How to Cite These Archived Letters
Dear Colleague Archive 1991
| Date of Letter | Topic Summary | ID |
|---|---|---|
| 1991-January-01 | "Is America exporting good manners (the kind proper to democracy), along with hamburgers?" | 97 |
| 1991-January-15 | On crime, punishment, and Robert van Gulik's translation of a Chinese detective story of the 18th century, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee | 98 |
| 1991-February-01 | "Faith has the power to wipe out history and the pride of heritage." | 99 |
| 1991-February-15 | Comments on a story from Janwillen van de Wetering | 100 |
| 1991-March-01 | "Society as a whole shows signs of becoming more and more suspicious of science and scholarship. The underlying reason is that it is in the nature of science and scholarship to soar and expand..." | 101 |
| 1991-March-15 | On chance, luck, Norman Schwarzkopf | 102 |
| 1991-April-01 | Detective stories: "...we academics are outsiders and universalists, who sometimes doubt our usefulness to society. Well, sleuths are also outsiders and universalists, but their usefulness to society is not in doubt." | 103 |
| 1991-April-15 | "Our times seem to me remarkably perverse because we take pride only in the accidental and the contingent." | 104 |
| 1991-May-01 | Regarding the Kurds: "People are invisible unless art, even when it is only the minor art of Disney, reminds us of their blood-and-bone presence." | 105 |
| 1991-May-15 | "The modern attitude to life is, then, radically different from the premodern. The other important difference is in regard to truth." | 106 |
| 1991-June-01 | "A utopia that a Lenin or a Mao can only dream of is right here in my neighborhood. Yet I am overcome, at times, by sadness. Is this all? The striving and horrors of history have culminated miraculously in a happy outcome—the best possible outcome, which is the Memorial Union." | 107 |
| 1991-September-01 | "When I look over my file of old correspondence, I inevitably feel depressed...Strange to say, my response to the stories in my commonplace book, none of which are from my own life, is different." | 108 |
| 1991-September-15 | Of bias in ordinary language: "The vocabulary of ethics, once you start to think about it, is more foul and retrograde than any other kind of talk." | 109 |
| 1991-October-01 | Regarding Chinese-Americans: "Can a people have self-confidence without an awareness of their own cultural attainments and heritage?" | 110 |
| 1991-October-15 | "Many universities carry some such transcendental-universalist motto as 'Light and Truth.' The thrust of our enterprise is to seek more light and move closer to truth. And in this enterprise, American universities are highly competitive, as were the Greek city-states." | 111 |
| 1991-November-01 | On the human brain in civilization: "In the West, more and more mental voltage is now apportioned to meeting sociopolitical demands than to those of abstract understanding." | 112 |
| 1991-November-15 | "Homosexuals belong to cosmopolitan civilization. They have always felt more at home in the great cities of the world than in small towns and the provinces." | 113 |
| 1991-December-01 | "How does one communicate with students who only know of "diversity", and for whom "common humanity" is an alien (and probably subversive) concept?" | 114 |
| 1991-December-15 | "The single strongest evidence that Russia is a part of the West is its cult of the individual." | 115 |
Terms of Use, How to Cite.