In a recent essay an insightful quote caught my eye:

The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labours of cabinets and foreign offices.

(Richard Cobden, in a speech to the British House of Commons in 1850, cited by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the New York Times Book Review of 8 Sep 2002)

Yes! But the relationships among liberty, peace, trade, and knowledge are far more complex than those words suggest. The four factors are interwoven in a network of (to put it mechanistically) feedback loops, time delays, and nonlinear functions. They flourish together. Remove any one of them and, as history demonstrates, the system decays back toward a ground state of injustice, poverty, ignorance, and strife.

(see also Education vs Eduction (30 Apr 1999), My Business (30 May 1999), Lost Inheritance (7 Jul 1999), Education of the Youth (1 Dec 2001), Boston Public Library (20 Jun 2002), Invest in Peace (9 Jul 2002), ...)

TopicSociety - 2002-09-13

(correlates: FreeTrial, HumanGenomania, MacaulayOnCopyright, ...)