YESTERMORROW: NOTES ON MAN'S PROGRESS

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These broad comments on the progress of man celebrate the dawn of a new age. The author sees in the emergence of the technological age an end to the Spenglerian doom of Western Civilization and a beginning of global civilization outstripping the past and incorporating a Nietzschean world where all values have been transvaluated. The birth and death cycles of the ""hothouse"" cultures of the last 5000 years, with their ideals, myths and creativity, are giving way to a global change in all of human life. We are now in ""yestermorrow"", a stage preceding the time when human life in its varied dimensions will be radically altered. The explosion which has burst this window in the cultural hothouse is technology, ""which has made all things possible"". In our age ""man can conceive of nothing which he cannot invent"", the author tells us; ""a magic carpet is no longer a scientific problem but only a problem in construction"". These notes form a brilliant and illuminating excursion through the labyrinth of technological experience and into its effects on art, metaphysics, history, religion and literature. Underlying the notes, which are soberly enumerated, is a gigantic thesis. Marek's documentation is awesome; no serious historian could not feel its challenge.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1961

Categories: NONFICTION