The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.
Interpretation
The quote critiques society's treatment of dissenters throughout history, contrasting past and modern methods of repression.
Harold Innis highlights a grim evolution in how society deals with those who hold opposing views. While the Middle Ages resorted to physical violence by burning heretics, the modern age metaphorically threatens them with the destructive power of atom bombs, suggesting that contemporary society continues to suppress dissent, albeit in more technologically advanced and devastating ways.
In practice
During a debate on free speech, this quote could illustrate the consequences of societal intolerance.
The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine, has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication. Their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity.
It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.
Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.
She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didnβt care.
If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.
All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.
Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.
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