Caesar in our future?
Garvey, John
kids hadn't put their lives on the line, and could always run back home to Mommy and Daddy and a station wagon in the suburbs. But this is all ancient history. The Movement is as dead as the...
...The Marxist and the philosophi- ~cal anarchist and the socialist and the Republican all agree that without some commonly established way of ar- riving at social order people will suffer even more than they ordinarily do...
...The opposition of abolitionists to slavery was often seen as a sectarian thing, as the opposition to abortion is today...
...The burnt-out cases are raising organic vegetables or teaching crafts in community colleges or working on PhD...
...Every four years Americans are led to believe that they may elect the Messiah--this is what the public rela- tions front-men want, anyway--and some people are really disappointed when the water isn't changed to wine after all...
...To one set of people it means the way in which any given society agrees to order itself, and it is hard to argue with such a sunny definition, which puts community and agreement at the center...
...The other possibility is that there is a pattern intended, and a reality beyond us, a reality which is in some ways beyond our knowing, which nevertheless has a claim on us...
...Who can really say what went wrong7 But the Movement was not without its effect...
...The old line about hypocrisy being the tribute vice pays to virtue is built into the operation of a reasonable society, and into the way that society will regard law and the limits of law...
...Dorothy Day has said that the taking of the papal states by Ital- ian revolutionaries was an ,tot of Divine Providence...
...There is a necessary tension between the definitions...
...But that's just not the sort of thing one can say to a stranger, out of the blue...
...If it is good, a common opinion has it, it should be legislated...
...What was I to say...
...The willingness of Christians to use coercion has been seen in all its ugliness only with A T ONE LEVEL there is no argument...
...With the disenthronement of the au- thorities who claimed to be able to inter- pret and enforce the divine plan, we came to assume in practice that there is no transcendent meaning...
...Evers was a good speaker too, a master of the Southern black antiphonal style who could build the"Yes, Lord...
...It is easier, emotionally, to ask law to deliver us from our deepening bore- dom and restlessness...
...SECULARIZATION k THE LAW eight years earlier...
...The place was packed...
...For many people law is identified with coercion, which is, in this view, law's II April 1980:199 the triumph of a society in which Chris- tianity is far from being a self-evident good...
...If we are alone in this sense, if meaning is only a symptom of humanity and not something which includes and trans-cends us, the rules are ours to determine and write out, according to our own best lights...
...There is clearly a world of ideologi- cal difference between (a) and (b), but they might look the same in practice, a fact which defenders of any totalitarian ideology or theocracy fail to see--a Khomeini or an orthodox member of the Communist party can see only weakness or waffling in the tolerance of diverse views...
...A secular view of law which takes as its base the radical limits of law and human definition can serve us, but it will reveal what law cannot do, and it will leave us facing questions for which our culture has'no answer...
...I'd like to have said: Allard, you made a deeper impression on me than any other chance encounter of my life...
...But because we have lost our sense of the symbolic, while retaining a natural need for a world informed by symbols, we act unwisely...
...This is where secularization poses its major problems...
...But this victory over tyranny had an odd side-effect: when a sense of the transcen- dent was shifted from the collective to the individual level, it began to be seen as a subjective thing, as if collective agree- ment made for truth, and as if a sense of the transcendent--dumbed down to a taste for religion-- were something like a preference for chocolate...
...JOHN GARVEY Commonweal: 200...
...In this case we cannot sim- ply define the way we will take...
...The first is that there is no intended pattern to things other than the one we intend...
...This was the case with Quakers during our own colonial era, and the Quakers were considered downright seditious when they opposed participation in the revolutionary war...
...In 1971 I went back to Mississippi to see how things had turned out...
...Lacking symbols of authority, we ask the state to fill a void it cannot fill...
...Reporters were milling about...
...Yet in the cases of war, slavery, capital punishment, and abortion we reach the place at which religion and civic order necessarily touch one ~other...
...meaning and purpose are things ~Ve read into the universe, put- ting them there, like arbitrary signposts, in an attempt to make sense of our lives...
...View (b), accepting the radical limit of human speech and definition, and al- lowing for a slow, extra-legal process of social growth, involving both individual and communal insight, has a built-in ap- preciation of limitation, contingency, and precariousness...
...There is an ambiguity about the word "law...
...I saw Charlie McLaurin at a rally in Sunflower County...
...Antigone knows a higher reverence, and will honor her brother's body even if it means death...
...He was run- ning for the state legislature, had gained weight, gave a practiced, sensible speech supporting the Mayor...
...enshrin- ing human definition as it does, it is limit- less...
...View (a) tends to- wards an optimistic view of law...
...The separation of church and state is certainly good for the church, which for too long, from Constantine through Tor- quemada to Cromwell, enjoyed the use of a weapon which it should have fore- sworn for the sake of the Gospel...
...Antigone confronts Creon, who insists that her rebel brother's body must not be given reverence: he must be a sign to the community of the peril involved when one transgresses the community will, or at least the will of the community's representatives...
...But there are dangers in the shrinking of religion to the level of the individual, and in our century the social consequences of the loss of a transcendent sense of life has already begun to make the Inquisition look pal- try...
...Sorry you lost another race for Congress, better luck next time...
