Gubbinal

We marked yesterday the fourth anniversary of the death of our father, the industrial designer, Jim Warren; though it is now more like a decade since he was fully present, with all his earthly wits about him. Yet we could still converse; wordlessly, at the end. An Anglican priest once warned us, while on deathbed duty to another customer, that hearing is the last thing to go. Do not assume the dying are deaf. But in our experience, character is the last thing, & traces remain even when every other faculty has disintegrated. Four years ago we were compelled to knock something on this topic quickly together. Our handwritten squib wound up on the Internet, & may still be found, here. Ten years, since we began the task of sorting through the records & possessions of a man who was by nature both a designer & a teacher. We still have a small mountain to attack, of his files, slides, binders, models, drawings; we are still assimilating or distributing his art materials. But even were we not doing this, we would still be recalling, day after day, his voice & general approach to life. This is worth recalling, for he was in so many ways a better man than we are. He taught more by example than by instruction, & yet what he taught was plain. Build: the good, the true, the beautiful. Destroy: the bad, the false, the ugly. Debate was happily joined on what to put in which category & why; & all our life with him we were happily debating; but ever with a view to creation & destruction. Let us add that these three intrinsic qualities of things, present or absent, are aspects of the One: that what is ugly will also be false in some sense; that what is ugly & false points to some evil; that conversely when something is beautiful & good it points to some discoverable truth; that no aspect is to be neglected or discounted. Beauty, to the point, is never dispensable. The post-religious,

utilitarian view of the world, that has emerged chiefly since the European Enlightenment, takes it for an afterthought, a luxury, a bonus; something purely subjective & therefore superfluous. Beauty to most of our contemporaries is all very well if one can afford it; but ugly is cheaper. The notion that the end justifies the means is built upon this obscene falsehood. When we reconstruct pre-industrial landscapes, anywhere on the planet, we find a kind of relief. Even among the iconoclasts, thrown up in many times & locations, harmony & proportion are acknowledged. Even as late in the day as Georgian England, a row of apparently identical houses is not made from identical units. The windows & doors have been placed by eye, with a view to the overall composition. This was not because the builders lacked rulers. It was because they realized too strict a repetition would be monotonous, & therefore ugly. It would convey an impression dead, not alive. This wasnt a question for cost/benefit analysis: one did not do things that would not do. God is in the details, we can hear our papa preaching. God can see what you have hidden around the back. He was not a religious man, by disposition. His religion was mediated through principles of art & design. He had a makeshift theology based simply on the avoidance of falsehood: moral, intellectual, or aesthetic. We have come a long way, along the path of progress. People today are profoundly calloused, from constant beating: from living in environments that are monstrously ugly. They still make aesthetic judgements paradoxically sometimes the more fanatic from having been twisted or suppressed. More often one discerns spilt art on the analogy of spilt religion. For the faculty will never leave man alone. Every child is

born with the capacity to distinguish fair from foul, awaiting cultivation. But as in the moral & intellectual domains, the sensibility to beauty can be perverted. And for all the callousing, the pain remains beneath the skin, throbbing & disturbing ones peace. It is symptom if not the cause of an illness, for which people often seek pharmaceutical relief. But joy cannot be restored with pills. That strange flower, the sun, Have it your way. The world is ugly, Is just what you

say.

And the people are sad.

The iconoclast Bauhaus, to whose principles papa partially subscribed, sought a cure through the elimination of false decoration; false in the sense that it was slapped onto objects with which it had nothing to do to prettify them, & thereby conceal what they really were. In papas slides & teaching notes we found furious, mocking attacks on the kitsch, always fair within their boundaries. We used to argue with him that the boundaries were themselves too narrow; that they left fine art isolated in museums, or on too high a pedestal, with no gradation of craft from the humble to the sublime. Form follows function was a spray to kill weeds that defoliated, too, the whole garden. Largely he came to agree with this from his side, & we from ours to admit we had no alternative cure to offer, short of pitching out every technical advance from the last 200 years. So we must continue working on this problem, this grim business in which our world is constructed on the analogy of a toilet, with proper attention only to hygiene. Or as Wallace Stevens observed: That tuft of jungle feathers, Is just what you say. That animal eye,

That savage of fire, your way. The world is ugly,

That seed,

Have it

And the people are sad.

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The end of Twinkies?

At last, people begin to understand. Its not just some abstract end of the world. Its the end of Wonder Bread. Its the end of Ding Dongs. Its the end of Twinkies. Hostess Brands Inc. have shut all their factories. Many thousands of employees who decided to strike a company that had twice filed for Chapter Eleven protection also begin to understand. They may now wave their little signs in perpetuity. Except, not so fast. Those bidding auction-room prices on eBay for the last box of Twinkies may soon find that the liquidators have sold the brands, together with the industrial recipes. Twinkies may rise again. Maybe theyll start making them in China. They are imperishable after all. One could ship them from anywhere. One hardly knows what to think. Up here in the High Doganate, we are shockingly indifferent to the fate of Twinkies. Our view was that a person who puts that in his mouth needs the rest of his head examined. But not by us. We are snooty & elitist up here. By the standards of the Greater Parkdale Area we probably count as a foodie. We did eat a Twinkie once, or something very similar; just as we once tried Beondegi, the popular Korean snack, made from steamed silkworm pupae (and not from maggots as commonly supposed). You only live once, & not long at that, as the philosophers have observed. In neither case did we finish the serving. Given starvation, & a choice only between the two between a tin of Beondegi & a box of Twinkies well, we preferred the seasoning of the silkworm pupae.

