Record your thoughts for Erasmus Compositor. See what others have said to Erasmus Compositor.
Some years ago there appeared in newspapers a political cartoon showing a larger than life, primitive looking caveman with a giant club chasing a satellite. Our technological advancements far outpace our moral and social progress, what little we may experience. This concern over our society's love affair and obsession with technology research to the neglect of the study of languages, history, and cultural issues, is not new to the age of satellites and computers. Speaking in 1918, during the closing months of World War I, Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr. expressed his hope that the unbalanced interest in technology during the opening years of the twentieth century might be acknowledged and corrected. His comments are quite relevant to our own obsessions at the end of the century. Will we ever learn? Here are his comments.
[P. 71] We may perhaps take courage from the feeling that is being engendered by the present gigantic conflict, that one of its lessons will be the futility of a civilization wrapped up in the promotion of merely material aims. If progress means solely the application of science to practical needs, then we must be willing to accept also, as one of the results of such a conception of progress, the utilization of scientific discoveries for the perfection of weapons of warfare, which has made the present war [World War I] the most destructive and the most appalling in the history of man. But the union at the present time of practically the entire civilized world in the tremendous struggle for the preservation of such purely ideal possessions as liberty and democracy, comes as a stern but welcome reminder to us that human destiny is to be worked out through other means than merely the promotion of the practical and directly useful sciences. In a recent number of the Century Magazine (June 1918), Sir Gilbert Murray points out with unsurpassed eloquence, that the things which, after all, count for most in this world lie outside of the province of the natural sciences, that literature, the study of the "Humanities," and the cultivation of pure research represent contributions making for the real progress of man along the path mapped out [p. 72] for him by his intellectual endowments and by the possession of impulses that prompt him to sacrifice what is dearest to him--aye, life itself--for the attainment of ideal ends. If the hopes voiced by many distinguished thinkers, and in various ways, that the war will lead to a renaissance in which the historical and philological sciences will again be accorded the place which they merit--if these longing hopes be fulfilled, then we may also look for more encouragement for Semitic and Sanskrit studies on the part of our American universities. It rests largely with those to whom the destinies of our higher institutions of learning are confided, whether we are to look forward to a record of progress during the next thirty years that will be as gratifying as is the record of the three decades that have passed since the foundation of this useful and delightful Oriental Club.
This passage was taken from Prof. Morris Jastrow, Jr., "Supplementary Account of Thirty Years' Progress in Semitic Studies, and Discussion of Dr. Peters' Paper," Thirty Years of Oriental Studies, issued in commemoration of thirty years of activity of the Oriental Club of Philadelphia, edited by Roland G. Kent. Philadelphia, 1918.
Look at these other issues in professional business communication: