PAGE SIX women use less frequently, and if they keep scoresheets that wo men may not, the truth remains that women understand the words when, they hear them, and they understand the score when it is shown to them. The tendency in our time is for persons to think of each other as things. That is our cultural affliction. It is directly related to our affluence. With wealth comes a measure of irresponsib lity, of "me first", which the poor cannot afford. With "the affluent society" comes a de mend for familial instability and for lack of strong personal ties among the individuals of our country. Our economy requires that persons be mobile. A man must be prepared to go wherever his company sends him, to what ever "success" is to be found. Such mobility is incornpatable with the more traditional value of a stable family. Where once it was common for a family home to contain at one time members from several genera tions and for it to be passed down over several of those gen erations, it is now common for families to be spread over wide regions of our country and for "old folks" to be farmed out to a nursery home where they can 'die without making too much of a mess. A grandchild, if lucky, may first meet grandma at grandma's funeral. Technocracy requires social mobility. Social mobility leads to cultural instability, as is clear ly reflected in the riots in our ghettos,- in our student rebellions. and in our paranoia about com munism, beards, or anything "different" that threatens our al ready tenuous social situation. If some 30% of all marriages in our country end in divorce, and if our nations area of most rapid change, California, that that fig ure is over 50%, it is possible that our "divorce rate" reflects some serious error in our way of conceiving of and living in our world. That 'is not to mention our "suicide rate" or our "crime rate." The current plea for "law and order" is our plea for an aspirin when really what we need is major surgery. THE HIGHACRES COLLEGIAN If we are to begin to make love possible, we must reassess the whole fabric of our culture. If we are to alter the condition of our culture, it will not be suf ficient to merely alter our insti tution. Limiting our concern to better guns for the police, to a larger federal budget, to a change in foreign policy, is to treat the effects of our infection as if they were its cause. Our institutions reflect our people but the sickness is in man, in the individual man, not in his politi cal or social machine. If we are to improve our way of loving, and hence our way of living, we must attack the minds, then the hearts, then the souls of men. Our weapon must be education. With respect to our use of each other as utensils, with respect to the way in which we no longer seem capable of love, one way to perhaps effect a positive change is to re-evaluate the way in which we think about love. Love is in our culture most frequently identified first with sex, and sec ond with a species of feeling. A fundamental cause for the faiblre of so many human relationships is a total identification of love with these two elements and with nothing more. Sex is surely an important part of the total love relationship, and so is feeling, but moments of sexual excitement, or for more healthy among us, hours of such excitement, are transitory. Neither sexual excitement nor any state of feeling can be sus tained at a high level of intensity over a long period of time. We mean by "excitement" or "feel ing" that which is intense but fleeting. What sense can it make, then, to identify love, by which we usually mean something dur able, with what is by nature transitory? What sense can it make to think that love is pure ly a matter of sex or feeling? If love is feeling, then marri age makes no sense. It may be by identifying love with feeling that we cause our divorce rate to be so high. In our thought and expectation we base marriage on what is by nature inadequate to support it: on feeling. Marriage is consecrated in a promise. A promise is essentially different from a passion. A promiseis an act of will, an act aimed at the future, an act meant to have duration; a passion is a response to an immediate stimuli, a re sponse demanding action in the present, a response of limited duration. Today, because we identify love with feelings or pas- sion, we have forgotten the ele ment of will in it. We promise on the basis of transitory passion, not on the basis of a total com mitment of our will. To - say "I love", if we speak truly, is to say "I will to love." It is not to report on the conditions of our adrenal glands. It is this confusion about the proper place of decision, of com mitment, of the will in love, .and the consequent error in expecta tion which derives from it, that has led many young persons to think of marriage as a kind of perpetual date with sexual privi leges. Marriage is not a" dream date so much as it is a total re latimship between two human beings. A total relationship is one in which individuals are com pletely themselves; that is, it is one in which anger is as apt to occur as tenderneSs. - Because young persons expect the same thrill to dominate each day of their marriage as dominated so many of their dates, the first fight with their spouse, because it is a moment of bad feeling, leads them to think "he or she doesn't love me", rather than to see such an explosion as what is to be occassionally expected when two persons live each day together in the intimate condition of marriage. Their initial con fusion about what love involves leads to their disaster. To suggest that love involves will is again to follow Eric Fromm. Love, for Fromm, is "a centered act of the total person ality." It is what we at the start caled a matter of ulVmate ser iousness. In love it is not some thing - that is at stake but one's self. And if there is any immed iate burden nut on us by such a realization, it is the task of be coming a whole human being, the task of curing ourselves of sadism and masochism of ideas and attitudes that in the end may bring us more pain than we can bear. It is the task of learning once again to laugh not with our lips but with our whole being, even as the ballerina dances not with her feet but with her whole body. MEET MR. CAMPBELL RICHARD CAMPBELL Richard Campbell "made his appearance on this earth on the day of December 13, 1942 in a New York City hospital. Later he was educated in the public school system of that city. He gradtated from Stuyves•tatit High School and Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he received his B. A. in humanities, philosophy, and literature in 1965. ,Duitng this time he also attended the Univer sity of Minnesota in Minneapolis. September of 1966 brought him to Penn State where he persued his master in philosophy and oomparative literature. Mr. Cam' bell's plans for the future consists •of teaching, writ ing, and nerhans . study;ng .for a second M. A. in English or in Religious Studies. APRIL,
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