Description
Book SynopsisThis book surveys the breadth of mankind's postmodern malaise, which is achieved through a discussion of the major challenges, social and psychological, which every individual faces in the effort to live fully in the twenty-first century. These challenges lay in broadly familiar domains: self- and group-consciousness; common man and his place in a future society in which mental activity dominates; work and leisure; knowledge and values accruing from it, both for self and others; possibilities in education; civilization, with its Dark Age phenomena and its dreams of progress; the role of the past in contemporary life; and power, both in society and within the sovereign individual who, though bound by physical and intellectual limits, functions as a seeker after the freedom and self-fulfillment which are so wholly integral to the human condition. And finally a serious question: What fate awaits the perpetual non-conformist, whose views, however unwelcome in his own time and in a conte
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments – Introduction: Man’s Milieu—Happiness, Understanding, Limits – Seeing Forward: Ordinary Man’s Clouded Perspective – Collective Consciousness: Industrial Man and the Paradoxes of Social Logic – Common Man and His Critics: From Ridicule and Exhortation to Parity in an Age of Political Correctness – Realities of Work and Leisure: The Question of Psychological Costs – Facts on the Ground: Inequities of a Global Process and Their Human Effects – The Struggle Against Indiscipline: A Psychological Challenge to Middle-Class Society – Education (I): The Unfulfilled Promise – Education (II): Man the Learner: Swimming Against Cultural Currents – Education (III): The Learner and His Cultural Bonds: An Enigma of Modern Times – Can Men Suffer the Worst—And See Beyond the Unattainable "Best" as Well? – Progress vs. The Dark Age Scenario (I): Can Governments "Manage" Poverty? – Progress vs. The Dark Age Scenario (II): Man’s Dream of Progress and the Facts of Anti-Progress – The Civilizing Process—A Darwinian Enigma: From Religion to Anti-Religion to Neo-Barbarism – Mankind Evolving: Civilization, Power, the Individual – The Philosophical Future – In Sum: A Foredestined Future: The Philosophical Individual – Bibliography – Index.
