Chapter 1

THE NEED FOR NEW FRONTIERS

I shall not forget the first time I saw the word ennui. At the moment I did not think it was a word. I thought it was a typographical error. But I consulted my trusty Collegiate Dictionary and there it was. That is why I recognized it when I ran across it again recently in a magazine article describing the feelings and attitudes of modern man in our western culture. It is defined as "a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction; tedium; boredom."

I've noticed another term creeping with recurrent frequency into writings analyzing our reaction to our current situation. It is satiety. It seems a little peculiar to find it keeping this kind of company, because it is from a Latin word which meant "satisfaction." When it was adopted into English it meant "complete satisfaction," but words are like the people who use them. They change with advancing age. Now satiety means "an excess of gratification of any desire or need, resulting in wearisomeness or loathing." Modern man is fed up. He is "full up to here." He has had it and still has it! But the anomaly of it is that he is empty, hungry, thirsty and vacuous.

Even the "Now generation" does not like the Now! If one is in Junior High, life is icky. If he is in Senior High, it is yucky! The last term is the way to describe what happens when you poke your finger down your throat and try to vomit. Yuck! There is nothing to be gained by trying to sell the kids on the idea that "You never had it so good." The question will be flashed back immediately, "What's so good about it?" When you start cataloguing the things they have you will be interrupted with a Bronx cheer, or with the curt admonition, "Forget it!" Things simply do not fill the inner void. It is like trying to fill the bottomless pit by dumping garbage into its gaping maw.

What has happened is that we have lost the spirit of adventure somewhere along the way. It was still here when our great-grandparents were alive. If we are old enough, as I certainly am, it had spilled over into the lives of our grandparents. Of course, words like "adventure" are not easily confined when captured by usage, which is what we mean by definition. What is an adventure to one may seem quite humdrum to another. It is quite an adventure to a six-year old boy to visit the Ringling Brothers Circus, but it is no thrill to a lad of the same age whose parents are performers and who was born in a circus wagon. In reality, visiting a circus is not an adventure in the fair sense of the word unless the elephants go on a rampage and knock the tent down, or the hons break out of their cages and clamber up among the spectators. The idea of risk or jeopardy cannot be eliminated from adventure, and the definition which seems to best suit is "a bold undertaking, in which hazards are to be met and the issue hangs upon unforeseen events." Certainly there are adventurers in our day, but their feats stand out in the morning headlines or the evening telecasts because of their infrequency. The disappearance of the frontier and its absorption by encroaching "civilization" robbed men of the opportunity for a lot of real adventure.

When I was a lad I lived in a small mining village in the Missouri Ozarks. There were aged patriarchs surviving who had made the trip to Texas, across the Oklahoma Territory, in covered wagons. To hear them tell about it was better than reading a book. One could he on his stomach on the front porch with his chin cupped in his hands, looking up into a wrinkled face burned brown by exposure to sun and wind and listen by the hour. In imagination he could see the little band gathered about the campfire at dusk, or hear the whirring sound of rattlers or the howling of wolves. No one on the long trek knew what awaited on the morrow.

One of our relatives, designated by everyone who knew him as "Uncle Preston" had enlisted in an earlier day as a buffalo hunter to supply fresh meat daily for a cavalry unit sent out to "tame the Injins" as he expressed it. As he told it, about the only way to tame one who protested the trespass of the white man upon his hunting-grounds was to shoot him. Uncle Preston never trusted an Indian who was alive, and his distrust deepened when a dozen of them came upon him skinning "a buffler." He barely escaped due to his fleet-footed horse, suffering only from wounded pride and "an arrer" through his favorite campaign hat.

Almost every day brought a new sense of adventure to those who lived in log cabins in forest clearings, or in sod shanties on the prairies. Even death was a part of it, and when it came close, the family was gathered about the old four-poster bed for the final word of advice and admonition by the dying one, if he was conscious and able to speak. The hands of loved ones clasped his own until the spirit wrenched itself loose from its clay dwelhng, then gently folded the hands of the dead across his chest. Grief was assuaged by the hard work of digging the grave, and burial often took place the same day, or early the next morning, especially in the heat of the summer. There was no evasion and no pretense. Death was a part of the whole scheme of things. It was the final Great Adventure in the flesh, and everyone would share it!

We are not going to recapture those days, nor would we want to do so if we could. The good old days were mostly old. They were not all that good. Our feeble little sporadic attempts to return to them are more laughable than serious. When we decide to take the family on a camping trip for a week during which we will live in a tent, we want to be sure the park site is equipped with electric lights, showers and toilet facilities. We must not forget the portable refrigerator. The can of bug spray must not be left at home. And even though we may wear a Daniel Boone type shirt with a fringe at the bottom, and a hat with a Davy Crockett insignia on it, we are not frontiersmen. We prove it when we arrive home by hurrying into the house to turn on the central air-conditioning unit!

But what must not be ovei'ooked is that man was not created for a life of ease and softness. He is a creative being and he needs the motivation of challenge if he is to mature. He must resist elements, overcome opposition and face threats. He must lay his life on the line, risk his future, and measure up to the requirements of the hour. When he lives in a world where everything moves along with a precision dictated by others, both that world and himself disintegrates and falls apart. The individual who knows no tension and shares in no adventure becomes more like a domesticated animal' than a man made in the image of God. He feeds, sleeps, breeds, and dies, and the world soon forgets he was in it.

There will be little argument about the tendency toward dehumanization in the kind of culture to which we are subjected. The coming of the Industrial Age which first produced its sweat-shops, and then its factory production lines, made the laborer a mere unit of production, chaining him as effectively to a spot as if he had been shackled to a girder. The Industrial Age spawned the Machine Age. Georges Bernanos, in his book Tradition of Freedom, always spells Machine with a capital letter. He argues that Society was taken by surprise by the invasion of the Machine and collapsed suddenly under the iron weight.

Whether that concept is correct or otherwise, men soon became slaves of the machines which they invented, and like all good slaves, took upon them the character of their masters. One cannot survive long as a slave who does not adapt himself to the nature of the master. Of course, machines still required the thinking powers of men to survive, as the Romans required the intelligence of their slaves in order to continue, but the spirit of adventure was burned out of men chained to production lines as ancient slaves were chained to the galley seats.

There is little sense of conquest achieved by arousing each morning to the jarring sound of an electric alarm clock, catching a bus on the same corner, standing all day in the same factory location, fastening four lugs in the same place on each succeeding car, and eating the same food at the same time each day in the company cafeteria. A little bit of the spirit of adventure returns periodically at contract expiration date. Then the worker feels a tinge of pride at rearing up on his hind legs and confronting a giant corporation, a faceless entity, and threatening to walk out and keep walking "until hell freezes over."

Even then the worker is still a part of a System, which is merely a machine under another name. He does not get to fight the dragon directly. This is done by negotiators, some of whom are not above lining their pockets with some of the dues assessed against the workers. It is true that the worker can go down to the union hall and vote upon the contract, but here he is only one of a pushing, shoving group, cursing the company and yet hoping he can stay on the payroll. What can be done to rescue man from the bondage of things as they are, and give him an opportunity to become what creation meant him to be--a little lower than God?

Man must not be betrayed at this juncture into regarding an increased amount in his pay envelope as a worthy adventure. There is nothing about receiving just remuneration for services rendered which is wrong, nor is there any sin in increased fringe benefits commensurate with need. There is certainly nothing sinful about being granted an increasingly extended vacation upon the basis of years of service, although what is done during a vacation may be quite sinful. But none of these make a man truly a Man, for even the ox which treads out the grain is worthy of sharing the grain which he treads out.

To become an adventurer one must seek for a new frontier which is worthy of his efforts as a rational being. But where will he go? If he back-packs into "the wilderness" he finds the ashes of burned-out campfires. He also finds empty cigaret packs and beer cans as well as discarded catsup bottles and mustard jars. Even the towering Himalayas have been so defiled by litter and human waste that consideration has been given to forbidding additional climbing on the snowclad slopes. Wherever one goes to get away from it all he finds the aged and fading legend carved on trees. "Kilroy was here."

