Chesterton speaks to us today

G.K. Chesterton

I don’t need to introduce Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Everybody knows him. Or everybody should know him. Everyone has read him. Or everyone should read him. Chesterton is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, but sometimes he seems to speak for the 21st. To prove it, I have chosen some of his quotes. A few are well known, others less so. Let Chesterton speak for himself:

“Progress” is a useless word; for progress takes for granted an already defined direction; and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree. (The works of Charles Dickens, ch. 8, 1911)

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. (The blunders of our parties, Illustrated London News, 1924)

We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press. (Orthodoxy, chapter 7, 1908)

If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence. (What's Wrong With The World, part 1, ch. 3, 1910)

The tragedy of the modern woman is not that she is not allowed to follow man, but that she follows him far too slavishly. (The Victorian Era in Literature, ch. 2, 1913)

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. (Orthodoxy, ch.3, 1908)

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. (Heretics, ch. 20, 1905)

Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. (What's Wrong With the World, part 4, ch.6, 1910). See my post Plans, forecasts and estimations in this blog for E.F. Schumacher’s view on this question.

The old parental authority [will be replaced] by the far more sweeping and destructive authority of the State. (Illustrated London News, 24 Nov. 1928)

Many a school boasts of having the last ideas on education, when it has not even the first idea. (What's Wrong With the World, part 4, ch. 6, 1910)

If individuals have any hope of protecting their freedom, they must protect their family life. (The well & the shallows, "St. Thomas More", 1935)

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. (A Short History of England, ch. 10, 1917)

Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern. (Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, The New Name, 1917)

As this is a popular science blog, I will add a few more quotes, somewhat related to science:

Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution. (The Everlasting man, Part 1, ch. 1, 1925). See my post Is man just an animal? in this blog.

It is absurd to say that you are advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. (Orthodoxy, ch. 7, 1908). See my post On intelligence in this blog.

There had begun that easy automatic habit, of science as an oiled and smooth-running machine, that habit of treating things as obviously unquestionable, when, indeed, they are obviously questionable. (The Victorian Era in Literature, ch. 4, 1913) See my post What’s a scientific theory in this blog.

Suppose something of the type of... contraception really stalks through the modern State, leading the march of human progress through abortion to infanticide... One of the chief features of the state of Peace we now enjoy is the killing of a considerable number of harmless human beings. (The well & the shallows, "Where is the paradox" and “Killing the nerve”, 1935) See my post This is what science says about human life in this blog.

Frank Sheed said this about Chesterton:

When a man is as right as that in his forecasts, there is some reason to think he may be right in his premises.

A fully scientific conclusion.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Politics and Economy: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

A few more things about dietetics

In a previous post I questioned that dietetics is a science, because it seems to follow quite often what can be considered alternatives of fashion, and I gave some examples. In this article I’m going to add a few more, along with a general consideration.

• The expiration date of yogurts. A few years ago, there were several books published and speeches made, asserting that yogurt should never be eaten just one day after its expiration date. Of course, no expired food should ever be used to help poor people. However, any quality expert knows that expiration dates always include a safety margin that can sometimes be quite long (days, weeks, or even months). Therefore, some kinds of very recently expired food are probably within that safety margin and can be eaten without problems. Not to mention the fact that there are products (such as yogurts) that don’t need an expiration date, as their substance is not spoiled, even though it may lose nutritional or flavor properties. This is why lately, in this type of products, there is no longer talk of an expiration date, but of a preferred consumption date.

Timeline

Poster of the film based on Timeline

In 1999, Michael Crichton published his novel Timeline, a typical science fiction novel about time travel, whose plot can be summarized as follows:

A research company has developed a procedure to travel into the past. Using it, they sent to 14th century France, in the midst of the 100 Years War, a history professor who is conducting archaeological studies in ruins near the medieval fortress of La Roque. His collaborators, who do not know what is happening, find among the ruins a call for help from the professor, which when subjected to carbon-14 dating turns out to come from the 14th century. Picked up by the company that sponsors their studies, they are sent into the past to save the professor, who cannot return on his own.

In another post in this blog, I discussed the paradoxes that can be caused by traveling into the past, and various procedures invented by scientists and writers to escape them. In the novel, Crichton mentions two:

Equality or absurdity?

Read in Science News, issue of September 26 2020:

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin. Carolus Linnaeus. Gregor Mendel. They’re all men. They’re all white. And their names appear in every biology book included in a recent analysis of college textbooks. According to the survey, mentions of white men still dominate biology textbooks despite growing recognition of the scientific contributions of women and people of color.

The good news, the researchers say: Scientists in textbooks are getting more diverse. The bad news: If diversification continues at its current pace, it will take another 500 years for mentions of Black scientists to accurately reflect the number of Black college biology students.

This article is one more example of the tyranny of political correctness and the degree of madness or folly in our society. That a serious high-profile magazine like Science News also makes these blunders shows that the situation is rapidly degenerating. So fast, that it is possible that I may well see the total collapse of our civilization, which I believed would take place long after my death.

A Singular Universe

Javier Sánchez Cañizares is one of the contributors to the book Preguntas sobre Ciencia y Fe, published in 2014 and republished this year. In 2020, Javier has published a book in Spanish with the same title as this post, which can be considered as a book on philosophy of science at a high level of popularization. The goal of the book is to show that materialistic reductionism has no chance of providing a correct complete explanation, as our universe is singular because of several different reasons: