Gaining Insight

I know that over the years folk singer and activist Pete Seeger has been criticized for his seemingly uncritical support of the then Soviet Union. He was roundly chastised for never speaking out against the excesses and then torture and atrocities of the Staling regime. As an old-guard leftist Seeger came in for many challenges.

Ron Radosh, in a special to the New York Sun, mentioned that he had recently called Seeger to task after a documentary on his life. He said at the time that while Seeger had written many laudable songs on social issues, even in other countries, he never wrote one about the Gulags and the death lists of Stalin. Recently, then he received a letter from Seeger. Radosh then wrote:

I almost fell off the chair when I read Mr. Seeger's words: "I think you're right - I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR." For years, Mr. Seeger continued, he had been trying to get people to realize that any social change had to be nonviolent, in the fashion sought by Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Seeger had hoped, he explained, that both Khrushchev and later Gorbachev would "open things up." He acknowledged that he underestimated, and perhaps still does, "how the majority of the human race has faith in violence."
--New York Sun

I applaud Seeger for his words- and Radosh for the willingness to post what Seeger said in his own column. Both have showed in this a willingness to talk that is often lost in too much political rhetoric. I for one am glad that Seeger can say these things now. Pete is one of my heroes. He has been a tireless advocate for what he saw as right and true and needed for a better world. I have often disagreed with his extreme leftist, even communist stance and support of the Soviet state's dictatorship. But I have seen him stand up in music and life to do what is right. (Plus I like his music!)

But the last quote in the article amazes me- and perhaps gives a clue into why Seeger continues to work as he does. He has "underestimated how the majority of the human race has faith in violence." As a Christian pacifist myself I find that remarkable. I have seen over and over in my life the devastating truth of what Pete underestimates. Perhaps it is a hopefulness built on his own desire to make the human experience less warlike. But it surely does ignore- or play down- the depths of the human soul from which violence can spring.

Whether you believe that the Genesis stories are exact accounts of actual events or "creation stories" explaining the events that all can see, it is not a surprise that Cain and Abel, the world that brought about Noah's Ark, or the impetus for the Tower of Babel make up most of the first 11 chapters. It is the deepest sadness of the human story writ large- jealousy, hatred, greed, death. We are not immune.

As Stanley Hauerwas once said in a slightly different form, I am a pacifist so I can be reminded of what I should do when I am tempted to do the opposite. I don't know whether Pete Seeger has learned the profound potential for violence behind human nature, but I applaud that he has made some statements that challenge his own past support of such violence, if only by his silence.

One of the most dangerous things about our human political, philosophical and religious approaches is that we so easily adopt blind acceptance of things that may or may not be as true as we think they are. What Seeger fell into with the Soviet Union we may just as easily fall into with our American nationalism or Christian triumphalism or atheistic "superiority feelings." Any completely blind acceptance of a human interpretation of such things can easily lead us into places we better not go.

Doubt and honest reflection and critical thinking and analysis are requirements for our world to survive. Perhaps, with each such step of honest reflection, any of us can move to a closer walk with what is truly beyond us but which we can move closer to in honesty.