Planet on strike

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Planet on Strike

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Displaced Person's Almanac

The Liberated Zone:
A Guide to Christian Resistance

Tlie Lebanon and Phoenicia: Ancient Texts

Illustrating Their Physical Geography

and Native Industries, Volume I

John Pairman Brown

PLANET

ON

STRIKE

IsJ^J

THE SEABURY PRESS • NEW YORK

311

Copyright (q) 1970 by John Pairman Brown

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-100351

Design by Carol Basen

666-1269-C-5

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used
or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission from the publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For
George, Felicity, Maryam, and David

5D6G

Preface

This book was written by a middle-aged person
for the young, who are likely not to read it, but
with whom he still works. Not as objects of paternal or
missionary concern, but as comrades in a risky forced push
into the future, in spite of our differences in hairdo and
domestic arrangements. Another middle-aged person look-
ing over our shoulders may feel I reach conservative con-
clusions by revolutionary logic. Well, the aim is helping
stabilize a global community to carry out fundamental
changes demanded by the needs of the planet, of the poor,
of our hearts, and laid on us by an old book in all our
hands.

I have here to present more than conventional thanks
to The Seabury Press for buying a pig in a poke; and a more
than conventional disclaimer that it doesn't necessarily
express the views of any incorporated body — not even the
Free Church of Berkeley, whose trustees released me from
what seemed like more urgent jobs to write it. It does
express, as best I could, the conclusions required by The
Liberated Zone — the suggestions for personal life which
the Church Divinity School of the Pacific kindly repatri-
ated me from the Middle East to make. Once again Dick
York and my wife, Emily, held my hand when the work
went badly.

viii . PREFACE

My diligent editor across the continent, and the slothful
editor in my heart, still point to faults of matter and or-
ganization. I can only explain that the world's laser-beam
never gave me a chance to cool down. Each morning
brought new reports of daring and folly: footsteps in lunar
dust, poisons in the seabed. Each night I went to sleep with
the sound in my ears of that bombing which has brought
on a planetary revolt. But also, just during the writing I've
felt the growth of a precious community, seen and unseen,
whose views I was simply recording. On our bootleg Tel-
star channel, in spite of war, pollution, and resentment,
there is going out a message of hope.

John Pairman Brown

Berkeley, California

August 12, 1969

Anniversary of William Blake's death, 1827.

Contents

PREFACE Vll

Introduction: The Revolution and Its Demands 1

Part I: The Phases of Revolution 13

Chapter One Green Revolution: Renewal of

the Environment 14

Chapter Two Peace Revolution: Renewal of

Community 27

Chapter Three Inner Revolution: Renewal of

Integrity 41

Part II: The Demands of Our New Life 55

Chapter Four The Demand for Fidelity: Going

Through the Waters 56

Chapter Five The Demand for Love: The

Source of Creativity 77

Chapter Six The Demand for Usefulness:

Actual Vocation 93

X • CONTENTS

Chapter Seven The Demand for Justice: Going

Beyond Power 108

Chapter Eight The Demand to Help: Waiting

on Table 125

Chapter Nine The Demand for Hope: Falling

Casualty 143

Chapter Ten The Demand for Joy: The Feast 155
conclusion: New Containers, New Contents 174

Introduction:

The Revolution
and Its Demands

Unlicensed by any authorities, a global under-
ground communications network has sprung up,
calling for a planetary strike. It's responding to a crisis
of violence on three levels: against natural order, social
order, individual freedom. More often than not, the
strikers meet violence with counter-violence. To that ex-
tent, there's no revolution happening, but only a change
of masters — which may help things some, but in the end
not enough. The trouble is, the demands presented haven't
been thought through, they're merely tactical. But if they
could find their proper anchorage in the past, they'd be-
come our bellbuoys in the fog blowing landward from the
sea of the future.

So on the vacant lots of the old society, in between
skirmish and counter-skirmish of police and militants, I
remove the litter to uncover three hopeful new shoots,
springing from layers of the present which were deposited
by successive periods of evolution. Corresponding to our
roots in the biological environment, our extension in soci-

2 • PLANET ON STRIKE

ety, and our transcendence of both in individual freedom,
we discover an authentic triple revolution of life: the
green revolution of conservation, the peace revolution of
liberated community, the inner revolution of integrity.
The first part of this book outlines the shape they're be-
ginning to take on.

Through the imperfect strategy of the strike, men
and women around the globe today are claiming an actual
role in that revolution, for the first time daring to become
themselves. The human race has issued a non-negotiable
demand for life. The second part of this book analyzes the
renewal in the periods of our individual life required by
the novel situation. We've inherited symbolic forms to
shape each life-phase. In face of the urgent revolutions for
conservation and peace, these forms must be radically
adapted to build up a new level of personal consistency —
the inner revolution. As soon as we start to work out those
adaptations, we see they were precisely what time's arrow
(which also generated the crisis of violence) had all along
intended.

"On Strike, Shut It Down"

V
The cracked leather of traditional institutions has a
flexible new wineskin inside; the rising ferment of peo-
ple's rebellion is the actual sap which must be poured into
it. The young bear the future; revolution wins out in the
end. Both young and old have a hand in determining
whether the revolution is violent or not; unilateral conces-
sions are required of both sides. To avoid further
bloodshed and stiffening of positions, the old must

THE REVOLUTION AND ITS DEMANDS • 3

relinquish the power which in any case will be taken from
them by death. To avoid haphazard rebuilding, the young
must voluntarily accept and refine old institutions, which
in some form will be forced on them by the need to run
society.

The old are older today, and comparatively there are
fewer of them. As technology accelerates the pace of his-
toric time, the decade when their opinions were formed
constantly recedes further from the present. Until popula-
tion increase is damped, the majority will be under thirty.
The old men in the managerial classes of the planet,
whether corporate or socialist, were raised on humorless
self-denying ideologies of economics, which further dis-
torted the one-sided insights of Calvin and Marx. The
great thing was to work hard, plow one's labor back into
the system (the Economy or Party), and by its gratitude
assure a stable niche for one's children. Today both means
and ends are dropping away.

The peoples that used to supply raw materials and
cheap labor to the Great Powers are asking for them back
again. The lower middle class is less and less interested in
providing the clerical help to run the System. As the Sys-
tem automates, it faces a generation which rejects the role
of knowledgeable consumer. Women and children picket
the expensive missile systems their menfolk set up to pro-
tect them. Prague doesn't wish to be saved from capitalist
intervention. The sons of Defense Secretaries occupy Har-
vard buildings. Meanwhile judges, bishops, politicians go
on speaking as if old sanctions were still operative. Young
people are thrown back on their own perceptions, crudely
formed by the mass media^ — but not so crudely as to miss
the contrast between professed and actual goals.

4 • PLANET ON STRIKE

The old men, who can't read the signals, in frustra-
tion tighten traditional controls. As the helicopters of
nightmare drift from cradle to cradle, in Saigon, in Bo-
livia, in Tokyo, in Berkeley, mothers and children and old
people, seeing themselves crop-dusted like insects with
toxic agents, in rage and hope strike out against bullying.
The spontaneous agreement of Catholics around the
world to shelve the encyclical Humanae Vitae shows a con-
fidence they know what's good for their families, their so-
ciety, their environment. Liberation movements, defeat-
ing eight-engine bombers with bicycles, tanks with molotov
cocktails, bayonets with flowers, are a political affirmation
of the dignity of man — which their American and Russian
masters once meant to affirm by their revolutions. At the
fragile point of society, where young people are com-
puter-dated with jobs, there's a massive refusal to accept
what they can only see as paternalism and complicity. The
planet is on strike.

It's hard for a ruling class to be reminded that its
status rests on the destruction of private property in a Bos-
ton Tea Party. Daughters of the American Revolution
still must try to see that the liberated young woman taking
a daily pill is intending to carry on their work. The Uni-
versity is embarrassed at its origin in the protest of a Soc-
rates against illegitimate claims, when the underprivileged
ask for it to be turned over to them once again. At the
mythical fountainhead of that Judaeo-Christian heritage
invoked by commencement speakers lie the non-nego-
tiable demands of a brick-makers' union. Around the
globe goes up a shout, "On strike, shut it down."

The rebels, with all their shortcomings, have still
caught the masters at the weak point of their rhetoric. Es-

THE REVOLUTION AND ITS DEMANDS • 5

tablishment anger towards blacks, students, Viet Cong,
hippies is frustration at being inhibited by its own
principles from wiping them out on the spot. It should in-
deed be shocking to see guns carried into college adminis-
tration buildings — but hardly for a public bored with
seeing guns fired into peasant villages. There must be a
better way than guns; but few persons in America (or
Russia) have illustrated it, and few of them have had med-
als struck in their lifetime. Perhaps the strikers fail to
make the best case, concentrating on superficial grievances
or amnesty for themselves; all the more reason to help
them find it.

For the case is there. The voices of protest, however
shrill, inconsistent, parochial, each are getting at some in-
justice or folly which cries out for instant correction. Even
though every set of infuriating non-negotiable demands
should prove improper, the principle of non-negotiable
demands corresponds to the way things actually are. Our
right to exist on this planet, although not our own inven-
tion, isn't something we must wheedle from any big daddy
as we bring him his slippers. The unalterable demands of
the strikers aren't all that different from the "inalienable
rights" of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; or
from something we may still remember, the thirst for
God's justice and vindication which admits no substitute.

The planetary environment, pushed beyond its break-
ing point, is also going on strike: Lake Erie is dead, the
butterflies are disappearing, industrial air is unbreathable.
The ecology has an unexpected ally, the young of the
human species, whose diurnal cycle, violated by noise and
office-routine, by distraction and boredom, by pills and
pills, is refusing to function. Our technicians in research

6 . PLANET ON STRIKE

and development branches, in crowd-control seminars,
screened for psychological stability, could keep all else in
line, but not their own kids. Mrs. Leigh Roycroft at seven-
teen wrote the San Francisco Chronicle (April 16, 1969):
"When I was four years old we lived on Nell is Air Force
Base in Las Vegas. I remember so clearly, too clearly, the
misty early mornings when sleep was still half claiming. I
remember my mother coming to wake my brother and me
on the occasion of still another in-atmosphere nuclear test.
I can still see with nightmare clarity that mushroom cloud
rising and expanding, tinted rose and orange and all the
colors of life as the sun came up over the desert. O great si-
lent majority, did you ever have the bomb before your
breakfast? I went, for a short while, to school in Fairfield,
home of Travis Air Force Base. My school faced hills on
which stood the gaunt gantrys of missiles planted during
the Cuban crisis. It went so well with my white-washed
American history,"

The American homeowner and the Asiatic insurgent
are stuck with each other in this telluric closed system, a
potential Eden walled off by the cherubim of galactic
space. Why is it so hard for them to get together on it?
Mutual insecurity cuts deep. It's well not to underestimate
the hostility of Israelis and Arabs, Turks and Armenians,
Malaysians and Chinese. Hardest of all to placate are those
responsible for mass death; they're threatened with total
collapse if they should admit their guilt. How can the
murderer be brought back into decent society? To avoid
despairing of people, we must find a way to say that the
enemy isn't evil people but evil powers — and then deal
with them. The fact of broken orders calls for a different
answer than preventive detention of militants on the one
hand, and glacially gradual reform of institutions on the

THE REVOLUTION AND ITS DEMANDS • 7

other. The gap is widening too fast for any such putty to
fill it.

The idiocy of two missile-systems facing each other
across the Arctic underlines a monstrous psychological
fact: distrust. No narrower is the rift between uptight par-
ent and dropout child: anger, silence, refusal to credit the
other with wishing to bridge it. And who will reconcile
the robin on the lawn with the DDT manufacturer?

Any spontaneous response is quickly overlaid with
time, habit. We mentally block out jails, war; out of sight,
out of mind. We jump at the chance to authenticate the
lies told about us; as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
No abstract goodwill overcomes distrust; required are
work, suffering, discipline. But when our antagonisms
push both sides into unrepairable damage to society or the
planet, we see that trust is necessary. Then it must be pos-
sible. Like other living things, it's only born of its own
kind. That orange only ripens on a tree whose sap flows
back and back to a root outside space and time. Like other
trees, its growth is often stunted; but it doesn't have to be,
it can fill the world.

The Breaking and Renewal of Natural Orders

As all the systems of global biology and society inter-
lock, as all human beings intersect, the massive job of re-
newal can't be broken up into absolutely separate compo-
nents; it's a single cake. Still, a cake elaborate enough for
a fresh start, a birthday or wedding, has to be built up in
layers, and then cut in sectors. The two parts of this book
slice renewal in those two ways at right angles to each
other, beginning with the three layers of natural order.

8 . PLANET ON STRIKE

Planetary evolution generated in turn two levels of
organization: nature and society. A man or woman — a bio-
logical organism caught up in a stream of history — is the
place they overlap. The individual appears to be the sum
of his biological inheritance and of his contacts with other
individuals. But that sum stands on a higher third level:
the freedom of a being aware of having emerged from ear-
lier phases of evolution.

We're the top growth of the tree of life, spreading up-
wards to meet the sun abo\ e the lower canopies of biology
and history. But the world-tree has been attacked on our
level by an undiagnosed blight, which spreads back down
from us. Again and again its golden apples crumble into
the cindery fruits of Sodom. Our intelligence lets us evade,
for a time, the limits placed by fixed global resources on
the spread of every other species. But that spore of reason
has puffed up into the toadstools of overpopulation and
technology, which overload the environment with unsuita-
ble items. Right from the beginning, social order has been
only a dream; history is the record of class struggle, op-
pression of subject populations.

Only in our own years have all three levels of vio-
lence been seen as interrelated and of equal urgency.
While each was always latent, those which depend on de-
veloped technology both appear later, and are harder to
reverse. Although the disruption of global ecology came
last, it will take a global effort to undo it.

The agency responsible for destruction of natural or-
ders obviously includes ourselves. Still, even the person
most directly responsible for the damage — the racist, gen-
eral, broker, logger, bully, advertiser, cardinal — can find
plausible excuses; he's operating inside a system not of his

THE REVOLUTION AND ITS DEMANDS • 9

own making. It's true also that at some point he made a
decision not to fight it.

As corruption builds up, the claims of evil become
more insistent, but at the same time more strongly con-
trasted with our instincts. Individuals through their im-
mersion in an exploitative system either consciously assent
to violence, or actively initiate it. But they also suffer it
directly from others, and indirectly from the environment.
Every person is both victim and accomplice in the break-
ing of orders.

The same intelligence and freedom involved in the
breaking also makes restoration of the orders possible. It
would be hopeless to try and begin reconstruction from
the ground up in any one generation. But, just as the dark
thread of violence can be traced indefinitely far back, so
can a golden thread of renewal — the history of hope. By it
we lay hold on the gieen revolution, replacing economic
"development" of the planet by ecological decontamina-
tion, recycling all materials. In the peace revolution we
replace individual aggression by persuasion within
community. The inner revolution means replacing self-
assertion with gentleness. We can summarize the triple
breakthrough in the old hope of a new Jerusalem: at once
a restored garden, with its river and tree of life; a city at
peace; a building whose stones are the pearls of individual
lives. A new planet, new community, new humanity.

Our New Fidelity

Last Maundy Thursday when my wife and I went to
our Free Church, a boy with an Indian headband far out

10 . PLANET ON STRIKE

on some trip came up and asked if we were Quakers. The
word has gone out that one class of persons anyvvay,
through consistency over the centuries, has merited trust.
Kind reader, is he called by your name? If not, now would
be a good time for reappraisal of self.

For we do hold our life in our hands. Each revolu-
tion, even when it ends up in new slavery, is still affirming
the springtime of individual liberation. The new plane-
tary citizen, a Hammarskjold, goes directly where the
threat to community is greatest; and that's only the
negative side of a new fidelity starting to breed true.
Under the most hopeful assumptions, it will take a num-
ber of generations to be fairly sure that the threat has been
averted. What level of spirituality will be built up by men
of all cultures actually cooperating over those centuries?

The individual man or woman is given the best
chance of working into renewal at the turning-points of life
which begin a new phase of its trajectory. Some are
unique: birth, puberty, death. Some are periodic: falling
casualty, celebration. Some may be either: entering into
sexual fulfilment, taking on vocation. Each stage rests on a
biological function essential to maintain either the indi-
vidual or the species. Each also generates a social
grouping: the family, working team, class, school, the
State. The biological and social functions of each stage
stand for some aspect of individual freedom which goes
beyond them. People become most aware of violence and
renewal, both in nature and society, at those interchanges.

Personal renewal into integrity can only be effected
through a symbolism of word, action, or object, operating
at the roots of nature and history. The scene of that hap-
pening is community — what in some sense we may call the

THE REVOLUTION AND ITS DEMANDS . 11

Church. Through community, individuals have their best
leverage on politics to push forward the green revolution,
and in part the peace revolution; but on a longer view, the
community itself is the spreading area of peace.

In the history of community, the torch we inherit and
pass on, the claim is made that the inner revolution has al-
ready in principle been carried out. Individual crises are
given universal meaning by their anchorage in an histori-
cal event so distant (and even in its own time long ex-
pected) that all peoples can today recognize in it a
fountainhead of their own history. Our new awareness of
violence and renewal makes us look at the origins of the
Church in the life of Jesus under a different light. The
current revolution requires us to reinterpret the ancient
revolution of which he was the center. This reinterpreta-
tion won't be arbitrary. For he represents the coming-of-
age of Western history, which in turn plays the key role in
planetary history. The violence against which he strug-
gled, and his new definition of community, are the sources
of current breakage and current fidelity.

The wise men we still fall back on, both in West and
East, describe our fulfilment as taking the right course —
varying with the local development of land transport, a
path or road; the Way, Seafaring societies envisage it as a
voyage by water. And it not merely has to fit the unique
parabola of our personal development; the future terrain
we must build it across hasn't even been deposited yet by
the volcanic or sedimentary processes of the present —
namely, the sum of all our individual routes. No television
into time will show us that driver, the future Me, or the
deteriorating vehicle of his body. The one sign we can be
sure of finding is ROAD UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

12 • PLANET ON STRIKE

As monitor of the march, many have followed Dante
the Florentine out of the dark waste to see the stars. Oth-
ers stand with Bunyan the tinker, a load on their back and
a book in their hand, looking up to the distant wicket
gate: "What must I do to be saved?" Some children I
know have set up a permanent picket line against a certain
Lord of the Dark Tower. Russians have Zhivago, Vietnam-
ese their much-suffering sister Kieu. But beyond poetry,
allegory, fairy tale, fiction, epic, we also need as plain a
map as may be of the unfinished road. So I've undertaken
here, writing not far from the Hay ward fault and under a
target moon, to draw up a simplified guide to the over-
night lodgings we'll all be staying at, Americans and oth-
ers alike, on our journey under protest across the land-
scape of revolution.

part I: The Phases
of Revolution

chapter ONE

Green Revolution:
Renewal of the
Environment

Throughout the universe, higher levels of or-
ganization imitate lower levels — and always with
important novelties. Things have more detail, both in
space and time, than myth or speculation ever guessed. Not
surprising; since our myth-making faculty is just one fea-
ture of cosmic self-understanding. We can be sure also that
the universe is more complicated than our minds, how-
ever scientific, have yet perceived. Still we must act on
what they report to date.

The Patterns of Natural Order

The physical world repeats patterns on very different
scales in space, and thus sets a precedent for biology and
history in time. The atom has a nucleus of heavy particles
with a hiveful of electrons buzzing around it. In most of
the universe, atoms are bound by shared electrons into
simple molecules, which are then built in extremely large

RENEWAL OF THE ENVIRONMENT • 15

numbers into the regular patterns of gas, liquid, crystal.
As nuclear forces fade out and electric forces cancel, a new
type of force becomes discernible, the gravitational. By it
solar systems are held together, patterned like the atom,
but simpler and less regular. As nuclear and electric forces
limit the size of a nucleus, gravity and thermodynamics
limit the size of a star. Up to ten billion stars, thinly dis-
persed as a gas, form rotating galaxies. They in turn, up to
about a trillion, dispersed at random fill what looks like a
finite expanding space. Its size is somehow determined by
the "surface" tension of the matter it bears, curved in on
itself like a soap-bubble in one more dimension.

Again, the several dozen fugitive particles of nuclear
decay may be pointing to a lower level of organization, so
that each proton or electron would in turn be a structured
little world. And our "universe" might conceivably be
built along some dimension with others like itself into a
bigger arrangement. Pascal suggests that the array of struc-
tures both below the atom and beyond the galaxy is re-
peated forever, so that the universe would be doubly
infinite; each flea would bite a big flea, and have a little
flea biting him.

The known universe is a product of time, probably
by expansion during ten billion years from an original
tight beginning. But although the building-blocks, from
elementary particles to galaxies, are subject to change,
they persist over long periods comparable to the age of the
whole. This state of affairs is greatly modified in special
•environments like our planet, bathed in a constant flow of
radiation from a sun-star. The energy of that stream
builds atoms into organizations far more complex than
anything else we know in the cosmos, with properties not

16 • PLANET ON STRIKE

suggested by the physicist's world — life, consciousness,
love. We are the center; Ptolemy was right and Coperni-
cus was wrong. The continuity of protoplasm behind us,
back to the original condensation of the sea, is itself a fact
of cosmic age; for it's occupied a large portion (perhaps
twenty percent) of the assumed total age of the universe,
during which many supernovas have been born and died.
Planetary evolution differs in important ways from
cosmic.

Elaboration through time. Galaxies and stars may not
be much younger than atoms and protons; physical pat-
terns could have crystallized on all levels at nearly the
same time. But on the planet, structures were elaborated
in time, from the protein-rich original sea to proto-viruses,
one-celled organisms, complex organisms, vertebrates,
land animals, more-or-less rational man. The spherical
shell of life we inhabit has fewer atoms than the planet's
iron heart, its crystalline layers, or the first sea; but it's not
repetitive like a crystal or liquid, it has unending variety,
functional specialization. And in its hierarchy of order,
each higher center of organization is more recent than the
one below it.

Acceleration of evolutionary time. Evolutionary time,
as measured by the appearance of new levels of order
against standard physical time, has speeded up a billion-
fold. The Palaeolithic period is comparable to ages of
biological evolution; and it's true that the mutations of flu
virus happen in the historic periods of years — perhaps
triggered by social and medical change. But over against
cosmic and planetary evolution, our decades represent a

RENEWAL OF THE ENVIRONMENT • 17

new phenomenon, where features of the biological and
social environment change drastically in ten earth-orbits
around the sun.

Fragility of living structures. Physical structures are
too big or too widespread to be affected by man's intelli-
gence. We have nothing to split a star or planet with. Our
splitting of nuclei repeats something which happens any-
way in stars, its products liave an advance slot in the sys-
tem. On the planet, every level of organization is vulnera-
ble to environmental changes — an eruption, earthquake,
ice age, tropical age, increase in solar radiation,
meteor-fall. Species or phyla fall prey to destructive muta-
tions, to their neighbors. And the evolution has culmi-
nated in a system of organization — ourselves — with the
power to destroy itself, lower levels, and large parts of the
environment which has evolved along with them.

In spite of these big differences, planetary evolution
maintains previous levels of organization and builds them
into contemporary structures. A redwood's grain summa-
rizes its push upwards and its bracing against gravity over
a thousand years. The animals in a square mile of grass-
land are the result of hundreds of millions of years of de-
velopment; their distribution holds the key to the making
and breaking of land-bridges between the continents. The
spices in our kitchens, a cross-section of global botany,
summarize the whole history of commerce since the
Roman Empire; the cassia of Solomon and Sappho origi-
nated in the Mekong Delta.

Long before modern science, understanding of our
roots in ecology was available through myth or specula-

18 • PLANET ON STRIKE

tion. The nine months of gestation have always on some
level been seen to echo the emergence of life from the sea.
The feeling for sacred groves and the earth mother was re-
born in the eighteenth century through identification with
the wilderness, at the point of its destruction by industrial-
ism. And in turn these biological patterns are taken up
and transformed on the levels of society and individual
freedom.

The Breaking of Biological Order

The physical properties of water determine where life
can exist. As the fixing of the simplest charged particle,
the proton, water parallels in the living environment the
flux of charged particles in the sun. Also then it stands for
all environmental orders, the reservoirs which supply the
water of our life.

It seems a general rule that, whatever can happen,
will happen; every potentiality in the end is realized. The
fact that biology and society are vulnerable to technology
and overpopulation implies that somewhere, sometime,
the wound will actually be struck. But to the responsible
conscious agent, that breaking of natural order is seen
under the category of wrong. In the first age of literature
which remains definitive for us, the poet shows how the
inexplicable act would appear to a power underlying the
space-time manifold: "My people have done two evils;
they have rejected me, the fountain of living water, to dig
for themselves reservoirs, broken reservoirs, which cannot
hold water" (Jeremiah 2: 13). As the imagined environ-
mental Golden Age is violated, all the orders fall away: bi-

RENEWAL OF THE ENVIRONMENT • 19

ological order is altered by weeds, social order by murder,
individual order by death newly seen as threat, "For you
are dust, and to dust you will return."

In the past, only a rare observer could note irreversi-
ble changes in the environment, as when Plato records
that great houses in Athens stood built with timber from
hills where in his day only the bee pastured. Ours is the
first generation universally aware of such changes — the in-
troduction of chlorinated hydrocarbons as pesticides
around the globe. Violence between groups has also taken
new forms, to which the mass media create new awareness,
both among executioners and victims.

The original biological rhythms of our life have been
built by history as fixed-cycle components into systems
undergoing ever more rapid change. At most, puberty is
anticipated by two or three years, death postponed by
twenty or thirty. No wonder then so many take on
chemicals for metabolic adjustment to the altered environ-
ment. We that make do with traditional caffeine and alco-
hol seem the queer ones, who can't attune our ears to the
amplifiers, our eyes to the cathode-ray tube, our hands to
the freeway.

Americans, living in affluent communities, parasitic
on other parts of the globe even for water, form an exag-
gerated picture of what technology can do. Inherited bio-
logical and historical structures are not indefinitely mal-
leable like gold. No counter-technology will work against
oil-slicks and deforestation; only the skill and restraint
which conform so close to the contours of nature as to be a
second nature.

As body rhythms point back to the beginning of life
on the planet, our discomfort at violence points ahead to a

20 . PLANET ON STRIKE

planet again waste and void when demonism has run its
course. The same old books which anticipated our discov-
ery of evolution are still far in advance of us, in their con-
crete symbolism of the end of world illustrating where our
road leads. If our politics is to steer a clumsy United Na-
tions into the right way, it must be guided by delicate in-
dividual compasses. We enter deeper into ourselves, trace
out each broken root in our earth mother, patiently set up
conditions for new life. Our emotions, reason, conscious-
ness— each aspect of our freedom — are somehow a blos-
soming from the basic conditions of the amoeba or the
cell: assimilation and reproduction.

Biological Roots of Our Freedom

Assimilation. In tropical climates, the energy of pri-
mary human organization can go simply into assuring the
food-supply. In colder climates, we feel like working
harder — and must, to assure clothing and shelter also. Un-
usually favorable environments like Polynesia, with guar-
anteed food-supply, produce societies with built-in
population controls, where the bulk of energy flows into
an elaborate ingrown artistic culture. The original func-
tion of economic, political, social power is to put a protec-
tive frontier around foodlands or waters. Getting food, or
its symbolic equivalent, is the primary need which pushes
the male into his vocation. Money in young America is ap-
propriately called "bread," as in Rome it was called
"cows" (pecunia).

Our superabundance of energy can lend itself to mis-
direction, and therefore from time to time does. In a char-
acter where the emotions are diverted inward or

RENEWAL OF THE ENVIRONMENT • 21

downward, which Freud ingeniously called the anal fixa-
tion, money the food-equivalent is transformed into a
dung-equivalent, as in the constipated miser, the stock
figure of comedy.

In a simple society, community is manifested by shar-
ing the food-supply which it exists to protect. The charac-
teristic form of community is the feast. In the temperate
climates of the West, the feast is celebrated with special
vestments in a temple — the symbolic use of food, shelter,
and clothing.

Primary aggressiveness aims at capturing the enemy's
food-supply. Judging our neighbor's fears by our own, we
credit him Avith preparing to anticipate an attack of our
own on him. Our imagination of the worst is self-
fulfilling, giving us a permanent motive of union for the
self-defense which ahvays spills over into pre-emptive
strikes.

Reproduction. Sexuality and hunger compete for our
attention, generating love and comradeship. In different
ways for the man and the woman, sexuality is a detaching
of something from the self as a beginning of new life. It
too can become diverted like money, and get assimilated
to the excretory organs it shares. Love is an intenser form
of community; but the sexual act, except in the symbolic
form of a dance, is less well adapted than the feast to pub-
lic cult. Males of the human species, lacking (apart from
their beards) ornamental secondary sexual characteristics,
compensate by adorning the feast with music and dance.

Wherever social patterns disintegrate, sexuality like
money-getting becomes an end in itself. The Greeks called
interest on a loan tokos, "begetting." With us, sexuality is
a dominant theme of the advertising that urges us to move

22 . PLANET ON STRIKE

out of anal fixation and spend money — the muck that's no
use unless spread. Again, we have more children than is to
the planet's interest, JFrom fear that the enemy, imitating
our aggression, will outnumber us: "Happy is the man
who has his quiver full of them; he will not be ashamed
when he speaks with his enemy in the gate." Lehensraum
for all those kids is the secondary motive of aggression —
which after a while, summing up money-getting and
child-getting, becomes the final end in itself. Since the sex-
ual motive is thought higher than the monetary, wars for
economic expansion are motivated in heroic ages through
the abduction of a frail Helen by some foreign Paris. In
our unheroic age, the pretext for mass slaughter of civil-
ians, with attendant prostitution, is the fiction of potent
black or yellow men coming at our womenfolk with their
military or sexual "tools."

As sexual and working energy wane, the world needs
our death to make room for yoimger men and women. Be-
sides the urge to beget a family and community, we have
built into us a complementary acquiescence in death.
When the death-wish gets out of hand, it takes the forms
of self-hate, proneness to accidents, the courting of failure,
suicide. If we can project its object onto another person, it
becomes one more reinforcement of aggression. But prop-
erly canalized, it provides the biological root for the most
human of actions, self-sacrifice.

The Breaking of Natural Patterns in Us

Biologically, assimilation and reproduction represent
the conquest of space by protoplasm. When life rises to the
level of tool-using consciousness, space is also conquered

RENEWAL OF THE ENVIRONMENT • 23

by the products of life— technology. When consciousness
rises to the level of history, the spread of our species also
conquers time; the awareness of this fact is the birth of
language. The ultimate form of language is to define in
poetry or legend the meaning of community as shown by
"intercourse," social or sexual.

In the takeup of nature into history, as biological ne-
cessities are derailed into inappropriate functions, aggres-
sion (natural when directed at the bully) is institutional-
ized into subjecting the weaker. We reverse Vergil's impe-
rial maxim to read, "To spare the proud and put down
the conquered." The crown of our self-understanding, lan-
guage, is perverted into pretending that the weaker is a
threat, or that our aggression is to his interest. In the
counter-functionality of the mass media, our ultimate
function of understanding ourselves is corrupted into the
ultimate perversion of deceiving ourselves.

Overpopulation with its attendant aggression over-
loads the very environment we were trying to secure; tech-
nology by its side compounds the damage. The beginning
of a cure comes by our empathy with the childhood of the
race in its instinctive revulsion at needlessly destroying a
tree or an animal. We must then bring the needs of the en-
vironment into the turning-points of our life — precisely
where the biological needs of the organism come to the
fore, in actuality or symbolism.

The Restoration of Natural Order: A New Concern

A new concern is being built into our muscles and
imaginations — the green revolution. If we're raising a
family, own a woodlot, run a regulatory agency, we'll try

24 • PLANET ON STRIKE

to make it a model. But of course the real problems are on
planetary scale: reversing pollution and exploitation, city
and country planning, extending wilderness areas. Inter-
national treaties with UN sanctions are needed. In the
meantime a multiplication of voluntary groups like the
Sierra Club is required — the more political the better, here
is where politics can't go wrong. Right now we can start
looking for men and money to restore the defoliated Viet-
namese jungle.

Conservation in America, which had reached a liberal
deadlock with the last national parks, in the last few years
has cut deeper into our psyches. Rachel Carson made
DDT a political issue, offshore drilling made oil a politi-
cal issue, Ronald Reagan made trees a political issue.
George Orwell saw that the sexual act would become a po-
litical act. Berkeley made nonviolence ecological; Frank
Bardacke said, "Don't throw stones, they are parts of our
mother." Nobody has the globe patented. The American
Indian will have the last word, who shows up from time to
time to remind us that even he is only the tenant of the
land; the Great Spirit can bring himself to shake the
groimd and drop the fire because he knows that the Indian
who upholds his peace will be able to survive.

Where suffragettes used to chain themselves to street-
lights, it's more important for people to watch housewives
chaining themselves to redwoods on TV. When the dam-
age is done it's done; here massive civil disobedience most
clearly has right on its side. Eventually the law must forget
about ownership and come aroimd to the principle that
birds, mountains, waterways are nobody's private property
but God's. Earth and the Tree of Life rooted in her have a
prescriptive right to existence.

RENEWAL OF THE ENVIRONMENT . 25

Nothing so brings us back to our childhood, to our
real selves, as remembering what kind of rocks used to
form the streambed, which flowers came up first in spring.
Nothing so brings home to us the existence of different
peoples as the apprehension of a different landscape in a
Japanese print. For me the war really means a country stay
at Nam Dinh, sitting outside a guest-house on the Red
River (October 6, 1967), stranded by explosions at mod-
erate distance and anti-aircraft fire. The noon air has the
feel of a very hot season now mostly passed by. Earlier,
children had been swimming the other side of the river,
and bare-legged girls slogging through the paddy; now
they are resting and listening to the radio. Two house-
boats with floppy striped sails are moored upstream,
bicyclists below are going across a bridge with bamboo
handrail. A girl from the commune is going by me to ^vash
the dishes in the river. (The guest-house is equipped with
a ne\\-style privy, and none of us Americans are getting
dysentery.) Irrigation sloshes behind me in the banana
grove where our camouflaged jeeps are parked, sur-
rounded with big orange iris-like flowers in pots. Water
lilies are floating at the river's edge. The Western eye
must refocus to see that the thickets alternating with rice
paddies are all bamboo, in dozens of species. Two dogs are
playing beside me in the banana tree's shade, and golden
sparrows hardly bigger than hummingbirds dart at the
blossoms. Cooperation between nature and the works of
man; a variation on the theme of a Vermont river-
meadow, something quite different the planet had up its
sleeve.

The power of the environment to resist our
depredations is indirect and long-term: cutting off the sup-

26 • PLANET ON STRIKE

ply of something we need to live. While the rivers still run
clear, we must grit our teeth and go into the offices of men
who think us fools, to make our plea for living things. The
Greeks set temples where they were aware of gods already
existing, as at Delphi. Benedictines picked abbeys with an
eye to agriculture, sanitation, landscape. But Terra is our
temple, our abbey. When the burning of fossil fuels or the
tarring of the surface disrupt her breathing and heat-
balance, we just have to start phasing out our cars and jets.
The spiral of evolution points ahead to true fulfilment of
the most archaic Stone Age spirituality, when civilization
has melted invisible back under a restored forest.

chapter TWO

Peace Revolution:
Renewal of
Community

While physics and biology contain real knowl-
edge constantly increasing, what are called psy-
chology and sociology blur over old insights and don't
replace them with a comparable body of knowledge. The
understanding of human nature by any society is con-
centrated in the events where it first became aware of itself.
Each generation is lucky if it reaches its parents' level of
that understanding. As midwife of the future, it has also to
affirm something radically new; but it affirms the new
thing about the free humanity it first saw through old
texts.

The Social Orders and Their Breaking

The biological needs taken up into our freedom are
also spread out into social institutions. These are the nec-
essary background of our self-understanding, but also the
scene where the warping of natural orders goes furthest.

28 • PLANET ON STRIKE

Within each social grouping there is created an oppressed
class of victims — which by that fact is potentially the
bearer of the future.

The jamily. Persons linked to us through begetting
are our primary extensions into space and time, extra
hands we can count on as our own. Through food-getting
and reproduction we give birth to our own community,
wiiich holds more land than we could by ourselves. So also
in time; my father is the living voice of the past, my son
the hope of the future.

In the communication gap between parents who've
accepted the challenge of affluence, and the young who re-
ject the lavished gifts, the family generates two oppressed
groups: the retired and the young. (It's not so clear to me
as to some w^omen that women are oppressed; but in fol-
lowing chapters I suggest some elements of their libera-
tion.) Grandparents are baffled at the new generation
conflict, and at their exclusion from it. There aren't any
proper rooms for them in the new homes being built by a
mobile class; they can't claim any longer to speak with in-
herited authority. The young have organized themselves;
it would take a new Confucius to organize the old.

The working team. A father can hardly teach his son
a job any more, cheated of a creative vocation himself and
beginning to forget it. He simply identifies with current
disorder; the young can see only hypocrisy and compro-
mise. Paul Goodman, who found a big lack of manly jobs
for the high-school graduate, chronicles the progressive dis-
illusionment of the filling-station attendant.

The prostitution and powerlessness spread all up the

RENEWAL OF COMMUNITY • 29

working scale; overpaid executives are equally unsure of
their jobs and prisoners of the System. The System is pris-
oner of itself. Personal fulfilment exists only in rare pock-
ets on any level. But there is a graduated injustice of re- ^
ward, which Marxist analysis correctly sees as producing
the victims of workers and unemployed. In America, '"■
where the grossly victimized are a minority, the ^
viciousness of the System lies in its inability to resolve pov-
erty and exclusion for that minority; in its massive projec-
tion of victimization overseas; in its dehumanizing effect
on all levels at home.

The community of knowledge. The bond of conscious-
ness between past and future is the University, the weakest
link in the chain of oppression. It victimizes a class of stu-
dents— the increasing percentage of our young people who
go there, and find it unresponsive to their hopes of voca-
tion, and collusive with the State.

Professors of language or biochemistry are distressed
to see ill-informed students, Marxists or blacks, demand-
ing seats on committees. They want no complicity in this
overthrowing of the standards of competence and truth.
But they hadn't previously confessed or noticed their com-
plicity in an overthrowing of oppressed populations, their
collaboration with agribusiness, slum landlords, mass
media, makers of war. The University of California was
the prime contractor for the hydrogen bomb. The stu-
dents, groping for community, try to push back to medi-
eval control by teachers and learners, before the faculty
had gone into politics, and was replaced as owner of the
University by politically appointed administrators.

But there's no way the University can wholly screen

30 . PLANET ON STRIKE

out professional excellence in teachers and students.
Competing schools of thought keep recognizable standards
alive. The life of the sciences, arts, professions is objective
enough so that from time to time actual competence
breaks through. Thus Noam Chomsky, from his sanctuary
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been the
most responsible critic of professionals who abdicated re-
sponsibility.

Social classes. Groups of the same ethnic or cultural
background should ideally be so bound up with a vocation
or a vision of the future that they don't want to trade
places with anybody. In Europe, most people wish to re-
tain their own language, cuisine, and opera house; they're
uninterested in emigrating. But there are only a few signs
that every Akron is becoming a Vienna. Our immigrants
sloughed off the best they brought, retaining vulgarized
customs and churches less as a bulwark against assimila-
tion than against black competition. Russia maintains
varied peasant roots over against mass culture; we were
uniquely unfortunate in the slave trade which built a vic-
tim black class.

Equality with functional differences between classes
must grow organically. If it's organized from above, as
often in Russia, the motive is manipulation. The transla-
tion of "separate and equal" is "separate and luiequal."
Autonomy of local groups sounds dandy luitil we translate
it as "States' rights," the label for racist control of sup-
pressed ethnic groups. Federal intervention in the South
once appeared the helping hand of justice — until we saw
that its purpose was building a united front at home to
strengthen the hand of intervention overseas. Still, if

RENEWAL OF COMMUNITY • 31

States' rights people should take their slogans seriously,
they'd build blacks and whites into a real regional
community, using Confederate buttons for draft-
resistance. The Southern Conference Educational Fund
(SCEF) calls its paper, the most effective voice for justice
there, The Southern Patriot.

The State and its usurpations. From the city-state to
now, political government has more and more englobed
other forms of power — economic, military, police, commu-
nications, knowledge, medical, service. The State that
sums them up plays a double role. So far as men are exer-
cising genuine professions, the State harmonizes them. But
so far as profession and natural orders have been broken
by pollution, war, and alienation, the damage is done
through the impersonal institutions which make up the
State. A social institution, without the individual's con-
science, forgets its original purpose. Individuals at fault
begin its corruption and assent to it; but the corrupted in-
stitution has an inner demonic life of its own.

Political groupings are the organization of people on
the basis of power. As long as institutions are defined by
self-interest, they will conflict. A just distribution of power
seems on the level of power unrealizable. Centralized
power converts autonomy into satellites. The British Em-
pire looked like a self-liquidating imperialism — until we
saw that its former control, like that of the French, was
mostly taken over by the economic control of its daughter,
the American Empire. Western imperialism has created
around the world a bloc of oppressed nations.

The best hope would seem to lie in a system of stable
self-respecting states both protected and restrained by law.

32 • PLANET ON STRIKE

But success on one level precludes success on a more im-
portant level. Our assimilation of white immigrants raised
insurmountable barriers against the black. Our success in
creating a zone of affluence here walls us off from the
Third World — and our own dropout kids. Anything goes
to defend that wall.

The State is indispensable in maintaining certain
kinds of organization, and any substitute will turn out to
be the State again in a different form. But the disorder
centered in its activities is so high today that it threatens
to tear down the whole fabric of institutions built into it,
through environmental decay, class or international war-
fare, psychological collapse. And there isn't any merely po-
litical organ inside the framework of the State which can
effectively criticize or redirect its course. The dilemma of
the State as a self-destructing artifact can only be solved by
changing the terms of the problem. The escalation of tech-
nology has made critical a need which always existed: an
institution where people are organized on some basis other
than power. A community.

The Cry for Community

As the State came into being regardless of the ap-
proval or disapproval of individuals, it will also so con-
tinue. Since it's the scene of the broad trend to violence,
the form of authentic effort is searching for a place where
that trend is reversed. This conclusion has either an anar-
chist or a religious tonality; for it means that a fully com-
mitted and realistic person can't make politics the heart of
his struggle for justice. The center must be somewhere

RENEWAL OF COMMUNITY • 33

else. Since the State has a big power of persuasion to re-
cruit well-meaning persons into its purposes, new commu-
nity is ahvays built through a minority. When the major-
ity come in, the community is already far on the way to
fossil ization: Ave just hope that the seed of creative dissent
is growing in it.

The institutions which make up the State, even when
functioning at their best, rest on coercion. The only
grounds of unity remaining is voluntary membership. The
State can claim our loyalty ^vhen on balance it's beneficent
or neutral. \Vhen it threatens basic orders, in everybody's
interest it must be resisted — in such a way that ne^v break-
age doesn't occur. The strength and balance to do this
can't come from an individual, much less from the State,
but only from a voluntary community with roots in the
past, reversing violence by reconciliation.

Each profession and art — much more the State — has a
built-in bias for itself. Beyond them all there is needed an
institution whose only bias is humanity, organizing a
broader base of people on a higher level — a tradition of
commimity. Its history is a fourth level of order above bio-
logical, social, and personal.

The only person ^ve can trust is one who's reliably
undertaken to make our interests his own, or to discuss
conflict of interests before he acts. We can hire an em-
ployee to do this only in certain areas. But a man knows
when he comes home from work that the house will have
been cleaned, the children's quarrels settled, dinner
begun; a woman knows her husband will come home from
work. So the only institution we can commit ourselves to
without holding back is one Avhich asks us to subordinate
our interests to other people — because we know it's mak-

34 • PLANET ON STRIKE

ing the same request of them. Only it can claim trust from
outsiders or count on indefinite growth. Because it consid-
ers its self-preservation secondary to the interests of outsid-
ers; that is, it doesn't recognize the status of being outside.
Only by pushing this single principle through to the end
can it break out of the trap of becoming an immortal arti-
ficial person without conscience.

The Church as Inheritor of Community

On the wrong side of the fabric of history, dark bru-
tality is the solid weave, and the gold is meaningless loose
ends. Mostly like any seamstress we've got to do grubby
painstaking work on the back side of the goods. But every
once in a while we must turn the cloth over to see where
we're going. Then the intended pattern emerges, a purpos-
iveness bigger than individuals.

Like other natural growths, history on the planet has
structure, grain. The growing edge of its development
passed from the eastern Mediterranean through the
Roman Empire to Europe. Along this axis, man's poten-
tialities have been magnified both for good and for evil;
the State, and the culture set inside it and against it, have
achieved maximum development. Thus it was Europe (in
part through her daughters, America and Russia) which
introduced the rest of the world to the scientific method of
achieving truth; but which also imposed its own culture
and control on the other continents through political, reli-
gious, economic imperialism.

Being a free person in a free society means being a
maker of images across time— symbolic forms defining our

RENEWAL OF COMMUNITY • 35

self-understanding and handed down through generations.
In the Western tradition, free persons first appeared in the
relatively democratic city-states of Greece and Israel, be-
hind which no historic records were continuously pre-
served. Both saw dimly, in prophecy and myth, that man
was slated to pass beyond freedom to love. The New Tes-
tament, drawing from both under the totalitarian Roman
Empire, records the full realization of that possibility.

Beside Oriental teachers of wisdom, the Hebrew
prophets and Jesus are both more realistic about the
world's injustice, and more concerned to reduce it through
genuine community. But if they set the standard for a co-
herent evolution, every society (like every individual)
must have some intuitions of the same excellence. Even
through the haze of Buddhist legend and our ignorance,
we feel that Gautama illustrated in his society the same
concern for individual integrity as Jesus in ours.

The meeting of Western and Eastern spirituality is
an easy hope; but such things don't happen without
conflict and suffering. The place where Christianity and
Buddhism are coming into actual contact is Viet Nam. Far
beneath the war, two courtesies are meeting under secular
disguise. The reality of their rapprochement is measured
by the fidelity with which the best people of both sides
hold to their commitments in the face of murder and be-
trayal.

The paradoxical institution, which grows by not hav-
ing a self-interest, must in the end be called the Church,
collecting the threads of the ancient world for us. Each of
our life-stages gets its real meaning only through solidarity
with the historical Jesus — now in the crisis of our revolu-
tions more than ever before. The element of "apology" in

36 . PLANET ON STRIKE

this book, justification for fidelity to our tradition, is
spread out through the chapters which follow.

The Church's Case of Amnesia

It was possible, and foreseen, that the Church would
forget its purpose as universal institution. Like everything
possible, it happened. In every other institution, power
and self-interest are built in by definition. Therefore the
Church, whose definition is to reject power and self-
interest, is open to more complete exploitation than any
other. Whenever it loses its character as community by be-
coming coercive or violent, it takes on the same ambiguity
as the State — that is, it becomes part of the State. The
most obvious corruption is the take-over of the Church by
segments of the State, which use its moral authority over
individuals to further their purposes.

The Established Church in America is uniquely vul-
nerable to the application of its own principles; for
through immigration it's become a mirror of the world
scene. The perennial corruption of the Church has
assumed definitive forms in America today: the heresy of
idolatry, pinning our hope to an exploitative State; the
schism of denominationalism which no longer believes
even in its own alleged principles. So the conditions under
which alone its message can actually be spoken or heard
are renewal and reunion: radical nonviolence and radical
ecumenism. The Reformation standard of a "standing or
falling Church" — namely, the preaching of justification by
faith alone — went back to Paul; nonviolence and unity
would mean a penetration back to Jesus.

The silence of the American Church in face of vi-

RENEWAL OF COMMUNITY • 37

olence is the other side of the Voice of America. What
keeps the denominations separated and silent is the identi-
cal moral rift which has opened up in each; are people
willing to make excuses for murder or not? The theoreti-
cal top-level ecumenism of the Consultation on Church
Union (COCU) is seen to be irrelevant even by the grad-
ualist liberals; and so they've directed their remaining
moral concern into tentative urban reform — all that their
constituencies will swallow.

Each denomination played its role in creating the
America Ave know — Massachusetts Congregationalism, the
Established Church of the central states, Methodism and
the sects of the frontier, the Catholicism of the immi-
grants. As violence is destroying the American synthesis,
the denominations, having served their function, are
being melted down into something new. Our best model is
still the new Church of South India, whose radical reun-
ion sprang from the most deeply oppressed sector of the
nation of nonviolence.

At the base of the dying trunks of Church and State,
beside the deadwood are springing the vigorous root-
suckers of liberation and renewal. Nobody knows how
long they'll be able to grow and organize, flowering
from the perennial root, before the burden of power is
laid on them. Now, while the world can't recognize them,
are being deposited the first woody layers which will let
them bear weight — and also determine their future shape.
Today is the only day we can count on to build better safe-
guards against injustice into new institutions. But if we
have had to look for life elsewhere, so have millions of oth-
ers. A generation of despair and hope must rewrite its con-
stitution.

38 • PLANET ON STRIKE

The Restoration of Community: A New Covenant

The Church would be useless to the State for
take-over unless in some sense it is the Church, producing
in each generation lives of saints. Mostly its actual work
goes on outside the Church so labelled. It must recognize
Marx as a prophet of justice, even though he failed to see
the temptation of his socialism to fall into power-seeking.
The apostles of nonviolence are precisely the Church of
Jesus incognito. Whenever a person grasps the original
principles of its founding, ripples spread out from him in-
definitely far down to history afterwards.

In spite of genocide against the red man, the black
man, and the yellow man, America has been the refuge of
Protestantism and protest. The moving frontier spread
across the continent seeds of a genuinely new way, even
though now heaped over with rubbish. Along the arrow's
flight marked out by the Mayflower Compact, there's laid
on us the duty to form a new covenant of humanity here,
suitable for export.

The cry for peace and liberation, even when self-
centered, is the seed for renewal and reunion of the
Church. The shoe is on the other foot; the existing de-
nominations are to be seen as part of the Church of Jesus
to the extent that they let the new wind blow through
them. Pope John XXIII pointed to the unity of God's peo-
ple; we can't see yet how far his church or others are
willing to follow. The essential marks of the Church in-
cognito are service to need, resistance to evil, openness to
difference; in the end also it needs to take off its incognito
and be seen for what it is.

RENEWAL OF COMMUNITY • 39

Our inner freedom and our biological nature are
partners, mutually raising each other up. Our first act of
restoration for the planetary environment will remove
inner psychological blockages, and help us work towards
further restoration. The same mutuality exists between
the individual and the community. Each person is
conscious in his personal inadequacy, the weakness of his
left hand, of needing to rely on the community which his
right hand is planting and watering.

Church history thinks to set us the dilemma of choos-
ing between the separated sect set over against the faults of
society, and the universal Church identified with them.
But what we see springing up in the actual present is a
Church scattered through all countries; universal and rad-
ical; Catholic and therefore set over against each society it
finds itself in. Our membership in that Church — our ad-
herence to the revolution — revives the Stoic dream, first
seen under Alexander's universal empire, of becoming cit-
izens of the planet at large. By that membership, distrust is
actually beginning to break down. Over against the ma-
nipulated United Nations Organization, there is growing
up a counter-community, an United People's Organiza-
tion.

We must insist on a community universal in space and
time — a rising bread in all lands leading back to the past
of each society's original self-awareness. And in fact the
golden sunflower of our inner awareness begins to turn its
face upwards. The great religions interlock. From Bud-
dhist India came the nard with which the Messiah was
anointed, the jewels in the better world of Isaiah and Plato
and John. The cult of the hibernating and resurrected
bear, our brother who tastes the honeycomb, was brought
by the Pennsylvania Germans (and attached to the wood-

40 . PLANET ON STRIKE

chuck) in an America where bear-totems had crossed the
Bering Straits.

Somewhere within the movements of our time, re-
veille is being sounded for a new level of humanity — new,
but also the realization on global scale of an old level.
Over against the Communist Manifesto, which sets
mankind at war with itself, another trumpet calls out that
the enemy is within all and external to all: "Peoples of the
world, unite." It can't be done in the frame^\'ork of busi-
ness as usual, golf as usual, church as usual, draft as usual,
school as usual. Lifelong commitment, resistance, persecu-
tion, comradeship are in the cards — as we were told from
the beginning.

^ '

chapter THREE

Inner Revolution:
Renewal of
Integrity

Even after we trace out each root of a man or
woman in the soil of biology, each tendril in
the woodland of society, we haven't touched the person's
center. How shall we think about the power by which we
become aware of our niche in space and time, and to that
extent escape it; aware of our faults, and are so far lib-
erated from them?

Our Freedom as Linkage Between
Nature and History

Man perfects the tendency of the universe to turn
things inside out. To grasp his inner space we must start
from an overview of the outer space he organizes — for ex-
ample, sitting here on the yellowing spring grass of the
Berkeley hills on a windy afternoon, looking down over
the University, and west across the Bay to the Golden Gate
Bridge. Hidden behind Mount Tamalpais is the valley of
fog that waters the Muir redwood forest. I could about sail

42 • PLANET ON STRIKE

a paper airplane onto the roof of Cal library, with its ex-
cellent classical and Semitic collections. Behind me, on the
other side of a fence which forbids loitering in the name
of the Regents, is the cyclotron; they are discovering
things about the elementary particles we should be let in
on. South across the Bay the smoky trail of a jet is taking
off over the white buildings of the city to Hawaii, Tokyo,
Bangkok.

Every square foot has human fingerprints on it — a
double set. On one hand, adaptation of the environment
for knowledge and use, as in the elegant catenary of the
bridge, imposing significance on its cliffs like a Greek tem-
ple. On the other hand, deterioration. Old accounts
describe a crown of redwoods around this bowl of earth
and water, now replaced with weedy Australian eucalyp-
tus. The garbage dump in the Bay has grown, balancing
the unsightly rectangle of Treasure Island naval base. A
big tin can sitting on the Richmond hills undoes the ^\ ork
of the bridge. Choking white feathers sprout from the fac-
tory chimneys of Oakland and West Berkeley; around
them huddle the two-bedroom stucco manors of the
ghetto, cramped in by the polluted bayshore and the ele-
vated transit tracks. Smoke trails up from a thousand
cookout campfires of the white occupying force in the
hills. Two freighters are putting out to sea from Port Chi-
cago and Alameda, I suppose carrying materiel to Cam
Ranh Bay.

This network of information and control and destruc-
tion, the product of only a hundred years, is the outer
shell of the elastic elusive thing we're trying to grasp — the
collective and individual freedom at the nodes of the net-
work, sprawling over space and time, turning inwards in
knowledge and blindness. Just out of sight are Sproul Hall

RENEWAL OF INTEGRITY • 43

steps, where a revolutionary government one day may set
a plaque marking Mario Savio's place in the Free Speech
Movement of 1965. Somewhere in the preternatural smog
overlaying Oakland, the all-American city, is the Induc-
tion Center where so many of my friends were busted in
fall of 1967 — to exchange Johnson for Nixon. It would
seem as if the use and abuse of freedom were inseparable,
two faces of Janus, two sides of a coin. But something in us
cries out that the coin is only sandwich-silver, there must
be a way to split its halves.

A week after I made those notes. Sheriff Frank Madi-
gan's blue-coveralled deputies w^ere running amok
through the streets shooting hippies. Brigadier General
Bernard Nurre called down a helicopter strike on students
and bystanders with lingering CS — riot-control canisters
diverted from Saigon. And in this early spring of 1970 ev-
erything is closer together; the cushions between motive
and act, act and result have been taken away. We say to
our brother "thou fool" and we become in fact his mur-
derer. Technology instantly translates our disrespect for
nature into w^asteland. There aren't any wilderness areas
or passive societies w^hich can simply absorb our hatred.
By the same token, a blow aimed at our brother strikes us.
The mass media impartially record both the violence done
to exploited populations, biological or social, and the ex-
cuses by W'hich we explain it away.

We're faced with the primordial riddle that good and
evil are brothers. A riddle is a description of something fa-
miliar, so accurate that it becomes strange again:

As round as an apple

As deep as a cup

And all the king's horses

Cannot pull it up.

44 . PLANET ON STRIKE

But even when we realize the answer, it doesn't explain
how a well gets water at the bottom. And what is the water
at the bottom of ourselves? Man is a walking riddle, a
flesh-and-blood contradiction. But we can only see this be-
cause we already had the idea of a radical consistency.

We didn't invent our standards of excellence, or the
severity of the judgments that get passed; we inherited
them from Greek tragedy, Hebrew prophecy. The Bud-
dhist world will find them in its own past. Those first
seers didn't invent them either; by fresh insight they saw
historical laws operating, in their present or the future.
Until recently, retribution was delayed long enough so
that men could think of the standards as merely ideal, the
judgments as only symbolic. Today both the visionary and
everyman have adequate ground to fear the judgment of
God as the billy clubs fall on the skulls, as the fish die in
the polluted Bay. But if everything that can happen will
happen, then we must also reckon on the sanctifying grace
of God as a daily possibility. Of course, when we see the
wagon-track dipping down into the flooded streambed, we
look around for every other possible route first. Salvation
is the last resort.

Of all the failures the University can be charged with,
the chief is seldom made, especially by revolutionaries. It
gives very few of its students a foothold in their own past
— the classical and Hebrew world. Better translations from
Greek are available than ever before, but students don't
treat them as seriously as translations from Sanskrit or
Chinese — languages we knoiv we won't learn. Young peo-
ple who do feel the imique value of these texts are
shunted into minute pedantic studies. Where is the man
to whom Achilles or Jeremiah is the model for his own
excellence?

RENEWAL OF INTEGRITY • 45

Our incautious extensions drag us down. The down-
payment on a house, job-offers, the threat of conscription,
the fear of failure, our first success, channel us in im-
proper directions. Through passive assent to the manage-
ment of society by the mass media, creativity withers. Ho-
mogenization denatures protest into stylish marketable
consumer-products; hippy ateliers mass-produce peace
symbols for New York tourists. "Revolutionary work"
means running the mimeograph in a scrubby office — a
faithful caricature of the business world. If idealism at-
tracts us into the life of service, we see that the only slots
available — as social workers, clergy, teachers — are con-
stantly liable to takeover by malfunctioning institutions
for their preservation.

