Word: humankind
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Lionel Tiger's forthcoming book offers some slightly more definite advice-or at least postulation. Although he is not studying happiness as such, the anthropologist argues that humankind does not have to go looking far for its basic source of wellbeing: it is built right into the human body. Says he: "Our benign sense of the future could have been bred into us and other complex animals out of the need to survive." Tiger speculates that man pushes ever onward, inextinguishably optimistic in the face of adversity, because of his biochemistry. The key to mankind's optimism...
...their insatiable hunger for news about the future, Americans surely prove themselves kinsmen of their remotest ancestors. Humankind, archaeology has long since made clear, began trying to penetrate tomorrow as soon as it dawned on men that there was one. The oracle and prophetic magic were invented before the wheel. Today, entrails are about the only thing not widely sifted for inklings of things to be. The soothsaying fraternity conjures all year long to supply the public addiction. The orgiastic bumper crop comes as a sort of special start-of-the-year fix. One effect of the overdose is that...
...detect their limits. Let the stunning statistic from the Utah study stand-but add to it the universal knowledge that roughly ten out often people suffer "adverse emotional reactions" to life itself. Those who do not ought to have their heads examined. Even saints-especially saints-anguish. Evidently humankind from ages immemorial has known a rough time in that darkest gully of the year the season of the winter solstice. In fact, most historians agree that it was precisely to relieve the morbidity inherent in the season that the species invented the extravagant celebrations that have endured to this...
Congratulations to the little fish, the snail darter [June 26]! Perhaps humankind is at last using its brain and realizing that as we exterminate life around us, we are narrowing the gap between us and our own extinction...
Your contention that in my Christian Century article I maintained that Jesus Christ was the product of a "genetics experiment" is ludicrous. My concern was whether the idea of the origin of humankind with extraterrestrial assistance would in any way compromise what the church believes about the uniqueness of God's revelation in and through Christ. Personally I don't think that it would, since the heart of that revelation (that God is love and mercy) is at the moral core of the universe. It is of cosmic dimensions and is not limited to the earth...