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World Order

WINTER 1968-69

THE IGNORANCE OF SOCRATES

James C. Haden

CURRENT ISSUES IN CHRISTIAN ECUMENISM

Robert C. Neville

DYSFUNCTIONS OF RELIGION AND WHY

Jalil Mahmoudi

THE OCEAN—OUR LAST RESOURCE

Arthur Lyon Dahl

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 3 NUMBER 2 • 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 © 1969, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

IN THIS ISSUE

1 Progressive Revelation

Editorial

2 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

4 The Ignorance of Socrates

by James C. Haden

15 The Ocean—Our Last Resource

by Arthur Lyon Dahl

22 Frankenstein: An Allegorical Analysis

by Allan L. Ward

30 Current Issues in Christian Ecumenism

by Robert C. Neville

29 A Poem by Betty Engert

35 Dysfunctions of Religion and Why

by Jalil Mahmoudi

45 The Decade

A Poem by Marzieh Gail

46 Sahara Reclamation: A Garden and a Paradise

in the Making, by Richard St. Barbe Baker

51 Wandering through Hell:

Jean-Luc Godard and Weekend,

by Gary Morrison

55 Authors and Artists

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Progressive Revelation

EDITORIAL

ONE OF THE PRINCIPLES of the Bahá’í Faith is the unity of religions. All religions stem from a single Source, the Bahá’í writings affirm, and are therefore one. The apparent diversity within this unity results from the adaptation of the divine message by each Messenger to the needs and capacities of a given people at a given epoch in history.

In the Bahá’í View, each dispensation consists of two parts. One of them, subject to essential changes, applies specifically to the unique culture and conditions to which it is addressed; the needs and problems of a nomadic people of millennia ago are not those of the global community struggling for birth in our time. The other part bears the mark of eternity; the essential message, which defines our relationship with God, does not change in its substance, although in its expression the proportionate emphasis of the various aspects of the message may vary from one dispensation to another.

Thus, in a rather simplistic schema, if one starts with the Mosaic dispensation, one is struck by the importance of the law, that is by the prominence given to the relationship between the individual and the God-oriented community. The Christian message is in some ways a reaction against legalism—it stresses the relationship of brotherhood and love between individuals. The Muslim revelation is addressed to the whole community of those who submit to the will of God; the community as a whole has its prescribed manner of obedience to God. The Bahá’í dispensation is the first to address itself to the responsibilities of different communities to each other, to the problem of the harmonious functioning of all the parts of the world, for not until our time has the world functioned as a whole.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

THOUGH IT IS only two years since WORLD ORDER has resumed publication, we can already boast of second-generation contributors. Arthur Lyon Dahl, whose father’s “A Pattern for Future Society” appeared in our Fall 1966 issue (Vol. 1, No. 1), writes about the ocean and in the process demonstrates the crying need for world government. Without international cooperation and control our “last resource” would soon be polluted and ruined, creating a problem of unexampled magnitude and perhaps endangering the very existence of man on this planet.

* * *

Turning to the literary field, we find Allan L. Ward’s analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein demonstrating the need for cooperation in another area— interpersonal relationships—and challenging us to “peer into the dark corridors of our own fears and injustices.” But Mr. Ward’s reexamination of the long-time favorite is important for another reason. It points out the fruitfulness of returning to classics of former ages, especially the nineteenth century, with the eyes of the new age. Indeed, it suggests a new type of literary criticism, of which we will be seeing more in coming issues.

* * *

James Haden takes us much farther back into history—the fifth century B.C.—to speak to a very modern problem. He explores feelingly and searchingly Socrates’ agonizing attempt, and failure, to reconcile the “opposing forces of intellect and feeling,” of mind and mystic unity, and points out the relevance of Socrates’ dilemma to twentieth-century man’s coping with the same two seemingly contradictory but divine goods.

* * *

Robert C. Neville’s “Current Issues in Christian Ecumenism” and Jalil Mahmoudi’s “Dysfunctions of Religion and Why” must be read together. Mr. Neville addresses himself to a variety of doctrinal and historical problems which have brought varying, but scarcely satisfactory, degrees of unity and/or disunity to liberal and conservative Catholic and Protestant circles, concluding that a solution can be found only in a “common community” and a common piety. Mr. Mahmoudi speaks to the disservices, or dysfunctions, which the religions of the past, in one way or another, have all come to work on the peoples they originally meant to guide. But he goes beyond the slough of despond to show how the Bahá’í concept of progressive revelation contains the seeds of an ecumenism that unites all faiths and prevents religion from falling into dysfunction.

To the Editor

PEOPLE IN GROUPS

We very much enjoy and appreciate WORLD ORDER Magazine. The consistently high calibre and stimulation, both intellectual and spiritual, of its content make the arrival of each issue an eagerly-awaited occasion. Many of the articles deserve, and get, several readings; with each, a new, previously overlooked facet, or insight comes into view.

We feel that Pamela Ringwood’s excellent [Page 3] essay, “People in Groups” (Summer, 1968), is an article which will enrich the reading experience, and possibly the lives, of the friends in our Canadian Bahá’í Community.

ELEANOR HARDING

Editorial Board

Canadian Bahá’í News

King City, Ont., Canada

FROM FUTILITY TO ROMANTICISM

Along with the worries over taxes, war, inflation, and riots, people are questioning the nature and value of our current literary trends. While some express confident praise of our literature, others express confusion about what writers are trying to communicate.

Literary thought swings on a pendulum from age to age. The pendulum has swung from Greek classicism to modern existentialism. Presently the pendulum has swung to a genre which expresses doubts, fears, futility, painting a morbid picture of human existence and leading man to question his place in the cosmos. The most burning questions facing modern man concern the existence of God and the human soul. “Does God really exist? Is man born into this life only to die? Is man merely an animal driven by passion?” These questions, characterizing the present trend, provide no concrete answers to satisfy the reader or lead him to further speculative thought. Man seems to have reached an impasse of futility which will not allow him to go beyond the realm of utter hopelessness. It is unreasonable to assume that this period of unanswered questions can last indefinitely, because man, a naturally curious being, cannot and will not remain in constant doubt. What will happen?

The pendulum will swing to a course similar to Romanticism. Why Romanticism? What makes it so special that man will want something similar? This is difficult to ascertain conclusively, but most likely because the Romantic movement typified what contemporary man is searching for—peace of mind, communion with God, love of fellow man. The Romantic writer, valuing deep feeling, delighting in originality, spontaneity, the individual and his development, asserted his own personality. He saw a unity of God and nature, envisioned a brotherhood of man, and, I believe, found contentment in his observations. The Romantic had many of the doubts we hear expressed today, but from his viewpoint he found answers to his questions by looking at the world around him and seeing its natural harmony and beauty.

This is not to say that man will bury his head in the sand and ignore everything unpleasant, for until he finds something which satisfies his needs he will keep on searching and striving toward the long idealized goals of world brotherhood, world peace, and universal understanding. Quoting Wordsworth, man will have his “days bound each to each by natural piety.” When man arrives at this point he will find himself in another “romantic age.” He will have answered his questions, renewed his confidence, and in all likelihood raised his level of spirituality and human understanding.

JOHN MANN

Albany State University

Albany, New York

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The Ignorance of Socrates

By JAMES C. HADEN

FEW FIGURES in human history have exerted a more continuous fascination than that of Socrates. Even in his own lifetime he was so much an object of interest to his fellow-Athenians that he was the butt of comic plays not only by Aristophanes (The Clouds) but also by two other playwrights. He was the close friend of the eminent public figures of his day—which extended from the Periclean age through the period of the Peloponnesian Wars down to the opening years of the fourth century B.C. His trial and execution were the occasion for various compositions by writers of the fourth century and later. But most important, he had the exceptional fortune to draw under his spell another remarkable genius: Plato, who immortalized his mentor in his dialogues, for which he created a literary form previously unknown to Greece.

A. N. Whitehead’s judgment that the subsequent history of Western thought is no more than a series of footnotes to Plato has been quoted so much that it is in danger of becoming nothing but a cliché; but, although it goes a little too far, still it is close enough to the truth to be valued. Yet the face of Socrates which looks out at us from Plato’s pages has been an endless source of puzzlement to those who have reflected on it. Erasmus saw no heresy in calling him “Saint Socrates”. Nietzsche regarded him as the product of the growing sickness of Greek society which had already passed its noblest period and was well-advanced on the road to personal, intellectual, and social foulness and corruption. On the other hand, Kierkegaard describes Socrates as the only real alternative to Christ as Teacher.

The list of contradictory judgments could be extended almost indefinitely, but it is more important to raise certain questions for ourselves, conscious that they are still open to inquiry. We must ask what sort of man Socrates really was: sophist? lover of truth? scientist? moralist? hero? buffoon? Was he a man whose penetrating questioning instructs, or rather one whose effect, as is said of him in one of the Platonic dialogues, is like the paralysis inflicted by an electric eel? Does he heal or corrupt? If we can give some kind of reply to this problem, then perhaps we will have a clue to his perennial fascination through the ages.

The Man and His Life

LET US START with a few simple facts which we know with reasonable certainty about the man and his life. He was born about 470 B.C. in Athens, and, except for a few occasions when he fought as an infantryman in campaigns of the fateful Peloponnesian Wars, he lived there his entire life. His father seems to have been of the middle class, perhaps a sculptor; his mother was a midwife. In a city which valued above all breeding, wealth, and physical beauty, Socrates possessed none of these, yet nonetheless moved freely among all classes, the most aristocratic as well as the most ordinary. Many of the outstanding and brilliant young [Page 6] men of the city were strongly attracted to him. One of the chief of these was the notorious Alcibiades, who himself had the power to bewitch the citizens of Athens into forgiving him for repeated acts of debauchery and treason. We know that he married rather late in life and that he had three children, of whom nothing further is heard. We know that he worked at no specific trade, at least for the major portion of his life, but that when civic administrative duties, which were distributed by lot throughout the citizenry, fell to him, he carried them out scrupulously. At some point about the middle of his life, one of his admirers asked the oracle at Delphi if Socrates was in fact the wisest man in Athens. He received the usual carefully ambiguous answer that there was no one wiser than Socrates. From that time on, Socrates spent his life in a relentless questioning of his fellow citizens, ostensibly to discover whether or not those with reputations for wisdom were actually so, despite the oracular response.

Then, in the spring of 399, we find the indictment charging him with impiety posted outside the office of the King Archon, who had jurisdiction over religious litigation. It was preserved for many centuries, thanks to the fame of the case; in its grim and laconic legal phraseology it runs: “Meletus, son of Meletus, of the deme of Pitthus, indicts Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, of the deme of Alopece, on his oath, to the following effect. Socrates is guilty of not worshipping the gods whom the State worships, but introducing new and unfamiliar religious practices, and further, of corrupting the young. Penalty demanded: death.”

This Meletus who brought the writ against Socrates was an obscure young man who seems to have brought a similar charge against another person in the same year. Now he was the co-prosecutor with two others: an inconsequential orator named Lycon, and another figure who does not seem to belong in this little group at all—a man named Anytus. He was one of the most prominent and influential leaders of the democratic party that had bloodily and successfully resisted attempts by tyrannical groups to seize control of Athens in the political turmoil that followed the crushing and humiliating Athenian defeat at the hands of Sparta and her allies in 404.

Anytus was a man whose previous record, so far as it is known to us, would lead us to expect a tolerant, stable, intelligent, honest individual. He seems to have been a successful manufacturer, not highly educated, but certainly not stupid or fanatical. He was a firm democrat in politics. He was a courageous man in difficulties, having been one of the two leaders of the bold military operation against the oligarchs which seized the Piraeus and turned the tide away from tyranny. Now he was laboring to put on a stable foundation the moderate and effective democracy that had prevailed prior to the Peloponnesian Wars.

There have been many guesses about the real reason for Socrates’ ordeal, and quite a few of them revolve around this lesser enigma of Anytus. Since he was clearly the most powerful of the three prosecutors, it can be presumed that Meletus and Lycon were merely fronts for Anytus’ own desire to eliminate Socrates from the city. Xenophon, never a very subtle interpreter of ideas and motives, supposed that Anytus incited Meletus to bring suit because Socrates, long before, had convinced Anytus’ son not to follow his father’s trade of tanner.

Virtually no one, however, subscribes to Xenophon’s suggestion; a more common conjecture is that Anytus lent his authority to the suit because he deemed Socrates a danger to the still precarious restoration of democracy. Socrates’ practice of exposing the lack of wisdom in public leaders, and indeed his doubts about the whole idea of handing over political power to large numbers of men who were unable to give any adequate account of why they did what they did would hardly contribute to strong confidence in the new democratic regime.

[Page 7] Amid the still smoldering passions of the time, it would have been easy to forget that Socrates had been just as independent toward the aristocrats and remember only that the brilliance of his mind had attracted to him other brilliant people who were by and large politically anti-democratic, such as Alcibiades. A general amnesty laid down in 403 prevented Socrates from being accused of political crimes, such as association with these men, but had he not stayed in Athens even during the brief tyranny of the Thirty when the democrats had to take refuge elsewhere? And is that not circumstantial evidence of guilt? So now that he still was walking about criticizing the party now in power, he had to be eliminated by some indirect accusation which would not be forbidden by the amnesty. Impiety, with all its vagueness, would do as well as anything. Hence Meletus, with his known fanaticism, simply served as a convenient, if false, front for a retribution for oligarchical sympathies.

Others believe, especially on the basis of some passages in Plato’s Apology, that the charge of impiety was a genuine one, and that it stemmed from a widespread conviction in the city that Socrates was simply one of the Sophists, who taught that the divinities, like the sun, are purely natural things. Anaxagoras, a philosopher of nature who had been a friend of Pericles, had publicly maintained that the sun was not Apollo, but merely a piece of molten rock about as big as the Peloponnesus. For this and other statements, coupled with some irritation among the mob at Pericles himself, Anaxagoras had been charged with impiety many years before and forced to flee Athens. And had not Aristophanes portrayed Socrates as just such a man, in The Clouds? Therefore this account makes the real reason for the trial lie in a general exasperation with Socrates and the Sophists, made unbearable because of the still bleeding wounds inflicted by the recent war. With the removal of the absorbing objective of victory, and with the elimination of internal party strife, Socrates simply became the target of universal resentment on the part of the ordinary man. They had endured him before, feeling themselves complacent about their democracy or being absorbed in the goals of war, but now they had reached the breaking point on his arrogance toward ancient beliefs and institutions.

A much more intriguing interpretation of the reasons for Socrates’ trial, and of all others the one which I think comes closest to the right solution of the problem, has been advanced by E. A. Havelock. Looking at Greek society in 450 B.C. and then again in 350 B.C., one of the most prominent facts is that by the latter date there were the equivalent of universities at Athens, something totally unknown to the previous century. These universities, Plato’s Academy, the school for budding statesmen run by Isocrates, and so on, had taken over the function of instructing young men for the duties of adult life. What must have been the case earlier? Obviously there must have been something which did a comparable job, and Havelock reconstructs a “family group” or “household unit”, consisting of a larger and more flexible association of kinsmen than the simple patriarchal family. This household unit was an economic unit (in fact, the word “economy” is derived from the Greek word for household); it functioned as “the factory, banking house, and merchandising unit.” It was the household which owned slaves, putting their services and skills at the disposal of the members of the unit as necessary.

Now, in a society constructed of such units, a young man expecting to take his place in it would naturally be trained by the household unit itself, and within the framework of its values. A son might be associated with his father, but might also be attached to another male relative, depending on the young man’s skills and the needs of the household. In some cases he might be attached for training to another household, if that unit were on friendly terms with his own.

