This is my favorite paragraph in the Postrel piece about Croly. Crolyists hate plenitude.
America is an amazing place: creative, generous, and productive, with so many cultural nooks and crannies that no one can comprehend them all. Ours is a country whose greatness lies in its plenitude, the sheer diversity of niches--business, cultural, artistic, stylistic, intellectual, athletic, philanthropic, technical, you name it--it continuously creates and fills. (I owe the apt term plenitude to anthropologist Grant McCracken's book by that name, available at www.cultureby.com.) Plenitude is exciting, fun, stimulating, cool. It allows more people to be happy more of the time. It defies rigid status categories, whether "traditional" or "multicultural," in favor of the fluidity of choice and contract. It is a source of progress and competition, of the essential variations in the evolution of a dynamic civilization.
Unfortunately, cultureby.com seems to be an inoperative link and the book doesn't show up on amazon. |
