A Moral, Not an Economic Option

...Nevertheless, the Greek word for "private" is "idiotes...

...His friends on the left hoped that enough people would remain, or become, really poor to cause loss of faith in the promises and rebellion against the system...

...In this "working paper" he offers an initial effort at a Marxist analysis of American society and culture, hoping to assist others to carry on their active theologizing with a clear comprehension of the concrete conditions in which the project takes place...

...after outlining the options in a fashion not altogether different from Holland's, he ended by arguing for the half-way choice of the New Deal...

...The economic interpretation of major events in American history offered by Williams and his more sophisticated predecessor Charles Beard, has always broken down when confronted with facts...

...Social Gospel theologian .Walter Rauschenbusch outlined such a view of "the social crisis" early in the century...

...That argument was always self-righteous and never empirically validated, but, even granting it, the fatal flaw was that no one ever got around to raising the religious question after their bellies were full...

...In the thirties Henry Wallace wrote a book called America Must Choose...

...Francis, and to Jesus Christ...

...Cynics at both ends of the spectrum played to their self-interest...

...Hopes awakened among minorities and women will not be fulfilled, the dynamics of corporate profit will demand further exportation of jobs, leading to unemployment and a decreasing share of national wealth for workers, while the revolt of the third world and the new competition within the first world threaten the security of the major institutions of American capitalism itself...

...The American journey, in his view, has come to a major crossroads, and his interpretation of that crossroads shapes both his understanding of the past and his prescriptions for the future...

...Faced with that fact, and the end of growth it requires, the elites confront a real dilemma...

...Gandhi was immediately compared to Socrates, to Buddha, to St...

...When questioned, the old man explained that brahmacarya must be tested, or it wou!d lose its edge...

...Nor was it his uneasy relationship with his sons, who tried in vain to live up to their father's exalted ideals...

...but he never held public office...

...Then, when everyone is in deep trouble, presumably socialists can come forward to lead the masses, oddly with the same promise of a materially better life which long was carried most credibly by their capitalist opponents...

...The simplicity of life, the outright poverty he demanded from his wife and children, he first cheerfully imposed on himself...

...a miserable people might be forgiven if they decide the odds are better with the trilateral commission...

...Bishops' Bicentennial Program...

...we have been different because of the frontier, but now, with the end of growth, there will be increasing misery, spreading first through the workers, whose jobs are going and whose unions must be brought under control, then into the middle class, beset by debt and easy prey for repressive leadership...

...This position would argue that socialism is first of all a moral, not an economic, option: it should be chosen because it is right...

...omy, but it will not become a trap which enshrines social process at the expense of human will and trivializes human struggle by confining it to those whose oppression is too real and too awful to he simply the locus for someone else's dream of authenticity...

...ideas and values, it seems, must always seem less real, less reliable, less important...

...It was certainly not his questionable behavior to his wife...

...Gandhi was not endowed with any exceptional scholarly, scientific, or artistic talents...

...Christian social action began by saying that the poor could not be evangelized because their concerns were with survival...

...Why 400 biographies...

...Finally, the people who should be addressed are not the poor, who are quite right to seek immediate gains for themselves and their families that socialism in fact cannot at the moment provide, but the middle class...

...Expansion provided a growing pie of goods and services which could mean a higher standard of living without any real re-distribution of income, wealth or power...

...His historical analysis relies heavily on the work of such revisionist historians as William Appleman Williams, while his analysis of the contemporary scene combines a well established new left view of the domestic crisis with some distinctive insights into the relationship between domestic problems and the broader problems of the international economic order...

...Drawing upon Williams, Holland argues that the ideology and reality of economic expansion, first across the continent, then into the world economic arena, provided the nation's dominant elites with the means whereby they could maintain control over American society...

...But both the Western psychologist, Erikson, and Gandhi's own disciple, Bose, concluded that these eccentricities were the result of his repressed sexuality...

...Ved Mehta, devoted though he is to the Father of India, does not hesitate to set down these and other facts relating to Gandhi's neurotic obsessions with diet, sexuality, and excretion...

...How would Christ have judged it...

...Holland, like many others, believes that the age of expansion is over...

