Editorial January 9, 1971 Issue

Better Because it's New?

Naomi Price

This is a century of discovery and invention. Each day the human race is bombarded with propaganda in support of new gadgets, new life-styles, new "wonder" drugs, and new morals for individuals and society—new means and methods of doing almost anything.

So heavy are the pressures of promotion and advertising for these many new things that one's judgment of their true value tends to become obscured. Finally, faced with such a glut of fresh mental concepts and material objects, the thinker may pause in confusion to ask, "Are they any more effective than the means and methods of the past? Are they really better because they're new?"

When one considers the new ways of harming one's neighbor, of waging war and killing, that are constantly appearing, it can hardly be right to assume that every event in human experience is progressive, or that every new material object is an improvement on last year's model. So how may we discriminate between the valuable and the worthless, the true idea and the pretentious claim of innovative mortal thought?

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

In 1950, after two major and several minor operations, I was...