Word: silent
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...second idea which sets Moynihan apart from more conventional liberals is his concern with the "silent majority" of Americans who are worried about violence and disorder. Borrowing from Emile Durkheim, and more particularly from the conservative American sociologist Robert A. Nisbet, Moynihan argues that the central problem of modern civilization is to overcome the atomization of society into disoriented individuals through the conscious strengthening of groups and group norms. This effort--Nisbet's "quest for community"--is in Moynihan's view the origin of lower middle-class "reaction' to lower-class violence, which is seen as disorienting, destabilizing, and therefore...
Just after Christmas we went on a picnic. It was raining and grey and a perfect day for Volkswagens. I drove through Tomoka Park, down narrow roads with Spanish moss above, hiding the sky. We stopped and watched a silent group of pure white egrets perch high in some palm trees on an island in the marsh. Then we rode down a twisting, red clay road to the Bulow Sugar Mill Plantation ruins. Once there, we got out, and I jumped around for a while. Gayle followed, but she was always conscious of the fact that she was getting...
...husband comes home from work and yawns, "How was your day, dear?" Wife (pleasantly): "O.K. How was yours?" Husband: "Oh, you know, the usual." When disagreements loom, they take refuge in the newspaper, TV or "etiquette-upmanship," a self-righteous silent treatment rationalized by the thought that self-control is more virtuous than disagreement. Argue Authors Bach and Wyden: "A marriage that operates on the after-you-my-dear-Al-phonse principle may last a lifetime-a lifetime of fake accommodation, monotony, self-deception and contempt...
...EXTREME case of this sense of responsibility stemming from guilty is Joseph Kraft. In a column written after Chicago, Kraft said that the journalist does not reflect the views of Middle America (Nixon's "silent Americans," Reston's "nonpolitical majority"), and he questions whether the reporter can then claim to be the "agent of the sovereign public...
Perhaps the most socially significant kind of public silence involves bystanders who are unwilling to intervene or call police when crimes occur before their eyes. Yet are such silent witnesses really as apathetic as social critics usually portray them? Perhaps not. In what the American Association for the Advancement of Science calls 1968's best sociopsychological research, Professors John M. Darley of Princeton and Bibb Latané of Ohio State portray homo urbanus in an entirely different light. Testing the reaction of college students to a feigned emergency, they found that the emotions of those who remained quiet hardly...