Are Mermaids an Endangered Species?

A friend is worried about the plight of the polar bear. Apparently, with global warming, they are suddenly endangered, at least according to the IUCN and the NRDC. The claim is that, with less ice in the Arctic, they will lose the diving platforms from which they hunt for their prey.

And the “US Commission on Ocean Policy” has come out strongly to “significantly increase federal spending on ocean science and education.”

I can’t get excited.

The IUCN is essentially a consortium of people who have a vested interest in convincing the public that at least some species are endangered. If they are not, IUCN ceases to have any reason to exist or to be funded. The same is true for the self-appointed “Natural Resources Defense Council.” As for the “US Commission on Ocean Policy,” could anyone really expect a commission so named ever to come out with the opposite finding: that the government should give them less money in future? That there is no need for such a commission and the government has wasted money by funding it? Does that sound vaguely consistent with human nature?

Rare individuals can sometimes be honest. Committees never are.

This is the basic flaw in too many, and quite possibly all, of the sources calling for more money to be put into the preservation of various species, and all ecological research. The calls come from people who stand to gain money and power if we buy the claim.

Of course, this is a bit of an ad hominem argument on my part. The fact that they have an obvious vested interest means that what they say should never be taken at face value; their claims and their methodology must be carefully examined. Nevertheless, their studies might be correct.

The IUCN comments on the polar bear, topping off their list of endangered species worldwide, suggest otherwise, though. They are purely speculative—polar bears _might_ run into a problem in future due to global warming, if there is global warming. They make no reference to the recent studies (e.g., see http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=143012005) that suggest the polar bear population is rising rapidly; if only to explain why they discount them. This suggests intent to deceive.

And it bodes ill for the rest of their list—if the polar bear is their best shot, they don’t have much of a case.

Remembering this bias, it is well to realize how limited our knowledge of what goes on in the biosphere really is; we are not much better at understanding or predicting its complex interrelationships than at predicting the weather, or predicting climate change. All are systems so far known to be too complex for reliable computer modeling. Because this is the case, studies can be made to appear to show almost anything.

Here’s an example: are the number of species known to exist in the world growing or declining? Answer: they are growing. We are still discovering new species all the time, while documented extinctions are rare.

Of course, being Darwinians, we believe these “new” species have always been there; we’ve just never noticed them before, in all of human history.

Still, our practical experience is of a growing, not a shrinking, species list.

But consider this as well: if we are so bad at spotting species that have always been there, how sure can we ever be that a given species is “extinct”? Indeed, many species, once thought to be extinct, have then been spotted again in the wild.

And how about this? Every time a new species is spotted, it goes immediately onto the “endangered species list.” Necessarily—it must be rare, or someone, out of six billion and over five thousand years, would have seen it before.

The natural impression this produces is that many more species every day are becoming endangered. My friend’s source, IUCN, reports the figure “16,119 species of animals and plants” are “threatened with extinction” as if this is an important number. Yet much of it may simply represent new species discoveries, not really a threatened decline in biodiversity at all.

We know even less, of course, about what goes on in the oceans, than about what is happening on the land. This makes the oceans an especially rich field for those who want to fudge data—and it is therefore telling that they seem to get a lion’s share of the attention of the doomsayers.

And next to the oceans, we know least about the polar regions. Intriguing, therefore, that it is from here that warnings come about supposed rapid global warming, ice shelf collapse, and holes in the ozone layer.

Travellers’ tales have always come from such places. A few hundred years ago, the inhabitants of the North Pole had tails, or wore a bright red suit and drove reindeer. Or Saturn ruled a temperate paradise where, beyond a whirlpool, people lived forever. Just as, in the oceans, there were vast sea serpents, below which beautiful mermaids lived in their coral palaces, in a place called Atlantis.

Some Citizens are More Equal than Others

Canada has joined the US, Australia, and New Zealand in voting against a UN Resolution on the Rights of Indigenous People. There is of course a hue and cry, about Canada voting against human rights.

Right. When you see the US, Australia, and New Zealand together on one side of an issue, and Saudi Arabia, Cuba, China, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Russia—all current members of the UN Council on Human Rights—on the other, who is more likely to be defending human rights?

To put it in the most charitable light possible, the proposed charter—now an official UN resolution—is self-contradictory. It requires that indigenous people be treated as equal to all others (Article 2), then immediately contradicts this by giving indigenous peoples a wide range of rights not available to other citizens.

Governments are obliged, for example, to protect indigenous groups from “any action”—not any _government_ action, but any action by anybody—with the “aim or effect” of depriving the aboriginals of their “ethnic identities” or “cultural values.”

Apparently, if an aboriginal person fails to think like all other aboriginal people, a crime has been committed—perhaps by that aboriginal, but certainly by the nearest non-aboriginal. What values one may choose or not choose to hold, as an indigene, are strictly limited. If an evangelist convinces an Indian to convert to a new religion, for example, isn’t he depriving him of some element of his ethnic identity? Many already argue strongly that he is—see the furor about religious residential schools in Canada.

What about a converted aboriginal who manages to convert a second aboriginal? Has he committed a crime? Or is this crime only possible for non-aboriginal persons? How about a teacher who teaches them to read and write? Or even how to use a wheel? None of these are present in traditional Canadian Indian culture. Has a crime been committed?

Indigenous people also now have the right to “practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs,” specifically including their “religious and spiritual traditions.” Governments may not interfere.

Okay; but what if their cultural traditions involve a violation of the human rights of others? What if they traditionally practice, say, human sacrifice, or cannibalism, or slavery, or polygamy, or the exposure of unwanted grandparents, or the need to kill another adult human in order to be recognized as a full member of the community? In the past, indigenous groups in Canada did all of these things. It would seem this is now their inalienable right as aboriginals.

Even if this is okay, can the rest of us do the same?

Canada objected in particular to the requirement that no law be passed affecting indigenous people without their prior consent, through their own institutions.

And Canada should know.

Canadian aboriginals are not just one people. They are as different from one another as Scots, Hungarians, and Mauritanians. There are over 600 recognized native governments in Canada. Now, remember how hard it was to get the consent of ten different provinces in order to amend the constitution? Multiply this by 60—and to pass any law.

Now apply the principle to other groups, as equality demands: one would need the consent of all organized groups in Canada in order to pass any law. In effect, any legislation would have to pass unanimously. Pass a law against picking pockets? Not if the pickpockets’ union objected.

Aboriginals are also apparently entitled, as a matter of “equality,” to “special measures” to improve their economic and social conditions.

If this is not special treatment, what meaning is left in the term? And what can “special measures” mean—given that all honest governments, as a matter of course, already seek to improve the economic and social conditions of all citizens as much as they can? Doesn’t it necessarily mean taking money, resources, jobs, and opportunities from other citizens and giving it to aboriginals? Whatever you might want to call this, “equality” is not the right word. This is actually about how Hitler started out with the Jews—partly on the basis that the Aryans were the indigenous people, the natives, and the Jews were foreign colonizers.

Another article in the resolution grants aboriginals the right to “conservation and protection of the environment and the productive capacity of their lands… and resources. States shall establish and implement assistance programmes for indigenous people for such conservation.”

This is an odd right—it looks like a “right” never to fail. Wish we all had that. Given that the indigenes already hold their own lands and resources, who is it but they themselves who could possibly be depleting the productive capacity of their lands and resources? Aboriginals are guaranteed bailouts by the rest of us if they destroy their own property. A non-aboriginal, on the other hand, might instead be charged with arson, or fined for pollution.

Indigenes are also granted “intellectual property” rights over their “cultural heritage.” This “cultural heritage” includes their “genetic resources.”

This implies that aboriginals are personally responsible for their own genetic makeup as well as their entire culture. Do all Italians collect a royalty whenever anyone uses Italian DNA, or views the Mona Lisa? And, if we are really going to hold aboriginals responsible for their own genetic makeup, aren’t we opening a door to a rather unfortunate possibility? That they can just as readily be blamed and punished as rewarded for it?

The resolution also reserves the right of traditional governments not only to select their own membership (Article 33), but also to “determine the responsibilities of individuals to their communities” (Article 35).

Literally, this means any individual can be declared by any aboriginal government to be their rightful subject. Once so designated, they can be legally forced to do whatever that government chooses. And there is no escape.

There is a word for that, when done by non-aboriginals.

The word is slavery.

There are other practical problems. In demanding such special treatment for a special group designated “indigenous,” the UN resolution neglects to define what they mean by the term “indigenous.” It is, after all merely a “social construct,” indeed, a polite fiction. With one hypothetical exception, no country really has an indigenous population. All peoples started out somewhere else; nobody has sprung from the earth where they stand. Conversely, all nations have previous inhabitants, and in those in which they have not been massacred wholesale, most still retain populations of them.

There is, apparently, a reason for this, and it is the obvious one; it is not merely an oversight. No UN body has ever been able to agree on a definition.

This alone makes the entire resolution frighteningly arbitrary—any government is free to enforce or not enforce it to the benefit or detriment of any group, ensuring unequal protection from the law.

It is, in sum, an instrument of tyranny.

On Jihad and the Muslim Oppression of Women

I attended a talk at our campus today by a former Texas Protestant preacher who, quite some years ago, converted to Islam.

He was good; of course. He was a professional talker. He has his own local TV show. Lots of folksy jokes, only a few of which I had heard before. Granted, no intellectual depth, and a whole lot of repetition. He was not honest or clever enough to avoid repeating as truth a typical bit of the Black Legend against the Catholic Church. He claimed vaguely that “a Catholic Church council 1600 years ago debated whether women had souls.”

