Varsity Talk

Friends: I am here to speak at your invitation – or at least, at the invitation of some of you. Thank you for inviting me. The question then rises – What can I say that is relevant both to your condition and my condition?

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The outward environment, here, in this building, in this town, is radically different from where I come from, where I have perhaps my spiritual roots – a house alongside a pa by the Wanganui River.

Your aims and problems may be different. My aim – however poorly fulfilled – is to receive the peace and love of God, and help others to receive it, in a communal atmosphere. Since that is God’s business, my main problems are external – to get the money to pay food bills or renovate spouting, for example.

Your aims are probably more multiple – to pass exams, at the lowest – to make certain complicated social adjustments – or else to crack a rather terrible shell of apathy that belongs so tragically to the varsity environment. I suppose – rightly or wrongly – that our main problems are emotional – confusion and loneliness, the problems of people in a crowd where few make themselves emotionally available to others – the problems of acquiring freedom of choice in a highly conditioned social frame – the problem, at times, of having an extremely sour emotional gut.

My own problems are not quite of this kind – partly because I have amputated from my life, most of the time, the whole echo cage and mirror house of the mass media. I don’t read newspapers. I don’t watch the TV.

Yet people are people – and we all have to contend with the very deep spiritual difficulties that are inclined to crop up in a society as determinedly materialistic as our own. If we go with it, we get leprosy. If we go against it, we get hurt and exhausted by continual clashes with the expectations of our neighbours.

I will give you some notes that I wrote after a three-months stay in Wellington. They may be of some use to you.

Very roughly, I have presented a few of the rock-bottom difficulties of our society. I suggest you think about them. In these notes I did mention the real temptation to become a Marxist – meaning by that, a man devoted to social militancy in a neo-Marxist style.

When a liberal approach shows itself to be useless – when men go to jail every day of the week for being out of work – when girls and boys of fifteen work as prostitutes – when the Government uses petitions about the Maori land as lavatory paper – when bureaucrats develop a curious blindness, and cannot see one old empty house, among a city full of houses, for the homeless to get at a cheap rent – when the complacent backside of a commercialised vulture seems to be shutting out the sunlight – then one may be tempted to break a few by-laws or let off at least one or two verbal bombs.

There is, of course, a Christian precedent for militancy close to one’s hand, in the behaviour of Christ throwing over the tables of the money-changers in the Temple. But militancy is always against something. It would be different if our society was actually impoverished. In an affluent society it is best to get on with the humiliating task of trying quietly and endlessly to construct page 441 something. People can become sane and peaceful even building a fowl house together, out of love.

Still, we have to be able to think about our culture. We happen, not exactly by our own choice, to live in a capitalist society. Therefore we have the problems of capitalism, just as in Russia or China or Cuba, they have the problems of Communism. I doubt if any of you can ignore these problems. They are too massive and too rapidly increasing.

You are bound to be affected by the pains of depersonalisation, desacralisation and centralisation, and the hideous dry rot of the slave-owning mentality – whether you yourselves become slaves or belong to the class of owners.

You might question the use of the word ‘slave’. But people become slaves as soon as they sell themselves – their attitudes, their honesty, their personal freedom of choice, the soul, if you like – along with their labour. In an affluent society slavery is rarely obvious. If Pharaoh, building the pyramids, had fed the slaves well, made some of them overseers, presented them with TV shows of their own work, even held discussion programmes about the history and aims of pyramid-building – but still put them in jail if they didn’t work, made sure his police scoured the desert for anyone making tracks elsewhere, and gave the sick and the old, miserable lodgings and barely enough of a pension to keep them alive – then Pharaoh is still Pharaoh, and the slaves are still slaves – whatever the overseers might say.

Remember then that most of you are being trained as some kind of overseers. It’s no good having overseers that are idiots. They have to be intelligent enough to make the necessary minor decisions – but still too brainwashed, too well bought, ever to buck the system. Under capitalism a social conscience is a social disaster. Self-interest is the keyword in Pharaoh’s educational programme.

As Pope Paul wisely points out, it is not industrialisation per se that gives us leprosy – industry could be a minor blessing – it is the woeful social system that goes along with industry – what one may call the industrial power structure.

I don’t suggest you should become converts to Marxism. But the Marxist critic is often the most incisive one – and I doubt if we can understand our capitalist society simply by using the rosy-coloured lens provided for us by capitalism itself.

It is difficult for students. They are dependent people. On many levels they are owned by their families or other financial backers, as racehorses are owned by people who want to win races with them. But a man or woman is not a horse.

I sympathise if any of you feel that at this stage in your lives, you just want to back-pedal a bit – get away from the authorities who have been shoving you up the ladder for the past ten or fifteen years, and develop new social page 442 contacts. That does make sense. Examinations could hardly be regarded as the main diet of university life, except by the narrowest of cynics.

I do suggest that you should not allow yourselves to be so paralysed by a sense of false obligation – to others, or to an implanted part of yourself – that you don’t endeavour to discover what your true obligations are. I can’t possibly tell you what they are. I wouldn’t know. But I do know that neither your obligations nor mine can be wholly unrelated to the changing of a society that is smothering its offspring as a stupid sow smothers her litter. If we don’t change it, I think it will change itself by further deterioration into some kind of Fascist power structure.

I can’t prove that. But I suggest that – whenever you have the opportunity – you should visit the jails, work in the worst jobs in town – not the best ones – sit for a few mornings at the back of the Magistrate’s Court – get to know by personal contact the special problems of Maori and Island people – invite strangers to participate in your lives – go to the mental hospitals (in that area, students have a very high casualty rate) – and in general make yourself thoroughly acquainted with the great running ulcers and wounds of our culture.

In doing this, you will be performing the main duty of a Christian – whether or not you go to church – since Christ made it clear that works of mercy were essential for salvation. You will also be getting the experience that will tell you what your own social role should be. Thank you.

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