enthalpy

Friday, September 19, 2003


David Gelernter strikes a pretty interesting comparison between 1939 and today, and why in 1939 it was perfectly acceptable to have a sign in New York City that said "Dynamite Stored Here - Danger Explosives Danger"
"Doing as you ought was not the only virtue and does not, all by itself, explain all those house calls or train porters. But it offers one clue to the logic of a society that seems, in certain ways, to have functioned more humanely than ours."
As he states, these changes don't happen in a vacuum, and there are thousands of culprits that can be blamed for this change, but the greatest is the total lack of shame.
"I claim that the continual practice of proper behavior on an endless succession of trivial, meaningless occasions makes a person at least a bit more apt to act properly when the chips are down. I claim that all the little oughts late thirties society treasured are one cause of the huge divide in social character between that era and this."
Who could argue with that?



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