Romance

One of the striking differences between the fourteenth century, when a man was free to roam, and these drab days of regimentation is the difference in the concept of love.
In those far off days, a young man in Spring time might obsess about a girl. My friend, Dick, spent his whole life struck with awesome wonder at the loveliness of the fair sex.
Back then love and lust and desire were all part of one parcel for us common folk. Desire did not seem to preclude tenderness.
The overseer classes, the clerks and the knights, and the rulers at court, had their troubadours, and they created Romance.
In those days Dualist religion was all the rage; The spiritual was good; the physical was bad. For the hierarchs, Dualism meant that women were hated. Women embodied temptation, attachment to the physical world. They were only loved when they became disembodied, when the sexual instinct was taken out of love. Instead of being honoured, as we peasants honoured women, the hierarchs divided women into 'good' girls and 'bad' girls.
This they called Romance.
Romance really came into its own about two hundred years ago, with the triumph of  Property throughout Europe. As capital accumulated and violence was centralized in the hierarchy, the countryside began to be viewed as a spectacle, something detached from the self. Likewise, other people began to be viewed as things, to be viewed and consumed from the perspective of the self.
We all became tourists, visitors, here for the sensation.
Again, women were disembodied, as people became more detached from reality.
Romance is essentially a collection of sensations from the point of view of the self, and when the self tires of the object of its ‘love’ it moves onto something, or somebody, else.
But back in the fourteenth century, for all the faults of the Roman Church, we saw Love less as Romance, and more as Charity.
Charity meant giving and supporting the loved one, not exploiting her. Physical love was not simply an exchange of experiences. We did not mine our beloved for fresh experiences.
But now, in a world of exchange, how are the children to learn how to cherish?    

Warning: Economic Growth May Lead To Poverty

If you make a chair and you sell it outside the economy of your nation state, the economy of your nation state becomes richer. If you sell the chair within your nation state the economy of your nation state will become richer too. There will be more chairs.
If you sell a service beyond the boundaries of your nation state then the economy of your nation state becomes richer, just as if you sold something more tangible.
However, if you sell a service within the boundaries of your nation state the economy will grow, and people may be richer, or they may not.
If the service is cooking meals for the elderly, then clearly the elderly benefit and they are ‘richer’.
However, if the service is a form that the elderly have to fill in, stating their racial characteristics and their sexual orientation there will be no benefit to the elderly person. Their productive time and their ink has been wasted. Someone has been paid to produce the useless forms and to process them.
Power has been centralised, but the elderly and the rest of us are poorer.
Money has been exchanged, economic activity has increased, but our time and energy has been wasted.
And so, with the obvious exception of the arms trade, manufacturing increases prosperity, whereas services may increase prosperity, but likely as not will not.
An economy such as ours which is primarily a service economy grows through internal colonisation, through increased centralisation and regulation of power, by the monetarisation of all activity.
For example, these days there are many sports activities organised for young children, such as football, where they have all the equipment and adults are present to supervise them. The adults are paid to supervise, and have been vetted by other adults who have been paid to check on them.
Yet fewer little boys are to be found playing football than fifty years ago, when they would play out, and make a couple of goalposts with their jumpers. This free activity is largely prohibited. Unsupervised, children are 'nuisances'. They are kept indoors because of the danger of cars, the perceived danger from paedophiles, and  primary school homework (which did not exist fifty years ago)
There is vastly more economic activity, but less human activity.

Paying the Gatekeeper increases economic activity but decreases prosperity. 

Widows Of The Living And The Dead

Some years ago my good lady, Revoltina, visited a friend in Andalusia. There was a distinct shortage of men in town.  There are many places in this world where the men folk have left to find work.
In this poem Rosalia de Castro describes a similar situation in nineteenth century Galicia. Like Galicia herself, the Peasant Woman is left without a man to work for her, without a man to serve her. 


Este vaise  y aquel vaise
E todos, todos se van,
Galicia, sin homes quedas
Que te poidan traballar.
Tés en cambio orfos e orfas
E campos de soledad.
E nais que non teñen fillos
E fillos que non tén pais
E tés corazóns que sufren
Longas ausencias mortás
Viudas de vivos e mortos
Que ninguén consolará.

This one goes and that one goes,
All of them, all of them go.
Galicia, you are left without men
Who can work you.
Instead you are left with
Orphans and lonely fields.
And mothers without sons,
And sons without fathers
And hearts that suffer 
The long dead absences,
Widows of the living and the dead
That no one can console.

The Conclusions Of The Lollards

John Ball writes: It is many years since the Lord took the blindness from my eyes and let me see His Truth. For that I was expelled, beaten, imprisoned. For years I existed, a wandering preacher, living off the charity of poor peasants, sympathetic merchants, and even the occasional godly knight. Women, in particular, were glad to hear my message, for they feel a particular revulsion for the violence of men, the endless war in France, the self serving priests, the taxes that steal the strength of their youth.
Several years after my death, some fellow Lollards presented the Twelve Conclusions to King Richard and Parliament.
Here are the first three Conclusions:

1. That when the Church of England began to go mad after temporalities, like its great step-mother the Roman Church, and churches were authorized by appropriation in divers places, faith, hope and charity began to flee from our Church, because pride, with its doleful progeny of mortal sins, claimed this under title of truth. This conclusion is general, and proved by experience, custom and manner or fashion, as you shall afterwards hear.

