Word: alien
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WHEN David Riesman quit medicine for the law, a superb clinician moved to a rather alien field. It is this image of Riesman that remains after all the criticisms of this book--a man who is, for all the lapses in reasoning and method this volume suggest, astonishingly perceptive of the disquiet that troubles American intellectuals. Perhaps Riesman will be of more interest to intellectual historians than sociologists of the future, but to either group he has an immediate message about his world that must not be obscured by the real but almost irrelevant lapses in his methods and definitions
Many Britons have long clucked over the U.S. troubles with segregation. The British, they rather suggest, are above all that. But with rising colored immigration from far-off places, more and more Englishmen find themselves living alongside new neighbors who look frightfully alien. In the first five months of this year, 38,700 immigrants came from the West Indies. India and Pakistan-84% more than the same period last year. There is no legal barrier to immigration from Commonwealth countries. The government, worried by the increase, officially talks of finding a solution "as friendly to these people...
...intolerance got reinforcements too. When a former Congregational chapel on Smethwick's main street was converted into a temple to serve the Indian Sikhs who have recently settled in the town, there were fresh mutterings of alien influences. The Anglican vicar of St. Michael's and All Angels Church lamented in his parish magazine that a building which had long been used for Christian worship was now "being renovated, decorated and adapted as a temple for black people to preach what we have always spoken of as heathen rites...
Next, let's not invoke Chaucer. His Troilus and Criseyde is the greatest long narrative poem in our language, and it is also the source of Shakespeare's lve story. But here too the dramatist radically altered the personalities of Chaucer's characters, and adopted an alien, discursive approach...
...women to trust each other, to behave responsibly toward each other and toward the world, by bringing to pass here and now a way of life that will not have to be 'sold,' a way of life so incomparably superior and happier and more just that the alien virus cannot possibly establish itself within...