On Tuesday I joined Alex Pierson to discuss the ugly mix of ideological and partisan dysfunction behind MP Jenica Atwin’s decision to leave the Green Party for the welcoming Liberals over extreme anti-Israel views she then suddenly claimed she’d never held.
“The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law.”
Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism
On the Crown & Crozier podcast I discuss Magna Carta, church, state and you.
“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”
G.K. Chesterton What I Saw In America
“Unless a louse could really leap, believe you me, She wouldn’t go walking on that weave, it was so threadbare.”
William Langland Piers Plowman (edited, introduced and annotated by Elizabeth D. Kirk and Judith H. Anderson) Passus V ll. 196-97 (describing Covetousness’ shabby appearance)
In my latest National Post column I say “This government doesn’t do hard” could become our new national motto as a vast cast of characters across the executive, legislative and judicial branches avoids thinking about difficult choices from COVID to national security and the budget.
“This life in us... however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened. To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish. Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”
Malcolm Muggeridge Something Beautiful for God
“fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which... have since hardened into convictions. First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet…. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling … In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure. The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational…. one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy