essays in idleness david warren

Essays in Idleness

January 5, 2025, papa’s century.

Like other useless old men, I find myself celebrating anniversaries that do not command the attention of the world, for I am surrounded, increasingly, by the dead. For instance, today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of my father — who took his leave from this world about sixteen years ago. I am, like every surviving son of every father, more and more alone with him; and he, in his way, more and more alone with me. This is because I knew him as he was, before the world began to become unrecognizable.

Like his father before him, my father was “radically liberal.” Papa’s adult life began in a uniform, flying sorties in Spitfires against Hitler; grandpa’s began in the mud-fields of France (though happily elevated on a horse), against the Kaiser. Mine I speak about too much, but it was not heroic like theirs. Perhaps only men can understand this: that you cannot be a man until you have risked your life. Nor can you be a good man until you have risked everything in a noble cause.

Papa’s, and also grandpa’s life, as artist, was also fraught with difficulties, which are put in the way of every honest man.

In contrast to the “neo,” or modern, who lives more spontaneously, for comfort.

I wrote, “radically liberal,” but here, too, I am using terms that cannot be understood today. Canada, and the other English-speaking countries, grew up in defiance of the socialist and totalitarian principles that guided many of our neighbours. Our instinct was always to freedom — even, if necessary, from each other. Only very recently in history was this instinct — expressed across a range from moderately liberal to reasonably conservative — compromised, and progressively suppressed. (We exist for the government, now.)

One speaks with the dead, in reverence, through silence. My sense is that papa is still listening.

January 3, 2025

Alternative für deutschland.

Alice Weidel, the federal leader of Germany’s “far-right” AfD, has approximately the same policy prescriptions as Donald Trump. Chiefly they are to return to the bourgeois habits that used to make free market states prosperous. But she subscribes to these in mainland Europe, which has been easily spooked since the Nazis offered policies that were not bourgeois.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” as the far-right poet, T. S. Eliot, wrote in Burnt Norton , now the better part of a century ago. (He was arguably plagiarizing the far-right German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.)

One could recommend that my readers look her up on YouBoob , or better search for print, and form their own opinion on this Frau Weidel. (Who speaks English, and Chinese, fluently.)

Compare her, for instance, to the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who rose to power as the prosecutor protecting Muslim “grooming gangs,” and now puts people in gaol who protest on behalf of their rape and murder victims. The idea that Mr Starmer should have a rôle in the government of a civilized country, is as absurd as the idea that the 14-year-old narcissist who has ruled Canada, or the 82-year-old senescent who has ruled the United States, are respectable members of the human race.

The remarkable “coalition” of Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy, Kennedy, Vance, &c, &c — which includes several prominent Democrats now awarded the title “far-right” by America’s utterly worthless media — may be about to change the atmosphere, even in the black heart of the Dark Continent (Europe). None of these new Yankee brooms is as unambiguously vicious as the “statesmen” they are replacing.

But it will be difficult for them. The truth is that politics are often controlled by the lowest of the low, as today. The most successful of our power-mad “elites” tend to be very evil, and free only with nasty smears for their opponents. That, and public ignorance, are the secrets by which Liberals, Democrats, and other Socialists continue to win elections, and to increase the massive accumulation of criminal incompetents in their bureaucracies — where any hint of ability or even honesty will be punished.

Looking forward, I am not optimistic. But one should be open to the unexpected, in this God-created world.

December 31, 2024

Crossing the tiber.

I wake this morning, at last, “free, white, and twenty-one,” for it is the twenty-first anniversary of my reception into the Catholic Church. This occurred on Wednesday, the last day of anno MMIII, and I was the late Father Jonathan Robinson’s catechumen.

One is not born Catholic, though I was myself born free, white, and with other markers of identity and privilege. For instance, I was born male, according to the doctor who delivered me, and to my mother, who was present at the time. As one of more than a billion (human) males alive at that moment, I could not reasonably invest pride in being male, and was generally too young for anything but what Alfred North Whitehead identified as the buzzing , “the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact,” now out of the womb although previously inside it.

“It is the flying dart of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.”

And in a certain sense, so is the going to Church. When conversion happens to those of riper years, as I was, it is normally intentional, thus taking one beyond Lucretius, although I am uncertain whether anyone ever got beyond Whitehead.

In my case, it came after a delay of three hundred twenty-and-a-half months, for I had largely accepted the Roman faith on Maundy Thursday, 1976, while crossing the Thames on the Hungerford Bridge. Crossing the Tiber was the consequence of some additional thought and prayer.

December 24, 2024

Origen explains.

