Word: questioningly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unfortunately Levenson's era was fraught with tensions which conspired to make his asking any questions extremely difficult. In the early fifties Levenson, like Liang, found himself caught in an objectionable political current that swept him along against his will. His association at Harvard with Fairbank, then suspected by the McCarran Committee of having something to do with Communists at home and abroad, aroused the suspicion of California's loyalty-oath-bearing legislators that Levenson, too, might harbor secret Communist sympathies. Further outcry arose after Levenson's first interview with the University of California in 1949, when he is supposed...
...this view ignores the subtleties of Levenson's relativism. Other histories were not important because their historical experiences had one to one correspondences with one's own experience. The crucial question was not, "How is this the same as what he knows or is?" but, as Levenson wrote in the third volume of the trilogy, "Why should a generation comparable enough to his own to be judged in his vocabulary not be analogous to his own?... Why should earlier men, who deserve to be taken as seriously as he himself, diverge so far from his standards...
...Vietnam War era, Levenson turned to the question of provincialism and cosmopolitanism, what Frederic Wakeman has called "a key issue still in the People's Republic today: how much can be taken in bits and pieces without altering the basic system." In the lone volume of an uncompleted trilogy, and a few articles, Levenson concentrated on the dilemmas of a people in whom provincial and cosmopolitan tendences were then colliding in the massive outbreak of the Cultural Revolution...
...political movements in China and in the United States were not separable from the struggles of people defining their relations to their pasts and the worlds around them. Levenson publicly stated his opposition to American involvement in Vietnam from 1965 on. But he was moved more by the larger question, which persists in China still as it did in his own choices to live as a Jew, an intellectual and an American: is there a happy medium between a feckless cosmopolitanism (hampered by the "fact that the cosmos was somebody else's"); and a terrifying isolation that cut off both...
Whether a sense of personal and social responsibility should be enforced by law is a legitimate question; I'm not at all certain that it should. But unless Mr. Yates--"individualistic and independent" though he is--is truly alone in the world, he has a duty to himself and to those who care about him not to endanger his own life unnecessarily. He should not climb dangerous mountains alone--legally or otherwise. Kim Hasse Freshman Proctor