Transcript
YLVISAKER: There will be something old-fashioned in what I say tonight, and it was brought to my mind just two seconds ago by hearing the confusion between trespasses and debts. I'm a trespass man, myself. It may be because I grew up in the Depression and debts had one of those unforgettable meanings to me -- debts that never were really forgiven. I hesitated in coming up tonight, partly because I have been late, but partly because of a rather confusing introduction
. As I walked in you were singing the doxology, and when you got to the last line, this person up here leading it motioned to me -- you know, "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." I didn't know which to respond to. But I come tonight again looking forward as I did last year to the chance to check minds with you again. Mine has been, as I'm sure all of us, have our lives
to be an odyssey of thinking, of doubting, of formulating, of reformulating, discarding, and putting back together. Even though I have left formally the Church, I find that reconvening with those who are still serving the institution for me is like touching home base, and I go wandering off for a year and come back into some assembly such as this to see my
journey as compared to yours. It's been fascinating to find out how similar these journeys really have been -- for some of us who have wandered outside the institution and some of those still in the institution who are, I think, truly wandering inside. Some changes I welcome. When I come back, hearing the guitar tonight was really great. And I'll tell you why. When I grew up in the Lutheran Church in Minnesota, my job got to be to
tune the organ, and I don't know if you remember the old pipe organs which worked on pneumatic principle often went into a cipher. This is on a hot summer Sunday morning, somebody played one key, like an A flat, and if the [maws?] had been working on the felts, that note kept playing through the whole service. And I used to have to get out of my pew and -- you know what it's like for a kid to walk in front of his peers -- disappear into the organ while the minister
was trying to on, the congregation was trying not to pay attention to what I was doing. I bumped my head. They could hear me throbbing my way through the organ until finally I'd try out a few notes and I'd get the wrong one and the congregation just waiting and the minister trying to keep that sermon sounding right. Sooner or later I would get to that key, though, and stop it. But I kept thinking how much more convenient a guitar is. All you have to do
is hit the guy over the head to make him stop. It may be that Johann Sebastian Bach doesn't sound the same, but I'm certain that spirit probably is exactly the same. Some of you may have come across a cousin of mine who has made his reputation by working with the guitar in nightclubs with a mask. He's a young man that I did not know too well when we grew up some miles distance in Minnesota, but it has been fun
occasionally to reconnoiter with him as well. When I was working at the Ford Foundation not too many years ago, he descended on me with his guitar and we spontaneously had ourselves a hymn sing in the Ford Foundation. And if you can imagine that -- that place is potentially the best collection spot in the nation. We never had a chance to pass the hat on that occasion, but I think we would have done better than we would have done in that Lutheran church in Minnesota. On one occasion I'll never forget, being also the usher
who had to pass that hat, and the consternation of the man -- this is in the middle of the Depression -- putting in a $5 bill and asked if he could please take out change. And I was sitting there monitoring him as he picked those nickels and dimes up, wondering when he was going to get to $4.95. There was a moment of doubt when he took the nickel over $5 and I didn't know quite how to handle the situation. The Depression's were rough days, as you recall. Now the
subject of your get-together is the Christian ministry, and I've been asked if I remember the letter right to talk about the Christian ministry and human development. That would invite a filibuster in itself, which I'll try to avoid. Let me try to say what's on my mind, in the sense of comparing notes with you, and I would then appreciate if we could get into at least some questions and answers so that I could learn from you as well
. I'm inclined to quote Scripture at times. Never forget our favorite from St. Paul: "Let the women keep silence in the church." I won't invoke that rule tonight. I just took a count, and I think that we men are in the minority if my eyes tell me the truth. Let's start, first of all, with a proposition that there is an awful lot that is subjective in the title and in our wanderings. I'll end up by
saying that I think that subjective note is probably the healthiest thing in God's creation. But it also creates an awful lot of difficulties for us when you realize how much that we see is the result of our own perceptions, and as extraordinary as a human language and the human mind is, so that one person's subjective perceptions can be compared with another's, still all of us live alone inside of our minds and in our own perceptions. I do discover, however, though, that that varying
perceptions of our time seem to boil down to two that are relevant at least for my talk tonight. And that's the perception of what this United States or American society or modern society is really becoming. Are we in a period of human flowering or of chaos? I have talked recently to Standard Oil of Indiana in an executive retreat up in northern Wisconsin, and I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school to say that
