It may be that the misperception of the President's call for prudence as a call for selflessness stems from the penchant of elected politicians for dressing up political actions in the exalted language of moral concern.
It is as though the United States, lulled by such ideological foils as Nazism and Communism into an exalted notion of its moral power and mission, missed the central event of the 20th century: the steady, and often violent, political awakening of peoples who had been exposed for decades to the sharp edges of Western power.
Not surprisingly, in Tibet and Burma, where a modern, militarised state tyrannises a largely pre-modern and unorganised population, monasteries have been exalted as alternative centres of moral and political authority, and monks and nuns have come to spearhead resistance to unrighteous regimes.
Sometimes, thanks to corresponding moral prowess in one exalted to society's elite by physical gifts, sport can light a path.
The moral being that whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
He recognizes that style has a moral dimension, and, through the discovery of exalted romance, he attempts to free the style he loves of its prejudicial narrowness and to sublimate it into a variety of freedom that is inseparable from discipline and forethought — into a sort of conditioned spontaneity and refined instinct.
In 1693, however, Guyon lost both her position at Saint-Cyr and the favour of Maintenon after some of her students claimed that they had acquired exalted spiritual states and declared a preference for their own moral judgment, shaped by God in prayer, over obedience to conventional rules.
Museology is in moral crisis after a spate of manic construction that has exalted edifices over their contents, and institutional narcissism over the romance of art lovers and art works.
In the eighteenth century, he goes on, moral realism was challenged by the new ideas of moral Romanticism, whereby the self was exalted rather than distrusted.
As Elshtain's stately summaries of Addams's pronouncements roll on, her voice winds around her subject's, creating odd moments of piety, homiletics and overgeneralization: "Without a mooring in a moral purpose, life scatters, falters, and dries up"; "The modern city degrades what should be exalted".
