Word: idea
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pessimistic objections to the present course and rate of improvement-indeed to the whole idea of material progress as an absolute value-have been stirred, too, by a continued, if unequal, philosophic conflict over the nature of man. In one view-long predominant and customarily summed up by Descartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am"-thought and instinct are separate and man at his best is a rational animal. In the other view, often pilloried under the pejorative name Romanticism, thought and feeling are rightly and forever intermingled. Systems are to be avoided, individuality is stressed-which often made...
...Thus it seems particularly tragic that the idealism that brought whites and blacks together in the early '60s has evaporated. Yet perhaps it was, as the militants now say, a false idealism based on the notion that whites could lift blacks with well-meaning, but destructive paternalism. That idea, at least, is now dead, and a new kind of dialogue is developing in which whites help, but do not command the black advance...
...unlimited) resources toward achieving the nation's ideals? The question now demands a different answer from the one that Americans have grown accustomed to since the New Deal. The Depression clearly required Washington to "do for the people what they cannot do for themselves." However alluring that idea seemed as recently as the days of Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society, it is now close to being self-defeating...
...best which governs least." A highly interdependent nation needs a great central government to cope with problems that affect all citizens and states. But equally obvious, Washington needs a new tactic: it must encourage Americans to do for themselves what they could do if they tried to. This idea has often been used as a sort of shorthand for the callous notion that all public assistance is a coddling waste; it does not mean that in the present context. What is at stake now is the freeing of the individual from unnecessary dependence on a remote bureaucratic apparatus...
Even an early end to the Viet Nam war offers little immediate prospect for substantial savings. Former U.S. Budget Director Charles Schultze, now of the Brookings Institution, in Agenda for the Nation, effectively explodes the idea that the annual $29 billion that the war is now costing will be available for domestic needs. Working from an optimistic "scenario" that assumes an early end to the fighting and deactivation of some troops beginning in July, Schultze foresees no substantial reduction in military expenditures until 1971. Ordnance and munitions lines run on after any cessation of hostilities to rebuild depleted inventories...