no doubt why the Devil himself is represented as reptilian, as a snake or dragon. They operate on sheer self-interest, lacking love or empathy.

Of course, they are really amoral, not immoral; they have no moral sense. Spiders presumably operate like robots, following their programming, their instinct. But there is therefore no moral issue in killing them, any more than in turning off a light.

This is why cannibalism is not cool, but it is cool to swat a mosquito.

Reform UK and Reform Canada

 

Mr. Charisma

Summer is usually slow for news. Not this summer. We have epochal elections underway in both France and the UK. In the UK, many people are pointing to the “Canadian example.” Kind of flattering to get noticed. 

They mean the election of 1993, in which Kim Campbell led the Tories from a majority, 168 seats, to just two seats in total. The suggestion is that something similar could happen to the British Tories in two weeks’ time. In both cases, supposedly, it was because of the emergence of a new party on the right, in both cases named “Reform.” 

(The original “Reform” was actually a US movement, under Ross Perot; but that perhaps takes us too far afield.)

Are the situations really similar?

Campbell in 1993 was actually facing two insurgent parties, Reform and the Bloc Quebecois, a regional separatist party. The BQ actually did better than Reform in that election, and so was a more significant factor. The BQ was formed by former Conservatives, and mostly cut into their vote. In the UK, there is a comparable regional separatist party, the Scottish Nationalists. But they naturally cut into the Labour vote, not the Conservatives. 

Based on this difference, it seems the British Tories have less to fear.

On the other hand, the leader of Canadian Reform at the time, Preston Manning, was not charismatic. Nigel Farage, the UK Reform leader, is uniquely charismatic. 

Based on this difference, it seems the British Tories have much to worry about.

On the other other hand, Canadian Reform was also fuelled by regional resentments, whih gave them a natural base generating seats in Parliament. UK Reform does not have this.

In either case, the reason for the insurgency is the same: no federal party was addressing an issue, or issues, of vital concern to the general public. People felt they were being ignored. In Canada, it was about changing the constitution; although immigration levels were already also a concern. In the UK today it is mass immigration.

More broadly, there is a natural schism in “Conservative” parties. Because the left has gone Marxist since at least the 1930s, perhaps since the “Progressive” era of the 1920s, “conservative” parties have become coalitions of everyone else, of both actual conservatives and classical liberals. 

These philosophies are not compatible. 

In the UK, conservative Conservatives are referred to as “one nation” Conservatives, or sometimes as “wets.” In Canada, they are called Red Tories. They believe in paternalistic, government, as did Disraeli or Burke. Classic liberals want a smaller government and respect for individual rights and freedoms, like Gladstone or Jefferson.

Tension between the two is inevitable. If one faction suppresses the other, you get a revolt. Yet it seems that a coalition of both has been needed to overcome the Marxists.

This may no longer be true. 

Imagine

 

Friend Maximilian sends a video clip of Irish comic Dave Allen. The gag is that Catholics think only Catholics go to heaven. And he points to a comment: “I always thought every religion thinks that way.”

Actually, only some fundamentalist Protestants think this way: that only “born again” members of their own denomination get to heaven. This is a reasonable conclusion from Martin Luther’s doctrine of “salvation by faith alone.” If you are saved by your belief, you must have the correct belief to be saved.

 For the Catholic Church, however, this position is heretical. Yes, non-Catholics can get to heaven.  Google “Feeneyism”; and note the ethnicity of the name. Like Allen, and, indeed, like Maximilian, Feeney was Irish. Due to long contact and subjugation, Irish Catholics have often picked up Protestant heresies. Don’t ask me about my own Irish “Catholic” upbringing.

This does not quite mean that Catholics believe “all good people go to heaven.” Rather, to be clear, all who sincerely seek truth, as well as striving to do what is morally right, get there. Faith is involved. If this search for truth nevertheless does not lead them to Catholicism, so long as they are sincere in their beliefs, they are protected from guilt by what Catholics refer to as “invincible ignorance.” Indeed, so long as anyone seeks truth, they are a follower of Christ: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

The same is true for Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists: none of them think you must be formal members of that religion to achieve heaven, or enlightenment, or blessedness. It is only Protestants; and not even all Protestants. Many Anglicans, for example, are “latitudinarians.” Yet the fundamentally Protestant background to English-speaking culture leads many to assume that this is the standard among all religions.

Maximilian objects, “What about the Muslims and the Jews?” He was clearly thinking of the situation in Gaza. 

Being a leftist, he was at the same time taking the “plague on both your houses” position, supposing the Jews were equally responsible for the hostilities. Or rather, to avoid blaming anyone for their actions, religion was. If we could only get rid of religion, we would all live in peace and harmony. 

Hamas started the war, of course, not Israel. 

There is surely an ethnic more than a religious distinction between the two sides. One fifth of the population of Israel is Muslim. Before Hamas took over, the PLO led the fight against Israel; and the PLO was Marxist, not Islamist. George Habash, leader of the more radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was Christian, not Muslim. The conflict pre-existed any religious justification for it. 

So does Islam hold that you must be a Muslim to go to heaven?

