EPILOGUE CHANGE, CONSTANCY & THE POT OF GOLD

Although, throughout my autobiography, I have made many comments on life, there is still much that I have observed but of which I have made no mention. Life is too full, and society is too varied and exciting to encompass the whole.

However, two items require attention: the unprecedented change that has occurred during my lifetime, and what I have learnt about that which endures. Through this I also hope to give an overview of the society in which I have lived.

I
I remember my grandfather, Harry Rumble, very well but find it hard to realise that he was born in 1866 and celebrated his twenty-first birthday in 1887 amid great celebrations in England on the day of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee. The space of time between his birth and the present is a mere 130 years -no more than a flick of an eyelid in the long history of humankind. And yet, in that period of 130 years, life of modern man has changed more than at any other time.
An old man, like my grandfather, just before his death, has lived a long time. However, in some respects he has lived a thousand years, in other respects ten thousand, or even a million. Within my grandfather's lifetime and up to the present, the world has advanced from the four-wheeled wagon of his birth -and of Mesopotamia fifty centuries ago -to the bullet-train in Japan, to the space probe, to the landing of man on the moon, and to sampling the composition of rocks on Mars in search of signs of once-living organisms.
My grandfather was born into the world's most advanced culture, but it was a culture in which men lived lives much like those of their ancestors. In many commonplace ways it was a culture like that of biblical times, in which village water was still drawn from wells, clothing was often homespun - and candles and soap homemade - oil still lit the lamps, man's muscle moved most of his tools, and most men travelled either by horse - as they had in ancient Egypt - or on foot, as they had a million years before. The men then alive had not expected to be astounded in their
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life time, and they hadn't been .
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In this introductory section I have drawn very heavily on an article entitled An Essay on Time written by the editors and published in the 1963 edition of The Great Ideas Today being the annual year-book associated with Great Books of the Western World published by Encyclopaedia Britannica. I was very impressed by this essay when I first read it in 1963.
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Marvellous new things had come - the printing press, the telescope, the cotton gin, the steam engine and people spoke of "modern times". But these innovations had proceeded at a pedestrian pace from the Renaissance on. Their advent was manageable; the world could cope with them. No great engineer ever
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had to confess, as Herbert Hoover did of Telstar :
"The electronics men have just gone beyond my comprehension. I belong to a generation that just doesn't grasp all that."
There was always, in all past eras, more of the old remaining than there was of the new; more of the familiar, the homely, and the understood. Not that the world had stood still. The world is a restless place, because man is a restless creature. However remote the goatherd, however rigid the slave, however repressive the tyrant, there has always been changes, if not from generation to generation, then from century to century. The art of pottery making took four hundred years to travel a hundred miles in Neolithic Europe - but it travelled. Wandering and war cross-fertilised civilisations. There were sudden slave revolutions, sudden continents found, sudden "breakthroughs" like the clock or the compass. From the standpoint of the whole of human society, there had never been a stable world. What there had been was a stably changing world which was recognisable from historical epoch to historical epoch.
With only a little orientation, it is not impossible that a Marcus Aurelius could have stepped from the second century to the nineteenth more comfortably than a nineteenth-century man could step into the second half of the twentieth. The child of a little over one hundred years ago could have awakened in ancient Assyria or Babylon and recognised the essential conditions of human life: the times and modes of planting and harvest and, in the cities, of the season's first wonderful fresh fruits and vegetables in the stalls and the stores; the work done by hand-grinding, corn shelling, churning - with the help of domestic animals in the fields; the heat and cold of unconditioned air. Of course, there were wonders one hundred years ago, but the difference between lighting a candle and turning up the gas was something a man could assimilate.
The last one hundred years have changed all that. Young Germans, born in a world of half-timbered houses and hewn stone now live in a world of aluminium, plastic and glass. Since the Second World War in the fourth and fifth decades of this century, children live in a phenomenally new world. Those children have gone from radio to television, from propeller to jet. Young people of today, born in the pre-computer age have seen the birth of the automated, near-workerless factory, such as robot-operated motorcar assembly lines, and the advent of satellite communication and global television. They simply accept that rockets will blast off the earth to explore distant planets. And the child is still young who was born before the coming of the Internet and e-mail, electronic banking and smart-cards - those small computerised pieces of plastic that displace the need for coins.
Someone once pointed out that in 1776 it took more than three days to go from Boston to New York by the fastest means that man could travel. What was important about this fact, he said, was not that the trip took three days, but that it was the same time that it would have taken to make the trip a thousand, or two-thousand years before. Transportation then meant communication: there was no faster way for men to exchange information, except by fire signals - a technique as old as fire itself. My uncle Horace joined the National Mutual Life Insurance Company as an office-boy in 1905. At that time neither the Perth office nor the Melbourne Head Office owned a typewriter -a tool long since supplanted by the word-processor. Instructions or documents from Melbourne took ten days to arrive in Perth via one of
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Telstar was the name given to either of two experimental communications satellites used between 1962 and 1965 to amplify and relay various signals, especially television, around the world. Global television grew out of this.
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THE ACCELERATED PACE OF CHANGE IN THE LAST 130 YEARS
the coastal steamers.
The world we now live in is the product of near-instantaneous communication and very rapid transport. When my son was living at Zurich in Switzerland recently, I could speak to him on the telephone as clearly as if he were in the next room, and we constantly exchanged e-mail messages via our computers at very little cost. He could FAX³ a document to me in a matter of seconds.
It was not long after James Watt patented the steam engine in 1769 with the consequent emergence of the first industrial revolution that men conceived the idea of Progress. And the rate of progress seemed ever increasing. In 1917 American anthropologist Robert Lowie expressed this vividly:
We may liken the progress of mankind to that of a man 100 years old, who dawdles through kindergarten for 85 years, takes ten years to go through the primary grades, then rushes with lightning rapidity through grammar school, high school and college.
What would Lowie have thought about the technological innovations introduced from his day to the present? However, since his time, we have come to question whether "progress" is the unqualified good that we once thought; today we question whether ever-increasing advances in our technological world have been for the good when society has not kept up with their consequences. But the beginning of the technological age brought hope for the future, for the possibility of improvement of the human condition.
Charles Darwin, the greatest single contributor to the doctrine of progress, wrote in The Descent of Man:
Man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals and religion.
"Modern" change - let us not call it progress - started in such technological areas as the steam engine and the weaving loom. This forced upon society a social change, and this change has spread to more and more areas with ever increasing rapidity. A kind of psychological contagion has been running like wildfire through all of man's activities. Why has this been so? Why after six decades of stagnation was there a sudden movement towards racial integration of the Negro in America? Why the sudden breaking away from colonialism? Why the rush to the cities of people of the underdeveloped countries? Why have we had not only the arms race and the space race but also the "rat race" of harder and harder living among those people who have at least achieved the possibility of leisure? Why has there been a precipitate rise in addiction to stimulants and tranquillisers with spiralling dependence on alcohol and hard drugs such as heroin? Why has there been such a rise in crime, divorce, suicide, and psychoneurosis? And why are all these social changes taking place at the same time? Is this progress? Or have we failed as a society to come to terms with the consequences of technological development?
It is questions like this that we need to ask, although the interaction of all the causal elements is
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FAX = Facsimile, a means by which a document is scanned and digitised, then transmitted to its destination where it is reconstructed and printed. Fax machines came into widespread domestic, as distinct from commercial, use in the 1980s and 1990s.
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probably too complex to decipher and beyond the scope of what I can attempt here.
Leaving behind these sociological issues for the moment, let me examine the specific changes that I have observed during my lifetime, which now spans the biblical period of three score years and ten. When I started planning this section of my writing, I sat down with Kay and together we prepared a list of the changes that we had noted. By the time we had half-completed the task, I realised that we had set an agenda for an entire book, a project once again well beyond the scope of this autobiography. So, without apology, I will touch briefly upon the topic, realising that I cannot possibly do it justice.
Even I was born into a world of candles, oil lamps and wooden houses, with wood fires for cooking. This was the world I knew in 1934 at the age of six. We, and the other inhabitants of Yarloop, led a village existence because we had little mobility. No one had a telephone or radio with which to be aware of the wider world; No one had a motor car. We depended on the daily steam train to travel any distance. I remember the great excitement when my father heard the sound of an aeroplane and took me outside to look at a lone biplane passing overhead. This was something very rare.
We did everything by hand. Dad chopped the wood for the fire with an axe while mother polished the jarrah floorboards on her hands and knees. Our life then was much like it would have been centuries before. The horse and cart was still a part of everyday life. Mr Dornbusch, our greengrocer, with his horse and cart plodded past our door. Even when, at the age of ten, we moved to the city, the baker still came down our street with his horse and cart. As he ran from house to house with his large basket of loaves, his horse followed, knowing exactly where to stop and wait for his master to refresh his basket from the cart.
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In 1939 and 1940, when we first came to the city, Perth had a population of only 240,000 , but it had many more facilities than Yarloop. Our home had electric light and power but our only appliances
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were an electric iron, a radio and a telephone . However, looking back to earlier times, we must realise that Thomas Edison did not invent the incandescent lamp until 1878 and the first power generating plant was set up in New York City in 1882. In only about 50 years, electric light and power could be found in most homes in developed countries. The same was true for the telephone developed by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. These technical developments spread like wild-fire because they filled both a human desire and need. But nothing spread more rapidly, or eventually came to dominate society more completely, than electronics.
In 1942, when I was fourteen years of age, I eagerly waited each month for the arrival of my “Radio and Hobbies” magazine, which I read avidly. The whole area of electronics was then easily understandable, and state-of-the-art electronic circuits could be constructed at home. It was the era of
⁴ By 1997 the population of Perth had grown almost five times to over 1.2 million.
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As an indirect comment on the extent of change, in 1940 our home had only two electrical power points: one in the kitchen and one in the lounge. Few people had appliances. When I built my present house in 1989, it had 35 electric power points - indicating a great proliferation of electrical appliances throughout the home.
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the vacuum-tube, and the technology was comparatively new.
The electron as an entity was not discovered by J. J. Thompson until 1897. Following observations by Edison, Fleming developed the diode vacuum tube and patented it in 1904. This greatly improved the reliability of detection of radio signals. Like many boys of my day, my first experimentation was with a crystal set. When a fine wire⁶ was placed in contact with a galena crystal, it passed electrical currents in one direction only, and this “rectifier” was what was needed to detect radio signals. I remember spending hours adjusting the cat’s whisker to obtain the greatest sensitivity. The vacuum-tube diode “rectified” the signals automatically without need for adjustment. Then, in 1906, the vacuum-tube triode was invented. This could amplify signals, and the technology of electronics was on its way. The first half of the 20^th century was dominated by the vacuum tube, and radio broadcasting was established world wide. Paradoxically, the early radio receiver with its galena crystal rectifier proved to be the forerunner of the next development, which made the vacuum-tube obsolete.
When I was twenty years of age, I worked for a year in the PMG Research Laboratories in Melbourne. One day, early in 1948, my boss drew my attention to a new development announced in the previous year by the Bell Telephone Laboratories in America. This was the point-contact transistor. He gave me some germanium semiconductor material and asked me to see if I could measure any transistor effects. What I did was crude, and I observed nothing.
Much research took place in America before an improved transistor became commercially viable but, by the 1960s they were rapidly replacing vacuum-tubes. They were smaller, more reliable, and used less power. Soon, teenagers in Perth were walking about the streets with their “trannies” - portable transistor radios. But the real future of transistors lay in integrated circuits with their application to computers. The early computers, developed around 1943, contained many vacuum tubes. The 1946 ENIAC machine⁷ used 18,000 vacuum tubes and measured about 2.5 metres in height and 24 metres in length. The first commercial computers were like that, and were very expensive.
Integrated circuits (ICs) placed many transistors on a single chip of silicon and by 1970 a chip 3 mm square could hold 1000 transistors. This was what was needed by the computer industry. By the mid1990s a single IC, 2.5 cm square, could hold 100 million transistors and other circuit elements. These were manufactured in vast quantities and the production cost dropped so much that microprocessors⁸could be cheaply incorporated into such consumer products as programmable microwave ovens, clothes washers, self-focussing and automatic-exposure cameras, telephones, musical instruments, watches, security systems, automatic fuel injection and other controls in motor cars, and the like.
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Microelectronics dominated business, industry, government, banking with its ATMs , and other sectors. Often consumers were unaware that they were using a computer.
The social implications were enormous, but before discussing these, I wish to explore in more detail the changes in communication and transport.
⁶ Colloquially known as a “cat’s whisker”. ⁷ See page 145 ⁸ Virtually a complete computer on a single chip ⁹ Automatic Teller Machines
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TECHNICAL CHANGES: ELECTRIC LIGHT, ELECTRONICS & COMPUTERS
Radio had immediate impact on society: Although the first transatlantic wireless message was not sent by Marconi until 1901, a wireless station was constructed at Applecross on the then outskirts of Perth as early as 1912. After World War I, my uncle Horace, returning from Britain to Fremantle by ship in January 1919 wrote in his diary on the 14^th of that month:
Our wireless picked up the first messages from Australia today when we got news from Applecross. . .
And on Monday, the 20^thJanuary:
Sent off two wireless messages in the morning - one to Mother in Bunbury and the other to Vera in Perth to say that we should arrive in Fremantle on Wednesday.
Regular commercial broadcasting started in the 1920s and radio was a part of my daily life while still living in Yarloop. I have hardly known society without it. Television came to Perth much later. John Logie Baird had demonstrated crude television transmission in Britain in the 1920s but it was not until 1936 that a service was launched in London, and 1939 in New York. World War II then curtailed its commercial development until 1946, although there was much war-time work in the related area of
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radar . After 1946, television developed very rapidly: In 1941 there were only 10,000 television sets in the United States. By 1949 the number had grown to one million sets; ten million by 1951 and over
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50 million by 1960. Perth’s first television station opened on my birthday, 7 May 1960.
Television eventually had a much greater social impact than radio. The last forty years has seen colour television and, with the development of microwave links and satellites, regular global programs. As we sat in our lounge-room, we saw the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in China, as it happened. In the
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following year we followed on the spot accounts of the prosecution of the “hi-tech” Persian Gulf war .
