Volume 26, Number 4 · March 22, 1979
Human Prospecting
By Peter Singer
The Arrogance of Humanism
by David Ehrenfeld
Oxford University Press, 286 pp., $10.95
The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization
by William Barrett
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 359 pp., $12.95
The Paradox of Cause and Other Essays
by John William Miller
Norton, 192 pp., $14.95
'Is there hope for man?' was the opening question of Robert Heilbroner's An Inquiry Into the Human Prospect.[1] The query was prompted by brooding doubts about our ability to avoid catastrophe, or at least a steady deterioration in the human condition. Heilbroner offered no evidence that these doubts were widely shared. He simply gambled that in saying that they existed he would not generate in his readers 'the incredulity I should feel were I to open a book whose first statement was that the prevailing mood of our time was one of widely shared optimism.'
Review, 3194 words
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