...Law is becoming our culture...
...But in the ceremony of tragedy she is honored communally...
...or if there is, it is beyond social consideration...
...Wisdom and fair- ness, not state appointment, were the criteria by which a man was accepted as a judge...
...There is nothing beyond practical detail to trip us up...
...The danger which accompanied the rise of Christendom (Christianity sup- ported by the power of the state) has become clear to us: few people can be found who would defend the Inquisition, the Crusades, or the use of excommuni- cation as a political tool...
...The people who claimed Lowenstein was an agent of the CIA have forgotten all the details...
...The way law affects the poor, the "least of the brethren," is in Christian terms law's judgment of itself...
...Unlike the regulation of traffic or the rate of taxation, these issues are directly related to what we believe about life, its source, end, and meaning...
...when his motorcade raced from one rally to another up through the Delta, State Police cars led the way with sirens screaming...
...But the vanishing of the mingled church and state, which followed the Re- naissance and Enlightenment, left West- ern society with no basis other than dem- ocratic consensus or some form of des- potism, or something in between, for ar- riving at binding decisions...
...Here a rough but neces- sary generalization must be made: where meaning is concerned we are faced with two possibilities...
...This is not the only conceivable way: in ancient Celtic societies, for example, the judiciary was not a function of the central governing authority...
...A reasonable community has some mental room for what it cannot bring itself to accept in ordinary practice: the unjust king recognizes the authority of the prophet, even while plotting the prophet's death...
...instead, contending parties agreed on the choice of a judge whose word would be final...
...Charles Evers, the black mayor of the tiny town of Fayette, was running for governor...
...He spoke of the new day coming, white and black working together for a better life in Mississippi...
...If it is bad, it should be forbidden under the law...
...Perhaps a consideration of the possibility of this meaning may be entertained by individu-, als and communities, but it is considered dangerous when their search, with all of its unsettling results, begins to touch the larger society...
...Antigone is, in communal terms, a moral absolutist and quite unreasonable...
...What law means should not be seen too easily...
...City police directed traffic out front...
...theses on Eugene V. Debs...
...Few people would monm the passing of the order which mingled the spiritual and temporal too casually, reducing problems of spirituality and collective order to religious and civic administra- tion...
...A ~ complacent ecclesiastical official recognizes the authority of Francis of Assisi's witness, and wishes it weren't so...
...I couldn't find the words to be- gin, as we passed to and from the shower...
...No human being or set of laws can adequately fill out a symbol...
...The problem of secularization is that it could lead to a' genuinely godless society, and a society which does not know how to render any- thing to God will finally render every- thing to Caesar...
...This is one re- sult of the reduction of questions involv- ing spiritual and moral values to the sub- jective level: they must one way or another be dealt with communally, and law is our common language...
...Even the word "authority" has narrowed for us to its ugliest dimension, leaving be- hind its deeper associations of responsi- bility, stewardship, and wisdom...
...There was a time when those who opposed slavery were considered religious fanatics...
...The Movement is as dead as the Popular Front...
...our work will instead be one of discovery and at- tention, a much more delicate thing than rule-making (or rule-obeying...
...The revolution" seems like a dream...
...and there wasn't no turning back now ("Yes Lord...
...The assumption of secularity is that the belief in a meaning beyond human defini- tion is (a) nonsensical...
...or (b) if reason- able, beyond the possibility of decent arfi'culation, where that articulation is likely to lead to enforcement, since en- forcement has in the past led to a denial of values which are central to decent soci- ety...
...There is this difference, though, between (a) and (b...
...Of course the Mayor was going home to Fayette, but they'd had those old white politicians running scared there for awhile ("Oh yeah...
...For some reason I never spoke to Low- enstein...
...If law is defined simply as the way order is achieved, everyone is for it...
...THOMAS POWERS I bottom line: look at what happens to you if you do not obey, if you do not fit in, if you are vagrant or strange...
...But in our time the nation-state--whatever its ideological cast--has the final word where law is concerned...
...The generous and optimistic definition is based on recognition of an obvious need to acknowledge and pay reverence to the idea of communal obligation, to put that idea into a form which binds us to one another, and--especially in our age--to state an alternative to the individualism which leaves each of us finally abandoned...
...All of the social props had to be kicked out from under Christendom for Christianity to learn an essential lesson about itself: there are some things it must not depend on...
...A local television crew was waiting to get the Mayor's concession speech...
...There is a void, a collective and cultural void as well as an individual one, which will be t'dled...
...These forms make as much practical sense as any, and passing of the old forms is not to be mourned, from either a religious or polit- ical perspective, by anyone who ap, preciates the wonderful way democracy has had of keeping despots out of power...
...kids hadn't put their lives on the line, and could always run back home to Mommy and Daddy and a station wagon in the suburbs...
...s into a roar from the audience...
...Evers admitted they'd whipped us, he'd bite no bones about that, but what he said sounded like a victory speech ali the sanle...
...The passions are only cinders...
...Another use of the word is not so benign...
...The night of the election there was a party at the meeting hall on Lynch Street in Jackson where Lowenstein had spoken Of several minds: John Garvey I CAESAR IN OUR FUTURE...
Vol. 107 • April 1980 • No. 7
