Final Letter to Richard H. Nolte

Mr. Richard H. Nolte
The Alicia Patterson Fund
535 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York

Dear Dick,

Now that I am back at Newsweek, Tina and I want to express our thanks to the directors and staff of APF for making the past year possible. To say that our sabbatical was unique, unparalleled, idyllic would slight the experience. We fell into the pace, peace and pleasure of continental European life fairly precipitously and now that we are back we are experiencing the normal re-entry problems.

Tina nearly passed out when she visited her first supermarket since our return. I allowed my driver’s license to expire and have been trying to register a VW we bought in Holland: this process has convinced me that the lines in the Prague police station moved fairly fast and that bureaucracies are the case everywhere. But these are piddling points.

The year abroad has changed our perspective in a number of ways. It was a fascinating experience to view our homeland from an ocean away, and unsettling in light of last year’s tumultuous events. While we discovered and savored the sundry wonders and delights of Europe we were nevertheless struck by the notion that where it’s—happening where it’s at—is in the old U.S. of A.

The main forces by which a society moves, or is propelled, seem to emanate largely from America. Europe takes our cue especially in the communications media, marketing, management, modifying the initial American thrust to suit its national needs. In electronic media, the European approach in almost an exact copy of the American—MacLuhan, of course, would say that electronic media impose their own rules, regardless of human efforts to shape them. The result of this media development will affect European politics in a way similar to the effect media have had on politics in America.

This by way of preface to the following jumble of gypsy scholarship, which is what took me from writing about art and technology to other matters. The progression was logical, since art, like politics, are merely reflections of deeper forces or currents running in a society. It was those currents that came to preoccupy me.

For me, three events stand out from the past year: the street battle of Chicago at the Democratic convention time; the invasion of Czechoslovakia; and, most importantly, our successful landing on the moon. All three events epitomize the difficulties and potentials of the American future. The Chicago battle was a drama of the divisions and danger that confront us domestically. The Russian-led invasion pointed up the difficulties of cooperation in an ideological struggle which has shaken the world for the past half-century continues—in Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East and Latin America.

Our landing Americans (and very American Americans, it should be noted) on the moon will doubtless serve as the great metaphor for many things, not the least of which is man’s increasing need for spiritual conviction and solace. The continuing debate about our moon shot will boil down to the question of whether the achievement took us farther from or closer to the question of God’s existence and man’s faith in His designs.

We were enormously pleased to get back to the states in time to watch the Apollo flight on T.V., overwhelmed to see those first, slow footsteps imprinted on another planet, awed by the complexity of the technology and the teamwork required to take men off the earth, put them on the lunar surface and bring them back again. I have little or no sympathy with those vested interests who continually carped at the wonder of the achievement, though I wondered whether the aftermath might not be another step in the question that has nagged and inspired man since he ate the forbidden fruit.

The term “revolution” is bandied about loosely today, but we do live in a truly revolutionary time (though not for the reasons the word is popularly used). We have, with the symbolic—and quite real—victory over space, come to the point where we can ask the most revolutionary question ever posed to mankind: can Man live without God? Will we heed God’s promise or Man’s promise? As the eschatology of Communism sought to replace that of Christianity, the eschatology of Science and Technology now adds a new dimension—in a sense fulfills the materialist promise of Marx, and corrects Marx’s mistakes.

This seems to me the great irony of superficial events: the Great Cultural Revolution is occurring in the West, not the East, both spiritually, technologically and politically. That West Germany made noises suggesting they would get together financially with Czechoslovakia or East Germany is a revolutionary threat the USSR could not abide. Through technology, the world may be Americanized rather than Communised, but the content of materialist ideologies, which posit Man’s perfectibility over God’s promise of salvation, poses the real revolutionary question of our epoch.

We know Communism, Socialism, Democracy and their variant forms; now we in the West are in the midst of what I choose to call (no doubt making scholars wince) hardware socialism. By this I mean—and this is a simplification—the ideal of Socialism, from Rousseau, to the Fabians, backed up with the supposed infallibility of Science and Technology. If the record of socialist planning in England appears disappointing, one can now assert that the planners never had the technological tools to make their plans come out right. Now we do.

If we can send men to the moon…And so our hubris grows, and grows for good reason since we have, in fact, achieved the unthinkable. Every age is Faustian to the men living through it, but we are living through the epoch when Leonardo’s vision of man at the center of his universe is now seemingly within our grasp. We are no longer necessarily after the girls and gold that seduced the Faust of legend: we are tempted by the prospect of universal peace and plenty.

Most of what I called the future-businessmen are hardware socialists and they are changing our world radically. But against their vision of technological planning and orderly progress we find the chaotic animism of the young all over the world. I believe the FBM stand in a difficult position; they are beyond the comprehension (unless their methods yield profits) of the property society and behind the young who will supposedly inherit the knowledge society. Their “religion” does not possess the charisma nor the substance to attract the young, whose search in every wild direction for spiritual values and convictions is as touching as it is terrifying.

The tribalism of today’s young, and the animism of youth’s music, its narcotic quests, its communal aloneness in masses rallying around this cause or that are as much symptoms as conditions. And the readiness of the young to advocate and activate the overthrow of a “system” that is difficult even for its closest critics to pinpoint or isolate should bring up some doubts about the excellence of their education.

I am pained to confess that I have few answers to what appear to me as difficulties to be worked out rather than problems to be solved. There are, of course, no magic answers, no pat solutions. Men muddle through, using what tools are at hand, and jobs are done. That is the spirit and attitude that built America, and despite centuries of imperfections, landed Americans on the moon. Whether Utopias are dreamed or made remains a moot point. But societies are made before they are dreamed.

There is no finality in my thoughts or my writings, and what seem to me answers are simply signposts pointing on ahead to other questions. In the rich confusion of modern life, I Suppose everyone comes to formulating some sort of rubric to contain, or compress, all the unwieldy questions and notions that preoccupy him. For me, the rubric is the notion of the contending philosophies—or religions—and the seduction of watching how the battle goes.

I may have used my year to reach laboriously a point others reach with little effort. But it took me labor and for this I am in debt to the APF program. Many thanks.

Sincerely,



S. K. Oberbeck