one of the very distinguished officers of the corporation, when he heard me use the word "chaos" or "anarchy," he suddenly came alive and said, "You really have got it. That's what it's all about these days." And I knew right away where he was going with that one. Where he was going was to talk about how tough it was to deal with the young people of our times -- not just the people in the streets, but also the people on the assembly lines, the young people who aren't showing up for work on Friday morning and on Monday morning,
who are taking long weekends, who are saying in effect, "I'll go to work, make enough bread to exist, to buy my hifi or whatever it may be, but I'm not taking my soul to work. I'm going to keep it here at home." And this person was feeling very strongly that his older system in which he could rely implicitly, instinctively, and inevitably on a person's loyalty in the job -- that whole time
was changing. He was scared of it, because as we know, organization for mass production is an intricate job. Any institution requires a certain amount of discipline, and he was feeling that slipping away from underneath this institution was a very disciple that you relied on to carry things out. We had quite an interest question-answer period, as you can imagine, when it turned out that I wasn't wholly in accord with his feeling that anarchy described everything or that
the anarchy that we may be seeing is necessarily that bad. But let's start with the proposition that our perceptions are indeed very subjective, and I'll play around with different interpretations of some of the same facts which I think are relevant to the way in which you approach your ministry in the church. Start, first of all, with some wag -- intellectual wag -- who summed up intellectual history for me -- I wish I had known about it earlier, I would've saved a lot of tuition --
he said in effect that the whole intellectual history of man could be told in terms of five Jews. One was Moses, who said it was all in the head; second was Christ, who said it was all in the heart; the third was Marx, who said it was all in the stomach; the fourth was Freud, who said it was all in the genitals; and the fifth was Einstein, who said it was all relative. Now maybe it is, maybe it is. But if it is relative, again, I'm going to conclude
on a note where I see the optimism of that. Let's take a basic fact which happened to the human animal in his social organization several centuries ago and which is proceeding with accelerating rapidity throughout the world, where American society, which probably has gone through it most recently, is simply in the forefront in time of a development which is happening around the world. I'd put it this way:
call it "urbanization" if you wish, call it "the emergence from a rural society." A lot of names for it, and I won't go into the usual analytical, academic stuff about it. As I see what is happening during this period of two or three centuries -- in our history happening slowly -- if you go to any place in Africa, India, wherever around the world or into some of our rural communities today, what took us two or three centuries to accomplish is sometimes happening
overnight by a plane ride from Puerto Rico to the Lower East Side of New York, or from Sonoma, the migration into East Los Angeles, or from the Maritime Provinces into some of the major Canadian urban settlements -- happening with extraordinary rapidity. And we can say, "Yes, we know what it is. You go from farming into working in the city." Let's take a look at that process from two different points of view. One, I'll interpret it
very optimistically, then I'm going to give you kind of a rougher interpretation of it. And then let's see if we can put it together towards the end, at least where my mind is right now in putting it together. That process I compare very much in my own mind to a nuclear reactor in which one places the atom and bombards it with the nuclear reaction, and then what happens is the atom -- the shell of the atom
-- the destroyed -- broken up -- and within it the particles that we now know to be of an infinite variety are released and accelerated and energized. Einstein -- and it's appropriate that we should say this within yards of where that beautiful man with bowed head walked and contemplated -- Einstein gave us a measure of the power of that reaction by saying that it was e=mc2. Energy
was the output of mass times the constants, which is the speed of light, squared. It means, then, for a grain of an atom one comes out with stupendous energy, and the bomb was a negative, destructive redescription of that. Now what's happening is that the atom in this process of urbanization or changing of our cultural patterns -- the atom, which I would say is the family, the church, the labor union
, the small town, the extended family, the kinship, and so forth -- that was the atomic structure. And we've now placed it in a nuclear reactor where it's being bombarded, and what is being released is the particle or the individual. I'll put it in very earthy terms. Take that Puerto Rican family or the black family out of North Carolina -- the tobacco -- or the Maritimes or the Japanese rural family or the Indian
family coming in from the regions around Calcutta. It started with that atomic shell -- that structure which protected the individual, gave him a locked in place and security, and a feeling of belonging -- and then suddenly expose. Now take that family, as I say, out of Puerto Rico, and fly him from Fajardo into the Lower East Side and watch what happens within sometimes 24 hours. And you will see
an abbreviated form exactly of this nuclear reaction. The father is displaced in the relationship, because the mother will be employed in New York, very likely not the father. Both will be displaced in the sense of having to carry on through teaching in the family -- the intimate relationships -- to carry on the folk wisdom that has been translated to them. It is of no use to the kid on the streets or the individual no matter where