This bringing of international events, be they wars, famines or other human disasters, directly into our homes, brought its own cultural and value changes. On a happier note, I could sometimes watch an international debate with the moderator in Sydney, while the panel members were in London, Beijing, Paris and New York. Very rapidly the world seemed smaller.
Communication, in all its forms, changed rapidly. Even in the early days of radio, its advantages for education were obvious. In Australia, “The School of the Air” developed, in which a teacher kept in contact with children in remote locations by two-way radio. International and other long-distance phone calls became relatively cheap. Many people then rang overseas relatives as a matter of course, just as my sister in New Jersey and I talk to each other several times each year and enjoy this personal
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radar (1941): a device or system consisting usually of a synchronized radio transmitter and receiver that emits radio waves and processes their reflections for display; used especially for detecting and locating objects such as ships and aircraft.
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Persian Gulf War - (1990-91), international conflict that was triggered by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, ordered the invasion and occupation of Kuwait with the apparent aim of acquiring that nation's large oil reserves. On August 3 the United Nations Security Council called for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, and on August 6 the council imposed a worldwide ban on trade with Iraq. Iraq's invasion and the potential threat it then posed to Saudi Arabia prompted the United States and its western European NATO allies to rush troops to Saudi Arabia to deter a possible attack. Egypt and several other Arab nations joined the anti-Iraq coalition and contributed forces to the military buildup, known as Operation Desert Shield. Hussein meanwhile built up his occupying army in Kuwait to about 300,000 troops.
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way of keeping in touch. In Australia, the “mobile” phone proved more popular than in almost any other country.
The most recent development in communications has been the Internet, which is a network connecting many computer networks. From its creation in 1983 it has grown rapidly beyond its largely academic origin into an increasingly commercial and popular medium. By the mid-1990s the Internet connected millions of computers throughout the world.
An early use of the Internet was for electronic mail¹³, but the development of the World Wide Web expanded dramatically during the 1990s and is now the most important component of the Internet. It enabled simple and intuitive navigation of Internet sites through a graphical interface. My grandchildren are connected to the “Web” via their personal computers and have almost immediate and unlimited access to documents, libraries and other information throughout the world. Increasingly, commercial companies and educational institutions are developing web sites.
For example, a prospective student in Singapore or Canada can access the Currie Hall web site from his home. On his home computer screen he can read a description of the student residence and look at photographs of the Hall, typical student rooms and facilities. He can even “download” an application form for residence and e-mail it directly back to the Hall. As another example, someone in Australia can access a “virtual” shop anywhere in the world, examine the merchandise on offer, and buy selected items, paying for these with his international credit card. In yet another application, high-speed digital satellite communications facilitate electronic printing at remote sites; for example, the world's major newspapers and magazines transmit electronic page copies to different geographic locations for local printing and distribution. There is almost no limit to the application of electronics to communications.
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Radio, television and the Internet are 20 century developments that have brought the world into our living rooms. We are now aware of the world in a way never before possible. To use Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, we now live in a “global village”. One other 20^th century development contributed to this: the coming of aircraft. From the first, tentative powered flight by the Wright brothers in 1903, both world wars contributed significantly to the development of aircraft. Initially, planes used propellers but, in 1958, the Boeing company brought its first pure jet into service with Pan American. Compared with the conventional propeller-driven plane, the jet proved remarkably inexpensive in fuel consumption and maintenance costs measured in terms of passenger-miles. It quickly became the
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Cellular, or “mobile” telephones are transportable devices that may be used in motor vehicles or by pedestrians. Communicating by radio-wave in the 800-900 megahertz band, they permit a significant degree of mobility within a defined serving region that may be hundreds of square kilometres in area.
¹³ e-mail
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The W orld W ide W eb is the leading information retrieval service of the Internet It gives users access to a vast array of documents that are connected to each other by means of hypertext or hypermedia links --i.e. electronic connections that link related pieces of information in order to allow a user easy access to them. Hypertext allows the user to select a word from text and thereby access other documents that contain additional information pertaining to that word; hypermedia documents feature links to images, sounds, animations, and movies. The development of the W orld W ide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland.
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dominant form of propulsion for large aircraft: The Boeing 727 could carry over 100 passengers, while the 747 -the “Jumbo Jet” -introduced in 1970 usually took 400 passengers and freight, but could take 500. Very quickly this became the preferred mode of long-distance transport
My father had travelled on one of the last three-masted, square-rigged sailing ships in 1918 from Rio de Janeiro to Bunbury and had taken many weeks to make the trip. In the first half of this century most people travelled overseas by ocean liner. This culminated in 1938 with the launching of the Queen
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Elizabeth which, with 200,000 horsepower engines, could travel at over 50 km per hour. Sea travel took about three weeks from Fremantle to Britain and was still the preferred means when we went overseas in 1958 and again in 1969. However, when the Boeing jets came into service and one could make the same journey in less than one day, sea travel was quickly relegated to recreational cruises or
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the transportation of bulk freight. That position still applies today. By the late 20 century life had become too frenetic to waste time on a leisurely sea voyage unless that was one’s sole purpose.
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In 1996 when my son worked for Alcatel in Switzerland he combined the Internet and air travel. Working from his home in Perth, he maintained a permanent Internet connection with his company in Zürich. After six weeks in Perth he flew in one day to Zürich for a week’s consultation before returning to Perth. He repeated this process many times. The ability to work from one’s home for an overseas company and to visit them rapidly from time to time is something that has only been possible in the last few years.
The cultural significance of the motor car is very great but, technically, its major features were developed by the first decade of this century and have not greatly changed since then. Karl Benz built the first internal combustion engine motor car in 1885 and, up to the turn of the century, they looked more like a “horseless carriage” - as they were often called - than the car of today.
It was in 1908 that Henry Ford produced his Model T car. "I will build a motor car for the great multitude," he proclaimed in announcing the birth of the Model T. In the 19 years of the Model T's existence, he sold 15,500,000 of the cars in the United States, almost 1,000,000 more in Canada, and 250,000 in Great Britain, a production total amounting to half the output of the world. The motor age arrived owing mostly to Ford's vision of the car as the ordinary man's utility rather than as the rich man's luxury.
Before World War II, the motor car, like the telephone was for most people still a luxury. However, from the end of the war, with increasing economic prosperity, it was not long before everyone had both a telephone and a car. For example, there were half a million private cars in Australia in 1945, but this had grown to 4 million by 1970. Since then, the market has almost saturated and it is not uncommon to see three or four cars outside a home: both parents and their grown children own their own car. When a teenager turns 17 - the official age when one can obtain a driver’s licence - his friends ask ‘Have you got your own set of “wheels”?’
Australians prefer the flexibility and convenience of private transport to public transport by bus or train. Our cities have become congested with highways and freeways, while air-pollution caused by exhaust fumes has become a problem. Perhaps the greatest influence of the car has been the way in which it has changed society and our values - a topic to be discussed later.
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150 megawatt; horsepower was an old imperial measure; 1 hp = 746 watts ¹⁶ See page 544
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The father of all these advances in physical science and technology was the 18 century period known as The Enlightenment. This was based upon a few great fundamental ideas - such as the dedication to reason, the belief in intellectual progress, the confidence in nature as a source of inspiration and value, and the search for tolerance and freedom in political and social institutions. The Enlightenment produced many cross-currents of intellectual and philosophical expression. So it is not surprising that the spectacular advances in the physical sciences were more than matched by those in medical science.
Indeed, medical practice today is almost unrecognisable from what it was at the time of my grandfather’s birth. An unfortunate infantryman wounded at the battle of Waterloo in 1815 had very little chance of survival should a limb require amputation. First, he suffered intense pain since nothing
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more than alcohol was available to dull his senses. Ether and chloroform were not used as anesthetics until the late 1840s - and then they were uncontrolled in application and were dangerous to life if used to excess. If our infantryman survived the shock of amputation, he could die from loss of blood, as his wound was probably staunched with tar or hot oil. There was no such thing as a blood transfusion
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available in his day. Next, his wound was likely to become infected and he would die of septicemia .
Harry Rumble was born in 1866 and, at that time, nothing was known of bacteria or viruses. The Tubercle and Cholera bacilli were not discovered until the early 1880s. When Joseph Lister was appointed in 1861 as surgeon to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, it was hoped that hospital disease¹⁹would be greatly decreased in the new building. The hope proved vain, however. Lister reported that, in his Male Accident Ward, between 45 and 50 percent of his amputation cases died from sepsis¹⁸between 1861 and 1865. His subsequent work in antiseptics had dramatic results: Death following amputation had greatly decreased by 1869.
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In the latter part of the 19 century surgery was the glamour area of medicine; surgeons acquired a reputation for showmanship. They often played up to the audiences that attended many operations. Eventually, there was some attempt at cleanliness: instruments and dressings were sterilised with dilute carbolic acid. The routine of “scrubbing up” was introduced and, by the turn of the century, some surgeons even wore rubber gloves. But much misunderstanding remained: An instrument, accidently dropped to the floor, was usually wiped with the fingers and used again. A sterile catheter was sometimes blown through by the surgeon to make sure it was clear.
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Slipshod methods of ensuring cleanliness persisted well into the 20 century. My aunt Maude died of septic meningitis not long after giving birth to her daughter Miriamme in 1926. At the subsequent inquest it was established that the instruments used for the breach birth had not been properly sterilised.
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It was the third case of septicemia at the small private hospital that year. The hospital was closed .
¹⁷ In some countries, opium was used
¹⁸ Sepsis is a toxic condition resulting from the spread of bacteria or their products from a focus of infection; especially septicemia which is invasion of the bloodstream by virulent microorganisms from a local seat of infection accompanied by chills, fever, and prostration--called also blood poisoning
¹⁹ Now known to be an infection of the blood by disease producing microorganisms
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See The Rumble Family Register page 272
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TECHNICAL CHANGES: AIRCRAFT, MOTOR-CAR ADVANCES IN MEDICINE
The idea of the “prima dona” surgeon, working alone, did not give way to team-work until World War I. Slowly it was realised that surgery could benefit from other technologies such as biomedical engineering and the use of new materials. Today, plastics and special inert metals are widely used, but did not exist in the 1890s.
The ability to carry out a blood transfusion developed in the first two decades of the 20^thcentury, but it took the Second World War to successfully develop blood banks. Without successful blood transfusion, heart surgery would never have been possible. Some work was done in the first half of the 20^th century, but surgeons generally regarded it as too dangerous. War has always been a fertile ground for technological advance and during World War II Dwight Harken removed 134 missiles from the chests of wounded soldiers without the loss of one patient - in 13 cases the missile was lodged within the heart chamber itself. The stigma of heart surgery having been removed, much advance was made after the war. Now there was a heart-lung machine and other technical advances which resulted in 1967 in the first heart transplant by South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard.
I clearly remember the newspaper announcement in December of my first year at Currie Hall:
Dec 3. The first human heart transplant has been successfully carried out in Groote Schuur Hospital, Capetown, by a team of 30 doctors and nurses led by Christiaan N. Barnard, Professor of Cardio-thoracic surgery, who gave a new heart to Louis Washkansky, a 53-year-old grocer who was suffering grave heart failure. The transplant was made possible when Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old bank clerk was brought in dying after a road accident and agreed to her heart being used. . . Professor Barnard said that it was not the transplant that was a problem, but tissue rejection.
Team-work is now all-important. The rapid progress of medicine in this century was reinforced by enormous improvements in communication between scientists throughout the world. Through publications, conferences, and--later--computers and electronic media, they freely exchanged ideas and reported on their endeavours. No longer was it common for an individual to work in isolation. Although specialization increased, teamwork became the norm. It consequently has become more difficult to ascribe medical accomplishments to particular individuals.
Interdisciplinary studies, for example, made advances in immunology available to the surgeon. New developments in immunosuppression²¹ have advanced the field of transplantation enormously. Kidney transplants, supplemented by dialysis with an artificial kidney machine, are now routine. Work is being done on liver and lung transplants.
Advances in medicine have always posed moral questions. In the 1960s kidney dialysis machines were expensive, and few in number. Many more patients required them than the number of machines available. Those who were not put on a machine would die. How did one make the moral choice? Should the machine be given to a young person who had his whole life before him, or should it be given to a much older person who already had a full life of experience?
Life expectancy figures at birth are a good measure of the state of medicine and community health programs. In developed countries these have increased dramatically this century. In ancient Greece and Rome it was estimated to be 28 years. In 1901 in western developed countries, such as England, USA and Australia, it was 48 years for males and 52 for females. By 1990 it had risen to 71 and 77 years respectively. Today, apart from cancer and AIDS²², attention is now focussed not on mortality but on morbidity - keeping the population free from disease.
²¹ The use of drugs to prevent organ rejection ²² AIDS = Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
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In the second half of this century there have been many advances in cell biology while new developments in biochemistry and physiology have opened the way for more precise diagnostic tests.
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When I suffered a slight stroke in 1995, I was given a CAT scan of the brain and, later an
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ultrasound scan of the jugular artery. These non-invasive techniques quickly made previous medical practices obsolete.
Perhaps one of the most important discoveries in cell biology was that of the nuclear genetic material DNA. In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick, working from crystallographic studies, proposed their
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now-famous model, which showed DNA as composed of two spirally wound, helical chains. This made it possible to envisage how genes replicate their precise structures when their copies are synthesized. It also made it possible to explain how a gene can carry genetic information written in some chemical code. Finally, it helped to envisage how mutational changes in the genes are produced. These advances had implications for both immunology and genetic engineering.
For immunology, a clearer comprehension also emerged of the ways in which the cells of the body defend themselves by modifying their chemical activities to produce antibodies against injurious agents. The introduction of organ transplantation, with its complication of tissue rejection, brought this broader concept of immunology to the fore. It was found that in some conditions viruses invade the genetic material of cells and distort their metabolic processes. Such viruses may lie dormant for many years before becoming active. It is now thought that this may be the underlying cause of many cancers, in which cells escape from the usual constraints imposed upon them by the normal body. The dreaded affliction of AIDS is caused by a virus that has a long dormant period and then attacks the cells that produce antibodies. The result is that the affected person is not able to generate an immune response to infections or malignancies.
AIDS, which was first conclusively identified in 1981, is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The disease is transmitted by sexual activity, by the sharing of HIV-contaminated intravenous needles by drug users, or by blood transfusion with contaminated blood. The typical individual with AIDS faces a relentless succession of new and relapsing infections that eventually bring about death
Sexually transmitted diseases have always been with us, but the problem changed for society with the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in 1961. This freed couples from the use of physical barriers, such as condoms, to prevent conception, but it also increased the risk of sexual infection. Ever since the industrial revolution there has been a breakdown of tightly-knit small communities and the emergence of anonymous big-city existence. With this, social controls weakened. The individual now had a multiplicity of choices of behaviour with varying degrees of social acceptability. There was an increase in pre-marital sexual activity. Life for many became both more complex and more permissive. There has always been homosexuality, but there is no evidence that it has become more widespread because of urbanisation or technological progress. However, there has been widespread recognition of its existence, and some degree of community acceptance. All these factors have increased the risk of developing AIDS.
²³ Computerised axial tomography
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Vibrations of the same physical nature as sound but with frequencies above the range of human hearing, used for diagnostic or therapeutic use, especially in a technique involving the formation of a two-dimensional image used for the examination and measurement of internal body structures and the detection of bodily abnormalities
²⁵ deoxyribonucleic acid
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CHANGES IN: SURGERY, IMMUNOLOGY, LIFE EXPECTANCY, DNA, AIDS & SOCIETY
Our Australian newspapers first carried a report about AIDS in December 1981:
Dec 31: Alarming reports from Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York suggest that a new type of lung infection and skin cancer may be common in homosexuals. It appears to destroy the body’s immune system, so that after a period of weight loss the victim succumbs to infections. Doctors have yet to devise a cure for the disease, which is unnamed and does not appear to be confined to homosexuals.
The first case of AIDS in Australia appeared in July 1983. In September 1987 363 cases were reported since the beginning of the year, and a total of 583 cases had been reported since 1982. The majority of cases were homosexual or bisexual men. 319 had died. By 1997 between ten and twelve thousand new cases of HIV infection per day were reported worldwide, making the search for a vaccine of extreme importance. Initially, panic spread through the homosexual and then the general community. A widely publicised campaign for “safe-sex” by the use of condoms was mounted²⁶and sex education in schools attempted to instill the need for safe sex. The old religious taboos of “no sex before marriage” had been largely disregarded since the introduction of the pill, which made pregnancy unlikely, and it was thought that accurate education was the best safeguard, although this met opposition from some segments of the community, especially the churches, as encouraging and promoting promiscuity and homosexuality. It is not possible to separate medicine from moral or value questions.
The discovery of DNA and its mechanism led to the science of genetic engineering in the latter half of the ^th century. Technically this is known as recombinant DNA technology, or gene cloning, in which DNA molecules from two or more sources are combined either within cells or in vitro and are then inserted into host organisms in which they are able to propagate. Gene cloning is used to produce new genetic combinations that are of value to science, medicine, agriculture, and industry.
Genetic engineering has advanced the understanding of many theoretical and practical aspects of gene function and organization. Through recombinant DNA techniques, bacteria have been created that are capable of synthesizing human insulin, human growth hormone, alpha interferon²⁷, a hepatitis B vaccine, and other medically useful substances. Plants may be genetically adjusted to enable them to fix nitrogen, and genetic diseases can possibly be corrected by replacing "bad" genes with "normal" ones. Nevertheless, special concern has been focused on such achievements for fear that they might result in the introduction of unfavourable and possibly dangerous traits into microorganisms that were previously free of them--e.g., resistance to antibiotics, production of toxins, or a tendency to cause disease.
By the 1980s genetic engineers had cloned both plants and animals. In July 1997 two sheep were cloned with a human gene so their milk will contain a blood-clotting protein that can be used to treat human haemophilia. This work could prove that cloning is an efficient way to create herds of cows or flocks of sheep that act as drug-making factories. These practical applications of cloning are economically promising but philosophically unsettling. Animal breeders would welcome the chance to clone top-quality livestock. A single superior animal could be used to create a line of genetic constancy, much as has been done with fruit trees. Clones are also highly useful in biological research because of their genetic uniformity.
The cloning of human beings is a subject fraught with ethical and moral controversy. If cloning can ensure the infinite replication of specific genetic traits, a judgment would need to be made as to which traits are desirable and therefore worthy of perpetuation. The persons empowered to exercise such
²⁶ For example, one slogan stated “If it’s not on, it’s not on”
²⁷ Proteins that inhibit the replication of many viruses, useful in treating certain forms of leukemia and hepatitis
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11: EPILOGUE: CHANGE, CONSTANCY & THE POT OF GOLD
judgment would be in a position to change the course of human development.
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Perhaps the best example of concentrated scientific endeavour of the late 20 century is the Human Genome Project. Started in 1990, the project's ultimate goal is to identify the chromosomal location of every human gene and to determine each gene's precise chemical structure in order to elucidate its
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function in health and disease . The potential utility of the Human Genome Project is immense. The information gathered will serve as the basic reference for research in human biology and medicine and will provide fundamental insights into the genetic basis of human disease. The new technologies developed in the course of the project will be applicable in numerous other fields of biomedical endeavour. Another objective of the project is to address the ethical, legal, and social implications of the information obtained. Society will derive the greatest benefit from this knowledge only if it takes measures to prevent abuses, such as invasions of the privacy of an individual's genetic background by employers, insurers, or government agencies or discrimination based on genetic grounds. This immense project is being undertaken with the collaboration of scientists in Amercia, Japan, the United
st
Kingdom, France and Russia. Perhaps it will usher in changes in the 21 century even greater than
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those in the 20 .
Over the centuries mankind has been ravaged by epidemics such as smallpox and typhus and yet, although Edward Jenner developed a vaccination process for smallpox in 1796, it was to be a hundred years before the role of bacteria and viruses began to be understood. Serious epidemics of other
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diseases scourged the early 20 century - such as the influenza outbreak in 1918-19, during which 20 million people around the world perished. Because the influenza virus changed its character from one epidemic to the next, it proved difficult to develop a reliable vaccine, which did not come until 1945.
Although Pasteur established the principle of effective vaccines in 1881, the medical community had to await advances in microbiology and immunology. For this the development of the electron microscope was needed. It was well into the 1930s, before much was known about viruses. Salk developed a poliomyelitis vaccine in 1954, while vaccines for measles and rubella had to wait until the 1960s. Typhus had always seemed associated with people crowded together in filth, cold, poverty and hunger, and yet a vaccine was not developed until World War II. It is still an ever-present threat to impoverished and destitute people in many parts of the world.
These epidemics gave rise to increasing national concern for public health: Governments became involved in programs for preventing disease, prolonging life and human efficiency through organised effort. During this century effective action has been directed towards sanitation, control of communicable infections, education of individuals in personal hygiene and the organisation of medical
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and nursing services. The work initiated by scientists in the 19 century continued in the 20 century with the discovery of vitamins, antibiotics and much else.
²⁸Every cell of an organism has a set of chromosomes containing the heritable genetic material that directs its development--i.e., its genome. The genetic material of chromosomes is DNA. Each of the paired strands of the DNA molecule is a linear array of subunits called nucleotides, or bases, of which there are four types--adenine, cytosine, thymine, and guanine. Genes are discrete stretches of nucleotides that carry the information the cell uses to construct proteins. The human genome is composed of about 3 billion base pairs and contains 50,000 to 100,000 genes. The genes take up only about 5 to 10 percent of the DNA; some of the remaining DNA, which does not code for proteins, may regulate whether or not proteins are made, but the function of most of it is unknown.
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The first half of the 20th century saw further advances in community health care, particularly in the welfare of mothers and children and the health of schoolchildren, the emergence of the public health nurse, baby-clinics, and the development of voluntary health agencies, health education programs, and occupational health programs. Programs for routine vaccination of infants for major diseases developed, while increasingly there was concern and campaigns to warn of the dangers of alcohol, smoking, the taking of drugs, and unsafe sex.
In Australia, state governments became responsible for the administration of public health, hospitals, and medicine. Health care is nominally free under the Commonwealth government's Medicare program, which is funded by deductions from taxable personal income, but the whole system is in collapse owing to inadequate funding. Those who can afford it pay for private health insurance and patronize private hospitals, which are strongly supported by the medical profession. Kay and I spend between us almost 6% of our income on Medicare and private health insurance.
As our population becomes older, the burden of paying for the sick and elderly increasingly falls on the younger people in the work-force. Part of the problem is that we have come to expect a high standard of health care and much of this now depends on highly skilled personnel and increasingly expensive equipment and drugs. We all expect that, if a high standard of care is possible, we have the right to receive it - even though the country is finding it difficult to afford it. Nonetheless, the improvements of the last one hundred years have been enormous so that we now enjoy a level of community care unparalleled in the past.
The same is true for our changing attitude to mental health. Compared with last century, we are now much more enlightened and humane. Throughout the ages the mentally disturbed have been viewed with a mixture of fear and revulsion. Their fate generally has been one of rejection, neglect, and ill treatment; often they were cast into asylums and kept out of view. Although in ancient medical writings there are references to mental disturbance that display views very similar to modern humane attitudes, interspersed in the same literature are instances of socially sanctioned cruelty based upon the belief that mental disorders have supernatural origins such as demonic possession.
So-called madhouses such as Bedlam (founded in London in 1247) were typical of 18th-century mental institutions in which the sufferers were routinely shackled and physically mistreated. Inmates of these places often were believed to be devoid of human feeling, and their management was indifferent if not brutal; the primary consideration was to isolate the mentally disturbed from ordinary society. It was not until 1908 that some public outcry and the newly emerging scientific psychology began to make changes possible. The European development of psychoanalysis, initiated by Sigmund Freud in Vienna, placed heavy emphasis on childhood experiences as major factors in the development of psychiatric symptoms and led worldwide to increasing public awareness of psychological and social environmental elements as primary factors in the development of mental disorders. Carl Jung in the 1920s, and many others have since extended and modified his work. During this century mental
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disturbances have come to be recognised as either psychoses or neuroses .
²⁹fundamental mental derangement (as schizophrenia) characterized by defective or lost contact with reality
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a mental and emotional disorder that affects only part of the personality, is accompanied by a less distorted perception of reality than in a psychosis, does not result in
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Pharmacology joined forces with the practice of psychiatry to produce a series of drugs, particularly after World War II, that helped control psychotic disorders such as manic-depressive states and schizophrenia. Slowly, understanding of the underlying mechanisms of mental disturbance grew: Some were related to certain chemical imbalances in the body. By the use of medication many people who would previously have been confined to a mental institution were able to rejoin the community. Mental disturbance became recognisable as a disease of the body, to be treated medically like any other physical abnormality so that slowly the stigma attached to being “mad” decreased.
In 1957 an anti-depressant pill was developed, followed by anti-anxiety medication in the 1960s. Many patients presenting themselves to doctors with various neuroses were given a “quick fix” with medication, but this did not remove the underlying cause, which was often psychological and not organic. Over-prescription of medication became of concern. In recent years there have been many advances in psychotherapy which aim to treat mental or emotional disorders by psychological means . The practice of individual, group and family psychotherapy is now widespread, often using short-term therapies rather than the protracted approaches of Freud and Jung. Group psychotherapy is used in many related areas such as helping business and management groups operate with more harmony, with less stress and frustration, and with more understanding of the dynamics of their situation.
Advances during the 20^thcentury in the understanding of human behaviour have been reflected in other ways in our society. For example, studies of motivation and of conditioning have influenced everything from advertising to the formulation of political policies to attract votes. On a more philosophical level, the explanation of much human behaviour in terms of chemical malfunction in the body, has raised the question of the extent to which an individual is responsible for his own actions.
While both individual and public health are of considerable importance, great changes in personal material standards of living were made in the second half of this century, particularly in the developed countries. After World War II there was a significant rise in prosperity for most people. They had endured the poverty of the great economic depression of the early 1930s and the privations of the 193945 world war. My mother came through this period as a young married woman and had no labour saving devices around her home and no money for anything but essentials. But times have changed.
Today it is taken for granted that a middle-class family will live in a well-constructed brick home, probably with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a family room in addition to the lounge, and maybe a games room and a swimming pool. The house will contain radios, a television set, a personal computer - possibly connected to the Internet, a video cassette recorder, and an audio compact-disk player. The kitchen will have a gas or electric oven, a microwave oven, a refrigerator and possibly a dishwasher. The laundry will most certainly have a clothes-washer, and possibly an electric dryer. An
disturbance of the use of language, and is accompanied by various physical, physiological, and mental disturbances (as anxieties, or phobias)
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M any psychotherapies are based on the assertion that (1) Human behaviour is prompted chiefly by emotional considerations, but insight and self-understanding are necessary to modify and control behaviour; (2) A significant proportion of human emotion is not normally accessible to one's personal awareness or introspection, being rooted in the unconscious, i.e., those portions of the mind beneath the level of consciousness; (3) Any process that makes available to a person's conscious awareness the true significance of emotional conflicts and tensions that were hitherto held in the unconscious will thereby produce heightened awareness and increased stability and emotional control.
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PUBLIC HEALTH, MENTAL HEALTH. IMPROVEMENTS IN THE STANDARD OF LIVING
electric vacuum-cleaner will enable the floors to be kept clean with minimum effort, while a motor-driven lawn-mower will take care of the garden. Hot water will be available at the turn of a tap. Many homes will have air-conditioning installed and a security system to warn of intruders.
Today, most products in the home are mass produced in developing countries where labour is
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comparatively cheap. We are moving to a global economy. During the 20 century, advances in chemicals and materials have been extensive: The use of plastics is ubiquitous. As a small boy the only
32
plastic I remember was Bakelite . Most containers were made of tin or other metal. When one bought small items they were placed in brown paper bags. The butcher wrapped his meat in “butchers’” paper
- a low-grade white paper. All this has changed. Although Celluloid was developed in 1869, it was not a true plastic. The discovery of Bakelite led to intense research, particularly in Germany where, in 1922, it was shown that rubber contained macromolecules; a giant polymer was developed and named polystyrene. Vinyl chloride had been discovered in 1835 and polymer vinyl chloride (PVC) was produced in 1912.
Industry has now spawned a host of important new materials: For example, a vast range of applications has been found for plastics that have been manufactured in many different forms with widely varied characteristics. Our home is filled with plastic items from thin films such as “Glad-Wrap” used for sealing small quantities of foodstuff, food containers, to dishes, and to the casing of my computer and other electronic equipment.
Glass fibre has been molded in rigid shapes to provide motorcar bodies and hulls for small ships. Carbon fibre has demonstrated remarkable properties that make it an alternative to metals for high-temperature turbine blades. Research on ceramics has produced materials resistant to high temperatures suitable for heat shields on spacecraft.
The demand for iron and its alloys and for the nonferrous metals has remained high. The modern world has found extensive new uses for the latter: copper for electrical conductors, tin for protective plating of less resistant metals, lead as a shield in nuclear-power installations, and silver in photography. In most of these cases the initial development began before the 20th century, but perfection and application took place this century.
The possibility of creating artificial fibres was another 19th-century discovery that did not become commercially significant until the 20th century, when such fibres were developed alongside the solid plastics to which they are closely related. The first artificial textiles were of rayon, made from regenerated cellulose by extrusion through minute holes, but later research exploited the polymerization techniques being used in solid plastics, and culminated in the production of nylon just before the outbreak of World War II. Nylon was developed with the women's stocking market in mind, but the conditions of war gave it an opportunity to demonstrate its versatility and reliability as parachute fabric and towlines. This and other synthetic fibres became generally available only after the war. Anyone
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from the 19 century coming suddenly into our present age would be amazed at the variety of new materials in everyday use, just as we might be amazed at their further proliferation in a hundred years from now.
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Bakelite, the first completely synthetic plastic was commercially produced from phenol and formaldehyde in 1910. A dark thermosetting resin, it was used in the electrical industry. The first colourless resin, from urea-formaldehyde, though patented in 1918, was not marketed until 1928. Though available in any colour, it was moisture adsorbent (that is, moisture clung to its surface); this problem was not overcome until 1939 by using melamine instead of urea.
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Today there is much pressure for the supply of materials, not only because of the rise in prosperity in the Western world but also because of the population explosion. This came about due to improvements in medicine, sanitation and nutrition in most parts of the world. In 1650 world population was about 500 million. Between that date and 1850 the average annual rate of increase of the world's population doubled; it doubled again by the 1920s, and more than doubled, once more, by the 1970s.
If the time taken to double the world's population over the past 350 years is taken as a measure, then the doubling time is seen to have been shrinking fast. It took 200 years, to 1825, to double the world's population from 500 million to one billion. It took only 100 years to achieve the next doubling, bringing the total to two billion by 1930; and only 45 years to achieve yet another doubling, to four billion by 1975. Although there are signs of slowing in this last part of the 20th century, many experts predict eight billion by early in the 21st century, a reduction in the doubling time to about 40 years. If we are to maintain our current level of nutrition, health, clothing and shelter, there must be an enormous increase in our production capacity.
As material prosperity increased in Western nations, the birth-rate fell but remained high in the developing countries. Determined efforts in a few countries, such as Singapore, Sri Lanka, and China³³, are beginning to yield some results but, on the whole, attempts to persuade non-Westerners to have smaller families so far have failed. One result is the persistence of predominantly youthful populations in societies that can least afford the burden of feeding and educating their nonproductive young. People under 15 make up more than 40 percent of the populations of the Third World , as compared with between 20 and 30 percent in the industrialized world.
The consequences of the population explosion are many, and have become particularly acute during my
35
lifetime. Famines still occur regularly in some developing countries . While we must find ways to limit population growth, it is necessary to expand, mechanise and increase the efficiency of food production. As population has increased so, too, markets have grown. Some of these markets are shifting from the western countries to the developing countries, particularly in Asia. With increase in production, energy requirements have increased and there is much searching for new energy sources, such as coal, gas and oil. This has produced, in turn, political rivalries and struggles to gain control of
³³ For some years China has been trying to enforce a “one child family” policy
34
Third World = the aggregate of the underdeveloped nations of the world; Second W orld = the Communist nations as a political and economic bloc; First World = the highly developed industrialized nations, often considered the westernized countries of the world
³⁵The causes of famine are numerous. Natural causes destroy crops and food supplies and include drought, heavy rain and flooding, unseasonable cold weather, typhoons, vermin depredations, plant disease, and insect infestations. Drought is the most common natural cause and the prime contributor to famine in arid and semiarid regions, as in parts of Africa. Many of Asia's famines have been characterized as food shortages due to overpopulation. These have occurred in drought- and flood-prone areas with agricultural production at or barely above the subsistence level. In 1967 a severe famine was recorded in Bihar -a Northeastern state in India, and excessive mortality was avoided only by a major international relief effort. Famine also continued to plague China into the 20th century: more than 3,000,000 persons starved to death in 1928-29.
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ADVANCES IN MATERIALS, PLASTICS, THE POPULATION EXPLOSION. FAMINE & THE SEARCH FOR RESOURCES & GREATER PRODUCTION
these resources. The development of new types of energy, such as nuclear power, has brought with it the hazards of nuclear radiation should there be accidents - particularly as there have been two or three disasters at nuclear power plants.
On a vacant lot beside the Shire office in the small Western Australian town of Gnowangerup there stands a huge bright green, steam tractor measuring four metres in length and three metres in height. It was manufactured in Britain and shipped to Albany in 1898. Initially used by several farmers for clearing land and tilling the soil, it was later acquired by a government department which used it as an
36
early form of bulldozer . It is now a monument to the important transition of society from man’s muscle power to modern mechanisation. By contrast, the latest earth-moving trucks used in the opencut mines in the northwest of this state carry up to 200 tons of ore, have an engine capacity of 1,500 kilowatts (2,000 horsepower), with tyres alone that are three metres in diameter. If man today still depended on his own muscles and on his horses, he would never cope with the present production demands. Through the steam engine and then the internal combustion engine, he has freed himself from back-breaking labour and increased his productivity beyond measure.
Fortunately, the quantity of food produced in the 20th century increased rapidly through intensive application of modern technology. The internal-combustion engine proved much more suitable than steam in the tractor and this has become the almost universal agent of mobile power on the farm in the industrialized countries. The same engines powered other machines such as combine harvesters, while synthetic fertilizers, an important product of the chemical industry, became popular in most types of farming, and other chemicals--such as pesticides and herbicides--were also developed. World War II gave a powerful boost to this.
37
Despite problems that developed later, the introduction of DDT as a highly effective insecticide in 1944 was a particularly significant achievement of chemical technology. However, insects that attacked crops developed a resistance to DDT, and in the 1960s there was much criticism of the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Fortunately the introduction of new strains³⁸of wheat, rice and cotton - for example brought about greatly increased yields. Food supplies per capita in developing countries have increased at nearly the same rate as in developed countries, indicating a narrowing gap between food supplies and population growth in the developing countries.
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The 20 century also brought enormous improvements in industrial productivity. This started with Henry Ford, who designed an assembly line for his model T car in 1913. The result was a remarkable reduction of manufacturing time. Under the old system, by which parts were carried to a stationary
³⁶ a tractor-driven machine usually having a broad blunt horizontal blade for moving earth (as in road building)
37
dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane: a colorless odorless water-insoluble crystalline insecticide that tends to accumulate in ecosystems and has toxic effects on many vertebrates
38
Some new strains were developed using genetic alteration. Genetic means have also been used to modify insects so that they become infertile.
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11: EPILOGUE: CHANGE, CONSTANCY & THE POT OF GOLD
assembly point, 12½ man-hours were required for each vehicle. Using mechanical means to pull the chassis past stockpiles of components, with each worker dedicated to assembling a single component, he cut labour time to 93 man-minutes by the end of April 1914. Ford's methods drastically reduced the price of a private motor car, and brought it within the reach of the common man.
Most industries followed the assembly-line principles introduced by Ford, with a constant search for greater and greater efficiency in the use of human labour. “Time and Motion Study” engineers studied how the human operator could work more efficiently, and had little regard for the repetitive drudgery and monotonous nature of much of the work. The worker was regarded as an unskilled, unintelligent person who simply became another cog in the manufacturing machine. Consequently there has been constant conflict between management and workers for much of this century, as evidenced by the rise of a strong and belligerent trade-union movement.
However, slowly, a more humane approach has been adopted in some areas. For example, in the 1990s Semler in Brazil reorganised his work-force, creating small teams, in which everyone was multi-skilled, and in which everyone took part responsibility for all aspects of the work being done. Whenever a production unit grew to more than about fifty persons, he split the production into separate operations. Within any one unit, decisions were made by all employees, the individual employee even setting his own salary level - but doing it while also having responsibility for the overall budget.
Semler found that workers became much more interested in their work; it had variety; it asked them to take responsibility, and it encouraged them to think about the best ways to do things. Workers were also given a quarter of all profits. The result was that productivity increased enormously, profits increased, and workers were happy.
Semler considered that the motivation was not to produce profits; if this were the sole aim, then workers tended to be treated as numbers - as non-human beings. Part of the real purpose in life, he said, was to live a purposeful life, and one giving satisfaction; a life in which everyone is valued and everyone is trusted. In his companies, quality of human life is very important, and he believes strongly in trusting others.
Conventional management, said Semler, is based on mistrust: on the assumption that the worker will shirk his work, is dishonest, and will get out of you what he can: it breeds an antagonistic us-them relationship. This, says Semler, is not the way things should be, and he has proved that his own approach works.
Perhaps the single most important industrial development this century has been the widespread introduction of automation into almost every activity. The principle behind automation is one of feedback: a desired performance is compared with the actual performance and the difference between the two used to bring the actual performance nearer to that desired. A common example of a feedback control system is the thermostat used in an oven to control temperature. In this device, a decrease in oven temperature causes an electrical switch to close, thus turning on the heating unit. As the temperature rises, the switch opens and the heat supply is turned off. The thermostat can be set to turn on the heating unit at any particular set point.
Advances in computer technology have enabled them to be used as sophisticated devices to analyse the control required in an automatic system, while improved sensor technology has provided a vast array of measuring devices that can be used as components in automatic feedback control systems. Some of these sensor systems require computer technology for their implementation. Machine vision, for example, requires the processing of enormous amounts of data that can be accomplished only by
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MECHANISATION, FOOD PRODUCTION, INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTIVITY & AUTOMATION
high-speed digital computers. This technology is proving to be a versatile sensory capability for various industrial tasks, such as part identification, quality inspection, and robot guidance. During World War II a highly sophisticated mathematical theory of automatic control systems developed while, more recently, theories of artificial intelligence have been employed.
Artificial intelligence is an advanced field of computer science in which the computer is programmed to exhibit characteristics commonly associated with human intelligence. These characteristics include the capacity for learning, understanding language, reasoning, solving problems, rendering expert diagnoses, and similar mental capabilities. Developments in artificial intelligence are expected to provide robots and other "intelligent" machines with the ability to communicate with humans and to accept very high-level instructions rather than the detailed step-by-step programming statements typically required of today's programmable machines. For example, a robot of the future endowed with artificial intelligence might be capable of accepting and executing the command "assemble the product." Present-day industrial robots must be provided with a detailed set of instructions specifying the locations of the product's components, the order in which they are to be assembled, and so forth.
Present day applications of automation are enormous. Consider the following examples:
# Modern electronic telephone switching systems are based on highly sophisticated digital computers that
perform functions such as monitoring thousands of telephone lines, determining which lines require
service, storing the digits of each telephone number as it is being dialed, setting up the required
connections, sending electrical signals to ring the receiver's phone, monitoring the call during its
progress, and disconnecting the phone when the call is completed. These systems also are used to time
and bill calls and to transmit billing information and other data relative to the business operations of the
phone company.
# Communications satellites have become essential for communicating telephone or video signals across
great distances. Such communications would not be possible without the automated guidance systems that
place and retain the satellites in predetermined orbits.
# Automatic mail-sorting machines have been developed for use in many post offices throughout the world
to read codes on envelopes and sort the envelopes according to destination.
# Automation has been applied in various ways in the transportation industries. Applications include airline
reservation systems, automatic pilots in aircraft and locomotives, and urban mass-transit systems. The
airlines use computerized reservation systems to continuously monitor the status of all flights. With these
systems, ticket agents at widely dispersed locations can obtain information about the availability of seats
on any flight in a matter of seconds. The reservation systems compare requests for space with the status
of each flight, grant space when available, and automatically update the reservation status files.
Passengers can even receive their seat assignments well in advance of flight departures.
# Banking and financial institutions have embraced automation in their operations--principally through
computer technology--to facilitate the processing of large volumes of documents and financial
transactions. The sorting of cheques is done by optical character-recognition systems utilising the special
alphanumeric characters at the bottom of cheques. Bank balances are computed and recorded using
computer systems installed by virtually all financial institutions. Major banks have established electronic
banking systems, including automatic teller machines. Located in places convenient for their customers,
these automatic tellers permit users to complete basic transactions without requiring the assistance of
bank personnel.
# Credit card transactions have also become highly automated. Restaurants, retailers, and other
organisations are using systems that automatically check the validity of a credit card and the credit
standing of the cardholder in a matter of seconds as the customer waits for the transaction to be finalised.
Some credit card transactions trigger immediate transfer of funds equal to the amount of the sale from
the cardholder's account into the merchant's account.
# Retail trade has seen a number of changes in its operations as a result of automation. Selling merchandise
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has typically been a very labour-intensive activity, with sales staff needed to assist customers with their selections and then finalise transactions at the cash register. Each transaction depletes the store's inventory, so the item purchased must be identified for reorder. Much clerical effort is expended by the store when inventory is managed by strictly manual procedures. Computerized systems have been installed in most modern retail stores to speed sales transactions and automatically update inventory records as the stock of each item is reduced.
# Henry Ford’s assembly line with human operators has largely been replaced by an assembly line in which components are assembled by robots. Very few human beings are required in the operation.
# Microwave ovens, washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, video recorders, and other modern household appliances typically contain a microprocessor that works as the computer controller for the device. The consumer operates the appliance by programming the controller to perform the required functions, including timing (ovens, dryers), power levels (microwave ovens), input channels (video recorders), and other cycle options (washing machines). The programming of the device is done simply by pressing a series of buttons in the proper sequence, so the user does not think of the procedure as programming a computer.
