Innovation Versus Conservation?

While reading a book on innovation by Steven Johnson, several questions occured to Alan Jacobs:

Under what circumstances does a given society need strategies of conservation and preservation more than it needs innovation? ... Do the habits of mind (personal and social) that promote innovation consort harmoniously with those that promote conservation and preservation? Can a person, or a society, reconcile these two impulses, or will one dominate at the expense of the other?

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan