Chicago Centrum, JW , Social Methods School 3/17/74
I have spent the last three years of my life trying
to bring together the insights and practical intuitions of movement
colleagues into some coherent picture of our world. I am going
to assume some things about other people which I know to be true
about myself. One of these is that I am caught up in the complexity
of the 20th century world. It has dawned on me very practically
that we live in a complex world, in a complex age. I am also going
to assume that there is a peculiar sort of complexity going on,
the complexity of having to decide to engage in that unbelievably
complex social process.
I am going to tell you a story. It is a very helpful
story. I have been saying for years it will be a great story.
The reason it is a great story is that we are living it. Indeed,
the whole earth lives this story. In that fact, the story finally
finds its significance.
To begin the story, I have to talk about our times.
We live in a time of transition. We live in an age where the images
that held together the great cultures of civilization are gone.
Arnold Toynbee said, in his study of the history of civilization,
that thirty full-fledged civilizations have existed in the whole
history of the globe. Of those thirty, twenty-nine are no longer
in existence. The one he said was still in existence was Western
Civilization. I would suggest that the record is now perfect.
Why has every great culture gone out of being? The
Indian culture, the African culture, the Chinese culture, and
so on, have all gone out of being for no apparent reason. The
basic values that hold together what it means to be a human being
are gone. The basic social institutions men have forged in our
time are gone. The family has collapsed. The nation state has
collapsed. The local community has collapsed. The metropolitan
center has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. The only thing that
has not collapsed, it seems, is the economic process. If you go
into the very midst of the economic giants of our day, you would
see there, too, the collapse.
People have now created poetry to talk about this
transition. The preceding period was a period of civilization.
That period was 15,000 years long. Whatever it is we are moving
into is PostCivilization. Whatever we mean today by civilized
human beings is going out of being. People use poetry to describe
the time we are moving into, such as "posthuman" era,
or the time of "humanness plus one." Arthur Clarke says
that humanness plus one is going to be the self-conscious human
being who is much better suited for life among the stars than
we poor weak creatures are for walking about on dry land. Chardin
says this is the time of consciousness, and we are moving into
the time of postconsciousness. That which you depend on
to remind yourself that you are not an animal is no longer adequate
to freight being a human being. Kazantzakis said the old world
is crashing clown and the new world has not yet been built. Something
like that has been the story of our lives.
Yet, in the midst of that story, something has happened.
What happened was the 1960's. The noisy decade of the collapse
happened all across the globe. Where the ferment in society in
the Fifties had not really shown itself except here and there,
all of a sudden it exploded in the Sixties. Youth stood up, and
moved all across the world. women grasped that the images they
had been given to freight the meaning of their lives were gone.
It has become clear that the images created to freight maleness
are not adequate either. So we stood in the midst of an abyss.
The black revolution rose up, maybe that was where civilization
was utterly shattered. As every other culture collapsed, it was
Western civilization that moved in and saved the day, so we thought.
Then in the heart of that one civilization, the word became clear.
Everything had collapsed.
If you think back to the Sixties, it was the time
that out of nowhere came the disestablishment, standing over against
the established demands of society. The third world was the disestablishment
over against the rest of the world. The women were the disestablishment
over against the men. The Blacks were the disestablishment over
against the Whites. The youth were the disestablishment over against
the adults. The clamor that broke out here and there, the riots
and the bloodshed, the cost in human suffering was like a society
tearing itself apart. Then a stranger thing happened. Students
who were not in Vietnam, but in Ohio, were shot at Kent State.
They were not shot by Vietnamese or by gangsters. They were shot
by National Guardsmen. The response had nothing to do with National
Guardsmen; the response was the students shut down the University.
When the students shut down the University, the'/ found out that
what was going on in the university was inadequate. This finally
came to a head here at the University of Illinois when the students
said to the establishment, in the administration, "We're
not going to open up this school till you change things."
The administration said, ''We'll change. You tell us what to do."
The students went hack to school. The students started attending
classes all over again. They started writing term papers. Now
they are streaking. That kind of unbelievable abyss has opened
up.
Michael Harrington has recently written a book called
Fragments of A Century, in which he recounts his life story through
the sixties. After being one of the leading forces of discontent
for renewal within the Roman Catholic Church within the socialists,
in the Civil Rights movement, in the Peace movement, Harrington
says he was called in by President Lyndon Johnson to 1'e an advisor
to the War on Poverty. The man has a nervous breakdown. His psyche
could not contain, could not deal with the unbelievable happening
of the sixties. We have passed the point where collapse, where
destruction, where the sense of innocent suffering was overwhelming
to the sense of the new being birthed. It's almost as though the
Seventies up until now, have been the recovery from a corporate
nervous breakdown. The sixties were the noise of collapse and
seventies have been the silence of waiting. Gone are all the movements
that were so relevant. The Civil Rights Movement is gone. The
Peace movement is gone. The women's movement has either turned
in upon itself or everyone has just said forget about it. But
it is not that we live in the time of waiting in the sense of
sitting back in a chair. Rather the silence of waiting is the
silence that falls upon soldiers as they move toward the beach
waiting to he dispersed. It is the silence that comes upon an
army as it begins to ready itself to charge into battle. It is
an electric silence.
What happened in the Sixties to cause such a period
of poised waiting? The happening was really threefold. In
the first place, it became clear when you deal with any part of
society, you are in fact dealing with all of society. That is
Kent State. You do not deal with the War in Vietnam simply in
Vietnam. That is, when you are dealing with the war in Vietnam,
you are never dealing simply with the war in Viet Nam. All of
society is one complex web of relationships. To attack anyone
is to attack them all. Secondly, the gap between the individual
and the social disappeared. It became clear that there was no
such thing as being a man of integrity, when civilization has
collapsed. There was no such thing as being a responsible human
being when you live in a society that was committing war on innocent
people. It did not matter what side of the issue you were on.
The third thing is only now corning clear: the gap between the
global and the local disappeared. It is not even shocking to us
that people in the Middle East raise cain and the next week I
am waiting in line for gasoline. All of a sudden we now have a
way to participate in the globe. When I buy my car, I am deciding
the future of the planet. With every gallon my car burns, it is
not enough to watch the exhaust go out the back, but the precious
resources of the globe be burned.
Those three awarenesses characterized what happened
in the sixties. Out of that awareness, a new consciousness began
to emerge, a new basis, a new set of values, to which every human
being, could say, "Yes." Those values went something
like this. Whatever else you are dealing with from here on out,
you are dealing with All the Earth. It is no longer possible to
think of yourself as dealing with only your nation in 1974. Ecology
is not an issue that affects one part of the globe over against
any other part of the globe because you are dealing with the whole
earth. The second presupposition that became clear was that whatever
else you mean by society, it had to do with All the People. There
is not going to he a society of Whites. There is not going to
be a society of Blacks. There is not going to be a society of
simply adults. "All the Earth and All the People'' is the
basis, the image, without which there is no future of civilization.
That fact became clear when those men stepped out of that rocket
ship onto the moon. They televised not only those men: stepping
out, standing on the moon, but there behind them was the earth.
The third dimension is that those realities and the
reality of new civilization coming into being, has to do with
All the Consciousness. That is to say that this new civilization,
this new sense, this new consensus across the world which has
so changed our lives and turned them inside out, has, in the first
instance, nothing to do with the stuff of life. It has nothing
to do with the way people organize themselves. It is simply the
awareness that comes from sitting in your living room and from
watching Viet Nam and Israel. Watching, watching, watching. It
is simply the awareness that comes from watching, the people outside
this building, and every culture outside the door. It is the awareness
that comes from walking down the street. It is seeing the unbelievable
diversity in any one of those communities is the Guild experiment.
It's the awareness that comes when you watch a line of cars at
gas station. This new consensus, this new solidarity among men,
this new grasping after a new civilization is a new kind of consciousness.
That new consciousness is underneath the times in which we live.
