“Already, by the time that Anselm died in 1109, Latin Christendom had been set upon a course so distinctive that what today we term ‘the West’ is less its heir than its continuation…. Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical realignment, when our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as some of us had assumed them to be, the need to recognize just how culturally contingent they are is more pressing than ever. To live in a western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable – indeed the inescapable – influence of Christianity. Whether it be the conviction that the workings of conscience are the surest determinants of good law, or that Church and state exist as distinct entities, or that polygamy is unacceptable, its trace elements are to be found everywhere in the West…. The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past.”

Author’s “Preface” in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

In a piece for the Aristotle Foundation in the Epoch Times I assess claims that the extent of open anti-Semitism in Canada today resembles the period right before World War Two, and conclude that it’s actually worse now.

“But what the [Christmas 1914 World War I] truce revealed, by its unofficial and spontaneous nature, was how resilient certain attitudes and values were. Despite the slaughter of the early months, it was the subsequent war that began profoundly to alter those values and to hasten and spread in the west the drift to narcissism and fantasy that had been characteristic of the avant-garde and large segments of the German population before the war.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

In my latest Epoch Times column I say instead of worrying about polls asking whether we think the decline in trust might mysteriously reverse itself, we should concentrate on reversing it by making sure we’re trustworthy. I know it sounds weird but it just might work.

“But perhaps the most important influence in the development of a vision of social order based on commonly accepted values was the growth of Protestantism and of Bible reading [in Britain], especially in the wake of the great revival in the early nineteenth century. By the end of that century a shared vision of social order was widely in place. This vision and its accompanying values were not imposed through social imperialism but grew out of the religious environment and, where this did not suffice, out of improved economic and social conditions. It is generally accepted that by the end of the Victorian era, most of the British population no longer had to struggle simply to subsist. A measure of comfort, however small, had been achieved in most cases. Consumption of meat instead of bread, of milk and eggs instead of just potatoes, was rising. In recent years, before the turn of the century, there had been a steady rise in real wages, a decline in family size, a drop in the consumption of alcohol, and the beginnings of social welfare provisions. Archdeacon Wilson, headmaster of Clifton College, remarked in the speech to the Working Men’s Club of St. Agnes in 1893: ‘Possibly a future historian writing the history of the English people in this period will think much less of the legislative and even of the commercial and scientific progress of the period than of the remarkable social movement by which there has been an effort made, by a thousand agencies, to bring about unity of feeling between different classes, and to wage war against conditions of life which earlier generations seem to have tolerated.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

In my latest Epoch Times column I warn that what benefits citizens and what benefits politicians is often different, and as rational utility maximizers politicians will dependably choose the latter if we let them.

“The laymen who scoffed at Einstein’s general theory of relativity because space could not be ‘curved’ – it was not that sort of thing – were not simply wrong or mistaken. Nor were the mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who tried to develop a Euclidean version of Einstein’s theory. What had previously been meant by space was necessarily flat, homogeneous, isotropic, and unaffected by the presence of matter. If it had not been, Newtonian physics would not have worked. To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space-time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole. Only men who had together undergone or failed to undergo that transformation would be able to discover precisely what they agreed or disagreed about. Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial. Consider, for another example, the men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by ‘earth’ was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly, Copernicus’ innovation was not simply to move the earth. Rather, it was a whole new way of regarding the problems of physics and astronomy, one that necessarily changed the meaning of both ‘earth’ and ‘motion.’ Without those changes the concept of a moving earth was mad. On the other hand, once they had been made and understood, both Descartes and Huyghens could realize that the earth's motion was a question with no content for science.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“‘The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.’”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Donald Morrison, ed. Mikhail S. Gorbachev: An Intimate Biography (apparently Gorbachev cited it in a speech).