It is important to realize that determinism does not imply events occur in spite of our actions. Some events occur because we dete...rmine them. Determinism must not be confused with the doctrine of fatalism, which asserts that future events are entirely beyond our control. "It is all written in the stars," declares the fatalist. "What will be will be." The soldier who behaves recklessly on the battlefield in the face of a hail of bullets while thinking "if my number is on it, no precaution will avert death" is a fatalist. Some Oriental religions contain fatalist overtones, and many people are inclined to lapse into fatalism from time to time, especially as far as major world affairs are concerned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the wil...l, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither the historian nor the cartographer can ever reproduce the reality they are trying to communicate to the reader of books or... maps; they can but give a plan, a series of indications, of this reality. There are contrasting schemes for choosing from enormous numbers of geographic details. You may have a map in which every feature that can be named, every hill, brook, crossroads, is crowded in; or you may have a map in which many details are omitted in the effort to show the reader the lay of the land, the shape of the mountain systems, the relations of drainage, relief, communications, and so on. Both kinds are useful, depending on the needs of the user.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One good reason for the popularity of "reductionism" among the philosophical outposts of the Western Establishment is that it can ...be, and is, used as a device for trying to take the wind, so to speak, out of the sails of Marxism.... In essence reductionism is a kind of anti-Marxist caricature of Marxist determinism. It is what anti-Marxists pretend that Marxist determinism is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While enclosed shopping malls suspended space, time, and weather, Disneyland went one step further and suspended reality. Any geog...raphic, cultural, or mythical location, whether supplied by fictional texts (Tom Sawyer's Island), historical locations (New Orleans Square), or futuristic projections (Space Mountain), could be reconfigured as a setting for entertainment. Shopping malls easily adapted this appropriation of "place" in the creation of a specialized theme environment. In Scottsdale, the Borgata, an open-air shopping mall set down in the flat Arizona desert, reinterprets the medieval Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano with piazza and scaled-down towers (made of real Italian bricks).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Marxist combination of materialism and determinism is fatally anti-humanistic. It denies a consciousness, a mind, that is inde...pendent of material conditions and class relations. It denies a will and volition that are capable of shaping the course of history. It denies an individuality that is not reducible to class. It denies both the idea and the reality of freedom, a freedom that is something more than the "bourgeois" freedom to buy and sell. It denies a morality that transcends class interests. And it denies the spirituality of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both peoples had a clearly defined consciousness of being different from all other peoples: The Hebrews from the Gentiles, the Gre...eks from the Barbarians. The bearer of group consciousness was with them not king or priesthood but the people as a whole, every Hebrew or every Greek. With the other peoples of antiquity, only rulers and empires left their traces on history. With the Hebrews and the Greeks it was the national character and the spiritual creative energy of the people which endured. It is because their cultural continuity proved stronger than racial, political, or geographic continuity, that they live on today. The idea of a nation-state was unknown to them but they had the strong consciousness of a cultural mission.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he ...believes he has free will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoan...alyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relation...s removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »