THE ISSUES
1. Last night we talked about a number of things,
and what I'd like to hold that under is the category of Universal
Sociality. You saw Jon begin to work overagainst and articulate
to us postmodern essentialism. In a way, here was our introductory
session. Now, tomorrow morning, when we have our finale, or concluding
session, what we'll be taking up there at that timeI
don't know what tocall itbut again it
will be a battery of things that I like to hold together under
the name Local Sociality. But what we'll be working on here is
the practical engagement of every person: what you and I can do,
or how you and I respond, or may respond, in a concrete situation.
Universal Sociality is the totality of everything; Local Sociality
is where I as local man pick up. Actually, now, we want to hit
three areas, and the best way I can talk about that, is in the
whole dimension of sociality and point to what Jon was doing last
night: Resurgence is coming, Resurgence is here, Resurgence is
at hand. The springs of life are flowing, and Resurgence
is engagement; Resurgence is creativity; Resurgence is meaning.
The springs of life are flowing through man today as he is radically
engaging himself with life, creating in the midst of life, discerning
meaning in the midst of life. So these are the areas we'll be
working on in these three categories today, and then we will move
to the conclusion tomorrow.
2. Now, under the area of engagement I'd like to
talk about Resurgence as engagement, first of all in the political
situation, or the political dynamic would be the better way to
put that, although I'll be talking about the situation beyond
the dynamic. But Resurgence is the political dynamic today. Then
we want to look at the individual disruption. That is, how in
the imbalance within the political dynamic, your life and my life
have been radically disrupted and thrown askew, how our lives
have been alienated and are rootless. And then thirdly' want to
talk about the Phasiality that Jon mentioned last night. And Resurgence
is Phasiality, and what it means to live four great times. And
then lastly I'd like to talk about Resurgence as the coming anew
into being of morality. Resurgence is the emerging of the new
morality in our times.
3. Well, these are the dimensions I'd like to chat
a little bit about. Before I do, I'd like to read you a poem.
And it's a silly little old great poem. It's titled to J.S. That
threatened me to begin with! To J.S. (Read poem.)
4. Well, every society has the problem of preserving
itself. And you know Aristotle probably first and most clearly
articulated this when he said that one of the basic drives of
man is selfpreservation. That is, man and society have to
sustain themselves. And yet man is more than the brute beast.
He doesn't sustain himself just to sustain himself, but he always
has an aim, he always has a purpose in life toward which he is
thrusting. Aristotle called that the rational propensity
l consciousness of consciousness toward the rational, or toward
meaning in life, significance, or purpose for living.
5. But also Aristotle saw that if man did not order
himself, that propensity for selfpreservation would finally
destroy him. In other words, men would gobble one another up
that society as well as nature is tooth and claw. And so, Aristotle
said that there was a second propensity called order, and that
had to be satisfied in order that the propensity for selfpreservation
and the propensity toward meaning could go on and would
not perish. So society has to fulfill these three propensities.
Otherwise society cannot go on, and man is destroyed. Therefore
we build structures to hold these kinds of dynamics.
6. Indeed as Jon and then Jim later on were saying
last night, you have the economic, the political, and the cultural
dynamics that are there. I think, first of all, we have to say
that the political dynam4ic is Resurgence here, as we look at
it today in the midst Of the total. As my colleagues will come
along, they will be talking about their particular dimension as
Resurgence. But here Resurgence is engagement, and this is what
we want to see in the midst of this.
7. But before we go on, when you talk about this,
what you are doing is welding out, and talking about the new 20th
century anthropology. In other words, this way of laying out the
dynamic of society shows a universal dynamic; it's what goes on
in every society at any place at any time in any kind of a situation.
At the same time, it's a universal function. In other words, it's
trying to articulate the way life is, not the way life should
be, but it's trying just to describe what goes on in the midst
of life, and to start with that and to see where it leads us.
So, what we come to then is the foundational dimension here in
the Economic, and then you move over to the Communal, and then
finally to the meaning pole.
8. Another way to put it, the communal pole over
here in the political is your organizing pole. It is the defending
pole; it is that by means of which the others are enacted and
taken care of. It delimits the Economic, as we saw last night.
It's the guardian of the Cultural, as it's related to the other
two poles in that. And again, I'm saying that just to say that
you're pointing to a dynamic goingonness in the midst of society
or, to turn that around, you're pointing to
a goingonness in society which is always dynamic. Whenever we
talk about these, we are after articulating the dynamics. It's
not a static structure that we are trying to lay out, but the
dynamics that are there of the way that society goes on. We are
just trying to say the way it is, the way society takes place
and the way that it happens. And again, here, on this side, the
stabilizing dynamics, the order, and on the other side here, the
decisionmaking dynamics; and on this side, the dynamics
of guarantee that finally life has a social vision to be grounded
in. Well, let's just pull that forth now, and enlarge a little
bit, so that we can get a clearer look on it.
9. Let's start with the bottom left here, what is
called the ordering dynamic. This enforces the social stability.
If you want to put it this way and to caricatureit just
a little, here's just the brute force in the midst of society
that goes on. The basic pole of that is your common defense O
That is brute force, and when society gets a little bit out of
hand, or it looks as if chaos or anarchy may come in, force comes
into play. During the riots of 1968, you began to get in magazines
stories of how the suburbs were arming themselves, and gun racks
were going up, and all sorts of weapons were coming into being.
Common Defense was taking place to protect society. Of course,
you could go on and call this your armed services. It's a little
hard to see how Viet Nam is an expression of our common defense,
and yet as you recall when that was started, the ways in which
we talked about increasing our armed forces budget were to protect
ourselves against what might happen there halfway around the world
in that little country.
10. Over in this part is your Domestic Tranquillity.
That's your law and order dimension, that's the police, that is
where you ensure the compliance of society with the social decision
it's made. That's the internal force in the midst of society.
Then up here, you have the Legal Base. And the Legal Base is the
imaginal force in the midst of society; it's the consensus of
society, and it's the Common Law before it's ever externalized
in statutes. And you can see, you know, that there is a common
consensus of how society ought to go on. In our country, there's
been a common consensus at least since the Civil War and until
very recently. Therefore, you had a relaxation about how law and
order was articulated. Whereas, if you go into some of the newer
countries where they do not have a common base or consensus, here,
brother, the law and order pole is much stronger than we would
find it here. So this is your ordering or enforcing dynamic.
11. Then, over on this side, we see that every dimension
of the political process of society has to have some means of
arbitration. This is your justice pole, or dynamic, by which you
implement the will of the people. And first of all, of course,
here is just Legislative Consensus. In our own society, you know,
the Political dynamic was probably most clearly articulated through
the coming into being of our country. That is, it was made selfconscious
or exposed in a brand way there. But now, the Legislative Consensus
is seen where the Congress meets, or you have a family meeting
to decide what has to be done in the situation. In other words,
you organize the common mind here. Then over at this point, is
the Judicial Procedure. This would be the Supreme Court of our
land, the court system, or it could be Mama and Papa sitting down
and deciding whether to spank Johnny or to take away his allowance
or to send him to bed early, or something like that, in sense
of making that kind of decision or judgment.
12. Up here is the Executive Authority. And this
is those who see that this process is carried out. It is the administration
enactment of the Legislative and Judicial dynamics. You probably
remember the first way that this was exposed, at least in my own
lifetime where the scream came. President Roosevelt in the Executive
Authority tried to pack the Supreme Court in order to put pressure
on the Legislature, to bring about the kind of arbitration that
he felt ought to take place in the midst of society.
13. In humanity's earliest history, you had to emphasize
the order pole to protect yourself against the beasts and from
the other tribes coming in and attacking you or moving into your
situation. And so you were out to stave of social chaos and just
add a stability to the values that your clan or tribe had in the
midst of itself. Then, beginning in the 18th century,
you find a radical change taking place here. You move to the Justice
Pole, and now individuals began to see that they could participate
in society here. This was the age of empires and the commonwealth
of nations. The 18th century just revolutionized the
whole political world: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,"
was shouted on the continent, and our own Constitution brought
a new political state into being at that time.
14. Then another shift took place In the l9th century.
What happened here was that people saw because of what happened
in the l8th century, primarily, be could control his destiny
and in the economic area aspecial1y. And so the vision of the
Welfare State came into being. We could build a brand new relationship
to provide for our basic needs. At the same time, you know, this
was coupled with the explosion of the Industrial Revolution, It
offered a possibility to guide the economic f1ow in a way that
had never existed before, in life.
15. But in the 20th century, or in the present time,
we have seen that the invention of the Welfare State is expanded
to the globe. In fact, we have for the first time in the history
of mankind the technological tools and the means by which to food
every person in the world. That's just a given in our day. So
the radicalness of the vision has just burst loose here, through
the ability to create a new kind of political state and organization.
16. And yet, at the same time, this treat possibility
and the consuming quest has led us to the social imbalance. The
drama in the whole political dimension in the past has given us
our cultural heroes. You just think as a child how you were reared
on Washington, and Jefferson, Stonewall Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy
Roosevelt, and on and on. Yet today, the excitement is gone; the
political dimension of our life is askew, and you no longer expect'
anything in the political dimension. You may get heated up over
an election, but; inside of you, you know, it's a false bringing
about of energy. Finally, the political dimension just seems to
have become impotent as far as attracting us. What mother today
tells her child that he can become President of the United States,
that that ought to be something he should shoot for?
17. Well, the question is why. Why the social disruption of resurgence? The key to this is the imbalance. As you heard, the tyranny of the economic has rendered the political impotent, and this has resulted at the same time in an imbalance in the political. For example, if you take the whole political pole, the tyrant here is Order. It has cost more in our land, and it's got the screams and the emphasis, yet not only in our land, but around the world. So the Ordering function is the huge tyrant, and it's rendered Justice over here impotent, and has just collapsed Welfare, the wellbeing of a situation. What happens here, as you know, so that the power that's used to create stability, is latched over to just freeze the dynamic into the status quo. That power is just a mailed fist into the face of history. So Justice is limited and distorted because of that overwhelming power, and, at the same time, Justice is rendered a tool or an arm of enforcing order You almost no longer trust the court s\7stems to give you a release of law and order, but they become that which binds you more in the midst of this situation. Welfare is just crushed by it. My God, with the impotence of Justice and the magnitude of Order, you're just aware of a new kind of situation to be in.
18. On the one hand, you know that you have to forge
your own history; this is what it means to be a human being. You
know that you need to help sustain your existence, keep your freedom,
and be significantly engaged. Yet, with the collapse of that pole,
of the Welfare or wellbeing pole, you're forced to participate
in the degradation of your own existence. The serious consequence
of this is that today we have lost our social vision. The people
who run our economy are the economic community; they determine
where we go, what we do, what we wear, who we meet, even what
we think. All the political statements are impotent, or if not
impotent, they are certainly hollow, which is just another way
of saying impotent.
19. The Social Process is so big. It's worldwide,
it's totally interrelated and it's alldetermining that you
end up feeling like a cog. That cog is so small you can't even
find the wheel of which you're a cog in the midst of society.
Therefore, it doesn't seem as if you can do anything about it;
it makes no difference. So you're rootless and alienated from
your engagement in the midst of society.
20. Our malaise today is that of disengagement, resulting
in impotence, helplessness. and finally guilt. The only thing
you and I can see is either so radical, Or so painful, or
it requires such an inordinate use of power, that you and I try
to do anything almost to escape from it. So we define our world
in terms of being a rugged individualist that goes off by himself,
or a family that escapes to a suburban haven, you know, or playing,
dabbling in our communities, provincializing our nation. You know
how the individual is we hang on to our cool. Even our images
of engagement are finally pseudoimages. The rugged individualist
is engaged in nature.
21. This morning when I got up they always have a sports spot on the radio, I do not know what time it is but they talked to this guy who had gone to northern Sweden to hunt moose. Well, what happened? Well, he went through about two or three minutes of what happened. How many moose did you get? They did not even see a moose. But the Swedish cuisine is just great, the best food you could have, the most comfortable place. It was great to get back to nature. The whole summary of this was what a wonderful way it was to get back to nature.
22. But, if that is not enough, a man escapes into
his family. In fact he isolates himself from issues with his family.
Your family is the place of peace, and you do not get involved
with your family. You know that is so axiomatic and basic that
when you start to move missionally with your family' people scream.
I never will forget when we moved from Evanston to Chicago, how
both of our families screamed at it. They screamed at me: "Why
are you taking Anne and the children to Chicago? I don't know
whether Anne's mother screamed, "Why are you taking Joe and
the children to Chicago?" But she did scream, "Why are
you going down there to Chicago?" It's almost as if the family
couldn't possibly do anything like that. So you build a community
to associate with likeminded people9 then you take vacations
to get away from those likeminded people. The whole reason
for being of the family just contributes to man's disengagement
here. This also means that the family, when it escapes to the
suburbs, goes about playing with pseudoengagement. You go
out and you become a member of the PTA, or you join the City Council.
And that's really great. You can play politics there. You can
make decisions about parking meters, new grass and flagpoles9
and street signs, and "Welcome to our great village,"
and zoning laws. In other words, you build a stockade community
with bigger and better walls there. But the community itself becomes
a nonentity; it cuts itself off even from urban engagement.
23. But if that's not enough, then we conceal from
ourselves that disengagement leads to a hidden reactionaryism
or colonialism. The only way you can now blast us loose from our
cool, is to either hit us at our economic point, or to hit us
at our disengagement haven. The only way you could get us to respond
is to scratch the back that holds the arm that's scratching our
back. So we live off the rest of the world. We hang onto outdated
ideologies; we're consumed with guilt; we're dug in defensively;
we're afraid and yet at the same time we're thinking that radical
change is inconceivable. We're entrenched in provincialism, and
life out ofthat which blinds itself to the total need of
the world. And yet, at the same time, in the midst of that are
emerging attempts and possibilities of Resurgence in the political
dynamic. You know the happenings in our day, like the youth
oh, to be politically engaged in our day! The women
how they can be effective human beings in our society, and when
the women's revolution began, it hit head on the legal structures
of our society, the Political dynamic. And the Blacks in the Civil
Rights movement used Justice as a tool to get at Order, to provide
them new possibilities in that situation. And the Black Power
element even symbolically rattled around in the Ordering dimension
to try to shape new possibilities. The Third World, in their fight
against the economic tyranny of the West, have nationalized their
industries, rearranged their tariff and exchange regulations;
everything to try to stave that off. All of these are signs of
how man 1s attempting anew to be engaged in our time. The Economic
dimension itself you know is rising up. Resources, or the friends
of Resources, use the political to fight the Pollution that is
destroying Resources. That's another great vision there of how
the Political is coming alive in the sense of giving opportunities
of engagement.
24. Behind all of these evidences of resurgence you
find motifs, or happenings going on. For example, man today sees
himself as a global human being. He knows that he can never act
again in a way that is disrelated or unrelated with the rest of
the world. He has no possibility of that. In fact, I guess ;t
was about a year ago, before Nixon visited China, I read in the
paper where some reporter said that we now have a world government.
It's suddenly a shock, you know. We now have a world government.
All my life I've thought, wouldn't it be great to have a world
government, and now along comes somebody saying, "We have
a world government." Well, you begin to reflect a little
bit on that and sure, we've decided we're not going to destroy
ourselves, we've decided we're not going to lapse into anarchy.
And you see at the same time we have a universal economic community.
It's worldwide. It covers the East and the West. We have an international
community, and its common language is English, incidentally. That's
something, isn't it? It's almost as if today there are no more
barriers. Everything has been transcended. At the same time you
have the Resurgence in the global dimension, you have it in the
local community. Primal community is being recreated. People
see that power rests in the grassroots, there's no opportunity
for new possibilities You have resurgence of engagement coming
about in new forms of corporate existence: International communities,
the scientific community, the business community. There's a worldwide
relational network going on now that cuts across and takes into
account not only disciplines, but various numbers of disciplines.
There's a common decision underlying local and global man, that
he is going to be engaged in those situations like that. And you
have global problemsolving groups that are interrelated
around the world.
25. In the midst of this, you find people rising
up and demanding that authentic style take place. They're going
to be urban people, that are going to transcend all kinds of provincialisms
and traditions and boundaries that have been there in the past.
There's a cultural interchange taking place and people see that
if they're going to be engaged today, it's going to be in that
kind of relationship. New families are rising up and deciding
that they're going to be missionally engaged in the midst of society.
Wherever you go, and whatever culture you meet, whatever business
you come up against, you find many people who have decided that
they're going to be authentic human beings. By that I mean they
see that Resurgence is engagement, and they jolly well are going
to be engaged. It's that kind of thing that's going on
new motifs and possibilities.
