Entropy
Clark, Jack
Running down the liberal centuries ENTROPY A NEW WORLD VIEW Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard Viking, $10.95, 324 pp. Jock Clark One of the earliest and most persistent responses to...
...WHY...
...Marxists and business magnates who agreed on little else could find common cause in dismissing such visions...
...Apologies, Dear Friends (Fides/ Claretian...
...Although one wants to praise a writer for an effort to go beyond analysis and imagine solutions, Rifkin's forgetfulness of liberal history undermines the seriousness of Entropy...
...Clearly, the romantics and Utopians were running against the tide of history and of progress in seeking to go backward...
...Almost inevitably, in a book which attempts to cover so much material other minor flaws abound...
...jean bethke ELSHTAIN is an associate professor of political science at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...Inexorably we bring matter and energy from usable to unusable forms...
...More specifically we have spent the last three centuries squandering millions of years of solar energy stored in fossil fuels...
...Education consists too much of cramming facts in people's heads and too little in teaching people to think in qualitative terms...
...Those who cling to these illusions are resisting the most modern mandates of science...
...Whatever illusions and naivete liberals and radicals may have carried from the Enlightenment onward, the idea of historical progress and of human beings as the center of the universe provided intellectual tools for opposing tyranny and establishing democratic rule...
...WILLIAM H. SLAVICK is a member of the faculty at the University of Southern Maine.ersity of Southern Maine...
...Jock Clark One of the earliest and most persistent responses to industrialization and its "dark, Satanic mills" has been a vision of and a desire for a more decentralized, pastoral, and egalitarian community...
...In wasting that resource we lulled ourselves into believing that there were no limits...
...What does not seem to occur to him is that precisely the social order he envisions may be highly authoritarian...
...According to Rifkin all social thought since Newton and Descartes has been a harmful illusion...
...Now, according to Rifkin, we are sharply up against nature's limits, and our lifestyles must change radically...
...JACK CLARK is publisher of Food Monitor, a bi-monthly journal of World Hunger Year, Inc...
...Most of all, the future society will have internalized the entropic world view, and people will understand that Progress and History are illusions based on an outmoded Newtonian world view...
...Even religion must be reformulated, or, in Rifkin's phrase, we must have a "second Christian Reformation...
...excess packaging needs to be cut, transportation must be more energy-efficient...
...One is tempted to note how curious this is from a writer who was popularizing the revolutionary traditions of the American Revolution four short years ago...
...Many of the changes Rifkin advocates reflect a fairly familiar liberal-left-ecologist agenda...
...EUGENE KENNEDY is the author of the Father's Day (Doubleday...
...JAMES T. BAKER is the author of the first published book on Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton: Social Critic...
...military spending represents "the most highly entropic form of human activity" and must be curtailed...
...their vision affronted that most modern of gods, Science...
...John Locke's work is described chiefly as "an environmentalist's nightmare...
...it takes 10 calories of energy for American farms to produce one calorie of food...
...In discarding his liberal credentials Rifkin shows no understanding of that accomplishment...
...Interestingly, Rifkin at one point suggests that resistance to the new entropic realities may take a fascist form...
...The most overwhelming scientific fact confronting us, he and Ted Howard argue, is the second law of thermodymanics, the entropy law...
...Major arguments could begin around Rifkin's romanticization of subsistence, organic farming as a way of life for most of humanity...
...Human liberty represents a precious and very fragile conquest...
...Imagining any future without appreciating that fact becomes a sterile and unworthy exercise...
...solar energy must be developed...
...Cities will be much smaller, perhaps 50,000 or so at the maximum...
...Our cities are too big, requiring too many people in service occupations...
...Throughout the book, Rifkin treats the thought of the last three centuries as a nightmare from which humankind must awake...
...REVIEWERS David J. O'BRIEN teaches history at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester...
...The Biblical injunction to have dominion over the earth will be reinterpreted to mean humans exercising a careful stewardship over the finite resources of God's creation...
...our agriculture too energy intensive...
...Nuclear power, in both its fission and fusion forms, must be rejected...
...All of that matters much less than Entropy's utter dismissal of the liberal tradition and total rejection of nearly three centuries of social and political thought...
...Often the tone combines a glib self-assurance with painfully evident mistakes (to cite two examples: the assertion that other-worldliness led to Christianity's tolerance for despoiling the environment and the assertion that a one-toone relationship exists between unemployment and entropy...
...In Entropy, Jeremy Rifkin seeks to turn the accusation on its head...
...Since Entropy is presented as nothing less than a new world view, Rifkin goes well beyond the familiar agenda in proposing lifestyle changes...
...In all these areas of policy discussion, Rifkin covers familiar ground, but his presentation is well-organized and contains very useful information in condensed form (e.g...
...JOHN DEEDY is the author of the newly published "interim biography" of Daniel Berri-gan...
...Order in the human environment is created only by creating a larger disorder in the universe...
...We will live, according to Rifkin's scheme, mostly as subsistence farmers, with some people engaged in manufacturing far fewer goods than are made now...
...On the other side of all these changes lies a society very much like the one proposed by the romantics and Utopians...
Vol. 108 • April 1981 • No. 7