But we are not Mayor Bloomberg. We wouldnt try to discourage members of the urban proletariat from buying Twinkies, or soda pop in gallon jugs, or any of the other products of post-modern capitalism. We would drop the ridiculous health messages he & his ilk now propose to stipulate. We have never liked half measures. No, we would do nothing of the kind. At least, not until we have the vice squads in place for the Aesthetic Division of our new Rapid Reactionary model police. This paramilitary force, which we have often imagined, would conduct dawn raids on the supermarkets, removing from the shelves everything deemed ugly, purely on the basis of external packaging. Even the milk would go, if our cops found it being sold in these 1.33-litre plastic blood bags. Indeed, anything sorted into metric portions would be a candidate for our Lists. We have never felt comfortable telling people how to live. Not when we can reduce their options by direct action. We mentioned cars, in a previous post, but that was just scratching the surface of things that will have to go.
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November 15, 2012

Democracy versus Bombay

We are, for the immediately foreseeable future, a long distance from Bombay, or would perhaps write more cautiously. Calling it Bombay would be the first incautious note. This was the name given to the city by the British, who founded it. From the start it was an entrept; through centuries it became home to a great variety of peoples. However the British came upon that name probably from

Portuguese, for it was the Portuguese who ceded the territory to the British East India Company there was never a place named Mumbai. This new name, which the whole worlds gliberal media quickly adopted after official proclamation in 1996, is actually a corruption of Bombay in Marathi. Mumbai happens to be the name in Gujarati, too, but this was mere accident; it was imposed as an act of Marathi chauvinism. (A Gujarati speaking in English would say, Bombay.) Various alternative etymologies have been offered, all of them fanciful, & all advanced by political wingnuts. The British even supplied most of the land, beginning in the late 18th century. The site was originally seven small shallow-water islands, much flooded at high tide, along the western rim of a natural deep harbour. They were a fishermans perch, & a navigation hazard. In 1782 the governor, William Hornby, began the land reclamation project with a causeway linking these islands. To this was added successive wonders of civil engineering, until by the middle of the next century Bombay had grown physically into the Manhattan of the Indian subcontinent, sea-walled where necessary above the tide line. It was the capital of the British presidency of Bombay; it became the capital of the State of Bombay after Indian independence. In 1960, the state of Maharashtra was created, as an ethnic domain corresponding vaguely to the old Hindu marches that hemmed & threatened the Mughal Empire. Maratha warriors were genuinely fearsome, in their day. Bombay became the capital of Maharashtra, being in it though not of it. The kind of statistics one reads in e.g. the Wicked Paedia are highly misleading, for by generalizing they suggest that Maharashtra is among Indias richest states. Populous it is (more inhabitants than Mexico), but rich it is not. Bombay is, by the standards of modern India,

filthy stinking rich. So, to some degree, is Poona (Pune in current political jargon). Nagpur may have moments. But the rest of Maharashtra just lowers the averages. Let us walk into the Bombay Stock Exchange (still defiantly so called) in our imagination. We have done so in our person, but not recently. Yet to this day, we are assured, it is full of Gujaratis, with a fair sprinkling of Parsees & many other ethnic & linguistic avatars, freely trading with each other. One will hear a lot more English than Hindi (the ethnic language of north-western & north India, imposed on the rest of India by politicians); & hardly ever Marathi. This is spontaneous, not legislated multiculturalism; for the beating capitalist heart of Bombay is not ethnic. Nor can it become ethnic except by political intervention. To this day, the Marathis, who do indeed supply a great mass of the citys labourers, & people most of its slums, make better farmers & craftsmen & soldiers & have, for all their numbers in Bombay, not flourished as investors & industrialists & traders. (They control Bollywood, however; a scene almost as ugly as Hollywood.) Beneath this lies deep cultural history; & we do not mean to condemn the Marathis, for as gentle reader may have observed, we are partial to farmers & craftsmen & soldiers; & actors & actresses & musicians for that matter. We are however opposed to populists & bigots, & this is where the chauvinist Marathi politician, Bal Thackeray, comes in. Caution two: we wouldnt be writing this in Bombay just now, while Bala-sahib has lain for months on his deathbed, & where units of Indias Rapid Action Force & myriad anti-riot squads wait upon news of his medical developments. For the man Thackeray, once a newspaper cartoonist, was the founder of Shiv Sena, an extremely ugly political party built on the ministrations of thuggees & goondas. They are bad