The American businessman puts eighteen hours a day
into making himself invulnerable: work and play, office
and home, ruthlessness and charity, all fits together. On
the other side we're reproached by the voluntary hardships
of a Che Guevara to make himself a true revolutionary,
"the highest type of human being." What can we put be-
side all this single-mindedness? We all know that each step
in our past could have been firmer, without our typical in-
attention, conflict of motives, shortcuts, laziness, tendency
to self-defeat. But how do we know this? Above all from
the examples of those who've done better: saints.

The Restoration of Humanity:
A New Commitment

It's hard to see how past excellences could be im-
proved on — sculpture, architecture, painting, polyphonic
music, tragedy. That is, they can't even be equalled, since

46 • PLANET ON STRIKE

doing the same thing over again is no equality. The radi-
cal potentiality of the future is actual novelties of human
character, with growing real influence on the world. A
manipulative society wants us to believe that any reputa-
tion for consistency must be the result of a public relations
campaign. But the saint, even more than the philosopher
or scientist, has a genealogy; he's reproducing, with appro-
priate variations, a type of character long ago invented.
Some like Pope John have acquired wholeness by a child-
like freedom from certain knowledge and doubts; others
by feeding on them. The very existence of a post called
Secretary General of the United Nations created a new
character: judge among the Great Powers, servant of the
human race. We come to see people as belonging to "our"
society just so far as we actually stand beside them; the cit-
izenship rolls of community cut across all boundaries, lan-
guages, centuries.

It would seem as if in so bureaucratic a society, where
information is thought the uniquely scarce item, change
must be a committee product. But a committee can't come
up with the life-style, or the use of words, which move
men to new action. What Herbert Marcuse calls the "re-
pressive tolerance" of the system is a careful screening out
of all the signals from the past, from nature, from over-
seas, from the inner world, which would question the
glossy finish. The moon-landing and war-reportage were
packaged for unreality, complete with ads, to resemble
Saturday morning comics. But in unpredictable moments
of sanity the truth breaks through. The isolated prophet,
filtering out of the information-Niagara precisely the criti-
cal items, once again puts together the figure of an actual
human being.

RENEWAL OF INTEGRITY • 47

The message going out across the oceans is that the
need for integrity has given birth to integrity. A new sanc-
tity has been bom. A center of consistency in the sloshing
tides; actual working energies directed to the rebuilding
of nature and community, starting with ourselves.

The dogma that character must always be ambiguous
came from the effort to maintain a fictitious private moral-
ity inside a manipulative mass society. But when the easy
career ladder has been cut off, not by our choice but socie-
ty's, the traps are no longer hidden. We may still exploit
the revolution as a field of academic study, or as an excuse
to lapse into old violence for a new cause. We may get too
far ahead, lose the way, and retreat into conformity or fall
casualty. But there's a position of dynamic equilibrium
where the pulls from all those directions cancel each other
out. We'd always been told that sanctity was forced on us,
not chosen. Now we see that the whole breaking wave of
history demands that balance from us — and makes it possi-
ble.

Men assume that moral action involves a choice be-
tween existing alternatives — that is, between two evils.
But each dilemma should bring out the courage and
creativity to invent an original alternative, to put the dis-
cussion on a new plane. We can't look for this to func-
tionaries who haven't yet seen the situation on this de-
nuded, colonialized, disoriented planet — much less the
possibility of making their own creative response, again
and again. The field is wide open. Nobody has thought to
train for the marathon, and we incompetents who hap-
pened by are told by the judge to put on track shoes and
wait for the pistol.

If this book differs from manuals of ethics, it's be-

48 • PLANET ON STRIKE

cause no provisions for a double standard are laid down.
Actually "ethics" or its translation "morality" is the wrong
thing to be talking about, because both mean "habit."
And we must break through both old habits and the habit
of habit, to look at things always freshly. The excellence of
the saint looks like habit to the outsider; but as the man
or woman sees it, every time you wake up the same strug-
gle must be gone through.

Traditional ethics assumed we already had a frame of
reference — a profession, a bank account, a social status —
and asked us to balance threats to that status against the
demands of morality. But this meant that, long before it
caught its moral man, he'd already made his basic choice
— perhaps not quite beyond reach of revision. We have to
start farther back and take up the burden of choosing, not
our actions, but ourselves. We're not to work by a set of
rules, but by a vision of the character which is the true
center of renewal. And we're not faced with a variety of
situations which may, or may not, alter rules; the situation
is a global fact. The correct thing doesn't run at right
angles to our interests, so that compromise or renuncia-
tion is called for; we're asked to step through a false con-
sciousness to recognition of our real long'-term interests —
and those of the planet, and of our great-grandchildren
crying out to remember them. We're not up against a
conflict of interests but a question of fact: which things
build true order and which don't?

When one man blows the trumpet, that's ego-grati-
fication; however ingenious his publicity, what he be-
gins will eventually die. We recognize the right time to
follow when the signal is given not by man but by God —
that is, by a turn of events which no individual began.
Our wounds are the clearest sign. We can be sure that oth-

RENEWAL OF INTEGRITY • 49

ers will have felt what has scarred us so deeply, our train-
ing and talents weren't all that special. Of course some of
them are trying to choke down that awareness. Since we
don't want to despair of them, we have to say that a de-
monic smog has distorted their vision; dispelling it is our
job.

The cry to demythologize old symbolism was un-
timely. "Whenever," a theologian asked, "do we read in
the daily papers that angels or demons are the immediate
cause of historical events?" Daily. We can't simply con-
demn as unredeemable our brothers who've been re-
cruited into violent institutions; nor give saints of our age
the personal credit we know they'll refuse. To pass beyond
condemnation and hero-worship is to see history as the
battlefield of more-than-human insurgencies of good and
evil.

Older classics of spirituality show a thoroughly indi-
vidual trip into inner space: Pascal's Pensees, the Imita-
tion of Christ. Inner life in our time is blossoming in the
common tasks of world renewal, as with a Bonhoeffer, a
Hammarskjold. The earthscape against which our work
must be done looms clearer — above all through the vision
of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The most ur-
gent call to our following is sent out by another student of
Ignatius Loyola, my friend and brother Daniel Berrigan,
designing a brand-new spirituality through his loving bat-
tle against his State and Order.

The years which turn institutions once fresh into
brittle caricatures of themselves are also the golden bowl
to be filled with the water of life. Ignoring the
pseudo-events by which the media distract us from reali-
ties, we make current needs so vivid that even our sloth
can't ignore them. Refusing all Novocaine to deaden the

50 • PLANET ON STRIKE

days of our felon's sentence, we methodically build time.
Under the spring sunshine of our careful attention, dor-
mant branches bear sap. As we become aware of our soli-
darity with men and women in other times and situations,
we slough off crippling limits; the skeleton, musculature,
nervous system of an eternal community of love take
shape. It spontaneously moves over to make room for us;
Homer is modified by Shakespeare, and our gentleness
makes up (we're told) what was defective in the sufferings
of the founder. In the dark valley of our conformism and
folly, as our eyes get used to looking, on every slope we see
the fireflies of original lives lighting up. The galaxies of a
new universe are being born.

The Stages of Our Liberation

By reversing the corruption of the elements of our
life we turn back the chain of radioactive decay, and trans-
mute our lead into light-giving uranium again. As the
place where nature and history intersect, we are not so
much to begin as to become the reconstruction of biologi-
cal and social order. In the first place this involves a recon-
struction of the Church. In her unique sacramental
relation to the biological order, she can initiate a global
reversal of violence; also she is the most effective lever to
budge the other institutions of our society.

Any scheme of parcelling out our life will do which
lets us get quickly down to work on its actual texture — the
cloth where actual reweaving is done. The planetary de-
mand for life will analyze itself in accordance with what-
ever divisions we adopt. Here I modify the Catholic
scheme of seven sacraments, which form the necessary link

RENEWAL OF INTEGRITY • 51

between nature (in their concrete biological symbolism)
and society (in their liturgical format and historic origins).
Shakespeare's seven ages include items that the Church
misses — vocation and the realm of the State, the pot-
bellied justice and bearded soldier. I'm also influenced by
Erik Erikson's scheme of eight stages of development; if
each faculty isn't developed at its own right time, the per-
son is permanently stunted. But I begin where he starts to
end — at late puberty, when the individual for better or
worse makes his own decisions, on the basis of equipment
built into him through the family.

On the fixed biological groundbass of birth, sexual-
ity, and death, a force going beyond nature and history is
building each turning-point of our lives into a revolution-
ary sanctity. Our beginning is to formulate clearly the de-
mands made by each period of life in the permanent new
situation.

The demand for fidelity: a fresh start. As each indi-
vidual in his birth repeats the birth of the species, by a
symbolic rebirth he must take on the fidelity called for by
history — from now on, a commitment to nonviolence.

The demand for love: sexuality. As sexuality con-
tinues the species, each person, through marriage or other-
wise, takes on the job of building a few others into the
most permanent possible example of stable community.

The demand for usefulness: vocation. As each person
channels sexuality into creativity, we must redesign old vo-
cations and invent new ones to push through the necessary
tasks of the revolution.

52 • PLANET ON STRIKE

The demand for justice: the problem of power. Ag-
gression organizes people in a society of coercion, the State.
Over against that imperfect justice, the individual must
give a higher commitment to the principle of community
through voluntary assent.

The demand to help: service. The most expensive
form of community is availability to the needs of others.
This universal ordination to human service, a waiting on
table, is the most basic novelty of the New Testament.

The demand for hope: falling casualty. At another
stage the tables are turned, and the waiter must be waited
on. Our conduct when in casualty status measures the gen-
uineness of that community which we claim is constituted
by failure.

The demand for joy: the feast. Both the individual
body and the body of the community are maintained and
built up by the act of assimilation. In the context of the
festival, all our phases and roles are celebrated in their
final definition.

The Source of Renewal

Our individuality is marked off by our intersection
with every other individual we've met or read about in
books; we're a child of the actual community of the
human race. So the renewal of the Chinch goes recipro-
cally with individual renewal; both the creativity and the
flaw of man's freedom go deeper than any individual.

RENEWAL OF INTEGRITY • 53

Where does the cry for justice come from, the scattered
groping actions for new life? How can it be explained that
where violence cut deepest, the indestructible urge to de-
cency reappears? that the revolution breeds critics of revo-
lutionary counter-violence? Somehow we must say that
men are constantly touched, if they're willing, by a stand-
ard of truth which goes beyond both the exploitation they
resist, and the failings of the resistance; it's not bound up
with any one class, cause, society. Since time along with
space is one of the things that emerged in cosmic evolu-
tion, the permanent possibility of new life is deeper rooted
than the time and place where we first meet it. Our more
than globular universe can only be moved by a lever rest-
ing on some pivot outside it. And we don't reach the bot-
tom of any historical movement until we see it in cosmic
terms. Myth-making man, not knowing so much of either
history or science as we do, has the advantage that he can
seize both together in one hand. Our liberal education
consists in following the clue of his language to express
that fact beyond facts. In the end, to label the revolution-
ary who again and again subverts history into love, we
haven't got any choice but to apply the old names of God
to that Archimedes, who, from his fulcrum underneath the
cosmic manifold, with infinite gentleness guides it into new
life.

Since most people at most times can't push analysis of
history to the end, we must leave a lot of room for coali-
tion with all those who, for excellent reasons, can't claim
they're working in the name of God. But, although that
claim is of course constantly being perverted, failure to
make it in some language will in the long run lead people
to find a different God. We have to agree that God is a

54 . PLANET ON STRIKE

jealous God, if you don't end up with him you end up
somewhere else.

When a new idea has been thought of, it's repeated a
hundred times over. One civil rights demonstration, one
national liberation front, one peace march, one ghetto re-
bellion, one student take-over, one demand for reparations
produces an indefinite number of others. All the more
then we should be looking, both in the daily papers and in
our hearts, to see where and how somebody first makes the
decisive breakthrough out of the delusional systems which
have imprisoned us for so long. A new infusion of life
across continents was implicit in the moment in the chapel
when John Wesley felt his heart strangely warmed.

It's easy to be diverted into doing something less than
is indicated. The highest threshold to be gotten over lies
in front of the door of life. It takes a man or woman of ex-
ceptional simplicity to go right up to it without being dis-
tracted. That consistency doesn't happen all of a sudden,
it lies at the end of a long road of self-purification. And
when we get there, we see that this end is only a begin-
ning. The revolutionary fresh start required of us is the
common sense to begin at the beginning.

part 1 1 : The Demands of
Our New Life

chapter FOUR

The Demand for Fidelity:
Going Through
the Waters

Most people never quite finish being born, we're
tied by an umbilical cord to stepmotherly in-
stitutions. When this girl on our street first went off to
school, she knew a string was tied between her and the
back doorknob, which got looped around blocks if she
didn't come back the way she went. We can all learn from
the tadpole, who after the bother of learning to swim opts
for a new environment.

The normal case of a fresh start is with the young per-
son just waked up from the impression that the policeman
and postman are towers of morality. During the sixties, in
that overlap period when residual childhood freshness
sensitizes the dawning moral judgment, the prevalence of
poisoning, murder, and intimidation stamped itself forci-
bly on him. Late maturing is always possible. Still, if
middle-aged people during the Johnson years could read
the morning body-count and not get sick over their fried
eggs, what will they gag on?

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 57

Diagnosis of Complicity by the Young

The young protest first what hits them directly, com-
puterization: being put on a punch card, segregated into
dorms, destined for social security, pre-enrolled for Fresh-
man Comp, conscripted by aging realtors. Concerned par-
ents ask: How do I get my child off drugs, off the street,
into a proper marriage, into a real vocation? The pre-
liminary answer is always: Stop the war and the draft.
That would only be a first step: it's necessary also to
change the habits and institutions which made the war
and the draft. But for the kids, the draft is conclusive
proof what old people are about. If they join the National
Guard to avoid shooting local patriots overseas, they're
dispatched to shoot high-school buddies or put a bayonet
into the blouses of their old dates.

A parent who still sends out remittances won't be-
lieve that the young are an oppressed class. But they've
burned their bridges, and the long hair unacceptable in
Peoria or Houston is only a sign of that break. Frank Mad-
igan, the sheriff of Alameda County, explained that
many of his deputies were newly discharged veterans, and
so of course treated demonstrators as Viet Cong. Integra-
tion has finally worked. Since the children of the ghetto
couldn't be brought up to suburban level, the children of
the suburb went spontaneously down to theirs — instant
niggers.

A gypsy generation rediscovering play can't take on
joyless adult make-believe. The substitute society they've
patched up seems in its least common denominator

58 . PLANET ON STRIKE

impoverished enough: sleeping around, living off the
street, smoking grass, wearing long hair and freaky clothes,
improvising Oriental mysticism, listening to rock bands. If
they still insist on preferring it, their judgment on grown-
up culture is all the more persuasive.

The white dropout ghetto, though its criticisms are
just, is no Messianic community; it's still a Coney Island
mirror of middle-class society. It's moved beyond the
mind-expanding drugs, which short-circuit the neural
tracks (probably with premature aging) back to the old
pills that Mom drops up in the tiled bathroom on Magno-
lia Drive: uppers (amphetamines) for acceleration to
public speed, downers (barbiturates) for slowdown to pri-
vate sleep. Its promiscuity reflects the serial polygamy back
on the hill, which in turn is the other face of Puritanism.
Its dirt on the outside of hopefully beautiful personalities
is intended as a turning inside out of suburban hypocrisy.
Its lack of planning reflects the improvisation of bourgeois
culture, the pyramiding of credit. The suburb refuses to
see future collapse. The dropout world refuses to see any
future at all — it's reverted to the expectations of the
world's end in primitive Christianity. "They were saying
on the street in L.A. there's going to be this big earth-
quake when the pigs come on heavy next month, and my
mind was blown because I'm Aquarian, so man I split."

While little kids are being given Social Security num-
bers, and pedestrians licensed by the Motor Vehicle
Bureau, in reaction a voluntary proletariat is being born.
All ragamuffin seventh graders look like hippies; but when
we see their folks driving an old Ford truck to the PTA
from an out-of-town commune in their beads and bare feet
— or delivering our mail — we realize the computer may

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 59

not win after all. The other day this dropout I know deliv-
ered his girl friend's little boy baby (uncertain whether it
was his own) and cut the cord; no father, no birth certifi-
cate, no census report, no draft card; just a baby.

Washing Off Our Brother's Blood

If in our own way we try to grasp the interior of com-
plicity, we move back through our nerves into our spinal
cord, out into tendons, muscles, bones. The circuitry of
our brain is jammed on Nixon's the one and rather
fighting than switching. The base of our spine aches from
the waiting benches at Welfare. We feel the itch of a fun-
gus infection in our crotch from the garbage-teeming
shores; leukemia spreads in our radioactive marrow; our
toes tread the pools of resin from the felled redwood. In
our nostrils is the smell of burned flesh. Our lack of pig-
mentation shrinks us back into the shade like a pulled
onion.

And there is dirt on our hands, I look at my own
alleged priest's hands: the feel under our fingers of the na-
palm burns, scars from fragmentation pellets and buck-
shot, Che's blood in Bolivia, blood from the streets of
Selma and Newark and Chicago and Berkeley. The word
we ask to be told is. Wash off your brother's blood. We
keep bugging our kids to wash their little hands. We
dream of the tsunami wave sweeping away the mess we've
made of our families and jobs. We take long showers. In
the interior seascape of our guilty heart, the beach girl in
her scraps of cloth slouches beside the prophet in his
camel's-hair, both pointing back to childhood waters.

60 . PLANET ON STRIKE

In our lack of a collective myth, we Americans can
only turn back to the private myth of our childhood.
Nothing since then has gone so well as the summer vaca-
tions in the cottage with faded shingles by the shore.
Going off to college, getting married, changing jobs,
sending kids to high school all seem temporary detours,
after which we'll go back to the beach and everything will
be as it was. Each of us is Huck Finn, sneaking out in the
twilight to a rowboat tied up under giant willows. Our
childhood memory-bank is all plugged in to our appropri-
ation, or rape, of the virgin country.

We must find a way to cut moral losses, not throw
good time after bad. A fresh start would not only renew
the soil that the blossom of the future grows from; it alters
the judgments we apply to the past. Every action carries
two possibilities: being whittled away to nothing, and
being built on. In prophetic justice we look to our chil-
dren for wisdom; the times they are rapidly changing. The
stable end-product of nostalgia can be repentance.

Our century, ^vhich has gone right and wrong in so
many new ways, has made a great thing of fooling around
on beaches. Before us I can only think of Xenophon's ma-
rines swimming bare-ass off their sea bivouac. The knotted
bikini, named fantastically after our greatest guilt, is fetish
for our compulsion to go back to the fig leaves of Eden
and the great waters. Our associations with water are a pri-
mordial complex: return to play, return to the womb, evo-
lution, getting clean, nakedness and procreation, submis-
sion to death, washing off the death of guilt, drowning,
return to the surface in the seafoam of resurrection. John
Wheelwright summarizes in his elegy ('Tish Food") for
Hart Crane, suicide by drowning:

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 61

The sea's teats have suckled you, and you are sunk far
in bubble-dreams, under swaying translucent vines
of thundering interior wonder , . .

No images will undercut these. We can only go back be-
hind Cain and Abel by washing off our brother's blood.

Making a fresh start isn't rejecting sin and guilt (not
in our power) but accepting the burden of guilt. When
faced by the United Fruit Company, Dow Chemical, the
chainsaw in the redwood forest, Forest Lawn, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the RAND Corporation, the Oak-
land Housing Authority, Richard Daley's bullies, the
John Birch Society, our cue is to say, "There by the grace
of God go I." Our only strength is the forgiveness in
which we embrace a President or Presidium as brothers,
recognizing no hatred or violence of theirs as alien to us —
and at the same time resisting to the death the dark pow-
ers which have colonized them.

The Condition of Our Fresh Start:
Refusal of Conscription

The planetary strike invades our split-level bedrooms
in the dropping out of their children, which, even at its
least responsible, reflects a non-negotiahle demand for
fidelity. Since fidelity only settles into a consistent state
over years, our beginning is just the initial condition of
new life. Even though children of Quaker or revolution-
ary families may never undergo a crisis of redirection, and
even though older people may also take the new route, the
situation of the young determines the moral condition of
our fresh start. Young men from eighteen to twenty-six.

62 • PLANET ON STRIKE

the type of heroic humanity in Greek art, have become
once again our moral leaders.

The modern State can't allow the precedent of letting
citizens drop out unpunished; it has to keep up pressure
for conformity in some area. Precisely that area must be
the scene of our fresh start. A modern reader of George
Fox's Journals is puzzled that his confrontation with Es-
tablishment came on the issues of wearing his hat in court
and not taking an oath. But Caesar's illegitimate claims
were only symbolic in those simple days. The pressure for
religious conformity wasn't burdensome; even Fox
couldn't perceive the error of slavery; he needed to offer
his cheeks and back only to the violence of individuals.
The American State applies greatest pressure, by prison
and loss of civil rights, in the area of conscription, forced
by its own imperial logic to provide the peace movement
with a permanent organizing issue. Repeal would destroy
U.S. foreign policy by opening the door to a massive anti-
recruitment campaign. Nixon's campaign promise to end
the draft will turn out to be a facade for continuing it —
perhaps within a more widespread regimentation into
Youth Service. Here young men, led by Fox's Friends, in-
evitably made their stand. In any foreseeable future here,
the regular moral demand of a fresh start is refusal of con-
scription.

It might seem as if nonviolence were a functional spe-
cialization; we need some people to fight wars, others to
protest them. It's true that a society needs garbage-
collectors — but only a certain number. But there's no ra-
tional way of determining how many soldiers we need; the
threat felt from a foreign power varies in proportion to
the effort deployed to meet it. The maintenance of armies

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 63

by males presumes women and old people incapable of
forming rational judgments about their own interests.

In a society where not all are fearful and not all cou-
rageous, the initial task is not to abolish the military, but
to reduce its level by subtracting oneself and others from
it. If nobody volunteered, the country already would be
invulnerable. And the refuser committed to the lifetime
risk of peace-making isn't taking any easy way out. All
countries are now so interlocking, that a general fear-level
exists; my decision to spend time reconciling rather than
fighting reduces it, so that afterwards all parties are more
secure than before. The strength of our pullout lies in the
Establishment's guilty awareness of its own contradictions;
it hires moralists to reduce the violence-level at home, and
imprisons them for reducing it abroad. The young men's
unanswerable ultimatum is: we resist the draft in the
name of nonviolence, or in the name of violence we join
the revolution.

Does this necessary form of our fresh start have any
relevance for oppressed communities — Latin Americans,
blacks, Asians? Their obvious loyalty is identification with
their own revolution; how could they go beyond it? After
the death of Kins;, the black nonviolent movement here is
in full disarray. The best Latin Americans seem united be-
hind revolution, as violent as needs be. Nonviolent resis-
tance is having its biggest success in Czechoslovakia; but
their special situation and national character seem irrele-
vant elsewhere.

This analysis, apparently discouraging, can be put in
a sensational way: America is the vanguard. Just as our
leaders claim, but in a slightly different way, our combina-
tion of residual freedoms with global power opens the

64 . PLANET ON STRIKE

chance for us to become leaders of humanity. Our young
people have a unique universal vocation: separating them-
selves so clearly from exploitation that other youth around
the world will have to follow their lead. They're a poten-
tial elite. It needs a crystal-clear ideology, a flexible but re-
liable organization, and an absolute commitment to the
inner revolution of integrity.

As isolated examples of what could be done by mil-
lions, I think of Maximilianus, the African resister of a.d.
295, "I am not permitted to fight"; of Franz Jagerstatter,
the Austrian Catholic peasant, lacking a single sympa-
thetic soul beside him, who refused induction into Hitler's
armies. I see a boy with long hair as one who won't have a
regimented haircut. With gratitude I think of those now
in prison whom I can't judge by any standard of morality,
because in their quiet constancy they've become the stand-
ard I judge myself by.

The Resistance program succeeded beyond its
dreams. As the actual organization melted into the land-
scape, largely through jail, thousands of young men (no
doubt many with mixed motives) are simply not showing
for induction or are refusing. The courts only prosecute a
small percentage of cases at random, and even so are hope-
lessly behind. It's scary to see a breakdown of authority,
because you don't know where it will end. Authority with
all its task forces should have thought of that first. For all
parties, amnesty alone — which we may well not get —
could patch things up even for the time being.

Since our nation was populated in part by refugees
from European conscription, we can hardly criticize men
who take refuge in Canada or Sweden, or parents with
young children who emigrate — even though we may regret
their abandoning the most effective scene of action. Much

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 65

less could any white man ask black youth to risk a Federal
jail, lacking the verbal skills and social influence to have
any hope of conscientious-objector status. As they melt
back into the ghetto they join the global strike.

From one point of view, the authenticity of any act is
only decided at the end of our life: how effectively did it
mo\'e us to\vards a new way? From another point of view,
the critical duty in the present has been to arrest our State
in its criminally insane course of murdering a lovely peo-
ple dedicated to its oAvn culture. But — as that people also
understands in its objectivity — compromise or untruthful-
ness now in the anti-war movement means a succession of
new^ victims in the decades ahead.

The Original Discovery of the Fresh Start

Since we're faced with a planetary destruction of
order, our individual fresh start is only made fully effec-
tive when built into a renewed planetary community. A
community withers without roots in the past. To find com-
mon ground with our cultural cousins around the globe,
we must dig back to the point where our roots interlace
with theirs. You'd think Buddhists might look to the
illumination of Gautama under the bo-tree; actually the
Buddhists I know who take justice and ecology most seri-
ously have moved three-quarters of the way over, they've
gone Marxist. The Western book which underlies Marx-
ism and all other social change presupposes a fresh start:
metanoia, "conversion," a complete turnabout of our will
and emotions which focusses them onto the single right
object.

Shovelling off the alluvial deposits of magic, misun-

66 . PLANET ON STRIKE

derstanding, compromise in century after century of eccle-
siastical history, we dig underneath the dried riverbed to
the perpetual undergound stream of mountain water. The
original living cell of community, the little group of Jesus
and his associates, crystallized around the fanatic preacher
standing beside the waters. Jesus alone saw the meaning of
what the baptizer was doing, and "was made sin for us,"
declaring his solidarity with Herod and Hitler. The rec-
ords normally see the action as a mode of dying: "I have a
baptism to be baptized with"; "as we are buried with him
by baptism into death."

The Hebrews, like Thales the pre-Socratic, started
from the swamp-cosmology of Sumeria. They saw it as re-
enacted at every crisis, mythical or historical: creation,
flood, crossing the Red Sea, crossing Jordan, return from
exile. Each time there rises up wet and sleek from those
waters a living community. Jesus' words and life define
that emergence as a naturalization into the one fully legiti-
mate commonwealth, a new community where the only
sanction is love. His nonviolence in our world of technol-
ogy run wild has become both necessary and possible for
survival. As criticism discovers the uncertain areas of his
biography, we move into the area where the documents
allow no room for doubt — a new level of truth which their
novel technique was specifically designed to record.

Jesus is unmarried; and dissociates himself from the
self-punishment of John. He is a man of learning; and re-
fuses the teacher's privileges. He is a popular leader; and
rejects the compromises of realistic politics. He has deep
psychological powers; and puts away from himself the role
of wonderworker. He has unmeasured influence over his
friends; and weans them away from him, refusing the la-

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 67

bels by which they try to fix him. He believes in a power
for which all things are possible; and regrets the sparrow's
fall. He foretells war in which society and nature will per-
ish; and rejects participation in the most just self-defense.
He will not exploit the animal or vegetable realm; or do
stones the violence of making them bread against their na-
ture. He sets himself against imperial oppression of the
poor; and also against counter-violence in their just strug-
gle. By his example he puts maximum pressure on the
others to follow; and refrains from all other pressure.

Every wave of exploitation beats against him and is
dissipated into foam, because there's no part of him it can
claim. He has passed through to the other side of death.
Our only possible fresh start is identification with the prin-
ciple he represents. That means entering the stream of his-
tory which flows from him. Baptism is the permanently
valid symbolic act by which we receive solidarity with
Jesus' way of nonviolence. Its intrinsic meaning, his well-
attested character, ensure that always in the end it will
lose any corrupt associations. It doesn't mark an exclusion
but an inclusion; for it defines the only way the human
race can live together.

Anointing with the Spirit

That immersion is obviously also a washing; when we
understand the ancient bath, we see the connection with
new life. There was hardly any water for bathing in an-
cient cities until the aqueducts of imperial Rome. After
daily nude exercises, the Greek or Roman man smeared
on low-grade olive oil, then clean sand, and scraped off the

68 . PLANET ON STRIKE

mass. A painted vase of olive oil was the prize for victors
in the games. In the sun-baked Mediterranean this oiling,
still followed by local athletes, is preferable to our con-
stant baths; it keeps the skin supple, protects against burn-
ing and skin-cancer. In the ancient world, deficiencies in
cleaning (and in extraction of the oil) were made up for
by blending in scents — distillation of alcohol to carry
perfumes was unknown.

