“Are you saying that such programs are a waste of time?”
“Not at all, though they do tend to give people a false sense of progress and hope. Programs are initiated in order to counter or defeat vision.”
“Give me an example of what you mean by vision.”
“Vision in our culture supports isolation, for example. It supports a separate home for every family. It supports locks on the doors. It powerfully supports staying isolated behind your locked doors and viewing the world electronically. Since this is the case, no programs are needed to encourage people to stay home and watch television. On the other hand, if you want to get people to turn off their television sets and leave their homes, that’s when you need a program.”
“I see—I think.”
“Isolation is supported by vision, so it takes care of itself, but community building isn’t, so it has to be supported by programs. Programs invariably run counter to vision, and so have to be thrust on people—have to be ‘sold’ to people. For example, if you want people to live simply, reduce consumption, reuse, and recycle, you must create programs that encourage such behaviors. But if you want them to consume a lot and waste a lot, you don’t need to create programs of encouragement, because these behaviors are supported by our cultural vision.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Vision is the flowing river. Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow. What I’m saying is that the world will not be saved by people with programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved because the people living in it have a new vision.”
“In other words, people with a new vision will have new programs.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I repeat: Vision doesn’t need programs. Vision is the flowing river. The Industrial Revolution was a flowing river. It needed no programs to get it going or to keep it going.”
“But it wasn’t always flowing.”
“Exactly. It wasn’t a river in the second century or the eighth or the thirteenth. There was no sign of the river in those centuries. But, one after another, tiny springs bubbled up and began to flow together, decade after decade, century after century. In the fifteenth century, it was a trickle. In the sixteenth, it became a brook. In the seventeenth, it became a stream. In the eighteenth, it became a river. In the nineteenth, it became a torrent. In the twentieth, it became a world-engulfing flood. And through all this time, not a single program was needed to further its progress. It was awakened and sustained and enhanced entirely by vision.”
“I understand.”
“It’s a sign of our cultural collapse that supporting our vision has come to be seen as wicked, while undermining that vision has come to be seen as noble. For example, children in school are never encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Success is something to be sought for its own sake, certainly not for any wealth it might bring. Business leaders might be offered as role models because of their ‘creativity’ and their ‘contributions to society,’ but they would never be offered as role models because they have luxurious homes, exotic cars, and servants to attend to every need. In the world of our children’s textbooks, an admirable person would never do anything just for money.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“The people of our culture are tremendous bullet-biters. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this idiom, ‘biting the bullet’ supposedly helps one tolerate pain. One first tries to avoid the pain, but if the pain absolutely must be borne, then one must ‘bite the bullet.’ For most who write and think about our future, it’s a foregone conclusion that we’re all going to have to bite the bullet very hard in order to survive. It doesn’t occur to these thinkers and writers that it would be far less painful to start fresh. As they view it, our task is to grit our teeth and cling faithfully to the vision that is destroying us. As they see it, our doom is to go on indefinitely hammering ourselves in the head with one hand while using the other to dispense aspirin tablets for the pain.”
I asked, “Is it so easy to change a cultural vision?”
“The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire. The people of Rome were ready to hear what St. Paul had to say to them. If they hadn’t been, he would have disappeared without a trace and his name would be unknown to us.”
“Christianity didn’t exactly catch on like wildfire.”
“Considering the rate at which it was possible to spread new ideas in those days, without printing presses, radio, or television, it caught on like wildfire.”
“Yes, I suppose it did.”
“The point I want to make here is that I have no idea what people with changed minds will do. Paul was in the same condition as he traveled the empire changing minds in the middle of the first century. He couldn’t possibly have predicted the institutional development of the papacy or the shape of Christian society in feudal Europe. By contrast, the early science-fiction writer Jules Verne could make a century’s worth of excellent predictions, because nothing changed between his time and ours in terms of vision. If people in the coming century have a new vision, then they’ll do what is completely unpredictable by us. Indeed, if this were not the case—if their actions were predictable by us—then this would prove that they didn’t have a new vision after all, that their vision and ours were essentially the same.”
I said, “It seems to me that you do, however, have a program. You mean to change minds.”
“Would you say that Paul had a program?”
“No, not really. I’d say he had an objective or an intention.”
“I’d say the same for me. Program isn’t the right word for what I’m doing, though I know it’s the word I used in answering that woman’s question tonight.”
“You almost make it sound as though people should refrain from action of any kind. Doesn’t any course of action eventually become a program?”
“This misses the point. Programs aren’t ‘forbidden.’ What’s important is to understand the difference between vision and programs. Programs are inherently reactionary. This doesn’t make them ‘bad,’ it just makes them reactionary, meaning that they always follow, never lead (because they only react to something else). Programs are like first aid. This doesn’t make them ‘bad,’ it just makes them provisional and temporary. Programs are invariably responses to something bad, which means they must wait for bad things to happen. (Again, this doesn’t make them wicked, it just forever makes them play catch-up.) By contrast, vision doesn’t wait for something bad to happen, it pursues something desirable. Vision doesn’t oppose, it proposes. It doesn’t stave off defeat, it opens the way to success.
