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Usually the point of an opinion piece is to have an opinion. In a departure from the tradition of the column, I've got a question, not an answer.
I've done a modicum of reading in the field of political theory. To some, this is a rather esoteric field, apart from pulling John Locke's "separation of church and state" idea out of the context of its time and completely misrepresenting it … but that's another column.
Today I concern myself with Edmund Burke, a contemporary, friend and sometime antagonist of Thomas Paine. Burke was the father of traditional conservatism, a movement that has as much to do with libertarianism as any other modern mainstream ideology. Burke argued the importance of tradition and warned against the sudden and violent revolution that Paine and, it seems, most people today, favor.
We've seen a presidential campaign run almost completely on the watchword of change. This isn't a dig at Obama so much as an opportunity to pose the following question: Is change always good?
Change has brought us the convenience and freedom of cars, but also their dangers: pollution, oil-centered foreign policy and stock car racing. Change has brought us cinema and television, allowing us to see anything from Michael Phelps' swimming exploits in Beijing to election coverage in real time. But it has also brought us 24-hour news networks that overemphasize trivial stories to fill airtime, sat us down in front of the tube instead of taking us outside and made what few dinners we still eat as families revolve around reruns of "Seinfeld" (great as they might be) instead of conversation.
I'm not a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination. I watch tons of television, I'd rather drive than walk most places and I'm giving serious thought to voting for the candidate for whom the word "change" is as much a vocal tic as anything else. But I can't help but wonder if our society is the dog that caught the car - we've advanced so far so quickly that we don't really know what to do with ourselves.
My mother jokes occasionally about some advances in technology and other fronts being waypoints on the march to Big Brother at best, to Armageddon at worst. The iPhone is probably not going to evolve into the Mark of the Beast, but it is worth taking into account whether we want all the baggage that comes with having the world at our fingertips all the time.
I'm not sure if it's worth it.
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