Word: humanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...their dialogue has the same tentative, despairing quality. ("We are happy," one Mary says. "We are really and truly happy. Aren't we?" Are we really pretending?" Silence. "We are really and truly happy.") But though the Marys in Daisies share with Didi and Gogo a fundamental lack of human resonance, Chytilova's purpose has little in common with Beckett's lofty pursuit of silence. Rather Daisies is a meditation on the personal and social consequences of conspicuous consumption. Consumption is here equated with destruction (a fundamentally schizoid position--unable to deal with the world, the schizoid individual incorporates...
...World Health Organization is sponsoring a lecture on "Human Ecology" to be given by Professor Rene Dubos of Rockefeller University. Wednesday, July 16, 1969 at the Grand Ball-room of the Sheraton Boston Hotel. A limited number of complimentary tickets are available in Matthews Hall room 4. Open to all Harvard students, faculty, and staff...
...Alan Harrington notes, have begun to grope for the secrets of extending life. Organ transplants and artificial parts are already promising realities. The author also cites such wildly remote possibilities as quick-freezing incurables until cures can be found, administering rejuvenating shots of DNA and even duplicating an entire human body from genetically coded snippets. To exclamations that immortality achieved by such means is an impossible dream or a presumptuous nightmare, Harrington asserts that man is capable of anything...
From this stupendously optimistic point of view, immortality is not a fringe benefit but a gut issue. Death, says Harrington, is an unacceptable imposition on the human race. Having already invoked science to support his faith, Harrington lays hands on human irrationality and violence for the same purpose. Fear of extinction, he suggests, combined with the frustrated lust for eternal life, underlies the disturbed behavior that threatens humanity with madness and self-destruction. Had men only "world enough and time," he argues, they could explore the endless varieties of love, work and play. The resulting fulfilled, relaxed race would...
Like Nietzsche, he regards as crippling devices all faiths that encourage human adjustment to mortality by separating the indestructible spirit from the bone and gristle of being. Such factors, he believes, separate man from natural pride in his fleshly individuality, humbling him and cutting him off from his true spiritual condition-what Harrington calls a "state of Permanent Revolution against Imaginary Gods." The Devil, it follows, far from being the embodiment of evil, is man's healthiest prototypical projection of his own radical intention to challenge the gods-in fact, to become God. All humbling conceptions...