26. The present malaise in the contemporary political
situation has created again a deep crisis in us as individuals.
We want to be socially engaged, and yet we're unable to determine
where and how to be engaged. The deeps of crisis reflected primarily
and I would want to push maybe this morning
in one of the given areas of life in the fact
that you and I grow old and die. It's not only that you and I
grow old and die, but everything that has life grows old and dies.
Now we can see this as a general abstraction, perhaps, or a general
observation, but it comes to me horribly in the particular. I
am growing old. And that's true, whether I'm 15 years old, or
50 years old. And not only that, society relates to me in a different
way. Yet in this awareness, resurgence is seen, and it's the resurgence
of Phasiality. Basically the occasion of resurgence is in 4 areas.
You know the 020 with the youth, 2040 with the rising
adults, 4060 with the established adults, and then 60death
are the elders. You see this is not something that is imposed
on society, but this is an ontological reality. By that I mean
it is operating in every society from beginning to end. There
have been great social constructs that have captured this dynamic.
The Hindus, for example, with their 4 stages of life. You can
go to any culture and see how they have emphasized certain transitions
to articulate phasiality, however reduced it may have been. The
greatness of that articulation held that society in being in many
different ways.
27. Now I want to get these lifetimes up here: The
youth from 020, the Rising Adult from 2040, the Established
Adult from 4060, and the Elder from 60death. First
we want to talk about the role of these people, then the passage,
and then the escapes that they have.
28. For the youth, you might say, it's to be an historical
apprentice; and by that you don't mean that they are going to
study some vocational training, but they're apprentices of life
itself. Their job is to be learners, to appropriate mystery in
the depths of life, and to answer the questions "Why?"
and "How?", to dream new dreams, to have new visions
of possibility of what could take place. Here is an historical
apprenticeship of that person. He is born physically here, at
birth, and his death is dying to just dreaming, to irresponsibility.
He is physically born into that. When he reaches 20, he dies to
the fact that for the rest of his life he can wander around dreaming
or raising the question of why. He has to take a brand new relationship.
And his escape is, in one sense, dismissing his heritage. He's
going to raise a whole new heritage in that. In our youth meeting
the other day, one of them said, "I don't like the way adults
look. I don't want to be an adult." What's going on i~ that
they refuse the vision. In other words, if I dream than one of
these days I'm going to have to embody my dreams, so I refuse
my vision at that point.
29. With the rising adult he's the social pioneer.
He finds a vocation; he selects a wife, he creates a family. Here's
his opportunity to put these dreams that he dreamed into history;
here' 8 his opportunity to ground them; here's where he sees social
change take place; he makes them practical, builds new societies;
he's the one that's moving out into the fore at this point. When
he births here, he passes into work, if you want to put it that
way , and you mean work in the broad sense of that. When he dies
to that age and passes into the next one, he dies to being experimental,
to the radical creating of the new. But at this point his escape
is, like that of youth, he doesn't want to be an adult, Have you
ever seen youth that are 30 years old, still trying to be youth?
Well, that's your adult, he refuses to be that one. And yet at
the same time, if he tries to be a rising adult, he knows that
his creativity is never adequate. What he does then is move into
abstractionism, or refuse to do what he's going to do. That abstractionism
is his escape.
30. Then we come to the established adult. He's the
social guardian. And what a great role this is' He sustains and
protects society; he rules for the good of society. Here's the
man who is probably in middle or top management or he has created
his own private business, he's riding on the hard work of 15 or
20 years that's gone on before now. He's the governor, or the
guarantor, that society goes on. He's going to grasp the past
and hold it, gee that the present is established, and guard the
future. He's the one that holds society in being at this particular
time and place. His passage into this situation is into his place
or locus of service. In other words, he's made his bed. When he's
birthed into that age, he's birthed into that bed he's worked
to create for 20 years. When he leaves here, he leaves the life
of power. He dies to the life of power. When he becomes 60 and
goes on, he gives up his hold on society. When you get there.
you've made your bed and now you're going to have to live in it.
One of our colleagues is a doctor. He went to the deserts of Australia,
fooling around out there with those scrawny sick cows and sheep,
didn't have enough food to eat and water to drink, just nowhere.
Suddenly he turned 40. What are you going to do with your life?
It's already been made. Is this where my life is?, the rest of
it, down here with scrawny cows and scrub oaks: Is that where
I've made my bed? Is that where I'm going to lie in it? I've never
really come off in life; that's the fear. So you reduce life to
a possessiveness of where you are, or a provincialism. You squeeze
life down, so that you block off the totality of it.
31. Now the Elder. What a great role that is. He's
the historical statesman. He's the wise man; he's the symbol of
the transcendent wisdom. He assures the inclusive reflection that
goes on; he holds the broad wisdom of the society in being. When
he's birthed into this, he's retired. His birth is retirement,
so to speak. He's retired from the activity of the guardianship
that he had. Of course when he dies to this particular part, he
dies to physical life itself at that point. Now his escape is
from the strangeness. He's confronted with the strangeness. He's
supposed to be the Elder, the guardian of the past wisdom, and
all the past is collapsed. How do you get the 20th century related
to all the past wisdom? So you retire into nothingness. You're
just retired out there; there's no wisdom for you to hold onto,
and you just vegetate. You try to convince yourself' there is
really some reason why you're here, and yet you know there is
more. Sometimes the escape then is into past roles. I told some
of you that I want to visit General Wood, who was at that time
the President of Sears and Roebuck, I called him up to make an
appointment to get some money. He said, "Well, sure, come
on over" and gave me a time. Well, I should have smelled
something. It sure was easy to get in to see the President of
the organization. I went over to Sears, went to the back of the
place, punched the button, went up to the third floor, walked
out beautiful place, you know, huge mahogany walls
and big thick carpets. There was a secretary and she guided me
into another office and then into another office. Well, by this
time if my intuitions hadn't rattled me too hard, they were sure
rattling now. I knew something was wrong. You just smelled death
when you walked into that. They had promoted General Wood out
of existence, and now he was still trying to play President of
that company when he had no relationship to it. You walked in
there and you could smell that. He had escaped into the past.
These are necessarily interrelated. And, at the same time, the
phases aren't fixed. No matter if you're 80, and something needs
to be done to dream new dreams in society, you go back and dream
new dreams. Or if you're 18, and the structures of society are
collapsing, you go out and shore them up. Whatever is necessary.
You're not trapped by your own rationality; but use your own rationality
to create significance here. Life then becomes a perpetual wonder
at every age that you are. And the gift of authentic engagement
is at this point. To recover your phase is to receive your life
back as a gift, and so Phasiality is Resurgence.
32. Well, Resurgence is also the New Morality. Today
to talk about the base of the new Morality is to talk about then
Universa1 Benevolence; care, concern, I'd like to use this word
love, if you'd allow what I'm going to say to describe the activity
that you'd point to.
33. In Tennesee Williams' play, The Night of the
Iguana, there was a clergyman who had it made. He knew what life
was about; he knew what it meant to live. He was visiting in one
of the Third World countries with a mass of starving people, and
he sat where there were just heaps of dung, and saw people crawling
out on those heaps of dung, trying to find little particles of
food that had passed through people's bodies in order just to
be able to sustain themselves. The whole worldfell on him.
The rest of the play was about him hiding in some little village,
trying to come to terms with that world that had fallen on him.
34. The most recent time that this took place was
last summer, when one of our participants was walking down the
street and it was dark, or rather dusky and he noticed three fellows
coming down the street. ''Oh, my God, I'm going to get robbed."
But they passed by him, and about 20 or 30 behind him, unbeknown
to him was an old woman walking, and they attacked her. I said,
"Well, what did you do?" And he said, "I just kept
walking on, and as I walked on, she made noises like an animal
in deep pain." You know the reaction you have in your mind:
"If that had been me, I'd have gone back and protected that
woman," or the reflection "Why didn't she give them
her purse? It wasn't worth battling for that"' But she didn't,
she hung on to it evidently, because they hurt her, or even killed
her. But it was that animal scream.
35. It's just like the scream of the world. Suddenly
what you have on top of you is the world. You see, you're now
exposed to the whole world on your back; not just some particular
thing, but all of life Wroom! Those horrifying 25,000
miles, and 500 billion tons of matter are on your back. When you
begin to interiorize that; you begin to see what Universal Benevolence
is. That's just the way life is, and Universal Benevolence is
to the human being that you are: to have that world on your back.
36. When that radical interiorization comes you know
that you're totally related to everything that takes place. You're
related to every last person on this globe bar none. The war in
Viet Nam is like some horrible monster, for whatever else is horrible
about is, it just grabs us and will not let us go. It holds us
present to our relationships to strange people and strange places
that we don't understand, that are alien, that we cannot like,
and that we wish we'd be rid of. But you and I arc totally related;
that's the way life is. Universal Benevolence is to be the total
relationship that you are.
37. Then Universal Benevolence is also responsibility
for the past. The peat moves in on you. It doesn't' care anything
about you, it just moves in on you. It demands recreation; it
demands that you be integrated into what you're doing; it demands
to be related. It's as though Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great,
Napoleon, and Lumumba are all there to be honored, and to move
into the future with you. That's just the way life is. Universal
Benevolence is to be that responsibility for the past that you
are.
38. Universal Benevolence is also dominion over the
future. The future waits for my model to be enacted. Now if you're
like me, your first response to that is, "What in the world
are you talking about?" lot me say it again. I have dominion
over the future. Both of those are poetic ways of saying that
tomorrow can be different by virtue of the way that I act today.
That too is just the way life is, Universal Benevolence is to
be the dominion over the future that you are.
39. Then, it is on behalf of all. You see, I decide
the destiny of all men. I live and act on behalf of al1 men And
that's whether I like it or not, whether I know it or not regardless
of how much I give myself, that's just the way life is. Universal
Benevolence is to be all that I am on behalf of al1 men.
40. Well, if you're like I am, there are screams
in the midst of you at this point. When that total world settles
on you the desire to escape is there. You know, my first job is
to say, "What in the world do you mean I'm related to everybody?
What I do is so inconsequential, it doesn't matter in the wildest
imagination." So I attempt to escape and to block out the
total interrelatedness. Or, I say, "Brother, you're insane.
What do you mean I have responsibility for the past?" And
sheer anger comes out. I don't show that anger; I just say, "Man,
you're out of your cottonpicking mind for even raising that
subject." So it's escape into cynicism and hatred.
41. And then, as for the future My models
are so inadequate. What do you mean, those petty little old things
that I create and then act and battleplan out? They can't possibly
match the demand." So I escape into impossibility. Or again,
you say, "Poor little old ma; I'm so insignificant. What
can one person do?" Or again, you escape into selfdepreciation.
42. But you see that escape goes on, and you know
there's always the question of life in the midst of it, because
you and I know there's no escape from that encounter. Life moves
in on you, whether you like it or not. I'd also like to submit
there's no final blotting out of the fact that life has moved
in on you with that encounter. Now you and I can weave all sorts
of illusions and images around us; but finally there's no blotting
out for if you finally blot it out, we know enough about the way
a human being operates to know that the alternative is that you
blow yourself into psychosis. There's no way to live except out
of the way life is. There's just no other way; and life won't
take no for an answer. Life demands a yes; a yes that selfconsciously
lives with the way life is all the time. That's the question that
is shoved into the midst of my being.
43. I'd like to submit to you that resurgence is
Universal Benevolence. It is the Resurgence that underlies and
catalyzes the Resurgence of engagement and the Resurgence of Phasiality,
For the Resurgence of engagement is only Resurgence when it is
radical engagement; that is, the Resurgence of engagement with
all of life, past, present, and future. Resurgence is also Phasiality.
That means that the world of total responsibility for the globe
is upon me in every phase. If I'm a Youth, I dream dreams on behalf
of the world; if I'm an Rising Adult, I create brand new societies;
if I'm an Established Adult, I establish the whole world; and
if I'm an Elder, my whole wisdom is related to all. So whatever
particular lifetime you live out of, you live it to the fullest.
44. As someone said last night: the springs of life
are flowing. Resurgence is at hand. It's not a giddy Resurgence;
it's the kind of Resurgence that comes after life has burned you
out, so to speak, where you finally see that nothing is going
away, that yours is total, complete responsibility that takes
the world upon its back for the rest of its life. Resurgence is
engagement) Resurgence is Phasiality; and Resurgence is the New
Morality.
Joseph A. Slicker