April 11, 1973
Page 11910
FORGOTTEN VALUES
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, one of my constituents, Mr. Ben Drisko, of Camden, has drawn my attention to a provocative statement on modern life, delivered in a sermon by Dr. William J. Robbins at the First Universalist Church in Rockland, Maine.
In his sermon, Dr. Robbins traces some of the ideas and forces which have guided men and structured their societies in the past, as contrasted to our modern world of "time-saving and back-saving devices – computerized businesses – and fractured personalities." Dr. Robbins eloquently reminds us of the enduring value of our religious and intellectual heritage. I ask unanimous consent that his remarks be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the remarks were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
FORGOTTEN VALUES
It is pretty difficult and demanding and sometimes frustrating to try to be a thoughtful and at the same time a modern religious person, particularly in the western version of civilization – our familiar pattern of what it means to be civilized. We have to remind ourselves, in order to break out of our parochialism, that Western Civilization is not the only civilization. Far from it! It's just one in many, the one in which we live, but there are other patterns of culture.
You and I are the products of a special kind of moral and religious upbringing. Whether we are conscious of it or not, our roots are very deep in what is called the Judeo-Christian tradition, articulated and developed into a great architectonic structure of metaphysics, theology, ethics, law and politics, by men trained in the rigors of analysis as invented and developed by Greek
and Roman philosophers. That fusion of the Hebraic, Christian, and Greek philosophic tradition produced extraordinary results, notably, the medieval world view. The final product of this great fusion of earlier distinct ways of thinking and living had a wonderful symmetry about it. It was a complete structure. Popes and emperors, priests and friars, princes, vassals or serfs might be quite illiterate and often were so. Recall that Charlemagne, crowned on Christmas Day in 800 A.D. as the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, could not read and write. There are few more decisive figures than Charlemagne in western history. But, even so, he knew and felt and embodied many things, many truths, which intellectually he could not understand or explain.
People living in such a unified culture might be quite illiterate, but they knew where they stood, they knew what they stood for, and they knew who was the ultimate Determiner of their Destiny. They knew also to whom they would have to give account on the great Day of Judgment, so often depicted in the statues, paintings, and stained glass of their cathedrals.
The lines of authority, which we nowadays would call the chain of command, were all brought together in the hands of one eternal authority, whose name was God. Many psychological and moral benefits were derived from living in that kind of harmonized, total pattern.
Our Pilgrim and Puritan forebears coming ashore on this new and nearly empty continent intended and really tried hard to make Massachusetts (and that includes Maine) into a latter day Commonwealth according to the pattern set down in the Hebrew Scripture. This was the Promised Land as the Pilgrims saw it; its laws, its morals, its religion, its civic order were to be the new form of the old covenant.
As in the much more extensive medieval model, this earthly life was to be spent in self-discipline and preparation for the next life. It's hard for us to comprehend. You and I don't know much about the next life. So we focus down here. But heaven to those early Americans was almost more real than earth. This was just an outer court, the passageway, so to speak, by which you entered the great temple. They knew where they were going. We say it somewhat in jest: "Heaven's my destination"! They would have said it in all seriousness, and acted accordingly.
But between the early 1600's and the late 1700's, too much had happened for the founding fathers of the United States Federal Government to try to perpetuate and write into the national Constitution that old Puritan dream of a reconstituted Commonwealth of God.
In those two centuries, some things that had once been entirely conceivable became impossible. A massive reorganization of large ideas had come about during the Age of Reason. The new science, new philosophy, new self-awareness and the new climate of ideas produced a new breed of teachers, pamphleteers and statesmen in what we now call the liberal tradition. Several of the founders of the federal government were quite willing to call themselves free-thinkers. If the French Revolution, following the American Revolution, had not gotten short-circuited into the awful days of the Terror, and had not produced the Emperor Napoleon, our cultural history might have followed quite a different course. But those massacres and those French armies moving all over Europe to Moscow, even across the Mediterranean to Egypt, so shocked the sensibilities of Western Europe, Great Britain and America that a great political reaction set in and conservatism prevailed, counteracting for awhile the otherwise clear and acceptable results of the Enlightenment. There was a temporary delay in the development. The modern mind had been born in the two great Centuries of Reason; the shattered dilapidated world-view of the previous thousand years could never again be satisfactorily pieced together from the broken fragments.
