War in the Closed World (4): Incidents from the Revolution

Sunday Night Journal — February 22, 2010

I’m discovering a problem with my plan for producing a new piece of this book every week in a blog post. In addition to the basic problems that anyone beginning a book must address—where to begin, what structure to use or at least tentatively aim for—there’s the problem that a blog post of a thousand words or so is a self-contained unit. If it doesn’t tell a more or less complete story, it should at least make some specific point. But the pieces of this narrative that are taking shape in my mind don’t necessarily fit the mold. At the moment I’m floundering, and am offering just a few more anecdotes in the vein of last week’s.

Winter of 1967, in a dormitory room at the University of Alabama. This was my freshman year. I had become friends with one of the guys in the room next door. We had discovered a bond in our alienation from the normal world, and spent hours in conversation. This semester would be our last in the dorm; next fall we would share an apartment off-campus, and would continue to do so until the spring of 1970. I will have more to say about him later. At the moment I’m remembering a single remark, one that remains with me out of many hours of forgotten conversation. We talked a great deal about our sympathy with the radical movements happening in more sophisticated parts of the country; we’d been reading about them for several years in Time and Life and Newsweek, and seeing them on TV, and we felt an instinctive sympathy with them, though as I recall it our sense of kinship had nothing much to do with the specific political and cultural goals of those movements, and a great deal to do with a formless dissatisfaction and impulse to rebel.

We had taken to writing our favorite quotations on the walls of our rooms (an indulgence for which our parents would pay after we moved out). On his wall there was a juxtaposition of two quotations. One was Jefferson’s famous statement about slavery: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Just below that was Voltaire: “Crush the infamous thing.” (It would be twenty years or more before I learned that Voltaire was speaking of the Church, or at least of its authorities—écrasez l'infâme.)  Did he mean that America should be crushed?, I wondered. “Anything would be better than what we have,” he replied.

I think I made some weak sound of agreement, which was dishonest, because I was shocked and didn’t agree at all. Could he really think of nothing worse than living in the United States of America? I could think of a great many things. Certainly there wasn’t much in the way of material goods that we could complain of lacking, especially in comparison with most of the rest of the world. (I hadn’t yet learned that any deficiency in another country, especially a poor one, was at bottom our fault.)

But he was two years older than I, and far more knowledgeable about most things. My failure to grasp that we were actually living in a nightmare must indicate some lack of sophistication on my part, some dullness of perception.

Late 1969 or early 1970. I was sitting in Kwik-Snak, an old-fashioned diner, just off the university campus, with a friend, a former student who had dropped out of school after a year or so and moved to Atlanta. She still maintained contact with a few friends in Tuscaloosa and seemed to enjoy telling us impressive tales from the big city, where the drugs were more powerful, the politics more radical, the hippies more crazy, the police more brutal. I was belittling the hard-core leftists who, in this year of escalating tension, of Kent State and other landmark events of the struggle between left-wing youth and the establishment, seemed to take Communism, or rather some not-very-coherent hodgepodge of Communist slogans, as a serious project, a goal for our revolution. I made some disparaging remark about how miserable it would be to live in the Soviet Union—I was bourgeois enough to believe that the picture we had of it was probably fairly accurate, capitalist bias in the media notwithstanding.

“Yes,” she said, “the Russian revolution didn’t work out too well. But the Chinese revolution, now—that’s a different story.”

I looked at her silently. Did she not believe what was being reported of Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Or did she believe it, and think it was a good thing? In either case, one of us was seriously deluded. I didn’t think it was I, but I wasn’t sure. Perhaps, again, I was just too dull, or too conditioned by my middle-class prejudices, to recognize the truth.

Spring of 1970. The same friend was visiting again (and by the way, “friend” is not a euphemism here—we had no romantic involvement), this time having brought with her several of her Atlanta friends, by way of demonstrating to us just how much more hip and radical they were in comparison to us provincial college-town hippies. They stayed with me, or us—I don’t recall my roommate being there, but perhaps he was. It was a tiny three-room place—front room, kitchen, bedroom. The front room was crammed with the visitors and various local friends and acquaintances who happened to stop by. It was stuffy and smoky and uncomfortable both physically and psychologically; there was a lot of posturing going on. One of the people from Atlanta was a big loud abrasive young woman who spoke in a sort of continuing sneer. She was telling some story that involved the fact that “her old man”—meaning her boyfriend, or, perhaps, husband—was in jail. I don’t remember why, probably drugs.

One of the locals, a kid, fairly new to the scene, an open-faced, enthusiastic, puppy-ish sort, was not up-to-date with the slang. He was appalled. “Your old man? They put your father in jail?”

The woman looked at him with scorn. “My. Old. Man.”

“You mean they put your father in jail? Oh my God, I can’t believe they put your father in jail”

She did not intend to compromise her status by compromising her language. More slowly, and more emphatically, she repeated “My. Old. Man.”

Her tone and her look were withering, and the boy finally understood that he was being put down. He looked embarrassed and fell silent.

Looking back on it now, I think this subculture of liberation was the most rigidly conformist environment I’ve ever experienced. But at the time I was as intimidated as my poor guest, and although I was offended by the woman’s deliberate cruelty, I still felt it was a deficiency in me that made me feel so out of place.

War in the Closed World (3): Incidents from the Revolution

Sunday Night Journal — February 14, 2010

I’m not making any effort at this point to begin at the beginning of my story. The order in which pieces of it appear here may have nothing to do with their order in the final work. For now I’m only rummaging around in my memories, and writing about whichever of them is uppermost in my mind on any Sunday.

I can’t remember exactly when this first incident happened, but it was certainly no earlier than 1968, and probably no later than 1969. I would have been a sophomore or junior in college, at the University of Alabama. Beyond the west end of the campus there was a residential area of many blocks consisting of old houses that had been divided into apartments. I lived in that general area, as did most of my friends and acquaintances. I was at the apartment of some one of these, though I have no idea now whose it was, or why I was there, or  anything else except a vague memory of it being a typically shabby, messy hippie apartment.

All I remember is something said by one of the people there. I’ll call him Roger. I didn’t know him very well. He was an influential person in the fairly small but very visible campus radical community. But unlike most of us, who hurled contempt on the conventional world from outside and were ready to burn our bridges to it (or thought we were), he seemed to want to keep one foot in the mainstream. He was active in campus politics. He dressed neatly and fairly conventionally. His hair was a little longer than was usual but not excessively so—it didn’t hang to his shoulders or puff out in an unkempt frizz. I thought of him when the records of Bill Clinton’s attempts to avoid the draft were published: Clinton, as you may recall, was very concerned with “maintaining his viability within the system.” As, it seemed, was Roger.

I think I recall that he paid only a brief visit to whatever group was assembled in the apartment. Perhaps he was politicking; I recall that we was talkative, in a way that seemed to me a little stagey. I recall him standing at the door, about to leave, and giving a little speech, of which I recall only the last words: we, the radicals, would do this, and we would do that, and the effect would be to “free up this university.”

Addled though I was with the desire to rebel in every way, I still had enough of my wits about me to wonder what he meant. I went home wondering what he meant, and I suppose it’s significant that I still remember the moment. What and where were the chains from which we needed to be freed? What in the university was oppressing us? What was it that he thought we should be able to do that we were being prevented from doing? We were American college students, and by virtue of that fact alone among the most privileged people in the world. Whatever rules the university imposed on us were fairly trivial and easily evaded. True, there were laws forbidding the use of drugs, and they were a threat to us, but the university had nothing to do with those laws and no power to change them. There were still restrictions on the girls who lived in the dormitories, but few in our crowd lived there.

The question recurred to me from time to time: free to do what? Not to do the work assigned in our classes? Perhaps that was it: we should be given good grades and degrees regardless of whether or not we earned them; surely the demand that we do one thing and not another was oppressive in itself.

But of course the most likely thing is that he had nothing in particular in mind. It was only words, the sort of words we used all the time, never troubling ourselves to look closely at what we might mean by them. But yet they were not entirely empty words: they did express a real anger, obscure and incoherent though it was.

Some time after this—and I think I can pin this down to sometime in the winter or spring of 1970—Jerry Rubin, a then-famous radical activist, was invited by some student group to speak on campus. I think there was a controversy about whether the administration would allow him to speak, but in the end he did, in Foster Auditorium. I went to hear him. I remember a crowd mostly standing; if there were seats there must not have been enough. I remember Rubin barking and ranting from the stage, but not a single word he said; I think it’s safe to assume that it was poisonous nonsense.

