JOURNALISM AND JOACHIM'S CHILDREN

(9 of 10)

(because impossible) heaven-on-earth, Mephisto cannot repossess. He who sups with material progress must use a long spoon—and bring his lawyer; but a return to the main stream of Western thought does not require spurning utterly the material world. Excessive love of materiality has naturally accompanied the Gnostic dream, but the remedy is to end the dream, not to indulge in a hypocritical modern mood described by Richard Wilbur's couplet:

We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear, "you are not true."

The mood that holds material progress unworthy and moral progress impossible is produced by frustration and disappointment at the collapse of Gnostic visions. Modern skepticism is the burned child's blister. When Joachim of Flora's prophecy collapsed, one of his followers, Salimbene of Parma, wrote: "After the year 1260 passed, I entirely laid aside [Joachim's] doctrine, and I am disposed henceforth to believe nothing save what I see." A natural reaction—which can lead either to a better intellectuality or toward stagnation, depending on how "what I see" is defined.

A SET OF CONVICTIONS

A responsible journalist has to be in favor of more & better intellectuality if only because his work makes no sense unless public opinion has a common ground, a framework of ideas and standards within which fruitful debate can take place. Alfred North Whitehead expressed the responsibility this way:

"It is our duty. . .It is our business—as philosophers, students and practical men—to recreate a vision of the world including the elements of reverence and order, without which society lapses into riot."

To discharge his part of this responsibility, a journalist must work along two complementary lines:

1) An avid, ceaseless, sweating pursuit of facts, not as an editor—Gnostic or otherwise—imagines them to be, but as they are. This is primarily the business of the reporter.

2) Consideration of the reporter's facts and the relations between them in the light of other facts and of principles of experience. Without such consideration, the news makes no sense—to the journalist, to the intellectual or to the public. This judgment or adding up is primarily the business of an editor.

Thirty years ago, in its prospectus, TIME stated some "prejudices." On its 1953 anniversary, it can state some convictions, some compass bearings by which it considers the news:

¶ That God's order in man's world includes a moral code, based upon man's unchanging nature and not subject to man's repeal, suspension or amendment.

¶ That, as Supreme Court Justice Douglas said, "we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being," and that American history cannot be understood or correct policy formed except with recognition of that fact. It follows that equality before the law is based on each man's dignity in God's sight; that political liberty is based on the soul's freedom to accept or reject the good; that legal equality and political freedom must be applied without discrimination of race or creed.

¶ That those rights should be enforced, even in favor of those who oppose U.S. institutions, subject only to the state's duty to protect its