Word: humanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tranquil Sleep. The same unsettling effect is produced by the Swiftian irony that Goffman brings to his appraisal of the human scene. To him, a hanging is a social event, circumscribed, just like a one-day sale or a picnic, by rules calculated to make the performance go smoothly. For this reason, he says, a "table of drops" based on body weight was worked out by long experience "so that the length of the free fall would neither leave the man to wriggle nor tear off his head." The true stagecraft of a funeral, says Goffman, is found "backstage," away...
Goffman's thesis-he declines to call it a theory-rests on a fundamental assumption: all rational human beings share, without necessarily knowing that they do, a desire for public order. Society is founded on an unspoken mutual trust. The pedestrian assumes, without thinking, that the driver has no motive for running him down. Instead of fatally beating a fellow passenger who has borrowed his newspaper, the commuter can be expected to limit his objections to words or gestures directed at recovering his property...
...such as egg yolks, shellfish and organ meats. On the basis of early research, scientists assumed that the cholesterol found in mushy, atheromatous deposits in diseased coronary arteries came from the cholesterol consumed in foodstuffs. They had to abandon this simplistic view as soon as they realized that the human body manufactures cholesterol from several raw materials, notably the hard animal fats...
...playing, one steps out of one time into another," temporarily halting, in a way that suggests eternity, a world in which death occurs. Thus, the Vienna Philharmonic could give a concert as Soviet troops be sieged the city in 1945: "an affirmation of the ultimate triumph of all human gestures of creative beauty over the gestures of destruction...
...FROM DAMNATION. Certain human deeds, says Berger, in the common experience of mankind seem "not only evil, but monstrously evil." The archetypal example is the Nazi mass execution of the Jews. Man is "constrained to condemn, and condemn absolutely," the villainy of an Eichmann, and that condemnation derives from a belief that when a person commits such crimes, "he separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community, and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human...