Word: moralisms
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Harvard puts up a mighty pretense of moral neutrality as the Corporation allots its billions, and the Harvard Management Company makes its millions for what are supposed to be the “best interests” of the University. Somehow, ethical values and human values got left out of these best interests. They have come to mean little more than material values, with no other measure than the maximization of profit for the Corporation and its endowment...
...hierarchy we are expected to accept, lowly students that we are. And we are expected to accept it under the false pretense that these decisions can actually be made devoid of values and human assumptions. That they are therefore best left to the experts on high, unencumbered by the moral commitments which plague the rest...
What really distinguishes Martin, and what marks him as a major force for evolution in fantasy, is his refusal to embrace a vision of the world as a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil. Tolkien's work has enormous imaginative force, but you have to go elsewhere for moral complexity. Martin's wars are multifaceted and ambiguous, as are the men and women who wage them and the gods who watch them and chortle, and somehow that makes them mean more. A Feast for Crows isn't pretty elves against gnarly orcs. It's men and women slugging...
...shame. As much as we rely on the government for security intelligence, we rely on artists to offer moral intelligence about how evil works. "It's like they say, Know your enemy," says Ethan Reiff, a co-executive producer, with Cyrus Voris, of Sleeper Cell, a 10-hour Showtime mini-series (running over two weeks beginning Dec. 4) that goes inside an al-Qaeda cadre planning a WMD attack in Los Angeles. "In pop culture," says Voris, "terrorists have been simplistic bad guys who come from a country called Unnamedistan...
Perhaps because of the tricky moral ground--and the potential for bolstering stereotypes--those terrorism scripts include sympathetic Muslims as audience surrogates. In Syriana there is a reformist Arab prince; in War Within, Hassan's childhood friend Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), an assimilated suburban dad, doesn't understand why Hassan can't leave his anger and piety back in the Old World. In its sweeping, 24-like thriller plot, Sleeper Cell depicts a wide range of extremists but also Darwyn (Michael Ealy), a devout Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates the cell and sees its members as foes of Islam...