Word: ethical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rampant self-pity has produced an ethic of irresponsibility: "Blame it on God, the girls, on the government, on heredity, or on environment, on the parents, on the siblings, on the cold war, on the pressures toward conformity, on being unloved and unwanted. But don't blame it on me, the very center around which the whole universe revolves." Topsy-turvily, compassion is extended to the evildoer rather than to his victims. Thus the recent U.S. scene has offered the spectacle of "The Martyr as Manly Rapist" (Caryl Chessman), "The Martyr as High-Minded Gigolo" (Chance Wayne in Sweet...
...altogether a pleasure to read the artistically written and in some ways highly extraordinary first novel of Andre Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just. For here the author makes a serious attempt to examine the basic tenets of the Jewish faith and the significance of this ethic to its believers. Judaism has, after all, survived for almost six thousand years in the face of continuous persecution that reached a crescendo in the Second World War. The modern Jew looks back on this incredible history with mingled pride and horror, often wondering whether his faith is worth the suffering. This...
...this ethic of resignation persists in the end. It is not the cultural masochism that appears in many novels about the Jews. Rather it is a despairing admission that, absurd as it may be, "that's how it is". Ernie Levy dosen't have a choice. In Hitler's world there is no such thing as "assimilation." Ernie puts his yellow Star of David on with pleasure. "He had no intention of glorifying himself, of separating himself from the humble procession of the Jewish people." He has learned, through his suffering, that he has a moral obligation to himself...
...religion," it is up to each individual "to invent his [or her] own sexual ethic according to the problems posed by the violence of his [or her] desire, taste for love affairs, or worry over conjugal fidelity...
...Vanity Fair) Crowninshield epigrammatized the situation: "Married men make very poor husbands." By their second or third generations, most U.S. moneyed clans are marked for either 1) distinction, 2) extinction. Those that survive with distinction, e.g., Lowells, Rockefellers. Guggenheims, treat their money as a public trust and adopt the ethic of responsibility laid down by an early Du Pont: "No privilege exists that is not inseparably bound to a duty." Other socialite families go the way so graphically described by the Philadelphia dowager who said, "Most of the Biddies and Cadwaladers are either in front of bars or behind bars...