Editors' note: The original of this lecture is badly distorted and very difficult to understand. This transcription reflects our best judgment about what is on the tape, but we caution the reader that we are less sure of the words than usual.

{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

...{ }. { }? I -- I do not know your {rules}, and I do not -- { } wish to interfere with Los Angeles' {glory}. {And -- they have the social problem of history. But how about the -- I don't know. { }? Anybody {know}? { }.

I said to you last time in all seriousness that the area of a social history of the United States from 1800 until 1960 had to be carved out against very many ambiguities. The first was that history must be predicated on the future--and this is today not recognized at all; many people treat history as a knowledge of a past that has no relation to the future, that is finished, and -- after this, that somehow and somewhere, the future begins and {acts}. To me, that's a heresy. That's the abolition of history. And I have to say something about our relation -- the relation of this course to the future very definitely today.

The past is that part of the future for which you and I must -- are responsible because it already got started and only through us can it continue. So we are only concerned in human history with that past which was created by our forefathers, our antece- -- predecessors so that it may come to full bloom in the end. Take speech. Obviously people at one mysterious time created all the languages. There must have been in the beginning over 100,000 languages, a fertility which favorably compares to the pattern of -- your inventions of the United States the last hundred years. They were the great creations of -- ancient times, languages. Only on this continent, of America there are still, as you know, several thousand of them. In Africa, there are over 10,000. I only mention this because you have, in the social history, to -- be quite clear about this profound and painful question: will languages endure? How many languages will still have to perish? Obviously, many of these 10,000 in Africa {will} -- disappear, in the dictionary, in print. Nobody is going to speak Swahili and Bantu very long anymore. It's even worse in the Amazonas Basin.

So language, the power to speak, you and I are responsible for, and that must go on. Even though you try to abolish language by slang, it can't be helped. Somebody would have to know the language in which the Bible and in which Shakespeare is written. It may not be English. It may be -- but speech, the power to speak is the first historical phenomenon which was created in the past, and for which you and I--although we don't contribute too much to it--you and I, we are {all} responsible. Somebody has to teach the children, really, and not just the

comic strips.

This is very {seriously threatened} today. Society today moves very rapidly to a -- to a situation in which to learn language is unusual. "So what?" is the -- usually the content of most speeches to which I listen. Very few people can speak. That has nothing to do with the individual idiom. It has nothing to do with English, or with Latin, or with Greek. Understand me right. The power to speak is -- the pow- -- the power to confide in each other, to coalesce with each other. All unionism, all co- -- all cohesion of peoples, nations, depends on our power to speak. And the less you think it is necessary that you -- you say -- I just listen to any conversation, and every important name and stated name, beginning from God and ending with the devil, is replaced in your language by the word "thing." "That thing," and then I know you speak of God. Or "somehow." Also, when a person doesn't know quite, he says, "somehow." This is the abolition of speech, and it's rapidly progressing, and has never for -- disappeared so -- so quickly as in our generation. Or I'm afraid I already covered more than one { }.

So that's a serious question in society: how far is this heritage of ours, that we take for granted that human beings do speak--how far is this going to reach the future? So the historical problem of society in this century, and in all technical life, in all industrialized societies at this moment is: will that which started in the past--the power to speak--will this wither on the stem? Will it disappear? Will it be reduced to U- -- what is it?--UCLA? Or -- or will you still understand that it is the University of California at Los Angeles?

One is speech, and the other is shorthand. And you cannot get speech only in the form of AAA, BBB, CCC, et cetera. But most of you, if you count your vocabulary, really excel in replacing all the true words by "something," "somehow," "somewhere," "some-when." We all -- becoming very quickly somebodies. That's not enough. And a society would disintegrate not only, but they would probably be called traitors to our tradition, because in the matter of speech -- we -- we give up what we have inherited and which was created on the first day to last forever. Because people do speak--may I throw this out as a -- an important truth?--people did speak from the very beginning to reach the end of time. The great desire of man to speak was to name their {ancestor} in such a way that he could never be forgotten by now. Take the great chieftain, take the great spirit. All these were -- were processes--speech is -- is process--by which we enter history, stay in history, and are never forgotten, and never extrapolated from history.

If your -- corpse is dead on the ground, your name is still allowed to live on. And there is nothing in human history that doesn't live by this power of speech. There is no other way. You can erect monuments -- from sheet metal, or

from bronze, or from gold, or from mercury, or whatever the last metal is -- you use, uranium--if there is no inscription, and nobody knows who is meant on this { } monument, { }. We cannot monumentalize our existence on this earth. It {can --} no endurance without this power of sacred, important, remembered, and taught names. And since you abolish names if you possibly can, and say, "I know somebody who," you are -- we are guilty -- all of us are guilty in diminishing our inheritance. And if you think how -- what children rea- -- learn today, and what they did learn in 1870 in a Vermont schoolhouse with regard to language, you will see that there is little progress, and very much reduction to nothing.

That's just one example of this strange fact. Strange, because not one of you is prepared to admit it, that history is not a luxury. History is not interesting as a science. History is not for the librarians. History is not even for professors. But history--and not even for you, gentleme- -- ladies and gentlemen, who take courses in history--but history is an action. It is a constant percolating, a constant shifting process by which that from the past, which -- must never perish, is continued, and that which must perish is eliminated. It's a process of metabolism, of elimination, and of continuation.

And let me say once more as a crude, but I think useful, definition, that I shall not treat anything as an historical phenomenon over which there hasn't been passed -- passed judgment, as on the last Judgment Day, whether it deserves to be carried on, or whether it has to be eliminated and buried. And there are such great things, like writing, and speaking, and sharing, and { }, and law that have started long ago, and that you and I are responsible for, lest they perish.

So history is the problem of Rudyard Kipling's recessional, "Lest We Forget." It is a constant action of revival of the past. And to make the point very clearly, you see, there are two kinds of revival, which may tempt you to understand that what I'm doing, because you'll see that all mankind has -- has been doing this for the last 2,000 years--there are two kinds of such revival of his- -- of the beginnings of the future. And I may now, perhaps with your understanding, con- -- define the past.

[tape interruption]

...which are in danger not to be carried into the future. History is concerned with its own beginnings of the past, which the historian, the history-teller, the mother who tells her child, the pater who tells his -- the confirmation class, those things which have to be kept alive, because they have begun the future at a certain point in the past. And you will admit that to speak English is

not an -- an adventure of 1959, but is the revival of English, you see. And we may be very satisfied if we ever achieve to the eloquence of William Shakespeare again.

But there are two kinds of revival. One is in direct succession. Your child is born; it has to learn English. You feel that you still are capable of doing -- speaking it. You have to revive in this brute--in this little brat--the power to speak. Yes, I don't think that children by themselves are very celestial. I don't share this adoration of children. For the historian, children endanger history.

Yes, they have to be brought up to live it. I mean, they are out of history, this side of history. They do not automatically represent the future. They are handicaps to the future unless you bring them up to parity. You make them, for example, speak real English, otherwise they're just below the level that already was attained a hundred years ago. And I think you will, if you look around, it's obvious that many more people in our society are historically misfit to -- to -- to carry anything, to -- to inherit the earth, to bring anything to fruition in the next generation. They send their children to kindergarten. They send them to feebleminded schools, or to high-endow- -- gifted schools, or whatever the nomenclature is. But they certainly dump them. And by dumping them, they leave it to the organized forces of -- this government, or the Church, or whatever it is, to learn what they should learn from their parents. And therefore we are in a -- at this moment in a turmoil to find the institution by which children should be initiated to the same stamina which they have inherited from the past. You just have to think of juvenile delinquents. Why do they exist? Because between 14 and 21, nobody in this country is initiated through hardship. It's the same where any primitive tribe initiated its young to real life.

[tape interruption]

And if you do not experience and you do not learn to -- to suffer pain, and to love, and feel affection for several years in a serious manner, you just remain as stupid -- if you don't learn to listen, and to obey, and -- not -- learn to speak. Learn -- feeling, hearing, suffering, and loving are great acts, and they have to be dinned into people by great acts of education and training. Instead, you see that from 14 to 21 or 22, as long as you are in this college, you are -- we are doomed to { } examinations. That's not life.

