Mugged By Reality

September 16, 1984
Lakeland

Undated
Port Charlotte

“I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality.” That is the slogan on a T-shirt and is the seed of my theme today. In spite of our many comforts, toys, there is a wide-spread anxiety, even dread of the future. In attempting to deal with this, my talk divides into 1) the theme of progress, which has been an essential part of the last 2 or 300 years at least, 2) the events which have cast doubt on human progress (mugged by reality), 3) a look at what progress has meant, and 4) can we still have reasonable hopes for the human venture?

Many of us were reared in the belief that the future was bright. In my early years, two basic propositions were part of how I was programmed. In Unitarian churches, the fifth sentence in the belief affirmations was, “we believe in the progress of mankind, onward and upward forever.” In Universalist churches it was affirmed “we believe in the power of men of good will and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.”

Science and engineering were providing benefits undreamed of by my grandparents. Through Thomas Edison’s inventive and managerial genius, the wonders of electricity brought well-lighted homes, factories, streets, the electric refrigerator, and marvelous appliances. Henry Ford developed the assembly line, and the Model T became the low-cost automobile for millions for business and the Sunday afternoon ride. Farm machinery and scientific soil and planting methods so increased agricultural efficiency and production that it was not difficult to predict (and many did) that soon no one in the world would be hungry.

In our land we cherished the American Dream. Born of our struggle for independence, the revolutionary victories at Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill and Yorktown; the promise of the frontier, richer in resources than ever known in the world, America was the New Jerusalem, the land of never-ending progress.

Woodrow Wilson convinced us that we were to fight WWI to make the world “safe for democracy” and that the war was a “war to end all wars.” In the 1920s, there were disarmament treaties culminating in the Kellogg-Brand peace pact of 1929.

In that same decade, millions of Americans were getting rich (on paper). Not only bankers, brokers, and business men were speculating in stocks, but also clerks, warehousemen, and crafts workers were playing the market. President Calvin Coolidge was widely praised when he pronounced, “The business of America is business.”

Surely Tennyson’s glowing 19th century optimism in the hymn we sang was coming true.

“Yea, we dip into the future,
far as human eye can see,
See the vision of the world,
And all the wonder that shall be,
Hear the war drum throb no longer,
See the battle flags all furled,
In the parliament of man,
The federation of the world.” (1842)

Then these bright, idealistic dreams were mugged by reality. The world was not safe for democracy. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, and the Japanese empire demonstrated that beyond any doubt.

The Depression, beginning in 1929, brought shocked awareness that unlimited American prosperity was not guaranteed. Millions of home owners, farm owners, business men, speculators, lost all their material possessions. The Dust Bowl, bank failures, 20-25% unemployed – the shining American Dream became tarnished.

World War II dimmed the dream of the progress of mankind onward and upward forever. Not only terrible battlefield carnage, but also cities were destroyed from the air; the holocaust demonstrated how demonic human nature could be. Thirty years after the “war to end wars,” 50-60 million people died.

The atomic bomb was designed, engineered, and delivered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The science and engineering which had unlimited promise for the world also lead to nuclear weapons, supersonic bombers, all the sophisticated engines of destruction which can be unleashed by a few electronic impulses.

In THE TEMPEST, when Prospero, with his occult knowledge, and Ariel, spirit of magical powers, have brought together the shipwreck survivors, most of them scoundrels, innocent Miranda says to her father with delight,

“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!”

Prospero, who has experienced treason and double-dealing, replies, “’Tis new to thee.”

The shadows, realities and threats of the last 50 years cast authentic doubt on how “beauteous mankind is” for the whole litany of reasons that you can cite as well as I can.

Even so, there seems to be limited sensitivity to the ominous threats to human survival. There were a couple of items that illustrated that, and I didn’t know whether to weep or laugh. This was a question addressed to TV Guide: “If we become involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes? Should I store them in a lead-lined container?” The same source reports that civil defense officials in Utica NY (we are told) plan to order 1000 hamburgers and 1000 cups of coffee from fast-food restaurants to sustain occupants of municipal fall-out shelters in the event of nuclear attack.

For the first time in American history, many parents do not expect life to be as good for their children as it has been for the parents. Working, saving, sacrificing for the sake of children and their future has been a distinctive and prevailing motivation. But many parents fear now that this may not come to pass.

In RICHARD III (Act IV, Sc. 1), Shakespeare’s tragedy of different times, the Bishop of Carlisle says,

“The woe's to come; the children yet unborn.
Shall feel this day as sharp to them as thorn.”

But if the foregoing reflected only an undiluted pessimism on my part, I would not have taken your time. I would moan my lamentations and wait with whatever stoicism I could muster for that giant blinding flash. But there’s more to be said. 2600 years ago, the philosopher Xenophanes wrote, “The gods did not reveal to men all the things from the beginning, but men, through their own search, find in the course of time that which is better.”

As an historian of the subject demonstrates, the idea of progress, the dream of human progress, did not suddenly spring forth full-born in the period 1750 to 1900, even though that period marks the zenith of the idea of progress. [CJW note: That hope is found in the Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian cultures even in sad times and [amid] barbaric events.]

No matter where one looks, the evidence of progress is unmistakable. The application of design and engineering to scientific theory has created a new world of wonders that would stagger the imagination of the author of the ARABIAN NIGHTS. Although some of us are critical of aspects of the medical profession, many of us would not be alive but for advances in healing and hospital technology. How many thousands of children do not have polio because of Dr. Salk? The achievements would fill large volumes.

In spite of the sad and deprived condition of the people who live at poverty level, there has been much more done in the last 50 years of our nation than ever before. Americans differ on the effective remedies for poverty, but there is more general sensitivity to the plight of the poor, the deprived, the abused – a consciousness that was only a faint glimmer in the early years of my life.

The opportunities for education have increased. The pool of men and women informed and skilled in scientific specialties and the liberal arts has grown beyond any predictions of a half-century ago.

What went wrong? I respond to what Kirkpatrick Sale (HUMAN SALE, p. 35) points to. Along with a belief in progress, we have been tempted by “technofix.” Oil shortage? Liquify coal. Food shortage? Irrigate the Sahara. Civil disturbances in the summer heat of cities? Cover them with geodesic domes to control temperature and if necessary alter oxygen mix to induce lethargy in the rebellious.

The technofix deals with externals. Furthermore, the side-effects of technofix are not always considered. Think about one “technofix” that went wrong – the Aswan Dam on the Egyptian Nile. As Kirkpatrick Sale notes (HUMAN SALE, pp. 30-31),

“The dam was built at vast expense in order to provide electricity for the Egyptian people, increase agricultural production through controlled irrigation, increase fish production by providing a new lake, and thus improve the general standard of living. But the dam has blocked off the Nile waters so that millions of tons of natural fertilizers end up in the lake behind it and never either get to the farmlands downstream, severely harming agricultural production, or to marine life in the delta, severely curtailing fish production. So the government planners were forced to use much of the electricity from the dam not for home or industry, but to make artificial fertilizers for the farmers, and someday they hope, artificial chemicals for the delta fishermen, thus using electricity to solve the problem created by the dam that was built to solve problems by electricity. But since the artificial fertilizers so far have been strange to the soil and didn’t work as well as the natural ones, and since the delta waters, stagnant now for much of the year, have bred a variety of diseases, the overall standard of living has in fact been lowered.”

Where, then, lies the hope or technofix that is more authentic than fantasy or daydreaming? Can we be more skilled in human survival than the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, who could turn it on but not turn it off?

A social scientist noted “one of the outstanding features of neurotic behavior is the patient’s inability to learn from the past.” (A. Koestler, THE INVISIBLE WRITING, p. 190) Can people, nations, learn from the past? Can there be more ethical imagination in understanding that all inventions we devise have side effects? If there are uncounted workers who will be displaced by the fast-developing robotic production devices, what happens to those for whom industry no longer has a place? There has to be a limit to those who can find low-paid jobs in fast-food restaurants, or sit at computer consoles. Big Brother’s dictatorship in Orwell’s 1984 kept the unemployed narcotized with plentiful supplies of cheap, chemical gin.

The second song we sang this morning encompasses our hope – “Faith in Ourselves”:

Faith in ourselves must be steadfast as a growing tree
Strong through the years strewn with rock and thorn
Our dreams may go astray
Still we salute each day
And left our hearts with faith reborn.

If one values the human enterprise, seeks to hold on, even by the fingernails, to the old but ever-new goal of justice for all, then we maintain the never-ending struggle for a kinder world.

To hold on to the realistic hope that Walt Whitman voiced: ... [Editor’s note: quote missing]

One of the lessons drummed into me as I was being taught homiletics was “never underestimate the intelligence of people; never overestimate their information.” Whether or not I have learned that lesson well or badly, personally, I am still convinced that in the social order, given fuller information, enough of the general public will respond to that which preserves and enhances human life and values rather than the opposite, and that has sustained me.

Rollo May observed (COURAGE TO CREATE, p. 58), “Anxiety comes from not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence.”

It sounds like a cliché – but I believe lack of knowledge leads to anxiety, anxiety leads to fear, and fear leads to hate. If our idealism has been mugged by reality, then, if we have faith in ourselves, we will seek to inform ourselves on the source of anxieties, beyond slogans and fear.

I no longer can accept that “the progress of man is onward and upward forever.” There are too many conditions and qualifications necessary to maintain such glorious, inevitable optimism.

A figure that wise Aristotle used so many centuries ago is more compelling to me. “Those who are now renowned have taken over as if in a relay race (from hand to hand, relieving one another) from many many predecessors who on their part progressed, and thus have themselves made progress.” (METAPHYSICS)

In relay races, sometimes the baton is dropped in the act of passing. So with people and their civilizations. But the race continues. Aristotle also noted in his METAPHYSICS, “No one is able to attain the truth adequately, while on the other hand we do not collectively fail; but each one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by all of us together, a considerable amount is amassed.”

One thing more: a sense of the sacred needs to be recovered. This is not a call to an old-time religion because many of the claims and demands of the religious right do not seem very sacred to me. The sacred is that which we revere – an aura which surrounds our highest values because those values are the most precious. The sacred nature of persons, the sacredness of planet Earth and the universe in which it has its being. As in [the] Torah when [the] Deity refused to reveal his/her name to Moses (“I AM what I AM,” I am what I will be), there need not be alarm if our theological designations differ, “we are what we are, the Earth is.” We will be what we choose to be. On such foundations, the sacred can sustain us.

The late Lillian Smith, a courageous pioneer in illuminating the cost of bigotry, wrote in KILLERS OF THE DREAM, (not degenderized)

“Man ... with feet tied to the past and hands clutching at the stars! Only by an agonizing pull of his dream can he wrench himself out of such fixating stuff and climb thin air into the unknown. But he has always done it and he can do it again. he has the means, the techniques, he has the knowledge and insight and courage, he has the dream. All have synchronized in beautiful harmony, for the first time in his history. Does he have the desire? That is a question that each human being must answer alone. It is a secret ballot that one by one we shall cast, and only those votes will be counted that are cast in time.”