TOWARD A SELF-RENEWING SOCIETY

The U.S. is torn by radical demands for total change, on the one hand, and by fear of any sort of change, on the other. How can the U.S. reform its society without going to either extreme? No one has yet produced a completely satisfactory answer. But no one has tried harder than John W. Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, now chairman of the Urban Coalition. In delivering the annual Godkin Lectures at Harvard, Gardner made an eloquent plea for constructive change in American institutions. Excerpts:

IT is hard to view events on the domestic scene today without feeling that these are dark days for the nation. But it may be that we were in greater peril when we were less worried, when all the present evils were layered over by our national smugness. We may even be on the mend. But our salvation will never be handed to us. If we are lucky, we will be given the chance to earn it. Unfortunately, we are enormously clever at avoiding self-examination.

Instant Antiquity

The crises of the urban environment suggest the depth and complexity of issues in the management of our society. Why have we had such difficulty, steadily mounting difficulty, in getting at these problems? One might blame our apathy, or our unwillingness to spend, or our resistance to change. But something else is wrong, something central, something crucial. Our society, as it is now functioning, is not an adequate problem-solving mechanism. The machinery of the society is not working in a fashion that will permit us to solve any of our problems effectively.

Each reformer comes to his task with a little bundle of desired changes. The implication is that if appropriate reforms are carried through and the defects corrected, the society will be wholly satisfactory and the work of the reformer done. That is a primitive way of viewing social change. The true task is to design a society (and institutions) capable of continuous change, renewal and responsiveness. We can less and less afford to limit ourselves to routine repair of breakdowns in our institutions. Unless we are willing to see a final confrontation between institutions that refuse to change and critics bent on destruction, we had better get on with the business of redesigning our society. We must dispose of the notion that social change is a process that alters a tranquil status quo. Today there is no tranquillity to alter. The rush of change brings a kind of instant antiquity.

The departments of the Federal Government are in grave need of renewal. State government in most places is a 19th century relic; in most cities, municipal government is a waxworks of stiffly preserved anachronisms. The courts are crippled by archaic organizational arrangements; the unions, the professions, the universities, the corporations, each has spun its own impenetrable web of vested interests.

That human institutions require periodic redesign (if only because of their tendency to decay) is not a minor fact about them. How curious it is, then, that in all of history no people has seriously attempted to take into account the aging of institutions and to provide for their continuous renewal. Why shouldn't we be the first to do so?

A society capable of continuous renewal would be characterized first of all by pluralism--by variety, alternatives, choices and multiple focuses of power and initiative. We have just such pluralism in this society. But the logic of modern large-scale organization, governmental or corporate, tends to squeeze out pluralism and to move us toward one comprehensively articulated system of power. If that trend proceeds unchecked in the public sphere, there will soon (say, in 25 years) be no such thing as state, county and city government. There will be one all-encompassing governmental system.

As the trend proceeds in the private sphere, corporations merge, small colleges and small businesses find survival increasingly difficult. I find myself treasuring every remaining bit of pluralism, everything that stands between us and an all-embracing system. When I hear young people recommending the abolition of private enterprise, I question whether they have weighed the consequences. It may not have occurred to them that socialism or any other alternative to private enterprise would certainly mean the shouldering by Government of huge new burdens. Our giant corporations would not disappear. They would simply be merged into unimaginably vast Government ministries. And bureaucracy would conquer all.

The society capable of continuous renewal will be one that develops to the fullest its human resources, that removes obstacles to individual fulfillment, that emphasizes education, lifelong learning and selfdiscovery. We are still far from having created such a system.

To bring full justice and equality to black people is the historic assignment of this generation. The problems will be resolved not by violence or hatred or bitterness or police suppression, but only by patient, determined efforts on the part of the great, politically moderate majority of whites and blacks.

The Beehive Model

We have in the tradition of this nation a well-tested framework of values. Our problem is not to find better values, but rather to be faithful to those we profess--and to make those values live in our institutions, which we have yet to do. If we believe in individual dignity and responsibility, for example, we must do the necessary, sometimes expensive, often complicated things that will make it possible for each person to have a decent job if he wants one.

More than anything else, the contemporary demoralization stems from a breakdown in the relationship of the individual to society. It is widely assumed that the condition applies only to hippies, college radicals, artists and intellectuals. But it may also be found in some degree throughout the population. On the one hand, men have never had more control than they have in this country today; on the other, we complain that we can't control our own fate.

One of the problems is that the end toward which all modern societies, whatever their ideology, seem to be moving is the beehive model, in which the total system perfects itself as the individual is steadily dwarfed. All modern societies, capitalist or Communist, are moving toward ever larger and more inclusive systems of organization, toward ever greater dominance of the system's purposes over individual purposes.

Contemporary critics often appear to believe that the smothering of individuality is a consequence of intentional decisions by people at the top. Right-wingers blame Government leaders, left-wingers blame corporate leaders. But the modern leader is always in some measure caught in the system. To a considerable degree, the system determines how and when he will exercise power. The queen bee is as much a prisoner of the system as is any other in the hive.

