Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Huckster Nietzsche. The 19th Century's Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche made the grade in 20th Century advertising. In the New York Times, John Ward shoe stores led off an ad for a "neither staid nor stuffy" shoe with the Nietzschean quote: "I am not successful at being pompous...
...TIME'S cover this week is Reinhold Niebuhr (see RELIGION). Many editors would not consider him news. In the headline sense, he says nothing "sensational." Yet Niebuhr is conducting an inquiry that may turn out to be more important to the 20th Century than the United Nations Assembly or any investigation by the Senate. For decades large segments of the Christian churches shied away from theology; God was "a lurking luminosity, a cozy thought." Against the current of his day, Niebuhr pursues a quest into the nature of God, of man, of sin. What Niebuhr thinks has a profound...
...almost hermetically smug optimism. The idea that man is sinful and needs redemption was subtly changed into the idea that man is by nature good and hence capable of indefinite perfectibility. This perfectibility is being achieved through technology, science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th Century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is (if the speaker happens to be a liberal Protestant) divine, or (if he happens to be religiously unattached) at least benign. Thus the reason-defying paradoxes of Christian faith are happily bypassed...
Catastrophic Paradoxes. And yet, as 20th Century civilization reaches a climax, its own paradoxes grow catastrophic. The incomparable technological achievement is more & more dedicated to the task of destruction. Man's marvelous conquest of space has made total war a household experience and, over vast reaches of the world, the commonest of childhood memories. The more abundance increases, the more resentment becomes the characteristic new look on 20th Century faces. The more production multiplies, the more scarcities become endemic. The faster science gains on disease (which, ultimately, seems always to elude it), the more the human race dies...
...limit of finite life. This is the 'ideological taint' in which all human knowledge is involved and which is always something more than mere human ignorance. It is always partly an effort to hide that ignorance by pretension." This is pre-eminently the sin of the 20th Century...