Word: purposeless
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What riveted the public, in the wink of an eye, was Carter's use of the words "screw" and "shack up" while making a candid, purposeless admission that like other humans, he harbors lustful thoughts. With that, the Democratic nominee opened himself to titillating ridicule, bluenose outrage and serious questions about his judgment: should a presidential candidate choose a public forum where he will share attention with busty "Miss November" and a blurb heralding "Much More Sex in Cinema"? The cover promotion for the Carter story: "Now, the Real Jimmy Carter on Politics, Religion, the Press...
Oswald Spengler had been developing somewhat similar theories as early as the first volume of Decline of the West in 1918. But while Spengler argued that the decay of civilizations was inexorable and essentially purposeless, Toynbee insisted that man retains his freedom of choice: "I do not believe that civilizations have to die...Civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills." Moreover, it has a purpose, a dimly perceived but divinely ordained purpose. "History," he wrote, "[is] a vision of God's creation on the move...
...humility, since the nation is continually held accountable to judgment by the Almighty. The covenant idea can also restore the faith in the future that once characterized the U.S. Neuhaus contends that if Americans lose the belief that God is working toward a culmination, history is seen as purposeless. He worries that America's intellectual leaders are so "emancipated" from religion that spiritual questions are cloaked in secular terms like "national purpose." Thus discussion of public policy is "floundering in moral evasiveness and mendacity." Neuhaus scorns the "vulgar anti-Americanism" of many intellectuals and says that because they...
Sociologist Palmer believes that the competitive, increasingly computerized and mechanized nature of U.S. society is creating more and more lost and purposeless people. To a degree, those conditions exist in most industrialized nations. But in the U.S. they are especially intense and combined with particularly American elements that have almost become cliches: the loosening of many moral and social restraints on all kinds of behavior in an increasingly lax society; the decline of tradition and the breakdown of the family; the mobility of American life that so often turns into rootlessness; the U.S. frontier culture of violence and its still...
WHEN WILLIAM POWELL. Boston brahmin dropout from the purposeless life of the idle rich reveals at the end of La Cava's My Man Godtrey that his idea of how to cure Depression America's woes is to build nightclubs staffed by the unemployed, the letdown we feel is the characteristic failure of. Hollywood comedies about social problems. Throughout the film. Powell describes the injustice of a system which permits the callous extravagance of the society families he serves as butler, yet when the smoke clears the flowing champagne on Sulton Place drowns the social' criticism which gave the film...