Christ came to save us, in more ways than we can possibly imagine. One of those ways is through the working out of the “fact” of Jesus in the history of ideas. The finest minds of early Christendom were Greek minds, very impressive in themselves. Much that was Greek, especially much that was Platonic, was imported into Christianity in the first centuries; but even more impressive was what was turned out. The whole ancient idea of God was turned inside out, and through the many centuries since, we have been invisibly benefiting from this mental exercise. Let me try to explain.

Origen is one of the Fathers of the Church, who lived c. 185 to c. 254; a man from Alexandria who also preached itinerantly in the Holy Land. He is among the more controversial figures, I think less for what he thought and wrote himself, than for what many of his followers and admirers thought and wrote in his wake, taking his more speculative thoughts too far, or misunderstanding them. He was condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, and there has been some stigma associated with his name ever since.

Yet the greatest of Church thinkers keep returning to Origen, and have been thrilled by him, for there is no greater mind at work in the early centuries after Christ — not even Augustine in the West, or Chrysostom in the East. And the thinking of Origen can never be contained, for he was a light in the minds of Jerome, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose. He was the intellectual source of so much that became orthodoxy.

And he is coming back again, partly through the happy chance of the discovery of lost works in the Egyptian desert, and partly through the re-discovery of him by modern thinkers, such as one of my own heroes, Hans Urs von Balthasar. There were large advances in our understanding of Origen through the latter half of the XXth century, and I think more may follow in this XXIst.

But the book I shall refer to now, Contra Celsum , has been around all along. It is Origen’s defence of Christianity against a philosophical attack by Celsus, a learned and decent Greek-speaking pagan. Much of what Celsus has to say would pass as perfectly modern and “liberal” — Celsus likes the high standard of Christian morality, and he is attracted to the idea of the Logos. But he doesn’t believe Christ is “the Son of the Father,” he is put off by all the miracles he finds in the Gospels, and by much of the tone. He thinks the Christians themselves are small-minded and intolerant. He fears them in the same way a modern “liberal” fears those “born again” — people who refuse to fit in to the progressive secular society around them.

We’ve heard all that before, what is more interesting in Celsus’s objection to the Incarnation and Resurrection, for it is not the modern one. (Curiously enough, it closely resembles the Muslim critique of claims for Jesus — for the Muslims remain very close to the ancient Greeks in their theology.) Celsus is scandalized by the whole idea of “God the Son,” in principle. For to his Greek mind, the most obvious attribute of God is his self-sufficiency. He can’t fathom the idea of a God who would intentionally make himself vulnerable.

If God came down to earth as Christ, for whatever purpose — prophet, spy, saviour, you name it — then fine, Celsus could handle that. But if Christ is God, he must act like God, he must act the way “everyone knows” God acts — Omnipotently. He might be hiding out for a while, for sport, pretending to be a flesh-and-blood man and travelling incognito. Fair enough.

But no, this God exposes himself in a manger. He makes a show of his powerlessness, which ends in getting himself crucified. This can’t make any sense; God could not possibly have got himself into a fix like that, for if someone threatened to crucify God, “we all know,” God would be angry! And being God, he could surely blow away Pontius Pilate, and the whole Roman army for that matter. The real God humiliates his enemies, he doesn’t get humiliated.

It’s worse than that, for this “Christ” has not come for the sake of the righteous, but for the sinners. He even admits it! The real God would have come to help those who are prudent and pure, who have clean hands, who are free of evil. Celsus actually reads the Gospel parables and finds them sick, sick, sick. He screams: “You are trying to tell me it is an evil thing not to have sinned? What kind of crackpot are you?”

Now, Origen responds. He understands exactly where Celsus is coming from. He knows “how this all looks” to the traditional Greek mind, for after all Origen had one himself, and had gone to great pains to twist free of it. He knows there is nothing insincere in Celsus, that his opponent is expressing a genuine revulsion for what he considers to be perverse.

At the most dramatic moment (in Book IV) Origen makes his stand. He tells Celsus that he cannot understand Christ because he can only understand a love that seeks its own “eudaemonia,” its own well-being and self-sufficiency. But Christ’s love is revealed in his very humiliation, in his very dependency. It is a moment when Origen throws off the shackles of Platonism, and invites the other pagans to do it, too. But many won’t, can’t, because they are trapped in the ancient worldview.

This is what is so profound in the Christian message; not Christ’s strength but his weakness. It is the root of the sympathy we are invited to feel for people who are sinners, and for people who are not like us. It shatters the ancient morality of “us versus them.” It is the very source of what we mean by “enlightened,” even those of us who are post-Christian.

