Word: pattersons
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Concern over Israel also brought back traditional Jewish anxieties over the future of the "race," and with a vengeance. With the reaffirmation of Jewish ethnicity that ensued, as Patterson puts it, "the Jewish intellectual was on the spot." For Patterson, the apostacy of the Jewish liberal intellectuals who for years have made Commentary one of the most respected liberal organs in the country best exemplifies the reaction of the Jewish intelligentsia to this crisis: a distressing turn rightward and the abandonment of their courageous conviction that all issues should be open to tough, non-partisan intellectual scrutiny in favor...
...critique of American Jewish intellectual reaction only highlights the chief problem that Patterson perceives in the continuing fashionability of ethnic loyalty--that ethnic subcultures are now acting as political interest groups in the increasingly competitive scrap for America's, and the world's, shrinking social and physical resources. Drawing on his classification of ethnicity prototypes, Patterson notes that this politically revolutionary trend is inherent in the nature of what he labels "the revivalist ethnic group." Ruthlessly pursuing his argument, he summarizes the phenomenon by arguing that...
...these vituperative attacks on the dangerous and dysfunctional elements of ethnic chauvinism, Patterson has as much in mind the difficult road ahead for the developing Third World nations as the reactionary pettiness of the current neo-ethnicity movement in the U.S. And he concludes that if the modern world is to see any lasting structural social change toward a more egalitarian world order, it must transcend this historically cyclical pattern of "ethnic revivalism...
...Patterson is long on criticism of ethnicity in its many guiss, he comes up a bit short on substantive solutions to the problems for which it has traditionally served as an answer. Throughout the book he espouses the alternative of a new individualist universalism, envisioning a world in which people respect each other's differences, appreciate each other's individual talents, and come together no longer in "ethnic" but in existential solidarity...
...these philosophical abstractions were the only alternative to ethnic identification that Patterson offered, it could easily be argued that he commits the same error for which he attacks the ethnicity advocates--naively embracing an ideal while ignoring the structural social constraints that keep most of the world's people from realizing...