Word: decays
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Complacency is a problem, he said, adding "we're alert to any incipient signs of decay...
...rate, Toynbee declared that the 21 civilizations he identified in recorded history had all followed certain patterns of growth and decay. According to what he called the law of "challenge and response," a specific challenge like the shortage of food in preclassical Greece might lead to varying responses (Spartan militarism or Athens' overseas empire), and after a "time of troubles" there would emerge a larger entity that would attempt to serve as a universal state (nurturing a universal church)-until it collapsed...
Oswald Spengler had been developing somewhat similar theories as early as the first volume of Decline of the West in 1918. But while Spengler argued that the decay of civilizations was inexorable and essentially purposeless, Toynbee insisted that man retains his freedom of choice: "I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills." Moreover, it has a purpose, a dimly perceived but divinely ordained purpose. "History," he wrote, "[is] a vision of God's creation on the move...
...best things in Pieces of the Frame are outside this comfortable sphere--an article about a lucrative quarterhorse race in New Mexico and one about the decay of Atlantic City. In both McPhee the educated family man on vaction fades away; he is not present at all in the racing article, and he takes on an unusual, ghostly Monopoly-playing persona in Atlantic City. The removal helps, because it gets rid of the chummy, comfortable tone that dominates the rest of the book. McPhee's writing works best when he is confronting the unfamiliar and making an effort to convey...
Hundreds of thousands of years from now, the most persistent signs of man's present civilization could be masses of well-preserved plastic bottles, containers, bags and wrappings. That is because plastics resist natural processes of decay almost indefinitely. To make the material go away when it is thrown away, scientists in Germany have developed a type of plastic that disintegrates when exposed to the ultraviolet rays in sunlight. But it has a hitch: the sun does not distinguish between unopened plastic containers and discards...