Word: rifkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rifkin's treatment of history best illustrates the deficiencies of a book to which any reader alienated by modern society would gravitate to as an answer to his problems. In one tidy half-page paragraph, Rifkin summarizes the historical theories of Toynbee, Spengler, Ortega y Gasset and Marx, allocating each scholar one sentence in this day of scarce resources. His next paragraphy begins...
...gereralization, then, Rifkin explains away any theory of history different from his own--Marx never incorporated entropy into historical materialism...
Much of what Rifkin puts forward in Entropy has a chillingly familiar ring. In his effort to make a grand, holistic leap to an integrated world view--"Here is the point where science joins metaphysics and ethics"--Rifkin has sacrificed a good measure of substance. But when he stops taking on great thinkers in three-page chapters and starts focusing on specifics, Entropy begins to suck you in, and the simple appeal of the entropy world view penetrates the rhetoric. Essentially, the moral equivalent of war in an entropic world view is peace. Warfare, and its preparation, are the most...
ACCORDING TO RIFKIN, we should throw off the burdensome pre-occupatino of growth and cast aside notions of economic and technical progress. This strikes a responsive chord with anyone following the present election campaign. But the author is guilty of a personal bias himself. Entropy is clearly pitched at the industrialized Northeast and Trilateral Commission types. Rifkin says frugality no longer exists in our "high-entropy society"; he contends that leisure has o verrun the work ethic; and in our mechanical, materialist value system, we have forsaken the pursuit of spiritual consciousness...
...author's fervor recalls Ronald Reagan's recent pronouncements, and Rifkin completely ignores the reaction to this decadence, this high-entropy--the resurgence of a moral majority and the advent of a strong right in American politics. Reagan's followers seem to prescribe the "low-entropy society Rifkin craves...