# The motor car is an example of a highly automated consumer product. The modern car is typically equipped with several microprocessors that operate a variety of functions, including engine control (fuel-air ratio, for example), the automatic gear box and the cruise control.
I have taken all these examples to illustrate the way in which automation has permeated every aspect of our society during the last fifty years and has had enormous social implications. Over the years the social merits of automation have been widely argued. The biggest controversy has focused on how automation affects employment, but there are other important aspects of automation, including its effect on productivity, economic competition, education, and quality of life.
Nearly all industrial installations of automation, and in particular robotics, involve a replacement of human labour by an automated system. Therefore, one of the direct effects of automation in factory operations is the dislocation of human labour from the workplace. The long-term effects of automation on employment and unemployment rates are debatable. Today most industrial countries have a high level of unemployment. At the one end of society we have a dearth of highly trained individuals required to design and maintain the new systems; at the other end, we have an excess of low-skilled people whose jobs have been taken over by machines. Centralisation of services has meant the closure of branch offices with loss of jobs at all levels of skill. Some argue that while workers have indeed lost jobs through automation, population increases and consumer demand for the products of automation have compensated for these losses. There is undoubtedly a need for constant retraining and upgrading of skills as automation spreads to more and more industries.
Advantages commonly attributed to automation include higher production rates and increased productivity, more efficient use of materials, better product quality, improved safety, shorter workweeks for labour, and reduced factory lead times. Higher output and increased productivity have been two of the biggest reasons in justifying the use of automation. Despite the claims of high quality from good workmanship by humans, automated systems typically perform the manufacturing process with less variability than human workers, resulting in greater control and consistency of product quality. Also, increased process control makes more efficient use of materials, resulting in less scrap.
Another benefit of automation is the reduction in the number of hours worked on average per week by factory workers. In 1900 the average workweek was approximately 70 hours. This has gradually been reduced to a standard workweek in the industrialised countries of about 40 hours. Mechanisation and automation have played a significant role in this reduction.
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APPLICATIONS OF AUTOMATION: BENEFITS AND DISADVANTAGES
Despite the social benefits that might result from retraining displaced workers for other jobs, in almost all cases the worker whose job has been taken over by a machine undergoes a period of emotional stress. In addition to displacement from work, the worker may be displaced geographically. In order to find other work, a person may have to relocate, which is another source of stress.
Young people leaving school without higher qualifications find it difficult to secure work so that youth unemployment is particularly high. Such youth may feel that they are unwanted by society and suffer feelings of worthlessness and depression. Youth suicide is at a high level, while many turn to drugs such as heroin. Society has not yet found a way to solve this problem.
There are also potential risks that automation technology will ultimately subjugate rather than serve humankind. The risks include the possibility that workers will become slaves to automated machines, that the privacy of humans will be invaded by vast computer data networks, that human error in the management of technology will somehow endanger civilization, and that society will become dependent on automation for its economic well-being. The high level of efficient communication and organisation has enabled the development of large multinational corporations that are driven by a profit motive without moral concern for society as a whole.
The optimists assert that, these dangers aside, automation technology, if used wisely and effectively, can yield substantial opportunities for the future. There is an opportunity to relieve humans from repetitive, hazardous, and unpleasant labour in all forms. And there is an opportunity for future automation technologies to provide a growing social and economic environment in which humans can enjoy a higher standard of living and a better way of life.
In 1969, while on study-leave in America, I bought a book at Stanford University by Frenchman Jacques Ellul called The Technological Society. Ellul thought of technology broadly as the organisation of things to achieve a desired result; in this sense, the development of large business corporations, particularly in the 20^th century, is an important aspect of the technological change that has taken place. Not that large business concerns are new. John Elphinstone, the benefactor of my Chinese ancestor, was part of a large company, the East India Company, that started trading in 1600 and grew to power and influence in many parts of the world. However, it was only after 1850 that the rate of corporate growth became breathtaking. When my grandfather arrived in Perth in 1897, giant corporations, particularly in Germany, had already grouped together to influence the terms of trade, forming cartels in the chemical and electrical industries.
th
However, it was not until the second half of the 20 century that giant companies harnessed the new technologies of computers and of communication to control much of the world economy. The
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multinational corporation evolved. Today, huge companies like General Motors, Ford, Exxon, IBM, Unilever and Nestlé, for example, individually have larger economies than those of many individual nations. Of the world’s 100 largest economies, 50 are multinational corporations. Two-thirds of all international trade is accounted for by just 500 corporations. Not only are these corporations very wealthy and wield much power, but the world still has great contrast between the richest and the
³⁹ Sometimes called transnational corporations.
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poorest people. One fifth of the world’s people control 85%, while the poorest fifth control only 1.4%
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of the world’s money .
While some company executives believe that their companies should act as responsible public institutions, holding power in trust for the community⁴¹, most consider that their only responsibility is to maximize their profits. This, they argue, will expand employment and raise living standards.
Nonetheless, decisions made by company managements have ramifications throughout society. In effect, companies can decide which parts of the country or even which parts of the world will prosper and which will decline by choosing where to locate their plants and other installations. The giant companies not only decide what to produce but also help to instill in their customers, typically through television advertising, a desire for the amenities that the companies make available. To the extent that large firms provide employment, their personnel requirements determine the curricula of schools and universities. For these reasons, individuals' aspirations and dissatisfactions are likely to be influenced by large companies. They cajole and bribe governments to do their bidding. Under these circumstances, one would think that they cannot avoid a wider community responsibility, but this is rarely so.
In 1995 I watched a television interview with ninety-year-old Sir Garfield Barwick, one time Minister in the Federal Government and later Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. During his term as a minister he introduced tax reforms - reforms that allowed many affluent people to find ways to minimise their tax. The interviewer asked him whether this was moral.
`Moral?' he snorted. `This has got nothing to do with morals! Governments throughout history have never had regard for morals. They simply do what they do.'
His attitude was that politics was a power play: he who has the strength and the wiliness always wins. Never has it been otherwise, so it is no use talking about morals. As Chief justice of the High Court, his task was to interpret the law. His view was that in government, right and wrong are not measured in moral terms but in legal terms. If, according to the law, an action is legal, then it is right. If it is illegal, then it is wrong. It is the judge's role to correctly interpret the law, and hence what is right and wrong. The naive may think that laws are made according to moral principles of right and wrong, but they are mistaken: laws are often made for ulterior purposes such as pacifying community groups, gaining party popularity and so increasing the chances of re-election, and the retention of power. There may be a rhetoric of moral appeal, but the persuasive reasons for action are based on power play. This may be a cynical view of life, said Barwick, but it was the realistic and pragmatic attitude to adopt.
Unfortunately the same attitude is adopted by many multinational companies. Pharmaceutical companies have promoted drugs in developing countries when they have been removed from sale in the developed countries because they we found unsafe: For the treatment of diarrhoea in babies the drug Immodium was developed but had to be used under very restricted conditions. The drug company marketed this in Pakistan where it could be obtained without prescription and used in much larger doses than recommended. Many small children died. When a Pakistani doctor waged battle with the drug company, it refused to recognise the problem until a documentary film was made. Within two days of the film being released in Europe the drug company stopped production and withdrew retail stocks.
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Quoted by The New Internationalist magazine, M ay 1995 and November 1997. This magazine reports on world poverty and inequality and focusses attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and powerless in both rich and poor nations.
⁴¹ See the example of Semler, page 585
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DANGERS OF AUTOMATION MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS MORAL CONCERNS
This is simply one of many examples.
In summary, by the late 20th century, in terms of size, influence, and visibility, the corporation has become the dominant business form in industrial nations. While corporations may be large or small, ranging from firms having hundreds of thousands of employees to neighbourhood businesses of very modest proportions, public attention has increasingly focused on the several hundred giant companies that play a preponderant economic role in the United States, Japan, Korea, the nations of western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and several other countries. These firms not only occupy important positions in the economy, but they have great social, political, and cultural influence as well. Both at home and abroad they affect the operations of national and local governments, give shape to local communities, and influence the values of ordinary individuals. Therefore, while in fact and in law corporate businesses are private enterprises, their activities have consequences that are public in character and as pervasive as those of many governments.
As we approach the close of the 20^th century, we seem ruled increasingly by free market principles and what is called economic rationalism. It is the old approach that, if you let everyone follow his own self interest, then, if they do well materially and become rich, this will wash off for the benefit of the poor. Exponents point to socialist, communist states and claim that, while the concepts may be good, the theories have not worked in practice because human beings are frail; those with power grab it to their own advantage. They point to the failure and disintegration of the USSR. They point to communist China, which is turning to capitalist principles to get things done.
They say that only when the motivation is personal advantage will people work hard. They point to social welfare as encouraging lack of personal responsibility and encouraging indolence and a "handout" mentality.
Many social scientists are very critical of the "dry economics" of the economic rationalist. It is all very well, they say, to suggest that the best economic conditions will result from open competition. But ruthless competition and privatisation encourage greed. The motivation for action is always because “there is a quid in it for me”. This philosophy of “greed is good” overlooks the importance of community and of finer feelings of trust and comradeship that ought to exist. They suggest that trust between people, a sense of community belonging and of working together for the common good, has gone.
These qualities may be grouped as "social capital", which we are neglecting at our peril. Good communities, psychologically healthy communities, are those that gain their well-being through a sense of communality, trust and belongingness. Studies in Italy have shown that psychologically healthy communities perform economically better than those that are not healthy. The example of Semler supports this. And yet, our global economic rationalists ignore these lessons.
Unfortunately there is some truth in what the economic rationalists say. We need personal incentive, but we also need concern for those who are poor and powerless. Above all, we need to educate our young people to a sense of personal responsibility. We are failing to do this, since the overt value system of society says that greed and self interest is good and that, if I don't take what I can get, no one else will help me. Our politicians set an appalling example; the family structure is breaking down and there is little to persuade young people to espouse values based on justice and love. But more of this, later.
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Like sex, war has always been with us but during the last 130 years there has been a change in the magnitude and nature of war, and a change in the consequences of conducting a major war. We have seen two major world wars and innumerable smaller ones. The casualties in World War I dwarfed those of previous wars: some 8,500,000 soldiers died as a result of wounds or disease, while estimates of the total number of dead in World War II vary anywhere from 35,000,000 to 60,000,000. Few have ventured even to try to calculate the total number of persons who were wounded or permanently disabled. The use of aircraft, particularly in World War II, changed the nature of war from something waged between the combatant armies to the slaughter of civilians. It was this that contributed to the huge increase in casualties in the Second World War by the indiscriminate bombing of cities. World War I saw the use of poison gas but, since that time, although both chemical and biological weapons have been developed, they have rarely been used.
Perhaps the best example of the inhumanity of modern war is the development of the landmine during this century. To quote one account:
The central fact about landmines that overrules all others is that of mine injury. No attempt at empathy can make us understand this reality. One step, and the body can turn into a shower of gory scraps, impossible to piece together again. Or else the person survives but a limb (or more) is torn away and what is left is shattered, unimaginably mutilated.⁴²
I make no apology for the graphic description because the landmine is hideous and appeals to ban their use should be heeded. There are an estimated 110 million active mines scattered in over 70 countries; a further 110 million have been stockpiled. Once landmines have been strewn about the countryside they lie hidden until some unsuspecting person - possibly a child or woman - steps on one, perhaps years later. 2,000 people are involved in landmine accidents every month, that is, one victim every 20 minutes. About 800 of these will die and the rest will be maimed for life. Erik Prokosch described the phenomenon of the antipersonnel landmine designer in his book The Technology of Killing:
A weapons designer is not, first and foremost, a killer: he is a statistician, a metallurgist, an engineer. But when he is put to work in the area of munitions he is transformed and thinks only in terms of ‘lethal area estimates’, ‘kill probabilities’ and ‘effective casualty radius’. He then probably returns to his home in the suburbs to play with his own children without making the connection between his day’s work and the devastation caused on the other side of the world.’
But life for those who employ designers is even less complicated: it is all about the bottom line - profit. Journalist Neil Christie-Ormond had a career as a war correspondent. After covering the Biafra War in 1967 he was disgusted by what he saw and was left with two painful memories, one of overwhelming sadness at the misery that war brings to people, and the other of rage: rage for the arms sellers. Years later, he wrote:
Rage is for the arms sellers: virtually government representatives, key earners of foreign currency; encouraged, pampered and unbelievably well-rewarded. Typical of their trade is the following event.
The Middle East is jumpy again. A few of us are in a bar in Tel Aviv, alert. An unmistakable arms dealer arrives to meet a Defence Ministry official. We just overhear his third drink clincher: ‘The other side is getting the 105 mm guns from somewhere, but we could rush over the new 176 mm, on easy terms of course.’ A few days
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The New Internationalist, September 1997, page 7
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ECONOMIC RATIONALISM, SOCIAL CAPITAL 20^TH CENTURY WAR
later, a Swedish colleague spotted the same gentleman in Alexandria, offering the Arabs something even bigger, better.
I later managed to get a dealer drunk. Well into his cups, and nearing very early retirement, he boastfully admitted that without large, more widespread misery his profits would not increase. And, incredibly, he added: ‘Naturally, the stimulation of hostilities in times of peace was a necessary evil.’ Prime targets were unstable locations where the terrain called for `sophisticated' hardware, reliance on costly spares, upgrading, training.
Horrifyingly, fleetingly, the global military-government-armaments conspiracy emerged. We quickly realised the truth about our own inability to influence or change anything. It was virtually impossible then to get a story about this activity printed anywhere significant. The conspiracy remains, sadly, more powerful today than ever.
This article may contain considerable journalistic licence but it does convey the immorality of large corporations that trade in arms, a trade supported by most governments and veiled in secrecy on the grounds of maintaining national security.
