ABSTRACT
One of the signs of human advancement is that people gradually embrace a vision of an enlarged self: extending it to women, children, ethnic minorities, nature, the earth. The humanist agenda has been very much a story about the blessings and hazards of such an expanding self: the challenge to focus on the Other without distorting or destroying the Self. There is little doubt that one of the most spectacular crossings of the Rubicon that separates the self from the Other took place in the late 1960s. It happened, as if through osmosis, in all corners of the world. And though its rationale and aims differed from place to place, it was everywhere a moral journey, inspired by the young generation’s discovery of the authoritarian nerve running through the heart of modernity – one that was deforming humans, and ravaging their cultures and their natural environment.
