Author: Redactor

To accept words instead of things, to content oneself with words, to dispute about words: such is the history of all man’s intellectual aberrations. He is driven to this by two opposite tendencies: need of certainty, and indolence in inquiry.
The result of this is that he lumps together a whole order of phenomena, more or less connected, by a word more or less expressive and precise. He comprehends in this word, creatures of all kinds; and when he has once contracted the habit of repeating this word to himself or to others, he no longer observes the facts of the case: he only attaches his belief to the word.
As soon as the word is pronounced in his presence, some of his cerebral cells begin to act; and by reflex action he utters a series of incoherent but already-formed ideas upon the question which is before us.

Yves Guyot, Prostitution Under the Regulation System (Edgar Beckit Truman, M.D., F.C.S., trans., 1884), pp. 1–2.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by the French artist André Gill (1840-1885).

“Repeatedly over the past few years the American public has been subjected to a litany of catastrophes — to predictions of impending disaster that are claimed to be unique to modern civilization. The oceans are dying, the atmosphere is poisoned, the earth itself is losing its capacity to support life. . . . The anticipated catastrophes are our own fault, of course, blamed on the greedy and perfidious nature of modern man.

“Well, it’s all pretty heady stuff, but is it true? As with so many issues that involve technology, the answer is yes — and no — probably rather more ‘no’ than ‘yes.’”

Dixy Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, 1990

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.

Co-authors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander of “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture,” The Inquirer (August 9, 2017), an article that caused a huge backlash against Dr. Wax at her institution, the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Immediately following the above-quoted passage, the article continued:

The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.

Would the re-embrace of bourgeois norms by the ordinary Americans who have abandoned them significantly reduce society’s pathologies? There is every reason to believe so. . . .

Neither government nor municipal monopolies are novelties; they are antiques. . . . They are not indicative of evolution, but of retrogression.

Yves Guyot, Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (H. F. Baker, trans., 1914), p. 397.

Illustration is a detail from a caricature by the great French artist André Gill (1840-1885).

“Who speaks for science? Or, to put it another way, on whom does the press rely to speak for science?”

Dixy Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, 1990