Book 1: The Wealth of Nations Book 1 by Adam Smith
This Book is where the reading was selected for our assignment on September 28, 2010. Interesting book on Capitalism and Economics. Considered one of the first major works on the field of Economics.
Book 2:The Renaissance, A Short History, by Paul Johnson
Good fast read to get a really broad view of the Renaissance. Gives the major facts and events of the artists and philosophers of the Renaissance era.
Book 3: The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin
A compilation of lectures given by Isaiah Berlin just before he died about the Romantic Era. He was trying to write a book about the Romantic Era at the time, but died before he could finish it. Good overview of why the Romantic Era started.
Second Life could easily be renamed "'Romantic' Life". The idea of being able to create a world and a "life" for yourself, the individual, with a rejection of many of the boundaries that we have in this world, are fundamentally a Romantic view of existence. Comparing Second Life with the life we live now in reality shows us that Second Life really is a form of radicalism, breaking away from the bonds of this life, and giving you a freedom unlike any other.
This freedom has allowed companies and educational institutions to even create an environment of learning and working that would not be possible within this world, but only within the virtual. The internet really is changing the way we learn, work, play, and even live.
However, I wonder how far this will go. What I'm scared of is ending up in a life depicted in Disney and Pixar's "Wall-E". Watch this clip:
"It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next." --Charles Dickens, Hard Times.
What has driven society to where we are now? Why did people just accept the difficulties of the industrial revolution, and push onward with the way things were? Why haven't we ended up in a society like the "Steampunk" movement has fantasized? Why aren't we living in a Communistic Society that people like Karl Marx called for?
To sum it up in two words, I would say this:
COMFORT and PROGRESSION
People become comfortable in the society that they live in. They get used to it. That is why the middle classes and the working classes never really rebel; they become comfortable with where they are, and how things are going.
But this doesn't apply to everyone. There are those who want to make the world better. There are people who see the world that they currently live in, and develop new ideas, theories, and inventions, in order to make life better for everyone. Some of these ideas take off. The Crystal Palace.
Electricity. Telephones. The internet. All of these have developed out of our drive, as human beings, to progress.
But what has determined which ideas will "take off", and which ones will end up off the side of the road in the dust?
