Word: human
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...journalists are not as cynical as ' they are often given blame - or credit - for being, they are nonetheless among the least surprised and most prepared of people for the possibilities of both disaster and triumph in human affairs. That, after all, is their business. As TIME'S editors saw it, last week's flight of the Apollo astronauts overshadowed -even if, in the long view of history, it did not cancel out - many of the most compelling events of the year. In just 147 hours, it transformed the pioneers of lunar space into the men whom history...
...year's transcendent legacy may well be that in Christmas week 1968, the human race glimpsed not a new continent or a new colony, but a new age, one that will inevitably reshape man's view of himself and his destiny. For what must surely rank as one of the greatest physical adventures in history was, unlike the immortal explorations of the past, infinitely more than a reconnaissance of geography or unknown elements. It was a journey into man's future, a hopeful but urgent summons, in Poet Archibald MacLeish's words, "to see ourselves...
...prophecy was false. What followed for mankind was not the Apocalypse, though there was to be abundant blood and bitterness. What followed was a tremendous resurgence of mind and spirit, a vast expansion of human knowledge and power, indeed a great age of reason...
...Rubinoff acknowledges his indebtedness to thinkers from Plato to Sartre. It is, however, in the analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that the assumption underlying The Pornography of Power is most readily grasped. Of Stevenson's portrayal of the ambivalence of human nature, Rubinoff writes: "Dr. Jekyll, the humanist, originally creates Mr. Hyde (in itself a thoroughly evil act) so that the forces of evil incarnated in a Hyde can be scientifically studied and eventually banished from the human psyche. So confident is Jekyll in the iron strength of his own virtue that...
Predictably, the process is not easy. Besides the individual's own natural shiftiness, Rubinoff argues, one of the great intellectual stumbling blocks to such self-knowledge is liberal humanism, a near-religion that obscures the truth about human nature by assuming that evil is to be found not in man but in social and political institutions, and preaching that they, and indeed man himself, are perfectible through the application of discipline and reason. With the aid of this and other rationalizations, modern man tends to repress the natural knowledge of evil and of his own demonic urges. The result...