Word: progressive
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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...
Like today's futurists, many middle-class white students, though genuinely indignant about economic and racial inequalities, have begun judging the country as if its material problems had virtually been solved. Progress, they argue from this philosophical perspective, has in many ways made men worse, not better. No matter how dazzling, GNP can never spell GOD. Rockets, computers, the fair distribution of enough goods and services have little value except as machinery used to create a society. That society is valuable only in terms of the caliber of its people, their sense of justice and honesty, their appreciation...
...Whitehead hypothesis. One thing ought to be clear from experience. Whether God is dead or not, belief in God or something very like him seems to be an ecological necessity for the balance of man in society. The same is true of faith in the possibility of progress and a sense of mission in the world, though in the future these concepts will perhaps not be used in the same simplistic, old-fashioned ways...
...still concerned with the old material expectations. They are not insensitive to esthetics. Despite extremist behavior, for many of them right now the "quality of life" is something far simpler than it is to the white students: a better life, a better job-largely the products of material progress. Along with the Viet Nam War it was, after all, a demand for a betterment of the Negroes' condition that first spurred the young, and indeed the country, to the present reappraisal of itself...
...underdeveloped peoples abroad also want, and desperately need, the fruits of material progress. In seeking it they hope to profit further from Americans' successes, as well as from their failures and shortcomings. So, despite the pessimism about the limitations of material progress, which the paradoxes of the American experience have lately pointed up, it is unlikely that the world will abandon its pursuit. The present rebellion by the blacks and the young could still fragment American society beyond anything now imagined possible. The end result will more likely be a heightening consciousness, a raising of national sights...