At the rare ceremony of an actual bath in water, all
the more important to restore skin-oils. Lower-class Arab
girls in Beirut today, though very neat, seldom bathe from
week to week; but on their wedding day undergo an elabo-
rate bath with perfuming. Whenever Homeric heroes ar-
rive at somebody's palace, they're bathed by the maids —
perhaps country boys wouldn't know how to go about it.
Then they're anointed with olive oil and dressed in a
clean linen tunic.

The processions of the Parthenon frieze and
Augustus' Altar of Peace show a free citizenry wearing
their dress of office — white tunics or togas. Ideally they
took a bath beforehand. (At the date of the reliefs, both
Athens and Rome had become imperialist states, making
propaganda out of democratic symbols; but the symbols
are authentic.) The Greek names of the tunic (chiton)
and of the best linen (byssos) are the Sumerian and Egyp-
tian words for flax, brought in by Phoenician trade. Along
with the fabric, the classical world also inherited from the
Near East the civic context it was worn in.

Hebrew priests and kings (unlike earlier Near East-
ern ones) held delegated authority, for they were answera-
ble to the prophet, who enjoyed an inviolable status like
the Roman tribune of the people. When they were conse-

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 69

crated for office, they probably took a bath, and were
anointed (as still in Britain) and clothed in vestments
which defined their office. Prophets shared the anointing.

When Jesus was seen as summing up the roles of king,
priest, and prophet in an unexpected way, he was given all
three offices under the title of "Anointed," Aramaic Mes-
siah, Greek Christ. (He is also seen in Greek manner as a
victorious athlete.) The elements of consecration are
spread out through his life: the ritual bath, an anointing,
investiture in the murex-purple cloak of royalty. All point
to that death which confirms his Messianic status: "This
Jesus whom you crucified, God has made both Lord and
Christ."

The acts of passage through the waters and anointing
are seen together as conveying the "gifts of the Spirit."
There is a uniform Mediterranean physiology in which
the word for "wind" (Hebrew ruah, Greek pneuma, Latin
spiritus) also means "breath" and "principle of life." The
ruah of God which moves on the face of the water is a pre-
cosmic wind, thought of as his breath, which impregnates
the deep into life. Later he breathes it onto the clay which
he has shaped. So the ritual bath, which marks our birth
into a new state of life, is taken as the point where we start
breathing its atmosphere.

A community is seen as a bigger man animated by its
proper breath or "spirit." Its "members" are limbs of his
body, and are ascribed common descent, real or adoptive.
Hellenes are descendants of Hellen son of Deucalion, sur-
vivor of the Flood; Israelites of Israel-Joseph. We're all
sons of Adam. One trouble in America is that we can't re-
vive the myth of Noah to give white and black a common
ancestor.

70 . PLANET ON STRIKE

Jesus' original ideological program, the Sermon on
the Mount, represents his understanding of the fresh start
which both he and his hearers have just made. Their bap-
tism by John generated a new community inside Israel,
where Jesus through his gifts emerged as leader. In its es-
prit de corps we come to live "in Christ" the principle of
reconciliation, as previously we had died in Adam the
principle of estrangement.

Murder is committed by the first sons of Adam; its re-
sult is Babel, many peoples with mutually incomprehensi-
ble languages. The community of Jesus is held together by
a common spirit which puts the mutually understood
tongues of brotherhood in every mouth. Communication
through the shared language of dialogue is also the form
of the new community invented by Plato.

Baptism and Confirniation in the Church

When under Constantine the Church was taken up
into the power-structure, the phases of the ritual bath
were separated. Baptism became a token of membership in
the only society anybody could see, of which Church and
State were two elements. Hence it was put as early in life
as possible. (Constantine himself, the link between two
ages, postponed baptism until he'd finished his necessary
crimes.) The gift of the spirit became optional and was
put around puberty.

The Reformation State Churches were in a dilemma;
they were the religious phase of a total society, but they
wanted to return to the principle that a person chose the
new way of Jesus freely. But then there had to be a possi-

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 71

bility of his rejecting it— or choosing it in a way unaccept-
able to the established Church. They patched up the
dilemma by continuing infant baptism, and making
confirmation theoretically an acceptance in one's own per-
son of what had been promised before by others. Soon that
reaffirmation became mostly formal. The total society was
broken instead by the appearance of dissenting churches
and then of skepticism, always against opposition. In the
end it was secular law, not canon law, that evolved the no-
tion of tolerance — which for the first time since Constan-
tine restored to the Church in principle its autonomy over
against the State.

But within any of the existing denominations today, as
in America, baptism is an infancy rite, introducing the
baby to the community. Confirmation or confession of
faith is a puberty rite of graduation from church school —
really of graduation from church. For we've evolved a chil-
dren's religion, suitable also for those in second childhood,
patronized by adults principally to ensure attendance of
their kids in church school. Entrance into that religion is
no longer an act of separation from the world, but of iden-
tification with it.

The radical Reformation sects restored adult decision
to split from the world, preserved in theory by Baptists.
Their liberal clergy, hampered by tradition from making
immersion less than total, can dispense with it today alto-
gether. But we face evils for which immersion is not too
great, but too little, symbolic expression. In their guerrilla
attacks on draft boards, the Baltimore and Milwaukee
Catholics used real self-drawn blood, real homemade na-
palm. If ever somebody in the Peace Movement is bap-
tized, he'll actually get wet in some body of water — maybe

72 • PLANET ON STRIKE

a Baptist tank. Tlie bell bottomed trousers and army jack-
ets of our dropouts, with their cry for authentic drama,
point back to the old symbols — the white garment, can-
dles, procession. No need to refute their mythology that
the myrrh of Moses' anointing oil was psychedelic.

The early Church communicated a secret summary of
ideology to the candidates, and we should be working on
such a chain of slogans. The imposition of hands, begun
by the minister (a link with the global community in
space and time), should spread to the whole group with
the kiss of peace — what all humanity except Anglo-Saxons
do when they meet. Mutual acceptance, reciprocal subor-
dination. We verbal types needn't be surprised if action
people, normally tongue-tied, respond in the languages of
play.

Adult Baptism as Normative

So far as the Church claims to be the nucleus of the re-
newed community, it must make commitment to itself an
adult affair. In the rapid social change we'll be seeing to
the end of time, each generation must decide for itself to
take on integrity. That was also how the Church began.
Of course people are grooving up younger than they used
to, in the accelerated political consciousness of our high
schools.

In a stable society before scientific medicine, being
born was the biggest trauma Avhen acceptance Avas most
needed. The later crises of puberty, marriage, vocation
were slid over or prearranged. Today with medicine and
natural childbirth, coming into the world isn't necessarily

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 73

to be propitiated by parents or child. But the infant bap-
tism fastened onto us by medieval fear of death has robbed
the Church of the proper way to manifest its own begin-
ning.

The American Resistance has developed a symbolism
of original power for young men to take the right road:
the turn-in of draft cards. But it's an action vulnerable to
the whim of the State to modify or repeal, like the incense
on Caesar's altar. Then and now, resistance to Leviathan
is the natural moral condition of baptism — but not a sub-
stitute. It's not available in the same Avay to women or
older men, and doesn't operate on the same psychological
level.

In our transitional period, most converts to a renewed
Way have been baptized as babies by conformist parents
in a conformist Church. Of course the new church is the
daughter of the old; when it goes back to mother saying
"War is murder" it doesn't want to shock, but to show
how well it's learned its catechism. Still, as the Roman
church suspects the form or intent of Protestant baptism,
much more may we suspect the form or intent by which
babies without conscience are accepted into racist exploi-
tative societies. Out of the peace revolution is born an
evangelism of actual sin and actual redemption —
awareness of complicity and of liberation. Persons aware
of coming into the community of new life for the first time
should have the privilege of entering it — and by the
means indicated in old books, in their subconscious de-
sires. Instead of asking theoretical questions about valid-
ity, why not rather ask the person what (if anything) has
happened? For persons baptized as infayits in established
churches, the normal mode of taking on renewal will be

74 . PLANET ON STRIKE

conditional rebaptism. Its vows should clearly define the
meaning of recruitment into the nonviolent revolution of
Jesus — what the Book of Common Prayer should intend
by "Christ's faithful soldier and servant."

If America moves towards stable revolutionary
Quaker-style families, the cry for "birthright" infant bap-
tism would return soon enough. The danger will be that
once again a way of life (however objectively correct) will
be imposed on children without their wishes having been
consulted. Of course people hope their kids will follow
them in the peace revolution; but it can't be done in
Maoist style by youth battalions, but only by availability
of the option and persuasion.

Getting the Message Through Obstacles

How can the unionized blue-collar workers, ill-
educated and TV-watching, be brought to see the unsatis-
factory substitute for living that's been fobbed off on
them? As the Resistance has struggled to push its
convictions over apathy and bureaucracy, it's been driven
out of Puritan shyness into ritual drama — the stylized vul-
garity in the morality-plays of the San Francisco Mime
Troupe, the Bread and Puppet Theatre. Few have bugged
the churches so successfully as the guerrilla street liturgies
of our own Dick York, of Viv Broughton's radical church
in London. The Cranmers of our new age shall be Jerry
Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, burning five-dollar bills at
the Stock Exchange, milling in for peace, wearing revolu-
tionary costumes to un-American committees, inaugurat-
ing pigs.

GOING THROUGH THE WATERS • 75

The Fresh Start as Rebuilding Community

As we dissociate ourselves from exploitation in the
world, much more so in the Church, which we claim as
seed of a new world. Since denominationalism marks the
Church's powerlessness to throw off complicity, our
baptism is a rejection of denominations. The precondition
of reunion is our personal fresh start. As obedience to God
implies disobedience to the State, so far as it's trespassing
on his property, it also implies an act of ecclesiastical dis-
obedience, so far as the Church has gone along with the
State. The membership rolls of sixteenth-century Christi-
anity don't make sense any longer. The only Church we
can be baptized into is underground or underwater — the
yellow submarine we all live in.

Nascent congregations are springing up from the
community already there in the peace movement. History
is gathering together children of the denominations who
heard the message their clergy transmitted and rejected.
The liberated Church will become visible when seminar-
ians ask to be ordained in it, when people come to be bap-
tized into the thing which is blossoming — precisely as a re-
sult of their adherence.

To swing the compass-needle of our psyche into line
with the electromagnetic field of the cosmos may begin
as an act of deprivation: the schizoid withdrawal which
points to a new center outside claiming us; the auto acci-
dent which snaps old threads and makes us put the new to-
gether. But when we emerge finally from the waters and a
dove brings the olive to our brow, if ever in our lives we

76 • PLANET ON STRIKE

should know what it means to be a man or woman. The
first test of our fresh start is our freedom simultaneously to
concentrate psychic energy into sexuality and to sublimate
it into creativity. The next crisis is our non-negotiable de-
mand for love.

chapter FIVE

The Demand for Love:
The Source
of Creativity

The chemist sees water as the fundamental
liquid, and normal saline or wine as complex
md derivative. So the Department of Philosophy line is
that clear colorless consciousness is the normal state of
ourselves. But the actual condition of our psyche is a
spectrum of colored emotional states, where sexuality is-
suing into creation is predominate. In Hebrew the primary
meaning of the verb "to know" is sexual, "And Abram
knew Sarah his wife"; the intellectual meaning is gotten
from this by abstraction.

Our relationship to other living creatures is floated on
a sea of sexuality. We play a feminine-passive role over
against the animals; like the female of their species, we ad-
mire the lion's mane, the peacock's tail, the stag's antlers,
the cock's comb. Art today, as in early matrilineal sorieties,
stresses female sexual characteristics; but our classic art is
marked by statues of the naked standing male. We've de-

78 . PLANET ON STRIKE

rived from the animals the will to domination over fel-
low-males, which is extended to control over nature and
magnified into mindless social institutions; but sexual dom-
ination needn't be so destructive.

The Derailment of Sexuality

The energy of sexuality tends to get invested in sym-
bols, bank deposits of its gold. A handkerchief, a ring, a
photo, places, odors. The nostalgia for childhood land-
scape or the reliable tune of the summer merry-go-round
is projection of preadolescent sexuality. The psychic stir-
ring which at a different place or time leads to overt sex-
uality can illuminate a scientific problem, push us into
craftsmanship, remind us of a friend in trouble. The act of
sex consummated is a psychic sanctuary to march out from
and return to safely. Sublimation and fulfilment: poles of
one magnet.

The interdependence of society reflects on the cul-
tural level the biological necessity of intermarriage. The
incest-taboo, the body's own awareness of harmful reces-
sive mutations, spreads out positively into elaborate
kinship systems. In early and primitive societies, the ex-
change of women, like commerce, is a bond tying neigh-
boring communities together — the original civilizing in-
fluence.

The different wave-lengths of sexuality in men and
women, which they can never tell each other about, are
the psychic components of procreation. As the newly ferti-
lized ovum imitates the first life in the primordial sea, our

THE SOURCE OF CREATIVITY • 79

desire reflects a planetary tension in the eons of pre-life.
The superabundance of our sexuality provides for the con-
tinuance of the species. And also the head of steam for all
other creativity too; our best ideas come in the free play of
dreaming. But if we let that engine run idle for too long it
shakes itself to pieces.

When a society has become an end in itself and lost
the assent of its supposed citizens, it begins advertising it-
self and manipulating them through technique grown au-
tonomous. The Roman Empire advertised itself through
its own power — coinage, inscriptions, the emperor, the
army. The Middle Ages advertised themselves through
their own civic and divine cult. Our society has to give
people apparent freedom of choice; religious symbols have
died, power must be pretended improper. So everything
we want to sell has to be advertised through a woman's
belly. It's remarkable that so many Americans can break
through mystification and find the road to wealth and
power.

A distorted culture cheats desire with unrewarding
objects: a cat, a homosexual attachment, pornography,
compulsivity. The derailment of sexuality, in its twisting
of inner space, mirrors manipulation of the outer environ-
ment— and of the nature-peoples who inhabited it before
we came along. Especially in America, destructive sexual
tension is built up by the interracial affinities which are
supposed not to exist. Eldridge Cleaver, during his years
of celibacy on ice, analyzes the whole of our society as the
forbidden liaison between the Supermasculine Menial and
the Ultrafeminine, with the Omnipotent Administrator
and the Amazon standing frustrated in the wings.

80 • PLANET ON STRIKE

Marriage as Permanent Gene-Cell
of Revolution

The direct biological fruit of sexuality is childbirth,
which tames it and transfers it to new objects. Its indirect
cultural fruit has been called sublimation: a direct change
from solid to gas without ever passing through the liquid
state. Sublimation normally appears as the creativity of a
profession, learned by apprenticeship, and continuing so-
ciety by cultural rather than genetic inheritance. It's im-
portant to keep the two channels distinct: not to try and
teach your wife everything you know, not to make love to
your students.

Each phase of the revolution will only blossom out of
a stable cadre, convinced about what must be done, and
ready to wait five, ten, twenty years until the right mo-
ment for action. The family is the primary cadre. If we
can't build permanent peace-loving families, with sex and
close personal relations going for us, how can we ever
build peace-loving nations? The family is the revohition-
ary building unit, the cell or chromosome, naturally indi-
cated by our biological roots.

Both for individual fulfilment and for a new society,
people need to hold stably together, with flying buttresses
in the past to brace them against the winds of faddism and
violence. When anger invades a marriage with its billy
club and Mace, people must decide whether there was a
permanent relation. But even if we decide we must trans-
plant once again, we should be clear we've postponed the
long-term schedule of setting down roots.

THE SOURCE OF CREATIVITY • 81

It was a natural mistake for the young people to as-
sume that the locked box of scorpions, the hypocrisy of
adult society, discredited the hope of permanence in
human relations. But discovering how badly the suburb
has failed should just produce the determination to do
better. The one best way for the revolution to show its se-
riousness is in giving its elders an example of fidelity to a
sick lover, a buddy in jail, a neurotic husband.

The Revelation of Sexuality in History

Human freedom was invented through the discovery
of the human body under the Mediterranean sun after
millennia of sculpture which showed kings, priests, gods
in their rigid hieratic dress. Xenophon says again you
could tell his men from the barbarians by the fact that
Hellenes were brown and Persians white. Athletics at
Olympia or Sparta was a segregated Garden of Eden. The
sculpture is echoed by Pindar's praise of the victor in the
games, celebrating a struggle against dark powers, but
without inherent tragedy. Sexuality is projected onto a
new understanding of the gods in the Song of Solomon,
and when Hesiod chronicles the descent of Titanic beings
from the amour of Earth with Sky.

Sexuality was no sooner liberated than corrupted, and
innocence became a child's monopoly — even so with an
undertow of desire and aggression. The bronze maidens
on the blinding sands of Mykonos can't achieve full lack
of shame, entire nakedness. Plato, who gave sexuality its
place in Being, distresses us by making it not merely subli-
mated but homosexual, following the fashion of his times.

82 • PLANET ON STRIKE

So the love of Achilles and Patroclus, once no different
from that of David and Jonathan, "surpassing the love of
women," later was given overt coloration.

The fresh start discovered by Jesus liberates all psy-
chic powers, beginning with sexuality. Besides the politi-
cal revolutionaries whose movement he co-opted for non-
violence, his earliest companions were women of the
street, whom he saw as closest to naturalization in the new
City. Once they had been the ministrants of temple-
hospitality. Before the appointment of a resident consul
from his city, the travelling merchant had no protection
under law except the guest-friendship of a god in his priv-
ileged sanctuary. So the temple was the first hotel, and
hence the scene of what is misleadingly called "sacred
prostitution." It was good business, and a religious duty,
for the girls of the city like an Eskimo's daughter to
provide the stranger with home comforts. By the time of
Jesus, their clients were overseas mercenaries, and the old
civic hospitality was no more. Somehow he restored their
trust in humankind and rechanneled sexuality. Susan Son-
tag records that the Vietnamese rehabilitated the prosti-
tutes of Hanoi by pampering them in country-houses and
reading them fairy-tales.

The natural acceptance of sexuality by Jesus becomes
strained and ambiguous in Paul, who can hold only ele-
ments in isolation: the praise of Christian love (agape);
the naked athlete of the Isthmian games, "I have fought
the good fight, I have finished my course." Literature dena-
tures the violence of history by naive sexual motives, de-
riving great events from the curiosity of an Eve, the am-
bition of a mythical Dido or actual Cleopatra. Pasternak
organizes our experience of revolutionary change by sue-

THE SOURCE OF CREATIVITY • 83

cessive liaisons: a wife from the old regime, a mistress
from the new, a pickup from disintegration.

Western history is worked out in the fluctuations of
sexuality: the invention of romantic love in Provence; its
polarization into Puritan repression and Latin machismo;
its projection onto the Romantic landscape. When Deism
drove the old Calvinism out of Boston, it was pushed back
into New Hampshire and Vermont, where it festered into
our spectacular sexual deviations: polygamous Joseph
Smith, Mary Baker Eddy's metaphysical prudery, chaste
Transcendentalism, the segregated Shakers, the peculiar
Oneida community. Long before the Wright brothers,
Goethe made Faust dream of flying towards the sunset in
an eternal evening over the world's seashores. The peoples
of the earth play and swim at the edge of the waters they
had once come out from, divested of the skins and fabrics
they had picked up on dry land:

And see the children sport upon the shore
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Population Planning and Individual Fulfilment

It's wrong to make a woman bear six children unless
she's physically very fit and her husband well-to-do:

Oh your daddy's rich

And your ma is good-looking.

In any case it's too many for the planet. And high birth-
rate plus high infant mortality, as in India and Latin
America, destroys human dignity. The poor man is forced
into this ill-judged claim to esteem above all through colo-

84 . PLANET ON STRIKE

nialism, now inherited by America, which increased his
hopes and decreased his opportunities. The high birthrate
in refugee camps shows what people do when they haven't
got anything to do; the whole world is becoming a refugee
camp from vanished community.

A crash program of population control is a temporary
necessity:

There was an old woman w ho lived in a shoe.
She had so many children!
(She didn't know what to do.)

But in the end nothing will do but an economic system
where people can see more than a marginal standard of
living when they limit their families. If American invest-
ment is too paternalistic to allow this, local nationalisms
must arise, presumably socialist, perhaps not too closely
tied to Russia or China.

The human being can live in the arctics or tropics,
devise means of survival in the depths of the sea or outer
space. But the efflorescence of culture — with all its
ambiguities — came from temperate climates. We'll do well
not to push our plasticity too far. Especially the facts of
being female put limits on the adaptability of the species.
An element of woman's liberation is her recognition that
she's one check to complete male destruction of the globe.

The interruption of a physical cycle produces general
frustration. Jet flight over several time zones distorts the
organism for a day or so, and diplomats or businessmen
aren't supposed to negotiate immediately upon arrival.
Childbirth is an integral part of the woman's sexual cycle.
Her excitation rises and falls more slowly than the man's,
and is less localized. She's not quite released from tension
uiuil nursing brings on the uterine contractions which

THE SOURCE OF CREATIVITY • 85

snap the rubber band back to nearly where it was before.
How to reconcile family planning with release from ten-
sion? America has settled on the contraceptive pill as the
basic means of planning, and others than doctors need to
discuss the problems it creates.

Spokesmen for the sexual revolution point to the
"separation of sexuality from conception" as a biological
fact. How far is it a psychological fact? The pill, although
it accentuates the lunar cycle, in other respects gives the
impression of being pregnant. When girls first start it, a
number report dizziness and trouble in focussing — effects
much more widespread than scattered reports of blood-
clotting. Some get prematurely broad in the hips — per-
haps not just with the better eating which comes from
cooking for a man, but also with cumulative pseudo-preg-
nancy. Others feel the pill is trippy, they're walking
drugstores, turning themselves on and off, up and down.

Cautious women have a lively suspicion of the un-
tested chemicals of the drug business, remembering thalid-
omide. For better or worse, in or out of marriage, some
have gone on with mechanical or chemical contraception,
accepting as a lesser evil the psychic barrier from its be-
ing awkward, messy, not fully reliable. In general we
shouldn't expect to find a way of cutting ourselves off com-
pletely from the biological conditions of our existence.

For a different reason — the daily schedule required —
the pill doesn't work in illiterate village societies. Under-
developed countries doing population control are better
off with the Loop, which doesn't require maintenance and
is less likely to have unknown long-term effects. While in-
dividually not foolproof, it works well statistically; that's
fine so long as the villagers are willing to be treated as sta-
tistics.

86 . PLANET ON STRIKE

We must firmly squash down the part of us that still
hankers back to frontier America, when big families were
an economic asset on farms of indefinite acreage. One
branch of medicine we can certainly cut back on is help-
ing childless couples to have babies — especially when the
remedy may bring multiple births. Rather we should treat
their sterility as a precious natural resource, and help
them turn it to good use. Here may be the means to take
the pressure of guilt off the homosexual.

The urgency of having fewer people points to abor-
tion in more cases than now legal, above all when a de-
formed child is likely. We must just live with the damage
it does to the woman's body and psyche. Of course, repres-
sive laws (as with abortion and marijuana) are one of the
roadblocks by which the American system in its folly de-
tours reform into revolution. We might meditate on the
fact that Greeks and Romans, the inventors of human dig-
nity, exposed a deformed child at birth, before the father
had acknowledged it as a person with legal rights. This
unsentimental realism about the requirements of a hard
world sprang from reluctance to clutter up the earth with
nonviable beings. Still we've decided that this is an im-
proper decision for any person to make; all the more then
we should take extra pains not to overstep our preroga-
tives elsewhere.

A Family Schedule

Moralists have little business to sit around and criti-
cize the courting practices of a society; much business to
criticize a society which forces courting practices on young

THE SOURCE OF CREATIVITY • 87

people many years before the desirable time to have chil-
dren. Where moderate delay of awakening does no dam-
age, our current premature sexualization deprives people
of the privilege of having been children, and gets them
married too young. The Vietnamese, admired by Ameri-
can revolutionaries, although their strength lies in past
fertility, prescribe three delays to their young women: if
they fall in love, to delay engagement; if they get engaged,
to delay marriage; if they get married, to delay having chil-
dren. Sexual liberation is seen as a barrier to vocational
liberation. If we find these antiseptic heroines unattrac-
tive, we have the burden of working out something better.

It's damaging for a couple to use any means of contra-
ception for an extended period of years at the beginning
of their relationship. Having no children or even one
child doesn't give enough reason to be living together —
which always creates more problems than it solves. And an
unmarried couple needs a double commitment to hold to-
gether.

A lot of the girls show another symptom of pseudo-
pregnancy: irrational short temper. A girl living childless
with a man, whether married or unmarried, wavers be-
tween fears of losing him if she gets sick or fired, and
threats of leaving him. Behind fear and threat lies the
growing boredom of continued sexuality with the same
person which never leads to the creation of anything — ex-
cept endless work on a Ph.D. thesis, or savings for a second
car for her to get a better job to earn money to save for a
better second car . . . And in any case the lingering fear
(or hope) of unplanned pregnancy. The pseudo-preg-
nancy of the pill bears more of the disadvantages of the
real thing than we realize — and none of the advantages.

88 . PLANET ON STRIKE

The other side of the fertility dilemma appears when
couples marry early, get the right-size family by the middle
twenties, and then have to face twenty years of contracep-
tion at the other end. Not all children want to be pals
with parents no older than great big brothers and sisters.
We need once again a normal schedule of marriage (if
only as a pattern to deviate from) which will minimize
frustrations. So much is now known in scholarship, the sci-
ences, the professions, that professional training for both
men and women should extend into the late twenties. A
married person with children usually makes it through
graduate school with competent work, but without the
imagination and depth ideally required.

If people get married in the late twenties, they can
further utilize the natural cycle of the woman's recupera-
tion, which makes it easier to have children about three
years apart. Children closer together tire out the mother
and compete for attention on the same level. In this way
childbearing can end in the late thirties, when it's less de-
sirable for both mother and baby. Then there isn't a long
period of contraception ahead. Also the demands of the
children and one or two professional careers channel en-
ergy away from sexuality.

A new spontaneous sentiment for planning is the
trend for couples to have one or two children of their own
and then adopt multiracial orphans from at home or
abroad. It maximizes benefits from genetic intermixture,
liberal training, the cheerful solidarity of big families.
The extra care required for adopted babies also helps take
pressure off sexuality. (But of course a properly function-
ing world wouldn't produce all those babies to be put out
for adoption.)

THE SOURCE OF CREATIVITY • 89

For the mother, childbirth and lactation are the end
of a cycle; for the child, a beginning. It's preferable for
him to go ahead from it with a permanent father and
mother — in accordance with the facts of his conception,
which he somehow understands even before it's explained
in the learning context of the playground. Children
brought up otherwise have something left out of their
makeup, which can be compensated but not replaced by a
different kind of intensity.

To acquiesce in the constant breakup of radical fami-
lies and liaisons as a revolutionary necessity, even when
spending time in separate jails, is a counsel of despair.
The anarchist theory of loosing indiscriminate sexuality
onto society disrupts the movement for change as much as
it does the System. Not merely pressure of vocational
training, but also the risky work which only the young can
do, point strongly to postponement of marriage. Student
revolutionaries approaching the magic age of thirty are
now moving into stable marriages. They don't need to
breed big families themselves, since they're converting a
new generation of middle-class rebels — themselves often
products of a liberal happy suburban fortress.

Within a repressive society in rapid change, the per-
sonnel of the revolution can always be recruited from the
decaying order of things. Hence a myth of the world's end,
where having children is secondary. The full force of per-
sonality, so seldom realized, can be channelled into organ-
izing. Paul sees so big a burden of interpretation on per-
sons like himself as to rule out marriage — which in the
Roman world had broken down much more completely
than in ours, and had to be rebuilt precisely on the basis
of the new community. John Wesley in the face of un-

90 . PLANET ON STRIKE

evangelized Europe and America saw it imperative for
the herald to spend a number of years unmarried.

The archaic discipline of the Catholic Church plays
an ambiguous role. On one hand, its intransigence on
birth control and clerical marriage, its complicated pre-
tenses about divorce and childrearing, make people un-
able to see it as an actual guide for faith or morals. On
the other hand, its members who voluntarily took on celi-
bacy exhibit a spirituality of population control, and form
a revolutionary vanguard, imfettered to vote for the fu-
ture in a time of cosmic troubles. These inner contradic-
tions will only be resolved through an infusion of Protes-
tant liberty in new-style reunion.

The mistakes venial for individuals are mortal for
societies. Paul's harsh words about sexual deviation in the
early chapters of Romans are sociological analysis; family
breakdown is an index of social collapse. The very fact
that it's easy and forgivable for individuals to go wrong
implies something unforgivable about society. Our moral-
ists can't find words harsh enough for our Madison Ave-
nue temples of prostitution.

The Family as Unit of Rebuilding

The New Testament sees the solidarity in the local
community as its marriage to Christ. Today the solidarity
of the Church is fractured into denominations. If people
are well-informed enough to know they want something
claimed by one of the denominations — ^a liturgy, a system
of discipline — they also know it doesn't say what they

THE SOURCE OF CREATIVITY • 91

must hear. A spirituality of marriage adequate to the sit-
uation cuts across existing divisions.

In the marriage vows, the fresh start of baptism into
nonviolence must be channelled into an undertaking not
to overburden the planet, the oppressed, the partner. Like-
wise through the mysterious process of education people
must help their children to make the same choice as they
did, but no less freely. Actual sensitivity about personal
relations is almost as hard to achieve in a house as on a
planet. If we can reach across the earthquake-fault here,
we can hope to reach across it anywhere. And it has been
bridged here from time to time. If a peacemaker isn't de-
termined on actual integrity with wife or husband, we
don't have to take that peacefulness very seriously any-
where else.

