The Temptations a Revolutionary Encounters

THE Berrigans contend that revolution must begin with profound personal change, because other human development is impossible without it. They recognize that a violent society can invite equally violent revolution, but they do not counsel it. In his new book, No Bars to Manhood, Daniel Berrigan suggests the temptations that the revolutionary must face. Excerpts:

P: The validity of politicizing others as a tactic is always questionable. My difficulty is not with the tactic as such, but with the way it almost inevitably becomes an occasion for manipulation of others, on behalf of more or less laudable purposes.

P: Do not validate old, bankrupt methods of coercion and murder by creating new, bankrupt methods of roughly the same things. "Doing one's thing," rightly understood, is a way of opening doors to the imagination. For student groups and others it has meant a very precious thing: "Among us, you are a free man. Become yourself." At the same time, "Do your own thing" can be twisted by the immature and undisciplined in accord with their own whims. Then it becomes a license, a kind of big or little game hunt. Activists ruin others because "their thing" demands intellectual or sexual coercion. In the name of doing a big public thing, they do shameful, personal things and leave the wreckage of other lives to mark their trail.

P: Corrupt and current forms of power make great capital of abstract terms in order to mask their chief occupations. So men speak publicly today of "pacification" when they really mean violence and death-dealing on a large scale. But the rhetoric of activist groups also has its seductions and dangers. Sometimes the language masks an itch for revenge and violence, and contains nothing new, whether by way of spiritual resources or imagination. The most accurate thing that can be said about it is that it has despaired of communication.

P: Everyone with an eye in his head can recognize universal problems. This is not the task. The task is to localize the universal, to render it manageable by getting to work on it where one lives. The real question is, "What can a few men and women offer to a few others by way of alternatives to the general, indeed universal, reliance on death?"

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