Word: truthful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WESTERN CIVILIZATION is burning, and its artists are fiddling away. They must put down their bows and start fighting anew the good fight, for morality, and for truth, lest darkness engulf mankind...
This is John Gardner's argument in his essay On Moral Fiction. It sounds simplistic, and--of course--it is. Gardner poses as the Gabriel for a new artistic responsibility, sternly blasting forth on the trumpet, calling on the forces of "Beauty, Truth and Goodness" to regroup...
THROUGH WHAT he says in these essays Gardner is identifying himself with a long tradition of critics like Matthew Arnold who tried to diagnose the ills of their societies. And Gardner's calls for "Beauty, Truth and Goodness" are not far removed from Arnold's famous celebration of "sweetness and light." But Gardner lacks the formal power, the rhetorical skill which Arnold employed to make the abstract palatable and comprehensible. Gardner's book is structureless. The divisions between chapters are arbitrary, and just about the only overall element of the book that seems planned is the appearance of Thor...
...must place the academic goals of the University above all other considerations"' on the grounds that "partisan agitation on the part of undergraduates is secondary to the achievement of a deeper understanding of ethics, science and esthetics." Furthermore Ms. Esser writes that "by teaching students how such goals [morality, truth and beauty] are more more important that profit and power, Harvard guarantees that its students will never repeat the criminal greed of U.S. corporations now in South Africa...
...Esser has failed to see the connection between the University's actions and its ability and moral right to teach its students the values of morality and truth. Is it not hypocritical for Harvard to teach us such values while at the same time it violates them by their involvement in South Africa? How can an immoral institution teach morality? How can it teach the value of truth...