Word: utopia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sense, a socialist lecturing to atheists on political economy is every bit as much preaching to them about the salvation of their souls--propter nos homines at propter nostram salutem--as a priest addressing the faithful about the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. The aim is not heaven, however, but utopia--and a false utopia will no more do than a tinsel paradise would have sufficed for the martyres and the prophets. To atheists, politics is religion; rival schemes of wordly order, are, literally, conflicting eschatologies; and the contemporary sense of individual political impotence is as awful a burden as Luther...
Every time the cause of some baffling infection is found or a new wonder drug is discovered, the news is hailed as another step toward a hygienic utopia in which disease and premature death will have no place. Not so fast, says one of the world's top authorities on infectious diseases and a pioneer of the antibiotic age; disease is an aspect of man's adaptation to his environment, and as his environment changes, so do his diseases-but they do not disappear. In Mirage of Health, published this week (Harper; $4), famed Microbiologist René Jules...
...that had for so long kept the Colorados in power: the welfare state. Conceived by Colorado Leader José Batlle y Ordóñez, twice Uruguay's President (1903-07; 1911-15), Gaucho socialism at first transformed cattle-and sheep-growing Uruguay into a Latin American Utopia, Uruguayans into devoted followers of the Colorados. They got pensions (usually starting at 50) and the eight-hour day 20 years before the U.S. did. They got a vast network of government industries: insurance, rum, cement, petroleum refining and distribution, electricity. They got paid leave for expectant working mothers, state-paid...
Under Luís Batlle Berres, 61 (Batlle y Ordóñez' nephew), Uruguayans in the past eleven years got the real bill for Utopia. The state ballooned into an octopus, employed a fifth of the nation's force, with offices staffed so heavily that bureaucrats had to come early to get seats...
...college language teacher's idea of utopia would be when a student came out of secondary school knowing two languages and entered college either to start on a third or to perfect his writing in the second. But this utopia will be long in coming, for the colleges now are doing the work of the secondary schools in teaching students elementary languages. There are some schools which have no language program at all whereas others give their pupils only an antiquated start in French or Spanish and see them come to grief in the College Board Exams. Until the secondary...