Putting numbers to nearly everything is the postmodern world’s way of separating facts and knowledge from mere opinion or superstition. This not merely reflects a cramped view of knowledge, it is false and immensely damaging to rational inquiry, discussion and the dissemination of knowledge. David Solway mounts a counter-argument for quality over mere quantity. Although nominally about the social sciences and aimed at its practitioners, Solway’s essay serves up food for thought for any consumer, customer or target of the social sciences: students, their parents, business people, employers, government officials, voters. In short, all of us.

Smear, denounce, attack, delegitimize and wreck their career. The twisted toolbox of today’s left – including here in Canada – should be growing familiar to conservatives, for victims in virtually all walks of life topple almost daily. One of the latest is sociologist Ricardo Duchesne, long of the University of New Brunswick but, as of last week, no longer. David Solway illuminates the sordid saga of a solid researcher and author becoming the left’s racist du jour.

With the possible exception of executives of regulated utilities or owners of supply-managed farms, you rarely find socialists running private businesses. Except, apparently, in the near-failed socialist state of Greece. Canadian writer David Solway made this discovery at an antiquarian bookstore in Athens, where he learned from the hard-bargaining proprietor that socialists can be as good at taking other people’s money as they are at spending it.

Many are suffering under the isolation triggered by the Wuhan virus. Yet solitude was once considered an attraction rather than an affliction, a time to pursue activities for their intrinsic pleasure. David Solway urges us to rescue poetry from its cultural exile as a way of enriching reflection and keeping the language vital and renewed.