Islam, too, believes you do not have to be a formal member of the faith to get to heaven. “Islam” means “submission.” Anyone who submits to the will of the one God is “Muslim.” Muslims will therefore argue that Islam is the world’s oldest faith, and that Jesus and Moses and Abraham and St. Francis of Assisi were all Muslims.

Islam is, however, almost uniquely, a political as well as a religious doctrine. By its standards, the only government that is ever legitimate is an Islamist government, imposing the laws laid out in the Quran and Hadith. 

This does not mean all others must convert: but they must submit to being governed by the shariah law.

This is akin to the demands of liberalism, enshrined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that all governments must recognize certain human rights and democratic principles in order to be legitimate. It is an ideological or political issue, not a religious one. 

In both cases, it is based on an appeal to divine authority. It is because God says so: “endowed by their creator.” “The laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

So, the problem is not religion; it is this annoying concept of human rights.

For the sake of world peace, should human rights be banned? Show of hands?

Simile

 

Modern textbooks never explain simile properly. The ones I am working with say only that it involves comparing two items using “like” or “as.” This definition is useful only for distinguishing a simile from a metaphor. “Toronto is like Montreal” is not a simile. The texts recognize that this is not a simile, and deduct marks from students who would say it is, but cannot seem to explain why not, leaving the students cruelly confused.

An online source, “literarydevices.net”, is a bit better. They explain that a simile is a comparison expressing similarity “between two things that are different enough from each other such that their comparability appears unlikely.” 

This is still not right. At what point are two things so different that a simile exists? “Toronto is like Gananoque” is still not a simile. Neither is “Toronto is like Peru.” These are straight comparisions. One goes on to explain how the one is like the other.

And even if you accept that this is what a simile is doing, why would you want to do this? It seems at least somewhat contradictory, or as though you are deliberately trying to confuse or trick the reader: asserting that dissimilar things are similar. 

Put simply, a simile conveys a sense of something unseen or difficult to see by comparison with something seen or easy to picture. They are useful, indeed necessary, because what we cannot see we cannot directly communicate. If I say “There is a rose in the garden,” my meaning is obvious to the listener; if there is any confusion, I point to the rose. If I say, “I love you,” the meaning is utterly ambiguous to the listener. I cannot point to the emotion I feel, and make the listener feel it. Hence many heartbreaks and betrayals.

To ever be sure what is meant by an abstract term, a term not describing a sense object, we need what T.S. Eliot called an “objective correlative”: an object to stand in for it, a visual or other physical sensation that conveys the idea or the emotion. Therefore simile, metaphor, and symbol. Therefore, indeed, I suspect, mythology itself. We must a something like “My love is like that red rose in your garden.” Our emotional reaction to a beautiful flower is reasonably evocative of what we feel when we love.

Therefore, simile. “Happiness is like a warm puppy.” “Hope is the thing with wings.” “Free as a bird.”  “Life is like a box of chocolates.” “As clever as a fox.” One cannot directly see cleverness, as one cannot see hope, or freedom, or happiness, or life, but you can watch how a fox behaves, and likely get the gist. 

It’s simple, but in these times we are generally such hopeless materialists that we cannot get it. It is a symptom of being dead inside.

Canadian Content

 

The people of Europe are now rising up against mass immigration, primarily because they see it overwhelming their own cultures. 

There is as yet no similar resistance in Canada, even though our immigration levels are higher. 

This is because the average Canadian is under the tragic misapprehension that he has no culture to protect.

And this is a spectacular failure of our governments and our education system. It is their job to promote distinct Canadian culture, as a matter of both national unity and of quality of life. For centuries, they have been doing the opposite, and flooding out our culture with “multiculturalism” is just the final stage. 

Justin Trudeau has publicly announced, “there is no Canadian mainstream.” Once a colony, always a colony. Canadians are conditioned to imagine that culture is always something that must be imported. We are here to hew wood and draw water.

When I was going through school, I chafed that almost everything we read in literature was written in the UK; an English major did not include a single course in Canadian literature. It felt almost subversive to be keeping tabs on Canadian literature in my free time. Now, seamlessly, the Britlit has been replaced with aboriginal literature, alienated immigrant literature, post-colonial literature from the Third World, anything but Canadian literature, on the transparently false premise that these, and not the Canadian voice, are the voices previously unheard in Canada and suppressed.

Canada actually has an impressive and productive artistic culture, and everyone knows it except Canadians. When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature, the reaction from the average Canadian was probably, “Who is Alice Munro?”

This is criminal malpractice by our governments and our educational systems. It is as though they have deliberately set out to destroy Canada.

Canada has no mainstream? 

We have Anne of Green Gables, which is as fine a piece of writing as has ever been done anywhere. It is the founding document for a proud Canadian tradition of children’s literature and children’s culture. This needs to be celebrated, as Denmark celebrates Hans Christian Andersen. 

We have Robert W. Service, who is the most successful poet in the English language. We are especially powerful in poetry, with Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Al Purdy. Related to this, we have a special strength in lyrical songwriting, which made Canadians especially prominent in the 60s folk revival: Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Ian Tyson, Stan Rogers, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Robbie Robertson. We were and are the best.

