GRE考试写作范文——Issue 146_GRE写作

GRE考试写作范文——Issue 146

　　Lending credence to this explanation for the paradoxical nature of the speaker s claim are the many historical cases of uneasy marriages between commitment to and criticism of the same idea or policy. For example, Edward Teller, the so-called father of the atom bomb, was firmly committed to America s policy of gaining military superiority over the Japanese and the Germans; yet at the same time he attempted fervently to dissuade the U.S. military from employing his technology for destruction, while becoming the most visible advocate for various peaceful and productive applications of atomic energy. Another example is George Washington, who was quoted as saying that all the world s denizens should abhor war wherever they may find it. Yet this was the same military general who played a key role in the Revolutionary War between Britain and the States. A third example was Einstein, who while committed to the mathematical soundness of his theories about relativity could not reconcile them with the equally compelling quantum theory which emerged later in Einstein s life. In fact, Einstein spent the last twenty years of his life criticizing his own theories and struggling to determine how to reconcile them with newer theories.

　　In the face of historical examples supporting the speaker s claim are innumerable influential individuals who were zealously committed to certain ideas and policies but who were not critical of them, at least not outwardly. Could anyone honestly claim, for instance, that Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who in the late 19th Century paved the way for the women s rights movement by way of their fervent advocacy, were at the same time highly critical or suspicious of the notion that women deserve equal rights under the law? Also, would it not be absurd to claim that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, history s two leading advocates of civil disobedience as a means to social reform, had serious doubts about the ideals to which they were so demonstrably committed? Finally, consider the two ideologues and revolutionaries Lenin and Mussolini. Is it even plausible that their demonstrated commitment to their own Communist and Fascist policies, respectively, belied some deep personal suspicion about the merits of these policies? To my knowledge no private writing of any of these historical figures lends any support to the claim that these leaders were particularly critical of their own ideas or policies.