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World Order

SUMMER 1968

ATHOS—GOD’S HOLY MOUNTAIN

Benjamin P. Ruhe

A NEW UNIONISM

A. L. Lincoln

PABLO CASALS AT 91

Laila Storch

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 2 NUMBER 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER is intended to stimulate, inspire and serve thinking people in their search to find relationships between contemporary life and contemporary religious teachings and philosophy.

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

Art Consultants:

GEORGE NEUZIL

LORI NEUZIL

Subscriber Service:

PRISCILLA CHUNOWITZ

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 112 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts and suggestions for articles and subjects to be treated editorially will be welcomed and acknowledged by the editors.

Subscription: Regular mail USA, $3.50; Foreign, $4.00. Single copy, $1.00.

Copyright © 1968, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

IN THIS ISSUE

1 Nationalism as Zeitgeist

Editorial

2 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

4 Athos—God’s Holy Mountain

by Benjamin P. Ruhe

12 America

A Poem by Rowell Hoff

14 A New Unionism

by A. L. Lincoln

31 Morality without Religion: Is It Possible?

by Farhad Kazemzadeh

34 Casals at 91

by Laila Storch

38 People in Groups

by Pamela Ringwood

44 Europe at the Turn of the Age

A Book Review by Firuz Kazemzadeh

47 Authors and Artists of This Issue

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Nationalism as Zeitgeist

EDITORIAL

EVERY AGE has its own temper, its own zeitgeist. Ours is dominated by nationalism. Nationalism has dissolved empires, overthrown dynasties, subverted international movements, and made of the nation a false god. Nationalism has been a principal cause of war and is today the main obstacle to the establishment of world peace.

So strong is the hold of nationalism that even the most determined opponents of war often fail to see that the achievement of peace presupposes the elimination of unrestrained nationalism.

The inability of the United Nations to prevent or stop wars is a result of almost universal refusal by statesmen as well as the masses to give up a portion of national sovereignty to the world organization. Yet, a world of sovereign states must of necessity remain a world of international anarchy.

In a day when so many people are alert to the needs of humanity, where there are societies, unions, and action groups working for the realization of so many ideals, we see distressingly few individuals dedicating themselves to the promotion of internationalism. Those who protest against wars, those who preach universal peace, are asking for the fruits of a plant they do not wish to cultivate—world government.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

NOW THAT WE’VE GOT letters to the editor, as of the last issue, we are giving ourselves an opportunity to furnish the other half of the dialogue. The editorial doesn’t give us the chance to chat with you in the same way—it is restricted to one topic and is traditionally delivered in what Stephen Potter calls a plonking tone. This new section, whose structure is marked mostly by its lack of structure, will permit us to react to your letters, to give you curious bits of information about our contributors which might not be entirely appropriate to the little biographies we have been providing with the articles, to share with you any thoughts we have, related to the articles or just suggested by what is going on in the world—in other words to chat with you. Before we had the letters column, our magazine was a succession of articles, fixed in print, suddenly timeless; with the letters, and now our letter to you, we think the static quality is lightened by our existing in time as well as space. The result will be as unforeseen for us as it is for you; in fact, we recommend that you read the next paragraph to see what will happen, just as we will write it and thereby know what it will be.

IT WOULD BE HARD to imagine a greater contrast than that between Benjamin Ruhe’s article on the vestige of monastic life represented by Mount Athos and the intense treatment of the New Unionism, by A. L. Lincoln. Mount Athos, formerly a brilliant center of religious life and thought, is now inhabited chiefly by old men, who have given themselves up wholly to meditation, and who have apparently renounced all awareness of the problems and torments of the world outside. A hundred years ago, Bahá’u’lláh called upon the cloistered ones to leave their convents and their hermitages, to marry, and to take their part in the world. The Bahá’ís have always emphasized the importance of meditation, of quiet communication with God, as spiritual nourishment needed in the constant struggle to secure justice, which, says Bahá’u’lláh, is “the best beloved of all things in My sight.” Yet, the preoccupation with justice, or rather with injustice, can lead, perhaps, to forgetfulness of the necessity for action within the context of meditation, which might be described as consultation with God. In Lincoln’s article, intense in its love of the people, and intent on the quest for those devices which are most likely to secure the solidarity of the ghetto communities and as a result their general welfare, one might suggest that the spiritual aspect of the problem had been somewhat neglected.

Incidentally, Mr. Lincoln is someone you should know about. The article you will read here was the result of a one-semester project which involved studying at the University of Chicago and working with the Chicago community organizations. He graduated from Harvard in 1967 (Magna cum laude in Social Studies), and is now living in a Chicago slum and attending the University of Chicago Law School. He tells us in a letter, “Most importantly, I was studying the Bahá’í Faith [Page 3] while working on this paper, enrolled shortly after completing it, and am now an active member of the Chicago Bahá’í Community.”

LAILA STORCH has contributed a gem of an article on Pablo Casals. She is a skilled musician herself, an oboist of the first rank, a respected musicologist (specializing in the Baroque), and has been associated with Casals since 1950, first at the Prades Festivals, then in Puerto Rico, and is now a Professor at the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico. Besides that, she is a member of the Soni Ventorum wind quintet, which tours all over the Western Hemisphere. Her article on Casals is a wonderful illustration of work performed in the spirit of service as a form of worship. We expect soon to publish an article on the connection between art and religion; meanwhile, this article, taken together with Bernard Leach’s statement of an artist’s faith in our very first number (if you haven’t read it, do it!) will convey the sense of reverence which one owes to the truly creative artist: If any one has been created in the image of God, it must be he.

To the Editor

MORALE BUILDERS

We are writing to express our appreciation of the Winter issue of WORLD ORDER. Each time the magazine comes out, we wonder how you will maintain the consistently high standards you have set in previous issues. This one certainly fulfills all expectations. And doesn’t it show how the intellectual people of the world are gradually adopting Bahá’í ideas and ideals even when they are not Bahá’ís?

We thank you for your excellent work, and we look forward to future issues. We have placed WORLD ORDER in the Hartford Public Library and are proud to have it there.

LORNA TASKER

Secretary

Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís

Hartford, Connecticut

Thank you—this is a magazine one can share with pride with anyone.

MR. AND MRS. JOHN MARLOW

Peterborough, New Hampshire

THINGS TO DO

. . . I would like to see articles of a visionary nature reflecting our changing world. . . . I feel that there is ample evidence in the sciences and economics, to show that world order is now a logical horizon.

Perhaps each article in future issues could reflect on a different aspect of civilization, including education, law, government, communications media (I am impressed with Marshall McLuhan), as well as philosophy and the social sciences.

You can find articles on any of the foregoing in a variety of journals, but in no other magazine are they collated so as to make a recognizable pattern, which to me is the function of this magazine.

A READER

(Signature illegible)

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

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Simopetra Monastery on Mount Athos

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ATHOS—God’s Holy Mountain

By BENJAMIN P. RUHE

“Do you hear the little bird singing? It is glorifying God.”

—The hermit Avaakum

ALL THINGS GLORIFY GOD on Mount Athos, Greece’s Holy Mountain. A peninsula devoted entirely to monasticism for more than ten centuries, Athos is a living museum where medieval life, with its miracles and credulities, has been preserved intact into the 20th Century. Many of the holy ikons are said to have arrived on the Mountain over the centuries by skimming across the waves under their own power. Even today a monk upon going out will hang a cross on his door to keep out the Devil. And tales of saints prowling the monastery corridors are told as contemporary news.

This pronounced atmosphere of supernaturalism startled an Englishman visiting the Mountain. Seeing an aged monk feeding some cats in a courtyard, he went over to watch. The monk’s gaze was sightless, he noticed, and the man’s hearing impaired as well, since the old man gave no sign of recognition. After watching silently for a few minutes, the visitor thought it only polite to broach a conversation.

“Eimai Anglos” (I am English), he announced.

The monk looked up with a start.

“Enas angelos?” (An angel?) he asked, smiling and pleased—and not too surprised with the angelic visitation.

In a century marked by the growth of materialistic and activist doctrines in the world in general and in religious organizations in particular, such a spiritual climate, with its emphasis on the living presence of Divine Beings, is rare indeed. With its twenty monasteries and many hundreds of monks, Athos is a thoroughly remarkable anachronism, representing in the last third of the 20th Century a way of life largely lost to the world, which for a long time now has severely depreciated the contemplative and spiritual life. Even a quick study of the Holy Mountain’s history can be instructive. Its survival may be more geographic and historical accident than anything else. Yet the lasting values it represents have unquestionably helped it to live long in the face of strong counterpressures, and as a consequence these values are well worth examining. A brief history along with some of the odd aspects of Athonite life down through the centuries can put Athos in some contemporary perspective.

A 25-MILE-LONG PENINSULA jutting southward into the Aegean Sea from mainland Macedonia, Athos began drawing hermits as early as the Fourth and Fifth Centuries at a time when monasticism was beginning in the Christian church. Its harshly rugged terrain —a peak at the tip of the peninsula rears up more than 7,000 feet from the sea —provided the required isolation and challenge. In 963 A.D., a formal monastery was established, which today, a millennium later, still lives; and this communal establishment became the model for nineteen others to follow. Munificently financed by Byzantine kings and princes, Athos flowered for several hundred years. Its golden age then ended with the conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the West after the Fourth Crusade. Subsequent domination of the peninsula by the Turks lasted until the beginning [Page 6] of this century. Yet the momentum of monastic life was such that Athos has withered very slowly, with periods of resurgence occurring after each downturning.

Today, Athos still pulses. Nowhere else can the Byzantine school of painting be studied to such advantage. The treasuries of the monasteries contain inestimably valuable illuminated manuscripts, as well as collections of jewelry and examples of the goldsmith’s art. The buildings are, with the exception of Pompeii, the most ancient existing specimens of domestic architecture in Europe. The rough splendor of crag and Aegean Sea is hardly to be equalled. Most interesting of all, a portion of the life of the Middle Ages is enacted before one’s eyes, with its customs, dress, modes of thought and belief all essentially unchanged. A visit to Athos is a visit to Byzantium, to the great Christian empire of the East.

Karyes, the capital, is a town of solemn calm: no women gossip on the streets, no children play; singing, whistling, and shouting are forbidden; musical instruments are barred, as they are throughout the whole of the peninsula; and smoking (“the incense of the Devil,” say the monks) is frowned upon. Three monks possessing three keys to open the three locks of one door formerly guarded the treasury of one monastery. Since Athos uses the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian, a visitor may arrive on a boat docking on, say, December 3, but his feet touch the wharf on Athos’ November 20. Such calendar tricks can be confusing indeed to a time-disciplined Westerner. Eighteen of the monasteries use Byzantine time, which takes its twelve o’clock from sunset; the nineteenth uses a Persian time system current in the Caucasus centuries ago, which takes its twelve o’clock from dawn; and the twentieth monastery uses the 24-hour Western system.

Unforgettable images crowd the Athos traveler’s memory: the policeman taking his ease by reading Lysistrata. In one guestroom a lime-filled brazier-like pot provided with a spoon for use as a spittoon. The colorful painful beds with their local fauna, to be caught and cracked between the fingernails; the spot of blood was earlier supplied by the hunter himself. The briskly efficient breakfast tray for departing guests; veterans toss down the tiny glass of fiery raki, eat the spoonful of jam, drink the glass of water, drop the soiled spoon into the empty tumbler, and sip the boiling little cup of Turkish coffee for the final five minutes.

But of all the aspects of Athos, surely the most unusual is the total ban on females and female animals of any kind. Apparently the operative concept here is that women are evil, or at the root of evil. The monks, however, explain that the Blessed Virgin once paid Athos a visit when an adverse wind seized her boat and drove it ashore there. She promptly laid claim to the peninsula, so the legend goes, and excluded all other women from “her garden”. The ban was formalized and extended in a Byzantine bull issued in 1066 A.D., the year of William the Conqueror, forbidding access to Athos “to any woman, to any female, to any eunuch, to any child, to any smooth visage.” The exclusion rule has been faithfully enforced ever since, although there have been breaches by masquerading women and, during the Greek civil war following World War II, by Communist women partisans who joined a short-lived raiding party on the peninsular capital. The yowling of mating cats during spring nights has shown to more than one monastery guest another exception—this one granted of necessity by the monks who explain, “There are so many rats!”

The ban on “smooth visages” was enforced until fairly recent times by frontier guards who used a comb test. A young man presenting himself for enrollment as a novice had a heavy wooden comb thrust into his beard. If it dropped out, he was instructed to leave and return only after the hairs had increased in density and firmness. [Page 7] To this day, the monks cut none of their hair.

Two hundred square miles of reserved territory, Athos is virtually autonomous and manages to be, all at the same time, a republic, a democracy and a theocracy; in short, it is self-governing on a democratic basis with priests in control. Athos is under the political and economic sovereignty of Greece, but the sovereignty is largely external and is exercised mainly to protect the community’s internal calm. Day-to-day government is handled by the monks themselves through a Residence of Elders made up of one senior monk from each of the twenty monasteries. This Holy Synod, as it is also called, is essentially a legislative body, with certain small judicial functions as well. Important basic decisions made by the Synod, if spiritual, are subject to ratification by the Patriarch in Istanbul; if worldly, by Athens. By levying a three percent duty on Athonite imports and exports, the Holy Community amasses a good income of its own.

While the monks are all members of the Orthodox Church, they are by no means all Greeks. There are many Russians, plus a scattering of Serbians, Bulgarians, Rumanians, even Albanians. And in addition to the twenty major monasteries, all ringed by fortress walls, there are dozens of smaller dependencies ranging down to hermit colonies on cliff faces. There is also the occasional wild, wandering anchorite with a mind “kissed by God”. The wide variation of religious vocations to be found on the Holy Mountain constitutes one of its greatest strengths. No matter what a man’s inclination, he can find a calling on Athos satisfying to it; and if his inclination should change, so can he change his vocation. The variation is even reflected in the monasteries, some of which are run on strictly communal lines, with the individual monk owning no private property, not even his own clothes. Other monasteries permit a fairly individual way of life, with ownership of private property, but require members to assembly jointly at religious services. Whatever the monkish differences, Athos can properly be called a mini-nation of monks.

HOW DO THE ATHONITES live? By hard work mainly. Expropriation of lands over the centuries by Balkan and other nations, including Greece itself, has reduced many of the once-rich monasteries to penury; and the days of princely monks arriving with retainers to share their religious exile are long past. Nowadays the monks live by farming, fishing, timbering (a major source of wealth in lumber-poor Greece), and craftsmanship. Ikons and other holy relics made by Athonite painters and artisans are sold around the world wherever Orthodox communities flourish.

However, such industry is strictly secondary to the main occupation of Athos—religion. A monk attends several services every day and may average eight hours a day in church. Continuous church rites of 13 to 15 hours on feast nights are common, with the monks standing the entire time. Athonite fasts likewise tend to be long and rigorous. A typical day’s schedule at one monastery, which is by no means the most rigorous to be found on the Mountain, reveals the mode of life. At 4 a.m., the monks arise and attend matins and the liturgy in church, then have coffee; 7 to 10 a.m., special tasks; 10 a.m. to noon, study, talk with guests, etc.; noon to 3 p.m., lunch followed by rest; 3 to 4 p.m., vespers and compline; 4 to 6 p.m., special tasks; 6 to 9 p.m., prepare and eat evening meal, study; 9 p.m., pray in private and go to bed. This schedule is different on Sundays, major holy days, days when there are all-night services, and during long fasts. It also varies somewhat from season to season, depending on the daylight.

It is certain that no one remains on Athos because the life is easy. Yet the rewards of all this striving are many, and on several levels, as any visitor to Athos soon judges. The Holy Mountain is able to convert any [Page 8] traveler into a pilgrim through his contact with its inhabitants. Many of the monks have come full circle, from childhood to maturity, thence back to a cleansed new simplicity. The best of them are bearded children. Goodness shines forth from their faces. Their humility is Christ-like. Single-mindedly following the age-old vows of stability, obedience, poverty, and chastity, the monks teach their conviction that the fullest way of self-expression in the world can be accomplished by withdrawing from it. (The vow of stability binds the monk to remain for life in the same monastery.) They do not engage in an active apostolate, and never even seem to have considered it necessary. But their apostolate of prayer and example to the Orthodox world has been unexcelled, if remote and certainly failing to touch the average man, even in Greece.

Nowhere on Athos is life harder than in Karulia, a colony of hermits perched like swallows on a cliffside. Karulia is “The Desert”, the extreme, the glory of Athos. Many Athonite monks aspire to the arduous life it and other hermitages represent, but few are judged by their superiors to have sufficient character and fortitude for the life. On Athos permission to become a hermit is a prize to be earned only over long years.

The anchorites of Karulia represent the ascetic ideal roughened by exposure, dirty because cleanliness is considered a vanity, Clothed in wrappings and wearing crude sandals. Poverty combined with renunciation tends to erase the personalities of most of them. From their heroic resistance to heat and cold evolves a Christ-like humility, even a nullity of indifference. Negative, unremarkable, anaemic—such are the solitaries. The retreat inward makes these absolutist anchorites safe even from the impertinence of the curious.

One monk who represented in many ways the special qualities to be found in hermits, but who yet retained a distinctive personality, was Father Philarete, who lived in a tin shack in Karulia. He dined once a day on weak soup buttressed by chunks of stone-hard leftover bread given him by his parent monastery, drank tea of herbs he had plucked himself from amid the cactuses, and prayed most of his waking hours. He wore his long white beard in a utilitarian braid.

Philarete was old but spry as a goat, and volunteered one sunny morning some years back to guide some visitors around his unusual colony. It was a trip that combined hair-raising descents with dramatic bird’s-eye views of the cliffs. “Glory be to God!” Philarete would say in booming tones every several minutes, startling guests and wild life alike at each invocation.

A fellow monk praised Philarete as being a very holy man, a real knight of the faith, but Philarete remarked sadly, “Yes, I have been on the Mountain fifty years . . . but with little progress. I am the worst of men.”

A disaster befell Philarete some time later. A wanderer broke into a hut at Karulia and stole some articles. Philarete and other persons were called to mainland Salonika to testify. With the strictness that characterized him in his religious view, Philarete refused to take an oath that what he said was true, claiming that this would be contrary to Christ’s injunction which says: “Do not swear at all . . . but let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.” Since Greek law specifies that anyone who refuses to testify under oath is liable to punishment, Philarete was given a four-month jail term. Philarete endured his imprisonment without getting at all upset. He then calmly returned to Karulia to take up his old life, considering his prison sentence a punishment by God Himself for some element of vainglory that must have been lurking in him.

WHAT IS ATHOS today? It is first of all a place of memorable Arcadian beauty, an eternal world of sea and cliffs and sky. Amid the fading glory of the Mountain’s [Page 9]

[Page 10] motley monasteries, there is all that beauty to savor. Men need not despoil, after all. Forests need not be plundered, water fouled, habitations made a blot on the landscape. More than a millennium old, Athos is a living proof of man’s ability to wrest a living from barren rocks and to make a wild place flower.

Principles which are abstract concepts in the Western world actually constitute personal codes of conduct on Holy Mountain. Ideals are lived there day by day with unswerving devotion. Thus Athos provides a standard by which to measure experiences, people, beliefs; it serves as a kind of useful touchstone.

Of the Athonite scale of values, one can be more questioning. Is not the self-redemption which each monk seeks an essentially selfish goal? Should not a redeemed man help to redeem others and to redeem society itself? Athos concerns itself little with the test of the world, although its example may certainly be useful to those who may know of it. It does provide a valuable direct service to the Eastern Church by supplying priests and officials for service elsewhere, although this practice, largely forced upon it by the outside church, has been criticized on the Mountain as weakening Athos.

The celibate life constitutes another problem area. A contemporary Westerner trying to learn from the Athonite experience may well consider celibacy a largely outmoded medieval concept, useless as a solution to the larger social problems of the world today, however helpful it may have been in certain places and at certain times in the past. More germane perhaps is a general consideration of the retreat or the meditative period, the time of withdrawal for prayer and self-contemplation. A visit to Athos provides convincing evidence of the difficulties and discipline required really to enter into this life. Could one become a contemplative for a week? Certainly not, by the Athonite standard. For a month? Doubtful. For a sabbatical year? Perhaps, with work and a receptive spirit. But the example of a man’s successfully taking up the contemplative life toward the end of his days is seen everywhere on Athos. Could a youth become a contemplative for a time for the solidification of his manhood, then resume his former life? This would seem to be a proper question, but Athonite history suggests an answer in the negative. The experiences of Athos suggest that the rigors of monasticism are not for the young.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE of Athos? Archimandrite Gabriel of Dionysiou Monastery, in his book The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness, says: “We believe that the Mountain, by the Grace of God, will continue in existence till the end of time. . . . Souls beloved by God will never cease coming to it, because its spirituality will always have the power of attracting those who are heavy-laden with sin, and its holiness those who are pure of heart.” Nevertheless the population of monks is today under two thousand, some five and a half thousand less than it was at the turn of the century. The monks recall that there were even fewer monks after the Greek war of independence in the early 19th Century than there are today, yet Athonite monasticism made a strong comeback after that earlier decline. In any event, as Archimandrite Gabriel stresses, “The splendor and grandeur of the Holy Mountain is not to be judged by the small or large number of monks who dwell on it. This fluctuation has occurred many times during the thousand-year period of monastic life. . . .”

Although it is a peninsula, Athos has always seemed an island, surviving in the face of great adversities: pirate and crusader attacks, long centuries of Turkish occupation, a late 19th Century and early 20th Century Czarist plot to make a Russian base of the peninsula which was foiled only by the Communist revolution, Nazi conquest during World War II, the Red partisan invasion [Page 11] afterward, even recent locust swarms of tourist “beggars” (now banned) doing Greece on a shoestring, Latinizers, heretics, and internal schisms of one sort or another have been defeated. Even monkish torpor has given way to periods of enthusiasm and growth.

Surely, the survival of Athos into the 20th Century is largely accidental. And, although its lessons in harmonic living are beautiful ones, yet the applications of its modes of life seem increasingly remote. The Virgin’s Garden is a long, large, noble experiment in mankind’s groping for truth. It is an important phenomenon visible to and analyzable by the Western world. But the basic issues it raises are perhaps its most vital contribution, since these issues are of the highest relevance to mankind today.

Secularism in the world has apparently overwhelmed that genre of spiritual forces represented by Athos. Certainly the contemplative life has today been minimized, and its potential adherents caught up in today’s social trends. Certainly too the assumptions, aspects, and results of Athonite life must be critically examined: the erasure of the personality and the retreat inward; humility and the return to childlike attitudes of simplicity and wonder; the rigorous life of hardship and deprivation; the womanless life with that vital half of life experience completely cut away; the endless hours of prayer and meditation; the discipline of the religious communal life—all these values and aspects of Athos appear to bow before the hurricane of contemporary change. But should we return to some, adopt others in some modified forms, at least re-explore old “truths” for a new age?

To most men, life now is rarely simple, orderly, sincere, or of great depth. New approaches are clearly required to meet contemporary and future needs in a world never envisioned by the Byzantines—approaches that are global in scope and encompassing in doctrine. Yet, Holy Mountain does have one compelling message to give us, simple, and at the same time, profound. Salvation, it teaches, consists not in keeping up with the times, but in transcending them. It is an old lesson worth relearning.

The Holy Mountain plods into its second millennium of existence, a remarkable fossil. Suspended in time between Constantine and Makarios, Athos has lived long and lives the more.

[Page 12]

AMERICA

My country, ’tis to thee,

sweet land of—

sad land of misery,

to thee I sing.

Oh say! can you see

by the noontide’s hot fire

what so proudly you scorned

at the morning’s first gleaming?

whose black backs wore the stripes

of the slave driver’s lash,

who knew no loved homes

in the land of the white man’s pride

where our brothers died

and John Brown’s body

lies mouldering in the dust,

where Medgar Evers’ body

lies mouldering in the dust,

land where red men’s bodies—

land where black men’s bodies—

where men’s bodies lie broken

whose broad streams of bright blood

through the perilous years

cried out from the ground

to heedless generations—

Oh now! can you hear

the sighs of the poor

the gathering rage of the blood

the wailing and shouting

from sea to shining sea

from hearts where all sad songs have long been sung?

The earth itself has tired of the tyrant’s feet!

From every mountainside

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freedom rings not yet,

beloved country.

(—does that star-spangled banner yet wave

in the grasp of the worldly, in the door of the grave?)

O beautiful for spacious hearts,

America!

God shed His grace on thee!

The trials you have chosen,

the travail and the sorrow,

will deepen a while.

The cities will burn.

The pain of the prairies

will vie with the grief of the mountains.

Then will you see

the high made lowly.

Then will your tears

be fuel for a light.

Then will the world

behold as a beacon

a people arising.

The smell of the truth will be known,

the song of the nations.

Peace will be thy robe, and equity

will be thine adorning

and justice thy crown.

Do not despair,

though terrors yet unspoken be revealed;

for you will rise, not white, but purified,

America,

beloved land.

Rowell Hoff

[Page 14]

[Page 15]

A NEW UNIONISM

Focus on community-based organizations among slum dwellers in Chicago

By A. L. LINCOLN

THE DECADE of the nineteen-sixties has seen the emergence of a new breed of militant, community-based organizations among city slum dwellers. Chicago was one of the earliest centers of activity and now has more than a dozen of these “slum unions”. They have forerunners like Alinsky’s Back of the Yards Council, imitators and offshoots in other cities, and important differences among themselves, but collectively they represent a phenomenon worthy of critical attention.

