Idealism

David Sedaris, in his essay Remembering my Childhood on the Continent of Africa, uses clever parallelism, thinly veiled satire, disconnected idealism, and intermittent dialogue to supplement an allegorical analysis of Security and Liberty in Human Society. Sedaris is a well-known comedic author, and his essays tend to be about one subject at face value, but an entirely different one between the lines. This clever distinction allows the reader to enjoy two stories at a time. Given this,…

linguist and social activist Noam Chomsky. If it’s documenting anything, it’s the depth and breadth of Chomsky’s thinking. Noam Chomsky’s new film “Requiem for the American Dream” is a clear-eyed, easily accessible outline of how and why American idealism has been sabotaged. Although he doesn’t detail the dream, Chomsky sketches its promise of mobility, an expectation of progress toward a better life through some sort of democratic polity. These…

called West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his exotic passion and obsession for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the ultimate American Dream. For all the ones who have read the book they would understand that some…

winds of change blew on the ruins of our republic”, Alex recounts. The separation between the eastern and western cultures, communism and capitalism, authoritarianism and democracy was no longer. How far will a son go to shelter his beloved mother’s idealism towards the communist nation she pledged…

The twentieth century is when the past notions of human rights developed fully into a researched document argued and defined by world thinkers as the Universal Declaration of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human rights was not developed out of nothing, it was heralded by idealistic people who saw the world of the early twentieth century, and wanted to define the rights that should be universal to the world. The rights that they wrote had already existed in a multitude of world…

From 1955 to 1975, American soldiers were fighting a war in Vietnam. During this time Marine Lieutenant Philip Caputo landed at Da Nang with the first ground combat unit deployed to Vietnam. Months later, having served on the line in one of history’s ugliest wars, he returned home. Physically whole but emotionally impacted, his adolescent beliefs forever gone. In his book, A Rumor Of War, Philip Caputo offers an insightful analysis regarding the psychological damages a soldier faces post-war.…

Although Machiavelli and Socrates both lived during times of uncertainty, political fragmentation and violence, their philosophies about how the state should conduct itself are in direct contrast with one another. Machiavelli’s the Prince is founded on the principal that if a ruler wishes to maintain power, he should embody the ideology of pragmatism, while Socrates believes the state should follow him in his commitment to moral purity and justice. The inherent dissonance between these…

Attacking the Status Quo Descartes’ Dualism and Material Realism Since Rene Descartes alienated reality into two separate realms, of mind and matter, many philosophers have endeavored to rationalize the capacity of human consciousness within Cartesian dualism. Science, or more precisely quantum physics, have introduced persuasive reasons to be skeptical of a dualistic philosophy as being conceivable. In order for the realms of mind and matter to interact, physics claims that an exchange of…

Nearly everyone recognizes the impact that Jackie Robinson had on Major League Baseball and other professional sports, but not everyone realizes that Jackie Robinson simply stepping foot on a baseball field impacted the world of politics, the entertainment industry and the entire Civil Rights movement. The United States was slowly becoming more racially equal in the mid 1900s. “In 1948, President Harry Truman ordered the armed forces to desegregate, in 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board…

Wallace Nutting was a purveyor of a past that fit his own conservative ideas. A charismatic salesman of history, he constantly sought to challenge the status quo. Thomas Denenberg uses Wallace Nutting’s brand of colonial idealism as a parallel with an American society on the precipice of social change at the turn of the century. Nutting successfully provided the middle class an escape from the adversity of the “machine age”. Using Wallace Nutting as a tool to discuss anti-modernism, Denenberg…