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Knowledge Is Powerless, by David Warren – Brown Pelican Society of Lousiana

Knowledge Is Powerless, by David Warren

Mission Accomplished: The Rainbow Seamless Garment Is Suffocating the Church, as Intended, by John Zmirak
May 17, 2024
Editorial: Harrison Butker for President, by Eric Sammon
May 17, 2024

Screenshot. Christ Crowned with Thorns by Matthias Stom, c. 1633-39 [Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA]

By David Warren, The Catholic Thing, May 17, 2024

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

Note: I’m extremely grateful to everyone who responded to the first day of our mid-year fundraising yesterday. Thanks to every one of you for your commitment and generosity. I wish I could respond to each of you individually but numbers make that impossible. We received donations from every state in the union and foreign countries from New Zealand to Ireland to the Czech Republic. One donor was kind enough to say, “Thanks for holding true to our Catholic values. It’s getting difficult to find that anymore.”  Another wrote: “With love and thanks for all your contributions to our knowledge about the greater Catholic community (locally & overseas) and encouraging our development in Faith, Hope and Love!!!” From a third: “I and my family read your articles daily and then discuss them among ourselves. Priceless!” I know that many more of you share those sentiments. So, let’s keep at this funding thing until we’re where we need to be for our Catholic Thing. You know the drill.  Click the button below and follow the simple instructions. Make sure that TCT is here this year and well into the future. — Robert Royal

 

Scientia potentia est – “Knowledge is power” – was launched upon the world by Francis Bacon, and entered flight with Thomas Hobbes. The phrase was among the watchwords of the new, post-Catholic, “scientific” order, or “Reformation” as its exponents came to call themselves. They had a new, nominalist, appreciation of technology.

Yet the phrase, or some near variant, may be found in the Hebrew Book of Proverbs, and here and there over the many intervening centuries. The difference was that Bacon, and his secretary, Hobbes, used it like thugs. They meant political power – the power over others. They did not mean the power to fuel virtue.

That “information” is power was a decisive step down, into mediocrity. It seems to have come about when the generations of advertising salesmen co-opted the phrase, and began using it in their promotions. …

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