Word: moral
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most progressive to the most conservative, is willing to accept that romantic love for another person is an absolute good capable of redeeming even the most lost of souls. I find it inexplicable that a culture willing to do away with so many reasonable and necessary rules of moral behavior should have picked romantic love as its one unquestioned value. Not only does the value derive from a conception that is purely Western and relatively recent, it is based on a gross misconception of what motivates love and of what virtue should be about...
That romantic love is a route to moral perfection is an idea that few civilizations have shared with our own. Arranged marriages are the norm in many non-Western cultures, and in India, for instance, contemporary young people have voluntarily returned to the tradition of arranged marriage because they believe such arrangements usually make for more stable families...
...suitable woman in order to have children, and that was that. A man would love his natural family and usually grow to love his wife and children (as is the normal course of things), but there was little merit attached to this love, since it was considered his moral obligation to care for them one way or the other...
Stoic philosophy, which dominated moral thought in the Roman Empire, stressed that one should not become emotionally attached to the things of the world, whether they be wealth, honor or, or even one's own children...
British director Stephen Daldry originally sent Hare to the Middle East to write a conventional play. But Hare returned with a different notion: to incorporate his meetings with dozens of people into a monologue. "All his plays are forms of moral discourse in a way," says Richard Eyre, who has directed most of Hare's work over the past 30 years. "How do you live your life, that's really the question, isn't it?" Via Dolorosa emerges naturally from an earlier play about the Church of England, Racing Demon, and also from a bold 1996 lecture Hare gave...