Word: lessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Emerson was fading from the intellectual scene. In the wake of Darwin's theory of natural selection, some anthropologists started viewing all human culture--music, technology, religion, whatever--as something that evolves rather as plants and animals evolve. "In the mental sphere the struggle for existence is not less fierce than in the physical," observed the British anthropologist Sir James Frazer. "In the end the better ideas carry...
...nearly a half-century after Teilhard's death, we have cause to be less sanguine about this noosphere business. Viewing the noosphere up close and personal--from the inside--we can see that its potential for good and evil is about equal. The Internet can unite people across distance, but it is indifferent to whether they are chess players, crusading environmentalists or neo-Nazis...
...which a knight's wife was staying--and the Crusader force, frying in heavy armor and unable to fight its way to the water, was overwhelmed by the Muslims. When the Christian knights retreated to the coastal fortress of Tyre, Saladin turned his army inland. Jerusalem withstood him for less than two weeks. In stark contrast to the earlier Crusader bloodbath, his occupiers neither murdered nor looted. "Christians everywhere will remember the kindness we have bestowed upon them," he said...
...called a Third Crusade. And although Richard the Lion-Hearted bested Saladin in battle after battle, he could not wrest the Holy City from him, and he returned to Europe. The city, always Islam's third holiest site, became even more central to the faithful. Saladin's family ruled less than 60 years longer, but his style of administration and his humane application of justice to both war and governance influenced Arab rulers for centuries. His tolerance was exemplary. He allowed Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem after its fall. The great Jewish sage Maimonides was his physician. Woven into chivalric legend...
...worst at the hands of revisionists. If he has managed to keep his place on Mount Rushmore, he has been vilified almost everywhere else in recent years as a slave-owning hypocrite and racist; a political extremist; an apologist for the vicious, botched French Revolution; and in general, somewhat less the genius remembered in our folklore than a provincial intellectual and tinkerer...