What I remember is a brief encounter with Roger. He came up to me in the crowd and said the crowd was too quiet; he wanted things to be livelier. He told me to move around in the crowd and clap and cheer and try to get others to do the same. And I  remember feeling that what my ears were telling me was so appalling that I had trouble believing them.

If there was any firm and specific conviction that was supposed to characterize our movement, it was that one was always to be authentic—never to pretend to any thought or emotion that was not genuine, never to behave in a way that was not a direct expression of what one really felt or thought. The commercial and political hype that dominated American life was evil, filling the air and the minds of the people with manipulative falsehoods, and we were to deny and defy that spirit in our lives as well as in our politics. And here was someone telling me to engage in just the sort of manipulation we despised.

I reacted as a believing Christian might on being asked to assist in perpetrating a fraudulent miracle: disgusted and angry. Of course I was absurdly naïve; the various radical movements were at least as much interested in imagery and advertising as any corporation. I don’t remember giving Roger any answer, and he moved on through the crowd, trying to get people worked up.

I can’t say this was any sort of turning point for me, but it was one of many moments of disillusionment that didn’t so much turn me against the movement as toward a very dark cynicism (which came naturally to me anyway). It is well to be stripped of destructive illusions, even if it’s painful. I just wish I hadn’t had these particular illusions in the first place.

Conservative and Catholic (2)

Sunday Night Journal — January 31, 2010

The contention that to be a conservative is to be less than fully Catholic has a further implication with which I disagree: that there is another set of socio-economic and political opinions which is fully Catholic, and to which therefore a faithful Catholic ought to subscribe.

I don’t think this is true at any very detailed and specific level. Obviously there are Catholic social principles which have the teaching authority of the Church behind them. And obviously Catholics are obliged to honor and to the best of their ability implement these principles. But there is room for a great many approaches to the implementation, and consequently for a great deal of legitimate disagreement. There is no simple and clear solution to most social problems which represents the only truly Catholic way.

For instance, in the comments on the Caelum et Terra discussion I mentioned last week, Daniel describes hearing Fr. Benedict Groeschel, whom I admire immensely, speak of illegal immigration and deliver

…a fiery denunciation against any hostility to our brothers and sisters who come here seeking work, and quoted the Old Testament on how defrauding the laborer of his wage is a sin which cries to heaven for vengeance. This last in reference to the fact that illegal immigrants pay Social Security payroll taxes, which they will never receive back in retirement.

As a description of the spirit in which this problem ought to be addressed, this is excellent, and one could hardly disagree with it. But it’s pretty useless as a solution to the problem, as it doesn’t even address the numerous conflicting claims of rights and justice involved in the situation. Just to mention one of those, there is the question of the effect of illegal immigrants on the jobs and wages available to citizens. I have seen with my own eyes African-American workers replaced with Mexican ones who are undoubtedly working for lower wages. Which has the stronger claim to justice at the expense of the other? Fr. Groeschel’s “fiery denunciation” can’t tell us. The immigration question represents an odd alliance of capitalists, who want cheap labor and don’t care where it comes from, and leftists who apparently don’t believe that the United States has any right to control its borders, or to treat its citizens differently from non-citizens. The American citizens who might have done many of these jobs don’t seem to matter much to either group. I think it was the younger president Bush who often referred to “jobs Americans won’t do,” neglecting to add the crucial qualifier “for the wages offered.”

Which suggests another example, the question of the just wage or living wage. It’s a clear Catholic teaching that workers should be paid a living wage. But there are many details of the implementation of that principle which have to be worked out in practice, with great attention to the possibility of unintended consequences.. Should, for instance, an employer pay a married man with children more than an unmarried person? If the answer is yes, should it be enforced by law? To do so would create a huge incentive for employers not to hire that married man. And what of the fact that the whole pattern of breadwinner-husband stay-at-home-wife has mostly dissolved here and in Europe? In principle all such vagaries and unintended consequences could be forestalled by more and more laws, but that effort tends toward the placement of most economic activity under state control, and that hasn’t worked out very well where it’s been tried.

Illustrations could be multiplied. My point is not to address either of these problems, immigration or wages, but to insist that the path from principle to policy is often not at all clear.

That a Catholic approach to politics is not fully encompassed in either conventional conservatism or conventional liberalism is obviously true. That a Catholic is compromised by aligning himself with one or the other is not therefore true. Each represents a way of approaching practical solutions, each emphasizes a different set of problems and preferred ways of solving them. However much we may complain about the inadequacies and distortions and inconsistencies present in the broad description of political forces in this country as a contest between “conservative” and “liberal”—I think “progressive” is a better term—the description persists because it is applicable enough to be useful; the forces denoted by the two terms do exist.

For my part—as I said last week—I find that on the whole my views coincide much more with conservatism than progressivism, and so am willing to call myself a conservative. That identification isn’t terribly important to me; it is only important at the moment because I resent the charge that it makes me less than fully Catholic. Others may hold themselves aloof from both sides, and I have no argument with that. And I don’t mind people considering themselves to be right and me wrong when we disagree; that’s life. Nor do I have any argument in principle with those who want to build a political movement which is explicitly Catholic and which would agree with conservatives about some things and progressives about others (though I suspect that any such movement would, in our climate, be treated as “conservative,” which would be very frustrating to its adherents).

But to declare oneself the enemy and superior of those who do associate themselves with one side or the other is only to create another side, a faction. I consider factionalism to be one of the great problems facing the Church, at least in this country. It usually involves the separating or distancing of oneself  from others by going beyond the unity in essentials prescribed by St. Augustine and insisting on unity in matters where legitimate disagreement—Augustine’s liberty—exists.

And yes, I see the danger of starting a faction obsessed with deploring factionalism. My intention is simply to avoid participating in it as much as possible, and so, having made this point once, I don’t plan to harp on it.

Catholic and Conservative (1)

Sunday Night Journal — January 24, 2010

This is another topic I that need to get out of the way before I can focus primarily on the memoir upon which I’ve embarked. It’s a bit of unfinished business from last year, and there will be at least one more installment, possibly two.

Back in April I was one of a group of people who received an email from my friend Daniel Nichols on the use of torture by the American government. A discussion followed, and soon, via attention to the approval of so-called “enhanced interrogation” by many conservatives, became focused on the nature of conservatism. Things became a bit testy, and a bit later the argument spilled over into a post (by Daniel) and comments on the Caelum et Terra blog. That discussion in turn became heated; I lost my temper and withdrew. Since then I’ve intended to revisit the topic at enough length to state my position clearly and then be done with it.

The email discussion of course is not publicly available, but the blog discussion is here. I mention the email only because I want to note that the antagonistic tone of the C&T exchange did not spring up as quickly as it appears to have done, but had already been established in the email discussion. One remark in particular had fired me up: the assertion that the term “conservative” is “an idol of the mind.” A debate with a Catholic man ceases to be friendly when someone suggests that he is in thrall to an idol.

Normally I just allow these teapot-tempests in the blogosphere to slip away and be forgotten. But I want to say more on this subject because, beyond the immediate provocations in those two exchanges, I’ve had a long-simmering resentment of the insinuation, discernible in this debate, that to be a conservative is to be less than fully Catholic.

It is certainly true that conservatism as a socio-political category, and a very broad one, encompasses all sorts of people who are not Catholic and have all sorts of ideas that are not Catholic. Some of these ideas are “not Catholic” only in the sense that the one who holds them arrived at his position by some other means than reasoning from Catholic principles. Some are “not Catholic” in the sense that they are in contradiction to Catholic principles, and of course there’s a danger that a Catholic conservative will be unduly influenced by these. Our political life today operates at a pretty high level of anger—dangerously high, I think—and in the heat of battle people tend to become reactionary and to accept ideas and behavior from their own side which they would condemn from the other. Obviously a Catholic has to be on guard against letting this tendency lead him astray. And there’s nothing wrong with challenging a Catholic conservative on some specific instance of this; in fact if the matter is serious one ought to do it. But the suggestion that merely to classify oneself as a conservative in itself compromises one’s fidelity to the Church is wrong, and rests on a misconception about conservatism.

