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.
If you are seeking for security, certainty, your eyes will become closed. And you will be less and less surprised and you will lose the capacity to wonder. Once you lose the capacity to wonder, you have lost religion. Religion is the opening of your wondering heart. Religion is a receptivity for the mysterious that surrounds us. Don't seek security; don't seek advice on how to live your life.
Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.
Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space―space even more than time.
But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.
Secrecy, once accepted, becomes an addiction.
What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and color and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack.
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