Word: rifkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...PAGES OF TEXT, Washington lawyer Jeremy Rifkin wants to crush conventional wisdom, rip away the illusions veiling our perceptions of the world, and revolutionize our daily lives. He feels he has hit upon one of those great ideas that change our very existence, powerful in its simplicity and attractive in its incisiveness. In fact, he is so confident that the second law of thermodynamics--the law of entropy--governs our being that his attempt to put forth a new world view assumes the form of a preachy polemic. Whether or not we want to believe in an "entropic" perspective...
...Maybe Rifkin, the author of several thought-provoking books like The North Will Rise Again, is right. Maybe the entropy law does determine our fate contrary to our "Newtonian," or progress-oriented inclinations. In essence, the entropy law states that all energy flows inexorably from the orderly to the disorderly and from the usable to the unusable. Thus, when we expend energy under the guise of progress, we are in fact accelerating destructiveness. Presumably, Rifkin awoke early one morning and saw that this second law of thermodynamics could be applied to absolutely everything, and proceeded--with the assistance of disciple...
...QUIBBLE with the value of having people think up revolutionary world views and test them on the public. But in Entropy, no matter how alluring the thesis, Rifkin does not persuade. Rifkin employs puerile rhetorical techniques like the word "just" ("That just doesn't true," "This just isn't the case," "That just doesn't hold up," "This just isn't so," to name a few). He capitalizes phrases like "Big Questions." He uses italics. He will do anything to help you believe...
Perhaps more impressive is the diverse roster of physicists and philosophers both contemporary and ancient figures whom Rifkin draws upon to prove his point. Still, his argument flows from the sublime to the ridiculous in an annoying cycle. His style is entropic; how else can you describe someone who in one breath quotes Einstein and in the next produces a remarkably declarative and pithy sentence like "Wrong!" to refute Newton...
Because the ecological crisis is worldwide in scope while only American Christianity is surveyed. because Rifkin shifts randomly between referring to post-'50s politics and 18th century ideas when he uses the term 'liberalism,' and because he seems willing to twist the evidence to support a very tenuous hypothesis, The Emerging Order finally succeeds only in raising the issue and prompting thought about where we want to go. Prophecy gives way to polemic, and so the book cannot succeed on its own terms, as an outline of the emerging situation...