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The Superbowl Culture of Male Violence

Two years ago I wrote a piece analyzing professional football. I argued that this great national sport, which claims the devotion of a significant percentage of our population, mirrors in a ritual way some of the worst characteristics of our culture. In particular, I insisted, it interlinks four qualities that drive the American violence machine: physical brutality, profit-maximizing commercialism, an authoritarian-military mentality and sexism. (Of course, I was focusing on the destructive elements of professional football, not condemning sport in general.)

After two years’ reflection, I would make only one important change in my earlier perspective. I have come to the conclusion that the fundamental evil from which the others flow is sexism. The basic way by which the male in our culture establishes his sexual identity is a prime source of exaggerated aggression in the interpersonal, economic and political realms. The problem can be put thus: How are males in our society conditioned to value themselves as persons? What are the criteria of self-worth and social acceptance among American men? Let me explore these questions in the context of major social patterns and institutions. The answers, I am convinced, manifest a close relationship between violence and sexism.

How to Teach a Boy Aggression

First, a word about my use of terms. By "aggression" and "violence" I mean not only destructive conduct toward persons and property, but also the subtle types of violence that have been called avoidable injury and the institutionalized violence that deprives people of rights and resources. By "sexism," I mean a learned pattern of relationships among men that creates an adversary and domineering style between male and male and toward all females. These distinctions should become clear as we examine concrete social structures and mores.

The American family is the first conditioning agency for the mode of self-identity that leads to aggression. The boy learns very early that if he is to attain real manhood, he must perform and compete better than girls -- at least physically. To be thought of as a sissy is tragic for a male child. By way of toys and games denied to girls, he is schooled to muscular and psychic aggressiveness. He understands from the start that both his own and society’s acceptance of him as a man depends on his being dominant toward and protective of females and successfully competitive toward males. TV’s "Sixty Minutes" program presented an exceedingly graphic example of such pedagogy earlier this year when it showed the indoctrination of prospective little candidates for Midget Football Leagues. Toughness, aggressiveness and winning were portrayed as ultimate values, and the risk of serious physical injury was ignored or minimized. Vividly encapsulated in the episode were the fathers’ needs to extend their own competitive-success syndrome to their sons and to ward off fears of deviant sexual development in the boys.

The American family also teaches violence by direct example, notably through father-mother relations. Overt violence on the part of husbands toward their wives, while not common, is a sizable social reality. In addition to wife-beating, there are threats of abandonment, which are especially menacing to a woman whose socialization has left her without independent means of support. She may be punished by being ignored or by having her movements and her circle of friends limited. The young boy observes these control patterns and incorporates them into his own personality for later use. Again, he sees that his father has some power while his mother is weak and submissive. This experience also creates in him a potentially destructive tension. He may value the unconditional love of the mother and at the same time reject or even despise her for her derivative and dependent status. Later, his own desire for status and adventure may cause him to suppress the affectional (mother) dimension in himself in order to seek power among males.

At the same time, women’s resentment at being used gives rise in them to feelings of hostility which may prompt them to manipulate their husbands in devious ways and to exercise over their children a dominance that harms the latter psychologically. These hidden structures of animosity in family life, arising from the sexist structure of our culture, create a climate of enmity, envy and suspicion, a training ground of violence. For in such a climate, the roles and expectations of family members degenerate so that none of them can realize personal potential, much less empower others. Feeling psychologically impotent, they lack a sense of self-worth. And, as sociological and psychological studies have shown, low self-regard tends to lead to antisocial, aggressive behavior.

A sexist family structure can also foster violent leanings in young males by impairing their power to empathize with others. In order to survive, the child may have to deny the reality of hostile and dominative parental relations, and that denial makes it very difficult for him to get in touch with his own feelings and wants. But unless we sense our own real feelings we cannot begin to perceive the feelings of others. It is this inability to empathize with the pain and tenor of the victims that opens the door to acts of violence.

The Sexism of Schools and Peer Groups

What the sexist family began, the school promotes in more sophisticated ways. Athletic events, academic grades, examinations are geared to fashion male children into competitors and achievers. (Illuminating in this connection is the fact, established by a number of studies, that many female college students program themselves to fail, in order not to abandon the accepted image of femininity.) Of course, competitiveness does not necessarily conduce to violence. It may be just a rivalry that makes the contest an enjoyable exercise of skill. But our schools indoctrinate the young male with a deadly serious spirit of competition. He is trained for a confrontation with others in which his own self-identity, self-respect and public acceptance are at stake. He can hardly afford to lose. Winning is all, even if it means trampling on his fellows. Hostility and violence are tools for removing obstacles on the way to the top.

More perhaps than by formal schooling, the young male is influenced by peer relationships. Here again the sexist mentality is basic, though it reveals itself in different ways. Among deprived minority groups, for instance, the gang offers the young male a quick road to personal selfhood and social respect in his own group and even in the larger society that has stacked the deck against him and his peers. A tough stance and acts of violence bring him material rewards, a reputation for bravery, and the adulation of females. For in the gangs -- as well as in certain alternate-life-style groups -- the woman’s role is essentially subordinate and derivative; she functions to bolster male toughness. Thus the gang reflects in crude miniature some of the impulses that drive American society. It is a new chapter in a long national history of aggressive individualism, frontier lawlessness and the glorification of outlaws. Technology has only helped to update an old American institution.

The middle- and upper-class male peer group is also a milieu for sexist development. The assumption here is that inflicting pain will produce real men who get ahead; witness, for instance, the rite of fraternity hazing, or the tendency to label draft resisters "faggots" because they refused to undergo pain as an introduction to manhood. In this group the fear of homosexuality is as pervasive as the passion for fast, powerful cars. Both the fear and the passion grow out of the cultural demand for potency in heterosexual performance. The young male, torn by doubts about his own sexual capacity, flees from the specter of homosexuality and reassures himself by driving at excessive speeds. The problem is not that many or most young men are quite naturally somewhat insecure sexually; rather, it is the domineering, violence-oriented sexuality that is advocated as a cure. The young man is encouraged to "score" with girls, to "make" women. This is a sexuality of conquest, of trophies to deck out his ego.

Rape as Rage

Apply all this to big-time football. I think it should now be obvious that this game does indeed manifest and reinforce the fundamental evil of our culture; namely, its sexism. The weekend trek to the arena is not an escape from the world of corporate America, but a pilgrimage to the national shrines where the virtues of toughness and insensitivity can be renewed and the role of woman is clearly defined against the masculine criteria of value. In the football spectacle the important action is male-dominated; women can share in it only at a distance. They can shout and squeal from afar for the pleasure and service of the male whose "bunnies" they are.

Yet for all its chest-thumping bravado, the game also portrays the anxieties and contradictions of aggressive sexuality. Its calculated violence makes it hard for the player to become sensitively attuned to his own body. Moreover, in distorting the challenge of sustaining authentically interpersonal sexuality, it evidences an unhealthy polarity. In a culture that is geared to aggressive attainment and that demands a kind of technological efficiency even in sex, many men are imbued with a fear of relating to women in sex as full equals. For as between equals, there is no need for one to control the other or to succeed according to external prescriptions.

Violent crime in the United States is a particularly male phenomenon. "Crime" is usually taken to mean violence to property (theft) or to persons (assault, homicide). Rape involves both theft and assault, while at the same time pointing to the sexist underpinnings of much violent crime. And since the incidence of rape has been on the rise, it merits special attention.

Rape represents a compulsion to dominate and harm women. The physical brutality that often accompanies it manifests the rapist’s need to force a woman to do his will. It is probably this urge to overpower and coerce, rather than sexual appetite, that motivates him. In the act of rape, he may simply be venting his conscious or unconscious rage against society or against other women in his life. Readers will remember Eldridge Cleaver’s graphic confession that in committing rape he was striking out against a repressive social order (though’ later on Cleaver saw this crime as dehumanizing to both the perpetrator and the victim) .

Whatever the rapist’s motives, his action itself is particularly demeaning for the woman. It reduces her to a thing in a thing-oriented culture. This crime marks the culminating point of the cultural ethos which shapes the male psyche in terms of winner-loser. It requires that the competitor, the opponent, the enemy be humiliated and rendered powerless -- that is, made into woman.

Other social overtones of rape likewise exemplify the violence-prone mentality of our male-dominant society. Fear of it is used to perpetuate a status quo where men hold power and women stay in their place, to foster the notion that women are like children who need to be protected by male-dominated laws and institutions. This message is implicit in police investigations. By questions and innuendo, officials often try to fasten the blame for rape on the victim. What was she doing in a certain part of town, why was she dressed provocatively, why was she alone? She stepped out of her place and therefore deserves to be frightened and abused.

Again, the punishment for rape prescribed by law is so severe that the rapist will hardly be convicted unless he is of a minority class; that is, an inferior, already something like a woman. There is also the fact that, since a woman is considered the possession of a husband or father, an assault on her violates male property rights. This view is especially in evidence when a black is implicated in the rape of a white woman. Having created the myth of the black’s extraordinary sexual prowess, the white male interprets such a case as an affront to his ego, his virility and his property.

Watergate -- for Men Only

These same male psychic patterns operate in our economic life -- not only in that of the criminal underworld but throughout the corporate-capitalist system. Both at home and abroad, that system is rapacious. Its purpose is to amass wealth, and to do that calls for toughness and aggressiveness along with willingness to sacrifice humane considerations for material gain. Social concern is largely a façade. Exxon and ITT buy humanitarian TV commercials, but their primary aim is to make the rich richer. The corporation exists not as a community but as an efficient means of concentrating wealth in the hands of a small band of individuals. And in committing economic "rape" it fulfills male ego needs as these have been conditioned in our culture. The vast majority of our population judges a man by the amount of money he makes. So does the man himself.

But when women struggle for or attain equal financial standing with men, the men feel castrated. Men have protected their money-based identity by mouthing their self-serving, ideology of mother and home while using women as cheap labor. Thus our economic system is permeated with sexist violence -- to men too, because it not only keeps men from fostering lives of intimacy and community, but also prevents them from finding real pleasure in their work.

On the political level, our society’s sexism raises frightening prospects. We have lately heard a great deal of talk about not negotiating on our knees, not turning tail, not presiding over the first American defeat. This is the talk of little boys who learned that winning was all. The culture of Bonnie and Clyde and the "fastest gun" has a quick trigger finger. It views the international political scene as a game board for power manipulations; that is, for placating the male psyche.

At home, this code of toughness decrees that men shall attain power by any means available. Such is the real message of Watergate. Notice, by the way, that Watergate is a male-only affair. When a woman finally appears among the conspirators, she is a mere secretary who bungled with a tape recorder. Watergate was in fundamental contradiction to the best in our democratic heritage and in full accord with the superbowl culture of male violence. It exemplified the American male mystique to the superlative degree.

But that mystique is not only opposed to the best elements of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence; it is also a rejection of the core ethos of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Justice, equality and community -- all the qualities that promote the common welfare -- cannot exist side by side with proneness to violence. The gospel stresses the building of trusting, life-supporting communities; the male mystique emphasizes individualist self-aggrandizement through domination of others. The gospel advocates the sharing of resources; the hero-hunter mentality nourishes itself by amassing and quantifying things for the self or its immediate extensions. The Judeo-Christian ideal evolved toward an ethic of minimizing destructive aggression; the male mystique is geared toward Overt and hidden violence. Until we see and deal with these contradictions, we will continue to harbor a false conscience that is psychologically and spiritually damaging. We cannot live in this society without complicity in its evils. But it is quite another matter to blind ourselves to hypocritical contradictions and even to claim that they are glorious virtues.

Can MANkind Some Day at Last Be Free?

The focus of Scripture is on the liberation from bondage, from the powers of death that diminish our humanity. And the prototype of our enslavement is the oppression of women. From this primary distortion of the male mind proceeds the oppression of other "lesser people." The violence-prone masculine psyche drives us to racism, colonialism, imperialism and other types of oppression which are in fact extensions of the male-female pattern that lets us project the dark side of ourselves onto the other and so allows us to use/abuse other human beings for our own selfish ends.

At root, male chauvinism is a denial of our co-humanity with others and a rejection of the (masculine) animus and the (feminine) anima that reside in every individual. But the oppressor is also the oppressed. The male mystique is the instrument of the male’s bondage. It keeps him from realizing his full personhood. How then can American men change the basic myth they have been taught to live by? How can they begin to sense their self-worth according to another model -- that of the affectionate, nondominative, sharing, communal person? On their lived-out answers to these questions depend the survival of humanity and the restoration of their own personal humanness,

Verdict

The charge was murder. The defendant was a handsome black man looking considerably younger than his 29 years. He sat impassively at a table with his court-appointed lawyers while a prosecutor from the district attorney’s office questioned the panel of prospective jurors sitting in the spectators’ section of the courtroom. Like the rest of the panel, I was there by "invitation" and had no excuses which the law considered valid for declining. I wished I had.

I

"Do any of you know the defendant or his family? The victim or his family? Are you familiar with this case from newspaper or television reporting of it? Do you know any of the attorneys? Have you ever been convicted of a felony or are you now under any indictment? Are you related to, or close to, anybody in law enforcement? Have you been a victim of any crime?" A Yes answer to any of these questions brought further questioning as to whether the person responding thought his or her judgment or impartiality would be clouded by the circumstances. I was clean on all of these counts.

First the prosecution and then the defense asked additional questions of each person on the panel by name. "Where are you employed? What is your work? How long have you been on that job? Are you married? Does your wife [husband] also work outside the home? Where, and at what? Have you any children? How long have you lived in the county? How many years of education do you have? What is your church affiliation? How active are you in it? What do you do for recreation?"

I was not at all apprehensive as my turn came to answer these personal questions. After all, I had been assured by some of my colleagues that neither side wants professors on a jury. They want "ordinary" folks -- not overeducated eggheads who think so abstractly that they don’t recognize a plain simple fact on the one hand, or don’t respond to emotional appeals on the other. Furthermore, I am a minister and the husband of a minister. If the prosecution didn’t reject me as a sentimental bleeding-heart, surely the defense would refuse me for being overly judgmental of sin. Besides, I had within the hour become a jury-panel reject on a dinky civil suit involving a nonfatal auto accident. If I couldn’t be trusted to judge innocence or guilt in that litigation, what was the likelihood that I would be seated on a jury in a murder case?

Many are called, but few are chosen. I neither desired nor expected to be among those few. But I was. My education in the functioning of justice, American style, moved forthwith from television, newspapers and civics books to the courtroom, the jury room and the jurors’ sleeping quarters in the courthouse. My preconceptions and stereotypes proceeded to fall like iron ducks in a shooting gallery.

It was a profoundly positive experience and one that considerably increased my respect for the day-to-day functioning of our legal system in its efforts to achieve a tolerable approximation of justice -- or the equitable distribution of injustice -- for all of our citizens. Obviously my testimony here is that of a layman and a novice, based on a single experience as a juror in a criminal case.

II

Briefly, the case before us, according to the evidence submitted during the trial, was this: The treasurer of a Baptist church took the offering, after Sunday evening services, to the night depository of a neighborhood bank. As he was about to deposit it, the money bag was grabbed by a man who then shot the victim through the heart at close range with a sawed-off shotgun. The victim’s two teen-aged daughters, who had gone with their father to church and accompanied him to the bank to make the deposit, watched in horror from their car. The man who grabbed the money and pulled the trigger was shortly thereafter arrested -- and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment by this very judge in this very courtroom.

The defendant before us, according to a statement over his signature, was waiting in the gunman’s car nearby. He had learned that the robbery was to be committed only after he got into the car with the killer; he had "jacked around" with the shotgun in the car en route to the bank. When he heard the shot, he panicked, slid into the driver’s seat and drove the car to the home of a relative, where the killer picked it up. Then he rode back to his own home with someone else.

Other than the defendant’s statement, the incriminating evidence submitted by the prosecution was fragmentary and circumstantial. No eyewitness testified that the accused man was in the killer’s car. No witness testified that the defendant had helped plan the robbery, although he knew of the Sunday evening routine of his neighbor, the church treasurer. The treasurer’s daughter had told him, and the killer and some other "dudes" were present on that occasion at the defendant’s home. A person is criminally responsible for an offense committed by the conduct of another if "acting with intent to promote or assist the commission of the offense, he solicits, encourages, directs, aids or attempts to aid" the other. This provision applies not only to the offense planned, but to any graver one that may take place, if its occurrence ought to have been anticipated. So the law provides, and so the judge instructed the jury. Hence the charge not of armed robbery but of murder.

Clearly, the defendant’s statement was a crucial issue. A city detective testified that about three hours after the arrest he had typed the defendant’s statement, laboriously paraphrasing it into an intelligible whole from the defendant’s rambling oral account. The accused man sat beside him, and gave his assent to the written statement, or revised it, one segment at a time, as the detective read it back to him. The defendant did not sign it at once, but asked and received some time "to think about it." He then signed it twice: once in the presence of the detective alone, and again later with a news reporter present as a witness.

The accused man was advised of his rights, à la Miranda, not once but four times. They were read to him first at the time of his arrest, and twice more after he was taken in and booked. They were also mimeographed at the top of the form on which the detective typed his statement. These are (1) the right to have a lawyer present to advise him either prior to questioning or during it; (2) if he cannot afford a lawyer, the right to have one appointed by the state to counsel with him prior to or during the making of a statement; (3) the right to remain silent and not make any statement at all, knowing that any statement he does make may be used against him at his trial.

The last sentence at the bottom of the defendant’s statement indicated that he had read the completed statement, and that he knew the above-stated rights and voluntarily waived them. The detective had taken at face value the defendant’s assertion (which he had also made to others on different occasions) that he had finished the tenth grade in high school and could read and write the English language, and the officer included that assertion in the typewritten statement. He admitted under inquiry from the defense that had he known the accused man to be illiterate, the procedure in taking his statement would have been somewhat different.

The main tactic of the defense was to prove the defendant to be an illiterate who could not read and write the English language. How then could he "knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily" waive his rights; or even be absolutely sure that the statement he signed said exactly what he wanted to say? The defendant’s mother testified that her son had been hit by a car and seriously injured when he was in the sixth grade, and that he had never really gone back to school after that. She said he could not read and write. The defendant’s wife confirmed her husband’s illiteracy. A cellmate in the county jail testified that he wrote letters for the accused to the wife. The defendant’s report card from the seventh grade of an all-black school showed straight F’s in every subject except citizenship (C), some 15 years ago.

III

That was the substance of the case as it was unfolded before us. Now who were we, the jurors? Not one but two of us were professors. (In fact two other professors on the earlier civil-suit panel with me had been chosen for that jury. That is four out of four.) Those, prosecutors were a bit careless; the guilty verdict which they seek has no room for professorial provided thats, moreovers and howevers.

Four Baptists, and some active ones, too? When the victim was a Baptist protecting the Lord’s money? The wife of a police officer? And the sister of a police officer? Have those defense attorneys lost their minds? They are about to lose their client. All of us, five men and seven women, had white skin. There were some blue collars, and some red necks. Four were apparently quite affluent: a dentist who paid for his lunch in a small restaurant with a hundred-dollar bill, an appliance distributor for the area, the wife of a businessman with a prestigious address and a fine car, the widow of a building contractor, 80 years old and a world traveler. None of us were, like the man whose guilt or innocence we were to pronounce, illiterate, poor and black.

All four attorneys dressed fashionably and appeared to be in mid-career. The team from the district attorney’s office was headed by a man whom his opponent called a "seasoned prosecutor." One defense lawyer held the Ph.D. degree in addition to his law degree; both had good professional addresses. The judge was a cheerful, courteous, low-keyed veteran of 15 years in his present office, soon to retire.

The trial itself was a far cry from the movies’ dramatic nail-biters and TV’s courtroom morality plays. From the juror’s point of view, the process consisted mostly of waiting followed by recessing. To the judge and the attorneys it was quite different, I am sure. When something does not go quite according to Hoyle on the witness stand, the first move is to hustle the jury out of court and into their soundproof room while the judge and the counsel confer. When we were in the box, listening to witnesses, the data seemed made of little technicalities interrupted by little legalisms. No sweeping panorama of freedom versus tyranny, progress versus retrogression, right versus wrong (or even right versus left) opened before us.

Why don’t they get on with the case? This is the case. When do we get to decide for justice and against injustice? When we have the bare essential evidence, bit by ambiguous bit. How can we get the whole picture? We can’t. Nobody can. But we jurors may have only those portions of it which the attorneys and the judge decide we must know in order to decide whether the defendant is guilty of the specific charge against him -- no more, no less, and very little other, however interesting and important it might be.

There were in the grim proceedings two amusing incidents. Both brought red faces to some attorneys, chuckles to the judge, and of course hasty trips out of the courtroom for the jurors, while a conference was held at the bench. One testy prosecution witness, after solemnly giving his name, immediately pleaded the fifth amendment when asked if he knew the defendant. Later the defense summoned the accused man’s mother to the stand. She was supposed to be in the witness room, for witnesses are not allowed to hear each other’s testimony, lest they adjust their own. While the flustered bailiff searched for her in the witness room and the halls, the ancient black woman, her countenance ruined by many cares, got up from the spectators’ section of the courtroom, where she had been listening to all preceding testimony, and gravely made her way to the stand.

IV

Three and a half days after we were seated as a jury the trial was over and the outcome of it given into our hands. The judge, at his discretion, had allowed us to go home each evening while the trial was in progress, with strict instructions to discuss it with no one. Only when the case was delivered to us for decision were we sequestered until our verdict was reached. If the verdict was "guilty,"’ we would meet again to recommend punishment on a scale of five to 99 years.

Here was a black man obviously involved to some degree in the theft of church funds and the murder of a white man in a southern city, now on trial in "the Man’s" court before an all-white middle-class jury. A textbook case! But a textbook case of what? It depends upon the cliches and stereotypes of one’s particular ideology.

Some would say it is a clear-cut case of street crime by hooligans -- which crime has made city life a terror for decent, innocent citizens: "The reason such crime has increased so much is that we are too soft on criminals. They know that the hands of law-enforcement officers are tied by the rulings of a libertarian Supreme Court. They know that the odds against their conviction are high even if they are caught. They know that if they do go to prison they will soon be let out by soft-headed parole officers. Then they’re back on the streets again committing more serious crimes. Look at the statistics! Is that justice? Now here is a chance to make an example of this one hoodlum, and to teach them all a lesson."

That, however, was not our job as a jury.

Others would say, "Just one more example of the poor, ignorant, oppressed black getting a raw deal from the power structure of this country! What chance has he? Society is more at fault than he is. Why is he poor and ignorant? Why can’t he find a steady job? Why was he in an all-black school? If he were a wealthy white man he wouldn’t have sweated out six months in the county jail worrying about a long term in the penitentiary. Besides, if he is sent to the pen, it will only make matters worse. It will make a criminal out of him whether he is one now or not. Look at the statistics! Is that justice? What really needs correction is the whole social system."

That, however, was not our job as a jury either.

Our task had been described to us almost ad nauseam by attorneys for both prosecution and defense, and by the judge. They outlined our job and its ground rifles before the trial began, and again at its end in the attorneys’ summaries and the judge’s instructions. The defendant is presumed innocent until he is proved guilty. The burden of proof lies upon the prosecution. The grand jury indictment is not evidence of guilt. The defendant’s failure to testify in his own behalf is not to be taken as a circumstance against him. His confession may be used as evidence against him "if it appear that same was freely made without compulsion or persuasion" and he waives "knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily" the rights previously mentioned, prior to and during the making of the statement. If the jurors have a reasonable doubt about this, they must not consider the statement for any purpose, nor any evidence obtained as a result thereof. Circumstantial evidence against the accused man must not only lead consistently, step by step, to a conclusion of his guilt; it must also "exclude to a moral certainty every other reasonable hypothesis."

I had not realized before how high things are stacked against the prosecution in criminal cases. I knew it intellectually, but not existentially. Was that a shrug of resignation or a plea for help between the lines of the prosecution’s closing speech?

We deliberated formally as a jury for about three and a half hours in the afternoon. We deliberated for another hour or so the next morning after a not-so-restful night in the jury dormitory. All of us pondered on our pillows. Some of us prayed. All of us heard the banging of iron doors in the jail on the floors above us. I doubt that any juror among us believed that the defendant was innocent of all involvement in the brutal robbery and murder of a Christian layman discharging his responsibilities. I know that none of us believed that he was proved guilty as charged beyond a reasonable doubt, to the point of moral certainty, by the evidence presented to us in court, construed as the law provides and as the judge instructed. The verdict was unanimous on the first ballot. Not guilty.

V

In the hall afterward, the woman juror with the fine car and address hugged the ex-defendant’s beautiful wife of seven years, mother of his two children. "I hope this is a new beginning for you," she said. The attorneys, who weren’t allowed even to say "good morning" to a juror while the trial was in progress, chatted with us too. One pointed out that the United States still uses the jury system much more extensively than any other major country and that it is under considerable fire. It is so expensive. Expensive? I should say so. Think of the time of those four attorneys over the past six months. Think of the hours put in by 12 jurors for six days, not to mention the token $10 a day the state paid each of us -- plus the nice steaks we had for dinner on our one sequestered evening.

The jury system is accused of being horribly inefficient. We can testify to that. Mostly we sat and smoked too much and drank too much coffee and waited to be called into the courtroom and sat some more. But if efficiency is the measure of a system of justice, it would be hard to beat the six-gun and hemp-rope justice of the legendary old west -- and its sophisticated proponents are with us to this day. When it comes to dealing with a troublesome race, the gas chambers and crematories of Auschwitz were superbly efficient. And a certain trial in the Soviet Union, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn described it, was quite efficient too. The communist prosecutors observed many formalities, but the outcome for the defendants was never really in doubt from the beginning -- Siberia, or somewhere in the Gulag Archipelago. Peoples’ courts and military tribunals in the newer nations and some older ones too? Very efficient. I will settle for the inefficient system in which I participated, and pay my share gladly.

On the one evening when the jury was taken out together to a steakhouse, we traveled in three taxis with a bailiff in each carload. The taxis were to go and come together in a convoy. Because of the heavy traffic, our taxi got separated temporarily from the others. This circumstance caused considerable distress to the elderly bailiff in our car. I asked the old gentleman why the cabs had to stay together anyhow, since the distance was short and every driver knew where we were going. His reply was at once petty and profound. "It’s the law."

VI

It’s the law. Those irritating legalisms and time-consuming technicalities that had alternately irked and amused us while we were trying to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God looked a bit different as our cab caught up with the others waiting for us. It is by such little legalities that we are all protected from each other, from our government and from ourselves. Despite those trivialities and legalisms -- or maybe precisely because of them -- one man had been sent to prison for life and another charged with the same crime was to be set free.

Maybe that grand goal of the good society is brought into being not by vigilante types taking over from what they call a too-permissive culture, nor yet by romantic revolutionaries and utopians eager to junk the whole system and start over, nor by any visionary ideologies and scenarios of the right or left. Maybe we "let justice roll down like waters" -- not in torrents of rhetoric nor cataclysmic tides of revolution, but in the slow melting of the snow-mass of backed-up grievances, by the ambiguous resolution of human tragedies in thousands of little courtrooms across the land.

Maybe justice and the good society are brought about precisely by lawyers and judges sending the jury out of the courtroom while they decide whether to admit the testimony of an old black woman who has been listening in on the whole trial of her son. And by jurors sitting and smoking and drinking coffee for hours on end while they had rather be about their jobs -- and then finding their way through legalisms and technicalities to reasonable doubts and moral certainties. I’m committed to that way -- until, say, our country’s tricentennial.

No Posturing in Borrowed Plumes

Recently a student of mine, whom we shall call Student A, submitted a sermon outline "in partial fulfillment of course requirements" (as conventional academic phraseology so plaintively puts it. I immediately recognized the title and the four main points, in Sequence and verbatim, as the sermon outline of a nationally known preacher in an eastern city, whom we shall call Preacher B. We happened to have a commercial recording of that particular sermon in our library. When I brought this fact to the attention of Student A, he unhappily admitted that the sermon was not his own work. But, he said, he had borrowed it from Preacher C, a less well known preacher in a midwestern city, who had delivered it from his pulpit without acknowledging his indebtedness to Preacher B. And a fine sermon it was.

I told a faculty colleague, Professor D, of the incident (without mentioning Student A by name). His laughing reply was that the whole business was poetic justice of a sort. On an eastern trip not long since, he explained he had gone to morning worship in the church of Preacher B, whom he greatly admired. It chanced that on that particular Sunday, Preacher B used almost verbatim a sermon by Preacher E, which sermon Professor D had included with due credit in an anthology of sermons he had edited. When he met Professor D at the door afterwards, Preacher B’s embarrassment was acute. He had been caught in an impossible time-bind that week, he said, and had resorted under pressure to a practice he deplored, had rarely if ever indulged in before and would certainly never follow again -- sentiments very like those expressed to me by Student A.

This is surely a remarkable case of homiletical hanky-panky. But I fear it is not at all unusual; it may be more like the tip of an iceberg. Shall we laugh over it or cry? Certainly ministers cannot afford to have the suspicion of plagiarism added to the burden under which they must labor today. Why then do they lay themselves open to it? For the moment, let’s give then, the benefit of the doubt and name the extenuating circumstances.

I

First, is the often cited fact that the parish preacher is under a nearly impossible production schedule. A sermon per week is equivalent to a 400-page volume per year. The sheer quantity of material -- not to mention quality -- represents an awesome demand upon any man.

Second, all sermons draw, theoretically, on the same primary sources the Scriptures. Granted that the riches of Christ are unsearchable, there are still only so many ways of outlining a sermon on the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, and there is only so much to be said on the parable of the soils or the parable of the Pharisee and the publican praying in the temple. And Jesus said it tolerably well. Under such circumstances originality is hard to come by indeed. Borrowing and repetition, whether intentional or unintentional, are inevitable. Besides, what minister is so systematic in collecting data that he remembers the primary source of every illustration, every major idea, or even every bare-bones sermon outline he uses? My generation of preachers avidly read Harry Emerson Fosdick. Years afterward it was difficult for us to preach about anything Fosdick preached about without being in his debt in ways we were not even aware of. (I have found out as much -- to my embarrassment -- in rereading Fosdick’s sermons and my own later.)

Third, a sermon is neither an academic term paper nor a paper to be read at the annual meeting of some learned society. A good preacher, however conscientious he may be in tracing his materials to their source, will not choke the flow of his morning sermon with a profusion of oral footnotes. And he can use the escape hatch "as somebody has said" only so many times in each sermon -- the fewer times, the better.

These circumstances make genuinely unintentional plagiarism a fact of life for every parish minister.

One more circumstance deserves mention; namely, that not all parish ministers can expect to be excellent in the pulpit. Many men’s gifts lie primarily in other areas of ministry, and through these they bless their congregations with truly redemptive ministries that include the "proclaiming" of the gospel. What harm then if of Sunday mornings such men let the really fine preachers carry most of the preaching load for them by providing sermon introductions, basic outlines and illustrative material? (To be sure, few would want to go so far as a seminary classmate of mine who regularly, and without acknowledging his source, preached Fosdick’s sermons in his student church because he figured that his little congregation "deserved the best." You can’t fault his motive -- at least not the one he verbalized.)

Writing in the Wall Street Journal for March 14, 1972 (p. 1) , George Mitchell estimates at 40,000 the number of subscribers to publishing services which issue "weekly texts or tapes that clergymen can deliver verbatim." Mitchell quotes a Chicago pastor as saying: "Frankly, I don’t have the time or the training to produce a quality sermon every week.... I don’t think I’m shortchanging my congregation if I find something suitable from an outside source." Judging by the popularity of volumes of sermons, ministers’ manuals and pulpit digests, many ministers share this pastor’s views.

II

Perhaps we now admit the possibility of a nonmalignant strain of plagiarism, however much we may deplore it. But having made all due allowances, I believe that the use of other men’s material in our own sermons still brings us up against a profoundly ethical issue. According to The Random House Dictionary, plagiarism is "the appropriation or imitation of the language, ideas, and thoughts of another author, and representation of them as one’s original work" (italics mine). That last phrase is the accusing finger. There is nothing wrong with appropriation; indeed, education involves the appropriation of one’s heritage. It is in the representation that the trouble lies. Ethically, the issue can be readily identified; it is dishonesty, pretense.

Technically, plagiarism is easy to avoid -- by the preacher’s simply making sufficient and graceful acknowledgment whenever he knows that the language and ideas he presents are not his own original work. Acknowledgment is the sovereign preventive and cure of plagiarism. The stylistic issue may be a bit complicated, but the ethical and technical issues are not.

But weighty as the ethical issue of dishonesty is, a weightier one yet has to do with the minister’s calling, vocation and self-understanding. Surely every minister has some sense of his personal responsibility to be a spokesman for God, a mediator of the Eternal to his times. In meeting that dread responsibility he needs, of course, all the human help he can get, from the community of faith and from secular wisdom, But the angle of vision must be his own, and the synthesis must be the work of God upon his own conscience, heart and mind. "Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces? Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, says the Lord, who steal my words from one another" (Jer. 23:29-30).

The burden of proclamation is each man’s own. Those of us whose gifts of intellect and speech are manifestly mediocre bear exactly the same responsibility as do persons of greater talents. But is there not more hope than despair in that fact? The Lord expects of his spokesmen that they wrestle afresh with his Word and his people’s need and proclaim what he gives them to see. But we are led to believe that in this as in other responsibilities the Lord’s judgment of "Well done" or "You slothful servant" depends not upon the magnitude of the servant’s gifts but upon the fidelity of his stewardship of them.

Obviously, hubris is a constant danger here. Where does professional pride -- and the preacher is a professional -- cease to be a strength and become a snare and a delusion? I freely admit that I take greater satisfaction in using my own insight and craftsmanship (such as they are) in preparing a sermon than in using those of any other preacher, however much more scholarly or eloquent he may be. I had rather discern a cry of human need voiced in a novel, or discover the grace of God profanely proclaimed in a drama on the stage or on the street, than retell what some other has discerned there. I had rather create a sermon illustration than borrow one, if I can. Mere pride? The Lord knows; I don’t.

III

There is much evidence that those who hear us also prefer that we roll our own. They can read all the good sermons they want to. Do not our congregations expect from their own ministers that they wrestle honestly and immediately with the Christian faith and the issues of human life, and preach from that inner encounter rather than give a digest of what other ministers have said? It is at this point that the truth-half in Marshall McLuhan’s half-truth, "The medium is the message," speaks to our condition. The minister standing to preach before a congregation is a medium. If he be only a purveyor of other men’s experience with the Eternal, or a synthesizer of the secondhand, he is that medium-message.

But -- as P. T. Forsyth said long ago (in Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind [Hodder & Stoughton, 1908], p. 284) -- let a man arise to preach "with an equal knowledge of his sin, his Savior, and his subject." Let him bring to his words the witness of his own struggle with the Scriptures, his own contention with God in prayer, his own vulnerable love for his people, his own "daily pressure... of... anxiety for all the churches." Then medium and message become not only single but singular. The rhetorical quality may drop, but the spiritual power increases, "When God makes a man into a fisher of men," says Rudolph Bohren (Preaching and Community [John Knox Press, 1965], p. 48) "this man cannot be content merely with casting his net or line; he is himself a worm wriggling on the hook." Live bait!

The issue, then, is deeper than a student’s grade, a distinguished preacher’s embarrassment, an undistinguished preacher’s pretensions, or a homiletics professor’s pedantry in drawing a crooked line of definition between plagiarism and legitimate borrowing. The issue is no less than that of the preacher’s vocation and viability as a spokesman for his God. Of every preacher, however limited his powers, Karl Barth wrote (The Preaching of the Gospel [Westminster, 1961], p. 52): ‘‘He is the one who has been called, he it is who must speak. Let there be no posturing in borrowed plumes"

A Moratorium on Missionaries?

An African church leader recently laid before the World and U.S. National Councils of Churches a proposal that there be a moratorium on sending and receiving money and missionary personnel. John Gatu, general secretary of the Presbyterian Church in East Africa, said that their continuing sense of dependence on and domination by foreign church groups inhibits many churches in Asia, Africa and Latin America from development in response to God’s mission. ". . . [Our] present problems," he explained, "can only be solved if all missionaries can be withdrawn in order to allow a period of not less than five years for each side to rethink and formulate what is going to be their future relationship. . . . The churches of the Third World must be allowed to find their own identity, and the continuation of the present missionary movement is a hindrance to this selfhood of the church."

However shocking this proposal may seem, it is imperative that Christians in Europe and North America face the issue squarely -- for one reason, because it will probably be a major item for discussion on the agenda of virtually every Protestant mission board and society that is related to the ecumenical movement; for another, because the feelings voiced by Mr. Gatu are shared by a number of church leaders in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as in Europe and the United States.

Thus Emerito P. Nacpil, president of Union Theological Seminary near Manila, Philippines, told an assembly of church leaders and missionaries gathered in Asia in 1971 that under present conditions a partnership between Asian and Western churches "can only be a partnership between the weak and the strong. And that means the continued dependence of the weak upon the strong and the continued dominance of the strong over the weak." The missionary today, he said, is a symbol of the universality of Western imperialism among the rising generations of the Third World. [Therefore I believe that the present structure of modern missions is dead. And . . . we ought . . . to eulogize it and then bury it . . . In other words, the most missionary service a missionary under the present system can do today in Asia is to go home.

Again, Father Paul Verghese, a former associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches and now principal of an Orthodox theological seminary in India, writes from that country:

Today it is economic imperialism or neocolonialism that is the pattern of missions. Relief agencies and mission boards control the younger churches through purse strings. Foreign finances, ideas and personnel still dominate the younger churches and stifle their spontaneous growth. . . . So now I say, The mission of the church is the greatest enemy of the gospel."

A third voice in harmony with Mr. Gatu’s is that of José Miguez-Bonino, dean of Union Theological Seminary in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Recently addressing a group in the United States, Dr. Miguez said:

We in the younger churches have to learn the discipline of freedom to accept and to refuse, to place resources at the service of mission rather than to have mission patterned by resources. . . . We cannot for the love of our brethren or for the love of Cod let anybody or anything stand in the way of our taking on our own shoulders our responsibility. If, in order to do that, we must say to you, our friends, Stay home," we will do so because before God we have this grave responsibility of our integrity.

I

The first thing to be said about this growing sentiment in Third World churches is that it should be seen as a sign of the world church’s vitality. It is an indication that the "younger churches" have come of age. And the leaders of those churches are ready and able to articulate what this new sense of strength and self-confidence implies with regard to the traditional structures of relationship to the churches of the West, The challenge they pose is the fruit of our labors in world mission over the past 180 years.

Second, the basic issue in the moratorium proposal is integrity -- for both sides. On the part of the Third World churches it is a question of authority and control as they seek to establish and express their own identity. On the part of the churches in Europe and North America it is a question of accountability and faithfulness to the mandate for world mission inherent in the gospel. Therefore the relation between selfhood and universality, while crucial, should not imply contrast or opposition, for a church ought to be both local and universal.

A recent study of this problem, carried out by George A. Hood for the Conference of British Missionary Societies and titled In Whole and in Part, suggests that a better formulation of the issue would be: How may the interdependence of the church in mission be expressed throughout the world and in every place? Hood reaches the conclusion that the clearest expression of interdependence across the whole spectrum of the church’s life is found in giving and receiving." Indeed, he says, "the greatest threat to interdependence is self-sufficiency. . . . Some parts of the church are clearly being impoverished by feeling unable to give and others by their inability to receive." The most important implication of these facts for mission boards is that they need "to make the ideas of wholeness, interdependence, mutuality, more central."

Similarly, the WCC’s 1973 Bangkok Conference on "Salvation Today" said (report of Section III) that "the whole debate on the moratorium springs from our failure to relate to one another in a way which does not dehumanize," and that "in some situations the moratorium proposal, painful though it may be for both sides, may be the best means of resolving a present dilemma and advancing the mission of Christ."

II

There are indeed situations in which withdrawal of missionaries may be in the best interests of the Christian mission -- for instance, where the sociopolitical setup of a particular country or area is utterly contrary to the gospel and where the established church is identified with the status quo. It was a situation of that kind that, in 1971, led the White Fathers (a Roman Catholic mission society founded in 1868 and known officially as the Missionaries of Africa) to withdraw all their personnel from Mozambique. The Vatican-Portuguese Missionary Accord has aligned the Roman Catholic Church and its local hierarchy with the colonial regime in that country, and when all positive efforts of the White Fathers failed to end the flagrant injustices visited on blacks in Mozambique, they decided, according to one report, that "they had to withdraw so as not to allow themselves to be considered partners of the church-state collusion." While other mission societies operating in Mozambique have chosen to continue their witness there by a silent presence, the controversial decision of the White Fathers has been widely heralded as "an act of authentic Christian witness in the face of difficult options."

It was a different motive that, in 1969, prompted the unilateral decision of Methodist missionaries in Uruguay to withdraw for at least one year. They viewed their action as "a vote of confidence for the national church in its effort to work out a new life" -- that is, as a way of supporting the indigenous church. Their voluntary withdrawal, they believed, would free the church of Uruguay to establish its own structures and to lay down the conditions under which whatever missionaries it invited to come back would be obliged to serve. (Thus far the Uruguayan church has invited only one missionary couple to return.) This move of the Methodists, like that of the White Fathers, has proved controversial. Some call it a bold act of witness, others see it as a new form of paternalism, this time telling the national church what it does not need.

These, however, were limited moves. The moratorium proposed by Gatu and Nacpil is much more far-reaching. They are talking about all missionaries under the present structures of sending and receiving. Surely their approach is too shortsighted and simplistic for an exceedingly complex set of historical circumstances. We cannot responsibly solve the accumulated problems of nearly 200 years of missionary relationships by suddenly going into isolation; nor will the New Testament allow us to do so.

III

In the first place, so sweeping a moratorium would promote the domestication of the churches in their respective cultures, and this in turn would promote the further encroachment on them of tribal religion. Already cultural paganism infests the churches in most areas of the world -- nowhere more so than around the North Atlantic basin. To insulate them further, as the moratorium would do, could only encourage this pagan trend. The fact is that the "foreign" missionary presence in the life of any church should serve as a particular reminder of the "alien" nature of the gospel to every nation and culture. Unquestionably we in Europe and North America need this reminder especially. But churches in other parts of the world are not immune to some of the same temptations we face in the West.

In the second place, if we truly believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior of all humankind, we must consider the effect of the proposed moratorium on the evangelization of the vast multitudes of non-Christians throughout the world, particularly in countries where the national churches represent but a tiny fraction of the population. One thinks immediately, for instance, of India’s 548 million people, with Christians numbering only 14.2 million or 2.6 per cent; of Pakistan’s 43 million, with 335,000 or .8 per cent Christians; and of Bangladesh’s 72 million, with 216,000 or .3 per cent Christians. In these and many other countries, the population increases each year by more than their total Christian community. Yet the moratorium would serve to immobilize the churches of the West in relation to mission in these areas. It would limit us to mission where we are -- an altogether unbiblical concept -- and negate the concept of mission as the whole church bringing the whole gospel to the whole world.

In view of the enormous need and opportunity for missionary witness and service in all six continents, it is appalling that we of the West presently make so small a part of our resources available for this purpose. The mainline ecumenical denominations are particularly remiss in this respect. Thus the 11-million-member United Methodist Church -- the largest denomination in the National Council of Churches -- has seen a decline of missionaries serving overseas from 1,450 in 1968 to 824 scheduled for 1974; and of every dollar given to that church, only 1.1 cents actually goes for work outside the U.S. Again, the Missionary Orientation Center once operated at Stony Point, New York, by five of the major Protestant mission boards has now closed because not enough missionaries are being sent overseas to maintain it. And the number of U.S. Catholic missionaries serving abroad is the lowest in ten years, down from a high of 9,655 in 1969 to 7,649 in 1972.

By contrast, many conservative evangelical Protestant groups are increasing their overseas mission work. The Christian and Missionary Alliance, for instance, with only 92,000 members in the U.S. now has 893 missionaries overseas, and of every dollar given it for work beyond the local church, 85 cents goes toward overseas missions.

IV

I cannot subscribe to the so-called "mystical doctrine of salt water" -- the idea that being transported over salt water, the more of it the better, is what constitutes missionary service. Neither do I think that more missionaries mean more mission." I maintain, however, that men and women sent to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in cross-cultural situations are integral to the mission established in the incarnation. I agree wholeheartedly with the policy summed up by one mission agency in a recent working paper:

We wish to affirm the validity of the missionary presence as an essential part of the gospel. The good news of Jesus Christ is communicated through persons and becomes evident through the interaction between persons. We believe the place of persons at the heart of mission to be an abiding reality; We also wish to affirm the validity of the missionary presence as essential to our understanding of the universality of the church.

If the participation of persons in world mission is lacking or is limited by arbitrary rules, all areas of the church’s life will suffer. In point here is R. Pierce Beaver’s recent warning:

. . . one front of mission cannot be neglected or denied without adverse effect on other fronts; and already the domestic agencies of the churches are being afflicted with blight and malnutrition. The mission is one, and it is worldwide. . . The sending mission of discipling the nations to the ends of the earth is always the spiritual thermometer which measures the faith of the Christian community.

This is not to suggest that the styles and structures of missionary involvement should be static. The WCC’s Bangkok Conference cited above rightly urged missionary agencies to "examine critically their involvement as part of patterns of political and economic domination, and to re-evaluate the role of personnel and finance at their disposal in the light of that examination."

Yet the need to review and re-evaluate present structures and strategies does not suspend the Christian mandate for world mission -- not if we see "the missionary presence as an essential part of the gospel." Else we would be guilty of sub-mission. As the Bangkok Conference said (Section III):

What we must seek is . . . a mature relationship between churches. Basic to such a relationship is mutual commitment to participate in Christ’s mission in the world. A precondition for this is that each church involved in the relationship should have a clear realization of its own identity. This cannot be found in isolation, however, for it is only in relationship with others that we discover ourselves.

Actually, the overwhelming weight of opinion in the Third World, and in the "First" World too; is very much on the side of continued missionary presence. Even Mr. Gatu admits that "not many" African church leaders agree with his moratorium proposal. Nor do leaders of "younger churches" elsewhere. Recently, for instance, the United Church Board for World Ministries indicated to the Kyodan (the United Church of Christ in Japan) that owing to budgetary stringencies, it might have to withdraw some missionaries. The response of the Japanese was that they would undertake to raise enough money to keep the missionaries, because -- as they said -- they felt that in their situation the foreign missionary presence was essential to the integrity of the gospel and of the church. This past year, in fact, the Kyodan raised about $100,000 for this purpose.

V

Finally, we must assess the moratorium proposal in the light of the increasingly vital internationalization of the missionary enterprise. Today, the Third World is not only sending missionaries to the Third World; it is also thinking in terms of mission to America and mission to Europe -- thrusts that mission boards and the World Council of Churches are working hard to effectuate. A recently published research report, Missions from the Third World (available from William Carey Library, 533 Hermosa Street, South Pasadena, Calif. 91030), reveals that currently at least 209 Protestant agencies in the Third World are sending out 3,411 missionaries. This global inter-involvement in mission, going beyond traditional relationships and patterns for decision-making and exchange of personnel, holds enormous promise for the future.

The new era in world mission challenges all churches to manifest the universality of the ecclesia by sharing resources in the common task of expressing the redemptive action of God, in Christ. But, as the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries says, meeting that challenge will require of us more total commitment and wholeness of vision, greater intentionality and receptivity, and more serious and joyous international sharing and interdependence than we have yet known."

 

 

Constituents of a Theory of the Media

If you should think this is Utopian, then I would ask you to consider why it is Utopian.

-- Brecht: Theory of Radio

1. With the development of the electronic media, the industry that shapes consciousness has become the pacemaker for the social and economic development of societies in the late industrial age. It infiltrates into all other sectors of production, takes over more and more directional and control functions, and determines the standard of the prevailing technology.

(In lieu of normative definitions here is an incomplete list of new developments which have emerged in the last 20 years: news satellites, color television, cable relay television, cassettes, videotape, videotape recorders, video-phones, stereophony, laser techniques, electrostatic reproduction processes, electronic high-speed printing, composing and learning machines, microfiches with electronic access, printing by radio, time-sharing computers, data banks. All these new forms of media are constantly forming new connections both with each other and with older media like printing, radio, film, television, telephone, teletype, radar and so on. They are clearly coming together to form a universal system. (Illustrative material and asides, originally printed in a smaller type, are here enclosed in brackets.)

The general contradiction between productive forces and productive relationships emerges most sharply, however, when they are most advanced. (By contrast, protracted structural crises as in coal-mining can be solved merely by getting rid of a backlog, that is to say, essentially they can be solved within the terms of their own system and a revolutionary strategy that relied on them would be short-sighted.)

Monopoly capitalism develops the consciousness-shaping industry more quickly and more extensively than other sectors of production; it must at the same time fetter it. A socialist media theory has to work at this contradiction. Demonstrate that it cannot be solved within the given productive relationships -- rapidly increasing discrepancies -- potential destructive forces. ‘Certain demands of a prognostic nature musy not a problem. It is consciously prevented for understandable political reasons. The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance. It is based, in the last analysis, on the basic contradiction between the ruling class and the ruled class -- that is to say between monopoly capital or monopolistic bureaucracy on the one hand and the dependent masses on the other.

(This structural analogy can be worked out in detail. To the programs offered by the broadcasting cartels there correspond the politics offered by a power cartel consisting of parties constituted along authoritarian lines. In both cases marginal differences in their platforms reflect a competitive relationship which on essential questions is nonexistent. Minimal independent activity on the part of the voter/viewer. As is the case with parliamentary elections under the two-party system the feedback is reduced to indices. ‘Training in decision making’ is reduced to the response to a single, three-point switching process: Program 1; Program 2; Switch off (abstention).)

‘Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication. Radio would be the most wonderful means of communication imaginable in public life, a huge linked system -- that is to say, it would be such if it were capable not only of transmitting but of receiving, of allowing the listener not only to hear but to speak, and did not isolate him but brought him into contact. Unrealizable in this social system, realizable in another, these proposals, which are, after all, only the natural consequences of technical development, help towards the propagation and shaping of the other system.’ (Bertolt Brecht: Theory of Radio (1932), Gesammelte Werke, Band VIII, pp. 129 seq., 134.)

The Orwellian Fantasy

3.George Orwell’s bogey of a monolithic consciousness industry derives from a view of the media which is undialectical and obsolete. The possibility of total control of such a system at a central point belongs not to the future but to the past. With the aid of systems theory, a discipline which is part of bourgeois science -- using, that is to say, categories which are immanent in the system -- it can be demonstrated that a linked series of communications or, to use the technical term, switchable network, to the degree that it exceeds a certain critical size, can no longer be centrally controlled but only dealt with statistically. This basic ‘leakiness’ of stochastic systems admittedly allows the calculation of probabilities based on sampling and extrapolations; but blanket supervision would demand a monitor that was bigger than the system itself. The monitoring of all telephone conversations, for instance, postulates an apparatus which would need to be n times more extensive and more complicated than that of the present telephone system. A censor’s office, which carried out its work extensively, would of necessity become the largest branch of industry in its society.

But supervision on the basis of approximation can only offer inadequate instruments for the self-regulation of the whole system in accordance with the concepts of those who govern it. It postulates a high degree of internal stability. If this precarious balance is upset, then crisis measures based on statistical methods of control are useless. Interference can penetrate the leaky nexus of the media, spreading and multiplying there with the utmost speed by resonance. The régime so threatened will in such cases, insofar as it is still capable of action, use force and adopt police or military methods.

A state of emergency is therefore the only alternative to leakage in the consciousness industry; but it cannot be maintained in the long run. Societies in the late industrial age rely on the free exchange of information; the ‘objective pressures’ to which their controllers constantly appeal are thus turned against them. Every attempt to suppress the random factors, each diminution of the average flow and each distortion of the information structure must, in the long run, lead to an embolism.

The electronic media have not only built up the information network intensively, they have also spread it extensively. The radio wars of the fifties demonstrated that in the realm of communications, national sovereignty is condemned to wither away. The further development of satellites will deal it the coup de grâce. Quarantine regulations for information, such as were promulgated by Fascism and Stalinism, are only possible today at the cost of deliberate industrial regression.

(Example. The Soviet bureaucracy, that is to say the most widespread and complicated bureaucracy in the world, has to deny itself almost entirely an elementary piece of organizational equipment, the duplicating machine, because this instrument potentially makes everyone a printer. The political risk involved, the possibility of a leakage in the information network, is accepted only at the highest levels, at exposed switchpoints in political, military and scientific areas. It is clear that Soviet society has to pay an immense price for the suppression of its own productive resources -- clumsy procedures, misinformation, faux frais. The phenomenon incidentally has its analogue in the capitalist West, if in a diluted form. The technically most advanced electrostatic copying machine, which operates with ordinary paper -- which cannot that is to say, be supervised and is independent of suppliers -- is the product of a monopoly (Xerox); on principle it is not sold but rented. the rates themselves ensure that it does not get into the wrong hands. The equipment crops up as if by magic where economic and political power are concentrated. Political control of the equipment goes hand in hand with maximization of profits for the manufacturer. Admittedly this control, as opposed to Soviet methods, is by no means ‘water-tight’ for the reasons indicated.)

The problem of censorship thus enters a new historical stage. The struggle for the freedom of the press and freedom of ideas has, up till now, been mainly an argument within the bourgeoisie itself; for the masses, freedom to express opinions was a fiction since they were, from the beginning, barred from the means of production -- above all from the press -- and thus were unable to join in freedom of expression from the start. Today censorship is threatened by the productive forces of the consciousness industry which is already, to some extent, gaining the upper hand over the prevailing relations of production. Long before the latter are overthrown, the contradiction between what is possible and what actually exists will become acute.

Cultural Archaism in the Left Critique

4. The New Left of the sixties has reduced the development of the media to a single concept -- that of manipulation. This concept was originally extremely useful for heuristic purposes and has made possible a great many individual analytical investigations, but it now threatens to degenerate into a mere slogan which conceals more than it is able to illuminate, and therefore itself requires analysis.

The current theory of manipulation on the Left is essentially defensive; its effects can lead the movement into defeatism. Subjectively speaking, behind the tendency to go on the defensive lies a sense of impotence. Objectively, it corresponds to the absolutely correct view that the decisive means of production are in enemy hands. But to react to this state of affairs with moral indignation is naïve. There is in general an undertone of lamentation when people speak of manipulation which points to idealistic expectations -- as if the class enemy had ever stuck to the promises of fair play it occasionally utters. The liberal superstition that in political and social questions there is such a thing as pure, unmanipulated truth, seems to enjoy remarkable currency among the socialist Left. It is the unspoken basic premise of the manipulation thesis.

This thesis provides no incentive to push ahead. A socialist perspective which does not go beyond attacking existing property relationships is limited. The expropriation of Springer is a desirable goal but it would be good to know to whom the media should be handed over. The Party? To judge by all experience of that solution, it is not a possible alternative. It is perhaps no accident that the Left has not yet produced an analysis of the pattern of manipulation in countries with socialist régimes.

The manipulation thesis also serves to exculpate oneself. To cast the enemy in the role of the devil is to conceal the weakness and lack of perspective in one’s own agitation. If the latter leads to self-isolation instead of mobilizing the masses, then its failure is attributed holus-bolus to the overwhelming power of the media.

The theory of repressive tolerance has also permeated discussion of the media by the Left. This concept, which was formulated by its author with the utmost care, has also, when whittled away in an undialectical manner, become a vehicle for resignation. Admittedly, when an office-equipment firm can attempt to recruit sales staff with the picture of Che Guevara and the text We would have hired him, the temptation to withdraw is great. But fear of handling shit is a luxury a sewer-man cannot necessarily afford.

The electronic media do away with cleanliness; they are by their nature ‘dirty’. That is part of their productive power. In terms of structure, they are anti-sectarian -- a further reason why the Left, insofar as it is not prepared to re-examine its traditions, has little idea what to do with them. The desire for a cleanly defined ‘line’ and for the suppression of ‘deviations’ is anachronistic and now serves only one’s own need for security. It weakens one’s own position by irrational purges, exclusions and fragmentation, instead of strengthening it by rational discussion.

These resistances and fears are strengthened by a series of cultural factors which, for the most part, operate unconsciously, and which are to be explained by the social history of the participants in today’s Left movement -- namely their bourgeois class background. It often seems as if it were precisely because of their progressive potential that the media are felt to be an immense threatening power; because for the first time they present a basic challenge to bourgeois culture and thereby to the privileges of the bourgeois intelligentsia-.--a challenge far more radical than any self-doubt this social group can display. In the New Left’s opposition to the media, old bourgeois fears such as the fear of ‘the masses’ seem to be reappearing along with equally old bourgeois longings for pre-industrial times dressed up in progressive clothing.

(At the very beginning of the student revolt, during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the computer was a favorite target for aggression. Interest in the Third World is not always free from motives based on antagonism towards civilization which has its source in conservative culture critique. During the May events in Paris the reversion to archaic forms of production was particularly characteristic. Instead of carrying out agitation among the workers in a modern offset press, the students printed their posters on the hand presses of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The political slogans were hand-painted; stencils would certainly have made it possible to produce them en masse, but it would have offended the creative imagination of the authors. The ability to make proper strategic use of the most advanced media was lacking. It was not the radio headquarters that were seized by the rebels, but the Odéon Theatre, steeped in tradition.)

The obverse of this fear of contact with the media is the fascination they exert on left-wing movements in the great cities. On the one hand, the comrades take refuge in outdated forms of communication and esoteric arts and crafts instead of occupying themselves with the contradiction between the present constitution of the media and their revolutionary potential; on the other hand, they cannot escape from the consciousness industry’s program or from its aesthetic. This leads, subjectively, to a split between a puritanical view of political action and the area of private ‘leisure’; objectively, it leads to a split between politically active groups and sub-cultural groups.

In Western Europe the socialist movement mainly addresses itself to a public of converts through newspapers and journals which are exclusive in terms of language, content, and form. These news-sheets presuppose a structure of party members and sympathizers and a situation, where the media are concerned, that roughly corresponds to the historical situation in 1900; they are obviously fixated on the Iskra model. Presumably the people who produce them listen to the Rolling Stones, follow occupations and strikes on television, and go to the cinema to see a Western or a Goddard; only in their capacity as producers do they make an exception, and, in their analyses, the whole media sector is reduced to the slogan of ‘manipulation’. Every foray into this territory is regarded from the start with suspicion as a step towards integration. This suspicion is not unjustified; it can however also mask one’s own ambivalence and insecurity. Fear of being swallowed up by the system is a sign of weakness; it presupposes that capitalism could overcome any contradiction -- a conviction which can easily be refuted historically and is theoretically untenable.

If the socialist movement writes off the new productive forces of the consciousness industry and relegates work on the media to a subculture, then we have a vicious circle. For the Underground may be increasingly aware of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the disc, of videotape, of the electronic camera, and so on, and is systematically exploring the terrain, but it has no political viewpoint of its own and therefore mostly falls a helpless victim to commercialism. The politically active groups then point to such cases with smug Schadenfreude. A process of un-learning is the result and both sides are the losers. Capitalism alone benefits from the Left’s antagonism to the media, as it does from the de-politicization of the counter-culture.

Democratic Manipulation

5. manipulation -- etymologically, handling -- means technical treatment of a given material with a particular goal in mind. When the technical intervention is of immediate social relevance, then manipulation is a political act. In the case of the media industry that is by definition the case.

Thus every use of the media presupposes manipulation. The most elementary processes in media production, from the choice of the medium itself to shooting, cutting, synchronization, dubbing, right up to distribution, are all operations carried out on the raw material. There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming, or broadcasting. The question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. A revolutionary plan should not require the manipulators to disappear; on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator.

All technical manipulations are potentially dangerous; the manipulation of the media cannot be countered, however, by old or new forms of censorship, but only by direct social control, that is to say, by the mass of the people, who will have become productive. To this end, the elimination of capitalistic property relationships is a necessary, but by no means sufficient condition. There have been no historical examples up until now of the mass self-regulating learning process which is made possible by the electronic media. The Communists’ fear of releasing this potential, of the mobilizing capabilities of the media, of the interaction of free producers. is one of the main reasons why even in the socialist countries, the old bourgeois culture, greatly disguised and distorted but structurally intact, continues to hold sway.

(As a historical explanation it may be pointed out that the consciousness industry in Russia at the time of the October Revolution was extraordinarily backward; their productive capacity has grown enormously since then, but the productive relationships have been artificially preserved, often by force. Then, as now, a primitively edited press, books and theatre, were the key media in the Soviet Union. The development of radio, film and television, is politically arrested. Foreign stations like the BBC, the Voice of America, and the Deutschland Welle, therefore, not only find listeners, but are received with almost boundless faith. Archaic media like the handwritten pamphlet and poems orally transmitted play an important role.)

6. The new media are egalitarian in structure. Anyone can take part in them by a simple switching process. The programs themselves are not material things and can be reproduced at will. In this sense the electronic media are entirely different from the older media like the book or the easel-painting, the exclusive class character of which is obvious. Television programs for privileged groups are certainly technically conceivable -- closed-circuit television -- but run counter to the structure. Potentially the new media do away with all educational privileges and thereby with the cultural monopoly of the bourgeois intelligentsia. This is one of the reasons for the intelligentsia’s resentment against the new industry. As for the ‘spirit’ which they are endeavoring to defend against ‘depersonalization’ and ‘mass culture’, the sooner they abandon it the better.

Properties of the new media

7. The new media are orientated towards action, not contemplation; present, not tradition. Their attitude to time is completely opposed to that of bourgeois culture which aspires to possession, that is to extension in time, best of all, to eternity. The media produce no objects that can be hoarded and auctioned. They do away completely with ‘intellectual property’ and liquidate the ‘heritage’, that is to say, the class specific handing-on of non-material capital.

That does not mean to say that they have no history or that they contribute to the loss of historical consciousness. On the contrary, they make it possible for the first time to record historical material so that it can be reproduced at will. By making this material available for present-day purposes, they make it obvious to anyone using it that the writing of history is always manipulation. But the memory they hold in readiness is not the preserve of a scholarly caste. It is social. The banked information is accessible to anyone and this accessibility is as instantaneous as its recording. It suffices to compare the model of a private library with that of a socialized data bank to recognize the structural difference between the two systems.

8. It is wrong to regard media equipment as mere means of consumption. It is always, in principle, also means of production and, indeed, since it is in the hands of the masses, socialized means of production. The contradiction between producers and consumers is not inherent in the electronic media; on the contrary, it has to be artificially reinforced by economic and administrative measures.

(An early example of this is provided by the difference between telegraph and telephone. Whereas the former, to this day, has remained in the hands of a bureaucratic institution which can scan and file every text transmitted, the telephone is directly accessible to all users. With the aid of conference circuits, it can even make possible collective intervention in a discussion by physically remote groups.

On the other hand those auditory and visual means of communication which rely on ‘wireless’ are still subject to state control (legislation on wireless installations). In the face of technical developments, which long ago made local and international radio-telephony possible, and which constantly opened up new wavebands for television -- in the UHF band alone, the dissemination of numerous programs in one locality is possible without interference, not to mention the possibilities offered by wired and satellite television -- the prevailing laws for control of the air are anachronistic. They recall the time when the operation of a printing press was dependent on an imperial license. The socialist movements will take up the struggle for their own wavelengths and must, within the foreseeable future, build their own transmitters and relay stations.)

9. One immediate consequence of the structural nature of the new media is that none of the régimes at present in power can release their potential. Only a free socialist society will be able to make them fully productive. A further characteristic of the most advanced media -- probably the decisive one -- confirms this thesis: their collective structure.

For the prospect that in future, with the aid of the media, anyone can become a producer, would remain apolitical and limited were this productive effort to find an outlet in individual tinkering. Work on the media is possible for an individual only in so far as it remains socially and therefore aesthetically irrelevant. The collection of transparencies from the last holiday trip provides a model.

That is naturally what the prevailing market mechanisms have aimed at. It has long been clear from apparatus like miniature and 8 mm cine cameras, as well as the tape recorder, which are in actual fact already in the hands of the masses, that the individual, so long as he remains isolated, can become with their help at best an amateur but not a producer. Even so potent a means of production as the short-wave transmitter has been tamed in this way and reduced to a harmless and inconsequential hobby in the hands of scattered radio hams. The programs which the isolated amateur mounts are always only bad, outdated copies of what he in any case receives.

(Private production for the media is no more than licensed cottage industry. Even when it is made public it remains pure compromise. To this end, the men who own the media have developed special programs which are usually called ‘Democratic Forum’ or something of the kind. There, tucked away in the corner, ‘the reader (listener, viewer) has his say’, which can naturally be cut short at any time. As in the case of public opinion polling, he is only asked questions so that he may have a chance to confirm his own dependence. It is a control circuit where what is fed in has already made complete allowance for the feedback.

The concept of a license can also be used in another sense -- in an economic one; the system attempts to make each participant into a concessionaire of the monopoly that develops his films or plays back his cassettes. The aim is to nip in the bud in this way that independence which video-equipment, for instance, makes possible. Naturally, such tendencies go against the grain of the structure and the new productive forces not only permit but indeed demand their reversal.)

The poor, feeble and frequently humiliating results of this licensed activity are often referred to with contempt by the professional media producers. On top of the damage suffered by the masses comes triumphant mockery because they clearly do not know how to use the media properly. The sort of thing that goes on in certain popular television shows is taken as proof that they are completely incapable of articulating on their own.

Not only does this run counter to the results of the latest psychological and pedagogical research, but it can easily be seen to be a reactionary protective formulation; the ‘gifted’ people are quite simply defending their territories. Here we have a cultural analogue to the familiar political judgments concerning a working class which is presumed to be ‘stultified’ and incapable of any kind of self-determination. Curiously, one may hear the view that the masses could never govern themselves out of the mouths of people who consider themselves socialists. In the best of cases, these are economists who cannot conceive of socialism as anything other than nationalization.

A Socialist Strategy

10. Any socialist strategy for the media must, on the contrary, strive to end the isolation of the individual participants from the social learning and production process. This is impossible unless those concerned organize themselves. This is the political core of the question of the media. It is over this point that socialist concepts part company with the neo-liberal and technocratic ones. Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress. Anyone who imagines that freedom for the media will be established if only everyone is busy transmitting and receiving is the dupe of a liberalism which, decked out in contemporary colors, merely peddles the faded concepts of a pre-ordained harmony of social interests.

In the face of such illusions, what must be firmly held on to is that the proper use of the media demands organization and makes it possible. Every production that deals with the interests of the producers postulates a collective method of production. It is itself already a form of self-organization of social needs. Tape recorders, ordinary cameras and cine cameras, are already extensively owned by wage-earners. The question is why these means of production do not turn up at workplaces, in schools, in the offices of the bureaucracy, in short, everywhere where there is social conflict. By producing aggressive forms of publicity which were their own, the masses could secure evidence of their daily experiences and draw effective lessons from them.

Naturally bourgeois society defends itself against such prospects with a battery of legal measures. It bases itself on the law of trespass, on commercial and official secrecy. While its secret services penetrate everywhere and plug in to the most intimate conversations, it pleads a touching concern for confidentiality, and makes a sensitive display of worrying about the question of a privacy in which all that is private is the interest of the exploiters. Only a collective, organized effort can tear down these paper walls.

Communication networks which are constructed for such purposes can, over and above their primary function, provide politically interesting organizational models. In the socialist movements the dialectic of discipline and spontaneity, centralism and decentralization, authoritarian leadership and anti-authoritarian disintegration has long ago reached deadlock. Network-like communications models built on the principal of reversibility of circuits might give indications of how to overcome this situation: a mass newspaper, written and distributed by its readers, a video network of politically active groups.

More radically than any good intention, more lastingly than existential flight from one’s own class, the media, once they have come into their own, destroy the private production methods of bourgeois intellectuals. Only in productive work and learning processes can their individualism be broken down in such a way that it is transformed from morally based (that is to say as individual as ever) self-sacrifice to a new kind of political self understanding and behavior.

11. An all too widely disseminated thesis maintains that present-day capitalism lives by the exploitation of unreal needs. That is at best a half-truth. The results obtained by popular American sociologists like Vance Packard are not unuseful but limited. What they have to say about the stimulation of needs through advertising and artificial obsolescence can in any case not be adequately explained by the hypnotic pull exerted on the wage-earners by mass consumption. The hypothesis of ‘consumer terror’ corresponds to the prejudices of a middle class, which considers itself politically enlightened, against the allegedly integrated proletariat, which has become petty-bourgeois and corrupt. The attractive power of mass consumption is based not on the dictates of false needs, but on the falsification and exploitation of quite real and legitimate ones without which the parasitic process of advertising would be redundant. A socialist movement ought not to denounce these needs, but take them seriously, investigate them and make them politically productive.

That is also valid for the consciousness industry. The electronic media do not owe their irresistible power to any sleight-of-hand but to the elemental power of deep social needs which come through even in the present depraved form of these media.

Precisely because no one bothers about them, the interests of the masses have remained a relatively unknown field, at least insofar as they are historically new. They certainly extend far beyond those goals which the traditional working class movement represented. Just as in the field of production, the industry which produces goods and the consciousness industry merge more and more, so too, subjectively, where needs are concerned, material and non-material factors are closely interwoven. In the process old psycho-social themes are firmly embedded -- social prestige, identification patterns -- but powerful new themes emerge which are utopian in nature. From a materialistic point of view neither the one nor the other must be suppressed.

Henri Lefèbvre has proposed the concept of the spectacle, the exhibition, the show, to fit the present form of mass consumption. Goods and shop windows, traffic and advertisements, stores and the world of communications, news and packaging, architecture and media production come together to form a totality, a permanent theatre, which dominates not only the public city centers but also private interiors. The expression ‘beautiful living’ makes the most commonplace objects of general use into props for this universal festival, in which the fetishistic nature of the commodities triumphs completely over their use value. The swindle these festivals perpetrate is, and remains, a swindle within the present social structure. But it is the harbinger of something else. Consumption as spectacle contains the promise that want will disappear. The deceptive, brutal and obscene features of this festival derive from the fact that there can be no question of a real fulfillment of its promise. But so long as scarcity holds sway, use-value remains a decisive category which can only be abolished by trickery. Yet trickery on such a scale is only conceivable if it is based on mass need. This need -- it is a utopian one -- is there. It is the desire for a new ecology, for a breaking-down of environmental barriers, for an aesthetic which is not limited to the sphere of ‘the artistic’. These desires are not -- or are not primarily -- internalized rules of the game as played by the capitalist system. They have physiological roots and can no longer be suppressed. Consumption as spectacle is -- in parody form -- the anticipation of a Utopian situation.

The promises of the media demonstrate the same ambivalence. They are an answer to the mass need for non-material variety and mobility -- which at present finds its material realization in private car-ownership and tourism -- and they exploit it. Other collective wishes, which capital often recognizes more quickly and evaluates more correctly than its opponents but naturally only so as to trap them and rob them of their explosive force, are just as powerful, just as unequivocally emancipatory: the need to take part in the social process on a local, national and international scale; the need for new forms of interaction, for release from ignorance and tutelage; the need for self-determination. ‘Be everywhere!’ is one of the most successful slogans of the media industry. The readers’ parliament of Bild-Zeitung (The Springer press mass publication) direct democracy used against the interests of the demos. ‘Open spaces’ and ‘free time’ -- concepts which corral and neutralize the urgent wishes of the masses.

(The corresponding acceptance by the media of utopian stories. E.g. the story of the young Italo-American who hijacked a passenger plane to get home from California to Rome was taken up without protest even by the reactionary mass press and undoubtedly correctly understood by its readers. The identification is based on what has become a general need. Nobody can understand why such journeys should be reserved for politicians, functionaries, and business men. The role of the pop star could be analyzed from a similar angle; in it the authoritarian and emancipatory factors are mingled in an extraordinary way. It is perhaps not unimportant that beat music offers groups, not individuals, as identification models. In the productions of the Rolling Stones (and in the manner of their production) the utopian content is apparent. Events like the Woodstock Festival, the concerts in Hyde Park, on the Isle of Wight, and at Altamont, California, develop a mobilizing power which the political Left can only envy.)

It is absolutely clear that, within the present social forms, the consciousness industry can satisfy none of the needs on which it lives and which it must fan, except in the illusory form of games. The point, however, is not to demolish its promises but to take them literally and to show that they can be met only through a cultural revolution. Socialists and socialist régimes which multiply the frustration of the masses by declaring their needs to be false, become the accomplices of the system they have undertaken to fight.

12. Summary.

Repressive use of media Emancipatory use of media

Centrally controlled program Decentralized program

One transmitter, many receivers Each receiver a potential

transmitter

Immobilization of isolated Mobilization of the masses

individuals

Passive consumer behavior Interaction of those involved,

feedback

Depoliticization A political learning process

Production by specialists Collective production

Control by property owners or Social control by self-bureaucracy organization

The Subversive Power of the New Media

13. As far as the objectively subversive potentialities of the electronic media are concerned, both sides in the international class struggle -- except for the fatalistic adherents of the thesis of manipulation in the metropoles -- are of one mind. Frantz Fanon was the first to draw attention to the fact that the transistor receiver was one of the most important weapons in the Third World’s fight for freedom. Albert Hertzog, ex-Minister of the South African Republic and the mouthpiece of the right wing of the ruling party, is of the opinion that ‘television will lead to the ruin of the white man in South Africa’ (Der Spiegel 20/10/1969). American imperialism has recognized the situation. It attempts to meet the ‘revolution of rising expectations in Latin America -- that is what its ideologues call it -- by scattering its own transmitters all over the continent and into the remotest regions of the Amazon basin, and by distributing single-frequency transistors to the native population. The attacks of the Nixon administration on the capitalist media in the USA reveals its understanding that their reporting, however one-sided and distorted, has become a decisive factor in mobilizing people against the war in Vietnam. Whereas only 25 years ago the French massacres in Madagascar, with almost one hundred thousand dead, became known only to the readers of Le Monde under the heading of ‘Other News’ and therefore remained unnoticed and without sequel in the capital city, today the media drag colonial wars into the centers of imperialism.

The direct mobilizing potentialities of the media become still more clear when they are consciously used for subversive ends. Their presence is a factor that immensely increases the demonstrative nature of any political act. The student movements in the USA, in Japan, and in Western Europe soon recognized this and, to begin with, achieved considerable momentary successes with the aid of the media. These effects have worn off. Naïve trust in the magical power of reproduction cannot replace organizational work; only active and coherent groups can force the media to comply with the logic of their actions. That can be demonstrated from the example of the Tupamaros in Uruguay, whose revolutionary practice has implicit in it publicity for their actions. Thus the actors become authors. The abduction of the American Ambassador in Rio de Janeiro was planned with a view to its impact on the media. It was a television production. The Arab guerillas proceed in the same way. The first to experiment with these techniques internationally were the Cubans. Fidel appreciated the revolutionary potential of the media correctly from the first (Moncada 1953). Today illegal political action demands at one and the same time maximum security and maximum publicity.

14. Revolutionary situations always bring with them discontinuous, spontaneous changes brought about by the masses in the existing aggregate of the media. How far the changes thus brought about take root and how permanent they are demonstrates the extent to which a cultural revolution is successful. The situation in the media is the most accurate and sensitive barometer for the rise of bureaucratic or bonapartist anticyclones. So long as the cultural revolution has the initiative, the social imagination of the masses overcomes even technical backwardness and transforms the function of the old media so that their structures are exploded. ‘With our work the Revolution has achieved a colossal labor of propaganda and enlightenment. We ripped up the traditional book into single pages, magnified these a hundred times, printed them in color and stuck them up as posters in the streets . . . Our lack of printing equipment and the necessity for speed meant that, though the best work was hand-printed, the most rewarding was standardized, lapidary and adapted to the simplest mechanical form of reproduction. Thus State Decrees were printed as rolled-up illustrated leaflets, and Army Orders as illustrated pamphlets’ (El Lissitsky. The Future of the Book, New Left Review, No. 41, p. 42.). In the twenties, the Russian film reached a standard that was far in advance of the available productive forces. Pudovkin’s Kinoglas and Dziga Vertov’s Kinopravda were no ‘newsreels’ but political television magazine programs avant l’écran. The campaign against illiteracy in Cuba broke through the linear, exclusive, and isolating structure of the medium of the book. In the China of the Cultural Revolution, wall newspapers functioned like an electronic mass medium-- at least in the big towns. The resistance of the Czechoslovak population to the Soviet invasion gave rise to spontaneous productivity on the part of the masses, which ignored the institutional barriers of the media. (Details to be supplied.) Such situations are exceptional. It is precisely their utopian nature, which reaches out beyond the existing productive forces (it follows that the productive relationships are not to be permanently overthrown), that makes them precarious, leads to reversals and defeats. They demonstrate all the more clearly what enormous political and cultural energies are hidden in the enchained masses and with what imagination they are able, at the moment of liberation, to realize all the opportunities offered by the new media.

The Media: an empty category of Marxist Theory

15. That the Marxist Left should argue theoretically and act practically from the standpoint of the most advanced productive forces in their society, that they should develop in depth all the liberating factors immanent in these forces and use them strategically, is no academic expectation but a political necessity. However, with a single great exception, that of Walter Benjamin (and in his footsteps, Brecht), Marxists have not understood the consciousness industry and have been aware only of its bourgeois-capitalist dark side and not of its socialist possibilities. An author like Georg Lukács is a perfect example of this theoretical and practical backwardness. Nor are the works of Horkheimer and Adorno free of a nostalgia which clings to early bourgeois media.

(Their view of the cultural industry cannot be discussed here. Much more typical of Marxism between the two wars is the position of Lukács, which can be seen very clearly from an early essay on ‘Old Culture and New Culture’ (Kommunismus, Zeitschrift der Kommunistischen Internationale für die Länder Südosteuropas, 1920 pp. 1538 -- 49). ‘Anything that culture produces’, can according to Lukács, ‘have real cultural value only if it is in itself valuable, if the creation of each individual product is from the standpoint of its maker a single, finite process. It must, moreover, be a process conditioned by the human potentialities and capabilities of the creator. The most typical example of such a process is the work of art, where the entire genesis of the work is exclusively the result of the artist’s labor and each detail of the work that emerges is determined by the individual qualities of the artist. In highly developed mechanical industry on the other hand, any connection between the product and the creator is abolished. The human being serves the machine, he adapts to it. Production becomes completely independent of the human potentialities and capabilities of the worker.’ These ‘forces which destroy culture’ impair the work’s ‘truth to the material’, its ‘level’, and deal the final blow to the ‘work as an end in itself’. There is no more question of ‘the organic unity of the products of culture, its harmonious, joy-giving being’. Capitalist culture must lack ‘the simple and natural harmony and beauty of the old culture -- culture in the true, literal sense of the word.’ Fortunately things need not remain so. The ‘culture of proletarian society’ although ‘in the context of such scientific research as is possible at this time’ nothing more can be said about it, will certainly remedy these ills. Lukács asks himself ‘which are the cultural values which, in accordance with the nature of this context, can be taken over from the old society by the new and further developed.’ Answer: Not the inhuman machines but ‘the idea of mankind as an end in itself, the basic idea of the new culture’, for it is ‘the inheritance of the classical idealism of the nineteenth century’. Quite right. ‘This is where the philistine concept of art turns up with all its deadly obtuseness -- an idea to which all technical considerations are foreign and which feels that with the provocative appearance of the new technology its end has come’ (Walter Benjamin: Kleine Geschichte der Photographie in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit Frankfurt 1963 p. 69).

These nostalgic backward glances at the landscape of the last century, these reactionary ideals, are already the forerunners of socialist realism, which mercilessly galvanized and then buried those very ‘cultural values’, which Lukács rode out to rescue. Unfortunately, in the process, the Soviet cultural revolution was thrown to the wolves; but this aesthete can in any case hardly have thought any more highly of it than did J. V. Stalin)

The inadequate understanding which Marxists have shown of the media and the questionable use they have made of them has produced a vacuum in Western industrialized countries into which a stream of non-Marxist hypotheses and practices has consequently flowed. From the Cabaret Voltaire to Andy Warhol’s Factory, from the silent film comedians to the Beatles, from the first comic-strip artists to the present managers of the Underground, the apolitical have made much more radical progress in dealing with the media than any grouping of the Left. (Exception -- Münzenberg). Innocents have put themselves in the forefront of the new productive forces on the basis of mere intuitions with which communism -- to its detriment -- has not wished to concern itself. Today this apolitical avant-garde has found its ventriloquist and prophet in Marshall McLuhan, an author who admittedly lacks any analytical categories for the understanding of social processes, but whose confused books serve as a quarry of undigested observations for the media industry. Certainly his little finger has experienced more of the productive power of the new media than all the ideological commissions of the CPSU and their endless resolutions and directives put together.

Incapable of any theoretical construction, McLuhan does not present his material as a concept but as the common denominator of a reactionary doctrine of salvation. He admittedly did not invent but was the first to formulate explicitly a mystique of the media which dissolves all political problems in smoke -- the same smoke as gets in the eyes of his followers. It promises the salvation of man through the technology of television and indeed of television as it is practiced today. Now McLuhan’s attempt to stand Marx on his head is not exactly new. He shares with his numerous predecessors the determination to suppress all problems of the economic base, their idealistic tendencies and their belittling of the class struggle in the naïve terms of a vague humanism. A new Rousseau, like all copies only a pale version of the old, he preaches the gospel of the new primitive man who, naturally on a higher level, must return to prehistoric tribal existence in the ‘global village’.

It is scarcely worthwhile to deal with such concepts. This charlatan’s most famous saying -- ‘the medium is the message’ -- perhaps deserves more attention. In spite of its provocative idiocy, it betrays more than its author knows. It reveals in the most accurate way the tautological nature of the mystique of the media. The one remarkable thing about the television set, according to him, is that it moves -- a thesis which in view of the nature of American programs has, admittedly, something attractive about it.

(The complementary mistake consists in the widely spread illusion that media are neutral instruments with which any ‘messages’ one pleases can be transmitted without regard for their structure or for the structure of the medium. In the East European countries the television newsreaders read 15 minute-long conference communiqués and Central Committee resolutions which are not even suitable for printing in a newspaper, clearly under the delusion that they might fascinate a public of millions.)

The sentence -- the medium is the message -- transmits yet another message, however, and a much more important one. It tells us that the bourgeoisie does indeed have all possible means at its disposal to communicate something to us, but that it has nothing more to say. It is ideologically sterile. Its intention to hold on to the control of the means of production at any price, while being incapable of making the socially necessary use of them is here expressed with complete frankness in the superstructure. It wants the media as such and to no purpose.

This wish has been shared for decades and given symbolical expression by an artistic avant-garde whose program logically admits only the alternative of negative signals and amorphous noise. Example: the meanwhile outdated ‘literature of silence’, Warhol’s films in which everything can happen at once or nothing at all and John Cage’s 45-minute-long Lecture on Nothing(1959).

The Achievement of Benjamin

16. The revolution in the conditions of production in the superstructure has made the traditional aesthetic theory unusable, completely unhinging its fundamental categories and destroying its ‘standards’. The theory of knowledge on which it was based is outmoded. In the electronic media, a radically altered relationship between subject and object emerges with which the old critical concepts cannot deal. The idea of the self-sufficient work of art collapsed long ago. The long-drawn discussion over the death of art proceeds in a circle so long as it does not examine critically the aesthetic concept on which it is based, so long as it employs criteria which no longer correspond to the state of the productive forces. When constructing an aesthetic adapted to the changed situation, one must take as a starting point the work of the only Marxist theoretician who recognized the liberating potential of the new media. Thirty-five years ago, that is to say, at a time when the consciousness industry was relatively undeveloped, Walter Benjamin subjected this phenomenon to a penetrating dialectical-materialist analysis. His approach, has not been matched by any theory since then, far less further developed.

‘One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence and in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.’

‘For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. . . . But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -- politics. . . . Today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental’ (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illumination;, London 1970, pp. 223-7).

The trends which Benjamin recognized in his day in the film and the true import of which he grasped theoretically, have become patent today with the rapid development of the consciousness industry. What used to be called art, has now, in the strict Hegelian sense, been dialectically surpassed by and in the media. The quarrel about the end of art is otiose so long as this end is not understood dialectically. Artistic productivity reveals itself to be the extreme marginal case of a much more widespread productivity, and it is socially important only insofar as it surrenders all pretensions to autonomy and recognizes itself to be a marginal case. Wherever the professional producers make a virtue out of the necessity of their specialist skills and even derive a privileged status from them, their experience and knowledge have become useless. This means that as far as an aesthetic theory is concerned, a radical change in perspectives is needed. Instead of looking at the productions of the new media from the point of view of the older modes of production we must, on the contrary, analyze the products of the traditional ‘artistic’ media from the standpoint of modern conditions of production.

(‘Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question -- whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art -- was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film.’ -- ibid., p. 229.)

The panic aroused by such a shift in perspectives is understandable. The process not only changes the old burdensome craft secrets in the superstructure into white elephants, it also conceals a genuinely destructive element. It is, in a word, risky. But the only chance for the aesthetic tradition lies in its dialectical supersession. In the same way, classical physics has survived as a marginal special case within the framework of a much more comprehensive theory.

This state of affairs can be identified in individual cases in all the traditional artistic disciplines. Their present-day developments remain incomprehensible so long as one attempts to deduce them from their own prehistory. On the other hand, their usefulness or otherwise can be judged as soon as one regards them as special cases in a general aesthetic of the media. Some indications of the possible critical approaches which stem from this will be made below, taking literature as an example.

The Supersession of Written Culture

17. Written literature has, historically speaking, played a dominant role for only a few centuries. Even today, the predominance of the book has an episodic air. An incomparably longer time preceded it in which literature was oral. Now it is being succeeded by the age of the electronic media which tend once more to make people speak. At its period of fullest development the book to some extent usurped the place of the more primitive but generally more accessible methods of production of the past; on the other hand, it was a stand-in for future methods which make it possible for everyone to become a producer.

The revolutionary role of the printed book has been described often enough and it would be absurd to deny it. From the point of view of its structure as a medium, written literature, like the bourgeoisie who produced it and whom it served, was progressive. (See the Communist Manifesto.) On the analogy of the economic development of capitalism, which was indispensable for the development of the industrial revolution, the non-material productive forces could not have developed without their own capital accumulation. (We also owe the accumulation of Das Kapital and its teachings to the medium of the book.)

Nevertheless, almost everybody speaks better than he writes. (This also applies to authors.) Writing is a highly formalized technique which, in purely physiological terms, demands a peculiarly rigid bodily posture. To this there corresponds the high degree of social specialization that it demands. Professional writers have always tended to think in caste terms. The class character of their work is unquestionable, even in the age of universal compulsory education. The whole process is extraordinarily beset with taboos. Spelling mistakes, which are completely immaterial in terms of communication, are punished by the social disqualification of the writer. The rules that govern this technique have a normative power attributed to them for which there is no rational basis. Intimidation through the written word has remained a widespread and class-specific phenomenon even in advanced industrial societies.

These alienating factors cannot be eradicated from written literature. They are reinforced by the methods by which society transmits its writing techniques. While people learn to speak very early, and mostly in psychologically favorable conditions, learning to write forms an important part of authoritarian socialization by the school (‘good writing’ as a kind of breaking-in). This sets its stamp for ever on written communication -- on its tone, its syntax, and its whole style. This also applies to the text on this page.)

The formalization of written language permits and encourages the repression of opposition. ‘in speech, unresolved contradictions betray themselves by pauses, hesitations, slips of the tongue, repetitions, anacoluthons, quite apart from phrasing, mimicry, gesticulation, pace and volume. The aesthetic of written literature scorns such involuntary factors as ‘mistakes’. It demands, explicitly or implicitly, the smoothing out of contradictions, rationalization,ýÿÿÿ‚�ƒ�„�…�†�‡�ˆ�‰�Š�‹�Œ��Ž��‘’""•–—˜�™�š�›�œ��žŸ� ¡�¢�£�¤�¥�¦�§�¨�©�ª�«�¬�þÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ±�²�³�´�µ�¶�·�þÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ regularization of the spoken form irrespective of content. Even as a child, the writer is urged to hide his unsolved problems behind a protective screen of correctness.

Structurally, the printed book is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and reader. Feedback and interaction are extremely limited, demand elaborate procedures, and only in the rarest cases lead to corrections. Once an edition has been printed it cannot be corrected; at best it can be pulped. The control circuit in the case of literary criticism is extremely cumbersome and elitist. It excludes the public on principle.

None of the characteristics that distinguish written and printed literature apply to the electronic media. Microphone and camera abolish the class character of the mode of production (not of the production itself). The normative rules become unimportant. Oral interviews, arguments, demonstrations, neither demand nor allow orthography or ‘good writing’. The television screen exposes the aesthetic smoothing-out of contradictions as camouflage. Admittedly, swarms of liars appear on it, but anyone can see from a long way off that they are peddling something. As at present constituted, radio, film, and television, are burdened to excess with authoritarian characteristics, the characteristics of the monologue, which they have inherited from older methods of production -- and that is no accident. These outworn elements in today’s media aesthetics are demanded by the social relations. They do not follow from the structure of the media. On the contrary, they go against it, for the structure demands interaction.

It is extremely improbable, however, that writing as a special technique will disappear in the foreseeable future. That goes for the book as well, the practical advantages of which for many purposes remain obvious. It is admittedly less handy and takes up more room than other storage systems, but up to now it offers simpler methods of access than, for example, the microfilm or the tape bank. It ought to be integrated into the system as a marginal case and thereby forfeit its aura of cult and ritual.

(This can be deduced from technological developments. Electronics are noticeably taking over writing: teleprinters, reading machines, high-speed transmissions, automatic photographic and electronic composition, automatic writing devices, typesetters, electrostatic processes, ampex libraries, cassette encyclopaedias, photocopiers and magnetic copiers, speedprinters.

The outstanding Russian media expert El Lissitsky incidentally demanded an ‘electro-library’ as far back as 1923 -- a request which, given the technical conditions of the time, must have seemed ridiculous or at least incomprehensible. This is how far this man’s imagination reached into the future:

‘I draw the following analogy:

Inventions in the field Inventions in the field

of verbal traffic of general traffic

Articulated language Upright gait

Writing The wheel

Gutenberg’s printing press Carts drawn by animal power

? The automobile

? The airplane

I have produced this analogy to prove that so long as the book remains a palpable object, i.e. so long as it is not replaced by auto-vocalizing and kino-vocalizing representations, we must look to the field of the manufacture of books for basic innovations in the near future.

There are signs to hand suggesting that this basic innovation is likely to come from the neighborhood of the collotype.’ -- op. cit. p. 40. Today, writing has in many cases already become a secondary technique, a means of transcribing orally recorded speech; tape-recorded proceedings, attempts at speech-pattern recognition, and the conversion of speech into writing.)

18. The ineffectiveness of literary criticism when faced with so-called documentary literature is an indication of how far the critics’ thinking has lagged behind the stage of the productive forces. It stems from the fact that the media have eliminated one of the most fundamental categories of aesthetics up to now -- fiction. The fiction/non-fiction argument has been laid to rest just as was the 19th century’s favorite dialectic of ‘art’ and ‘life’. In his day, Benjamin demonstrated that the ‘apparatus’ (the concept of the medium was not yet available to him) abolishes authenticity. In the productions of the consciousness industry, the difference between the ‘genuine’ original and the reproduction disappears -- ‘that aspect of reality which is not dependent on the apparatus has now become its most artificial aspect’. The process of reproduction reacts on the object reproduced and alters it fundamentally. The effects of this have not yet been adequately explained epistemologically. The categorical uncertainties to which it gives rise also affect the concept of the documentary. Strictly speaking, it has shrunk to its legal dimensions. A document is something the ‘forging’, i.e. the reproduction of which, is punishable by imprisonment. This definition naturally has no theoretical meaning. The reason is that a reproduction, to the extent that its technical quality is good enough, cannot be distinguished in any way from the original, irrespective of whether it is a painting, a passport or a bank note. The legal concept of the documentary record is only pragmatically useful; it serves only to protect economic interests.

The productions of the electronic media, by their nature, evade such distinctions as those between documentary and feature films. They are in every case explicitly determined by the given situation. The producer can never pretend, like the traditional novelist, ‘to stand above things’. He is therefore partisan from the start. This fact finds formal expression in his techniques. Cutting, editing, dubbing -- these are techniques for conscious manipulation without which the use of the new media is inconceivable. It is precisely in these work processes that their productive power reveals itself -- and here it is completely immaterial whether one is dealing with the production of a reportage or a play. The material, whether ‘documentary’ or ‘fiction’, is in each case only a prototype, a half-finished article, and the more closely one examines its origins, the more blurred the difference becomes. (Develop more precisely. The reality in which a camera turns up is always faked, e.g. the moon-landing.)

The Desacralization of Art

19. The media also do away with the old category of works of art which can only be considered as separate objects, not as independent of their material infrastructure. The media do not produce such objects. They create programs. Their production is in the nature of a process. That does not mean only (or not primarily) that there is no foreseeable end to the program -- a fact which, in view of what we are at present presented with, admittedly makes a certain hostility to the media understandable. It means, above all, that the media program is open to its own consequences without structural limitations. (This is not an empirical description but a demand. A demand which admittedly is not made of the medium from without; it is a consequence of its nature, from which the much-vaunted open form can be derived -- and not as a modification of it -- from an old aesthetic.) The programs of the consciousness industry must subsume into themselves their own results, the reactions and the corrections which they call forth, otherwise they are already out of date. They are therefore to be thought of not as means of consumption but as means of their own production.

20. It is characteristic of artistic avant-gardes that they have, so to speak, a presentiment of the potentiality of media which still lie in the future. ‘It has always been one of the most important tasks of art to give rise to a demand, the time for the complete satisfaction of which has not yet come. The history of every art form has critical periods when that form strives towards effects which can only be easily achieved if the technical norm is changed, that is to say, in a new art form. The artistic extravagances and crudities which arise in this way, for instance in the so-called decadent period, really stem from art’s richest historical source of power. Dadaism in the end teemed with such barbarisms. We can only now recognize the nature of its striving. Dadaism was attempting to achieve those effects which the public today seeks in film with the means of painting (or of literature)’ (Benjamin, op. cit. p. 42). This is where the prognostic value of otherwise inessential productions such as happenings, flux and mixed media shows, is to be found. There are writers who in their work show an awareness of the fact that media, with the characteristics of the monologue, today have only a residual use-value. Many of them admittedly draw fairly short-sighted conclusions from this glimpse of the truth. For example, they offer the user the opportunity to arrange the material provided by arbitrary permutations. Every reader as it were should write his own book. When carried to extremes, such attempts to produce interaction, even when it goes against the structure of the medium employed, are nothing

more than invitations to freewheel. Mere noise permits of no articulated interactions. Short cuts, of the kind that Concept Art peddles, are based on the banal and false conclusion that the development of the productive forces renders all work superfluous. With the same justification, one could leave a computer to its own devices on the assumption that a random generator will organize material production by itself. Fortunately cybernetics experts are not given to such childish games.

21. For the old fashioned ‘artist’ -- let us call him the author -- it follows from these reflections that he must see it as his goal to make himself redundant as a specialist in much the same way as a teacher of literacy only fulfills his task when he is no longer necessary. Like every learning process, this process too is reciprocal. The specialist will learn as much or more from the non-specialists as the other way round. Only then can he contrive to make himself dispensable.

Meanwhile his social usefulness can best be measured by the degree to which he is capable of using the liberating factors in the media and bringing them to fruition. The tactical contradictions in which he must become involved in the process can neither be denied nor covered up in any way. But strategically his role is clear. The author has to work as the agent of the masses. He can lose himself in them I only when they themselves become authors, the authors of history.

21. ‘Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will’ (Antonio Gramsci).

Using Literary Criticism on the Gospels

The evangelists are genuinely authors, authors using traditional material but nonetheless authors: they write for a definite purpose, they give their work a distinct and individual structure, they have thematic concerns which they pursue, the characters in the story they each tell function as protagonists in a plot, and so on. . . If the evangelists are authors, then they must be studied as authors, and they must be studied as other authors are studied.



So wrote the late Norman Perrin in an article published ten years ago (Biblical Research 17 [1972]: 5-18). At that time his viewpoint was novel, but it was a sign of things to come. Now literary critical approaches to the Bible are commonplace in scholarly journals, at scholarly meetings and in publishers’ lists of new books. Methods of biblical scholarship are rapidly changing, but one can safely predict that viewing the biblical texts as literature and using the critical methods commonly applied to non-biblical literature will obtain a prominent place in academic study of the Bible. Literary criticism also offers many possibilities for enriching the devotional and liturgical use of the Bible.

Rather than trying to survey the entire field of literary critical approaches to the Bible, I would like to keep my reflections narrow and personal. This means offering some small tribute to Norman Perrin, who first showed me the promise of a genuine literary criticism of the Gospel of Mark. Although my reflections will relate specifically to the literary criticism of the Gospels, much of what I will say applies equally well to the other New Testament literature and to the Hebrew Bible.

When I came to the University of Chicago in 1974 in order to study the Gospel of Mark with Norman Perrin, I had no idea that I would become a “literary critic.” Before coming to Chicago, I knew of Perrin chiefly from his widely praised book on the authentic teaching of the historical Jesus, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (Harper & Row, 1967), and from his small but highly regarded book, What Is Redaction Criticism? (Fortress, 1969). Consequently, I arrived in Chicago expecting to do “life of Jesus research” and redaction criticism with a master. But when I arrived, Perrin was calling himself a literary critic. He was reading, discussing and doing literary criticism with anyone who was interested -- students and colleagues alike. Some of us winced when he boldly called himself a literary critic, for he and we were still new to this business. But boldness was Perrin’s trademark. In his case, the urge to be always in the forefront of the development of his discipline was spurred in part by the specter of ill health that haunted him. He had no time to waste, and he had an unerring sense of direction. He sensed which way our discipline was headed, pushed forward as far as he himself could, and encouraged many students and colleagues in the relatively short time he had.

When I began to study with him, Perrin was arguing that literary criticism was emerging as the methodological heir to redaction criticism. He said that redaction criticism had been so successful in demonstrating the theological viewpoints of the Gospel writers, and that the evangelists’ influence on the traditional material they were editing had been found to be so pervasive, that it was no longer possible simply to characterize the Gospel writers as collectors and editors of tradition. They were much more than that: they were authors -- authors who had made use of traditional material, but authors nonetheless. Curiously, redaction criticism was so successful that it led one to discover its own shortcomings and thus to move beyond it. As the biblical scholar and literary critic Dan Via so aptly put it, redaction criticism “mutated into a genuine literary criticism.

It is crucial to realize the magnitude of this “mutation.” Literary criticism is not simply the methodological heir to redaction criticism; it is not just the latest faddish approach available to the student of the Gospels. It represents a significant shift in perspective away from the concern for historical matters that has dominated biblical studies for so long. I will describe the development of the historical critical approach to the Gospels, so that it will be clear how a literary critical approach is different.

The historical critical approach to the Gospels (and to the whole Bible) came into its own in the 19th century. In Gospel studies this was primarily the era of source criticism, the quest for the written sources that were thought to lie behind the Gospels as they now exist. Source criticism was necessary because there seemed to be a direct relationship of dependence among the Gospels. Near-verbatim repetition among the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke makes unavoidable the conclusion that at least one of them functioned as a written source for at least one of the others. The solution most widely agreed upon to the question of who is borrowing from whom is still the Two-Source Hypothesis, according to which Mark is understood to be the first Gospel written, and Mark and the hypothetical source Q are proposed as the primary written sources used by Matthew and Luke.

An important footnote to this chapter in the development of modern biblical scholarship is the fact that source criticism was often called (and still is sometimes called) “literary criticism.” This is an indication that 19th century biblical critics were initially concerned with the Gospels as literature. But the first, most glaring literary problem they had to grapple with in the Gospels was the matter of sources. As a result, what they called literary criticism was rapidly reduced to the search for the written sources lying behind the biblical books. Nineteenth century literary criticism of the Gospels thus dealt not with them but with their prehistory. When modern literary critics speak of their task, they do not reject insights into the sources lying behind a text, but they place the emphasis on the text itself, as a finished literary construct.

In the years after World War I, form Criticism was developed; it maintained the focus on the prehistory of the text. The form critics attempted to isolate the discrete units of oral tradition preserved now in the written Gospels, and they assessed how the form of each individual pericope had been shaped by the sociological context in which it originally had been used. Here we see not only the same focus on the prehistory of the text that had been prominent in source criticism, but also the tendency already strong in source criticism to fragment or disintegrate the text in search of its antecedent components. This is another of the legacies of the historical critical enterprise as it has been conducted by biblical scholars: the penchant for disintegrating the text into earlier and therefore supposedly more significant pieces of material.

The modern literary critic finds no reason to dispute the important insight that much oral tradition does lie preserved in our written Gospels. And the sociological setting of any piece of language, whether oral or written, can scarcely be ignored. But the present-day literary critic is impatient to put all the pieces isolated by the form critic back together, to see what the whole looks like. By way of analogy, I tell my students that one can learn a great deal about a car by tearing it down into its component pieces and studying the form and function of each piece. But unless one puts the pieces back together to see the car functioning as a single, integral whole, one can hardly claim to have understood the car as a car.

Following World War II, redaction criticism came upon the scene. This method began to put back together some, but not all, of the pieces isolated by the form critics. The goal of the redaction critics was to understand the redaction, or editing, of the traditional material by the Gospel writers. In particular, redaction critics have been especially concerned to fathom the theological viewpoints implied by the way the evangelists edited their sources. The redaction critics have discovered a surprising degree of theological sophistication as well as a previously unsuspected degree of coherence in each of the Gospels, but the method is severely limited by its inherited inclination to view the Gospels essentially as edited collections of traditional material. Although redaction criticism tended to give more respect and credit to the individuals who wrote the Gospels than source or form criticism had, it still placed a great emphasis on the prehistory of each Gospel and tended to disintegrate each text into material labeled “tradition” and other material labeled “redaction.”

At this point, perceptive scholars like Norman Perrin began to suggest that if the Gospel writers were able to produce a reasonably coherent narrative out of a collection of traditional material, and, moreover, if they successfully communicated their own theological perceptions by the way they, put the pieces of tradition together, then we should start to acknowledge them as legitimate authors. The fundamental insights of source, form and redaction criticism might still be affirmed, with sincere gratitude for the labor of the practitioners of these methods. But the time had now come to resist the longstanding impulse to disintegrate the Gospels in the effort to comprehend the prehistory of each text. It was time to put all of the pieces back together, to see how a Gospel works as a piece of literature, as an integral, literary whole. Thus redaction criticism led Perrin and others to move beyond redaction criticism, and thereby to move away from the focus on historical questions that had dominated biblical scholarship for so long.

It would be rash to suggest that the era of historical criticism in biblical studies was only a prelude to an era of literary criticism. I think it is fair to say that a host of important literary questions about the Gospels have been held in abeyance for a century and a half, awaiting the work of the source, form and redaction critics. It was probably inevitable that questions about written sources, pieces of oral tradition and the editing or redaction of it all would be raised and addressed first. Each of these concerns is necessitated by the nature of the Gospels; each of these factors was involved in their creation. Appropriately, each has received a generous amount of attention for many years. Now it is time to bring forth those other, literary questions that have been waiting in the wings for so long. Perrin conveniently summarized a number of the unexplored literary concerns in the quotation above: the structure of the literary whole, themes, characters, plot and so on.

It is not simply that these genuinely literary concerns have waited quite long enough to be brought onstage. It is also the perception of many scholars that the results of source, form and, especially, redaction criticism impel one to move on to literary criticism. I found out for myself, in an unforeseen manner, that redaction criticism mutates into genuine literary criticism -- a discovery made in the course of writing my dissertation (now published as Loaves and Fishes: The Function of the Feeding Stories in the Gospel of Mark [Scholars Press, 1981]).

The topic of my dissertation was the two stories of a miraculous feeding of a multitude in Mark: the Feeding of the Five Thousand (Mark 6:30-44) and the Feeding of the Four Thousand (Mark 8:1-10). There has been a time-honored consensus, going all the way back to the source critics, that these two stories represent variants of a single traditional story. The Gospel writer included both versions, it is said, almost carelessly. After all, in both versions of the story the disciples seem to have no idea of what Jesus is capable of doing to feed vast crowds. Surely they would not have been so obtuse on the second occasion of a miraculous feeding. Therefore, the standard argument runs, these two stories are actually variants of the same story, each version of which included some mention of the disciples’ initial ignorance of what Jesus is about to do. When the evangelist tells essentially the same story twice, the disciples are accidentally made to look incredibly stupid.

That is the usual scholarly accounting of the two feeding stories in Mark. Suspecting that rather than explaining the stories, this theory just explained them away, I applied standard redaction critical techniques to them to see if I could detect where Mark was borrowing from tradition and where he was editing that tradition. I found I could not substantiate the supposition that both stories were inherited by the evangelist from the tradition. The shorter and less colorful of the two stories, the Feeding of the Four Thousand (Mark 8:1-10), may well have been inherited from the tradition -- its vocabulary and compositional style are unlike that of most of the Gospel and may betray an origin in a source used by the evangelist. The Feeding of the Five Thousand (Mark 6:30-44), on the other hand, was probably composed entirely by the Gospel writer. The vocabulary and style of this story was absolutely congruent with the vocabulary and style favored by Mark when he is editing his sources. In addition, careful analysis suggests that the older, traditional form of the story served as a model for the evangelist’s own composition.

At this point redaction criticism reaches an impasse. The redaction critic is supposed to find the word or phrase that reveals the editorial activity of the evangelist in shaping the tradition he inherited. But what is one to do when he finds instead that the evangelist has composed an entire story? That is, what is one to do when one finds that Mark was not simply an editor of tradition, but a fine storyteller in his own right? Redaction criticism, with its orientation toward editors and editing, is no longer helpful at this point. If the editor is really an author (who just happens to edit), then we need a critical method that will help us to appreciate and to understand the author as an author and his Gospel as a genuine literary work. Redaction criticism serves us well in our quest to understand the Gospels, but eventually its usefulness wanes, and one must turn to a genuine literary criticism of the Gospels in order to continue the quest.

With regard to the feeding stories in Mark, the interesting literary question is not what the Gospel writer was trying to say when he composed the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Altogether, the storyteller chooses to tell us not one but two feeding stories. It is irrelevant that one story is traditional in origin and the other his own composition. Mark, as the author of the Gospel, bears full responsibility for the entire narrative, regardless of how much traditional material he may have incorporated into the story. The literary critic, concerned with interpreting the Gospel as an integral, literary whole, must deal with both feeding stories with equal seriousness. Therefore, even if my thesis that Mark himself composed the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand were to be conclusively refuted, I would still insist that both stories need to be taken seriously as episodes in Mark’s story about Jesus. From a literary critical perspective, it simply will not do to explain away the tensions arising between the two stories by labeling them variants of pre-Gospel tradition.

One can no longer dodge the admittedly distasteful conclusion that the author intends for the disciples to come off badly in this pair of stories. They look dense because that is the way the author paints them. Indeed, Mark has used rich irony in the feeding stories and throughout the Gospel. When the second feeding incident begins to unfold, it is narrative artistry and not careless editing that makes the disciples say, “How can one feed these men with bread here in the desert?” The reader, remembering the earlier feeding incident, knows very well how Jesus is able to satisfy the needs of the crowd. But the disciples seem oblivious of his power. They skewer themselves on their own words, while the reader watches and learns from their mistakes.

Of course, in a thorough literary critical interpretation of the Gospel, one would expect the portrait of the disciples in the feeding stories to be consistent with the portrait of the disciples elsewhere in the Gospel. This in fact seems to be the case; several scholars have suggested that the theme of the obtuseness and failures of the disciples pervades the Gospel of Mark. Upon further literary study it may prove to be the theme of the Gospel, perhaps replacing the “messianic secret” in the affections of students of Mark’s Gospel.



The literary criticism of the Gospels, as illustrated by this interpretation of the feeding stories, has much potential to benefit both the academy and the church. I have already indicated the way in which literary criticism furthers the development of approaches used in Gospel studies, while at the same time it represents a major shift in orientation away from the longstanding preoccupation with historical questions. I have suggested that a host of literary questions have long awaited careful consideration, and that now the time has come to give them the attention they deserve. There is much work to be done in this long-neglected vineyard.

But to state even more sharply the challenge that literary criticism presents to both the academy and the church, I would say that our work is to rediscover a sense of the wholeness of each of the Gospels. When we do that, we will begin to hear once again the unmistakable voice of each individual evangelist as he tells us his own version of the story of Jesus, from beginning to end.

The challenge of literary criticism confronts a guild of biblical scholars who have been predisposed to disintegrate the Gospels into supposed component pieces. The church, too, has often stifled the voice of each evangelist, either by disintegrating his Gospel into bite-sized lectionary texts, or by harmonizing the Gospels, melting them together into one variegated lump of Gospel lore. Few biblical scholars have taken seriously both feeding stories in Mark; similarly, how many sermons have you heard on both stories, as a pair? Such sermonizing would feel awkward for most of us, for that is simply not the way expository preaching is usually done. And yet a literary critical reading of Mark suggests that this pair of stories belongs together, and if we wish to understand what Mark had in mind by writing his Gospel, we had best keep them together. Or to state the challenge of literary criticism yet another way, perhaps we should note that the Gospel writers produced neither volumes of learned exegesis nor sermons. Rather, they told stories; and if we wish to understand what the Gospels say, we should study how stories are told.

The Kingdom of God Belongs to the Poor

Luke 6: 17-26:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will befitted

Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

Our Gospel lesson for today is part of the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew, the sermon on the Mount is very long, but Luke gives a shorter version of it.

The Sermon on the Mount is addressed to the disciples. It is about the nature of the kingdom and life in the kingdom of God. It is a beautiful sermon and millions of people are fascinated and attracted by its message. In India, a large number of Hindus have great love for the teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. It had produced a great impression on Mahatma Gandhi. Reading the Sermon on the Mount gave him comfort and boundless joy, he once said. It was one of the influences which led him to adopt the principle of non-violence (passive resistance) in his political struggle against the evils of colonialism.

In the first century, Israel was eagerly awaiting the coming of the new age. This longing for the dawn of a new age was not confined to Israel alone. The people in Rome, long before the birth of Christ, were longing for a leader who would establish peace and inaugurate a new age. The last years of the Roman Republic were years of utter chaos, an age of agony for ordinary people. Military leaders fought against each other in their lust for power. It was a time of bloodshed. The people were longing for a leader who would bring about order and peace. When Augustus defeated the rival military leaders and brought about peace in the first century, he was hailed as a Messiah. The advent of peace under the Roman Caesars seemed to the poets of the Augustinian era as the dawn of a golden age. It was to such a situation that Jesus came.

Jesus preached the kingdom of God, inviting all ‘to repent and enter the kingdom of God.’ The kingdom of God represented a new age, the messianic age when God’s will would be done on earth as in heaven. What is the new thing about the kingdom of God? What happens when the kingdom comes?

In the Old Testament, the prophets foretold what would happen when the kingdom arrived. In Isaiah chapter 25, there is a graphic description of the new age to come.

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine -- the best meat and the finest of wines. On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces.

In the new age, God will prepare a banquet for all peoples, not merely for the people of Israel. God will destroy the shroud that is spread over all people. The shroud means the sheet that is used to cover a dead body or the face of people who mourn. There is a shroud of gloom that spreads on all areas of the life of the world today, the gloom that is spread over the children of broken families, over single parents, over the unemployed, over minority communities. The banishment of sorrow and suffering, misery and pain, even death, belong to the very heart of the kingdom of God.

In Isaiah chapter 61, the prophet again speaks of what will happen when the Messiah comes.

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release for the prisoners.

In God’s kingdom all that destroy human life, human dignity and human freedom will be removed. This expectation has been fulfilled with the coming of Christ. In the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah and announced, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’.

