Word: santayana
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...THOSE WHO forget the past are condemned to repeat it." Of all possible thinkers, of all possible quotations, these words of George Santayana appeared on a sign above Jim Jones's throne in the Guyanese jungle. After three days of trying to make sense of the People's Temple with traditional assumptions about American life, I found this the most astonishing irony, the most provocative and mysterious detail...
...could one imagine a connection between Santayana and Jones's cult? Santayana--the philosopher of the American consciousness, the dissector of our spiritual heritage; the rationalist Harvard professor, the ascetic hermit; the half-Spanish, half-Boston Brahmin writer who knew the spirit of this country so well yet found it troubling and oppressive--what did Jim Jones see in his words? Surely there is some subterranean meaning in this strange confluence of philosophies...
Obviously, Santayana's words were a warning to us, the observers of this bizarre act: beware, it might happen again. Yet the quotation had meant something to the cultists as well. What "past" did they have in mind? Had Jones just picked up the quotation somewhere, and used it superficially? Or had he read Santayana in depth? And if he had, what perverse twistings of the intellect had brought him to his own conclusions...
...answers to these questions are less important than the acceptance of the sheer incongruity of Santayana's words sitting there amid the stench of corpses and the extinction of Jones's vision. The real question is, what sort of culture could, over a space of 50 years, harbor philosophiesas utterly different as Santayana's and Jones's? And how could the two men meet, there in the jungle, beyond all understanding...
What was it in America's spiritual heritage that could have inspired an endeavor like Jonestown--where radical politics, fundamentalist theology, Utopian optimism, black consciousness, psychological manipulation, inherent sexuality, violence, communistic tyranny and ultimate mass suicide were reconciled and united under that quotation from Santayana? The "past"--the irony is that those 900 people did not escape...