Document: H. Evan Runner, Point Counter Point (n.d.).

Excerpt: There can be little doubt that our civilization is at one of its epoch-making turning points, as at the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation. There is now, as there was then, a remarkable quickening of the cultural impulse, an increased perception and sensitivity, a notable enlargement of experience. Yet there is also a critical difference. The intervening centuries have brought the Industrial Revolution and the development of political and social democracy. Huge systems of public education, if they have not evoked the truth that every man supposedly possessed within him, have at least brought an incredible accumulation of factual knowledge within the reach of every man. Today the masses have come on to the foreground. We encounter them everywhere. In just a single country, whether it be in the sphere of education or the arts or science, you have immediately to do with so many persons and so many centres of hustling activity. And then there are the many effects of computerization. Indeed, the current step-up in the tempo of cultural change, complicated by this state of affairs, is so unprecedented that someone has come up with the somewhat contrived term ‘rapidation’ to describe its uniqueness. Think only of the great scientific and technological advances of our time, the exploration of limitless sky, of depths of ocean, of the earth’s poles, the changes in the ways we store information.

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Point Counter Point – H.E. Runner.pdf