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Coles: You mentioned a little while back that you especially have hope for our young who are university-educated and who have their ideals if not their actions grounded in certain values that you share. I strongly disagree—in the sense that I have not found that people in universities (or for that matter many others who in this century have proclaimed the brotherhood of man) are any more immune to arrogance and meanness and viciousness and snobbery than others of us are. Many of the people I work with (they are now called "middle Americans") are young people —and you don't talk about them . . . Some of these young people may not be as murderous as some of the young people you're talking about. -
Coles: You say you feel American power is uniquely dangerous to the world. I do not agree. I see American power as one element in the world, and one dangerous element. But I do not see American power as uniquely dangerous—not when we have before us the spectacle of Soviet power, and rising Chinese power, and falling British power. How can one overlook the murderous greed we have seen the Kremlin display? What is one to make of the outlandish iconography Mao's Peking unashamedly tries to impose on China, and maybe all Asia?
Berrigan: I am arguing that we are particularly dangerous as a nation—because of the nuclear resources and armaments we possess, and also because of the ideological frenzy induced in us by 20 years of a "cold war." I would never deny that other nations are also dangerous ... I never expect decent activity from great power, whether it be church power or state power.
Coles: You claim it is because I am a husband and a father that I am cautious. In another sense of the word I "husband" my resources and remain loyal to the system, the social system, the economic system, out of fear, out of trembling for my children ... So, I carefully, maybe semiconsciously, calibrate how far "out" I dare go politically. Is that what you're saying?
Berrigan: Yes. And I think marriage as we understand it and family life as we understand it in this culture both tend to define people in a far more suffocating and totalizing way than we want to acknowledge. There is a very nearly universal supposition that after one marries one ought to cool off with regard to political activism and compassion—as compared to one's student days, one's "young" days.
Coles: Married men to a degree lose their social compassion?
Berrigan: Yes.
Coles: You are saying that our institutions are not fit institutions and therefore have no right to exercise their authority as institutions and determine, for instance, how to deal with violence, whether it be from the Klan or from the Weatherman. But if those institutions don't have such authority, which institutions, which people do?
Berrigan: We do.
Coles: Who is we!