news for Jews (yes, Bombay has Jews), & for every other ethnicity that is not Hindu Marathi, including Muslims (of which Bombay has plenty), & Parsees, & Christians of all origins. And Buddhist Marathis, too, who converted to escape the stigma of the untouchable caste. Also, potentially or actually bad news for any prominent Marathi of an independent disposition. In other words, bad news all round for anyone not in the client demographic. But numbers, not truths, are what tell in a democracy. And to the great Marathi masses, Bal Thackeray is a kind of saviour. His Shiv Sena has always promised to deliver into their hands what could not be obtained, except through politics: chiefly, other peoples possessions. The name Thackeray is incidentally fake. It was actually Thakre to start with, & not even Maharashtrian, for the family hailed from Bihar. The Anglicization was in this case pure pretence; Bala-sahib pronounces it as if it were English, as in William Makepeace Thackeray (whose Indian links were to Calcutta instead). Likewise, his descendants have attended the Bombay Scottish School; it is a prestige thing. Hitler, for that matter, was not actually a German; & we mention him advisedly. Thackeray has often praised Hitler, & presented him as someone who did for the Germans what he proposes to do for the Marathis. (Ask a German today what boons Hitler conferred upon the Germans.) Thackeray has perhaps as often angrily denied that he has ever praised Hitler. It depends, as it does with demagogues everywhere, on the day of the week & the time of the day. It was Bala-sahib Thackeray who got the Mumbai ball rolling, just as it was he who contributed through the years not only to Maharashtrian thug politics financed through protection rackets but to the pan-Indian Hindu nationalism that offers the planet something to look forward to when

fanatic Islam relaxes. He has done this through a bewildering array of party alliances of convenience, each of which tends to prove most convenient to the nastiest party. And although he is quite mortal, he has left this earth a delinquent nephew, named Raj Shrikant Thackeray, to carry on his work. Raj, also known locally as Mini-me Thackeray, embodies a Marathi chauvinism that makes his uncle sometimes seem by comparison modest, gentle, & wise. He lacks his uncles almost charmingly sick sense of humour. We are not proposing to write a book on Indian politics at this moment. The interested reader could acquaint himself with background, foreground, & prospects of doom, by long & patient study. The limit of our present ambition is to call attention to a phenomenon too frequently overlooked. It is about democracy, & it helps to explain why we dont like it much. Thackeray is a product of democratic politics, who could rise in no other. So was Hitler: not merely the winner of a crucial German election, but a man who could not rise except atop a party machine, whose very existence was predicated upon the democratic style of representative institutions. So was Mussolini; so was Lenin; so was Mao. Shiv Sena, the Nazis, the Fascists, the Communists, & every other manifestation of tribal & totalitarian irredentism, was made possible by the historical emergence of the party model; easily exported to places where democracy itself had never been, via the European empires. Such parties do not necessarily come to power by free election; but the very condition for nationalist & socialist advance is party-political. Moreover, even without winning elections or ever achieving formal power, such parties can exert a decisive influence on the course of political events compelling other parties to make concessions in order to keep the real crazies from power.

The nationalism & the socialism are the obverse & reverse of a single coin. One side flips to the other, then back, as needed; both offer the appropriation of the individual by the mass, & the replacement of God with the Leviathan. That is, both identically herald the self-worship of mass-man. There is of course much more to be said on this. But we are trying to give an indication of what needs saying: that those truly opposed to nationalism & socialism, & more generally to Godless tyranny, will observe its chief modern source & cause. In a single word, loaded with cant, it is democracy: the politics of the mob. There are many words to oppose this cant expression, all of which revert from the general to the particular, again. In English one of our favourites is, Bombay.
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November 13, 2012

A literary widow
Valerie Eliot, the widow of Thomas Stearns Eliot, died Friday in London, a little less than half a century after her husband. We caught a glimpse of her once in the London Library: a magnificent dowager empress of a woman. She donated a substantial part of the huge copyright earnings from Andrew Lloyd Webers musical, Cats (based on Eliots Old Possums Book) to an expansion of that most Alexandrian of all private libraries, in the north-west corner of St Jamess Square. But at the time we saw her, she was there only to borrow books. Eliot had once been president of that library, founded by Carlyle in 1841. We resented the expansion, unreasonably, because it involved the destruction of the old philosophy bunker, many floors up top of one of the newer columns of

an extraordinary three-dimensional labyrinth. To find it required first locating a succession of three different staircases (two of them helical) through meanders in which one glimpsed, through iron floor grates, book stacks over stacks dropping many storeys down. Bunker was the word, for that particular column of the library was built of poured concrete, & the room at top housed numerous ancient folio volumes, many of them with shrapnel still embedded from a German bomb in the last World War. One long shard had passed all the way through An Essay Concerning the Human Understanding , with supplementary treatises by John Locke, pinning it permanently shut. (Who says there is no God?) No one ever seemed to visit that room, & for several years we appropriated a little oak school desk, on runners by a southfacing window. We visited almost daily, leaving our notebooks & other low-value equipage in a bottom drawer, never to be disturbed. Our heart seizes up with nostalgia when we remember that room, & so many others in the London Library, including the rather grand, high, L-shaped formal Reading Room, where magnificent old toffs slept in wide cushioned armchairs, with the old broadsheet Times covering their faces, rising & falling with their snores. How often, in London, we preferred the Luftwaffes alterations to what was rebuilt post-War, in a 1950s style one architecture critic dubbed, Late Georgian Bomb Damage. But the London Library expansions all happened the day before yesterday. Money is a terrible destroyer of character. The buildings are now climate-controlled & wheelchair accessible, if you know what we mean. When we last walked in, we hardly recognized the place, & a new generation of PR-trained, smileyfaced staff had replaced all the high-collared ghosts, who looked at one disapprovingly, & were pellucidly unhelpful. We had stepped into the future, where everything is nice.

