Word: westernism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this category China, India, the Muslim world and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as compact units. For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying...
...most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions...
...burn Ohio's high-sulfur coal, say the companies, would necessitate installing expensive scrubbing devices. They rebelled at the cost; one utility reckoned that compliance with the EPA order could cause a 24% rise in electric rates. Instead, the companies said, they would import low-sulfur coal from Western or Appalachian states. That in turn riled the miners, who argue that if the utilities buy out-of-state coal, demand for Ohio coal will fall by as much as 30% and 12,500 people will be out of work...
...what has this technology accomplished? In Barrett's dour view, it has enslaved us. William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution have brought forth even more hellish inventions to refuel the Western world's "frantic dynamism." Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, B.F. Skinner's proposals for a "technology of behavior" and the threat of nuclear holocaust complete a disastrous legacy...
This demonstration of how philosophy informs "the whole life of humanity" is no academic exercise. Barrett is convinced that the history of ideas foreshadows the fate of the Western world. His vision of the future, in both its American and Russian versions-Skinner's programmed Utopia vs. the triumph of Soviet totalitarianism-sometimes sounds like a science-fiction scenario. A former Marxist, Barrett shares with other victims of the god that failed a dramatic anxiety about the menace of Communism...