Fire and Knowledge

Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, “We will not be dictated to,” and proceeded to become stenographers.

–G. K. Chesterton (on feminism)

(I am told this is cited from Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (Sheed and Ward, 1943), p. 205, but I have not confirmed this.)

Thanks to our overweening preoccupation with Communism at home and abroad America became the first nation in modern history to build a war economy in peacetime. Defense spending in the fifties ranged between $40 billion and $53 billion a year—or more than total government spending on everything at the dawn of the decade.

–Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006), p. 132

Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France detonated scores more.

–Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006), p. 125

Within a few minutes of mesmerizing, sensitive patients would fall into a characteristic “crisis” taken by [Franz] Mesmer [1734-1815] as proof of his method. Bodies would begin to shake, arms and legs move violently and involuntarily, teeth chatter loudly. Patients would grimace, groan, babble, scream, faint, and fall unconscious.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “The Chain of Reason Versus the Chain of Thumbs” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 185

Significantly, when an Indian child was brought up in white ways, the education often failed to stick. “If he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” More significantly, the opposite was not true. White children raised as Indians demonstrated no desire, after visits to English settlements, to stay there. “In a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

–H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 221

If I look back over the last hundred years it seems to me that we have lost more than we have gained, that what we have lost was valuable, and that what we have gained is trifling, for what we have lost was old and what we have gained is merely new.

–Edwin Muir in The Story and the Fable, quoted in Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 74

Tampering with the natural order was a hazardous business. Franklin told a story of how an excess of blackbirds in New England’s cornfields prompted the locals to pass laws encouraging the destruction of those pests. The blackbirds were duly diminished, but the New Englanders soon discovered their meadows engulfed in worms on which the blackbirds had fed. “Finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their black-birds.” Drawing the moral, Franklin cautioned, “Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of Providence and to interfere with the government of the world, we had need be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good.”

–H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 220

I’m finishing up Graham Greene’s spy novel, The Human Factor. (I found a first edition at a garage sale for fifty cents.) It’s a good story — it keeps you reading and deals with some interesting ethical questions. I’ve enjoyed it.

I knew Greene wrote spy novels, but I only recently learned that he actually worked for the SIS — in fact, he was recruited by and worked under the infamous Kim Philby (one of the most successful double-agents in history). So he has inside experience — which makes his spy novels a lot more interesting, in my opinion.