GOING FORWARD IN ERA OF CONTRADICTION.

Byline: Joan Saunders Wixen Local View

HOW will the age in which we live someday be remembered?

Will these years someday be thought of as a time when human beings were going backward and forward simultaneously? When machines were starting to do the work of humans, while humans were beginning to behave more like machines?

Might our age someday be referred to as the age of contradictions, when things first had to come apart in order to come together? A world where nations that once had been arch enemies became friends? A time when people began to think they finally had peace in the world, but then a new war would break out?

``Look at what we're doing to our world,'' I once said to Norman Cousins in his UCLA office. ``We're polluting our air, water and land. And look at how we're building up nuclear waste and all the wars going on. Do you really think that the human race can survive much longer?''

He paused, looked me in the eyes, smiled knowingly and said very emphatically, ``No matter how smart we think we are, no one really knows enough to be a pessimist.''

``It's almost too overwhelming,'' I said to Jonas Salk, as I interviewed him at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., ``to live in a time where hate and love, humor and pathos are often disguised as one another. Where insanity is thought to be sanity, and sanity is labeled as insanity. Where violence is considered normal, and in order for us to protect ourselves and function in a rational, sane way, we now have to go around behaving rather paranoid.''

``The problem in our world,'' he said, ``is that man has altered his environment at a rate so far exceeding the development of the changes in his instinctive behavior and his intuitive reactions, he is now the victim of his own so-called successes. Man, himself, possesses the potential to cause many of his disorders as well as the attributes to develop the means for their prevention and cure.

But how do we not go off the deep end when our lives are so frenetic and there are so many changes in our lives? Won't living with so much stress have some drastic effect on the human race? That's what I once asked Hans Selye, the doctor whose work first pioneered the effects on stress.

``Stress can result in either pathology and cause us to break down, or else it can cause us to regenerate and grow, the same way electricity either can cause or prevent heat,'' he said. ``It all depends upon how things are balanced. The crucial thing is how we adapt. And how we adapt depends on our knowing that defeat, now and then, doesn't mean we're failures. What matters is not as much what happens to us in life, but how we react to it.''

Maybe we will have to accept there has to be more to our lives than what appears. That what we don't know and isn't visible is often more meaningful than what is.

``I have a photograph Einstein gave me years ago,'' the late industrialist Armand Hammer once told me. ``It is the first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning and the last thing I look at before I go to sleep at night. I keep it on the table right beside my bed. The inscription reads: One first begins to live when one can live outside of oneself.''

OK, so how do we get outside of ourselves, as we wobble unsteadily back and forth on our tightropes, swaying farther and farther from the center, as we speed along, precariously balanced, zooming faster and faster, higher and higher in our evolution?

If we swerve too far to one side and put too much faith in our technology, we become dehumanized. If we push too far to the other side we become alienated from the progress of life itself. And if we push to the extreme in either direction, we end up at the very same place. We fall off, hit bottom and end up right back where we've started, everything we've accomplished, shattered in bits and pieces.

Who knows? Maybe life is just a divine and mysterious game, and what's important isn't the game, itself, but how we play it.

As Nietzsche once said, what doesn't destroy me, makes me stronger. Maybe now, as we head simultaneously toward utopia and disaster, we have to be exactly where we are today in order to see things more in perspective to be better able to determine what we accept as progress.