When I came back to the United States after two years of teaching in England in the mid-1960s, the words and tune of that song, sung with Bob Dylan’s ersatz-Appalachian whine, were reverberating through the air at the University of Illiniois at Champaign-Urbana, where I was about to begin a master’s degree in English.
I found myself singing along with everybody else, then, gradually, not singing, then worrying, and finally badly disturbed. If everybody actually attached any serious meaning to the sentiments of the song, then we were in deep trouble. The whole idea was that everyone over, say, 25 had better bug out, since they, being old, constituted nothing but an obstruction to the brave new world that “The Movement” was about to build. Everything—that’s everything: morals, manners, suppositions, politics, ethics, gender—had to go. Evil in the world was the fault of everyone over 25 and their ancestors back to Eden, and The Movement was going to regenerate mankind (PC. language hadn’t got hold yet), and we were about to enter an era of innocence, peace, love, and smile-on-your-brother.
My difficulty with that was that I didn’t believe it. But I think I was the only one of 60,000 people on the campus who didn’t. They really thought that original sin could be evaporated simply by popping daffodils down the barrels of the National Guards’ M1 rifles and calling each other “brother.” Fornication, drugs, and self-congratulation were fine: The evil in the world was “out there” in the military-industrial complex, racism (500 miles away in Selma), and something called conservatism.
All of this seems like a bit of ancient history. But plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. We are seeing a piquant variation on the theme in the events of this year, most notably in the election of Benedict XVI as pope. The general notion that rules with tsar-like absolutism over the major TV networks, academia, and the presiding newspapers is that “times have changed,” and the Roman Catholic Church had better catch up.
That is, the pope had better get with the agenda. Commonly, the top items on that agenda are birth control, condoms for the prevention of AIDS, priestesses, the slaughter of the innocents (euphemistically and mendaciously called—and espoused by millions of Catholics—”choice”), and the entire agenda of the gay caucus.
The apoplexy in the press (with a few notable exceptions) was almost tediously predictable. Ratzinger is a German. He had belonged to the Hitler Youth. He is a “hard-liner.” He is an “arch-conservative.” He suppressed the Latin American liberation theologians (i.e., he is against the poor).
The difficulty with all of this is that slogans and abbreviations are as far as public discourse goes. For example, a seminarian telephoned me from Duke University, and his principal remark was that Benedict is “against condoms.” Ergo, bad pope.
Those two words—”against condoms”—will carry any public airing of the topic. But the Roman Catholic Church has an immense, sophisticated, and deeply humanitarian moral theology. Fornication, as it happens, works toward the destruction of the human person. It represents a ripping of the fabric that veils the sanctity of our personhood or, to change the metaphor, a bartering of the crown jewels in the flea market. The Church has always taught this. All the major religious and ethical systems in every civilization, tribe, or society teach this. No priggish pope made up the idea. Condoms expedite this trashing of our humanity. The Church bears witness to the dignity that crowns us humans. The Bishop of Rome is the keeper of this tradition. Benedict XVI is not a “hard-liner.” He is a faithful shepherd.