Freedom: A fighting faith VII

The cultural problema is but one aspect of the  larger problema of the role of independent groups, of voluntary  associations in free society.  There is an evident thinness in the texture of political democracy, a lack of appeal to those irrational sentiments once mobilized by religión and now by totalitarianism.  Democracy, we have argued, is probably inherently incapable of satisfying those emotions in the apparatus of the state without losing its own character. Yet, a democratic society, based on a genuine cultural pluralism, on widespread and spontaneous group activity, could go far to supply outlets for the variegated emotions of man, and thus to restore meaning to democratic life.  It is the dispearance of effective group activity which leads towards emptiness in the individual, and it also compels the enlargement of the Powers of the state.
People deprived of any meaningful role in society, lacking even their own groups to give them a sense of belonging, become cannon fodder for totalitarianism.  And groups themsleves, once long established, suffer inevitable tendencias toward exclusiveness and bureaucratization, forger their original purpose and contribute to the downfall of freedom.  If the American Medical Association, for example, had given serious attention to the problema of meeting the medical needs of America today, Doctor Fishbein would not be dunning his membership for funds to support a lobby against national health insurance.  In the short run, the failure of volutary iniative invites the spread of state power.  In the long run, the disappearance of voluntary associations paves the way for the pulverization of the social structure essential to totalitarianism.  By the revitalization of voluntary associations, we can siphon off emotions which might otherwise be driven to the solutions of despair.  We can créate strong bulwarks against the totalitarianization of society.
Democracy requires unremitting action on many fronts.  It is, in other words, a process not a conclusión. However painful the thought, it must be recongnized that its commitments are unending.  The belief in the millenium has dominated our social thinking too long. Our utopian porphets have always supposed that a day would come when all who had not worshiped the beast nor received his mark on their foreheads would reign for a thousand years.  "And GOd shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be pain: for the former things are passed away."
But the Christian millenium calls for a catastrophic change in human nature.  Let us not sentimentilize the milennium by believing we can attain through scientific Discovery or through the revisión of our economic system.  We must grow up now and foresake the millennial dream.  We Will not arise one morning to find all problems solved, all nned for futher strain and struggle ended, while we work two hours a day and spend our leisure eating milk and honey.  Given human imperfection, society will continue imperfect.  Problems Will always torment us, because all important problems are insoluble; that is why they are important.  The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.
This is just as true of the problema of international society.  "What men call peace", Gilson has well said, "Is never anything but a space between two wars, a precarious equilibrium that lasts as long as mutual fear prevents disensión from declaring itself.  This parody of  true peace, this armed fear...may well support a kind of order, but never can it bring mankind anything of tranquility.  Not until the social order becomes the spontenaneous expression of an interior peace in men´s hearts shall we have that tranwuility".  Does it seem likely (pending the millennium) that we shall ever have an interior peace in the hearts of enough men to transform the nature of human society?  The pursuit of peace, Whitehead reminds us, easily passes into its bastard substitute, anesthesia.
So we are forced back on the reality of struggle.  So long as society stays free, so long it Will continue its state of tensión, breeding contradiction, breeding strife. But we betray ourselves, if we accept contradiction and strife as the total meaning of conflicto.  For conflicto is also the guarrantee of freedom; it is the instrument of change; it is, above all, the source of Discovery, the source of art, the source of love.  The choice we face is not between progress with conflicto and progress without conflicto.  The choice is between conflict and stagnation.  You cannot expel conflict from society any more tan you can from the human mind.  When you attempt it, the psychic costs in schizophrenia or torpor are the same.
The totalitarians regard the toleration of conflict as our central weakness.  So it may appear to be in an age of anxiety.   But we know it to be bascially our central strength.  The new radicalism derives its power from an acceptance of conflict -an acceptance combined with a determination to create a social framework where conflict issues, not in excessive anxiety, but in creativity.  The center is vital; the center must hold.  The objct of the new radicalism is to restore the center, to reunite individual and community in fruitful unión.  The spirit of the new radicalism is the spirit of the center- the spirit of human decency, opposing the extremes of tyranny.  Yet, in a more fundamental sense, does not the center represent one extreme? while, at the other, are grouped the forces  of corruption-  men transformed by pride and power into enemies of humanity.
The new radicalism, drawing strength from a realistic conception of man, dedicates itself to porblems as they come, attacking them in terms which best advance the humane and libertarian values, which best secure the freedom and fulfillment of the individual.  It believes in attack- and put of attack Will come passionate intensity.
Can we win the fight? We must commit  ourselves to it with all our vigor in all its dimensions: the struggle within the world against Communism and fascism; the struggle within our country against oprression and stagnation; the struggle within ourselves against pride and corruption; not can engagement in one dimensión exclude responsability for another.  Economic and political action can help restore the balance between individual and community and thereby reduce one grear source of anxiety.  But even the most favorable social arrangements cannot guarantee individual virtue; and we are far yet from having solved the social problema.
The commitment is complex and rigourous.  When has it not been so?  If democracy cannot produce the large resolute breed of men capable of the climatic effor, it Will founder.  Our ot the effort, out of the struggle alone, can come the high courage and faith which Will preserve freedom.