Word: ethical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...found it wanting, and have uttered "the absolute refusal," as New Left Guru Herbert Marcuse calls it, to modern urban technology and the civilization it has produced. With surpassing ease and a cool sense of authority, the children of plenty have voiced an intention to live by a different ethical standard than their parents accepted. The pleasure principle has been elevated over the Puritan ethic of work. To do one's own thing is a greater duty than to be a useful citizen. Personal freedom in the midst of squalor is more liberating than social conformity with the trappings...
...easy enough for adults to reject the irrationality and hedonism of this ethic. But the young are quick to point out that the most rational and technically accomplished society known to man has led only to racism, repression and a meaningless war in the jungles of Southeast Asia. If that is oversimplification, it is the kind around which ringing slogans are made...
They live in overmortgaged, underserviced blue-collar ghet tos where they pay a stiffer price - in poor schools, en croaching throughways and war casualties - than do affluent whites across the city lines. Most of them still believe in God, country, the work ethic and a sexual standard that calls for at least a decent public restraint. In a day of diz zying moral change, they see themselves as the last defenders of moral authority. That is why they still admire the military and regard the police as heroes. The New York Times's Tom Wicker had a revelation...
...courage has often been a means to lesser ends. "Who gets wealth that puts not from the shore?" asked Poet Samuel Daniel in England's expansive 16th century. "Danger hath honor; great designs their fame/Glory doth follow, courage goes before." Daniel's poem was the mercantile ethic frozen in meter. In that spirit, the conquistadors braved terra incognita to bleed Montezuma of his gold; the slave traders kidnaped tribesmen from Africa. In that spirit empires were created-and the conflicts of colonialism that still haunt the world. The motives for these enterprises were not necessarily ignoble...
...Alcohol is seen as an agent which lubricates the wheels of commerce and catalyzes social intercourse. Marijuana is just for fun and therefore is in conflict with powerful vestiges of the Protestant Ethic," he commented...