Every time I hear a minority-rights advocate say that she should not have to debate haters who question her very right to exist, I say: on the contrary, that is exactly who you need to debate.
“Consciousness does not save man from perdition, but it makes him understand the source and end of his fate.”
When “the break in tradition” finally occurred, not in the history of ideas but as a political fact—when, that is, the unprecedented world-destroying crimes of totalitarian regimes exploded our traditional standards of judgment—we were left with the question “not ‘What are we fighting against’ but ‘What are we fighting for?’
Indeed, the entire neo-Malthusian rhetoric of absolute resource limits or, to use the popular phrase, of ecological “carrying capacity,” has come to strike me as deeply misleading, because it implies impending, unbreachable constraints on human development. Human history is a triumphant record of people smashing through such constraints. I had learned that the limits to growth a society faces are a product of both its physical context—that is, its context of natural resources and environment—and the ingenuity it brings to bear on that context.
And a large popular following, [Mazzini, the Italian nationalist] believed, could only be achieved by appropriating the vocabulary and practices of Catholicism: God, faith, duty, preaching, martyrdom and blood. It was a short step from the interpenetration of religion and politics – a competitor to the French deities of liberty, fraternity and equality – to cultural supremacism.
Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.
--Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac, section 19
(A tip o' the hat to Professor John S. Nelson, University of Iowa, for this quote.)
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