On March 27 in a Christian Heritage Party webinar talk “Magna Lockdown: Canadian Liberty in a Medical Crisis” I argued that liberty isn’t a frivolous luxury or vague abstract ideal but a vital practical tool for creating and maintaining good government in crises as well as quiet times.
“Human nature red in tooth and claw.”
Again I quote myself, swollen in head and pride (from August 2000)
In my latest National Post column I say it’s fatuous to ask companies to stay out of politics; what they need to do, being collections of people, is seek to act morally in public as in private affairs.
“If a rule of the form ‘he who takes the benefit must pay the cost’ is at stake, then solving the problem means spotting cheats. People do this well. The mind is not following abstract reason; it is enforcing a social contract.... Given this view of man – a natural trader, ever concerned with social debts and an uncertain future – it is little wonder that human minds are interested in detecting cheats, not pursuing pure logic, and in sampling frequencies rather than making risky one-off guesses.”
The Economist July 4, 1992 [an article on so-called "Wason tests" some of which people solve far better than others though they are logically equivalent]
“To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“There is a game of April Fool that’s played behind its door,/ Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more”.
G.K. Chesterton “The Aristocrat” with respect to the Devil’s “little place at What’sitsname (it isn’t far away)”
In my latest National Post column I say the astounding outburst of rudeness from Communist China’s diplomats has very little to do with China and a whole lot to do with Communism.
“I am not certain that brevity is the soul of wit, but brevity is an excellent substitute for wit.”
G.K. Chesterton in New York Times April 10, 1921, quoted in Gilbert! magazine vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)