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Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life By Adam Gopnik 211 pages; Knopf...
...writes, "Literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance." With their adherence to logic and observation, and devotion to thoughtful expression, Lincoln and Darwin - in addition to everything else they accomplished - helped kickstart the engine of the modern...
...modern civilized state claims a monopoly on punishment. Mobs with pitchforks, vigilantism, frontier justice - all seem sweaty and coarse compared with the men in powdered wigs duly processing the law. But as this crisis makes clear, we are in a new frontier now, in financial badlands created by technology and globalization, with no maps and few rules, and the law has not caught up to us. Until it does, we are left with the old sanctions: symbols and shame. That still leaves the problem of knowing whom precisely to scorn. "Capitalism," John Maynard Keynes once argued, "is the astounding belief...
...problem with smashing the whole system, however, is that it's a lazy answer to a fierce challenge. Modern capitalism has created unprecedented wealth in our lifetime, shown its power to lift people out of poverty and spread a culture of competitive genius. So we make a case for who got us here, and who might have saved us and didn't. Even faith itself can be faulted when it turns into blind optimism that sees no risk, hears no sirens. There are plenty of prosecutors who will have a chance to make their case against anyone who crossed...
...from the nearby universities. The mall is popular with Basijis--the young volunteers who fill the ranks of government-sponsored demonstrations. When they grow up, they join the government and the Revolutionary Guards corps. The Mahestan mall sells mostly religious paraphernalia--Koranic software, recordings of religious chants, speeches from modern Islamic heroes like Khomeini, Ahmadinejad and Lebanese Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah--that constitute a kind of state-sponsored Islamic pop culture. Such a culture sustains the Basij movement, which is itself part of the way the government tries to channel a generation that grew up with no memory...