Word: modern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...policies and to deliberately provoke a crisis. Police were then summoned to oust the intruders; moderate students, angered at both the fact of the "bust" and what they felt was police brutality, were radicalized into organizing a strike. The three-day boycott of classes was the first in the modern history of a venerable institution that prides itself on its devotion to learning and the rational resolution of differences. It was a shock?to faculty, students and administration alike?that for a time the "Harvard way" had failed. No matter how soon the present crisis is resolved, the great temple...
...operating room, recovery room or intensive-care unit of a modern hospital, the more sophisticated devices may actually be safer than the routine ones, because they are used by highly trained physicians and nurses who are on the alert for danger signals. Even so, says Walter, such vigilance may not always be sufficient. In a situation involving a patient who has an electrical lead going into his heart or a major artery, for example, a minute accidental current leakage, ordinarily considered negligible, may stop a patient's heart. Perhaps more dangerous in the long run are the heating pads...
...carnival farces before God." Formal belief in God seems to have no part in Vonnegut's philosophy, though in Slaughterhouse-Five he does suggest that the story of the Crucifixion would be more appealing if Jesus had been not the Son of God but a nobody. Few modern writers have borne witness against inhumanity with more humanity or humor...
...card culture, his satiric forays are really an appeal for a return to Christlike behavior in a world never conspicuously able to follow Christ's example. For Vonnegut, man's worst folly is a persistent attempt to adjust, smoothly, rationally, to the unthinkable, to the unbearable. Misused, modern science is its prime instrument. "I think a lot of people teach savagery to their children to survive," he observed recently. Then he added, saying it all, from Cain and Abel to the cold war, "They may need the savagery, but it's bad for the neighbors...
...spine of Burgess's criticism is philosophical, and he has found his archetypal literary enemy in a most unusual source. In Burgess's view the worst modern vices (materialism, pragmatism, relativism) may be traced to the works and influence of the heretical English monk Pelagius, who denied original sin and, 1,500 years before Marx-or Harold Wilson-taught that human perfection was obtainable by civic means. There is an opposite, more severe, tragic tradition that he identifies with the moral absolutism of Saint Augustine. One or other of these disparate attitudes may be detected by Burgess...