The Problems We Face

Williamsburg, VA - February 3, 1968

It is not difficult to find analogies to the days just two hundred years ago when Virginia's House of Burgesses met in Williamsburg to consider the crushing nature of the crown across the sea.

Our problems today seem far more complex than those that disturbed the colonists. Perhaps they are. If so, they demand even greater dedication, courage and resolve than the considerable quantities of these attributes displayed by the early patriots of Virginia.

As we plunge headlong toward the 21st Century, let us consider the inescapable crux of all the problems that are facing us.

How, with an exploding population and the increasing impingement of each of us on the other, and the necessity of meshing our lives for the greatest comfort of the greatest number, can we preserve the one characteristic without which life is worthless-the human dignity and the freedom of choice of the individual?

We must ask ourselves some hard questions. Have we, for instance, gone too far with civil liberty? A shocking question? Perhaps. But should we not permit ourselves-nay, should we not demand of ourselves-that we examine each question without the pre-conceptions that stifle honest research?

We can say to ourselves without embarrassing our democratic traditions: "Surely there is a way to protect the majority against the marauding bands of narcotic-crazed Hell's Angels without infringing on anyone's genuine civil rights, including theirs."

The Supreme Court takes action it believes correct in curtailing abuses of our civil liberties-but where are the original thinkers, the innovators, who can break with old tradition to find a modem answer to modem problems?

It is possible, for instance, that in the crowded conditions of the 20th Century man's civil liberties are going to have to be curtailed for the greater good of the greater number.

It is possible that freedom of individual action permissible when this nation was young and under-populated no longer is permissible as we enter middle-age and are over-populated.

These are radical thoughts, but we must not turn our backs on such problems, nor brand by unsavory names those who would pursue the research into them.

Some day, and the dawn of that day cannot long be held back, we must take a new look at state's rights, not because we believe any less in the principles on which the doctrine was conceived but because we realize that the nature of our nation is changing.

Our fiscal policy is in a shambles, partly because of unnecessary duplication of government. Taxes are duplicated and, what is worse, hidden in an attempt to deceive the people. Efficiency of government is impaired and the machinery overwhelmed by proliferation of government agencies, on both the federal and local levels.

Nor is this tendency restricted to government. Big business itself becomes burdensomely top-heavy as it expands, and the people pay a tax for inefficiency in the form of higher prices.

If it takes top-to-bottom re-structuring of the American system, then we should not be afraid of such radical re-building. That which is sacred in our past does not require lipservice to obsolesence.

We need not so much states rights as human rights, and, of these, economic security and opportunity are high on the list. Without them discontent will fester in the land. But to provide them we cannot suppress ambition nor penalize success.

Place alongside states rights those of personal liberty and national sovereignty. No one desires to surrender any part of those achievements we hold dear and for which we have shed our nation's blood and wealth.

But let's not condemn the dissenters who feel that perhaps we have no choice in a world ever more crowded, moving at a speed which is ever increasing. When man learned to fly, he looked to the uncrowded skies to spread his wings and soar with the freedom of the birds. Today he finds himself restricted to air lanes and certain heights and landing patterns. The freedom he admired would bring tragic chaos.

It is not adequate to believe that the standards which were good enough for our fathers are good enough for us. The world, as much as we may deplore the fact, is not the same today as it was when the House of Burgesses met in 1768. As a matter of fact, it is not the same as it was just last year.

In 1940, which seemed turbulent to us at the time but which looks peacefully remote today, there were just 130 million of us. Today there are 200 million.

Where there were two of us trying to find a home, drive down the highway, find a secluded spot of beach, trying to buy a theater ticket-today there are three of us. In another twenty-eight years as we near the turn of the century there will be six of us seeking to occupy that same space that three of us occupy today.

When the founding patriots first sat in Williamsburg there were four persons per square mile in the thirteen colonies. Today there are 56 of us per square mile and by the year 2000 it will be 100 Americans per square mile.

Can we really believe that 1770 solutions are adequate for 1970 problems? If we are to meet our problems, the dissenters who speak revolutionary thoughts must not be stifled. They may have the answer to lead us from the wilderness.

