Death of the Liberal Class (28 page)

What I mean is that there is no chance of rehabilitation, no chance, so far as we see, of changing them; certainly no chance of adjusting them to this abominable world about them—and who wants them adjusted, anyway?

 

What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.
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It is very important to keep that kind of perspective. We haven’t lost everything because we have lost today. The biblical evidence for the survival of any empire is not very large; in fact, the whole weight of biblical history goes in the other direction. They all come down. According to the Book of Revelation, Babylon self-destructs. There is not even a hint of an enemy at the gates. “Fallen! Fallen! is Babylon the Great.” I think we are somewhere in that orbit where the fall of the towers was symbolic as well as horribly actual. The thing is bringing itself down by a willful blindness that is astonishing. I happen to go very strongly with the Buddhist understanding that the good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere. I put a secret footnote in my mind. I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. There is a biblical ignorance about all this that is very revealing. . . . I have come to the conclusion that the stronger a series of events in a lifetime hearken to the Bible, the less one will know about outcome. That was true from Abraham to Jesus. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go. My impression being that the tactic is of secondary importance. If we are talking real, we are talking about a community with a common spirit, the ability to open the Bible with a common understanding. In this world death seems often redundantly powerful. And yet we have the resurrection to cope with.
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The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living—the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet—was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place. We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation.

 

In the late 1970s, Unitarians started saying that the trouble was that their children didn’t know what to tell their friends they believed. When I heard it in grad school at The University of Chicago, I thought no, the trouble is that neither the adults nor the ministers knew what mattered. The U.U.’s then took a fatal turn. They essentially conducted a poll, to find what members and attendees of the churches happened to believe—in other words, what beliefs had they brought in with them? From this weird process the Seven Principles were born, as “What U.U.’s Believe.” Yet looking through them, they’re simply the generic beliefs shared by all cultural liberals, whether they were religious or not. They had projected their beliefs onto a platform, then worshiped them. So they collapsed into a narcissism that has grown weaker and more desperate since they adopted those Seven Dwarfs in 1985. It became and is even worse.

 

The Unitarians, like all white moderate-to-liberal Christians and Jews, have seen their role as speaking up for the downtrodden. It’s fair to say that the early civil-rights movement would not have succeeded without the white liberal support. But this changed in the 1960s and 1970s, when Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X didn’t want white folks speaking for them, and had far more charismatic speakers themselves. Same with the women’s movement. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer were miles ahead, and wanted to speak for themselves. After Stonewall, the gays also spoke for themselves. This left white liberals with no useful role in society. They were welcome to follow the black, women, gay leaders, but not to speak for them. When they could no longer speak for anybody, they—and by
they
I mean the faculties of good humanities divisions and women’s studies—started the political correctness movement. The inane brilliance of this was that, by inventing disadvantaged groups, nobody could say they didn’t have the right to speak for them.
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