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

“the annoyed feeling which people have on seeing a job being badly done.”

T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Whenever a moral issue is raised, the reflex of many people is to spout, ‘Who is to say what is right or wrong?’ This is the wrong question. The right question isn’t ‘Who is to say?' but 'How can we find out?’”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” July 1, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/the-moon-is-made-of-cheese]

“At dinner he [Nero Wolfe] started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that paid the oil bill was connected, but he wasn’t. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy. I tried to put up a stiff argument, but he knows more words.”

Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout A Right to Die

“Whether in Korea or in Tierra del Fuego, in Alaska or in New Zealand, the cross on which Jesus had been tortured to death came to serve as the most globally recognized symbol of a God that there has ever been…. The man who greeted the news of the Japanese surrender in 1945 by quoting scripture and offering up praise to Christ was not Truman, nor Churchill, nor de Gaulle, but the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek.”

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

In my latest Epoch Times column I deplore the tidal wave of linguistic sewage engulfing us from social media to the pages of daily papers as evidence of mental and moral decay.

In 1914 “Germany threatened not only Britain’s military and economic position in the world but the whole moral basis of the Pax Britannia, which, as the British argued, had given the world a century of peace, and respite from general European war not enjoyed since the Rome of the Antonines. The British mission, whether in the wider world, the empire, or at home among her own populace, was principally one of extending the sense of civic virtue, of teaching both the foreigner and the uneducated Britain the rules of civilized social conduct, the rules for ‘playing the game.’ The British mission was to introduce ‘lesser breeds,’ to use Kipling’s words, to ‘the law.’ Civilization and law, then, were virtually synonymous. Civilization was possible only if one played the game according to rules laid down by time, history, precedent, all of which amounted to the law. Civilization was a question of objective values, of external form, of behavior rather than sentiment, of duty rather than whim. ‘It is only civilized beings who can combine,’ wrote J.S. Mill in his essay ‘Civilization.’ ‘All combination is compromise: it is the sacrifice of some portion of individual will for a common purpose. The savage cannot bear to sacrifice, for any purpose, the satisfaction of his individual will.’”

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