David Brooks in The New York Times today
(on the Times Wire at 3:21 AM ET) —
|
It took a lot to get us here. It took a once-in-a-century societal challenge — the stresses and strains brought by the global information age — and it took a political system that was too detached and sclerotic to understand and deal with them. There are many ways to capture this massive failure, but I’d rely on the old sociological distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. All across the world, we have masses of voters who live in a world of gemeinschaft: where relationships are personal, organic and fused by particular affections. These people define their loyalty to community, faith and nation in personal, in-the-gut sort of ways. But we have a leadership class and an experience of globalization that is from the world of gesellschaft: where systems are impersonal, rule based, abstract, indirect and formal. |
This suggests …
Schaft!
The above Schaft dates suggest in turn a review of this journal's
remarks on April 8 through April 11, 2016, which include…
The Schaft robot's world is, like the new whitehouse.gov website,
admirably "impersonal, rule based, abstract, indirect and formal."
The New York Times , on the other hand, offers the sort of
aesthetic experience so aptly described in the above William
Hamilton New Yorker cartoon.