Is there any way to avoid the beehive model? Perhaps. We must ask the individual to accept certain kinds of responsibility, and we must create the institutional framework in which individual responsibility is feasible. Traditionally, we have spent enormous energy exhorting the individual to act responsibly, and very little energy designing the kind of society in which he can act responsibly.

A Chance for Service

The loss of a sense of community is particularly serious. In some ways modern society binds the individual too tightly, but in other ways it holds him too loosely--and the latter causes as much pain as the former. He feels constrained by the conformity required in a highly organized society, but he also feels lost and without moorings. And both feelings may be traced to the same cause: the disappearance of the natural human community and its replacement by formula controls that irk and give no sense of security.

When people, for whatever reason--oppression or laziness or complacency--take no part in their institutions, the institutions themselves decay at an accelerating rate. But it is not essential that everyone participate. As a matter of fact, if everyone suddenly did, the society would fly apart. Participation should simply be an available option.

Can action on the part of the individual at the grass roots ever really be effective? It all depends on how we design our society. We must, for example, undertake a drastic overhaul of local government.

All large-scale organization tends to smother individuality. But today's young person doesn't give due weight to the fact that large-scale organization, properly designed, can also benefit the individual, enrich his life, increase his choices. Everyone lampoons modern technological society, but no one is prepared to give up his refrigerator. Everyone condemns bigness, but there is no movement of population toward the unspoiled, lonely places of the continent. We must identify those features of modern organization that strengthen the individual and those that diminish him. Given such analysis, we can design institutions that would strengthen and nourish each person. In short, we can build a society to man's measure, if we have the will.

Such a society will not just serve the individual but give him an opportunity to serve. When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless; they no longer feel rootless. Without allegiance and commitment, individual freedom degenerates into a sterile self-preoccupation.

Just as modern man obsessively breaks up the forms and patterns of life and then finds himself nervous and afraid in a formless world, so, in the name of freedom, he compulsively dissolves the limits on behavior and then finds himself unhappy in a world without limits. He sweeps aside rules, manners, formalities and standards of taste, anything that even slightly inhibits the free play of emotion and impulse. Yet not only the claims of civility but also the realities of individual development call for some measure of selfdiscipline. We have explored about as fully as a civilization can the joys of impulse, of a world without forms, order or limits. A balance must be struck.

For a variety of reasons, we have seen increasingly widespread hostility to institutions%#151;any and all institutions, here and around the world. The standard phrase concerning social disorders is "It's only a small group that's involved." But that is a misleading assertion. Beyond the fractious few, beyond even the considerable group of sympathizers, is the larger number of people who have no fixed views but are running a chronic low fever of antagonism toward their institutions, their fellow men and life in general. They provide the climate in which disorder spreads. In that climate, unfortunately, our honored tradition of dissent has undergone an unprecedented debasement.

Among the dissenters today we hear a few with a special message. They say: "We don't need reform, we need revolution. The whole system is rotten and should be destroyed." I have talked long and seriously with such people and have found that most of them don't really mean it. There is an awesome theatricality about today's radicalism. But some, of course, do mean it. They have fallen victim to an old and naive doctrine--that man is naturally good, humane, decent, just and honorable, but that corrupt and wicked institutions have transformed the noble savage into a civilized monster. Destroy the corrupt institutions, they say, and man's native goodness will flower. There isn't anything in history or anthropology to confirm the thesis, but it survives down the generations.

The responsible critic comes to understand the complex machinery by which change must be accomplished, finds the key points of leverage, identifies feasible alternatives, and measures his work by real results. The irresponsible critic never exposes himself to the tough tests of reality. He doesn't subject his view of the world to the cleansing discipline of historical perspective or contemporary relevance. He defines the problem to suit himself. He can spin fantasies of what might be, without the heartbreaking, backbreaking work of building social change into resistant human institutions. Out of such self-indulgent and feckless radicalism come few victories.

A Relevant Call

The chief means by which citizens make their influence felt must continue to be the long-tested, well-established procedures of a free society: the ballot, the lawsuit, the strike, the petition and so on. One hears a special justification for the recent ghetto riots. The riots were necessary, it is argued, to produce fear in the power structure and thereby to get action on the social front. It is true that the riots provoked fear, but there were a lot of consequences besides constructive social action. The riots led many Congressmen and citizens to resist further federal programs for the cities. The riots also strengthened every right-wing extremist group in the country.

I do not blame the ghetto residents for being angry, but they must not let their anger lead them into self-destructive moves. They must seek--as the college activist must seek, as we all must seek--a world in which man's destructive impulses are brought within a framework of law and rationality. Anyone who unleashes man's destructive impulses had better stand a long way back. The anarchist paves the way for the authoritarian. The serious citizen will have to learn a simple truth: one must act forcefully to combat injustice, and at the same time one must oppose disorder and violence.

The years immediately ahead will test this nation as seriously as any we have known in our history. We have plenty of debaters, blamers, provocateurs. We don't have plenty of problem-solvers. A relevant call to action would address itself to that complacent lump of Americans who fatten on the yield of this society but never bestir themselves to solve its problems, to powerful men who rest complacently with outworn institutions, and to Americans still uncommitted to the values we profess to cherish as a people.

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