Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker... into the game?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the schem...e of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the end, the fate of children depends on our ability to use technology constructively and carefully. The connection of children... and technology is not simply a matter of seat belts, safe toys, safe air, water and food, additive-free baby foods, or improved television programming. These are all important issues, but to stop here is to forget that today's children will soon be adults. Technological decisions made today will determine, perhaps irrevocably, the kind of physical and social world we bequeath them and the kind of people they become.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To de-animalize human mentality, to purge it of obsolete evolutionary characteristics, in particular of death,... which foreknowledge terrorizes the contents of skulls with, is the fundamental project of technology;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver's seat, it is our reluctan...ce, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination--unstanchable as that red flood may be--but rather the albumen in ...the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea. This is the chthonian matrix from which we rose. We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homag...e to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The difference between humans and other organisms is that humans, having discerned something of how evolution works, are now able ...to confront their choices consciously. That is not the same as saying that we can now control evolution. I don't know how much of a difference it is in effect: we may be able to perceive our choices and still be unable to choose and act. By overpopulating the planet as we are now doing, for example, we are making an evolutionary choice just as unplanned as that of our hominid ancestors when they began cracking antelope and other hominids over the head with sticks. Nevertheless, we do differ from the first hominids in our having some notion of the implications of our behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, ...cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Hindu scriptures, like the Buddhist, dwell ... on withdrawal from the realm of pleasure. The spiritually mature man is one who... "abandons desires," who "has lost desires for joys," who "withdraws, as a tortoise his limbs from all sides, his senses from the objects of sense." Hence the ideal man as depicted in the Bhagavad Gita: a man of discipline, who acts without worrying about the fruits of his action, a man who is unmoved by acclaim and by criticism.... That Hinduism and Buddhism sound so much alike is not shocking. The Buddha was born a Hindu. But he carried the theme of sensory indifference further, boiling it down to a severe maxim--life is suffering--and placing it in the center of his philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »