The Good Life
The Moral Individual in an Antimoral World
-
- 139,00 kr
Publisher Description
The Good Life is an engaging, reasoned look at American values: how the angry political right hijacks and corrupts ideas about morality, how the fringe political left abandons the moral outlook, and how antimoralism from many sources results in cruelty, harsh law, dangerous irrationality, corrupt religion, greed, and gross inequality, and undermines American democracy. Cheryl Mendelson reminds us how far these trends have taken us from our roots, and how a humane democracy, with its freedoms, depends on the moral sense of its citizens.
Medelson gives clear-sighted descriptions, free of ideology, of what morality really is, tracing it to its psychological roots, and of the antimoralism behind familiar cultural tics like authoritarianism, the culture of "cool," irrationalist movements in politics and religion, and the sterility of academic attempts to understand the moral life. Along the way, she gives a clear, persuasive explanation of why moral truth exists and why believing this doesn't force us to be dogmatic and judgmental. Mendelson's book is a bracing polemic, but it is also inspiring and, with its eye-opening analysis of the moral mentality, an education in what it means to be moral in an antimoral world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This powerful, thorough book preaches "moral mentality." By following a moral geography mapping the good, moral life, Mendelson (Home Comforts) corrects oversimplified, misleading notions of morality. The author allows that the word "moral" suffers ambiguities, which, she regrets, has resulted in its co-opting by the political right. She is not neutral in her gritty analysis. She names names from Right to Left, from Cheney to Mamet. A professor of philosophy at Barnard College, Mendelson distinguishes among premoral, antimoral, and immoral; she discusses torture and abortion under "pseudomoral." In 10 chapters, she marks among other coordinates the intersections of morality with democracy, family, money, and culture. She assesses the damage of being uncaringly cool or incurably narcissistic; she assails academe in one chapter and carves up puddin'-headed pundits in the last chapter, a long, often impenetrable disquisition. The headnotes quotes from Hume, Leonard Cohen, Nietzsche and others support her theories as much as multiple examples from literature (Shakespeare, Dickens, the Bront s), law, and life. Her style, clean and sharp and heavily footnoted, does not suffer minds "immune to reason."
