Power, Civilization and the Psychology of Conscience

1959 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-661
Author(s):  
E. V. Walter
Keyword(s):  
Belief Systems ◽  
Internal Controls ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
World War ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
Rapid Social Change ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Psychological Truth ◽  
First World

After the first world war, Paul Valéry spoke for the entire generation when he observed that Western civilization had learned that it was mortal, and that “a civilization is as fragile as a life.” Thoughtful people discussed Oswald Spengler's work, began to criticize the idea of progress, revived cyclical theories of cultural decline, and were deeply stirred by the idea that Western civilization was in a state of decay. Since that time there has been no end to jeremiads and diagnoses judging that the crisis of our time is caused by the loss of spiritual convictions, the eclipse of transcendental values, the decline of morality, or the breakdown of traditional belief systems.Frequently, the writings in this genre have offered not sound diagnoses but merely truisms and dolorous representations of symptoms; nevertheless, concealed in them lurks a psychological truth. The breakdown in morality and traditional beliefs, stimulated by rapid social change, mass society and secularization, has helped to devitalize the psychological bearer of conscience and morality: the superego. Historically, the cultivation of the superego had propagated civilized men and a system of internal controls. Now the deterioration of the superego has brought crisis for political power and regression for civilization.

Rosenberg, Isaac (1890–1918)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Peters
Keyword(s):  
Significant Contribution ◽  
First World War ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
War Experience ◽  
First World

An important but underappreciated British poet of the First World War, Isaac Rosenberg made a significant contribution to the literature that came out of the war. Throughout his life, Rosenberg was beset by poverty, and unlike many other young men of that time enlisted when the war broke out primarily for the steady pay cheque. Rosenberg comments on nature’s indifference to the tragedy occurring in its midst and exposes the precarious position of men in the conflict. He invokes religious imagery to interrogate the role of deity amidst the carnage of the battle. Highly sceptical when he entered the conflict, Rosenberg responded to the war not with feelings of disenchantment, but with a modernist scepticism toward Western civilization and the Western worldview. His unique response to the war gives him a place with Wilfred Owen as one of the most important British poets to write about their First World War experience. Had Rosenberg survived the war, it seems possible that he might have become a powerful voice in Modernist literature.

Socio-political and confessional preconditions of the birth of the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church in Western Ukraine (20-30 years of the twentieth century)

2000 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
R. Soloviy
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Factor ◽  
First World

In the history of religious organizations of Western Ukraine in the 20-30th years of the XX century. The activity of such an early protestant denominational formation as the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church occupies a prominent position. Among UCRC researchers there are several approaches to the preconditions for the birth of the Ukrainian Calvinistic movement in Western Ukraine. In particular, O. Dombrovsky, studying the historical preconditions for the formation of the UREC in Western Ukraine, expressed the view that the formation of the Calvinist cell should be considered in the broad context of the Ukrainian national revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, a new assessment of the religious factor in public life proposed by the Ukrainian radical activists ( M. Drahomanov, I. Franko, M. Pavlik), and significant socio-political, national-cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the events of the First World War. Other researchers of Ukrainian Calvinism, who based their analysis on the confessional-polemical approach (I.Vlasovsky, M.Stepanovich), interpreted Protestantism in Ukraine as a product of Western cultural and religious influences, alien to Ukrainian spirituality and culture.

Ale na razie tu cisza” – fotografie sprzed katastrofy w wybranych zapisach literackich (Stefan Chwin, Ryszard Kapuściński, Wisława Szymborska)

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Magdalena Strąk
Keyword(s):  
Time Perspective ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
First World War ◽  
General Concept ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin’s autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie „Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r.” [At an exhibition “The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944”] and Wisława Szymborska’s Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.

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