∞
Perhaps the foremost trend our nostalgia keeps us from seeing is the vast decentralization of American life, which has characterized the early years of this century and looks only to grow. The postwar order was dominated by large institutions: big government, big business, big labor, big media, big universities, mass culture. But in every area of our national life—or at least every area except government—we are witnessing the replacement of large, centralized institutions by smaller, decentralized networks.Younger Americans are growing up amid a profusion of options in every realm of life, with far more choice but far less predictability and security. Dynamism is increasingly driven not by economies of scale but by competitively-driven marginal improvements. Our culture is becoming a sea of subcultures. Sources of information, entertainment, and education are proliferating.
Blinded by Nostalgia | Yuval Levin | First Things. This seems very wrong to me. Not because the “smaller, decentralized networks” don’t exist but because they tend to be totally dependent on the “large, centralized institutions”: a handful of massive companies (TimeWarner, Comcast, Microsoft, Google, Apple) govern our access to our personal networks and keep them under close surveillance — gathering data they may well share with the NSA and other governmental agencies. Levin is confusing the appearance (decentralization) with the reality (increasing consolidation of data in the hands of a few powerhouse organizations).
∞
[gallery] smithsonianlibraries:
Bruce soon found out that you just don’t challenge a skeleton to a bare-knuckle fight.From: “The English dance of death, from the designs of Thomas Rowlandson” (1903)
∞
When we develop and use educational technologies that monitor a student’s every moment in school and online, we groom that student for a lifetime of surveillance from the NSA, from data brokers, from advertisers, marketers, and even CCTV cameras. By watching every move that students make while learning, we model to students that we do not trust them– that ultimately, their every move will be under scrutiny from others. When students recognize that they are being watched, they begin to act differently– and from that very moment they begin to cede one small bit of freedom at a time….By developing technologies that collect, track, record, analyze every move a student makes both online and off, technologists and investors and educators are ensuring that today’s students will have less privacy than any other generation that came before them, threatening to make privacy and anonymity unattainable for future generations.
∞
Outside of pockets of extreme deprivation, children’s society is severely restricted by our practice of placing children under the equivalent of house arrest. In only three generations, children in the British Isles as well as the United States have lost their freedom to roam, their independently explorable territories shrinking from hundreds of acres to the dimensions of each child’s own back yard. This is not an accusation toward parents; their decisions reflect their judgments about their children’s safety in the world. Specifically, parents judge that there is no community beyond their doors that they can rely on to keep their children safe. Christopher Alexander’s Pattern 57: Children in the City (A Pattern Language) states that “If children are not able to explore the whole of the adult world around them, they cannot become adults. But modern cities are so dangerous that children cannot be allowed to explore them freely.” Unfortunately, this has become the case not just in large cities, but in small towns and even rural areas.
∞
When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, `Would that she were.’ For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin. The Christian and the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with the writers of the New Statesman; and those writers would of course agree with me.
— C. S. Lewis, “Is Theism Important?”
∞
[gallery] austinkleon:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s four types of readersFrom lecture two of his Seven Lectures On Shakespeare and Milton
(Thx @communicatrix!)
∞
Marilynne Robinson is one of the great religious novelists, not only of our age, but any age. Reading her new novel Lila, one wonders how critics could worry that American fiction has lost its faith, though such worries make one think there might well have been wedding guests at Cana who complained about the shortage of water after witnessing the miracle with wine.
Marilynne Robinson’s Lila Review | New Republic. Robinson is wonderful, but one novelist, no matter how great, can’t do justice to the varieties of religious experience. Even if she were the greatest religious writer who ever lived, one might legitimately wish for American fiction, at its highest levels, to be more attentive to matters of faith.