Revolutionary movements at one stage must be Puri-
tanical. How can a vacation, a place by the sea, guestrooms
and a garden, violin lessons be squared with the austerity
and urgency of the present? But these are the things we're
fighting for, and they must be built somehow into the rev-
olution, or they won't be there when it succeeds. One of
the places where the old violence is first overcome is in a
family of Bachs, Huxleys, Wesleys. Even a whole commu-
nity of Quakers can build a new constructive life on the
rubble of the old society.

Both suburban and revolutionary families shipwreck
on the transformation of sexuality. In a certain year, there
seems to be nothing holding husband and wife together
but a bunch of fractious children. Still, the widening gap
needn't be anybody's fault or even something wrong. The
original job is starting to be wound up; the children are

92 • PLANET ON STRIKE

taking their life into their own hands, more independent
than anybody gave them credit for. "Daddy, us third-
graders had a sitdoun today. We sat down outside the
classroom for half an hour. We demanded no more
substitutes."

At this point the parents' cue is to keep on switching
creativity to the task which both they and the children can
recognize as above all legitimate. No more substitutes.
Perhaps a deepening involvement of the woman in what
the man is doing. But the very notion of a profession in
which the wife can take legitimate interest and pride
shows how far we've got to move from the current job
scene. Much more, for husband and wife to work out an
actual joint project. Whatever woman's liberation means
for them, both must radically rethink the channelling of
creativity. How can it find a profession which will support
the family and still express their rock-bottom convictions
as it blossoms into usefulness?

chapter SIX

The Demand for
Usefulness:
Actual Vocation

The need for food, and aggression with its com-
plex roots, push man into his daily work. But
our "economic" system isn't any longer what its name
implies, a rational "household management" of the planet.
Its jobs fit neither into intelligible long-range goals nor
individual fulfilment. There they sit, rootless parasites in
the jungle of competition (itself rooted in no proper soil
but its own decay), bearing ostentatious purple flowers un-
touched by sun, wind, and rain.

The Crisis of Counter-Productive Jobs

Jacques Ellul has analyzed with pitiless logic how the
growth of knowledge has forced all jobs, and the society
which they allegedly serve, into a cycle of self-expanding
technique, recognizing no principles but itself, doing
whatever can be done because it can be. If the supply of
raw materials were infinite, what ever could break the

94 . PLANET ON STRIKE

cycle? Our finitude is our salvation. The limitations of
planetary ecology, of the poor's patience, of our inner
balance, ensure that at some point technique will destroy
the conditions for its own existence. We could still hope to
smash its handcuffs a little before the whole environment
spontaneously breaks down. The most important sciences
are the ones which laid out the groundplan of natural or-
ders before they were stifled by the finigus growth of tech-
nique: ecology, Marxist historical analysis, the classical lit-
eratures which define individual freedom.

John Calvin, who wound up the clock of our ec-
onomic system by inventing the delayed gratification of
saving, left tiie goals and means of the professions inade-
quately examined. To the industrial and imperial West he
gave the dogma that any job which actually exists has a
prescriptive right to be called the service of God. The mys-
tique of secularism ends up in the same bind; any move-
ment which involves large numbers of people must be a
proper part of the human enterprise. But we must rather
ask of every job and profession whether it serves a legiti-
mate need; and in a legitimate way, without breaking of
orders. We do this by holding the System more seriously
than it does itself to its self-professed principles.

What is called a "student" movement leads the push
into the future, wavering between withdrawal and vio-
lence. But in either case studying is abandoned: the young
people are too itchy to embark on any seven-year course of
study, medicine or physics. The bridge which normally
leads from curiosity to vocation loses its abutments on
both ends and falls into the river.

Simultaneously the attractive power of the profes-
sions is corrupted. The scientist lets his research be chan-

ACTUAL VOCATION • 95

nelled by grants from foundations dipping into a Defense
Department well. Businessmen acquiesce in buying per-
sonal affluence at the cost of personal stifling, and the clos-
ing of doors for billions around the world. A parasitic sys-
tem of middlemen muscles in on writing and artistic
production, making and breaking fads by marketing rules,
as Time invented the Death of God in 1966.

Unionized labor is there serving its two collusive mas-
ters; what their hands have made is taken from them,
nothing to show their families except calluses and the pay-
check to live in the suburbs and watch the TV and stand
in line at popular restaurants. None has a second string to
his bow; even this unsatisfactory life is lived only by kind
permission of the System.

And then the young people see their professors cut-
ting classes to get consulting fees for tightening the Sys-
tem's bolts. There isn't any sense of working together at a
joint task. A depression might turn people back to necessi-
ties, but is unlikely so long as the State goes on subsidizing
a military machine, and patching up inflation through
old-age benefits.

In a poor society, alienation is controlled by a class
of exploiting rich, hidden behind bureaucracy. In an
affluent society, alienation is built into the institutional
complex of the system, which generates warped parallels
to the institutions of a normally functioning society.
Under this constant pressure the whole body of the State
degenerates into a cancer feeding on itself. The media are
its pseudo-language, spreading the lie that the interests of
the technological complex are supreme. Its jobs are a ma-
nipulation of paper and men. Through it, the industrial
complex (more and more automated) turns out self-

96 . PLANET ON STRIKE

producing instruments of destruction, self-destructing
consumer products, regardless of need. Obliteration and
obsolescence — a system whose humanitarian triumph is
military items obsolete before used, or scrubbed on the
assembly line after billions have been spent. Its foreign
policy is the degradation or development of poor peoples
through its diplomatic, military, industrial, academic
arms. Its churches are the churches.

What makes the System seem so unapproachable is
that so many people are spending their full working time
(with however bad a conscience) at jobs which support it.
The new things which critically need to be done involve a
radical break with existing job-slots. Of course those slots
are a big break with what they were a quarter-century ago,
as the System progressively deforms the jobs inside itself.
The aggressive retool themselves for new niches, others
fall by the way.

At first, the people moving out or moving over will
only seem like scattered individuals. But somewhere some-
time there will be a breakthrough — beginning in the
Black Caucus of many professions now. The University re-
bellion is serving notice that young people will not put
their bodies behind the existing desks next to the potted
philodendron and the glassbrick walls. With much in-
efficiency and waste, because of their inadequate train-
ing, they're groping for new slots to move into. But also
the vanguard of the professionals — those with exceptional
political consciousness or professional competence — are
beginning to make the break. Physicists and physicians are
taking the Hippocratic oath of revolutionary humanism
not to lend themselves to the System's purposes of war and
intimidation.

ACTUAL VOCATION • 97

The Revolution of Inner Discipline

The new consciousness of vocation began when pro-
fessionals discovered that, while the unions slept behind
them, they were in the vanguard by virtue of condemning
the settled foreign policy of their Government on their
own principles. When doctors denounced it for maiming
civilians; anthropologists as genocidal; biologists as de-
stroying a unique environment; statesmen as imprudent;
lawyers as illegal; ambassadors as bad public relations;
clergy as immoral — the Government could only set up its
last smoke screens to persuade its captive generals not to
condemn it as bad tactics, or its economists as bad invest-
ment.

We can tell that the System is set on pulling itself
down when its own logic again and again reminds us of its
final refutation — our ineradicable dissatisfaction. I just
got a questionnaire for my twenty-fifth reunion yearbook.
Was I on schedule? Were any of my children hippies?
W^ere they attending the old school? How did I estimate
my net worth? Was my portfolio for income or growth?
What was my house valued at? Over against seniority, ten-
ure, and investments, the principal hope for the future is
our dynamic security of getting fired to do the next thing
on the agenda of the cosmos. You may thumb your nose at
your boss: "Something is happening here, and you don't
know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?" It's the finger of God
writing out new job-descriptions.

Past needs have produced specialized forms of per-
sonal discipline — the monk, the missionary, the inventor.

98 • PLANET ON STRIKE

the entrepreneur. We ask for an American da Vinci to di-
agram the proportions of a man. People do all that drink-
ing, watching ball games on TV, golf, driving around on
the freeways, because they can't face spending time on
themselves. From the lack of any gravitational mass in
those empty lives, by an exact law the high-velocity
children spin off centrifugally into new eccentric orbits.

A man becomes himself by what he does: "In the be-
ginning was the deed." The self-affirmation of a fresh start,
the creativity which temporarily flowed into the pool of
sexuality, are supposed in the end to fill up the ocean of a
"vocation," something you're called to by the nature of
things. Our co-workers there are built up with us into a
professional team. How can it pass from being the arena of
competition, where men are ground down into identical
grains of sand, to a nuclear cell of actual community?

Craftsmanship as Affirmation of Natural Orders

Our demand for usefulness is another form of the cry
for meaning. Our community began to cohere for the first
time while we wrapped hundreds of pounds of donated
pennies to bail out our brothers and sisters in jail. In our
need for perfection, our own spoiled craftsmanship throws
us back on the primordial creativity. We find our meaning
in work — and not just anything which calls itself work,
but the work of the revolutions of peace, done in solidar-
ity with that archaic revolution which once lifted the cos-
mos up bright and dripping out of the seismic waves of
chaos.

After the initial procreative act of creation, our tradi-

ACTUAL VOCATION • 99

tion sees its nuts-and-bolts detail as the work of a master
tinker who hammers the earth out flat, and the sky as an
Achilles' shield. "The sky announces the splendor of God,
and the firmament shows the work of his hands" (Ps.
19:2). Before that burst of creativity all is waste and void
— there's no proper light, no birds in the air, all subject to
earthquake. Then the architect sets up the seven pillars
supporting the circular temple of the universe, and so sta-
bilizes all.

As we walk through the forest, by an act of concentra-
tion we can focus on the billions of atoms in a leaf, and
then think out to the waves of the sea, trying to grasp the
extent of the matter in all the planets and galaxies. It's
full of mysteries. Where are all the negative protons which
should have been formed to balance off the positive ones
in our part of the universe? Do the galaxies alternate mat-
ter and anti-matter? Anyway, wherever we look, every-
thing is full of organization; somebody has been hard at
work.

Our task is patiently to extricate the horse impris-
oned in the jade, the cherries latent under the bark, the
potential man overlaid by the frightened bully. In our
part of the creation the most important things are human
beings and the forms they define themselves in — words.
The literary scholar instructed in the area of liberation
brings out of his safe-deposit box new things and old
things. Since we can't add an inch to our height, our work
doesn't consist in making new things but in remaking ex-
isting ones, polishing tarnished silver. The master we're
all apprenticed to did his apprenticeship in the living
grain of wood or stone, and then graduated as commu-
nity-organizer and poet.

100 • PLANET ON STRIKE

Excellence: Beating the System
at Its Own Game

If the military is our profession we need to switch.
But if we have a potentially rational vocation, our cue is
neither to drop out, nor to lose hope, nor to go on
climbing the ladder in hopes of gradual change; but to
beat the System at its own game. If we take seriously the
professed principles of business, the Church, law, engi-
neering, foreign policy, medicine, we'll find that they sit
in judgment on the System and condemn large areas of
current practice. If we try to drop out, someday we'll have
to drop back in again into compromise with the System —
an unfruitful one, because we haven't got the competence
to attack it head-on. After initial rebellion, a student
should learn his profession exceptionally well, get his cre-
dentials, and then turn his back on its promise of security.
Swamp the profession with the reality of your work, and
then use that bridgehead to push its compromised goals
through to the universal goals they imply.

Of course our contracts will frequently be termi-
nated. We must keep firmly in mind that we're the ones
who've been entrusted with the true principles of the Sys-
tem, and that it knows it. It hopes we'll crawl back
humbled. But if we bounce back with double energy and
even more extensive proposals, better credentials than
ever, it can't exclude us from the discussion. Because the
apparently reliable are more or less phony careerists, who
at graduate school every time cut the lectures on profes-
sional ethics. In the end it's not the threat from the System
that holds us back, but our slothful self-destructive suspi-
cion that the System may be right. Push beyond that; ev-

ACTUAL VOCATION • 101

erything salvageable in the System will be salvaged only
because able men not easily hurt have kept holding it up
to its word.

Every harlot was a virgin once, every bureaucrat was
at one time a man, and we do him the credit of calling
him back to himself. Of course we may not bring over the
top management en bloc. They are at this very moment
pretending that automation or group-dynamics is allowing
the System to break through its old ways and become radi-
cally responsive to our wishes — if we'll only be patient.
But our patience has lasted five thousand years and things
aren't all that different.

Let it not offer us the cookies of minor concessions, or
manipulate us by alternating patronage and neglect. We
stick with it because we don't set ourselves up as founders
of a counter-System; we propose to keep our lines open to
the radicals of the next generation, who will be born in-
side it. We're stuck with the System as we're stuck with the
planet; we have to retain confidence that renewal is possi-
ble within both. If we hold a true measure of the depth of
its problems, we won't be fobbed off by its usual alterna-
tion of cynicism and complacency.

We will deal with the System on our scale, not its. It's
as impossible to reconstruct a whole economic system as a
whole continental biology; it operates by uncounted big
and little mechanisms which slip through the meshes of
every planner. What we can hope to do is: to halt by polit-
ical action the major operations which are destroying nat-
ural orders; to introduce correct principles in small areas
where we more nearly have control; and then patiently to
observe the reaction to this preliminary injection of order.
After we've shaken the aphids off the rose bush, cut down
the jungle of weeds, pruned off the deadwood, watered and

102 • PLANET ON STRIKE

fertilized, we just have to wait and see where the new
growth appears. It knows better than we do.

We must envisage a radical reordering of priorities in
the professions, which can only be done by each individual
in his own job and caucus. Catholic natural-law theory is a
timid approach to what is needed. What Paul Goodman
writes can always be read with profit. But everybody
knows his own area best. We have to introduce the new ge-
netic strains of love where we're actually operating — in
the soil of the planet.

The natural orders. Lawyers must find where exist-
ing legal systems are most vulnerable to an application of
justice, and push them to define new principles of interna-
tional law, new rights for people and things. We must en-
courage and fund the new breed of physicist and biologist
who act as our watchdogs against the constant dangers of
nuclear technology, insecticides, untried drugs, synthetic
additives, substitute consumer products. We need edu-
cated farmers and ranchers who incorporate wildlife
preserves on their land, observe it with love, collaborate
on equal terms with professional scientists — for knowl-
edge, not manipulation.

The planet and the local community. Planners
today are operating on the wrong scales: too big to be re-
sponsive to local needs, too small to be responsive to plan-
etary needs. We must focus on each and distinguish them
sharply.

Decentralizing. It must be possible for a radical
banker to find a means to help the ghetto or a poor nation
finance itself and then keep his hands off. Or for doctors to

ACTUAL VOCATION • 103

invent a bridge between lucrative private specialty and
immense clinics — a modest friendly neighborhood medi-
cine. Engineers who don't scale up but down, finding ways
to reduce the need for their own work, making it invisible.
City planning — better, finding a smaller level of organiza-
tion without the waste of commuting, everybody bringing
his specialty into a more intimate approachable scale. Dis-
persing industry into the fields— as Hanoi did under pres-
sure of bombing. Local co-ops, bail bondsmen. Every step
is in the right direction which destroys some possibility of
national advertising.

Internationalizing. A crash program to expand the
study of Russian and Chinese, as well as minor languages;
developing the wisdom of the body to be at home in dif-
ferent climates. Lobbying to create UN conservation and
rights commissions with real teeth in them. Embodying
war-crimes precedents like Nuremberg and Stockholm in
authoritative legal textbooks and live institutions. Using
overseas loans for actual indigenous development. Genu-
ine adaptation of Western medicine to other environ-
ments, a coordinated attack on overpopulation by different
techniques. Above all, every professional on all levels say-
ing No to the flow of war materiel and personnel.

Self-esteem and esteem for others. Every admin-
istrator I know is squeezed by the dilemma of having sac-
rificed his own creativity in favor of service to others —
which turns out nonexistent. Much greater realism about
both is required.

Radical service. Reliable subsidies for militant law-
yers who defend the defenseless — not for a year or two as

104 . PLANET ON STRIKE

public defender (a legal chaplaincy) but lifelong. Social
service that doesn't exhaust the worker or demean the
receiver — because it's done to strengthen the necessary
revolutions. Medical committees for human rights which
take on the police as a major health problem. Above all
creating the reality that the administrator is the servant of
the creative people around him. Not accepting complex
decision-making bodies, just because they're expensive and
succeeded in putting a missile-bearing submarine in the
water.

Humanizing. Restoring the link between workman
and consumer. Contractors who will build more houses
and more durable ones — with rooms for old people in
them. Doctors who give a sick person more civilized treat-
ment than a dinner guest. People's historians, like Staugh-
ton Lynd writing a history of the American Resistance.
Teaching the right books and encouraging people to
produce more of the same. Restoring a philosophical disci-
pline which doesn't confine itself to an ingrown set of
topics.

Besides the practical vocations through which the
world's work is done, some must devote themselves wholly
to what we all do in part: through ideology, meditation
defining the meaning of the world's work. On a globe only
too well explored and grown familiar, is there still a voca-
tion for the hermit? Thomas Merton found a way in Ken-
tucky; the Port Chicago vigil for eight hundred days wit-
nessed to nonviolence over against napalm in darkest
California.

Woman's job just as it is in most ways offers the ideal

ACTUAL VOCATION • 105

example. Somebody who keeps the house clean, takes care
of the kids, plants a vegetable garden, fixes meals, and does
the laundry has carried through her share of the bargain —
really, the job assigned to Adam in the management of the
garden. In comparison, what's all this destruction and
busy work that men are doing? The liberation of women
consists in their awareness of forming the vanguard of the
green revolution.

Not the worst but the best men today are crippled by
inhibitions about putting their true impulses into action.
We must remind ourselves of the enormous energies avail-
able to society — Athens, Florence, London, the frontier,
the Russian revolution, the space program. And these
were pagan renaissance programs, in large part exploita-
tive, asserting po^ver. Much deeper potential was tapped
by the renewers of the Church — Francis, Luther, Fox,
Wesley — carrying their vision of integrity through to its
simple logical end. We have a job even more critical than
theirs, we're proceeding less blindly. Why is the cry for hu-
manization of world society no stronger? Because we don't
trust the Spirit of humanity enough to make it stronger.
We take a step forward and then half-draw it back, look-
ing up and down the line to see if anybody else has taken
the step; they are looking too.

But the course of events is currently issuing the com-
mand to march. Perhaps radical renewal won't come until
our preliminary commitment to family or career is de-
stroyed by persecution. Honest Frenchmen could unite
against their country's Algerian policy — so much more hu-
mane than our colonialism — because facile hopes had
already been shattered in the Resistance of World War IL
Its members — Camus, Ellul — could return to normal life

106 . PLANET ON STRIKE

and a career of deepened insight, but only because they'd
once given up the certainty of those things. In America,
students and the young haven't yet reached that despera-
tion; only the blacks as yet can place their hope in having
given up hope.

Restoration of Working Community
in the Church

Hebrew literature, like early Greek literature, is both
science and history in embryo. By reading those texts
against our current imderstanding of nature and society,
we come to see the unavoidable conditions of our exist-
ence here. The New Testament alone defines what it
means to be a free individual, rooted in the natural and so-
cial environments but transcending them. Each man, as
his own priest in his own vocation, has to work out those
insights concretely for himself. By cooperative effort we do
the jobs called for by the revolution.

Most vocations don't carry their final meaning in
themselves. The farmer, businessman, workman produce
things to sustain life; the doctor, social worker maintain it
against threats. For what purpose? The actual meaning of
life lies in the symbolic forms which define it. The poet is
called the maker par excellence. The poetry behind us
says that a plastic force beyond matter and energy calls
things into being by a word. The act of naming — self-
definition, celebrating — is what the others exist for, the
principal employment of Eden.

Language, the word, is the business of us all. The
spirit or breath of wisdom that all our works should be

ACTUAL VOCATION • 107

done in finds its primary task in speaking the word which
guides all the others. Literature is the center of education;
it's the light which makes the trades, arts, sciences, profes-
sions transparent of humanity.

In the new community building up around us, each
man from his own learning and experience helps formu-
late goals for himself and others. Our solidarity in what
we call the Church is our confidence that others, drawing
from the same wells, have the same trust in us as we in
them. Without the need of interminable conferences, by
our built-in unity of goal we're workers on one team.

Most of our errors are ignorance; we manage to over-
look the record which shows other people in textbook
fashion falling into the trap which lies in front of us. The
statesman, whether Establishment or revolutionary, can
only operate by manipulation of men and movements.
The real revolution happens w^hen poets are the acknowl-
edged legislators of mankind. Not a Vergil but an Augustus
builds an oppressive empire; not an Archbishop but a Fox
builds a new community. As we pass through our appren-
ticeship we come face to face with po^ver, the heart of the
dark forces, and ^\e realize we can't beat it at its own game
of coercion. We can only help people get organized
through the powerlessness of the word. The legions of Be-
elzebub are supreme in their own non-realm; the chains
by which they've bound mankind don't fall except by the
folly of preaching. Community is only built through the
unconditional demand for justice, which in the end goes
beyond all politics.

chapter SEVEN

The Demand
for Justice:
Going Beyond Power

So far as individuals or families trust each other,
they're organized by voluntary agreement into
community. So far as they don't, they're organized by
coercion into the State; a majority or large minority is
oppressed. The first step towards community is the de-
mand to restore justice for the oppressed. Since trust and
distrust will continue, our organization will contain el-
ements of both coercion and freedom. Of course they don't
stand on the same level, and some adjustments between
them are more desirable than others.

The Impotence and Danger of Power

Coercion is a more pervasive element of our world
than choice; but we can't be so clear that it's actually exer-
cised by somebody. The agents of coercion do what they
do because they're told to by their superiors, or by the
tradition of their fellows. The head of the department has
to reckon with those traditions; with the politicians who
shield certain interests; with influential pressure-groups.

GOING BEYOND POWER • 109

Coercion isn't willed by one man and can't be altered by
one man; it's just there, like the law of gravity. Its first vic-
tim is the man who thinks he exercises it.

An individual works himself up in the hierarchy of
coercion by following certain rules: recognition of his
powerlessness to change things, willingness to go along
with the system. You can't speak about a moral or im-
moral man in this context, but only about a strong or weak
man. The strong man is consistent about responding to
pressures from various directions, and so gravitates into
top positions. The weak man wobbles — maybe he's just
stupid. Society gets precisely the police and administrators
it bargains for, who respond like a seismograph to minute
shifts of mass. If a man wants to reform the police, chief of
police is the last office he should run for.

The President of the United States is essentially pow-
erless. Robert Kennedy's account of the Cuban missile cri-
sis shows the impotence of his brother and Khrushchev,
going through foreordained military and diplomatic ritu-
als. We do want a strong man as President, to register
accurately the pressures acting on him without cracking,
so that we have something to rely on. If he gets impris-
oned by the military and Intelligence, or by his party, the
system becomes unstable through the automatic reaction
of the slighted groups. But the individual voter can't do
anything even to get the strong man in. Any other aims of
a man besides ambition in running for President are irrel-
evant. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, very different in style,
were all ruthless, industrious, ambitious — and powerless.
The war, the deterioration of the cities, space exploration
ran their apparently destined courses, independent of
these men's policies — or lack of them.

As you go further down the ladder to a Congressman

110 • PLANET ON STRIKE

or administrative appointee, some offices permit true ele-
ments of choice and influence on policy: being a watchdog
of civil rights, an advocate of reform. On this level politi-
cal pressures are only partial; provided the man satisfies
his constituents in certain areas, he's free to be himself in
others. But just because he'd like to end a war, patch up
the city, dismantle the missiles, doesn't mean he can do it.
Not much change will be accomplished through Congress-
men whose constituencies (and therefore their own views)
differ only fractionally from the ruling elite. The biggest
potentially deviant constituencies here are of blacks, per-
haps youth— certainly not yet women. It would be wildly
unrealistic to think of running for Congress as a sheep in
wolf's clothing. The most hopeful politics is a straight-out
radical campaign. But the biggest influences for change in
the sixties came from quite outside the constitutional
scheme.

The growth of technology as communications gave
the poor a new knowledge of their own strength; as
affluence, it gave them hopes it's impossible to deny. Es-
tablishment political theory lays it down as dogma that the
biggest threat is always from anarchic forces of disorder —
Vikings, Turks, bikies, militants, hippies, Commies. Its
claimed first concern is to legitimate a central authority
which can impose law and order. Only then will it appeal
to the morality or interests of the rulers to mitigate their
use of authority.

In older times, the damage which could be done by
any leader of men, however charismatic and perverse, was
limited; both nature and society absorbed all the blows he
could give it. Bubonic plague was a greater threat. Today
in a number of countries, offices staffed by robot bureau-
crats hold the power to damage permanently the whole

GOING BEYOND POWER .111

planetary living system. What we have to fear isn't the raw
power of anarchic rootless masses, but those rationalizing
technical procedures, operating through impersonal insti-
tutions, which have replaced all personal centers of au-
thority.

Oppressed groups hardly anywhere threaten to take
over the governing system as such, but only to amputate
its illegitimate extensions, the pseudopods of the world-
amoeba. Still the System cynically creates the fear that if
power is taken from the hands of the moderate humane
civilized men who now exercise it, after a period of anar-
chy it will fall to unbalanced passionate militants who will
impose a reign of terror. A second Hitler — this time with
nuclear weapons at his disposal. Of course, something
worse than the present can always be imagined. But the
time to cry out against murder, the place where we need to
be most on guard against Hitlerism, is never the future
but the present.

Russia is a threat to world community today, not be-
cause she's undergone a revolution, but because she hasn't,
she continues Czarist oppression in industrial format.
America is a threat, not because she represents something
new but something old: European racist imperialism with
different techniques. If China becomes a serious threat, it
will be because in her externally imposed isolation she
couldn't break the habit of bureaucracy.

Our Provisional Commitment to Politics

Our commitment to any political goals must always
be provisional. For the goals will be partial, with their
own element of injustice; also they will be further com-

112 • PLANET ON STRIKE

promised in the process of moving towards them. That
doesn't mean we shouldn't be committed. Before any glo-
bal action for conservation, before any step to inner
integrity, must first come our response to the demand for
justice. Working for justice is so critical a problem pre-
cisely because we're not sure ho\v to go about it. But we'd
better not let that doubt paralyze us into a twin of the
complacency which pretends there isn't any problem. Bet-
ter a provisional passionate commitment to a political fail-
ure than no commitment. The means of our politics may
appear nonpolitical; but the ends must always be revolu-
tionary, recognizing each injustice, old and new, and over-
throwing it as fast as possible.

Precisely as a result of our adherence, the formerly
oppressed group may gain real power. Since we're all of
one nature, that group will have the same temptation as
its predecessors: using its new power to oppress other
groups in turn. Since every growth has its roots, its misuse
of power springs from the very beginnings of the revolu-
tionary struggle, however disinterested or quixotic its
cause then seemed.

Other commitments are directed towards a perma-
nent human or natural object — a wife, a forest, a body of
learning. But our commitment to justice can never take
any political institution for granted. The corruption of
politics makes politics the most religious of occupations,
where it's necessary always to have in mind a transcendent
object with no adequate representation in history. Beyond
every application of justice here, we're pushed back to an
overriding principle of justice which by the facts of the
case can't be embodied in any human institution.

Any particular legal system deserves our provisional

GOING BEYOND POWER .113

assent as an effort to embody justice on one level. But the
sanction of any legal system is coercion; it will always be
used by the class in power to strengthen itself and put
down any possible competitors. Our partial assent to the
law of man also forces us beyond it into an absolute assent
to what may be called the law of God.

Augustine asked if it was proper for a man to sit as
judge and pass sentence; he gave the answer Yes. So far as
I know he didn't adequately realize the corruption of the
legal system in its own terms. We who do, must give a dif-
ferent answer. A man may sit if (i) in day-by-day decisions
he can carry out substantially better justice than a less con-
scientious man; and (2) if he takes the sting out of his
complicity with the massive injustice remaining by using
the leverage of his judgeship to work for judicial reform.
But for a man who has agreed this far to work with the
corrupt system there can't be any vacation, any sleep.

In general, any job (say, a policeman's) within a
warped structure is justifiable just so far as we can use it to
start straightening the distortion. If our day-by-day work
necessarily involves us in deep complicity, our usefulness
for reform is destroyed in advance, we haven't got any le-
verage. We needn't worry about the positions falling va-
cant, there will always be policemen and judges. If the
policeman is essentially a pawn, so that neither a kindly
nor a sadistic man on the job changes the character of the
work done, this is no place to waste our kindliness. For we
can always choose to work for change through a vocation
which isn't so fatally handicapped.

As a matter of fact, power operating through law
today mostly carries out the will of a demonic System,
overruling the merits of the persons who fill its positions.

114 • PLANET ON STRIKE

An idealist is trapped where a cynic is at home. For the
idealist is forced to pretend that he's acting out of prin-
ciple when he's acting out of necessity. And then, instead
of justifying his actions as conditional necessities of state,
he justifies them as absolute necessities of morality.

When injustice is being done to a group inside the
System, we can work actively to help it without attributing
exclusive virtue to its claims. Liberal intellectuals rightly
supported the labor movement between the two World
Wars. But today, with improvement in the status of labor,
the principal injustices done by the System are to groups
which don't form part of it.

The instinctive first step towards justice is normally
to exercise the limited violence for good which we were
taught — except this time on behalf of the oppressed over
against the Establishment. But as we reflect back on our
Establishment past, we can see that both sides are the same
species and will fall into the same traps. There doesn't
seem to be any way now of keeping the family fight down
to the old-fashioned level, which may bruise some limbs
but is guaranteed not to pull the house down.

So we go on repeating to the System the warning of
ancient wisdom to beware of presumptuous arrogance —
with less and less confidence that our warning will be
heard. Meanwhile we struggle, if necessary through that
same System, towards means of control for the \iolence
against the environment which has priced itself out of the
international market, a luxury not the richest can afford.
Frustrated there also, we transfer our political task to pro-
visional support for the most hopeful revolutionary move-
ments, and try to humanize and moderate their methods
by our presence. At the same time we renew our absolute

GOING BEYOND POWER • 115

commitment to building a nonpolitical revolution of vol-
untary community. Jacques Ellul defines our fundamental
working principle: to abandon the revolution as soon as it
succeeds, and go over to the side of the new class of the op-
pressed.

By all signs, the United States is in for a basic change
in the way it does things — a second American Revolution.
Bloody or not? Blacks, hippies, students here are as deeply
identified as they could be with their Vietnamese brothers
and sisters. If Viet Nam is part of America, enough blood
has been shed to glut any theorist of revolution.

Even in face of a likely right-wing reaction, I suppose
we should be hoping and working for a change in America
that would: do actual justice to blacks and other minori-
ties; recognize student power; take over some corporate
monopolies; modify the policy of intervention overseas;
develop a safeguard of trust and then dismantle missile-
installations; end the draft and political repression; repeal
marijuana laws; control insecticides. And even those
modest demands, which just begin to touch our deeper
alienation, sound wildly Utopian.

But in any case white and black revolutionaries here
will remain very much children of the American System.
Their tactics are the realistic exercise of violence which
they've been taught by the practice of their elders, or by
the theology of a Reinhold Niebuhr. They will share with
their forerunners the illusion that full control over one's
society is possible and desirable. After the State has been
replaced or changed — certainly with new pretensions, per-
haps not so intractable as before — nearly all the critical
jobs will remain to be completed by free persons in
voluntary community.

116 . PLANET ON STRIKE

The Transcending of Power

So long as we continue to operate solely in the politi-
cal realm, we have to keep assessing greater and lesser in-
justice. But our study of history could still convince us, in
the most pragmatic political terms, that even an appar-
ently "just" war of liberation was an actual step towards
global nuclear war. In that case its justice would become
some kind of mirage in the light of ultimate expediency.

There may be a way of lessening both injustice and
the likelihood of atomic war which doesn't lie along the
route of politics. It would mean renouncing the effort to
reconstruct society as a whole from positions of power; the
current rulers of the State would be left where they are.
Instead: organizing people without coercion. We have no
idea how far this mode of organization could be extended,
reducing the damage done by the State while letting it stay
in power. Never before have the penalties of failure been
so great or so obvious. By the nature of the effort, an at-
tempt at noncoercive organization can't increase the vi-
olence-level, at worst it can only fail; at all times it's worth
a try.

We shall never lack candidates for the White House
or episcopal sees. The business of politicians is making
compromises; we can leave that up to them, we needn't
butt into their business. Our cue is to present them with
the whole package, the best way we can see it, of what's re-
quired by love, by justice, by survival. The more healthy
currents there are at work in our society, the better
politicians we're likely to get; but it's not one of the things

GOING BEYOND POWER .117

we can work for directly. This must be what Paul meant
by saying that the ruler was appointed by God. We do our
thing, and take what Providence supplies. Politics is in-
curably ambiguous. Definitive political affirmations apply
only to the realm of our final citizenship. Paradoxically,
only through that realm can the historic nations of the
planet be held back from self-destruction.

A Road Not Taken:
Removing the Missile-Threat

Even more ominous than the current scenes of actual
violence is the double missile screen bracketing the North
Pole, together with Polaris submarines and other deploy-
ments. Our military expenditures, our foreign policy are
designed around the fear and threat of using those sys-
tems. If military spending were reduced, Forman's half
billion could be seen for the peanuts it is. The one biggest
security we could win for the planet would be the cer-
tainty that neither Russia nor America would intention-
ally set off their missiles. A discussion of alternatives will
illustrate the possibility of transcending power. If the
balance of terror were removed, the missiles could start
being dismantled. They don't need to be replaced by a
hundred percent foolproof system; they're not absolutely
foolproof themselves.

This isn't the Utopianism of unilateral disarmament
or World Federalism, but a hope which, pushed hard
enough by voluntary agencies, could possibly be endorsed
by atavistic governments. If anybody wants to know why
so many people have given up on our leaders as criminals

118 . PLANET ON STRIKE

or fools, let him recollect that during the whole anti-
ballistic-missile debate no influential voice was raised to
suggest an alteiiiati\ e to the whole preventive lunacy.

Instead of the present system of conflicting interests,
what is needed is a system of identical interests. The sim-
plest way would be at all times to have so many Americans
in Russia, and so many Russians here, that neither govern-
ment could strike the other, from the certainty of the
death or imprisonment of those hostages. Both sides
would be much more careful not to have missiles go off ac-
cidentally, knowing their own citizens were on target. The
initiative for peace which we like to claim would be pre-
served if we offered to fund the entire program. We would
simply both send students to the other country, with re-
turn visas valid when the total of a million on each side
had been built up. It would be money well spent, unlike
that on missile folly. The same procedure, unlike missile-
deployment, would be flexible enough for adaptation to
Soviet-Chinese hostility. A fixed percent annual turnover
of persons would be written in, so that neither govern-
ment could write off the absentees as disloyal emigrants.

Why hasn't it been started already? Our dismay at
the current technology, bureaucracy, modes of decision-
making is that they look for the icrong kind of solutions to
problems. W^hen faced with mutual suspicion of America
and Russia after World War II. neither set of planners
tried to deal with it by diplomacy, movements of old-
fashioned persons. Instead they used enormous amounts of
brainpower to create technology which vastly increased
the suspicions. Each side in its own thinking bears more
responsibility, since each claims to be the open and inno-
vative system.

GOING BEYOND POWER .119

The Cross as Sacrament of Power

We talk as if the dilemma between Establishment vio-
lence and revolutionary violence was a discovery of our
own, to which traditional beliefs must adapt themselves
and give a radically new answer. But our traditional
beliefs consist precisely in the affirmation that the di-
lemma has already been resolved. S. G. Brandon's Jesus
and the Zealots, a book making some splash among Chris-
tian revolutionaries, conclusively proves what should
never have been doubted or forgotten, that most of Jesus'
associates had long been members of a revolutionary guer-
rilla movement. Brandon is less successful in doing away
with the unanimous evidence of the Gospels that Jesus
found a different line to take; in discovering the real au-
thor of the pacifism which he has the Evangelists ascribe to
Jesus; or in explaining why this executed Messianic claim-
ant should have been remembered rather than another.

In fact the Gospels in the most literal way possible
give the cue for our action over against both exploitation
and revolution. The breaking and restoration of all the or-
ders simultaneously are seen in an execution carried out
by the imperial power: the one uniquely free individual,
the representative of the oppressed poor, expected as Son
of Man to restore the biological order of Eden. The Gos-
pels show individuals as responsible — Caiaphas, Herod,
Pilatus. Paul sees them in turn as agents of demonic forces
ignorant of the hidden wisdom of God; 'Tor if they had
known it. they would not have executed the lord of splen-
dor" (I Cor. 2: 18). Those Powers have infiltrated the

120 . PLANET ON STRIKE

State so deeply that one Caesar can only be overthrown by
another, and we may just as well give the Caesar we've got
what belongs to him.

The new vision was the possibility of a counter-
organization of society based not on coercion but volun-
tary adherence: the thing which Jesus has no name for but
simply illustrates and builds, which Paul names the
Church. Its ideology was verified through its anchor in the
remotest past — its conviction that Law and Prophets
pointed to the new organization. Likewise around the
world today, the work of prophets and of Jesus together
make up our lever on the past. Both then and now, the
agreed-on literary text and historical event behind us gen-
erate in our scattered communities common forms of art,
liturgy, polity, sexuality, direct action.

The meaning of the ancient city, which produced
those texts and events, is a local pattern for planetary com-
munity. If agriculture was an enterprise conceived in the
first village units of food-gatherers, the city preceded the
farm, and remains the center for global management. The
model can never cut itself off sharply from the surround-
ing territory; in every age the bearer of the future is the
man who carries the new discoveries of that community
into the next outer circle. Studying foreign languages is
the basic symbol of our true internationalism, and it's
scandalous that hardly any Americans except CIA agents
know Vietnamese.

The proclamation of the Gospel — the interruption of
all other programs for a special announcement that the
Liberated Zone of love is at hand — affirms that no dilem-
mas are insoluble; we never find ourselves in a moral box.
The apparent contradiction between the necessity of rev-

GOING BEYOND POWER .121

olution, and the certainty that (as Jim Bevel says) murder
is no revolution, just points to the reality that revolution
must be somewhere else. We are supposed to beat revolu-
tionaries at their own game — that is, to join them in their
condemnation of injustice, and to see injustice also in
whatever methods they've taken over from the enemy.

The Marxist theory of the withering away of the State
is correct in the sense that its functions must gradually be
taken over by noncoercive organizations. It's false in the
sense that if the State withers away obviously, a successor
State will rush into the vacuum. Our cue is to leave it
there, enjoying affluence and prestige, discouraging com-
petitors of the same sort; and simultaneously to draw its
teeth, to move people from inside it effectively to another
place, reducing the power of that Gulliver to trample peo-
ple by tying him hand and foot with a thousand gentle
threads, to confuse and disarm him with love.

The true unofficial ambassadors of the city dispense
with its passports and weapons, going out on their task of
organizing the next adjacent province. That control can
only be exercised through the paradoxical means of non-
self-assertion; in no other way will its claim to universality
be generally acceptable. As soon as we push the principles
of any politics through to their end, they overthrow its an-
nounced aims in favor of more inclusive ones. Unlike
every other art or science, politics dissolves itself without
residue and points beyond itself to another sphere. The
only invincible weapon, the sacrament of politics, is the
Cross; the sole ultimately viable community is the
Church. The scapegoat liberator suffers in the wilderness
outside the city for the city's benefit; his humiliation is the
ultimate definition of politics. What has been called the

122 . PLANET ON STRIKE

death of God is the discovery that fulfilment is achieved
through powerlessness.

Nonviolence as Unique Principle
of Community

Because of our defects in solidarity with the op-
pressed, by the time we come over to their side they've al-
ready hit on a partly violent solution. Our guilt requires
us to assent provisionally to their violence, as in some
sense embodying justice, while still trying to mitigate it.
Their violence corresponds to our tardiness. For where a
people's cry for justice has found an adequate leader from
the very beginning, he can exercise pure nonviolence. As
justice to the biological environment consists in letting it
be itself, so justice to our brother consists in letting him
be himself.

The Church as we see it has been recast in the plastic
mold of that State which to save its credibility has mur-
dered millions of our brothers. Its current form is a web of
competing assertions of ecclesiastical power, draining off
the energy which should go into actual work. If we think
to leave it to wither on the vine over there, it still claims a
monopoly on the symbolic forms which we need to oper-
ate by. We've got to go and reclaim our inheritance by
reorganizing the current heirs, however unpromising they
may seem. That necessary reunion and renewal can only
be effected by the Cross, in a renunciation of rival claims
and of competition with the State, through a joint recogni-
tion of powerlessness.

The State, in the grip of demonic forces, is blind. Still

GOING BEYOND POWER . 123

it senses in the Church a threat to its claimed monopoly
on human organization. It alternates between trying to
lick the Church and trying to join it; persecution is fol-
lowed by establishment. In one mood, the Powers tell us
that voluntary assent is a mirage, and our only choice is to
come over and humanize their coercion. In another mood
they congratulate us on our discovery; and then come over
and introduce their coercion into the Church, turning it
into one more department of State. The Church character-
istically makes the mistake of fighting the last war instead
of this one. The push for a secular Christianity today is
the last gasp of the Reformation; the big enemy is still
seen as a coercive self-centered Church. But that enemy is
dead. The real enemy is our temptation to join the State
in its enterprise, instead of carrying out our proper and
different enterprise.

The task of our time, to Avhich the Church has the
only adequate clues, is to create a web of voluntary non-
coercive relations as a counter-organization of human soci-
ety over against the States — -and their house-organ the
United Nations. Of course a lot of what claims to be the
Church is really the State; and a lot of what really is the
Church goes under different names or none. The Beast has
his claws so deep in us that we have to mobilize all our re-
sources to burn out his mark from our forehead.

Our love can't be satisfied with anything less than a
declaration of sacred war against the Establishment — that
paradoxical campaign which alone can be called defensive
or just. We are to put on the complete guerrilla outfit of
truth. Only our newly found unity in the radical Jesus
will give us a fighting chance to persevere. Even so, many
are likely to fall — especially those struggling in the dark

124 • PLANET ON STRIKE

with mixed-up orders. The two things which will most
commend recruitment in our army are the services we per-
form for the victims of war, and the dignity with which we
submit to our own casualty status. Performing and ac-
cepting ministry are the two sides of the coin which is the
genuine human stamp, held together by the solidarity in
which we bear one another's burdens.

chapter EIGHT

The Demand to Help:
Waiting on Table

We identify with another person by casting him
in the closest role inside our family, as substitute
father, son, wife, sister, uncle. Our relationship acquires
reality either by our joint work on some team, or through
some modification of sexuality. It reflects the emotions and
tensions of my family; likewise, as in the family, I see
through the relation what I was once or will be.

In particular, one man gets under another's skin as
substitute brother; comrade, master, or apprentice, de-
pending on age. If I find myself diminished or shrivelled
by the identification, I'm seeing my brother as victim and
suffering with him. If I feel a block in the identification,
he enters into the peculiar relation of being my enemy; in-
stead of the fraternal support of David and Jonathan, I
feel the rivalry of Cain and Abel.

The Need for Subordination

My perception of the brother as enemy reveals a fault
in myself. If our analysis of history is correct, we should be
persuaded that the enemy's side will lose and that our side
will win. If he threatens us even so, it's a sign we've left

126 . PLANET ON STRIKE

out some important consideration, for which we should be
thankful to him. But if we've truly done our homework,
we should see in the enemy one more casualty of the Sys-
tem, deprived by it of his manhood. It's just that he
doesn't know it and resists awareness.

The enemy is a special kind of victim. The suburb is
a ghetto victimized by frustration and fear, and can send
out distress-signals only through its children. The power-
ful are the object of hatred, mostly justified, from all
around the world. There isn't any standard by which they
can be called successful or fulfilled human beings.

We have the options of rejecting or accepting identifi-
cation with the helpless victim. So far as we're afraid of
sinking to his level, we reject him and become his enemy,
striking him down with our heel to increase the distance
between us. Almost every white person in America is
objectively racist; he maintains inviolate some refuge, so-
cial or vocational, from which the black is excluded.
Seeing the injustice of his own side, he knows that in strict
fairness a complete reversal of positions is called for. He's
afraid that the first step towards righting the wrong would
set that whole wheel turning; and so he's not before taking
the step.

This complicity is only overcome through enforcing
the identification by an act of will. This obviously means
helping the victim — treating him as a blood brother, as we
in empathy would like to be treated. The "altruism" of
the Golden Rule is the conclusion of a syllogism, whose
premises are our own needs and the solidarity of the race.
Built into our makeup is the demand to be permitted ser-
vice. Essential to its reality is that we should have some-
thing to help the victim with, we don't come empty-
handed.

WAITING ON TABLE . 127

We have our own world: our kids who like to go on
walks and bring home frogs' eggs; our students who want
to know what we've read; people we like to sing with. If
we haven't got anything to bring the victim from that
world, where is the reality in our offer to be his servant?
Great men have fallen into this trap. Albert Schweitzer
still maintained a bush hospital when Africans wanted
medical centers: he didn't offer them the things he lived
for, Bach and Biblical criticism. Through his partial fail-
ure we may judge the authenticity of our service. If the
victim asks for revolution, we'll at least try to redistribute
land. And we can be sure that he's also asking to give us
something — in any case, the meaning of his suffering.

The System feels a threat in our demand to help — a
deep relationship which bypasses its mode of operation. So
it makes the conditions of service unpleasant and leaches
out ideological content. Social workers are underpaid and
overloaded; subjected to harrassing regulations, like their
clients; forced to spend half their time writing reports un-
der the county official who has graciously allowed them the
privilege of service. They're not allowed to share anything
valuable with the client — common artistic projects, friend-
ship, study, religious or political activities. No wonder
there's a high casualty rate among workers. The sensitive
break down after a few years, make a mess of their own
lives, become exhausted or cynical. Worse yet for all par-
ties if they adjust to the job by becoming hard-boiled.

Alternatively, the System co-opts service for its own
ends. The Peace Corps sends young people with a desire
for service off to foreign lands that the State Department is
interested in, for a period short enough to keep them from
becoming a revolutionary force there. But nobody antici-
pated the radicalizing effect on the young people, who on

128 . PLANET ON STRIKE

their return can't enter conventional vocations, and be-
come a revolutionary force here. The Government over-
reached itself in exposing them to reality. We now hear
talk about universal youth training, centered of course on
military "service" — as if the art of killing bore some rela-
tionship to the figure of the waiter at table.

Chaplaincy as the Corruption of Service

The co-option of service is perfected in chaplaincy.
The chaplain's clients are inmates of a place of involun-
tary servitude: a boys' school, a prison, an old folks' home,
an army, a mental institution, a juvenile hall. The chap-
lain is dispensed by the warden from any prior vows w^hich
imply an authority superior to the institution. In return
for permission to make impersonal contact ^vith his
charges under supervision, and to help them circumvent
minor regulations, he's assigned his real role as spiritual
policeman: maintaining discipline, inculcating the spirit
of the institution, building morale. When relatives or re-
porters ask about conditions in the punishment compound
or infirmary, the chaplain is available as front man.

The American middle class is middle class because it
instinctively pays that deference to the System which
penal institutions must enforce. A widespread seminary
joke (and dream) is a call for the ministry to the overpri-
vileged. Not surprising then that it shares all features of
chaplaincy but coercion. The military-industrial complex
maintains the housing development as its place of involun-
tary servitude. More and more the once invisible stockade
separating it from the ghetto is marked with real barbed

WAITING ON TABLE • 129

wire. Its plan from the beginning provided for denomina-
tional churches of appropriate architecture and well-
indoctrinated chaplains, to soften the private blows of life,
and to keep the inmates of the magnolia compound ad-
justed, efficient, ignorant, and guilty.

Even as we work to destroy exploitation in the future,
we must patch up its damage in the present. But service
can never be politically neutral. While our political parti-
sanship must always be provisional, it must also be ex-
plicit. Even the alleged services of the chaplain are in the
end phony; neither the military resister nor the boarding-
school rebel consults him. Rather than try to convert him,
we pull strings for radical clergy to visit the disenfran-
chised in military stockades or youth-prisons, and publi-
cize what they find. Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan
did what decades of preaching had failed at: they nigger-
ized white moralists so that they could say truly, "We are
all street people; we are all Viet Cong." Only through nat-
uralization in the ghetto and the colony do we lay claim to
our humanity; we're constituted by the black, the hippy.

The warden finds the chaplain useful and contempti-
ble; the terms of their relationship ensure that the chap-
lain won't have a message for him. Only the Gospel agita-
tor has a chance of getting through. Another time he's
likely to show up as inmate; the depth of his influence de-
pends on his consistency in the two roles. Only he can get
through the elephant-hide and bring the sword of the
Spirit to the violent oppressor — of all men most oppressed
by his own violence. Only the radical independent is free
enough to treat the men with revolvers not as pigs but as
people.

If the Man is denying basic human needs to the op-

130 • PLANET ON STRIKE

pressed — food, clothing, shelter, medicine — in Biafra or
Berkeley, then the agitator goes out with those necessities.
But at a certain point he realizes that he's working for the
authorities, who rely on him to cool it for them. As politi-
cal consciousness increases among the oppressed — partly as
a result of his own presence — a point comes where they
still ask him for those needs, but despise him if he offers
nothing more. Now he must find something else to give
them; only his own motivation is good enough in the end.

The Waiter at Table

The central novelty introduced by Jesus was making
the type of human merit the waiter at table, the diakonos.
From the Latin names of the servant and slave come the
words by which we generalize this notion, ministry and
service. He so sees himself, "I am among you as one that
serves," and is seen by others, "taking the form of a slave."
His way means willingness to feed the hungry and give the
child a cup of water. He is credited with indefinite powers
to feed people and provide drink. Unquestionably he had
indefinite powers of curing psychosomatic diseases; the
record provides little which resembles invention. Espe-
cially plausible is the slight importance he is shown as at-
taching to these powers.

In his absolute respect for the neighbor, he sees
corporal works of mercy as pointing to a new transaction
between the hidden power of history and each individual,
where he is only the catalyst. For the first time, people
were taking on the human shape intended from the begin-
ning. His final service is giving them a name for that new

WAITING ON TABLE .131

state of affairs. He puts them on exactly the same level as
himself, making no secret of his own motivation. Each is
to go out in turn and take on the same role of servant.
With the same order of priorities: they also are to heal
and feed, but above all convey their own understanding of
that mission.

The good news of which they're heralds is that
human fulfilment in community comes by the act of ser-
vice. And conversely; the highest service lies in the act of
announcing none other than that good news. In one series
of teachings the beneficiary is the anonymous and proba-
bly thankless victim. In another series he is the enemy —
who as we've seen is also victimized by his own violence.
In a world of hardened enmities, nothing short of actual
reconciliation will do.

No religion less priestly than this. Reversal of hier-
archy runs through the whole record. No individual or
group is pre-eminent. Texts of shaky authenticity point to
one Peter or a Twelve as pronouncers of forgiveness. A
text of higher authority makes the duty and power of for-
giveness universal: 'Torgive us our oppressions to the ex-
tent that we have forgiven our oppressors." The harlots
and quislings go into the area of liberation ahead of reli-
gious leaders. When we finally find a passage where
leaders are being appointed, what are the conditions of
their leadership? They're the ones who are regularly seen
washing their brothers' feet, "He who is great among you
shall be the least. " The one sign of pre-eminence is subor-
dination.

So the Messianic status of Jesus was the fact that a
prostitute anointed him for death. Paul agrees that the
central item of Jesus' "ministry" was neither his symbolic

132 . PLANET ON STRIKE

actions nor his carefully assembled words, but his destined
death. Still there must come a class of men (very likely the
least important of all) with a traditional literary educa-
tion, who do the verbal communicating that's also needed,
naming what others are doing. To this class alone in the
usage of later generations the title of "ministry" has stuck.
It's true that their subordination is also the only role which
their teacher claims for himself; by their unimportance
they have a closeness to him. In the paradoxes of modesty
there's no place to speak of greater or lesser, but only of
different functions in the one body.

Today we realize uneasily that waiters, like taxicab
drivers, are thinking about their tip; their availability is
controlled by union regulations. Where shall we find the
servant? The friendly bartender doubles as bouncer; the
available psychiatrist marks down his thirty-five bucks an
hour. The only person who puts himself unreservedly at
the service of others is the clown. The brash repartee with
which he cons us out of our spare change is only part of
the act. Like the waiter he has a complicated routine
which it takes a lifetime to master. Shakespeare learned
from some sacral tradition that only the Fool could be the
chorus of the tragedy; but who told America that every
circus must have its clown? He's the last prophet with im-
munity to prick the follies and crimes of the powerful.

The Problem of Leadership

The need for clear lines of leadership in any organiza-
tion is obvious. Equally persuasive is the radical way the
Gospel overthrows our accustomed notions of leadership.

WAITING ON TABLE • 133

It's a problem of maximum difficulty to adjust the claims
of organization and of the Spirit without falling into
either anarchy or papacy. The difficulty isn't arbitrary.
Both as a theoretical and a practical problem, it's the hard-
est first step in embodying the new way into an actual
community. Here if anywhere can we be confident that
we're dealing with the breakage of orders at the root. We
can say in advance that any alleged form of ministry must
constantly be justifying its existence. When one fails to, as
it will from time to time, the actual place of ministry will
move elsewhere. There isn't any external sign other than
itself that it can certainly be recognized by.

The most primitive form of community, gathering
food or making war or opening up a cave, presupposes
leadership, a rudimentary politics. The final form of com-
munity rejects the political leadership of coercion; it
accepts the fact of leadership, but turns it upside down by
making it a primacy in service. No legally defined office
can guarantee its holder the reality of being a "servant of
the servants of God"; Popes are where we find them. Since
we must always hold back from supporting political lead-
ers, all the more we need a kind of leadership which
in principle we can accept without qualification. That
doesn't prevent us from doubting the reliability of a par-
ticular individual or institutionalized ministry; it does
mean that the idea of ministry isn't flawed at the root like
political leadership.

The Twelve Apostles weren't Elders and they weren't
ordained. They just set the example of the servant who
washes the guests' feet, the volunteer who takes our place
in the gas chamber. They're told that the same role is
played wherever somebody casts out demons in the name

134 . PLANET ON STRIKE

of Jesus — a man's name being what defines his character.
The cloudy Presbyters, Deacons, Bishops of the Apostolic
Age were a good translation of the idea of ministry; but
they were a translation, the thing which has to be done in
every age. Ministry in our age is translated into the figure
of Gandhi, the medical heroes of The Plague, this one and
that one in whom we recognize it. The only valid Apos-
tolic Succession is the history of love. Whatever commu-
nity we finally anchor in will be found to have authentic
roots in that history.

The Gospels radically overthrow all ecclesiastical pre-
tensions; the only authenticity of ministry is faithfulness
to the pattern of service in Jesus. The enormous
breakthrough of the Ecumenical Movement, which we're
just beginning to appreciate, is that any claim to ministry
can be presumed in advance legitimate. Mutal subordina-
tion is the ministry shared by the human race; it's the only
way we can put the orders back together again, starting
with society. The genuineness of any ordination is the
clarity with which it illustrates that universal ordination.
Any ministry is as valid as it chooses.

In the first centuries of the Church, the biggest prob-
lem was a claim to legitimacy by mythological syncretistic
cults promising a private salvation. To meet them, it was
important for the ministry to trace its authority back in
time through a continuity of teaching to the Apostles.
From Constantine through the Middle Ages, the authority
of the ministry as a matter of practice rested on political
authentication in the present by a hierarchical society.
The Reformers judged a church and its ministry by the
fidelity of its preaching the Epistle to the Romans; and,
in the case of Calvin, by its conformity to a (precariously)

WAITING ON TABLE • 135

reconstructed New Testament pattern of church-organiza-
tion. Over against this archaeological claim to restore a
forgotten past, the Catholic Church alleged a continuity of
ordination back to the Apostles. But all parties were in the
unconscious trap of asking for a sort of validity parallel to
that of the new nations. Only the radical Reformation sects
and their successors tried to break loose into conformity
with the actual circumstances of the New Testament.

The Ecumenical Movement was made possible
through the breakdown of the alliance between Church
and State invented by Constantine. Since the Church is no
longer integrated into the State's legal system, the ministry
no longer has to present its legal qualifications. When po-
litical powers are contending for control of the State, it's a
life-and-death matter that individuals should be given
guidance about recognizing the correct one. The valida-
tion of political regimes — of course by a legal system of
their own creation — is their essence. When the State relied
on one or more captive churches to give it legitimacy, the
same notion of validity w^as automatically applied to them
also.

Now that Christendom is again a community set over
against the State, as when it was born, each of these stand-
ards for an authentic ministry can be used where it works.
The Church now being liberated will recognize a continu-
ity with everything good in its past — particularly with the
succession of saints. It will let its forms be influenced by
the political structures to which it has most commitment
— namely, revolutionary ones. With the Reformers, it will
judge its message by conformity to the New Testament.
But not (like the official Reformation) in Paul's interpre-
tation; rather (like the radical Reformation) in the words

136 . PLANET ON STRIKE

of Jesus. It will also look to the New Testament for the
form of ministry; not as a fixed hierarchy of offices (which
can't be found there), but as conformity to the non-self-
assertion of Jesus.

Today any group that claims to be a Christian com-
munity should be accepted as such until proved otherwise.
People aren't lining up to grab the coattails of the
Church; what would be gained by a false claim to faith? So
likewise the minister accepted by some community has an
advance presumption in his favor. But society, in face of
the threat which service presents to it, undercuts ministry
by treating the servants as if they were masters through
social-security exemptions, tax deductions, draft immu-
nity, social perquisites. The claim to those benefits is the
only warning signal against a purported ministry.

Looking at the varieties of experimentation beside
the dying trunk of the old churches, we can't tell yet
which will be the main channels of the new sap. But we
know in principle that if we do today's job, scattered
efforts will in time cohere, new forms more adequate to
renewal will spring up. With our new historical under-
standing, \ve see that this was also how the Apostolic
ministry won recognition. We can see how past ages of the
Church stiffened impromptu administrative measures into
absolutes. We understand too well how prophetic author-
ity is institutionalized to be wholly unaware when it hap-
pens again in our midst. Thus we move a step in self-
knowledge beyond the Reformation. Institutional forms
are more nearly under our control because we understand
better their independent life. We'll be more cautious this
time about attributing final validity to the forms which
turn out correct for our age.