So I think that at this moment, the ordinary revival, in the next generation, which I hear at this moment {called} "revival," is threatened. The ordinary tradition -- you call it "tradition," "continuation," "education," call it as ever you like--I prefer to call it "revival," because here you have millions of newborn fishes. They are fishes because they can't speak. And certainly they can't obey. And

they don't obey. And they aren't even asked to obey. They are made happy. They are sent to the psychoanalyst--or the parents are sent to the psychoanalyst--and -- because the -- they -- the routine process of obedience, and -- and teaching doesn't function. And anybody who isn't constantly in the stream of history falls sick. Man can be made so plastic, that if he isn't filled with the -- the {noted} rhythm of constant speech, song, art, religion, prayer, historical anecdotes, speak -- speech in the highest sense of the word, he becomes mere self. And I had yesterday a terrible talk with some of you -- group of you who always insisted that they themselves didn't think so, and they had all themselves an individual opinion, and of course no understanding whatsoever, because these poor children didn't know that history is a big stream in which we swim; and it is nothing to be looked upon from the bookstore or the bank, and criticized by oneself. You are in the midst of -- of life.

I've made -- stressed this revival. It is necessary in every living generation {which is meant} to come to life, to real life, to historical existence, to action, to responsibility, to love, affection, courage, creativity.

By this story, which I heard a few weeks ago--it -- was told to me by a South African, Laurens van der Post. You -- some of you may have read his books and -- about the situation in Africa. He is a South African, {Boer} { } married to an Englishwoman, and he has written some very famous books on the South African situation. His most beautiful and most recent book is on the Kalahari Desert. And he made it in the Kalahari Desert. And it has to do with speech, as a model case of how speech is revived in every generation. And for us, who are losing it, this power, at this moment so considerably, I think it -- it exemplifies what is threatening the historical process in the western world {at this moment}. And Mr. Laurens van der Post had a grandfather who, in his struggle with the bushmen, killed many of them with his, of course, superior gunnery. But two of them, as young boys, he caught and kept at the house, and cared for them very tenderly, as a matter of fact. They became old men in the -- his grandfather's house. And this young Laurens came to love these people, and they came to love him. And they said to him that they would send him to his -- their tribe. When he was grown up, he should go there and report, and hold certain things, and he would be well received. And they -- the -- these warriors at home in the desert would then tell him the true story of the bushman.

So when he -- was -- {began on the strength of this}, and so finally he had an occasion to do so; and he went into the Kalahari Desert, and he joined these bushmen, whose language he knew, and gave them the message, and they were very hospitable. And he said, "Now tell me your stories. I'm eager to listen."

And they said, "Now, you wait a minute. You first have to be -- to go

hunting with us."

He didn't quite understand, but { } all the seasons went by, and the different kinds of hunt. Finally the big elephant hunt. And after he had proved to be a co-hunter, a co-warrior of the tribe, because hunter and warrior of course is the same status of full-fledged allegiance, they sat down and he was allowed to listen to their tales. And these tales were the legislation, the constitution, the history, the poetry, the religion of the tribe.

In this living tradition of telling these stories, these people felt, he said, that they had their whole {pleasure} of life. This made them into conscious, living beings. And anybody who was allowed to listen to these stories was invited, instilled with the faith, the courage, the confidence of this tribe. Therefore, only a member was allowed to listen. And as hospitality goes, you know, you take a man -- into your home under the consideration that for the time being, he is a member of your household. In the same sense, he had to hunt first with these people, you see, in order to make sure that he wouldn't look like a scientist or an historian in the western world on this poor tribesman, but would acknowledge his equality with them, and he would treat them not objects of his curiosity, exploit them, write a book about them, and get a doctor's degree for that, but that he would settle -- settle down with them and share this living process of bringing to light the past in the stories told. That's all they had. They had no libraries; they had no money; they hardly had dress. But they had this treasure of living traditions which come to life in every one who is initiated into this {tribe}.