“In our culture at the present moment, the flow of the river is toward catastrophe, and programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede its flow. My objective is to change the direction of the flow, away from catastrophe. With the river moving in a new direction, people wouldn’t have to devise programs to impede its flow, and all the programs presently in place would be left standing in the mud, unneeded and useless.”
“Very ambitious,” I remarked dryly.
“You could call my delusions messianic,” B said with a smile. “Others have—those who denounce me as the Antichrist.”
Those words came to me with a little shock, and I spent a moment mulling them over before replying that I didn’t see what the Antichrist had to do with it.
“That’s because you haven’t heard enough—or haven’t followed what you’ve heard to its logical conclusions.”
He had me there. There was no doubt of that. Or at least, so I thought.
* The text of this speech will be found in Chapter 27–The Collapse of Values.
Sunday, May 19 (cont.)
The Inquisition
“I’d like to know why Fr. Osborne is here.” That came from Shirin. I looked at her, b
ut her eyes were on B.
“Shall we see if he’ll tell us?” B asked.
Shirin exchanged a glance with the girl at the other end of her elegant Directoire ottoman. Everybody in the audience seemed to exchange a glance with his or her neighbor. Apparently their answer looked like a yes to B, who turned and nodded the question to me.
I figured I must have good espionagic instincts, because I saw in an instant that there was a lot of safe truth I could tell them without coming within miles of a lie that might trip me up later. My dialogue with B had kept my attention focused on him up to this point. Now that it was my turn, I had a look around. Shirin I’ve already described. She was to me sphinxlike and inscrutable, with her strangely marked face and intense eyes. Bonnie, the girl at the other end of the ottoman (who I later learned was the daughter of an American businessman), was even more overtly suspicious and hostile. The audience behind them (outside what I took to be an inner circle) seemed more neutral. The man B had called Michael was someone I felt an instinctive liking for, I’m not sure why. He gave the impression of being tall, clumsy, and slightly funny looking, with big, fleshy ears, a long face, sleepy eyes, and rubbery, humorous lips, but at the same time both highly intelligent and naturally modest. His clothes were so nondescript that I have no recollection of them at all. There was a short, crafty-looking woman in her fifties that for some reason I pegged as a school principal. There was a distinguished-looking man in his seventies, a physician perhaps, or a retired librarian; later I found out he was a baker. There was a young working-class couple who seemed nervous and slightly alarmed; they were the Teitels, Monika and Heinz. There was a smirking twenty-year-old who looked like he was just itching for a chance to crush me like an insect with his giant intellect; that was Albrecht.
“Let me start by saying why I’m not here,” I told them. “I’m not here as a Vatican emissary. If I were, I’d look like one—I’d be wearing a black suit and a Roman collar. It’s true, on the other hand, that I was sent here by my order, but not as a missionary or a polemicist. I’m not here to make converts or defend the Faith. I’m here to listen and understand.”
“What order?” Shirin asked.
“The Laurentians.” The name clearly rang no bells. I told her it was a teaching order similar to the Jesuits.
“Why do the Laurentians want to ‘understand’ B? Why them rather than the Dominicans or the Franciscans?”
“I’m afraid I can’t speak for the Dominicans and the Franciscans.”
“The question is, why are the Laurentians curious? I assume you can speak for them.”
Well, she had me there, of course. I was not far from admitting that the Laurentians wanted reassurance that the Antichrist charge being made against B was unfounded, but he had just finished telling me I was still not up to speed on this issue where he was concerned.
“I feel like I’m being pulled in two directions,” I told her. “Is your question why anyone in the Church is curious or why the Laurentians in particular are curious?”
“Are the answers different?”
“Yes, they certainly are.”
“Well, start by telling us why anyone in the Church is curious.”
“You’re attracting attention, evidently on religious grounds, that’s why. Anyone who walked by the theater last night could see this and would be curious to know what it was all about.”
“Okay. And why are the Laurentians curious?”
“I’ll answer that very bluntly. We like to be ahead of the rest. We like to be a little nimbler, a little more alert, a little more curious, and a little more avid to have our curiosity satisfied.”
“Cutting-edge types.”
“That’s how we like to see ourselves. Is that reprehensible?”
Shirin smiled and shook her head. “Neatly done,” she said.
I looked over at B, who was nodding with approval. “Very neatly done indeed,” he said. “Really smart wolves know that the most suspicious-looking wolf in the pack is the one disguised as a sheep.”
“So you’re saying what? That really smart wolves don’t fool with disguises?”
B looked around the room and finally nodded at Michael, who grinned at me goofily and said, “Really smart wolves disguise themselves as friendly wolves.”
