A Theology for Radical Politics Michael Novak */« Herder and Herder 1969 HERDER AND HERDER NEW YORK 232 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 My thanks are due to the following publishers for permission to quote from the works cited: Random House for The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus; Beacon Press for The New Student Left: An Anthology, by M. Cohen and D. Hale, cds.; Marc-Laird Publications for It's Happening: A Portrait of the Youth Scene Today, by J. L. Simmons and B. Winograd; and the New American Library for A Prophetic Minority, by Jack Newfield. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 69-17073 © 1969 by Michael Novak Manufactured in the United States Contents Introduction 1. The Inadequacies of the Old Order 2. Identity and Intimacy 3. Wisdom in Action 4. Power, Disruption, and Revolution 5. Students and Demonstrations 6. The Beauty of Earth 7. Human First, Christian Second 8. Mysticism and Politics: An Epilogue For Gretchen not a hippie but 4-H and still revolutionary Introduction The Revolution of 1976 “Each generation has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes the most promotive of its own happi¬ ness. ... A generation holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held and may change their laws and institu¬ tions to suit themselves ” Thomas Jefferson* The American Revolution> Thomas Jefferson hoped, would be renewed every twenty years. We have disappointed that hope. When Americans think about revolution, nowadays7 they tend to think backwards, nostalgically—to a crippled man and a bandaged man marching to music of long ago. Have not American patriots in the last ten years tried to rekindle our ideals by turning primarily to memory, rather than to future risks that we must take? To speak of a revolution in the United States is to make many Americans uncomfortable. It seems to many unsettling, subversive7 un-American. Why do we need a revolution in America? Because the goals to which our people are committed are goals which do not ever entitle us to announce: “This is it. No farther. We have arrived. No more revolutionsThe goals to which our people * Quoted by John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York, 1963), pp. 157-158. 9 A THEOLOGY FOR RADICAL POLITICS are committed—liberty and justice for all—are goals which require continual self-transcendence, continual gomg beyond where we are at present. The United States is not now a free society or a just society, nor will it be such a society fifteen years from now, or fifty years from now. To be a free man is an achievement much aspired towards; it is an achievement never wholly attained. The more clearly one knows the mean¬ ing of the word and the more sharply one tastes the reality— then all the more powerfidly does one realize how far in the future freedom is. We are not free men. We are only trying to become free. Those who speak too easily of freedom do not deserve re¬ spect. We are all guilty of what Sartre calls “bad faith.” We say one thing, when we mean another. We claim to be free, then picture ourselves as helpless. “I would like to help you,” we say, Ubut, you see, it's impossible.” Or: “I hate to do this; if it were up to ?ne, I would not do it; but the rides . . .” Or: “No man loves peace more than I do. 1 don't want war. But I'm helpless. It's up to the other side . . .” There is at present enough knowledge and enough money in the world to insure that no human being needs to starve to death. Yet every minute, while we sit here, persons do starve to death. “We are helpless,” say Americans. “There is nothing we can do about it” Perhaps we could begin by being truthful: the truth is that helplessness is the most often voiced sentiment of university people, of politicians, of businessmen, of Americans in general. We are not so much the free world, as the helpless world. We are the not-yet-free people. “We want to do differently. Our heart is in the right place.” No doubt the American heart is big enough to try to save the whole world (even if we have to destroy it). “Our heart is in the right place. But we are help¬ less.” The revolution that is required in the United States is, then, a revolution in the quality of human life, a revolution in the 10 INTRODUCTION quotient of human freedom realized by each of us. To too large an extent, freedom in the United States reduces to a consumer's freedom: we are free to prefer Ban to Right Guard, to drive an Oldsmobile rather than a Buick, to work for IBM rather than GM. Politically, we exercise very little control over our city government, our state government, or the policies of our president. We vote for president once every four years, but in between elections it is supremely difficult to have one's counsels listened to, genuinely listened to, even if not accepted. It is possible to feel quite alienated from the American political system, to feel as if our system simply rolls along under its own momentum, to feel as though elections are basically a sham whereby the same policies are executed by the same per¬ sons, who merely change faces and names. A growing number of young people feel such alienation. What is the role of the university in the coming American revolution? An Israeli friend of mine, who is something of a Marxist, points out that it is an American myth that one can revolutionize a society by making changes in the school system. No school system, he argues, is stronger than the cidture in which it lives. By the time students come to the university, they have already been indoctrinated into the dominant values of their society. A'loreover, the pressures of the surrounding, all-encompassing society govern the life of the school. Such pressures, in fact, come to be called “reality,” and becoming adjusted to them comes to be called “maturity.” If you wish a revolution, he concludes, do not waste time trying to change the schools; change the dominant institutions of society, and the schools will change on their own. I?i this perspective, the university is almost irrelevant to the coming revolution. The university is a place to which one comes for information, technical skills, and further immersion in the dominant values already existent in one's own society. The university is not a place for learning how to revolutionize one's society. It is a place for learning how to succeed in one's 11 A THEOLOGY FOR RADICAL POLITICS society—it promises a bigger and better career. The university is a training center for good citizens: for talerited, capable, happy Americans. “Keep A?nerica great. Support your local university” We must agree, I think, that the Marxist interpretation of the university and the typical American interpretation agree in this most hnportant respect: both assert that the university is basically a tool of the community for inculcating its ovm basic values. Marxists predict that American universities 'will produce exactly what typical Americans desire them to pro¬ duce: typical Americans. American universities 'will produce trained, skillful personnel able to take their place in the Ameri¬ can system. Since, typically, A?nerica?is have a mystique about youth, students are expected to be less responsible and more exuberant than their elders—panty raids and protest marches are allowed—but they should not go to “extremes” (In that case, the police will be called.) University officials are expected to temper youthful exuberance 'with the harsh realities of adult “responsibility ” The taxpayers pay for the schools, and so taxpayers have a right, a majority of Americans seem to say, to see that law and order are maintained—their law and order, their society, their established values. The typical American point of view, manifested in recent polls and in many editorials, articles, and comments, appears to be that a young man is responsible if and only if he con¬ forms to the basic norms, standards, and procedures of our society; that is, if and only if he is not a revolutionary. To say of a student that he is “irresponsible” “far out,” “extremist ” or even “controversial” is not, in most American contexts, to be reconmiending him, exactly, for a job. One could conceive of a society, however, which so valued a critique of its own social, economic, and political practices that those who failed to develop revolutionary perspectives would be considered deadwood, conformists, drones, bores, and failures. (In some societies, such students get A’s—and that makes the meaning 12 INTRODUCTION of “honor student" problematic. For what is the student hon¬ ored? A student suspicious of the honors passed out by society and critical of himself may deserve to be honored. But then he will be the very one to whom such honors mean least.) The American university, in brief, is ambivalent regarding the American revolutionary tradition. On the one hand, a major poll a few years ago revealed that a majority of Ameri¬ cans would, if asked, vote down the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, Americans feel guilty when accused of injustice, me quality of opportunity, or racism. At first they try to deny the facts; they ad?nit the validity of the principle. (Americans could say, for example, “Of course, we're a racist country, and as long as whites remain a majority, that's the way it's going to be. It's to our advantage. Why not?") Thus Americans both commit themselves to revolutionary principles and show little interest in carrying them out. Lots of principle, very little interest: poor banking practice. A second ambivalence relates to education. Americans want their children to be educated to freedom, but at the same time they want them, basically, to be happy with America the way it is: don't ask too many questions, don't upset the present law and order, don't try to rearrange the bases of power. In short: be free but not revolutionary. The major task of the American way of life is to keep on repeating to people that they are free, while teaching them to be utterly docile. The chief means for doing this is the system of rewards. The more you accept the assumptions of the system (the more, for example, you accept the principle of competition), the more likely your advance¬ ment will be. Moreover, the easiest way to end complaints about the system is to raise people's salary by a thousand dol¬ lars or so a year. It is not necessary to use a Gestapo to attain conformity; one may just as easily attain it by paying good rewards. In place of bread and circuses, modem technology pacifies our people with cars and color television. The third ambivalence regarding freedom is a peculiarly 13 A THEOLOGY FOR RADICAL POLITICS liberal ambivalence. Liberalism as a movement springs from the Enlightenment; it wedded technology to the autonomous in¬ dividual. But these two spouses are incompatible. The more extensive technology becomes, the less autonomy the indi- vidual has. Almost all of us wear wrist watches to synchronize our movements with those of the system of which we are a part. Before we have a chance to protect ourselves, television and radio and newspapers and magazines and books fill our minds and hearts with images and impressions. What falls within that mainstream may be simply asserted, without proof —for example, that the North Vietnamese are “aggressors” in South Vietnam. Whatever falls outside that mainstream must be proved—e.g., that the North Vietnamese are not aggressors in South Vietnam. Statements voiced sincerely by the Presi¬ dent of the United States not only must be taken as true until proven false; they also establish a universe of discourse that throws the entire burden of proof upon the dissenters. In brief, technology has put mto the hands of administrators a power never before equaled in history. Some philosophers and histo¬ rians have even been led to say that technology has rendered revolutions in a highly organized society impossible. Thus many of the most liberal thinkers of our recent history manifest an ambivalence toward freedom of which they seem hardly conscious. They go on using the catchwords of John Stuart Mill, and of their anti-Nazi, anti-Communist, anti- Joseph McCarthy days, as if these catchwords sufficed to deal with the threats to freedom in our time. They do not recog¬ nize that the power of the mass media, a competitive economic system, and the politics of ever larger masses of people consti¬ tute a far graver threat to our freedom than any faced in preceding eras of our culture. Liberalism sufficed to bring us through World War II. But the managerial, administrative society of the future will use liberals as gears use oil: reason¬ able, pragmatic, procedurally conscious men who will reduce friction in the system. 14