Word: inertias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...minimal. About all they now have to do is once in a while vote at some general meeting. Meanwhile the rulers of the state and the other propagators of ideology sincerely believe in their ideology and many of them have devoted themselves to it out of long years of inertia, out of ignorance and man's peculiar psychological habit of developing a philosophy to justify his main sphere of activity...
Fairbank begins with a stunningly impressive analysis, written in 1946, on the prospects for democracy in China at that time. They were nil, he concluded, not only because the Communists were more vigorous and popular than the American-backed Kuomintang, but also because "the inertia of tradition" did not permit Western-style solutions in China. Fairbank was of course right, and since that essay-as textbook writer, as target of the McCarthy campaign, as a mover and shaker in the field of Asian studies in the U.S.-he has stuck to his main theme. The great Confucian system of government...
...spontaneous oil sketches and color notes that fill the Musée Moreau in Paris-for that dynamism that animated Moreau's romantic predecessors, Delacroix and Chassériau. Rather, it is a delight of surface. To fix it, Moreau resorted to what he called the "beauty of inertia." He noted of Michelangelo, whom he adored: "All these figures seem fixed in a gesture of ideal somnambulism; they are unconscious of the movements they make." Once immobilized, the figures in his allegorical paintings-Oedipus, Salome and the like-could then be loaded with accessories, encrusted with redundant decoration...
...those whom they condemn. They may think themselves the backbone of society and the ultimate arbiters of change, but history is apt to judge them differently. For change conies from those who care, who propose and agitate, modified by those who care differently and oppose; the rest is inertia. The inert middle is not what Aristotle meant to extol...
Often, standing in the middle of the school, it is difficult to see constructive activity in progress. Chaotic activity or inertia may seem to reign. But following an individual student around to watch what he does in a day often provides a markedly different perspective...