A Quote by Pierre L. van den Berghe
I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.
Related Quotes
The only difference between the narrator of contemporary affairs and the ordinary historian is that moral judgments about the present provoke fiercer reactions and have more immediately practical implications than moral judgments about the past.
Indifference looks like detachment, but it is not; indifference is simply no interest. Detachment is not absence of interest - detachment is absolute interest, tremendous interest, but still with the capacity of non-clinging. Enjoy the moment while it is there and when the moment starts disappearing, as everything is bound to disappear, let it go. That is detachment.
The distemper of which, as a community, we are sick, should be considered rather as a moral than a political malady.
We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. We can therefore not fully appreciate the value of freedom until we know how a society of free men as a whole differs from one in which unfreedom prevails.
The Truth about Leo Strauss is the most balanced and insightful book yet written about Strauss's thought, students, and political influence. It dispels myths promulgated by both friends and foes and persuasively traces the conflicting paths that American thinkers indebted to Strauss have taken.
We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much, if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?...I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing; but the eye that blinks, that is something.
I just want to say that the multiculturalism - and especially the cultural relativism which is even worse than multiculturalism, the concept that all cultures are equal - is the worst recipe for any society.
Those fighters, the Syrian part that you're talking about, lost its natural incubators in the Syrian society - they don't have incubators anymore ; that's why they have incubators abroad. They need money from abroad, they need moral support and political support from abroad. They don't have any grassroots, any incubator. So, when you stop the smuggling, we don't have problems.
In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter - which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking 'enlightenment' meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference.
The avoidance of explicit ethical judgments leads political scientists to one overriding implicit value judgment - that in favor of the political status quo as it happens to prevail in any given society.
Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.
Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites than non-whites.
To be consistently effective, you must put a certain distance between yourself and what happens to you on the golf course. This is not indifference, it's detachment.
If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
My man has to be more intelligent than I am, which is difficult to find. He should definitely be more successful than me, which is not so difficult to find. I'd be a fool to expect a better looking man than me, which is impossible to find.
There is nothing more difficult to measure than the value of visible emotion.
Related Authors
Allen W. Wood Quotes
American
Professor
Clayton Christensen Quotes
American
Professor
Glenn Reynolds Quotes
American
Professor
Gordon S. Wood Quotes
American
Professor
Jeffrey Pfeffer Quotes
American
Professor
Jerry A. Coyne Quotes
American
Professor
Michael Hudson Quotes
American
Professor
Richard A. Falk Quotes
American
Professor
Robert S. Kaplan Quotes
American
Professor
Ruth Simmons Quotes
American
Professor
Seyyed Hossein Nasr Quotes
Iranian
Professor