Not that we blame Valerie Eliot. Instead we blame Margaret Thatcher, for making Britain prosperous in an ugly age. It was still such a beautifully decaying & dysfunctional, classridden ruin in the 1970s. That much we can say for socialism. By the 1990s we had people with truly vile accents, dripping with their gains from the most vulgar imaginable economic activities. This piece in the Daily Telegraph, by an unusually wellinformed hack, celebrates the passing of literary widows. Mrs Eliot, along with Sonia Orwell, Natasha Spender, Kathleen Tynan, & Mrs Cecil Day-Lewis, were among the formidable legion, all now finally dead. As Peter Stanford writes, they were mostly second wives (the first having conveniently predeceased), decades younger than the famous men they married. Each lived on, tenaciously to fight for her husbands reputation, & to fulfil the actual requirements of his will. The idea of a devoted wife became in the meantime so alien & unbelievable, that they were made into pantomime villains, to whom the lowest motives were casually assigned. But in the case of Valerie Eliot especially, a formidable woman who could hold her own against the filth. Her greatest accomplishment consisted of decades of implacable opposition to biographers intent upon invading T.S. Eliots private life, & thereby depriving him of his dignity. A capable scholar, she took control of the editing of the poets letters & manuscripts; & shrewdly managed the estate to raise the considerable sums with which to endow not only the London Library, but the English department of Newnham College at Cambridge, & many other arts & literary institutions. A figure of the Establishment she was, & as her husband once became among the more remarkable accomplishments of a man who was essentially a chainsmoking bohemian. For he was also a Christian; one who could still conceive Christendom as an Establishment, to be inhabited & served.

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November 12, 2012

Now what?
Whoever hath a Will, Anne hath a way, said James Joyce somewhere, probably in Finnegans Wake though we cant find the passage. It is one of the great obscene puns of all time. Watching General Petraeus come down perhaps the only competent man in the Obama administration we were reminded that men & women can never be trusted in each others company. Merely checking the headlines, one is apprised of the latest proofs. Media which showed no interest in the appalling failure to secure the American mission in Benghazi, or rescue the inmates while the U.S. had a chance, are suddenly all over this story of a potential security breach. (Ike had an affair, & JFK several dozen, & people looked the other way. Suddenly now that we are living in Sodom & Gomorrah, marital infidelity is a resignation offence.) We dare just one rightwing tabloid to ask the question on many ageing minds. To wit, Do you understand now why we dont put women on the front line? Or rather, why we didnt used to. There are many unanswerable reasons for this, & Mrs Broadwell has supplied only a few of them. Men, you see, are easily distracted by women. And this is a serious thing because men have one-track minds. Women can multitask, they claim, but men require focus, & when there is a war going on, it is best to leave them focused on the enemy. The other arguments we may leave aside for today. They touch upon civilizational matters that are anyway best pursued on other planes. This one is merely practical & tactical.

Some decades ago, we met a female Israeli paratrooper, directing automobile traffic along the Rehov Yaffo in new Jerusalem. She was wearing an impressive side arm, & her military uniform on this fill-in civilian job. Indeed, she looked quite fetching thus accoutred, & we essayed a ludicrous act of jaywalking in order to get her attention. (We were young, once.) This worked, & in the upshot we received a stiff warning about the traffic rules, & an invitation to a party. Details, details: let us cut to the chase. We were puzzled, in those days, by the whole idea of a female paratrooper, & were enlightened by the answers we received from this young lady, to various questions we were later able to put. We go in when all the men are dead, was the short & summarizing reply. She belonged to an all-female paratrooper unit, in constant training & ever ready for call-up in the event of war. (In peacetime, apparently, other useful tasks.) As she explained, the Israelis, whose survival depends on never losing a single war, were not so stupid as to put men & women in the same paratroop unit; nor so uncivilized as to send the women in first. They were, in effect, a reserve to the battalion reserve. Now that struck us as a sensible arrangement, given the shortage of manpower that followed from being a nation of a few million surrounded by enemies of a few hundred million. Well, we could say more. But we would be accused, in that case, of indulging a morbid fascination with the selfdestruction of the United States of America, as of the West, generally.
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November 6, 2012

In the kingdom of Whatever

We do not like Daylight Savings Time (why would we?) but can say this much for it. Once every year, it gives us a publicly-recognized opportunity to set all our clocks back one hour. While this is hardly sufficient to erase centuries of Error, it is a satisfying gesture. Voting no longer gives us that sort of thrill. Those bastards never set the clock back a single minute, as Evelyn Waugh explained, to some dimwit or other, who asked why he wouldnt vote even for the Tories. (No doubt apocryphal; the best quotes usually are.) Our American readers are reminded to set their clock backs this morning, if they havent already. And as it is now the first Tuesday in November of a Leap Year, vote often & early for James Michael Curley. Had we the energy, & a car, we might be tempted to drive down to Ohio, & impersonate dead Americans in a dozen voting precincts. But then, we would probably overcome the temptation. As a former newspaper pundit, we are ashamed to say, we would be capable of talking gentle readers ear off with comments on polls, their background assumptions, the underlying demographic facts, the partisan trends & their causes; the conclusion of which would be that were not sure who will win. Without enthusiasm, we support Mr Romneys Mormon-Christian coalition, or at least, have long been on record against the Obama Nation that makes desolate. But the Archbishop of Phila, the estimable Charles J. Chaput, makes a more sober point. Read this. And do not weep, for as he says, it has always been this way. Verily: our Kingdom is not of this world. *