. It is of no use to the father anymore. It is no use to the mother apparently, because she has to adapt. She becomes the moneymaker; she becomes a budgeter in the family. And suddenly each of those individuals in that network is exposed and released and accelerated. I'm not going to talk about the destructive side of it at first. Let's talk about the positive side. I would think that the energy release from this process is as great as Einstein calculated in the physical reaction --
equally as great. Now you can see expressions of it. If, for example, one goes into the very communities where this process is taking place in the most dramatic form, one gets an explosive energy release. West Side Story, do you recall, the vibrancy of that thing? Not only Leonard Bernstein, who -- but Leonard Bernstein caught the sense of that vibrancy and the energy level when he composed that music and wrote that play, including its Romeo and Juliet tragic ending. But the
power is expressed in the movement, in the dance, in the song, the vitality, and even in the gang operations. And the gang, by the way, for the kids in many respects has been an attempt to find a modern counterpart of the old atomic structure to fit within. Tonight, as I rode out from Newark with a taxi cab driver -- black out of South Carolina who has spent 15 years in Newark -- he kept saying exactly that -- about
the need of many of his young people to join organizations -- with a black Muslim, the Panther organization, or whatever it might be -- to reaffiliate and to get that sense of belonging. But there is in that intermediate point and probably in its permanent form the release of energy. Our kids -- the kids who are now in that baby bulge period who have gone through that I would like to write the biography of, the tidal wave of '46 to presently when they're
now hitting voting age -- those kids express not just the energy release and energy gain of higher nutritional levels. And these have been fantastic, with physical results which we know. But they have been energized in many different ways by being released from that locked in situation where they once were. The positive side is the energy release. The positive side, too, is, I think, the flowering of the individual
. In its best form, this is really God's creation in all its resplendent glory, the lilies of the field, as one sees the variety of human beings which emerge no longer with the conformity imposed upon them by the former atomic structures. Those of us who were used to dealing with human beings locked into the atom have been in for a rough transition during this period of time. That rough transition
has extended into the Catholic Church, into the deepest forms of authoritarian development, where again -- and my controversy with my father was precisely this, which was to be released of Lutheran theology, at least to the point where I could argue with him and use the dialectic as my way of becoming an individual. I'm not judging it -- that was a good product. Let's take a look at the better part of that development, as I say. The power of this is
fantastic. The resplendent glory of it is incredible, and the energy levels are something to behold. In retrospect, we will see the tragedy of this last generation or its waste when we think that we bred this generation of kids in the image of the old -- the veterans from World War II coming back and deciding to take up the VA housing in the suburbs, never to go back to
the nonsense that they had experienced in Europe and the Far East in war, to build a beautiful relationship at home, and to do it in the image of the agrarian economy, where the kids obviously would have something to do -- there was a purpose for them when they were born. In my Minnesota territory, the farm family -- we had the four or five boys -- didn't really suffer until the point when we began moving in and consolidating the farms. There was a place for all those kids, a job to be done. But we raised
an extraordinary number of these kids with this power at a time when they were not needed in American society by the traditional forms of organization, by the traditional job market, as a result of which we've had this throbbing, pulsing tidal wave coming in on us of that tremendous energy potential. And it's crashed upon many of our institutions. As those kids have gone, they've busted up
every institution in their way, in a sense, and the first wave is a destructive wave. Destructive, perhaps, in healthy terms, and I've watched those of us who were authoritarian in our beginnings have to adjust to the power of this wave. And where the two crashed and clashed was not always very beautiful. As was said in the introduction, I went through the expression of that clash, for example, in the Newark Riot in
1967. That can be interpreted in many ways -- this way -- because that riot and progressive riots were largely kids. The age level, by the way, began to descend. When Martin Luther King was killed the next year, the age level went down from an average of about 18 to an average of 16, 14. And I began to case what was happening. The migrants in this trek from the farm to the cities, average age 16. The median age of the Puerto Rican population in New York until recently was 16 or 17. And you'll find in all the cities of the
of the world where we've seen this movement that the young in those early years are the ones that come in. What happens when they come into Newark? Several things. They can't vote. And that is the age when we know statistically -- the age is violent prone. That's when violence occurs in the -- most of us grow out of violence during our lifetime. I was using a .22 and insulating glasses out and telephone poles and electric poles at the
age of 16 and 17 in Minnesota. And before any of you judge me, where were you during that period of time? That was my period of violence, and I outgrew it. I only swear at them now; I don't shoot at them. This is the same thing. When you put kids at that age level and you keep them out of the control of institutions or the chance to react and then they come up against authoritarian institutions which are defensive in their posture, confrontation is bound to occur. And much of the energy