We must dare to dissent from the old adages which have guided us. We must examine with a clinical eye the suppositions on which we have based our society. One of our wise modern philosophers, Marya Mannes, has put forth some of those propositions:

Money buys security. Well, does it? Against crime? Against pollution? Against corruption? Against congestion? Against addiction?

The pursuit of happiness is the great American dream. Whose happiness? Yours or theirs? Can the individual be happy in an unhappy society? Can he remain well in a sick one?

Welfare takes care of the poor. Does it? At what cost to us--and to them?

Democracy and capitalism are the pillars of a free society and therefore morally right. Right for whom? At what stage of development? In what part of the world? Whose morality?

Socialism and communism are morally evil and therefore threaten our existence. Why? Because their ideas are stronger than ours? Because they use force to promote themselves and we do not? Don't we? If we are both strong and morally right, what are we afraid of? These are questions we must ask, and the search for the answers should be unceasing.

A very keen observer of the scientific scene and a philosopher, Lord Ritchie Calder, notes that scientific revolution is the "replacement of one set of propositions that have served practitioners satisfactorily (in spite of anomalies) with a new set." A set of propositions, called a paradigm, provides model problems and solutions, the framework in which science works. He notes that to reject a paradigm--to foment scientific revolution--is to commit a "breach of accepted scientific tradition." Yet the great scientific discoverers have been revolutionaries. They have rejected an important paradigm of their discipline.

In political thought, in the discipline of the political sciences, we must be willing to escape our paradigm, we must listen to those who would escape, we must hear out the dissenters. We must seek out and make use of -the original thinkers.

The Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals were an excellent example of original thinking, although the motivation was suspect of revenge. Powerful arguments were made, and are still put forth, that such trials of crimes not previously set forth in international law, were ex post facto, and therefore themselves a crime against a basic principle of modern law-a legal paradigm.

Yet the counter-argument that prevailed represented innovation and a dissent from conformity, necessitated by the current need. It went that the world, in the atomic age, would not have a chance after a third world war to establish legal precedent against future offenders, that the judicial side of any new system of international law would have to establish its own precedent even before the legislative and executive sides of a future international system of order came into being.

The tragedy, of course, is that twenty-two years after Nuremberg the other parts of that international system are still but a gleam in our eyes, but that is not the fault of the jurists who have given us a body of precedent against war crimes when we grow wise enough to apply it.

Now today we find some who dissent from our current war raising the precedent of Nuremberg to claim the individual's rights to decide when war is justified. There is considerable question whether they have read well the documentation of Nuremberg and its findings, but there is a concept here that should not be lightly dismissed merely because it flies in the face of our conventional view of patriotism. It is dissent and dissent must be given consideration no matter bow revolting.

For, interestingly enough, "revolting" and "revolution" come from the same Latin word. And to be revolutionary in attacking our problems of today and tomorrow is not to deny our American heritage, the heritage of the patriots who once met here, but to honor it.

Indeed, to refuse to recognize the need for revolution is the ultimate denial of the principles for which the distinguished Virginia forefathers risked so much, offering even to lay down their lives.

We are now in a scientific revolution. In the life span of the youngest member of this audience we have sped through three eras-the atomic age, the computer age, the space age, and now we stand on the threshold of the most revolutionary of them all, the DNA age--the unlocking of the very secret of life, of what makes us what we are. We soon will have the frightening knowledge of how to make man any way we want him-smart or stupid, tall or short, black or white.

In the next thirty years the transplant of human organs will be commonplace, the birthrate will be controlled, we will be exploring and perhaps colonizing the ocean floor. Can anyone deny that a political revolution will accompany that scientific revolution?

We have the future in our power. The 21st Century will not burst upon us in full flower. We can mold it to be what man wants it to be. But to do that we must know what we want, and we must examine each of our institutions to determine whether they stand up to the challenges of the century ahead.