To which we might add, that His Grace, in the item linked, touches upon vast history, through Brad Gregorys recent book, The Unintended Reformation, which we have promised ourself to read. In our experience, people (a term we use to include Catholics) know little to nothing about the Reformation, & this mite floats on the breeze of centuries of half-remembered sectarian propaganda. Consider this remark: Late mediaeval clergy too often preached one thing & did another. Greed, simony, nepotism, luxury, sexual licence, & schism in the hierarchy created an intolerable gap between Christian preaching & practice. True, but note the qualification. Let us distinguish between too often, & always. The point here is that the Protestants did not finally focus upon the greed, simony, nepotism, &c, rather used it to support attacks on the doctrine itself, by which such crimes were ultimately defined. (How often, back in the days of the Cold War, we found ourself painfully obliged to defend corrupt & hypocritical allies in places like Vietnam, against supposed morally pure Communists, who would not merely depose them, but impose a tyranny that turned morality itself upside down.) Corruption there was in many places, but also, exemplary works. In England, for instance, on the eve of Henry VIIIs sack of the monasteries, it is necessary to go through them case by case. Some were in an appalling condition; some were shining lights; & many were somewhere between. We should not easily accept a caricature, in which the worst cases are taken as typical. (Read Eamon Duffy, for instance, & through his bibliographies, find much more.) It should also be remembered that the arguments of the Reformers were themselves the product of the later Middle

Ages. Reckless anachronism recasts them, through eyes that are looking through the history backwards. Our side did not consist of perfect little choirboys. No side of anything ever did, for this planet is diseased. Conversely there was good in the worst of the Reformers; the good that God had put there. And while there is plenty of better & worse to argue, the argument itself leads us astray. For the issue was not the assignment of Brownie points, but the integrity of Christendom.
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November 1, 2012

Hallowtide
Call up All Saints in Google, at least from up here in the High Doganate, & one will get at the top the offer of a catalogue for the winter collection of an Anglo-American clothing emporium that appears to specialize in mildly risqu unisexual knitwear. The top Wiki search result yields an article on a British-Canadian pop-music girl group, founded in 1993 but since liquidated. Go for All Hallows instead, & one will learn that it was the title of a successful album by an American punk rock band. In the way that every economic transaction, no matter how sordid, adds to GDP, all three of these links increased our knowledge. Search tip: never, ever, hit Images for anything. It would perhaps be captious to characterize the contemporary religious outlook as smileyface satanism, but we have noticed that Halloween is now the most popular survivor of the old Christian festivals. Except, it wasnt a feast, but the Eve of All Hallows. All Saints Day is in turn eve to All Souls, in a liturgical movement of the Christian

calendar that remains startling after a thousand years. From Heaven the Saints have looked down, into Purgatory; & with them, for our own, we pray. All Souls is murkily hallowed in our memory, to anno 1976, when we first hesitantly entered Christian churches, not as tourist but believer. Months had passed since our conversion, wed become comfortable at last with Trinitarianism. But against church attendance we still chafed. We recall one of our earliest prayers to the personalized Deity: Please, Lord, dont make me go in there. We still find this the hardest part of Christian instruction; we still need nearly to whip ourself to church. And we still go, flinching for what may happen, seeking the Mass & not Christian society; still essentially allergic to coffee clatches, & deficient in love for our fellow man; still seeking Christ & almost expecting to find someone else in charge. Our first thought, after conversion, was to become a Catholic. For in an objective view of twenty centuries, it seemed perfectly obvious that the Roman was the Christian Church, par excellence. A close friend, & beloved old atheist companion from the road in Asia giant, red-haired, Scottish, & with a mind redolent of Edinburgh, able to kick a man or an idea down the stairs put it most succinctly. If Id had your experience, he said, I wouldnt fart about. Id go straight to Rome. But at the time we lived in England, where every glimpse we received of the Roman communion was a fresh source of discouragement. Even before converting, we were outraged aesthetically, by the desecration of Catholic worship that had followed on Vatican II; & by the 1970s we were confronted not only by a liturgy made wilfully & viciously ugly, but by the preaching of ridiculous heresies plain even from a merely literary knowledge of Catholic doctrine. That, in short, was how we became High Anglican, & remained so

for too many years. It sounded & looked vastly more Catholic; & the music was superb. The priests, too, were seldom community organizers from the batty Left; many seemed themselves to be Christian, & they could read & write. The key was however to be found in a small village church in Suffolk. It was filled with humble country folk, clich to our big city eyes. We had no business there; were only passing from Ipswich to Woodbridge on an idle architectural walking tour. (St Marys, Great Bealings, we thought it was; but now looking at the map were not sure it wasnt St Marys, Playford.) The tower bell was ringing, & on a sudden inspiration, entirely out of character, we went in. It was the evening of All Souls. We watched parishioners silently kneel before taking their pews; pray, stand, sit, mutter, listen; sing a hymn. Then they rose & began to stumble about. Our memory fails, compounded by our confusion at the time. We were awkward, we had no notion what to do. We were ignored, stepped around, & almost through, as if an overfamiliar ghost. There were candles, a procession was forming: What now? The procession led out, through the arch under the tower, into the churchyard. On clearing the portal it scattered, into small purposeful groups. And then we realized: the people are carrying their candles to the tombstones; members of each family to their ancestors graves. For centuries, perhaps, they had been doing this; from time out of mind ploughed into the ground, generation by generation, & rising again & again from this earth. With the Lord, one day is as a thousand years, & a thousand years as one day. We had come as a spectator, or voyeur, we suppose; as an

intellectual, curious in some anthropological way, always hungry for something to study & analyze. We had come now as a Christian, but from very far away. And now, to our stockpile of Christian teaching, we began to add: I am one of these people.
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October 31, 2012