WAITING ON TABLE • 137

The peculiar mixture of jobs, thought of as equally
permanent, held by the American clergyman is an acci-
dent of history which needn't last very much longer. Is
there a good reason why a man should take on marriage-
counselling as a lifetime vocation, or organizing the
oppressed, or pulling drunks off streets, or maintain-
ing architectural monuments? The exhausting genuine
jobs would perhaps be better done with regular replace-
ments.

Even among the jobs which imply lifetime training or
commitment, we should allow wide variations how far
they need be united in one person. In fact they're mostly
separated today. For example. Learning in the Bible or
church history: knowledge and love of the old languages,
with the generalizing eye to see them mirrored in current
experience. The prophetic voice: speaking the words
which will isolate demonic forces and coordinate resist-
ance to them. Pastor to the pastors: recognizing one's own
dispensability, enabling colleagues to win actual inde-
pendence, holding oneself available to help with the
personal problems they can't solve for themselves. Cele-
bration: the work of the poet and artist who find the right
forms for contemporaries to praise existence.

On these criteria, George Fox and John Bunyan (for
example), with their irregular authorization, have the
best possible claims to a valid ministry. As our problems
are more far-reaching, we should expect the true ministry
to our age to emerge from our experience with equal sur-
prise and inevitability. If we ask what individual or body
ordained the minister, we should be prepared to hear as
from Paul that his ordination wasn't of man but of God.

138 . PLANET ON STRIKE

The Ministry of Women

Charles Williams, operating with a sacrificial theory
of the common meal, said that women were debarred from
offering the blood of Christ symbolically because in the
coinherence of the human race they offered it actually.
Since the childbirth and care which only they can perform
is a uniquely concrete form of service, it's less important
to devise other forms for them than for men. Because the
center of the Church's celebration is a dramatic represen-
tation of what a man once did, propriety of casting will
normally have it performed by a male. But female roles
could be much more prominent in liturgical or guerrilla
theatre on the model of the Christmas mysteries. If the
pressure of exclusion is taken off, we should expect women
to determine their own level in the universal ordination
to service, with some functional specialization over against
men, but also with considerable overlap. The mistake has
been the assumption of Constantinian Christianity that
there must be some one legally defined hierarchy of minis-
ters, rather than the thing which Paul describes so clearly,
a coordinated spectrum of talents.

Problems of the Missionary

From the viewpoint of the Third World, what ser-
vices can be better provided by Westerners than by their
own people? In the undeveloped Arab countries, there is
room for tactful suggestions about agriculture, sanitation,

WAITING ON TABLE • 139

medicine; for agitation against slavery, virtual or actual.
In North \'^iet Nam, these things have been taken in hand
along local lines; heavy industry is being supplied by So-
cialist countries. But after the war, American radicals
could help open up areas of political freedom within the
new national unity. Others wall judge better what can be
done in other lands.

The most essential task has been barely defined: the
cultural ambassador. Not as today setting up enclaves to
disseminate an alien culture, a Goethe Institut or U.S.
Information Service. I look to see urban planners analyz-
ing village societies to see where we went wrong. Or biolo-
gists, to study how traditional practice recycles raw ma-
terials. Or Western monks going out for dialogue on
the inner life. If the appearance of indigenous Eastern
churches were in the cards as a result of such meetings,
they would appear; no other kind of Oriental church is
worth thinking about.

Opening our convictions to other people raises the
question: How do we avoid indoctrination, imposing our
private or Western styles on others? First by making sure
that our views are rooted in an objective analysis of real
current needs, actual facts of nature and history. Then, by
making sure that what we're recommending, even if possi-
bly erroneous, is at least harmless. In the end we'll find
ourselves saying, Harmlessness is truth. Not the passive
harmlessness of the helpless victim or gagged liberal, but
the active reconciling harmlessness for which another
name is revolutionary nonviolence. This is just one more
way of rephrasing the good news we've been entrusted
with — which in the end must carry its authentication on
its face.

140 . PLANET ON STRIKE

The World Community of Reconciliation

Saul Alinsky, community organizer, observed that
concrete service to obvious human need is the thing which
legitimates any more radical action. We go around after
the System picking up its pieces, taking the logic of its mis-
takes more seriously than it does. This is a constructive way
of expressing our solidarity with it in error. At the same
time it prevents the System from wholly disowning us. Al-
though it will fire us, beat us up, get us in trouble, it can't
deny that we're the ones who are washing its dirty dishes.
Also the salvaged community constitutes our organizing
base, to which we offer a higher level of service: our own
understanding of things, our own motivation.

One big threat to America's self-image is the growing
army of dropout clergy and sisters. It was they originally
who instructed the young people about love and war. Nei-
ther teacher nor student could continue school as usual
when they discovered that the churches had no intention
of taking seriously what was written in their own charter.
Society can get indignant at the young people, who were
never intended to listen in church, but only go through
the motions. But it specifically assigned the clergy the duty
of sincerity — and at the same time the incompatible one of
getting along with existing conditions. Their withdrawal
has had less influence because they've fallen into the pos-
ture expected of them, as the victim keeps step with the
executioner. The dropout tacitly accepts his assigned role
of adulterer, neurotic, doubter; it's harder than we think
to escape type-casting. But one day the untidy ranks of the

WAITING ON TABLE . 141

displaced will brace up spontaneously into a community
whose outlaw status is a source of pride rather than guilt.

The American church complex assigns its members
the duty of bringing reconciliation to all the people they
come in touch with. That covers a lot of ground; who on
the planet has failed to be contacted by an American
Christian? In our one world, the Church has finally redis-
covered her original constituency, populations thought
permanently silent — grapepickers, ragpickers, ghetto un-
employed, prisoners, dispossessed peasants, students, lep-
ers, those social lepers the hippies. Actual reconciliation
would be to determine the issue of justice truthfully be-
tween the newly vocal and their better-established oppo-
nents (many of whom sit in the front pew on Sunday
morning), while finding a definition of their common in-
terest they could agree on.

Of course the mediator standing between the lines of
street people and a police riot is likely to get hit by rocks,
bottles, clubs, bayonets, bullets, chemical agents. He takes
that risk. Intelligent Americans should decide though: do
they want him there or not? They must realize (like intel-
ligent Russians) that hearts and minds must actually be
won, and that it won't work to dispatch tanks into cities,
order airstrikes, burn down the houses of peasants, or even
send bank credits to the poor. Only men and women will
do. The mediator must first win the rebel's trust, and the
holders of big power can't offer much advice. They can
just choose between two alternatives: putting actual confi-
dence in the messenger of reconciliation who makes his
risky trip across lines, or rejecting his offices and waiting
for the man with the bandolier carrying an ultimatum.

Those new communities of the alienated in their

142 • PLANET ON STRIKE

dawning self-consciousness speak louder than books the
word which the church Establishment has to hear. The ir-
regular ministry to the oppressed by persons with unstable
private lives is, more than any other one thing, building
the united ministry in the future renewed Church. And
our ultimate service of renewal — restoration of the plane-
tary environment — can only be the work of a world recon-
ciling community.

Everyone so far as he can manage his own problems
has the potential of becoming a leader. But sooner or later
everyone succumbs to his own problems; "Others he
saved, himself he cannot save." The other side of the coin
of helpfulness is the mental attitude with which we accept
the unpleasant reality, either that nobody is helping us, or
that we'll have to accept help from somebody. In the end
the parabola of our life brings us back again to the mute
resentful dependence in which we were born.

chapter MINE

The Demand for Hope:
Falling Casualty

As if to make sure we won't be stood up on our
date with death, we keep holding rehearsals —
falling casualty. Our failures cover a wide band of things
we're responsible for and things we aren't; from the inside
they look a lot alike. It's hard for a woman to discover by
herself whether she's being shelved by her husband, or
whether she nags at him and arranges for him to fail, or
whether they've both just been given a bum break by the
universe.

The child, secure with organs he's too weak to over-
load, parts whose full function he can only guess, doesn't
doubt his immortality. That innocence points to the conti-
nuity of the species, of culture — perhaps to some deeper
continuity of every instant. But first he must discover that
some day his friend the garbage-collector won't come, that
he won't always live in this house, that mummy and daddy
won't always be there to keep it from burning down while
he's asleep; that some day he'll have to turn in the library
card which was stamped Permanently Valid. (The reason
adults stay up late at night is because their mummys and
daddys aren't there to keep the house from burning down,

144 . PLANET ON STRIKE

they don't trust it to take care of itself.) As dizziness on
ladders sets in, we start doing something constructive
about it: putting together photograph albums, collecting
current American coins, contributing brass flower-stands
to the church. Even so not quite constructive enough.

Still we do all need to move over and make room for
a new crop to grow up. Some kind of acquiescence or
death-wish is built into us. Some people move smoothly
towards their destination, dropping off excess baggage at
each airport as they use up the final panels of their yard-
long excursion ticket. But it's harder to preserve that
steadiness in the face of dissolution when we're committed
to social change. Both justified guilt and unjustified anxi-
ety become more intense. We can't see what kind of a
world we're launching our kids into — with even more in-
adequate preparations than usual. Will the rainstorm wait
until we've closed down the house?

The Rising Casualty-Rate

The types of casualty characteristic in any society
point to its areas of greatest tension. The Gospels presup-
pose a world whose problem is impotence: they're full of
lame, blind, paralytics, deaf, dumb, unclean. Paul sees cor-
rectly that these are all nonverbal signals of inability to
find the right way and hold to it. One class of our diseases
is a compulsive overloading of the system: heart attacks,
cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema. Another is invasions of
the organism by a foreign element: allergy, homosexual-
ity, cancer. Both types loom large in our symbolism, we
spend the most money dealing with them; perhaps we're

FALLING CASUALTY • 145

even most susceptible to them. What we fear most for our
society, with good reason, is collapse from overloading
inside, and invasion by foreign elements, outside agitators.

Our nervous breakdowns and family breakdowns are
the little snaps which add up to social breakdown. The
sado-masochism of bullying and Yesmanship in business il-
lustrates our foreign policy. Our most widely used remedy,
the tranquilizer, points to the peace the world is calling
for. But we try for it by covering up our awareness of
conflict and injustice, rather than by pushing through to
the end. We cry Peace Peace where there isn't any peace.

In the movement for social change, casualties of every
sort are constant. A man who seemed committed to the
way of persuasion begins under stress to speak darkly of
guns. A couple who've made big sacrifices for each other,
when they're finally reunited and set up in an apartment,
after a few months can't keep going and split. A social
worker grossly neglects his own family, turns to drugs.
The clergyman whose radical project is sabotaged by his
superiors, or by its intrinsic difficulty, takes pains to hasten
its failure, and in cynicism goes back to selling insurance.

The progressive decay of personal relations, bad
enough in a loveless marriage, gets worse under the um-
brella of ideology, when both parties can include among
their charges against the other side its taking an incorrect
line. And then the progressive creation of misunderstand-
ings; treating the other party like a public meeting; each
pushing the other into defending an unattractive corner.
All our psychic stability, and the vocational second strings
to our bow, are needed to stay out of the box, to extricate
ourselves once in, to help the others now shut up in it.

But the sign that some kind of revolution will go

146 . PLANET ON STRIKE

through is that ex-radicals aren't swinging onto the con-
servative bandwagon. They crawl into an apolitical hole
and lick their wounds. Our perception of the System's vio-
lence can't be shrugged off once we've felt it, even though
we succumb or take on counter-violence. Our casualties
aren't the gross moral failure of apostasy, finking out, but a
gross emotional inadequacy, with unfairness to family and
friends. Nobody is better aware of the unfairness than the
casualty — which only intensifies his guilt.

Across America (not to go farther afield) is a fellow-
ship of millions who have fallen. If they could be made
aware of their brotherhood and set back on their feet
again, they'd be an irresistible army. Their recuperation is
slow, partial, with many scars; they work themselves back
into mechanical undemanding jobs, superficial personal
relationships. Still in their silence they raise an incoherent
demand that their failure should be made a solid founda-
tion of hope.

Changing What Can Be Changed

A well-known prayer asks for the serenity to accept
what can't be changed, the courage to change what can be,
and the wisdom to know the difference. This sentiment
has been taken up by Alcoholics Anonymous, and we
might think about alcoholism for a moment as a typical
Establishment form of casualty. One implied dogma is
that alcoholism can be changed; we may heartily agree,
recognize AA as a disguise of the Church, and help our
straight friends make their way to it. Behind this however
lies another dogma, that the tendency towards alcoholism

FALLING CASUALTY . 147

is something which can't be changed. AA comes close to
chaplaincy, assuming that the conditions of society are be-
yond change, beyond criticism, and that the only possible
service is to pick up the pieces. But alcoholism is a groping
towards the inner revolution, an honorable though de-
structive response to the psychic violence of the System.
When a person is trapped in a spiral of activities that are
destroying his integrity, and still has unfinished business
which prevents him killing himself, he resorts to the de-
ferred suicide of drinking. AA, though among the best of
Establishment services, still, by sending its members back
rehabilitated to the world of fraternal orders and Little
League baseball, is only patching up the symptoms of the
exploitative system which produced alcoholism in the first
place.

But we're never allowed to set limits of possible
change in the renewal of institutions or environment. No
use bandaging the ulcer unless we treat the infection with
antibiotics. Whatever is necessary must be possible. That
doesn't prove the change can be effected through us; it
does prove we have to try harder and then let somebody
else try.

The two sides have only just engaged each other here;
the paranoia of the System also strongly infects all who've
gotten off the trolley-car tracks of society. The founders of
student movements, intentional communities, service-
ministries, expect their corps of volunteers to work as a
team, and are naively surprised when deep anger or self-
deception surfaces over office space and subsistence-
allowances. A group apparently must have its quota of
such failures before it can see its way to absolutely clear
and realistic goals, resolute commitment, an actually

148 . PLANET ON STRIKE

functioning organization. Up on the timberline of the fu-
ture we're too exposed to the elements to allow that hatred
of self and of others which the System has bred in.

After that famous fresh start we'd assumed we were
now immunized against evil; we could push through on
our own projects, accept all the junk the world would
dump on us, and have strength left over to help our broth-
ers in trouble. Just then word comes in roundabout that
we've hurt somebody's feelings, and he resents it too much
to talk about it. Here is where we must remember that the
fresh start was meant to be constantly repeated; we must
summon up our will and go back to the point we thought
we'd left far behind. Although it's not precisely in our
power to do this, the power is available to make bad per-
sonal relations one of the things that can and must be
changed.

Accepting the Necessity of Our Failure

But not forever. The capacity of each to absorb pun-
ishment and start over again is finite. Happy is the man
whose physical strength rides on into a wise old age, and
whose moral strength grows to the end. But most of us, not
altogether by our own fault, at some point will be hurt so
seriously that we won't recover complete use of the in-
jured faculty, even though we may go on some ways fur-
ther. At some point we'll be hurt so seriously that we
won't go on much further. This is one of the things we
won't change.

With the same broad perspective we bring to the em-
bittered casualty, we can try not to become embittered

FALLING CASUALTY • 149

ourselves. Our insight wasn't all that exceptional. If we,
with our mediocre talents, discovered some urgent job and
made a try at it, perhaps, if we avoided gross compromises,
others will take the same route. Maybe they're just waiting
politely for us to get out of the way. The biggest service
we can do them is not to add cynicism of ours to their bur-
den, and to express confidence that the job will be done.

Here lies the center of what may be called our spiritu-
ality. When we've fallen casualty, by a dull but always pos-
sible act of will we may summon up the presence of others
who held out to the end. Perhaps those who immolated
themselves for justice or peace: Venerable Quang Due the
Buddhist of Saigon, Jan Palach under the Soviet occupa-
tion of Prague, our own Norman Morrison the Quaker.
Probably we should affirm that this is never the optimum
response. All the more then we have to match their
firmness as they moved towards the irrevocable act.

As we sink deeper into casualty we may remember
that we once planned to be famous. Morrison and the oth-
ers are remembered by accidents of publicity. At the same
time then we should also maintain psychic identification
with the anonymous victims of violence — the Holy Inno-
cents of Jerusalem, of the Wars of Religion, the Albi-
genses, Indians and Negroes, victims of Auschwitz, Cov-
entry, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Viet
Nam — as well as those who weren't even caught up in that
much history.

Around retirement time we have to face also the
status, not of being forgotten in the future, but of being
disenfranchised in the present. As usual the problem is in-
terlocking: the false independence of the old, which is
really a withdrawing into isolation; the unreal wish of

150 . PLANET ON STRIKE

children to perfect their harmonious career before settling
a parent down into it. Making the right gesture of good-
will to the old is part of the realism with which we later
will accept casualty status ourselves.

Whatever happens, we can remember with thankful-
ness that we weren't those casualties from birth, the blind
and deaf sons of privilege who bring their own special
attache-case sophistication into making counterinsurgency
humane. I cut myself once shaving when I remembered
suddenly that I'd known quite well the man who gave the
order for the bombing. The most intractable and central
problem, how such a person can be helped to turn towards
the light, is the one about which there seems the least to
say. We haven't any reason to feel we're better than he is;
we can just be grateful for the luck, or providence, which
made us more vulnerable to the truth.

Although our casualty may be a physical separation
from the community which is working for change, we can
know that we're never cut off from somebody who's been
genuinely our brother. The successful have made their
graves already in their life; but the memory of the martyr,
the clown, the fanatic, the fool is always green. We go to
join the honorable company of all who chose the risk that
their weakness would be revealed — and were gravely
taken up on that bet by the Universe.

Sacred Casualty

Suddenly at the end of the day we remember with
hope that our elder brother was also a failure. All along,
the mark of his casualty status has been hanging around

FALLING CASUALTY • 151

our necks; it's identical with our struggle for peace. Briefly
during his life he seemed to have persuaded the others
about the new way; then political interests regained the
upper hand in their minds and he lost them. Any formula-
tions he may have developed about how he'd do his job
must have fallen away from him, and there's little evi-
dence he found any clear substitute. So we lose the origi-
nal fresh certainty of our convictions, and are left holding
the empty carton of an enterprise without contents. The
one thing we can hold on to is that we're the latest in a
long line of failures; better so than in what is called the
world's long line of successes.

At this point, our casualty, without ceasing to be it-
self, starts getting turned upside down in the massive re-
versal which history makes of all the world's values. As
usual our end recapitulates our beginning. Here where
the trajectory of our rocket reapproaches the earth it set
out from, once again a fresh start is indicated. In our
weakness we're to reaffirm the correctness of the vision we
were guided by in our original strength. The united
power of our weakness down through history overthrows
every working principle of the men in button-down shirts
who are thought to determine the course of affairs. In the
paradoxical interchange of rich and poor, master and ser-
vant, high and low, first and last, the clown also shakes up
our conventional notions about life and death in his hat,
and turns them onto the table in a quite unsuspected rela-
tionship.

The record shoAvs failure and execution followed by a
kind of success where legend finds itself at a loss for words,
which for want of a better name we call resurrection. New
life appears as solidarity of a brotherhood. When the fra-

152 . PLANET ON STRIKE

ternal relations catalyzed by some third party survive the
worst the world can do to them, there's no way to avoid
their continuing operation in the affairs of men. The
earthbound individual body is metamorphosed into a
weightless winged phase everywhere visible. In another
part of the record, that change is anticipated in the living
body as transfiguration (just a Latin translation of "meta-
morphosis"). The pattern of our hope is given on the fra-
grant mountain which to our middle age had loomed as
hopeless fatigue, swinging open like a gate of dream to the
secret valley. We feel the foldings of the earth's crust dy-
namically as an actual pushofT to the stars. The Hudson
V^alley is realized in nineteenth-century woodcuts as Bun-
yan's Delectable Mountains. Still the mountain-gates don't
cease being the gates of death as well, and we'll not forget
that Transfiguration is also Hiroshima day.

After many false starts, one day we discover that the
ferry-boat has finally left the mainland and is headed for
an indistinct shoreline out to sea. The last cars are on
board, the gulls soar silently looking at our sandwiches.
The propellers are veining the water into alabaster, sur-
prising schools of tiny fish. The Seabreeze smelling of fish
and tar pushes back the land heat. We sit among children,
bird-watchers, businessmen in sports shirts going through
newspapers, detached and forgetting whether the ferry is
taking us to the Fortunate Isles of a Martha's Vineyard or
to another commuter job. Our credit cards are in our
pocket and we've left a note for the people who are taking
our house; but there's been no word from the uncommu-
nicative Yankee agent who manages our summer affairs.
And it turns out our services were not all that indispensa-
ble at the office. Finally the conduct of affairs is out of our
hands.

FALLING CASUALTY • 153

Building the Casualty-List into a Community

The ultimate discreditation of the churches as they
exist is their callousness and inability to deal with casual-
ties inside or outside. The only salvage operation we may
be able to mount is joining the refugees in the rubble.
Even that is some gift. Those we rehabilitate may not
seem the best material to built a resilient organization
from; still there they are, an available manpower pool.

Our big mistake is confusing casualty-status with ref-
utation of our principles or methods. Properly we should
see it as irrefutable proof of both; we had hold of such a
big chunk of reality that the System couldn't tolerate us
any longer. When somebody freaks out we shouldn't panic
and call in the head-shrinker or get a lot of pills pre-
scribed. Rather, take it as one more incentive to develop a
psychiatry or cure of souls which will help people live
with not being adjusted to their society, and turn their
energies to changing it.

In the end, whether this or that renewal succeeds de-
pends how far all kinds of people — conservative, confused,
bluecollar — can see it as fulfilling their own suppressed
hopes. The deepest effect of any movement is on those
who touch it only at its outermost fringes where its ap-
parent force is fully spent. At that point, with absolute ac-
curacy a collective unconscious symbolism picks out the
true center of a man's work — George Fox's hat, Francis'
birds, Gandhi's spinning-wheel.

The community we dream of is neither a sect turned
in on itself nor the old System lightly sprinkled with re-
form. It has to be none other than the actual society of

154 . PLANET ON STRIKE

man, with all its confused history and destructive tenden-
cies, waking up and turning to the sunlight that streams in
the windows. If the dispossessed convince us too com-
pletely we'll pull out; if we convince the authorities too
completely we'll sell out. Renewal wavers between the
poles of a fatal magnetism: separatism and co-option. Fail-
ure is the only way to avoid both and insure that our work
is appropriated simply by the one community of men and
women.

In the end, success or failure isn't ours to decide on.
We have bread if the earth grows it. But we can always by
an act of will focus our eye on the needs of the present,
with the wisdom provided by a firm hold on the living
vine of the past. The central content of that remembrance
is that defeat means solidarity. Through our embrace of
casualty we choose life.

chapter TEN

The Demand
for Joy:
The Feast

It's something less than a pun to say that since
our lives are maintained by assimilation, fulfil-
ment must mean being filled full. In the warm Med-
iterranean climate, which lies behind us, there isn't the
need for constant intake of calories to keep up body tem-
peratures. Breakfast or lunch just keep the stomach going
until dinnertime at sunset. When artificial light barely
existed, sleep and sexuality came right after the meal —
there wasn't anything else to do. (Up until recent times,
people slept longer in winter than in summer — the species
was semihibernating. The afternoon siesta in part avoids
the summer heat, in part makes up for the short sleeping
night.) It was at dinner that the basic family community
was realized. When people are in good health, not in
mourning or facing a coming event with anxiety, even
under a repressive political regime it's hard to prevent
dinner being a time of actual happiness.

156 • PLANET ON STRIKE

The Realization of Community

One feature of joy is the spirit of play — the extension
of childhood into adult life through mock food gathering
or mock combat (where conversely for the child, play an-
ticipates adult work). Play is one of the things we do most
nearly for its own sake, as Perpetua in her vision of Para-
dise found nothing else to do. The feast is permanently en-
dowed with something like play through the gift of Diony-
sos, the sap of the vine "which makes glad the heart of
Gods and men." Of all mind-altering chemicals, alcohol
alone appeared universally through agriculture and took a
place at the common meal. We have only legends about a
humanity without wine — which may in fact have helped
break the fixed circuits of instinct and start the species on
the new path of consciousness. As the horse and dog are
built permanently into our psyche through accidents of
domestication; the lion and eagle, salmon and stag
through symbolism and sport; even more closely the vine
trails over all the works of Western man. The lands where
it grows with difficulty or hasn't caught on, like China and
India, are the most foreign to us; but even they must come
to terms with it in the end because of the world-role of
Western humanity.

In the ancient city-state the meat-eating Homeric
hero or Bedouin is continued as theoretical ideal through
occasional animal sacrifice; but the growth of population
and poverty forced vegetarianism, supplemented by cheese
and fish. The meat-offering of Abel the virtuous nomad is
called acceptable over against the grain-offering of agricul-

THE FEAST • 157

tural Cain; but this polemic against Canaanite influence
was soon overthrown by history. Semitic lahm- "staff of
life" denotes meat in Arabic but bread in Hebrew. Roman
soldiers marched on two pounds of soggy black bread per
diem, and complained if it was replaced by less staying
venison. Dependence on grain for life and the vine for
meaning led to a sacral apology for cutting them, like the
stronger taboos associated with animal blood. (Even more
serious to cut a tree, and forests or groves belonged to the
god or his political agent.) The yearly death and rebirth
of the grain ^vas seen as a hopeful prospect for the men
who fed on it. Pindar must refer to the ritual exhibition of
an ear of grain at Eleusis:

Blessed is he who goes under ground having seen these

things;
He knows the end of life,
And he knows its God-given beginning.

Demeter and Persephone, to have the seed of grain taken
around the world, sent out the naked youth Triptolemos,
who has reached us as Johnny Appleseed.

The necessities of agriculture led to discovery of the
magical number 365, and pegged recurrent celebrations
on the year it defined. The strictly lunar calendar of Islam
that wanders through the year suits the needs of the
night-riding nomad. We were forced into nonlunar
"months" by the overriding importance of the year. Still a
woman I know remembers the lunar phase when each
baby came; and the central festival of our year remains
tied to our now violated sister. The ebb and flow of psy-
chic energy also dictated a shorter cycle, once fixed as the
four quarters of the moon, which now like the month

158 . PLANET ON STRIKE

marches out of phase with the moon, at its mechanical
pace of seven days.

As village communities expanded into imperial cities,
dates of accession and founding were located on the farm-
calendar; the natural biological cycles became the basis of
history. So the child learns to define its involvement in the
family and nature through festivals at snowtime, flower-
time, end of school, and dead-leaf time. It locates its indi-
viduality by the recurrent celebration of its own birthday.

The original forms of politics and art cluster around
the ceremonies which define the community's meaning.
The gathering of the citizen body — whether for war, vot-
ing, athletics, or festival — was an assembly of substantially
the same group of men (excluding women, children,
slaves, and foreigners) in various public places wearing
various uniforms. In particular the linen of the festival is
taken up, as we saw, in the fresh start of the Church —
whose Greek name, ekklesia, earlier meant the Assembly
of the democratic city. For it saw itself as the common-
wealth of those whose city was the universe.

The basic symbolic form of the community was the
traditional literary text used as libretto for a ritual drama
produced at the festival. It explains by history or myth
how the community was founded; it also derives moral
principles for contemporary action from that original
event. In a regular cycle of secularization the sacred drama
is elaborated, separates from the festival, achieves meaning
in its own right, and sinks back to formalism or triviality.
So Attic drama arose from the cult of Dionysos; European
music from the marriage of chun h music and folk music
(itself enshrining a pagan religion); Shakespeare from the
English mystery-plays. Today the sacred arts are in the

THE FEAST • 159

decay phase of the cycle. The limitations of Marxism-
Leninism come out strongly in the banality of Soviet pub-
lic ceremonies. Only the very young find a source of re-
newal in music produced while under the influence of
electricity. Perhaps the unamplified guitars and masked
mimes of the peace movement contain the sacred drama of
the future.

Meeting the Crisis of Joylessness

How can we bring the alternation of the seasons to
life again — snow on the mountains or poppies in the field?
Is it possible to think our way back into the Panathenaic
procession, high Mass at Chartres, a Fourth of July circus?
On this big spaceship that the little ones lift off from, we
become aware of orbiting the sun, we acquire a case of mo-
tion sickness. To get sea-legs once again we must brace
ourselves against the steering-wheel of history. The
innovative Zen hippy be-in leaves out the most important
thing: continuity with past celebration.

The replacement of natural cycles by arbitrary tech-
nique on an automatized globe presents us only with
the joyless alternatives of isolation and crowds, anxiety
and consumption, affluence and poverty. Information re-
trieval isn't part of the solution but of the problem; for
the knowledge we need to retrieve isn't the kind that can
be put on tape, it must exist in the minds and bodies of
men. A Greek tragedy is classes studying it, scholars writ-
ing commentaries on it, academic places painfully staging
it in Greek, playwrights adapting it for Broadway. The
past slips away from us like the tail of a comet. To hold it

160 . PLANET ON STRIKE

in line we must build it into stone, set it to music, re-
hearse it in our bodies; and then go out in the streets of
the future and do it in face of the Man's batons and chop-
pers.