There is a reason why he had to be vague—and this suggests dishonesty on his part. Makes it harder to check. The reference seems to be to the Council of Macon. No, you’ve never heard of it. Because it does not appear in any list of the Church Councils. Indeed, there is no reference to it of any kind in the Catholic Encyclopedia. This is because it was not an ecumenical Church Council, not what we normally mean by the term "Church Council." It had no authority to speak for the Church. It was just a small regional gathering of bishops in France, called by themselves--a "council" only in the generic sense of a meeting.

But there is also no evidence that it debated any such question.

We have the records from the actual council. There is no mention in them of either women or souls. All we have to the contrary is a claim by St. Gregory of Tours that at this or some other unidentified French council of about this time, one bishop argued that the term “man” in the Bible did not include women. No more, and no less; and none present, according to Gregory, agreed with him. Gregory reports the incident, apparently, because the bishop’s claim seemed so shocking, so absurd, to Gregory and to his contemporaries.

Now, here’s the great irony: if this means even one bishop believed women did not have souls, it means that feminists today do not believe women have souls—for they make exactly the same claim, that the term "man" does not include women. Yet nobody is shocked when they say it.

In other words, much of what Dr. Yusuf Estes said was probably misinformed. But he was fun to watch, anyway.

The Rev. Dr’s topic was “Why are women not equal in Islam?” An interesting extension of my recent posting here on abayas.

He pointed out that the majority of converts to Islam are women. And the reason for this is simple: because women get a better deal under Islam than do men. They are not equal, because they are superior.

The abaya is only the beginning. In Islam, a man who marries is obliged to fully support his wife financially. She has no financial obligations towards him. Legally, she can do as she pleases; work or not work. If she chooses to work, her money is then her own.

It is an overwhelming advantage for women: the same advantage a slaveowner has over a slave.

What of the man’s status within the family? Dr. Yusuf pointed out that the best the Quran said for the husband and father was that he was “imam” of the family. This does not imply dominance—the word for that would be “malek,” king. “Imam” means simply “leader in prayer.” Moreover, the word derives from the root “Uma,” which is the word for “Mother.”

In other words, it means the father’s position is to be “the mother during prayer.” And “mother” is roughly cognate to “leader.”

How can this be construed as elevating man above woman? Rather, at most, it elevates man to equality with women.

But only for a few minutes a day.

Dr. Estes also asked the audience to recite in unison—as they were able to do, even in English—one of the best-known Hadith.

Someone asked Mohammed to whom, after God, a mortal owed his obedience. “To the prophets,” Muhammed explained.

“And after that?”

“To their mother.”

“And after that?”

“To their mother.”

“And after that?”

“To their mother.”

“And after that?”

“To their father.”

Kind of makes the point.

Oppression of women? Right.

Of course, all this would be about equally true of Christian traditions—that they give the advantage overwhelmingly to the woman in most things. Which is one reason churches are mostly full of women, not men. The only real difference is that Islam still holds strongly to these values, while the West has mostly fallen away from its religious values.



In passing, Dr. Yusuf made another important point, on the meaning of the word “kaffir.” This is the word usually translated into English as “infidels” or “unbelievers.” People quote passages about fighting kaffirs, about “jihad” against kaffirs, as if they referred to Christians and Jews, as if they justified aggression against them.

They do not.

The proper meaning of the word “kaffir” is “someone who covers.” It is actually etymologically related to the English word “cover.” It is very like the Christian term “hypocrite,” literally, “one who wears a mask.”

It refers properly to someone who accepts the truth of Islam, and yet conceals it, or conceals his own acts counter to it.

No honest Christian can be accused of “covering up” his lack of adherence to Islam. Exactly as no honest Muslim can be accused of being a hypocrite.

And the calumnies the Quran pronounces against kaffirs are very similar to the calumnies the Bible pronounces against hypocrites.

An N-Bomb

Those who follow this blog regularly may have noticed a certain absence of paid advertising recently.

The reason for this, I think, is my recent blatant use of "the n-word": "nigger."

Kind of makes you understand why AP did not dare use it, even though it was the crucial information in a straight news piece.

Kind of makes you understand why there are so many important things the mainstream media dare not say. Their livelihoods, after all, depend on those paid ads pouring in.

Nor are the advertisers to blame here--it's not their business to alienate people. Just the way the world works, and how social pressures for conformity can be so strong.

Thank God for the blogosphere.

Fun with Abayas

In a world survey of happiness, guess which countries scored highest for the happiness of women relative to men? Nine of the top ten: Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, the UAE, Bangladesh, Palestine, Jordan, and Morocco. All are Muslim.

It is just a lot more fun, it turns out, to be a Muslim woman than a Muslim man.

How does the anti-religious left reconcile this with their claim that women in these countries, and in Islam, are “oppressed” or “repressed”?

I can’t imagine. But did they ever really believe it? No, those who complain about the “treatment of women” in Muslim societies are not opposed to religion because they are concerned about the welfare of women; they are opposed to religion, and “concern about the welfare of women” is a polite fiction, a mental veil, to mask their true focus.

It’s all, after all, about getting naked.

That's all "women's liberation" was ever all about.

For women, though, wearing an abaya is lots of fun. It confers the power of invisibility—you can see others, but they cannot see you. This is one of mankind's deepest fantasies. It’s like having tinted windows in your car, or wearing sunglasses, or wearing a mask; only much more so. It gives you a huge strategic advantage over everyone you meet.

Men, of course, are not allowed to wear them. That would be a serious crime.

But for women, wearing an abaya is, contrary to much nonsense in the West, completely voluntary.

They do it because it is fun.

Pyramid Powers

Busy at my own work, I was half-listening to two other college professors chatting. Something about Von Daniken and Velikovsky--they both enjoyed them, and took them quite seriously. One was advising the other what books to read next. Then something about the Mayan pyramids in Mexico being identical to the early pyramids in Egypt. But “the Church had destroyed the Mayan writings.” So we’ll never know the connections.

The International Catholic Conspiracy had struck again.

These were very educated people, holders of advanced degrees. These are the people educating our young.

I have been around many ivied water coolers and faculty lounges, and have heard there many such urban legends. This overheard conversation was about par for the course.

How is it that so much of what such well-educated people “know” is superstition and prejudice?

Let’s look at this bit about the Catholic Church suppressing Native American culture.

In fact, what records we have of the Mayans were preserved by Catholic clergy. The Popul Vuh, the Mayan sacred epic, was preserved and translated into Spanish by Father Francisco Ximanez in 1702. Without him, we would perhaps know nothing of the Mayans.

And this is true throughout the Americas. In most places, where the native peoples have a writing system, it was devised for them by missionaries. Where they have any kind of written records of their past or any literature, they were written down and preserved by missionaries. Where the languages have been preserved, it has been through grammars and dictionaries made by missionaries. Where we know the old legends and beliefs, these were recorded by missionaries. Missionaries worked hard to preserve native culture. In Kamloops, BC, for example, Father Jean-Marie Raphael LeJeune founded and published the Kamloops Wawa from 1891 to 1923: a regular newspaper in the Chinook language, reflecting Native concerns.

Native culture was changed forever –one might say it was “destroyed,” but that is debatable--by plagues, alcohol, and the sudden availability of higher quality goods and more efficient technologies from abroad. It was not destroyed by Christianity.

Granted, Christianity was one part of this mix. Christianity replaced the native religions, just as it had earlier replaced native religions across Europe. At the same time, it did what it could to protect the natives from alcohol and plague.

And the change from native to Christian beliefs was hardly by compulsion. I, too, would be pretty eager to embrace a new faith that condemned human sacrifice, slavery and torture, preached the equality of man, and protected me from curses, loss of soul, and demonic possession. Never mind that it was the core of the culture that had produced steel, navigation, and so forth.

Was this a great loss for native culture? Surely, any believing Christian must believe it was a great gain, for the culture and for every native individual. Perhaps we Christians are wrong—but the natives of that day were perfectly free to make up their own minds on that, and their own decision ought to be respected. In any case, if in this Europeans “destroyed” native culture, we must believe equally that the culture of Europe itself was earlier “destroyed” by this same foreign doctrine. Some do believe this.The Nazis did.

But why do two college professors believe something so obviously false?

Whenever occurs a great evil or a great good, whenever right and wrong appear in the world in the raw, a standard process begins. All of us who have a vested interest in concealing the truth—which probably means all of us--start to work, spinning silken threads out of our own guts, to conceal matters under thick cobwebs of disinformation. The guilty are exonerated and rewarded, the good punished and blamed. We do this so we can live with ourselves, for we know we are too often not good and not right.

And so the evils of Fascism and Nazism are now commonly blamed on the Catholic Church, which was at the time almost the only voice against it.

And so pedophilia, which was almost accepted by Kinsey and the Sixties “sexual revolution,” is now commonly blamed on the Catholic Church, which was at the time almost the only voice against it.

And so racism is now commonly blamed uniquely on White Anglo-Saxons, on the British and the Americans; note Andrew Young’s famous claim that the English invented racism. But these were, historically, the people who fought hardest against Hitler, against slavery, against caste in India. These were the people who most promoted the doctrines of human rights and the equality of man.

And so racism now commonly masquerades as “anti-racism.” White Anglo-Saxons are now racially stigmatized themselves, by “anti-racists,” in terms hauntingly similar to those once used against Jews. White men are stigmatized in terms hauntingly similar to those once used against blacks.

And so our universities and colleges, because they have been so successful as the bastions of free inquiry and deep thought, are now where the cobwebs most gather. Where thought must stay safe and shallow, and inquiry be carefully proscribed. Where absurdities and plain lies must be embraced as equally likely as certain truth to be true. Because we are all frightened of truth; we all have something to lose from it.

The truth about pyramids, of course, is they are simply the easiest high structure to build.

Watch any child piling blocks.

