John Paul II as the Last Hippie

It was quite a year, 1968: assassinations, student uprisings, turmoil everywhere, the air itself pregnant with portents. Whatever was going to happen, surely nothing would ever be the same again. What, then, became of the young of ‘68? Why did the fury and mire of their demands--which, it seemed, might topple society’s very foundations--recede like a wave of the sea, vanishing as if it had never been?

For his intriguing “1968” (sub-sub-titled “An International Oral History”), Ronald Fraser and eight other writers whom he enlisted (Daniel Bertaux, Bret Eynon, Ronald Grele, Beatrix Le Wita, Daniele Linhart, Luisa Passerini, Jochen Staadt and Annemarie Troger) interviewed 175 of those who played parts in the student dramas of 20 years ago in the United States, West Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Northern Ireland.

The book is not organized into a necklace of interminable interviews, as might be feared, but rather as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. The story begins with the Cold War of the 1950s and ends with the breakup of the student movements in the early 1970s. Into this story the authors have tucked extensive quotations from their interviews, giving us a kind of split screen on which we are able to view parallel developments in different countries simultaneously.

They have done a beautiful job of capturing the sound of the era. Here, for instance, is Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the saintly student leader of Nanterre University, on the night of the Paris barricades, May 10/11, 1968. “It’s a moment I shall never forget,” he writes. “Suddenly, spontaneously, barricades were being thrown up in the streets. People were building up the cobblestones because they wanted--many of them for the first time--to throw themselves into a collective , spontaneous activity. People were releasing all their repressed feelings, expressing them in a festive spirit. Thousands felt the need to communicate with each other, to love one another. That night has forever made me optimistic about history. Having lived through it, I can’t ever say, ‘It will never happen. . . .’ ”

The Paris barricades are very nearly the center, the still point, of the whole story. Almost immediately, the unity began to dissolve into opposite poles. At one pole were clustered the self-dramatizing dropouts: “We weren’t interested in taking over administration buildings. We were interested in blowing people’s minds, basically”; or, more gently, “Fight imperialism! Eat organic food!” At the other pole were the self-dramatizing, more-or-less violent revolutionaries: “Smash monogamy!” and (a sign at a Weatherman gun display) “P-I-E-C-E NOW!”

Thus commitment and community yielded to the theater of self-absorption, which yielded to vacations (“What kind of a revolution is this,” asked Hans Maier, a literary historian and friend of the German Students for a Democratic Society, “which stops short in the summer vacations?”), which yielded at last to graduation and growing up.

One is even tempted, in more cynical moments, to side with the character in Elmore Leonard’s new novel, “Freaky Deaky,” who says: “Sweetheart, that whole show back then was a put-on. You gonna tell me we were trying to change the world? We were . . . having fun. All that screaming about Vietnam and burning draft cards? That was a little bitty part of it. Getting stoned and laid was the trip. Where’s everybody now? We’ve come clear around to the other side, joined the establishment.”

The authors eschew not only such cynicism but virtually all analysis. Of the many movements that they touch on in the course of their 400 pages, only these remain: the civil rights movements of the United States and Northern Ireland and the human rights movements of the Eastern bloc (which merit but one mention in the text). Why do these remain? Because, I submit, they were not chiefly student movements at all but grew out of enculturated community traditions that were deeply felt and intergenerational. If you are black or Chicano or Ulster Catholic or a Polish shipyard worker, you cannot take the summer off from your struggle--and you know perfectly well that hating your parents has nothing to do with anything. But by limiting themselves to students, the authors have no way of explaining why the movements under study proved so ephemeral. They may also be blinkered by a Marxist bias, which I thought I caught some whiffs of, and which, in its ideological purity, is a sure prescription for misunderstanding just about everything.

In the spring of 1967, only months before the fabled confrontations dealt with in “1968,” Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical (or universal) letter under the title “Populorum Progressio” (“The Development of Nations”). The “universe” to which such letters are addressed is normally the world’s Catholic bishops, but Paul--in a move that had been tried only once before (by John XXIII in his peace encyclical)--decided to address “all human beings of good will.” This was, obviously, because he thought he had something unusual to say, not something of narrowly Catholic interest. What he said--in the leanest, most oracular Latin--was that the Church, as “an expert in humanity,” looked with pain upon the outrageously unequal distribution of the world’s wealth, intended by the Creator for everyone’s use. The rich, he said, had a “duty of solidarity” with the poor, one that could not be discharged by endless babble about fault and the inevitability of free markets but only by sharing. “Development,” he concluded, “is the new name for peace.” Pretty straightforward, really.

Recently, Paul’s successor, John Paul II, issued an encyclical--”Sollicitudo Rei Socialis” (“(The Church’s) Social Concern”)--to commemorate the 20th anniversary of “Populorum Progressio.” It too is addressed to humanity and says much the same thing, pointing out, as did its predecessor, that the arms race stops development cold.

Twenty years later, however, the picture is a darker one, and the hopes of 1967-68 for a greener world have largely faded. John Paul notes that “underdevelopment” has begun to infect even the wealthy countries in the guise of chronic housing shortages and unemployment and that the poorest part of the Third World has become the unthinkable Fourth World.

What are the Pope’s solutions? He has none--at least none of a technical nature. He says the problem is not technical, not theoretical, but moral: The world is the way it is because of the sins of individual human beings, which create “structures of sin”--the vast apparatus of injustice that functions in all societies. I’m not sure how anyone could disagree with this. The Pope’s approach is, after all, so phenomenological--so dependent on describing things as everyone with eyes must see them. Some have felt themselves judged--and howled their displeasure. Most will simply ignore this document, and others like it, as insufficiently exciting to warrant attention. What is happening unnoticed, however, is that the papacy--starting with “Rerum Novarum” (“Of New Things”), Leo XIII’s labor encyclical of 1891--has been cultivating a rich soil of social analysis and moral judgment that has begun to bear fruit--in the relatively bloodless revolutions of the Philippines and South Korea, in the halting but perceptible democratization of the Soviet bloc, perhaps even in the arduously slow land reforms of intractable Latin America.

The Pope has what the students of 1968 did not have, for he directs the Catholic Church, a dusty edifice but just as surely--in the right hands--a potent instrument for change. One could look on him as the Last Hippie, a Don Quixote who still believes absurdly in the possibility of a better world. But John Paul is not about to graduate and join a brokerage. Because he is there for the long haul, a reliable constant willing to put his soul and body on the line, he could--just possibly--succeed in internationalizing the moral crusade of men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and making “peaceful revolution” and “option for the poor” and “civilization of love” permanent terms in the world’s vocabulary.

1968

A Student Generation in Revolt by Ronald Fraser et al (Pantheon: $24.95, cloth;$14.95, paper; 408 pp.) SOLLICITUDO REI SOCIALIS Social Concern by Pope John Paul II (United States Catholic (Conference; (800) 235-USCC; $5.45, paper; 102 pp.)