fullness of the utopian intention must be kept firmly in mind. Socialists did not intend merely to mitigate the evils of capitalism or merely to introduce some regulation and control of the economy. They intended its wholesale replacement. Socialists did not intend merely to improve international relations or to moderate the scale or frequency of war. They intended to create the universal family of mankind and to end war forever. They did not intend merely an extension of democracy and equality, but rather the transcendence of democracy and the creation of a new human order of profoundly equal and elevated mankind." Christianity shares many of the ideals of socialism—cooperativeness, brotherhood and sisterhood, equality, responsibility for changing history. But Christianity, as the festival of Christmas shows, is not utopian. There was no room for Jesus in the inn. In Bethlehem, he was a stranger, vulnerable to Herod and to Roman rule. Infants were slaughtered in an attempt to do away with him. He himself died on the cross, the starkest symbol both of alienation and of the absurd in human history. (If God so treats his son, shall the rest of us get off more lightly?) The God of Christianity and Judaism permits his people to wander in history in a wilderness. The sufferings, loneliness, anguish, and misery he permits them to share are fathomless. The Jewish-Christian God is no deus ex machina, no Pollyanna, no goody-two-shoes. He obliges each individual, in the darkness, to exert his or her own inner liberty and choice. He is the God of liberty. He exacts enormous and wearying responsibilities. He is the God of humble deeds and hidden virtues, who delights in the motions of the heart even of the most forgotten and most miserable among us, a God who sees not only external circumstance but interior life. The God we turn to on Christmas is not a God made in our measure, nor is he a function of our needs, personal or social. He does not rescue us from our responsibilities, mistakes, or betrayals. For our ideas, we bear the consequences. He offers no escape from the toils of history, chance, and contingency. He is the Lord of the absurd, hidden from view, not understandable. He transcends our purposes and our needs. Many cults today, political and pious, offer an easier messianism, a happier salvation, a more utopian political and social hope. The God of Jews and Christians obliges us to struggle and to suffer, even when there is no hope. There is no valid escape from freedom, even in despair; such is the anti-messianic messianism of Christmas. December 23-24, 1978 Why Jonestown Destroyed the Family Many commentators seem not to wish to understand how nine hundred persons could voluntarily go to their deaths at Jonestown. But Jim Jones understood well enough how to organize collective death, so the answer cannot be all that mysterious. Beginning in September 1977, more than a year before the actual suicide, Jim Jones held late-night emergency alerts at Jonestown at least once a week. His collectivists had worked in the field six days a week from 7.A.M. until 6 P.M., had been kept awake for as long as six hours a night for public harangues, were poorly fed on rice, beans, and weak tea, and in this condition were told, week after week, that they were about to die. In sworn testimony on June 15, 1978, which the press refused to take seriously, Deborah Layton Blakey, one of Jim Jones's closest aides, testified as follows: "Life at Jonestown was so miserable and the physical pain of exhaustion was so great that . . . I had become indifferent as to whether I lived or died." On many occasions, Jim Jones made all of his followers drink a red liquid. Sometimes he told them in advance that they were about to drink poison, sometimes he told them after they had drunk it that they would die in fifteen minutes. Thus, socialist suicide was enacted not once but many times. The early rituals, Jones explained, were a "loyalty test." "There was constant talk of death," Mrs. Blakey testified in June 1978. "In the early days of the People's Temple, general rhetoric about dying for principles was sometimes heard. In Jonestown, the concept of mass suicide for socialism arose." Jim Jones taught the evil of individual will. He supplanted many individual wills with one socialized will. The techniques for doing this have been known since at least the time of Plato's Republic, although modern collectivized states have routinized the science. The first and chief obstacle that must be eliminated before individual liberty can be destroyed is the family. This, no doubt, is why the People's Temple depended on the destruction of the family. The family is a mediating institution, a center of resistance to the collective. It is a source of noncollectivist loyalties, a protector of linked individuals, a haven of privacy, common sense, and self-determination. Through a grave weakness of political thought since Hobbes, only two poles of human reality are analyzed carefully, the individual and the state, while the family and other mediating institutions are tragically neglected. Jonestown flashes glaring light on this inadequacy. the sway of our free institutions, even that mass suicide would have been a mad, crroneous, but clear tribute to liberty. So long as institutions do not harm others or the basic practices of liberty, such institutions are permitted to grow here. For generations, serious thinkers argued that no democracy could survive the madnesses harbored in the human breast. Popular excesses would destroy democracies, such thinkers believed. The noble experiment conducted on these shores for some two hundred years has proved this pessimism wrong. Yet the price we pay for our liberties is high. Each of us is assaulted, night and day, by conduct and ideas we feel instinctively “there should be a law against" conduct and ideas we find corrupt, unfree, destructive, dangerous. Still, our institutions properly instruct us to be tolerant, to live and to let live, to concentrate upon our own moral visions, without undue efforts to force others to conform to ours. We suffer many fools, much madness, and an uncommon fund of criminality. A free society is not a society in which every person is healthy and good (according to one vision of health and moral goodness). It is a society in which competing visions clash, in which individuals find their own way through countless mazes, in which confusions multiply and insecurities abound, in which the experiences of nothingness and alienation and loneliness are, for many, daily bread. But these are signs of health. These are the necessary accompaniments of liberty on earth. Liberty means, in praetice, the right to sin, the right to err, the right to do what is (in the eyes of others) corrupt and even self-destructive. Liberty does not make humans good. It permits what humans are to express itself and to become visible. That is why free societies must, necessarily, seem shocking. That is why they must seem to those brought up under more severe traditions scandalous, of flagrant wickedness. For what individuals in their liberty decide to do with their lives cannot reasonably be expected to be in all cases saintly, good, enlightened, or even reasonable. The power of goodness and reason in individual human lives has always been weaker than optimists have longed for. Yet, given the powerful support of traditions, rituals, and institutions that try to teach, instruct, and strengthen enlightenment and moral goodness, individuals in a free society do give evidence of an astonishing degree of goodness and reason. “In political life, one should expect," Aristotle taught, "only a tincture of virtue." Our institutions have trained us to strive for more than a tincture of virture. Many attain it. Yet precisely because our institutions are free, they also permit us to see the worst that liberty can lead to, even the horrors. December 9, 1978 PORTIONS OF TRANSCRIPT OF TAPE FROM T Following are excerpts from a transcript of a tape recording obtoned by ONES: I've tried my best to give la good life. n spite of all that I've tried, a hand- Not only are we in a compound situa- So, to sit here and wait for the catas But we've tried. And as Jack Dean 900 ned la" lid in pe at 95 pe it, as a ay el Kussi how to do that, to go mory Stone, our Teres to crane. You But what those people are gonna g done; and what they get through wi make our lives worse than hell. W make us - will make the rest of us m He brought accept it. When they get through lying. und Deanna Myr- They posed so many lies betwee Francisco will there and that truck that we are — w Ld they? are done in as far as any other alterna , you tive. Russia? De late for They started to es too late for res, sir, you WOMAN: Well, I say let's make air airlift to Russia. That's what say. I don't think nothing is impossible. if you believe it. JONES: How are we going to d that? How are you going to airlift Russia? WOMAN: Well, I thought they said lace. I can't we got in an emergency, they gave yo Contry these mat Ieejut here. a code to let them know. Death Not Fearful JONES: No, they didn't. They gave They've got win beds. And it's 200 late. AM CAEL Vouvy — at least that's the ways—I've always put my I me of us a code that they'd let us know on that my people at something at 3 me. issue; not us create an issue for them And they sex brease the They said that we - if they saw the blame for ths- tantive that country coming down they'd give us way. They said never in Ear we code. They'd give us a code. We can tried to get the mar neck here. Ejar, check on that and see if it's on the code whose mother's beer yg mm, and Did you check with Russia to see! lying on him, and ing areas up they'll take us in a minute but other this family. And they've a red to wise we die? kill us by any means necessary. De you I don't know what else to say to these think I'm going to deliver them Ej people. But to me death is not a fearfu Not on your life. thing. It's living that's cursed. I hav MAN: I know a way to find Stone if never, never, never, never seen any it'll help us. thing like this before in my life. I've JONES: No. You're not going. You never seen people take the law and di 're not going. You're not going. I can't-in their own hands and provoke w live that way. I cannot live that way, and try to purposely agitate mother of I've lived with for all; I'll die for all children. There is no need to finish us [Applause.] it's not worth living like this. Not worth living like this. I've been living on hope for a long time, Christine and I appreciate you've always been a very good agitator. I like agitation, because you have to see two sides of one issue-two sides of a question. |