We have a rich and beautiful tradition of humour, and of the sympathetic portrayal of small town life. We have Stephen Leacock, especially Sunshine Sketches. We have Thomas Chandler Haliburton. And that tradition stretches on through W.O. Mitchell, Wayne and Schuster, to Norm MacDonald, Corner Gas, and Schitt’s Creek. 

We have great visual art. Everybody knows about Krieghoff, the Group of Seven and Emily Carr; maybe Paul Kane. But they are not the best. They seem more like tokens, cliches: “look, they painted Canadian landscapes.” Big deal. Tom Thompson was the man. And we should be celebrating William Kurelek, Douglas Coupland, and Alex Colville; painters who painted Canadians and Canadian life, not just postcards of the place. And when we speak of Canadian art, we must cite Yousef Karsh, the greatest portrait photographer ever. And we have great architects: Safdie, Gehry, Erickson, I guess I must also mention Cardinal, although I find his work appalling.

We are great at design; the Canadian flag is the best in the world, and that reflects a wider tradition of Canadian heraldry. In Sofia, Bulgaria, I was shown with immense pride a block of buildings they believed was the pinnacle of architectural style. These were buildings that would not have stood out in Montreal or Quebec City.

And, yeah, there’s hockey, a Canadian sport that has become a world sport. There are not many countries that have that level of cultural prestige, that their pastimes become international. As well as hockey, we have given the world the canoe, the kayak, the snow shoe. 

And we have great culinary traditions: poutine, of course; it really is available now all over the world. Our tradition of cheddar cheese used to be the world’s best, not to mention Oka and other regional cheeses, until it was destroyed by the government’s cartel system, which shut it out from world markets. We developed the McIntosh apple. We developed the Montreal bagel and Montreal smoked meat. We decided to put pineapple on pizza, but anyone is entitled to at least one mistake. Canadian rye whisky is world-renowned. We gave the world maple syrup!

And all this despite our government and our schools working against us. Despite the mobs tearing down our statues and our monuments and denigrating our founders. It is worth preserving. It is worth rising up for.

This is not to say we should be against immigrants. Many of the greatest aspects of Canadian culture have been produced by first or second-generation immigrants. The best culture comes from the mix of cultures. But it must be a melting pot; the idea must be that we are making something new and distinctly Canadian here, and we are all in this together.

Multiculturalism is colonialism. Multiculturalism is the enemy.

As Others See Us

 

Why Did the Killing Fields Happen?

 

Friend Xerxes has rfecently returned from a trip to Cambodia, in which he visited the “Killing Fields.” He expresses deep puzzlement over how such brutality could have happened. He notes that the executioners were mostly young men, and credits it all to male aggression. Then he shifts to portraying the Khmer Rouge as “ultra-nationalists,” and draws parallels to Trump.

He oddly—or perhaps predictably—does not mention the name “Khmer Rouge.” That “rouge” is the elephant in the room that he is determined not to see. That isn’t garden-variety nationalism.

As for the executioners generally being young males, that can most easily be accounted for by the fact that the task of killing without guns required hard manual labour and physical strength. It follows that the executioners would be young men. Their own individual motivations were pretty much beside the point in any case: what motivated those giving the orders?

The Khmer Rouge were in practice nationalistic. But so was the Lon Nol regime they overthrew: nationalism cannot have been the essential ingredient in their secret sauce nor in their rise to power. They were Marxists, communists, Rouge, and their official ideology was actually, in contrast to the regime they replaced, internationalist.

The clue to what caused the mass killings was that, when they came to power, they declared it to be “year zero.” They were a millenarian movement. Millenarianism (Wikipedia): “the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which ‘all things will be changed.’" 

This is the heart of Marxism. True communism will be a time of total equality and plenty, and nobody will need to work or do anything they do not want to do. There will be no government, for the lion will lie down with the lamb. One can achieve heaven on earth by political action. But in order to do this, obviously, all evil on earth must be tracked down and completely eliminated. So the mass killings begin.

This is what motivated the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, and no doubt most of their acolytes: the dream that they were achieving paradise. Here, now, imminently.

To do so, of course, everything about the current social, political, economic systems must be smashed; they are tainted with evil. They brought evil into the world. “All things will be changed.” Nobody must read. Statues and monuments must be pulled down. Money must be abolished; religion must be abolished; the family must be abolished. Any might reintroduce bad influences. 

Xenophobia, let alone nationalism, was therefore not the main impetus. The problem was that the outside world was, as yet, beyond Khmer Rouge government control, and so a source of possible bad influences.

So too Maoist China, or Stalinist Russia, or Kim’s North Korea, or Castro’s Cuba. In principle, these too were internationalist movements. But they had to draw an iron curtain around the territory they controlled to prevent evil influences. As with Cambodia, in China, Mao actually overthrew and supplanted the Nationalists.

Millenarianism in politics always leads to holocaust. Nazism was another millenarian movement. It was committed to creating the new race, the “superman,” and a “thousand-year reich.” This too would be a paradise on earth—for this new species. They too had to exclude and eliminate polluting elements. The French Revolution went down the same path, under the Jacobins. They too declared a year zero, a new age of reason. This led inevitably to fear and suppression of all dissent, of foreign influences, and to mass executions.