Disaster porn
Halloween came to the eastern seaboard of the USA this year via Hurricane Sandy, & most memorably to NYC, burning out a neighbourhood in Queens, crippling Con Ed, flooding subways & tunnels. Up here in the GPA (Greater Parkdale Area, as we call the conurbation that radiates from the western shores of Lake Ontario), there was much less than the promised damage & excitement; the storm relaxed quickly once inland, & its track deflected east. We now see the best of New York showing again, as it cleans up the mess with its own immediate resources. The last city to hold out against the American Revolutionists, it still shows its British qualities under stress; & its Irish in the real men who still staff its fire, police, & rescue services. God keep them. The rest of the world has been sharing in the photos & videos: the best natural disaster footage since the tsunami in Japan. We watched plenty of this material on our laptop, until self-disgust caught up with our declining curiosity. Science, as Don Colacho said, has impressively increased velocity & range for the dissemination of idiocy; but long before the Internet, the media were feeding the publics right to know. Human empathy inspires generous giving to disaster victims,

& much more is usually commandeered through tax systems. Human corruption is such that most of this aid gets into the wrong hands. In Japan, for instance, where something like 150 billion dollars was raised for reconstruction after the tsunami, government auditors now find about half has evaporated within the bureaucracies, & half of what remains was spent to enrich purveyors of economic recovery whose projects had nought to do with the tsunami. It does not follow that the remaining quarter is being well or even honestly spent. We argued once that, over the years, far more damage had been done to Haiti by foreign aid, than by earthquakes & hurricanes & floods. We were greeted of course with howls of execration, from the sort of people whose livelihoods depend on fundraising for such causes. None of those were Haitians. The photogenic core of rescue & medical operations that actually save lives cost a tiny fraction of the money that is raised; & almost all of that is delivered by agencies that function almost anonymously, out of existing budgets. The real heroes are e.g. the men & women of the U.S. Navy (almost always first to arrive), & quick-responding field hospital teams from countries like Israel. The demons are those who administer recovery, reinforcing the power of the State to hold the poor in subjection, & prevent their modest efforts to help themselves. Some evils lead to goods, but most evils, so far as can be traced, lead to other evils. This, we think, is at the root of our self-disgust, in being the consumer of voyeur media. Those who do not suffer themselves derive illicit pleasure from those who do, then become easy marks for emotional manipulation. The do-gooders make their livings exploiting deep veins of unexamined guilt. Meanwhile, the dignity of those who truly suffer is compromised; for it is humiliating to be put on camera in the moment one wrestles with grief & loss. The media make their money from this, but what they do is unspeakable.

3 comments
October 30, 2012

Aphorisms of Don Colacho

Here are some aphorisms of the Colombian thinker, Nicols Gmez Dvila (Don Colacho, 19131994), whose compendium, Escolios a un texto implcito, is among the significant documents of the 20th century. His work had been translated into many European languages, but not English; a gentleman named Stephen in Irving, Texas, is remedying this defect by posting his own translations in a searchable weblog. (He cannot be adequately praised.) We have shamelessly stolen every one of these items from that marvellous blog: * There are two kinds of men: those who believe in original sin, & idiots. Humanity is the only totally false god. Reason, Progress, & Justice are the theological virtues of the fool. Either man has rights, or the people is sovereign. The simultaneous assertion of two mutually exclusive theses is what people have called liberalism. Liberalism proclaims the right of the individual to degrade himself, provided his degradation does not impede the degradation of his neighbour. Under the name of liberty, man conceals his hunger for

sovereignty. To refute the new morality, one needs only to examine the faces of its aged devotees. Envy is the key to more stories than sex. Without a hierarchical structure it is not possible to transform freedom from a fable. The liberal always discovers too late that the price of equality is the omnipotent State. Those whose gratitude for receiving a benefit is transformed into devotion to the person who grants it, instead of degenerating into the usual hatred aroused by all benefactors, are aristocrats; even if they walk around in rags. Ingratitude, disloyalty, resentment, rancour define plebeian soul in every age, & characterize this century. the

The necessary & sufficient condition of despotism is the disappearance of every kind of social authority not conferred by the State. Natural disasters devastate a region less effectively than the alliance of greed & technology. Sciences greatest triumph appears to lie in the increasing speed with which an idiocy can be transported from one location to another. Religion did not arise out of the need to assure social solidarity, nor were cathedrals built to encourage tourism. The reactionary does not become a conservative except in

ages which maintain something worthy of being conserved. Thought tends to be a response to an outrage rather than to a question. The root of reactionary thought is not distrust of reason but distrust of the will. Metaphysical problems do not haunt man so that he will solve them, but so that he will live them. An explanation consists in assimilating a strange mystery to a familiar mystery. By replacing the concrete sense perception of the object with its abstract intellectual construction, man gains the world & loses his soul. A dentistry degree is respectable, but a philosophy degree is grotesque. The impact of a text is proportional to the cunning of its insinuations. Literary skill consists in keeping a phrase at the right temperature. Classical literature is obviously not prelapsarian, but happily it is pre-Gnostic. Every work of art speaks to us of God; no matter what it says. A good painting cuts short the art critics lyricism.