This form of education, then, was inseparable [Page 8] from family life. The family prepared a youth for life, and controlled his entry into the social structure as a functional member, imbued with respect for the kind of community loyalty or piety which, as Euthyphro says in one of the dialogues, is the salvation of both families and states. The social structure was hardly distinct from the family groups; in political and social life the heads of households were a powerful group, since they represented the economic life of the city. Therefore anything which would raise a serious threat to this established seat of stability and power could expect to meet resistance.

During the fifth century B.C. this family-based higher education was first challenged, by the men known as Sophists who professed to teach intellectual and technical subjects. They would teach anything to anyone, but since they were individuals divorced from any economic unit, traveling from city to city, they had to take pay to live. They were lecturers and industrious writers of textbooks. All this meant that education was now beginning to be conceived as a rationalized, abstract discipline, which did not depend on the matrix of the household, and which therefore was beyond the control of the elders. So the families were faced with the prospect of the loss of one of their functions—education —and therefore with loss of power in political affairs. When they could implant their own values in the maturing minds of their sons, they could be confident of stability in governmental affairs, because these same young men would in their turn become elders, wielding power in the legislative, judicial, and administrative work of the city-state, and continuing the established patterns and traditions. If this educative function was taken away, and transformed into an intellectual discipline of an abstract type, owing no allegiance to any person or family, who could be sure of the outcome?

Factors of Discontent

IT IS SMALL WONDER that throughout the old social structure of the city a vague but growing uneasiness was felt. This uneasiness might well have been heightened by the fact that economic life was growing more complex and interdependent, so that the old, apprenticeship techniques of instruction were becoming outmoded, even apart from any activity of the Sophists. It happened that pure intellectual curiosity and virtuosity arose just about the time that society was growing more complex; there was, therefore, a need for the kind of service the Sophists were performing. But the old way was so intertwined with values of another kind—implicit respect and reverence for the family as such—that a thrust on the educational front was felt to cut into the unity of the family and its ancient blood loyalties and pieties.

Socrates was lumped together with the Sophists, as Aristophanes’ play makes plain, in the popular opinion. He too was making education something detached from any concrete social unit. As he went about Athens, his questions were directed at men who were leaders in their respective fields—everything from pottery-making to politics. And these very men were undertaking the daily responsibility of transmitting their values and techniques to their young relatives and friends who had been apprenticed to them. To these apprentices they could say, “Watch me, and see how it is done”; to Socrates they had to answer in intellectual terms. Their own previous education had fitted them to handle the former situation, but not the latter. Hence they were understandably exasperated. Socrates’ trial was an attempt to put the clock back, to stem a tide which had been running for fifty years toward the institutionalization of education. Havelock conjectures that if there had been no Socrates, Athens might have developed a public university system superseding the uncontrolled instruction by [Page 9] the Sophists. If this had occurred, then the professors would have enjoyed maintenance at public expense. Perhaps this is one neat twist of Socratic irony.

Such is Professor Havelock’s thesis. All that he says seems quite ingenious and convincing, as far as it goes. But it hardly goes far enough. He leaves us with the Socrates of Xenophon’s account: a prosy man, perhaps a bit eccentric, but still nobody of any great stature or profound depths. We must turn to the Platonic Socrates to find a message which transcends the limits of social revolution and raises questions about truly ultimate things.

Havelock’s explanation of the trial of Socrates seems simply to assimilate its victim to the tribe of Sophists, with only minor differentiating features; for instance, he was a native Athenian and no other Sophist was; he took no pay; he never wrote anything of his views and techniques; he seemed to give and receive from his followers much the same kind of devotion that must have cemented together the master and apprentice in the old household educational unit; and so on. These differentiations are in fact all drawn from the old system, and merely added to his Sophist-like concern over generalized intellectual technique. Therefore in Havelock’s eyes Socrates is a “transitional” figure, of importance mainly because he signified that the tide was indeed setting toward institutionalized higher education in Athens.

Socratic Ignorance

NOW, THE TRUE significance is lost in this account, because it entirely leaves out the question of Socratic ignorance. The Sophists never tired of proclaiming that they knew what they knew, and knew it clearly and well. They could do what the ordinary man could not, namely, use words to impart their knowledge, and people who had the necessary fees flocked to hear them lecture and debate. But Socrates invariably said that he was truly ignorant, and scrupulously avoided any didactic expositions of knowledge. His whole method is one of questioning, not of declaiming.

And yet, assuming that Plato shows us Socrates in action with reasonable accuracy, it is hard for the student to avoid feeling that Socrates does in fact know a great deal. His questions are far from aimless, which they probably would be if he did not possess something which would give a fixed point in the swirl of the dialectic. A Socratic dialogue is far different from a random conversation between people who really don’t know anything. Furthermore, he is shown as having a great fund of specific information on all sorts of subjects. This would seem to imply that he really did have knowledge, and therefore that he was lying when he claimed ignorance.

All this, however, is superficial. Socrates himself realized that it is a mistake to identify mere learning with wisdom. The Sophists were learned, and he was as learned as they, but it was wisdom which he sought even beyond this. And therefore beyond the shimmer of all his information about poetry, science, language, and many other subjects, lay a deep darkness, of which he was himself aware, and it was this fundamental ignorance of which he spoke with complete sincerity.

But there is a grave consequence of this: the thesis being developed here is that even though his prosecutors in 399 did not know it, their indictment was in fact accurate. Socrates was arraigned, tried, and executed justly. Socrates is not here to defend himself a second time, and we have to approach the task with honesty and avoid tricks of interpretation. But more than a man is on trial here—and was on trial there. A similar indictment has to be brought in against wide reaches of past and present intellectual endeavor. In fact, the morality of intellect is in the dock with Socrates. If we treat the problem this way, there is a good chance we will eventually arrive at some answer to the question of what kind of man Socrates really was, and why he has not been allowed to sleep forgotten in his grave.

In the first place, we may dispose simply [Page 10] of any questions about the technical legality of the trial. Everything about it was done in strict accordance with the existing laws of Athens. This kind of suit was not particularly uncommon; the thing which made it interesting to the citizens of that day was the notoriety of the man accused. Disbelief in the official deities of the city was already rife, and perhaps had the suit been brought fifty years later, it would never have gotten to court, or else, Socrates would have been acquitted regardless of his defiant speech in his defense. But Socrates’ life span fell just at a time when Athens, a very special city, was undergoing a very universal process, and hence there was played out a drama which consisted actually of a struggle between two goods which can also be evil. These two goods met in Socrates, and his agony was the agony of mankind.

These two goods are on the one hand that of the old, dark, inexpressible, instinctual unity of things, and on the other that of the new, clear, expressible, rational analysis of things. Put on a common sense level, it is the contrast between loyalty and intellect. Put on a more abstract level, it is the conflict between continuity or collectivity and division or separateness. Let us take as a premise that each in itself is a good thing; also that they are quite different things, in some sense in opposition. And the last basic premise is that if either obliterates the other, the result is evil. In addition, some definitions adopted from the modern theologian, Paul Tillich, will be useful. The religious attitude is an attitude of “ultimate concern”; the “holy” or “divine” is whatever we regard as ultimate and the object of our concern. “Ultimate” means “unconditional”; what is unconditional is not dependent on something else. We can commit ourselves to it, but not vice versa.

On this basis it can once again be charged that Socrates did in fact corrupt the youth of Athens and that he did in fact introduce new divinities. And we can accept Socrates’ own supposition in the Apology that the corruption took place through the novelty of the divinities.

What then were these religious novelties, or in what sense were Socrates’ divinities different? “I do believe that there are gods,” he says in the Apology, “and in a sense higher than that in which any of my accusers believe in them.” What is the key to this statement? It lies in scrutinizing Socrates, the man of intellect. There is no point whatsoever in saying that Socrates was a rationalizer of religious doctrines in the sense that he sought naturalistic explanations of presumed divinities and divine events. He was not just another Anaxagoras. He certainly did not believe the tales of the gods literally; many passages in Plato’s dialogues underscore this point. Divinity was very real to him, but never in the form of a personal deity or a pantheon of personal deities.

Rather, I think that Socrates was responding to the magnetism of the discovery of intellect. At this early stage of the history of the mind, the intellect was not something which could be simply taken for granted. It was only very gradually emerging as something which it could take as its own object —which could be thought about in its own right. Over the preceding two centuries a succession of Greek philosophers had painfully taken a series of giant steps toward the discovery of the mind as mind; and at last a whole class of men, the Sophists, had arisen to cleave without reservation to the life of the intellect. They were busy applying intellect to man and his activities, becoming the first grammarians, sociologists, rhetoricians, scriptural critics, political scientists, and the like. Mind had turned on itself, and in these men it operated without restriction. It is doubtful whether there are any obvious, built-in limitations to the workings of the intellect, and therefore when these men set to work to intellectualize whatever came to their attention, they ended up with no object of value save the intellect itself. The political scientists tended to say that might makes right; the sociologists preached the relativity of cultural [Page 11] values; the rhetoricians saw nothing wrong in their pupils’ use of their learned skills to any end whatsoever.

Socrates and the Sophists

IN THE POPULAR VIEW, Socrates was classed with these men. Most commentators hold that it is the destructive and critical aspect of both Socrates’ teachings and that of the Sophists that allows them to seem alike. But Socrates was not purely critical, and their similarity lies rather in their seeing the intellect as a positive value in itself, and not only positive but also as ultimate—which is to say, divine. That the intellect then functions critically and often destructively is secondary and due simply to the nature of the intellect. Its proper work is to clarify by analysis and division, by drawing exact distinctions, and by discerning logical relations between the elements it sifts out. In Socrates’ case this happened to take the form of the search for definitions.

Socrates, then, was in this sense a Sophist and rightly so-called. He himself felt the power of the intellect to an immense degree, and through him others felt it. The very intensity of his devotion to intellect, which is divine for him, is apparent in the facts of his relations with others. You must be utterly convinced that this man was grotesquely and notoriously ugly, and ugliness is repellent. Just to see the name “Socrates” on a printed page is not to realize what it must have been like to see him directly. Imagine a squat, paunchy man with a bulbous head on which are facial features individually and collectively repulsive: bulging eyes set almost as far apart as those of a fish; ears sticking out widely from the sides of the head; hands with spatulate fingers in need of a manicure, hairy bowlegs with splay feet calloused from going barefoot in all types of weather. His complexion was coarse and his teeth were probably going bad. His clothes were probably threadbare, and certainly carelessly worn. And yet, despite all this, person after person, once hearing Socrates converse, was irresistibly drawn to him. It could only have been due to the radiance of his commitment to intellect.

Intellect happens to be embodied in men, especially when (as was the case in fifth century Greece) there is little written communication of intellectuality. Hence young men flocked to study with the Sophists, and wealthy older men sometimes spent fortunes to sit at their feet. But with some pupils there comes a time when it dawns on them that the intellect is not necessarily rooted in a particular man, that it is something which can be abstracted and made one’s own possession just as well. The power and the magnetism become detached from the person of the teacher and pass into the mind of the pupil. If intellect comes by itself, unqualified, this is a perilous moment. The fate of the pupil as a good human being hangs in the balance. Many times it does come alone, and then the clan of Sophists has spawned another member. Young men and women who are engaged in graduate-level study for a profession vividly display the danger: they have learned enough to feel the power of professional knowledge, and there is nothing in them to check this power. Whether they are studying medicine, law, any of the humanities or the pure sciences, or any other field, they are worshippers of the unrestricted intellect. And they are thereby less than human beings, and corrupt.

This feeling was undoubtedly even stronger when the Western mind was still in its adolescence, and when so many of its fields were as yet uncharted and promised the delights of unlimited inquiry. This is one of the primary aspects of the man, Socrates. Since [Page 12] it is the side which lies uppermost in the Platonic dialogues, it can hardly fail to be noticed. We must now turn to the other side, which lies underneath in darkness. It is the aspect of felt, collective unity. This is much harder to get at, since it is never accurately analyzable or expressible.

Socrates resembled the Sophists in one essential aspect—their intellectualism. We can now show that he is different from them in a second essential aspect. The Sophists as a group were rootless people. In an age and place where almost all men recognized a loyalty to a specific community, these men had broken their allegiance to the cities of their birth, and under the lash of intellect had begun to travel from place to place giving instruction for pay. For them the community was not important; it was not a locus of values for them, and rootedness was a matter for derision, since their sole value attached to the intellect, which knows no time or place. Their rootlessness in itself disturbed the ordinary Greeks, although they didn’t quite know why. It just was not right for a man to scorn the community which had produced him. The Sophists, however, since they regarded themselves as essentially intellectual, and since their communities had not given them this gift—they had discovered it for themselves—found it easy to detach themselves, for no essential part of their selves consisted of a community tie. If intellect is impersonal and abstract, and if the self consists of intellect, then the self can be supremely indifferent to any particular community or person. And this seems to have been the prevailing attitude among the Sophists.

Socrates, however, was quite different, despite his commitment to intellect. Plato’s testimony, which we have no reason to disbelieve, is that Socrates placed a high value on his community ties. He had no desire to leave Athens of his own free will, and at the end this fact even worked against him by stirring up suspicion that he was a secret sympathizer with the oligarchical party. His devotion to Athens is the main topic of a little dialogue called the Crito, the scene of which is the prison cell where Socrates lies awaiting execution. His friend Crito tries to get him to escape (which evidently would have been quite feasible) but Socrates declines, and explicitly on the grounds that he owes a debt to the laws and institutions of the city, having been born and reared there. No Sophist would have responded this way. He imagines that the laws of Athens are speaking to him, and has them say:

Since you were brought into the world and nurtured and educated by us, can you deny that you are our child and slave, as your fathers were before you? And if this is true, you are not on equal terms with us . . . . Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?

In this way Socrates reveals himself as allied with the traditionalists and conservatives. This tradition has an immensely old history. The value of collectivity can be traced as far back into man’s primitive state as we can penetrate. When the savage practices his magic, acting out the hunt and the kill in order to insure success, he is not so much imitating a real hunt to come as he is actually performing a hunt. All things and events are dimly and deeply felt to be one, and an action performed with symbolic spears and a symbolic prey is identical with a similar action done with functional spears against an edible quarry. The Greeks had at this stage in their development come far beyond this level of primitive magic, but there is no difficulty in pointing to institutions of the fifth century B.C. in Athens which embody this unity. The family, and also the household of which Havelock speaks, rest on it. Tragic drama is another familiar case. The mystery religions and the Dionysian frenzies are examples of [Page 13] it. The many fraternal associations and societies the Greeks had also illustrate it. These were more than associations for convenience or amusement or utility. There was a sense of a concrete bond of brotherhood alongside of which the pledge of brotherhood exacted by our modern fraternities and lodges is a false imitation.

The Athenian laws illustrated this underlying bond in many ways, but the supreme illustration is plainly and simply the true democratic spirit. Hence we find Anytus, the sincere democrat, among the accusers of Socrates. In our day, since the intellect has swollen to such vast proportions, political democracy is often said to be founded on a society of independent and separate individuals, which is the legacy of eighteenth century rationalism. In fifth-century Athens, despite the effect of the Sophists, the old feeling of blood-brotherhood persisted in a strong form. The community, even the democratic community, did not so much belong to the citizens as the citizens belonged to it. The city was a unit, a single pervasive environment, into which the individual persons merged, and its institutions constituted in effect the very air they breathed. This is why Greek democracy worked.

For the Greeks this mystical unity partook of divinity. Each such brotherhood, whether it was a city-state or whether it was a family or a school, was dedicated to a patron god or goddess. The divinity was held to be actually in the unity, but as we can now see it, the patron god afforded a more obvious symbol of concrete religious spirit. Homer and Hesiod in their poems had earlier worked out a pantheon in which what were originally these mutely felt bonds and forces took on human form and characteristics. The Olympian gods displaced the older, darker gods of blood and earth. That personification was satisfactory for a more primitive era, in its groping for enlightenment, but now the growing indifference to all but the required rituals was undercutting simple-minded literalism with regard to this pantheon. Yet the pull of the felt unity persisted; being more deeply rooted, and being below the level of consciousness and explicitness, it was not subject to direct criticism and attack. Assaults on it were unwitting and indirect. The bitterness and agony of the Peloponnesian War and the convulsions of the political strife in Athens during and after the war were all the worse because of its presence, but had the effect of weakening it and breaking up the soil of community to receive the divisive seeds of triumphant intellectuality.

His Corruptive Influence

THEREFORE, SOCRATES, with his magnetic intellectuality, which entered into many potentially able minds in which there was not an equal, inexpressible commitment to the polar opposite of intellect, really did corrupt the youth of Athens. He felt the counterbalance and hence was not himself corrupt, but he could not communicate it. The passion for intellect, which he spread like a contagion, acted in others to rupture and tear away these ancient unconscious bonds. Divinity was now not only the ultimate of feeling, but also the ultimate of intellect. The Greeks were too close to all this to see it clearly, and they had no recourse save to grumble that Socrates interfered with young men’s attachments to their families, or that he disregarded the traditional deities. Deep inside them they could feel something vital being severed. Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates is of a piece with his overall social conservatism, which shows through all his plays. And Anytus, the accuser, was indeed an honest man, sincerely committed to the plain brotherhood of democracy, the conviction that men are a natural unity and all equally entitled to political participation. Socrates’ intellect kept him from joining either that brotherhood or the more restricted one of the aristocracy, [Page 14] but he simultaneously recognized the worth of brotherhood beyond the limitations of any such partial unity.

This put him in a position where he himself felt torn and unable to resolve the contradiction between intellect and feeling. If we grasp this dilemma, countless obscurities in the dialogues become clear. Over and over again Socrates is made to ask: Is virtue the same as knowledge? And no clear answer is ever given. Socrates the man was never able to assure himself finally that the intellectual knowledge which drew him so strongly was of itself adequate to provide the depth and strength which come from direct commitment to felt unity, yet he could not bring the two together. Had he simply been willing to give up one pole or the other, his search would have terminated, and he could have slept nights. But he felt balanced—pethaps even crucified—between the two incommensurable values, and was too much of a man to give up either. This is the true secret of the ignorance which Socrates constantly claimed for himself. He was entirely sincere; he did know a great deal, and especially he knew that both intellect and unity are divine goods. This gives the structure to his questionings: when he talks with a Sophist, he stands for unity and loyalty; when he talks with the unenlightened, he stands for the clarity of intellect.

This Enigmatic Figure

THE FINAL DOUBT and ignorance that would not let him go had to do with the undiscovered means of reconciling these two; it was this that he truly did not know how to do. Yet he saw that a true teacher must find a way to reconcile them to unite rational clarity and expressibility with the stability and solidarity of felt unity, or run the terrible risk of corrupting the souls in his charge. Most men either never feel this difficulty, or else they flee from it by committing themselves to one pole and suppressing the other.

Hence feeling becomes the enemy of intellect, and intellect the foe of feeling. Socrates had too much perceptiveness and fortitude to do this, so he could never be either an ordinary citizen or a true Sophist, and he died as he had lived—a tragically lonely individual.

It is net enough to say, as does Romano Guardini, that Socrates is a tragic figure because he brings new values which come into conflict with the traditional values of his epoch. Socrates is a far more tragic figure than an Antigone or even a Prometheus, because the confrontation of values had been taking place within him for most of his life, even before it was externalized in his trial. If the divinity of the intellect had not taken possession of the same living body as did the divinity of the mystic unity, all would have been different. But they did, and the two gods strove inside him and drove him on his endless quest for peace. It is small wonder that he was charged with religious innovations. And it was only just that he should die at the hands of the more ancient divinity of the two, the dark god of unity.

The overpowering fascination which this enigmatic man has held for so many generations arises because he is a perfect symbol of the human condition, and this is felt even when it is not understood. Socrates was crucified on the opposing forces of intellect and feeling, and so are we now. Once intellect became established as a permanent possession of mankind, it began a struggle with the other for dominance. Not the Greeks, therefore, but later generations could best sense the symbolic meaning of Socrates. In his own day, only one man was perceptive enough to feel it at all correctly, and that was Plato. The dialogues are his monument to this unique man, possessed by gods, but possessing the tragic flaw of being unable to reconcile them. There was only one Socrates, and now there can be only one, for now the drama is played out on a wider stage, that of all mankind.

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THE OCEAN— Our Last Resource

By ARTHUR LYON DAHL

MUCH HAS BEEN SAID in recent years about the sea as the ultimate answer to many of man’s problems. Predictions depict the ocean as providing an endless supply of food, vast oil and mineral resources, space for all of the wastes of our technological civilization, room for our burgeoning population, and unlimited potential for recreation, transportation, and many of man’s other activities. As with all of man’s dreams, however, the picture is not as perfect as it has usually been painted. Many of the possible uses of the sea [Page 16] are mutually exclusive, and rapid development of those alternatives that are technologically the most feasible at present may forever rule out other alternatives.

The sea is still in many ways an unknown area, a complex and delicately balanced system, closely interrelated with the rest of man’s environment. Before the oceans are further exploited on any scale, more research should be done, more knowledge accumulated, and new decision-making institutions of sufficient scope created, so that the proper choices can be made concerning the ultimate balance of uses that will be the most beneficial to the whole society. The present largely uncontrolled exploitation can only result in the destruction of the resource, as has occurred in many land areas, although the international nature of the oceans will make the repercussions of such destruction much more widespread. It is therefore worthwhile to summarize the major areas of potential ocean development with some of their interrelationships, and to discuss ways in which this development can proceed. The future of the oceans is being decided today, and the wrong decisions, or the lack of them, can have undreamed consequences for the civilization of tomorrow.

Food from the Sea

ONE OF THE MOST frequent generalizations about the sea is that in the future it will provide a superabundance of food for mankind. In certain respects this may be true, but there are several important qualifications that must be made. There is an abundance of food in the oceans, but much of it is in forms that are difficult to harvest, or that cannot easily be made edible. There is considerable food value in grass and trees, too, but our digestive tract cannot utilize most of it. Much of the world’s food at present comes from the grains, seeds of grasses with food materials, chiefly carbohydrates, stored to help the young seedlings get started. Most plants in the sea have never developed such easily harvested concentrations of food, and so for many years to come, our chief sources of carbohydrates will remain on land. Only when processes are developed for the cheap conversion of other plant materials such as cellulose to food, not only from marine plants, but also from trees and weeds, will the full value of the food energy stored in the sea be realizable.

Two areas, however, where food from the oceans will be of increasing significance do exist: ocean foods can provide a source of protein, and they can become substitutes for fruits and vegetables. Meat is always very inefficient to produce relative to plant foods, because so much of the plant energy an animal eats is expended in the everyday living activities of the animal, and little is stored in the form of meat or other edible materials. However, animals are able to digest and utilize many of the plant materials that man is not able to digest directly, and can thus serve as a conversion mechanism for such plant resources. Since the inefficiency of raising meat cannot be justified in areas of food shortages where human food crops must take priority over animal fodder, we are turning more and more to areas such as the sea as sources of the protein that is so essential to man’s diet. Indeed, recent estimates suggest that there is in the sea sufficient protein available to supply the needs of six billion people.

A number of nations are rapidly expanding their fisheries industries and exploring the oceans for new areas of fish concentrations. Several governments are developing processes for producing fish protein concentrates that can be used as additives in other foods to provide the necessary proteins for human growth and thus to help solve the severe protein deficiency already afflicting much of the world’s population. But just as with animals, such as the bison of the American plains, that once served as meat sources for man but have now been reduced to curiosities, it is easy to overfish wild fish stocks and thus reduce them tremendously, especially with modern fishing techniques. This can only be avoided by careful management of the fish resource, adjusting the catch size to the reproductive efficiency of the organism so that the species can continue [Page 17] to replace its numbers indefinitely. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the reproductive patterns, food sources, life cycles, and breeding grounds of marine animals is limited, and the information available for many important species is insufficient for proper management of the stocks. The result frequently is that the fishermen catch as many as they can, depleting valuable food resources in the sea. An excellent example is the case of the great blue whale, the world’s largest animal, for which the nations operating whaling fleets could not limit themselves to suitable quotas, and thus have hunted it almost to the point of extinction. A ban on hunting the blue whale was only approved when there were too few remaining to be hunted economically.

A complicating factor here is that many of the most important fisheries are situated on continental shelves and in other areas that are claimed by the adjacent nations as national waters. This has often been done to prevent other nations from upsetting the fisheries which a particular nation has been trying to maintain; but in the long run this fragmentation of important ocean areas among many different sovereignties prevents the type of integrated management that will probably be necessary to preserve the various ocean resources for future generations. Fish populations often migrate very widely, perhaps breeding in one nation’s waters, feeding in a second, and being caught in a third. Another serious factor is that many important commercial species reproduce in rivers, estuaries, and other near-shore waters that are now being polluted, or destroyed by development, thus wiping out the breeding bases for important fish populations. There are few regulatory agencies with sufficient power or willingness to curb such alterations, with their short-term or local benefits, in order to preserve what would be much more valuable long-term resources, at least on a world basis.

In a few areas of the world, especially in southeast Asia, fish farming in ponds or enclosed estuaries is now being practiced successfully with very high yields, but the number of areas that can now be used this way are limited, and it will be a long time before fish farming will be practical on a much larger scale. Our best immediate hope is to develop techniques for managing the wild populations of fish in the open oceans for maximum sustainable harvests.

The seaweeds are often mentioned as potential food sources for the future; and certainly in some areas of the world such as the Far East they are now commercially cultivated for food. Yet they have the same drawback as other marine organisms in that they are not good sources of digestible carbohydrates, our most important foodstuff. Their primary use, therefore, is as a substitute for vegetables, because of their extremely high content of vitamins and minerals. A few are also excellent sources of protein. The problem with using the larger seaweeds widely is that most species grow naturally only along very narrow coastal strips, and the total amounts available are limited and are difficult to harvest economically. Eventually, with further understanding of their growth habits and reproductive cycles, it may be possible to farm or cultivate the most important species on a much more extensive basis than at present, since their extremely high growth rates and important nutritive qualities make them very desirable. Still there is much research that needs to be done, and it is only in a very few areas of the world, especially in the Far East, that it is practical to farm seaweeds at present.

The plankton, the microscopic floating plants and animals of the open ocean, are also mentioned as a possible future food. A recent study of one species showed that it was an extremely nutritious organism with much the same protein value as the basic protein in milk. However, no techniques are known at present for harvesting these organisms in sufficient quantities or even growing them in the ocean in adequate concentrations to make them an important resource, so for some time to come we must be content with the natural harvesting along the food chain that [Page 18] presently utilizes these microscopic food producers as the raw material for the fish that we are able to catch.

One of the greatest difficulties in managing and utilizing the food resources in the ocean is that they make up extremely complex interacting systems, with many organisms depending on each other, much as people depend on each other in a city for food, housing, and the myriad necessities of a civilized life. Marine organisms are also very sensitive to changes in their environment, because the ocean is in many ways a stable and unchanging place to live. This makes the life systems of the ocean very sensitive to pollution damage or environmental destruction, and the effects of only a small disturbance affecting only a few organisms can have extensive repercussions in many other parts of the ecological community because of the complicated interactions involved, much as a single labor dispute involving bus drivers or sanitation workers can upset a city. Only after careful scientific research and evaluation should alterations to biologically important areas be made.

Technological Uses

THE TECHNOLOGICAL possibilities of the ocean are another facet of its many-faceted uses which call for long-range planning. The exploitation of the mineral resources of the sea is already well under way. Continental shelves are being drilled extensively for oil and natural gas. Tin and gold-bearing sands are being mined in shallow areas, as are a variety of building materials. Other areas of important ores are known, and it will be only a matter of time before economically feasible techniques for their recovery are developed. These activities often require extensive marine or shore-based installations which can interfere with fishing, navigation, and scenic or recreational values, and preclude other types of development. Pollution of near-shore waters with oil and silt may also result. The economic interests supporting development may be much more powerful than the regulatory agencies, and immediate gain can too easily outweigh long-term consequences. As the capabilities for living and working under the sea increase, deeper and deeper areas will be explored and exploited, increasing the need for effective control.

Another use of the ocean which is very important at the present time is its use for transportation of various kinds. We presently ply the ocean surface with ships of many sizes and purposes, and go beneath it with submarines. While air travel has become increasingly important, it is probable that the oceans will long remain an important pathway for transporting many kinds of materials. In planning for this we shall have to keep in mind the protection of the other possible uses of the ocean, for while the passage of a ship in itself is not usually very damaging to the ocean system, the construction of harbors often destroys important inshore areas that have many other uses or are important for the maintenance of marine life. Accidents such as sinkings often release large quantities of pollutants, as occurred in the Torrey Canyon disaster, and we may some day see conflicts between desired shipping routes and areas that are being used for ocean farming or some other aCtivity where the ships would become a hazard. This problem will become increasingly complex as the ocean is used more and more for industries, living space, and recreation, all of which will need transportation systems for people, equipment, and products. Agencies will increasingly be needed to control marine traffic, just as air and land traffic are controlled.

Pollution

ONE OF THE GRAVEST problems in the immediate use of the ocean, resulting indirectly from the population explosion, is that we have long regarded the ocean as a wonderful place to dump all of our waste materials, either directly or through our river systems. Since the ocean was an unlimited body of water, the wastes vanished, and nobody had to worry about them. Suddenly we have reached the point where in many areas we [Page 19] are dumping in more waste than the ocean can cope with, polluting inshore areas, wreaking havoc with the local marine organisms, and creating a tremendous amount of ecological destruction. This waste not only includes sewage from cities and chemicals from industrial plants. It also includes some radioactive wastes, either washed down rivers or deposited in the sea. It includes important quantities of insecticides and fertilizers that are washed off farm land and down into the sea through rivers. And it includes thermal pollution from electric generating plants where sea water is used for cooling. The outflow of large quantities of heated water into the ocean can significantly alter the coastal temperature, to which marine organisms are highly sensitive. Water desalination plants may produce heated or highly saline effluents that could constitute a local pollution hazard. An example of the effects of pollution that have already occurred is the finding recently of DDT residues in Antarctic penguins in an area thousands of miles from any place where DDT has been used, illustrating that such chemicals, which do not break down quickly, have now contaminated the entire ocean and are being concentrated by the food chains into organisms where they could be an important hazard. The world must quickly realize that we live on a planet of very limited area, and that there is no such thing as throwing something away and never seeing it again; it will always end up in someone else’s back yard, if not our own. We must learn to recycle all of our wastes within the system: the sewage from our cities can become, after processing, a fertilizer and soil supplement for farm lands; and the thermal pollution from power plants can be harnessed instead to make new areas available for growing tropical crops, or to provide the heat for manufacturing processes.

Recreation, Conservation, and Science

OCEAN AREAS are being used more and more for recreational activities both on and below the surface, including swimming and boating, fishing and spearfishing, skin diving, and just looking at the scenery or marveling at the wonders of the ocean bottom. These are certain to become more popular in the future as recreational areas on land become more crowded. There is already, for instance, an underwater nature trail in a U.S. National Park in the Virgin Islands. As underwater communities are constructed, techniques will have to be developed to control their pollution. Means will have to be devised for segregating various activities in the ocean to proteCt, for example, people in recreational or residential areas from the passage of large ships. Most problems that have occurred in the development of land communities will recur in some form in the sea, and will need to be regulated or resolved by appropriate institutions.

Another aspect of the oceans that is becoming of increasing concern to people in many parts of the world is the preservation of the natural heritage that many ocean areas represent. Just as on land many nations have found it necessary to set aside their most beautiful natural areas as parks to be permanently preserved for the enjoyment of all people, so also is it becoming necessary for many countries to set aside some of their most beautiful ocean and coastal areas as marine parks that will be barred to commercial uses and protected from pollution and other destruction. This is, however, only beginning, and there needs to be much more interest on the part of the general public in investigating their own coastal areas, determining which are of real scenic or scientific value in their natural state, and then taking steps to see that they are preserved in some legal form as parks for the benefit of future generations.

The ocean is, finally, an important area for [Page 20] scientific investigations of many sorts. Life probably originated in the sea, many of the early steps in evolution took place there, and many of the organisms living today are evidence of these evolutionary steps. The study of marine organisms is thus important to elucidating many basic problems in biology. The oceans also serve as an important laboratory for the determination of the history of the earth, and for investigations into the origins of continents, mountain chains, and other geological features. Ocean studies are crucial to a knowledge of the weather and the atmospheric circulation patterns, and provide data for the study of many physical problems in fluid dynamics, underwater acoustics, and other areas of concern. It will be many years before these problems can be investigated fully, and it is therefore essential to the progress of science that important sections of the oceans be preserved intact as laboratories for the study of the earth and its life.

The Need for World Institutions

CERTAIN STATEMENTS can be made concerning the potential interactions between the various ocean uses. All of the uses involving biological resources, scientific research, and scenic or aesthetic values require that as little alteration as possible be made in the ocean environment, except under carefully controlled conditions. Since it is not possible to isolate physically special ocean sections, certain activities, especially those producing pollution, may have to be banned entirely. Mining and farming are usually incompatible in the sea, as on land, because of the disturbance to the environment that mineral extraction usually entails, and would therefore have to be kept separate. Alternatives can be chosen, such as building deep water terminals for ships, or using hovercraft not requiring deep water docks, in areas where harbor construction would destroy biologically important coastal ecosystems. Some interactions could actually be beneficial. For instance, controlled additions of sewage could be used to fertilize ocean areas and increase their productivity, and heated water from power plants could be added to fish ponds or other sea farming areas to stabilize growing conditions or to permit cultivation at naturally unsuitable times of year. Thermal additions could also help keep northern harbors ice free, if this would not effect biological values too severely. In essence, compromises similar to those made between conflicting interests on land will be needed in the sea; the lessons of wise long-term management are also the same, and should not have to be learned again.

All of this leads up to one very basic problem: the ocean is a world resource, and decisions as to its exploitation should be made on a world basis. No international institutions yet exist, outside of a few connected with specialized fisheries, that can direct the necessary scientific investigations of this complex system, consider all the costs, and then make suitable decisions or establish appropriate controls. Most of the decisions being made at present are made by local or national institutions and are based on short-term costs and benefits. For instance, it is cheaper to dump sewage into the ocean than to convert it into a soil supplement because the costs of the destruction of ocean resources by pollution are not usually borne by the responsible locality, and can only be assessed over many years. And yet the human race cannot afford to allow the ocean to be seriously degraded; it is too important in maintaining the balance of the planetary environment. The ocean plays an essential part in the cycle of the water that we must have for life; it appears to play a crucial role in the planetary weather pattern; it is becoming increasingly imporrant on a biological basis as a food source for man; it is even crucial to the maintenance of the quality of our atmosphere. Man requires oxygen for life, and it is the oceans that to a large extent replenish the oxygen in the atmosphere and reduce the level of carbon dioxide that is produced by the respiration of man and other life, and by the burning of fuels and waste products. No one knows [Page 21] how sensitive this system is, or how easily upset, but we cannot afford to take chances with it.

The only solution is to develop a world approach to the problem, and to create the necessary organizations to plan the long-term development of the ocean resources for the benefit of all mankind. This is only one aspect of the critical need for world cooperation in all aspects of human endeavor, and for the establishment of a world system. A recent proposal, presented in one form to the last session of the United Nations General Assembly by Malta, was that the oceans beyond the continental shelves should be turned over to the United Nations for their control and development, and that the tax income from this development should be used as the primary financial source for the United Nations, or as a source of aid for the developing countries of the world. This suggestion has met with strong opposition from many nations and corporations that would like to exploit the open ocean without such limitations. It is not too early to establish an international regulatory agency for ocean maintenance and development, and the United Nations would be an appropriate place for such activity, if the political problems involved and selfish national interests can be set aside. Much research still has to be done, many solutions tried on a small scale, before appropriate answers will be found. If the present state of affairs is allowed to continue, many ocean resources will be destroyed or severely damaged, just as many of the resources on the land have been in the past.

The alternatives that face us now, therefore, are whether we will permit the destruction of this last major area of renewable resources, or whether we will work to leave them as a rich asset that will play an important material role in the development of a world civilization. The key to this choice lies in international understanding and cooperation. The sea is a vast new frontier for which the old governmental mechanisms and systems of society are no longer sufficient; existing institutions fail to look beyond their traditional concerns and national interests, yet refuse to yield the necessary sovereignty to an international body. We must evolve a new social system based on a world order of man, where cooperation for the total good replaces international anarchy. Perhaps the need to develop the oceans will push man in this direction and will help to guide him toward the establishment of a world civilization.

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FRANKENSTEIN: An Allegorical Analysis

By ALLAN L. WARD

EACH AGE LOOKS at literary works with new eyes and projects into them ideas which previous generations have either neglected or not seen. An early-nineteenth century classic which calls for such a reexamination is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The creature made by Dr. Frankenstein is one of a long line of literary monsters ranging from the Cyclops of Greek mythology and the giants of the Bible, to the modern lagoon creatures and dimensional beings from space. Yet, Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, since his unusual birth in the laboratory, has become the king of literary monsters. He has stalked his way through every entertainment medium; he has been widely imitated; and more recently he has been caricatured and burlesqued.

The story of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster invites attention as an enduring success in a time-honored literary genre. But more important, the monster, because of his enduring popularity, makes it possible to reexamine his tale in the light of modern racial developments. Such a study, which we may pursue with the smile of detachment as well as the soberness of analysis, provides us with a study of an allegory of prejudice and discrimination.

Historical Background

THE UNLIKELY CREATOR of both Dr. Frankenstein and his hapless monster was a teen-ager named Mary, whose own story invites analysis. She left England with one of its most famous Romantic poets, Percy B. Shelley, who penned the following lines to her:

The world is dreary,

And I am weary

Of wandering on without thee, Mary;

A joy was erewhile

In thy voice and thy smile

And ’tis gone, when I should be gone too, Mary.

In 1815, a year after their elopement, her first child, born prematurely, died; in 1816, her second son was born. During that summer, the Shelleys vacationed with Lord Byron in the mountains of Switzerland, read ghost stories together to pass the rainy evenings, decided to produce horror stories of their own, each beginning one, but only Mary persevering to complete hers, Frankenstein, during the following months.

In the same period, Mary’s half-sister committed suicide, as did Shelley’s legal wife, Harriet. He married Mary, and the following year, 1817, she bore him a third child, and wrote the preface to her novel, while Percy penned:

[Page 23]

[Page 24]

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless

legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . .

Tragically, the child died in 1818, the same year the book was published, the other boy died in 1819, and Percy drowned in 1822, while the trunkless legs of Ozymandias and the eclectic body of Frankenstein’s monster lived on.

Philosophical and Sociological Implications

THE CAUSES of conflict in the story fall into two parts. The first is primarily philosophical and concerns itself with the rights of humans to toy with creation. The second concerns the reaction of members of a society to a being who is recognizably similar but noticeably different from themselves.

Mary Shelley seemed more aware of the potential horror present in the first part. She even subtitled her book The Modern Prometheus, recalling the Greek myth of that god’s task of creating the first human being from the clay of the earth. Dr. Frankenstein, as a modern Prometheus, plays seriously with these secrets of human creation and sparks off existence in a being of his own creation.

Part of Mary’s idea came, she said, from her husband’s conversations with his fellow poet:

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.

To Mary, the hideousness of the concept that came to her concerned man’s tampering with things forbidden to him, taboo seeds, as it were, from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She saw the creation by man of one in his own image as terrifying, and wrote, “‘Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.’”

The implications of this facet of the book have been much discussed already, and we shall leave them to further philosophical discourse and scientific exploration. The part we shall examine begins as soon as the monster opens his “dull yellow eye.” From there on, social interaction assumes primary importance. Between the eye’s opening and the last farewell many years later as the monster disappears in the mists of an arctic ice flow, a pattern of symbols emerges concerning prejudgment and discrimination.

The Dichotomy of Inner and Outer Attributes

IN ITS RESEMBLANCE to mythical tales with their symbolic elements of titanic heroes and monsters, Frankenstein’s story contains what might be considered a representation of the archetype of one whose inner reality is never acknowledged by those in his environment because of his outer looks and their inner blindness. The story may be viewed as an allegory, with the monster, whose name nobody knows, representing “Everyman,” or “Every-race,” or “Every-Ethnic-Group,” who have been subjected to negative responses because of their outward appearance by groups of people who never bothered to get to know the inner, individual, personalities.

Outer qualities are the more obvious, and consist of social classifications and physical attributes. Inner qualities are more complex and referred to generally as “personality traits,” or religiously as “spiritual attributes,” or “being made in the image of God.” A clear and useful expression of the dichotomy was made in a speech to the fourth national convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. [Page 25] He began by saying,

According to the words of the Old Testament, God has said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” . . . . that is to say, the perfections of God, the divine virtues are reflected or revealed in the human reality. . . . Let us now discover more specifically how he is the image and likeness of God and what is the standard or criterion by which he can be measured and estimated.

Then he questioned the outer attributes:

If a man possesses wealth can we call him an image and likeness of God? Or is human honor and notoriety the criterion of divine nearness? Can we apply the test of racial color and say that man of a certain hue—white, black, brown, yellow, red—is the true image of his Creator?

And then he concluded,

We must conclude that color is not the standard and estimate of judgment and that it is of no importance, for color is accidental in nature. . . . Man is not man simply because of bodily attributes. . . . The standard of divine measure and judgment is his intelligence and spirit. Therefore let this be the only criterion and estimate. . . . The character and purity of the heart is of all importance. . . . The qualities and attributes of divinity are radiated from the depths of a pure human heart.

The Frankenstein story provides a literary allegory of these ideas.

The Outer Qualities

SCARCELY A DOZEN lines of the whole book are devoted to a description of the monster’s outer looks, and thus most people have acquired more ideas about this aspect of him from Boris Karloff’s film make-up than from the original text. Dr. Frankenstein’s initial description appears when he first awakens the creature:

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

Dr. Frankenstein did not see his creation again for two years, at which time he describes the night scene: “A flash of lightning illuminated the object . . . its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life.”

The sea captain, who was the last person to see the monster, offered the only other observation, saying the monster was “. . . gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. . . . one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy. . . . Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome yet appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes involuntarily. . . .”

The physical attributes which even a horrified populace might have admired included his great strength, endurance, and suppleness, reflected in Dr. Frankenstein’s observation, “I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle. . . .” In addition, he ate roots and berries, and had an extremely high intelligence.

Brief though the physical descriptions are, yet they sustain the tale; without those looks there would have been no public reaction, and [Page 26] hence, no story.

The Inner Qualities

THE CREATURE'S inner characteristics received more attention in the book, though no recognition by the remainder of the characters. He summed up his own wish admirably, after he learned to speak, and well at that, when he said, “‘Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.’”

He showed an appreciation for natural beauty: “‘Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; . . .’” And he appreciated the beauty of human virtues: “‘No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. . . . I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion.’”

He put his principles into practice, as shown by his actions when he took secret refuge in a shed adjoining a small cottage:

‘I had been accustomed, during the night, to steal a part of their store for my own consumption; but when I found that in doing this I inflicted pain on the cottagers, I abstained, and satisfied myself with berries, nuts, and roots, which I gathered from a neighbouring wood.

‘I discovered also another means through which I was enabled to assist their labours. I found that the youth spent a great part of each day in collecting wood for the family fire; and, during the night, I often took his tools, the use of which I quickly discovered, and brought home firing sufficient for the consumption of several days.’

Spurned by everyone who saw him, he sought one final solace, and requested Dr. Frankenstein to make him a mate, with whom he could find at least a little companionship. Therein he showed his ability to feel very human emotions. He said, “‘Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone?’” And he asked, “‘Shall each man . . . find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn.’” All he requested was justice: “‘Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind.’” And he was willing to go beyond justice and show mercy: “‘If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them an hundred and an hundred fold; for that one creature’s sake, I would make peace with the whole kind!’”

Treatment by Closest Associate

THE MONSTER’S first encounter with the human race came when he first awakened, and met young, handsome, intelligent Dr. Frankenstein, who reported: “Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room . . .” When the monster, in a friendly manner, followed him up to his bedroom, the doctor was hardly hospitable and related that he “escaped, and rushed down stairs.”

Then the doctor collapsed, had a long attack of the popular Victorian illness “brain-fever,” took a rest cure, and hiked onto a lonely glacier in Switzerland, only to have another confrontation with the monster, whom [Page 27] he greeted, “‘Devil . . . do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! ...’”

The doctor did not trample effectively and ended up listening to the monster’s plea for a mate. “His words had a strange effect upon me,” Dr. Frankenstein admitted, and then he also admitted how the outward looks blinded him to the inner virtues: “I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.”

The doctor gave his word, the word of a gentleman and scholar, to make the companion creature for the monster, but at almost the moment of completion, broke his word: “. . . on looking up, I saw, by the light of the moon, the daemon at the casement . . . . and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness. . . .” Frankenstein’s feelings toward the creature had not improved by the end of the book when he decided, “‘By the sacred earth on which I kneel . . . I swear . . . to pursue the daemon . . . until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict.’”

Treatment by Others

THE MONSTER received no more compassion from others than he had from the doctor. The monster described the first reaction when he stumbled out into the world: “‘. . . I perceived a small hut. . . . Finding the door open, I entered. An old man sat in it. . . . He turned on hearing a noise; and, perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and quitting the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable.’”

So he tried again, this time a larger house. “‘. . . I had hardly placed my foot within the door, before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country.’”

Then came his education and his greatest hope for acceptance. Seeking refuge in a shed that had a crack through which he could secretly watch the activities of the family in the adjoining house, he observed:

‘They loved, and sympathised with one another; and their joys, depending on each other, were not interrupted by the casualties that took place around them. The more I saw of them, the greater became my desire to claim their protection and kindness; my heart yearned to be known and loved by these amiable creatures: to see their sweet looks directed towards me with affection was the utmost limit of my emotion.’

Through the conversations he overheard and some books he found, the monster learned to read, write, and speak fluently within a few months, and became learned in history, philosophy, and the classics. But he not only accepted the standards of knowledge of the cottagers, but their standards of beauty, and therein another part of the symbolism becomes apparent:

‘I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions: but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.’

[Page 28] This result is symbolic of what takes place when any group internalizes the artificial standards of others, and then sees itself from that viewpoint.