In all these cases, the longer term agenda was not nationalism, but world conquest by their millenarian ideology. 

This includes the Khmer Rouge. They actually started the war with Vietnam that ended in their downfall.

It is not Trump, nor the rising Euro-nationalists, but the modern “woke” left and the Eurocrats, that resemble the Khmer Rouge.

Religion vs. Spirituality

 

These days, many people claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” What do they mean by that? It is an inherently vague claim, as though they are hiding something. However, this list of distinctions recently popped up in my Facebook feed:

Religion vs Spirituality 

• Religion: worships God. • Spirituality: encourages oneness with God. 

• Religion: God is outside of you. • Spirituality: God is within you. 

• Religion: separates people who have different beliefs. • Spirituality: unites people regardless of their beliefs. 

• Religion: teaches people to be afraid of hell. • Spirituality: teaches people to create heaven on Earth. 

• Religion: based on fear and restriction. • Spirituality: based on love and freedom. 

• Religion: feels like being a single drop in the ocean. • Spirituality: feels like being the entire ocean in a single drop. 

• Religion: based on others' experience. • Spirituality: based on your personal experience. 

This makes clear how sinister “spirituality” is. 

Taking the points in turn:

 “Oneness with God” can mean either of two things: dissolving selfhood in the divine oneness, as Buddhists hope to do; or deciding one is God. A later item on this list makes clear which is meant here: the Buddhist concept is of being a single drop lost in the ocean. The “spirituality” concept is that you are the ocean. This is the sin of hubris, which we sometimes today less properly call narcissism. “I am the entire ocean of being. No one else exists.”

Hubris leads to bad things.

The second point in our list is about the same. Christianity stresses that God is present within your soul or consciousness: Jesus knocks at the door of your heart. “The kingdom of heaven is within.” The distinction must be that to the spiritual, God is encompassed by your ego and your will, “within” in this more complete sense. God is you.

The third point is correct that religion “separates people who have different beliefs.” It unites people around common beliefs; but necessarily, so long as there is not one world religion, it excludes from this unity others who do not share those beliefs, to the extent that they do not. But spirituality not more unifying. It is everyone having their own unique beliefs. It is all alienation, lacking any unifying function. What happens when two people both believe they are God, and disagree? One must eliminate the other.

The fourth point claims that religion ‘teaches people to be afraid of hell.” According to religion, this is conceptually false. Everyone has a conscience; which is to say, everyone fears hell. Religion does not instill that. Every culture assumes the cosmos is ultimately just, and there is payback for immoral actions. The eastern faiths speak of karma; the pagan Greeks said even the gods are subject to Dike, cosmic justice, and the Erinyes will pursue an evildoer. Hell is universal, and pre-exists religion.

Religion emerges to offer escape from it. 

To blame religion for hell is like blaming your doctor for illness, and supposing you can avoid it by not seeing him.

Spirituality, point four goes on to say, seeks to “create heaven on earth.” Trying to do this has led historically to unimaginable atrocities. This is the Holodimir; this is the Great Leap Forward; this is the Nazi quest for the superman; this is the Killing Fields. In Biblical terms, this is the Tower of Babel and this is the antichrist. 

It sounds like a worthy goal. Why does it always go wrong?

Karl Marx’s favourite aphorism, according to intimates, was Mephistopheles’s line from Faust: “everything that exists deserves to be destroyed.” This is where millenarianism seems to lead. One looks at what exists, sees its imperfections, sees it does not fulfill one’s deepest desires, and so one must destroy it.

Point five: it is not entirely false to say that religion is based on “fear and restrictions.” The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the Bible says, and the word “religion” means restriction, “binding.” Admitting that God exists and is not us indeed imposes obligations: to seek and honour truth, to treat others with respect, to be humble and to admit our own limitations. Religions also generally impose ritual obligations. Where’s the fun in that?

The “freedom” spirituality offers is freedom from this: freedom from the need to honour truth, to treat others with respect, or to admit our limitations. Which is to say, it offers narcissism.

This is not real freedom. One quickly becomes a slave to one’s desires, all of which are incipent addictions. More alcohol, each time less satisfying. More sex, each time less satisfying. More power, each time less satisfying. True freedom is the freedom to follow one’s conscience. This is what religion offers.

To say spirituality is based on love is a lie. “I am the ocean; nobody else exists” is the opposite of love. Christianity, on the other hand, is explicitly based on love, and on the proposition that “God is love.” 

Love is not a transitory feeling, and not sex. Love is not what one feels towards a well-cooked piece of meat. True love is seeking the best for the other, which means a set of obligations towards the other. “If you love me, keep my commandments.” This is what spirituality rejects.

I am not sure what to make of the final claim, that religion is based on others’ experience. This denies the central tenet of Judaism, Christianity, and devotional Hinduism that we must each have a personal relationship with God. And it denies the central tenet of Buddhism, that theory is irrelevant, it is all about the personal experience of enlightenment. So what is meant here?

That religion builds on the experience of others. It offers tested techniques for achieving and sustaining that personal experience of the sacred, spiritual world. To reject that is equivalent to rejecting science or education, in favour of working it all out for yourself. What is the benefit?

