Word: deterministic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...18th century, Enlightenment notions of free will and human progress had begun to challenge harsh determinist doctrines. Americans had come to accept the theories of English Philosopher John Locke, who wrote widely on child rearing, speculating that children were not born depraved, but that the "souls of the newly born are just empty tablets afterwards to be filled in by observation and reasoning...
Jane Kramer, who originally wrote The Last Cowboy for serialization in The New Yorker, sets Henry and Betsy Blanton in a determinist context of history, geography and economics. Her sympathetic sketches of modern cowboy life are framed by facts - about beef consumption (Americans ate 27 billion lbs. of it in one year), ranching technology, federal meat-grading standards and the quirks in Texas law. Cattlemen, for example, don't have to fence their animals in. Farmers who want to protect their crops have to fence cattle out. Kramer achieves the intended effect: to show the American cowboy riding...
...culture to survive, it must then evolve technologically and begin all over again. As a rule it is rare to encounter blatantly obvious "logic" such as his declaration that "similar variable under similar conditions tend to give rise to similar consequences." Indeed Harris while avowedly a cultural determinist covers himself from sniper-fire with this gray-handkerchief-waving...
...Boston chapter of the Committee Against Racism (CAR) held a meeting yesterday to denounce what they called determinist theories like those in the book, "Sociobiology" by E.O. Wilson, professor of Zoology...
...moralizing. One loves the unique American restlessness, the refusal to settle for what is, even if that sometimes means a lack of contemplation and peace. One loves the fact that America sees itself as the shaper of its own destiny, both private and public. While psychology, sociology and determinist historical theories have become massively fashionable, there is still a strong strain of resistance to the notion that man is formed by environment, by outside powers, or that the nation is in the grip of immutable forces. This rejection of fate, this insistence that everything is possible, is surely the dominant...