Journal: Emmaus Journal
Volume: EMJ 03:1 (Summer 1994)
Article: The Chronicle of an Undeception
Author: Michael E. Bauman

EmJ 3:1 (Win 94) p. 71

The Chronicle of an Undeception

Michael Bauman1

The Tragic Vision of Life

I confess to believing at one time nearly all the pervasive and persistent fantasies of the sixties. As in Joni Mitchell’s anthem for the Woodstock nation, I thought all I had to do was “get back to the land to set my soul free.” I thought that flowers had power, that love could be free, and that the system was to blame. By 1968, I had the whole world figured out. I knew the cause of every evil—America—and I knew the solution to every problem—freedom and tolerance.

If the truth be told, of course, I knew nothing, at least nothing worth knowing. I knew how to posture, but not how to stand. I knew how to protest, but not how to protect. I knew how to work up an impressive case of moral outrage, but I didn’t know morality. I knew about peace, but I didn’t know enough to fight for it. I knew about self-indulgence, self-preservation, self-esteem, and self-expression, but I didn’t know about self-sacrifice and self-control.

Worse still, I didn’t even know myself. I didn’t know what Socrates knew about me—that I entered this world in a state of total and seamless ignorance, and that my ignorance could never be breached as long as I remained blissfully unaware of it. I didn’t know what St. Augustine knew about me—that the well of my soul was poisoned, and that whatever was down in the well would come up in the bucket. St. Augustine also knew this about my soul: No matter how hard it tried, no matter where it looked, it could never find its rest anywhere but in God. I didn’t know what Edmund Burke knew about—that no government could fix what ailed me, either by the things it did or by the things it did not. The most any state could do was to help protect me from myself and from others.

EmJ 3:1 (Win 94) p. 72

Most importantly, however, I did not know that I was Everyman. When I learned that, I stopped being a liberal.

Like almost all dissidents of my generation, I was a protestor without a plan and a visionary without a vision. I had not yet learned that you see only what you are able to see, and I was able to see only the egalitarian, relativistic, self-indulgent, superstitions of the secular, wayward, left. Please do not think that this was simply a case of prelapsarian innocence. It was not. It was ignorance and it was evil, although I would have denied it at the time.

Only slowly did I come to understand that my fellow dissidents and I had taken for ourselves the easiest and least productive of all tasks, that of denigrator. And only slowly did I come to understand that to destroy is easy, to bu...