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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| "Any change premised on the mutability of human nature usually ends up being a mistake." |
| 2010-05-28 |
| James Lileks, "The Daily Bleat" ...yes, I have built a side-career out of mocking cultural values inferred from bygone jetsam, but I'm not trying to set up our modern ironized culture as superior just because we can't pump out happy-clappy imagery to sell soup. I kid because I love, as the saying goes. When the imagery is egregiously stupid and betrays an idea whose offensive nature should have been apparent to any civilization capable of flight and penicillin, yes, slap ‘em. (More on this in the morn at Lint, the Institute of Official Cheer's daily blog.) But it's boring to criticize the 50s for not being as “enlightened' as the 70s, or think that “progress' doesn't have trade-offs. I put “progress' in “quotes' because the term is generally used to describe the devolution of social strictures, and while I think many such erosions had salutary effects, civilizations often mistake change for progress. Any change premised on the mutability of human nature usually ends up being a mistake. Not the mutability of people; we're quite pliable. Our natures, however, are fixed. |
| Posted by:Mike |