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief

The most interesting thing about human beings, next to consciousness itself, is what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief.” As Coleridge pointed out, we are wholly capable, indeed we are eager, to “pretend” any number of things we know are not true. This is how art works: we knowingly buy into an invented world.

Take, for example, a Hollywood movie. We know perfectly well that it is completely imaginary, that the people we are watching are not real people, but actors acting the parts. We have seen the same actors in other movies, in other parts. We even know more or less how it must end—we know, for example, that the hero is not going to get killed. We know, as Chekhov observed, that a gun visible in a drawer early in the movie, will be used by the final curtain. Yet we readily become quite wrapped up in it, feel real emotions for the images on the screen, real fear and concern, “forget” that we know the ending, “forget” everything outside the movie itself.

In fact, mostly we do not really forget. It is a question of splitting off our consciousness, so that one part of our mind knows all this, while another does not.

It is a talent even the smallest children have. It is the ability to “make believe.”

We are the same with sports and games: while they are perfectly useless, and what happens in them means nothing beyond themselves, we become very powerfully wrapped up in their progress and outcome. We yell; we cheer; we demand that the referee be hanged. Then we go home and go about our lives.

And we find this experience infinitely enjoyable.

This is a good thing; and it is a bad thing.

For something like the same thing happens with fanaticism, with true believers of all kinds. We are perfectly able, when presented with an attractive and emotionally satisfying theory, to “believe” things that are obviously false to reason and to evidence. Once people have a comfortable fixed idea, they will positively ignore evidence that contradicts it. As Churchill once observed, people occasionally stumble upon truth. But most of us just stand back up, dust ourselves off, and continue on our chosen way.

But the same ability gives us release, as Aristotle noted, from the stresses and the tribulations of life. When things are bad, we can step into a good book, or a beautiful painting, and escape the horrors of the everyday.

This profound human ability was mistaken, by Freud and Jung, for an “unconscious,” or “subconscious.” But this way of looking at it is completely wrong. For at least the vast majority of us, I would think—certainly for me--we are perfectly able to distinguish the dream from the waking world, and are never fully unconscious of either. We are not genuinely unconscious when we are reading a book; we have simply split our consciousness, so that we are aware of two levels of reality at once. As Blake described it:

Now I a two-fold vision see;
And a two-fold vision is given to me.
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight;
And threefold in the darkest night;
And twofold always; May God us keep
From single vision, and Newton’s sleep.

This ability of ours to split our consciousness is of obvious value in explaining the nature of the Trinity. For, if we can split our consciousnesses in such a way, so surely can God, who is much greater than we, creating separate “persons,” including one provisionally unaware of his Godhood in order to share completely in our sufferings. Father, Son, incarnation, Holy Ghost.

It is also helpful in understanding the “problem of evil”—why this world, though created by an all-powerful and good God, has undesirable things in it. As Aristotle explained, in this game of suspended disbelief, we actually enjoy the experience of fear and pity—we go to the theatre or the cinema repeatedly to experience them. Children play tag in part in order to get scared; and no game is fun if you cannot possibly lose. So too, this world can be seen, as Shakespeare said, as a stage, and our little lives as dreams or sports we are enjoying in the manner of an instructive performance.

Life, in the end, is a two-ring, or a three-ring circus. On the one hand, there is our little diurnal performance on the stage. On the other, happening concurrently, is our eternal life in heaven. And also perhaps again, eternally present, the New Jerusalem at the end of time—the perfection, not just of our individual souls, but of all things. Given the latter two, the unhappy events of the former one are, perhaps, sheer playful joy. And perhaps we are all along conscious, in some part, of the latter two, even as we lose ourselves, by willing suspension of disbelief, in the former.

The trick is to remain always somewhat aware of the reality behind it all: of God and of his kingdom. And perhaps the point of life is learning that trick.

… be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The N-word

I just read a bizarre piece from Associated Press headlined “Comedian gets hook for using the N-word.”

I had to read the whole article just out of curiosity. What the heck is “the n-word”?

Strictly speaking, I still don’t know. The article itself never dares to even report the word. It is, apparently, just too offensive. It seems, though, to be the word “nigger”—albeit used here by a black comedian, in jest, before a black audience.

And what is wrong with the word “nigger”? The article does not say. Its offensiveness is taken for granted.

It all strikes me as odd. Not to say loopy. Not to say hysterical. Yes, it is a bit of a mispronunciation of the French “negre,” meaning “black.” And the French are a bit fussy about how foreigners pronounce their language. But offensive? Too offensive to appear in print? This still seems a bit over the top.

I do a dictionary check to find out more.

Random House reports “The term NIGGER is now probably the most offensive word in English.” Wow. Worse, apparently, than “m**********r,” say? Let alone “d**n”? (Although another dictionary insists that “nigra” is “even more offensive than ‘nigger.’”) Where have I been?

Okay—so it is offensive, by dictionary definition. But still, why? For the proper definition of the term, according to the same source, is simply “A. black person. B. a member of any dark-skinned people.”

So here’s what I don’t get. I’m afraid that, if this is the most offensive word in the English language, it follows that it is worse to be a black person than to fornicate with one’s mother, say, or to spend eternity in hell. To have dark skin is the worst possible thing that you could do.

Is that really the message we want to convey?

Let’s say it is. Even so, racial equality demands that we officially consider “whitey” to be equally offensive. It seems to be “nigger’s” exact parallel, right down to the offensive intent. If we object to one, and not the other equally, we are assuming either 1) it is far more creditable to have pale than dark skin, or 2) black people have more rights than white people.

But then, if words that are intrinsically neutral in meaning can become offensive by being used by someone or other with intent to insult, racial equality requires that we consider almost any term for any ethnic group just as offensive. Certainly, “Jew,” is commonly used as a pejorative. So nobody must henceforth use the word. Same for “WASP,” or “Yank,” or “Anglo.”

Somehow, though, as a Mick and a Paddy myself, not to mention an Anglo, I just cannot muster a sufficient level of outrage. Who cares? It occurs to me that black people in North America today must have remarkably little to worry about if they can really spare the energy for this crusade against a harmless word. I envy them.

There may be a few words referring to race or ethnicity in English that are genuinely offensive. But I can’t think of a single clear example.

English can insult on other grounds. GI—now there’s a word that genuinely is insulting in its meaning. And yet, ironically, nobody considers it offensive. “Guy” for males is another example—it seems to imply that one is either stuffed doll to be paraded to general contempt, or a traitor worthy of being hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Other languages can insult on racial grounds. In Chinese, Westerners are commonly referred to as devils or demons; and one common word for “foreign” also means “ugly.”

But English, with its international viewpoint and intercultural history, is actually exemplary in this regard.

And it is worth remembering that, in the end, even a genuinely insulting word cannot hurt us. The matter is trivial.

Nor can banning a word end the insults. If someone wants to insult you, and mere intent to insult makes a word an insult, any conceivable word to do it just as well as “nigger.”

So all objecting to “nigger” as a word really manages to do is to limit everyone’s freedom of speech. And once the principle is solidly established, that language can and should be limited in order to limit or prevent unwanted thoughts or sentiments, the next limitation might not be equally trivial. Legislating language to control thoughts is the nightmare that Orwell conjures up with “Newspeak” in his novel 1984.

And there is another consideration. Every time we change the language, we limit mutual comprehension. This is a grave matter—this is what language is for. We are pulling one more random bolt out of the community-making machine.

Oldspeakers, in particular, unless they happen go to the right schools and attend the right parties, may miss the change—and be persecuted for it. A great way, in the end, to enforce a class system.

As for anyone who has already died—they are out of luck.

But this also means we are gradually cutting ourselves off from the greatest minds of the past, and from our cultural heritage. For example, this particular word “nigger” was used, without pejorative intent, by such writers as Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Charles Dickens.

Now, let’s suppose we are at least wise enough not to ban these books from our libraries and our schools for the sake of “the n-word.” Even so, we have caused a grave loss. If we insist that “nigger” is pejorative, our children, if not we ourselves, will henceforth quite likely no longer be able to understand these books properly. We will see the word “nigger” and assume its means Twain, Conrad, and Dickens hated black people. Which is not their point at all.

A similar case, in my own experience: Yeats’s magnificent late poem “Lapis Lazuli,” to my mind one of the very best poems written by the best poet in English, ends with the punchline “Their ancient, glittering eyes are gay.” It was written in the 1930s. It is now almost impossible, I find, for a student to hear it without breaking into a smirk. A masterpiece of our common culture has thereby been destroyed, like an indelible moustache painted on the Mona Lisa.

Losing Twain, Conrad, and Dickens—that is no trivial loss. What could be worth it?

Science in the Classroom

Teaching today is entirely scientific. Prospective teachers must learn to do “active research” with their classes, then use it continually to determine what does and does not work.

Unfortunately, the first thing that clearly does not work is active research. Though in theory every single teacher now teaching is doing this much of the time, nothing has ever come of it—no significant evidence that any one teaching technique consistently works better than any one other. As I understand it, this is true even of teaching itself: there is no significant evidence from “active research” that students taking a class learn their subject any faster than students studying it on their own.

True, there are at any given time well-known “good” teaching techniques that all teachers are expected to use. Today, we are supposed to be “student-centred.” We are supposed to use a “communicative approach,” and/or a “constructivist approach.” We must be “interactive” and use “intrinsic motivation.” There are even sometimes studies to back some of this up

But none of these studies ever turn out to be reproducible. It becomes a matter merely of fad or fashion. Invariably, in five year’s time, another study will conclusively disprove the current theory, and “good” teaching will involve rejecting all of the practices popular today.

This dog don’t hunt. This dog is chasing its own tail. This dog has made a dumb error, called “social science.” Teaching can never and should never be “scientific.” Human beings are far too complex and aware for science ever to understand.

