Confessions of a Miseducated Man

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Unit 12

• Confessions of a Miseducated Man

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Life Story

• writer,
• editor,
• citizen diplomat,
• promoter of holistic healing,
• unflagging optimist

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Life Story

• born in New Jersey, on June 24, 1915.
• a fine athlete and a fine writer.
• writer and editor with brief stints at the New
  York Evening Post and Current History.
• executive editor of the Saturday Review of
  Literature (later Saturday Review)

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• "Inevitably, an individual is measured by his or
  her largest concerns." -from Human Options, by
  Norman Cousins

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Lifelong concerns

• War and peace, world governance, justice, human
  freedom, the human impact on the environment, and
  health and wholeness.
• His primary platform for promoting his views
  editor of Saturday Review for the better part of
  forty years.

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Belief in world governance

• During World War II Cousins was a member of the
  editorial board for the Overseas Bureau of the
  Office of War Information and was cochairman of
  the 1943 Victory Book Campaign.
• He also came to believe that enduring world peace
  could only be achieved through effective world
  governance.

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Belief in World Governance

• In Saturday Review, Cousins affirmed that The
  need for world government was clear before August
  6, 1945, but Hiroshima(??) and Nagasaki(??) raise
  that need to such dimensions that it can no
  longer be ignored."

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Belief in World Federalism

• In Who Speaks for Man, Cousins expanded his
  arguments for world federalism and for a world no
  longer based on the supremacy of nationalism and
  other superficial differences "The new education
  must be less concerned with sophistication than
  compassion. It must recognize the hazards of
  tribalism. It must teach man the most difficult
  lesson of allto look at someone anywhere in the
  world and be able to see the image of himself.
  The old emphasis upon superficial differences
  that separate peoples must give way to education
  for citizenship in the human community. "With
  such an education and with such
  self-understanding, it is possible that some
  nation or people may come forward with the vital
  inspiration that men need no less than food.
  Leadership on this higher level does not require
  mountains of gold or thundering propaganda. It is
  concerned with human destiny. Human destiny is
  the issue. People will respond." He concluded the
  book with this hopeful affirmation "War is an
  invention of the human mind. The human mind can
  invent peace with justice."

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Contribution to Peace and Human Well-being

• His concern, for the victims of Hiroshima,
  following a postwar visit to that devastated
  city, became quite personal. He arranged, with
  funding from Saturday Review readers, for medical
  treatment in the United States for twenty-four
  young Japanese women who came to be known as the
  "Hiroshima Maidens."
• Saturday Review readers also supported the
  medical care of 400 Japanese children orphaned by
  the atomic bomb.
• In the 1950s Cousins and his wife legally adopted
  one of the "Maidens."
• A few years later, again with the support of
  Saturday Review readers, Cousins helped create a
  program for the " thirty-five Polish women who
  had been victims of Nazi medical experiments
  during the war.

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Criticism of Atmospheric Nuclear Testing

• During the 1950s Cousins was outspoken in his
  criticism of atmospheric nuclear testing. In 1957
  he was among the founders and became the first
  cochairman of the National Committee for a Sane
  Nuclear Policy (SANE). In the early 1960s he
  became an unofficial citizen diplomat,
  facilitating communication between the Vatican,
  the Kremlin, and the White House which helped to
  lead to the Soviet-American nuclear test ban
  treaty. Upon ratification of the treaty in 1963,
  President Kennedy publicly thanked Cousins for
  his help with the treaty, and Pope John XXIII
  awarded Cousins his personal medallion.

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Anti-war voice

• oppose the American role in Vietnam
• oppose the nuclear arms race,
• argue for a strengthened United Nations leading
  to world government.
• As he wrote "The essential lesson most people
  still resist is that they are members of one
  species. It is this that we all sharethe
  emergence of a common destiny and the beginning
  of the perception, however misty, that something
  beyond the nation will have to be brought into
  being if the human race is to have any meaning."

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Attitude towards Disease

• a regimen(???)
• high doses of vitamin C
• positive emotions (including daily doses of belly
  laughter)
• "the life force may be the least understood force
  on earth
• Books
• Anatomy(??) of an Illness as Perceived by the
  Patient Reflections on Healing and
  Regeneration,
• The Healing Heart Antidotes to Panic and
  Helplessness.

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Reflection on Atomic Bomb

• I wonder if we might go back to that day in
  August when the world learned of the dropping of
  the atomic bomb. As editor of a leading magazine
  in the United States, what was your reaction?
  What were your thoughts, and what did you do?

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• And one had a feeling, or at least I did, that a
  curtain had dropped on human history and that a
  new curtain was going up, and that no one quite
  knew what the new script would be. But the fact
  that the old play had ended seemed rather clear.
  It also seemed to me that a blanket of
  obsolescence(??,??) had been thrown over human
  history, because all the things that human beings
  did, in terms of civilization, suddenly seemed to
  have no validity because there was now no
  mechanism by which human beings could provide for
  a reasonably secure future. We had always lived
  with the habits of war, and now methods for
  fighting war represented an entirely new
  dimension in warfare which threatened the species
  as a whole. But the habits of war, and the habits
  of thinking about relations among nations, hadn't
  changed, and so we were trapped. And so I say
  there was a sense that the curtain had come down
  on one stage in human history and a new curtain
  was going up, the script for which had not been
  written.