that they represented had no expression in jobs -- unemployment rate 28 percent -- in most of these areas. And by the way, in our suburbs -- white suburbs – 14 to 15 percent. No real place, and they sensed after a while that they had been brought into this world for parental enjoyment, rather than for a purpose, which they are now struggling to find. Adversity, however, is not a bad thing in many of its ways, and one can see now the energy in the second round of the youth
movement, which I see on us in the '70s as contrasted in many ways to the '60s, where it tipped over institution after institution. It is now beginning to become more introspective, inventive, socially creative, and at the very best, the energy level represented by this movement -- by the release of the individual-- I think is really a glorious thing. I identified it with kids. What has been interesting has been how quickly the kids who represented the spirit of the times
have communicated that spirit through the age ranks. And now we're beginning to see cultural patterns crumble underneath the advance of the same spirit of liberation. The women's lib movement, the black movement, the men's movement now in revolt to the women's movement -- by the way I think that's going to take creative form too, but let's not anticipate that just now. There will be many of these movements of liberation where the individual cuts loose, first in the
form of the group. But then, as you discover, the interest fallout: the various forms of the protest take first a group form -- and it was identified as the black movement, the kids movement, the women's movement -- and then in the advanced stage of that movement in begins to fall out into individualized forms. Very interesting -- I've discovered the way to deal with -- and one has to deal -- with the first wave of protest is immediately to appeal,
not to confront but to appeal, to the individualist within that group and to the instincts which led him at first into that group movement. And then one begins to discover, as I say, the power and the glory of that movement. Now I happen to know what transitional problems -- let's talk about now a more negative interpretation of these same developments. The positive side: the released individual, far more energy, far more potential that we've ever
known, and by the way, far more ripe for the ministry. Why? It'll take me a while to develop that. Take a look now at the negative parts of this movement. Some of us and the people I'm now listening to -- incidentally, I should warn you I've changed jobs again. I don't hold jobs very long. I'm now the Dean of the School of Education at Harvard University as of July 1st. You get into an ivy league rut after a while. I apologize for that
. But I kind of thought that now is the time to get into education -- about the time, we've gone through a lot of the fads and the violent developments -- and to really probe more deeply into what education is all about given the new ground rules of the individual developments of power and energy and self-expression that I've described. The negative part of it is what I mentioned. A lot of the energy of the nuclear reactor which should be kinetic energy -- energy of motion to be harnessed --
has been dissipated as heat energy -- into anger, into emotion -- because we have not learned how to deal with this atomic pile of social development. The lead rods have been missing. The church -- you know, I won't berate you anymore. We're past the point of talking about the suburban church and what it did to the central city during the '40s and '50s and the '60s. We're past the point of pointing fingers right now, because I think all of us recognize there's been enough of the law and we ought to be developing a gospel. But
we do know that what the church did represent in former society was no longer relevant or there. A lead rod to be inserted into this reaction, and not to destroy the reaction, but to release its power and to use its power. And so much -- because of the confrontation -- was lost in the expression into heat. We melted a lot of our atomic piles -- our cities, one atomic reactor out of control
after the other -- not, by the way, blowing up. The atomic reactor doesn't blow up when it runs wild. It melts and just oozes down into a human lava-like situation, cooling into aftertime and inactivity -- the tragedy again kind of a refreezing of the human potential. And this is what one sees now in cities across the country. Not explosiveness --
beat, cooling kind of thing into what I regard as the opposite of the potential. That's been one problem, but let's go deeper into this thing. A very subtle thing happened. First, we began to realize that when you pull out of a contained society, where the church, the family, and the rest keep the individual in his place and give him an emotional security -- when this begins to disappear, you miss certain things. First, you do have a sense of
loneliness, of the individual now having power and not knowing what to do with it. The kid with a gun in his hand. The kid with a hot rod car in his hand or an adult no longer bound by a community that watches his every behavior and having the possibility of sinning with impunity. I think those of you in the business know what I mean. The anonymity of this kind of life, which allows you to do things that formerly were regarded as
"bad" or "sinful." Now one gets along without it. Now we're going through a period where the individual doesn't know -- first, he had that release of a kid who got out from underneath the parents and the cops and had fun. He was sure he was doing wrong. Now he's beginning to wonder if some of those behavior patterns were right -- patterns of marriage, relationships with kids. A lot of our criminal laws are being rewritten to take out of the courts and the jurisdiction of the police things