It arrives with the Christ child, upsetting all received ideas about God. It is the significence of the babe in the crèche at Bethlehem. It is what the angels are announcing to the shepherds as they bide their flocks. Through this extraordinary act of self-humiliation, we are suddenly in the presence of the Glory of God.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. — I wrote this piece for Christmas, many years ago, and a dear reader now sends it to me as an old newspaper clipping. Good exercise, re-typing. Surely it is out of copyright by now.

December 21, 2024

It is foolish to declaim against “sentimentality” at Christmas, as I often do. Declaim, if you will, against false sentimentality, or even against the cheap, but not against sentiment itself, though it is sometimes noisy. When it is true, it is normally silent, and may be spookily and profoundly silent. But “gushing” or “corny” do not make it untrue. What is good commands sentiment in men with chests, has always done, and will always.

At the opening of The Abolition of Man ( 1943 ) , C. S. Lewis made an attack on the progressive educationists of his day, that applies to academics in all times and places. This slim book is among those which persuade me that I should not be writing, lest I distract from more necessary authors. Read at a slight angle to the commonplace, it exposes the whole scheme of the “academic left,” that would suppress everything not materially “objective.”

As Lewis grasped, by Christian faith, there is, at the root, not a contest between two potentially valid world-views. It is explicitly an invasion of the good by the evil. Yet also it is an exposure of the good, as evil can uniquely do, when the good has been lost sight of.

The concluding book of his “space trilogy” — That Hideous Strength (1945) — is in fact the great dystopian novel for our scientistic age, and not anything by “George Orwell.” It is set with invincible aptness in the university-research world, in a “Nice” institution. Lewis does not present selfishness and hypocrisy within this environment, but the agency of Satan.

December 19, 2024

Edith Carson was the wonderful old lady with a fat fluffy grey cat, who lived next door when I was a child in Georgetown, Ontario. I do not use the term “wonderful” lightly. Mrs Carson baked a constant supply of cookies and tarts, to distribute among the neighbourhood’s children. I was a notorious suck-up to old ladies, in those days. (Still am.)

Among her many eccentricities, old Mrs Carson (whose young husband had been killed in France during the First World War; his photograph was still atop her piano) was a conservationist. She did not like to waste anything, but would collect it all neatly. She was memorably opposed to the communists, who were putting fluoride in our drinking water. And most spectacularly, upon each return from the market, her bananas and melons would be cast about her lawn and garden. This was because each must touch the earth, and she couldn’t be sure each had touched it yet, given industrial picking technology.

As for the vegetables, she grew most of them herself.

Make no mistake: she was expert in all dietary issues, and the better she was informed the more controversial her views — generally in opposition to anything “new.”

We must stop obeying the communists — I agree with Mrs Carson. Their laboratory hands tell us which of many ten-thousands of poisonous additives and preservatives will (almost certainly) not kill the average, healthy person (right away), and if they are listed in microscopic type in the least visible place on the label, may be inserted inside everything.

This, however, doesn’t interest me.

What I want to know is whether the bananas have touched the earth, yet.

December 17, 2024

Ventilating.

Recently, when indulging in automotive travel near “Idlerton,” Ontario (a misspelt place), I spotted a dairy farm. This is not something a city boy often has an opportunity to do: most of us are of course confirmed in Environmentalism, which demands total ignorance from its votaries, unlike Christianity.

I was thinking of the Greenies as I looked at the cows.

“Oh my God!” …  (Or, “OMG!” in the liturgy of the Green religion.) … “There are cows! Cows! … I think they may be farting!”

We were proceeding towards a restaurant in inner Idlerton where we would be able to order, and eat, cows — or at least the parts of them listed on their menu. This seemed the perfect solution to me. They are quite edible. Each is an immense, rippling bundle of meat — each undulating ungulate — wrapped attractively in leather. Dairy farmers might object to the capture of their animals for eating; we will need a Green argument.

Thus we should eat only those animals designated by the government for Medical Assistance In Dying.

But a “Greenie” now tells me he has a better solution to the “methane crisis,” in which he has invested. It is to feed all the world’s beeves and milchcows the synthetic enzyme inhibitor he is selling. This “technological breakthrough” promises to reduce farting, towards, though not quite to, “net zero.”

Progressive governments are now making fart-reducing additives compulsory, so this Greenie stands to make a government-assisted fortune (until other environmentalists get his product banned). Meanwhile, at least one new department can be created (per government), to re-inspect and re-approve all cattle, after measuring the fart volume of each; all will employ professional bureaucrats (which is to say, already tested), in brand-new, managerial “chains of command,” with regulations designed to “reduce global warming.”

