Over in the NYTimes colum­nist David Brooks talks about Two The­o­ries of Change. He’s talk­ing about mod­ern Amer­i­can pol­i­tics but it seems rel­e­vant to Friends. Here’s his sum­mary of a new paper by Yuval Levin of the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago:

[Thomas] Paine believed that soci­eties exist in an “eter­nal now.” That some­thing has existed for ages tells us noth­ing about its value. The past is dead and the liv­ing should use their pow­ers of analy­sis to sweep away exist­ing arrange­ments when nec­es­sary, and begin the world anew. He even sug­gested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new gen­er­a­tion could begin again

[Edmund] Burke, a par­tic­i­pant in the British Enlight­en­ment, had a dif­fer­ent vision of change. He believed that each gen­er­a­tion is a small part of a long chain of his­tory. We serve as trustees for the wis­dom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a lit­tle improved, to our descen­dents. That wis­dom fills the gaps in our own rea­son, as age-old insti­tu­tions implic­itly con­tain more wis­dom than any indi­vid­ual could have.

For Brooks, the Paine fol­l­low­ers are Tea Party activists who think it’s fine to “sweep away 100 years of his­tory and return gov­ern­ment to its prein­dus­trial role.”