Word: etzioni
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...America a fixation on assassination conspiracies? After all, the latest furor over who really killed J.F.K., inspired by Oliver Stone's movie, has only recently abated. There remain rabid challenges to official versions of the Martin Luther King and Malcolm X murders. To sociologist Amitai Etzioni, the fascination with these questions reflects a need to explain life's inexplicable dark side: Why did all these heroes die? That tendency is encouraged by America's individualism, which encourages an instinctive distrust of authority and officialdom...
...patients for AIDS. Some people argue for mandatory testing; others insist that it be voluntary. But both groups seem concerned only with the patient's rights. "No one on either side wonders if the patient has a responsibility to his fellow human beings," says George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni. "The language focuses almost exclusively on individual rights, which are quickly described as absolute and which are then disconnected from societal obligations...
...Etzioni and his followers, the question is how best to promote responsibility before imposing it. "In the end, free people are going to decide for themselves how to act," says Roger Conner of the American Alliance for Rights & Responsibilities, a bipartisan public-interest group. "How they feel about a duty that may be imposed on them is crucial. Way before something like Norplant is coerced, there has to be serious education and the widespread availability of birth control. If those conditions are met, there is a far greater possibility that both the individual and society will accept imposition. A regime...
There is much to noodle here, and there soon may also be the opportunity to see if these issues can support a presidential campaign. The leading Democratic advocate of civic obligation is Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who announced his candidacy last week. Beyond sharing the views of Etzioni and Conner, Clinton has actually succeeded in having some of the "responsibilities" philosophy codified in law. For example, Arkansas parents who fail to attend parent-teacher conferences can be fined, and students who drop out of school are denied driver's licenses. "Not everything we do that is wrong is illegal," says...
...that words can hurt, or that civil rights and tolerance are essential in a democracy, but that hypersensitivity clouds rational discourse: how to knit a contentious American society together rather than allow it to become balkanized by competing interests. "We need to reset the thermostats," writes sociologist Etzioni, "not shatter windows or tear down walls. Extremism in defense of virtue is a vice...