NEW RADICALISM
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Volunteers in Colombia David Riesman counted them in. "The Peace
Corps is no exotic junket, made socially defensible by primarily
physical strenuousness," he wrote. "What it does is to put people into
positions of awesome and complicated responsibility." Riesman de–
scribed the "terrifying and illuminating" assignments they had:
In a society where some people desperately want and need them,
while others fear and resent them, they have perforce to become
diplomats without portfolio, in a language in which they feel awk–
ward, among customs easily and unknowingly violated. They can
take nothing for granted, not th'e promises of officials, nor the
smiles of their co-workers, nor yet their own reaction to occasions
of betrayal, dissappointment, or misunderstanding of their work....
Many had become self-trained anthropologists in villages whose com–
plicated networks of influence, malice, and rare benevolence no
one had mapped yet. . . .
To those who have engaged in community action in the urban
or rural slums of America, this will have a familiar ring. The separa–
tion of rich and poor is much the same and the consequences are the
same, whether frustration at the lack of peaceful change explodes in
violence in Vietnam or the Dominican Republic or the district of
Watts; whether outsiders are there to compound the trouble or not.
If
every Communist and Klu Klux Klansman and Black Muslim in
the world took a one-way trip to Mars, most of the problems here
would remain.
Of course, we can't solve all these problems, but we can help in
the development of problem-solving capacity, and the creation of
communities, including a world community, in which people parti–
cipate as self-governing citizens, not as subjects. This would be a
victory not for one nation or group of nations, but for the process
of persuasion, for the process of peaceful change, for the idea of
government by the consent of the governed.
The nineteenth century was less complex-its struggles were
defined by front lines and barricades. The network of struggles now
is
all
around us, and enemies and allies are hard to identify.
This is the second area-this matter of identifying one's enemies
and allies-where I sense a partial blindness in the New Radicalism.
A friend who walked from Selma to Montgomery tells how one of the
young leaders of the march said to him: "The Federal Government
is
the
enemy."
That was said while the march proceeded under the