between consenting adults which formerly in our standards, particularly in my branch of the Lutheran Church -- it's so small you won't find it, it think's that the Missouri Senate is radical. But in that brand of the Church I can tell you what some of these -- the sins these were regarded to be and the horror with which some of these relaxations now seem to be looked at. But that -- we did discover that release period when people probably, if anything, wasted a lot of that
liberty and indulged. Now we're beginning to see a certain rationality in their actions, and they're trying to divest guilt from behavior patterns. And they're walking lonely through this period of time. Guidance is not very easily there. I appreciate now more and more, because I walked on the Harvard campus last night, to see a sign outside of one of the churches: "Emergency Counseling." Any time of night you walk in. And kind of
relieving, too, to find out now that you can go confess your sins to a guy who doesn't know if you've sinned or not. There's a comfort in that, but a loneliness, because you cannot get the absolution that formerly confession in the Catholic Church or the high spirit of our Church gave you before. That loneliness is a devastating thing on the American scene, and not only in the American scene but the contemporary scene in all parts of the world where I've traveled. I've found it in the Soviet Union
among young adults. Divorce rate 80 percent in Moscow for reasons which make a certain amount of economic sense and social sense. And there, too, the beginning of the relationship of roommates without marriage -- all of that taking place not only in this country, but around the world. That is, perhaps, the loneliness that I'm describing that leads to pathological behavior usually addressed against yourself
and your self-image is one of the devastating things that's happened during this transition of the human animal from one culture to the next. Another thing has been that many of the things that we could rely on -- not just the companionship that I've been describing or the guidelines from those who are in a position of carrying on the folk wisdom and the commandments -- one of the things that have been missing have been services that we now realize were implicit in the extended family and the small atomic structure of before. Let's
give you great down to earth examples which you'll be aware of. Take one out of the culture. When I went to Japan, I asked one of the young Japanese people 10 years ago representing the Ford Foundation, "What would be the best thing we could do the help them in their transition from rural to urban?" He said, "Develop marriage -- places where people can arrange marriages. What's become the dating computer service now in our society." I tell you, I laughed. I thought the guy was putting me on, and then
he was very offended, and in Japanese style it took us three more meetings before we got back to the subject. Then he told me what it was. In the extended family, the Japanese, Eastern Oriental traditional is an arranged marriage, and the child may resist it -- may fight it in an extraordinary case -- but it was an accepted part of the tradition. When the kids at age 16 began going into the cities, they didn't know how to get married. They literally were by themselves. They didn't
know how to arrange it, and you had an interesting subtlety. In Japan in the Tokugawa Era of isolation -- 300 years -- they created a static society, and to make the lowest people in society feel good they created a lower structure called the "buraku" or the "eta" who came out of different backgrounds. Sometimes they were nobles who had sinned or maybe just people who were subjugatable, and they put them down into this
lowest group where they were made to collect the garbage, the night's soil -- the kind of things that untouchables around the world do. They are Japanese stock. You cannot tell them apart as you can tell a black apart from a white or usually the untouchable class. In the old society they were identified -- they lived in certain places, they were in certain occupations, and the kid never made a mistake. If he was of a higher social station, he didn't have to worry. Now when you go into Tokyo and you come from an upper-middle class and you go in to Tokyo and you get a
job and you go on the bus, the girl next to you may be buraku, eta. But you don't know, and since we've now democratized over there underneath the MacArthur influence, it is written out it's illegal to try to trace back any of these people to try to find out if they really came from that class. There's a black market. Human beings are the same everywhere. The father of the concerned kid now has detectives who dig back into the records to find out if, indeed, this person came from
buraku. That's a pathological case of what I'm describing -- is how do the kids get married. Delicately they'd face this girl -- she's a gorgeous chick -- wants to marry her, and then he's got in the back of his mind, "Hey, is she buraku? Who is she? What station in life?" And so they were saying, "We have to create a service which is missing that was formerly just implicit in the system that's no longer here. Let's take in our own system law." In the legal services business,
we always assume that the lawyer was used only in exceptional cases. In a small town he made his living, but there weren't too many of them. And usually if you got in trouble your parent talked to the cop or he talked to the judge who was a neighbor or something of this kind, and if you got into a little bit of marital trouble you consulted with grandma or she didn't consult with you at all, she just hit you over the head or something of this kind. It was taken care of. A lawyer wasn't necessary. Now if you go into an individualized society where relationships
almost by definition are impersonal, then law becomes an absolutely necessary thing. And don't -- who realized it first but the lawyers? Talk about a guild that's made it. The lawyers have done it. They are -- exploding market for law in our culture. We discovered during the poverty days that the poor badly needed the law and no lawyers were available. We created the legal services program. Rather