Unless, of course, you are God. And can simply decree reality to be whatever you want. Gravity exists only at your sufferance.

My advice: if anyone tells you they are “spiritual, but not religious,” back away slowly, and stay away.

The Pride Flag

 

It is “pride month.” Within a block of my house, two versions of the pride flag are flying from private flagpoles.

A friend of mine, himself in a stable homosexual relationship, is alarmed by this trend. It reminds him of the distinctive Nazi flag appearing in Weimar Germany. Like the Nazi flag, it expresses aggressive commitment to an all-embracing ideology. 

And, I would add, that ideology, “wokism,” or “postmodernism,” or “intersectionality,” or whatever new name it hides under, is philosophically the same as Nazism in all particulars. 

Sagan's Standard

 

Atheists and materialists love to cite Sagan's standard: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I think the concept ultimately comes from David Hume.

It is simply an admission of confirmation bias. You resist anything that differs from your existing beliefs. For what else makes a claim “extraordinary”?

Or else it is an expression of the ad populum fallacy; if by “extraordinary” is meant an assertion not often made. Truth is not determined by vote.

It is the evidence itself that determines whether a claim is “extraordinary.” The same standard of evidence applies to all assertions. 

Angry Pierre

 

Andrew Lawton has just published a bio of Pierre Poilievre. Discussing it, he and Brian Lilley puzzled over the common claim by Trudeau and the Liberals, and by some commentators, that Poilievre is angry and mean. Even that this makes him ultimately unelectable. They feel the opposite. They find him friendly and cheerful.

So do I. And not just his supposed private persona. His public persona.  It is striking to me that Poilievre never shows anger, never loses his cool when attacked, however outrageously. He always responds with a smile, and, as often as not, with a joke. The self-control is astounding. 

Trudeau, by contrast, always seems angry. He mocks up anger even when I suspect he does not feel it. He calls opponents Nazis, “unacceptable,” foreign agents, and on and on.

How to account for this odd inversion of what seem to be plain, visible facts?

I think Harry Tuman said it best. 

When he was giving a speech, some listener shouted at him, “Give ‘em hell, Harry.” 

And Truman responded, “I never give them hell. I just tell the truth, and to them it sounds like hell.”

Poilievre is an extremely good communicator. By simply clearly stating the matter, and asking precise questions, he makes the other side look bad. It feels like hell to them. A narcissist will never blame themselves for an error or misdeed: instead, they blame the person who points it out. You blame the police; you blame the judge; you blame the jury; you blame the church; you blame conventional morality; you blame society as a whole.

It’s a childish response, but common. Especially, these days, on the left.

For Poilievre, it is a Catch-22; he is obliged to pretend to be wrong.

Roughly the same narcissistic impulse perhaps accounts for much Trump Derangement Syndrome. 

Trump too is a great communicator. That sounds like hell to the other side.

Trump is not usually blamed, like Poilievre, for seeming angry. That is because he really does indulge in anger at times. Trump does, unlike Poilievre, trade in insults and make extreme charges against his opponents. He can be brutal to an opponent. Therefore, they do not accuse him of anger.

But he does speak truth; he is always saying out loud what everyone is thinking. This is what the left fears about him; and so they accuse him of lying.

Poilievre’s words are more calculated than Trump’s, more like those of a conventional politician. He hedges and dodges: will not take a stand on the proposed new capital gains tax, because there is no political gain in it, and so forth. He speaks the truth, but more selectively. But unlike Trump, he does not show anger; is always gentlemanly about it. And so they accuse him not of lying or prevaricating, but of always being angry.

This is how gaslighting works. 

Whatever the narcissist says will be the opposite of the truth. 

One reason they do this is because they fear truth, and want to get as far away from it as possible. Another reason is that they recognize good traits in others, and immediately envy them. They must appropriate them to themselves instead, and insist they are not found in the other. 

The takeaway is that we are currently governed by petulant children with weapons.

Why Canada Is So Woke

 

Canada has a reputation as the wokest country in the Anglosphere; perhaps in the developed world. What is it about Canada that makes it so susceptible to this?

I say it is the legendary Canadian “niceness,” the love of social harmony. “Peace, order, and good government.” This, I think, traces back to the UE Loyalists: English Canada was founded on the fundamental principle of deference to authority. This means not just government authority—and Canada is surely the only country in the world where the police force is such a beloved national symbol—but also social authority generally, the dictates of good manners and polite discourse.

This means that Canadians are peculiarly vulnerable to being bullied. Anyone who shouts loudly will have their demands met, for the sake of social peace, and anyone who speaks as an authority will be accepted as such. 

This is what the modern woke left really is: a selection of bullies making demands. A set of special interest groups, overall a minority. Like any bully, they will not desist until and unless firmly challenged; their demands will only grow and grow. And against this trend, Canada is uniquely defenseless.

