Word: moralizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...essayist proceeds however to draw some intriguing but quite probably specious conclusions about the mental state of today's American youth, its confusion over a double moral standard: the hedonistic view of the individual versus the Victorian ethos of the community. The essayist exhorts all future writers of Harvard Square sex-fiction to probe more deeply into the unhappiness which is the apparent outcome in most of the stories under discussion, and come up with a moral framework which is bigger, better and all in all more valid than that which exists or is in the process of ceasing...
...scant majority do feel that their "moral concern has grown more intense in the absence of any assurance of God's existence or of an after-life." However, the attitude of the atheist-agnostic group toward undertaking the risks of world government was the same as for the undergraduates as a whole--evenly divided almost exactly--except that, out of the 30 people who responded that they were indifferent to the whole issue, ten were agnostics and one an atheist! On one of the most crucial questions of the twentieth century, it appears, the "enlightened skeptic" exceeds his believing brethren...
...with those words, one reaches the self-contradictory heart of Harvard unbelief--as also in the atheist admiration of Jesus and the agnostic appreciation of the Church. The undergraduate skeptic seems to have forgotten what was the rock on which the Western moral structure has rested for two millenia, forgotten from what book his ethical principles originally sprang, in Whose name meaning and purpose have overtly or covertly been found in life since time immemorial, and at Whose omnipotent behest good and evil were first thought to be distinguished and have been held in rigid antithesis ever since...
...question of questions, that the problem of God is not whether an entity exists or does not exist--about which a cautious skepticism might make sense--but whether the spiritual dynamo of an entire civilization is still running or not, whether the ancient foundation of an entire moral system has been eroded away, whether an awesome Person is alive or dead. Here a decision one way or the other must be made; one "merely for practical purposes" is not "mere", for with postulates so fundamental as this, all purposes are momentously practical...
...part of the latter group of the nuclear holocaust such a conflict would almost certainly entail--as well as a greater reluctance to identify the survival of a North American nation-state with the good of higher culture everywhere and for all time. If so, a deeper moral concern with the fate of this world may be adumbrated here--as well as a strikingly universal sense of direct ethical responsibility...