1

"...it is absolutely necessary that rebellion find its reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere." --Camus, The Rebel

There are a lot of people who are very confused by everything that has happened here over the last two weeks. Erik Erikson said at lunch the other day that our "objective referents" have been destroyed. Much of the order has gone out of our lives--things we believed in like the authority of the faculty, the benignness of the deans have suddenly been snatched away, he said. It is only natural that we are confused; Erikson said that he was confused, and he intimated that even Stanley Hoffmann may be confused.

Now, I am not one of those guys who knocks confusion. I find it very hard to imagine "objective referents" that are good enough to have around for more than a few weeks anyway. Still, this essay is mainly an explanation of things, and please forgive it.

The main reason that people here are confused is that they have been trying to interpret the events of the last two weeks the way that Harvard students have been taught to interpret everything--by holding it still (and it won't hold still) and examining it. Mainly, we are intimately concerned with why this is going on. It is a silly thing to be concerned with. Billy Pilgrim (in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five) was concerned with it after some people from another planet carried him away in their space ship, but they set him straight:

"Welcome aboard Mr. Pilgrim," said the loudspeaker. "Any questions?"

Billy licked his lips, through a while inquired at last: "why me?"

"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter. Why anything? Because this moment simply is. have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"

"Yes." Billy in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment, There is no why."

2

But we search for why, and we become hopelessly bogged down in worldly metaphors, which are our second problem. We believe in Boyle's Law and various aspects of Newtonian Physics, and so we think that "outbreaks," "explosions," "eruptions," etc. occur when there is a lot of pressure built up. So when the newspapers and everyone else say that the campus "exploded," our mind moves to the physical metaphor. Next, it moves to the causes of explosion--what enormous pressures have built up and have no place to go and go explode? And so we look for the reasons: the channels are not smooth enough, there are bottlenecks, students are oppressed, the war is creating tensions, people hate something intensely (ROTC, expansion). Our explanations of explosion are based on the metaphor of explosion, and they miss the point.

But metaphor is something that we revere at Harvard. (In fact, Harvard is a metaphor for Harvard.) Thomas Schelling, the game theory professor, was able to convince a large number of faculty members to support his amendment to the Bruner motion on ROTC by comparing ROTC with the Anglican Church. Think of ROTC as the Anglican Church, he said. Now, even if we realized that the Anglican Church is teaching ministers here and that is something we think is wrong for a university to allow, we would not want to boot the Church off the campus so promptly and meanly. The argument is wonderfully persuasive. It was hard for faculty people to think of ROTC as being ROTC for so long without a solution. When ROTC became the Anglican Church, it moved farther away and was easier to deal with. Obviously, you are not mean to a peaceful, sensitive Anglican minister.

Of course, there is a problem with all this. The Reserve Officers Training Corps is not the Anglican Church (or even the Unitarian Church), and it probably never has been. Also, Harvard did not explode last week. There were no buildings flying around and limbs and grass and heads. So why do we look for "unbearable pressures?"

3