1974
PROJECTIONS
NOT REJECTIONS
We expect to move a little step forward each summer, maybe only a little tiny step. This year we are discussing positives more, and it is pretty hard to grasp positives. It is much easier to reject something which is what most radicals have been doing up to now.
One of the main questions on our minds is how much we can key in on this
country, our country, and at the same time have a global concept. It is important to start this way because so many things we've thought in the past came from Europe and from the concepts Marx derived from his perceptions in the middle of the nineteenth century. We know that you can't discuss the
U.S. without discussing the rest of the world, because everything is tied up with everything else, U.S. economics is tied up with world economics. But we have to look at questions from the standpoint of what we can do.
172
174 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
For example, the question of welfare has a lot to do with the
economy, but it also has a lot to do with how human beings should
live and share responsibility for society in all its many manifesta-
tions. We have chosen to take it up from the point of view of
whether people should be zombies.
One of the reasons why we have to key in on the U.S. is
because the U.S. context has so much rejection in it. We recognize
that the positives we put forward will not be readily accepted by
people, but we are trying to avoid being so liberal that what we say
makes everybody happy but at the same time also doesn't
challenge anybody to become revolutionary. In doing this, we are
testing others as well as ourselves. What we say goes against the
grain of what a lot of people think. But that is what a revolution-
ist should be doing going against the grain. For example, we have a
position in regard to political prisoners. We have refused to allow
the concept of political prisoners to be distorted to the point where
any cat who goes down the street and steals a car becomes a
political prisoner because he/she lives in the ghetto. Some folks
are not going to like our saying that, because a lot of people now
believe and are being encouraged to believe that they are political
prisoners every time they get arrested for stealing.
Life is not simple: It is agony and it is ecstasy. Without agony
there can't be ecstasy, and if you haven't known ecstasy, you don't
know what agony is either. You only know sadness or pain.
Section I
Rejecting Cynicism
Many young people do not think of themselves as shaping the
world. When we ask them why, it appears that they feel like
victims, that they are being played with. It is the "Student As
Nigger" complex.
We cannot accept everything that young people do as the
expression of the new society because most of them are still in the
stage of rejection. Look at the Black Panther Party, for example
Those kids tried to be more political than most black militants who
just thought in terms of picking up the gun. But right now, you
can expect very little from Black Panther youth. They have been
wiped out all over the country--like the young Indian braves. The
white kids are equally lost. They started out rejecting their
parents, as bourgeois s.o.b.'s, who had created all this mess. They
took the attitude to their parents: "If you hadn't done what you
did, we would have a different relationship with blacks." The
white kids played a tremendous role in the black movement in the
Projections Not Rejections 175
early days, and they also took the movement beyond the question
of blacks? They said their parents had messed up the whole world.
Black youth didn't totally reject their parents in the same sense
but they were very critical. Then black radicals began to establish
symbols which put them in an idealistic realm and separated them
off from the rest of their communities which were facing real
problems?
Many young people complain about fragmentation, but frag-
mentation itself is a product of the difference between people in
terms of how they judge what is progress and what is not
progress. Fragmentation has to start from the idea that there was
at one time a unity--a piece of cheese that wasn't cut up. Then
things fell apart. During World War II there was tremendous
unity in this country. After the war, fragmentation began when
blacks began to struggle against what was. The Vietnam War
fragmented the society even more because for the first time
people were really divided and clashing head-on over the foreign
policy of the country. Now a lot of people think that we can patch
up that fragmentation and go back to the past. Nixon represented
this patching up to a lot of people.
We have to ask ourselves, "Wasn't that fragmentation a
contribution to making more people concerned about the way our
society should go!" There are many different views now and a
whole lot more thinking about a whole lot more things. Imme-
diately after World War II people were concerned only about
whether there would be full employment. Now the simple
questions that once kept us unified have become more complex.
Fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing. It has caused a
lot of pain, but it has compelled all of us, more than ever before, to
begin to wonder about questions we never thought of in the past,
especially about how we would govern this country and what we
really mean by self-government-which up to now we have only
celebrated as a slogan or as Fourth of July rhetoric.
Having seen the Senate Select Committee hearings on
Watergate and the House Judiciary Committee hearings, one can
begin to see an alternative to settling controversial questions by
violence. We had never seen up to this time the possibility of using
the media as a means to focus the attention of people on par-
ticular issues and engage them in debate among themselves as
Well as to witness the kind of debate which is involved in the
Process of serious decision-making. The House Judiciary Com-
mittee hearings gave us an insight into what Hannah Arendt calls
176 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
"political space" or politics. UP to now Americans have thought of
politics mainly as shenanigans, logrolling, and so on; something
that individuals did only for their own self-interest, to please their
constituents, in order to get re-elected, or to evade issues. Now we
have seen something take place here which we can explore. But we
can explore it further only if we stop being cynics, about tech-
nology and about people: We can seethe potential in technology if
we know how we want to use it, as a means of bringing people
together for debate, discussion, exploration in order to arrive at
decisions for an entire country.
We have to be able to take something like the House Judiciary
hearings and explain how they are manifestations of the capacity
of ordinary people to behave in a socially responsible fashion
when faced with the necessity to do so. The House Judiciary
hearings are also an illustration of the scarcity of this kind of
behavior in the last twenty-five years. The HJC, when faced with
a particular problem, responded very well. But it was a very special
problem: They were not really facing the problems of how people
should live together, as, for example, those who wrote the Con-
stitution did in 1787-1789. That the HJC hearings stand so alone
is a demonstration of the fantastic degradation that has been
happening in this country. It just proves how far we still are from
facing our real problems.
To this a cynic might respond that reaching out to the belief
that things can go in a positive direction is "just" another form of
trying to achieve emotional security for yourself.
In the first place, what is wrong with seeking emotional
security! Why should we look down upon a search for security?
All living species have sought security. Judgments can be made
about the way one searches for security but not about the search
itself.
Why should people accept insecurity? To search for security
could mean opening one s mind. If you are cynical about people, if
you don't believe in their potential to go beyond where they are,
then there is no use talking about change. You just let things stay
where they are, and whatever happens will happen. Cynicism is
much worse than sexism or racism because it denies the human
potential in eoeryone, regardless of sex or race.
Projections Not Rejections 177
Section 2
The Search For Community In Music
Modern popular music in the United States represents an
effort by young people to discover communality--not through
Bach or Beethoven but through the immediacies of rock and roll,
or jazz or country and western. They are searching in this medium
to discover a way to express communality. That is why 600,000
went to Watkins Glen. Young people are searching for almost any
form in which communality may be expressed, and the forms at
this moment are rock and roll or country and western.
For seventy-five years there has been this search for
communality in music and through music in the United States.
Negro blues was the search among Negroes--it had nothing to do
with "rights." It wasn't only the rhythm that was taken over by
whites; it was the search. Whites took over a great deal of iazz, not
because of its musical quality but because it expressed something
that all whites wanted and missed in their lives. "Why should only
blacks have it? Why can't we have it?" whites asked. That is what
Mezz Messrow, the Jewish saxophone player, was searching for in
Really the Blues.Music is one of the ways in which America expresses
its extraordinarily passionate search for communality.
Perhaps it is because Americans have so little in common, in
terms of background and a history which they have created
together, that they have found this communality in music. At one
time, Americans didn't talk the same, they didn't eat the same
foods, and in particular, they have never created a political
community together. Music was the least antagonistic because it
evoked the most basic feelings. So it became one of the few ways
through which people could find their communality in a non-
antagonistic way.
This music is something of unbelievable importance in the
U.S. Someone from China couldn't have the faintest idea of it.
This music is rooted both in the agony and the ecstasy o~ this
country. That is why jazz could only have been created in the
U.S. not in Africa or Europe, (and that is why the Black National-
ist attempts to disown jazz are nonsense). Western music is much
more related to the cowhand, the lonesome cowboy far away from
home. It never took on the social meaning or brought people
together the way that jazz did. (Neither did hillbilly music.) The
music coming up from the South, which united the African and
European strands, brought people together because it was a
178 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
totally innovative creation of this country. Black blues was
sad: the guy had lost his woman; "my baby done left me." Hill-
billy music was gay. Western music and mountain hillbilly music
were regional--not the basis of an enlargement as blues and jazz
were.
We should distinguish between Woodstock Nation and
Watkins Glen and what happened in blues and jazz. Blues and jazz
and country music came out of genuine communities expressing
the aspirations of the people in these communities. As a result of
the form in which they expressed these aspirations, other people
related to their music and therefore some unity was achieved
between different types of people within the country.
On the other hand, what we see taking place in Woodstock
Nation and Watkins Glen is not an expression of communities.
What we witness here is a lot of alienated individuals who are alike
in their lostness, coming together from all parts of the country to a
particular place, to hear performers brought together by promo-
ters who have seen the possibility of making money from all these
alienated individuals, people on the fringe or outskirts of the
society, who want to come together. They are reminiscent of
Huey Newton's Intercommunalism-which embodied the illusion
that somehow or another we are going to create communities by
bringing a lot of different types of victims together.
together.
In the early days we had music coming out of the aspirations
of musicians who were part of a community and who were part of
its historical development. This is not what is taking place now.
What is taking place now is undoubtedly an important social phen-
omenon, but in jazz we had the cultural creation of a community
which is something very different.
Why do people go to country music, 'bluegrass' concerts
today! Bluegrass music seems to attract a kind of longhair,
youngish type who wants to be close to popular movement and be
non-elitist. What various groups like in music at this point
(whether this is always true one is not sure) has a great deal to do
with the kind of people they want to be with and the kind of people
they don't want to be with. When people say they dent like
classical music, they often mean that they don't want to be with
people who like classical music. They are expressing a social
attitude through the form of an opinion about what they like in
music. They are not musicians. They are listening to what the
people whom they want to be with listen to. The musician listens
Projections Not Rejections 179
to music differently. For one thing, he/she knows a lot about it.
Red Women's Detachment and White Haired Girl may mean a great
deal to the Chinese at this particular point because they relate
very intimately to the kind of struggle they are engaged in. Also
the music is close enough to the music they know so that they feel
at home with it. People who know dance in other countries may be
attracted by the highly skillful dancing. On the other hand, The East
is Red is very moving to anyone. It is an epic film of the revolution,
containing portions which like the New World Symphony convey a
sense of great masses of people and nature in motion. Some of
Mao's poems have this same combination of epic and lyric quality.
Written in Chinese characters, they probably mean a great deal
more to the Chinese than they can possibly mean to us.
When Beethoven wrote the last movement to the Ninth
Symphony, he was celebrating the brotherhood and sisterhood of
Man/woman. Then, for some fantastic reason, Dvorak, who
wasn't a particularly great musician, came to the United States
and wrote the New World Symphony in which he celebrated not the
general grandeur of humanity but the potentiality of humanity.
He wasn't just creating a piece of classical music. In the New World
Symphony you feel the historical movement of man/woman. It is
like the sound track of a huge drama, an epic.
How do we project the potentiality of man/woman on a grand
scale today? Duke Ellington does it in his Sacred Music Concert: "In
the Beginning, God" is a celebration of "In the Beginning, Man."
Music is a human creation that tells us something about the
development of man/woman. The rock and rollers are expressing
their frustrations. Rock and roll is a rejection, including amplifi-
cation to the point where the sound blasts your eardrums. In the
music of somebody like Johnny Cash, a lot of people see some
immediate relation to their notion of life, especially what they are
searching for from the past.
Maybe music, including classical music, can tell us something
more than what has been. Is life delicate! Is it exquisite7 Is it harsh
and demanding? Music is a human instrument that tells us about
the development of man/woman--all of it, not just rejection or
nostalgia.
From Yesterday to Tomorrow
The grandeur of the New World Symphony is that it expressed all
the ethnic groups of the United States. Jazz was more uniquely a
creation of black Americans. Gershwin began to make a unity
180 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
between black and white in his music. Then, when the blacks
began to go toward Black Power, they diffused the American
strand. So no one knows where they are going today.
In the U.S. music in its various forms is the expression of a
variety of cultures. Why did Stravinsky spend the last forty years
of his life in Los Angeles? Stravinsky shattered all kinds of notions
of music. Then he came to this country, not in order to be
American but because, as he said, "In order to think or to feel, I
have to live in America." Why do so many people come here!
Because here is a place where you can discover how to move from
yesterday to tomorrow. This, oddly enough, is the one place
where you can escape the limitations of the past, the limitations of
yesterday's cultures, and begin to wonder what tomorrow's
culture will be.
We don't know what the outcome will be. The United States is
a hotbed of new thought, precisely because it doesn't have a
culture, because it isn't a nation, because it isn't white or black,
Slavic or Eskimo.
A long time ago Katherine Dunham, the black dancer-anthro-
pologist, said a beautiful thing: "We can't look merely at our past
but we can look at our past and bring it into the present. We look
towards the future." Does an artist need a philosophy to base
his/her artistry on--or do we look to artists to break free and point
a way?
When a Sicilian came here in 1910, he/she came because
He/she thought that life here would be better than in Sicily.
He/she didn't come here with any ideas of culture at all. For the
same reason people went West--for land, for beaver skins, gold,
or something like that. The early settlers and the later immigrants
didn't come here looking for a culture. They came representing a
culture. But then they became enmeshed in a whole way of life
Precisely because American hasn't a culture, we are not only
free to discover what music is, what sculpture is. We are also free
to discover what new human relationships are. In this country,
minus the material pressures on the one hand and the cultural
restrictions on the other, we are incredibly free to wonder what
would be better material relations and better human relations We
are the freest country in the world--which makes it that much
more difficult to discover how we can go about changing this
country. Nobody knows what they want to overthrow. The same
thing goes for culture. In light of the fact that we don't have a
culture, we are free to wonder what a culture would be. What is
Projections Not Rejections 181
music, what is choreography! Why is Jerome Robbins the kind of
guy he is? When he went to Russia, he scared the devil out of
them, because dancers in Russia dance in the classical tradition.
Then Jerome Robbins goes there and says there are countless
different ways to dance--ways to use dance to express your
thoughts?
This country is tearing the world apart, not only technologi-
cally but in every other way. All sculptors, all painters, most of the
writers who amount to anything all over the world, come to
America because we don't have a culture. But also, because we are
human beings, we are searching for something which unites us
and which in the end becomes a culture.
Our Unique Freedom To Invent
The creation of any new art form is always a tremendous
rupture from a previous form. When there is virtually no form to
break with, you can invent freely. This is as true in politics as in
art. Our freedom to invent new politics is unparalleled in the
history of the world. But we have to invent this new politics.
All sorts of people come from all over the world to America to
escape the limitations of cultures. Whether, having come from
elsewhere they will all be able to be creative here is questionable.
Those who do create do belong to a culture in the sense that they
developed out of the culture. They are prophets who go beyond--
not expatriates, who are very different from prophets. The
prophet, through all kinds of struggles in relation to his/her cul-
ture, is able to leap out of it.
In a revolutionary period you have changes of form in art.
(That is the way we have to think about politics also. It must move
outside of what has previously been considered political to include
many other aspects of life.)
For example, why should people expect great new music to
emerge as jazz? Jazz, which burst forth on the American scene,
has already taken us all a huge step forward. So why should we
expect jazz to develop further any more than we would expect
classical music to develop further. Both were created in a partic-
ular period by particular people. The music which at one time was
a great transcendence of limitations by a particular people
(Malraux says that "all art is a revolt against man's fate--all great
art transfigures the meaning of the world."), can't possibly be
Created at this time by any other people. It was created under very
u"ique conditions. Reverent epic music--which is very political in
182 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
the sense that Leonard Bernstein's Mass and Ellington's Sacred
Concert are political-transcends jazz. They are not attempts to
extend jazz, to make it more sophisticated or more versatile like,
for example, progressive jazz. Mass and Sacred Concert burst out of
the new historical environment of the early 1970s, following upon
the explosions and revelations of the 1960s. As a result, they
expand our entire social horizon, bringing us so much more
of the human spirit, its infinite variety, its conflicts and contra-
dictions, its aspirations and its shortcomings. They bring to mind
the creek drama of Periclean Athens. Previously the main form of
creek art had been sculpture, but then it moved into the new form
of drama which brought us individuals in social conflict with one
another on a huge stage, struggling for new relations in a period of
transition.
We are trying to get away from the idea that the more you
look at each individual man/woman, the more you understand
manlwoman. We are inclined to think that the more you look at
the individual, the less you understand the species.
In Manas (June 12, 1974) Henry Geiger quotes W. Norman
Brown writing about Indian art: "Sculpture was not meant to be a
reminder of a human being or of an apotheosis of man, but of
something abstract, spiritual in its reality beyond apprehension by
the sense, an ocular reference to universal knowledge that might
somehow become comprehensible to humanity."
He then quotes Lawrence Binyon in The Flight of the
Dragon: "Some of the finest Buddhist art is to be found in por-
traiture, both painted and sculptured. But it is to be noted that the
portraiture of the kind so prevalent in Europe scarcely seems to
exist. Most of these portraits were made after death, and partook
of an ideal character, and only great personalities of saints, sages,
heroes seem to have been thought worthy of portrayal. It was the
ideal embodied in the man, rather than his external features,
which it sought to represent. These Buddhist portraits are
remarkable for contained intensity of expression; in them, too, the
aim of rhythmical vitality is once again manifested."
Like the Buddhists we have to have a concept of the ideal. It
may be an American ideal or a Chinese ideal, but you can't judge
man/woman by looking at each individual. One has to confront
each individual with a more or less ideal notion of what a human
being could be--not "is" or "was" but "could be." In America, we
are free to think about what a human being could be. We are not
controlled by any ideology or any culture. That is both why we are 1,
Projections Not Rejections 183
free and why we have so incredibly much responsibility to the
world to demonstrate how all the past limitations can be shat-
tered? And this is also why we are so lost. Because when you are
free, you are also floundering until you find your direction.
Rock and roll is a strange phenomenon in which disappoint-
ment with their parents and with American society has led a
whole generation into pure subjectivity. That is what rock and roll
is, even though it has a background for its subjectivity.
Is there any music in this period that enables us to look as
Man/woman in an enlarged sense? When there are revolutionary
or truly new thoughts, not just rephrases of old thoughts, there
will be new music. It is absolutely fantastic that in the 1930s
"Solidarity Forever" was the song that everybody sang. And then
in the 1960s, "We Shall Overcome" became the song that
everybody sang. Neither was composed by musicians. Both
sprang out of a new set of relations. We believe that there will be a
new music when a few of us have advanced a new set of thoughts
about human relations or a new set of human relations. We are
going to write the preamble to which someone will write a new
song.
Section 3
What is the Human Spirit?
Many young people are looking for something spiritual. We
are finding it terribly difficult to talk about this for fear that if we
did, we would be talking like Jesus. Mao talks about the human
spirit very easily because the notion of human spirit, if you are
Chinese, is associated with the way people have been relating
among themselves for thousands of years and also how they have
related themselves to philosophy or to ideas. In the United States
there is a total absence of that sense of relationship to a historical
past and the development of the human species. To relate to a
Person suggests going up to the person and giving him/her a kiss
or a Freedom Now handshake.
How do we concretize the search for a sense of the human
spirit so that a kid can look for it or understand what is being
talked about and so that the word "spirit" does not bring to mind
the Holy Ghost or Jesus Christ.
Ho Chi Minh had to give peasants who had no sense of
national identity a concept of a national identity. Each peasant
knew about his/her little village, his/her own ancestry. (In that
184 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
sense he/she knew much more than the average American.) But
what he/she knew was extremely limited, narrow: some rituals,
some rice paddies, some symbols. Ho recognized that the first
thing to overcome was the lack of a sense of national identity on
the part of the peasants. He saw that the Vietnamese peasants
lacked a sense of national identity not only because they had been
deprived of it by French and American imperialism but because
they themselves had never developed to that stage. But recog-
nizing where they were in relation to where they still had to go, he
could project to them where they had to go.
Americans also lack that sense of national identity or history.
On the one hand, each of us is different, and on the other, each of
us lacks the same thing.
The difference between ourselves and Ho is that the Viet-
namese had an external antagonist against the background of
which they had to discover their national identity or selfhood. But
in the United States, although we have fought wars, we have
never really been in one. Our anatagonist is ourselves, our own
limitations. What we are searching for is the way to get at the
antagonist. Ho had a visible tangible enemy. Our main enemy is an
internal one. That means developing a trend of thought very
different from the thought of the past. It has taken us so long to
free ourselves from the European notions of external enemies--
the French versus the Germans. In the thirties or even the early
sixties, you could still mobilize people against the obvious external
class or race enemy, but since then too many workers and too
many blacks have become a part of the system. S
Mao had the courage to launch the "Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution" in order to let the peasants know that they
had to smash the limitations which had been imposed upon them
and to discover what limitations they wanted to impose upon
themselves. How do you do that in the United States where there
are no immediate practical projects over which to struggle in order
to make these discoveries? At this point we can't start great leaps
forward--except in the heads of a few people.
Literature, History, Politics
One way is by helping Americans to recognize what is
distinctively American about themselves. They can recognize this
1) through the distinctive character of America as exemplified in
its great literature; 2) through the historical development or lack
of historical development in this country; and 3) through drastic
Projections Not Rejections 185
proposals with regard to very concrete issues like work, schools,
etc.
American literature reveals the American character. And
Melville is really the crucial writer. There are four characters of
Melville's who are more important than Ahab in relating to young
people: Ishmael, the guy who runs away from routinism; Billy
Budd, the guy who is full of values but is extremely inarticulate;
Bartleby the Scrivener, the guy who says he prefers not to (the
abstainer); and Pierre who contemplates his navel. The worst part
about Billy Budd is that he doesn't seek to find the words by which
he can develop and express his feelings and turn them into
thoughts. He remains content to be inarticulate; he prefers, like so
many Americans, to remain an innocent. In the same way that
Bartleby the Scrivener abstains from the act, Billy Budd abstains
from the search for the words which will enable him to turn his
feelings into thoughts and thus discover his human identity.
These characters are very meaningful as representative types
of American youth. Melville discovered them.
The second thing is to discover our history. Our history is
that, for the most part, we have no history. Except for a few people
who descended from the early settlers, everybody else came
recently or was forced to come here. The overwhelming majority
of Americans have no sense of having participated as a people in
the humanizing political struggle to create a nation. The discovery
of our differences, the struggle over these differences in a political
way rather than on an ethnic basis is something that we still
have to do. The discovery of our political identity, who we are as
American people, is an enterprise, an adventure which lies before
us. We are still in the process of creating the American nation.
Only a very few people participated in the initial creation of
the American nation, in numbers as well as in terms of ancestry.
The rest of us who came as immigrants, or as slaves who were
excluded by force, still have that great socializing, humanizing,
individualizing experience before us. We must want to make that
experience, feel that it is necessary to the development of our-
Selves as human. We must want to make this country a distinctive
nation, standing for something important among nations. A
nation is something that a people have to create; they can't inherit
it and become somebody worthwhile, any more than a rich man's
son can become somebody by inheriting his father's wealth. We
have to create this nation through a discovery of its past history
and a Concept of the future we want. We can't just be complainers
186 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
or abstainers or holier-than-thou innocents. We have to want to
do more than return to nature and to "grand unity" as the Taoists
did at the beginning of the Chinese nation 2500 years ago. We
have to want a concept of what is right and what is wrong and to
want to be creators of those concepts. We have to want to
establish our own equivalent of "the mandate of heaven" which a
government loses when it no longer advances the humanity of the
people. We have to want to make definitions of national
boundaries which the Chinese also had to do 2500 years ago. We
have to want to do all these things and find the people who want
also to do these things. We have to explain why it is necessary and
then find the people who want to pioneer, to take the leadership in
creating a new nation.
What is the role of the human spirit in all this? One may want
to discover oneself or one's role in the creation of that nation
which gives one pride and integrity. But nationhood is more than
pride and integrity. Nationhood involves politics, assuming the
responsibility for decisions, and struggling for the power
necessary to decide where your country is going in relation to
crucial issues.
What could persuade young people that this is elemental to
their search for brotherhood and sisterhood! Well, first of all, not
all young people are alike. Some of them have concepts of develop-
ment. So when you talk to them about human evolution or
development from membership in a family to membership in a
dan, to membership in a nation, it means something to them; they
have some feeling for the struggles that are necessary for great
numbers of people to move from one stage to the next.
The third step is very important: making the drastic proposals
that open political controversy and political struggle; for example,
closing down schools, freezing mobility and so on.
When we begin to break down concretely what we mean by a
spiritual revolution, when we make clear that human spirit is
essentially the courage to grapple with difficult concepts and
questions in a revolutionary way then we stop thinking about
spirit as something like the Holy Ghost.
In China Mao says that if you have spirit, there are different
ways to exemplify it. There are very particular things that have to
be done, very concrete problems that have to be grappled with,
like terracing a mountain or growing apples in a tropical climate
We don't have the same forms, the same problems in the United
States. So to talk about "spirit" seems general and without
Projections Not Rejections 187
application That is what bothers so many young people. They feel
the urge to concentrate all their passions, aspirations and feelings
together in something worthwhile. Then all of a sudden, they run
into a vacuum because they don't know what to do. Do they create
the vacuum themselves by believing that they can put it all
together in an instant, without recognizing all the labor, patience
and suffering of the negative, all the struggles in theory and
method that they have to go through? In a sense they want signals
instead of symbols. "We have all these passions; tell us what to
do."
In China and Russia there were concrete struggles in which
spirit could be visibly demonstrated. But we can't find in the U.S.
the kinds of demonstrations within experience that the Chinese
found. So Americans have to be ready to perform without the
experiences; or to find various ways to make experience meaning-
ful. They can't say, "I don't have the practical experiences; there-
fore I can't grasp the theory." They have to recognize that there is
no simple answer just because they want simple answers. But we
do need the kind of answers that give them some place to begin.
There is intense pressure to transfer some experiences from
China to the U.S., because if we could do that, it would be
infinitely simpler.
The Myth of Equality
Thinking zoologically, if insects are 300 million years older
than man/woman, then maybe we should begin wondering what
time means. Chardin says that the average zoological species
(technically speaking, phylum) lives 88 million years. Humankind
has lived only a few. We have another 55-60 million years ahead of
us. We are not trying here to solve the problems of humankind for
all time. We are merely trying to make a small advance. We are not
trying to establish the ultimate. We are just trying to persuade
people to wonder what would be better tomorrow than it is today.
What would be better? What do you have to do to make it better!
When young people first begin to do some serious thinking
about themselves, for example, in adolescence, they begin to
argue the question, "Is it society which determines or is it the
individual who determines?" This question recurs again and
again. The kids who begin to argue the question in college
bull sessions think that they are arguing it scientifically or as
abstract knowledge. But we know that when we argue the
question today, we are concerned with the answer in terms of how
188 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
it enables us, as revolutionists, to persuade men and women that
they can change their society. What philosophical presuppositions
do we need, in terms of our very fundamental goal and purpose to
make society into a better place for people to live?
Until now progressives (since Rousseau) have believed, and
believed very fundamentally even though in their practice they
may not have followed this presupposition that we all began as
equal, and then society distorted, or perverted us into differences.
Therefore what we must do is change society so that we can revert
to our original stage of angelic equality.
Now we are saying that if we accept the idea that people are
born different rather than equal, we will be able to create a society
in which there will be greater justice, greater potentiality for the
development of individuals, greater equality, greater order. In
other words, starting from this presupposition, we could develop
a qualitatively better society.
By keeping this process clear, we can purify or purge
ourselves of a notion or assumption which has been held for a
great many years and which we have all shared (because we were
thinking within a particular framework) that everything began as
equal, and then difference was introduced by an evil influence
(society). We have all been prisoners of this idea of natural
equality. We see through our eyes, not with them, i.e., what we see is
shaped by what we believe.
The philosophy of the Chinese Communists doesn't have
within it the idea of equality as we have it because the Chinese
didn't go through the period of Christianity which asserted that
everybody is equal in the sight of God; nor did they go through the
period of Rousseau and the democratic revolution which advanced
the idea that "all men are created equal." We must never forget
that by the time the Chinese embraced Marxism, they had behind
them thousands of years of history of many different ideas. When
they became Marxists, they did not wipe out all the wisdom which
had been accumulated over the centuries. The Chinese expect
differences among people to exist and to be constantly emerging
Therefore they have found it relatively easy to avoid the trap of
ultra-democracy.
All people are born unequal, mentally and physically
Everybody is born different. Diversity characterizes every grain
of sand on the beach; how much more then must it be true of
human beings? The idea that everybody is the same is an idea that
was created by the human mind at a particular time in order to
Projections Not Rejections 189
struggle against a stratified society.
The ancients, and religious people in general, think that
special People are born special because of some gift from the gods
o, from God: for example, the mother mated with a god. Thus
Jesus specialness was explained by a myth of God's entering
somehow into Mary's womb. In the past it has been considered
necessary that we find special reasons (myths) for special people.
Now we are beginning to see that it is not necessary to have special
reasons for special people. Specialness is not something which has
to be explained. It is something which we should expect. What
would require very special explanation (or a myth) would be
everybody's being the same.
But there comes a time when you have to realize that an idea
which was created to advance the struggle for a more just society,
and which has enabled us to advance to where we are today, not
only does not advance the struggle for a more just society but
actually acts as a barrier to creating a more just society. That is
where we are now. Today we are handicapped by the myth of
equality because, for example, if everybody is equal, then leader-
ship isn't necessary, nor is it necessary for people to accept the
demand upon themselves to develop beyond where they are.
So what we are talking about here, which might evolve into a
philosophy adopted by many, may one hundred or two hundred or
even fifty years from now be re-evaluated, just as we are now re-
evaluating the idea of equality.
Up to now, for the last one hundred years, it has been
generally assumed that Marx and Rousseau were totally right and
everybody else was totally wrong. We are now saying that they
were right for their time but not for now; and also that they were
never totally right nor is it possible ever to develop a philosophy
that is totally right.
Rousseau and Marx were part of the historical process,
emerging as very special people at a very early stage of capitalism.
It is not a question of whether they were right any more than it is a
question of whether capitalism was right. Capitalism happened,
and they developed ideas to struggle against its dehumanization of
people. Now, just as we have to establish that capitalism isn't the
final society, we have to establish that Rousseau and Marx didn't
Say the last word. We have to think of historical process, not in
terms of huge abstractions like "the sovereignty of the people" or
"the general will" or "class is the locomotive of history" but in
terms of people using their minds. The next revolution in America
188 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
it enables us, as revolutionists, to persuade men and women that
they can change their society. What philosophical presuppositions
do we need, in terms of our very fundamental goal and purpose to
make society into a better place for people to live?
Until now progressives (since Rousseau) have believed, and
believed very fundamentally even though in their practice they
may not have followed this presupposition that we all began as
equal, and then society distorted, or perverted us into differences.
Therefore what we must do is change society so that we can revert
to our original stage of angelic equality.
Now we are saying that if we accept the idea that people are
born different rather than equal, we will be able to create a society
in which there will be greater justice, greater potentiality for the
development of individuals, greater equality, greater order. In
other words, starting from this presupposition, we could develop
a qualitatively better society.
By keeping this process clear, we can purify or purge
ourselves of a notion or assumption which has been held for a
great many years and which we have all shared (because we were
thinking within a particular framework) that everything began as
equal, and then difference was introduced by an evil influence
(society). We have all been prisoners of this idea of natural
equality. We see through our eyes, not with them, i.e., what we see is
shaped by what we believe.
The philosophy of the Chinese Communists doesn't have
within it the idea of equality as we have it because the Chinese
didn't go through the period of Christianity which asserted that
everybody is equal in the sight of God; nor did they go through the
period of Rousseau and the democratic revolution which advanced
the idea that "all men are created equal." We must never forget
that by the time the Chinese embraced Marxism, they had behind
them thousands of years of history of many different ideas. When
they became Marxists, they did not wipe out all the wisdom which
had been accumulated over the centuries. The Chinese expect
differences among people to exist and to be constantly emerging
Therefore they have found it relatively easy to avoid the trap of
ultra-democracy.
All people are born unequal, mentally and physically
Everybody is born different. Diversity characterizes every grain
of sand on the beach; how much more then must it be true of
human beings! The idea that everybody is the same is an idea that
was created by the human mind at a particular time in order to
Projections Not Rejections 189
struggle against a stratified society.
The ancients, and religious people in general, think that
special People are born special because of some gift from the gods
o, from God: for example, the mother mated with a god. Thus
Jesus' specialness was explained by a myth of God's entering
somehow into Mary's womb. In the past it has been considered
necessary that we find special reasons (myths) for special people.
Now we are beginning to see that it is not necessary to have special
reasons for special people. Specialness is not something which has
to be explained. It is something which we should expect. What
would require very special explanation (or a myth) would be
everybody's being the same.
But there comes a time when you have to realize that an idea
which was created to advance the struggle for a more just society,
and which has enabled us to advance to where we are today, not
only does not advance the struggle for a more just society but
actually acts as a barrier to creating a more just society. That is
where we are now. Today we are handicapped by the myth of
equality because, for example, if everybody is equal, then leader-
ship isn't necessary, nor is it necessary for people to accept the
demand upon themselves to develop beyond where they are.
So what we are talking about here, which might evolve into a
philosophy adopted by many, may one hundred or two hundred or
even fifty years from now be re-evaluated, just as we are now re-
evaluating the idea of equality.
Up to now, for the last one hundred years, it has been
generally assumed that Marx and Rousseau were totally right and
everybody else was totally wrong. We are now saying that they
were right for their time but not for now; and also that they were
never totally right nor is it possible ever to develop a philosophy
that is totally right.
Rousseau and Marx were part of the historical process,
emerging as very special people at a very early stage of capitalism.
It is not a question of whether they were right any more than it is a
question of whether capitalism was right. Capitalism happened,
and they developed ideas to struggle against its dehumanization of
people. Now, just as we have to establish that capitalism isn't the
final society, we have to establish that Rousseau and Marx didn't
Say the last word. We have to think of historical process, not in
terms of huge abstractions like "the sovereignty of the people" or
"the general will" or "class is the locomotive of history" but in
terms of people using their minds. The next revolution in America
190 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
is going to be made by people who use their minds and who do not
just react out of animosity. The next stage of human development
will be made by the advanced use of that most human thing called
the mind. Up to now, we have used our minds creatively in
relation to technical problems. Now we have to use our minds
creatively in relation to human problems.
In Earthwalk Philip Slater says, "The search for social justice
over the past century has rested in large part on principles of
consistency, objectivity, fairness, equality, and so on. In the fight
against exploitation and oppression a major weapon has been to
expose the fact that two individuals from different social
backgrounds are not treated the same before the law, or that they
have unequal opportunities, or that they receive different
responses for certain behavior." In other words, in the past it has
been necessary to emphasize the concept of equality because the
main effort has been against the unequal treatment of people in
society. Obviously we are against an unfair society. But there is a
huge difference between a society aspiring only to give everybody
"a fair shake" and a society that "grasps both ends to pull forth the
middle" because it recognizes that both ends do exist but doesn't
reward those already gifted with additional privileges.
Why do we talk so much about what we can do from within
ourselves and developing our own potential and not so much
about others oppressing us! Because people who think chiefly of
oppression carry a monkey on their backs which cripples them.
For example, a black student can be bright and study hard but still
find it impossible to learn because all the time he/she is sitting in
class he/she is thinking, "The only reason that guy is getting
seventy-five dollars an hour and I have to sit here listening to him
is because he's white and I'm black." So he/she works and studies
but all he/she is seeing before him/her all the time is the oppressor.
We know a lot of young people who carry this monkey on their
backs.
The immediate response of most people, not only because of
their oppressed position in society but because of the prevailing
ideas of equality, is to react against oppression, to see themselves
as victims, to be afraid of the concept of inequality as implying
hierarchy and privilege for some people as opposed to themselves.
That is a natural response of oppressed people that they do not
seem to be able to move beyond, not because they are stupid or
want to mislead themselves but because we have not struggled
sufficiently to develop positive ideas of inequality so that we can
Projections Not Rejections 191
see relations between unequals as enriching and expanding
oneself and one's relations with others. So that intellectuals, for
example, who have the opportunity to live and work with workers
and vice versa, see themselves as expanded and enriched by this
relationship and by the contradictions inherent in it, instead of
each trying to become like the other.
Class and Community
If you think that everybody is equal, then it is impossible to
think in terms of communities which are made up of diverse
people.
The concept of belonging to a class is based on belonging to
something which is defined by antagonism to an enemy class--so
that those within a class are not seen in terms of their differences
but rather as equals by virtue of how their groups are defined.
Communities are very different from classes. People have
belonged to communities much longer than they have belonged to
classes.
It is only with the European Middle Ages, building on the
Christian notion that everybody is born equal, that we get the
basis of the notion of class. This notion comes very late in the
development of humankind. After this came the notion that
nobody could be thrown out of the community. All previous
people have always thrown somebody out, e.g., the aged. The aged
accepted this because communities make distinctions between
who is valuable and who isn't.
Equality is a reductive concept which leads one to think of
least common denominators and therefore of stagnant pools
where we need to see springs, of faceless masses where we need to
see a rich variety of individuals. We need many metaphors to help
Us understand how an idea which was once a peak has now
become a plateau. Most people are not thinking at all, but what is
SO sad is that those who call themselves radicals are still thinking
in terms of these plateaus. What is more, radicals will fight harder
to defend outmoded levels of thinking than the average person. So
that if you want to think on a higher level, you practically have to
engage in a crusade because radicals fight so hard to defend these
old ideas. In other words, they are more conservative than
ordinary people.
When we are ready to say positively that all men and women
are created unequal, and see within that the potential for creating
a more just social order, then we can begin making divisions
192 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
among the unequal, discovering the ways in which inequality
expresses itself, for example, in the fact that some oppressed
People become thugs while others who are equally oppressed seek
revolutionary ways to go beyond the present situation.
The notion of being special is more than lust believing that
everyone is born different from everyone else. It also means that
some people, because they feel more or know more or express
ideas in a way that others can't, have more to contribute to the
advancement of humanity at certain times than others have, for
example, Leonardo or Buddha or Malcolm X.
It isn't possible to make a revolution in the U.S. without recog-
nizing that there are special people. But it isn't a matter of picking
out the people first and then saying that their ideas are special.
That is always the danger in any recognition of special people.
What is necessary is the exact opposite. First you pick out the
special ideas, and then you wonder which people express or
embrace them.
Section 4
Psychic Hunger
We are trying to discover how to get people to understand
why they are miserable. One way we will not achieve this is by
telling people how miserable they are. Somehow or other, we
must begin to help people understand that they are capable of
envisaging another way to live. Not that we are able to give them
this other way. But to show them that they are capable of
envisaging another way to live--if only as a feeling of lack--and
that is the main reason why they are so miserable. Animals are not
miserable because they don't experience this contradiction
between the lives they are living and the sense of another way to
live, which expresses itself in human beings as psychic hunger.
A new book has come out, called Russ and Tom: Two American
TragediPs, which tells the story of Russ Lockridge who wrote
Raintree County and Tom Heggen who wrote Mr. Roberts. Both these
guys achieved phenomenal success almost overnight; yet both
shot themselves a few years later. Why did two apparently bright
guys discover that making a million dollars, achieving instant
international success, destroyed rather than enlarged them?
These guys didn't really have a notion of what their true psychic
hunger was, or they wouldn't have committed suicide.
What does your psyche want! What would satisfy the
Projections Not Rejections 193
hungers of your psyche? To be thought of as generous or as kind?
Or as the grandfather of all the kids on the block! Or perhaps to be
thought of as wise! We know that Nixon wanted to go down in the
history books as a great man but did he ever wonder or try to
define what makes a man great!
How do we help Americans to understand what they are
missing and don't even know that they are missing? (One way is
by playing them Ellington's Sacred Concert.) The House Judiciary
Committee Proceedings enlarged and elevated everybody who
participated in them and thereby everybody who viewed them. If
we can begin to grasp this, we may be able to find the words to
express it. It is very different from seeing people only as mean,
brutish, utilitarian creatures which, of course, they also are. The
Constitutional Convention of 1787 was probably one of the great-
est convocations that has taken place in human history even if
they did arrive at the decision that the slave was only three-fifths
of a person. The gravity of what they were doing elevated all who
participated.
Redefining Revolution
It isn't a luxury to wonder about these questions which the
average guy or gal never bothers to think about. You cannot begin
to have revolutionary thoughts if you start by wondering what
other people are going to think, especially other radicals.
Revolutionists have to think that what they think is worth
thinking about and not worry about what their grandchildren will
think of them. Because what their grandchildren will think
tomorrow depends a lot upon what they themselves think and do
today.
The word "revolution" is so tainted, so surcharged with past
meanings that people respond automatically. Everybody thinks
he/she understands what a revolution is. Yet we continue to use
the word because one of the major responsibilities of a revolution-
ist is to redefine revolution, just as it is to redefine socialism. If
Somebody asks you if you are a revolutionist, you can't just say
"yes" because in a way that capitulates to his or her definition of
what a revolutionist is. A lot of radicals say "yes" the same way
that they would check the box on a questionnaire on race, sex, or
religion. You don't help the person who asked the question by just
Checking the box. If you are on a platform and somebody asks you
this question, you say, "1 am glad you asked me that question. Let
me explain why I say I am a revolutionist."
194 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
We must boldly redefine revolution. Our job as people who
are advancing the American revolution is to persuade people that
their psychic hunger can be satisfied by doing things that are
elevated. A revolutionist is a Person who is daring enough to
believe that people can live differently. You have to believe that
you are capable of explaining the concepts you believe in, knowing
that other people have other and contradictory ideas about these
same things. Just as you can explain the difference between the
Russian view of socialism and the Chinese view, and the limita-
tions and narrowness of the former. A lot of people to this day
believe that capitalism, socialism, etc. are "things." They see
relationships as things. Seeing relationships as things (reifica-
tion) paralyzes them in their capacity to envisage new relation-
ships which they can participate in creating.
When people in their search for how to live better are ready to
make evolutionary changes by choice, then we will be able to have
revolution.
When people lived in tribes, they weren't lonely. But in all the
advanced countries of the world, we have arrived at a point where
practically everybody is lonely because they have been deprived of
community. Much more in America than anywhere else as
illustrated in the murderous and extremely important cartoons of
Charles Hamilton in the New Yorker people feel dehumanized.
But how do we move from non-humanity to humanity?
Without the sense of the need for community, why should
anyone have a sense of the need for revolution, except abstractly!
We have to arrive at revolution, not begin with it. The only reason
one would ever want a revolution in this country is because one
wanted to be one again with one's fellow human beings. When
people want to live differently from the way they are living now,
then they will make revolution and not before. Part of our job is to
indicate that the passion and the dedication which Guevara put
into Bolivia was misplaced and we are trying to discover the new
place to put it.
We have to decide what we think in order to change what
others think. To make a revolution it is necessary to persuade
some people who have some powers, some beliefs that they would
like to see extended. If they feel that way, they will make a change
Yet some people still think that if you raise a red flag and support
an ideology which nobody but your followers understand, you will
make a revolution.
196 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
conditions." This is also true but not true enough. How does one
persuade people that one does not live by bread alone? The
average gal or guy says, "First give me some bread and then I will
worry about the other things." In China they are just getting the
bread and having gotten it, their aspirations have been raised. So it
is possible to spur them on. But here are people who are eating as
well as Rockefeller and some even better but they are still
envious of Rockefeller.
How does one take this beyond confrontation? Because at the
moment of confrontation, a guy or gal will say, "that's right." But
the moment you stop confronting them, they deliberately go back
to their old way of not thinking about the contradiction. They
want to "just live and enjoy myself" even though they are not
really enjoying themselves.
When we say that we have to revise Marxism, we mean it in
the most profound sense. Marx was the end of a historical epoch,
not the beginning of a new one. In essence, he was thinking that if
you could satisfy the material needs of people, then you would
discover how beautiful people can be. The course of the U.S.,
especially since the end of World War II, has proved that this
is simply not true. Therefore we find this contradiction between
belly fullness and psychic hunger. Everybody is subject to belly
hunger but most people don't have the slightest idea of psychic
hunger because that requires a sensitivity and awareness of a
thousand things which most people have never bothered to
investigate.
The problem of the American revolutionist is not to persuade
people to struggle just against the obvious oppressor when the
oppressor is inside oneself. That is why we are beginning all over
again on another level which Marx didn't have to grapple with--
because up to only a few years ago the struggle was for survival
and material security. But now the struggle isn't for material
security; it is for psychic security, internal security. That is the
problem we have to look at. How does one accept responsibility for
this problem. It isn't by going to Columbus Circle and making
militant speeches, saying, "To hell with the boss." Duke Ellington
says it his way in his Sacred Concert. We have to discover how to do
that in terms of politics or political struggle. We don't have to
teach people how to struggle against something. We have to
project to them that, "you have to decide what you are struggling
for." Mao didn't have to face that question in China because the
Chinese knew what they were struggling for. It isn't difficult to
Projections Not Rejections 197
know this when you are starving or when your kid is working
fourteen hours a day in a coal mine.
We are not probing for answers so much as we are trying to
find the right questions. What is it that John D. Rockefeller III
(who wrote "The Second American Revolution") and Joe Doakes
who drives a bus both need? Suppose that instead of using a phrase
like "psychic security," we used one like "living purposefully." But
that implies that you have already gone through the process of
comparing values so that you have decided for what purpose you
are living. Whereas psychic insecurity is living without the faint-
est idea of why you are living.
Psyches don't live on bread. It is not a question of physical
well-being. We are talking about the need of people for spiritual
relationships with themselves, with others, with their surround-
ings. You can't tackle this by writing a Das Kapital. We need
something else--but what it is we don't know. It is not likely to be
a book at all--because books don't mobilize forces. At most a book
or manifesto can move only a few people.
How do we begin! One way is to try to persuade people to
think about community. How does one go about inspiring or per-
sueding people to think about community? We are beginning--
even though it may be twenty years before people can look back
and say that we made a beginning. Also the beginning never has
an end. It has climaxes which lead to new beginnings. A lot of
people who follow Marx think that there is an end. We believed
that for years. Now we realize that one year, two years, twenty
years from now, we or others may discover another thought that
it was impossible for us to think about this summer. We accept the
fact that there are mysteries which we have to incorporate into
what we know now, always looking for further illumination. We
recognize that whatever concept we could possibly evolve about a
community, having looked back and tried to sum up all that has
been true of communities, would nevertheless only be a beginning
of the struggle to form something which has never existed before.
We would be scared of a blueprint if we came up with one.
198 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE T
Section 5
Community
The Limits of the City
In a recent Manas, Ceiger says that after Murray Bookchin's
Limits of the City, nobody needs to write another book about the city.
Limits of the City deals with cities not as a city planner does but as a
place where people live and with a recognition that there are limits
to what people can take in their lives. Tokyo with 11 million people
(or New York or London) isn't even a city any more, let alone a
community. It is a megalopolis, an agglomeration. It isn't some-
thing that anybody is proud of in a nationalistic sense. So a guy or
gal living in that city can feel, "I am just going to f--- this up." We
are not saying that they ought to, but it is no wonder that people
living in New York act that way. They have no relationship to
anything in particular. Everybody pays attention to urban
planners who say that if we would just plan a city properly, we
would solve the problems of the city--which is absolutely ridic-
ulous. It is impossible to plan a city of eight million properly. It
should be smashed. Eight million people can't be a community. So
urban planning and city planning studies are worthless--except
from an engineering point of view. "How do you run an
expressway through Manhattan!" is a legitimate question, but it
has nothing to do with city planning.
