Word: positivist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...United States, there is a pronounced tendency, due perhaps to the high level of our technology and the positivist outlook which thrives in a technological environment, to regard man and society as conditioned by the tools they use. It is, for instance, widely believed in this country that there exists such a thing as an "industrial society" with its particular system of values and code of behavior: this despite the fact the record of history indicates quite convincingly that the introduction of advanced methods of mechanical production, in one country (e.g. England) led to the reduction of the power...
...surprising, therefore, that the sudden appearance in 1945 of nuclear weapons should have been received in the United States in a manner consistent with the positivist outlook. American intellectuals who addressed themselves to the question of their implications, assumed from the beginning that there inheres in these monstrous tools of destruction a logic obligatory on all who possessed them. That logic, in their view, rested on several related propositions: (1) that nuclear weapons were so destructive in their immediate application as well as after effects that they threatened not only the victim of aggression but all humanity, the aggressor included...