Word: prometheus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lasch claims that two basic personality types. Narcissus and Prometheus, are prototypical in Modern society. Both are variants of the lower-case narcissistic self, which is unable to accept its postnatal existence separate from nature. Narcissisus continually seeks to rejoin nature, while Prometheus tries to impose his infantile fantasies of omnipotence on it. So far so good...
...this observation immediately plunges Lasch into the difficult work of splitting infantile hairs. While the author agrees with scientists and industrialists that control over nature is a good thing, and with environmentalists that nature must be preserved (these two groups being loosely identified with Prometheus and Narcissus), he wants their actions to be motivated more by reality than by infantile fantasy. Lasch evidently fears right actions performed for the wrong reasons more than he fears wrong actions or their consequences. Psychologically, one supposes, this is typical and perhaps sound. However, from a practical, political, on ethical point of view...
...idea that one may find Prometheus chained to the dryer in a local laundromat, with the culture picking his brains as to which soda is better, is certainly droll; but it seems less an analysis of modern technology than a too plausible suggestion for Harvard's decadent undergraduate theater...
...that reached beyond politics. Darnton endeavors to demonstrate the change from the letters that a young merchant in La Rochelle wrote to the bookseller who regularly sent him the new works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Darnton's view, Rousseau's preachings first established "the author as Prometheus" and his readers as emotional disciples. Darnton also finds rich social implications in folk tales like "Little Red Riding Hood...
...screening of information has always been indispensable to both war and peace, to murder and romance, to spying and spirituality. Extreme privacy plays a prominent role in the most ancient myths. Irascible Zeus, who intended to withhold the knowledge of fire from humans, was outraged when he learned that Prometheus had gone public with it. Zeus was so put off that he assembled a plethora of troubles and sent them down to mortals in the custody of Pandora. Everybody knows the calamity that resulted from the insistence on disclosure of Pandora's cargo...