Word: rousseauian
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...deny the existence of material progress, but many contend that there has not been concomitant moral progress—a sublimation of our intrinsic greed, cruelty, and penchant for violence into more a humane social ethos. Once again, as much as it may please us to romanticize the Rousseauian savage and see civilization as the source of all moral and spiritual malaise, an honest account of our ethical development cannot bear out our prelapsarian fantasies...
...although the Tasaday were not completely isolated, as Elizalde, National Geographic and others had first presented them, some of the original claims, particularly those based on linguistic evidence, cannot be easily dismissed. The only thoroughly sympathetic characters in this tale are the Tasaday themselves, who may not have been Rousseauian innocents but are certainly simple, guileless folk. Their story, however, has become exceedingly complex, revealing more about the tellers than the Tasaday themselves...
...HARVARD graduates can't be expected to leave the University with the conception of themselves as perfect Rousseauian citizens, whose only business is public service. And the fact that so many Harvard graduates work for private corporations does not necessarily mean that they ignore social causes. Most probably give sizeable donations every year to a wide range of charities, many speak out in moral outrage against "social injustices," and many serve as trustees and members of non-profit service organizations such as hospitals, and charitable groups. Besides, the argument goes, when one is a successful executive in a profitable company...
This isn't just a race, it's Hobbesean men racing over and intersecting the fates of those poor Rousseauian slobs who made their pitiful bargain surrendering essential freedoms for the Social Security benefits of their Social Contract. Are these despicable men cousins of the NRA and Birchers, neo-Nazis ready to tromp on the right of the rest of the highway passengers to avoid the shock of a Traveco Mobile Home with mad dog Joe Frasson at the wheel rattling by their VW at 110 mph? Or are they sportsmen and liberators, by their brave example, putting their drivers...
...Clare Judi Bowker), who has accompanied St. Francis on many an interminable nature-walk, any tenuous suspension of disbelief crumbles. Although Zeffirelli spares us cinematic tricks of visions and revelations, his harping on a band of post-adolescent outcasts of society, in search of their lost youth and a Rousseauian utopia, mars the simplicity of the tale just as badly. Treating the legend of St. Francis as a Christian fairy-tale might well have served Zeffirelli's artistic talents better than this poorly conceived Whole Earth Catalogue of the life, loves and politics of Italy's patron saint...