Word: progressive
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even if Nixon merely diagnoses what ails America, he will have gone a long way, for what the nation needs above all is a fundamental reassessment of its peril as well as its progress. Are the disruptions in U.S. life signs of decay, or are they constructively forcing Americans to do out of necessity what they have refused to do by choice? Can the U.S. go on risking the backlash effects of helping some needy people at the expense of others who refuse to share their gains-or does it sorely need a unifying national challenge, a moral equivalent...
...seasons, the habits and kindnesses of one wife at a time. But now, unable to go to school in nature, he must rapidly learn and unlearn technical ways that his father did not know and that may prove useless to his children. Religion fell away, while faith in industrial progress became a form of religion-now itself eroded by creeping pessimism. Less than ever before is Western man sure of his own nature, except that he is so adaptable. That quality is all that saves him from the pathological anxiety experienced by tribal Africans exposed too abruptly to technology...
...more than a hundred years now, what might be called industrial humanism, the dream of total progress through production and distribution, has held general credence in Western civilization. Science, industry, and a morality of shared materialism were linked in a powerful secular religion of consensus...
Much of it is due to shortsighted overselling of the possibilities of evolutionary progress. Darwin's theories showed that man had evolved from primordial protoplasm. But that evolution from a lower to a higher form of life had taken some two billion years. (Biologist H. J. Muller has graphically illustrated how long it took by imagining the span of time since life first appeared on earth as a trip along a tape running 90 miles from beyond New Haven to the center of a desk on Wall Street. Man appears 7 ½ feet from the center.) Darwin...
...take Latin America," Nixon said. "Any sophisticated observer of Latin America will tell you that the problem with the countries down there is that they've gone over to either all progress or all order. The genius of this country is that in a nation born of revolution, we have been able to combine stability with ordered progress." Since he had thought for so long before answering, I was a little surprised by the vacuity of his observations, and I began to feel a little silly for nodding so seriously and writing it all down. Nixon seemed to enjoy this...