interesting the confrontation that took place in Camden between Agnew and the legal services unit there. Agnew in many ways understandably reacts as a man who doesn't like the way the world is going, and damn it, he's going to stop the anarchy. And legal services is exactly the counterstatement to Agnew's basic instinct in that sense. And by the way, I'm not castigating him on a partisan basis. I'm just
describing what's evident in all this. If you want my Agnew behavior, come to watch me deal with my kids some time. I can make this sermon tonight, but let my kids do something out of hand and I'm a Lutheran father real fast. So I'm just talking about a behavior pattern here. Now the legal services guy in Camden is providing -- he's beginning to fill the chinks. Now we discover we need daycare suddenly. Why? Because mothers are going to work and the women's lib
movement is pulling them out of the home, and we're going to find, by the way, that the old suburban developments that were the glorious developments of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s are going to be obsolete communities just like the Victorian parts of our big cities which become vulnerable to slums, because it will not meet the lifestyle of some of the liberation that I'm talking about. Where in effect -- by the way, we liberated the male to go down and work in the office downtown and commute, and we kept the woman back in
the old period of life, and the kids trying to grow up in an ambivalent situation and wondering where they're going to take their directions. Legal services is an attempt to put that in. Daycare is an attempt to get into there now. And you'll notice that what our society is becoming in an urbanized situation is a service economy. That old establishment that ran the manufacturing economy is still seemingly powerful, but I regard them mostly as Cheshire cats. The smile of their power remains
and the substance is very much in question. The powerful element in our society now are the services, which are growing wild, really. The need for them is very evident. As we individualize, we produce another kind of relationship where one person deals with a stranger as a regular, routine matter, and in between we try to do these things. Now what we've done during this period of time has been very subtle, and I'm one of those guys that got caught in a liberal trap
in the 1960s. I don't like to put it quite that negatively because you have to justify your existence somehow, and I don't want to deny that I earned some of that payroll during the 1960s. Call it a survival pattern, if you will. But during that period of time, people like me began calling attention to the need for services in our culture that were missing and for the reform of the service organizations
. And you'll notice that most of the liberation movement has been addressed to the services: government services, the Church, the architects, the lawyers, the doctors, whatever it may be. It's addressed unfailingly and instinctively against that. And if you now go back through 10 years and see the accumulation of protest from the blacks to the kids to the women and so forth, it is going after the service structure -- the delivery of these services, their nature, and the rest. The first expression of
this, which I say may have been kind of a liberal trap in a way -- at least I was in that development -- was to argue that we ought -- society ought to provide these missing services at an acceptable level in modern form. So I've had my fights with doctors, and I guess I early on had the fight with the church, because I couldn't see my Norwegian, Lutheran farm [press?]
making it in this generation. I just couldn't see it. I took it on and fought it. Now, by the way, they've changed very fast, as I say, and I applaud that. But unfailingly we've been taking on the service structures. Now what's been right, what's been wrong? Right in that we've got to recognize that this society of individualists and so forth does have to get access to services
or have them in its immediate environment that are not there now or have been kept from him by income or by location, by being in a central city or whatever. That much is right. But we've learned now during this past that if you try to buy those services through professionals, you are doing two things. By the way, I'm saying this only part -- this is only part of the ledger. But the wrong part of it is
this: if you were to take daycare at the level that the perfectionist now requires it for the whole population, you'd probably eat up 10 percent of the GNP. Can you see institutionalizing daycare if now 45 percent of the women are in the workforce going to 70% in the next decade? Can you see expanding the daycare system with sensitive people running it, with ancillary medical
services and so forth, staffed at that level? We have known now that if you were to go into medicine and try to produce medical services at standard, first you are faced with a monopolistic guild that absorbs most of that in pay increases. That is, just about everything you put into medical treatment the last 10 years has been eaten up in inflationary wage increases. And the same thing goes for a lot of the services. They've absorbed the input and just digested as wage increases. If you
do try to do this -- in the short run particularly, but even over the long run -- then you begin toting up the bill of health, education, which keeps being expanded, even the church, and the architects, and all the daycare, and all the rest of it. You will come to something which cannot be managed within the Gross National Product. And now we're getting a second generation of wisdom on the economic level, which is a conservative movement, part of
which I think is the most brutal reaction I've seen in human history emerging on the scene right now. And I'd say watch it, and I'm going to tell you where your role is in that. When the conservative mind begins realizing that the liberal addition led him to an impossible tax bill, he began doing a very simple thing and a cruel thing. He realized that the people on welfare were a minority, and politically you can isolate them, expose them, stereotype them, and ridicule them
and cut them back. And then there develops a kind of "I've got mine, you get yours." We will cut down the benefits because the bill is so high precisely to the class that needs it the most, which is I'd say a brutal reaction to what is legitimately a conservative response in many respects. I've been looking for some kind of another explanation for why we probably can't go forever
building up the services on a professional basis at perfectionist levels and high budgetary cost. And I'm fighting two battles. One I just described: to stop the brutes from taking a right answer and leading it to a wrong conclusion. But on the other hand to find the positive-constructive. My own journey -- the recent journey of the last two months, which has been exciting for me -- I'll take you through it in just a moment -- started one night with Governor Gilligan in Ohio. One of my
jobs in society -- at least I get paid for it -- is to go around and be one of the thinkers for guys who are in political life. And Gilligan assembled a bunch of us the other night in Ohio -- very bright young governor, I don't know how many of you are from Ohio -- and he began talking about his problems of the next decade. And Lord, you should hear what a -- if you think you have problems, try being governor these days, where you have to make an assumption that at least half the colleges are going to go
into bankruptcy in the next 10 years and we'll prop private colleges and it'll land on your payroll. And when the number -- when crime is going up in a geometric progression with the rate of commitments, if you were to take sentences, going in that same geometric progression -- the number of kids with working mothers who have to be taken care of, the school requirements and the rest -- five years before this night with Gilligan, the bright people of the country would have been telling him how to spend his way
out of that problem. That night the ground rule was nobody makes brownie points by saying that he's going to put a cost on this thing, and this was a constructive thing because Gilligan was saying, "Now, look. Why does it take 10 years after high school to make an MD?" And the bright guy from Kansas City said, "We're doing it in six at an average cost of $2000 a year as against $25,000 a year in the latter years in the some of the medical schools." Gilligan says, "I'm listening."
Then they began -- but something more subtle that I want to get to. He began saying, "We're taking off the backs of society in the tradition we've been recently a lot of the problems. The mentally ill, marginal and clear, are being institutionalized." Do you know what the per day cost of institutionalization is? And that's been part of the American psychology -- that he thinks he can buy his way out of problems and put them
over there underneath professionals, who if well paid and well motivated are going to do the job. But we're beginning to discover that even the best professionals can't handle many of these problems, and they will do it, as I say, at increasing cost. And not only that -- they tend to become unionized after a while, like the teachers, public service workers, unions, and so forth, because dealing with the mass that develops when you go into institutionalization at this scale
or professionalization produces that kind of a bureaucratic mess, and if you have large organizations expect unionized behavior and guild behavior on both sides. Now here's the dilemma: if a Gilligan now has to solve these problems in a society like this where the need for these services is undeniable and you should not take the brutal way out, what is the answer? Gilligan is saying partly push some of those problems
back into family and into community. Now the next part of my intellectual journey comes when I went up to Harvard to talk to some of the bright psychologists up there who produce Sesame Street and who are now talking what they know about human development and when learning begins to occur. Interesting now that -- and we go through fads. Ten years from now, somebody may be finding otherwise. But I find this relating to a lot of my own experience
and a lot of folk wisdom. The critical years are minus-two pregnancy to plus-15 months, and they've begun to identify that in that period of time most of the kids either will make it so that they start becoming learners with reinforcements and families or they go down hill. And this isn't necessarily a class phenomenon. Or it can happen inside the same family, but mostly not
; mostly it's differentiated by families. It's a unique combination of identifying nutritional problems in the mother, also after birth in hearing, vision problems, neural problems -- catching them early. But also on the positive side -- the non-pathological -- is the stimulation given to the kid, motor sensations and the rest, and we find now that by age three or four, half of the intelligence and actually the
neural capacity of the brain has been developed. First response to that may well be let's institutionalize education earlier and begin producing preschool on a massive basis in society. I am not going to say that's wrong; I'm just going to say that there's an interesting beginning of questionings about that which now comes back to the parent. And the new thinking -- I kind of smile
when I say it -- is that we now have to concentrate probably not on educating the kids through professionals but educating parents about childhood and how one deals with children and what a responsibility it is to be a parent and what a mother can do during this period of time -- a close, belonging relationship which is both physical and emotional and intellectual. It may well be if you put Gilligan and this
together that there is a natural progression to the past in one sense: that we will try to recreate not the old rural community with its smalltownishness that all of us try to escape from sooner or later or go back to authoritarian forms of organization in labor union, church -- to old doctrine. We must recognize that we have new wine and we can't do it in old bottles. But there are certain
basic principles about how one deals with wine. There are certain fermentation processes and waiting processes and the rest and certain tender loving care that goes on with it. What I'm suggesting now to you is this, and I'm going to conclude on two points. The human ministry and the ministry in human development I think now requires those of you who are in it -- in one of the most critical sectors of the ministry -- to be able to grow into the
new in order to recapture some of what human beings learned long ago. You will not be able to do it by going back. You can only do it by going forward. You will never be able to treat these children or people again like we treated them before. I'm convinced of that. We have a different breed of animal in many ways. But that new breed of animal is as responsive as a human being has always been to the immediate
human attention and contact, and he cannot be farmed out. The process of farming out, whether it's to a professional minister when you send the kids to Sunday school, to a professional social worker, or to a professional daycare person, it itself doesn't have to be, but too often is interpreted, as an escape on the part of the person basically responsible from that responsibility. The ministry, therefore --
and I think your instinct has been right in the church to develop more and more the lay participation. Not to get caught in the situation where they pay you for your sermon on Sunday, but to keep your membership or the community you deal with intimately with you in these things. The second part of it is the nature of love. I don't think we've ever read the New Testament -- at least I never did -- quite right. Somehow or another, that word "love" got translated into Lutheran theology for me. And I didn't
rediscover it until a little, old Jewish lawyer in Jersey City -- a wise, shriveled up little immigrant -- one day was listening to me interpret some of his motivation, and I gave it some intellectual description. He says, "Paul, you're just wrong. You must know a human being is like a vegetable, like a plant responding to light. It will go -- a plant that is sensitive to light will
weave its way to find that light and will do many different things to get it." Always moves to the light. A human being always moves to approval. And the form of that approval can be a rather superficial form, I suppose, that we've seen in glorified in the entertainment field, perhaps, or the sudden popularity. But basically it is love that was talked about in the new Testament -- a love which, I think, has been given such a narrow and sterile interpretation
in our times. And when I hear people now saying, for example, as a result of, let's say, the Coleman Report -- saying that you cannot find a correlation between expenditures on education and results, I keep saying the fatal syndrome there is that on both sides -- those who want to spend and those who don't -- have short circuited what it the syndrome. And the person who either
delegates the kid to the professional and says, "Let him be trained over there and I await a product in return for my money" or the guy who says, "You're not going to get a return. Don't spend money" are both in that syndrome, because the guy who says "Don't spend the money" is being listened to by a whole group of people who need expenditures and attention and who are now being said it's OK for society to spend it on yachts but not on our kids. A subtle kind of a spiritual sensitivity, but again where the animal is turning
basically to love. And I think the message of Christ -- and we're talking tonight about a Christian ministry -- basically has to do with that in human development. Now I said that's one of the positive messages. The other positive message that I bring you is this: I told you I was wandering -- you probably thought interminably -- and I think that all of us these days are wandering in a kind of uncertainty. The taxi cab driver tonight to me who made so much sense
turned around to me and said, "You got to know who you are, and then it isn't so bad living in Newark or wherever it may be. You can live in between black and white, rich and poor if you know who you are." Socrates or somebody once said, "Know thyself." What he was really saying is "The whole damn thing is uncertain." Can you get serenity in the middle of that uncertainty? And what I'm discovering now is I think the God that Einstein
and Ben Franklin rediscovered as they experienced life free of theology is -- I think if I were God and I'd created the human affair, I'd create it just the way it's been created, so that there is no one who knows the answer, meaning we are free of anybody's answer. We are free in that lonely sense, perhaps, of not knowing certainty, and I don't expect to know it. I expect all us to
work for it, to look towards it, to try to get it, and then with a sense of humor and humility to back away and say, "Hey, I got to this point," and say to my son, "Now you travel a free path to do yours." The ministry, therefore, I'm talking about, I guess, is addressed also to that condition. Not simply to the need for love and not simply away from professionalization of the services in your ministry, but to the proposition
that one lives serenely with the uncertainty that God intended. Thank you very much.
MODERATOR: Dr. Ylvisaker would be will to respond to a few comments or questions if any of you want to make one. We'll take a moment to see.