Women are a similar case. Feminism was the vanguard of the woke trend; women continue to be more “woke” then men. Yet women are the chief victims of wokery. Feminism, in rejecting the traditional feminine role, subverted all their interests. This was more obvious in the early days, when “consciousness-raising sessions” were the main feminist activity. Women had to be bullied or socially shamed into the new doctrine. But now studies show that women are less happy than they were pre-1960, and women in developed nations are less happy than those in the Third Word, where traditional roles are still more common. And they are losing their advantage in life expectancy over men. 

This has happened because women are like Canadians. Women are naturally inclined—naturally inclined, note—to be nice, to defer to authority, to be flexible and go along. This, like Canadian niceness, is usually an admirable trait, but leaves one vulnerable to bullying and abuse. 

And the bully’s demands grow and grow. Now being nice requires accepting men in women’s washrooms, rapists in women’s prisons, men taking the trophies in women’s sports. 

This also perhaps explains the commonly noted phenomenon of “flying monkeys”: how bullies and narcissists always find willing accomplices. “We are three times the slaves of the owner of the Golden Cap, whosoever he may be.”

How far can it all go before the enslaved monkeys rebel? Perhaps we are about to see.

Jesus Speaks on Family Values

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. 21 When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”

22 And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”

23 So Jesus called them over to him and began to speak to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. 26 And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. 27 In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man’s house. 28 Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.”

30 He said this because they were saying, “He has an impure spirit.”

31 Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”

33 “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.

34 Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

There is a great deal to consider in this short passage, Sunday's gospel reading, For now, notice that it is framed as a conflict between Jesus and his family. Is the Bible warning us to beware of “family values”?

His family, it begins, went out to seize him; on the grounds that he was “out of his mind” or had an “impure spirit.” That he was insane, we would say today. “Insane” literally means “unclean,” “impure.”

“If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand,” Jesus observes. By “house” he clearly means family: it is hard to see how the physical structure of a building can be “divided against itself.” And Jesus’s own family, at this moment, is divided against him. He is saying that a divided, dysfunctional family must be shunned.

“And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand.” In other words, when there is a divided family, or a divided nation, Satan cannot be on both sides. Whenever there is strife, one side is righteous, and the other side is wrong. There is no moral ground for pacifism or for being an innocent bystander.

“no one can enter a strong man’s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man’s house.”

This looks at first like a non sequitor. What does the question of whether he is mad have to do with binding strong men and stealing from them? Why do “strong men” even come up?

The answer is obvious: his family is trying to seize him, to bind him, as we do with those we declare insane, either literally or, currently, through the use of chemicals. He is saying this is to steal from him. We must question: how often is this true of diagnoses of madness, of mental illness, generally? Are they attempts to steal? Is mental illness really a case of families trying to steal from a particularly strong child or sibling?

Freud himself, after all, observed that “the neurosis rides the strongest horse in the stable.” 

Next, what is the unforgivable sin, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? It is, here, calling someone mad who is not mad, but inspired. Understand that “mad” and “possessed by a demon” meant the same thing in Jesus’s day. It still does, really: “obsession” has this meaning.

I think we can abstract further: the unforgivable sin is when one recognizes the truth, or the right, and deliberately denies it. When one tries to convince a victim that they are insane or immoral for cleaving to it: gaslighting. When one tries to convince the rest of the world that someone is mad or bad for speaking the truth or doing the good: things like antisemitism; perhaps much of the edifice of “mental illness.” This is unforgivable because it is a conscious and deliberate turning against God, who is in his being truth and goodness. These are the Logos.

Jesus concludes by explicitly denying his family. Our true family is those who seek the truth and do the right; in this family of the church we are all brothers.

This all raises an awkward theological point. It would seem that, far from being without sin, as Catholicism teaches, Mary here is guilty of the one unforgivable sin.

But it can be reconciled by referring to St. Paul: that the essence of morality for women is to obey their husbands. It is Jesus’s mother and brothers who come—Mary may simply be acquiescing to the will and judgment of her male relatives. Which is what "brothers" meant in ancient Aramaic. Just as she acquiesces in her essential moral act: “let it be done to me according to your word.” This is perhaps why the Bible cites the presence of male relatives; Joseph having died by this time.

Feminists won’t like the message; but it is consistent. Morality for women consists not in judgment, but acquiescence, 

There are indeed many messages here. But one important one is to beware of family values. Family values are not Christianity. They are a hijacking of Christianity, comparable to nationalism or racism. And as dangerous.

Getting Old

 

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. – 2 Corinthians

This second reading at yesterday’s mass is an encouraging one for those of us getting on in years.

A Blot on Canada's History

 

Not the residential schools--the reporting on the residential schools.

Hard Times and Great Men

 

The way governments like the Tories in the UK, or Trudeau in Canada, are imploding looks like divine intervention. But so does the concomitant rise of political figures with unique, uncanny talents: Farage, Poilievre, and Trump. All are masterful rhetoricians; all are brilliant off the cuff; all work without notes; all convey sincerity.

How is it that these hard times seem to produce the needed man?

We saw the same thing circa 1980. After a time of ennui, of decline and relative social chaos, we saw at once Thatcher in Britain, Reagan in the US, and Pope John Paul II; one might also cite Trudeau in Canada, although he was not new in power. He rose in response to an earlier crisis, that of Quebec separatism; but was still in power 80-84.

