Word: mindlessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...other American minority cultures in that they often rediscover the value of their heritage here. I'm not talking now about a belief in God (an embarrassing topic at Harvard); I'm simply concerned with cultural identity. For other groups--like Catholics--Harvard is still an engine of mindless assimilation, cutting people off from their past...
...past and to fill the void with a new consciousness: "So far, the sounds of electronic music are meaningless, like the drippings and droppings of the abstract expressionist and action painters, like the words and images that the beat poets seek to capture with a tape recorder during their mindless monologues or in the trances of drug-taking...They want to carry nothing forward, but to get rid of all their inherited aesthetic and intellectual lumber; they have no public hope, for they feel soiled and guilty from contact with any part of existing society. They want to strip bare...
...Writes Mumford in The City in History: "Another century of such 'progress' may work irreparable damage upon the human race. Instead of deliberately creating an environment more effective than the ancient city, . . . our present methods would smooth out differences and reduce potentialities, to create a state of mindless unconsciousness . The polite name for this creature is 'man-in-space,' but the correct phrase is 'man out of his mind...
...made understandable. But throughout Virgin Spring, obsession is the key character trait. Ingeri, the slut who, in envy of the girl, casts the spel! that precedes her rape and death, excuses the murdrers by saying Odin has possessed them. The parallel to the householder's mindless slaughter of the murderers and blind dragging of his followers back to the scene of his daughter's death, is surely intentional. Obsession and tension make compelling viewing; they do not make persuasive or perceptive art. Bergman wanders instead into a morass of behavioristic description which robs his stories of meaning and depth...
...looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject...