A SENSE OF SIN
Mayer, Milton
The Two Worlds A SENSE OF SIN by MILTON MAYER This article is the concluding installment of Mr. Mayer's series of reports on a year and a half of living and traveling on both sides of the "Iron...
...I think not...
...But what every schoolboy—if no alumnus—knows is that there is nothing we don't do that they don't do...
...And what we know in our bones—and show in our demoralized national behavior—is that we are not wonderful at all...
...There is no way to stop Communism...
...It has always been everywhere in the world, in all of our lives, in perpetual contest with capitalism...
...I said that we couldn't be expected to change our habits— it's all a person can do to keep from getting to be any worse than he already is—but that the food and the drink ought at least to taste bitter...
...Here in Peoria we have hula-hoops, ice-cream bars, Elvis on the juke, a drink before dinner, the icecapades downtown, and a late TV show to top it off...
...If we can't, we must go on as we are, to disaster, because good must undertake to overcome evil (whether with evil or good) and people who think themselves better than other people are irresistibly compelled, and should be, to defend the good they embody by destroying the evil embodied in their enemies...
...If this was the end, the Europeans and Asians seemed to have expected it...
...but one of their shortcomings is their resistance to our good advice...
...Well, sir, God says to each of us, "Here is my creation...
...And faith will always test itself and for its failure prescribe greater faith, and test itself again...
...It isn't right that Communist wickedness should prosper the way it does...
...If, however, their shortcomings turn out to be identical with our own, we can correct them by correcting our own...
...Now nothing needs correction as badly as other people's shortcomings...
...Our task is to contribute our energies to the dream, so that it will work as well in society as it does in the home and the church...
...They, too, believe what they read in the papers...
...we do it as well at home on the Fourth...
...This is it," the American lady moaned, "this is it...
...In the Slave World it's a little further between jukes, and in the Free World you get the TV sell for soap instead of socialism...
...Marxist Communism substitutes belly-hunger for the Fall as the obstacle to perfectibility...
...Or be blown away...
...The power of Communism is not the reality, the procedure, the practice, but the dream...
...We were all turned out of the elevator quick, and the soldiers with their munitions as quickly piled in...
...and always spellbound...
...It is not a bogy pasted up by a crazy Russian exile in a sidewalk cafe in Geneva...
...The questions most often asked me in the Communist countries were these: "Do you all have your dinner cooked by a restaurant and brought in on a tray while you watch TV...
...We can only go on chanting, "He understands nothing but force...
...Only the Americans were surprised...
...Good should not, and will not, willingly co-exist with evil...
...The first is theologically false, the second politically groundless...
...Capitalism, in theory agnostic, is in practice necessarily atheistic...
...Precisely on the dot of 10:10 the display ended on all five roofs...
...It's so-so both places, though I like it better here...
...There is no necessary connection of democracy with either capitalism or Communism, except in so far as belly-hunger may be an impediment to the free exercise of political choice...
...It costs the American Friends Service Committee two cents to provide a hot meal for a belly-hungry child in the province of Orissa, in India...
...and in Debrecen, Hungary, a city the size of Peoria, we had every one of those blessings all in one day— hula-hoop, ice-cream bar, Elvis on the juke, drink, icecapades, and TV...
...It is what we all practice in our homes—the burden according to strength, the reward according to need—and what we all preach in church...
...Not repentance, but confession...
...Everybodies at ten o'clock...
...When I can see in my brother in Russia and China the good that is in me, and in myself the bad that is in him, I can speak of co-existence without the hyprocrisy that he, no less than I, discerns in my oratory...
...Five million Muscovites—and fifty Americans—watched the ten-minute splendor...
...There is nothing we want than they don't want...
...At ten p.m...
...And they see us in the same two contradictory and hypertense ways that we see them...
...Belly-hunger may be reduced by the profit system, but that is not its object...
...The cause of our immobilization has got to be eliminated before we can move at all...
...Communism is the response to man's wish to resolve the contradiction between the two lives we all lead...
...Capitalism accepts man's fall and says, "Leave him lay," which may be translated into French as "Laissez faire...
...War—including victorious war—is irrelevant to it except in so far as it spreads the conditions under which the need to reconstruct society is more widely and deeply felt...
...It is we, not he, who are left understanding nothing but force...
...Our anti-Communist howl is the howl of a cry-baby...
...to recognize that we've got it coming to us, whatever it is and whoever presents the bill in whatever form...
...Wasn't it wonderful...
...But there its spirituality ends...
...And then the fireworks began, simultaneously from the roofs of all five skyscrapers...
...How could we...
...one Sunday a month the Red Army produces a fireworks display...
...The American lady was no longer moaning...
...Communism is an ancient, profound, and profoundly religious (and specifically Christian) theory of man and society...
...The differences are all historical or geographical accidents...
...What Communism needs is a shining example...
...Which of us went...
...We have gorged in a belly-hungry world and the belly-hungry are presenting the bill, in behalf, of all things, of God...
...we say that, however well or badly it works, there is no other way to run a home or a church...
...There was nothing for it, and everybodies at ten o'clock shot up to the roof...
...But life, apart from the Americans, went on in the lobby...
...We and the Russians both think we're wonderful...
...Mayer's series of reports on a year and a half of living and traveling on both sides of the "Iron Curtain" in Europe__The Editors...
...the rest, of sterner stuff, stood sternly awaiting the end...
...I need nothing—nothing—but a sense of sin for my salvation here...
...Wasn't it just wonderful...
...But we are chained fast by the nightmare, and this is where we came in...
...There is nothing that they are that we aren't...
...We just stood there, like an up-ended can of sardines with the lid off...
...The little girl in Debrecen thought that all Americans were cannibals...
...It is lost in both places, and in both places for the same reason: material triumph...
...If we will reject reality, we ought at least to reject the imposition of our moral judgment on it...
...You're breaking my heart," said a drunken lady in the audience, and she handed me a nickel...
...but what if there is already within our nature an element which would enable us to overcome the one obstacle to our salvation, if a way were found to give it a chance to operate, an element presently represssed or uncultivated...
...We are watching Big Brother...
...But there's always a surprised American who wants to see the fireworks, and this time one of them got into the elevator after it shot back down from the roof and pressed the Roof button...
...We're deeper in the pit than they are because we got into it first...
...Communism will always appeal to social idealism, capitalism to individual self-interest...
...The whole sky was ablaze...
...The young lady operator thumbed through her book—it was an English grammar—and said, "No before ten o'clock...
...You would not expect the retired Chief of Staff of NATO to say what it is, but he did: "It is a world movement," said General Gruenther, "of the have-nots versus the haves...
...What was wonderful was the American lady...
...in which case there is a suppositious connection with Communism...
...Two-and-a-half hot meals...
...and the unselfish advocate of capitalism will always be the man who sees it as the regrettable corollary of a regrettable human nature...
...I was saying this the other night in a local saloon, where people were paying anywhere from $3.50 for a steak sandwich to $6.00 for a steak, plus, of course, drinks...
...Two years after the bear launched the sputnik we still cannot imagine his being a man like us...
...Whoever says in his old age that he was a radical when he was young means that he believed in some part of the Communist dream...
...Without a sense of sin we are amazed at our being in trouble...
...Like all dreams, Communism— Marxist and non-Marxist—has great gaps on precisely that level, the procedural, at which capitalism, which is not a dream, is unanswerably specific...
...Denying grace in favor of bootstrapism it spurns as sentimentality the spiritual call to men to care for one another except insofar as mutual advantage is involved...
...Do you really have insurance against a heart attack when you go to a horror movie...
...How could we, the unpossessed, imagine this naked man possessed of a fanatical faith...
...The Communist—including the atheist Marxist—is a man of faith...
...What happens to a Negro who can pass the examinations for a university...
...If the monster would only go away...
...It ignores grace and denies bootstrapism and limits itself to the ancient but neither profound nor profoundly religious (nor specifically Christian) rules of the market based on the view that man is imperfectible and not much good...
...whatever it is, including the chain gang or the slave labor camps, or the gassing of the Jews or the burning of the Indians, it is, or was, or will be everywhere...
...And if this is possible to us, then daybreak is possible, and the end of the nightmare...
...It's started...
...We are traumatized into the monster of our own nightmare...
...What is wonderful is America, alternately stupefied by doom and tickled pink to discover that "they're just like us...
...The American possibility here is, first, to recognize that there is no way to stop Communism, no more in other men's states than in our homes and churches, and, second, to try to correct its shortcomings in practice...
...Is this outside our nature...
...the capitalist is called to this concern neither spiritually nor sentimentally, but insofar, and only insofar, as he can not get labor cheaper or customers more dearly...
...In a buyer's market for labor or a seller's market for goods the concern would ruin him...
...loaded and fired, loaded and fired...
...better, because we wind it up with the flag in red, white, and blue rockets...
...We were packed, one Sunday evening, in one of the elevators in the lobby of the Hotel Ukraine...
...Confidentially, it's not so hot there—or here...
...In its view man is so good that he can lead the one life all the time—the life we practice at home and preach in church...
...As long as I see myself sinless and my brother in Russia and China as sinful—as indeed he is—I shall pursue his destruction...
...she said...
...No matter how bad men are, says capitalism, their bad impulses, providing they are left unhobbled, will restrain one another...
...But both systems have existed, and do exist, under political tryranny...
...Marx's "immediate program" for the Communist minority a century ago has become the actuality of every nation, including our own, which regards itself as progressive...
...Take what you want from it—and pay for it...
...Our earliest ancestors had it, and so did the Russians' latest...
...Which of us had the two cents to go to the belly-hungry child...
...It is only when we go to our jobs that we take it to be proper to practice and (in defense of the job-centered existence) preach anything else...
...We don't ask if it works in the home or the church...
...To say, then, as Aristotle does, that Communism won't work, or that the experience of it in this or that society proves that it won't work, is to miss the point...
...Dissolution of the nightmare, not armament, disarmament, technical assistance, or co-existence, is the condition of a detente...
...Jesus promised that all these things—the rules of procedure— would be added unto him who in faith accepted the Communist doctrine of burden and reward...
...We shouldn't ever have come...
...Not to stop sinning, but only to know we have sinned and are sinning...
...The ak-ak was dismantled with deadly automatic certainty and the powder-stained squads again commandeered the elevators and shot down to the lobby and out on the double...
...Not especially...
...I should...
...Marx, having no faith, was smart enough to leave the gaps wide open...
...And no matter how badly one or the other works, the realist (selfish or unselfish) will never abandon the necessity of the one, or the idealist the dream of the other...
...Sweating grimly, square-faced, deadly automatic and deadly certain, the anti-aircrafters loaded and fired their ak-ak...
...If we could see that circumstances and not nature determine the differences in human behavior, we could get a grip on our situation and undertake the liquidation of the present processes leading to disaster...
...Not to change our condition, but only to know it...
...Can we change that picture without having to change our human nature...
...its object is profit...
...There was a sudden hubbub in the lobby, and two squads of square-faced soldiers came through on the double, carrying dismantled ak-ak guns, or bazookas, and steel cases of ammunition...
...They say that it comes in handy hereafter, too...
...I didn't want to come," and she fell apart...
...It isn't right that superior people like us, who haven't done anything wrong, should be falling on our faces...
...But the monster will not go away...
...But the dream remains, always rooted in the perfectibility of man...
...a capitalist who closes his shop on Sunday is simply a bad capitalist...
...The one Himalayan obstacle to our salvation in the present crisis is the picture we have of other people...
...now she thinks that all Americans (including elderly males) are hula-hoopers like her...
...I have it from my old mother that you can't change human nature...
...But our rigidity does not permit of our being consistent: He is at once a sub-man and a bad-man...
...Its elimination requires, not a change in human nature, but a good, healthy, red-blooded and red-handed un-American sense of sin...
...Name it...
...So, too, men's care for one another...
...She didn't know it, but I was breaking her heart...
...But he understands the need to reconstruct society, and we do not...
...It's an air raid...
...Plato had the dream, too, but, unlike Jesus and Marx, he tried to fill in the gaps, and Aristotle tore him apart on purely procedural grounds: "Everybody's business is nobody's business...
...I must...
...The crisscrossing colors and patterns were magnificent...
...We ought not to condemn a man whose condition we cannot imagine...
...The young lady operator put her book down and without a signal from the starter the car shot to the roof, and then another, and another...
...In our historical, no less than geographical provinciality, we have identified capitalism, not just with Christianity, but with democracy...
...Some of the other Americans fell apart with her...
...Marxism is this pleasant dream of man's nature so modified by materialist rationality as to deny his Fall and relieve him of the mysticism of grace in an age of unbelief...
...Balked by the limits of imagination, we settle his hash by describing him as a madman or a villain—the only two creatures we can imagine who do not conform to our propertied, unpossessed picture of man...
...The young lady operator was pressing the floor buttons without looking up from the book she was studying, and the starter (an older young lady) was chattering with a friend...
...The Ukraine is twenty-three stories high, identical with four other rococo skyscrapers in Moscow, and there are not enough elevators to go around (or up and down...
...Unless we can dissolve the nightmare, we shall be able to recognize neither the fundamental good in the evil of the Communist world nor the fundamental evil in the good of our own...
...How could we, the propertied, imagine this unpropertied man and what Marx called "the naked condition of his existence...
Vol. 24 • June 1960 • No. 6
