Word: millennia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This prospect has endlessly occupied-and eluded-the inquiring human mind. If the species could be sensibly subdivided into races, then the races could be measured one against another, could be assigned proper places in the hierarchy of mankind. Cultural and geographical isolation, occurring over numberless millennia, could conceivably have bred peoples of widely differing physical and intellectual capacity. And taking Western technological man as the norm, it could be possible, given the right tools, to compare his performance against those of all the other human varieties...
Only a generation or so ago, anthropological theory rested on the comfortable and slightly condescending premise that the human mind evolved, over the millennia, in much the same way that man climbed physically up from the primordial slime. The stages in this intellectual growth were clearly identified: the Old Stone Age, the New Stone Age, the Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages. Savage cultures unaccountably stranded well along the path of progress were conveniently classified as civilization's simple-minded dropouts, lingering and isolated echoes from mankind's distant past...
...machine will either turn him into a collectivized, automatic non-person or blow him back to the jungle. The Myth of the Machine is hybrid literature-part history, part anthropology, part poetry. It is a violent, splenetic attack on much that has happened in civilization for the past several millennia, and it occasionally approaches the absurd. But the range of its erudition and imagination makes it good intellectual entertainment. It is a book to start arguments and speculation...
...Arcata Redwood Co., for instance, made $2,640,000 in 1965 on sales of $8,930,000. Much of the profit, of course, goes toward reforesting cleared areas with redwood saplings so that a continual supply of the tawny lumber is assured future generations. Though they endure for millennia, the trees achieve their greatest growth in their first 30 to 60 years...
There is no denying many of the McLuhanian truisms. Mankind today is indeed caught up in a technological tsunami of unprocessed information and unrelated impressions, events and pseudo events. But the world is not quite yet McLuhan's "global village," nor can the sequential thought patterns of three millennia be totally dissolved in a burst of electronic energy, however it is harnessed. With the sweeping generalization that delights his followers but irks so many anti-McLuhanians, he compares present times with the late medieval era, when tribal thought was giving way to print-processed "linear" thought, and finds...