I started reading One Click America. It does what many books seem to be doing these days, starts with a story that draws you in before it starts preaching at you. The introduction won me, and I want to keep going. But when it started preaching at me I noticed something. It uses inadequate categories.
Here is the thing. If the ways of understanding things in the past have been rejected, then you are going to understand things in new ways. The point of doing this would be the assumption that new ways of looking at things are more accurate. My problem is, I am increasingly sure they are not. Take the instance in this book. It is a book that bangs on about inequality. Inequality is how it classifies the problem, and so that will frame the conclusions and solutions. But when I read what is being described, I am not persuaded the problem is inequality. It is disorder. You can see where the categories align: when things have been ordered, then everybody will have the same. It is such a robotic approach to the problem, though. There is no depth to society when you view the fundamental problem not in terms of order but in terms of equality. As if society were spread out on a table, rather than occuplying the dimensions of the world.
Would greater familiarity with ancient and perennial wisdom not take more dimensions into consideration?
Unknowing 