Word: materialistic
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...election campaign. But the author is guilty of a personal bias himself. Entropy is clearly pitched at the industrialized Northeast and Trilateral Commission types. Rifkin says frugality no longer exists in our "high-entropy society"; he contends that leisure has o verrun the work ethic; and in our mechanical, materialist value system, we have forsaken the pursuit of spiritual consciousness...
...words, of "decorating a rigid, rectangular surface." Others, like Maurice Denis, wanted to restore art to the primacy as religious utterance that it had enjoyed before the deluge of 1789: "Lord," Denis exclaimed in his diary in 1889?the year the Eiffel Tower, symbol of materialist progress, was built?"we are a group of young people, devotees of the symbol, misunderstood by a world which mocks us Mystics! Lord, I pray you, may our reign come!" The desire for coherent symbols ?religious, mystical, anything but political?was as important a part of the early modernist program as the desire...
...Muslim leaders know), Communism is far more inimical to Islam than capitalism. But in the past 30 years, the U.S. has been a chief participant in a cultural encounter that is in some ways even more traumatic to the world of Islam than colonialism: the full onslaught of secular, materialist modernization, 20th century civilization sweeping into the timeless Muslim villages. The vast apparatus of Western progress, a machine overwhelmingly vigorous, profoundly tempting and yet decadent by all the disciplines of the Prophet, has threatened Muslim identity...
...world. Some sociobiologists believe it is evidence of man's inherent aggressiveness. Anthropologists are busy classifying different kinds of cannibalism, or depicting it as a ritualistic denial of death-the victim lives on by being incorporated as food. Columbia Anthropologist Marvin Harris (Cannibals and Kings) is a strict materialist who argues that cannibalism was a near universal practice made necessary by a scarcity of protein...
Nearly everyone turns out to be a materialist. The Palestinian gunmen are awed and seduced by the farmhouse's plumbing and appliances, and the radical chief is an art lover who decides to demand his prisoners' paintings as ransom. In the book's most amusing turn, crates of Cezannes, Degas and even a Vermeer arrive, and the farmhouse becomes an instant museum...