For a Catholic to participate in any political activity at all involves some risk of absorbing views which are to some degree incompatible with the teachings of the Church, because it involve collaborating with people who hold those views. You have to make common cause with people who don’t share your fundamental principles, and you must be ready to defend your cause on the grounds that it promotes the common good in ways that are at least widely, if not universally, agreed upon, not on the grounds that the Church teaches it. If you aren’t prepared to deal with this, you really aren’t prepared to engage in politics in our society. To refuse the compromises inevitable in politics is a defensible position, though I don’t think the purist necessarily occupies higher moral ground than the participant. The tension between the two is always with us, and each helps keep the other from absurdity.

But I digress. I think the main point of contention here lies not in the matters of participation and contamination, but in a more basic disagreement about the nature of conservatism. What sort of thing is it? I don’t mean “what do conservatives believe?” but rather “to what category does conservatism itself belong?”

My opponents in the disagreement documented above seem to believe that it is, or at least intends to be, a systematic philosophy, which makes it a rival to the Church, which in turn makes a Catholic who is also a conservative less than fully faithful to the Church because, as we all know, a man cannot serve two masters. They also insist that it fails as a system, because it is full of contradictions and inconsistencies; it is not only a rival to the Church, but an incoherent one.

I have to say that the attempt to respond to this complaint reminded me of arguing with objectivists, in that in both cases there is an insistence that certain terms must be defined with absolute precision or be dismissed as meaningless. The statement that the word “conservative” does not have a very precise meaning is taken as an admission that it has no meaning at all.

But life is full of things which don’t lend themselves to precise definition, but yet exist, thereby making meaningful the words by which they are named. There are many such terms in the arts. Terms like “romantic” and “classical” cannot be defined in such a way that as to remove all doubt about whether or not any given work belongs to one of those categories, and there are others that are even more slippery—post-romantic, neo-classical, jazz. There are very few, if any, artists or individual works of art which fit perfectly into any of these categories, or which does not contain elements of both. Yet we continue to use these words because they serve a purpose in describing broad tendencies. If a critic describes one pianist’s playing as more romantic than another’s, everyone knows what he means; no one shouts Define your terms! And if he did, he would be laughed at, and deserve to be.

In answering the question “what sort of thing is conservatism?” these aesthetic terms provide the most useful analogy I’ve been able to come up with. Like them, the word “conservative” is more descriptive than prescriptive (as conservatives often note). Like them, it does not begin with a set of abstract principles. Like them, it is more understandable as a product of temperament and attitudes than as a book of rules. As Russell Kirk insisted, it is not an ideology, but rather the negation of ideology. It is a concrete human phenomenon, not an invented system. It has no necessary metaphysic, and one may be a conservative and an atheist, or a conservative and a Catholic. It is a loose alliance of people with broadly similar views about the management of worldly affairs.

I began to call myself a conservative thirty years or so ago because I kept noticing that my views on socio-political matters were very often in agreement with what people who called themselves conservatives believed. I studied no catechism and assented to no body of doctrine. I certainly never expected to agree with everyone who calls himself a conservative, and in fact did, and do, disagree frequently with many of them. But the areas of agreement were, and are, great enough that the label continues to fit me, more or less. When or if that ceases to be true, I’ll cease to accept the term for myself.

I judge conservative ideas by the light of the Catholic faith, and not vice versa. Certainly there are plenty of examples of people who seem to be doing the opposite, though I think one ought to be careful about drawing that conclusion, as it presumes knowledge of another’s mind and heart which is ordinarily not available to us. And it is important to recognize that no political faction can be identified with the Catholic faith (this seems so obvious to me as to hardly need stating, though I sometimes see evidence that it does). But I reject absolutely the charge that to call myself a conservative constitutes, in itself, a lapse or defect, conscious or unconscious, in my fidelity to the Church.

Sounds to Grow On: The Smithsonian-Folkways Podcasts

Sunday Night Journal — January 17, 2010

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple of months or so and have had trouble making the time for it, so I’m going to allocate this week’s journal to it.

