559 - Not So Great Society

Not So Great Society
By H. Ganse Little, Jr.

H. Ganse Little, Jr., is a graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary. He took his doctorate at Harvard University and is now a member of the Department of Religion at Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.

IN his latest book, Dissenter in a Great Society: A Christian View of America in Crisis (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966, 164 pp., $4.95), William Stringfellow has formulated a passionate indictment of the incubus of human alienation which he contends has fastened its tentacles upon the length and breadth of the present age in these United States. The author is not a contemplative armchair theorist removed from the agony of the crisis he delineates. Quite the opposite. As a lawyer and an articulate Christian layman he has lived "on location" Within the demonic patterns of ghettoization which this volume excoriates. From the vantage point of his intimate association With the specter of collective human misery and despair, he has been a tireless advocate of reconciling justice in the struggle for human rights. It is the cry of outrage against the murderous dehumanizing forces of arrogance, apathy, and astigmatism, as they stalk the landscape of the "great society," Which sounds forth most shrilly and unmistakably in this book.

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Indeed, in this reviewer's opinion the style and substance of this most recent collection of Stringfellow utterances is best characterized as an urgent "cry." An alarm is sounded. Like the sentinels of old, the author has espied the gruesome visage of a saboteur intent upon destroying the fabric of his community. He has shouted "danger," and, along with many of the other voices of our time, has fixed our attention on the shadow of death that lurks among us. Yet it is just because the total impact of Stringfellow's words scarcely moves beyond the excitation of passionate warning that his book fails to compel the reader at important levels other than that of general laryngeal exhortation.

Stringfellow is at his best as a diagnostician of the bureaucratically self-serving impedimenta that obstruct, cripple, and render superficial the assaults on poverty and racism which have been mounted by the "great society." The iconoclastic vigor with which he unmasks the flat and insipid remedial efforts sponsored by the politics of consensus, as an instrumentality for social transformation, can only elicit approbation from readers who, like Stringfellow, have been stung by the deeply rooted and idolatrous assumption that property rights are more sacred than human rights. The profundity of the crisis that bestrides our time is illuminated when Stringfellow continually invites us to consider the conundrum of whether American society has the moral as well as the undisputed technical capability to exorcise the tenacious patterns of white supremacy and pernicious poverty that strangle our collective life.

We are disturbed anew (particularly after the recent referendum decision in New York City) when Stringfellow adumbrates the prospects for an American totalitarianism developing around the unchecked possession and execution of power within this country's municipal police forces. These are sinister prospects indeed when it is shown how intimately bound up they are with the possibilities of a holocaust exploding out of the tactical impasse reached by the human rights revolution when the results attained by the strategy of non-violence have been so precious little as far as redressing the grievances of a ghettoized society is concerned. All of this is to say that we are continually arrested and arraigned by Stringfellow's cry.

But one of the most disappointing failures in this book, the conspicuous aim of which is to alert the reader to the urgent responsibilities of dissent, is its virtual incapacity to move beyond the rhetoric

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of general exclamation to some sort of systematic analysis of: (a) the pathological structures of estrangement which constitute the current American crisis, and (b) the mediating principles by way of which the concrete relevance of what Stringfellow calls a Christian ethic of reconciliation might be exhibited. Too much of this book is long on hortatory homiletics and short on disciplined sociological and theological criticism. As a result no real substantive philosophy of dissent emerges other than the somewhat vague suggestion that the Christian conscience must always assume the posture of radical protest against the status quo.

Most of Stringfellow's observations about the character of Christian responsibility (despite the frequency with which the word "involvement" is enlisted) seem disturbingly abstract and delocated precisely because no real connective conceptual tissue is supplied which might link theological perspectives to empirical situation. The book lacks focus because it lacks a historical sensitivity to the alternative ways in which the relationship between Christian faith and social action might be construed. And ultimately, since for the most part the importance of systematic focus and tightly controlled analysis is eschewed, this book frequently lapses into the most banal sort of journalistic jingoism and platitudinous fillip. The pages on the significance of the Goldwater-Cow Palace convention and its aftermath constitute a tired rehearsal of the obvious. And the section on the immolation of Americans, concluding as it does with a cryptic apostrophe of Roger Laporte, is one of several meandering Stringfellowian excursions which makes it difficult for the total impact of the book to rise above the tone of random eclecticism and directionless omnium gatherum.

Because the reader is given very little clue in this book as to what might function as a unifying principle of analysis in the attempt to move toward an understanding of the responsibilities of dissent, he is often abandoned to decipher for himself the following kinds of confused signals. Stringfellow writes that the unrelenting posture of the church must be one of "profound dissent toward the prevailing status quo of secular society, whatever that may be at any given time" (p. 143). He also avers that integration in America means a "drastic reappraisal of values which has not yet been even theoretically contemplated" (p. 103). However, he can elsewhere (p. 78) speak of Senator Fulbright's televised hearings of the Senate Foreign

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Relations Committee as a "major reassertion of the American tradition" of dissent, and contend (p. 110) that "the Negro revolution must be considered within the context of the ethics and traditions of American social revolution." Nowhere does he systematically assist his reader in coming to grips with the complex relationship between "profound dissent" and "a drastic reappraisal of values," on the one hand, and the sense in which meaningful protest is a reassertion of tradition, on the other.

Likewise, in the course of an admirable attempt to explode the stereotypical misunderstanding of Malcolm X as an apostle of violence, Stringfellow reminds us that Malcolm X upheld the conviction "that when a man is assaulted he has the dignity and right to defend himself--one of the most venerable principles of Anglo-Saxon common law" (p. 95). Yet later in a passage that typifies much of the oracular tenor of this volume we are apprised of the dynamics of the witness of the cross: "Even if the knife is at the belly, let the white Christian not protest. Let him receive the assault recklessly, without precaution, without resistance, without rationalization, without extenuation, without a murmur" (p. 122). In the face of these kinds of statements the reader searches in vain for a carefully constructed argument from Stringfellow the lawyer as to how the Christian conscience is to understand the relationship between law and a theology of the cross. Because no such construction has been attempted, in the end the homiletical utterance has the field all to itself.

The author of Dissenter in a Great Society is a dedicated, courageous, and immensely gifted man. He has been where the action is and knows a great deal about the trial by fire that lies ahead of this land if it is going to redeem its most important promises. As one man's engagé response to the myth and travail of the so-called "great society" this book is a frequently moving personal testimony. As a carefully reasoned statement that correlates depth analysis of the institutional pathology of the present hour with the interpretive categories of Christian ethical reflection, the book is thin and for many will represent an unfortunate embodiment of the "misplaced offense. "