Word: moralists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like the Chautauqua and Lyceum orators, Pirsig is an inveterate moralist. In common with Emerson and the other nineteenth century American Romantics he bemoans the predicament of manufactured man and extolls "self-reliance" and "gumption" and the kind of knowledge that is not to be found in books but only at the cutting edge of experience. But Pirsig also recognizes that "self-reliance" has become the philosophy of American greed and reaction and that the familiar Romantic exhortations about experience and immediacy do not penetrate very far into technology nor into its scientific underpinning. For him the problem is that...
Like Huxley, Wilson can become an abstract moralist. The reader meets hun gry masses rather than hungry people. But in his gadfly or Waughspian capacity Wilson achieves top form. As If By Magic is rich in stock (but not too stock) characters: Japanese businessmen, German tourists, English eccentrics, American divorcees who look like failed Myrna Loys...
...York tailor's son in a corporal's uniform, straggling alone across a World War II battlefield in Germany. Later, as Dr. Beer, Benny turns up in Korea, enduring 2½ years in a Chinese prison camp. Here Becker is at his most persuasive as storyteller and moralist...
Adapting the audacious lawlessness of the porn movie to his Swiftian demolition of untrammeled appetite, his parable, as many critics have read it, of the collapse of modern society, Ferreri has arrived at a tantalizing blend: the dirty movie with the heart of an impassioned medieval moralist. The director has the puritan's inevitable fascination with sin and corruption: he's titillated by what he shows us, but he's repelled, too--and it's that moralistic disapproval, that unconcealable sense of shock, that separates his work, for all its salacious preoccupations, from that of the true, unstricken pornographers...
These seemingly diffuse attitudes find their unity in bourgeois fantasy life, which is perhaps the point. Skinner is in many ways a bourgeois moralist. The excitement of Kinkade and her friends upon reading about Walden Two (it was "everything I had ever wanted," she gushes) can best be understood by viewing it as a garden of forbidden delights, but in which the institutions whose repressions create the fantasy remain intact. One can go about pleasing the senses only after he has felt the satisfaction of work well done. The titillations of adultery and free sex induce a dizziness curable...