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Our Ever and Future Jungle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Marion J. Levy Jr
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Extract

These three volumes form a curious mind-full. Two concentrate on whence we come. The third concentrates on whither we are going. Mr. Ardrey and Professor Lorenz dwell on the implications for our present and our future of the earlier other animal forms that we continue. Mr. Kahn and Mr. Wiener are concerned almost exclusively with the kind of animals we are going to be. Even the first two volumes make less of the constancy of man as an animal than we might expect.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , January 1970 , pp. 301 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1970

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References

1 To be born free and be everywhere in chains has a special ring since it places heavy responsibility for diddling the present on the past. We now all hold against visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children for even one generation, but bodi causality and scapegoating support us in the reverse.

2 Although on many occasions Sorokin rejected the idea that cultures go through specific sequences of cycles (see p. 40, n. 18), it was other people? sequences and cycles to which he referred. He himself had a special one. His involved two immanent variables vibrating half a wavelength out of phase—an arrangement that lends itself to humor as well as large volumes.

3 After all, only recently (New York Times, p. 43, March 31, 1969) a major educator, Martin Meyerson, the President of the State University of New York, Buffalo, N.Y., is described as believing that "many students today have embraced ‘a new romanticism’ that focuses on the creative and even the irrational rather than the scholarly and rational.” He is further quoted as having said, “I can't explain why a whole new generation of students seem to be imbued with such an orientation, but that they are is something I find myself very responsive to, very favorably responsive to.” One does not ordinarily expect to find major university stewards giving enthusiastic endorsement to anti-intellectualism.

4 Sorokin, P. A., Social and Cultural Dynamics (New York 1937) Vol. 1, 3–54Google Scholar.

5 In my limning there is an admixture of the biological with other elements. These like all the other assertions I make here about the facts should be taken as hypotheses about the facts, but I do not think they can be shown to involve premature biological reduction or to be irrelevant to our year 2000. This may be Lorenzian.

6 This poem, reproduced here in its entirety is entitled “Reflections on Ingenuity.” It is in “The Face is Familiar” by Ogden Nash, Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1941, p. 139. Reproduced by special permission of Mr. Nash.

7 What is overindulgence under such circumstances? If it is not a question of the moral code (are we all Puritans even under the inhibitions?), then the Romans and many others in history hit on such techniques long ago.