Word: gardners
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...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...
...Robert Gardner...
...purposes are running things behind the scenes." Leaders, including the much-abused military-industrial complex, are doing about the best they can within an inherently defective problem-solving system, the first two lectures seemed to say. But in taking some querulous swipes at the new morality and radical lifestyles, Gardner suggested that this is "a world of imperfect people, some of them savage, some foolish, some undisciplined, some rapacious." And in his third lecture he reproached revolutionaries for falling victim "to an old old and naive doctrine--that man is naturally good, decent, humane, just and honorable, but that corrupt...
These confusions were at least partially resolved in the extraordinary view of power in United States society which permeated Gardner's three lectures. Here he was explicit: we should stop abusing political leaders and the military-industrial complex and admit that "perhaps no one is in charge." And in the first lecture he commented ominously, "Only those who know the Federal Government very well indeed know how disinclined it is to think in the largest terms about the nation's future." Right or wrong, the theory is an ingenious one, and like much of Gardner's writing it rings with...
...pungency of such frequent bits of straight talking is vitiated by the circularity of Gardner's thinking. The lectures diagnosed a crisis in morale running all through Unites States society, but offered only rhetorical affirmations as a cure--"we can build a society to man's measure--if we have the will." Gardner acknowledged that "there are things gravely wrong with our society as a problem-solving mechanism," but, except for a slight shift from federal to local government, seemed always to be urging only more and better of the same. The United States "urgently needs leaders to symbolize...