Many have been desensitised to the inhumanity of war. Perhaps two centuries ago with hand-to-hand fighting one could not avoid direct confrontation and the realisation that one was killing other human beings. Today, when the crew of a bomber plane presses the button to release a load of bombs on a city below, they have no direct comprehension of the human misery they are about to inflict, while those directing the war are even more isolated: they speak merely of the number of ‘megabodies’ eliminated. I am sure that those who dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 did not confront at that time the enormity of what they were doing.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the age of the Cold War when from 1945 to the early 1990s two power blocs - the Western industrialised nations and the Communist countries in the East, typified by USA and the USSR, threatened each other with a nuclear holocaust As they played brinkmanship, the world waited with fear. This global nature of threat and the accompanying fear was a new development during my lifetime. I was very conscious of it. British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke of “the balance of terror” as each side lived in fear of a surprise nuclear attack. Popular concern about the threat and the need for disarmament grew large as "Ban-the-Bomb" demonstrations proliferated during the late 1950s and early 1960s in many countries, although eventually most people believed that the outcome of a nuclear war would be so terrible that the possession of nuclear arms by both sides constituted an effective nuclear deterrent. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991 the Cold War came to an end and with it the constant fear in which we all lived.
In 1950 someone quipped: “If it works, it’s obsolete”, thus encapsulating both the idea of constant and rapid change, and the inevitability of that change. There are those who speak of the “technological imperative” -if something becomes technologically possible, then that development will occur, provided there is a profit in it for someone, whether or not it is for the good of society.
⁴³ The Cold W ar was waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and had only limited recourse to weapons.
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Whatever our attitude to modern technology, there can be no doubt that it presents us with a number of immediate problems that take the form of a traditional choice of evils, so that it is appropriate to regard them as constituting a "technological dilemma." This is the dilemma between, on the one hand, the overdependence of life in the advanced industrial countries on technology, and, on the other hand, the threat that technology will destroy the quality of life in modern society and even endanger society itself. Technology thus confronts Western civilization with the need to make a decision, or rather, a series of decisions, about how to use the enormous power available to society constructively rather than destructively. The need to control the development of technology, and so to resolve the dilemma, by regulating its application to creative social objectives, makes it ever more necessary to define these objectives while the problems presented by rapid technological growth can still be solved.
These problems, and the social objectives related to them, may be considered under four broad headings.
# First is the problem of controlling the application of nuclear technology.
# Second is the population problem, which is twofold: it seems necessary to find ways of controlling the dramatic rise in the number of human beings and, at the same time, to provide food and care for the people already living on the Earth.
# Third, there is the ecological problem, whereby the products and wastes of technical processes have polluted the environment and disturbed the balance of natural forces of regeneration.
# Fourth is the task of controlling computers, communications and information technology so that they are used solely for the benefit of humankind, expanding our abilities and options, while preventing government and big-business from invading individual privacy or curtailing our liberty.
We have created but not solved these problems and must bequeath them to those that come after us.
The ramifications of all the changes that have taken place during this century are immense; some have impacted on our daily lives and have changed our way of life more than others. It is impossible to discuss these comprehensively, but I will illustrate them by taking only a few examples, starting with the humble motor car, dismissed briefly on page 574 with a few short paragraphs.
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When my mother obtained her first car, she called it her “magic carpet” . It gave her freedom of movement and released her from the shackles of her immediate village of Yarloop. This is the first great virtue of the car for everyone: a previously unheard of freedom and mobility. One’s immediate, geographical world expands and becomes available to explore and experience. Friends can live miles away from one’s home, and yet we can visit them and keep in touch; one can take picnics and enjoy outings, visit the seaside and do all those things that might have been possible before but which probably were not done frequently because of the difficulty involved.
In 1979 my car, coupled to my new caravan, gave us days of pleasurable experience as we camped in the countryside surrounded by bushland settings; later, it enabled us to travel across Australia, stopping
⁴⁴ See page 39
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THE COLD WAR, THE TECHNOLOGICAL DILEMMA. THE MOTOR CAR: SOCIAL EFFECTS
for a day or so wherever we wished, experiencing the contrast between the harsh desert of the Nullarbor plain, the rain forests of Queensland and the rarified peaks of the Australian Alps.
But the car had a more prosaic influence upon our society: it changed our shopping habits. It was not long before the smaller corner grocery store was no more. No longer did the storeman write down a list of provisions to be delivered later to our home from his small and restricted stock. The large supermarket arrived because now everyone could travel in their car, perhaps some miles, to the centre, collect their purchases in shopping trolleys and then load them into the car for transport back home. Gone was the friendly grocery-man in the corner store who knew you personally and who asked whether your child had recovered from her recent attack of ‘flu. In its place there was a row of “check-out” girls whom you scarcely recognised, and who did not know you: In silence, or with a few perfunctory words, they processed your purchases with great efficiency. No need for them to have that prodigious skill of the old-timer in adding up long lists of prices quickly: bar-codes printed on each item were scanned to determine the price automatically while the cash register displayed the total bill and even calculated the change required for the amount you tendered. The “check-out chick” did not need even the skills of primary school arithmetic.
The supermarkets soon centred on a few nationwide chains that operated hundreds of stores, thus increasing their buying power. One consequence was an enormous increase in the range of products stocked and the consequent choice offered. Coupled with this was the effect of migration to Australia from Europe after World War II, the coming of Asians after the lifting of the White Australia Policy , and the influx of Vietnamese after 1975 with end of the Vietnam war. We started to see European and Asian foods stocked in our shops. Now, for the first time, we could browse in peace, comparing different products and discovering what was available. We could choose between an immense range of cereals for breakfast; we could examine pasta, noodles, sauces galore, or almost any other commodity, for that matter, rather than choose only from the one or two previously available in the corner store.
As households became more affluent and almost everyone had a freezer combined with their refrigerator, these supermarkets started stocking refrigerated goods ranging from frozen apple pies to lasagna, or crumbed fish. These could be stored for months and used as required. As more and more couples joined the work-force, less emphasis was placed on home cooking. Gone were the days when the stay-at-home-housewife had a regular “baking” day each week. More and more, couples depended on packaged, pre-prepared foods.
The supermarkets attracted many customers so that it was natural for other “specialty” shops to group around them in attractive suburban shopping centres with enormous car-parks for the now ubiquitous motor car. Several giant retailers, such as the American KMart, established themselves in such centres, providing overwhelming competition to many smaller shops, just as the supermarkets did to the corner grocery store.
As long as I can remember living in the city there were always fish-and-chips and hamburger shops but in the second half of the century drive-in, take-away shops sprang up in every suburb, headed by American McDonald’s specialising in hamburgers, while various others specialised in chicken meals.
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The anti-Asian immigration policy initiated by the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. It reflected a long-standing and unifying sentiment of the various Australian colonies and remained a fundamental government policy into the mid-20th century.
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In my youth chicken was expensive while beef was comparatively cheap. Now the position has been reversed as chickens are mass produced cheaply in battery units. One may ask whether this is an ethical treatment of poultry, but the practice is well-established.
The motor car has brought about other social changes, the first of which is a loss of community neighbourliness typical of the closely-knit small village. When I was young, most people travelled to work by public transport. Walking from our home we passed the time of day with neighbours and talked with them while waiting for the tram or the bus. There was a sense of being part of the small community. Since it was difficult to travel far, most people made friends with those who lived nearby.
This has changed: to take a modern scenario, people are rarely seen outside their homes. A man gets into his car in his garage, presses a button on a remote control unit and his garage door opens automatically; his car emerges and he drives off in his sealed capsule, making no human contact with those who live around him. On his return journey he again operates the remote control unit as his car approaches the house; the garage door opens, he drives in, and then it closes automatically behind him. Again he has made no contact with his neighbours.
Because of the car, a suburban sprawl developed as city population expanded: now it was possible to live further away from one’s workplace. Roads, highways and freeways developed, often causing visual pollution. Traffic jams were frequent as too many cars tried to use the roads, while their exhaust
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fumes generated smog . This, coupled with industrial pollution, contributed to what became known as the greenhouse effect ⁴⁷, bringing about the major problem of warming of the surface of the earth.
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Toward the end of the 20 century, the greenhouse effect became of global concern because the warming of the earth’s surface could have major consequences - not the least being partial melting of the ice-caps with resultant rise in sea-level that could submerge some communities, such as those living on small Pacific Ocean islands.
Before the coming of the car, farms were often less than 15 or 20 kilometres from the nearest railway siding because this was about the one-day limit for a horse and cart carrying produce. With the coming of the car and truck, farms could be placed much further from the railway. The car also narrowed the gap between rural and urban life. Farmers could more easily get to urban centres: they had better access to shops, regional hospitals and to schools. A regular school bus often ran a circuitous route picking up and returning farm children so they could attend a district high-school. Many of the smaller country towns declined and their shops, banks and other services closed as custom diverted to the larger regional centres.
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a fog made heavier and darker by smoke and chemical fumes; also: a photochemical haze caused by the action of solar ultraviolet radiation on atmosphere polluted with hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen from automobile exhaust
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greenhouse effect: warming of the surface and lower atmosphere caused by conversion of solar radiation into heat in a process involving selective transmission of short wave solar radiation by the atmosphere, its absorption by the planet's surface, and reradiation as infrared which is absorbed and partly reradiated back to the surface by atmospheric gases
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MOTOR CAR: URBAN & RURAL COMMUNITIES GREENHOUSE EFFECT ROAD DEATHS
As more and more cars came on to the roads, accidents and death became more frequent. Today, when a large airliner crashes and 250 or more people die in the one incident, it makes headline news. When a car crashes and the driver is killed, it rarely receives much mention. And yet, death on the roads is now a daily occurrence. In USA alone in one year 50,000 people are killed on the roads. Over 200 people are killed on Western Australian roads each year. Because of the convenience of the car and its imbedding into our very way of life, we deplore, but accept this high road toll.
Today there are many rules of the road to which one must adhere. There are stringent speed limits, driving tests before the issue of a licence, specially reduced speed limits for young drivers, and checks on alcohol use, and the necessity to wear protective seat-belts, but the accident rate continues to rise. This is particularly so amongst young men in the 17 to 25 age group who want the thrill of excitement, and the rush of adrenalin as they speed around dangerous corners and take risks.
They are in the experimental age - experiencing life, rejecting authority, and discovering their independence. Often they consume too much alcohol, which reduces both their judgment and their reaction time. A very large number of our road deaths are alcohol related and a 0.05% alcohol/blood content has been set as the legal limit. It is tragic when, during festive seasons such as Christmas, people drink too much, do not heed the limits, and then die on the road through a crash that often takes other innocent people with them. As I write, over sixty people in Australia have died this way over the 1997 Christmas period.
There is another social effect of the motor car that applies particularly to young people wanting to assert their freedom and independence. Over the last one hundred years there has been much change in social behaviour and notions of respectability. Once, two young people could not go out together without a
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chaperone . Young people were kept in ignorance of sex for fear that, if they knew about it in detail, they would act upon their knowledge. When Kay and I were young, our parents, and all people like them, had a common attitude: Nothing was worse than the family disgrace of a young unmarried daughter becoming pregnant, a common concern being, “What would everyone think?” There would be
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social condemnation and loss of face . The coming of the motor car made possible a drastic change in the sexual values of young people, who found in it a privacy not formerly attainable. By the middle of the century life had become more informal⁵⁰, knowledge through television had become much more widespread, and the contraceptive pill - that most doctors would prescribe without informing parents made sexual activity relatively safe. With decrease in the likelihood of pregnancy, the old requirement of a chaperone decreased, although parents worried about the new freedom given their children, and young people went out in their cars where, parked in some quiet spot, much sexual experimentation took place.
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A person (such as a matron) who for propriety accompanies one or more young unmarried women in public or in mixed company, or an older person who accompanies young people at a social gathering to ensure proper behaviour.
⁴⁹ See page 85 for a comment on my own sex education and the attitude of my parents.
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As one of many examples, M y parents, and people of their generation, usually addressed acquaintances formally as “Mr Brown” or “Mrs Smith”. Given names were not freely to be exchanged. A young person could never act informally to an older person. By the end of the century this had changed completely. If I rang a company over a business matter and asked to whom I was speaking, I would be told “Angela” or “Bob”. If I asked the young person for their family name, I would be judged as odd.
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The enormous growth in the number of motor vehicles world-wide and of other industrial manufactures produced an extensive search for reserves of world energy and commodity resources. For the first time, the question arose as to whether we would run out of resources. Early in 1973 I bought a book that had just been published, titled The Limits to Growth. In 1972, when Dennis Meadows and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published this book, it received wide publicity. It was based on a study commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international assembly of business leaders.
The report focused on hypotheses derived from a computer model of the interaction of various global socioeconomic trends; it projected a Malthusian vision in which the collapse of world order would result if population growth, industrial expansion, and increased pollution, combined with insufficient food production and the depletion of natural resources, were to continue at current rates. To offset these trends, the report called for "a Copernican revolution of the mind," to reevaluate the belief in endless growth and the tacit acceptance of wastefulness.
Besides zero population growth and a leveling-off of industrial production, the report also recommended increased pollution control, the recycling of materials, the manufacture of more durable and repairable goods, and a shift from consumer goods to a more service-oriented economy.
The report showed that with known resources and trends, the world could not continue on its current
st
course beyond the end of the 21 century. However, today, most of the report’s findings would be rejected because of the limitations of the models used, the inadequacy of the data, and the subjective, interpretive nature of projections based on them.
Nonetheless, we are much more aware today that we live on a planet of limited resources and we must act to shepherd those resources and invest considerably in finding alternative energy sources and courses of action.
We loved it, hated it, praised it and cursed it but, whatever else we did, from the second half of the 20^thcentury, we watched it. Television became entrenched in our daily lives and we learnt to live with it. Fortunately, mostly, people loved it. Far more than the radio, television took control of our lives: it opened a window on the world, bringing into our lounge-rooms world events, distant places, sporting fixtures and light entertainment. People who had simply been prominent names in our newspapers became alive. We felt that we knew them. We read their facial gestures and body language and decided what kinds of people they were. Many became “personalities” and, often, national icons.
