Word: purposeless
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...kind of art the government likes. Such art is apt to be expert, professional-at its worst, stereotyped, imitative, monotonous. Under a democracy, artists produce the kind of art they themselves like. Such art is apt to be personal, varied, lacking in precise standards-at its worst, amateurish, purposeless, sometimes egotistically incomprehensible. But at its best, democratic art flowers in endless variety, makes up in flashes of brilliant originality what it lacks in consistent workmanship...
What purpose lay behind this purposeless performance no one knew. Possibly Radio Andorra was just gathering an audience against the day when it will join the game of political propagandizing...
Perhaps the author should have explored more fully the implications of Schumpeter's definition of imperialism as an "objectless, irrational, violent disposition toward indefinite, purposeless expansion." What is implied here is the problematical contrast between absolutism's quest of glory and aggrandizement as an end in itself and the rationally oriented calculus of bourgeois capitalism. Such encomium of the profit motive strikes me as no more realistic than the Marxist interpretation of imperialism...
...They at any rate will know the truth, and perhaps it will make them free. Free from what? From imbeciles and morons who are allowed to reproduce their kind, and to subsist upon the labors of others, from psychopaths who lead the mentally inferior mass of civilized populations into purposeless wars and social revolutions, from the ever increasing numbers of biological and mental inferiors who are anti-social and criminalistic. If the generations to come can be emancipated from these worthless and deleterious elements, it will be a comparatively simple matter to perfect social and political institutions and to adjust...
...large, however, the new Yale plan rings true. The sum of human knowledge represents too large a sea upon which to set the unwary undergraduate adrift. Much criticism, often from. Yale undergraduates themselves, has been heard concerning a student's undirected, purposeless effort. Some integration, some degree of "genuine mastery of some one field", in President Angell's words, seems necessary in the modern world...