“‘There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.’ Today, in the West, there are many who would agree with [the just-quoted Heinrich] Himmler that, for humanity to claim a special status for itself, to imagine itself as somehow superior to the rest of creation, is an unwarrantable conceit. Homo sapiens is just another species.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw a connection between the mental paralysis of cultural relativism and the inability of Western nations to defend themselves militarily.
“Even as Poitiers was being fought, collections of sayings attributed to Muhammad were being compiled that, in due course, would come to constitute an entire corpus of law: Sunna. Any detail of Roman or Persian legislation, any fragment of Syrian or Mesopotamian custom, might be incorporated within. The only requirement was convincingly to represent it as having been spoken by the prophet – for anything spoken by Muhammad could be assumed to have the stamp of divine approval. Here, then, for Christians was a fateful challenge. Their time-honored conviction that the true law of God was to be found written on the heart could not have been more decisively repudiated. No longer was it the prerogative of Jews alone to believe in a great corpus of divine legislation that touched upon every facet of human existence, and prescribed in exacting detail how God desired men and women to live. The Talmud, an immense body of law compiled by Jewish scholars – rabbis – in the centuries prior to the Arab conquest of the Near East, had never threatened the inheritance of Paul’s teachings as the Sunna did. Muslims were not a beleaguered minority, prey to the bullying of Christian emperors and kings. They had conquered a vast and wealthy empire, and aspired to conquer yet more. Had Francia gone the way of Africa, and been lost for good to Christian rule, then the Franks too would doubtless and eventually be brought to the Muslim understanding of God and his law. The fundamental assumptions that governed Latin Christendom would thereby have been radically and momentously transformed. Few, if any, who fought at Poitiers would have realized it, but at stake in the battle had been nothing less than the legacy of Saint Paul.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“You can make your book with roguery, but vanity is incalculable.”
Cecil Rhodes to John Buchan, who met Rhodes and worked for him toward the end of Rhodes’ life, quoted in Roger Kimball, “‘Realism coloured by poetry’; Rereading John Buchan,” in The New Criterion September 2003 online
In my latest National Post column I call on Parliament to rein in the overweening pride and overreaching presumptions of Canada’s courts, especially the Supreme Court.
“The issue that is not clear to organizers, missionaries, educators, or any outsider, is simply that if people feel they don't have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it.”
Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“From that day, with characteristic pertinacity, he [Cato the Elder] ended all his speeches in the Senate, on whatever subject, with his dour conviction: Caterum censeo delendam esse Carthaginem – ‘Besides, I think that Carthage must be destroyed.’”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“A sense of humor. Back to Webster's Unabridged: humor is defined as ‘The mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating ludicrous or absurdly incongruous elements in ideas, situations, happenings, or acts...’ or ‘A changing and uncertain state of mind…’ The organizer searching with a free and open mind void of certainty, hating dogma, finds laughter not just a way to maintain his sanity but also a key to understanding life. Essentially, life is a tragedy; and the converse of tragedy is comedy. One can change a few lines in any Greek tragedy and it becomes a comedy, and vice versa. Knowing that contradictions are the signposts of progress he is ever on the alert for contradictions. A sense of humor helps him identify and make sense out of them. Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is: a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second. A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination. The organizer has a personal identity of his own that cannot be lost by absorption or acceptance of any kind of group discipline organization. I now begin to understand what I stated somewhat intuitively in Reveille for Radicals almost 20 years ago, that ‘the organizer in order to be part of all can be part of none.’”
Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [he’s listing the ideal elements for an organizer and I found the notion that left-wing radicals are consistently marked by a good sense of humour especially about themselves was itself so funny it was worth quoting].