The issue is that humans will inevitably seek out ways of finding intimacy and connection with strangers, with people they will never meet. Should we challenge the nation’s role in that process? Or allow it to step into a breach that would otherwise be filled by an ascendant consumer culture, in which identity and belonging are defined by what one

As Vannevar Bush observed, writing in 1949, the failure of the Nazis to develop a sufficiently effective proximity fuse, which allowed bombs to detonate just prior to hitting their targets, was a consequence of their arrogance, not their incompetence. The Germans, he wrote,32 were incredulous that “the verdammter Amerikaner” had succeeded “where

“If all beliefs are equally true or historically contingent, if the belief in reason is simply an ethnocentric Western prejudice, then there is no superior moral position from which to judge even the most abhorrent practices—as well as, of course, no epistemological basis for postmodernism itself.”

It is true, of course, that purportedly neutral or innocent aesthetic decisions are often means of constructing and maintaining caste hierarchies.

The act of rebellion that involves building something from nothing—whether it is a poem from a blank page, a painting from a canvas, or software code on a screen—by definition requires a rejection of what has come before. It involves the bracing conclusion that something new is necessary. The hubris involved in the act of creation—that

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.”

Our argument is that the path forward will involve a reconciliation of a commitment to the free market, and its atomization and isolation of individual wants and needs, with the insatiable human desire for some form of collective experience and endeavor.

“the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.”

As Manuel Castells Oliván,2 a Spanish sociologist, has written, “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.”