I asked, “Is it so easy to change a cultural vision?”
“The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire. The people of Rome were ready to hear what St. Paul had to say to them. If they hadn’t been, he would have disappeared without a trace and his name would be unknown to us.”
“Christianity didn’t exactly catch on like wildfire.”
“Considering the rate at which it was possible to spread new ideas in those days, without printing presses, radio, or television, it caught on like wildfire.”
“Yes, I suppose it did.”
“The point I want to make here is that I have no idea what people with changed minds will do. Paul was in the same condition as he traveled the empire changing minds in the middle of the first century. He couldn’t possibly have predicted the institutional development of the papacy or the shape of Christian society in feudal Europe. By contrast, the early science-fiction writer Jules Verne could make a century’s worth of excellent predictions, because nothing changed between his time and ours in terms of vision. If people in the coming century have a new vision, then they’ll do what is completely unpredictable by us. Indeed, if this were not the case—if their actions were predictable by us—then this would prove that they didn’t have a new vision after all, that their vision and ours were essentially the same.”
I said, “It seems to me that you do, however, have a program. You mean to change minds.”
“Would you say that Paul had a program?”
“No, not really. I’d say he had an objective or an intention.”
“I’d say the same for me. Program isn’t the right word for what I’m doing, though I know it’s the word I used in answering that woman’s question tonight.”
“You almost make it sound as though people should refrain from action of any kind. Doesn’t any course of action eventually become a program?”
“This misses the point. Programs aren’t ‘forbidden.’ What’s important is to understand the difference between vision and programs. Programs are inherently reactionary. This doesn’t make them ‘bad,’ it just makes them reactionary, meaning that they always follow, never lead (because they only react to something else). Programs are like first aid. This doesn’t make them ‘bad,’ it just makes them provisional and temporary. Programs are invariably responses to something bad, which means they must wait for bad things to happen. (Again, this doesn’t make them wicked, it just forever makes them play catch-up.) By contrast, vision doesn’t wait for something bad to happen, it pursues something desirable. Vision doesn’t oppose, it proposes. It doesn’t stave off defeat, it opens the way to success.
“In our culture at the present moment, the flow of the river is toward catastrophe, and programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede its flow. My objective is to change the direction of the flow, away from catastrophe. With the river moving in a new direction, people wouldn’t have to devise programs to impede its flow, and all the programs presently in place would be left standing in the mud, unneeded and useless.”
“Very ambitious,” I remarked dryly.
“You could call my delusions messianic,” B said with a smile. “Others have—those who denounce me as the Antichrist.”
Those words came to me with a little shock, and I spent a moment mulling them over before replying that I didn’t see what the Antichrist had to do with it.
“That’s because you haven’t heard enough—or haven’t followed what you’ve heard to its logical conclusions.”
He had me there. There was no doubt of that. Or at least, so I thought.
* The text of this speech will be found in Chapter 27–The Collapse of Values.
Sunday, May 19 (cont.)
The Inquisition
“I’d like to know why Fr. Osborne is here.” That came from Shirin. I looked at her, b
ut her eyes were on B.
“Shall we see if he’ll tell us?” B asked.
Shirin exchanged a glance with the girl at the other end of her elegant Directoire ottoman. Everybody in the audience seemed to exchange a glance with his or her neighbor. Apparently their answer looked like a yes to B, who turned and nodded the question to me.
I figured I must have good espionagic instincts, because I saw in an instant that there was a lot of safe truth I could tell them without coming within miles of a lie that might trip me up later. My dialogue with B had kept my attention focused on him up to this point. Now that it was my turn, I had a look around. Shirin I’ve already described. She was to me sphinxlike and inscrutable, with her strangely marked face and intense eyes. Bonnie, the girl at the other end of the ottoman (who I later learned was the daughter of an American businessman), was even more overtly suspicious and hostile. The audience behind them (outside what I took to be an inner circle) seemed more neutral. The man B had called Michael was someone I felt an instinctive liking for, I’m not sure why. He gave the impression of being tall, clumsy, and slightly funny looking, with big, fleshy ears, a long face, sleepy eyes, and rubbery, humorous lips, but at the same time both highly intelligent and naturally modest. His clothes were so nondescript that I have no recollection of them at all. There was a short, crafty-looking woman in her fifties that for some reason I pegged as a school principal. There was a distinguished-looking man in his seventies, a physician perhaps, or a retired librarian; later I found out he was a baker. There was a young working-class couple who seemed nervous and slightly alarmed; they were the Teitels, Monika and Heinz. There was a smirking twenty-year-old who looked like he was just itching for a chance to crush me like an insect with his giant intellect; that was Albrecht.
“Let me start by saying why I’m not here,” I told them. “I’m not here as a Vatican emissary. If I were, I’d look like one—I’d be wearing a black suit and a Roman collar. It’s true, on the other hand, that I was sent here by my order, but not as a missionary or a polemicist. I’m not here to make converts or defend the Faith. I’m here to listen and understand.”
“What order?” Shirin asked.
“The Laurentians.” The name clearly rang no bells. I told her it was a teaching order similar to the Jesuits.
“Why do the Laurentians want to ‘understand’ B? Why them rather than the Dominicans or the Franciscans?”