Word: error
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...give the Afghans some good, clean fun by organizing the country's first boxing matches and baseball games. Premier Sha'h Mahmoud Khan, who has a son at Harvard (and is a Gershwin fan), lobbed out the first ball, and smiled inscrutably as the game progressed from error to error. Since Afghan bagpipers on the sidelines tootled furiously and folk dancers whooped and whirled, the errors were understandable...
...Method & Error. Professor Northrop, who teaches the philosophy of science at Yale, will not abide condemnation of science as such. "Nothing," he says, "can do more harm to democracy than the thesis, so popular with many contemporary moral and religious leaders, that science is neutral, if not positively evil, with respect to human values...
Scientific method is all right, the glory of the West; but the "modern" views of the world constructed on it were flawed by a basic error. Northrop is not alone in finding this error in John Locke, whose 17th Century philosophy contained the premises of Jeffersonian democracy, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The error consisted in the theory that "physical substances" (space, planets, flowers) are definable only in Newtonian terms (extension, mass, volume), thus have no sensuous qualities (depth, heat, fragrance) but are supplied with them by the "mental substance" of the observer...
...West, with its theoretical knowledge (of ions, electromagnetic fields, atoms that are never seen, but "verified" by flashes, explosions, etc. which are), has much to offer the East, once the error of the West's philosophic ways since Locke is corrected. The West knows, for example, the science of the soil. The East, with its intuitive, contemplative knowledge of mother earth knows a lot that has no place in the West's scientific structure, and thereby finds the West's systematizing barren of much delight and wisdom. It is Professor Northrop's ambitious...
...dull public-service programs: "Good intentions are such a novel state of mind in radio that a broadcaster may almost be forgiven for falling into the error of thinking that's all a program needs...