Triumphs of the Spirit

By LANCE MORROW

How history responds to ideas and yearnings

So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light.

--Lucretius

News, almost by definition, tends in the other direction.

Events may be merely busy, of course--a sort of itch of the unusual, a restlessness in the world. But when the news is momentous, it may run toward darker, murkier regions, toward war and catastrophe.

Yet, sometimes, the news does rise toward the shores of light. Sometimes history responds not merely to the promptings of blind accident or economic tides but to the pressure of ideas or to a kind of coalescence of yearnings. "I have a dream," Martin Luther King Jr. cried at the Lincoln Memorial one August day in 1963. His dream and others made the news, made history, as completely as any bombs or earthquakes did.

There are individual dreams and collective dreams. Charles Lindbergh's trajectory across the Atlantic in 1927 was a vivid feat of individualism. He became one of the last romantic heroes. He brilliantly employed the technology of flight in its primitive stage, before technology seemed to overwhelm the individual. If the American space program produced a triumph of teamwork in an age when hundreds of human brains were needed to collaborate, like microchips, in the mastery of so much detail, Lindbergh's flight represented a peculiarly, almost wistfully, American way of doing things. It was a lonely achievement of the American character, self-contained, self-confident, in motion across great distances. Lindbergh perfectly embodies a contradiction in the older American soul. He was a kind of mystic mechanic. He arced up into another element. He took human possibility into another atmosphere. He made American materialism soar--the first great American export of the technological age.

The birth of Israel was an utterly different sort of achievement. If Lindbergh was the individualist outrider of a new age, the idea of Israel was a collective vision. It arose from an ancient tribal aspiration, the hope of an ingathering after the long centuries of the Diaspora.

The object was to create something where nothing had been before, or at least not for many centuries. After the terrible revelations of the Nazi Holocaust, the impulse was to create, to will a Jewish state into being in the desert. The Zionist ideal, unfortunately, did not sufficiently reckon with the complexities of Middle Eastern life and politics. The European Jews arrived in Palestine, one writer said, as if they had come to colonize the moon. But the place was not untenanted, and all the history of Israel since its birth has been troubled by a 35-year war that, quite apart from the usual territorial disputes and ethnic antagonisms, has been one of conflicting visions, of Israeli hopes and Palestinian hopes.

Martin Luther King's dream was also a collective dream, and the March on Washington in 1963 was also an ingathering. It was not a literal settlement, like Israel, but a moral encampment, the first mass demonstration of an age in which politics streamed into the streets. The mass outpourings of the '60s, the antiwar marches and the racial uprisings in Watts and Detroit and Newark and the rest, all became in some sense imitations of the March on Washington, efforts to recapture its essential sweetness and energy and its unassailable moral force. The subsequent demonstrations--riots, moratoriums, May Days--had a fallen and mitigated and sometimes violent character.

They never regained that quality of urgent dignity and imposing rhetoric that King embodied.

These events of the spirit always seemed to involve motion, a kind of moral migration. Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries, from the 13th to the 20th.

The church in many ways had been fixed immovably, held in a kind of wrought-iron vision of its own immutability. Vatican II opened the institution to change--some thought too much change. The vocabularies and trappings of eternity dropped away; the Mass, celebrated before in the sometimes mysterious universality of Latin, was now simplified, domesticated into vernaculars. The church became both more accessible and less imposing. The church threw itself open to risk.

The 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston was another convocation that changed the historical situation of people, or at least the appearance of it. The meeting in any case ratified and symbolized the change in the minds of women. Mass demonstrations, of course, are held to put fire into the participants as well as to impress bystanders. They bring all the individuals together, often individuals who regard themselves as victims, and show them that they are not alone, give them a sense of their power and possibilities.

Houston did all of that for the women's movement in America. It melded individuals into a solidarity that they had never known before, a union that cut across lines of class and race. If Lindbergh explored individual possibility, the women in Houston sought to join themselves to a truer theme of the 20th century--mass power.

--By Lance Morrow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.