The price of meat will be immeasurably increased, and as in approximately 100 percent of previous Green initiatives, the environment will be actually despoiled — creating possibilities for further Green interventions.

Philip Walling calls this “part of the greatest grab of wealth in history from the mass of ordinary people to a few stupendously rich internationalist oligarchs,” &c. … But really, it is just a triumph of democracy.

POSTSCRIPTUM. — People who have perhaps never been to the Prairies, and are less than three centuries old, may have difficulty understanding this article, along with most other things. For, before the arrival of the fascist White Man, the number of ruminants grazing these plains was very, very substantially greater. It was not just the bison. Many other ungulates were farting, and building up the soil. … It is a general problem with “climate change,” and other extreme forms of human stupidity: you must know something to escape the criminal operators who now control our environment. … But you don’t, and that’s why Justin and Jagmeet get elected.

December 13, 2024

Idleness remembered.

Today is the 240th anniversary of the death of Samuel Johnson, may he rest in peace. This also makes it the 40th anniversary of the foundation of The Idler , here in Canada. It seemed, at the time, a notable coincidence, for we had not intentionally chosen this date; also, allowing for the five hour time difference from London, the presses rolled (in Brampton, Ontario), at precisely the moment Dr Johnson died, albeit 200 years later.

The point was never to get the date right, however; the times are so frequently out of joint. It was to supply Canada (and the world) with something it seemed to be missing: a publication “for those who read,” of “elevated general interest,” like the better ones we had seen from the United States and Europe. It did not seem that such a thing was available, up here in the frigid, icy north, where thought processes are slow and glacial. We did not seriously expect it to last, in this climate. Yet for almost a decade, it supplied a happy experience for the Canadian literati, and excited the horror of our Left.

December 9, 2024

The wizard of oz.

My Chief Argentine Correspondent (who is not the pope, incidentally) has advised me — through his blog Quod scripsi, scripsi — against taking Artificial Intelligence to heart.

He begins by citing David Berlinsky:

“An algorithm is a finite procedure, written in a fixed symbolic vocabulary, governed by precise instructions, moving in discrete steps, 1, 2, 3 … whose execution requires no insight, cleverness, intuition, intelligence, or perspicuity, and that sooner or later comes to an end.”

This, for those who are alert, will dispose of the cult of “Artificial Intelligence.” AI hasn’t a will, or any originality; it cannot invent anything (except what is not true); it is as limiting as algorithms, programs, and applications. At best (or worst) it can only magnify many, many tedious acts of human stupidity, and make them go faster and faster. But behind everything is a little man hidden by a curtain. He is the wonderful Wizard of Oz!

My faithful Cosmolater (Carlos Caso-Rosendi) writes:

“Artificial Intelligence cannot be because intelligent thoughts are the products of a mind . Since there is no such thing as an artificial mind , there can be no such things as artificial intelligence or artificial thoughts.”

It was the same revelation about artificial life , in the ‘sixties. This could not be generated in a laboratory. Some tyros are still trying. They will always fail.

Oddly enough, a significant achievement of “intelligent design” research has been to show the impossibility of creating life. For God has put odds of ten to the ten thousandth in the way of every single step towards abiogenesis; enough to keep us busy until the end of time.

Biological life is also finite. It ends in death. And mind may not die, but cannot be touched; the life of spirit is further beyond comprehension. The spirit that animates our “artificial intelligence” project is mysteriously dark; but not therefore necessarily good. Indeed, were we not warned against it?

A COMMENTER COMMENTS. — What AI seems to lack is desire. “All men want to know” (said Aristotle), at least before modernity encraps them. AI desires nothing, not even what it’s told to desire.

December 7, 2024

Christmas shopping.

Commercialism is at its most obscene when it is allied with a spiritual festival. This is most noticeably so at Christmas, throughout what was once Christendom. I am not referring to Christmas carols or carollers, unless the tinkling is piped in recordings, and set to “repeat.” The coarse iniquity is brought home to us in the supermarkets and shopping malls, by the repertoire of pert, vacuous numbers with catchy tunes. Many of these songs, through recent decades, do not even trill “Merry Christmas,” but a frivolous, shallow, and meaningless mirth. This follows one around, while fetching groceries, like filth in one’s mouth and ears.

A violent response, such as Christ offered to the merchants and the money changers during the cleansing of the temple, will perhaps be rejected as inappropriate, but only because no temple service could be imagined in a specialized shopping domain.

