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He has that real disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress and novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
Evolution vs Progress vs Reform
(Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
While walking a cobblestone street yesterday
I happened to glance up just in time
to see a wonderous thing, a thing I’d say
was miraculous, even divine.
Above the gas lamp post hung in the air
a single brown leaf, unbothered, unmoving,
and my thought as transfixed I stood there
was the power its stolid behavior was proving:
a resistance of gravity, wind,
... See morepoetry and gold and dross
A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house.
G K. Chesterton • The Everlasting Man (with linked TOC)
Nationalism
Yes. Word processing is bad.
Before it, document length was bounded by the human capacity to copy long-form text & about to plateau.
After word processing, the tax & legal codes grew without check. And became incomprehensible to anyone but career experts. https://t.co/TCbEfRMONp
Word processing enabled unbounded growth of tax code
I Wish I May
They say there are millions out there,
but I cannot see even one tonight;
the sky is a ghastly gray, sick with city light
caught miles away that hangs in the air.
A lonely cricket
cries out wide and far
but is drowned out
by a sole sedan
coming back from the bar
which is drowned out
by the on-rushing roar of a jet
jammed full of business
poetry and gold and dross
In a way, these things they’d gathered were an illusion. A way to reassure themselves that they were doing something to prepare.
Brandon Sanderson • Towers of Midnight (The Wheel of Time Book 13)
“You may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
The difficulty of believing in democracy is that it is so hard to believe—like God and most other good things.