“one person with their mind made up can shove a lot of folks aroun!”
Tom Joad in John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
In my latest National Post column I argue that the strange juxtaposition of wokism and vicarious debauchery in the New York Times is actually a logical and coherent consequence of being “nonjudgemental”… without being a message well-tailored to me.
“Returning to the problem he identified in The Abolition of Man and De Descriptione Temporum, in the great change from one culture to another, Lewis [in The Discarded Image] suggested that something has been lost. Even as Plato and Aristotle once governed the direction of science, new philosophes of science govern the direction and application of science until ‘now, in some extreme forms of Behaviorism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we “go from that” is a dark question.’”
Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis
“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
“William Blake, 1757-1827” quoted in Gravitas Vol. I #2 (Summer 1994) without further attribution.
“Our motive may be taken to be the desire to serve our day and generation in the way that seems nearest to our hand. The battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift. Victory in war cannot be counted upon but what can be counted upon is that we should go forward determined to do what we can to bring this war to the end which we believe best for our friends and comrades in arms, without boastfulness or forgetting our duty, resolved to do the right so far as we can see the right.”
Part of Orde Wingate’s words to the Chindits as they set out into Burma in February 1943, quoted in Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [and note the contrast with the tone and content of totalitarian wartime or for that matter peacetime rhetoric].
“I fully agree with Leo Tolstoy when he said more or less the following: ‘People say it’s shameful to change one’s convictions. But I say: it’s shameful not to.’”
Vladimir Voinovich The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union
“I hadn’t expected him to open up, since he is as pigheaded as I am steadfast, but he could have made some little comment.”
Narrator Archie Goodwin re himself and his boss Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout “Blood Will Tell” in Trio for Blunt Instruments
In my latest Loonie Politics column I point out that Mark Carney’s slick verbiage is stunningly unreliable, not because he lies on purpose but because his colossal Donald-Trump-like self-regard bends reality for him in real time in very Trumpian fashion.