Word: mankind
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Boston banker who accused Johanna McGeary of "not doing her part for the American economy" because she rarely used her charge cards is a menace to mankind. I have personally never owned a charge card and have managed to stay in debt quite easily...
...answer: consciousness arose from language in two evolutionary steps and appeared for the first time in human history in the second millennium B.C. Jaynes proposes this startling concept in his new book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. If his theory is correct, mankind existed without consciousness for thousands of centuries, functioning dimly in "antlike" colonies nearly up to the age of Confucius and the ancient Greek philosophers. Before consciousness, says Jaynes, mankind was directed by hallucinatory voices, which survive today in schizophrenics; these voices, assumed to be divine, gave rise to all religions...
...words, the right chemical trigger) and if that child also had an imaginary playmate-a vestige of the old voices-you could train that child to bicamerality." The problem, he says, is that the child could not function in the modern world any more than a schizophrenic can. For mankind as a whole, "the voices are dead. We are stuck in a conscious world...
America's euphoric awe of science began to ebb with the Pandoran gift to mankind of the atomic bomb. Yet the most extreme expression of the nation's continued reverence for science and technology-dramatized in the tendency to call products "wonders" (as in drugs) or "miracles" (as in fabrics) or "magic" (as in electronics)-awaited the moment that a human foot first touched the moon. That feat, the President of the U.S. assured his countrymen, was to be ranked as the greatest thing since -Creation. After that exaltation, there was only...
Percy, of course, made this very observation the theme of The Moviegoer. Lancelot frequently says things that the author has written elsewhere, especially in The Message in the Bottle (1975), a collection of essays on the oddities of language and mankind. Because Percy and Lancelot share some opinions, there will inevitably be those who assume that they agree on everything. And since Lancelot utters enough reactionary claptrap to offend everyone, Percy is likely to get a lot of angry mail, particularly from women. Says Lancelot: "What the poor dears discovered is the monstrous truth lying at the very center...