Word: humanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even more confusing were Garder's comments on assumptions about human nature. In his second lecture, he called people "paranoid" who believe that "evil people with evil purposes are running things behind the scenes." Leaders, including the much-abused military-industrial complex, are doing about the best they can within an inherently defective problem-solving system, the first two lectures seemed to say. But in taking some querulous swipes at the new morality and radical lifestyles, Gardner suggested that this is "a world of imperfect people, some of them savage, some foolish, some undisciplined, some rapacious." And in his third...
...Antichrist just around the corner. The trouble with the image, according to an international symposium on unbelief last week, is that it is all wrong. "The modern world," declared University of California Sociologist Robert N. Bellah without irony, "is as alive with religious possibility as any epoch in human history...
Miss Graves, however, when approached directly, maintains that all she cares about is camels. "There's as much possibility for fresh invention in making a camel as in making a human figure," she says. Come to think of it, since nobody else has done much using the camel as a subject, there is probably more...
Because of all Lear's hang-ups, he could be called a truly modern figure for his sense of the precarious and tragic in human life. His nonsense verses, always catchy, should acquire renewed relevance today. They were the obverse of the solid moral copper coins given to good little Victorian children by the avuncular Establishment. His characters, like the "Old Person of Cadiz" or "Young Lady of Clare," are rarely righteous, and when they do practice virtue, it often goes refreshingly unrewarded. One thing this age will never really understand about Lear: his penchant for the nonporno limerick...
...Whereas religion, organizations and conferences based on the higher aspirations of man have failed to bring the human race closer to lasting peace, the intelligence services based on the more primitive instincts of distrust and enmity have ironically become the more effective instruments in preserving peace amongst the major powers in the atomic age." Thus Louis Hagen, a British author and movie maker, concludes his well-documented "dossier of espionage" conducted since 1945 in a secret political struggle over Germany...