...Class analysts were always looking for a class to carry the socialist dream, a group whose self-interest would lead it to advocate class revolution...

...Like any series of generalizations about American history, many of Holland's statements are open to considerable question...

...What explains it...

...Here, today, the argument becomes a bit confused, for, while the self-interest of the miserable will supposedly be the wellspring of rebellion, the promises cannot be as explicitly materialist for fear of the environment, nor can they be simply nationalization for fear of bureaucracy...

...There is a problem here...

...Yet no one, friend or enemy, ever accused the man of conscious hypocrisy...

...Mahatma Gandhi and Ills Apostles VED MEHTA Viking, $14.95 _~[ICHAEL ZEIK I have now read three biographies of Gafidhi...

...Holland is sufficiently aware of these problems to regularly mention problems of culture, but these are always within the Marxist superstructure, reflecting more basic realities of political economy...

...PHILLIP CORWIN iS a poet, novelist and critic who works for the United Nations...

...The American left has always needed something more than an adequate historical interpretation and a convincing political/economic analysis...

...Then it should be made clear that the transition to socialism will be hard not easy...

...The point is a simple one...

...Vulgar...

...Catholic Conference/National Conference of Catholic Bishops...

...FATHER RAYMOND A. SCROTH, S.J., is associate editor of Commonweal...

...So he talked a lot about latrines, and frequently carried a shovel...

...all should work to develop a common vision of a socialist future and a strategy for its realization...

...after visiting President Theodore Roosevelt he decided that the choice was not so bleak after all...

...In three sweeping chapters Holland outlines his views of the founding, growtt~, and current predicament of the United States...

...He may have held the sub-continent of India in his pocket (do dhotis have pockets...

...If, as those of us who argue for socialism keep saying, it can be democratic, then there is simply no substitute for politics, for the hard, difficult work of articulating long-run visions and shortrun options, trying to market those through persuasion, and trying to bring them into existence through the mechanics of political democracy, either through a revived socialist party Commonweal: J99 or, as Michael Harrington advocates, through an active and honest socialist presence within the Democratic party...

...Given the choice again between a militarist and imperialist future and a socialist transformation at home, one suspects that Americans might once again prefer to try to muddle through...

...Unable to reform as in the past by a promise of growth and a broader share in the surpluses growth creates, American capitalism must develop more obviousl...

...Americans refused to grasp the justice pole because they sensed, quite rightly, that it would cost them their liberty...

...In the 1890s and again in the 1930s Americans of all political persuasions held to a similar view of the national predicament...

...they are less convincing when production itself seems to be the enemy...

...this was the hereditary task of the Untouchables (who must have deserved such unenviable karma from their behavior in a previous existence...

...The process of applying the insights of liberation theology, and its theological method, to the United States continues now in a group of task forces exploring the theological dimension of experiences of oppression and injustice in contemporary North American society...

...The method of liberation theology requires such a contextualization, critical reflection on the setting of theology, in order to allow theology to take account both of its own culturally conditioned character and to make its application of Gospel values more specific, concrete, and realistic...

...In his seventies, for example, the Mahatma took to sleeping (naked) with his female attendants...

...That sounds fairly impressive until you hear that something over 400 of them have been written...

...These economic benefits, the hope for more, and the national glory which the policy implied, could calm the anxieties of the middle class and coopt the workers away from the oppression of the present to the mobility promised for the future...

...Aside from passing his bar examination in England (not an arduous achievement at the time), he never earned any academic degrees---nor did he ever win an election or hold public office...

...Gandhi realized, as some of his smart-mouthed critics have not, that unless he could change age-old attitudes regarding human excrement, there would be little hope for the social rehabilitation of the Untouchables...

...It will require a more moderate standard of living, an almost isolationist retreat from the international economic arena, a radical de,escalation of military production and, most important of all, an intelligent, dedicated, selfcritical politicization of our lives...

...Not economic but political oppression, and that more potential than real, explains t h e unrest which led to the Revolution...

...To counter the repressive and explorative policies to which the dominant classes are driven, Holland calls for solidarity among minorities, women, workers and much of the middle class: all have a common enemy in the structures of corporate capitalism...

...That is correct...

