Ethnic Differences
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A number of efforts have been made since the onset of the scientific age toward measuring various traits in order to identify specific characteristics differentiating racial characteristics, often in an attempt to show that certain groups are inferior to the majority Caucasian group. Stephen Jay Gould describes a number of these efforts as they were attempted in the early decades of this century, often as a means of classifying and even rejecting immigrants on the basis of supposed intelligence or criminal tendencies. Such efforts are attempts at proving a determinist perspective, and Gould wants to show that there are scientific weaknesses to this perspective and also that they occur in a political rather than a scientific context. We often confuse the concept of "racial" groups with "ethnic" groups, and we may use the terms interchangeably when they refer to very different types of group differences. In many ways, our society expresses confusion on the issue, at one time seeming to make the distinction, while at other times failing to do so. At other times, we may speak of the two as if they are one. Recently, of course, the entire issue has been complicated by a scientific view that race itself has no meaning and that racial distinctions are themselves false. This is in contravention to the long-standing view that the concept of race did indeed have meaning and that there were real biological differences among the races, while now scientists say that these differen
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case, as he repeats many times, Gould finds that the whole enterprise was flawed in its purpose, more political than scientific--to find a rationale for excluding certain immigrant groups and for elevating others.
Work Cited
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.
In his book Rites of Spring, Modris Eksteins uses the opening performance of Le Sacre du printemps in 1913 as a paradigm of the era prior to World War I, an era in which much of the most exciting and influential work in the arts was being done in Paris. This was the end of the era that would later come to be known as la belle époque. It was not a movement but a period in time, in some ways the last gasp of beauty and good living before the storm of the war. This era is strongly identified with the French idea of the good life, with good wine, good food, wit, sensuality, and sociability. Of course, this view of the time is a view from a distance, for this period had its problems and was not necessarily as filled with the joy of life as we might like to think from our safe distance. The use of the term la belle époque both draws upon and adds to the reputation of Paris and France in general as a taste maker, as Eksteins notes
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1779
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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