Reparations would keep the scab of slavery raw
I’ve been writing about American politics more than is my wont the past couple of weeks. That is not the result of a sudden upsurge in interest on my part, but out of a desire to clear the docket, and, more important, my mind in advance of Elul.
Political debate in America, such as it is, increasingly sucks one into modes of thought that are profoundly unserious and ways of speaking and writing that lower one. Resisting the slide into partisanship on behalf of one team or another requires ever greater energy.
In particular, I’d like to broaden my scope this week to consider some of the larger societal trends behind our increasingly divisive political discourse. Chief among those is rapid technological change. Economic historian Niall Ferguson argues that one would have to go back to the invention of movable type in the mid-15th century to find another example of such massive disruption of the public sphere as that created by the personal computer and the Internet.
Both the printing press and the Internet sharply reduced the cost of producing material for public consumption and therefore dramatically increased the volume of material available. The graphs of lower production costs and greatly expanded material are almost identical. The only difference: The time span over which those changes have taken place is nearly ten times faster today.
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