Where once they were all fellow members of the intelligentsia, now they are academics, lawyers, publishers, journalists, doctors, and bankers, with diverging ways of life, styles of dress, homes, incomes, and attitudes.
That's a way-of-life decision.
Fiction is naturally drawn to difference, away from homogeneity, drawn to the differentiation of one way from another way, one style of life from another style.
Gandhi keenly registered the moral and psychological effects of this worldwide destruction of old ways and life styles and the ascendancy of Western cultural, political, and economic norms.
Barth (1969), for example, conceived of ethnic distinctions as growing out of contact between collectivities rather than a product of the internal manufacture of cultural styles and ways of life.
Every individual, in this view, is unique, and his personality structure including his unique goal and ways of striving for it finds expression in his style of life, this life-style being the product of his own creativity.
It's this shift of sixties advocacy and styles into seventies ways of life and thought (to put it broadly) that forms the background, and motivates the drama, of a movie that captures that zeitgeist with intelligence and verve: Lawrence Kasdan's "The Big Chill".
Many opposition politicians now talk about halting or rolling back American-style liberalization to protect traditional ways of life.
Culturally, it came under a heavy Persian influence in Iraq, where the Arabs learned the ways and style of life of their conquered people, who were culturally superior to them.
