Word: moralizers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...article that holds up the diary as a sacred text and condemns any tamperers. The passions the book ignites suggest that everyone owns Anne Frank, that she has risen above the Holocaust, Judaism, girlhood and even goodness and become a totemic figure of the modern world--the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings...
Indeed, they love her, which is to say they love the book. In her diary she showed the world not only how fine a person she was, but also how necessary it is to come to terms with one's own moral being, even--perhaps especially--when the context is horror. The diary suggests that the story of oneself is all that we have, and that it is worth a life to get it right...
Wilson believed the key to sobriety was a change of heart. The suggested 12 steps include an admission of powerlessness, a moral inventory, a restitution for harm done, a call to service and a surrender to some personal God. In A.A., God can be anything from a radiator to a patriarch. Influenced by A.A., the American Medical Association has redefined alcoholism as a chronic disease, not a failure of willpower...
...voice rang out. "A miracle occurred," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "when Andrei Sakharov emerged in the Soviet state, among the swarms of corrupt, venal, unprincipled intelligentsia." By the time of his death in 1989, this humble physicist had influenced the spread of democratic ideals throughout the communist world. His moral challenge to tyranny, his faith in the individual and the power of reason, his courage in the face of denunciation and, finally, house arrest--made him a hero to ordinary citizens everywhere. He embodied the role that intellectuals are called upon to play in the creation of civil society and inspired...
...With the cold war ended and the Soviet threat gone, his exhortations against totalitarianism might seem anachronistic. Yet in China, where political freedom continues to be suppressed and intellectuals face harassment and arrest, his voice is still one of encouragement. For scientists his career remains a model of the moral responsibility that must accompany innovation. And Sakharov might remind the West too that freedom is fragile, that if democratic societies are not protective of their liberties, even they may lose it. On the night of his death, after returning from a tempestuous meeting of the Congress of People's Deputies...