These organizations are diverse in their origins, but they share a distinctive approach based on the realities of poverty in American cities. They reject the symbolic goals and appeals to conscience that have characterized much of the civil rights movement in favor of organizing the “grass roots” and gaining power for the poor themselves. Their aim is to change the slum-dweller’s hopeless and fatalistic apathy into a sense of efficacy and participation. To do so it is necessary to work with issues that concern poor people directly—bad housing conditions, inadequate welfare, chiseling merchants, and abusive police power. The disadvantaged population, it is believed, can best be reached and mobilized through these “bread-and-butter” issues, and the new movement’s closest identification is therefore with the labor union movement, rather than the more symbolic and status-oriented civil rights organizations. This kinship is often explicitly recognized by the adoption of such terms as “welfare union”, “tenant union”, “community union”, and “union to end slums”.

The implied parallel between these new organizations and labor unions raises some immediate questions. In what ways are they similar, and what does this enable us to say about their future? In all of American history, the labor movement stands as an almost unique example of organizational power and success among the scattered remnants of countless undernourished social movements. Will this new movement be able to achieve the organizational strength to survive the American climate? At the same time, the power and success of the labor movement in organizational terms is often contrasted with its lack of commitment to basic social values and its failure to champion the cause of those who need it most. Hence we may also wonder whether this new movement, if it survives, will genuinely serve the interests of the disadvantaged population. In attempting to answer these questions, we must inevitably face the even more troubling one of whether the twin goals of organizational strength and meaningful social change are in fact complementary or even compatible.

[Page 16] Although these questions are complex, they demand answers. To get at the dynamics of the situation and extrapolate into the future, an attempt will be made to generalize from the experience of the past few years in Chicago and draw on accumulated knowledge about the labor movement and organizations in general.

AN ORGANIZATION MAY be viewed as an exchange system, in which leadership offers “incentives” to induce constituents to contribute the time, effort, and resources which the organization needs to maintain itself. The political machine gets work from its precinct captains by promising them city patronage jobs, while reform clubs recruit volunteers by giving them reason to believe they are serving a righteous cause. Once the basic needs of organizational maintenance are determined, analysis should turn to the nature of the “incentives” which will appeal to a given constituency and to the tactics which will enable leadership to generate a continuous stream of such incentives. The study of these fundamental functional requirements has been found to reveal important influences on the ideology, structure, and policies as well as the viability of the resulting organization.

The first consideration in such an analysis is the nature of the organization’s potential membership base or “constituency.” The appeal of a given type of incentive to potential constituents depends on their special concerns, interests, and attitudes. At the same time, the constituency is the source of strategic leverage and contributions of time, effort, and resources. Therefore the nature of the slum constituency— its characteristic concerns, attitudes and interests, its resources and strategic position relative to the environment—will be the first topic of analysis.

This will lead into a study of the situation facing organization leadership—the constraints and opportunities imposed by the nature of the constituency and the range of available tactics. By considering the fruitfulness of such tactics in terms of “incentives” generated, some conclusions may be reached about the prospects for organizational maintenance and growth.

In a final section, four case studies will be used to analyze the influence of organizational needs on the development of ideology, structure, and policy. One may then consider whether an organization so constrained and so influenced can serve the interests of the disadvantaged in meaningful social change.

I. The Constituency

URBAN POVERTY is fruitful for organizing and for analysis precisely because it is more than simple relative economic ptivation; it is a syndrome of political and social, as well as economic, conditions. In Chicago, as in other cities, this class is made up primarily of racial and ethnic minorities—Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Appalachian whites—concentrated in certain areas of the city. The poor are not a completely homogeneous mass: Some are black, some brown and others white; some speak English, some Spanish; some are old and many are young; some have jobs and others are supported by welfare payments alone. They may also share the geographic community with more fortunate people—the Negro middle class trapped in the ghetto, small homeowners, storekeepers, ministers, and petty merchants. The organizer must be sensitive to these distinctions, but it is on the syndrome of poverty itself that he builds. Particularly important for his purposes is the array of forces and conditions which shape the daily lives and attitudes of [Page 17] the poor. These forces and conditions give rise to the grievances, the pressing concerns and the long-range interests with which he must work, and to the alienation and demoralization he must overcome.

Census statistics on substandard housing in slum areas of Chicago, fail to convey an adequate picture of the unhealthy, dangerous, and depressing conditions which prevail. Urban low-income housing is in extremely short supply, largely because of racial and class discrimination and government policies which have channeled all available funds into suburban home construction and high-rent apartment complexes. This seller’s market is further buttressed by an archaic common law concept of the lease which protects the landlord’s every interest while granting “. . . to the tenant the right to pay rent and precious little else.” Safe and sanitary conditions are supposed to be guaranteed by city housing and health codes, but they are seldom enforced, even when tenants complain.

The result is that the slum-dweller is forced to take what housing he can get, on the landlord’s terms. He must accept excessively high rent and overcrowding; he must learn to live with falling plaster, rotting woodwork, broken glass, treacherous stairways, unsanitary plumbing, erratic heat and water, lead poisoning, rats and cockroaches. The individual tenant has no bargaining power with his landlord, and moving out is no solution. His attempts to get the building code enforced may be met with retaliatory eviction or rent increase.

A LARGE PROPORTION, ordinarily ranging from twenty to forty percent, of the population of slum areas is on some form of public assistance, with Aid to Dependent Children and Old Age, Blind, and Disabled Assistance the major categories. Public assistance grants provide these people with the bare necessities of existence they would not otherwise have. Rather than alleviating poverty, however, the current welfare system actually reinforces many aspects of it.

In Chicago, as in New York, the caseworkers who administer the programs are among the most vocal critics. The International Union of Public Aid Employees has attacked the system for perpetuating unconscionable slum conditions by the low level of benefits, for discouraging initiative and self-help by its restrictive rules, and for destroying the autonomy and self-respect of recipients by subjecting them to constant interference, investigation, and indignity. One disillusioned caseworker told a reporter that she had come to the conclusion “that the whole system is designed to kick people when they’re down.” This disillusionment is spreading nationwide among those best acquainted with the operation of the welfare system. A professor at the Columbia School of Social Work has described the national welfare system as “characterized by a lawlessness, a discrimination by class and race, a disregard for human rights and dignity, and a niggardliness that are recurrent, often routine, if not institutionalized.”

Much of the state and national welfare legislation is still tainted with the ancient Elizabethan attitude to poor relief; it is designed to dispense the smallest possible benefits to the smallest possible number, and then only under the most trying and degrading conditions. The administration of welfare is even worse than the legislation. For every person receiving aid, there is at least [Page 18] one more in desperate need and fully eligible, but not on the rolls due to fear, ignorance, or arbitrary action by the local agency. The maximum budgets for recipient families are below most standards of health and decency, and any income or asset received by the family while on public aid is subtracted from the monthly grant.

Even with the most efficient housekeeping imaginable, it is impossible to build up any reserves; recipients must depend on special supplementary allowances for such things as furniture, laundry, winter clothing, carfare, and special dietary foods. These special checks can be issued only at the discretion of the caseworker and require vast amounts of complex paperwork. The staff is overworked, inexperienced, frustrated, and often sloppy and callous. In 1966 the turnover rate among caseworkers was 45% in the Cook County Department of Public Aid, and, as of October, 20% of the cases were not covered. Recipients are not informed of their rights and are systematically shortchanged while nine-tenths of the caseworker’s time is spent checking eligibility and investigating petty chiseling.

The limited range and number of available jobs is a basic problem for those who are employable. A large proportion of the poor are excluded from the labor force entirely —the young, the very old, the sick and disabled, the mothers with small children. Those who are able to work, however, face extraordinarily high rates of unemployment. One contributing factor is racial discrimination, in its most obvious form where even the supermarkets, shops, and loan companies in the black ghetto are manned by white workers. Discrimination by class is more subtle. The children of the poor are rejected because of their appearance, their address, their accent, or the amount or quality of their education. The trend toward geographical dispersion of employment also hurts slum-dwellers since the public transportation system is designed to carry people to and from the central business district.

The jobs the poor and the children of the poor are able to get are generally low-paid, irregular, and un-unionized. A prominent institution of slum life is the day labor agency which contracts to fill temporary needs for unskilled industrial or service manpower with casual workers recruited from the slum. Those who want work gather at the agency every morning at 5:30, the agent picks out the men he wants for the day and pays them the legal minimum wage while collecting the going rate from the employer. In order to use the services of the day labor agency, one must sign a contract not to accept permanent work with the employer. Many more jobs are available to the poor when the general labor market is tight, but even then, they are only the lowest paid and most insecure industrial, janitorial, and service positions.

THE QUALITY of public education has an important influence on the outlook and life prospects of the poor. The Chicago school system is highly segregated, and the percentage of children in segregated schools has actually increased in recent years. As the Supreme Court has held, segregated schools are inherently unequal because of the implied discrimination; but segregation also allows more concrete kinds of discrimination. Negro and lower class white schools have smaller per capita budgets, inferior facilities, larger classes, and more uncertified teachers. Overcrowding in slum schools has been relieved not by redistricting, but by the addition of temporary trailer classrooms, even when there is extra space in better schools nearby. The curriculum too has a class bias; what lower class children are asked to learn has no relevance to their experiences or prospects. The readers are [Page 19] peopled by white children of suburbia, not black children who live in tenements; the history books are full of kings and presidents, not workers or Negroes. The IQ tests which determine a child’s placement are based on unfamiliar concepts like “elephant” and “violin”, on reading skills they had no chance to acquire. The emphasis in lower class schools is on obedience and deference, not independent thought. Parents are unable to influence the school or even communicate effectively with the teacher. The school stifles independence and provides no outlet for frustration; apathy or revolt are natural responses.

The police also play a large role in slum life. They represent the awesome power of the larger society and exercise considerable power themselves. Research has shown that the police regularly violate the laws of criminal procedure governing arrest, search, and interrogation, frequently with the support or acquiescence of local courts. Most of the people in the slum are ignorant of their rights and too weak or poor to get redress. This gives the policeman less reason to exercise just restraint and often brings out the worst aspects of his character. A policeman in the slum feels himself in alien territory, constantly threatened by outbreaks of violence and tends to react aggressively on the slightest provocation; unnecessary roughness and brutality are commonplace. The police assigned to a particular area also react defensively as a group, if they feel their position of power in the community is threatened. They can use their considerable powers to harass or punish elements they regard as hostile. As a result, the police in the slum often appear to wield vast power unchecked by man or law. Due process has little meaning, and the poor are often treated as guilty until proven innocent.

Poor areas are plagued by a high incidence of consumer frauds. Many door-to-door selling operations concentrate on the slums precisely because of the gullibility and powerlessness of the residents. Unconscionable time payment contracts and shoddy merchandise abound. Slum stores also frequently take advantage of their customers by charging high prices for poor quality products. Repair shops regularly charge for unnecessary work, replace sound components with used parts, or refuse to return items left with them.

IN ADDITION to these constant features of slum life, there are certain kinds of events which can throw the entire community into chaos and cause even greater misery. The best example is urban renewal. In Chicago, federal urban renewal funds have generally been used to clear poor people out of an area and rebuild it for a new class of more desirable upper income residents. The program has also been used to clear large amounts of land for university and commercial use. The demolished low-income housing has not been replaced, no adequate program of relocation has been established, and most of the poor have been forced to move into other crowded slum areas. The urban renewal program has been tightly controlled by political and business interests which benefit from it, while the “community approval” provisions of the law were evaded by setting up “safe” local commissions to ratify the city’s plan.

The local agencies of the War on Poverty have been subject to the same political control and show the same insensitivity to the needs of the poor. This does not pose the [Page 20] same kind of threat as the massive land-taking of urban renewal, but where expectations were raised in advance, resentment is strong.

Most of the problems besetting the poor have long been recognized, several have received a good deal of attention in recent years, and yet in the slum there is little sign of progress and little cause for optimism. These problems persist because they are deeply rooted in the economic, political, and social structure of the nation. Many of the abuses in the welfare system result from the fact that the poor lack political power and must depend on the liberals to fight their battles for them. In many areas there are powerful forces working to make the system even more restrictive than it is. Without an effective mass base the liberal elements are weak, and even their victories may not represent the true interests of those they are trying to help. The housing problems of the slum are a function of a weak and corrupt urban real estate market and of government policies favoring suburban homeowners. The interests of the poor are not protected in the labor market because marginal and unemployed workers are not organized or represented by unions. The poor are shortchanged or discriminated against in education and city services because the politicians know there is little the poor can do. They are too ignorant, frightened, and disorganized to use the channels open to other groups in the city, and their votes are easily manipulated if they vote at all.

Some of the reasons for the powerlessness of the poor are quite obvious. The lack of spare time, money, and education clearly inhibit the ability of the poor to make their desires felt by those in power. Another major factor is the social and cultural aspect of poverty. In studies of different ethnic groups in several countries, Oscar Lewis found that there was a universal “culture of poverty” displayed by disadvantaged groups in capitalistic societies. Education, communications media, and advertising indoctrinate the poor with the tastes of an affluent society and the norms of a society which judges a man by what he earns and what he owns. They are taught to value things they can never attain, and they are taught that only the unworthy fail. Everything the society tells them makes them feel shut out of the mainstream and cut off from all that is good in life, and it makes them believe it is all because of their own failings. Self-respect is quashed, and the natural result is hopelessness, suppressed anger and guilt, apathy, and the demoralization and degeneracy which reinforce all the other conditions of poverty and give it its prison-like quality.