It was a realization of the fact that we have been "walled in" by man's carelessness, indifference, hypocrisy and sham, which launched a lot of brilliant young people on the tragic experiment with drugs which now is proving so costly in ruined lives and the frightful increase in crime essential to support the habit. We make a mistake in judgment when we blindly assume that in its inception "the drug bit" was a deliberate attempt of a youthful society to prostitute and enslave itself. Instead, the youth regarded themselves as already prostituted and enslaved by a life-style in which they had no choice and, in their reasoning at the time and under peer pressure, they could see no alternative except to be used or be damned!

In their immature rationalization they concluded it was possible to injest some chemical substance from without which would lift them out of what they regarded as a sordid state of existence and transport them into a new realm of fantasy which, with blown minds and distorted vision, they mistook for reality. It was not by accident they referred to "taking a trip" or "tripping out." Some of them died in agony. Others lived on as zombies, the walking dead. They had "freaked out" and were doomed to be out until trampled down by the Pale Horse.

Nothing which one takes orally or needles into his veins will ever provide the new frontier in which he can struggle to find his own identity or measure up to his personal potential. One might as well hit himself on the head with a hammer and conclude that the stars he sees indicate he is in orbit in the heavens as to swallow some substance and think that the psychedelic pinwheels which dance around in front of him mean that he is upon Cloud Nine. That is why it is regrettable to see the turning to alcoholic beverages by the young, some of whom are still in the elementary grades. The drug addict and the alcoholic not only preclude discovery of a worthy frontier existence but render themselves incapable of relating to it when another seeks to lead them.

Man has now proven that he can survive in the ocean depths in a bathysphere. He has left his footprints upon the gray ash of the moon. Hardly a spot upon the surface of the earth has gone untouched. The North Pole has been reached, and men have lived and studied at the South Pole. Jungle fortresses have been penetrated, glacial ice-caps have been explored, remote deserts discovered, and deep caverns have yielded their secret treasures. It goes without saying that the search for frontiers must be extended beyond the merely material realm.

For this kind of research man is especially endowed and equipped. He is more than material. While he possesses, in common with animals, the kind of body essential to existence on this planet, he is unlike the animals. He is not simply a higher order of animal. He is in a class by himself, and a class to which no mere animal can aspire. No one can account for the creativity of man by presupposing that he originated in primordial ooze and made his way upward through the whole realm of irrational creatures. The research done with chimpanzees as "tool-making" primates only serves to implement the unbridgeable gap between a hairy vertebrate poking a twig into an ant-hole to flush out insects, and the architect who designed the Senate Office Building. The chimpanzee does not think of the twig as a tool. It requires a human to make that kind of assessment.

Neither can one account for the development of conscience, that faculty enabling a man to decide as to the moral quality of his own actions or thoughts, and enjoining upon him that which he deems to be good, by an evolutionary process. At what point in "the upward climb" did man begin to sit in judgment upon his own thoughts upon the basis of conscience?

In older and simpler days it was sometimes argued that the ability of man to postulate the existence of God was proof that God existed. Whether that will stand up under the criteria of a more sophisticated logic I will not take time here to examine, but one thing it does prove is that man is not a trousered ape or a religious chimpanzee. The fact is that man is a threefold being consisting of body, soul and spirit. He is not so much a body possessed of a spirit, as a spirit possessed of a body, having hope of the life that now is and of that which is to come.

Because of this man can seek for spiritual frontiers and enter upon an adventure which transcends any thrill in the flesh. Almost everyone likes to read stories of pioneers, their hardships, sufferings and struggles against odds. It has already been stated that we cannot become pioneers in a geographical sense, but we can do so in the spiritual domain. J. B. Phillips refers to the early Christians as "pioneers of the new humanity" and since the new humanity has not yet reached its goal or destination we can join up and go along. It is my hope that in our succeeding pages I may motivate you to take a real trip. It will bow your heart but not blow your mind.

It is a suggestion of tremendous impact that we are strangers and pilgrims upon the earth. We are always in a foreign country. Moreover we are on battle duty. We are not passing through the land as tourists. We are on a seek and search mission. We are commandos who have been dropped behind the lines. We are in the greatest warfare of all-the battle for the minds of men. If we really believe this and have pledged full allegiance to the ruler of the whole earth, life can never be humdrum. If we do not believe it we may be "of all men most miserable."

Contents

Next Chapter: 2. The Real Secret of Life