And I think that's the relation to the creation of speech by which the living generation is revived -- or the language is revived, this treasure spirit is revived in the hearts of the newborn. As I say, they were animals who become human beings only through this action. That's their baptism of fire. Baptism is not a scene -- a scene in the Church. It is the same, you see. Baptism is the first word said over a child; it gets a name. And from that moment on, it can be filled with speech. And so baptism simply unlocks the door for the historical existence of a human being. It's the same with any ritual. Take circumcision in the Jewish community. At some moment, this inheritage begins. That's why, for example, circumcision and -- before Judaism never was practiced on the babies, but it was only {unlocked} if -- the baby was only -- the -- the youngborn was only called into life much later. Circumcision went with the hardships of initiation. And it is important, I think, to recover this sense of these rituals, because originally all these introductory rituals didn't happen at birth, and were not put on the shoulders of the parents or the godparents, but were just put on the young man himself. And he was told that this was his second birth, which I call the "revival."

So it's not my invention that I call this "revival." But it was the deep feel-

ing of these people that this was their second birth. They become only really fullborn, when the stream of history enters their heart and their consciousness.

There is a second kind of revival, and if you -- look around this campus, we are even overwhelmed by this kind of other revival so that you have lost sight of the first. The first has to do with the next generation. But we, as you know, have lived through an era which is called the Renaissance. We have Olympic Games, and we have Moorish, and { }, and Gothic, and pseudoGothic, and pseudo-Gothic cathedrals with barbershops inside. What is this?

Our history is -- is longer than the history of the Kalahari tribe. The Kalahari tribe in Africa is older than we in fact, but not in consciousness. What they have to convey is a short history. It's compressed. The memory of a tribe is usually six, seven generations long. And if we would live like the Mormons in Utah, only on a truly American tradition, then this would also be here a shortlived story. We would only have the natural {progress} the Mormons have, to make every young Mormon, you see, into a true Mormon by sending him abroad. As you know, that's their practice. It's a very wise one. In the Mormons, you have an example of the tribal form of existence, with a short-lived memory, because after all the Mormons are no older than {150} years now. As a matter of fact, the Mormons very much coincide with the -- with the period of -- with which we are dealing here in this course, because Joseph Smith, as far as they record, was born {1805} -- 1845, you see. And proselytizing all of America at this { }. { } see, right across from the Longfellow { } there is a huge Mormon temple, opened two years ago. Quite {a fact}.

A very important fact. But the Mormons don't have your and my problem of any Renaissance buildings, from Greek and Roman architecture, and Gothic and -- medieval architecture. They are plagued by an open history through all the ages. So as long -- as soon as you go before our period, from 1800 and 1906, and have to cover a -- the human history, beginning in 8000 B.C., all the rest is bunk. Don't believe in any of the geological figures for man, because -- all { }; {mythology}. And -- but it's long enough to this day, I remind you. And since we today have to cover the ground from the creation of speech to -- through the creation of architecture, and temples, and priests, to the creation of literature and Greece and to the writing of the Bible, and of prophecy and Judaism, through Christianity, you see, through the Inquisition, the Crusades, and what-not, you can imagine that we {usually} are hard-put to cover this ground constantly. Not one child can be really introduced into the great achievements of all these periods at one { } of our power. So we have this second kind of revival, which you have learned to call the Renaissance { }.

We select one of the most forgotten periods, which seem to contain impor-

tant truth and {urgent} truth -- standing in need of regeneration, of rebirth. We take that out, and we give a new second birth to these {very} remote, you see, things, from whom we already have been separated so long that there had to be a special effort { } what I have done at the moment with the Kalahari Desert -- is a { } act, you see, of a second type of regeneration, trying to interest you in accepting that go -- has happened long before our usual, you see, arena of thinking.

And so the second gen- -- or regenerations in history are not dealing with the young, trying to bring them up to {pari- --} history, but are dealing with the grownups' loss of perspective. And we are entering at this moment obviously a period in which the Roman and Greek Renaissance will give way to another kind of renaissance. And from 1960--I'm sure it has already begun, with the two world wars--the renaissance of a still more remote past -- from you and me, and is the -- of universal interest to the human race not yet in this country. Not an American problem. It's not a European problem. It's not an African problem. But to go before Jews and Greece in our {unearthing} order, creativity and law is today the order of the day. We -- we'll talk about this at the end of the course again. But I want to announce today that one of the topical questions of any social history that tries to keep perspective and direction, and tries not to lure you into the swamp of some antiquarian past, but wants to open a path into the future, would have to be the understanding that we go from renaissance to renaissance.

In order to set your mind at rest from the very beginning for this rather puzzling second regeneration, which is the action of educators, of artists, of historians, you see, of linguists, of prophets, you, by the way, of creature -- I gave you already the example of the Kalahari Desert; I think that without this example, I cannot wake you up to what we are { }. Initiation is the order of the day for the next 200 years in our society. You cannot just go to high school, become a factory hand, or a clerk in an office, or a type- -- secretary, a typist, without losing your birthright as a member of human so- -- history, of human society. That isn't good enough. What -- how to do this is a pain in the neck for any serious-minded person. I have done -- spent all my life since 1912 in trying to find the moral equivalent of war, of which William James spoke at that time before his death. And this is what initiation is: it's the moral equivalent of war. And {today} to find this for young women is a very serious business. And you haven't solved your educational problems as long as you think they consist in testing the IQ of a person, because the ladies will pardon me, to hell with IQs. That's -- doesn't make an historical person -- character in a human being, your IQs. And this is before us. It hasn't been solved. And as you know, this -- you just read the newspapers, and you know every day that some youngster is going astray, because he isn't given this necessary direction into initiation, into society. { }

can't do this by {polls}.

It may interest you that this wandering, this migration, this hopping around from one thing to be regenerated in the past to the next, has -- going on under our noses for the last thousand years, at this moment, you go into the books of the philosophy, for example, the highest appreciation at this moment is given not to Aristotle and Plato, but to the pre-Socratics. That is, we are gradually moving backward within the Greek and Roman renaissance. The excavations in Delphi {date} these people {in the} { } because there we come to the earliest beginning of Greek religion. Mr. Robert Graves, who--you know him perhaps, his wild genius?--has written a very book -- a very fine poem, "Hercules, My Shipmate." Wha- -- has anybody seen it? Who has? No response? He's a contemporary, so you are obsolete { }.

"Hercules, My Shipmate," an excellent book on the Argonauts and {Iaethon}. And it's pre-Homeric. What I'm driving at is, that at this moment, preHomeric Greece -- Greek, for example, {Mycenae}, you see, {Klosters}. The language, as you know, has been discovered which Nestor and Achilles spoke. We have now contemporary potsherd in which the name Achilles and Athene appear, in 1200 B.C. That is, we are 400 years before Homer -- the Homeric poems were written on which a professor of history would be { } and -- and educated { } a hundred years ago. We are going backward in the regeneration of Greece. And the same, by the way, of Rome. Etruscan antiquities are now higher valuated than the Roman ones. You will -- may have heard that there was a most excellent exhibition of Etruscan antiquities in Zrich, Switzerland, last year which took the country by storm. And I think even some of you tour- -- American tourists may have been misled into this ex- -- exhibition.

But the -- Renaissance of Rome and Greece began when you think of Dante's poem with Virgil. Now Virgil was a contemporary of Caesar Augustus and of Augustus -- of Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus. And anybody who has ever heard even, in the strange, excellent -- strange book which I found in the college bookstore called High Mark or -- Outlines of Dante, Outlines of Religion, Outlines of the University of California, Outlines of Examinations -- how do you call it, I mean { }?

(College Outline Series.)

Wie?

(College Outline Series.)

Yes, yes. Wonderful institution.

There even Dante had to be mentioned. Now he is the first of these regenerators, gentlemen, of the Greek and Latin Renaissance. But his only hero is -- is Virgil. That's only a few years B.C. He died in I think 19 B.C. Then we come to Thomas Aquinas, of whom you may have heard also, through this wonderful institution. He was a great thinker in -- 13th century, and he uses Aristotle. Now Aristotle lived in -- is a contemporary of Alexander the Great. That's 300 years backwards from Julius Caesar, you see. Now 200 years later, with the -- in Florence, the first Platonic academy was founded, around 1456. That's 200 years after the life of Thomas Aquinas. And Plato is, as you know, the teacher of Aristotle. So we go back one more step, you see. Then Pope, and in Germany Voss, and -- translate Homer. And Homer becomes popular, and the Greek tragedy. Or you can go to the 17th century in our history, and you come to Racine and Corneille, and they revive the Greek tragedy. Of course, they are tragedians, and not philosophers. And today, as I said, Mr. Robert Graves tries to compete with Homer by writing the epics of the Argonaut.

