In my latest National Post column I ponder the gleeful way many people welcome the development of AI that’s better than us at everything, and ask whether at Christmastime in particular we can’t find something to cherish in our fallible, all-too-human fellows and selves.
“family: the thing on which all civilization is built; the idea that a man and a woman should live largely for the next generation and that they should, to some extent, defer their personal amusements, such as divorce and dissipation, for the benefit of the next generation.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 22, 1911, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #5 (March 2003)
In my latest National Post column I say Britain needs a Tory victory because (a) Corbyn is a loathsome anti-Semite (b) democracy requires you to respect referendum results and (c) self-government requires a functioning parliament, which the UK hasn’t had since 2016.
“The pessimists who attack the Universe are always under this disadvantage. They have an exhilarating consciousness that they could make the sun and moon better; but they also have the depressing consciousness that they could not make the sun and moon at all.”
G.K. Chesterton in Charles Dickens, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan.-Feb. 2000)
“Dare to be naive."
R. Buckminster Fuller, quoted on www.goodreads.com/quotes/37173-dare-to-be-naive
“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”
Roberto Rossellini, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail July 7, 2004
“Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss.”
Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind (discussing Nietzsche’s views)
“‘The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Sir Walter Scott,” in Twelve Types, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (1-2/05)