The only way to solve these problems is to start with the
hunger of the psyche. How would people like to live? You build a
city around the way people would like to live. You can't compel
people to live in a city you would like to build.
There are a tremendous number of people who would like to
leave New York and go to the suburbs. They are really running
away because they feel that their lives are a constant misery to
them. The poor would like to leave also but they know they can't,
so they call the others s.o.b.s for running away. Those who go to
the suburbs are leaving a horror behind. Yet we know that as long
as they just see themselves as escaping, eventually the suburbs
come to the same end. Crime is now rising in the suburbs.
At the same time we have to recognize that what they do
reflects a serious situation. There is a desire to break up the cities
by most people in them, except the thugs and thieves who can ply
their trade best in the most crowded surroundings. Most city
dwellers feel trapped and would like to escape. The people who 1
Projections Not Rejections 199
run to the suburbs are running for negative reasons. If they left
the cities for positive reasons, they wouldn't go to the suburbs.
Why are state capitals in the United States not the biggest
citiest In Europe the spiritual, cultural and political center was the
capital? So you were a citizen in the sense that you belonged to and
felt a part of "public space."
After the Depression, American cities became administrative
centers for people on welfare in one form or another, and the
chance of their developing into a political center was lost. One of
the real problems is the Welfare State. The Welfare State is not a
government of the people. In the concept of "government by, of
and for the people" there is a lot of ambiguity, but there is a clear
difference between government by and government for the
people. In the concept of government by the people, there is some
sense of the people having responsibility for the government.
When the Depression came in the 1930s, in the wake of
mechanization of agriculture and the displacement of people from
the land, the chances of the city becoming something of a real
political center for acquiring "grandeur" were lost.
When FDR started the Welfare State, he made a bunch of
decisions which have altered the face of America ever since. By
and large, up to now, we have thought that the development of
the Welfare State was associated with the development of social-
ism and the rise of socialist consciousness which is exactly what
has not happened.
The city can become a city in the sense of a "public space" only
after one has created a sense of social grandeur, so that the city is
representative of the highest possible level of social relationships
and human achievements. Until people begin to think in terms of
striving for the highest possible level of social relationships and
human achievement, it is impossible to rebuild the cities.
The word city is associated in its origins with civitas, with civi-
lization, the place where civilization came together. Mumford
gives his concept of the city in The City in History. The city emerged
after man/woman moved from nomadic society into more or less
Stable agricultural society. The cities became the nuclei where
People got together on market day or where artists met to discuss
art. In its origins it was both the center of civilization and, almost
immediately, a walled city to fight off the barbarians, including
your own barbarians, e.g., starving farmers who wanted the grain
that had been stored in the city. The city became the embodiment
of the highest aspects of civilization and also of the conflicts
200 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
within civilization which is why all early cities were walled cities.
Roosevelt turned this around and made the city the dispenser of
grains to displaced farmers.
Americans have traditionally run away from the city as they
became more affluent. They have run away from the responsi-
bilities of the city. Beacon Hill in Boston was the last European
manifestation of the center of the city as the center of civilization.
Perhaps up to the early days of Civil War, maybe only up to the
time of Jackson, there was some idea that the most cultivated
people had responsibility to govern. There was some idea of
noblesse oblige, or the responsibilities of the aristocracy, with
regard to governing. This disappeared completely after the Civil
War. After that, those who became politicians were those who
dispensed the spoils. They were the servants of the industrial
bourgeoisie or of certain sectional interests.
A very different concept of politics goes along with the very
different concept of the city in the U.S.
The city grew because it represented certain forces which
were centripetal, tending to come together rather than fly apart. It
didn't grow on the basis of any theory. No city in America, except
Boston or perhaps Philadelphia, ever grew on the basis of an idea.
Boston and Philadelphia represented the end of the concept of the
city as the center of cultural achievement, social responsibility and
political action. Philadelphia, city of Love. Nashville, Tennessee,
New Orleans, you might say were proto-cities. The courthouse in
Nashville is a pseudo-Greek temple. It is not by accident that so
many courthouses in cities around the U.S. were pseudo-Greek
temples. The Creek cities symbolized the kinds of cities the people
who built the courthouses would have liked to create. But as the
U.S. became industrialized and all values except profit were
destroyed, the Creek notion of the city went out the window. The
city lost its value as a center of civilization. It was lust a center
where one made money by land speculation, by finance or by
starting industry.
Every European city for centuries was the center of civiliza-
tion for that country. Stockholm, Amsterdam. To this day there
isn't a Dutch who wouldn't die to save Amsterdam. Do you think
any New Yorker today would die for New York, or a Detroiter for
Detroit!
Most American radicals derive their idea of a city from New
Projections Not Rejections 201
York, i.e., the city as an agglomeration of cultures Jews,
Sicilians, Chinese, etc. But all the immigrants from Europe and
Asia and the American countryside who came to New York didn't
make it a city. They destroyed it as a city. Not that it was their
fault; there was no countervailing force which prevented them
from destroying it. LaGuardia, who was Mayor during the
thirties, talked about the city as an international world and did a
great deal to make that kind of a city out of New York. He made
clear that you couldn't build New York into a city which just
included WASPS; it had to include everybody. But is a conglomer-
ation of minorities an ideal city?
One of the greatest weaknesses of Frank Lloyd Wright was
that he was a populist, an agrarian romantic. He had an absolute
passion for living in a close relationship with Nature. He didn't
believe in putting together a whole lot of people in one spot. The
idea of a city being the very center of a society was foreign to him.
He saw civilization as permeating the whole society, the whole
nation. Why shouldn't every place be civilized? Why shouldn't
every place have a relationship to a tree or a cow or a neighbor! It
is terribly easy to get romantic and think, "Wouldn't it be wonder-
ful if everybody lived not in a city but in a glorified, civilized, rural
communal environment?" But that is contrary to the historical
tendency of people to get together. Some will be living in
communes and some in cities. In a civilized society there will be
subways. Not that working underground is civilized--but we are
going to live with cities for a long time. Our challenge isn't to
destroy the concept of cities but to recreate the notion of what a
city is for--besides lust an enormous accumulation of people all
trying to get enough to eat. A city is an idea, a symbol.
Mumford, as contrasted with Wright, was very concerned
with the accumulation of tradition which is possible in a city and
very difficult in the country. In the U.S. it is difficult to accumulate
any traditions at all because the society has been expanding so
rapidly and there is so much space. We are just coming to the
Situation where we can think about tradition, because tradition
comes from reflection. Reflection depends upon not being able to
escape the necessity to reflect, as well as having the time to reflect,
and being in the company o~ other reflectors--which is what a city
makes possible. This is where Americans are today for the first
time.
Originally the concept of the city was that of a self-governing
dolity. It was not only the center of tradition or of whatever
'T
202 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
industry there was but the center of the politics of the area.
The city is a historical concept. For people in China, over the
last hundred years, the city was a place like Shanghai, ruled by the
imperialists and the center of vice and corruption.
It is terribly difficult to discuss anything today without
referring to China--but we must never forget that Mao is discuss-
ing human relationships with people who already have a
communal relationship. Apart from a few cities like Canton and
Shanghai, China is still communal in the sense that it is made up of
innumerable agricultural villages. The Chinese appear deter-
mined to maintain a balance between town and country and to
avoid the kind of urban migration which has ended up destroying
the American city.
How Do Communities Start
In the past socialists have assumed that bringing the means of
production under social control would bring them under human
control. But today we can see that only those means of production
and only those communities which are on a scale capable of human
control can be controlled by human beings. How do you persuade
people who are used to production on a mass scale to accept things
on a human scale!
We started with the idea of international socialism: We were
striving for the international party which would lead the human
race--put in its crassest form. At this point we would say that it is
individual communities that we are striving for. We don't mean
communes--but rather people who are willing to think
communally in their communities. Because if you begin to think in
one community communally, you have respect for what another
community which also thinks communally is striving for. For
example, you don't decide to build a road going this way while
another community is building it that way--so that the two
couldn't possibly meet: The two communities have to put them-
selves into some contact. And you can extend this indefinitely up
to the limit of human experience.
The main thing is to start with the understanding that people
have to think in terms of an immediacy of relationship, not in
terms of general wants or general needs, or in terms of modern
technology permitting everybody to be given everything they
want, without anybody having to work and with everything being
decided by computers.
It is impossible to build socialism on a national scale or from
Projections Not Rejections 203
the top down. After certain minimal needs are guaranteed, each
community must become responsible for what it does. This is a
frightfully complicated thing. For example, no one little commu-
nity can put up the $300 million needed for an oil refinery. But
they can struggle to get other communities to cooperate with
them to build one.
How do communities start? Do they start at all? Most people
think that communities begin by bringing people together,
whereas it is not so much a question of starting communities from
scratch but rather of attempting to get people who are already
together physically to struggle to transform themselves and their
relationships into something more than a physical togetherness--
into communities. We cannot go back to Genesis, and like God,
take matter, give it form and then rest on the seventh day--or like
Noah start all over again with a male and a female from each
species.
People on a block in Detroit can discover that they are in
agreement about something which is sufficiently important so
that each one is ready to accept the diversity of others. You can't
force the result. All you can do is put forward the idea that it is
possible to have such ideas on which people can come together in a
new relationship. It is possible to go to people who are simply
together geographically and point out that they are not a commu-
nity but that they can become one. If they don't become one, they
will continue only to be enemies to one another, as they are today.
Under certain circumstances people are forced to act like a
community temporarily, e.g., after a tornado or hurricane. We
have witnessed many times the sense of community temporarily
evolving out of emergency situations. But we have also seen the
dissolution as soon as the emergency passed. We also know that it
is possible under certain types of leadership for communities to be
developed out of people who are together geographically, even
though the crisis is not a dramatic one. For example, when people
begin to sense that their problems are mounting, a few people can
take the initiative of proposing some type of organization or
action which will resolve some of the problems or make it possible
to avoid certain very undesirable alternatives.
It is important to recognize that everybody doesn't wake up
one morning and say, "We have to do something that spontane-
ous reaction only comes in cases of natural disasters.
Based Upon past experiences, when the few initiators put
forward the idea of organizing, about half the people will not
204 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
want to do anything, while about twenty percent will probably be
willing to undertake the responsibility of persuading others. What
characterizes that twenty percent! One thing appears to be clear.
They must feel that they have a stake in the actual place. They
can't just be transients.
Networks and Communities
Can communities be made up of people who don't live
together but feel similarly! An important distinction should be
made between networks and communities. Networks are made up
of people who have a common interest which involves part of their
lives--whereas communities are associations of people who by
virtue of the totality of their lives being involved are unable to
function outside the community. Those who came together at
Woodstock really form a network. They share something in
common for a particular time but only one aspect of their lives. A
community consists of people who are interdependent for an
extended period of time.
How does one begin to project the idea of interdependence?
For example, the Bucharest Population Conference began today.
Nine-tenths of the people from the developing nations are
undoubtedly saying, "Don't chatter to us about birth control.
Begin by giving up some of your wealth." They are talking about
the community of people on the planet. But isn't it premature to
talk about people on the planet as a community?
In Summer Before the Dark Doris Lessing has some marvelous
passages on the kinds of people who attend these conferences
from all over the world--some in turbans, some in derbies. But
whatever their garb, they are the same kind of people who come
from all over the world to talk sometimes in Cairo, sometimes in
Geneva, sometimes in Bucharest. They are the kind of people who
can't talk meaningfully about interdependence because they are
all the same types--the bureaucrats or social planners of the
world, a sociological category like "workers of the world."
We can't talk about the world community until we find out
more about what the local community is.
What distinguishes a community from the sociological
category of "workers" or "bureaucrats" The community has to be
conceived on the model of the family in the sense that there is
diversity and genuine interdependence in a family. The family is
based on opposite sexes, different ages, different abilities, dif-
ferent responsibilities. The relations of the members to one
Projections Not Rejections 205
another are essential to the being of each. None exists apart from
his/her relations to the other. They are not all strong or all weak.
Those who are strong give of their strength to the weak and weak
require the strong. They learn from each other, depend on each
other? These characteristics also exist in an ecosystem-and on
another level within a community. Without these characteristics
you don't have a community. These qualities are not sufficient but
they are necessary.
It is as if we have gone back some five thousand years in
rethinking certain fundamentals. We are not talking about a
theological community or a feudal community. But we are saying
that today there are no communities, and that we have to start all
over again to create communities because they are essential to the
development of human beings.
One example of the kind of problem we face is what is
happening in New England where the states are yelling their
heads off about paying too much for heating oil. Yet when
somebody says, "Let me build you a refinery to make some heating
oil," not a single place in New England will accept a refinery. We
are not saying that one of them should. But if everybody says,
"No, not me," how can you tackle such questions!
What about the concept of the town zoning plan which places
the responsibility upon towns to choose between alternatives? So
that if you want gas at the rate equal to other places and don't
want to burn wood, then you have to come up with a proposal
which makes it possible for you to have it. Then you have the
responsibility to mobilize your people to accept this proposal, but
you can't keep passing the buck.
The House Judiciary Committee members were faced with
the responsibility to decide what they thought was right and not
just what their constituents thought. These people transcended
their Constituents. You can't have communities until people are
ready to transcend personal interests on behalf of the community
and are ready to make decisions based on what they think is right
and not on taking a poll of what their neighbors or their
constituents think.
For the first time in history, by means of TV, individuals made
decisions for which they were ready to take responsibility before
the eyes of the world, now and in the future, and not just in
accordance with their constituents' views. People have been
arguing for the last 200 years whether those elected represent
constituents or are themselves individuals with judgment. It
206 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
has been a dilemma of representative government for 200 years.
In the House Judiciary Committee hearings, this dilemma was
resolved with the help of modern technology. For the first time
we began to see what might be involved in individuals acting as
community people. Up to now we have only seen technology
destroying communities. Here we got a glimpse of how techno-
logy might help the individual to act as a community person.
Why Community Is A Revolutionary Idea
There is a great difference between an organic community
and a community formed by virtue of political actions. A family is
like an organic community. To transform a bunch of people in a
particular area into a community, there must be actual interde-
pendence, i.e., dependence upon each other for continued
existence which includes material security, security of life and
limb, psychological security. If people can get these things
elsewhere, if regardless of their relations to one another in their
geographical area, they can be secure in life and limb, be satisfied
emotionally and able to subsist materially, you don't have
community.
In the U.S., especially with the tremendous mobility of the
last fifty years, people have thought that they were getting, and
actually have been getting, these things outside their geographical
area. Which is why community is such a revolutionary idea at
this time. Today some people will take anything which resembles a
community, e.g., communes or Jehovah's Witnesses or the Mus-
lims, because the need for community is so great. Their turf is in
their heads, they are idealistic, whereas a community has to have
real turf.
Real communities have to accept real people with all their
defects and deformities. You can't throw out of the community
those who are blind, dumb, old or who don't agree with you.
Communes tried to be too precious. If you associate only with like-
minded people and you are a human being, not a school of fish, you
end up like Brook Farm or the Spanish Inquisition. Or like
Fruitlands, where after a while people said, "Since we are trying to
grow upwards, not downwards, we should only eat upwards-
growing vegetables!"
There are certain things on which communities have to agree
But after a decision has been reached on any issue, you can't throw
out those who don't agree with the majority decision or tell them,
Projections Not Rejections 207
"if you don't agree, go some place else." Those who don't agree
have to go along with the majority, which raises the very complex
question of whether those who were against the Vietnam War
should have gone to Canada or should have stayed here and
struggled against the war and eventually gone to prison.
You can't build a community until you have sufficient
agreement, to begin with, on certain questions on which there are
neither majorities or minorities. Otherwise there isn't a com-
munity. If the majority says, "We want an oil refinery," you can't
blow it up because you don't agree. You accept the idea of majority
rule with regard to ongoing decisions.
There has to be some structure which enables everybody to
participate and requires everybody to assume responsibility.
Some people want to be in the community but not of it. When those
embattled farmers fired the shot heard round the world and went
home to their wives, some of them undoubtedly said, "Why did
you do that! Now we're going to be evicted." Which ones
represented the community! Those who fired the shots! Or those
who were afraid of being evicted! One of the things we should
expect in a modern community, as compared with those in the
past, is that there will be constant change and therefore constant
struggles. There will be times, many times, when the future will
be struggling against the present within the community. Allow-
ances must be made in the consensus which creates the
community for these struggles for change and against change. If
you don't, you may have a community in the sense of the past or
an "eco-system", but you won't have a community for the modern
world. Into our thinking about the community must go the
concepts of continuing change, continuing struggles, friction and
development.
We all have two pictures in our mind. One is that of a country
where everything started small. The other is New York City.
When you get to New York, you have this big hodgepodge. Do you
have to take one area in New York and say "the hell with the rest
of itll and try to create a community there? Or do you have to have
a struggle i, New York first to break up into communities because
there are other things which must be done before you can decen-
tralize? You just can't say to people, "You have to leave New York
and go to some place else to live so that we can break up New York
into some kind of manageable communities." First you have to
generate a force of people who believe this is necessary. And those
208 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
people must have already started in a direction and accomplished
certain objectives together so that they can believe that to make
this major move is going to mean some further benefit to them~
There must have been some advancement significant enough to
make them think that this colossal change is worth it. It is like the
Chinese people saying in the 1950s, "At least we are eating
regularly now and there haven't been any disastrous floods. Why
should we upset the applecart? We better keep on advancing the
way we have been." But the advancement doesn't have to be in
terms of satisfying a belly need as in China.
We have to avoid simplistic analyses. It appears that at one
stage the tribal community abandoned the old people because the
survival of the community depended on the best use of a very
limited number of resources. There was not enough to share with
the old who were assumed to have played their role in the perpet-
uation of the species. At another stage the tribal community
began to realize that the one thing you cannot be born with is
wisdom, that wisdom can only be acquired through living (and
therefore through age), and that wisdom is a very important
resource for the survival and advancement of the community. So
they began to value the old, and to spend a great deal of their
resources in caring for them, as for example, the Chinese and the
American Indians.
The person with very unusual and advanced ideas has often in
the past been forced out of the community because he/she appears
as a threat. Communities tend to be quite conservative in the
sense of believing that their preservation and perpetuation
depend upon maintaining the existing relationships rather than
creating new ones. That's why Savaranola was burned at the
stake; Galileo was not, only because he decided to retract. (Was
Galileo wrong when he said, "Maybe I serve a greater purpose
alive than dead." Should he have been a martyr in order to prove
his point that the earth went around the sun rather than vice
versa! Or should he have stayed alive!)
Some people argue that the individual who first puts forward
a new and exotic idea is purged from the community but that later
the new ideas are received back without the individual and that
this is a better way to accept the ideas. But maybe if a person lives
and remains in the community, the new ideas have to stand a
greater test, and the individual also.
In the past, communities have been small enough and change
Projections Not Rejections 209
has been slow enough so that there has been more time to arrive at
decisions A community has differences within it, but it also has
limits?
Can Everybody Have Everything?
In Russia the Stakhanovites go to the Black Sea resorts where
the aristocracy used to go. Cape Cod used to be one of the most
beautiful stretches of country in the world. Likewise Martha's
Vineyard? But if you provide that everybody can go to a place, you
are destroying the only reason why people want to go there. By a
process of natural selection in the old days, people with wealth
were able to live on the Cranberry Islands. Next came those with
relatively good jobs and long vacations-professorial types in
general, a Privileged middle class. Now if you say that everybody
should enjoy something of which there is a scarcity--which is
always going to be the case with natural resources--then you
have to establish some other criterion by which you choose who
can enjoy what. If it is not money, then it tends to be the favorites
of those who have the power. So you establish another process of
selection which one can hardly regard as more advanced than the
previous one.
Up to this time China hasn't had this problem because the idea
of enjoying yourself more than on a Sunday afternoon scarcely
exists. Some people who have enjoyed certain privileges in the
past are still allowed these privileges because they will die away
soon. We know of a man, for example, who still lives in the very
nice house he lived in before the revolution. He is now seventy
Years old, and when he dies they will probably turn his house into
something like a school. The new people who occupy top positions
are being re-educated to believe that if they have a vacation, they
Should spend it shovelling manure at the May 7th Cadre School. It
is not a society where you must spend a lot of your time figuring
OUt how to distribute enjoyment.
This is important, not in the abstract sense of how you
Provide justice but from the point of view of revolutionary phi-
losophy. The answer isn't just a question of equality for the
masses. We have to think not only of what it means today but
tomorrow, when there will be twice as many masses. This is why
the concept of the "new man/woman" is so important. How long it
Will take to create the "new man/woman" we don't know. Mao
S eight to ten generations. We can merely wonder about the
parameters within which one makes these judgments. Should
21O CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
everybody have everything? When Marx evolved the concept of
"from each according to their ability, to each according to their
needs," people's wants were very simple. But now there is
universal TV. Why shouldn't everybody want everything!
The Chinese make clear that higher education is a scarce
resource, and they make clear to the country as a whole that this
resource has been created by the labor of a great many people,
dead and living. It is the result of the accumulated labors of past as
well as present generations. Therefore they explain to people that
if one person is able to go to college, it is because other people are
doing other kinds of work to make it possible. The person who
enjoys higher education has to look upon it as a privilege and repay
society for the privilege after he or she has enjoyed it. Few people
in this country look on anything in this way. But in China they try
to get kids to understand this from very early; for example, there
are trees to enjoy only because "uncle" workers did a lot of
planting and cultivating in the remote as well as recent past, and
therefore others should not despoil the results of their labors.
The distinction between a privilege and a right is so important,
but very difficult to recognize except in a situation where there is
scarcity. In this country university education has come to be
looked upon as a right which entails no responsibilities--so out of
proportion has the concept of rights become. Unless we accept
that a lot of things we have taken for granted can be taken away
(not in a crude sense), it is hard to think of anything being worked
out in this country at all. When you have more or less inculcated
the idea of rights in people s minds and there is so much stuff lying
around, it is difficult to convey to people the truth that what is, is
the result of human effort.
Once things are considered a privilege and a resource, it is
necessary for people to earn the privilege by making some
contribution. In Russia enjoying such privileges as going to the
Black Sea is probably based upon party membership which iS
also considered a privilege. In China at the present time the party
member has a lot of work to do in terms of political responsibil-
ity, manual work, continuing self-criticism, and the other
responsibilities that go along with leadership, which are much
greater than those of the average person. Only very few people,
proportionately, are party members.
What the Chinese have done during these last few years has
done so much to clarify the concrete meaning of socialism FOr
example, they guarantee certain minimal necessities enough to
Projections Not Rejections 211
eat, a certain amount of education, health services, housing. But
after that, people have to make choices. They are paid for their
labor so that they have the wherewithal to decide, e.g., to use their
money for a sewing machine or a radio or a bicycle. Some people
say that this is only because the Chinese are still at such a low
material level, but we think it involves a much deeper understand-
ing of human nature and the need for human beings to be
constantly making choices in order to develop their selfhood and
self-reliance .
Putting Down Roots
Take the question of scenic sections of states like Maine or
Oregon. Should these be open to everyone. Probably the first step
would be to recognize that this is a community question. So a lot of
communities in Maine or Oregon may have a right to decide what
they would like their community to be like. They cannot assume
the responsibility for satisfying the hunger of four million people
from Brooklyn for fresh air.
When you take the responsibility for decision-making, certain
other things go along it, such as responsibility of people to stay
and accept the consequences of their decisions. Suppose Swans
Islanders said, "We need a lot of money in the community. There-
fore we are going to bring in some developers and we don't give a
damn what they do, because we will get enough money from
selling the land so that we can move some place else and let the
people who come afterwards suffer the consequences. We will
make a quick buck." Democratic decision-making doesn't mean
anything if it doesn't involve responsibility for the future. Corres-
pondingly, people in Maine have to recognize that there are four
million people in Brooklyn bursting at the seams to move out some
place. Is each community going to say, "You are not going to move
here, go some place else"! Or are they also responsible for won-
dering about those four million people” They can't just shut their
minds to the needs of people in cities.
If you are only talking about a few people coming for a short
vacation, that is one thing. When you begin to talk about people
coming in numbers, you have to think about what an area can
support. Maine has about a million people. On Swans Island there
are about 350 native or year-round residents. Their houses are
not freshly painted or kept up like those on Cranberry where
there are a lot of summer people. Does this have to do with
money7 For example, Poles in Hamtramck don't make any more
212 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
than the blacks in adjoining neighborhoods, but their homes are
all freshly painted. The Poles have lived in Hamtramck for gener-
ations and plan to stay there, whereas blacks coming into a neigh-
borhood like ours think they will get out soon--which is a very
different attitude.
One of the best-known stories in China is that of the man
from a barren mountain village who told Mao that the people in
his village, having heard that China was going to have tractors,
wanted to move down to the plains where they could use tractors.
Mao told him that if everybody who lived in the mountains came
down to the plains, the plains would become unlivable. So the man
went back and the villagers decided to terrace the land so that
tractors could be used on it. The result is Tai-chi--from which
everyone in China is urged to learn.
Should a community in Maine welcome tourists! When you
bring money into an area through tourism, you also encourage
your kids to think differently about the way they want to live. Will
they be baby-sitting for summer folk, trying to capture a summer
boyfriend! They will turn into certain types just as the
Bermudians have in the wake of U.S. tourism. You have to think
of all these things. It is not only a question of not excluding people
from the city but also of the kind of diversification in your
community that will make your people more self-reliant and less
servile. You have to develop some kind of productive resources,
some creative autonomy and not just exploit the natural resources
of the sunset and the sea. Long before American tourists came to
Jamaica, Jamaicans had lived there for hundreds of years. Now
they don't want to live that way any longer. They think of how
people in advanced countries live and they feel that they have
been deprived of that way of life.
People from all over the country, including Los Angeles, come
to Maine for vacations. What is the basis for selecting who can
come, which is another way of excluding some people! This is not
only a question of who can come to the country but also who can
go to the city. In China most of the people are still in the country
Here we have the problem of whether city kids from Brookline,
Brooklyn, etc. should come and flood Maine. Could we carry on
meaningful education in this country around the question of
abolishing the division of labor between town and country
between manual and mental labor, such as is being carried on in
China? They carry on this education by sending city kids to the
country for at least a couple of years. They have the power to do
Projections Not Rejections 213
it. But they also had some ideas behind the power otherwise
they would have had to cut off a lot of heads. Maybe rather than
bus for racial integration, it would be good to see a lot of city kids
go to school in the country and vice-versa.
Fundamentally don't we want to persuade people that you can
be just as civilized in the country as you can be in the city? Prole-
tarians are going to be the hardest to convince of this. That is why
it has taken us so many years to shatter the easy formulations.
Those who have been most oppressed are often still on the
"rights" level. They still think that everybody else has been
enjoying these things all these years--now it's our turn. We
recognize now that the masses are not just Rousseau's "fallen
angels," as, like other Marxists, we thought for so long. But at the
same time we know that the ones we have to persuade to think
more broadly are the masses--because if the masses haven't
grasped advanced ideas, any society has nothing but a mess on its
hands. If all you do is persuade some Harvard professionals, you
have only skimmed the surface. You may get their agreement
easily but that doesn't signify any real changes in society.
What is necessary to a community--and what does communi-
ty provide? Only through community can we begin to eliminate
these poisons in a systemic, concrete and serious way. If we agree
on this, we can begin to see what are some of the essentials of a
community .
You don't work towards a revolution or socialism in general.
Creating the community is perhaps the best place to start. Even to
create it is a hell of a task. Many young people believe in
community, but that doesn't mean that they will create communi-
ties. They may create communes. But they are all too much alike,
in age and background. They are usually extremely mobile; they
have not developed enough responsibility to a particular place so
that they can understand other people who have a responsibility
to particular places as more than "squares." They are more likely
to set themselves up in antagonism to an existing community, like
a foreign body. Communes often think the community should
adopt their way of thinking rather than accepting that a
community which has been some place for two hundred years has
its own ideas and its own dynamics.
The editor of the Maine Times is always asking, "How do we
Protect the Maine communities that now exist from being demol-
ished by McDonald or Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises! How
dQ you permit them to remain themselves when every force is
214 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
arrayed against them, and the force inside themselves has been
dribbling away for a hundred years? How do we enlarge the sense
of community in these communities and also help others to under-
stand what they mean, how valuabl