Anyone with an interest in American folk music is probably aware of Folkways Records, a company founded in 1948 by Moses Asch which did much to document and preserve the American folk legacy, as well as folk music of other countries. The recordings now belong to the Smithsonian Institution, and the Smithsonian, in collaboration with Moses Asch’s son Michael, is producing (or has produced) a series of 26 hour-long radio programs in which Michael rambles around the Folkways collection playing music and commenting on it. The programs are available as podcasts and can be found here. (Note to the technologically less-than-up-to-date: they’re really just MP3 files which can be downloaded and played with any audio software, e.g. Windows Media Player; the “podcast” paraphernalia just provides some extra conveniences.) I don’t especially like the title of the series, which rather smells of “social consciousness” didacticism, and indeed there is some of that—more on that topic in a minute—but in general this is great stuff.

Each program is organized around some particular theme, and of course some are more interesting than others. I’ve listened to six of them so far, and the most interesting of these has been “The Unfortunate Rake,” which traces the evolution of a folk song from 18^th century England to 20^th century America. Did you know that the songs “The Streets of Laredo” and “St. James Infirmary” are both descendants of a song called “The Unfortunate Rake”? I had no idea; they have very little in common now.

It’s indicative of…something or other…that although I grew up in the south, which is the  source of much of the most memorable American folk music, I knew almost nothing of the real thing until I encountered it in recordings. This began with the pop-folk of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, with groups like the Kingston Trio and the Brothers Four and the Highwaymen. I am indebted to an uncle, one of my mother’s brothers, and his wife for introducing me to music that was much closer to the roots. At first much of this was too rough and ragged for me, but I got over that, and still listen to the music I first heard there, which I can’t say about the Kingston Trio et.al. (though I think some of their music is worthwhile on its own terms, as a variety of pop music).

Much of what I heard at my aunt and uncle’s house was on the Folkways label, and I remember being fascinated by the packaging of the records themselves: they looked crude compared to the products of the big companies, and the notes appeared to have been typed (I mean, on a typewriter) and crudely duplicated. But the jackets were thick and sturdy, as was the vinyl on which the records were pressed. Some of mine are in much better shape than major label LPs that I’ve had just as long and treated no more badly. And the notes were full and factual and interesting. I remember in particular a Furry Lewis record (here) which, as far as I can recall, was my first encounter with slide guitar, which I love to this day. As B.B. King said of hearing Bukka (Booker) White’s slide, “that sound would go all through me.” And it still does. (Listen to the sample of “Pearlee Blues” at the link above.)

The Smithsonian is doing a great, great service by preserving and distributing these recordings and producing shows like “Songs to Grow On.” You can buy CDs and MP3s online, and in the latter case, you can download the liner notes in PDF format, something which very few labels are doing and which deserves particular praise on the part of those of us who like to learn something about the music we’re listening to.

As everyone with any interest at all in the topic knows, the interest in American folk music in the 1940s and ‘50s was predominantly a left-wing phenomenon. Though the authentic artists themselves had no particular political agenda, their urban admirers most certainly did. The Folkways catalog reflects this, sometimes in a pretty heavy-handed way, as does the “Songs to Grow On” series. Some of the material is not “folk” by normal definition, e.g. a program devoted to the Harlem Renaissance. And Michael Asch is pretty obviously a committed leftist. So you have to put up with a certain amount of left-wing propaganda in the programs, and mostly that’s not hard for a non-sympathizer like me to do. It’s well meant, I think, if naïve. But there is one moment of foolishness—to use no harsher term—that requires comment.

It’s toward the end of the first program in the series. Asch is discussing the optimism that followed World War II, the hope that a better world would follow the carnage. But these hopes were not to be realized, he says. I waited for what would come next, the explanation of what went wrong. And I shouldn’t have been surprised when it came, but I was. The answer, according to Asch: the hope for a better world was “a dream dashed with the Red scare.”

Perhaps it was understandable at the time, but there is no excuse for such views today, though I know they are still widely held (see almost any Hollywood treatment of the times). Anyone who can look at what the Soviet Union and China were doing in the years following WWII, or simply to refuse to look at all, and conclude that anti-communism was the great evil of the time is willfully blind. I’m not sure whether such blindness deserves pity or scorn, but it certainly does not deserve respect. It’s like a southerner blaming abolitionists for ruining the old South.

That didn’t stop me from enjoying the rest of the programs I’ve heard, and I’m hoping there won’t be anything else quite as egregious, though I may skip the program devoted to Sacco and Vanzetti.

There is an interesting rundown of the politics of the folk movement in this recent article at First Things. I think it’s factually correct though it exhibits little awareness of the fact that most people who liked this music simply liked the music.

