In my continuing reading of Martin's "My Life with the Saints," I have come across the not-quite saint and eternal problem to me, Dorothy Day. I know well about her - my mother has been a life-long fan of hers and I have heard her stories throughout my life. Then as now, she has always been (not seemed to be) a person of great compassion, courage and conviction - a person far beyond my moral station in just about every way possible. However, her beliefs and convictions, while morally based, have created problems for me from the beginning, particularly on two aspects. The first: pacifism. She was an absolute pacifist, citing Jesus, and stood steadfast against the first two wars and Vietnam as well (I don't know it for a fact, but I can assume Korea, too). In general, most are familiar with the arguments: while WWI led to WWII, once WWII was started, would it have been better to allow Nazi Germany and Tojo's Japan to take over much of the world? We can argue the ins and outs of this (for instance, Germany would have defeated Soviet Russia without US interference, just as Japan would have stopped Mao from forming communist China), but the question raised is: is violence ever a good thing? I go to a particular event in Dorothy's life to make my point.
In the soup kitchen that she ran in New York, an unstable and violent man threatened to kill one of the male volunteers. He had gotten into a fight before and broken someone's wrist, so it was no idle threat. Dorothy recounted the event as such: she and another woman wrestled the man to the ground which allowed the threatened man to escape. After further struggles, they were able to subdue him enough to get to a phone and call the police - not to arrest him, but to have him sent to a psychiatric hospital. But because they would not sign an official complaint, the police were unable to do this. They were finally able to convince the hospital to take him for a few days, but they could do no more without an official complaint. After some other trouble, they were able to get him confined for a month, but once again, not wanting him in trouble with the law, the hospital was unable to detain him for a longer period. After that, Day believes he left on a job on an oil tanker (or something like that - she was vague). She ends by saying (paraphrase) "You see what we were able to do without using violence?"
This attitude cuts to the root of my disagreement with her: she was not only not able to do much without "violence" (official restraint), but she unleashed an unstable and violent man back onto the world. He left her sphere, but he did not leave others'. Did he kill a man at port in Alaska? Did his widow grieve and her children grow up without the financial and moral support of their father? We do not know; nor did Dorothy. Instead, she seemed steadfast in her conviction that she was right, so steadfast that it seems more a moral conceit than an act of compassion.
This continues her view of "the system," my problem # 2. Growing up near the sweatshops of the American North East in the early 20th century, she witnessed the harsh working conditions of the poor and the immigrants. Afterward, when unionization was beginning, she saw the multitudes of the new poor created by the depression. These observations gave her a life-long distaste (hatred?) for the system and, it often seems, for the rich as a class, which continued until her death at about 1980. I see two problems with her attitude. In the first place, the system changed dramatically during her lifetime, precisely because of our democratic system. And, second, because of this change, much of the chronic poverty in this country can now be attributed to the activities of the poor, or the poor's upbringing (usually both); that is, that many, even most, of the degraded neighborhoods and sub-cultures in America are now the results of personal choices. Jesus told the Pharisees to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's", in effect telling people to have their personal spiritual lives come first. The Jews of the time wanted a military leader to free them from Rome; what they got was a spiritual leader to free them from themselves. And it is in this that I think Day was remiss. The poor are more in need of our compassion, and with that Day had compassion in spades, as a true saint. But logically she was missing something. In pursuit of a political narrative she lost, in this way, her spiritual narrative. Jesus's famous phrase, "You are freed from sin" often leaves out the last part, "go and sin no more." We are to help, but ultimately everyone is responsible for his own life, at least on the moral level. In America, that would include the physical level for most as well.
Yes, that argument could go on all night, as it frequently has. But I have another point to make about Dorothy Day, and this one only positive: to combat loneliness (a deep problem for her), Day prescribes community, and in this I couldn't agree more. My happiest times in life were spent in communities, even though those were always the times of my greatest challenges and poverty. However (there is an "however"), people have problems with community. I discovered this while living in a commune (briefly) during the early-mid seventies (describe in my book Dream Weaver - the chapter entitled "Back to the Garden). I found there something beautiful, but something that I could not do - that is, I felt that I could not leave beside my personal goals for the greater community. I found then that, even at the tender age of 20, I was already an individualist and nonconformist - in other words, an American. And yet I now come to think... that perhaps part of the problem had to do with the central authority and non-traditional theme of the commune. Would a Christian or Buddhist community be more amenable to me and other Americans? There is no question that modern people as a whole are consumed by loneliness - what sociologist Max Weber called "anomie." Individuality is part of our productive and social culture, and yet we all feel the pains of separation. Many are part of political action groups or religious communities, but are these too part-time? Instead, don't we really need the intensive community that was found (and is still found here and there) in the primitive tribes?