We may have to look no further than our own failure to plan for this future to find the seeds of youth's discontent. Convinced that we are not doing the job, they are turning their backs upon us. And lest they reject that which is good of our institutions and that accumulated wisdom which we possess solely by reason of age, we must not reject these youthful dissenters. In youth's rebellion we must assist, not resist.

Society is going to change. The only question is whether we are going to help. Not short of death can we avoid being a part of the human parade. The question is: where will we be in it? Up toward the front, carrying the banner? Swept along somewhere in the middle? Or perhaps trampled under foot as it marches over us en route to the future?

Our help is needed. While our way of life will change, we need to communicate, by word and deed, the values we know are constants--right or wrong, truth or falsehood, generosity or selfishness, dedication or cynicism, self-discipline or license.

The ferment aboard today in the land borders on anarchy, and there are fearful calls for law and order. But as surely as a boiling kettle will not stop generating steam just because a lid is clamped on it, our ferment cannot be suppressed by tanks and guns.

Far better than suppressing ferment, how about handling it the American way-how about channeling it toward a betterment and modernization of this society for the good of all? Why not use that steam to turn the lathes on which we can burnish away our self-doubts, polish our patriotism to a new brilliance and fashion a new American spirit. But to do that we must listen to the dissenters. And we must begin now. There is no time to lose.

Only by opening our eyes and ears, our hearts and our minds can we arrest the trend toward turmoil, doubt, suspicion, frustration-but arrest it we must before a whole generation swept up by it, is asked by inevitable mortality to assume the mantle of leadership.

We are told that hippy children hate their parents because they have been given too much, because we have denied them the joys of struggle and so have denied them the sweetest fruit of all-the taste of victory. If this is our sin it should be viewed with compassion. We can be forgiven for failing to understand that we should pretend poverty to assure the right conditions of growth for off-spring. The sin is inherent in an affluent society.

But there is a solution which takes advantage of our material wealth. With this wealth and our technological advances we can free the new generation from the hours of toil once required merely to assure minimum sustenance.

We would substitute education--education, not just training that turns out cogs for the industrial machine. Education which would prepare them to meet the challenges of their time, the challenge to all humankind. We would make it possible for all men, freed from daily drudgery, to think, and to give public service.

We could inspire man to think of the problems, to seek solutions, to give of their new-found time freely and gladly. We might even earn their gratitude for giving them this guidance to the task ahead and for creating the environment that would bring forth a new nation to meet 21st Century problems with the same vigor, imagination and constructive use of dissent that did the first convention here in meeting the 19th Century's challenge.

And so we find again in our search for the future the thread to the past. For isn't this the core of the greatness of Virginia? Why were the men whose foresight we praise to this day so omniscient? Because they were the educated men of their day, born and trained to public service. Yet in the economy of two centuries ago they were a small class.

What wonders we might accomplish in shaping the next century if a whole nation were educated, born and trained to public service! A nation of Jeffersons and Randolphs and Lees and Flemings and Carters and Henrys-is that really so wild a dream?

At 22, Thomas Jefferson stood outside the House of Burgesses and listened to Patrick Henry and, as Jefferson later wrote, be was inspired to read and ponder.

Presently youth is listening outside our doors but is it being inspired to ponder? Are we inspiring youth to turn off and turn away, or to come in and join the discussion of their future and ours?

In his excellent book Seat of Empire, Carl Bridenbaugh says of the patriots who first met here: "Their equality and status questioned, even threatened, the now united gentry became radicals, gentlemen revolutionists. They revolted to preserve what they had."

If we are to preserve what we have we must lead or at least join the revolution. Let our new gentry become radicals and seek bold new solutions to our problems.

This country has not lost its ability to respond to challenge, and while the challenges of today seem frightening in their complexity, there is no reason for despair. The more and the greater the challenges, the greater the heroism of thought, deed and courage to surmount them-and the more exciting the prospect of the combat.

America can find sustenance and inspiration by looking again at not what we were but what we are.



Cronkite for President - Can we find someone, (someone over 35 years old), who we could most all agree on for our next President?

How to fix civilization

Gaia Brain: democratic ownership and free market management of natural resources

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Gaia Brain paradigm