The single great idea, the drama of creation, the pyramid of power, the vision of the celestial city, literally in heaven, all of these were gone beyond recall by the end of the 18th century.
Democracy, liberty, toleration had been born. The modern world with its surprising, sometimes shocking capabilities, its new questions, its tentative uncertain answers, its fascinating techniques, and its this-worldly horizons had cone into existence
It is in this modern world that you and I must live today, in all of our comfort, with all of our education and affluence, timesaving and back-serving devices, mechanized or automated industries, computerized businesses, and with all of our worries, anxieties, our fractured personalities, our alienated populations and with our specialized scientists who can no longer even talk meaningful to one another because the field of each of them has developed its own language that is almost completely unknown to the outsider. Are these our new mystery cults?
There is no longer a field of chemistry, there are all kinds of sub-specialities within the field. Likewise, in biology and physics, and men can't cross the lines. In this respect our technologists make us think of nothing quite so much as "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" who could turn on the great floods, but lacked the magic word for controlling them or shutting them off.
Observers of our national scene today, sometimes call our current political style a "New Pragmatism", trying by the use of a philosophical term to make that style, whatever it should properly be called, look like a rational method of handling the affairs of state or "facing up to reality", as they say. Speaking this way, we not only devalue the dollar as we did a few months ago, when Mr. Nixon called it the "most significant monetary agreement in the history of the world", and then two weeks ago promptly devalued it again and called it "an opportunity". He thereby also devalues the English language.
Pragmatism is too fine a philosophical term to use for tinkering or stop-gapping or recovering a fumble for a lot of lost yardage. A valid pragmatism means "what is true works". It does not mean "what works is true". There's a world of difference. You and I are not going to solve primary problems by using secondary techniques. The legislative and executive branches of the present-day government play tiddly-winks with one another using the price of gold or the relative value of the American dollar and the Japanese Yen or the German Mark as the snapping discs in the game. But I'm very much afraid that our elected representatives do so all too truly represent the American people in this respect. Too truly to be good!
No doubt we Americans live too high. We ought to stop boasting about it, even if we won't do anything about it. We're just altogether too self-indulgent, 7% of the population of the world consuming 50% of the natural resources of the world. That's too lopsided for the American people to be thought of as a responsible member of the family of nations at this time in history.
And even at home when we have to balance our national budget, certainly a moral requirement for any nation, by making a $12 billion cut, we, at the same time, add $3 billion to the military budget. What a way to celebrate the President's historic trip to Peking and Moscow! We beef up the Armed Services with new weapons systems against a wholly hypothetical enemy, since China and Russia, now our friends, are the only nuclear powers we have recently targeted upon. Then we take several billions of dollars out of federal programs for the ill-housed, ill-educated, and ill-cared for children, widows, elderly and otherwise oppressed or unemployable persons in our own domestic family, who are not hypothetical in any sense of the word. We rightly forgive our foreign enemies after the war, and wrongly refuse to forgive or forget our home-born dissenters.
Is this morality or politics? I know that you and I live in the last third of the 20th century when great moral principles and logical and religious ideas are supposed to be outmoded and held to be totally irrelevant by the brightest practitioners of the new politics and the new morality. But listen! From far away and long ago can we not hear, however faintly, the gentle words "and thy neighbor as thyself?" What we hear, faint and muffled is sufficient to make us restless and uneasy. A modern person, such as you and I wish to be, had better make haste to learn that, even in the modern world, we do not make all of our own laws. The acid of modernity cannot dissolve reality. What our thinkers used to call the will of God, and we may call the Nature of things, does not allow everything to go. There's a lot more to nature than stuff and things. James Russell Lowell had the right idea in his familiar doggerel lines, a pretty good memory gem to salt away:
In vain we call old notions fudge
And bend our conscience to our dealing,
The Ten Commandments will not budge,
And stealing still continues stealing.
Can it be that we descendants of the Puritan Fathers of the 1620's or of the Founding Fathers of the 1700's have thought ourselves so far away from the controlling insights of the Judeo- Christian world-view that we have altogether forgotten and no longer feel the pressure upon our minds and our actions of the inexorable justice or the unquenchable mercy of God as taught by the ancient Hebrew prophets or the Prophet of Galilee. Those forgotten values, rationalized almost out of existence, certainly out of practice, had better be remembered again. And soon!
Recall Emerson's wonderfully prophetic words: "In the end it is only the triumph of principle that can bring you peace."