The ideas of the fathers in the nineteenth century have been visited on the third and fourth generations living in the second half of the twentieth century.
The men who conceived the idea that ‘morality is bunk’ did so with a mind well-stocked with moral ideas. But the minds of the third and fourth generations are no longer well-stocked with such ideas: they are well-stocked with ideas conceived in the nineteenth century, namely, that ‘morality is bunk’, that everything that appear to be ‘higher’ is really nothing but something quite mean and vulgar.
To their originators, these ideas were simply the result of their intellectual processes. In the third and fourth generations, they have become the very tools and instruments through which the world is being experienced and interpreted.
Those that bring forth new ideas are seldom ruled by them. But their ideas obtain power over men’s lives in the third and fourth generations when they have become a part of that great mass of ideas, including language, which seeps into a person’s mind during his ‘Dark Ages’.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Small is Beautiful, p. 73, 82
The past can instruct, but there can be no return and no "restoration."
The triumphant march of liberalism has succeeded in at once drawing down the social and natural resources that liberalism did not create and cannot replenish, but which sustained liberalism even as its advance eroded its own unacknowledged foundations.
Its successes were always blank checks written against a future it trusted it could repair.
[Patrick J. Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.18, 30
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