And we saw it in the great leaders who rose in response to WWII: Churchill, De Gaulle, Tito. 

I theorize that such talents are always about. However, so long as things are going well, nobody wants to listen to them. Churchill spent years in the wilderness. Partly due to envy, partly due to a sense that they might change things too much: safer to elect a cipher, so long as things are going well enough. There is also, in the back of our minds, the fear that any one individual who is too skilful and strong might be able to turn his office into a dictatorship.

I think, however, this last fear is misplaced. Those who are especially skilful are least tempted to seize power; they can achieve it legitimately. Not only did Churchill leave office peacefully, for example; he declined a peerage. A guaranteed office was an insult to his talents as a “man of the commons.” De Gaulle walked away from power twice. Washington limited himself to two terms. Dictators are usually unimpressive sorts who rise above their competence, and so need to strongarm to stay there. They are the relatively obscure backroom players, like Putin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ghaddafi, or Saddam, or Franco, or Kim Il-Sung, or Pol Pot, or, I might say, Pope Francis, who seem to emerge from the shadows. They appear on the dias, and people ask themselves, “Who is this guy?”

Granted that some dictators are the exception. Hitler and Mussolini are exceptions; as is Canada’s Trudeau. They were prominent figures before being elected, and had political skills. But I think it can fairly be said that they were all three clearly unqualified for their role of governing, of management. So they resorted to force and subterfuge.

Trump, Poilievre, and Farage all, in their way, have extensive management experience. 

Nor did Hitler, or Mussolini, radiate spontaneity and a sense of sincerity, as Poilievre, Farage, and Trump do.

They are not the stuff of which dictators are made.

Sunak the D- Day Dodger

 

Many are stumped by Rishi Sunak’s decision to cut short his attendance at the D Day 80th Anniversary Memorial observances to get back to do a TV interview. Never mind the lack of patriotism: it looked like political suicide.

But then, it looked like political suicide when Sunak called the election, down so far in the polls, with months to go on his mandate. And it seemed a strange lapse when he unnecessarily called it outdoors in the rain, without an umbrella; when he posed before an Exit sign for the photographers; or gave a campaign s at the Titanic Museum.

What on earth, they wonder, can be going on?  Can Sunak and his advisors all be so incompetent?

God would seem to be intervening in events. It works through our consciences: those who know they are in the wrong will, over time, deliberately sabotage themselves. They will taunt fate, until they are finally caught. When the police finally do catch a serial killer, the murderer falls asleep—and sleeps for some time. It is as if a great weight has been taken off their shoulders. At last all the tension is gone, and things are back as they ought to be.

Dostoyevsky captured the sentiment in Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.

This is why trials by ordeal, and duels, were once used to achieve justice. This is why, in war, if one side clearly has the moral high ground, they will win.

Sunak and the Tories know they have betrayed their supporters, and botched things through their intraparty power struggles. Sunak knows nobody elected him, and he is illegitimate. They cannot bear the pressure. They cannot rest until they are properly chastised for it.

We see something similar with Trudeau’s government in Canada. They have become gradually more brazen in their abuse of power. Caught out on the Covid vaccine, they demanded total lockdowns and a vaccine mandate. Called out on the lockdowns and the mandate, they responded by declaring the Emergency Act and seizing bank accounts. Faced with spiralling inflation from their spending, they double down on the carbon tax, alienating their strongest regional base. And try to force farmers to grow less food, limiting fertilizer. And they keep passing laws to silence dissent.

Recently, when a Conservative on committee demanded the names of MPs who seem to be guilty of treason, of aiding foreign powers to spy on Canadians, the response from the Liberal across the table was “Boo Hoo.”

This makes no sense given that they must eventually face the voters. They are saying, in effect, “I dare you all to vote us out of office.”

Given the polls, it cannot be arrogance. It is more like hysteria.

The same is true for the Biden administration and its acolytes, prosecuting Trump and his colleagues. Did they fix the 2020 election? Of course they did; they are quite openly trying to fix 2024. It amounts to an admission of guilt.

The same is so for the “woke” left as a whole. They have collectively jumped the shark. Their demands seem almost deliberately unreasonable. Now we must, for example, pretend that men are women, or be prosecuted.

This makes things weird for the moment, but it also means that the collapse of the left is in progress, and is inevitable. 

The Four R's: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, and Relevance

 

Courtesy of Indeed, here is a supposedly ideal answer to the standard interview question for teachers, “What is your teaching philosophy?” In other words, this is what your teaching philosophy is supposed to be. And it is utterly wrong:

“My teaching philosophy is to make my lesson plans relatable. In many cases, when a student can’t identify with the material, it’s harder for them to gather meaning. As a literature teacher, my goal is to help students empathize with characters, places and concepts, especially when those things are different from their own life experiences. As a student, I found stories more memorable when my teachers helped me draw parallels. As a student teacher, I like to make comparisons between older texts, like Shakespeare and modern events. For example, comparing events in the plays to events in pop culture. This not only helps students understand the stories but also helps them draw their own conclusions.”

First, the need for students to “identify with the material.” They are supposed to see “their own life experiences” reflected in the material.

