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The Blurred Vision
By James I McCord

"And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight" -Numbers 13 33

WE are increasingly aware that we are all members of an exodus society, that we are moving out of one age into another. Every exodus is motivated by a dream of a promised land, and this generation has had a vision of a new world, a land of promise which lies ahead, a society where barriers are broken down, poverty and disease are erased, threats to human life are eliminated, divisions are healed, and men live together in concord and peace.

Of course, such a vision of Utopia is not unique to this age. Sir Thomas More wrote of it, Francis Bacon dreamed of a New Atlantis, and Campanella spoke of a City of the Sun.

But what is different in our period is that there is present and ready to hand knowledge and technical skill that should enable us to move from where we are in this exodus to the land of promise where we want to be, and the movement should be steady and without interruption.

I

In any exodus situation there will inevitably be varying reactions, and in America in 1971 we can see a three-fold division taking place. There are, on the one hand, the members of the immobilized right who do not want to travel, who have no desire to take part in

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any exodus. They do not want to pack their bags; they are determined to remain where they are. They are to be pitied, for they represent the most frightened segment of the population. History tends to confirm the thesis that those who believe the least fear the most; those who believe the least in the promises that are ahead are the most fearful when travel is indicated.

A classical example of this weakness is to be found in the history of the ancient Greeks among the class of people known as the Sophists. Although Aristophanes called Socrates a Sophist, Socrates apparently tried to escape the label because he did not want to be identified with this group of itinerant teachers. They were skeptics who believed that there was no natural law or divine law, no providence, nothing fixed, nothing on which man and his society could build or depend.

Probably the most high-minded of all the Sophists was Protagoras. His famous dictum was, "Man is the measure of all things, of what they are that they are, and of what they are not that they are not." Whatever we have is the product of the cumulative wisdom of the ages, the Sophists contended. It is all a matter of techne, of mere arrangement. The kind of society in which we live has been contrived. Every system has been built up to a delicate balance through arrangement. Hence it follows that we should not rock the boat, attempt to improve anything, or assay any kind of progress, for all we would be doing would be to court chaos. And there are those today who feel that any criticism of existing conditions or any suggestion of an exodus that would involve our society would be the courting of chaos.

Besides the immobilized right there is the response of another minority-the romantic left-those whose watchword is "exodus now! " We want to travel, they say, but we want to make the trip by jet and we want to arrive, not tomorrow but yesterday. They indulge in what Norman Mailer describes as the "middle-class lust for apocalypse." Their dreams must always be fulfilled in an apocalyptic way. The results they seek are to be automatic, immediate, and absolute. They refuse to make the effort or to involve themselves in the struggle or to take the time to make real the dream that appears before their eyes. This group reminds me most of the flower children in Germany during the Weimar Republic after World War I. They, too, had a vision and wanted to participate

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in an exodus now. But the great problem with this mind-set is that when they do not get their wants now, then they say, "We have been betrayed," by the leaders, or the establishment, or the system, or whatever they choose to accuse. Having been betrayed, they then feel free to become cynical. This is the disturbing dimension in Charles Reich's Consciousness III: "A key word in understanding its origin is betrayal." When the Nazis began to march out of the beer halls of Bavaria, among their followers were the betrayed and now cynical flower children of Weimar.

Our greatest concern today is not with the reaction of the immobilized and static right or the romantic and apocalyptic left. It is with the reaction of the broad middle of America, those who have seen a vision and shared a dream, who through education and understanding have been able to lay hold of a concept of a world far better than the one in which we live. But just at the moment that the vision seemed to command and compel, just as the exodus was beginning, the vision has been blurred. This blur has been produced by a second look at the promised land, the new world that would be brought into being through technical wisdom and skill and through all the power of technology. Now it seems much less alluring, for there is a growing fear that it will be computerized, routinized, standardized, and depersonalized in all of its aspects. Mankind, rather than being unified, appears to be approaching homogenization and destined for the life of a beehive or an ant heap.

This is the blur that has caused the cultural parenthesis which we are now in in America-a parenthesis in which we have squared off to begin a great debate about the nature of the society toward which we are proceeding. And this brings us to the incident reported in the text.

II

The trek from Egypt to Canaan in the original Exodus was interrupted when Moses sent twelve men, one from every tribe and each a leader, to spy out the Promised Land. They traveled from south to north and back again, investigating the land, the people, and the cities in which they dwelled. Then came their report. It is a land that "flows with milk and honey. Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great, and moreover we saw the children of Anak there." Caleb's remonstrance,

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"Let us go up at once, and possess it," had no effect, for the people were in their own sight as grasshoppers, and so they were in the sight of others.

In America today we seem to be infected with a grasshopper neurosis. Someone has defined neurotics as those who build dream houses, psychotics as those who inhabit them, and psychiatrists are said to collect rent off them. We are not psychotic; we have not lost all touch with reality. But we have all the emotional disorder of the neurotic, the feelings of anxiety, obsessional thoughts, compulsive acts, and groundless complaints. We have simply become dysfunctional, quailing before the sons of Anak.

The first evidence of this condition is the paralysis of leadership especially the paralysis of liberal leadership at the present moment.

Some of you will remember Harry Ashmore's book, An Epitaph for Dixie. His thesis is that the problems for the past fifteen years have arisen primarily because those who through training, background, experience, and gifts should be leading have refused to exercise leadership and, therefore, the extremists, the strident voices, the little men with the bitter and mean spirits, have moved to the forefront to fill the vacuum. It is a tragedy when those who should be leading today in the great debate have suddenly found themselves paralyzed and have become masochistic. They do not act; they only react. They see the problems and are frozen before them. They say, "Rev up the violence of your rhetoric, denounce me louder, beat me again with your words, and make me feel guilder and guilder."

