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.
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 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).
“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 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
“As it turns out, tracking a balanced budget is like tracking a unicorn. The tracking is easy, but finding one is hard.”
Randall Denley in National Post August 16, 2024