Teaching, the New Testament points out, is a “gift of the spirit.” That means good teaching comes direct from God, as an inspiration—like prophecy, or speaking in tongues. You cannot teach a teacher to teach, any more than you can teach a writer to write. One is either a teacher, or one is not.

That also means that all teaching is essentially religious in nature.

We used to know this. Teaching used to be a, if not the, core religious activity. All schools, from Grade One through the Ph.D., were originally run by churches—not just in Christian culture, but in all religions. Buddhist monasteries were the local school, in Buddhist countries. In Muslim countries, the school was attached to the local mosque. In Confucian countries, the Confucian shrine was the local school, and vice versa. A Jewish synagogue is a shul, a school, no more, no less.

Not all great teachers are also religious figures; nor all religious figures also great teachers. But the exceptions are few. We all know Confucius was a teacher. But the Buddha’s essential nature, distinguishing him from uncounted unremembered enlightened beings who came before him, was that he alone took the trouble to teach the dharma to his fellow man—he is defined as a teacher. In the New Testament, Jesus is consistently addressed by his followers as “rebbe”—literally, “teacher.” One’s “guru,” the essential religious role in Hinduism, is one’s teacher; the Brahmin class is at once the priestly and the teacherly caste. It is the same function. So too in Confucianism. Every Catholic bishop is also by definition a teacher—that is his defined role.

One could learn a great deal, about teaching techniques, by reading the great books of the world’s religions. They often address the issue of form as well as content. Jesus, for example, with his parables; Confucius with his analysis of ritual, example, and ceremony; Buddhism with its koans; the Talmud with its illustrative stories. This, along with the techniques of other great teachers like Socrates, Aristotle, the Baal Shem Tov, St. Ignatius Loyola, Ngarjuna, Hui Neng, Shammai, Rumi, or Hillel, is what student teachers should be studying.

But that is not enough; content is no more arbitrary than form. Only religion ensures that we teach our students the right things—and if we do not, at best, we are wasting their time. How, without religion’s values, do we know what is of value to teach? How can we build a path without knowing its end?

In fact, to sit a child or adolescent in a classroom for five or seven hours a day, and bombard him with all sorts of things, and not touch upon religion, is to do him terrible harm. It is teaching him to avoid religion and leaving him without direction. If the child is at all bright or perceptive, this will cause a crisis some time in adolescence, when he notices that there is no apparent point to anything, no ultimate meaning or goal.

Consider this, and one must conclude that modern, “scientific” teaching is not just a failure.

It is a clear and present danger for our children.

It is teaching the best of them to commit suicide.

Mistah Kurtz--He Dead

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

TS Eliot perhaps had it right—the lines are from his grand poem “The Hollow Men”--describing the Modern Era as a slow slide into non-existence.

We hinted at this last post, musing that the “counterculture” was a suppression of emotion in favour of desire. This involved a reduction of both ourselves and other human beings from subjects into objects. It involved a reduction of ourselves andother humans into no more than our physical bodies. And this, we noted, was part of a wider, ongoing movement in this regard.

This is what Eliot was talking about, in “The Hollow Men.”

Back in the Sixties and Seventies, the general claim made by the terminally cool, at least in my earshot, was that we were all “out of touch with our bodies.” The press laments eternally that we are not taking proper care of the earth, or of our earthly flesh—global warming, the “obesity epidemic,” pollution, smoking, and the like.

As ever, this common view is the perfect inverse of the truth. Fitness crisis? So how come we are living much longer than never before? Ecological collapse? So how come we grow materially wealthier, year by year, and grow more food, while more people have potable water than ever?

The body is in fact the only part of our being that we care about; and “nature” has become the thing we worship. That’s what distinguishes modern Western civilization from all others: its sheer physicality.

“Psychology” means literally, “knowledge of the soul.” What is our approach to the soul? To stuff the body with chemicals. Are physical approaches likely to be the most direct and most efficient ways to treat spiritual illnesses? Not bloody likely. I hear one mental hospital introduced pets to the wards. From that point, the suicide rate was zero. But such straightforward solutions—a pathetic little bit of love for and from another being--are anathema, because they admit the existence of something more than bread alone. We know nothing, any more, of the soul. Most of us do not even believe it exists.

I recall recently a TV commercial which urged us all to “take care of the inner you.”

How is this to be done? Physical exercise.

There is no longer any inner us. As Eliot observed.

We are the hollow men.
We are the stuffed men.
Leaning together,
Headpiece filled with straw.

Alas.

We know our bodies, though, inch by quivering inch; usually, we indulge their every whim. We refuse our bodies things if and only if it is for their own good. Dieting, for example; or working out in the gym—and this is what we take to be virtue. Merely seeking to rot longer.

I watch proud professionals avoiding the stairs for the elevator, the sidewalk for their car, and then working out for an hour or more on their treadmills, and I cannot but think Eliot—and Jesus—got it right. This materialistic world is very like the classic Hades, the land of the dead without hope of salvation. What do these treadmill walkers resemble, running nowhere forever, but Sisyphus in Tartarus, forced eternally to push a stone up a hill and watch it roll back down again. What do these desperate dieters so resemble, as Tantalus, punished in the underworld by a vast banquet always just beyond his grasp?

It is all slow death by fast desire.

Never mind the suppression of love—which Eliot captures in such lines as:

Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

…We grope together
And avoid speech.

For that’s all others are to us, any more—broken stones. Mere things.

We also, equally, suppress hate and anger.

We fear violence to the point of hysteria, for example—to the point even of banning the spanking of children. To the point of condemning war as war, even a just war in self defense.

But it is not violence, per se, that we fear, is it? We have no problem at all with abortion, which is violence in the extreme. It is not even a crime; it does not even cost us money to do it. It is the anger and the hate and the courage that can accompany violence—the strong emotions—that we really fear. For we think it important to give stiffer penalties for crimes committed in a state of passion—“hate crimes”—than those done in cold blood, out of pure self-interest or desire. This seems mad, and is a reversal of the wisdom of the ages.

And it is not just emotion, either. It is everything except the body: it is reason, conscience, and imagination, too, that we fear. For they, too, can go counter to our will, to our desires.

The subjugation of reason to will and desire is apparent already in the philosophy of Adolf Hitler; but it is even clearer in postmodernism and in the movement called “human potential.” People maintain nowadays, almost as a matter of course, that we can actually choose our own beliefs; and that the choice we make is perfectly random and not open to dispute. As one young respondent remarked to Ted Byfield, “just because a thing is true does not mean that I have to believe it.”

Reality and reason must bend to our desires, rather than our desires to reality or reason.

Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

This is the dying of the light; this is death’s twilight kingdom. The light of reason has gone out.

It is less obvious that we have also abandoned imagination. The rediscovery of the lost imagination, after all, almost looks like the whole point of the counterculture. Yes, it was recovered by a purely physical means, by drugs, but it was claimed that the trip experience in the end recovered the knowledge that the imagination and its objects were real and powerful.

And yet, we did not really accept, or endorse, their reality. We accepted them as real only in so far as they seemed to correspond with our desires. We did not admit, then or even now, that the trip experience might have a dark side, that it might teach us unhappy things; that it might require things of us; or that the world of the imagination might include monsters and demons as well as angels and cute gnomes. We remained casual tourists in this strange foreign land. It remained, for us, as Freud and Jung call it, "subconscious" or "unconscious."

Just as we have subverted “love” to mean only sex, we have subverted the word “dream” to mean only our desires. When we speak of our “dreams,” we do not really mean our dreams, or even our daydreams, both of which we ignore. We mean our wants, our desires. To us, those who take their dreams seriously, as the early Christians did, are mad, “raving” (the word means, literally, “dreaming”).

And so, as Eliot realizes, we have systematically reduced our being, our consciousness, our selves, to the vanishing point: nothing but a rag stuffed on a stick. Nothing but the body and a bundle of ravening desires.

Unfortunately, of all the things we are, it is the body that knows death; it is the physical world that is subject to time. So, by reducing ourselves to no more, we have committed suicide. We are already in the dead land, the desert of prickly pears.

And death is as much our present as our future: bodies without souls are dead bodies. If we still move, it proves only that we are vampires.

This is the truth we must not speak. And so we fear any mention, any hint of death. We do not want to see it, we do not want to hear of it, we do not want to think about it. We take quite unreasonable steps to delay it as long as possible. Have someone dial 911 in Canada these days, and an ambulance, a police car, and a firetruck all appear with sirens blazing. That speaks of panic.

This is mad. We will all die; it is not something we can avoid. This being so, and the longest lifetime being trivial against eternity, a sane person would instead face death squarely, and make ready for it.

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Cool

One of the least attractive elements of the ‘60s was the emphasis on being “cool.” Cool sucks. Cool means not having or at least not showing emotion. As in "cold shoulder," "cold fish," “cold-blooded.” A related term is "hung up." In the Sixties, everyone wanted to avoid getting “hung up”—especially, as I recall it, on other people.

It is not hard to trace the origin of this idea. It is from Buddhism; it is from the second noble truth. "Suffering is caused by desire." Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder picked this up from their studies of Japanese Zen Buddhism—much of what we know as the “Beat” movement was an attempt by the American WWII generation to assimilate what they had learned of Japanese culture during the war and occupation. But it has been subtly changed on the way: the usual translation of the Second Noble Truth is: “Suffering is caused by desire.” The hippies, rather than trying to overcome desire, tried instead to overcome emotion.

And there is a difference.

For example, lack of desire obviously argues against free love—as does Buddhism. But lack of emotion is what makes “free love”—indiscriminate sex—possible. A lack of concern for the other person with whom you are having sex is essential—one must not become “hung up” on them, or love is no longer “free.” There are obligations.

And one must not care what happens to any children. One must, if necessary, be prepared to abort them. Otherwise, there are obligations. Yet Buddhism condemns abortion.