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Initially, television viewing was compulsive. When we first saw it in England , we sat glued to it for hours. It was the same with our grandchildren when they were small. They were fascinated, and temporarily abandoned their creative play to sit and watch it. What was it that made television so popular? Firstly, it provided entertainment within the home: it competed with cinema not only by
52
showing films, but by developing drama of its own, often as situation comedies . Young people, in
⁵¹ See page 200
52
In a situation comedy a number of characters, such as the members of a family, remain in the same situation week after week but experience comic adventures. Coupled with similar, more serious dramas, they have become the mainstay of television. A contemporary phenomenon has been the comedy program involving substantial amounts of political and social satire.
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ROAD DEATHS YOUNG PEOPLE & SEX LIMITS TO WORLD’S RESOURCES TELEVISION
particular, often watched these compulsively. Secondly, people have always enjoyed sport and soon settled down in their homes to watch national and international events telecast.
But there are two aspects to television: on the one hand it made us more aware of the world around us while, on the other hand, it often encouraged us to be passive onlookers. At one time, the Australian government, concerned at the lack of active participation by ordinary folk in health-promoting
53
activities, ran a “Life! Be in It!” campaign, telling us not to become “Couch Potatoes” . Likewise, while television might bring vividly to our attention the victims of starvation in Africa, or the horrors of death and genocide in Cambodia, it made us insensitive to these human tragedies through constant repetition of the images on our screens. Nonetheless, television proved a powerful medium of persuasion - as the advertising industry soon realised.
In Australia, four sectors of broadcasting quickly developed: the national, the public, the commercial sectors, and the Special Broadcasting Service. National broadcasting became the responsibility of the
54
ABC , which did not use advertising material, as it was government funded, but provided a wide range of programming--including educational, news, sports, religious, and entertainment--designed to promote Australian culture. Public broadcasting served specific interest groups, primarily through radio. Commercial broadcasting sought wide appeal because it depended financially on the revenue derived from advertisements, while the Special Broadcasting Service provided programming in more than 50 languages for overseas audiences and for Australia's ethnic communities. More people in Australia watch commercial television stations than any other.
Advertising - that technique and practice used to bring products, services, opinions, or causes to public notice for the purpose of persuading the public to respond in a certain way - is not something new to the
th
20 century. In the ancient and medieval world word-of-mouth was used. After the invention of
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printing, newspapers in the 17 century began to carry advertisements and the practice was soon
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flourishing. With the great expansion of business enterprises in the 19 century the first advertising
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agencies formed. In the 20 century advertising became both an art-form and a multi-million dollar business.
Most advertising involves promoting goods that are for sale, but similar methods are used to encourage people to drive safely, not to drink excessively while driving, to support various charities, or to vote for political candidates, among many other examples. Advertising itself is now big business. It soon became common for advertisers to buy short "spots" of time, usually a minute or less in duration, between or during regular programs when their messages would be televised. The size of the audience determined the amount of money the broadcaster could charge an advertiser, while the composition of the audience determined the advertiser's choice as to when a certain message, directed at a certain segment of the public, should be run.
Naturally, commercial television stations vied with each other to capture the largest audience at the peak viewing times, so as to attract the greatest advertising revenue. Market research organisations conducted polls to sample the extent to which people watched various stations and programs, while the stations programmed material of wide popular appeal, but not necessarily of any redeeming cultural value. To me, many commercial programs seem to aim at an intellectual age of ten, while their current
53
couch potato, a phrase coined in 1982: a lazy and inactive person; especially one who spends a great deal of time watching television.
⁵⁴ Australian Broadcasting Corporation
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11: EPILOGUE: CHANGE, CONSTANCY & THE POT OF GOLD
affairs programs assume that few people have an attention-span of more than a minute or so. Their programs are often slick, usually lack depth of treatment and resemble the popular press that appeals to
55
the masses. But they do not seek depth: most people want to be entertained by “soapies” , game-shows, and surface-discussion of current affairs. I greatly enjoy some of these programs when I want to relax.
This criticism may do injustice to some commercial stations who do run serious programs from time to time, but people wanting regular programs in depth usually turn to the ABC, although their ratings are very low. The ABC attracts only a very small percentage of Australian television viewers.
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Television brought a major change in the 20 century to the intensity and impact on the individual of commercial advertising. The aim of advertisers is not simply to inform you about their product, but to persuade you to buy it. A constant parade of “desirable” material goods, which we are urged to buy because “you deserve it”, may encourage excessive interest in material possessions, create "false wants," or promote the purchase of nonessential goods. For example, from time to time children's television programming has come under fire for promoting materialistic values. Others have countered this by pointing out that the criticisms overstate the power of marketing forces to influence individuals and portray members of the public as gullible individuals unable to distinguish between a good decision and a bad one. Nonetheless, some members of the public are easily swayed, particularly children, and respond to advertising pressures, especially when they are told that they can buy now and pay later. Buying on credit with the pervasive credit card contributes to this problem for those who cannot control the balance between their income and expenditure.
A famous example of advertising is that of smoking cigarettes. The powerful cigarette companies soon discovered the virtues of promoting their product to young people. Once a young person became addicted to smoking, they would buy cigarettes for the rest of their life. So, television advertisements for cigarettes portrayed young people in glamorous situations: Bronzed, healthy, desirable models in swim suits enjoying each other’s company on an up-market yacht, while smoking a particular brand of cigarette. Or perhaps the young people were pictured with their surf-boards beside an expensive sports-car against a background of the beach. The message was that you, too, could have this desirable lifestyle, and that smoking was an essential part of it.
When evidence accumulated about the health hazard of lung cancer associated with smoking, the tobacco companies denied the connection, and lobbied strongly with government to prevent restrictions on their advertising programs. However, eventually, such advertising was banned but not before a considerable battle was waged.
When the Industrial Revolution brought about mass production, industrialists’ hopes were raised of
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immensely high profits through mass marketing. During the 20 century, researchers began to undertake studies of the motivations of many types of consumers and of their responses to various kinds of salesmanship, advertising, and other marketing techniques. From the early 1930s on, there have been "consumer surveys" much in the manner of public-opinion surveys. Almost every conceivable variable affecting consumers' opinions, beliefs, suggestibilities, and behaviour has been
55
Soap opera, a broadcast dramatic serial program, so called in the United States because most of its major sponsors for many years were manufacturers of soap and detergents. The soap opera is characterized by a permanent cast of actors, a continuing story, emphasis on dialogue instead of action, a slower-than-life pace, and a consistently sentimental or melodramatic treatment.
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TELEVISION: ADVERTISING MASS MARKETING INFLUENCE ON POLITICS
investigated for every kind of group, subgroup, and culture in the major capitalist nations.
Large quantities of such information on consumers and voters are now stored and statistically processed by computers and are drawn upon for nationwide and international advertising campaigns costing billions of dollars annually worldwide. Such advertising--including political advertising--occupies a high percentage of commercial radio and television time. Critics have argued that advertising expenditures on such a scale, whether for deodorants or politicians, tend to waste society's resources and also to preclude effective competition by rival producers or politicians who cannot raise equally large amounts of money. Advertising for an American Presidential election may cost many tens of millions of dollars. Only the rich can afford it. A rising tide of consumer resistance and voter skepticism is leading to various attempts at consumer education, voter education, and proposals for regulatory legislation.
In recent decades, nearly every significant government, political party, special-interest group, social movement, and big business firm in the advanced countries has developed its own corps of specialized researchers, propagandists, or "opinion managers" -- sometimes referred to as information specialists or ‘lobbyists’. Some have become members of parliaments, cabinets, and corporate boards of directors. The most expert among them sometimes are highly skilled or trained, or both, in history, psychiatry, politics, social psychology, survey research, and statistical inference.
For example, politicians have become sensitive to their television images and now devise much of their campaign strategy with the television audience in mind. Advertising agencies familiar with television techniques have been brought into the political arena to plan campaigns and to develop and “package”
56
their clients' images. As with morals , so with truth. Television now has much influence on forming public opinion, and there is danger that control will fall into too few hands. Government rules try to limit monopoly, but the media owners are too powerful politically to be controlled easily.
During this century television has affected family life and values. Because it invades the family living room and is all-pervasive, it is not possible for parents to restrict their children from exposure to a wider world view than their own. If they ban the television in the home, their children feel deprived and return from school complaining about what they are missing. ‘Everyone else watches it,’ they say. Then, when they do watch the “box”, they are exposed to materialistic values, to violence and, in “soapies”, to values of which their parents may not approve. They may also be exposed to adult, sexual themes that are inappropriate to their age group. They certainly become exposed to the ways of the world, and grow up much faster than did children before the days of television.
Some observers comment that television is disruptive of family life: the family no longer takes their meal together or talks together. Television controls the house and people become passive. In the early
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part of the 20 century the family made its own entertainment, perhaps by singing around the piano together. Now, entertainment is provided for them; they see and hear outstanding artists and are no longer willing to contribute their own “inferior” offerings. Others question these criticisms saying that families never spent much time together and that now that there is television, the family as a unit may actually spend more time together watching a particular show and then talking about it. The jury is still out.
Parents have a great responsibility to guide their children in their exposure to television. It is still the parents’ and the teachers’ role to help establish their children’s values. Where their guidance is good, television can be a great boon, not only by providing entertainment but by informing us about the world in which we live. Kay and I have seen many fine programs dealing with current affairs, nature,
⁵⁶ See comment by Barwick, page 589
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11: EPILOGUE: CHANGE, CONSTANCY & THE POT OF GOLD
science, history, drama and music, but must be very selective about what we watch. I am encouraged by my grandchildren who, having grown up with constant exposure to television, can still be seen as teenagers, curled up in a corner with a good book. Reading allows the play of the imagination that is stifled by television.
Television and the motor car are just two examples of technological developments that have changed our society. But that society and its structure had been under much pressure and in constant flux since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Before that time the basic social and economic unit was the nuclear, or extended, family. Father, Mother and children sometimes with other relatives - formed a cohesive, patriarchal structure that held the unit and society together. There were mutual obligations and duties, respect to be given, and obedience to be exacted. The wife and children were subservient to the husband, but there were strong family ties and loyalties between members, while the whole was firmly upheld by the authority and conservatism of the Christian Church, which was still omni-present.
This pattern, which had been in force for centuries, was disrupted by the rise of industry and the movement of people to the cities. Many people, particularly unmarried youths, left the farms and went to urban centres to become industrial workers. Later in the nineteenth century the family was further
57
disrupted by the rise of elementary education for all children . No longer were children kept at home to share in the work and be economic assets. Many extended families dissolved, while the degree of parental control diminished greatly.
Slowly, the "working wife", employed outside the home, became the typical wife. Previously she was found only among the impoverished. This development was gradual and did not become common until
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the second half of the 20 century. When I was a child, both family and Church authority were still strong. When girls left school, those from poorer backgrounds sought unskilled work. Middle-class girls either stayed home, awaiting a husband, or trained and worked, for example, as a nurse or secretary, only to give up their employment when they married. As the working-wife evolved, she eventually claimed her income for herself rather than hand it to her husband as his right. With her enhanced economic power, independence, and greater association with people outside the home, she became much less a chattel.
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At the beginning of the 19th century, education was regarded as entirely the concern of voluntary or private enterprise. Although there were some philanthropic examples of education for the working class, most private schools were Church run, intended for the upper, ruling classes, and emphasised the classics combined with a strong dose of morals and schooling in Church dogma. It was not until 1870 that the English Parliament, after long, acrimonious debates, passed an Elementary Education Act, which became the foundation upon which the English educational system was built. In these debates religious teaching and worship were the crucial issues. In the final legislation careful safeguards were put in place to ensure as far as possible that no child would receive religious teaching contrary to the wishes of the parents. Eventually religious and moral education occupied a minor place in the curriculum, with a move to the practical skills required by the rising generation in an increasingly industrial society. In 1880 elementary education was made compulsory throughout England and Wales. Education in Australia was modelled on the British system with the establishment of primary schools by the end of the 19th century, and of state secondary schools in the early part of the 20^th century.
603
TV & FAMILY VALUES SOCIAL CHANGES IN FAMILY, EDUCATION & CHURCH
I have already noted the effect of the breakup of the family and the influence of anonymous big-city life on sexual freedom and behaviour⁵⁸. With improved transportation and job opportunities, society became increasingly mobile and all social controls weakened, not only in the area of sexual behaviour. With strong immigration policies after World War II, insular Australia became increasingly multicultural and people saw that there were ways of life and values other than their own. Cultural and ethnic subgroups that formerly would have had little contact were thrown together in the same schools, factories, offices, and neighbourhoods.
Another social change was the loss of the power and authority of the Church. There had been growing conflict between it and the claims of Science ever since the time of Copernicus and Galileo. The Church clung to the literal interpretation of the bible with dogmatic tenacity. Copernicus and Galileo represented the primacy of observed truth, and were declared heretics for their audacity. But slowly society accepted the primacy of truth and science, and the power of the Church diminished. Its view of “eternal truth” was challenged, and that challenge was upheld. The Christian Church had also split into many opposing fragments, further diminishing its central power. Today, it is hard to realise the full extent of the change that has taken place over the last three or four hundred years. Then, the whole of society was informed by the Church and by religious views. Science has now usurped its role: Today society is everywhere informed by scientific views. However, there is now little conflict between religion and science because the Church has, by and large, moved from its dogmatic, all-encompassing view of the world.
The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, has always been conservative and attributed a central position to the family in social and moral matters. Many today think this attitude excessively conservative. Traditional Catholic teaching on marriage had always been child-centred and made the primary end of marriage the procreation and rearing of children. Only recently have Catholic theologians begun to speak of mutual love as an end "equally primary." But the major problem was certainly the practice of birth control, particularly since the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1961. The moral arguments for the Catholic position against birth control had suffered general erosion,
59
so many Catholics regarded the declaration of Pope Paul VI in 1968, reiterating the traditional prohibition, as a blind exercise of authority.
The Church reaffirmed the principle of the stability of the family but such a view was not well adapted to the mobility of the modern family. Nor was it well adapted to the person with a strong desire to assert his independence, an independence made possible in today’s society. In the late 20th century the Roman Catholic Church was faced with the problem of preserving for its members the unquestioned values of mutual love and responsibility associated with the family without imposing on it an antiquated authoritarian structure.
