association-list

A little bit late to the party on this one, but I picked it up off of someone’s shelf and thought that it was inter­est­ing enough to keep read­ing, mostly on the strength of the voice. While I think that Savage has his heart in the right place, and that the moral scolds he seeks to address are worthy of swat­ting down, I am not sure that this book finds the best way to do it. People com­plain­ing about how right now is worse than the good old days is a seem­ingly uni­ver­sal human trait. A cer­tain type of person is always going to be doing it at any given point in his­tory. For some reason, today’s media gives these people a lot more air than they used to, but it’s hardly some­thing novel. I sus­pect that attack­ing any one instance is doomed to fail­ure, because even if you win, another person with a slightly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, pos­si­bly even on your intel­lec­tual side, will take up the torch soon enough. It seems to me that a better strat­egy over the long term is to figure out a way to give just as much air to people like Savage, who think that the cur­rent is a great place to be living, as to people like Bork, who’d rather live in some mist­ily ide­al­ized past where the person and their kind had more power.

It’s enter­tain­ing enough, but ulti­mately a bit fluffy, at least at this late date, where much of the imper­a­tive has worn off.