One Thing You Must Understand About the 1960s If You Want To Understand Anything At All About the 1960s

Sunday Night Journal — January 10, 2010

Every time I begin to write about the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s, I immediately come up against the question of what to call it. “The ‘60s” is hardly adequate—a great many things happened in the 1960s, and I am not talking about, for instance, the civil rights movement, although many of the participants and supporters of the thing I am talking about often treat the two as if they were one. And it’s true that they were connected, but the number of people actually involved in both was relatively small, and I think they’re connected mostly in that they were both aspects of a broad historical upheaval. That upheaval had its positive and negative aspects, the civil rights movement being among the positive ones, while the revolution of which I’m speaking was, I think, largely negative. I sometimes think of it simply as “the revolution” or “the cultural revolution” or “the revolution of the late ‘60s.” “The hippie movement,” “the counterculture”, “the radicalism of the late ‘60s”—all these are somewhat accurate, but not entirely complete without further explanation, and are also cumbersome to use repeatedly in an essay.

We need a new term, but  in the absence of one, and with the context clearly established, I think I’ll refer to it simply as “the revolution.” And what I mean is the explosive rebellion that occurred, primarily among young people, between roughly 1965 and 1970, reaching a peak of frenzy at the end of that period, leveling off and becoming part of the mainstream in the 1970s. It was not a political rebellion, though it had a strong political component, but primarily a cultural one (which is why I sometimes refer to it as the cultural revolution, but that term is generally understood as referring to the very different Chinese catastrophe launched around the same time). It was not physically violent, but it was philosophically and culturally violent. Its essential aim and motive was the attainment of an earthly paradise by the removal of any limit, either philosophical or practical, on the freedom of the individual in pursuit of personal happiness (which, in a materialistic age, often means only the pursuit of pleasure). And this project required the destruction of existing institutions, which were believed to function mainly to warp and suppress the fundamental benevolent innocence of the individual, and to have been designed to do so.

I say essential, meaning that these aims were of its essence. But I don’t mean that it can be reduced entirely to that. Like any human phenomenon, it was propelled by a mixture of motives, including some that were healthy—for instance, a reaction against the real pathologies of modern technical-commercial civilization. But it seems to me that the drive for heaven on earth, and the requisite destruction of existing things, were at the heart of it. To see it in that way is of course a reduction and truncation of the complex reality. But I think it’s important to begin with that, and then consider the nuances, variations, and exceptions.

Because the revolution arose within the remnant of western Christian civilization, it was a revolution against that civilization, and against Christianity, though it was sometimes, and usually unconsciously, allied with it against some of the dehumanizing aspects of modernity. That conflict was the beginning of what we now call the culture war.

And even as I write this I wonder if I don’t have the cause and effect backward, if the fundamental force was not rebellion against Christianity, and the drive for personal liberation but a vehicle for that rebellion. To resolve that question requires something more than natural insight, I think; we may not really know the answer until we can see the whole scope, and the hidden springs, of history with more acute spiritual vision than all but a very, very few ever have in this world.

Like any revolution, this one had deep roots in the society that produced it. And that’s the point I want to make today: the revolution was the eruption into a mass movement of forces that had been in operation for decades in the realm of specific attitudes and practices, and for centuries in the realm of theology (using that term to mean any thinking about the ultimate questions of meaning, whether affirming or denying God as understood by Christians).

Both its supporters and its detractors often fail to recognize, or to recognize fully, this fact. The supporters tend to see history, and in particular Western history, as a decline from innocent tribal paradise into crushing oppression imposed mainly by Christianity and lasting until roughly 1960, when the system began to crumble. Detractors tend to hold something like the same view, only with a reversal of values: things were pretty wonderful until the hippies came along and ruined everything. I think secular conservatives are more likely than Christians to make this mistake, but many Christians do, too—e.g. those Catholics who idealize the Church as it was in the 1950s, and are utterly baffled as to how it produced the Church of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Both sides tend to make the mistake of focusing on the 1950s, with the revolutionaries viewing that period as something close to hell on earth, and the conservatives viewing it as a golden age. Both seem far too much influenced by the movies and television shows of the time, seeming to believe on some level that they are an accurate picture of real people living real lives. (Yes, I’m exaggerating here, but the general outline of these two views of the revolution does very often resemble my sketch.)

