After 244 years — it began publication five years before the 1773 Boston Tea Party — the Encyclopaedia Britannica will henceforth be available only in digital form as it tries to catch up to reference Web sites such as Google and Wikipedia. Another digital casualty forgot it was selling the preservation of memories, a.k.a. “Kodak moments,” not film.
America now is divided between those who find this social churning unnerving and those who find it exhilarating. What Virginia Postrel postulated in 1998 in “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress” — the best book for rescuing the country from a ruinous itch for tidiness — is even more true now. Today’s primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled “progressives,” who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism.
I have often found this aspect of the American Left unusual. Be it the longing for the artificial industrial dominance of the U.S. after World War II or the period of social upheaval labelled "The 60's"; the strange desire to stop "climate change" when change is what climate does by definition (and as if any given climate has any claim to being the best or most proper climate); and countless other examples.
Maybe it all stems from the irrational notion that somewhere out there there must be an egghead who can solve our problems, or maybe it is simply a lack of vision and a deficiency in historical knowledge. Whatever the root cause, it certainly results it an outlook which can be as often regressive as progressive, backward looking as often as forward looking.
Very strange.
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