The world will miss Mercator. More, evidently, than it realises. But we all know the thing about prophets and honour. And the crucial thing about Mercator, the one we all need to keep looking for and paying for going forward, is publications that take the permanent things seriously instead of chasing ephemera.

As a freelance writer, I am, of course, grateful for the opportunity to write for this fine publication. (And get paid, a bit.) But whatever the sin of pride may say, it’s not really about me, is it? It’s about the crying need for journalism, in the broad sense, that tackles principalities and powers. Because when I say “ephemera”, I don’t just mean celebrities.

In fact the lifestyles of the rich and famous tell us much about our society and about how to live, and I don’t mean it in a good way. But an astounding amount of reporting and commentary is about politics, and very little of it is worth the paper it’s no longer printed on a week later, because the posturing and polemics themselves were worthless.

I don’t just mean badly done. Mostly, they are; if electricians were as incompetent in their chosen field, there’d be house fires and singed bodies from coast to coast to coast. But mostly, I mean that most of what politicians talk about, and journalists write about, is as superficial as it is fleeting.

Good for kindling

Back in the day, we used to close up the family cottage in late October and not return until May. And when we then started a fire with newspapers six months old or more, it was comically bizarre to look at the stories and remember that anyone ever cared. Before turning to today’s paper, no wiser for the lesson.

To quote an email from a friend some months back, you often hear the phrase, “Life is short. Enjoy it.” But how about “Eternity is long. Prepare for it.” And how much journalism takes eternity seriously?

I have now spent a surprising length of time in the field, which, among other things, has brought eternity inexorably closer. And again, it’s not about me, but the point here is that most of the publications I write for give very little attention to metaphysics. Which might seem to be simple business common sense, since readers don’t want to hear about sin, least of all their own. But I submit that it’s not.

The job of journalists is to make sense of the world for busy people. Or, in the words of my former colleague David Warren, who did and does take metaphysics very seriously, to ensure that the mud pie is thrown in the right face. And whose better than that of the Father of Lies himself? And what matters more, not just in some airy and far-off sense but immediately and every day, than what is morally right and morally wrong?

Including, I might add, in a lot of “breaking news”. It would be a very unusual newspaper or evening broadcast, if they even still have those, that warned people that Baal is back. Or whose staff, or audience, would grasp the warning if they did. Yet the other day, someone in loosely similar journalistic circles to me referred to Hamas’s conduct over the mortal remains of Ariel, Kfir and Shiri Bibas as “satanic”.

I responded, “When you use the word 'Satanic', mean it. Because it does apply here. Baal is back.” And I meant it. But most media outlets do not take the language of “evil” seriously even when, desperate to come to grips with real, raw, terrifying wickedness, they are forced to use it. Let alone the personification of evil.

Their use of such terms beats their common resort to “medieval” as the worst insult imaginable, from journalists who would struggle to say when they think the Middle Ages began or ended and what they were about. I have an immense file of such quotations that I perceive you would be fascinated to hear all about, just not now. But I will say that the main reason their use of “medieval” is even less on point than their use of “evil”, the reason modern journalists and politicians call anything from concentration camps to Islamism “medieval” in the sense of “really really bad thing”, is that they think the Middle Ages took religion seriously and nothing is worse than religion. At least one religion.

Even that perception is strangely ahistorical. The supposed blessed return of light, aka secularism, aka the “Enlightenment”, after around 1350 strangely coincided with things like the Thirty Years War, fought over Protestantism versus Catholicism, and the English Civil War, which killed more English people per capita than World War I and was fought over Puritanism versus crypto-Catholicism. Not to mention the St Bartholemew’s Day massacre. Or the vast Renaissance surge in witch-burning, a practice almost unknown in the Middle Ages. But I digress.