General Discussion

salvorhardin

(9,995 posts) Sun Aug 5, 2012, 09:23 AM Aug 2012

Age of Fracture : A Different Country Now

I listened to this interview with intellectual historian Dan Rodgers, author of Age of Fracture, this morning. I don't agree with him on everything, but he brings much needed perspective to understanding what's going on in the country today.

"One of the interesting things about our current time is a loss of being able to think sequentially, to think slowly, to think about things happening over a relatively gradual, incremental sense of time. How does this happen? In part it’s about market ideas that move into our everyday language. We think of satisfaction coming instantly, of people making choices very very quickly.

...

We unfortunately have a lot of people who not only don’t know history but don’t think they need to know, or would be hindered by too much knowledge of history.

…

And of course within U.S. history there’s a long strain of imagining that Americans will avoid the mistakes of others; therefore that they don’t really need to know too much about the past. We’ve lost a certain realism about history that was stronger in the middle of the last century — much stronger."

Link: http://www.radioopensource.org/dan-rodgers-age-of-fracture-a-different-country-now

Note: The interview isn't really four and a half hours long, despite the size of the mp3. It's only about 55 minutes. There's just three and a half hours of silence tacked onto the end!

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While listening to this interview, I was reminded once again of Adam Curtis' amazing documentary series Century of the Self. I can't recommend this series enough. You can watch all four parts online at http://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis_TheCenturyOfTheSelf.