Goya is the seer of demons, Picasso their accomplice. Civilizations enter into agony when they forget that there exists not merely an aesthetic activity, but also an aesthetic of activity. The Muse does not visit the man who works more, or the man who works less, but whomever she feels like visiting. Even though history has no laws, the course of a revolution is easily foreseen; because stupidity & madness do have laws. History is full of victorious morons. In history it is wise to hope for miracles, & absurd to trust in plans. To proclaim Christianity the cradle of the modern world is a grave calumny. There is some collusion between scepticism & faith: both undermine human presumptuousness. Wisdom comes down to not showing God how things should be done. Reason is no substitute for faith, as colour is no substitute for sound. When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples. My convictions are the same as those of an old woman praying in the corner of a church.

3 comments
October 29, 2012

The open pit

In the future, anyone opposed to the open society will be arrested, in the West. In the Middle East, perhaps only those who oppose the Islamic open society will be arrested; & in China, only the opponents of the Politburos. A big talk piece by David Rieff in National Interest has prompted this observation. Rieff, the product of Susan Sontags earliest liaison, with the Freudian sociologist Philip Rieff, could almost be said to have been born an avatar of societal openness. An anarchic vagabond, caressed by the liberal intelligentsia, he has been undermining their claims to authority in ever less subtle ways. He is member, fellow, or senior fellow of various prestigious fora of the selfcelebratory great & good, from the World Policy Institute, to the Council on Foreign Relations, to Human Rights Watch. Yet he now hints that the heroic project to bring the open society to the whole planet is a chimera, & that its leading exponents are titched. He is saying this cautiously; but read the article. Surely, finally, he can be disowned. We may not have to wait long for the arrests, especially if Barack Obama is able to bestow upon America the incomparable blessing of four more of his invaluable years. For the idea of the open society is itself open to evolution, & we are about one Supreme Court appointment from declaring the U.S. Constitution entirely open to keep up with it. The open society now requires vigorous universal welfare arrangements, centralized policy control by czars, & ceaseless bureaucratic punishment of the non-cooperative. It is Obamacare writ large; & the sceptic of the open society, whose conscience will not row to its command, already finds himself exposed to what Austin Ruse has called, the ugly

claws & bared teeth of the pelvic Left. But we mention this only to be melodramatic. It is from want of courage that opponents of the open society agree to go silent & stand down. We have the spectacle of some rookery of alarmed penguins, fleeing the transgressive sea lion, who catches & flails them at his leisure from their rear. After each round, the surviving penguins congratulate themselves on reaching safety. Yet sometimes, rather than fleeing, one spritely little proximate penguin with his razor beak stands to announce, the hell you are going to eat me, & we have instead the spectacle of a blinded, bleeding, panicked & retreating sea lion. This is not what Rieff is getting at, however. His position developed through his opposition to the U.S. military enterprise in Iraq, when George Bush & not George Soros was his target; but he is moving towards a fuller understanding that these two Georges, while opponents in any imaginable democratic ground game, were working all along from the same background assumption: that democracy, civil society, & the gamut of Western, postChristian schemes for universal emancipation, are the inevitable destiny of the world; that every obstacle to this emancipation must be levelled & paved; that nothing in the end must obstruct the view of the open society. This was exactly the position Francis Fukuyama advertised in his famous End of History? piece in the same National Interest, nearly a quarter century ago. It was a useful article because it generously revealed the fatuity of his own position; & he has spent the rest of his career trying to recover his poise. History has since continued, taking the usual unpredictable turns, & yet the astoundingly glib proposal that we must all work towards the inevitable triumph of the open society weaves ever more tightly into the progressive consciousness, along with freedom marches & the

American Dream. The segue of blissful Hegelian fantasy into breaking-news nightmare may yet cause the sleeper to wake, but meanwhile he remains in a kind of moral & intellectual coma, perfectly convinced that he can fly. Freedom cannot be imposed. Nor can one man define it for another; nor one society liberate another. We can work against a discernible evil slavery, say; or abortion; or some specific tyrant, individual or corporate. We can resist a specific evil, by prudently framing a specific law. But in contradiction of the essential tenet shared by radical Islam & the secular Left: we cannot command the good. For the good does not answer to human command. The paradox is not that the open society imposes a new, quasi-religious doctrinal order. Its demands are anyway constantly morphing, so that todays categorical imperative will be tomorrows capital crime. The paradox is rather a cheap imposture: that glib claim to inevitability & foreknowledge, against a background of history that offered constant surprise. That is what links the open society to Auschwitz, & to Stalin; that idiot self-confidence. The open society delegitimates every opponent, & strips every minority of its peace. Having foreseen an end, it can when necessary justify any means. It goes beyond any Pope, or Caliph, or Caesar, in claiming the monopoly on both force & virtue. It is restrained, at every turn, by some irrational sense of decency; but that decency is external to itself.
5 comments
October 27, 2012

Jacques Barzun
One hundred & four is not a bad age for a human to attain, though it seemed to us that Jacques Barzun was much older.

