We probably would not have much trouble, if we were to organize a poll, finding people who would agree that we are living on one of those epochal razor’s edges that humanity seems to have to cross from time to time. There are times, apparently, when there is a broad enough base underfoot to allow for a certain amount of pushing and shoving without any major calamity. But the sheer force of things (urbanization, population explosion, cybernation, deep shifts in our ideas about human life) seems, like a geological thrust fault, to have pushed the landscape up into a terrifying ridge where there is little room for missteps. It looks as though havoc and doom lie uncomfortably close on either side of us.
The interesting thing is that if you read the introduction to any history book, no matter what century it treats, you will probably find something to the effect that “the sixteenth (or thirteenth, or ninth, or eighteenth) century was a time of great upheaval. The old order was crumbling; established verities were being called in question; the structures of society were creaking. There was a sense both of anxiety and of exhilaration abroad as the new day dawned.” History seems to move by spasms, and it is a rare, if not non-existent, era that can be pointed to as an example of tranquillity and predictability. Even the pax Romana was a fugitive thing, guaranteed by the widespread deployment of garrisons, and administered by capricious demigods (Herod & Co.) whose notions of justice were peculiar at the very best. We sometimes point to the nineteenth century as the palmy time of stability, with Victoria on the throne, the colonels and bishops back and forth to India and Africa, and the churchbells ringing out over the hedgerows and cottages. But we forget the agony of the nineteenth century—the horrors about the Industrial Revolution, the assault on traditional doctrines by rationalism, the unsettling effect on religious faith of “scientific” discoveries (that, for instance, we must trace our lineage back, not to heaven, but to the bottom of the sea). The century was full of anguished spirits—Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, Newman, Browning, Tennyson—trying either to salvage some order or to discover new bases for order.
So, if we remember our history, we find that we are experiencing what nearly every other century has experienced. This is not to throw any encouraging light on the matter, as though we could say, “Oh, well, things will sort themselves out, and we’ll all look back on this troubled decade and wonder how we lived through it.” The bleak thing is that things don’t sort themselves out, and that one era after another goes down in ruins, with the graveyards full of soldiers and innocent bystanders who, far from living through it, were crushed in the wheels of the time. The Babylonian order crumbled before the Greek, the Greek before the Roman, the Roman before the Gothic; the Saxon order fell before the Norman; the Catholic order fell before the Reformation; the religious order disappeared before the Enlightenment. Things don’t sort themselves out—they are blasted; and it is a taxing question whether the “advance” of civilization has been misnamed.
The Issues Today
It sounds as though I am about to urge a return to some pastoral time when, for a moment, things looked good, and there were no Gothic barbarians or spinning jennies or Rousseaus or Darwins or yippies to threaten the order. But, for a start, there never was such a time (Eden itself had its invader), and, further, we couldn’t get back to it if we tried. Here we are, and like every other generation of humanity we must ask ourselves what is happening and what view to take of things.
We are all impressed, if not alarmed, by the sheer weight of the issues facing us now. What is to be done about the Super Powers with their ratio of overkill? What is to be done about the population explosion—especially in the countries whose birth rate is wildly disproportionate to the food supply and the capacity of the government to educate? What shall we do about megalopolis and multiversity? What about air and water pollution? What about traffic? What about taxes, and the unwieldiness of the welfare state? What about morality? What about student anarchy and racial hatred and demagoguery and crime and cynicism? Hey—what about all that?
I live in a community (New York City) in which all these perplexities are rather highly distilled. That is, within the area of a few square miles, not only does this town have all the ingredients of havoc: it has them in very large, and very strong, doses. But whatever may be epigrammatized in New York’s problems is potentially true of any place where men live together.
Law Had No Effect
When I first moved here three years ago, we began with a transit workers’ strike. For ten days hundreds of thousands of people either did not get to work at all, or walked, or sat in traffic jams. No matter what view one takes of the actual issues involved, one thing was clear: Law was impotent. There was not a single thing all the legal authority of this city could do to help the situation. Law was irrelevant. (One of the disputants announced to the city that the judge could “drop dead in his black robes.”)
A few weeks earlier, as my wife and I sat at tea late one afternoon, we noticed that the Brandenburg Concerto on the phonograph was quavering. Then the lights flickered, and, wondering whether any other building was having trouble with its electric current, I glanced out across the city just in time to see the Empire State Building and the entirety of Manhattan wink into blackness. For twelve hours exactly we all learned what it is like to carry on with life when the plug has been pulled. It threw our priorities into a peculiar light (not to make too painful a pun). It showed us all how precariously placed civilization is. We were hustled instantly back across hundreds of years into the Dark Ages simply by a tiny fault somewhere upstate.
Again, there have been two city-wide teachers’ strikes, keeping a million or so children milling in the streets for weeks on end while the law wrung its impotent hands and begged each side to be reasonable. The real issue is prior to whatever view one took of the immediate situation (for the life of me I cannot decide who was in the right in either dispute): it is the dramatization of the end of law as the ruling authority.
The most vivid situation we have had in New York (and readers in Memphis will sympathize) was the strike of the Uniformed Sanitation Workers. Here it was impossible to ignore the mounting (literally) crisis. Day by day, the sidewalks became more and more like trails cut between huge dunes of rubbish. In the more expensive neighborhoods, the janitors managed to keep the debris in immense cans and burlap sacks. But in neighborhoods where the rent rates did not pay for the services of these men, there were simply swirling drifts of refuse choking sidewalk and street alike. Again, it was not authority that restored order; it was capitulation. And once more, whichever side one took in the dispute (and it was difficult to be neutral here), one would have had to agree that law was irrelevant.
The one situation in which law was finally (and reluctantly) invoked to restore order and the rights of the majority (Columbia University) resulted in an almost universal outcry—not against the assault on law and democratic process, but against that very invocation of law. The guilty party turned out to be the agency by which New York’s ten million people ordinarily enjoy some frail sense of security. It was rather like punching the surgeon for sticking a knife into your abdomen.
But whatever happens, the events of our decade, not just in this large and unwieldy town but over the face of the whole earth, push us toward some radical questions about the nature of human society, and indeed, about that society’s chances for survival. It is over these questions that we find a great watershed of opinion. There is, on the one hand, a great deal of grassroots fear being stirred up. And on the other, there is enormous optimism. It is about this optimism that one might ask a question or two. For it is this that is sovereign in the New Left, is increasingly shared by journalists and thinkers, and seems to lie behind much of the rhetoric we hear, in established political circles and in dissident groups and, interestingly enough, in Protestant churchmanship.
Looking Back
Here again, it is worthwhile noting the historical precedents for situations like this. If one looks back through the poetic and prophetic commentary on society, one cannot escape this: that the voice of the poet and prophet has almost universally been raised against the way things were going. It is extremely difficult to find a poet or prophet who spent his wisdom applauding his own society. Moses and Elijah and Ezekiel and Isaiah and Jeremiah—each thundered against the deterioration of his own epoch. Plato bewailed what looked to him like the license of youth and the rising scorn for law. Dante consigned this person and that to Hell or Purgatory for presiding over the decline of public morality. Chaucer, with vast good humor and urbanity, poked at his own century (the fourteenth) for its cynicism (some of his priests and friars are scurrilous characters), and his contemporary, William Langland, wrote a book-length poem, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, in which he remorselessly assailed the immorality of his day. John Milton, of course, left no doubt as to where he stood on moral issues. The line continues down through Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift to Dr. Johnson, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and T. S. Eliot—the common thing among these vastly different writers being a deep concern for moral issues, and the sense that society as a whole is probably building Vanity Fair or Babylon, but certainly not the City of God.
When we compare this poetic and prophetic point of view toward society with our own day, however, we stumble into an odd business: the commanding voices today, unlike their forebears, are applauding the movement of events, and are urging an ever more rapid push toward the kind of world community they feel is being built. The idea seems to be that, if we can only remove this barrier, and this one, and this one, we will be on the threshold of Paradise. We must pluck down the structures of society; we must sweep away once and for all the repressive strictures of traditional morality; we must liberate men forever from the discouraging notion of some ogre in the sky who is looking angrily over their shoulder at everything they do (especially when they try to have fun); we must obliterate authority in all its grim forms—police, kings, religion, morality, boards of trustees. Then we shall be free to live and love, and neighborliness will prevail and prejudice will have disappeared and no one will trespass on anyone else’s property because we will all enjoy all things in common.
Now this is a very appealing vision. Who could decry such a Happy Valley? Who wants billy-clubs instead of flowers? Not, I, certainly. This vision (it is called by its enthusiasts The Third World) happens to lie very close to what I also see ahead. I, too, see as the climax of history such a realm in which love is the authority and arbiter, and in which hatred, prejudice, fear, cynicism, greed, and haughtiness are unknown.
But, unlike the ruling voices in our day (this would include our novelists, poets, journalists, and most vocal Protestant clergy and theologians), I see such a realm, not just around the corner, but on the far side of apocalypse. That is, the Christian idea (and the prophetic insight) has been that history moves toward the final consummation when, much to man’s dismay and consternation, there will be unveiled the towering authority of Love—that Love which was once upon a time announced to us and enacted for us in the figure of Jesus. That Christ, who was, Christians believe, Love Incarnate.
The prophetic imagery that attends the ultimate consummation is an imagery of glory and terror and joy, of trumpets and armor and wailing and thunder and the shaking of the foundations, and of all things—all botched and maimed and lost things—made new. The prophetic insight has always been that man builds, not the City of God, but Sodom. Not Paradise, but the Cities of the Plain. Not Jerusalem, but Babylon. And that, because of the frailty and evil written deep in this being, man cannot deliver himself from this tediously repeated cycle of vain building. So that it will not be the Enlightenment, nor the Industrial Revolution, nor the Reform Bill, nor the gaining of Independence, nor computers nor vaccine nor birth pills nor new moralities nor participatory democracy that will bring in the City of God—not this, but the deafening, blinding advent of Love Himself in the person of Jesus Christ.
For it is only Love that can change our hateful hearts and obliterate the fear and prejudice in them; and it is only the authority of Love that can bring us proud and bitter creatures to our knees in front of the thing we longed for all along without knowing it, and would have been able to get if we had known it.
