Word: instinctiveness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that of its nearest rival, the college in New Haven. So great is the potential for exploding the myth of the ivory tower, that the failure until very recently of the student movement to make an issue of it is a testament to that ever-exciting phenomenon's instinct for ineffectiveness and tokenism. But even as the battle has been joined this past Spring, that instinct appears ready to reassert itself...
Baldwin seems to have an instinct for no-win situations. It is almost as if he needed them to fulfill a larger need for his incessant self-examinations, which often turn out to be self-deprecations. In recalling his youthful days as an expatriate in Paris, Baldwin man ages to equate his attitude toward persecuted Algerians with the attitude of white Americans toward their black countrymen. His feeling of kinship with the Algerian cause was accompanied by the troubling fact that his American passport granted him special privileges...
...contrast, the Abron people of the Ivory Coast are more aggressive-"but in ways which no biologist could predict on the basis of instinct theory." Their aggression does not seem to arise from an inner, unalterable genetic program. Instead, it is generated by external situations and is released only through socially approved channels. Initially, Abron children are indulged and fondled by all the adults around them and show no aggression-until a new child is born. Then, Alland writes, having been abruptly displaced from center stage, "most babies who have been quite placid up to this point begin to show...
Midnight Oil begins with the story of how he became a writer without benefit of higher education, literary mentors or even good advice. Instinct made the 20-year-old Pritchett leave the leather trade in London and set off for Paris in 1921. He saw his first pepper mill, ate his first omelet, became an accent snob and-so far as he could afford a fop. In a more gradual way, "the orderliness of the trees, the gravely spaced avenues, rearranged my mind...
...many contemporary thinkers would accept this view of man as essentially savage. True, Freud once believed that human beings are born with an aggressive instinct and that "the aim of all life is death," but he later abandoned the idea. Currently, Ethologist Konrad Lorenz insists that aggression and violence are inevitable because they were bred into man by natural selection during prehistoric times. But there is widespread disagreement with this theory. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, for example, considers the Lorenz view "nonsense," calling it "not explanation but rationalization...