Critical reading not only for those who want to improve the world, but also for those who think we shouldn’t bother.
This collection of essays, taken from talks given by the author to Ethical Culture audiences over a 35-year span, explores the philosophy and history of ethics.
Chuman (Why the Ethical Movement Is so Small and What We Can Do About It, 1988) has been a pillar of the Ethical Culture movement for nearly five decades. This diverse collection introduces lay readers to what it means to be ethical and humanistic and how this moral stance differs from those based purely on reason or religion. After establishing that an ethical person “recognizes the importance of moral values and intends to act on them,” Chuman’s book breaks into four sections: “Ethics in Private Life,” which discusses subjects pertinent to the individual, such as sin and the pursuit of happiness; “Public Questions,” featuring topics one encounters in public life and how to address them, such as politics and the criticism of religion; “Humanist Heroes,” a survey of freethinkers throughout history, including Spinoza and the Founding Fathers; and “Interpretations of Ethical Culture,” which details the movement’s facets, from its spiritual tolerance to the value of reason. Throughout, Chuman uses his rigorous intellect—and savvy as a lecturer—to challenge dangerous suppositions, never backing away from difficult questions. In “A Humanist Looks at Sin,” he brings startling lucidity to the argument: “The problem of the notion of sin is that it makes a fetish and a celebration out of a particular aspect of human experience,” he says. “It seizes upon and dogmatizes pessimism.” And Chuman succeeds in maintaining a conversational tone; he never rants or condescends, even when covering basic ideas. For example, “The giving of myself in the effort to help another, not simply with transitory assistance, but in a way which leads toward his or her growth and greater actualization, is what I mean by caring.” Further into the collection, he delves into more fine-grained discussions, such as the problem with extreme secularism, which reward readers not only with provocative displays of reasoning, but with electrifying insights: “We are creatures of reason, to be sure….But our humanity extends far more broadly than our reason does.”
Critical reading not only for those who want to improve the world, but also for those who think we shouldn’t bother.Pub Date: March 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492804468
Page Count: 324
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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