The Sermon on the Mount is about life in the kingdom. The Beatitudes summarize the nature of the kingdom. "Blessed are you who are poor." In this world, in our society, the poor will always remain poor. They will always be hungry. The meek will always be persecuted and those who weep will always weep and no one is going to comfort them. This is the way of the world. In our society, ‘Blessed are the rich, for they will receive more wealth and influence.’

The coming of the kingdom of God creates a crisis in human society. It challenges our accepted political, economic and social order. In the kingdom of God, the tax collectors, the sinners, the prostitutes, the Samaritans and the Gentiles are accepted. When the Pharisees and the Scribes murmured saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them’, Jesus in reply told the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son. ‘There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.’ Jesus accepted the hospitality of a tax collector and when the Jewish leaders complained that he had gone to be the guest of a man who was a sinner Jesus replied, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, since he is also a son of Abraham’.

This is the new thing about the kingdom of God. When the kingdom comes, the foundations of the old order will crumble. The mighty will be cast down and the lowly lifted up. Blessed are those who are poor, hungry and those who weep. They will all be satisfied. But, ‘Woe unto you that are rich, for you have received your consolation; woe unto you that are full now, you shall mourn and weep’.

‘Blessed’ means that the poor, the hungry and those who mourn are the favored people. It is the task of the followers of Christ to care for them and struggle for a social, political and economic order which is just and participatory. Blessedness also refers to the joy which springs from within, which is completely independent of the changes and chances of the situation one may be in. The beatitude also speaks of that joy which sorrow and loss, pain and grief, are powerless to touch. It is a joy which nothing in life or death can take away.

The wealthy and the mighty of this world depend on their wealth and influence. They have their reward in this world itself. The poor have nothing to depend upon except on God. Their joy and blessedness comes out of their utter dependence on God; it is the joy of walking in the company of God. This is what happens when we live in the kingdom of God. This is a new thing. The poor are favored in the kingdom not only because injustice is done to them in this world, but also because they trust in God. ‘This poor man cried and God heard him.’

Prayer for Christian Unity (Ephesians 1: 9-10)

Ephesians 1: 9-10

Throughout his life and ministry, Jesus witnessed the unifying love of God for all: Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, male and female, the righteous and the sinner. The Gospel was a simple message about the unity of all; it was a message of reconciliation. The writer of the epistle to the Ephesians sums up the gospel thus:

He has made known to us his hidden purpose -- such was his will and pleasure determined beforehand in Christ -- to be put into effect when the time was ripe: namely that the universe, all in heaven and earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ.

From the foundation of the world, God had a plan and purpose for his creation. It was kept secret, but now he was pleased to reveal it to us in Jesus Christ. It is about the unity of all things, and the process of unification is already started with the coming of Christ. This unity is radically all inclusive. It is not limited to one group or one race or one nation or one denomination. It includes the whole creation.

The ecumenical movement is concerned about this unity of all creation in Christ.

Ecumenism in the first place is a vision, a vision of God’s plan and purpose to bring all things together in Christ. In the epistle to the Colossians it is said that the whole universe has been created through him and for him. "Through him God chose to reconcile the whole universe to himself." (Col. 1:16-20).

In the second place, ecumenism does not mean simply organizational unity. Unity in Christ expresses an inner wholeness, a quality of life and relationship. It is said that for the Hindu salvation means the individual soul merging with the ultimate Reality like a drop of water merging in the great ocean, but for the Buddhist the image is rather the ocean entering into the drop.

The ecumenical experience is like the whole ocean pouring into a drop of water. It is the expansion of our consciousness, the widening of our mental grasp. When this happens, we will be able to see the whole world as our world.

The ecumenical vision frees us from too much pre-occupation with ourselves and with our own problems. We are freed to love and serve the needs of others. St. Augustine once said that a man feels more at home with his dog than with a foreigner. This is the nature of human bondage. It is from this bondage that Christ has made us free. Ecumenism is an expression of this freedom, freedom for others, freedom from ego, freedom from the little world of my denomination, race or community; it is a freedom which helps us to see the world as my parish and my family.

Ecumenical vision is also a vision about a larger Christ. John R. Mott, the pioneer of the modern ecumenical movement, used to speak of this larger Christ, the Great Gospel, larger evangelism and the whole Gospel. The ecumenical vision is a vision about a larger Christ who is not active only in my little world, acting in familiar ways, but in the whole world, acting in surprising ways.

Ecumenism is not only a vision of God’s plan to sum up everything in Christ, it is also a task, a mission given to us. Archbishop Nathan Soderblom of Uppsala, who was the great leader of the Life and Work movement, a movement concerned with the church’s social witness, once said, "When the spirit of God visits humanity, it kindles a flame in our heart, a flame of love and justice

The ecumenical vision kindles in us a flame of love and justice which drives us to action. It is not enough that it remains a vision, the vision needs to be translated into actual realities in our everyday life. The unity of human kind, the unity of the church, is a gift of God, but at the same time it is also a task. Our unity in Christ is realized only to the extent that race, color, caste, national prejudices, segregation, denominational separateness are historically conquered and the separateness based on them done away with in the life of the churches and in the life of the society. Bishop Charles Brent of the Protestant Episcopal church in the USA, who was the main initiator of the Faith and Order Movement, used to say, "Whenever God gives a vision, he also points to a new responsibility".

The early church saw not only a vision of God’s plan to unite all humankind, but incessantly struggled to manifest that unity in the life of the church and the life of the world. St. Paul not only proclaimed that God was in Christ reconciling the whole world, but he also reminded the Christian community that, "therefore you are ambassadors of Christ".

Christianity from the very beginning tried to be an inclusive community. This is what differentiated Christianity from Judaism. Christianity was born in Judaism and its founder was a Jew. But very soon Christianity separated itself from Judaism. The new wine could not be contained in the old bottles. The Law, the temple, and separation from the Gentiles were essential elements in Jewish identity. Judaism was a national, an ethnic religion. Christianity, which was a universal religion, could not remain within the confines of Judaism. From the very beginning, Christianity incorporated into itself Jews and Gentiles, the Parthians, the Medes, the Elamites, the Greeks and the Barbarians. It mocked the barriers of race, language and nationality. It accepted everyone and everything except Jewish nationalism.

It was not easy for early Christians who were born and nurtured in the Jewish religion to accept the Gentiles into the Christian community. In the Acts of the Apostles (chapter 10) we have the story of Cornelius and Peter. When Peter in his vision is asked to kill and eat the animals, his reply is, "I have never eaten anything common or unclean". God replies to Peter, "What God has cleansed must not be called common". On that day Peter made a great discovery. "Truly I see God has no favorites".

We read in chapter 15 of the Acts of the Apostles about the Jewish-Gentile controversy where Paul fought for an all inclusive Christian community. After speaking of the great plan of God to unite all things in Christ, the epistle to the Ephesians goes on to describe how the plan of God was being realized in the life of the church. In the second chapter, the author reminds the Gentile Christians of the great transformation that has taken place in their life.

You remember you were once separate from Christ, excluded from the citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenant of promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far away have been bought through the blood of Christ.

Then he says:

For he is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. His purpose was to create in himself one new man but of the two, thus making peace.

This is what happens in Christ. Out of the Jew and the Gentile, Christ has made one new person. Our ecumenical task today, in a world divided by race and color and religion, is to create one new person out of whites and blacks, out of Protestant and Roman Catholic.

In India, a large number of people were considered ‘untouchables’. The stigma of untouchability that rested upon them for generations had condemned them to a semi-human existence. They were systematically exploited and kept down by high caste Hindus. It was among them that the Christian Gospel was preached. Today 80% of Protestants and 50% of Roman Catholics have come from among the ‘untouchables’. For many of those who joined the Christian community it represented an escape from dehumanizing values and conditions of their existence. The very fact that these people were considered as human beings, with dignity and freedom, and were brought into the fellowship of the church, was a powerful witness in India to the transforming and unifying power of the Gospel. Our Lord prayed, "May they be all one".

Jesus Had Compassion On Them (Matthew 14: 13-21)

Matthew 14: 13-21

And when he went ashore he saw a great throng; and he had compassion on them, and he healed their sick. And when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a lonely place and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves. Jesus said, They need not go away; you give them something to eat".

When we read the synoptic gospels, we are struck by the fact that Jesus was always followed by large crowds of people. He attracted crowds in his public ministry. Listen to what Mark says:

Jesus and his disciples went away to Lake Galilee and a large crowd followed him. They had come from Galilee, from Judea, from Jerusalem, from the territory of Idumea, from the territory on the east side of Jordan, and from the cities of Tyre and Sidon. All these people came to Jesus because they had heard of the things he was doing. The crowd was so large that Jesus told his disciples to get a boat ready for him, so that the people would not crush him. He had healed many sick people, and all those who were ill kept pushing their way to him in order to touch him. And whenever those who had evil spirits in them saw him, they would fall down before him and scream, "You are the Son of God." (Mark 3:7-11)

Wherever Jesus went he was in the midst of people. "When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. And many were gathered together, so that there was no longer room for them, not even about the door..." (Mark 2:1)

Jesus among the multitude, Jesus among the crowd, Jesus with the people, this is one of the themes of the Gospel story. We often think of Jesus as a solitary preacher, a religious recluse or a hermit. He was not an arm-chair rabbi or a theological professor. He was a man of the people.

• He went to the people and the people followed him.

• He was seen at home, in the synagogue, at the temple festivals, at the weddings and funerals and near sick beds.

• He was seen watching the farmer sow seed, observing how the seed grew, how the birds of the air made their nests and how children played in the market place.

• He was seen eating with the publicans, sinners and prostitutes:

His was a people’s movement. Who were the people who followed Jesus?

The people who gathered around Jesus were ordinary people, people with needs, desires, hopes and longings. They followed Jesus with different motives and they behaved differently at different times. They were all sorts of people with different needs.

Some of them were people who had lost their land.

• Some were feeling the burden of heavy taxation.

• There were people who experienced the cruelty of Roman rule.

• There were some who were alienated from the temple religion.

• There were the sick, the hungry and the thirsty, and there were others who were homeless, destitute, and marginalised.

Among them were people who wanted to hear about the coming rule of God and the establishment of the kingdom of God.

Jesus rebuked very harshly the religious leaders of his time. He criticized the political leaders. He found fault with his disciples. But he was never angry or annoyed with the people. He did not tell them they were poor because they were lazy and did not make use of the opportunities offered to them. He did not tell them that their suffering was because of their sin. He did not tell them that public money should not be spent on them. Once, when they saw a man who was blind from the time of his birth, his disciples asked him, "who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was blind from birth". Jesus answered, "It is not that this man or his parents sinned; he was born blind that God’s power might be displayed in curing him". (John 9:1-2).

Jesus knew very well that the people who followed him were not saints, holy men and women; and they did not follow him purely for spiritual reasons. He also knew that very often they were in that situation because the good things in life were taken away from them by those who are powerful in society who amassed for themselves economic, political and cultural supremacy at the expense of others.

When Jesus saw the crowd, his heart was moved with compassion, for they were like sheep without a shepherd. In the biblical usage, the word ‘compassion’ is a very strong word. In its original Greek it means a movement of the heart from oneself to the other. Our heart takes upon itself the suffering of the other. It is now more ours than the other person’s. We stand in the place of the other, carrying the other’s burden.

Jesus had compassion on the crowd. Salvador of Marcilles, a fourth century church father, said that when we say that Jesus had compassion on the people it means that all the individual suffering of many people is gathered in Christ and Christ bears all the suffering at the same time. The pressure of the suffering of the people is Christ’s passion. Christ is the sum total of all the poor in this world.

When he saw the crowd, he had compassion on them. They were hungry and thirsty. This is the immediate context of the feeding of the five thousand. It is not a demonstration of Christ’s miraculous power. He was not a magician or wonder worker. The feeding of the people was the natural outcome of his compassion. It was the result of the manifestation of the kingdom of God and its righteousness. The disciples tried to evade their responsibility, but Jesus told them, "They need not go away, you give them something to eat." John Chrysostom once said that God said to human beings, I have created heaven and earth, now I give you the power to make earth heaven. That is what happens when we feed the hungry.

The Mercy of God (Exodus 20: 1-20; Matthew 18: 21-35)

Exodus 20: 1-20; Matthew 18: 21-35

You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you? (Matt. 18: 32-33)

Jesus told several parables to illustrate the nature of the kingdom of God. The meaning of the kingdom of God, which is the central message of Jesus, is the unlimited love and mercy of God. A number of Jesus’ parables of the kingdom refer to this love of God. The kingdom of heaven is like a householder who hires people who are unemployed, hiring them at different times of the day but paying them equally. "Are you envious because I am generous," he asks.

The kingdom of God is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet. When those who were invited did not turn up, he tells his servants: "Go there in the street and gather everyone for the banquet".

Or it is like a man who had hundred sheep; if one is lost, he leaves the ninety nine and goes after the lost? It is not the will of my father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.

Or, the kingdom of God is like the woman who lost one coin and sweeps the whole place until she finds it. Then she calls the neighbors and says, "Rejoice with me". "I tell you", says Jesus, "there will be joy before the angels of God in heaven over the one sinner who repents".

The kingdom of God is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servant. When the man, whose debt ran into millions, fell down at his master’s feet and prayed, "Be patient with me", the master took pity on him and let him go free.

The kingdom of God is about the unlimited love of God, about the unlimited patience of God, about the unlimited forgiveness of God. We often want to set limits to God’s mercy and forgiveness. This is what Peter wanted. He asked Jesus how many times he should forgive. He wanted to be exact, he wanted to be definite and he wanted to draw the line when to forgive and when not to forgive.

In the same way, there are unwritten laws in the church about forgiveness. The kingdom of God is the unbound bounty of God. We are often impatient with God because he is generous in his forgiveness. Jonah was very angry with God for forgiving the people of Nineveh. In the parable of the householder who hired laborers at different times and paid them all equally, the people who were engaged first were envious of the generosity of the householder.

God cannot be God if he is not forgiving. In the Garden of Eden, God told Adam and Eve: You can eat everything except the fruit of one tree. If you eat, you will die. The wages of sin is death. They ate, they were entitled to die. Will God’s love allow them to die? Can he break his own law and spare them? God was in a dilemma. What did he do? He himself became a human being in order to receive the punishment which was meant for human beings and died instead of them. This is how St. Atbanasius of Alexandra and some of the other early church fathers explained the meaning of incarnation. God cannot be God if he is not forgiving. So what is our response?

The king asked the unforgiving servant: Should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? I remitted the whole of your debt when you appealed to me. Were you not bound to show your fellow servant the same pity I showed you?

Our first lesson for today, Exodus chapter 20, begins thus: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage". Then follows the Ten Commandments. The Law was not given so that Israel could work out its own salvation; it was not a means of salvation at all. It was given to a people who were already saved. The observance of the Law is a joyful response to a God who has shown mercy. The recipients of God’s mercy must respond in a particular way and shape their life accordingly. "You shall have no other God beside me". You should respect the rights of your fellow human beings and show mercy as I have shown mercy.

There is a beautiful story about Gautama Buddha. One fine morning Buddha was walking on the edge of a lotus pond in paradise. Though the lotus leaves covered the pond, Buddha could see hell deep below, all blood and fire and thousands crying and cursing. Among them Buddha recognized a person whose name was Kandata -- a bandit who murdered people while on earth. But Buddha remembered that Kandata did one good thing.

One day as Kandata was walking, he saw a small spider creeping on his way. He lifted his leg intending to kill it, but he did not. He thought that, though the spider was small, it was endowed with life, and so he spared it. Buddha while watching remembered this good deed of Kandata and thought of helping him. Then Buddha saw a spider making a web with its silver thread on a lotus leaf. He picked up the spider thread with his hand and let it down to Kandata. Kandata took the end of the thread and started to climb up. He felt the thread strong and almost reached paradise. Then he looked down and saw many others taking the spider thread and climbing up. Kandata was angry and called out, This thread is mine, you sinners get down, otherwise the thread will break. Then the thread broke and all went down including Kandata.

The thread was Buddha’s compassion. The thread of Buddha’s compassion could bear the burden of all creatures in suffering, but it could not bear the burden of one person trying to save himself at the expense of others. Buddha was very sad that day. Where compassion is lost, where forgiveness is lost, there is no God. "So also my heavenly Father will do to everyone of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart."