Word: utopia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...full-page ad in eleven U.S. newspapers to say that the network "assumes complete responsibility to the public for what appears on NBC." But the ad also insisted that "TV wins a daily vote of confidence in 45 million American homes," and rejected "grandiose schemes for television's Utopia." Unfortunately, NBC has so far brought forth no notable schemes, Utopian or otherwise, seems to be spending much of its brainpower working over the pity of it all. CBS has reiterated its own notion of responsibility-without having done anything noteworthy about more balanced programing, either-convinced that its function...
...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 et 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 martyrs and the saints. To atheists, politics is religion; rival schemes of worldly order, are, literally, conflicting eschatologies; and the contemporary sense of individual political impotence is as awful a burden as Luther...
Idealism for Schiller, Atkins emphasized, did not mean the offering of a Utopia, but rather a spirit of freedom which harmoniously combined feeling and reason. Nor was there any "blind romantic idealism" in the poet's system, for Schiller felt that pure freedom existed only in the realm of dreams and that practical freedom was limited by moral...
Lipset sees evidence that "a significant minority [of U.S. intellectuals] have become conservative." One reason is continued prosperity, another the implacable nature of Communism, which encourages intellectuals "to defend an existing or past society against those who argue for a future Utopia. Like Burke, they have come to look for sources of stability. Only time will tell whether a permanent change in the relationship of the American intellectual to his society is in process. There will still remain the inherent tendencies to oppose the status quo. Any status quo embodies rigidities and dogmatisms which intellectuals have an inalienable right...
...Utopia. What is it that the U.S. has to teach Europe? Paradoxically, says Bruckberger, it can teach Europe to be non-puritanical in its politics. Europe has consistently sacrificed man in the flesh to theory in the abstract. The French and Russian Revolutions were Procrustean; if human beings did not fit the bed of Utopia, their heads were chopped off. The American Revolution, on the other hand, assumed that the state was made for man. The founding fathers, suggests Bruckberger, had the uncommon sense to recognize that the people "have no right to deify and worship themselves." Thus...