Suchergebnisse

The psychol'al system of internal controls, the superego, has been a constitutive element for pol'al power & a factor in cultural advance. Modern soc conditions contribute to the deterioration of the superego, destroying the moral climate that has been the condition of a rational pol'al order, bringing crisis for pol'al power, regression for civilization, & the return of regressive forms of pol'al domination. Nevertheless, totalitarian leaders have found that the superego is more intractable & less plastic than they had assumed, & that it cannot be shaped entirely by pol'al educ. Atavistic forms of superego controls endure in a state of watchful suspension. The return to barbarism is not irreversible, for man's relation to barbarism is psychol'al, not solely historical, & mass men are potentially civilized. The future of civilization may depend on whether men will recapitulate their own history & re-enact psychol'ly what has been accomplished historically. AA-IPSA.

In An article published in the July 1942 number of the Review of Politics, I suggested that contemporary learned men who deny the existence of truth, virtue, or beauty, are led into a dilemma. Either they must confine truth to positive science, where the results are always tentative and incomplete with respect to the universe in which human beings have to move, or else they must believe that people generally will be inclined towards good and wise actions even though learning refuses to admit the existence of standards, apart from the rules of conduct that can be derived from positive science. The second view, we suggested, involves the admission that impersonal standards do exist, independent of positive science. We might conclude that the nourishment of these standards by means of the intellect, and with the help of results obtained by science, ought to be the supreme task of learning.