This book surveys the breadth of mankind's postmodern malaise, which is achieved through a discussion of the major challenges, social and psychological, which every individual faces in the effort to live fully in the twenty-first century. These challenges lay in broadly familiar domains: self- and group-consciousness; common man and his place in a future society in which mental activity dominates; work and leisure; knowledge and values accruing from it, both for self and others; possibilities in education; civilization, with its "Dark Age" phenomena and its dreams of progress; the role of the past in contemporary life; and power, both in society and within the sovereign individual who, though bound by physical and intellectual limits, functions as a seeker after the freedom and self-fulfillment which are so wholly integral to the human condition. And finally a serious question: What fate awaits the perpetual non-conformist, whose views, however unwelcome in his own time and in a contemporary environment, may in fact anticipate future living conditions?

Autorentext

Charles R. Reid earned his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin and his Ed.D. from the University of California. He taught at Iowa Wesleyan College, Fayetteville State University, and Ohlone College. He served in the Korean War and taught at numerous public schools.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments - Introduction: Man's Milieu-Happiness, Understanding, Limits - Seeing Forward: Ordinary Man's Clouded Perspective - Collective Consciousness: Industrial Man and the Paradoxes of Social Logic - Common Man and His Critics: From Ridicule and Exhortation to Parity in an Age of Political Correctness - Realities of Work and Leisure: The Question of Psychological Costs - Facts on the Ground: Inequities of a Global Process and Their Human Effects - The Struggle Against Indiscipline: A Psychological Challenge to Middle-Class Society - Education (I): The Unfulfilled Promise - Education (II): Man the Learner: Swimming Against Cultural Currents - Education (III): The Learner and His Cultural Bonds: An Enigma of Modern Times - Can Men Suffer the Worst-And See Beyond the Unattainable "Best" as Well? - Progress vs. The Dark Age Scenario (I): Can Governments "Manage" Poverty? - Progress vs. The Dark Age Scenario (II): Man's Dream of Progress and the Facts of Anti-Progress - The Civilizing Process-A Darwinian Enigma: From Religion to Anti-Religion to Neo-Barbarism - Mankind Evolving: Civilization, Power, the Individual - The Philosophical Future - In Sum: A Foredestined Future: The Philosophical Individual - Bibliography - Index.