“Such reactions [seeing only the enormous good or bad potential of a new technology] are amplified by what might be termed chronocentricity – the egotism that one’s own generation is posed on the very cusp of history. Today, we are repeatedly told that we are in the midst of a communications revolution. But the electric telegraph was, in many ways, far more disconcerting...”
Epilogue in Tom Standage The Victorian Internet
“It is natural to civilised man to go back upon his past, and to be grateful for all profit he can gain from the study of his own development. So we may be certain that the claim of Greece and Rome to our eternal gratitude will never cease to be asserted, and their right to teach us still what we could have learnt nowhere else will never be successfully disputed.”
W. Warde Fowler, Rome (written November 1911)
In my latest National Post column I deplore Canada’s tendency to ignore national security threats including, most recently, an aggressive Russian submarine presence in the North Atlantic that menaces vital communications systems.
"If he’s mad, I hope he’ll bite some of my other generals."
King George II responding to criticism of General James Wolfe, quoted by John Ivison in National Post June 12, 2012
In my latest National Post column I warn that the largest lesson of the Christine Blasey Ford-Brett Kavanaugh confrontation could easily be seen as: Avoid the opposite sex entirely.
“It was this century [the last before Christ] that produced most of the famous Romans whose names are familiar to us: the two Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, and finally Augustus, all of whom helped in various ways to save Italy and the Empire from premature dissolution. It was, in fact, an age of great personalities, and one, too, in which personal character became as deeply interesting to the men of the time as it is even now to us.”
W. Warde Fowler, Rome.
In the latest issue of The Landowner I ridicule Britain’s Royal Academy for putting on a show of what Renaissance artists should have painted if they’d been smart, nice and sophisticated like us.