by C. S. Lewis
No. It’s an impudent falsehood. Men did not
Invariably think the newer way
Prosaic, mad, inelegant, or what not.
Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church? Did anybody say
How modern and how ugly? They did not.
Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror? They were not.
If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?
Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.
If a quack doctor’s breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway
All that I can’t do, all that I could?
So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.
On their blog, Gary Becker advocates making the sale of organs for transplants legal, and Richard Posner agrees. Becker and Posner are both professors at the University of Chicago; both are Nobel laureates; both are part of the Law and Economics movement. (Posner, also a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, is familiar to members of the BJU debate team as an oft-quoted source.) Analyzing their assumptions about morality and the law is instructive about their particular movement and discussions of the law in general.
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For Christmas I was given daily calendar of quotations from Shakespeare. Though some think that I quote the Bard too much already, you can expect more frequent quotations.
The quotation for January 1 seemed appropriate:
It is the purpose that makes strong the vow. (Troilus and Cressida 5.3.28)
The quotation for January 2 likewise seemed appropriate:
For a kingdom any oath may be broken. (III Henry VI 1.2.19)
