“Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?”
Jeremiah 12:1 [King James Bible].
“in a psychological experiment that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g, a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Each experimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subject in a series of gradually increased exposures. After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen, and the run was terminated by two successive correct identifications. Even on the shortest exposures many subjects identified most of the cards, and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all. For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience. One would not even like to say that the subjects had seen something different from what they identified. With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it – the black has a red border. Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others. A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories. Even at forty times the average exposure required to recognize normal cards for what they were, more than 10 per cent of the anomalous cards were not correctly identified. And the subject who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: ‘I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!’ In the next section we shall occasionally see scientists behaving this way.”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
“Despite these appearances the ancient faith was diseased at the bottom and at the top. The deification of the emperors revealed not how much the upper classes thought of their rulers, but how little they thought of their gods. Among educated men philosophy was whittling away belief even while patronizing it.... The rich youths who went to Athens, Alexandria, and Rhodes for higher education found no sustenance there for the Roman creed. Greek poets made fun of the Roman pantheon, and Roman poets leaped to imitate them. The problems of Ovid assumed that the gods were fables; the epigrams of Martial assumed that they were jokes; and no one seems to have complained.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“It seems to me this pleasure-mad generation has lost the art of enjoyment.”
G.K. Chesterton in Gloucestershire Echo, Oct. 26, 1925, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
“A real spiritual abyss only opens when men appear to us to be boasting of bad actions; and this is true of nearly all that modern politicians and philanthropists boast of as their good actions. Social idealism is often actually Satanic; in the quite cold and rational sense that it claims to be the creator. To start the opposite ideal, of creatures being creative, or rather procreative, by a direct authority from the Creator, is not only a difficulty but a risk. It involves the probability of some abuse of freedom in practice. When the abuse is abominable, the true function of Government reappears; which is to exclude extreme abominations.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Nov. 1, 1934, quoted in “The Bad” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
“Gilbert’s history of man’s story [G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man] has the life of Jesus as the focal point of the world, the ‘crisis of history.’ The development of the Roman Catholic Church is the guiding line throughout history, a guide by which we can judge progress and advancement. Science has no place here, other than as a by-product of the spiritual centre, and man is no more near perfection in 1920 then he was in 1290. There has always been a path to heaven, and a road to somewhere else.”
Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
“In the end, he [G.K. Chesterton] says, the exaggeration of sex becomes sexlessness. We are no longer drawn to the bait on the hook. We are drawn to the hook itself.”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say all the excitement about Zohran Mamdani is misplaced, not because he isn’t potentially important but because what matters isn’t whether he wins a primary or even the New York general mayoral election. It’s what happens if and when he tries to govern and what the result tells us about the soundness or insanity of his principles.