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...went on to concede that his viewpoint might be shocking and called upon Dante for support, arguing that Dante placed "Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome." In fact, Forster had it backward. Dante placed Brutus and Cassius in the ninth circle for the same reason he put Judas there, not because the three sinners were disloyal to friends but rather because they were disloyal to Church and Empire, and thus to the divine order of things, which Dante trusted far more than...
...they differ radically in purpose and content. The myth has always been the engine of the future, a bright and energetic contraption that owed its efficiency to both American know-how and the hand of God. Except in its occasional celebrations of heroic legends, myth does not gaze backward; it is prospective, not retrospective. Being a creation of the Enlightenment, it is even inclined to be contemptuous of history. As Descartes said, historians are people who spend a lifetime attempting to discover facts about Roman life that any illiterate serving girl in Cicero's time knew well. History...
...driver brakes and shifts into park. His passenger jumps out while the engine is running and slams the door. The transmission pops into reverse, and the car lurches backward. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last week made an "initial determination" that some such sequence has been happening often enough to Ford Motor Co. vehicles to suggest a flaw in their automatic-transmission design. It was a step toward ordering the biggest recall in history, involving some 16 million Ford cars and trucks built between...
...doors and into the classrooms. For example, the sound idea that teachers should concentrate on whetting the interests of students and stirring creativity has been unsoundly used as an excuse to duck detailed schoolwork. Says Columbia's Teachers College Professor Diane Ravitch: "It is really putting things backward to say that if children feel good about themselves, then they will achieve. Instead, if children are learning and achieving, then they feel good about themselves." Ravitch believes U.S. education has suffered much from such pedagogic theories, and especially from the notion, which emerged from the social climate of the 1960s...
Pusey today denies this charge and repeats praise of 12 years ago with an added twist. "He seemed sincerely interested in how to promote modernization in backward parts of the world and he seemed to be doing it pretty well," Pusey says, "But I guess he was doing it too well. That was his problem...