Word: brutishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Noble Savages. Until recently, anthropology accepted the myopic judgment of Philosopher Thomas Hobbes that life in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Primitive peoples were construed as somewhat stupid living fossils, stalled in the path of progress. Today, though, experts seem more inclined to endorse Jean Jacques Rousseau's vision of the noble savage living in a Golden Age. And they go so far as to suggest that present civilization, despite its vast artistic and material advances, is in some ways no real improvement on the past. "It is still an open question whether...
...Brutish British. Anguilla was ready: a flotilla of lobster smacks, so one story went, would wake the island by blowing horns when a British ship appeared. A herd of goats was supposedly assigned to clog the airstrip, and there was desultory talk of using sharp rocks to block island beaches against infiltrators. Undaunted, the British mustered a force of about 300 men, including the Red Devils, a Royal Marine platoon and bobbies from Scotland Yard, to set up a pacification program. When the British surged ashore, automatic weapons at the ready, there were only a few children to meet them...
Next day, as a bobby solemnly directed traffic at one of the few major crossroads, Anguillians stirred themselves into a public demonstration. Webster, mounted on a motor bike, brandished the orange, white and turquoise flag of the "republic," and some of his fellow islanders waved signs reading "Brutish British Go Home" as they marched past the red-roofed school where the occupiers had set up temporary headquarters...
...important question to ask is: What is Styron's own attitude on ra- cial questions? The Confessions of Nat Turner is a clear enough reply. Styron obviously believes in a darkly militant way that any brutish black uprising is the inevitable result of white persecution. The effect of both, the persecution and the uprising, adds up to tragedy...
Despite the recent relaxation, life in the Soviet Union has a boring and sometimes even a brutish quality. Outside his home, the Russian cannot walk, sit clown or breathe without seeing a slogan, a flag, a statistic, a portrait of Lenin, a piece of heroic Soviet statuary. He is rarely allowed to tour outside the Soviet Union by himself, even in other socialist countries, and he must show an internal passport when he travels within his own country. A Russian spends much of his free time standing in queues, where he must push and heave to defend his place. Partly...