The More Things Change, the More They Actually Don’t

[Geee]

National Review:

Technology hasn’t changed the core of who we are, and history proves it.

In today’s technically sophisticated and globally connected world, we assume life has been completely reinvented. In truth, it has not changed all that much.

Facebook and Google may have recalibrated our lifestyles, but human nature, geography, and culture are nearly timeless. Even as ideologies and governments come and go, the same old, same old problems and challenges remain.

 

Compare what dominated the news in 1966, 50 years ago.

 

Abroad, Israel was constantly fighting on the West Bank against Palestinian guerrilla groups and in the air over Syria. It is likely that in another 50 years the story will remain about the same.

 

The Middle East in 1966 was going up in flames, just as it is today — and in many of the same places. The Syrian government was overthrown in a coup. The Saudis, Jordanians, and Egyptians were involved in a civil war in Yemen. The Egyptian government executed Islamists charged with planning a theocratic takeover.

 

Africa, as today, was wracked by wars or coups in places such as Chad, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan.

[Valin]

@Geee

 

While it is true The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same, still technology does change the way and speed we interact with the world.

 

Two Soldiers test early models of GPS manpack receivers in 1978. (U.S. Air Force photo)

 

 

 

Pop hits today do not sound all that much different from those that swept America in 1966, performed by groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Jefferson Airplane. Even fashion tastes come full circle. A man at work in a coat and tie looked about the same then as now. In 1966, miniskirt hemlines hit the mid-thigh — similar to the retro miniskirts of 2016.

 

Sept 1 1966

 

Sept 1 2016

[nickydog]

That was interesting, discouraging, and in many ways not surprising.

[Geee]

@Valin - I believe our company made the circuit boards for those radios

[Valin]

Related

Another Casualty of Campus Orthodoxy
Jason Willick
Sept. 2 2016

It’s been a persistent theme on this blog that college faculties, with their relentless focus on racial and gender diversity, have neglected another kind of diversity that is also important: Intellectual diversity. And by that we usually mean (following our friends at Heterodox Academy) that academic departments at elite institutions, especially in the social sciences and humanities, often have few or any members with right-of-center political opinions, and that this tends to harm their public standing and the quality of work they produce.

 

But political diversity is not the only kind of intellectual diversity that is relevant to a college’s pedagogical and research mission. Equally important is the (related) question of disciplinary diversity: Namely, that a range of fields of study, styles of inquiry and modes of analysis are represented—that academics don’t all study the same things in the same ways, leaving out vital subjects and perspectives.

A recent op-ed in the New York Times from Fredrik Logevall of Harvard and Kenneth Osgood of the Colorado School of Mines argues that that is exactly what is happening in the field of history. The fad for “bottom-up” historical narratives, they say, has marginalized one of the field’s most storied traditions: American political history—the study of presidents, diplomacy, and high-politics more broadly:

(Snip)