Category Archives: Literature
Americans think of themselves as the freest people on Earth. After all, they say, they have rule by majority, equality amongst themselves, freedom to do whatever they want, and most importantly, freedom to think whatever they want. The First Amendment to their United States Constitution proclaims the government may not infringe upon freedom of speech. Americans can generally say whatever they want without fear of legal sanction or physical violence. Yet in his seminal work Democracy in America, Alexis de … Continue reading
“Killing to Acquire and Secure Power, for Dummies” would be an apt subtitle for Niccolo Machiavelli’s book The Prince. Within this work, Machiavelli advocates the unrestrained pursuit of power as its own end, without allowing such paltry things as ethics to interfere. If massacring a slew of people will help one get power, one should by all means do it, according to Machiavelli. These advocacies of violence for one’s own selfish ends are not Machiavelli’s only breaks with the teachings … Continue reading
“I profess myself a Mazda-worshipper, a Zoroastrian, having vowed it and professed it. I pledge myself to the well-thought thought, I pledge myself to the well-spoken word, [and] I pledge myself to the well-done action.”1 This oath to believe in God and act according to his principles comes from Zoroastrian scripture, a representative of the millennia-old literature of Persia. Despite its age, scholars have not examined Persian literature to any great degree. Many of its few extant remains lay spread … Continue reading
Object of discussion: Barthelme, Donald. “A City of Churches.” The Best American Short Stories. Ed. John Updike. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000. 503-506. Prester is a town where everyone follows the same philosophy and lives the same way. The town’s residents are not individuals with their own distinct identities, but units comprising a ubiquitous and soulless collective. Surprisingly, Prester is not a city in the old Soviet Union; instead, it is the setting of Donald Barthelme’s “A City of … Continue reading
The most common definition of morality is knowledge of right and wrong. People use morality to justify their actions and decisions. Some individuals also try to impress their own morality upon other people in the belief that standards of right and wrong are the same for everyone. In her essay “On Morality,” Joan Didion objects to such thinking, saying that each person can have a different conception of morality. To illustrate her point, Didion first uses the examples of Klaus … Continue reading
Whenever an idiot teen with anger control problems decides that shooting people in the proper way to express rage, politicians of all political stripes say violence in the media is the cause. After the March 22 school shooting in El Cajon, California, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed that movies and video games foster an “ethic of violence” that results in juvenile killing. People always need convenient scapegoats to blame for society’s problems. The practice of deflecting responsibility is certainly nothing … Continue reading
