Word: americans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fact remains that this particular atrocity-a clear violation of the civilized values America claims to up hold-was apparently ordered by officers of the U.S. military and carried out by sons of honorable, God-fearing people. Inevitably, My Lai will be taken by some as a measure of American society...
...answer it; since De Tocqueville a succession of travelers from older and supposedly wiser civilizations have concluded that the U.S. lacks a tragic sense of life. The observation is largely true; the explanation is the varied strands of thought that, welded together, constitute the conventional wisdom of the American ethos...
...divine grace by his efforts alone. Put in secular terms, the Pelagianism of America means an unshakable faith in the righteousness of the U.S. "We tend to think," argues Roman Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak, "that it is not and cannot be evil at the center. We habitually believe that American intentions are good ones, that America has never started a war, that America is always on the side of democracy and justice and liberty, that Americans are unusually innocent, generous and good in their relationships with other people...
...Puritan ethos was a stimulus to striving and hard work; no wonder that it gave way to its secular descendant, pragmatism-the uniquely American philosophy articulated by C. S. Peirce, Dewey and William James. Americans are the exemplars of pragmatism, of rational humanism. The pragmatist, of course, does not deny the existence of evil-although he likes to call it something else. But he optimistically assumes that it exists in institutions rather than men, and can therefore be legislated away. Thus evils, in the American experience, have always been seen as concrete problems that could be dissected and analyzed-like...
...Thus the American ethos-part pragmatic, part Puritan, part Pelagian-has had the synergistic effect of masking the popular consciousness of evil. Traditionally, evil has been something distant, Wholly Other, rather than an enemy within. When Rap Brown complained that "violence is as American as cherry pie," most Americans dismissed the charge as the aberrant nastiness of a Black Power fanatic. When the Kerner Commission proposed that America was a racist nation, the U.S. public reacted with "Who, me?" protests of innocence. But there is a dark underside to American history: the despoliation of the Indian, the subjection...