Dorothy day was right, I believe, in pointing us to community. But how could we re-attain this? That for another day, FK
In the soup kitchen that she ran in New York, an unstable and violent man threatened to kill one of the male volunteers. He had gotten into a fight before and broken someone's wrist, so it was no idle threat. Dorothy recounted the event as such: she and another woman wrestled the man to the ground which allowed the threatened man to escape. After further struggles, they were able to subdue him enough to get to a phone and call the police - not to arrest him, but to have him sent to a psychiatric hospital. But because they would not sign an official complaint, the police were unable to do this. They were finally able to convince the hospital to take him for a few days, but they could do no more without an official complaint. After some other trouble, they were able to get him confined for a month, but once again, not wanting him in trouble with the law, the hospital was unable to detain him for a longer period. After that, Day believes he left on a job on an oil tanker (or something like that - she was vague). She ends by saying (paraphrase) "You see what we were able to do without using violence?"
This attitude cuts to the root of my disagreement with her: she was not only not able to do much without "violence" (official restraint), but she unleashed an unstable and violent man back onto the world. He left her sphere, but he did not leave others'. Did he kill a man at port in Alaska? Did his widow grieve and her children grow up without the financial and moral support of their father? We do not know; nor did Dorothy. Instead, she seemed steadfast in her conviction that she was right, so steadfast that it seems more a moral conceit than an act of compassion.
This continues her view of "the system," my problem # 2. Growing up near the sweatshops of the American North East in the early 20th century, she witnessed the harsh working conditions of the poor and the immigrants. Afterward, when unionization was beginning, she saw the multitudes of the new poor created by the depression. These observations gave her a life-long distaste (hatred?) for the system and, it often seems, for the rich as a class, which continued until her death at about 1980. I see two problems with her attitude. In the first place, the system changed dramatically during her lifetime, precisely because of our democratic system. And, second, because of this change, much of the chronic poverty in this country can now be attributed to the activities of the poor, or the poor's upbringing (usually both); that is, that many, even most, of the degraded neighborhoods and sub-cultures in America are now the results of personal choices. Jesus told the Pharisees to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's", in effect telling people to have their personal spiritual lives come first. The Jews of the time wanted a military leader to free them from Rome; what they got was a spiritual leader to free them from themselves. And it is in this that I think Day was remiss. The poor are more in need of our compassion, and with that Day had compassion in spades, as a true saint. But logically she was missing something. In pursuit of a political narrative she lost, in this way, her spiritual narrative. Jesus's famous phrase, "You are freed from sin" often leaves out the last part, "go and sin no more." We are to help, but ultimately everyone is responsible for his own life, at least on the moral level. In America, that would include the physical level for most as well.
Yes, that argument could go on all night, as it frequently has. But I have another point to make about Dorothy Day, and this one only positive: to combat loneliness (a deep problem for her), Day prescribes community, and in this I couldn't agree more. My happiest times in life were spent in communities, even though those were always the times of my greatest challenges and poverty. However (there is an "however"), people have problems with community. I discovered this while living in a commune (briefly) during the early-mid seventies (describe in my book Dream Weaver - the chapter entitled "Back to the Garden). I found there something beautiful, but something that I could not do - that is, I felt that I could not leave beside my personal goals for the greater community. I found then that, even at the tender age of 20, I was already an individualist and nonconformist - in other words, an American. And yet I now come to think... that perhaps part of the problem had to do with the central authority and non-traditional theme of the commune. Would a Christian or Buddhist community be more amenable to me and other Americans? There is no question that modern people as a whole are consumed by loneliness - what sociologist Max Weber called "anomie." Individuality is part of our productive and social culture, and yet we all feel the pains of separation. Many are part of political action groups or religious communities, but are these too part-time? Instead, don't we really need the intensive community that was found (and is still found here and there) in the primitive tribes?
Dorothy day was right, I believe, in pointing us to community. But how could we re-attain this? That for another day, FK
RSS Feed