Word: viewing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with his strength and confidence, the people grew stronger and stronger, while he grew weaker and weaker, until in the end he was so weakened he died, but the country emerged more powerful, more productive and more socially just than ever before. It was, to be sure, a romanticized view of her husband's presidency, but it suggests the ultimate mystery of Roosevelt's leadership--his ability to use his moral authority, the degree of confidence he inspired, to strengthen the people and bind them together in a just cause...
Lately, this view, "cultural evolutionism," has been revived and given a new vocabulary. "Meme"--a word chosen to stress the parallel with "gene"--is the label for packets of cultural information: technologies, songs, beliefs and so on. Just as those genes most conducive to their own replication are the ones that prevail, those memes best at getting themselves transmitted from human to human are the ones that come to form the human environment...
...starters, if you equate nature with beauty--as Emerson and other transcendentalists tended to--then there is a kind of beauty in the unfolding of technology. It is a process of natural evolution, and may deserve the tribute that Darwin paid to organic evolution: "There is grandeur in this view of life...
Indeed, if you believe, as I do, that intelligent, culture-generating animals were a likely outcome of biological evolution, then you might even say the first great evolutionary process naturally spawned the second, which has since taken over as the great molder of the material world. In this view, the kind of global brain now taking shape has been in the cards not just since the Stone Age but since the primordial ooze; it has been, in some sense, life's destiny...
...Year's Eve 1999 for a meeting with his father's lawyers (the felicitously named Armageddon, Armageddon, Armageddon & Greene) in preparation for the apocalypse. Great fun, with one caution: The whole thing was shot with a very shaky digital video camera - not the sort of thing to view with a hangover...