A Patchwork of Progress

Outlines changes in childhood obesity and overweight rates in California between 2005 and 2010 by county. Considers implications of regional variations, including public policy options for promoting healthy diets and physical activity

4. Psychology

Psychology is the scientific study of the behavior of organisms, particularly the processes involved in the complex organization of these organisms as individuals. The processes are studied from the analytic biochemical view (overlapping physiology) to the broad view of the effect of group activities on individual behavior (overlapping sociology). [excerpt

5. The Rise of National Feeling

In the centuries under review in this chapter the self-sufficient manor, the feudal aristocracy, and the cultural isolation of Europe fell before the forces of economic change. In much the same way and for many of the same reasons the political institutions and practices of feudalism succumbed to the joint attacks or monarchs and the middle class. Even in its day of glory feudalism had within itself certain weaknesses. It had never been able to maintain more than a modicum of order, and indeed under the chivalric code the proper occupation of the knight was warfare. To the interminable civil strife that persisted were added such larger wars as the Crusades, and both sapped baronial families of men and treasure. The feudal nobility sold privileges to their tenants and disposed of land to pay ransom or buy passage to the Holy Land at the same time that monarchs were introducing taxation and tightening the royal hold on government. Furthermore, used to the near anarchy of feudal life and required to devote nearly all of their time and attention to the management and defense of their estates, the barons could engage only spasmodically in attempts to control the royal government. As the royal power grew in scope and became more complex in the hands of professional civil servants, the nobles were in an increasingly unfavorable position to check it. Finally, the prestige which the feudal polity always accorded the crown put baronial dissidents at a disadvantage in a custom-conscious age. [excerpt

3. The Second Industrial Revolution

There is abundant evidence for the opinion that after about 1850 the Industrial Revolution entered upon a new phase in its development. Inventions occurred at a more rapid pace than ever before in history. (Between 1850 and 1914 there were more than fifty times as many patents issued in the Unites States as during the preceding sixty years.) Increasingly these inventions were the work of scientists and engineers working in the research laboratory rather than of self-taught craftsmen, as had often been the case in the eighteenth century. [excerpt

3. The Emergence of Socialist Parties, 1848-1914

The emergence of socialist parties frequently is treated by Marxians and non-Marxians alike, as an inevitable development. From this viewpoint, the Industrial Revolution completed the breakdown of an essentially land-based social structure, economy, and political system. New classes were creates; new interests required political expression. Working people, united by the often miserable conditions under which they lived and labored, ultimately turned to socialism. [excerpt

1. The Revival of Commerce

Throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed until quite recent times, Europe\u27s economy was primarily agrarian. From the eleventh century onward however, commerce followed by manufacturing and urbanization, became increasingly characteristic of Western Europe\u27s society. But the old made way for the new so slowly that the shift may be clearly discerned only through the lengthened perspective of the years. [excerpt

2. Meaning as a Problem in Contemporary Religious Thought

To judge from the public voice and countenance of religion in America at least, there is a preoccupation in religion with happiness at the expense of meaning. But between the two poles of happiness and meaning there is considerable distance. This chapter accepts the problem of meaning as more urgent than the problem of happiness. For over against the hopeful prescriptions for the integration of the personality and of social life through religion there stands the experience of disintegration of the structure of past confidence. Desperately, theologians wrestle with ancient symbols to wrest from them new significance or reference, or attempt to revivify their lost meaning and powers of evocation. In these critical times theological thought attempts to referee the contest between the lost soul and the powerful chaos of world history. In an intellectual landscape scarred by war, diplomatic failure, economic uncertainty, and a wide variety of psychic traumata, theologians probe the private egos, society, and even language itself to reestablish meaning. [excerpt

10. The Political Thought of Machiavelli

The national state in Western Europe was a new institution, without precedent in the European World. Its rise and almost immediate conflict with the Church challenged political theorists to reexamine the assumptions of a universal church in a universal empire upon which the theory of the two swords was based. These assumptions were so generally accepted that they were not easily abandoned. In the fourteenth century Marsiglia of Padua, for all his disinterest in the two swords, had arrived at his conclusions without denying either the existence of a universal church or the validity of the traditional morality. Other writers who defended the concentration of authority in royal hands sometimes stressed the power accorded the prince in Roman law or appealed to the need for a firm hand in maintaining peace and order in the state. But these writers remained firmly committed to an ideal of justice in political relationship which had its origin in Greek, Roman, and Christian sources. It remained for a figure of the Italian Renaissance, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), to make the decisive break with the past, which indeed Marsiglia had foreshadowed, an divorce politics from morality. [excerpt

5. Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich (1886) left his native Germany because of the Nazis about the same time as Karl Earth, but Tillich came to the United States and became a faculty member of Union Theological Seminary, New York. He had spent World War I as a Lutheran chaplain in the German trenches and came out of it looking for something better than the theology that could not explain or help the trench soldier. His resulting work, primarily expounded since his adoption of English, has led some to proclaim him as the Protestant theologian of our time. Others have branded him heretical. This situation is quite pleasing to him since he thinks of himself as living on the boundary between either/or. What he calls the Protestant principle emphasizes his refusal to idealize or idolatrize either side of the boundary. This principle rejects any effort to replace God with sacrament, creed, or even church, because God makes possible both sides of the boundary. God invests each side with power, with being, and thus God is the ground of being and the source of power. Therefore, to insist that one choose either science or religion, reason or revelation, objectivity or subjectivity, dogma or feeling is, on the one hand, to reject God and, on the other, to replace God. [excerpt

2. Victories of Political Liberalism

As we have already suggested in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, the roots of political liberalism antedated the nineteenth century. The philosophic principles of this creed were based on earlier ideas such as natural rights and utilitarianism. Political liberals held that human actions to be moral must be voluntary, and that a society seeking to follow the laws of nature must cherish individual liberty. Since they believed human reason was capable of discerning these laws, liberals believed that enlightened self-interest was an accurate guide for political action. In the next chapter we will take note of the kinship which existed between political liberals and economic liberals. Here we need only to say that both envisaged the chief functions of the state as primarily protective of life, liberty, and property, and active mainly to check abuses and prevent license. [excerpt