This is the opposite of the point of reading a book in the first place. One reads a novel to get away from one’s own everyday life, to experience the world from another’s perspective. Accordingly, the books that sell the best, that people most enjoy, are set in exotic locales and based on improbable situations: Harry Potter, James Bond, superhero comics and movies, the Da Vinci Code, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Star Wars. The surest way to bore students, and turn them off reading altogether, is to select readings that most closely reflect their own life experience. 

Moreover, this is deliberately preventing them from learning, subverting the entire point of going to school. One already knows about one’s own life situation. 

For the same reason, it is perverse to suggest that minority voices have traditionally been underrepresented in our literature or in the bookstores. Being exotic has always been an advantage. Pauline Johnson used to perform in buckskin. Grey Owl faked his Indian identity. 

As for comparing events in the classical texts to pop culture: always done these days. For years, every text I used had a chapter on the movie “Titanic”; and I could see the students roll their eyes and hear them audibly groan. Not “Titanic” again!

The problems with this approach are many. 

First, the students already know pop culture. They are not learning anything; you’re just wasting their time. 

Second, they probably know it better than the teacher. It is insulting to presume the teacher knows more than they do about such things. Why? What makes them the authority on Taylor Swift? Just because they’re older? Must the students merely knuckle under to established authority? Is this the lesson being taught? 

Third, nothing is so dated and uncool as yesterday’s biggest pop phenomenon. It is impossible to stay current. Especially in textbooks, which take at least a year from composition to publication, and then remain in circulation for years. Pop culture references will always be dated, and wincingly uncool. 

Fourth, everyone will fix on the same obvious pop culture references, going for the biggest bang, the biggest connection with the youngsters, and the thing, like Titanic, so big that even they, uncool old people as they are, are aware of it. Students will encounter the same cultural reference again and again, boring them beyond comprehension. When they could be out learning something.

A similar problem adheres when you try to connect your classic material with “current events.” Nothing is as dead, old, and dull as yesterday’s news. Text can’t possibly keep up, not being reissued daily. To compensate, “current events” in the classroom inevitably means a handful of generic topics: ecology, the environment, or “the environmental crisis”; the issues raised by new technology, considered generically; globalization; peace versus war, and such. There is an obvious problem of ideological bias; but without ideological bias, such topics are desperately repetitious and boring. Yes, pollution is bad. Yes, there are bad things on the Internet. Yes, the world is becoming smaller. Yes, peace is better than war. Snore.

Back in the old days, to avoid these problems, modern history was not taught; only classical history. Modern history, current events? Set that up as formal debates among the students. For the same reason, current novels and recent writing were not taught. Leave those for reading clubs in the common rooms.

Our ancestors had it right.

Those Endless Religious Wars

 

Friend Maximilian laments that too many people are convinced that only their religion is true; leading to endless strife. If only we could get past this religious prejudice and become more tolerant.

This is a common view. Like most common views, it is the opposite of the truth.

If you do not believe your religion is true, you do not believe your religion. If you nevertheless attend services and go through the public motions, you are a hypocrite.

“When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them. I tell you the truth, that is all the reward they will ever get. But when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private.”

“These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”

If you believe your religion is true, it follows that, wherever another religion differs from yours, you believe it is false. 

Now, does believing another person’s religion is false lead to strife? Do you commonly beat someone up for being in error? Do you want to kick someone down the stairs for thinking 1 + 1 = 7?

Religion imposes on its sincere followers rules for moral conduct; that is what the word “religion” means: “binding.”  These involve respect for the rights of others: in a phrase, “do unto others as you would be done by.” All the major religions do this. In that they impose these moral obligations on their followers, they are the main bulwark we have against strife. Laws alone are useless without a moral populace. If the people are not moral, they will not follow them anyway. If the police are not moral, they will not enforce them. If the judges are not moral, neither will they. Religion is the cement for all social order.

There are and have been wars of religion. There is a problem when two moral systems try to coexist in close proximity. But historically, most wars of religion involve the Muslims. Islam is curious in this regard: it is not just a religion, but a political ideology. It requires control of the secular power. This is not true of Buddhism other than Vajrayana, of Hinduism, of Judaism, Taoism, or mainstream Christianity. All are “mystical” faiths operating on the individual level, lacking a political agenda. Protestant sects vary on this point.

So subtract Islam from the equation. 

How many religious wars have there been, then, really? 

Northern Ireland comes up. But note, Sinn Fein and the IRA were Marxist, not Catholic, and condemned by the Catholic Church. The Ulster Protestants were motivated by religious prejudice, perhaps, but not the other side. In such a case, to blame “religion” or “religions” in general means blaming the victim. Blame the specific religion, or its errant followers.

Take away religion, on the other hand, and what do you have historically? Nazi Germany—the Nazi leadership was pagan or anti-religious, in revolt against Judeo-Christian morality. Soviet Russia and Maoist China, both officially atheist and hostile to religion. The Khmer Rouge and North Korea. The Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France. You have genocide. Inevitably.

Religion is the chief bulwark preventing social chaos, in which the strong simply prey on the weak.

Of course the strong resent religion, and will condemn it if emboldened. Be deeply suspicious of any force or source or opinion that stands against religion.