Commitment to the Untried

September 1980
Lakeland

Commitment to the Untried

The old ways may not be the best ways. Our loyalties to ways we have always behaved needs re-examination. This talk is an attempt to look at our human situation from the perspective of hope through the lens of reality.

H.G. Wells, perhaps the most noted writer of the early part of this century, was rather pessimistic about our motives and our lack of persistence in pursuit of our ideals, in defense of our values. He wrote that essay in 1924. Were he alive today, I know of no strong evidence that would cause him to change his attitude.

There is no need to review the list of issues and conflicts that place humankind in jeopardy. We worry about them, but perhaps do not worry enough, or worry constructively. Certainly a presidential election campaign is hardly the situation to feel elated at what the public demands from the contestants. Not within my memory has there been so many who are saying “none of the above.” [CJW note: particularly offensive/depressant yesterday’s mail book “Avoidism: A Guide to Dynamic Lethargy” ... 50% turnout or less] More and more frequently many of us share the feeling of Shakespeare’s Rosalind in AS YOU LIKE IT (Act I, Sc. 3), “O how full of briars is this working day world.”

That being so, you may well ask, where is the perspective of hope:? Hope is more fitting than despair, I believe, because of three conditions at least: We are all different persons, change is inevitable, and the important ingredient is finely expressed by Robert Frost in a poem I have read to you before:

Riders

The surest thing there is is we are riders
And though none too successful at it, guiders,
Through everything presented, land and tide
And now the very air, of what we ride.

What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?
We can just see the infant up astride,
His small fist buried in the bushy hide.

There is our wildest mount – a headless horse.
But though it runs unbridled off its course,
And all our blandishments would seem defied,
We have ideas yet that we haven’t tried.

The “wildest mount – the headless horse” of the poet is the modern, terrible dilemma of the human family. Can the people of the world be fed and housed? Are individual human rights only a localized aberration in the long wave of history? We don’t know. Thus, an answer may reside in a commitment to the untried.

First, we are different. There is no need to assign much time to demonstrate that. Because we persons are free agents, at least to a limited degree, our choices, our interests, our directions differ. Because we have choices we make mistakes. Our mistakes become apparent when our experience registers that someone else made a better choice or a more accurate decision. It is the nature of our human experience that we suffer a little or as much for our mistakes.

But now our differences can now and then point to better choices. We will do well to announce our differences – place our views and convictions in the open places for support or criticism. The world is too complex and too threatening for any reliance on one person or one group for answers.

The poet Marianne Moore had a wonderful line, “We must have the courage of our peculiarities.”

Secondly, the fact of change is ever-present. Change would be a platitudinous cliché except for the reality that it is an ever-present dynamic truth. We have some need to understand change in order to cope with the world in which we live.

Most persons long ago abandoned any idea of a universe fixed in place. The universe is dynamic, changing, and the many mythologies of the ancients seem inadequate. Our cities change. To make a personal observation, this summer I visited San Francisco for the first time in 14 years. At that time, the section called Haight-Ashbury was a place of low rents, a combination of black ghetto and home for the “flower children” and street dopers. They’re gone now. In 1980, it is a place where houses sell for 4 to 5 times the price of 10 years ago. No longer a low rent district for poor people, it is a place for people who can pay at least $100,000 for a house. The poor people are largely gone. I was told that the black people are forced to live in the suburbs – where whites moved (ran) a few years ago to escape living in the same neighborhood as black people. I found this hilarious in some comic-tragic sort of way. [CJW note: not prophets hand of just God in history]. but that’s aside from that area being just another illustration of social change. You can supply other obvious examples of social change. We won’t be able to cope with such change unless we are willing to try what has never been tried – to commit ourselves to the untried.

To hold a somewhat hopeful attitude for the survival and improvement of the human species on this planet may be both naïve and credulous. Some of you have reminded me in months past that I have been unduly pessimistic. I may be again. I came across this bit of wisdom from the writings of the late Abraham Maslow, who contributed much in helping us understand ourselves: he wrote, “Human nature is not nearly so bad as it is thought to be. In fact, it can be said that the possibilities of human nature have customarily been sold short.” (Quoted by Roszak, Person/Planet p. 93)

Is this quotation ... a resolve to seek out answers, untried ways a direct contradiction of the words I read from H.G. Wells at the beginning of this talk? It would seem so, except Wells went on in that essay to explain why he entitled it “The Creative Passion.”

He writes of his own opening position, “And if there is nothing more than these common impulses of the everyday life, this coarse stuff of common humanity, then all our ....” (read p. 344 – 346).

The desire to k now and the impulse to make – this for Wells was the creative passion and so it can be for us as a drive to try what has not been tried.

Aldous Huxley, the sensitive and penetrating writer, was quoted by his biographer, “Like everyone else, I am functioning at only a fraction of my potential.”

I could not help associating Wells’ dual qualities of “desire to know” and “impulse to make” with the writings of John Dewey, I think the wisest philosopher-teacher this country has produced. Oh, I know John Dewey is blamed for everything from illiteracy in the schools to the rise of Dr. Spock. I also am willing to bet a good dinner that his most virulent critics have not read his writings or studied his thoughts.

True he was not a supernaturalist in religion. He defined God as the process by which ideals became real. He believed strongly in ideals, calling them Ideal Ends – dependent on intelligence (and I would add, passion) for their realization. He believed in the power of the human imagination – as he put it, “laying hold of the possibilities offered to thought and action.” He wrote, “Men (sic) have never fully used the powers they possess to advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing. Dependence on an external power is the counterpart of surrender in human endeavor.”

In ringing changes on a variety of ways to suggest the value of commitment to the untried, some of you who read my thoughts and intuit my feelings rather well may have guessed that today I’m trying to build a base (a premise) for much of what I shall say and celebrate in this new Fellowship season. You would be correct.

There are two ways I would like to sum up – the first, some words from the poet/playwright Maxwell Anderson:

“I never believed much in a golden city
back there in the choir. I don’t believe in it now,
But they were right about one thing, the old prophets -
there is a holy city somewhere. A place we hunt
for, and go toward, all of us trying
and none of us finding it. And it’s no wonder
we don’t find it yet. Because our lives
are like the bird (you remember) in the old reader
that flew in from a dark night through a room
lighted with candles, in by an open window,
and out the other side; we come out of dark,
and live for a moment where it’s light, and then
go back into the dark again. Some time we’ll know
what’s out there in the black beyond the window
where we came in, and what’s out there in the black
on the other side, where it all seems to end.”

(from THE STAR WAGON)

The second is – this summer I read somewhere that Maggie Kuhn, that marvelous woman, chief advocate and, perhaps founder of the Grey Panthers, was inducted into the International Giraffe Society. That is an honor restricted to those who stick their necks out.

To my mind, both the playwright and the Grey Panther tell us that survival and well-being – salvation if you will – depend on the intelligence and imagination to try methods that have never been tried.