2.That our usual priesthood which began in Rome, pretended to be of power more lofty than the angels, is not that priesthood which Christ ordained for His apostles. This conclusion is proved because the Roman priesthood is bestowed with signs, rites, and pontifical blessings, of small virtue, nowhere exemplified in Holy Scripture, because the bishop's ordinal and the New Testament scarcely agree, and we cannot see that the Holy Spirit, by the reason of any such signs, confers the gift, for He and all His excellent gifts cannot consist in any one with mortal sin. A corollary of this is that it is a grievous play for wise men to see bishops trifle with the Holy Spirit in the bestowal of orders, because they give the tonsure in outward appearance in place of pure hearts: and this is the unrestrained introduction of antichrist into the Church to give colour to idleness.

3. That the law of celibacy enjoined to priests, which was first ordained to the prejudice of women, brings sodomy into all the Holy Church, but we excuse ourselves by the Bible because the decree says that we should not mention it, though suspected. Reason and experience prove this conclusion: reason, because the good living of ecclesiastics must have a natural outlet or worse; experience, because the secret proof of such men is that they find delight in women, and when thou hast proved such a man, mark him well, because he is one of them. A corollary to this is that private religions and the originators or beginning of this sin would be specially worthy of being checked, but God of His power with regard to secret sin sends open vengeance in His Church.

A Compact Mass

From the conclusion of Brooks Adams' book published in 1895 The Law of Civilization and Decay:

'As the pressure of economic competition intensifies with social consolidation, the family regularly disintegrates, the children rejecting the parental authority at a steadily decreasing age: until finally the population fuses into a compact mass, in which all individuals are equal before the law, and all are forced to compete with each other for the means of subsistence. When at length wealth has accumulated sufficiently to find vent through capitalistic methods of farming and manufacture, children lose all value, for then hiring labour is always cheaper than breeding. Thenceforward, among the more extravagant races, the family dwindles, as in ancient Rome or modern France, and marriage, having become a luxury, decreases. Moreover the economic instinct impels parents to reduce the possible number of inheritors of their property, that its bulk might not shrink.
Upon women the effect of these changes is prodigious. Their whole relation to society is altered. From a religious sacrament marriage is metamorphosed into a civil contract, by mutual consent; and, as the obligations of maternity diminish, the relation of husband and wife resolves itself into a sort of business partnership, tending always to become more ephemeral. Frequent as divorce now is, it was even more so under the Antonines.'

A False Equality

From her book The Denial Of Woman, Mary Malone writes;
'The religion of Equality, whose superstitions are the orthodoxy these days, seeks to reduce Woman to the level of Man.
To their credit, our ancestors knew that Woman was not like Man, and not simply because she has different genitalia. They were perfectly aware that gender is an integral part of a person's identity.
They knew that you are who you are, not who you want to be. They did not fantasize about what ought to be, and use their 'free will' to re-create themselves. They did not hate themselves as modern women do. They did not deny Woman.
When the Narrative tells us that all women should be Warriors and that all Men should be Carers, when the courage and resilience and the self denial of the male is denigrated, when the tenderness and love and practicality of the female is derided, when our children are taught that romance is gender neutral, that there is no difference between Woman and Man apart from our reproductive organs, we are staring into the abyss, we are on the edge of the destruction of Woman.
There is so much more to a man than his unseemly parts. He is strong, impulsive, energetic, loyal, irrational, childish, creative, everything a dog should be, and more.
Yet he lacks our adult purpose, our tenderness, our rationality. A man needs a woman for much more than her own unseemly parts. Without a woman a man is lost, as abandoned as a stray dog.
When a woman has a man and children she is complete. She has accomplished her will to power. She is the Mistress.
But a woman naked and alone, doing the work of men, has been stripped of her power.
For the Equal Woman, reduced to the level of the male, whose femininity has been ground down to the level of her sexual organs, there can be no romance, no love, no service, only mutual masturbation and genital imperialism.'

There Are A Lot Of Foreigners Abroad

My friend Dick has been nagging me again. He wants to have his say on the burning issues of the day. He says I think too much, lying on my back out in the forest, chewing hemp all day long. He says my readers need to know the opinion of the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, or in Dick's case, the piss artist down the pub.
Here is Dick's take on immigration.

'I was down in London the other day. Foreigners everywhere. I mean foreigners everywhere from everywhere.  It's supposed to be the capital of England, but where are the English? Southend, I suppose, if they're lucky - Scunthorpe if they're not.
I mean, I'm not being racist. I like West Indians. They play cricket, speak English, go to Protestant churches, and most of them have a drop or two of English blood in their veins.
And the Irish aren't too bad, either. They're from the British Isles like the English, though I'm not too keen on the Pope myself. I reckon he looks a bit shifty.
But who are these people from God forsaken places like Latvia and Zimbabwe and Kazakhstan?
Blimey, they'll be letting the French in next.
Me, I'm thinking of emigrating, there are so many foreigners here.
The only trouble is, when you go abroad, there are even more foreigners there than here.'