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Reflection on Atomic Bomb

• And you became an even more intense an advocate
  of world government and world federalism as a way
  out.
• Since I am opposed to anarchy, and since the
  principle danger in the world was anarchy on a
  world level, I couldn't take leave of my
  convictions about the dangers of anarchy just
  because nations created this situation.

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Quotes by Norman Cousins

• Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally
  without having to go outdoors.
• The more serious the illness, the more important
  it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all your
  resources-spiritual, emotional, intellectual,
  physical.
• Your heaviest artillery will be your will to
  live. Keep that big gun going.
• Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

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Quotes by Norman Cousins

• History is a vast early warning system.
• Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
• A library, to modify the famous metaphor of
  Socrates, should be the delivery room for the
  birth of ideas - a place where history comes to
  life.
• If something comes to life in others because of
  you, then you have made an approach to
  immortality.

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Quotes by Norman Cousins

• Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the
  universe, so no thought or action is without its
  effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen,
  felt or unfelt.
• Wisdom consists of the anticipation of
  consequences.

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Summary of his life

• "In June 1983 Cousins told the graduating class
  of Harvard Medical School that the "conquest of
  war and the pursuit of social justice... must
  become our grand preoccupation and magnificent
  obsession." These certainly were the concerns
  that obsessed him throughout his life, and over
  the years he battled through his writings and
  actions to make them matters of more general
  concern. Driven by the shock and portent of
  Hiroshima, he worked to combat unchecked
  nationalism, promote federalism, and build a
  sense of world citizenship, in the belief that
  people as a whole might yet construct a new world
  order of peace and justice. His optimism,
  intellectual curiosity, and commitment to the
  preservation of human life were equally
  unquenchable."

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Words

• -ship
• ????, ??, ??, ?hardship,
  friendship,sportsmanship??????,??
• ????, ??,?kingship,??,??,????professorship
  internship????apprenticeship???????
  dictatorship??,??membership????/??
• ????, ??, ?marksmanship??craftsmanship??,??
  

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• Mis-
• Misapply, misaim, misinform, misinterprete??,
  misunderstanding, mislead??
• Secure a. v.
• Free from danger or attack?????????????
• a secure fortress.
• Reliable, dependable ???????
• secure investments.?????

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• They ___ (Compression) two-months work into one.
• On the top of very high mountains snow ___
  throughout the year. (Persistence)
• The boy tried to ___ the scene it was described.
  (visual)
• Some people fail to see the fallacy of white
  ___ . (supreme)
• What is the difference between ____ and
  publicize? (propaganda)
• A teacher should not show ___ for any one of his
  pupils. (prefer)
• According to the treaty, some countries can enjoy
  ___ tariff rates. (prefer)

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Paraphrase

• The differences were all but wiped out by the
  similarities.
• The differences became so insignificant compared
  with the similarities, they were almost
  completely pushed aside and forgotten.
• Wipe out
• All but almost, nearly

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• This larger unity was the most important central
  fact of our time something on which people
  could build at a time when hope seemed misty,
  almost unreal.
• What can we build?
• our hope in the future of the mainkind
• What is this larger unity?
• The human community as a whole

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• But to stop there was like clearing the ground
  without any idea of what was to be built on it.
• If we only respect differences but pay no
  attention to similarities, it will be
  aimless/unconstructive.

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• It was the mark of a rounded man to be well
  traveled.
• Rounded man someone who has received a
  well-rounded education. Not one-sided, but
  complete and varied.
• For tribalism had persisted from earliest times,
  though it had taken refined forms
• Tribalism nationalism if also a enlarged form of
  it.???? ????

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• The universe itself does not hold life cheaply.
  Life is a rare occurrence
• The earth is the only place where life can be
  found, so the universe seems to favor life
  more/take life seriously. And the respect of life
  is the very basis on which we must build the
  future world community.

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• Leadership on this higher level does not require
  mountains of gold or thundering propaganda.
• This higher level spiritual/moral level
• Leadership on the spiritual/moral level is not
  based on money or propaganda.

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Discussion

• What does the author think of the differences
  between races and nations? What do you think?
• Do you agree that tribalism is standing in our
  way to progress today?

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• Obviously, the Chairmans remarks at the
  conference were ___ and not planned.
• Substantial b. spontaneous
• c. Simultaneous d. synthetic
• For the success of the project, the company
  should ___ the most of the opportunities at hand.
• a. obtain b. grasp
• c. catch d. make
• 3. Failure to follow the club rules ___ him from
  the volleyball team.
• a. disfavoured b. dispelled
• c. disqualified d. dismissed

Vocabulary
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4. The discovery of new oil-fields in various
parts of the country filled the government with
____ hope. a. eternal b. infinite c.
ceaseless d. everlasting 5. At first the company
refused to purchase the equipment, but this
decision was ____ revised. a. subsequently b.
successively c. Predominantly d.
preliminarily 6. The local police are authorized
to ___ anyones movements as they think of
it. a. pause b. halt c. repel d. keep
Vocabulary
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• 7. The local authorities realized the need to
  make ___ for elderly people in their housing
  programs.
• Preparation b. requirement
• c. Specification d. provision
• 8. Twelve is to three __ four is to one.
• a. what b. as
• c. that d. like
• 9. Things went well for her during her early life
  but in her middle age her ___ seemed to change.
• a. affair b. luck
• c. event d. chance

Vocabulary