Emotion, on the other hand, Buddhism does not condemn. Buddhism glorifies it; Buddhism requires it. The Bodhistattva Avalokiteshvara (aka Kwannon or Guan Yin), the most revered figure after the Buddha himself, is the very personification of compassion. He or she—a bodhisattva is a soul, which can be incarnated as either sex—eternally refuses nirvana for herself in order to help others, out of the perfect fullness of compassion. So, indeed, do all the bodhisattvas, or Buddhist saints—this is what one does to become a Buddhist saint.

One sacrifices one's own desires for the sake of compassion. One does not sacrifice compassion for the sake of one's desires. Up is not down.

Being “cool,” or emotionless, seems to be a good thing in certain situations. “Sang froid” in the face of peril seems admirable; or at least useful. Many people these days praise "EQ," which is essentially the ability to suppress one's own emotions for the sake of one's self-interest. But do not expect Buddhism (or Christianity) to support even this. There is the tale of a Zen master who was beheaded in the course of an anti-Buddhist purge. A follower criticized him for, at the moment he was about to die, screaming loudly.

He was corrected by his own master. This was no sign of lack of enlightenment. It is perfectly proper to experience fully one’s own emotions—to which one can be either attached or not attached. It is perfectly sensible to speak about desiring a particular emotion: wanting love, for example, or happiness. Hence the two are separate things. Indeed, to seek to avoid emotions is un-Buddhist, as this is itself a desire.

And so, like most good things, Buddhism has been perverted into its opposite. Hippiedom is to Buddhism more or less as Al Qaeda is to Islam.

Had the followers of Kerouac understood, the last thing they would have endorsed was free love. And, indeed, Kerouac himself, who was wiser than his followers, does not endorse it. His protagonist in Dharma Bums, as a proper Buddhist, considers it, quite accurately, “cruel.” And to Kerouac, becoming “hung up” was pretty clearly a good thing, not something to be avoided. One should, in fact, become “hung up” on whatever is there before you to be loved at every moment. This, to Kerouac, is what it is all about.

The systematic lack or suppression of emotion is in fact the technique of the con artist. It seems to me to lead, as night does day, to the sort of things Charles Manson was capable of, and capable of convincing hippies to do. Cold-bloodedness indeed.

I wonder, too, if people like Janis Joplin died, in the end, of a lack of love, from an emotional emptiness. For man does not live by sex alone.

In the end, this celebration of the “cool” marks hippiedom as a further progression of the tendency, common to the mainstream culture well before the fifties, of reducing human beings to machines or objects of detached scientific study; along the lines ofSkinner’s operant conditioning. Indeed, the poor deluded Beats embraced Zen Buddhism largely as a supposedly more “scientific” way to view the world.

It fits with their overall materialism: “love” to them was sex, and sex was love, as the phrase “free love” necessarily implies—for otherwise it is an oxymoron. And they mistook enlightenment for a chemical compound. It was all a dumb brutish blunder from which we have yet to work our way free.

Is China Doomed?

I’m going on intuition here, but I think a tipping point may have been reached. China is going to blow.

This week’s Economist features a cartoon in which the American Pentagon fears a “Worst case scenario”: “Russian bombers dropping Chinese toys.” As I read this, on TV, the BBC features pictures of “Chinese chocolates” crawling with worms.

It looks like the world media has latched on to this image of China: the consuming world now will soon have a fixed idea that “made in China” means dangerous.

It is one thing to have, for a while, a reputation for making shoddy goods—Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea all survived that. People will accept poor workmanship and lower-quality materials as a fair trade in return for low prices. But how easy is it to get past a broad general reputation for making dangerous goods?

How’s thalidomide been selling lately? Ford Pintos? DDT? Zeppelins?

Granted, there is no sign of economic trouble in China yet. And people are saying China is too big a part of the world economy now for it to be allowed by others to go down, and so it will not. Investing in China is a sure thing.

That is what they always say. That is always the general line just before an economic collapse—that is just what might be characterized as “irrational exuberance,” in Greenspan’s famous phrase. It is investors all thinking it is a sure thing that makes economic bubbles possible.

Does the world really need China? Not as far as I can see, in any practical sense. China is now a middle-income country; more than half the world’s countries now have a lower GDP per capita than China at purchasing power parity. That means they have more room to grow; there is actually a lot of potential competition for China as a possible source of low-cost goods. This is not to say that the collapse of China would not be painful; it does not touch on how China has woven herself into the world financial system. But she is not irreplaceable. Accounts on paper do not supercede realities on the ground.

Yes, China is big—one fifth of the world’s population. But India standing alone is just as big, and less developed. Then there are many other quite large nations, currently poorer than China: Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, all of Central Asia, all of Africa south of the Sahara, most of Central and South America… cumulatively they are much larger than China. In theory, in order to be competitive, Chinese goods must be higher quality than anything this list of nations can produce; for they cannot compete on price. If they are not, we have a bubble, which is going to blow.

Are they? It’s starting to look as though the answer is no; and we do not know how many more revelations of defects and corners cut are to come.

As a result, I expect foreign clients as a group to tilt quickly now to preferring non-Chinese suppliers, even if they cost a bit more. It will actually be worth a premium to be able to claim no Chinese components.

And so investment and income will go elsewhere.

So the Chinese economy should suffer, as this loss of sales and investment is felt.

I have expressed my belief often, in this column, that the Chinese economy is a pyramid scheme, held together by perpetual growth and lack of transparency. It fits that historical pattern too well. The reports of annual growth have been too regular, too consistent, too high, not to look suspicious, and China has all the lack of transparency to allow a Ponzi scheme to occur. We know for a fact that the official figures do not add up.

The durability of the modern Chinese growth has never yet been tested by any major economic setback. It is a recession that exposes such things. If it is a pyramid scheme, any serious interruption in growth will bring it down. Quality control may be the least of China’s worries. We could have a general Chinese economic collapse.

This in turn raises special problems for China. Its “Asian tiger” predecessors, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, all segued fairly smoothly to an open, democratic system of government. Except for Indonesia; and Indonesia, once recession came, suffered the political upheaval of revolution, and mass bloodletting, as well.

This, or probably much worse than this, can be expected in China. A regime that operates openly and with popular consent can withstand an economic shock. A secretive regime without a formal mandate tends to collapse. A sudden dip in the economic expectations of the middle class is identified by Craine Brinton, in Anatomy of Revolution, as the classic prelude to a revolution.

China’s government is notable, in fact, for its lack of a popular mandate and of transparency; much more so than Indonesia in 1997. It has accumulated a lot of historical skeletons in its party closets, that the average Chinese has managed so far to overlook only by a kind of willing suspension of disbelief. It has made no moves or proposals to convert itself into something more open or participatory, nothing that might earn it more patience from the middle class. It looks a bit old and doddering from sheer longevity. It is justified solely by the “economic miracle.” If that miracle evaporates, it will, in its turn, collapse. Economic trouble will be matched, and exacerbated, by a sudden lack of organization throughout Chinese society as a whole.

Revolutions are dangerous things; they rarely improve matters. It will take some time for any new government to form, restore order, and develop the sort of popular trust to put through the painful measures that will be necessary to restore the economic structure. There will be a temptation to resort to a “strong man,” and another Ponzi scheme. The matter will be made more difficult because, to ensure its own hegemony, the Chinese Communist Party has been pretty diligent in preventing the development of any other strong organizations of any kind in the land. Chaos threatens.

And then comes the next factor: historically, revolutions, in China, have not been quick or simple affairs. Largely because of China’s vast size, they have usually involved long and bloody civil wars. A governmental collapse, plus the lack of ready alternatives, could easily allow this to happen.

It could all easily knock China back another hundred years.

To prevent this, a great deal of international forbearance might be necessary—of the sort Russia, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin managed to get during the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Can China hope for that? With luck. But there will surely be a strong international lobby to insist on the independence of Tibet, and a strong Muslim lobby for the independence of Sinjang (Sinkiang). Mongolia would naturally desire the secession of Inner Mongolia; Korea, Vietnam, Central Asia, India, all have territorial claims of some sort on land now held by Beijing. Taiwan would, at a minimum, probably seize the opportunity to declare independence, as might Hong Kong and Macau as well. And the spectacle of “foreigners” biting off parts of “China” would not help any struggling new government to re-establish order and authority. Any more than it did for Weimar Germany, or the Qing at the beginning of this century.

This actually all seems to me the most probable path ahead. I would not want right now to be investing in China.

Nor would I even be counting on attending the Beijing Olympics. Believe it or not, even that is a bad omen. Such events tend to be the sort of big blowouts that mark a doomed regime, someone running on hype.

I do not refer only to the famous Berlin Olympics of 1936. Recall also that the 1940 Olympics had to be cancelled--they were set for Tokyo. So was the planned Roman International Exposition of 1942.

50 Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

Part of my vacation this summer was spent in France.

France cares far more about her own culture than Canada does. That much is obvious to even a casual tourist. Streets and metro stations are named for writers, artists, and philosophers, not to mention engineers and scientists. In Canada, I cannot imagine a “Kurelek” street or a metro station named “McLuhan.” We don’t even feature artists and thinkers on the banknotes—we’re the only country in the British Commonwealth that limits that honour to politicians. We certainly don’t bury our culture heroes in a “pantheon.” Indeed, the phrase “Canadian culture hero” sounds to me like an oxymoron.

But isn’t this a big mistake? Keith Spicer once observed in a formal government report, in reaction to a near-vote by Quebec to separate, that Canada badly needs poets extolling its sense of a nation. Where are they? Well, the government does precious little to help this happen, and it does seem to be something useful a government could do. There’s nothing obviously wrong with trying to keep the country together.

A sense of national unity, a sense of nation, comes, by definition, from a sense of shared culture. Most other countries know this, and actively promote their own culture. Britain has the British Council, Germany the Goethe Institute, France the Alliance Francais and Academie Francais. Where is Canada’s equivalent?

It’s not a question of money, surely. I’m not a big fan of government spending, and am not calling for a large outlay of money here. We currently, indeed, spend pots and armoured cars of money on “multiculturalism”—which is to say, on everyone else’s culture but our own. Let’s stop doing that, in the first place—it is obviously counterproductive.

Thanks to the Internet, and satellite TV, we could also be promoting Canadian culture overseas quite cheaply. Where is our equivalent of Korea’s Arirang TV, or the BBC’s magnificent web presence?

And it costs almost nothing to do such things as create an established list of “cultural treasures,” like Korea or Japan--costs nothing, and boosts tourism.

And even beyond tourism, and beyond national unity, the establishment and fostering of a Canadian “brand” is of benefit for all our exports. “Made in France” or “Made in Japan” or “Made in the USA” evoke clear and (generally) positive images. This is largely due to a fondness for French, Japanese, and American culture. So does “Made in Canada,” already. But advertising rarely hurts sales. And we are the world’s number one exporting country. We live or die on export sales.

So, on the whole, promoting culture would make, not cost, money.

There is surely no harm that it also has tremendous benefits that are not economic. The promotion of culture is a huge real boost to the quality of life of every Canadian. It makes Canada a more pleasant place to live; the arts consecrate the ground on which they virtually walk. There is a reason why Paris is a more desired address than, say, Indianopolis. And it is not for the service.


We do not celebrate our culture, I suspect, largely because most Canadians more or less openly feel Canadian culture is not worthy of such attention.

This is the sad residue of colonialism—when I was a child, we still all believed that anything from England must be better than the Canadian equivalent. Important things always happened elsewhere. Instead of growing out of this inferiority complex, Canada, with multiculturalism, has simply extended it to more mother countries.

Bad move.

In fact, Canadian culture is already huge, in world terms. People around the world are mad to listen to Celine Dion. They all know Shania Twain comes from Northern Ontario. They all want to pay big money to see Cirque du Soleil and IMAX. They all read Margaret Atwood, and laugh at Mike Myers. Canadian culture always looks more impressive from other countries; I have bobbed in a Philippine ferry to the tune of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Pussywillows, Cattails,” and heard Joni Mitchell’s “Carrie” on the Muzak system in France.

We seem to be the only ones who don’t appreciate it.

Another objection is that, being of two languages, our culture is necessarily not unified. But this is true, if at all, only of our literature. And even in literature, the matter seems marginal. There is, after all, such a thing as translation. We all know and love Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater,” Anglophones as much as Francophones.

I’d like to see, as a start, a new order of merit, like the Order of Canada, established strictly for artistic, literary, perhaps scientific and philosophical figures--for those who can justly be called active contributors to Canadian culture. No politicians, no philanthropists, no bureaucrats, just artists and thinkers. This could cost effectively nothing—nothing but the price of the badge and the ceremony.

And this body could be a working shop. It would, at regular intervals—perhaps one a year?--induct some dead figure into an official Canadian pantheon. This would involve a bit more expense: the cost of a bust or a painting, and a permanent physical location in Ottawa to display them all. Heck, the sky’s the limit—let’s include rotating exhibitions on members as well. This would not require a large permanent collection—items could be borrowed for the duration. It would do schoolchildren little harm to learn more about Stephen Leacock.

I’d like the same group to be given the job of creating a list of Canadian cultural treasures, on the model of such countries as Japan or Korea. This could be a guide for educators, and a guide for tourists.

They could also choose figures and images for Canadian coins, stamps, and banknotes—avoiding the present over reliance on politicians.

And they could choose from among their ranks the Governor-General, elevating this figure once and for all beyond politics and making him or her a genuine representative, as she should be, of the Canadian nation.

Of course, the creation of such an institution could lead to an “academic” or establishment style of art. Fine; I’m ready to take that chance. If it does, given the nature of art, it will still inspire more and better art. The good artists will organize and produce more in reaction to what they object to in the academy.

Who would choose the members? That’s a bit of a trick. Politicians would, I fear, be too inclined to select on political grounds—quotas for region, skin color, race, religion, and so forth. Self-selection by existing members would be too cliqueish, and does not work well at present in academics. I’d propose a vote by members of recognized cultural organizations—publishers and editors are in the business, for example, of evaluating authors. Gallery owners and museum curators are in the business of evaluating artists. Put such groups to work nominating and electing this body.

In the meantime, being an active contributor to the culture is an alienating and impoverishing thing at the best of times. Artists create the culture for the sake of all of us, and get precious little for themselves in return. The least we can do is give them a little formal recognition in return. Besides encouraging Canadians to take more interest in the arts, it might encourage more talented Canadians to strive to make a contribution—the feeling that what they were doing mattered to the rest of us, and that we were listening.

Canada: The Home of the Free

I dislike Canadian nationalism; all nationalism is idolatry. But sometimes it is only legitimate to point to Canadian history with pride. Believe it or not, a case can be made that Canada, and not the United States of America, is the true historical defender of human rights in North America. And perhaps, by extension, in the world at large.

It has been observed more than once, that the most fundamental human right, next to the right to life, is the right to freedom of conscience. Some, indeed, would place it higher. Now, have you ever wondered why French Canada refused to join the American Revolution? After all, France itself was on the American side. Any diminution of British power in North America was good news for France. And it might even have ended with Quebec independence, or Quebec back with France—the United States of America was not yet a done deal.

Why wouldn’t the French of Quebec have leapt at the chance to revolt? Yet they were not merely neutral; they fought hard against the American revolutionaries when they sought to invade, or to “liberate.”

The answer is simple. At the time of the Revolution, Catholics had no civil rights in the Thirteen Colonies. They could not vote or stand for office, even in once-Catholic Maryland. In Canada, by contrast, they had full civil rights. This was rare enough, under a nominally Protestant government, that the Quebecois were not inclined to risk any rocking of canoes. Nor were they convinced otherwise even in 1812, when the Americans tried again to take Canada for the Republic. A Catholic running for US president was still a major controversy as recently as 1960—and no Catholic has, in fact, become president since. A Mormon running for president is still controversial. By contrast, the religion of a candidate has never been an issue in a Canadian election, with the sole shameful exception of the Liberal attack on Stockwell Day’s “fundamentalism” in 2000.

Meantime, in Britain itself, Tony Blair reportedly did not dare to convert to Catholicism openly while in office—because it was arguably still unconstitutional for a Catholic to be prime minister.

Is this because Canadian politicians are simply not as concerned with religion?

Like heck. Both JS Woodsworth, founder of the CCF, and Tommy Douglas, founder of the NDP, were ministers. Georges Vanier, the former Governor-General, is in line for Catholic sainthood.

Within the US, the first declaration of religious liberty seems to have been in Catholic Maryland, where the “Act concerning Religion” proclaimed in 1649 that “no person or persons whatsoever within this province… professing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall from henceforth be any wise troubled, molested, or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof.” Sadly, however, this relative tolerance was rescinded when Protestants gained control of the colony from 1691. When the US Constitution was adopted, in 1791, twelve of the fourteen states still had religious tests for state office. Indeed, extending civil rights to Baptists or Quakers was still almost as controversial in most parts of the US as extending them to Catholics.

Meantime, the right to freedom of religion for both Catholics and Protestants was guaranteed to all residents of Britain’s Acadian possessions—the Canadian Maritimes--by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Toleration was also extended to all varieties of Protestants, and to Jews. This religious toleration was reaffirmed and extended to the balance of Canada, newly won from France, by the Quebec Act of 1774.



Canada—both French and English Canada—was also significantly more respectful, throughout its collective history, of the human rights of Indians and blacks. The Catholics of New France, like the Spanish, were active evangelizers of the Indians. Nowadays this is considered somehow illegitimate; but the truth is it showed a concern for the Indians as fellow human beings. The Protestants of the British colonies were quite late in comparison to take any interest in the enterprise. Similarly, while the French (and later the Scots of the Hudson’s Bay Company) intermarried with the Indians and largely formed one nation, the English-speaking settlers to the South passed laws making interracial marriage illegal. The Indians were somehow irredeemably “other.” As a result, when the Thirteen British colonies went to war with New France, it was, from their perspective, “The French and Indian War.” In other words, the Indians generally favoured and identified with the French.

Among the Protestants, it was the Moravians who first thought to try to save Indian souls, in Delaware, beginning in 1748. Unfortunately, it did not go well. The Indians were eager to convert, but local hostility both to ethnic Indians and to the Moravians forced them to flee their lands, ever further west. First they went to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but encroaching white settlers who would not recognize Indian land ownership kept pushing them on. By the American Revolution they were in the Ohio territory, intended by Britain as a permanent Indian reserve. Unfortunately, Ohio was ceded to the New United States in the peace settlement. The lucky fled, with the Mohawks and other Loyalist Indians, to Upper Canada. Those who remained in Ohio were all clubbed, scalped, and burned to death by the triumphant revolutionaries.

For whatever reason, the French tradition of accepting Indians as their fellow men was continued by the British in their Canadian territories. Hence most American Indians were British loyalists during the American Revolution, and fought for Britain—i.e., Canada--again in the War of 1812.

Throughout the further history of the two countries, Canada has most often been the sweet land of liberty for the Indians. The Sioux and other Indians of the Great Plains referred to the US-Canadian border as the “medicine line”: past that point was peace and safety.

Similarly, and no doubt for the same reasons, as Mark Noll--an American--writes in his History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, “Barbot in 1682 and Bishop George Berkeley in 1731”—both Protestants—“contrasted the somewhat greater concern for the spiritual life of blacks that was found in Catholic regions, New Spain and New France, with the widespread indifference among English settlers” (Noll, p. 78). In the American Revolution, the British commanders as a class disapproved of slavery, and often gave freedom to all black slaves in areas they held—long before Lincoln did it in the Civil War. As a result, when the British withdrew, many blacks who could fled with them as loyalists to Nova Scotia.

Slavery was, it is true, once practiced in Canada—it was a custom picked up from the Indians. But the total number of slaves was always small, in the tens or hundreds of persons, and slavery was effectively outlawed in Upper Canada in 1793, in Lower Canada in 1803, long before the US. From that time on, Canada gained significance for American slaves as the terminus of the Underground Railroad—the true land of the free.

True, democracy is older and more deeply ingrained in the US than in Canada. But democracy and human rights are not the same thing.

And, true, Canada in more recent years has not, under stiffer competition, been living up to its history in the area of human rights.

Perhaps a reminder of that proud history will inspire us to do better.

The Life Cycle of an Idealistic Organization

Catholics should be aware that Amnesty International, which once did admirable work on behalf of prisoners of conscience, primarily by organizing letter-writing campaigns, has become a rogue entity. It is now an “advocacy” organization with a specific political agenda. This agenda includes the promotion of abortion. It now also discriminates between human rights and “women’s rights,” reserving a special interest in the latter. It also firmly opposes the death penalty. I do too—but this is surely a matter on which reasonable people can differ, and well beyond their original mandate of defending prisoners of conscience. Indeed, Amnesty ought to allow others their conscience on this matter, if they are to practice what they once preached.

This tends to happen to such organizations:

First, an organization becomes significantly successful, through their sincerity and idealism.

Then, their resultant prestige and reputation for fearless honesty makes them extremely attractive to those who have hidden agendas, or to careerists, or to hypocrites. For them, it becomes the perfect vehicle.

And so they are over a fairly short time perverted into something more or less the opposite of what they were intended to be. It is almost the normal progression.

George Orwell traced the process in his novel Animal Farm, not to mention his non-fiction accounts of the Spanish Civil War. His classic phrase expressing this perversion of principle: “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.”

Craine Brinton traced the process in his brilliant Anatomy of Revolution. All revolutions follow this same script. The French Revolution, born in idealism, calling for equality, democracy, and brotherhood, ended in the ultimate careerist, Napoleon, in eternal war, and what amounted to a doctrine of radical inequality. The Russian Revolution, born in idealism and calling for democracy and equality, ended up with Stalin. Born in internationalism, it became the epitome of nationalism. The Chinese Revolution, born in idealism, ended up with Mao. The English Revolution got Cromwell. The second Russian Revolution is getting Putin. And Marxism as an intellectual movement got Lenin.

Some other examples: Harvard University was founded by the Puritans as a theological college. How comfortable do you suppose a Puritan minister would feel there today? For that matter, how comfortable would a Puritan feel in Massachusetts?

The ACLU used to be a model of non-partisanship; it once defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through a Jewish neighbourhood. Now it supports liberties only for the left, and for the secularists against the religious. It is rather less supportive of the right to free speech, freedom of conscience, or the right to bear arms, for example, than it is, say, of the right to privacy.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and most other recent “human rights” codes, similarly invert the original human rights doctrine of Locke or the US Constitution. Originally, human rights restricted governments by reserving certain areas to the individual. Now, they restrict individuals by reserving certain areas to the government.

The civil rights movement of the Sixties, which called for an end to quotas and for judging people, in Martin Luther King’s fine phrase, “not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character,” has also been co-opted into the opposite: a system of racial preferences in employment and education. And these quotas have mostly been in aid of middle-class white women, rather than blacks.

The Canadian foreign service up through the Fifties was justly celebrated as a collection of the best and the brightest, doing much with little, selfless and idealistic; Lester Pearson’s Nobel Prize was the seal. Nowadays, most Canadians with experience abroad complain of how much harder it is for them to deal with their embassy than it seems to be for Americans, Brits, Australians, Filipinos, and so on.

So too with religion. The same process can be traced in almost every Protestant denomination. Once upon a time, the Congregationalists split off from the Anglicans as a ginger group who took their religion more seriously. They are now part of the United Church. Somewhat later, again, the Methodists split off from the Anglicans as a ginger group who took their religion more seriously. They are now also part of the United Church. Meanwhile, the Pentecostals have split off as a ginger group who take their religion more seriously. Again and again, enthusiasm and doctrinal consistency lasts a generation, then the new denomination falls away into dull respectability as another “mainline Protestant denomination,” their theology, ritual, and even ministers, interchangeable. If anyone cares.

The Buddha, for his part, made no bones about predicting that his teaching would be hopelessly corrupted within 500 years. He was, indeed, a wise man. As John Powers, a Buddhist and Buddhist scholar currently with the Australian National University, cheerfully pointed out to me, Chinese "Zen" Buddhism teaches more or less the opposite of everything in the Pali Canon.

So it goes with nearly everything fine and noble in this fallen world.

With, it seems to me, one uncanny exception: the Catholic Church. Alone among all organizations, it seems to have managed to preserve its essential principles and essential good name for almost two thousand years—longer than any other organization has even managed to exist. (Some would argue the United States has done pretty well too—but if so, only for two hundred years or so).

Yes, some allege there were periods in the past when it did not keep to its better nature; perhaps so, though Catholic historians can argue quite convincingly that it is not so. We are not talking here of individual failings, mind, which are inevitable, but failings of the organization.

But even if we allow this claim, it surely does hold to its principles now. The proof is that this is the very criticism laid against it even by its enemies, that it has not changed course to suit the times. And what other organization of any kind in history has managed to do even this much, to fall completely away from idealistic founding principles, and then restore them without any break in organizational continuity?

This seems almost impossible; it would almost by definition require a Napoleon to surrender power voluntarily.

But it is as promised by Jesus himself in the Bible: “I name you Rock (Peter), and on this rock I will build my church. And the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”

Two thousand years is pretty good for testing the truth of that statement. By contrast, AI, and most of the other movements cited, held to their guns for no more than a generation.

The Real World of Abuse

I do not, as a rule, give money to beggars in Canada. I know too many who need help far more in other countries; and Canada has a good welfare system. I do give to buskers. It seems to me that artists offering their work free to those who cannot afford it are worthy of support. And I do often give to the vendors of street papers.

There is less logic to this: if they want to work instead of beg, why not sell the Globe or Toronto Star, rather than a newspaper specially printed for the purpose?

But the truth is, I am curious to read the papers. Because nobody takes them seriously, they tend to be outlets for eccentric views. And, in a world that is mad, anyone considered mad by the world is worth reading.

Usually they are dreadful. Most people cannot write very well. From one column in a recent example, though, I got an interesting insight. It was by someone who claimed to have been abused as a child, who had set up her own agency, “Lovecry,” to help other abused kids or adolescents she found on the streets.

She maintained that the official channels and official agencies were mostly useless for the truly abused. For two reasons: first, because the original abusers were often on their staff. Second, because abusers tend to be socially prominent. Therefore, mainstream society is almost automatically on their side and against the abused child or adolescent. Courts and agencies will routinely, she says, deny the problem, try to make it out as something else, or blame the victim.

This seemed pretty unlikely at first reading. After all, we hear a lot about abused children these days, and so get the impression that much is being done. I saw a big poster on the Toronto Metro the same day, warning of the scourge of elder abuse. If the powers that be really wanted to avoid the problem, why publicize it?

But on reflection, I think her claim is quite probably true. And it actually tallies with my own experience.

If a person enjoys abusing others, where would they most want to be? Why, working as a counselor of the abused, of course. First, it is the perfect cover—sheep’s clothing for the hungry wolf. Second, those who come to you are utterly vulnerable, already proven abusable, and with nowhere else to turn. Third, as a society we have set up absolutely no mechanism to prevent this. Fourth, abusers are manipulators. They are therefore, as a group, especially skilled at appearing to be what they are not.

It simply stands to reason, therefore, that some significant proportion of those who choose to work professionally with the bullied and abused will be bullies and abusers.

As to abusers being prominent citizens, this is also, on reflection, quite likely. Many studies show, for example, that those holding managerial positions, positions of authority, are much more likely than the general population to be “psychopaths.” This is probably true in all fields. The formula is simple: bullies crave power over others. Those who crave a thing will work harder towards acquiring it, and are therefore more likely to acquire it. Hence, bullies will normally rise to the top.

Psychopaths, aka bullies or abusers, more or less by definition also have strong “EQ”: they are able to control their own emotions well, and to manipulate the emotions of others. This skill, as many psychologists assert, is the key to success in the social world.

Someone who can, and likes to, manipulate the emotions of one person is an abuser. Someone who can, and likes to, manipulate the emotions of many people, is a worldly success. It is overwhelmingly likely that this describes the same person.

On top of this, there is the probability that Lord Acton is right in his famous aphorism, that power corrupts. Even those who achieved power with no intent to abuse, may learn to find the pastime pleasant. It would, sadly, be no more than human nature.

Put these two factors together, and it is probably fair to say that the proportion and level of abuse perpetrated will rise steadily with any rise in social class and position.

As a result, the truly abused are indeed unlikely to get any help from society as a whole, and from those assigned by society to handle the problem. They are more likely to get further abuse. Society’s natural bent may well always be to help the abuser and harm the abused—though the overall level of abuse may be greater in one society, less in another.

This is of course exactly what Jesus says in the New Testament. The powers of this world are the scribes and Pharisees whom he condemns as abusive. The abused are cited as blessed in the Beatitudes—along with the poor in spirit, the meek, the persecuted.

Are all those in positions of power and authority bad people? Not at all; I know many folks who are fairly prominent, and many, probably most, have high personal moral standards and are sincere in wishing to do good. But the problem is systemic, or rather, ingrained into the nature of the world.

As to the stereotype most of us have, of abusers being working-class men, "rednecks," or Catholic priests, this is just a convenient cover for abusing working-class men, or Catholic priests. In Nazi Germany, similarly, the targeted “abusers” were invariably Jews. In the pre-civil-rights-era US South, they were invariably black men. I recall a doctor not long ago in Canada saying the only evidence of physical abuse of a child he would consider significant was cigarette burns. To him, somehow, abusing was apparently necessarily tied up with smoking; for everyone knows smokers are bad people. And that poster I saw in the Toronto subway? It defined abuse, in so many words, ignoring facts that should be obvious to all, as the “mistreatment of women and children.” Men, it seems, are never abused; men are always abusers.

In reality, of course, a generally disliked group is actually the group least likely to ever get away with abusing anyone, and so the group least likely ever to try. They are also of course the group most likely to themselves be abused.

The world is indeed mad. Abusers are most often called abused, and the abused abusers.

What advice, then, can we give the abused?

First, it is probably safest to avoid all official agencies claiming to offer aid.

Second, read the New Testament. Start with the Sermon on the Mount.

Funding Religious Schools in Ontario

Warren Kinsella and Robert Fulford both argue that the Ontario Conservatives’ plan to fund all religious schools is unworkable. Kinsella asks “what will you name the new government ministry that will determine what is a bona fide religion deserving of funding, and what is not? And, then, how many lawyers will the Attorney-General need to hire to fight the decades of constitutional challenges you will immediately face?” Fulford writes: “Have they any idea of the theological and bureaucratic nightmares they are inviting? We'll need armies of officials to negotiate with those who say they want support -- Hindus, Copts, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Protestants. Which of the many Protestant sects will be supported? Which Muslims? Which Jews?” Fulford actually implies the whole Enlightenment is at stake.

But this is a false problem. First, we already make this determination—for tax purposes. It is therefore manifestly possible, and it would cost not one penny more nor one more hour of work, to simply recognize the same organizations for school funding.

Even were this not so, the matter would still be simple. If any group of, say, fifty families in a given municipality requested a school on religious grounds, why would it even be any business of government to decide whether they have a real religion? Isn’t that their own business? Don’t their children need schooling in any case?

News Flash: Mother Theresa Lacked Faith

I am sad to read of the spiritual struggles Mother Theresa suffered, as revealed in her letters to her spiritual director, now published as a book titled Mother Theresa: Come be My Light. But I am not surprised. I would have been surprised were it not so.

Mother Theresa apparently suffered a crisis of faith soon after she started her work in the Calcutta slums, the work for which she eventually won a Nobel Prize. She actually questioned the existence of God. She certainly had no sense of his presence. She spoke of her life as “torture” and “hell.”

And this terrible spiritual darkness apparently continued until her death. By then, she had even ceased praying. All the time the world was celebrating her as a great model of faith and love, she felt none.

Welcome to the real world. It is not what you read in magazines.

Mother Theresa chose for herself a very hard road. Recall the Beatitudes. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are the meek; blessed are those who are persecuted in the cause of right; blessed are you when people abuse you.” None of this describes Mother Theresa: instead, she was celebrated by the world, and set herself up as a leader.

Jesus advises that we do our good works in private. Mother Theresa’s were not just public, but world famous.

Jesus says it is barely possible for a rich man to enter heaven; that one must build up one’s riches in heaven, not here, for where one’s wealth is, there one’s heart will be. Mother Theresa was not rich, personally, but had power, fame, and the command of great sums of money.

So God’s silence. The proper attitude towards self and this world becomes increasingly difficult so long as this world keeps telling us we are wonderful and giving us what we ask. As that other sainted Theresa, of Lisieux, argued, it is altogether better to be a little flower. It is better to leave only tiny footprints in this world.

And yet, the work that Mother Theresa did was wholly commendable. She saved many lives, prevented much suffering, and, most importantly, brought many people to faith, and even to vocation. And, in order to do this, she really did need to set herself up as a leader and as a celebrity. People need this.

This then becomes Mother Theresa’s martyrdom, and the seal of her sainthood: that she laid down her own spiritual life for others. That she suffered a private hell so that others would not suffer.

Was she a hypocrite? Certainly not: for, as these letters prove, she revealed all, and in all humility, to her spiritual director. And her actions belie her claim and her own impression that she had no faith nor love within her. Hypocrites claim to love, but their actions belie this. Theresa claimed not to love, but her actions belied this. She was the opposite of a hypocrite.

Had her life been happy, even if Spartan, amid fame, respect, and general approval, where would be the great merit in that? As Jesus said, she would already have had her reward. This much any of us might have managed.

But, knowing how she suffered to do good, we can be sure she has her reward in heaven. This was something well out of the ordinary; something like sainthood.

The Conspiracy Strikes Again

In A Culture of Conspiracy, Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun writes that "a conspiracist worldview implies a universe governed by design rather than by randomness." He finds three principles in virtually every conspiracy theory: "Nothing happens by accident." "Nothing is as it seems." "Everything is connected."

This is also, importantly, the essence of “paranoia,” or “paranoid schizophrenia.” “Paranoia” means, more or less literally, “meaning everywhere.” Whether this is considered normal or hopelessly insane largely seems to depend on whether you accept the same paranoid delusion as do a fair number of your neighbours.

Tragically, this all should be self-evident. The reason why the conspiracist or paranoid worldview is so compelling is simply that it is true. God exists; and he really is pulling all the strings beyond our sight. And so is the devil. God designed the universe; it is designed. It has a plan. This design is called, theologically, the Logos.

There are, therefore, no accidents. Nothing happens randomly, and everything is connected. Because of “the Deceiver,” the “Father of Lies,” that is, the devil, and with the willing cooperation of our egos, who want to see things as we want them to be, few things are as they seem. Appearance and reality usually do not correspond. This is doubly true because the world is largely invisible--largely spiritual.

Because this is so, sooner or later this becomes apparent to us—to at least the brightest of us. Sooner or later we realize that the “official” explanation of things does not fit the facts. Things that are not supposed to be connected plainly are. Improbable things happen often. Things seem to be acting purposefully all around us.

This should not be a problem; this should be our salvation. It should call us to faith. The truth sets us free.

And indeed, the existence of God is always the most obvious and most logical explanation for these things. This is true purely by Occam’s Razor: it explains everything by positing only one, or perhaps two, beings. By contrast, any conspiracy theory must posit an ever-expanding number of ever more devious and clever conspirators to remain plausible. Moreover, the existence of God can more or less be logically proven; the existence of a really widespread and efficient conspiracy defies common experience and common sense.

Nevertheless, there are two things fighting hard against the religious hypothesis. First, we are commonly conscious of having sinned, and we do not wish to believe we will have to stand in judgment for it, as the existence of God implies. If God exists, he sees us with our trousers down. Every time. We want license, too, to continue to sin, to do what is our will regardless of the right and wrong; though we probably hope they apply to others. Accepting that all is in God’s hands (as opposed, say, to ours) argues that we cannot. Second, the powers of the social world, certainly at the present time, and probably in most or all times, also wish to deny and suppress the religious understanding of the world. For, if it is true, it also stands in judgment of them, individually and collectively. They too, like the rest of us, wish to sin boldly when it suits them. They will promote formal religion only if it is entirely under their own control.

Many of us, therefore, miss the obvious religious truth, and resort instead to elaborate conspiracy theories. As Chesterton said, those who will not believe in God will believe in anything. Things are being invisibly controlled by the CIA. Or by alien beings. Or by the bankers. Or by the Jews. Or witches, or the capitalists, or Big Business, or the oil companies, or the CPR, or the Trilateral Commission, or the bourgeoisie, or the Catholic Church, or the neocons, or the British, or the Americans, or the straight white males, and on and yawn. At a pinch, it might even be the neighbour’s dog.

Of course, some organizations really do attempt conspiracies: Al Qaeda, the KKK, the Nazis, the Mafia, the various Communist parties. But they generally do not amount to much in practice, succeeding, when they do, mostly by sheer coincidence in their own terms, and always, almost necessarily, disproving their own founding thesis by succeeding. Moreover, they are usually formed defensively, the idea being to protect their members from some larger imagined conspiracy that threatens them. Al Qaeda defends its members and clients against the worldwide conspiracy of the infidel forces, represented most clearly by the USA. The KKK in its own mind defended the South against the carpetbagger conspiracy to destroy their native culture. The Nazis of course protected the German nation against a supposed worldwide conspiracy of cosmopolitan Jews. The Mafia originally protected Sicilians against a mistrusted foreign government—the same condition many Italians perceived, as immigrants, in the US. And the Communists, of course, protect the masses against the evil capitalist bourgeoisie.

To summarize:

When one begins to think in a “paranoid” way, and chooses the same explanation as one’s neighbours, it tends to lead rather swiftly to the persecution of some designated group.

When one begins to think in a “paranoid” way, and chooses a different explanation from one’s neighbours, it tends to lead rather swiftly to persecution by one’s neighbours. One is judged “insane”—literally, “unclean.”

When one begins to think in a “paranoid” way, and accepts the religious explanation, it tends to lead rather swiftly to a sense of general contentment, even joy, in this world, let alone the next.

When one has never thought in a paranoid way, one is probably just not very bright.

I'm Back

Apologies to those who have become accustomed to visiting this site, for posting nothing for a month. I have been on vacation. It had been my intention to keep posting from the road, but one thing and another prevented this. It turns out, for example, that there are now very few Internet Cafes in either France or Canada. Everyone is now set up for wireless. But my laptop died on the road.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a good summer. And I note that Andrew Coyne is worse than I am on this. He has posted nothing on his (recommended) blog for ages.