Three snappy comebacks flashed through my mind, but I knew that nothing I could say was going to shake the truth of the implied charge.
The woman I’d thought of as a school principal piped up at this point in heavily accented English. “Always has been my guiding principle for forty years to say ‘Never trust a Christian.’ Not once has ever Christian given me reason to change.”
“May I ask why?” I said (glad for the diversion).
She stared at me with frank loathing. “Always your allegiance is in doubt, is … tainted.”
Unable to find the words she wanted, she spoke in German to Michael, who translated: “Your loyalty is always subject to change, Frau Hartmann says. Always subject to revision according to some undisclosed standard. Today you’re my friend, but there’s a hidden line inside of you that marks the beginning of your allegiance to God. If I unknowingly cross that line, then, although you continue to smile at me like a friend, you may see that it has become your holy duty to destroy me. This week you’re my friend, but next week they say I’m a witch and God wants witches to be burned, so you burn me. This week you’re my friend, but next week they say I’m an Anabaptist and God wants Anabaptists to be drowned, so you drown me. This week you’re my friend, but next week they say I’m a Waldensian and God wants Waldensians to be hanged, so you hang me.”
Michael gave me an apologetic smile and explained that Frau Doktor Hartmann was a historian.
Since I couldn’t think of any defense to make to her charge either, I turned back to B and said, “So I’m a wolf trying to pass himself off as a friend, and, being a Christian, I have an allegiance that is unreadable to outsiders. Where does that leave us?”
“I don’t know. Shirin?”
“What do you do with the notes you take when B talks?”
“They aren’t notes,” I told her, “they’re shorthand transcriptions.”
“All right. What do you do with them?”
Shirin had already visited my hotel once, to search my room. If she could manage that, it would be no great feat to find out what I did with my transcriptions. (In other words, I had to assume she already knew.)
“I fax them to my superior in the United States.”
“Why does he want them? And please don’t tell me how much he yearns to be on the cutting edge of religious thought.”
I turned back to B and said, “What comes next? Splinters under the fingernails? The rubber hose?”
B’s gargoylish face twisted into a scowl that seemed half-serious, half-humorous. “Why do you keep referring your problems to me? It’s Shirin you have to satisfy. Talk to her, not to me.”
I was stunned by this gender betrayal, and equally stunned by my own self-betrayal. I had tried, unconsciously, to nudge B into lining up on my side—us guys against the common enemy. I was profoundly disappointed in myself; I’d imagined I was at least a decade beyond such schoolboy games.
I looked at Shirin, and my priesthood slipped off my shoulders like a cloak with a broken clasp. In an instant she became a person in my eyes and ceased to be a troublesome, irrelevant parishioner that I had somehow to placate and get round. What was in her eyes, I now saw, was not hostility and suspicion but, amazingly, fear. For some reason inconceivable to me, I was a source of terror to this sinewy, competent woman. My heart melted with pity for her and remorse for the calculated deception that had brought me face-to-face with her.
I really intended to answer her question now, and I may even have thought I was doing so as I began to speak.
Some truth comes out
“B is telling me the world I belong to is extinct,” I said to her. “It’s been extinct for decades, and we didn’t even suspect it.”
> Shirin was frowning hard, struggling to make sense of my words but not wanting to distract me, now that I was evidently coming clean with some sort of truth.
“That’s not quite right,” I went on. “We suspect that we’re obsolete, but we’re confident that our suspicions are groundless. Do you see what I mean?”
Shirin shook her head helplessly.
“I’m talking about us guardians of the faith, you understand. The professionals. We know how to deal with our suspicions—we have to, because it’s our job to deal with the suspicions of other people. We are, in large part, professional soothers, professional reassurers, professional dispellers of doubt.”
Shirin nodded faintly, a millimeter or so, to let me know that she was beginning to follow me now, shakily.
“Our message to those we must reassure is: ‘Don’t worry, nothing’s happened. The world is just what it was. Don’t be anxious, don’t be alarmed. The foundation is solid. The pillars are still standing. Nothing has changed since … the year 1000, the year 200, the year 33, when the gates of heaven were opened for us by Someone who laid down His life for our sins and on the third day rose from the dead. Not a thing has changed since then. Though we go to war with smart bombs and nerve gas instead of swords and rocks, and write our thoughts on plastic disks instead of parchment scrolls, these days are still those days.’”
Suddenly it was Shirin’s turn to look to B for help. When he offered nothing, she turned to her friend at the other end of the ottoman, to Mrs. Hartmann, to Michael. No one seemed to have anything like a suggestion to make. With no more prospects in sight, she was forced to come back to me.
She said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”
“I had the impression you wanted the truth.”
“I do.”
“You can’t just say, ‘All I mean by truth is this one piece of the puzzle. If it isn’t this one piece, I don’t want to hear about it.’”
Shirin blinked and nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t understand what you were doing.”