In fact the revolution had been well under way for some time by the 1950s, only it had not emerged fully into the mainstream. To view it as something that came out of nowhere, like an asteroid striking the earth—a sudden, more or less spontaneous and more or less unprecedented event, whether viewed as creative or destructive—is to misunderstand it and to cut off any hope of seeing its true place in the long crisis of our civilization, or even of seeing accurately what it really was in itself.

War In the Closed World

Sunday Night Journal — January 3, 2010

Yes, the Sunday Night Journal is back. For those who started reading this blog within the past year, or have forgotten why I dropped the journal at the end of 2008, here is the explanation. It wouldn’t be perfectly accurate to say that the plan was a total failure, but it would be close; “miserable failure” is a pretty good description.

But I haven’t entirely abandoned my hopes for some of the projects which have gotten so little attention over the past year. Since it seems clear that I need some sort of external pressure, even of the contrived semi-illusory type I described last year, I intend to incorporate some of those projects into the Sunday journal, so you’ll be seeing fragments and drafts of some of those.

Chief among them—and I’m telling you this so that I’ll feel obliged to deliver something—will be the renewal of an effort I began and abandoned some thirty years ago, a sort of spiritual autobiography or memoir. Part of the reason I gave up that project was that I really didn’t want to write a detailed autobiography; there were many reasons for that, most fundamentally a sense that it is indecent to write in any detail about one’s relationships with other people, who may not wish to be part of your public story and who have no way of giving their view of things if it differs from yours, and I thought it would be impossible to write an autobiography without doing that. But a recent re-reading of C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy has given me some idea of how I could tell the most significant parts of my story without violating the privacy of others.  (Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain may be another, but I still haven’t gotten around to reading it.) And so I’m about to give it another try.

The chief concern of that earlier book was to have been the spiritual sources and significance of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and the social ramifications of the spiritual phenomena. With another thirty years’ experience behind me, I’ll be making the scope somewhat broader than that, though the revolution will still be prominent—it has to be, because it was of decisive importance in my life.

My attitude toward it has changed somewhat, too. In my early 30s, a newly re-converted Christian and with my lost years still very fresh in my memory, I was concerned with the attempt to understand what had gone wrong, in myself and in the culture. I had a good deal of sympathy for my younger self, seeing him primarily as a confused but genuine and relatively innocent seeker.

Now I see much more clearly the role that sin, original and personal, played in that young man’s life. I see his wretched and weak character, his blindness, his cowardice, his sheer stupidity. I regard him in fact with something pretty close to contempt. I’m embarrassed that he fell for the asinine ideas—if they can be called ideas—of the hippie movement.

It has become a struggle for me to recall that there was any good at all in that movement. There was, but, supposing that one could measure the proportions of truth and falsehood in it, of sanity and madness, I think the ratio might be something like 20-80, perhaps only 15-85. And it’s a pretty weak defense to say that the bad thing one embraced was not all bad: the Nazis were said to have made the trains run on time, and many Communists were sincerely concerned with economic justice.

I think I’ve said this here before, so my apologies if I’m repeating myself (but then this will probably be in the book, if there is one): it seems to me now that in the fall of 1967 I took a decisive step into spiritual darkness from which I didn’t emerge until some ten years later. For several years now I’ve been experiencing a kind of purgatory in which I’ve seen with horrifying clarity some of what I was and what I did in those years. And I’m troubled by evidence that I may not have changed as much as I would like to think I have.

Agonizing is not too strong a word for this experience. But yet there is a great deal of hope in it. I’ve been like the old professor in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, begging “Is there no mercy?” There is mercy. And I trust that in the end, the greater the mercy, the greater the joy.

My working title for the book is one I had chosen tentatively for that earlier effort: War in the Closed World. “War” refers to the cultural conflict of the ‘60s; “closed world” to an image I proposed for modern secular-technological civilization: a landscape without boundaries in any horizontal direction, but enclosed by a low ceiling which likewise stretches as far as the eye can see. Interestingly, Stratford Caldecott uses more or less the same image in Beauty for Truth’s Sake, which I reviewed here a few weeks ago (see here). It’s possible that a better title will emerge in the process of writing the book.

25-75 at most.