Sixty-six and two/thirds

October 1, 1967
Plainfield
Also Morristown, November 10, 1967

Sixty-six and two/thirds

Note: August 31
A few hours ago when midnight created the bridge from yesterday to today, 66 and 2/3 of the years of the 20th century became history. Millions of persons were born in the 20th century and died in infancy, childhood, or youth or middle years. Millions of persons still live who were alive when the 20th century began. Millions now living will see the beginning of the 21st century, thirty-three and one-third years from now.

The year 2000 will be anticipated with all varieties of wild alarms and predictions of catastrophe. The thousand year divide has always stimulated the imagination. Centuries before the C.E. began, Plato predicted that departed souls would return after spending 1000 years in the underworld. Part of the orthodox Christian hope has been always for the 2nd coming of Christ. When the year 1000 dawned, the churches were filled with the devout and fearful because of an abundance of predictions that the time had arrived for the end. The millennium had become synonymous with the end of things. But the world did not end in 1000. We approach 2000. Once again there will be numerous foretellers warning us that Christ will return with his angel armies to destroy unbelievers and the forces of Satan. All sorts of tortured mathematical formulas, linked to out-of-context Biblical passages will "prove" that 2000 will be the time of supernatural Armageddon.

There are other predictions than the theological. For example, there was an article titled "push-button beauty": "The chic woman of the year 2000 may have live butterflies fluttering around her hairdo... attracted by a specially scented hair spray. The same woman, according to predictions made at a cosmetics industry luncheon, will control her body measurements by reclining on a chaise lounge with electronic bubbles that massage away problem areas." (Daedalus, p.64) It is probably rudely irreverent or crudely unaesthetic for a male to wonder about the correlation, if any, between butterflies in the hairdo and bats in the belfry.

But as Daniel Bell pointed out, "the future begins in the present." As 2/3 of the 20th century has become history, it seems appropriate to ) review and appraise. When Casey Stengel was released by the Yankees, he said, "I guess this means they fired me. I'll never make the mistake of being 70 years old again." - which is good Stengelese emphasis on the reality that we can't turn back time. But if we are wise in seeking a better life we will attempt to interpret our experience in order to understand it, to learn where we might recast our expectations and redirect our efforts.

What have we learned, if anything, from the first two-thirds?

The 20th century dawned rosy-fingered. Large segments of the “Christian” world believed that its doctrines would soon prevail and heal the world’s ills. An enduring Protestant weekly was founded and named "The Christian Century." Eloquent preachers were urging believers to evangelize the world in one generation. Most Americans believed that it was the manifest destiny of the United States to lead the world in a triumph of peace and good-will.

But clouds soon obscured the rosy-fingered dawn – war and death and fear and strife and disillusion. The first World War was fought, in the words of our President Wilson to "save the world for democracy." But the countries that fought soon forgot that, including our own. The totalitarians filled the political vacuums with their songs, strongmen, slogans and slaughter. And in our own land, President Coolidge reminded us and the world that the business of America was business.

Technical progress and scientific development have been marvelous. Knowledge has doubled and doubled and doubled again.

But many hopes have become tainted by disillusions born of inhumanity, injustice, and most of all by our failure as a human family to put an end to war. Fear and conflict stalk the cities of our land. Prospects for prompt solutions there seem more and more remote as bureaucracies falter and ideals become dimmer. There are those who believe Spengler had the clearest insight and most accurate prediction when he wrote of the “Decline of the West.”

James Reston summarized:

"The first third of the century brought America out of her political isolation; the second third handed her the leadership of the Western world; the final third will determine whether she can guide the blind forces now threatening the human family.

"The first third of the century gave us the automobile, the airplane, the first World War, the Soviet revolution, and the Great Economic Depression.

"The middle third destroyed the old empires and the old political and religious order in an even more savage World War, and gave us atomic power and the intercontinental rocket, the Chinese revolution, and a wholly new map of fantastically rich and miserably poor nations."

As a young man, I remember when persons talked about plans for the future, again and again a subordinate clause would introduce their hopes, "If I keep my job, we will go here or buy that." That was the time of the Great Depression, and, in this land at least, deep insecurities gathered around the fear expressed as "If I keep my job."

But fears have moved to another threshold where pain is close to the surface and clusters of anxieties are more unsettling, even among those who seem suave and self-confident. Said or unsaid, the subordinate clause to our hopes and plans is, "if the bomb doesn't fall...." All our frustrations at the maddening obstacles blocking the way to a world at peace are contained in those words, "if the bomb doesn't fall." The very expression implies feelings of helplessness, "if the bomb doesn't fall" – indicating somehow that the bomb of itself can choose its time and place, rather than persons in power at the triggers.

Other certainties too are gone or disappearing. The old, harsh Puritan moralisms have lost power to enforce rigidities of behavior. But by and large, we have failed to learn better ways or to accept our own responsibilities to define and maintain ways of living which are both fulfilling to ourselves and generous to others.

The old, comforting theological assurances have eroded to the stage that, at 66 2/3, there are but fine grains of shifting sands remaining of the Rock of Ages. In spite of scholarly theologians and eloquent speakers, close to the surface of most religious discourse is the common agreement that God is not going to set things right. I do not encounter persons who possess such abiding hopes. Spoken or unspoken is the rebellious response that if God was going to set things right, God should have acted before the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, before saturation bombings, before the terrible atomic hours of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What can we believe? What can we do? If the bomb doesn't fall in the remaining 33 and 1/3, there may be a chance.

There are ways of considering the issues of living in the years before us. If any of us can exert influence, it must be where it will capture the attention of others, or to so grow ourselves in wisdom and stature that we can wrestle strongly with some part of the issues before us.

How would you define the most formidable questions ahead of us in the last third of the 20th century? I like the way Gyorgy Kepes of M.I.T. summarized (SR 3/5/66)

"FIRST, our environmental chaos, which accounts for inadequate living conditions, waste of human and material resources.
SECOND, our social chaos – lack of common ideas, common feelings, common purposes.
THIRD, our inner chaos – individual inability to live in harmony with one's self, inability to accept one's whole self and let body, feelings and thought dwell together in friendship."

In such classifications one can find central problem points. There is contained in his summary much of the temper of our time, whether one is disturbed by our reckless expenditure of our natural resources, feels the pain and perplexities of life in the cities, or senses the faltering of inner competence to deal with life wholesomely and happily.

In cybernetics, there is a necessary process called "feedback." Feedback is that series of events or experiences by which a machine or an organism corrects its own action. In the human system, pain is a feedback by which we learn not to put a finger in the fire. In a mechanical system, feedback may correct by thousandths of an inch the amount of steel being shaved by an automatic lathe. In the human, organic, living systems, moral feedback needs to flow through control mechanisms of values or goals that are to be prized and sought above all others. In my view, these values can be compressed into three propositions. One way or another, each of us teaches, preaches, writes, behaves in some fashion that either is productive or not in the solving of the problems before us.

There is an enduring insight in the parable of the Prodigal Son, quite apart from any theology, Jewish, Christian, or anything else. The young man wasted his life and substance in a far country. Then we read, "when he came to himself."

Each of us will come to himself as there is recognition that everyone of us, without exception, needs a self to live with. Now I am not trying to become a diluted, suburban imitation of Norman Vincent Peale. I have neither the competence nor desire for such emulation. But, more and more I become convinced that what we call the "self" is not a far country, remote from the burning questions of the social order. Our beliefs about ourselves make substantial differences in how authentically productive we can be in the social order. Recognizing the need to so grow that one reaches a self to live with
does not mean that one escape blissfully from the arenas wherein human destiny is determined. To have a self one can live with does not mean that one thinks about different problems but rather that one thinks about the same problems differently. It makes a great deal of difference in my over-view of the social order whether or not I believe life is worth living for me. And this applies to you also.

Believing that I need to maintain a self to live with and that you do also, next week I shall attempt to elaborate the idea of the Pilgrim Self.

But if I stopped here, there would be great disproportion. In addition to a self to live with, we need someone to live for. I speak not just of the complete and fulfilling relationship of a man and woman, although I do mean that in speaking of the necessity of having someone to live for; I speak not just of the love and care of parents for children and children for parents, although I do mean that; I speak not just of the close bond of friend and friend, as with David and Jonathan, although I do mean that. But even for those denied or deprived of such intimate bonds, there is a necessity of having someone to live for.

One recognizes the need of having someone to live for when he devotes time and attention to begin new and creative answers to persisting problems of the human condition – whether these are these of population control, reform of abortion laws, our recognition that we have been only fumbling around so far in attacking the problems of the cities or dealing effectively with the life or death issue of war and peace. To be fully human we are required to treat others as fully human as ourselves. That is living for them.

Because we must of necessity live for as well as with others, I shall attempt to deal with “War and Peace, an ethic for survival” two weeks hence.

Martin Buber had profound insight into the necessity of having someone to live for in his "I-Thou"relationship. Buber meant that we become authentic persons ourselves only when we believe, feel and accept others as persons totally, accepting them as persons, not things to be used. A wise, sensitive physician once wrote of the necessity and difficulty of the "I Thou" relationship, "we cannot constantly maintain the tension of intimacy and dramatic identification. A great many of our relations to persons may and must occur in the objective mode. We will, no matter, what we do, think of some people as 'things'. However, the basic indispensable and ultimate in relationships are those between two persons who see one another as real in their own right, who have the capacity to feel other others feelings, see through the others eyes and hear through the other's ears. Such intimacy is too much for any of us to endure as a steady diet. But all of us must have some of it or die." (Loomis, THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE, p.66)

One thing more, or there would be much disproportion still; we need a self to live with and someone to live for – we also need a religion to live by. You might prefer to say, "a faith to live by"; or a "philosophy to live by"; or "a set of values to live by." No matter the precise word. The question is, what do we hold to be ideal? What do we believe to be the true goals in this planet adventure? What do we believe to be fundamental about this creating universe of which we are a part? What do we believe is going to be powerfully determinant in our destinies in the years left to us, whether limited to this 20th century or overlapping into the 21st century?

Cardinal Wolsey, political schemer for Henry VIII, is alleged to have said on his deathbed, "If I had served my God as I have served my King, I would not now be in this extremity." Perhaps it is the yearning for the overview of life which made so many respond to Robert Bolt's play and movie, "A Man For All Seasons,” not just that he believed the Pope to be supreme authority – Church Council. On the 29th, I shall attempt to emphasize the need for an overview of life in the world through a biographical service, based on the life of Thomas More. More's life was a spectacular instance of the cost and worth of an overview of life, loyally maintained.

Much social change is happening; the pace will intensify almost surely. Without an overview, chaos and disaster can catch us unawares. Whether one calls the overview religion, faith, belief, or whatever, I believe we need such supporting framework for our existence, even as the all-glass skyscrapers must have the supporting framework of metal, creatively designed and skillfully joined.

In our time and particularly the one-third left of this century, the need for a universal framework becomes more and more obvious to me. The Christian Century is no longer an adequate name or description of the times. Actually it never was. There are clusters of universal idea-sharing beginning to be felt. Just as the Asian world needed Western ideas of progress, organization, and modernization, so the Western World needs some of the ancient Asian insights into the self in its solitariness and the relationship of self to that which underlies the rhythms of the Universe, If the East needed Western reason and practical knowledge, so the West needs Eastern feeling and deep reflection.

In summary, as the last third of the 20th century moves irresistibly toward the 21st, there will be prophecies of Biblical heaven and hell, doctrines of last things, exhortations about one final and irrevocable day of judgment. But such archaic suppositions can have no meaning for most of us. What we will confront, or should confront are those drives in our lives stirring us to deal with the meaning of the universe of our experiences – the purpose of life, creation, growth, decay, death, and the inescapable obligations one should fulfill in terms of his belief. To such searching we may address ourselves, possibly in the modes I have suggested –

a self to live with
someone to live for
a religion to live by

The framework for faith in our times has little space for a bland collectivity of inoffensive religion; and no room for an inert ethics. We should have no tolerance for mindless comfort. In this dimension we call "time" we have before us the opportunity to use the resources of civilized excellence to construct a live faith and a functioning ethic, both of which are necessities in our diverse, pluralistic and precarious world.