We call it Resurgence. In a few short years, certainly not before
1968, or before Kent State in 1970, society has shifted. Our architecture
symbolizes this Resurgence: the Opera House in Sidney, and the
pyramid building in San Francisco. In Minneapolis, they have a
building that is all glass on one side. You drive by it in the
evening and it looks like a pillar of fire. You drive by it in
the morning, it is the same. They tell me that on the way into
town from the airport in Washington, there is one place where,
if you look around, you can count twenty-three cranes on top of
buildings, where construction is going on. For whatever reason,
mankind has decided to rebuild the great cities. In twenty years,
there will probably be more building going on in these cities
than we have ever seen in history. Resurgence is that kind of
an unbelievable upheaval at the universal level.
There is a Turn as well that affects our lives. That
Turn happened to our consciousness, to our orientation. First
of all, this is a time of a turn to our own history, a turn to
the secular where the very times we have lived through, the Sixties,
have become an art form. We have not had the eyes to see. We never
realized when we were living through the Sixties what marvelous
times they were. We never realized before, the wonder and the
glory in the lives that are now ours. Our very own experience,
our very own expenditure, our very own engagement in society has
become spiritual to this body.
Michael Harrington has a quotation on that sort of experience in talking about his experience of attempting to change society and, having the vision of what is necessary falling apart, dissolving before his very eyes. But then he had a fantastic insight. He said that when people begin to form themselves together into movements to engage in society, and their vision of change falls apart, they find they were really after not that vision, but a new profound sense of engagement, a new possibility of grasping after a relevant vocation, a new ground out of which to participate in the practical dimension of human life. That kind of engagement will not go away.
That's the key to the fundamental reality of our
time. In our lifetime, the new social vehicle has been created.
A brand new social vehicle has been created. At any time, there
are two dimensions that make up a social vehicle. First of all,
it is people, all the people across the globe. But those people
are not a social vehicle. No, the social vehicle is not only made
up of bodies of people, but of people who have a vision, who have
the practical vision, an image of the future which not only informs
them about the solution of the problems they find themselves in,
but gives them a picture of their own engagement in the midst
of that new future. Secondly, a social vehicle has to do with
practice or a method, or a means by which people can concretely
map out the implementation of the vision they stand before. The
basis of that vision has to do with "All the Earth;"
we live in a global society. I had the pleasure of visiting some
conservative businessmen in Minneapolis and we started to talk
about the future, and there were some educators there, some liberal
educators there, and they started talking about the problems of
the Japanese economy. The businessmen said, "You fools, don't
you realize that we live in a global society?" I looked at
those businessmen and said, "What do you mean a global Society?"
And they said, "I'm leaving next week for Japan. I had two
people over from Europe to my plant this past week and all I know
is that if we don't deal with the Japanese economy so it doesn't
collapse, my firm is going to go under."
The second basis of that vision has to do with all
the people. With every single human being in the earth, this foundation
has fundamentally to do with the breakloose relative to human
consciousness. This has a practical manifestation as well. As
a result of the Sixties, as a part of the Resurgence, human beings
can have a new direction, a new sense of movement, a new focus
to their lives. They grasp a practical task they can participate
in. In the midst of the Resurgence of the 17th Century, that task
had to do with sailing over the seas; it had to do with the whole
globe. In Egypt, it had to do with building those unbelievable
pyramids. People grasp a new direction for themselves. They grasp
a new sense of fellowhood, of community, a new mode of relatedness
in which a man does not lose his uniqueness but rather has it
intensified. At the height of the Sixties, we began to break through
and grasp the fact that youth were not wrong. They lived a different
life than the adults. It was not that elders were useless, hut
simply lived a different life from the people who were twenty
or forty. It was not that the women had been downtrodden by the
men, but that there were fundamentally different operating images,
which in the midst of radical engagement with society , could
begin to be reappropriated. New forms of life began to emerge.
Then thirdly, a new drive began to emerge, a new
raw human power, a new sense of being able to pick up and build
civilization. Look at the myriad little groups in this community
and that community, that deal with one little issue and another
little issue, in which most of the people are not really interested
in or even very much involved. Present there is a kind of unbelievable
drive to be engaged in dealing seriously with the socio1 processes.
As we grapple with the recreation of society in our
local communities, our operating context is this emerging new
social vehicle, this new direction, and this new drive. These
are the profound happenings that are the seventies.
James Wiegel