Word: moralisms
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...Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as sensible as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, prosecuted and won a war to free him nevertheless. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a member of a Confederate militia, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to rile the nation over racial injustice and rouse its collective...
What put Twain off about religion was its bossiness and its alignment with corrupt community values that people--those standing to profit--insisted on calling a higher power. The very expression "moral sense" made him curl his lip. He denounced his own conscience, which frowned upon his anarchic instincts, his love of enjoyment, and made him feel guilty and rebellious...
...polemic. It registers the horror of lynchings but also undertakes to empathize with people who attended them. Their motivation, Twain argued, is not inhuman viciousness but "man's commonest weakness, his aversion to being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the commanding feature of the make...
...moral code of McCain's youth always distinguished between sins of honor and sins of pleasure. "Don't lie, cheat or steal - anything else is fair game," McCain told his son Jack when the boy left for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md. In his memoir, McCain recalls that by his mid-20s, he "had begun to aspire to a reputation for more commendable achievements than long nights of drinking and gambling...
...What makes the cult of the santos malandros stand out, however, is its moral ambiguity. Santiago Rondon, a "spiritual consultant" in La Pastora, one of the capital's oldest neighborhoods, describes the tradition as a windshield wiper swinging between good and not so good. "It goes this way and it goes that way," says Rondon. "One day the santos malandros help a desperate mother keep her child off drugs; the next day they help you score some cocaine. It's the duality of life, but that's the way real life functions." And there's always the danger, acknowledged...