Of course, a Calvinist is quick to admit that there is a guilt that is strong and healthy, one that God can forgive by canceling the past and opening the future. But he must go on and add that we as a nation are in the midst of a period of guilt that is not strong but is paralyzing and sick.

A second characteristic of our blurred vision is the flight away from the goal of the unity of man. Perhaps the strongest movement in society today is in the opposite direction. It is toward the retribalization of mankind. Wherever you look, man seems to be seeking the smaller tribal group. Within the context of his tribe, he is looking for his own roots, for his identity, for those characteristics that will make him different, that will confer individuality, and that will give him the authenticity he feels he has

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lost or that is being imperiled in the sort of society in which he lives.

The third development is a flourishing romanticism that sprang up as the 1960's closed and the 1970's opened, a romanticism that drives one back for perspective and understanding to the beginning of the nineteenth century and to the literature of Europe in the decades immediately following 1800. The movement then was against classicism with its sterile and stultifying forms.

The ethos is the same today. Now the rebellion is against structure and order for their repressiveness, and the quest is for freedom. There is an anti-rational flight from intellect in favor of emotion and feeling. There is a rejection of the corporate in favor of the individual. There is a rejection of the average, the norm, in favor of the exceptional, the novel. And there is a rejection of the complex and the difficult in favor of the primitive, the simple, the easy. Witness today's guitars, folk music, and phony madrigals.

We know the world in which we shall live will be more complex and will require more discipline, skill, dedication, and knowledge, but we seem to have lost the psychic energy to make the adjustment. Many who are past fifty have finished their agenda and are marking time until retirement, while many who are under thirty are seeking refuge in an imaginary primitive society that even the world's most affluent nation may not be able to sustain.

But romanticism now, as in the beginning of the nineteenth century, is a mixed phenomenon. It is both a flight from the present and "a protest in behalf of value." It is a generation's quest for the human. It represents a religious affirmation, a search for more humane values and relations.

Theodore Roszak, in his description of the counter-culture, makes essentially the same point. The counter-culture is a deliberate step outside our objectifying, scientific culture. It is an attempt in many different directions to define a new form of life in which the human will be the first priority and the humane will be the basic characteristic of all relations.

III

Let me conclude by suggesting certain guidelines for those who will participate in the great debate that has now begun. The first is this. In the midst of the discussion that is going on concerning

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the nature of the society in which we shall live and the character of America for the next generation, it is terribly important we enter into and share the different perceptions of different groups that are clamoring to be heard today. Now of all times, it has been remarked, is the worst for the closed mind and the up-tight personality. Each generation, each racial group has its own perspective, its own perception of what is real and what is right, and it is incumbent on us to share those perceptions. Pluralism is not merely coexistence; pluralism is shared existence.

The second guideline is to begin to take seriously the necessity for new priorities. Victor Ferkiss has written a book entitled Technological Man, with the subtitle, "The Myth and the Reality." This is a sober, well-judged study that contends that the new man, the technological man, is still much more myth than reality. Modern man is still the old man with new technological toys. But we are being catapulted willy-nilly into another age qualitatively different from any that has been, an age that is raising all sorts of questions about the relations among nations, the nature of environment, conditions for human survival, the nature of our cities, and the strength of our electorate. Unless we are willing to move beyond business as usual and to set up a new scale of priorities, then the leadership we now hold will be lost simply by default.

In the third place, we must move beyond paralysis to a rebirth of confidence. Recently John Gardner has written about The Recovery of Confidence, and I agree with his judgment that we are better off now in the midst of the present debate than we were before the debate began. As long as we lived smugly and complacently, thinking that all was right and nothing was wrong, as long as we lived with the myth of innocence, thinking that tragedy was impossible for us, then it was later than we thought. But now we have begun to awaken to the enormity of the problems before us: war race, poverty, family, and the rest, and a nation that is awakened is a nation that has taken the first and longest step toward the solution of its problems.

In the fourth place, let me suggest that we must now begin to acquire what Dr. Gardner calls "a shared vision." The middle generation in America has been asked to come to terms with many new realities. It has had to come to terms with religious pluralism, when it was born into a nation which was thought to be

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Protestant. It was a myth, but an effective one. It has had to come to terms with racial pluralism, when it was born into a nation which was thought to be white. It was another myth, and an even more effective one. It has had to come to terms with a new perspective with regard to the balance of power among nations and the balance of terror throughout the world. And for many it has been too much. The result is the failure of nerve and the crisis of confidence that characterize our grasshopper complex. But we are being challenged to acquire a new and shared vision of the sort of nation and world in which men live together in liberty, justice, and peace and for which we covenant to work.

Finally, we must remember that the greatest contribution the Christian can bring to this debate is the dimension of hope. Our society possesses knowledge, the technical skills and masteries which have been acquired. But knowledge, important as it is, is not enough to equip a nation in a time of crisis and doubt. There must also be hope. If education supplies knowledge, faith supplies courage and hope. Tertullian, the first of the Latin fathers, once defined hope as "patience with the lamp lit." The Christian has an opportunity to exhibit to our society that kind of patience with the lamp lit that will give courage and hope to move beyond the paralysis of the present parenthesis into the next stage of the exodus, into a land that does not devour its people but that flows with milk and honey.