II. Opportunities and Constraints

THESE, THEN, ARE the conditions, interests, and attitudes with which a slum organizer must work. What kinds of opportunities and constraints do they represent to organizers in their efforts to build an organization?

Clark and Wilson, in their paper on “incentive systems” refer to three types of incentives—material, purposive, and solidary. Material incentives are tangible rewards such as patronage in a political machine or salaries in a business firm. Purposive incentives are “ideological” in the sense that they involve agreement on some more or less distant goal and on a strategy for advancing toward that goal. The inducement to participate in an ideological organization is evidence of unity and vindication of principles. Solidary incentives refer to the value people place on associating with congenial, like-minded, or status-conferring company. Of these, the first two seem particularly relevant; the role of solidary incentives in slum organizing is distinctly limited and will simply have to be assumed.

Some distinction should be made between phases of the organizing process. Inducements [Page 21] which are sufficient to hold an organization together may not be sufficient to arouse potential members from apathy to action; conversely, techniques which are effective for mobilizing people in the first instance may not provide a basis for lasting organization. Lewis found that the culture of poverty included a distrust of outsiders or anyone who professes unselfish motives, a very cautious approach to risk-taking, and a deep reluctance to “get involved”. Slum organizers have been able to gain legitimacy for their efforts only by demonstrating real concern with the most salient of the “real” problems facing potential members, and by appealing to the pragmatic tradition of group action for group interests exemplified by the American labor movement. Still the resistance to involvement is great and often the only way to overcome it is to “rub raw” the latent resentments—stir up suppressed anger and focus it on some external object or enemy. Slum organizers must therefore search out and exploit issues with a high emotional content.

The prospects for viable organization may also be affected by certain other aspects of the constituency. Any organization requires some funds, if only for such basic equipment as a telephone and a typewriter. The need for money varies with the type of tactics employed, but the source of funds can be problematic with a constituency which is by definition impoverished. The need for contributions of time, effort, and skill also varies with the tactical mix, but a given form of participation may have costs or side-benefits depending on the overall structure and strategy of the organization. Finally, the configuration of common and conflicting interests, unifying and divisive issues in the constituency shapes the scope or organizational activity, the size of the most effective membership unit, and the internal cohesion of that unit.

HOUSING. The objective conditions of slum housing press themselves on the consciousness with immediacy and persistence. They achieve especially high salience when children are the victims of lead poisoning, rat-bites, or illness caused by lack of heat. Sometimes anger and outrage can be focused on the landlord, but this hostility is hard to sustain since there is little personal friction or contact; blame for many problems is placed on more visible scape-goats—fellow tenants. Organization has only been successful where the anger against the landlord could be used to overcome the petty divisiveness.

The most common tactic in the housing area is the rent strike. The basic idea of the rent strike originated in New York and has been used extensively in Chicago by Englewood Civic Organization, JOIN, and locals of the Union to End Slums in Lawndale and East Garfield Park. Like the labor strike, the rent strike is an effort to coerce the owner of the means of production by interrupting the flow of revenue from the production process. Because of the high fixed costs of building operation—regular mortgage, tax and utility payments—the weapon of rent withholding is a fairly powerful one. In a small building, even a partial rent strike can cause heavy financial losses. The major difficulty with the rent strike is that it is illegal in Illinois. If a landlord has the financial reserves to withstand the initial pressure, there are strong retaliatory weapons at his disposal. In a strike called by the Tenants Action Council at the Old Town Garden Apartments in August 1966, the landlord got 130 eviction orders and had the police physically remove most of the leaders. Eight people were arrested and charged with criminal trespass for chaining themselves to radiators [Page 22] or trying to move furniture back. Once the strike is over the landlord can usually claim back rent where the premises have not in fact been vacated.

Other tactics employ the leverage of publicity. The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) has picketed buildings and used sound trucks to advertise their complaints. The bad publicity can hurt a landlord quite severely since his profits are often closely tied to the vacancy and turnover rate in his buildings. Several organizations have also conducted informational picketing at the landlord’s suburban home to embarrass him before his neighbors. The Mile Square Federation passed out pamphlets at the opening of Marina City explaining that one of the prominent promoters of that luxury complex was also the owner of some rather disgraceful slum tenement buildings.

The most important obstacle to lasting success in the tenant organizing, however, lies not in the power of the landlord but in the limited concessions he is in a position to make. Since tenant action is essentially a consumer boycott, the landlord cannot pass the cost of concessions on in higher prices as many industrial employers can. Mortgage payments are fixed, taxes tend to rise from year to year, and the cost of labor and materials for maintenance is on the increase. While there are some large and apparently prosperous slum real estate operators, many of the “slumlords” are small investors locked into unprofitable holdings by falling prices. Even where there is a profit being made, it is frequently not made by the landlord, but by the mortgageholder. The building owner may have been forced to accept an inflated mortgage or a high rate of interest because he lacked capital of his own, or the inflated mortgage may be a ruse to camouflage the real beneficial ownership of the building.

One large real estate management company told a Wall Street Journal reporter that it had increased its expenditures for maintenance substantially after tenant protest actions, but the general experience has been that little material improvement is forthcoming. Tenant unions have been able to win extremely favorable contract terms from landlords, but they have found them largely unenforceable. Often the landlord simply cannot live up to the promises made under pressure; several, including the owners of the Old Town Garden Apartments, have made desperate attempts to sell their property on any terms. The only way to squeeze concrete improvements out of such a situation would be to help the landlord cut costs by reducing turnover and tenant-inflicted damage. The gains from such cooperation would be likely to be small relative to the loss in the emotional impact of the issue.

While the housing issue is one of the most salient in the slum community, the available tactics do not seem capable of generating dependable streams of incentives over the long run. Not only are the concrete material gains extremely scanty, but the problem itself is so complex, the enemy so obscure, and the solution so elusive that few compelling ideological rallying points can be found. The housing issue can be useful in stirring people up and bringing them together with fellow tenants, but, as mentioned above, it can also have strong divisive effects.

The Englewood Civic Organization made an attempt to use the landlord-tenant bargaining relationship as a source of revenue by inserting a “dues check-off” provision in the contract. Since the amount of rent paid by the tenants was to remain unchanged, the landlord would essentially be paying tribute to the union out of his own pocket. If such a provision was ever enforced, it would undoubtedly [Page 23] be invalidated by the courts. In at least one case, however, the housing issue has lent itself to the creation of a decentralized structure of building stewards and has aided in recruiting and training new volunteer workers for the organization.

WELFARE. The inadequacies and abuses of the welfare system have extremely high salience to recipients and potential recipients; the benefits are often the sole source of food and clothing for clients and their children. There is generally a large reservoir of repressed resentment at the humiliating and niggardly treatment which can be focused on the impersonal bureaucratic structure of the Department of Public Aid. This anger is kept alive by frequent contact with callous caseworkers and rude officials.

The most effective role for an organization is as advisor and advocate of aggrieved clients against the agency. In Chicago, this tactical approach has been used by Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), The United Friends (TUF), JOIN, and the West Side Organization (WSO). At first, organized clients were confronted by a complete refusal to meet on the part of the agency. When, in separate incidents, recipients and organizers from JOIN and WSO insisted on their right to be heard, they were arrested for trespass. Once the welfare office has agreed to deal with the organization, it can be forced to make material concessions simply because many of the commonest abuses are directly contrary to the department’s own rules. WSO claims to have processed 1,341 grievances in an eighteen-month period without losing a single case. Where the source of the abuse is in the regulations themselves or in the basic legislative instruments, there is strong opposition to change. The pressure from tax-payers’ groups and anti-“dole” public opinion is powerful and persistent, and, even where the system is obviously inadequate or unfair, the welfare department generally arranges special exceptions to avoid more basic changes. A legal approach based on federal welfare legislation and constitutional rights might be more effective in changing some of the regulations and practices, but it would be prohibitively expensive for most community organizations.

The steady stream of small but tangible benefits produced by a welfare grievance operation can be used to win gratitude and loyalty. This type of activity also affords an opportunity for recipients themselves to participate in negotiations and in teaching and advising others. In addition, experience working with welfare grievances carries with it definite lessons of an ideological nature. The hypocritical cruelty of the system gives workers the assurance of a righteous cause; the political bias is obvious, and the needed changes are clearly radical rather than gradual. Many individuals and groups have independently come to the conclusion that the only solution is to abolish the entire system and replace it with some more equitable and humane form of income redistribution such as the guaranteed minimum income. The welfare issue can thus play an important part in building consensus within an organization, and in “radicalizing the constituency”. The most severe disadvantage of welfare organizing lies in the danger of alienating segments of the community which consider themselves one step above welfare recipients and which hew to the anti-“dole” line with almost fanatical intensity. Welfare organizing provides no source of operating funds, but the tactics involved do not require large expenditures.

[Page 24] JOBS. The frustration of joblessness has considerable importance to the unemployed worker, but the cause of his hardship is obscured by application procedures, qualification requirements, limited geographic mobility, and economic conditions which limit the total amount of work available. Frequently there is no obvious enemy, and men are led to see their difficulties as a sign of their own worthlessness. Only in the black ghetto, where racial discrimination is openly visible is there a clear enemy—and even then it is hard to show the connection between that enemy and any particular aggrieved job-seeker.

The picketing of discriminatory employers has been tried on the West Side by WSO and the Mile Square Federation, and, in combination with a consumer boycott, it has been quite effective in changing hiring practices of those merchants and service establishments which depend on the local market. Even when such action does succeed in opening up new jobs for local people, the organization has no control over them; it cannot specify who is hired and thus loses the patronage effect. The problem of unemployment in a capitalistic society is so complex that few lessons can be drawn without a broader ideological analysis of the system as a whole. The tactics provide relatively little opportunity for active participation of volunteers, and since the rewards of success are so arbitrarily distributed, there is no real incentive for cooperative effort. There is also no apparent way to generate the operating funds to make the effort self-sustaining. As a result most of the grass-roots community organizations have dropped the issue, leaving it up to a group of clergymen who work under the slogan, “Operation Breadbasket: Your Ministers Fighting for You.”

SCHOOLS. Inadequacy and discrimination in education is an issue with high emotional content because of the cultural emphasis on education as the means of mobility. The enemy may be a local school administration, particular teachers, the school board, or the system as a whole.

The only available tactics involve the use of protest and publicity to mobilize the pressure of public opinion. TWO arranged an elaborate set of hearings in which slum school teachers, their identities concealed by sheets, testified about the disgraceful conditions in their schools. The Union to End Slums took part in a mass protest march organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Boycotts have also been tried with varying success. Still there have been few concrete improvements and fewer indications of overall progress. The problem of education lends itself to a variety of different ideological interpretations—the proponents of change are divided among the doctrines of “integrated education”, “quality education”, and “community control”.

This issue, like many of the others, provides an initial excuse for bringing people together, but little opportunity for satisfying involvement over the long run. Money can be collected only by formulating an ideology to appeal to middle class liberal fund sources, at the risk of alienating local people.

POLICE BRUTALITY. Incidents of police brutality arouse a flurry of outrage, but it tends to die down quickly. The enemy is clear, but far too powerful to oppose with impunity. The only tactic employed thus far has been protest, but even that has turned out to be a very risky business. Many organizations have experienced systematic patterns of harassment, and there have been a few cases of heavy retribution. Two weeks after a police brutality protest march, the offices of JOIN and United People were turned into a shambles by police raids. A meeting between [Page 25] American Civil Liberties Union lawyers and a group of youths in Woodlawn was disrupted by a raid, and several groundless arrests were made. These incidents of retaliation were followed by an understandable lull in organizational activity on the police issue, but in recent months there has been new discussion of collecting evidence on police abuses and educating slum people about their rights.

While the material rewards of work with this issue have been negative, the experience does have a distinct radicalizing effect, and the purposive incentives generated in this way seem to appeal to the young people who are both the most adventurous and the most frequent victims of police abuse. It is, however, a dangerous form of action for any organization to undertake, because the fear and intimidation can have the effect of isolating the few committed activists or of dividing even a relatively cohesive membership against itself. The issue affords no way of collecting money, but free legal aid can often be obtained. There is also a chance for effective use of less skilled volunteers in the education and evidence-collecting activities.

CONSUMER FRAUDS. Outrage over consumer frauds is usually fragmented and intermittent, because most of the chiseling is itself disconnected and sporadic. When there is a persistent pattern of fraud by particular businesses, then it can become a group grievance and an organizable issue. Community organizations have found ways of putting pressure on local businesses by picketing and consumer boycotts. TWO had a massive “square deal parade” down the main business street of Woodlawn. They also collected evidence about false weights and shoddy merchandise to use in negotiations with the store owners. The itinerant selling operation is harder to trap; legal action and consumer education seem about the best possibilities.

The tactics used may have some real influence in persuading merchants to modify their practices, but except in cases where actual refunds are granted, no direct material gains result from organization actions. The issue also lacks ideological implications, except possibly in the case of racial resentment against Jewish merchants in black ghetto areas. Again it is hard to see where operating funds can come from. The opportunity for volunteer participation varies with tactics, but is nowhere likely to be extensive or lasting.

URBAN RENEWAL. To be effective, organizing on one-shot issues like urban renewal must be done before the event takes place. People must be convinced that the threat is real even when it is not evident. The issue seems to be most salient to the segments of the community with the longest time-horizons and the largest stake—the businesses, churches, and small home owners rather than the very poor. If people can be convinced of the grave nature of the threat, they will grasp at any straw of hope the organization can offer them. Most community resistance to city urban renewal plans has been futile. One notable exception is The Woodlawn Organization’s battle against the University of Chicago’s plan for expansion into Woodlawn. Using leadership from the churches and financial backing from the affected businesses, TWO mounted an impressive campaign culminating in a mass sit-in in the Mayor’s office. At length the Mayor conceded the organization a substantial voice in the planning process. The stakes of an urban renewal battle are high, and interested groups can be called upon to contribute considerable backing during the crisis period. For many of these groups the experience of fighting a City Hall responsive only to big business and upper-class interests does have teaching value. The outstanding feature of urban renewal as an issue is the opportunity it affords for bringing together at least temporarily elements of the community that have few other interests in common.

In contrast with this massive array of [Page 26] issues, the labor organizer deals with only a small cluster of concerns focused around the basic struggle between labor and management over the division of benefits and burdens in the production process. The early organizers of the labor movement benefited from the salience of wage income and job conditions, they exploited the repressed hostility to the “bosses”, and they exacerbated the friction between managers and workers. They chose a central tactic and developed its effectiveness even though it was at first illegal. The strategic leverage of the strike, coupled with the prosperity of most sectors of the American economy, made it capable of generating a substantial stream of tangible material gains. During the early period of comparative weakness and during depressions, the unions supplemented the relatively meager material gains by exploiting the ideological potential of the conflict with capital.

With the coming of good times, ideological appeals were dropped in favor of more manageable material incentives. The labor union is also fortunate in having, in the employment relationship itself, an excellent source of funds. Wage deductions for dues are accepted as a cost of holding the job and a legitimate “commission” to the union for its efforts in improving conditions. Unions at first made extensive use of volunteer workers as shop stewards, but the importance of the steward system in internal communication and policy formation was gradually overshadowed by paid staffs of economists and time-study experts. The conflict with management forced a certain cohesion on the work force; the need for solidarity was clear in the strike and in the concept of collective bargaining. Internal divisions and conflicts arose, but mainly over the division of gains won from management.

The sheer multiplicity of issues in slum organizing can be either an asset or a liability. There is danger of spreading scarce resources too thinly, dissipating vital energy needlessly in unrelated undertakings. In addition, the different segments of the slum constituency reached by different issues may be antagonistic to each other. The welfare issue does have a divisive effect, at least initially, and the urban renewal issue may show up an even deeper divergence of interests. On the other hand, while the pool of able-bodied job-seekers overlaps but little with the mass of old and young, sick, disabled, and infirm dependent on welfare, they have a common interest in a more adequate and humane system of relief. The distinction between the young people interested in police brutality and the family heads concerned with housing conditions is merely a matter of a generation. There is no logical reason why these segments of the constituency cannot gain by supporting each other. To some extent, the opportunities and constraints associated with the different issues may turn out to be complementary. It may be possible to arouse the interest of a potential member on one issue, bring him into the organization and put him to work on another, and educate him with the ideological lessons of a third.

III. Ideology, Structure, and Policy

THESE, THEN, ARE the basic elements of the situation facing the organizer—the constraints, the opportunities, and the organizational needs with which he must work. Clearly the most difficult problem is making the transition from initial excitement to stable, lasting, and autonomous organization. An organization simply cannot be maintained on excitement alone if it is to achieve permanence [Page 27] or strength; and yet the very process of routinization may transform it so fundamentally that it is no longer faithful to its original purpose.

In terms of incentive theory, leaders must seek rationality and efficiency in the exchange system of incentives and contributions. They are led to concentrate the available incentives on gaining those contributions which are seen as most essential. The set of priorities and values formulated or adopted by the organization as its ideology defines what contributions are most essential and what kinds of incentives members can expect in return.

The American cultural bias in favor of material, pragmatic values tends to make organizations judge themselves in terms of immediate, tangible gains. This climate affects leaders, members, peers, and competitors alike, and it exerts strong pressures for an organization to specialize in those areas or those methods which produce the most demonstrable successes. Leaders are led to cultivate the segments of their constituency with the greatest concentration of resources or leverage. Organizational goals and policies are reshaped to generate incentives which please these essential contributors, while those with less to contribute are given marginal concessions or ignored entirely.

It is too early to predict with certainty the course of the slum union movement, but the influence of these cultural forces can already be seen in the developmental patterns of Chicago’s militant community organizations. We will have to extrapolate from the case material available to us at this time.

THE WOODLAWN ORGANIZATION. TWO is the oldest (1960) and most famous of Chicago’s slum organizations. It was started by paid organizers from Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, backed by grants from the Catholic and Presbyterian churches and a foundation. The initial organizing consisted of rubbing raw the latent frustrations of slum dwellers and searching out natural leaders and hot issues. The real catalyst, however, was the threat of land-taking by the University of Chicago under the aegis of the city urban renewal program. This issue was the basis of a coalition of block clubs, mostly composed of small home owners, and local church leadership, supported by business organizations, labor unions, social clubs, and fraternal orders. After a mass march to City Hall and a sit-in outside the Mayor’s office, an agreement was signed by Mayor Daley and the University representative granting TWO’s major demand about the pace and scope of renewal and giving the organization the right to appoint a majority of the planning committee and veto the selection of a program director. The organization then turned to the issues of housing, consumer frauds, and schools, and applied similar tactics. Publicity and mass demonstrations organized through the block clubs and churches were used to develop leverage for negotiations with landlords, merchants, and school officials.

In structure, TWO is a federation of about a hundred separate groups—churches, block clubs, business associations, and the like— held together by the slogan of “Self-determination for Woodlawn.” Even in statements for mass consumption, TWO leaders shy away from ideological appeals, feeling that it is quite radical enough for slum-dwellers to demand their fair share of the pie. No unnecessary meetings are held, and the emphasis is always on action which can produce visible results; organizational power is never wasted in areas where there is little chance of immediate success. Much has been made of TWO’s victories over the “power structure”, and it was hailed by Charles Silberman as “the most impressive experiment affecting Negroes anywhere in the United States.”

[Page 28] There was, moreover, a noticeable shift in TWO’s tactical mix over time. Instead of organizing new mass actions, the leaders did more negotiating with “outside powers” on the strength of previous demonstrations of power. It become more and more a staff operation. The ranks of the natural leaders thinned down to the most able and ambitious; a few among them became pre-eminent. Soon a relatively small elite group of leaders, many of whom actually had homes outside Woodlawn, were running the organization subject only to the check of the annual Constitutional Convention. The personal relationships between TWO leaders and people in the power structure of the City and University grew closer and closer. The University began a deliberate policy of helping TWO to build its power in Woodlawn. University connections helped the organization get a manpower training grant from the U.S. Department of Labor and may have been influential in negotiations with the City for a new police commander. Plans are currently being developed for a social service center and an urban education center to be established in Woodlawn with University funds and joint TWO-University control. Other recent activities have included a clean-up drive and a campaign to dry up a local skid row. While TWO has been concentrating its efforts on this type of issue, there have been increasing signs of disaffection at the grass-roots level. Groups of concerned parents have accused TWO leadership of getting too far removed from the people and their problems; the most active youth groups in the area have also felt obliged to take up a separate position to the left of TWO.

There are definite parallels between TWO’s line of development and that of the Back of the Yards Council, which started as a militant slum organization in the neighborhood Upton Sinclair described as “the jungle” during the thirties, and which is now a strongly conservative home owners’ association dedicated to the fight against open housing. Alinsky himself explains this development as a result of rising prosperity brought about through the efforts of the Council. The problems of the Negro ghetto, however, are much deeper, and TWO can only claim success by ignoring many of the most stubborn ills. The gains that TWO leaders have achieved benefit mainly the more fortunate elements of the community. TWO leadership, in its search for leverage against the city and the University, has been led to cultivate those richest in resources and influence. Some new leadership talents have been discovered, and some existing leaders have been raised to new positions of power, but the overall change is small. If the weakest and neediest were ever reached, they have since become disaffected, lost interest, and dropped back into apathy.

THE UNION TO END SLUMS. The Union to End Slums was a product of an alliance between the AFL-CIO Industrial Unions Department (dominated by the United Auto Workers) and Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Organizing efforts began in East Garfield Park, and later another “local” was established in Lawndale. This joint undertaking served at first as a vehicle for a splinter group in SCLC to move away from Dr. King’s symbolic “strategizing” to what they saw as more practical endeavors. The UAW was at the same time seeking identification with a progressive cause both to show its idealism and to win the confidence of Negro workers it hoped to organize. With labor advice and backing, the SCLC workers began organizing tenants around the housing issue. Captivated by the tenant union-labor union analogy, they mounted a major drive to win collective bargaining contracts with landlords.

The auto workers’ union was generous in its support of this drive, and under the pressure one of the city’s largest real estate firms signed a contract covering forty buildings, only a few of which had actually been organized. The leadership of the local Union to End Slums found it very difficult to organize the tenants after the major crisis had passed, [Page 29] and impossible to enforce the contract without organization. There was some feeling that the labor partners, with their high powered tactics, had moved too fast.

As the drive for bargaining rights continued, they started running into small landlords who were genuinely unable to meet the demands for repairs and who were essentially tied to their unprofitable holdings by the weakness of the market. While the labor leaders saw this as a strategic pitfall, a chance for the landlords to “shift the crisis back to us,” the local organization leadership was disposed to work out an accommodation. This debate coincided with an ideological development in another wing of SCLC in favor of economic self-determination in the ghetto to be achieved through communal ownership of housing and businesses. This was suddenly seen as the solution to the problem of the weak landlord, and a four million dollar grant was obtained to purchase buildings and convert them into some form of cooperative.

Where the pressure to produce immediate results led TWO to specialize in a narrow tactical approach, the Union to End Slums was induced to concentrate on a single issue. This left the question of goals and tactics up to an internal struggle between groups. The relationship between the local organization leadership and its backers in SCLC and the UAW illustrates the problem of split constituencies. The danger in the latest development phase is, as it was in the first phase, that policy will be shaped to the ends of one of the supporting organizations, resulting in a loss of contact with the slum constituency.

WEST SIDE ORGANIZATION. The West Side Organization was formed in 1963 with the backing of the Urban Training Center for the Christian Mission, an ecumenical offshoot of the National Council of Churches. The UTC was conceived as an effort to make the Church more “relevant” by giving clergymen three, six, or nine months of exposure to the problems of the inner city slum; they were at first mainly interested in WSO as an opportunity for trainees to do field work in the neighborhood. UTC staff shared control of WSO with a small group of leaders recruited from the area. After some experimentation with employment and other issues, welfare was picked as the main focus of activity.

A highly effective grievance procedure was established, and within the first eighteen months over twelve hundred grievances were successfully processed. Within a much shorter period, involvement with the welfare issue began shaping the perspectives of the organizers. The problem was no longer seen as a matter of isolated cases of abuse, but rather as a systematic pattern of humiliation and exploitation by a system existing as a “parasite on the misery of the poor.” The ills of the present system, it was concluded, could only be cured by its abolition and replacement by a guaranteed minimum annual income. Experience also indicated that the collapse of the welfare system could be brought about simply by forcing it to live up to all its statutory obligations. A “welfare union” was set up with this as a stated goal, and attempts were made to extend it citywide by alliances with other community organizations working on the welfare issue. The WSO leadership also sought to build up a body of adherents in its own area through a system of block clubs. Still there is no real effort to appeal to the broader slum community, and other more general-purpose organizations have grown up in the same neighborhood [Page 30] to fill unmet needs.

To a certain extent WSO seems to be using the material incentive generated by welfare tactics to cultivate a constituent base, albeit a rather specialized one. Discussion of the ideological implications of the issue seems so far to be limited to a narrow leadership group, and organization policy is still much influenced by the need to generate purposive incentives of a dramatic sort for the benefit of UTC trainees.

JOIN COMMUNITY UNION. JOIN was originally organized by a group of radical college students from the Students for a Democratic Society. They brought with them certain ideological preconceptions about the need for broad social change, and a commitment to the principles of “participatory democracy”. Early organizing focused around a wide range of issues—housing conditions, welfare, consumer frauds, police brutality, and abusive treatment of community people by the local agency of the War on Poverty. Rent strikes resulted in three contracts with landlords; a local merchant was forced to sign a fair practices agreement and repay people he had cheated; welfare grievances were processed; and a variety of different protest actions were carried out against the police, the OEO-funded Urban Progress Center, and the city administration.

The organizers soon recognized that direct action on these issues, even when it produced tangible results, did not get at the roots of the problems that concerned them. Rent strikes and welfare grievance handling, no matter how successful, could not change the fundamental realities of poverty and powerlessness. This apparent gap between the daily work of organizing and the overall goals of social change threatened to destroy the ideological cohesion of the organization. The flow of purposive incentives was weakened, and the contributions of organizing staff began to fall off. It became clear that unless something was done to deepen the consensus and reintegrate the intermediate and long range goals, the organization would stagnate.

A formal school was established to give organizers a more thorough understanding of the forces behind the problems they saw and to educate them in long range strategy and goals. At the same time, increased attention was devoted to political action as an intermediate goal, and foundation stones were laid for coalitions with other slum community organizations. A proposal for JOIN to run its own candidate for alderman in the 48th ward was defeated only by a narrow margin, in spite of the enormous odds against success in such a venture.

It was also decided that direct action tactics on major issues should be continued as a way of recruiting new members, giving them basic leadership skills and introducing them to a sense of efficacy and participation in decision-making. This recruiting system was supplemented by an informal program of dramatic skits designed to introduce audiences to a wide range of slum issues and to make an openly ideological appeal to potential members.

By defining success in terms of fundamental social change, JOIN chose an incentive system based primarily on ideological inducements. It also picked a goal so general and sweeping that it could only be reached through the participation and proselytizing efforts of the largest possible body of people. This strategy is firmly based on the realization that the only real leverage for fundamental social change lies in the collective beliefs and desires of the people, but it runs directly counter to the prevailing standards of tight organization, clearly defined goals, and success measured by material tokens. The pressure of these constricting standards cannot be escaped, and many of the most important battles for such an organization will be internal struggles over key questions of organizational goals, principles, and structures. It is precisely in this area that some of the most crucial innovations must be made.

[Page 31]

Morality without Religion: Is It Possible?

By FARHAD KAZEMZADEH

THE QUESTION whether morality can have a separate existence from religion is a perennial one. The views held by philosophers and theologians cover a broad spectrum, but the more extreme positions have always attracted a greater following and are more interesting to compare since they draw the issue more sharply.

The theists, represented by Augustine, Aquinas, Butler, and Paley, have argued that ethics can only be understood in terms of religion, while such influential thinkers as Kant, Hume, and Spinoza have tried to give morality an independent existence. In recent times theists have been increasingly outnumbered by their opponents in spite of the historical fact that religiously inspired ethical codes have enjoyed the greatest vigor and the longest success. The reasons for the opposition to the theists are many, but the most important are the following:

1. The critics of theism point to the disunity of traditional religions and claim that no worthwhile system of morality could contain so many different viewpoints; 2. They point out the schisms within traditional religions and again apply the criticism stated above; 3. They argue that, assuming traditional religions could be reconciled and given some sort of harmony, the task would still be futile since the once vigorous religions have become ossified and are no longer relevant to contemporary problems.

These are valid criticisms as far as they go; unfortunately, they have caused thinkers to jump to the conclusion that religion in principle cannot serve as a ground for morality. A discussion of whether such a conclusion is logically and factually supportable must be postponed for the moment. First, we must consider the alternative foundations for morality proposed by the critics to fill the vacuum left by rejected religion.

One alternative is secularism, an ethical theory which refuses to recognize anything as sacred or holy. Some secularists believe that the foundation of morality may be laid on the discoveries of social sciences. Another alternative is humanism, a theory which selects for the object of its devotion human society as a whole, or some policy or principle concerned with human society. Both of these alternatives to theism have serious drawbacks. It is my purpose to expose their weaknesses while arguing that morality without the support of religion is impossible. To accomplish this I shall first examine the nature of religion in order to discover those points at which it crosses over into the sphere of morality.

What Is Religion?

IN THE WIDEST SENSE religion may be defined as man’s belief in the existence of God and in his duties and obligations to Him. A revealed religion is one in which man’s beliefs are based on his acceptance of specific revelation. The term natural religion may be applied to beliefs primarily derived from man’s ratiocinative powers. Since historically the great religious movements have been of the revealed kind, I shall henceforth use [Page 32] the term religion to mean revealed religion.

The central feature of religion is that it presents to the believer the ultimate ground for his being. It tells him why he exists and what he must do to realize his full potential. Dewey says that religion unifies the self in devotion to something beyond itself. This is the private or internal aspect of religion. Man thrown on his own resources feels weak and unprotected. He sees no meaning in his life on this planet. In his solitude the creature turns to the Creator for protection and forgiveness. Only in Him does he hope to find eternal peace. The private aspect is characterized by the feeling of awe on the part of man; some have described it as the feeling of the numinous, and the mystics go as far as saying that the experience is entirely ineffable. But the realization by the creature of the existence of the Supreme Being is incomplete without his acceptance of his duties toward God. The inspiration derived from prayer and meditation gives man the power to act in accordance with God’s will.

But religion is more than an attitude of devotion, for it has a public or external side as well. Man is a product of society and achieves full realization of his potential in it rather than outside it. In dealing with man as a social being, religion concerns itself with concrete problems resulting from interaction between people. It first presents society with the ultimate ends, and then directs that social justice be accomplished in general or specific ways. Public works and public worship are two manifestations of public religion. The internal and the external aspects of religion complement each other; both are essential for a full religious life. If the individual shuns the public aspect of religion, he runs the danger of becoming selfish; but public works without private contemplation might become misdirected if the ultimate goals are not kept before the mind, and might become stagnant if the inspiration derived from private contemplation is not continually brought to it. To be religious one must have a private understanding of one’s duties to God, and then go beyond the inwardness of one’s feelings and needs to lose oneself in the service of the religious community.

Religion and Morality

MORALITY HAS A MORE limited scope than religion. It is a set of rules of conduct, a hierarchy of values with which to solve ethical problems. For the most part the rules of morality are remnants of codes of religious traditions as they have been supplemented by succeeding revelations, and misunderstood and distorted by man. Assuming, for argument’s sake, that morality is in fact independent of any religion, it is clear that its function is very much like that of the public aspect of religion. The rules of ethics serve to solve conflicts between people so that they may cooperate in activities which are either desirable in themselves or valuable as means to some further ends. The question which must now be answered is whether morality can have an autonomous existence, and if so, what would be its form and content.

It seems that, in order for a system of morals to be acceptable in this age, it must meet at least four requirements. Either these requirements are accepted as valid, or further discussion of the problem becomes impossible. Therefore, I state them in the form of axioms: 1. A system of morality must be such as to be shared by all mankind; it must have a unifying effect. 2. The system may not be arbitrary; rather there must be a reason that it is to be preferred to another system. 3. It must be sufficiently flexible in order to meet the changing needs of its time. 4. It must have the power of convincing people that it is worthy of acceptance. [Page 33] I contend that none of the alternatives to a religiously grounded morality meets the four criteria. Neither secularism nor humanism withstands the test.

Secularism allows each individual to have his own system of values and does not prefer any system to another since none can be holy. Humanism suffers from the same weakness, for it includes no principle through which a particular social ideal could be preferred to another. Thus humanism could accept fascism and communism as well as democracy. Morality and religion in its public aspect, on the other hand, concern themselves with creating harmony among men. A community which has accepted as valid the principles of its faith does not confront the problem of disunity as far as the goals of the community are concerned. Religion discloses to man the reason for his existence, and once it is accepted, the question whether its principles are worth pursuing does not arise. Secularism and humanism, on the contrary, are not grounded in anything permanent in self or society and have no better reason for holding a belief than that it is there. Secularism and humanism lack the machinery of self-criticism because their choice of ideals is not grounded in something ultimate and final.

The opponents of theism are correct in pointing out that traditional religions such as Christianity and Islam have failed to grow with a changing society and have become obsolete. They are also correct in stating that non-religious morality is perhaps more flexible. However, from the fact that the old religions have failed to meet the needs of present-day society, it does not follow that a new revelation would also be inadequate. Should a humanist or secularist be confronted with a new revelation that offered solutions for modern social ills, it would be up to him to demonstrate the inadequacy of the new religion. The least he could do, of course, would be to investigate the claims of the new faith,

A viable morality can only be one that has sufficient power to convince people that it was worthy of acceptance. If it lacks such power, it will languish and soon disappear. Religion gives man power to lead a moral life; it motivates him to act in such a way as to fulfill his destiny. Morality independent of religion claims to derive such power from feeling and intellect. Yet both of these are impermanent and subject to man’s will. Thus, ultimately, a secularist or humanist morality is the morality of the arbitrary human will.

Spinoza and Kant urge man to lead a good life for its own sake. But how does one know what a good life is unless one knows the reason for one’s being? And where does one find the steady, unfailing inspiration to lead a good life unless one finds oneself bound by love and duty to the Supreme Being? Revealed religion alone, not humanism or secularism, can answer these questions, for it is only religion that provides man with the intuitive understanding of the meaning of existence.

[Page 34]

CASALS AT 91

By LAILA STORCH

SHORTLY BEFORE his ninety-first birthday Pablo Casals held a three-week Master Class for young cellists at the Conservatory of Music in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Participants came from as far away as Chile and England. In the sessions, each one of which lasted for three hours, Casals demonstrated a continuous intensity of concentration which might well have provided the first lesson for those present. The cello constantly in his hands, he implemented all his comments and observations by illusrtations of the work at hand. With no printed music in front of him, and never hesitating or searching for a passage, he played large sections of over twenty major works from the cello repertoire, many of which he had not performed in more than thirty years. Many excellent musicians would not care to trust their memory of a composition which they had not reviewed for three years.

Among the steady auditors at the classes was a one-time student of the Russian composer Glazounov, who then himself became a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory and later still spent many years playing in the N. B. C. Symphony Orchestra under Toscanini. Reminiscing, he was heard to remark, “I remember playing with Casals in 1926—Amazing man.” Perhaps one measure of the “amazing man” is that this musician of wide experience, himself no longer young, would come every day to listen to each word Casals had to say, and feel refreshed at every hearing.

In the last ten years, through his renewed traveling and through television appearances, Casals has become known throughout the world as a figure of international stature who is using all the means at his disposal to make a plea for world peace. Casals never has and does not now, act through political channels. Almost inevitably some of his actions are interpreted by others as being of a political nature, but Casals himself has always reinforced his humanitarian convictions through the use of his music—either performance of it—in the case of his conducting his own oratorio “El Pesebre” as a part of his “peace crusade”, or the withholding of it—as in his refusal to play solo cello recitals in international concert halls since 1945.

One could write a substantial chronicle of Casals’ continuous efforts for the cause of peace during the past decade, up to his most recent message delivered on the eve of his ninety-first birthday, December 29, 1967, from the Governor’s Palace in Puerto Rico and relayed over television networks in the United States and Europe. Surely an artist of his years would have every right now to rest on his laurels. Not so. Casals chooses to involve himself in helping to promote world understanding.

Casals has excelled in the fields of composition, conducting, and teaching, [Page 35] [Page 36] but mention the name Pablo Casals, and it is still “world-famous cellist” that comes most instantly to mind.

The fabulous career of Casals, as artist, has been described in countless publications throughout the world. This legendary career includes command performances before Queen Victoria, triumphs in Czarist Russia, tours of the United States in 1901, even into Wild West areas. Early in the century—and into the 20’s—his name was synonymous with the Red Seal era of famous artists, when His Master’s Voice brought Casals’ cello, along with the violin of Fritz Kreisler and the tenor voice of Caruso, into the living rooms of the world.

WHAT MANNER OF ARTIST is it who has had, and who continues to have, such a striking impact on all who come in contact with him? Meeting Casals today, one is struck by his disarming simplicity and uncommon directness. But one may ask whether the basic character is not highly complex. The answer tends to be “Yes.” But no more complex, one may add, than any other individual of this superior calibre. It is a forgivable temptation for a musician to make a few observations in the hope that they may illuminate and clarify, if not explain, some of the facets of this unique interpretive artist.

At the very outset Casals presents an enormously valuable visual lesson: meaning the total picture presented while he plays. None of the energy necessary to create the penetrating sound is lost in superfluous motion—all is directed toward the actual production of the tone. There is none of the weaving, head-shaking, or pushing so freely indulged in by so many first rate cellists. There are no awkward angles, but total integration of the body with the instrument, resulting in a perfect balance and coordination between the bow-arm and the left hand.

As this perfect balance exists in the physical handling of the instrument, so is it also evident in the manner of projection of the music itself.

Among performing artists we often find a tendency to over-emphasize in one direction. Sometimes it is with brilliant mechanical display, so that even with fine tone, perfect intonation, and correct phrasing, the perceptive listener finds something lacking. Other musicians may give a spirited, lively performance or a highly charged emotional one, but they are technically unable to project these two facets in perfect equilibrium. To watch the ninety-one year old Casals in his Master Class sessions brings out this truth in stunning clarity. His approach neglects neither the area of infinite detail nor the general atmosphere and chatacter of the music.

IN THE MASTER CLASSES, Casals keeps up a running commentary—“Use the third finger;” “Change the bow on that trill;" “Give more accent—a real accent—don’t be afraid.” And then, in the next breath he insists on the general feeling of exaltation and fantasy called for in a movement of a Bach Suite. Here he says: “You must work this very slowly and give all the expression it has to have. Then you can play it in tempo. You need one year of work for that movement, but how wonderful, how wonderful!”

Casals’ own interpretation of the Prelude and Fugue of the 5th Bach Suite in [Page 37] C minor could be compared to a tonal projection of something as architecturally perfect as the Parthenon—a grandiose expression of form, complete in itself.

Casals insists and insists on variety and uses the realm of nature as the supreme example where nothing is repeated twice in exactly the same manner.

When he uses the term “natural” (which he does very often), he refers to what seems most right or logical, and not—as is sometimes misinterpreted—to playing in a carefree, casual manner. The phrase which Casals plays in this natural manner often strikes us as something spontaneous and inspirational, whereas it has probably evolved over a long time, indeed sometimes years of painstaking study and practice.

Add to this perfection of form his enthusiasm and a range of expression embracing all the nuances of human experience, and you have some small idea of the whole Casals . . . his surging, explosive even volcanic projection, and also extreme delicacy and serenity when the music demands it.

During his recent Puerto Rico Master Classes, referring to the Sarabande movement of the 4th Bach Suite, Casals told the students: “This is the most beautiful thing that has been written in music. Every time that I have played this, and this means hundreds, when I come to this moment I am so afraid and moved that I want to play it on my knees. There are no more notes. This is supreme.”

[Page 38]

People in Groups

By PAMELA RINGWOOD

EACH OF US has seen, at one time or another, a bird or a moth caught in a room or a car. It flutters wildly about, but efforts to guide it through an open window to freedom seem fruitless. The terrified creature cannot understand the human being, and the human being blunders and creates more confusion in his attempts to help the creature. Man, likewise, finds himself trapped in the cage of this century. He still analyzes his social situations in terms of the problems and remedies of the past. Yet meaningful communication with other human beings is more essential to his survival than at any other time in history. Man’s increasingly crowded and mobile world demands a new, vital approach to group dynamics and social relations which will ensure his well being not only on the local, or even on the national, or on the class level, but on a world-wide scale.

The problem confronting mankind has been clearly delineated by Darwin Cartwright:

We hear all around us today the assertion that the problems of the twentieth century are the problems of human relations. The survival of civilization, it is said, will depend upon man’s ability to create social inventions capable of harnessing for society’s constructive use, the vast physical energies now available for man’s use. Or, to put the matter more simply, we must learn how to change the way in which people behave towards each other. In broad outline the specifications for a good society are clear, but a serious technical problem remains. How can we change people so that they neither restrict the freedom nor limit the potentialities for growth of others, so that they accept and respect people of a different religion and nationality, colour or political opinion; so that nations can exist in a world without war, and so that the fruits of our technological advances can bring economic well-being and freedom from disease to all the peoples of the world?

What, one may ask, can religion contribute to the solution of these complex problems of group dynamics and social relations? Additional complications for man’s already complicated life, and senseless anachronistic taboos for men already questioning their purpose will not do. Yet the Bahá’í Faith, revealed for and addressed to the age described by Mr. Cartwright, does offer solutions. The aim of each individual Bahá’í is to help in structuring a new world order which, being based on spiritual principles, provides a new approach to human relations. This goal, for a Bahá’í, is not a Kingdom-of-God-on-Earth ideal. It is a gradually evolving reality through which he sees a means for bringing spiritual principles to bear on technological and scientific advances. It is a developing structure through which he as a member of a group must confront war and disease and poverty and famine and internal revolutions. It is a framework within which peoples of varying religious, national, political, and racial backgrounds cannot only reason together but [Page 39] also reach group decisions which all support.

The acquisition of wisdom for building a new world order and thus for coping with the complexities of twentieth-century life has two aspects. Fundamental principles which contain basic truth must be developed. Then these principles must be translated into the realities of everyday conduct. Since proofs and discussions on the eternal wisdom contained in the Bahá’í Revelation can be found in many books and articles, we will turn our attention here to the second aspect of acquiring wisdom—the translation of principle into practical use. But since a complete analysis of even the second process is impossible in a limited space, we will concentrate on one part: the way in which group structure and functioning within the Bahá’í Faith assist the individual in putting his ideals into practice and in making them a living reality.

Brief Outline of Bahá’í Groups

THE ABSORPTION of the individual into the Bahá’í community is accomplished on several levels. Each Bahá’í belongs to at least two communities or groups. He is a member of a national Bahá’í community, the community of the country in which he resides, whether it be the land of his birth or not. He is also a member of a world group, the international community of Bahá’ís. If other Bahá’ís live within his local area of civil jurisdiction, he is a member of yet a third group, a local Bahá’í community.

Membership in these communities—local, national, and world—is entirely voluntary. In addition, no person can be a Bahá’í without agreeing to community membership. It is impossible to say, “I believe ideally in the truths of the Bahá’í principles and I wish to endorse them and to call myself a Bahá’í, but I do not wish to live the principles in my daily life.” The principles, to be effective and to create a Bahá’í community, must be accepted by all participants, regardless of race or color, social status or national origin. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of Bahá’u’lláh, Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, left no doubt as to the all-encompassing community goal when he warned, “Had the principles of unity taught by Christ remained in the hearts, men would have refrained from war. Universalism must be re-taught.” The principles must, furthermore, be exercised in relation to other people. One person can be just only to another person, not to the air around his ideal hopes of justice. One can unite only with another human being.

Administrative necessities are handled at the local, national, and world community levels by elected bodies of nine members. But conferences and meetings for the solicitation and expression of individual views are held on these, as well as on regional levels. On the more localized levels, more opportunity is given to each individual to speak and participate in group discussions. On the less localized levels, the individual voice is inevitably given to delegates elected from lower levels. Channels of communication, however, are established, so that there is constant communication among all levels of community organization and the individual voice, from whatever community, is never neglected.

Learning Principles Preliminary to Action

BUT THE COMMUNITY units and the interrelationships between them are not the unique contribution which the Bahá’í Faith makes toward solving the complexities of modern group dynamics and social relations. The feature of the Bahá’í community which sets it apart from other communities is its emphasis on consultation—a group discussion more challenging to the individual and more complex in terms of group dynamics than that usually experienced. The object of each person participating in the consultation is not to put forward and defend his own [Page 40] point of view, but rather to assist the group in its search for the truth in the matter about which it is consulting. Each Bahá’í has, in addition, not only a right but a duty to lend his voice and to assist in this search. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá characterized the atmosphere of the consultative process by observing:

The members thereof must take counsel together in such wise that no occasion for ill-feeling or discord may arise. This can be attained when every member expresses with absolute freedom his own opinion and setteth forth his argument. Should any one oppose, he must on no account feel hurt, for not until matters are fully discussed can the right way be revealed. The shining spark of truth cometh forth only after the clash of differing opinions.

The emphasis on consultation and total group decision is one of the factors which helps to transfer a heterogeneous collection of individuals into a dynamic Bahá’í community. Oddly enough, the traditional ways of changing people, by lecture and exhortation, are not as effective as we tend to think. The analysis of an experiment in group dynamics makes the point clear:

In one series of experiments directed by Lewin it was found that a method of decision in which the group as a whole made a decision to have its members change their behaviour was from two to ten times as effective in producing actual change as was a lecture presenting exhortation to change.

The Anglican clergyman Dean Inge emphasizes the same inefficiency of lecture and exhortation when he observes that giving a sermon is like setting up a row of narrow-necked vessels (we are, as he says, all narrow-necked vessels) and trying to fill them by throwing a bucket of water over them. A few drops splash inside but most of the water washes off the outside of the vessels.

Mr. Inge’s observation confirms what social psychologists have been saying in more complex terms for the past twenty years or so: people do learn better when their minds are filled individually through group discussion than when a bucket full of sermon is thrown over them.

The importance of consultation, then, is clear. People need to talk over situations involving a change of attitude, and they need group discussions which will help them reach a decision within themselves. Unless one has a positive incentive to do so, one often postpones decision on matters involving changing one’s attitudes, and smooths over one’s conscience by accepting the principle, but with no intention of acting on the principle. The involvement of the individual in consultation and his responsibility towards helping gather a variety of viewpoints and towards resolving them into a just decision are powerful factors in motivating the individual to make a decision, internalize it, and abide by it.

A side benefit of consultation is that the responsibility of the participants is increased. It is not so easy, when one has participated in the making of a decision, to throw all responsibility for it onto “them”. It is said of Australians that they expect more of their governments and respect them less than other peoples. Certainly it is this characteristic that Dymphna Cusack satirizes in her novel about the Picnic Race Day in a country town. The town’s inhabitants threw the responsibility for organizing the Races onto a local committee and then proceeded to exercise what Dymphna Cusack describes as the God-given right of every Australian to offload the task onto a committee and then to criticize the committee.

Whether this Australian peculiarity can be traced to its early colonial origins, or whether it is a modern universal characteristic in an extreme form, yet the need to increase the responsibility of the populace [Page 41] is also a need of other democratic countries and groups. The need is particularly evident in fields such as welfare where public awareness of the needs of a particular group often lags far behind remedies. One often finds it much easier, for example, to enlist public sympathy for appeals involving children than for those involving teenagers, who not only have less appeal but may be a threatening group to some adults. It is often difficult, also, to arouse public support for “suspect” but needy groups such as unmarried mothers and to a lesser, but still significant extent, deserted wives or prisoners’ wives. Needy ex-servicemen’s widows, on the other hand, are considered more socially acceptable. The result is that public indifference to the treatment of minority groups may allow unjust situations to continue which would never be tolerated if recognized in a majority group. The level of awareness and assumption of responsibility necessary for the functioning of modern societies requires an increased attempt by the public to acquaint itself with and to feel involved in the social issues of the day. In bringing about this awareness, group consultation is much more effective than the widely used lecture or exhortation.

Continuing Action

IN ADDITION to providing an opportunity for group decision, which in turn increases individual responsibility, Bahá’í consultation has other benefits. One of its major strengths is continuity. The individual Bahá’í not only has a duty to participate in the decision; but, when the decision is reached, he, as a part of the community, must support it completely, whether he voted for it or against it. Research confirms the importance of group continuity just as it indicates the effectiveness of group decision. Kahn and Katz report that people who participate in group discussion, yet go back alone to their old community, find it harder to persevere in attitude change than people who are supported by change within their own community.

Bahá’í consultation also makes demands on the individual. It strengthens his motivation in developing new social skills and attitudes which will assist him in contributing meaningfully to consultation. The community, he finds, is not like a tennis club where, if he does not like a particular member, he can join another club or form an opposing subgroup. The Bahá’í, being denied both of these expedient exits, must learn to cope with the situation and to express his general love for mankind within the stress of the concrete situation. The negative fact that there is no way out, combined with the force of positive principles with which he actively agrees, pushes him into the challenge of attempting to live his principles. Thus, as the Bahá’í struggles to acquire new social skills which will facilitate his absorption into and effectiveness within the group, he is supported by the approval of the community and the certain knowledge that others are experiencing similar growth pangs.

The Bahá’í community then—one may observe this most easily in a small local group—provides a hot-house atmosphere in which individual virtues are nurtured and defects modified. The challenging demands made upon the individual living the Bahá’í principles in a materialistic environment and the rapid growth of the Bahá’í community itself help foster individual and [Page 42] group growth. But the close bond existing among the community members also contributes to the maturation process.

The very existence of a warm, accepting group which not only tolerates but seeks out, encourages, and absorbs different classes, age groups, occupations, nationalities, and races is in itself rare today. The more current attitude is that reflected in the story of the difficulties of the English Court of Appeal in preparing an address to be presented to the Queen on the opening of a chapel in 1882:

The proposed draft started, “We your Majesty’s judges, conscious as we are of our manifold defects . . .” Sir George Jessel, Master of the Rolls, strongly objected to that phrase and said, “I am not conscious of manifold defects and, if I were, I should not be fit to sit on the bench.” There was much argument and finally Lord Justice Bowen suggested as a compromise that instead of saying “conscious as we are of our manifold defects” the words should read “conscious as we are of one another’s manifold defects”.

Many of the communities of groups in which we participate do find it much easier to see one another’s manifold defects than their virtues. A cardinal principle informing the consultation of all Bahá’í groups is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s injunction to “Love the creatures for the sake of God and not for themselves. . . . Humanity is not perfect. There are imperfections in every human being and you will always become unhappy if you look toward the people themselves. But if you look toward God you will love them and be kind to them . . . ." This is obviously the kind of group in which an individual feels secure enough to effect changes within his own character and attitude and to experiment with the kind of adjustment required by his individual personality. There is no need for the Bahá’í to continue to conform to a conventionalized norm.

Another strength in Bahá’í consultation is that the aims of the group consist of service to mankind and not personal or introspective gains. While it is true that the conditions of consultation and group life encourage emotional development and are tolerant of varying kinds of personality expression, yet this is by no means the primary purpose of the group. Its purpose is to bring about a change in the hearts and souls of men through the acceptance of the Bahá’í Revelation and adherence to its principles, so that a new society may emerge and a more creative and constructive civilization than any yet reared may develop. To achieve this, Bahá’ís are actively concerned, individually and collectively, in expressing the love of God in service to mankind, and love and justice in their dealings with their fellow man.