...16 September 1977:600...

...Perhaps it is about time church activists and social democrats direct their analysis, their theology and their challenge to the middle and upper classes, telling them to stop pushing people around at home and killing them abroad and start finding ways to use the education, talent and treasure which they have received from America to build a human world and fulfill those promises which America once offered and in fact are still alive in the hearts of most of her people...

...Even his apparent obsession with excretion--it is not hard to make jokes about this homely, old man--was more than neurosis...

...Unfashionable as it may be to say this, Gandhi was probably in "need of a "Church"--and by that I mean a sacred community with which he could 'checkin' for corroboration or confrontation...

...In both periods business counterparts of todays "trilateral commission" and radical counterparts of Joe Holland agreed that the age of expansion had ended and America must move either to a more direct imperialism, with militarism and control at home, or to a real reordering of na16 September 1977:598 tional priorities and a real redistribution of power and wealth at home...

...Yet, when this man died, a black arm-band, like a mournful equator, encircled the globe...

...he was, in fact, beyond it...

...BOOKS i A MORAL, NOT AN ECONOMIC OPTION DAVID O'BIU[EN The American Journey: A Theology f o r the Americas Working Paper JOE HOLLAND 1DOC/North America and the Center o/ Concern, $2.50 Theology in the Americas was a year-long process of discussion o f liberation theology around the United States which climaxed in a major conference in Detroit in August, 1975...

...Instead, each generation goes to the poor to tell them how bad the system is and where their real interests lie...

...Joe Holland, a member of the staff of the Center of Concern, a Jesuit sponsored think tank on issues of justice and peace, has been an active participant in this program...

...Forces of production and the structures they develop are the "really real...

...Fearful lest they exploit the fame and power conveyed by the Gandhi name, he denied them even a formal education-maintaining that the life of a peaceful peasant was morally superior to that of the moneyed classes...

...They refused to grasp the libertarian pole because they knew, also quite correctly, that it would cost them their equality and a higher degree of injustice that even they, a relatively tough minded people, were prepared to tolerate...

...forceful mechanisms of control over its own people...

...P. DAVID FINKS is former associate director of the urban affairs department of the U.S...

...Government ownership and redistribution of income made sense when one presumed that capitalism had solved the problem of production...

...His eldest son ended by breaking completely with him, and became everything his father disapproved of: a meat-eater, an alcoholic, a gambler, and a philanderer...

...the Mahatma was still in his thirties when, without consulting her, he publicly announced his vow of brahmacarya (celibacy...

...For my part, I prefer a theme less apparent but very real in Holland's writings and=the-~heologyin the Americas group...

...Even now, Holland bases some of his hopes on the traditional Marxist notion of increasing misery...

...FATHER GERARD J . MCCARRON, OSFS, is a candidate for a doctoral degree in pastoral theology at Princeton Theological Seminary...

...WAYNE ANDREWS is Archives of American Art Professor at Wayne State University...

...Each successive class failed to live up to its obligations and allowed itself to be bought off by the promise of immediate gains...

...Gandhi had placed himself beyond Hindu orthodoxy...

...And "sleeping" was not a euphemism for the night's activities...

...Something similar could be said of the conflict between slavery and freedom which led to the Civil War...

...MICHAEL ZEIK teaches at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York...

...Growth had led to American "exceptionalism...

...This problem becomes clearer in Holland's assessment of the current "crisis...

...After his vow, h e made it his custom to confess publicly any sexual temptation he experienced...

...Holland's elites hoped to keep people under control by providing enough rewards to buy them off...

...only when they were secure with a moderate standard of living could they consider the religious question...

...Caste Hindus refused to clean their own waste...

...and that oppression can only be understood as such when account is taken of the ideas which informed the minds and hearts of colonial Americans...

...Many more, I should imagine, than have been written about Roosevelt, Churchill, or even Hitler (although, today, devils seem to fascinate us more than saints...

...Thus the socialist promise is even less convincing than in the past...

...That, he found, ended it...

...In this framework, Marxist analysis will be a useful tool to understanding the American political econ0 0 0 0 0 0 000 REVIEWERS DAVID O'BRIEN has served as consultant to the U.S...