The Good Life
The Moral Individual in an Antimoral World
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
The Good Life is a deeply reasoned but entertaining polemic about how the notion of morality has been co-opted by the political right, as the culture increasingly embraces the shallow charms of celebrity, gives a pass when it comes to failings in the realm of marital fidelity, and lives comfortably with the notion that we are all driven, more or less, by greed and the desire for power over others. Mendelson, who is for gay rights, sexual equality, labor unions, and the strong regulation of business and finance, is decidedly conservative when it comes to personal morality. She believes that while the right manages to effectively portray its opponents as socialist slackers, it claims a moral superiority it doesn't at all exhibit, lacking, as she says, moral compassion, one of the essential moral virtues. Provocative, inspiring, and deeply grounded, The Good Life shows that while the moral life is a hard road, the more of us who recognize that it is out there to be attempted, the better our culture will be.
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."
