Prescient thoughts on global provincialism

"By provincial I mean...a distortion of values, the exclusion of some, the exaggeration of others, which springs, not from lack of wide geographical perambulation, but from applying standards acquired within a limited area, to the whole of human experience; which confounds the contingent with the essential, the ephemeral with the permanent. In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares."

---T.S. Eliot, "What is a Classic?: Essays of Generalization 1930-1965" From: The Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, p.129-30.


Let's not even mention the "unborn" whose rights we so trenchantly defend...now...why is it that we "liberated" Iraq and didn't sign the Kyoto treaty?