The idea of shopping for gifts is, for the most part, also morally wrong. There is a traditional season of gift-giving through the twelve days of Christmas, but the replacement of the Sacrifice of the Mass on Christmas Day, by a commercial vomitation, should surely be permanently ended. Neither commerce, nor cheap sentimentality, should have been let near this rejoicing.

December 6, 2024

Is art redemptive.

Depends what you mean by art. I am aware of some that might be the opposite of redemptive, including all prostituted art, such as commercial jingles and corporate design. Sometimes even that rises to clever, although never to art. On the other hand, some very simple tunes and decorations, that do not even aspire to art, are redemptive.

I was fortunate in childhood, because after Rudyard Kipling and Jules Verne, I did not graduate to The Communist Manifesto . I think I actually resisted demonic inhabitation, when young, although not consistently. Instead, my ideological consciousness was occupied by Education Through Art (1943), by the anarchist, Sir Herbert Read. My father’s had been occupied by Art in Everyday Life (Harriet Irene Goldstein, 1925), and of course, like his father, too, we were all bowled by John Ruskin. Yet not even he (Ruskin) proposed things that were inevitable, and some of his excitements now seem dreary. Outdoor and still life Sunday painting also ran along both sides of my family.

So you could say that I inherited the propensity for being “redeemed by art.” It seems to work on children, and on the mad, as well. At least, the experts have accorded it therapeutic benefits, and it has launched a few schools of immuno-engineering. Moreover, education through art was recommended, i.e. by Plato, in The Republic .

But as various of my contemporaries discovered, it is not a reliable source of income. And when it becomes a reliable source of income, it generally ceases to be art.

So much for nature. The supernatural source of redemption is Jesus Christ, who does not restrict his means of approach. He might even choose art. Ask and it shall be answered, so to speak. The redemption in art is like that in everything else, a religious phenomenon. The aesthetic dimension is, like every other aspect of beauty, sanctity, and truth, not to be sought in artistic fashions.

December 4, 2024

Forgiveness.

One of the claimed glories of our post-Christian world, is its cancellation of forgiveness. I was reading about this in an article by Laura Perrins, which I found in the (excellent) website, The Conservative Woman.  She gives an account of the suicide of a young Oxford student, who had an awkward sexual encounter at the age of twenty, with a young woman who then announced that she had felt “discomfort.” His schoolmates called an inquisition, condemned him for “messing up,” and said they needed “space” from him. He appeared distraught, at this isolation. A couple of days later, he drowned himself in the Thames.

I thought of events that had happened, to me and to others, in a previous century: to men whose lives were, ever after, ruined; to several who were shamed into suicide, like rape victims, by things done to them. Already forty years ago, feminism had advanced to the point where reputations and livelihoods could be wrecked. Several persons known to me were slandered and destroyed by feckless accusations. (As Scott Symons said, back then, “There is no blood left to be shed in the battle of the sexes in Ontario.”)

Men have also done appalling things to women. (Did you know?)

But the revolutionary principle, now asphyxiating our neo-pagan society, gives the greater discomfort. It is the withdrawal of forgiveness, for all crimes — even those which were minor, or imaginary. For along with Christianity, mercy is nullified, and the world is consequently drowning in sleaze.

December 2, 2024

Once upon a time, when I was staying ever so briefly in Japan, I became confounded by everyday Japanese behaviour. Often it seemed neither rational, nor irrational; neither intelligible, nor mysterious, nor fuliginous. Reading their superb mediaeval literature in translation, especially novels from the Heian period (IXth through XIIIth centuries), I could speculate about their past and present attitudes and customs, and become lost among them. But while Japanese men were enigmatical to me, the women annulled my thoughts entirely.

Those were the days when “feminism” was at large in the West. This was supposed to be true in the East, too, thanks I suppose to neo-colonialism, or to another definition of feminism. For the Japanese woman, feminism apparently meant that women should be free of constraining tradition, and have what they want. But for the American or European woman, it meant they had declared themselves subservient to the totalitarian feminist agenda. This had made especially the young American women (“girls,” we used to call them) tedious and one-dimensional, although available for casual sex.

Whereas, when I told a “liberated” Japanese woman that I was married and had two delightful little boys, she replied, “Good men are hard to find. Women have to share them.”

It was a lyrical observation; or perhaps a deep, impenetrable flirtation. She was philosophizing, in an inscrutable way. This was a woman who had brilliantly observed that, “Democracy is impossible without slavery.”

By her inspiration I wrote a suite of poems, with the title: “Neither Monogamy nor Polygamy, but Origami.”

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