Word: morality
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...stated that in an article in the Atlantic Monthly I had "announced my discovery that there is no God"; and further that my solution of the moral problem in our time is: "a new morality founded on psychological laws." Both these statements are incorrect and misleading...
...weighs down all Shaplen's central characters. Archer Grayson watches an outbreak of Hindu-Moslem rioting and knows, "with a terrified shame, that he had been waiting for this to happen." When Archer gets in the way of a murderous mob, his death is a kind of anguished moral suicide. Author Shaplen as much as tells the readers: hate and violence anywhere are the concern of all decent men; they can be observed with indifference only at the cost of moral health...
Murder for the Doctor. As a result of such indifference, moral disintegration overwhelms a French civil servant in Saigon, overtakes a black-marketeering colonel in Manila. But it is in the title story that Shaplen does his most explicit preaching. True to pattern, U.S. Army 1st Lieut. Robert Gordon is a man of good will and hazy intention when he gets to Macao on leave. He and a German Jewish refugee doctor help a striking native laborer who has been injured; for this, the doctor is murdered by local reactionaries, and the police are blandly indifferent. Lieut. Gordon leaves...
...only story in the book that fails to come off, this one becomes a maudlin sermon, with the fuzzy moral that the Westerner should be on the side of the natives-whatever that is. Thus, better than any of the others, it makes plain what kind of blinkers Robert Shaplen's characters seem to wear. They are quite upset about what the Western impact may have done or failed to do to Asia but their reactions are impractical and confused and in some cases defy analysis. If Asia itself has anything to worry about after the Western rascals...
This article informed us that "Chiang has received more than three billion dollars from the U.S., much of it in actual war material. Still his armies have melted before Mao's Communists. The reason is obvious incompetent leadership, corruption, and lack of popular support." I suggest that the moral forces that overcame Chiang were very real indeed; but methinks these "moral forces" have taken up more than a little space on the Kremlin-to-China trade route...