There are guidelines, however, which must be observed, if the consultation is to be effective in promoting personal and social change. It must encompass worthwhile projects, if it is to have enduring interest to all types of people. Its decisions must be capable of being put into practice, or people will lose hope. Its endeavors must have some degree of success. If a group continually turns in on itself and performs a kind of intellectualized contemplation of its own navel, the sheer intensity of the observation brings with it unhealthy problems. Yet, the group’s turning outward, and its continuing support of its members in their service to mankind creates a healthy atmosphere in which to develop individual and group abilities and skills that are often thwarted by an unchallenging environment or by friends or family unsympathetic to [Page 43] characteristics which are different from their own or outside their experience.

A final strength of Bahá’í consultation is the purpose which it brings to the individual’s life. The anonymity associated with industrial societies does not deaden the member of the Bahá’í community. He has a purpose in life, he has a voice within an organic community both on the international and national levels, and he has the right and duty of active participation and responsibility on the local level. Since there is no clergy in the Bahá’í Faith, the administration of its affairs rests with the elected bodies and the communities of believers. Consequently, executive, regulative, and administrative decisions are required from individuals who previously may have had little or nothing to do with such matters. The individual Bahá’í is challenged to rise to occasions and to cope with complexities which Otherwise would not be his lot. But these challenges lay the foundation for greater awareness of his own potentialities and purpose and greater growth as a member of a group.

Two Warnings

TWO WARNINGS, however, are necessary. First, consultation in the Bahá’í community, being founded on spiritual principles, is a different experience from that which often goes under this name. It is very different from that of a Crown Prosecutor in Nineteenth-Century England, who went into Court one day with what must have appeared an open and shut murder case. The accused challenged the prosecutor to trial by battle. The custom dated back to the days of William the Conqueror who, to the delight of the Anglo-Saxon peers, allowed them to settle differences by challenging the accuser to battle. The battle started at sunup and the one who was still standing at sundown was judged to be in the right. Although never used, the statute had not been repealed and the challenge was good. The injustice of some group discussions, particularly in fields where parties are of unequal status, is that some of the participants are asked, or required, to enter unarmed into discussion-by-battle. Bahá’í consultation is radically different, and it is correspondingly more effective in its regulation of group dynamics.

The second warning is that a cursory survey can neither examine the vital spiritual foundations of the Bahá’í Faith, nor convey the balancing of principle and functioning in the Bahá’í consultation. But the pattern is clear. A new world order is emerging—a social structure which is able to provide constructive answers to the thetorical question of an early Christian priest: What shall it profit man if he sail to the moon in a ship and cannot bridge the abyss that separates man from man? Modern man does not need to be trapped within his cage, nor isolated from his fellow human beings. The Bahá’í Revelation supplies him with a new body of wisdom geared to the complexities of modern life, and the Bahá’í consultation provides him with a new approach to group dynamics and social relations which is already beginning to ensure his well being on the local as well as on the national and the world-wide scale.

[Page 44]

Europe at the Turn of the Age

A review of Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (New York: Bantam Books, 1966)

By FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BARBARA TUCHMAN is an accomplished writer. In The Guns of August, a book that brought her international renown as well as a Pulitzer prize, she demonstrated her ability to re-create history, to evoke the “feel” of the past, and to hold the attention of the reader while guiding him through complicated issues of diplomacy and warfare. In The Proud Tower she sets herself an even harder task: to paint in words the portrait of an age.

“The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization,” Miss Tuchman writes, “was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificance, extravagance, and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other’s company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want, more sentiment including false sentiment, less sufferance of mediocrity, more dignity in work, more delight in nature, more zest.”

An age being far too vast to fit on any canvas, the portrait had to be selective. Asia, Africa, the Americas, with the single exception of the United States, and even Russia, were excluded. Inevitably the result is a portrait of the Western world in the narrowest sense of the term.

The Western world had its patricians, the British aristocracy, whom Miss Tuchman depicts with sympathy and understanding. Perhaps through the mist of time they appear more attractive than they ever were in life. They are “dead” and of the dead one speaks no evil. Rich, proud, self-confident, English aristocrats as a ruling elite were an anachronism even before their age ended in January 1906 in the great “Transfer of Power” to which Miss Tuchman dedicates a chapter. Half a century later one would find it difficult to believe that the likes of Lord Salisbury or the Duke of Devonshire really existed, had not Winston Churchill survived to our own day.

At the opposite pole from the aristocrats stood the anarchists, a strange company of characters dedicated to the violent overthrow of all authority. They threw bombs at kings, stabbed empresses, shot presidents, and made the powerful tremble with fear and rage. The anarchists claimed to be the voice of the dispossessed, the miserable, the downtrodden. Yet they too shared the optimism of the age, the belief in the essential goodness of human nature which would make perfect society possible the moment the last despot was blown to bits.

The anarchists, colorful and loud though they were, lived on the fringes of Western society. At its center stood the traditional [Page 45] forces: monarchies, cabinets, armies, parliaments, industries, banks, stock exchanges. All were engaged in an unrelenting struggle for survival and power. Looking at European society, it was easy to transfer Darwin’s theories from biology to sociology and politics and through them to justify belligerence, competition, oppression, and war. On the horizon there loomed the threat of revolution vociferously proclaimed in behalf of an idealized proletariat by disgruntled idealistic intellectuals.

THERE WAS ROT at the heart of the age. Outwardly, good manners were cultivated, philanthropy was preached, and peace was occasionally prayed for. Inwardly, men seethed with barely suppressed hostility and aggressiveness. The Proud Tower enjoyed its overwhelming might and implicitly believed in its own superiority—racial, national, and cultural—to all other societies, past and present. This superiority, everyone knew, was based on the ability to generate force, and the ultimate test of force was war.

Peace was much discussed, but the governments carefully avoided any measures that might to any degree jeopardize their national sovereignty and their ability to make war. Miss Tuchman presents as the great advocate of peace Baroness Bertha von Suttner, a minor actress on the European stage, whose influence was very small indeed. Those whose opinions mattered (Wilhelm II, Teddy Roosevelt, Admiral Mahan, General Bernhardi, and many more) believed war to be an inevitable, if not a welcome, part of the natural order of things. In the final analysis, peace to them was a bore.

The rot at the heart of the age shows through most clearly in the chapter appropriately entitled “Neroism Is in the Air.” A great epoch of European culture, here exemplified by Richard Strauss, the Diagilev ballet, Wile, and Hauptmann, was sick to its core. Sexual perversion and the use of drugs spread through the upper reaches of society, creating a vast upper class underworld of hushed up depravity and crime. Occasionally a sensitive European would shudder at the sight of a society drunk with power, wealth, and pride. In a poem on a Biblical text Walther Rathenau predicted the end. [Page 46] Miss Tuchman notes that “readers who turned to Ezekiel would have found the judgment upon Tyre: ‘With thy wisdom and they understanding thou hast gotten thee riches and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasure and by thy traffick hast thou increased thy riches and thou hast said I am God. . . . Therefore I will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of nations, and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom . . . and bring thee down into the pit and thou shalt die the death of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.’”

Thus Miss Tuchman strikes the one religious note in her book. The nearly total absence of spiritual concern, the lack of spiritual dimension is characteristic of the Proud Tower. Who is at fault, the painter or the subject of the portrait? Or, perhaps, both?

TO A BAHÁ’Í the quarter century preceding the collapse of the old order holds a very special significance. In 1890, the opening year of Miss Tuchman’s book, in faraway ‘Akká, then a penal colony of the Ottoman government, Bahá’u’lláh spoke these words to Professor Edward G. Browne of Cambridge, the only European to attain His presence: “That all nations should become one in faith and all men as brothers; that the bonds of affection and unity between the sons of man should be strengthened; that diversity of religion should cease, and differences of race be annulled—what harm is there in this? . . . Yet so shall it be; these fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars shall pass away, and the ‘Most Great Peace’ shall come. . . . Do not you in Europe need this also? . . . Yet do we see your kings and rulers lavishing their treasures more freely on means for the destruction of the human rate than on that which would conduce to the happiness of mankind . . . These strifes and this bloodshed must cease, and all men be as one kindred and one family. . . . Let not a man glory in this, that he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind.”

The churches were silent, while the clergies with exemplary objectivity blessed the arms of all nations. An entire civilization had lost its soul when in 1911-12, on the eve of the holocaust, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá brought Bahá’u’lláh’s Message to Europe. In Vienna, Paris, London—these chambers of the Proud Tower—He cried for unity and peace, for mercy upon the masses of the world, for justice, for life. Only a few heard the cry. Europe, the cradle of Western civilization, could not be aroused. Soon the lights would go out. The patricians would betray their trust, the socialists would betray their internationalism, the masses would betray themselves. Europe could not be awakened because it was spiritually dead.

Though Miss Tuchman does not deal with the religious dimension of the crisis of Europe, her book raises the curtain on a fascinating and significant period which could perhaps be called “the age of the missed last chance.”

[Page 47]

Authors and Artists

BENJAMIN P. RUHE is a staff writer for the Sunday magazine of the Washington Star published in the District of Columbia. He was educated at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania State and Columbia Universities, and was an art student of the watercolorist Dong Kingman. While making a 26-month vagabond tour around the world some years ago, he spent three month on Mount Athos and has since done considerable research on the peninsula’s unique history and attributes.

ROWELL HOFF was a Chinese Language Specialist in the United States Air Force for over nine years before assuming his present position as instructor of English and Humanities at Central YMCA Community College in Chicago. Although he majored in music at Parsons College and earned a Master’s degree in theory and composition at State University of Iowa, Mr. Hoff devotes much time to writing poetry.

A. L. LINCOLN majored in social studies at Harvard and graduated Magna Cum laude in June 1967. His first article, “The New York City Transit Strike,” appeared in Public Policy, a publication of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Lincoln is now attending the University of Chicago Law School.

FARHAD KAZEMZADEH was born in 1942 in Tehran, Iran, and came to the United States at the age of 14. He graduated from the Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut, and Yale University, where he majored in philosophy. He then entered the Vanderbilt University Law School, obtaining his LLB. in 1967. Now he is in the U. S. Army in Korea.

LAILA STORCH, an oboist and Professor at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico, is a member of the Soni Ventorum wind quintet, and of the symphony orchestras of Puerto Rico and of the Casals Festival. She has played first oboe with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Efrem Kurtz, Ferenc Fricsay, Leopold Stokowski, Bruno [Page 48] Walter, and Sir Thomas Beecham. Her extensive travels have included research on Eighteenth Century oboe music in Austria, Germany, and France in 1955; and concert tours in Yugoslavia and Russia with the Robert Shaw Chorale in 1964. Miss Storch participated in the first Casals Festivals in Prades from 1950 to 1954. She studied music in California and then at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, with Marcel Tabuteau.

PAMELA RINGWOOD, a lawyer and social worker of Canberra, Australia, wrote “The Bahá’í Faith and the Professions” for the summer 1967 issue of World Order. She is interested in socio-legal aspects of society and in particular in the field of family law and inter-professional cooperation.

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH is the Editor of World Order and Professor of Russian History at Yale University.

ART CREDITS. P. 4, photo by N. A. Tombazi; p. 9, photo by William Nuefeld; p. 11, photo by courtesy National Tourist Organization of Greece; p. 14, photo by David Moellendorf; p. 35, photo by Columbia Records Photo; p. 37, photo of a painting by George Neuzil; p. 45, photo by David Moellendorf; inside back cover, lithograph by Lori Neuzil.

GEORGE NEUZIL, an art consultant to World Order, is rapidly developing a reputation as a young professional painter. His works were displayed recently at the art museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, and at the National Bahá’í’ Center in Wilmette, Illinois. Private collections in several parts of the world include many of his paintings.

LORI NEUZIL, like her husband George, is an art consultant to World Order. A colorist-painter, Mrs. Neuzil received a degree in Fine Arts from Layton School of Art last May.

[Page 49]

[Page 50]

FORTHCOMING ARTICLES

BECOMING YOUR TRUE SELF by Daniel C. Jordan, Professor of Education, University of Massachusetts. This article offers insights on how the Bahá’í Faith releases human potential.

THE IGNORANCE OF SOCRATES by James C. Haden, Professor of Philosophy, Oakland University. “We must ask what sort of man Socrates really was: sophist? lover of truth? scientist? moralist? hero? buffoon?” This is the question that Professor Haden attempts to answer in this article.

EMPLOYMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS by Hugh Jackson, Executive Director of the Wichita Urban League, Wichita, Kansas. Writing of the hardening of negative attitudes between blacks and whites, Mr. Jackson asserts: “Employment as it relates to human rights is, indeed, at the heart of the crisis. There is no more ugly and urgent crisis facing this nation today than the economic insecurity of black Americans.”

REFLECTIONS ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN by Nelly Marans, a French correspondent accredited with the United Nations Organization.