If we said correctly that our task is pushing forward a
triple revolution, then our celebration must be a call to
revolution — or better, a revolutionary act. But in our
America happiness would be a revolutionary act! That ap-
propriate joy for our age must also say clearly that it isn't
the invention of our age or of America, but that it lies at
the roots of humanity and isn't lacking from any age,
though sometimes covered over pretty deep with our gar-
bage. Affluence makes its celebration a grim display of
the status quo. In middle-class liberalism, unproductive
experiments in group relations mark the scene. The
anti-Establishment world makes its celebration too anti-
intellectual, so that it can't learn from its joy, and its
politics becomes a paranoid factionalism instead of a joy-
ful sharing in action. Celebration vacillates between indi-
vidual escape and communal euphoria, heightened or
blurred in a chemical haze.

Looking at the self-destructive drug scene today — in
some form spread across all classes — and thinking back to
grossly alcoholic nineteenth-century America, it's easy to
sympathize with Methodist total abstinence. But we
mustn't forget how the preacher's son was driven in turn
back to drunkenness. Every overindulgence signals some
defect; medieval gluttony was perhaps trying to compen-
sate for a vitamin-deficient diet. The alcoholism of parents
is discredited among alienated youth, who had to find an
agent of ecstasy unavailable to their elders — by being ille-
gal. Equally attractive by its vague impropriety is the al-

THE FEAST • 161

leged Oriental mysticism which the young have taken up,
spiritual grass, the opiate of the dropout classes.

The ecstasy associated with drugs is in principle legit-
imate and necessary, since the human race was weaned on
wine. But our potent synthetic chemicals reinforce the
compulsion of self-manipulation, and many naturally oc-
curring drugs are addictive. To an outsider, the most at-
tractive natural drug would be peyote, both for its
spectacular effects and for its rooting in an authentic cult
of the oppressed red man. Marijuana is the mildest — be-
cause our Cannabis produces it only in strong dilution. Its
chief proved danger is its illegality, and certainly existing
or proposed penalties for its use are grossly out of line.
But its symbolic function for a generation on strike is too
much of a hot-house plant, not rooted in history. Since it's
not part of a meal it privatizes ecstasy. And its past associa-
tions are violent; for in its stronger form of hashish it gave
their name to "assassins." It can't compete with Dionysos,
whom we're stuck with for better or worse.

There the community feast is at the heart of our tra-
dition. No way to scrap that past and make a new begin-
ning. In no imaginable future can we let the community
celebration mesh into political structures, too much injus-
tice is built into them. The community must cut across all
social strata and existing politics, as it began long ago. Its
unity can't be imposed by an authorized hierarchy or
charismatic leader. And all its forms, wherever they come
from, will only be adopted on their actual merits, by spon-
taneous assent, to which legislation and leadership must
be subordinated.

The final non-negotiable demand of life is joy; it
must reflect both current needs and a central tradition.

162 • PLANET ON STRIKE

That tradition will surely be relevant to our needs, since it
was formed precisely in answer to the shadowside of his-
tory: a continuity of violence exercised by difEerent agen-
cies, but all under a permanent demonic influence which
we can only grasp through the mythology of a global coun-
terinsurgency force. It has twined its masses of parasitic
dodder around the green stem of life; celebration must
break away from that kiss of death along our entire course.

Celebration as Summing Up Our Trajectory

Each phase of our journey is represented in the festi-
val of celebration, which must do justice to the require-
ments of all. At the same time each receives from it an
extra tonality of happiness.

The fresh start of fidelity. The existing Church fails
even to read aloud the standard it proposes to disobey.
Cranmer put the definition of conformity to social mores,
the Ten Commandments, at the beginning of his sacred
meal. But already in Jesus' time, enlightened rabbis held
that the Law could be reduced to a single principle — not
doing to others what you didn't want them to do to you.
"What is the most important commandment?" was a con-
ventional question. One tradition says that Jesus volun-
teered an answer acceptable to the intellectuals: two com-
mandments, love of God and love of neighbor. But Luke
is probably right (10: 27) in stating that this was rather
the ready-made answer the questioner came with. In either
case, Jesus' own original formulation is quite different; it
doesn't exactly deny the law of Moses, but it does go be-

THE FEAST • 163

yond it. He introduces the radical novelty of identifying
the neighbor as the victim. Either the helpless and proba-
bly unthankful outcast, as Luke here goes on to indicate;
or (even more radically) the enemy seen as victim of his
own prejudices, shut up in the ghetto of affluence, from
whom we expect only hard words and persecution.

If we're to call our community a following of Jesus
and not some kind of liberal Judaism, we can only post up
as the condition of its fresh start his own teaching. Love
your enemies. We will make our rule radical reconcilia-
tion. Even if we wish to interpret those words out of exist-
ence, we should be reminded about the starting-point of
our exegesis as often as possible. Episcopalians may be in-
terested to find out the one place in their Prayer Book
where this imperative is found. In a world which can be
destroyed both by the weapons of our enemy and of that
neighbor who claims to represent us, loving your enemy is
the only prudence. The community festival is a main-
spring of action to carry out the spirit of its fresh start.

The community of love. The community is the next
bigger level of organization, in which family units are the
proper cells. It calls its members brothers and sisters. It
contains parallels to all the family relations — sexuality,
comradeship, the refined relation between brother and sis-
ter. A young man isn't in all that unique a relation to his
girl friend, since he tries fitting every other girl into the
same role; but his relation to his sister has a unique color.
The community gives all relations that color. Its tone is
hit off, we're told, by the wedding feast; the company cele-
brates a sexuality not its own, but which as by-product has
brought it together.

164 . PLANET ON STRIKE

Since the community will often be a hit-and-run
affair, one step ahead of the Man, moving in where change
is happening, losing people to jail or travel, its member-
ship will be fluid. It will try to recognize its real members
where it finds them, under whatever name. Among people
who agree with it about the nonviolent revolution, its task
is removing the obstacles to seeing Jesus as founder of the
revolution. It will unmistakably call itself a continuation
of Jesus — and at the same time welcome anybody willing
to accept it in its own spirit.

Above all it'll take pains not to put barriers of its
making between itself and existing denominations. It will
also take pains not to be added to their number, but to be
a force working for love in each of them. It will be clear
where it stands — in such a way as to make it easiest for
them to move in that direction. It will be a community of
radical ecumenism; not reunion for the sake of adminis-
trative tidiness, but for joint action in the necessary jobs
of renewal.

No previous age of church history has been in the po-
sition of putting together a unity out of petrified frag-
ments. The style of operation needed is so new and
flexible, that we can only describe it concretely after it's
happened. It's only possible in such a vanguard scene as
the United States, with representatives of all traditions
shaken loose from traditional assumptions. Its new struc-
tures will reject from the old only what it must, and incor-
porate from the old whatever it can.

The intersection of the vocations. In celebration, his-
tory and the arts meet the individual most intimately. The
liturgy is its own dance. Liturgies of the West represent
the dignity of the Roman patrician in his own house; their

THE FEAST • 165

items of dress and gesture are our living link to the classi-
cal world. The Church also formalizes ecstatic dances of
liberation, shaking and quaking; and items of dress like
the friar's habit which once identified the wearer as one of
the poor. A minister to the twentieth century is a man
wearing bluejeans.

Historically we understand how cult builds architec-
ture to house itself. The cathedral of Sicilian Syracuse was
built in the fifth century b.c. as a Doric temple to Athena
of victory, converted into a basilica under Constantine,
briefly given Moorish ornaments, and provided with a ba-
roque facade in the eighteenth century. The American
churches where one can see native meaning are the white
steeples of New England and the missions of California;
but both streams have now run dry.

Classic periods of the Church have a uniquely appro-
priate music, simple enough for any congregation, deep
enough not to be exhausted by any genius. Such were Gre-
gorian plainsong; Lutheran chorale; the English tradition
where Watts and the Wesleys are dominant. Nothing is
more convincing than a uniform celebration in one of
those styles with a choir or congregation to which it's na-
tive. Nothing more unconvincing than tasteful eclecti-
cism from all styles in a congregation that can't sing or feel
any of them. There's no people's base for church music
today except freedom songs and peace songs with guitar
accompaniment. But it will be a while before we get a
translation of all the things we need to say in that idiom.

If the future holds art-forms representing a new
humanity, it will be because, in our age of artistic
deprivation, we worked that humanity out without sym-
bolism, in men and women. Through the celebrations of
the naked Church which lies ahead we may recover the

166 . PLANET ON STRIKE

power of the word. Perhaps the community will pick up
its new language already being spoken, from a Bob Dylan,
as the folksong of a Trinh Cong Son already speaks the
message of peace to all Vietnamese. Anyway it's set the
task of radical translation, unlocking a treasure-trove of
words to say the old things the only way we can hear them.
It must find the childhood rhythms, political slogans, for-
mulas of anger or love which will once again sound like
men and women talking about their actual concerns.

Since the Church preserves every element of culture
in its most original form, its word is a language of the
mouth and ear, not of the hand and eye. Skimming is the
technique of an amphetamine generation which speeds to
assimilate more than it really can, on the assumption that
meaning is spread thin. We will set up detoxification clin-
ics from those spiritual uppers, and write over the door:
SPEED READING KILLS. The ancieut book, like modern po-
etry, is so densely composed it can't be grasped at a rate
faster than reading aloud. Our Gospels are compilations of
short oral items which at one time circulated independ-
ently. Their liturgical reading in those sections continues
the way they were first delivered to illiterate audiences, be-
fore even they were collected in books.

In the end the word comes to us as a synthesis of the
arts. In tonal languages like Vietnamese every sentence has
its intrinsic melody; the group recitation of the Lord's
Prayer brings its own plainsong. So Pindar composed a
simple melody for each ode, and designed a choret)graphy
for the boys who sang it, appropriately costumed, in a
Doric setting. But before that happens again the word will
have to be stripped of everything else and come to us nak-
edly spoken, nakedly heard. No programmed learning or

THE FEAST • 167

closed-circuit television will take the place of our brother
speaking — speaking precisely because we're there in front
of him.

The community as place of sacrifice. The only way of
dealing with power is letting it destroy itself through our
submission. That way is seemingly broken by the first law
of life, assimilation; we are what we eat. The vegetarian-
ism of a Gandhi awakens deep echoes in us before we dis-
miss it as impractical. Even ancient agricultural societies
ate meat on ceremonial occasions. Except in hunting
economies the date of the ceremony was fixed on the
calendar, and so could only be met by a domesticated ani-
mal— itself born at a fixed lambing season. A "domesti-
cated" animal was one living in the house, like the man's
ewe lamb in the parable of Nathan. In Moslem Beirut,
lambs are still brought in as pets and slaughtered on the
festival. The children (and adults too) grow fond of the
new family member. Some societies grant it honorary fam-
ily membership; in others the family is enrolled in a sheep
or kangaroo totem. At slaughter-time permission or for-
giveness must be asked, on the chance that the animal
knows more than we realize. Its killing is the sacred and
polluting operation of sacrifice.

In the ancient world, temples were the only slaugh-
terhouses. Paul had all that trouble with "meat offered to
idols" because there wasn't any other kind. Open sacrifice
imposed standards of cleanness publicly verifiable; it
also reminded men, if the race must be continued by
bloodshed, what bloodshed was like. Our locked slaugh-
terhouses— at best antiseptic, at worst jungles — would have
offended classical sensitivities. We lock them up for the

168 . PLANET ON STRIKE

same reason we send old folks away to die; we have too
bad a conscience about death. But in the Providence of
God the TV news has uncovered what ^ve wrapped up.

Puritan America is as addicted to mass slaughter as
Assyria or the Third Reich. We tempt Fate by stockpiling
fissionable materials, nerve gas all over the planet. The
Spanish, in spite of their reputation for ferocity, were the
only conquerors of the New World to intermarry with the
locals. Perhaps a nonviolent society would need an institu-
tion as bloody, dangerous, and ostentatious as bullfighting
— a moral substitute for war. (I agree it didn't substitute
for the Spanish Civil War.) The last great Roman Emper-
ors— Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus — were colonials from Spain
where the old Italian character had emigrated; still today
we have there the living picture of the classical world.

The normal act of ancient religion was the sacrifice of
a bull on a hot day; his name Taurus is shared by most an-
cient languages. There was some pretense that he walked
voluntarily to death. In the human sacrifice of Phoenicia I
suppose a semblance of choice was generated by social
pressure. Ancient societies were groping to the point when
a victim would let himself be sacrificed for the good of
something more than a political fatherland. The Real
Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is effected by our soli-
darity with his revolutionary self-offering. As an oppressed
community approaches self-awareness, it makes its own
suffering available as an organizing issue around which
the oppressed everywhere can build. The violent powerful
and the violent powerless are both amnesia victims. By
forgetting their own history, they're doomed to repeat it.
In what the New Testament calls anaivnesis, "remem-
bering," the fog of amnesia is dispelled by the fresh wind
ot radical nonviolence.

THE FEAST • 169

Probably what Jesus meant was, "Do this [not on
some subsequent occasion, but now] so that I may be re-
membered by God." The sharing of the group in his self-
offering is meant to awake an echo — that is, to be "remem-
bered" in the Structure of being beyond space and time.
Since he's a man like us operating in the dark of actual
history, his words deal with the concrete present; that's
precisely what suited them to serve the future. The reality
of his having been remembered by God then is insured
through his being remembered by us now. Memory is an
actual prolongation of the past into the present, not
through lifeless stones or bones, but through the
unbrokenness of living community. The acid of reality in
his self-sacrifice dissolved the last remains of his individu-
ality, and liberated him to form the new level of unity in
our celebration. His death was identical with his resurrec-
tion, he was lifted up in both senses simultaneously. So
our joyful victory over death is inseparable from our in-
corporation into the community of his way.

The waiter at table. As concretely as possible, passing
around food and drink to often unappreciative people is
meant as traininsr in subordination, a school of nonviolent
action. If there are going to be arrests, let it be very clear
that the cadre gets busted first. Once that principle is
clear, it's widened to insure that the whole community is
the cadre— each in turn takes the paradoxical leadership
position. It intercedes before the Power of history for its
own prisoners and casualties, for the needs of other op-
pressed communities — above all for the powerful, victim-
ized by their inheritance of authority. Our awareness of
other people suffering educates us by stirring us to action
in the arena of history.

170 • PLANET ON STRIKE

The best service we can offer our brother is transmit-
ting our own motivation and joy. The usual corporal
works of mercy are sterile unless they're allowed to bubble
up into the biggest one — releasing the body for happiness.
Of course there's always the risk that happy people will
drink too much or get high or bring down the Man or ex-
ploit their buddies. Over against it is the certainty that un-
happy people haven't found joy.

The awareness of joy comes and goes, not entirely
under our control. We need to rest it on a sureness we
know what we're doing. The place where knowledge of
the Law and the Prophets existed was the Synagogue —
a University and meditation-center all in one. The
instructional parts of our freedom meal flow from that
root. Without arbitrary imposition of ideas either by indi-
viduals or by the group, the form of celebration (older
than either) does its own educating. The heart of libera-
tion comes from our study of history, the realization we're
not alone. The Establishment Church, to reinforce remem-
brance of its foundations, celebrates the memory of kings,
archbishops, persecutors, munificent benefactors. Even so,
by popular request it has to include the feast of a Francis
beside those of his master. Much more so, the means of in-
struction in the golden thread of our real history will be a
radical calendar, commemorating yearly the saints of an
authentic humanity.

The community as place of healing. The groups of re-
newal out across the country and the world, already jelling
into some kind of free church movement, are still hand-
cuffed by a guilt for failure. They've claimed to see better
and walk more surely than the Establishment churches.
Instead they keep lapsing into overt violence, factionalism,

THE FEAST • 171

compromise like the others. While the chaplains of the
white ghetto retire into an alert old age, the champions of
the poor fall into nervous breakdown, apostasy, compul-
sions. Partly it can't be helped and we just stick by them.
Partly our solidarity can affirm the community feast as a
place of radical healing. In that fellowship the commu-
nity can raise its casualties, heal over factions, bring about
reconciliation inside — as a preface to reconciliation of op-
pressors and oppressed outside. Realistic confession can
get the load actually off our back onto the broad shoulders
of history. We know the final fall that our periodic lapses
into casualty status are pointing ahead to. But if each in
turn can be taken up into brotherhood, we have some con-
fidence that the ultimate casualty also is swallowed up into
victory.

The normal temptation of a movement for peace or
justice is to sacrifice its members, or its cause, or both. The
Church is the Movement become conscious of itself. But
since it includes in some form all the problems of that
world which it belongs to and wants to help, healing be-
gins inside. If its basic concern can be for purity of mo-
tives and actions, it's a nucleus of healing, putting behind
itself both manipulation of persons in the name of an ide-
ology, and manipulation of truth for alleged human need.
It becomes an actual example of w^hat it advocates, a
beachhead of the counter-invasion which operates not by
force but gentleness.

The Restoration of the Orders

Liturgical forms which put first things first w'ill un-
dercut both the trivial matters where the denominations
differ and the basic errors where they're in agreement. By

172 • PLANET ON STRIKE

restoring the true history of liberation, in a common meal
of pure food and drink, we affirm the unity and renewal of
nature and society. The New Covenant of that ancient un-
derground cell of nonviolence becomes the constitution of
a global commonwealth.

The sacred calendar celebrates the lifetime of an ex-
emplary man through the yearly agricultural cycle, after
the style of the pagan mysteries. But the mysteries were
hardly celebrating anything more than that cycle — a god
maybe but certainly not a man. A wedding anniversary
isn't wholly separate from the wedding; it helps determine
retrospectively whether there actually was a wedding in
the first place. So the intention of the community to repre-
sent the past symbolically makes the past actually present.
Our life in community through the liturgy generates
whatever will be meaningful in the future. The political
prophet sees moving in men's hearts the determinations
which one day will produce great events. But we feel
working in us the political infrastructure of the universe.

Einstein discovered that in our space-time contin-
uum, by a suitable mathematical transformation, intervals
of time- can be represented as intervals of space; history is
projected onto geometry. The mythical geography of the
ancient world spatialized the future — and that more-than-
future which has been called eternity. The diamond-sharp
outline of the ancient city-state in its geographical setting
points to the unity of biology and citizenship. That union
is realized in the spiritual geography of the Revelation of
John — a book which from another viewpoint is a set of ru-
brics for a community liturgy, threatened and unsubdued
by the World Pig from the abyss.

We haven't ever actually been in Eden; the childhood

THE FEAST • 173

sexuality to which we attach its mountain-streams looked
for it in the future. Solomon and Ezekiel locate it in my
own adopted home where the great springs break out from
inside Lebanon. Under the Plan Vert, suitable prototype
for a World Park, the mountain once again is becoming as
Tacitus described it, "among tropic ardors, opaque with
shade and confident of snowfalls." Hosea's famous vine of
Lebanon, of which we're the branches, ctows there in
its last refuge from Moslem Puritanism, beside the grain
which isn't quickened unless it dies.

From the sacred marriage of the youth and his child
bride under their cedar canopy has sprung what George
Fox calls a "peaceable people" around the globe, illustrat-
ing the sweet reasonableness of reconciliation, each consid-
ering his brother above himself. In the restoration of
nature, and of our own nature, we've taken out naturaliza-
tion papers in the city where our true citizenship lies. And
when we finally settle down there, what do we find but
the secret brook still flowing through its streets, and the
golden world-tree of life dropping its purple fruit on the
banks? The temple of its civic liturgy, called the "house
of the forest of Lebanon," has its pillars of cedar living and
branching into a vaulted roof, just as its stones are people.
In that virgin woodland of the future with its floor of
Solomon's-seal and fern, time and space, nature and his-
tory blend into love, and the pillars of Chartres fuse with
the sacred grove of Muir Woods; for the forest is the cathe-
dral, and the cathedral is the forest.

Conclusion:

New Containers,
New Contents

It bothers us when somebody hijacks an airliner,
because we expect a plane ride to be a place of
peace, its only threat airsickness, or thunderheads pushing
up from over Chicago, monsoon clouds over Bangkok.
The envelope of war and death is only a hundred feet
thick. It's easy to see why the upper atmosphere, much
more so the moon, should have been thought by early man
a place of life. Actually though, as we know, we can only
get up there in a simulated city, a crowded tourist-section
or space-capsule. We haven't yet left a body on the moon,
and all our dead up until now are hidden in the earth or
sea — which also, by the same token, hold the secret of life.

The Planet as Our Organizing Base

Whatever exploration or colonization we may now
do. Terra is our organizing base. Her body and blood gen-
erated the complexities of our biochemistry; and if like the
giant Antaeus we get lifted off her for too long, some un-

NEW CONTAINERS, NEW CONTENTS • 175

suspected component of our strength will run thin. What-
ever extra-terrestrial societies we enter into treaty with,
the global society of nations is our only proper commu-
nity. Now that we can move towards the sun, as Milton
predicted, and

Look downward on that Globe whose hither side
With light from hence, though but reflected, shines,

the green revolution and the peace revolution are the
most elementary tasks of housekeeping in our forest city.

And those jobs, far beyond our capacity as they seem,
are only the outer consequences of an inner rebuilding.
The New Testament is its definitive statement, called out
by an earlier phase of the ongoing crisis. As we read it, we
can hardly help observing that its Way is different from
the way of the world. A wholeness quite other than con-
ventional morality, but still not completely out of sight, is
being laid on us.

The ground swell of political revolution all around
us draws its strength from that same tradition, which it
sees us as inheriting and disowning. If we don't make radi-
cal changes along lines that we choose, they'll be made for
us along lines that somebody else chooses. We don't let
our kids borrow even nickels from their mothers' pocket-
books, so as not to get into the habit. Much less can we
stand by in silence when somebody cuts down a tree or
starts a war.

A Liberated Church as Our Primary Community

Since the interlocking crisis of violence is unitary, all
of a piece, with damage to nature and society compound-

176 . PLANET ON STRIKE

ing each other, the response has got to be unitary. Any
community where that response is made here will have to
include a radically liberated Church. Nothing but a crisis
of this magnitude could radicalize the existing churches.
And even it may not, since they, like the other institutions
of our society, are in the grip of self-destroying demonic
powers. We can just pour out our life and trust to Provi-
dence.

We know only too well that we're brothers and sisters
of the violent. Every impulse which has led them out of
the right course is also working in us. At every turn we
have to fall back on the community of love to check us in
our tendency to destruction. Our efforts to liberate the
churches in conformity with the Gospel are nearly always
a failure. But we have to go on because we can't find that
community inside the churches as they are. For now that
the frontier of exploration is the moon, where no colony
of the oppressed can take refuge, world society is the only
society we've got. There's no New World left to go and
build our sectarian Utopia in.

The weak link in the chain of exploitation is what it
was all along intended to be: the Church. Because the
United States has a spectrum of denominations with no
one dominant, she's more accessible to the message, a po-
tential vanguard of the Gospel. The renewal carried out
through Francis was the last one which spent its course
fully inside the existing Church. Since then, each century
has seen movements for peace and liberation which have
gotten cut off from the central tradition of community.

In the sixteenth century radical reformers like
Menno Simons rediscovered the actual message of Jesus;
but they made community into self-contained sects, prone
from time to time to lapse into violence.

NEW CONTAINERS, NEW CONTENTS • 177

In the seventeenth century George Fox rediscovered
the true virtue of peace. But he rejected the symbolic
forms of the sacraments by which alone his community
v^ould have the power to go on attracting the world to it-
self. Even so his Friends are the clearest institutional wit-
ness to the truth today.

In the eighteenth century the Wesleys rediscovered
the preaching of Paul, on a deeper level of the psyche than
the official Reformation. But they allowed themselves to
be pushed out of the existing Church into moralism and
anti-intellectualism. Even so they were the driving force
behind the Evangelical revival: mission overseas and to
the new industrial proletariat, concern for abolition of
slavery.

In the nineteenth century the cry for liberation was
raised among the working poor by Marx, at a time when
the evangelical movement was being co-opted by Euro-
pean imperialism into a paternalistic missionary enter-
prise. But Marxism by its very success has been unable to
reach a new subproletariat. Because its secularism cut it
off from old symbolism, it attributes to itself a monopoly
on justice, ignores its own violence, and assumes its oppo-
nents incapable of reason.

In the twentieth century out of the soil of Marxism
have grown national liberation movements, which moved
from secularism to human concern through affirmation of
their own cultural roots. With some exceptions they
haven't found any alternative to violence — because they
didn't see their vanguard role broadly enough. Even so
they represent the most hopeful Third Force between the
American and Soviet empires.

During these five centuries renewal has been either

178 • PLANET ON STRIKE

divisive, or oriented towards counter-violence, or both.
While taking our stand with the renewal movements over
against the Establishment, we must alter them in two com-
plementary ways. The threat to the environment forces us
to dig ever deeper in eradicating our own tendency to vio-
lence, as a prelude to oflFering nonviolence to our oppo-
nent. At the same time we must be clearer than any of our
predecessors about our complicity with the exploitative so-
ciety, and our determination to build a new community
inside it and not over against it.

The Global Message

We hear rebel messages going out on secret wave-
lengths, and we know that action against violence is being
taken — hasty and partial, often self-frustrating. How can
we reduce the noise-level of the messages? A broadcast
bounced off a satellite, simultaneously translated into the
principal world languages, overcomes all obstacles to com-
munication but the greatest: distrust of the sender. And
we can't wait until some Gandhi or Chavez, at the apex of
a pyramid of the disarmed poor, has been able to requisi-
tion those channels.

Actually we all know in advance better than any Pope
or UN Secretary General how the necessary global message
would read. Only we private persons, with no political
power, have the freedom of action to build ourselves into
voluntary international communities of peace. Standing
on that base, we may bypass their monopolistic channels
and sent out our own Telstar message, economizing on
valuable words:

NEW CONTAINERS, NEW CONTENTS • \19

PEOPLE OF THE WORLD UNITE L

WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT DISTRUST

OUR BROTHERS ARE (.ETTING SMASHED

WE ALL HAVE A COMMON INTEREST

OUR SHARED LIFE ON THE PLANET

WE HOLD THAT LIFE IN OUR HANDS

A MAD POWER IS THREATENING IT

WE ARE CALLING A STRIKE FOR IT

THE ENEMY IS NOT PEOPLE j^ \

OUR FIDELITY WINS THE DAY ^ { j

It would be easier to find the right words if we desig-
nated beforehand some enemy who didn't have to hear
them, and adopted the slogans shared by the other half of
humanity. But then our alleged communication would
only widen the crack. Standing here in the United States
we try just to get an initial hearing from hungry Latin '
Americans, Asiatics under a police state, detribalized Afri-
cans. At the same time we remind our own people that
somewhere between Canada and Mexico there may still
exist an America on the growing edge of planetary and
cosmic history; as yet no Russian or Chinese has stepped
into the role of world peacemaker once played by A. J.
Muste.

To the Reader

If revolutions are going on, it's because people com-
mitted themselves to action before there was any move-
ment to join. If talk about a strike or revolution seems
artificial or threatening, I'm glad to drop those metaphors

180 . PLANET ON STRIKE

and leave a blank page in the book. The reader may fill it
up with what he knows in his heart is the right way for
him to be spoken to.

We both are very well aware that things have gone
wrong on the globe. And still a power, never yet fully meas-
ured, lies in the will of each individual to help set things
straight. Ripples of influence join every man and woman
to every other. Somebody has calculated that a chain of five
personal acquaintances can be built to connect any two in-
dividuals in the United States. Since every foreign land
has at least one friend in America, we are only a dozen
persons away from every soul on the planet. And the
planet itself has all along, we now discover, been receiving
gravitational waves from the rest of the cosmos, actual de-
formations of the space-time continuum, as the sleeping
galaxies shift in their beds and arouse their neighbors.

The sleepers are rising from the dead — more and
more now through our own persistent knocking. The
whole universe is illuminated by a cosmic principle which
has already found an historic example here: everything
can become itself without disturbing its neighbor — in fact
to their joint advantage. We're not to underestimate the
obstacles in the way of change. Still, independent of our
faults, there stand the Saints, objective and free, not with-
out their own blind spots, but mutually correcting each
other. And they witness above all that anybody anywhere
has the power to throw off the yoke of habit and pass
through the waters to the liberation of integrity. Keep in
mind, through whatever words are most natural, the
changes in society required by the needs of the planet and
of the poor; believe that those changes can be made by
your fidelity and nothing else.

NEW CONTAINERS, NEW CONTENTS • 181

My friend David Nesmith, who saw as much of the
war as any American civilian from a farm near Hue,
brought back an artillery shell which has been machined
into a chalice. It seems to me that this job requires a great
deal of pressure, and I don't understand how the Vietnam-
ese do it. Many other things about that remarkable people
also escape me. But it's very clear that every other artifact
around us, beginning with ourselves, has to undergo just
as much reshaping. In this book I've begun to block out
concretely what that would involve; if anything I'm sure
I've underestimated the difficulty. We will not find our
proper environment, sitting down each under his fig tree
unafraid, until after the bayonets of the masked battalions
have been forged into a plow, and every instrument of our
violence has been beaten out into a receptacle for the sap
of life.

GTU Library

BR121.2.B78 Q

Brown, John PaJrman/Planet on strike

3 2400 00018 5508

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