How little things change … After watching the excellent adaptation of Dickens “Little Dorrit” recently on ABC TV, I’ve been reading the book, and in chapter 10 Dickens muses on the pronouncements of politicians pre and post election.

“It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn’t been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn’t been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done.”

Despite the protestations of our secular age that humanity is on the improve, it’s clear that human nature doesn’t change … we just have different toys to play with in each era.

[This content was originally posted to Google Buzz, #37]