Longing for the acceptance of the family, he chose first to introduce himself at a time when the blind father was alone. Again we find the symbolism that those who are blind to outer qualities see inner ones, and those who see outer ones are blind to inner ones. The blind man welcomed the visitor:

“Enter . . . and I will try in what manner I can relieve your wants. . . . Do not despair. To be friendless is indeed to be unfortunate; but the hearts of men, when unprejudiced by any obvious self-interest, are full of brotherly love and charity. . . . I am blind, and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere.”

This part of the allegory is completed by the return of the other members of the family, who could see outwardly:

‘At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Saffie, and Agatha entered. Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? Agatha fainted; and Saffie . . . rushed out of the cottage. Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung: in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground and struck me violently with a stick. I could have torn him limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope. But my heart sunk within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained. . . . overcome by pain and anguish, I quitted the cottage. . . .’

Other people had the opportunity of showing not only kindness, but gratitude. After leaving the cottage, the monster saw a girl fall into a river, and with great effort, he saved her. Her “rustic” father then shot him. “‘This was then the reward of my benevolence!’ the monster concluded, ‘I had saved a human being from destruction, and, as a recompense, I now writhed under the miserable pain of a wound, which shattered the flesh and bone.’”

Reaction to Frustration

WITH SUCH A CASE history, we could hardly expect the perceptive personality of the monster, as a symbol of a suppressed ethnic group, to be continually unaffected by this series of violent rebuffs. As he said after being shot, “‘The feelings of kindness and gentleness which I had entertained but a few moments before gave place to hellish rage and gnashing of teeth.’” His own feelings of hostility grew towards those who showed him such unwarranted hostility, as he reasoned, “‘All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment. . . . There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies?’”

He concentrated his revenge on Dr. Frankenstein, the agent most responsible for his misery. The monster never denied the wrongness and futility of his own actions of revenge, but he made one of his most profound social observations when he asked the doctor, and through him, all of society:

. . . I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal when all human kind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, they are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.

The implication is clear. The group in authority [Page 29] tend to “see no wrong” in the doings of their own “in-group.” But when any trace of the same injustice is shown by the suppressed group, there comes a great condemnation. The familiar “we-they” attitude prevails, in which “we” can do no wrong, and “they” can do no right.

Summary and Conclusions

THE MONSTER’S final plea for a consideration of justice, then, is an allegorical echo of all unjustly suppressed peoples, “Am I to be thought the only criminal when all human kind sinned against me?”

The riot, uprising, and revolt of those who have been denied their human rights for outer excuses of skin color, position, wealth, or arbitrary class distinction, which explode from the breeding grounds of discontent, may be the mirror image of the hate and injustice consistently shown by the group in authority. If Dr. Frankenstein had never meted out injustice, the monster would never have learned it and returned it. The hideous face of the monster was really the reflection of the doctor, himself. Finally, when Dr. Frankenstein vowed revenge, and pursued the monster across seas and lands, he was really seeking to destroy the prejudice within himself, his own inner ugliness that he projected onto the monster’s outward form.

There is the heart of the allegory: people who judge others by their outer looks and material surroundings instead of by their inner qualities of justice, mercy, love, and so on, create a monstrous condition, an uncontrollable social climate, which ultimately will bring back on themselves, in one form or another, the same hate and injustice they have shown.

The implications are many, and a constant challenge to our society to explore and deal with. As Jung wrote, “Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend.” Until we comprehend much more fully and have dealt with the elements symbolized in the story of Frankenstein, this allegorical tale will continue to tantalize us, as we peer into the dark corridors of our own fears and injustices. And should we explore those dark halls and see the monster looking at us from the flickering shadows and have the courage to ask him his name, a Karloffian voice may lisp back our own.

---

A POEM

Do the broken and converging lines of

conversation

Lead us to meaning?

Or do they constitute meaning? Does our seeking

Bring us to the mighty language of our Faith?

Or would comfort and the weather serve as well?

Perhaps the minister was right, after all—

Dialogue is worship

(sometimes).

Betty Engert

[Page 30]

Current Issues in Christian Ecumenism

By ROBERT C. NEVILLE

THE PROPER EMPHASIS in the title of this article is on the word “current.” It is not the case that many issues have been resolved in ecumenical discussions. The official Roman Catholic position on the authority of the Pope has not changed, for instance, nor has the official Protestant opposition. But neither is it the case that Roman Catholics and Protestants argue about the issue the same way they did twenty years ago. The important thing is that the issue is simply not as current as it was.

My intent in this article is to assess a few of the issues that are current in the Protestant-Catholic discussion and to consider a few of the reasons for their currency. I speak from the position of a Protestant minister teaching philosophy, and sometimes theology, in a Roman Catholic University. I am not privy to the heights of the official ecumenical discussion; but I live daily with the society whose concerns determine what issues are current.

Two kinds of issues usually have been at the center of the ecumenical discussion: those concerning doctrine and those concerning the appropriation of history. Within Christianity the doctrinal issues themselves have been oriented toward conflicting interpretations of the founding historical events of the faith. I will discuss the issues under these two heads.

I. Doctrine

THE FIRST POINT about the state of doctrine in ecumenical discussions has to do, oddly enough, with scriptural studies. From the time of the Reformation until the middle of the nineteenth century scriptural studies could almost be called a branch of doctrinal studies or dogmatics. This was because doctrinal commitments in large part controlled the approach to scripture. Catholics were inclined to give great weight to the pastoral epistles and to the passage in Matthew where Jesus says he gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Protestants emphasized the letters of Paul, especially those passages extolling the sufficiency of grace and the righteousness of faith in contrast to the righteousness of the law.

In the nineteenth century, however, scriptural scholars began to elaborate a distinction of supreme importance. It was possible, they thought, to undertake a purely neutral and scientific historical study into the biblical texts and the conditions surrounding their composition. This involved prescinding from any doctrinal interest present-day Christians might have in the texts themselves. They thought it was possible to find out what the first century Christians themselves believed, without regard for whether it was wise or foolish, divinely inspired or derivative from competing religions, orthodox or heretical. The ninteenth century optimism for scientific historical objectivity has been tempered by now with an appreciation of the relativity of interpretative frameworks and of man’s subtle powers of self-deception. But the ideal is still objectivity, and all communions within Christianity have accepted it. This means that the historical work of scholars from all sides of the ecumenical disputes is to be accepted and judged according to standards of historical scholarly competence, not according to dogmatic orthodoxy. The outstanding display in our day of the universality of the community or scriptural scholars is the Anchor edition of the Bible, edited by Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish scholars.

[Page 31] As might be expected, since all denominations acknowledge at least some authority to the Bible, the new findings of the biblical scholars tended to temper the confidence of the appeals to biblical authority. In addition, the new independence of scriptural studies had the reciprocal effect of granting independence to doctrinal studies. Since the belief had usually been that doctrine derived plainly from scripture, when it was shown that this was not the case the doctrinal theologians had to search for a new ground. And whatever new grounds have been suggested, it seems that Catholics and Protestants now face pretty nearly the same problems. So while the practical results of independent biblical scholarship have not led to formal unity between the churches, the churches now find themselves on much more common ground. And the issues that were current when churches fought over the doctrinal interpretation of scriptures are no longer current.

The second point about the state of doctrine in ecumenical discussion has to do with changing conceptions of the grounds for discussion. Catholic and Protestant thoughts on the matter have developed independently until the recent Vatican Council, and it is worthwhile to trace the outlines of their changes.

The ecumenical movement, so-called, began in the early years of this century through the efforts of YMCA agents and Protestant missionaries working in non-western countries. The competition between denominations was patently embarrassing, especially to non-western peoples whose first acquaintance with Christianity came from an encounter with the Bible rather than from a culturally indigenous parish church situation. Without a background in the subtle differentiations of the development of western culture, it is almost impossible for the differences between denominations to make a difference. And the competition seemed a scandal to the gospel of the unity of the world in Christ. So the World Council of Churches grew out of efforts of various organizations devoted to very practical evangelical tasks.

Since practical rather than doctrinal motives lay behind the Protestant ecumenical movement, the theologians most happy with this were usually liberals. The result of this for the theological development of the movement was that great latitude of doctrinal opinion was permitted. One could be as orthodox as one pleased, or could deny the virgin birth, be soft on the Trinity, and think Jesus nothing but a great teacher. What mattered most was a commitment to organizational unity sufficient to harmonize the evangelical programs of the churches. The theological interpretation of the aims of the movement were in terms of biblical passages (for example, John 17:20-23; Ephesians 4:15-16) that are idealistic and rather non-controversial in terms of the old controversies.

The Roman Catholic Church reacted strongly against the theological grab-bag of liberal ecumenical Protestantism. A clear expression of this reaction is in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical of 1928, Mortalium Animos. Whereas there might have been room for practical cooperation between Catholics and Protestants, there was not much room for theological discussion, since the Protestants had almost no common position to discuss.

Meanwhile, quite apart from the ecumenical movement, Protestant academic theology was undergoing an integral development of its own. Specifically, the impact of the thought of Kierkegaard and the polemical writings of Karl Barth reintroduced a strong concern for the purity of the gospel. The development of Neo-orthodox theology emphasized a return to Reformation theology, to a way of thinking that sees Christianity as unique, an opposition to worldly ways of thinking. It involved a thorough criticism of liberal theology as a distorting accommodation of the stringency of the gospel to relativistic cultural forms. The result of Neo-orthodoxy has been a new consciousness on the part of Protestants of the doctrinal foundations of their faith. Theology again has become a thing of excellence among Protestants, and they are now prepared to discuss “their side” with Roman Catholics. Neo-orthodoxy [Page 32] itself has waned in the theological firmament and has been replaced by a great variety of other approaches to theology, some of which, miraculously enough, are not even German; but its legacy of appropriation of the theological heritage and appreciation of its importance have remained.

On the Roman Catholic side, the development of the status of doctrine has been almost the opposite. This century opened with the squashing of the Modernist “heresy” and with a great confidence in the authority and orthodoxy of the official doctrinal teachings. From this standpoint, there was no need to discuss anything with Protestants, since there was nothing to learn and only a great danger that pure doctrine might be compromised. To my mind, the most interesting passage from the encyclical Mortalium Animos, mentioned above, is the following:

Furthermore, it is never lawful to employ in connexion with articles of faith the distinction invented by some between “fundamental” and “non-fundamental” articles, the former to be accepted by all, the latter being left to the free acceptance of the faithful. The supernatural virtue of faith has as its formal motive the authority of God revealing, and this allows of no such distinction. All true followers of Christ, therefore, will believe the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God with the same faith as they believe the mystery of the august Trinity, the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff in the sense defined by the Oecumenical Vatican Council with the same faith as they believe the Incarnation of Our Lord. That these truths have been solemnly sanctioned and defined by the Church at various times, some of them even quite recently, makes no difference to their certainty, nor to our obligation of believing them. Has not God revealed them all?

The chief interest in this statement is that a great many Roman Catholics today, especially Catholics in the academic community, would not take it seriously. I doubt there was ever a time of much consensus on the equality of the doctrines of Papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception with those of the Trinity and Incarnation; but surely there is no such consensus now. I do not know how to account for the change from the mentality of Pius XI to that of contemporary Catholicism, except to point out obvious things like the political victory of the theological advisors to bishops at the Second Vatican Council. The extent of the change can be illustrated, however.

Recently I was in a public ecumenical discussion with a Roman Catholic priest who began by saying that there is considerable Christian unity because Catholics and Protestants recognize one another’s baptism and accept the same ancient creeds. He admitted there were no ready prospects for agreeing about other things like mutual ordination of priests and shared communion; but he said these problems would be solved as the present unity grew. A Catholic layman commenting on his remarks asked the plain question: “Doesn’t the Catholic Church claim to be the only true church and the only way to salvation? If so, how can there be any Christian unity with other ‘Christian’ churches?” The priest replied (and he was an older man, not a young iconoclast) that salvation comes from God, and that whomever God saves is in the true Church; now the saving grace of God is operative in the Roman Catholic Church, but, he said, this does not exclude it from operating elsewhere as well. This position would be acceptable to most Protestants. It amounts to the distinction between the order of salvation and the order of ecclesiastical authority that is so dear to the hearts of Protestants.

In matters of opening doctrine to discussion and dispute, the darkest fears of Pope Pius XI have been far exceeded. Whereas there still is some sense that certain doctrines, for instance the Incarnation and the Trinity, are more fundamental than others, there is now widespread feeling that they are all open to discussion. In fact, discussion is hotter about the [Page 33] more fundamental ones. Of course, this attitude is not universal among Roman Catholics I have met in the university. But discussion does indeed go on, and with as much freedom in the Roman Catholic community as in any Protestant community. As one Jesuit put it, debating with a Presbyterian, “I have an unshakeable faith in the Roman Catholic tradition as a whole, to which I am loyal, but there is no particular doctrine in that tradition, in any particular form, that I do not feel free to doubt.”

Perhaps the most poignant illustration of the openness of the Roman Catholic community to critical discussion of fundamental doctrines is a personal one. Among Methodist theologians I usually associate myself with the liberals. But in the Roman Catholic community more often than not I turn up in the moderately conservative camp. At the end of this article I shall remark further on this irony. But in general it illustrates the point I have been making throughout, that the developments of scriptural studies and theological doctrine within both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism have changed both from competitors with exclusive doctrines to confused cooperators sharing the same problems. Nearly all the theological positions represented within Protestantism find counterparts with Roman Catholicism, and in actual theological discussion, one’s traditional background makes little prima facie difference.

II. History

A BRIEF POINT must be made about the status of the interpretation of history in current ecumenical discussions. If what I have said so far is correct, then the obstacles to concrete church union do not lie in doctrinal matters. But on the level of popular religious life, on the level of piety, great obstacles remain. Even here, however, the situation has changed.

It used to be that Roman Catholics viewed Protestantism as a kind of folk religion, identifiable more by its connections with northern European mercantilism or Midwest American moralism than by its connections with the gospel and the early Christian tradition. And Protestants thought Catholics were just superstitious and ignorant people gulled by a crafty hierarchy. The customs of each offended the piety of the other. But now increased contact through local ecumenical discussions and cooperation in civic affairs have begun to foster familiarity, understanding, and affection.

The remaining and current obstacles have to do with coming to terms with the history of the last 450 years. Since the Reformation the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions have developed in divergent and apparently mutually exclusive ways. And yet the present vitality of each stems from its recent history. It is absolutely necessary for ecumenical progress that each side find a way of respecting the integrity and validity of the Christian piety in the other tradition. Ecumenism within Christianity has no future unless it can be commonly accepted that there is a Roman Catholic way and also Protestant ways of being Christian. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that in many respects each side defined itself in terms of opposition to the other, opposition that went as far as mendacity, murder, and political war.

The problem of exclusive histories is at the root of most of the current ecumenical problems. Inter-communion, mutual recognition of religious orders, inter-denominational marriages, conflicting allegiances to authorities, and the other problems of a practical sort associated with ecumenical discussion all stem from an inability of each side to accept the validity of the other’s historical development of forms of piety. It should be noted that these are practical problems, problems of discipline and authority, not doctrinal ones in the strict sense. But they are the concrete problems of church life.

Great progress is being made on the academic level to come to terms with history. As in scriptural studies, historical studies are now common endeavors of Catholics and Protestants. Fortunately each tradition had some men and moments of transcendent genius that can [Page 34] not to be denied by honest men on the other side. And even more fortunate, each side had men and moments of such villainy and stupidity that in the light of clear history neither can boast overmuch.

But the respect Catholic and Protestant academics have for each other has not found its way from the academy into the piety of the church—whether into grass-roots attitudes or into the minds of the leaders. The need for an abundantly clear articulation of a common sense of history has simply not been met.

III. Conclusion

THE CURRENT STATUS of Catholic-Protestant ecumenism bears some analogy to the state of things within Protestantism when the ecumenical movement began at the turn of the century. Doctrinal theology is in confusion, but it is not ecumenically significant; that is, doctrinal differences are not important for distinguishing the sides in the ecumenical discussion. Christendom stands divided and ineffectual, and there seems to be no adequate theoretical justification for the great divisions of authority. The practical differences are again at the center of discussion, i.e., those of common church life and piety. Just as the Protestant ecumenical movement was occasioned by the anticipated collapse of the classical competitive form of missionary activity, we are faced now with the anticipated collapse of “Christian civilization.”

There is, however, a significant difference. In the nineteenth century Protestantism had reacted against traditions of strict Calvinist and Lutheran orthodoxy by concentrating on historical and moral theology; this reaction was the basis of the liberal theology that underlay the ecumenical movement. Roman Catholicism at that time put down the liberalizing movement as the Modernist “heresy.” And only now is it going through the process of conceiving itself in historical, cultural, and sociological terms. It seems that such a historicizing of theology is necessary, at least temporarily, for the ecumenical movement to make progress. Without it there is no sense that religion contains more than true doctrine and that it is the other things, the practical issues, that are often more directly important for unity. Until the liberalizing movement has worked itself out in Roman Catholicism it will be hard to negotiate on the things important for discussion.

In the long run, however, while doctrine is not the whole of religion, or even the most important part, it lies at the center of Christianity. Christianity is based on a response to historical events, and doctrine is the interpretation of those events as normative for human life. Ecumenical unity cannot be achieved while preserving the integrity and vitality of the parties entering it unless the whole is illumined by an articulate understanding of the faith. Since great theology is usually brought to fruition by one man, we need a great theologian. Yet neither Protestantism nor Roman Catholicism seems to have one great enough.

I remarked before how odd it is that I am a liberal Methodist and a moderate conservative among Catholics. The liberalism stems from an appreciation which Protestants have of all the things in religion that are important other than doctrine, of the historical character of religious piety. But the conservatism stems from the Protestant appreciation of the centrality of doctrine that we have learned from Barth and his followers, in contrast to the liberal Catholic concentration on history. Protestants are looking for the great theologian. But I suspect there is no possibility of unilateral development any more. The theology needed will have to come from a common community, not from one tradition or the other. And the developments of piety must be mutual too.

The current issues in Christian ecumenism are chiefly practical, having to do with authority rather than doctrine. But their resolution will depend on finding a way to articulate them in terms of doctrinal problems common to both sides. And to do this it is necessary for both sides to have a common historical and hermeneutical grasp of all that is important in religion besides doctrine itself.

[Page 35]

DYSFUNCTIONS of RELIGION and WHY

By JALIL MAHMOUDI

THE FUNCTIONAL THEORY of sociology teaches that an institutional structure is established to perform a function. The institution must serve a practical need of the society. If it serves no purpose and has no function, it will cease to exist. History reveals that no culture has ever developed without religion. Archaeologists and cultural anthropologists have found elements of religion even in the most primitive cultures.

Since religion has persisted from the beginning of time throughout all the ages and through all of mankind’s vicissitudes, it may logically be concluded that it has been and is serving a need and a purpose, and therefore has a function, or even a multiplicity of functions.

Authorities in many fields have attested to the significance of religious institutions in the development of society. Emile Durkheim believes that religion has been the source of all the higher cultures. Max Weber observes in his writings that throughout history, religion has been one of the significant, dynamic factors of social change. The annals of the world, including Toynbee’s work, are replete with explanations of the relation of universal churches to civilization. The French historian, Fustel de Coulanges, author of The Ancient City, (1864), believes that religious ideas, above all, are the mainspring of social change. And the British social philosopher, Benjamin Kidd, asserts that religion is the mainspring of social evolution. Actually [Page 36] Kidd goes so far as to say that “the only force that can account for progress is religion, endowed with supernatural sanctions and fostering altruistic morals.”

Only occasionally in history have some thinkers sharpened their knives against religion. Among the recent ones are Karl Marx, who declares that religion is the opium of mankind, and Sigmund Freud, who refers to it as an “illusion” and “collective neurosis” and compares it with the obsessional neuroses that are found in children. As a result of the denial of religion these new schools of materialistic thought have brought about the establishment of a different type of “religion,” namely secular religion, be it dialectic, empirical, or positivistic. It seems that most of these profane “religions” or “isms” established by man are based on temporal, temperamental, and temporary needs of a certain group under certain circumstances and have some of the elements of prophetic religions, but they lack transcendental elements. Outwardly God is dethroned or dead, and apparently there is no such thing as the human soul or the hereafter. But they come close to deifying the founders of their schools of thought, and worship their values and what their hands have wrought. Thus all they have done is to substitute a secular religion for the sacred one. Sociologically speaking, these secular movements may also be classified as a kind of religion and therefore we may conclude that, even in the most atheistic and materialistic societies, the elements of religion still exist and persist.

Secular religions may serve a purpose, but they lack the central characteristics which theistic or prophetic religions contribute to human societies and cultures. This central characteristic, according to O’Dea, is religion’s “transcendance of everyday experience.” Talcott Parsons refers to it as “Transcendental reference,” something “beyond” the empirical. Theologically it might be referred to as the path or the way introduced by the great power from an unknown and sacred source, the ultimate, almighty, prayer hearing, prayer-answering, super-natural force, namely, God.

Some of the reasons (if not the reason) for schism in the church, or a feeling of irreligion, or the negation of and the attacks on religion, are to be found in what is termed the dysfunctions of religion.

Some of these dysfunctions observed by various renowned sociologists of religion can be summed up as follows:

1. In spite of the fact that religion is one of the most effective means of bringing about social change, it also may act as a force opposing and impeding social changes. Opposition of the clergies of different churches to the economic development of certain countries through land reform, and their serious objections to education and emancipation of women, are but two of many examples.

2. Religion has contributed a great deal to the development and preservation of knowledge and science. Islamic universities and their translation departments, Jewish scholars, Christian parochial schools, and clergies of many other religions were among the most active elements in the enlightenment of mankind. Actually Parsons claims that “science is most assuredly a fully legitimate child of Christianity (which, however, is only [Page 37] one of its ‘parents’).” On the other hand, religion can sacralize primitive thought, pseudo-scientific “facts” and finite ideas as well as provincial attitudes which stand as obstacles to the promotion and development of knowledge. For example, the suggestion that the earth might be round and revolve around the sun was considered blasphemy and a “crime” by the authorities of the Church who tried Galileo.

3. Religion can cause attachment to outdated and impractical norms and values which originally were meaningful and useful under circumstances and in the cultural milieu of the time and the place where they were promulgated. Attempts to by-pass religious norms which are felt to be outdated, as well as compromises, which are sometimes hypocritical and unethical, and may be psychologically damaging, are some of the outcomes of this dysfunction. Money-lending at interest in Medieval Christendom and in some of the Islamic countries, is but one of such problems. In practice they may call the interest on money “rent”; and since there is no prohibition against charging and paying “rent,” they may feel free to do so.

4. A phenomenon leading to a major problem is the process of urbanization. Until very recently a great majority of the people of the world, even in Europe and the United States, were agrarian. This condition has drastically changed in some parts of the world and is rapidly changing in other parts. Over three-fourths of the total population of the United States now live in metropolitan and urban communities while the situation was almost the reverse in the mid-nineteenth century. More or less the same trend, but at a slower pace, can be observed in the rest of the world.

Yet, with very few exceptions, all the major religions of the past were established either in tribal or rural communities. Urban problems—such as the constant and close association of peoples of various backgrounds with different sets of religious norms and values—which now demand solutions from traditional religious movements did not even exist when the religions came into being.

Attachment to the provincial norms and values of various religious groups and denominations, and the clash which develops from differences which divide them are the causes of additional serious problems. Social problems arising from situations of this nature are not hard to see. The conflict between the two Islamic sects, Shí’ah and Sunní, with its bloodshed; and the gory scenes resulting from the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India are two of many historical examples.

Ecological segregation and ghettos have been the solutions in some of the cities of the old world where there were different quarters for different religious groups. Separate enclaves and segregation for various ethnic, national, and racial groups were, and to some extent still are, prevalent in some of the larger cities.

5. Closely related to the problem of segregation and ghettos is the question of identity and diversity. It is not only between the followers of major religions such as Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also between the members of the various sects within the world religions that the gulf of diversity is wide and deep. The strong we-they feeling and the solid line between the [Page 38] in-group and the out-group are the major causes of diversity and conflict. The outcome of such a situation carried to the extreme is intrareligious as well as interreligious wars that have stained the pages of history. Even in its mildest form the outcome is disunity which, to say the least, prevents mankind from living in a successful, civilized way.

6. The ambiguity of the relation of religion to individual maturation is another serious matter. Dr. O’Dea says: “Religion often plays the role of institutionalizing immaturity and develops in its adherents dependence upon religious institutions and their leaders instead of an ability to assume individual responsibility and self-direction.”

The outstanding example of this dilemma is the story of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. In this novel the scene is laid in Spain during the Inquisition. Christ returns in His original human shape, and people recognize Him. He gives sight to the blind; “The crowd weeps and kisses the earth under His feet.” The weeping mourners bring a small open coffin and the mother of the dead child throws herself at His feet. “If it is Thou, raise my child!” He softly says “Maiden, arise!” and the girl rises. He performs miracles the way He did during His first coming. The Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral and sees everything. He even sees the dead child rise. But he bids the guards take Him. The guards lead Him to prison in the palace of the Holy Inquisition. In the dark of midnight the Grand Inquisitor himself comes to the prison and addresses Him thus:

“Is it Thou? Thou?” but receiving no answer, he adds at once, “Don’t answer, be silent. What canst Thou say, indeed? I know too well what Thou wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old. Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? For Thou hast come to hinder us, and Thou knowest that. But dost Thou know what will be tomorrow? I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him, but tomorrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have today kissed Thy feet, tomorrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire. Knowest Thou that? Yes, maybe Thou knowest it,” he added with thoughtful penetration, never for a moment taking his eyes off the Prisoner.

The Inquisitor keeps on. His speech is long but the essence of it, according to O’Dea, is that “institutionalized religion provides happiness and security for the great numbers and that Christ has no right to come back and disturb this happy condition. . . . Thus, according to Dostoyevsky, is emotional security, and with it order and tranquility in society, purchased at the price of individual immaturity and collective bondage.”

Dostoyevsky concludes the story with the following words:

“When the Inquisitor ceased speaking he waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down upon him. He saw the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all His answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: ‘Go, and come no more. . . . [Page 39] Come not at all, never, never!’ And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away.” “And the old man?” “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”

7. Religious dogma may interfere with or refuse secular means and scientific tools and methods to solve serious problems. For example, it may block the use of medical practices even to the extent of loss of lives.

Talcott Parsons says: “It is difficult in this field to discriminate genuine differences of value from distortions of reality, but the latter certainly are not absent.” The example given by Parsons reads: “One type of case is illustrated by the beliefs about health which have been prominently institutionalized in Christian Science. There seems to be no doubt that much very real suffering and many premature deaths of persons whose lives could have been saved have been occasioned by the religiously motivated refusal of Christian Scientists to avail themselves of the services of the medical profession.”

8. Commandments and teachings such as “Thou shalt not kill,” “brotherhood of man,” and “universal love” are the essential part of all religions. How eternal truths of this nature can be distorted as they were in the Crusades by followers of religions of brotherhood, is a matter to ponder. The Thirty Years’ War was fought primarily in the name and for the cause of religion. Talcott Parsons writes: . . in the 17th Century, the religion of love came to be the focus of a whole series of religious wars which nearly destroyed European society.”

Furthermore, some classical studies at the local level point out a disturbing fact. Questions, of course, can be raised as to the validity or reliability of the methodology of these studies. Also, no generalization can be made on the basis of these studies for all religious affiliations everywhere. They suggest, however, that “Americans who maintain some religious affiliations express more racial and ethnic prejudice than those who are not so affiliated.”

9. Religion of a certain kind may bring about an attitude of over-reliance and dependence on prayers and the supernatural, leading to idleness and lack of practical efforts to solve everyday and mundane problems. Extreme fatalistic behavior and the expectation that God will take care of all the details is characteristic of such an attitude.

A British traveler in India once related this story. He had rented a car to take him and members of his mission to a town in the Himalayan uplands. The chauffeur, a pious person, rose very early in the morning to say all his daily prayers plus some for the hazardous trip that he had ahead of him that day. He also read a special prayer for the car and blew at it as he was blessing it. After all these rituals and spiritual preparations they left the village. The car climbed a few miles and went through a a few hair-pin curves, then refused to go further. Being so preoccupied with the spiritual preparations, the driver had forgotten to put gas in the tank and water in the radiator.

10. Religion, which is supposed to bring about unity and to remove discriminatory lines, may become the cause of discrimination and segregation. This is particularly true in the Western World [Page 40] and among the followers of Him Whose Sermon on the Mount begins with “Blessed are the poor. . .” (Matthew 5:3). Membership in different denominations as a “status symbol” or what Max Lerner calls “badges of belonging” is well demonstrated in various sociologic studies. Peter L. Berger, in analyzing this problem concludes: “Thus, we are fully justified in speaking of middle-class churches and working-class churches, terms already used by the Lynds in the Middletown Studies. The line which separates manual and nonmanual occupations (a line which still is very important in our class system) also separates [people] in terms of church affiliation. The religious institution thus mirrors faithfully the class dynamics of the wider society.”

Why?

SOME OF THE DYSFUNCTIONS mentioned above either were not originally part of the religions or were functional in the past, served a purpose, and represented positive functions. The contributing factors which make them dysfunctional should be sought in the cyclical theory and in one or a combination of the following: man-made added dogmas; functional factors carried too far; norms and values becoming outdated; compromises; innocent misinterpretations; deliberate misinterpretations; distorted adaptations; and sacralization of that which is profane or finite. Also, from the sociopsychological point of view, some of the reasons for the dysfunctions of religion should probably be sought in the stage of maturity of the human being. Group membership or “belongingness” is one of the most important needs and feelings of man. As Erich Fromm puts it: “Man by origin is a herd animal,” and his emotional attachment to his group and its institutional values, is a very strong tie. In Allen Wheelis’ words, “values determine goals and goals define identity.”

Ordinarily the impulse to follow the leader and to be part of the group determines man’s action. Fromm says: “The degree to which man uses his thinking to rationalize irrational passions, and to justify the actions of his group, shows how great the distance is which man has still to travel in order to become Homo sapiens.”

It should be noted, however, that the process of rationalization, on this basis, is not an immutable part of “human nature”. It is a remnant of man’s primitive past which can be overcome. Certainly efforts are needed to break the chains of imitation and blind following of the herd. How soon this can be achieved depends on man’s determination to attain freedom, to think for himself, and to find the truth independently. Again to use Fromm’s words: “The unfolding and full emergence of reason is dependent on the attainment of full freedom and independence. Until this is accomplished man will tend to accept for truth that which the majority of his group want to be true; his judgment is determined by need for contact with the herd and by fear of being isolated from it.”

Religion claims that its main concern is to elevate man to the stage where he “ought to be.” The logical approach to achieve such an ideal is to start from where one “is,” to face the situation realistically, and to build from there.

One of the characteristics of man is his sense of value and his attachment and adherence to it. Rational arguments and reasoning on how valid or illusory the values may be is the crux of the problem. Actually values are those things which “men do prize and hold dear . . . without reference to their [Page 41] validity.” What most founders of religions claim is that they shift, modify, improve, enlarge, universalize, and humanize outdated values, bring new ones, and thus move humanity and its civilization a step forward. This can well be demonstrated by the following statement of Christ: “Do not think that I have come to do away with the Law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets. I have not come to do away with them, but to give them real meaning” (Matthew 5:17). In order “to give them real meaning” He had to explain and modify them, saying: “You have heard that it was said by them of old time . . . But I say unto you . . (Matthew 5). In the same manner Moses changed the old values in His day; so, too, did Muḥammad and Bahá’u’lláh. An analogy and meaningful example can be given by citing one of the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh where He says: “In former ages it has been said: ‘To love one’s native land is faith’. But the Tongue of grandeur hath said in the day of this Manifestation: ‘Glory is not his who loves his native land; but glory is his who loves his kind.’ By these exalted words He taught the birds of souls a new flight and effaced restriction and blind imitation from the Book.”

Looking at this process from a different angle, prophets can be seen as the leaders of the “value-oriented social movements” and thus they are revolutionaries or rebels. With regard to Jesus, Parsons says: “Jesus was not a social revolutionary, but he certainly was a rebel.” This explains the kind of treatment great religious leaders have received from their contemporary societies. As far as the terminology goes, “social movement,” “reform,” and “rebellion,” are secular or sociological terms. Bahá’ís, however, call it “progressive revelation.”

On the basis of the aforementioned explanation it may be concluded that most values were functional up to shortly before the time when the latest “reformer” or “rebel” (according to sociologists) or the new “Manifestation of God” (in Bahá’í terminology) introduced the new order for which the time was ripe.

For the purpose of this study distinction should be made between “sacred” and “secular,” or “transcendent” and “profane,” or, in Christ’s words, “God’s” and “Caesar’s.”

From the “sacred” and “transcendental” viewpoint, the acceptance of a theistic religion represents the acceptance of a prophet who has been chosen and commissioned by God. A major prophet is actually believed to be the “mouthpiece” and “the manifestation of God,” who gives the words and the laws of God to mankind, to bring salvation to the world. This means that God speaks to a person and gives him the word to be promulgated. This speaking of God may be taken literally or figuratively, through an intermediary such as the Holy Spirit, an Angel, or by direct revelation. Thus, it is implicit in accepting any divine prophet that there is a God and that God has spoken at least once. It can therefore be concluded that the laws, the values, and the normative orders promulgated by a divine prophet are divine in nature.

Now on the basis of the above statement, we are faced with three main questions:

1) If God had spoken once is there any reason why He should not speak again?

2) If the words and the laws promulgated by a prophet are divine in origin, who should alter or change the word of God, [Page 42] and bring the outdated divine laws up to date?

3) Could the laws of God be compromised or changed by man?

Let us further discuss this problem within the framework of divine religions and sacred beliefs.

The Bahá’í Approach

TO BAHÁ’Ís, religion is a very real and indispensable institution which comprises both transcendental values and utilitarian guidance to provide order and tranquility for humanity. Bahá’u’lláh says: “Religion is the greatest instrument for the order of the world and the tranquility of all existent beings. The weakness of the pillars of religion has encouraged the ignorant and rendered them audacious and arrogant. Truly, I say, whatever lowers the lofty station of religion will increase heedlessness in the wicked, and finally result in anarchy.”

They also believe not only that religion has been the foundation for the humanization of mankind, but that it is the basis of all civilization, and the cause of its progress. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says: “The greatest bestowal of God in the world of humanity is religion; for assuredly the divine teachings of religion are above all other sources of instruction and development to man. Religion confers upon man eternal life and guides his footsteps in the world of morality. It opens the doors of unending happiness and bestows everlasting honor upon the human kingdom. It has been the basis of all civilizations and progress in the history of mankind.”

Bahá’ís further believe that, inasmuch as all the theistic religions are promulgated from the same Source, they are one. Referring to religions and religious laws, Bahá’u’lláh asserts: “These principles and laws, these firmly-established and mighty systems, have proceeded from one Source, and are the rays of one Light. That they differ one from another is to be attributed to the varying requirements of the ages in which they were promulgated.”

Thus the Bahá’ís affirm the unity of religion. Religion, they believe, is truth and reality and “reality does not admit of multiplicity.” However, the contents of religion are separable into two parts: One is the spiritual and transcendental, the essential part of any religion. This part has never been nor ever will be changed. It is eternal, immutable, reaffirmed and confirmed by every manifestation of God. It is only expanded in meaning as man’s spiritual development progresses. The second part of religion consists of temporal values and social norms. These cannot remain static and unchanged in an ever-changing and dynamic world. Therefore, as mankind evolves, appropriate teachings have been and will be given, to modify and update the old teachings “according to the exigencies and requirements of time and place.” And since religious teachings are divine by nature, any change or alteration in them must also come from a divine source. In other words, if it is believed and accepted that religious laws and values are from God, then the law of God cannot be changed by man; it must be revised, amended, or changed by the same authority from which it came.

[Page 43] Bahá’ís believe that this is exactly the case. They do not look at prophets as different individuals and at their religion as different entities which are in competition and rivalry with each other. They are rather considered to be the messengers and the spokesmen of God to establish the cause of unity and concord amongst mankind. Bahá’u’lláh says, “All the Prophets are the Temples of the Cause of God, Who have appeared clothed in divers attire. If thou wilt observe with discriminating eyes, thou wilt behold them all abiding in the same tabernacle, soaring in the same heaven, seated upon the same throne, uttering the same speech, and proclaiming the same Faith.” Thus, their revelation in essence is one, but progressive, according to the state of evolution of man and his capacity to understand. This is exactly what Jesus said: “I have much more to tell you, but now it is too hard for you to understand. But when the Spirit of Truth comes, He will lead you into all the truth” (John 16:12, 13).

Since man evolves and with his evolution the situation and the needs change, the old solutions not only do not solve new problems, but they may become the cause of more problems, and the social teachings, once useful and functional, become dysfunctional.

As has been said in the beginning of this article, it is function that keeps and perpetuates institutional structures in society, and function is the consequence of the structure. Now if an institutional structure brings dysfunction to society, certainly society would be better off without it. For example, the function of the institutional structure of education is to promote knowledge and intelligence: if it promotes ignorance, it is dysfunctional. The same is true of the institution of government which is supposed to provide law and security. If it promotes lawlessness and anarchy it is dysfunctional, and society is better off without it. Religion as an institutional structure is no different. One of the most important functions of religion is to bring about unity and concord amongst mankind. Bahá’u’lláh says: “Oh people of the world! The religion of God is to create love and unity; do not make it the cause of enmity and discord.” He further warns: “Do not make the cause of order a cause for disorder, nor the means of unity a means for disunity.” Religion, when dysfunctional, acts in the opposite direction; it brings about harm instead of good, hatred instead of love. In that case, humanity would be better off without the institution of religion. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says: “Religion must be the cause of fellowship and love. If it becomes the cause of estrangement then it is not needed, for religion is like a remedy; if it aggravates the disease then it becomes unnecessary.”

Therefore, when dysfunctional elements creep into any religious system, it is time for the next “Spirit of Truth” to come or the next “Manifestation of God” to appear, to reaffirm, to amend, to correct, to change and advance or “to give meaning” to the previous teachings. This has been the story of religion in the past and it will continue to be so in the future, and this is, in part, what Bahá’ís mean by “progressive revelation.”

Shoghi Effendi, the late Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith explains this concept in the following words: “The Faith standing identified with the name of Bahá’u’lláh disclaims any intention to belittle any of the Prophets gone before Him, to whittle down any of their teachings, to obscure, however slightly, the radiance of their revelations, to oust them from the hearts of their followers, to abrogate the fundamentals of their doctrines, to discard any of their revealed Books, or to suppress the legitimate aspirations of their adherents. Repudiating the claim of any religion to be the final revelation of God to man, disclaiming finality for His own Revelation, Bahá’u’lláh inculcates [Page 44] the basic principle of the relativity of religious truth, the continuity of Divine Revelation, the progressiveness of religious experience. His aim is to widen the basis of all revealed religions and to unravel the mysteries of their scriptures. He insists on the unqualified recognition of the unity of their purpose, restates the eternal verities they enshrine, coordinates their functions, distinguishes the essential and the authentic from the nonessential and spurious in their teachings, separates the God-given truths from the priest-prompted superstitions, and on this as a basis proclaims the possibility, and even prophesies the inevitability, of their unification, and the consummation of their highest hopes.”

[Page 45]

The Decade

(Some will recognize the two lines from Tennyson)

Thy voice is on the rolling air,

Thou art not dead, though dead the years.

Mine eyes have leisure for their tears.

Thy presence compensates my fears:

I hear thy foot upon the stair.

Thy voice is on the rolling air.

Few hands would help thy cross to bear,

They hurled at thee their stones and spears.

Mine eyes have leisure for their tears.

No man sits in thy empty chair;

The writing said, thou hast no peers.

Thy voice is on the rolling air.

I see thee in the morning fair,

Thou livest in the golden spheres.

Mine eyes have leisure for their tears.

I know our meeting daily nears,

I feel that I shall find thee there.

Thy voice is on the rolling air,

Mine eyes have leisure for their tears.

MARZIEH GAIL

[Page 46]

[Page 47]

Sahara Reclamation: A Garden and a Paradise in the Making

By RICHARD ST. BARBE BAKER

THE DISCOVERY of vast underground water supplies in the world’s most famous desert and the application of new techniques in large-scale tree planting under desert conditions have shown that 2 million square miles of the Sahara can be reclaimed and made productive.

The enormity of the Sahara Reclamation Program dwarfs any other reclamation and rehabilitation project ever before planned. To understand what is involved, it is necessary to grasp the present extent of the Sahara and the speed at which it is advancing. Its 5 million square miles would contain an Australia and a half. It is over one-and-a-half times larger than the United States, and each year it is advancing relentlessly along a two-thousand mile front, often to a depth of 30 miles in a single year.

Before the First Sahara University Expedition, the popular belief was that the Sahara had always been a desert and always would be a desert. This assumption is not true. There was a time when large parts of the Sahara displayed a high state of culture, evidenced by the many rock drawings discovered recently. In 1952, the First Sahara University Expedition collected much valuable evidence to show that wide areas of the Sahara were created in historic times. Wave after wave of invaders felled the forests to make farms and left a trail of destruction behind them.

Chateaubriand has said: “Les forêts précèdent les civilisations, les déserts les suivent.” Cities rise where forests are razed. Prosperity is built upon what the forest yields and declines when the indirect or biological benefits of the forest are lost by the removal of tree cover and the essential link in the water-cycle is broken.

When Trees Vanish

IN THE CONFLICT between man and trees and the rise and fall of civilizations, the trees over a period of time might win back their supremacy, were it not for the goat—the bête noire of the forest. The mediaeval historian Ibn Khaldun remarked:

The grandfather raises sheep

The son raises goats

The grandson raises nothing!

The Romans colonized about 2 million square miles of North Africa, concentrating on wheat farming in much the same way as did the farmers in the United States. It took longer, of course, for the Romans to devastate the land than it took the "Wheat miners" of the Seven States to form the notorious dustbowl.

The Roman colonists of North Africa were subsequently driven out by the Arabs and their goats. It has been calculated that each Arab had about 100 goats; 100 million goats, following in the train of a million nomadic farmers, would devour the soil-protecting trees like giant locusts. When the trees disappear, the land becomes feverish; the spring water-table sinks.

It is vital to have tree cover in continental countries; for, when the trees vanish, the desert comes. As trees are the essential link in the water-cycle, the only way to reclaim the desert is to restore the green mantle of trees. To do [Page 48] this the ravaging goats must be restricted; animals must not be permitted to devour whatever little is left of green growth. The excessive grazing of cattle, sheep, and goats is as damaging to the land as wholesale felling of trees. The new countries of the Sahara are considering the advisability of turning from an animal economy to a sylvan one. Already mountainsides, made bare and eroded through excessive grazing, are being transformed under the banquette system along the contours and are producing apricots, figs, and cereals; and the landowners and their cultivators are now living happily under a grano-fructuarian economy.

We know now that it is possible to produce meat and milk of high quality direct from the plant kingdom. From the experience of the Saharan reclamationists it will not be long before modern technology makes livestock-farming obsolete, though it will take a little time for habit to catch up with discovery. These new foods are not only of superior taste, but richer and more wholesome, easy to prepare and cheaper to use. Along with homegrown vegetables and garden-fresh fruits, which luxuriate in the lands so rich in trace elements eroded from the mountain sides, this protein-rich plant-meat will advance and improve the human way of life.

In Sahara Conquest I have shown that soil-plant-man make a single nutrition cycle. It is because the emerging countries around the Sahara are realizing this and fully appreciate the place of trees in their economy that they are making such tremendous strides in restoring tree cover and in food production. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya are forging ahead in large-scale tree planting. It was the late King Mohammed VI of Morocco who inaugurated Les Forêts Jeunesse. The Tree Week, December 8-15, would see him mounted on his fine horse riding up the mountainsides, followed by thousands of young planters, assisted by foresters and nurserymen with lorry loads of tens of thousands of young trees. In a few months’ time, new forests were on their way, for, if planted with sympathy at the right time, trees grow rapidly.

Particular planting tasks are carried out each year by young voluntary labor, under expert guidance, from Tangier to Agadir, and from Marrakesh to Ujida. These young volunteers devote every Friday and Sunday, their free days, to planting until February 16 and even longer in some places if the good weather serves.

A New Way of Life

ALGERIA TOO, is demonstrating successfully a new way of life based on orchard trees and the growing of cereals. Michael Scott of Tangier, Secretary of the Sahara Reclamation Program for North Africa, drove me through extensive regions where the banquette system has proved successful beyond all expectation. Little banks are thrown up with the help of crawler tractors, if not too steep, or by hand, along the contours. Apricots and figs are planted along the banks, and cereals are cultivated in between. Where the slopes are too steep for cereals, they are planted with forest trees of mixed species.

On the weekends, thousands of young people pack into lorries with their rucksacks and planting tools and, under the supervision of trained foresters (who voluntarily devote their free time to this work), plant millions of trees for the fun of it, believing that this is the best way of helping their country.

Tunisia is equally enthusiastic about planting trees and is creating a 600-mile shelter-belt to modify the climate and provide protection for growing food. In one dune area near the sea, over 36 million olive trees have been planted since 1950 and these are already yielding over a million tons of olive oil a year.

In Libya, too, fast-growing eucalyptus are being planted on the sand dunes near the sea, to stabilize them, with the help of new techniques developed by Esso Research Ltd., of Harpenden, Herts, England. Both in Tunisia and in Libya, I saw hundreds of forest workers [Page 49] carrying trees in pots on stretchers and placing them in readiness for the planting gangs following immediately behind them.

Under the old method, each individual tree had to be surrounded by a little fence of palm leaves or grass, to stop the drifting sand from burying it — this is called “dissing.” With the new method the trees are simply planted in the sand. Then a 7-ton tanker equipped with huge balloon tires and loaded with a specially prepared mulch makes its way along the planted area while four men spray the dunes with a dark film. This oily mulch, while fixing the sand, allows any rain that might fall to penetrate to the roots of the trees. It also reduces evaporation from the soil, and it may reduce transpiration to a minimum, permitting the roots to establish contact with underground water supplies. The sun, shining on the black surface, draws up moisture to the roots, and the trees are thus watered from below. A wall of heat is thrown up from the blackened area and the rain-bearing winds from the sea are driven up to a considerable height and fall as dew, or even fine rain. By the time the mulch has worn away, the trees have taken possession of the dunes, stabilizing the sand while fulfilling their vital functions of transpiration, reinforcing the rain-bearing winds, providing shade and shelter, creating a micro-climate within a climate where gardens can flourish and homes be established.

The prophets of old who saw blossoming deserts were not visionaries, but seers of reality. It is only now that science has made these visions come true.

Fulfilling a Dream

IN THE UNITED ARAB REPUBLIC my dream for Sahara Reclamation is now being fulfilled. As a guest of the Deputy Prime Minister, who controls the whole of the vast Egyptian reclamation project, I visited Tahir (Liberation) Province, an entirely new area which was once the granary of the Romans, but which, for 2,000 years, had grown nothing. Now, irrigated with water from the Nile, conducted in huge cement canals with an elaborate network of smaller ones, one million acres of desert are giving way to cultivated farms which raise a great variety of fresh vegetables and fruit.

The average size of an irrigated farm is from 4 to 5 acres, which will support up to 15 people. Not all of them, of course, were living on the farms, for some were working in town, others were attending school or Agricultural College, or were at the University. Each farm was surrounded by a double row of casuarina [Page 50] trees and each field of one acre had a single row of the same tree around it.

It was a grand experience for me to visit the Director of Agriculture, surrounded by happy farmers, and to catch their enthusiasm for turning desert into prosperous farms. It was with real pleasure that I accepted an invitation to talk to the boys and girls in some of the schools. Each village has its own school and water tower and community center, run as a club. Life in the Tahir Province attracted me so much that I thought if only I were free I would love to go and live there with them and work on a farm in that happy community.

The Reclamation work in the New Valley, 400 miles south of Cairo, under the supervision of the Chairman of the Desert Development Organization, proved even more exciting. Two thousand ancient wells have been discovered, many buried under sand; yet, when the sand was cleared away, they began to give water again.

The new techniques are astounding, for they supply the answers as to how long the underground water, tapped by boring to depths of two or three thousand feet, may be depended upon to remain artesian, with water rising to the surface spontaneously, thus avoiding the need for pumping.

At Dakhla I stood by a new gusher, one of the thirty I had visited. There, from a depth of 3,600 feet, water was rising with such force that the electronic computer assured us that it would gush for 200 years before it was necessary for a pump! The water in that gusher, by which I stood, had flowed into Lake Chad, 1500 miles away, more than 200 years ago.

The Sudan has a progressive planting program and is creating huge shelter belts.

In Ethiopia I was greeted by my old friend, Professor Richard Pankhurst, Lecturer in Ethiopian Studies, and, through his good services, was granted a private audience with His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor, Haile Selassie, who generously consented to become Patron of the Sahara Reclamation Program. His illustrious predecessor, Menelik II, by saving Addis Ababa, that City of Destiny, by planting fast growing eucalyptus, had been acclaimed Patron Saint of the first Men of the Trees, which came into being at my forestry camp at Muguga, Kenya, on July 22, 1922.

In Kenya today there is a progressive forestry department, side by side with a very active Men of the Trees branch, whose President is Chief Josiah Njonjo, my interpreter at the First Dance of the Trees, described for the first time in the Teachers World in the Spring of 1923.

All the countries around the Sahara who have struggled for their freedom are now gradually coming together in the gigantic task of Sahara Reclamation.

After having visited the heads of state in the countries in and around the Sahara to enlist their concerted cooperation, it was my great privilege to entertain many of their representatives at the Sixth World Forestry Congress, which opened in Madrid on June 6, 1966. The 2,778 members and delegates there, from 92 countries, gave enthusiastic support to my proposals to call upon all Member States of the United Nations and countries represented at the Congress to use their manpower for large-scale planting; to treat the protection of the soil by adequate tree cover as a First Line of Defence; and to declare total war against the oncoming deserts of the world.

Significantly, Pope Paul, in addressing the Assembly of the United Nations in New York, said that it was not enough to dole out food to the starving peoples, but that we must give technical aid and reclaim the deserts to feed the people. He was aware that two million square miles of the Sahara, if reclaimed with the help of trees, could provide food for more than the present population of the world. The Sahara Reclamation Program submits that with world participation, 3,850,000,000 people could be sustained in the 2,000,000 square miles capable of being reclaimed.

Did ‘Abdu’l-Bahá foresee Sahara Reclamation when he pronounced:

This is the hour of the coming together of the sons of men . . . the earth will indeed become as a garden and a Paradise?

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Wandering through Hell: Jean-Luc Godard and Weekend

A Movie Review by GARY MORRISON

JEAN-LUC GODARD’S latest film, Weekend, is a disturbing, devastating, and effective satire. It is mostly an assemblage of bizarre, but often funny vignettes. The overall effect conveys an underlying and unmitigated horror which extends from the recognition that behind the façade of our modern urban, rational, Western civilization, there exists a growing barbarism and savagery which we generally associate with an extremely primitive form of existence. It is an apocryphal vision of our time, of the loss of human goodness, kindness, love, of anything meaningful in human relationships, a nightmare of the dehumanization and desensitizing effects of modern life. It is this supposedly rational civilization, deemed to be the highest and most cultivated form of existence, which Godard attacks. For a Bahá’í it is a visual expression of the social condition which Bahá’u’lláh so clearly saw developing as a result of “the vitality of man’s belief in God . . . dying out in every land” and about which He raised the cry, “Taste ye what your hands have wrought!”

Weekend poses certain problems, however, to the viewer expecting the traditional elements of a movie, because Godard is unconventional. He does not seek to tell a story; what story there is evolves into a surrealistic abstraction. Character development is not a major concern; there is almost no involvement between the viewer and the characters. Styles are mixed. There are constant allusions to other films, film characters, and directors which, if not understood, might appear to be absurd. Furthermore the film is not intended to be enjoyed. Thus, it is not a film one can casually sit through.

Godard, in all his films, challenges the assumption that the well-constructed plot or cohesive story, with which we are most familiar, is a film’s raison d’être. His creativity lies in his ability to select and arrange sometimes seemingly unrelated materials and to put them together in various styles in such a way as to create, in his own terms, a completely original view of reality. He uses jump cuts, or flashes word-messages onto the screen, or often simply changes the scene or locale for no reason. By incorporating unconventional devices he forces us to reinterpret what film is all about and to recognize that a movie is far more than a book visualized. Godard sees that film is to the director what the canvas is to the painter. Film is art and has its own standards, its own aesthetics. Moreover Godard refuses to impose literary standards on what is essentially a non-literary art form.

Weekend is an example of Godard’s unorthodox approach to film. It moves from the Hollywood gangster genre in its opening scenes to the stark realism, with obvious reference to Ingmar Bergman, of a self-revelation scene in an analyst’s office; gradually the film moves into total surrealism. The progression is so subtle that one does not question what would appear traditionally to be an outright lack of stylistic unity. The viewer is made to realize from the beginning, by the use of phrases flashed on the screen (“A scene [Page 52] of daily life in Paris,” or “ANAL lyse”), that what is unfolding is not a thriller, a psychological study or an adventure in realism, although these elements are all included.

The story is incidental. It is no more than a series of ostensibly related happenings. It begins with a husband and wife plotting to obtain a fortune by getting rid of the wife’s father, whom they are planning to visit over the weekend, and then each other. But murder is given a civilized veneer: she merely forgets to have the faulty brakes on his car repaired, and he can afford to have someone else shoot her.

The film cuts to what appears to be a completely unrelated scene in an analyst’s office. Emotionlessly, the wife describes in detail a sexual experience. There is no action; the camera moves in and out, focusing on her as she relates a tale which becomes increasingly more perverse. The scene appears pointless at the time; later in the film, however, we are brought back to this theme of the search for stimulation in perversity.

Perhaps one of the most brilliant scenes comes as the couple leaves Paris for the provinces. They are caught in a traffic tie-up on a narrow country road. The motorists honk their horns, scream and curse at one another, eat their picnic lunches on the pavement, and when the man and his wife pull out into the left-hand lane in order to bypass the traffic jam, the level of abuse rises and fighting breaks out. The couple inch past car after car, amidst yelling and blaring horns. As the car moves down the road, you view man in a state of thoughtlessness and selfishness. The tedium is unrelieved. The unpleasant sensation of sitting in rush hour traffic on a superhighway returns forcibly to you. You begin to wish that the cars would hurry up and move. You are about to shout and become one of the herd on the screen when suddenly the couple’s car breaks out of the tie-up. The car accelerates as you are shocked by a vision of the bloody bodies of women and children strewn over the ground amidst burning wrecks; but the car speeds by and the image is gone from the screen as quickly as it appeared. You are shocked momentarily by recognition of your own heedless self-concern in the face of a crisis demanding empathy.

As the camera follows the car through a peaceful scene of green fields and woods, you feel callously relieved that order has been restored. The couple, taking little notice of what they have just seen, argue over being late. The respite is brief, however; one soon becomes aware that the accident was not meant to be just one of life’s rare visions of horror. Instead Godard has forced the viewer through the looking glass, into a sunlit countryside in which flaming wrecks and mangled bodies are part of the landscape, into a full-blown surrealistic journey through the Hell of our times.

The man and woman stop in a village to telephone her parents. There they witness another fatal accident. Although they speed away once again, they become more and more deeply involved in the grotesque landscape. Finally they too lose their car in a flaming crash. When they attempt to continue on foot, they find only corpses along the road and a nineteenth century storybook couple whom they destroy for offering riddles instead of directions. No damage is done, since they were unreal, but no more so than Godard’s fleshless movie characters (at one point the man says he should never have accepted the part).

Godard’s landscape is strewn with gory accidents; blood and burning cars are recurring images. Insensitivity and dehumanization are caught in vignettes. Totally absorbed in her own desires, Corinne recognizes a pair of slacks created by a fashionable Parisian designer whose style she instantly recognizes; she strips them off the body of an accident victim and puts them on herself. In another vignette she is raped in a ditch by a passing hobo while the camera focuses on her husband who sits unconcerned on the bank. When she emerges nothing is said, nothing noticed; the two, tired of walking, move on, playing leapfrog down the road.

They ride for a time with a pianist driving [Page 53] [Page 54] his truck to a barnyard concert. They hitch another ride and find themselves having to pay for it by helping to collect garbage. The garbage collectors are an African and an Arab. They go into long speeches on the revolution of the Blacks and the Third World. Are these merely lengthy intellectual traps ending in a garbage heap? Or is it the garbage heap of Western rationalism which is being carried away by those revolutionaries of the Third World? Their speeches are not meant to be “Maoist harangues,” as some critics have suggested. Here Godard has captured the terrible ambivalence which is at the root of our time. Is it not apathy which reduces the expectation of revolution in the world to a mere intellectual expression over lunch? Godard superbly contrasts the mastication of the sandwich and the logic of the revolution being slapped together and chewed as a mental sandwich.

When they arrive at Oinville, they discover that the mother will not split any of the inheritance. As she returns from getting a skinned rabbit for dinner, they attack and murder her. The skinned rabbit falls to the ground, its blood mingling with the woman’s. Blood is spilled, but what does it matter if it is animal or human?

Money cannot save the couple from their fellow man. They are taken prisoner by a group of . . . savages? hippies? cop-outs from society? or representatives of society itself? It is the logical extension of all the horror gone before; “One must have more horror to kill the horror of the bourgeoisie,” one of the leaders states. “Civilized” life is reduced to its most savage level as the prisoners are subjected to perversion, killed, carved up and put in a stew to be eaten. This violent scene of carnage and cannibalism is brilliantly balanced by that of a jazz poet beating out the rhythms of our times at his drums on the bank of a placid lake, reciting the unintelligible word images of an elaborately intricate poetry to the unresponsive beauty of nature—the lake, the trees and the sky. And man, having lost all the human virtues and divine qualities once inspired by the poetry of his longing to rise above his own condition, has reduced himself, hiding behind the façade of his material civilization, to the state of a dehumanized, desensitized human being who is less than the animal. His return to nature is not a return to innocence but a return to the lowest level of man’s inhumanity to man. It is neither pleasant nor easy to behold.

The title of the film captures the essence of the satire. Weekend, a time of fun and freedom, is twisted into its opposite; fun is turned into savagery and individual freedom into perversity. What is truly meaningful in life is garbled by an unbridled intellectualism— action becomes apathy, and its only release is in the terrible bloodletting which is the horror driving out “the horror of the bourgeoisie,” which in this case may very well be just everyday life. Godard captures the essence of modern life and then abstracts it so that many scenes which at first appear absurd really have a sting of truth about them; in this he is a latter day Jonathan Swift.

Godard’s intention is not to give alternatives, or offer any positive solutions to the human condition. But Weekend is more than a mere Dante’s vision of Hell. A Bahá’í can see in Weekend the perfect portrait of an age gone mad, suffering from the decay of the human heart. Significantly, this Hell is not seen in the grand terms of an arms race, war, or holocaust; rather it is in terms of the basic element of the social situation, the individual. It is the “inner life and private character” of the individual which is severely jeopardized, subverted by the false standards and materialistic concerns of modern civilization.

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Authors and Artists

JAMES C. HADEN is Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University and author of articles in his field.

ARTHUR LYON DAHL, a marine biologist, is studying toward his doctoral degree at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

ALLAN L. WARD is Professor of Speech and Dean of Instruction at Philander-Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas. He has published a variety of studies including a treatise entitled “Seven Thousand Years in Retrospect”, which surveys certain modern religious activities in the light of religious teachings and prophecies since 5000 B.C. Dr. Ward is also well known for his illustration of the textbook “Speech for Everyday Use.”

ROBERT C. NEVILLE formerly taught philosophy at Yale University and is currently Professor of Protestant Theology at Fordham University.

BETTY ENGERT is a receptionist-librarian in the Office of Psychological Services and Career Planning at Wesleyan University.

JALIL MAHMOUDI is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Languages at the University of Utah. His main interests are the sociology of religion, family structure, and linguistics. His doctoral dissertation is entitled “A Sociological Analysis of the Bahá’í Movement.” He is the author of several books, including How To Teach a Foreign Language.

MARZIEH GAIL, a versatile author and translator, has published several articles in World Order, including “Notes on Persian Love Poems”, which appeared in the Spring 1968 issue. Among her books are The Sheltering Branch and Avignon in Flower.

RICHARD ST. BARBE BAKER has been a prime mover in the world of conservation for nearly half a century. He has made such important contributions to that cause as his successful fight against the encroaching sands of the Sahara and the establishment of the Men of the Trees in Kenya, where, due to his untiring efforts, six million trees have been planted. He is now engaged in the defense of the Redwoods of California against a projected six-lane highway. He is the author of Sahara Conquest.

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GARY MORRISON has recently returned to the United States after pioneering to Viet Nam and is currently working for a doctorate in Southeast Asian studies at Yale University.

ART CREDITS: P. 4, etching by Lori Neuzil; pp. 15 and 21, “Akka by the Sea,” from a photo series by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 23, print by Martha Dick; p. 35, lithograph by Sue Shappert; p. 44, photo by David Moellendorf; p. 46, photo by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 49, lithograph, “Horse after Cave Paintings”, by Sue Shappert; p. 53, drawing by Cecil G. Trew, from a private collection; back cover, etching by Lori Neuzil.

LORI NUEZIL, a colorist-painter, is an art consultant to World Order.

MARTHA DICK, a frequent contributor to World Order, is an experimentalist and works in many media.

SUE SHAPPERT, a printmaker, graduated from the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee and is now living in Australia.

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