Word: faiths
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Every new President basks in a rebirth of American hope, a resurgent faith that new men, with new perceptions, can summon the nation to greatness. In one sense, that hope is well justified in the case of Richard Nixon: he comes to power when the war in Viet Nam may finally be ending; today, Americans are generally agreed that the nation's resources must, as far as possible, be reallocated toward resolving its domestic ills...
...children, observing the seasons, the habits and kindnesses of one wife at a time. But now, unable to go to school in nature, he must rapidly learn and unlearn technical ways that his father did not know and that may prove useless to his children. Religion fell away, while faith in industrial progress became a form of religion-now itself eroded by creeping pessimism. Less than ever before is Western man sure of his own nature, except that he is so adaptable. That quality is all that saves him from the pathological anxiety experienced by tribal Africans exposed too abruptly...
...feeling has been a social outcast, preserved by poets and writers, celebrated unwittingly by ordinary men. The rational approach assumes that anything, including God, that cannot be proved to exist, does not exist. One essentially Romantic reply in religion was Kierkegaard's assertion that man must leap into faith, as into darkness, with no reassuring proof that God exists. Another response was modern Existentialism. In what it gloomily concedes is now a mechanistic world, it seeks to restore man's sense of individual vitality and will by urging him to will his own predetermined fate, just...
...hope but hard evidence points to the Whitehead hypothesis. One thing ought to be clear from experience. Whether God is dead or not, belief in God or something very like him seems to be an ecological necessity for the balance of man in society. The same is true of faith in the possibility of progress and a sense of mission in the world, though in the future these concepts will perhaps not be used in the same simplistic, old-fashioned ways...
Just what kind of country Americans want is, of course, the big question-and the answer remains curiously elusive. Americans have traditionally stressed optimism, a faith in the future, what John Kirk calls "progress, pragmatism, respect for achievement, a belief that rising wealth and expanding technology would ultimately dissipate most individual and social problems." Yet Americans have seldom examined those values long enough to see the possible inner contradictions. In part, they were too busy carving for themselves a share of the country's peerless abundance. Men with fabulous opportunities for self-advancement had no time for self-inspection...