Americas leading public intellectual was, from what we can make out, already quite mature when he came to the U.S. at age thirteen put into prep school there by his Whitmanesque, Americanophile father. His familys circle of friends in Paris included Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Duhamel, Marcel Duchamp, Edgar Varse, Stefan Zweig, & the little-remembered but remarkable vagrant typographer, Lucien Linard. These were Utopian people, but from the age before Lenin. They were crazy artists, with an outlook on life that simply cannot be translated into any language comprehensible to the present day. For instance, each had strong political views, but of a kind we might classify today as utterly apolitical. Barzun remained French while becoming entirely American. His mind was logical in the French way, & it was stocked with French things; but he used it for American purposes. He went to Columbia University, & stayed there for the duration of the 20th century, without ever becoming an academic in the narrow sense. His field was civilization, & together with Lionel Trilling (his contemporary, now dead for decades) he created a little cell of civilization in this most unlikely place (Columbia University). As recently as half a century ago, there was a significant community in the U.S. which aspired, in a humble, decent, republican way, to acquire & promote high culture. These were the sort of people who launched great books programmes, & begged European intellectuals to cross the Atlantic & teach them everything they knew. Barzun found & ministered to them. His several dozen books are without exception addressed to the common reader. They cover an extraordinary range of topics, & each is solid in its learning. Barzun was at home in art & music, as well as literature; in history, & also in the sciences. We have used the C word (for, Civilization), & he was among the last men living who understood that it is all one thing. Specialists are always welcome, but the specialist who is not backed up with a broad general knowledge who

has not read widely, not remained alive to arts & sciences at large is a subversive influence, & in his nature an enemy of civilization whenever he pretends to serve it. Some years ago we overheard a worthless little professor of philosophy in the University of Toronto sneering at the reputation of Jacques Barzun, for his very range. We asked him, sneeringly back, if he knew what the word university meant. He made it abundantly clear he did not. He was a specialist at war with those generalists & popularizers. It struck me that even in his own recondite area of specialization (analytical philosophy), Barzun could have tutored him, by explaining e.g. the breadth of topics that Wittgenstein was addressing; for the little man had no idea. The whole, very tenured career of this soi-disant professor had consisted of teaching the young & impressionable to sneer at things beyond his or their understanding. Barzun was civil as well as civilized, yet never pusillanimous. A large part of his work consisted of serenely articulated anger, focused chiefly upon the teaching profession. The phenomenon that is glibly called today political correctness a far stronger term is needed to convey the stench of it has been a feature of North American intellectual life for a long time. It is in fact the contemporary expression of the Puritan theological outlook, that landed with the Mayflower; & it has everything to do with cults of specialization, & with heresies (i.e. deceitful half-truths) both within & beyond the formal perimeter of religion. The Puritan spirit is iconoclastic; it seeks to cut things down, to smash the beautiful, to rule inconvenient truths out of court; to promote witch hunts. Barzun had unerringly the scent of this enemy, & could be annihilating in response to it; though as a correspondent reminds (see comments) he could also spy positive features in the Puritan heritage, & deal with its exponents quite charitably on their own terms,

for he was never a witch hunter himself. He was a nominal Catholic, not a church-goer, & by his own account at sea in the ecclesiastical life of America. He associated the Church with culture in the modern French manner, without vexing himself on any doctrinal point. He was allergic to the enthusiasm of converts; & found American Catholicism too Protestant for his tastes. Paradoxically, he observed that a typically American highchurch Presbyterianism with its choirs & processions was closer to the European semi-Catholicism in which he was reared. And this was compounded by his genius for not committing himself, even to the inevitable logical consequences of his own assertions. The closest we can find to a credal statement from him is, Nature is conscious of itself, in & through man. A lot would follow from that, but Barzun wouldnt follow. His dislike of converts extended to ideologues & reductionists of all sorts. His book, Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941 & revisions) the continuation of research & arguments begun much earlier is an inquiry into the nature of modern superstitions. He shows convincingly how capitalist notions of free competition & survival of the fittest were repackaged as a Victorian cosmology, & acquired the power of sorcery; how they were presented as quasi-religious doctrine; how the substitution of Natural Selection for Providence came to be defended with a warmth that never belonged to empirical science. The book brilliantly depicts the personal evolution of Thomas Huxley, that earnest & honest man, haunted by the real possibility that he had championed ideas which compromised the moral order, without yielding secure empirical results, or being able to do so. The book continues through the strange, quaintly Victorian world of Marxian political scientism & Wagnerian romantic egoism. It shows the hollowness beneath the crust on which our postmodernism has strutted; the excavation & discarding, beneath our own feet, of everything that supported us

except, might makes right. Barzun was a modern. Perhaps with his death we bury the last living modernist, like the last Great War veteran, or the last recipient of the Victoria Cross. His cultural history of that modern age, Dawn to Decadence (2000), makes a fine textbook we might recommend to serious private schools. Published when he was a nonagenarian, it shows no diminution of his powers, & embodies an erudition that is scintillating. He is a terse writer, but never an obscure one; his books are all accessible to any intelligent, attentive reader. And the quotes with which he decorated the pages of this one are an education in themselves: one well-known author after another saying something one might not expect him to say. Barzun represents the history of five very Western centuries with the freshness almost of an eyewitness; & while there can be no mistake about the moral & intellectual decadence into which we have fallen, he is hopeful throughout, & ends sure that something new must inevitably be stirring in our ashes. He is perhaps most Catholic in allowing Gods will; in that optimism which expects some good to come of evil, without ever commending the evil.