So it's very -- a very wonderful and mysterious part of our own history that while we are going forward to build Sputniks, and railroads, and airplanes, at the same time, we went backwards more and more, you see, away from the beginning of our era, digging up the {far-ago} past, and using them as educational food and asking every youngster to know -- {fill} himself with architecture, and forms of thinking, like Platonic ideas, and Aristotelian realism, and what-not, and so combining this second revival, you see, of a lost time with our own progress.

Now human beings, gentlemen, are human only as soon -- or as long as they retain the power to move forward and to look backward at the same time. The difference between a natural animal, you see, and a -- human beings, from the very beginning of man's creation on this earth, is not that both have bowels, and one goes upright, and the other crawls on the ground. It's a much more simpler freedom in humanity. And anybody who does it is human, and anybody who can't do this has not yet reached the sto- -- the stage of humanity.

In this sense, this regeneration, this Renaissance, which you think is a special period in history, is nothing but a special application of this constant principle: a man is free who at the same time can look backward to the law which has come down to him as tradition, and can look forward, and then decide whether to break the law or whether he has to continue. Because we are all lawbreakers, and we are all law-abiding. And anybody who is only law-abiding is not yet a human being. And only -- and on- -- anybody who is only a law-breaker is not yet a human being. Your and my problem is to know when to break the law, and when to abide by it. That's very serious. This is called Christian liberty. And we live in a Christian era, and you can't leave it. The full historicity of

human beings was proclaimed 1959 years ago, when a child was born that was at the same time under the law and {in liberty}. He was Joseph's son and He was the son of God at the same time. That's another way of stating the truth, which I have tried to reformulate, so to speak, in primitive -- more primitive terms, that we are free for any future, and that we are bound by the whole past, at the same time. Any girl who elopes, or any Juliet -- in Romeo and Juliet knows that she can elope, but she has to pay the penalty.

That is, every step forward costs a price. It costs a price of being delivered, of being emancipated from the past. And where this emancipation has gone so far, that everybody in this country has to think now he has a private religion, a private opinion, a private conviction, a little { } as an individual, and has lost all direction in history, there comes along some kind of regenerative, common effort from humanity to impose on him some discipline from the past that he has forgotten. That's why I think initiation will be in order, you see, for the last -- next 200 years, as a real question. As philosophy was in order for the clergy of the Middle Ages, you make out of these childish superstitious people, you see, intelligent, and fruitful, and truth-seeking, scholastic schoolmen. Each period is threatened with the same loss of direction.

Now you -- remember last -- last time, I tried to convince you--I don't know if I succeeded--that any future is only our common future so long as we keep alive the true power of the future: that is, to change direction in solidarity. Not the single individual. You and I may seem to be able to change direction. We have to take the whole society with us; before, it is fruitless; it's sterile. You people from the newspapers know this very well. They know many more things than the ones they are allowed to print.

These were the two principles I laid down; and I come back to them, and I haven't -- done nothing but to {catch} this principle today, to give you some substantial filling material to understand why the whole of your future consists--or not the whole { }--we must keep as our common destiny the avenue open to change together our direction. Otherwise we can no longer be human beings. If we are predetermined, if the whole future at this moment is just rushing into some kind of given form, like a -- in a -- in a steel -- foundry, if we are nothing but melting-pot metal, to be melted down into some form already predetermined by our technical civilization, then we would have ceased to be crea- -- creatures of our { }. We would just become -- we become { }. And if we would not believe it to take our sisters and brothers with us into this {future}, we would destroy the so- -- the fabric of society, because we would deny the solidarity that all men together are -- man must move at once. Or at least not at once, at least in such a piece that the stragglers from the end, from the rear, you see, and the avant-garde may keep the cohesion and their peace. The whole

army of mankind must move somehow in -- in unity. Can you see this?

Now, obviously therefore the historical process is a slow one, and yet it is a constantly renewing one, because any one moment, we have to be -- assert our freedom to change direction. { } last time to change direction from the Cadillac to the Volkswagen. That would be a change in direction, because for the first time the Uni- -- people of the United States would abandon their -- their notion by which they are known all over the world: bigger and better. It would -- suddenly be smaller and better. { }. And I don't know if { }.

[tape interruption; end.]