Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections on Four Decades of American Moral Experience - Hardcover

Marin, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1883642248 ISBN 13: 9781883642242

Publisher: Steerforth Pr, 1995

Synopsis

For more than thirty years Peter Marin has been thinking about and writing about the moral life of America. His is a rare voice - a writer of the Left who is also a critic of the Left; a secularist who sees modern secular humanism as a failing movement, nearly bankrupt; a thinker who ventures out into the actual world to engage himself directly in the lives of the people about whom he writes. Most often these are society's voiceless and ignored, the spiritually wounded, the down-and-out - welfare mothers, war-damaged veterans, the homeless.
His topics are diverse: the tidal chaos that is adolescence; the foolishness and hedonism of our pop therapies; the unquestioning acceptance of authority that he finds among the followers of a Tibetan Buddhist in Boulder, Colorado; a review of the Vietnam films of Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino which becomes, in Marin's hands, a protracted meditation on the moral pain of the men and women who fought that war. Unifying all of these essays is his unwavering attention to the moral and ethical meanings that lie behind our actions (or lack of action) and his consistent questioning of how we go about finding the magnanimity we owe to all human life in the face of "our fears of strangeness, our hatred of deviance, our love of order and control."

About this title

Reviews

Welfare mothers. Vietnam vets. Alienated adolescents. Homeless men. Everywhere Marin looks he sees morally confused people. What's more, their confusion defies easy resolution within the ethics Marin espouses. But even when he cannot reach resolution, the author insists on an astonishing honesty and rigor in his moral reflections. Readers will be surprised, for instance, to find a self-described secularist conceding that secularism has helped create a destructive moral vacuum in modern culture. Likewise unexpected is the argument that deification of the self leads to a kind of "soft fascism." Whether visiting a Buddhist school in Colorado or interviewing Esalen enthusiasts in San Francisco, the author has an eye for ugly realities that refuse to fit within political orthodoxy. It is those realities that readers must attend to if they are to accept his invitation to participate in a renewed conversation about moral values. A provocative look at a topic too often reduced to sound bites. Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Steerforth Pr
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1883642248
• ISBN 13: 9781883642242
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 265