The major sexual change in marriage was the emancipation of women, which brought with it an increasing acceptance of premarital sexual activity, the concept of woman as a human being with her own sexual needs and rights, and the possibility of terminating an unhappy marriage without incurring serious social censure. A second major change was the erosion of simplistic value systems: with increased mobility and social mixing, the individual learned that the values and attitudes he or she had
⁵⁸See page 577 and the discussion on AIDS
59
In July 1968, he published his encyclical Humanae Vitae ("Of Human Life"), which reaffirmed the stand of several of his predecessors on the long-smoldering controversy over artificial means of birth prevention, which he opposed. In many sectors this encyclical provoked adverse reactions that may be described as the most violent attacks on the authority of papal teaching in modern times.
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11: EPILOGUE: CHANGE, CONSTANCY & THE POT OF GOLD
unquestioningly accepted were not necessarily shared by neighbours and co-workers. As I have already noted⁶⁰, life became not only more complex but more permissive.
Other factors decreased the relevance of the Church. Before the rise of social science, and particularly of psychology and psychiatry, ministers of the Church often performed the role of counsellor and advisor in temporal as well as religious affairs. But these men were often ill-trained for their work and,
Change in the influence of the Church and the attitude to the human condition was also accelerated by the work and thought of humanists and philosophers following the Enlightenment, whether this be Jean
thth 61
Paul Sartre or Albert Camus. In the late 19 and early 20 centuries Existentialism arose and addressed two themes: The nature of Being, and the centrality of human choice.
Existentialists pointed out that no man ever asked to be born. He was thrown into the world and given the freedom of choice. He did not ask for this choice, it was thrust upon him whether he wanted it or not. No longer could he depend on the certainties of family or faith as a “security blanket” and thus avoid the anguish of awesome personal responsibility for the choices that he made: choices for which he
62
was always insufficiently prepared . And, when he fearfully made a particular choice, he had no way of knowing for sure that the outcome would be good, and he would never know whether other choices would have been better.
Existentialism emphasised the basic loneliness of the individual. It also emphasised the impossibility of finding truth through intellectual decision, and the irredeemably personal, subjective character of man's life. As such, it proved to be a very influential philosophy in the writings of the 20th century. Freedom, far from being the essence of hope and joy, is the source of man's dread of the universe and
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of his anxiety for himself. It faithfully mirrored the world in which 20 century man found himself: a world where he was cast off from the certainties of home and Church, and was on his own. When I lived in Currie Hall, I often found that young people wanted personal freedom, but were not always ready to accept the responsibility that went with it. Some experienced much anguish, indecision and loneliness, often leading to fits of depression.
However, when young people threw over the certainties of religion, they discovered that science and the newer philosophies did not prove an adequate substitute: they could not give the return to certainty
⁶⁰ Page 577
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Continental existentialism had its roots in Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) and Nietzsche (1844 - 1900). Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher and writer, was one of the most influential modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the root motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment's secularism, expressed in his observation that "God is dead," in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe's most celebrated intellectuals after his death in 1900.
⁶² See earlier discussion on this topic on pages 266 - 267.
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DECLINE OF THE CHURCH EXISTENTIALISM: CHOICE & UNCERTAINTY, ANGUISH
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for which they longed . This has been the century of the "lost individual". Ideas of alienation , anomie , identity crisis, and estrangement from norms have been rife and carefully studied by sociologists. In countless ways, interest in the loss of community, in the search for community, and in the individual's relation to society and morality have had expression in the work of the social sciences.
There is to be seen too, especially during later decades of this century, a questioning of the role of reason in human affairs--a questioning that stands in stark contrast with the rationalism in the two or three preceding centuries. The scientific method has proved inadequate to explore the deeper longings of the human spirit, which in the past found expression through religion.
While it is one thing for existential philosophers to gaze at the fish-bowl of humanity and in abstract manner note the problems and predicaments of modern society, it is another thing to confront or experience face-to-face the loss of meaningfulness in life. In January 1991 I watched an SBS television program on the problems of young people between the ages of fifteen and the early twenties in Latvia. Most expressed a sense of meaningless in their lives: Some lost themselves at rock concerts, some became hippies and dropped out of society, while others committed acts of vandalism on trains.
Many were angry with society as they felt they had been discarded and were not needed. There was no work for them, and they felt that society had no concern for them. Time was when one gained a sense
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of meaning and value in life through belonging to a close-knit and recognised family structure . The breakdown of that family structure and the emergence of individualism cast people adrift. Once, the family gave one a sense of identity. In pre-industrial society the question of who one is was likely to be answered in terms of place of origin or family membership: “I am John, of Birmingham”, or “I am
63
See page 257 for a discussion with my student, Bob, in 1964. Bob had discovered that the existence of God could not be proved rationally. What then could be the purpose of life?, he asked. He was thrown into confusion and depression and, for a period, floundered in his approach to life.
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Alienation is the state of feeling estranged or separated from one's work, products of work, or self. It has various meanings, the most common being: (1) powerlessness, the feeling that one's destiny is not under one's own control but is determined by external agents, fate, luck, or institutional arrangements; (2) meaninglessness, referring either to the lack of comprehensibility or consistent meaning in any area of action (such as world affairs or interpersonal relations) or to a generalized sense of purposelessness in life; (3) normlessness, the lack of commitment to shared social prescriptions for behaviour (hence widespread deviance, distrust, unrestrained individual competition, and the like); (4) cultural estrangement, the sense of removal from established values in society (as, for example, in the intellectual or student rebellions against conventional institutions); (5) social isolation, the sense of loneliness or exclusion in social relations ( as, for example, among minority group members ); and
(6) self-estrangement, perhaps the most difficult to define and in a sense the master theme, the understanding that in one way or another the individual is out of touch with himself.
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Anomie: social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values; also: personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals
⁶⁶ My own sense of identity and of belonging was greatly increased through writing my family history, The Rumble Family Register.
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11: EPILOGUE: CHANGE, CONSTANCY & THE POT OF GOLD
John, the son of Robert”. In our present industrial society the question is typically answered in terms of one’s occupation: “I am John, the carpenter” or “I am John, the accountant”. The first thing that most people ask of others today is, “What do you do?” It is their occupation that both defines them, determines their place in society, and gives them their own sense of self-worth. Young people who cannot get a job and feel un-needed can only answer, “I am John, the no-one, the useless”.
Some of the young people interviewed in Latvia were trying to gain professional qualifications, but
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others had given up looking for work or training. Punk rock was popular among their group. However, the documentary program did not show any young people who were happy with their lot. In this sense it was a biased sample, but there are many young people in Australia and in the rest of the industrial world who do not, and cannot, look to a hopeful future.
What were the concerns of these young people in Latvia? Most expressed a lack of love: Some said their mother loved them, but this did not indicate a high quality love. They felt that, perhaps, all mothers have a motherly love, but that was not the same thing as loving them for themselves alone. Fathers were not even mentioned. Parental love alone was not enough: They wanted and needed love from their peers. Many said they had never had this. This added to their sense of being both worthless and un-needed. This stressed the extreme importance of relationship in depth with others.
They were concerned because the society of older adults did not want to give them a voice. The young people wanted to be treated with respect and responsibility, and have their opinions heard. Many could not find a valid reason for their existence. One could search after material possessions, but finally these were not of value. If there was nothing of deep and satisfying meaning in life, then what was the purpose of life? One young man had found a meaning through Hinduism, but others regarded that he was opting out.
Overall there was the feeling that the material world, the world of their parents, had let them down. There was nothing worthwhile to strive for. There was a sense of hopelessness. There was no sense of the "spiritual" nature of man - and by that they did not mean structured religion.
This lack of meaning in life and sense of hopelessness is reflected in the high suicide rate among young people. On 14 October 1991 The West Australian newspaper carried the front page headline:
Study Raises Alarm on Youth Suicides
Paraphrased, the report said:
It has been recognised for a long time that the suicide rate among late teenagers has always been higher than the rest of the population. The WA report said that it was estimated that over 9,000 high school students suffered severe depression. In the 15 - 25 age group more than 3 in 1000 had attempted suicide. For every suicide, 21 had tried it.
The study showed that family stress and conflict were possibly the most important factors underlying suicidal behaviour in the age group. Aboriginal and migrant groups were not over-represented, and only 3% were street kids. Most were impulsive attempts. Most came from homes with high occupational status. The peak age for suicide attempts was 19 for females and 17 for males.
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Punk rock is music marked by extreme and often deliberately offensive expressions of alienation and social discontent
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YOUTH: LOSS OF MEANING, PURPOSE SUICIDE DEHUMANISING WORK
In Western Australia there were 218 suicides in 1995 compared with 172 in 1985, both about 1 in 8,000
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of the population . In March 1993 a Perth coroner, reporting on a suicide, said that suicides involved people of all ages and from all social strata. We poured millions into campaigns for road safety, he said, but made inadequate provision for the personal tragedies of lonely and unhappy people. Suicides resulted from the pressures of life and had to be recognised as a feature of society in the 1990s. The general public, he concluded, was unaware of the magnitude of the problem.
Because of its possible connection with mental health, suicide is still a taboo subject in society, and we have to recognise that it stems from feelings of isolation and hopelessness, coupled with low self-esteem and self-worth. Many parents fail to understand the pressure on their young people, and the additional pressure on young males not to show their feelings. Many depressed young people need, more than anything else, to be able to talk to someone about their feelings. But so often they feel estranged from everyone. The young in Latvia expressed this when they said that motherly love was not enough: they needed significant relationship with others.
The modern day ethic of economic rationalism places all emphasis on the bottom line: the profit measured simply in dollars. This encourages a dehumanising atmosphere in many work situations that contributes to the feeling that one is treated as a “thing” with no inherent self-worth. In 1991, when I had left Currie Hall, my brother-in-law, John Walker, asked me whether, now that I was half-retired and could look back over life, I would have done things differently. He had retired from a career working for an insurance company.
Reflecting on his own experiences in the business world, he said that he now saw its false values. ‘My boss was only interested in the amount of insurance I could sell; the more I sold, the better his results at the end of the year, and the more chance he had of promotion. We were all encouraged to make false friendship with clients, purely to secure their business. I could never do that. If I formed a friendship, it had to be genuine, so I was never a very good salesman.’ In hindsight he saw this. Had he realised it at the time, he would probably have got out of the insurance business long ago.
During the last few years before retirement, John saw the Yuppies⁶⁹ clambering for position and status, climbing over one another. He saw the cut-throat competition, the cynicism, the lies, and false values and double standards that were part of that business world. Today he realises that the goals of material
70
possession and of status were misguided .
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Compare this with the number of heroin deaths: In 1985, 234 or 1 in 6,140 and in 1995 458 or 1 in 3,813. In 1992 there were 215 suicides in Western Australia compared with 200 deaths through road accidents.
69
A term introduced in 1983 indicating a young tertiary-educated adult who is employed in a well-paying profession and who lives and works in or near a large city. Originally derived from young urban professional, but generally re-interpreted as “Young, upwardly-mobile professional”.
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Initially, John had asked whether my experience was the same. I replied that I had been in a fortunate position. When I was the Principal at Currie Hall, there is little that I would have changed. That position was a satisfying one, and my retirement from it was more to gain personal breathing space, because physically I could no longer keep up the pace, than to escape from something I found objectionable. But within the University there were similar, but lesser pressures. People did jockey for advancement and the well-worn cliche, "Publish or Perish" applied.
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11: EPILOGUE: CHANGE, CONSTANCY & THE POT OF GOLD
Perhaps man has never been regarded by his fellows as an end in himself and has always been used by others. However, in the pre-industrial age he still maintained a sense of belonging through his family and church. Quite apart from the effects of industrialisation on loosening these ties, the rise of Laissez
72 th
faire attitudes and of individualism in the 19 century gave a justification for espousing the belief that “greed is good”. One outcome was the estrangement of the individual as stressed by existentialism; another was the attitude that “the world owes me a living”; A “Me-first” ethic developed. Technology gave opportunity for the powerful to become more powerful and for the weak to remain disinherited.
Family structure is now very weak. Almost one in three marriages end in divorce so that many children no longer experience the strength and bond that a united family can give. Many unmarried couples have children. These relationships are often short-lived, so there is an increasing number of single-parent families. We have largely become a secular society that pays only lip-service to religion so many gain no security from it. Once the churches were powerful. Sunday was God’s day: there was no sport and no commercial trading on that day. This was so when I was young. Now, those restraints are gone. Church congregations have decreased in size, and there is difficulty in finding recruits to the clergy. Many say that the Church does not meet the needs of the times: it does not recognise the position of women, who are often denied the right to join the clergy. While society increasingly recognises the homosexual and lesbian community, much of the church does not. Some sections of the church retain an outdated liturgy and practice, so some young people, seeking security and relevance, have turned to the charismatic churches.
The more I write about the changes that have occurred since the birth of my grandfather, the more I realise the inadequacy of what I have written - except to convey the notion that change has been momentous, continuous and unsettling. There are so many things that I have not mentioned: for example, space exploration, new notions of cosmology and the beginning of the universe with the big-bang theory, or the awe-inspiring notion of black holes gobbling up matter in space.
But on a more human scale and taking a world perspective, we have seen the rise and collapse of the major social experiment of Communism. We have seen totalitarian regimes rise and fall. We have seen attempts to strengthen democratic processes and the granting of universal suffrage. We have seen the rise in material expectations of the developing countries, particularly in Asia, and the rise of intense nationalism throughout the world. We have seen the loss of colonies with the overthrow of former European masters. In South Africa we have seen years of racial prejudice in the system of Apartheid⁷³
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A doctrine opposing governmental interference in economic affairs beyond the minimum necessary for the maintenance of peace and property rights; also a philosophy or practice characterized by a deliberate abstention from direction or interference especially with individual freedom of choice and action.
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A political and social philosophy that placed high value on the freedom of the individual and generally stressed the self-directed, self-contained, and comparatively unrestrained individual or ego. The French political commentator Alexis de Tocqueville, who coined the word, described it in terms of a kind of moderate selfishness, disposing human beings to be concerned only with their own small circle of family and friends.
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Apartheid was a system of racial segregation operating from 1948 to 1993-94 in South Africa. The political and social structure was based on a system of legalized discrimination that maintained the political and economic dominance of the white minority and legally enshrined the complete segregation of whites, Coloureds (persons of mixed race), Asians (mostly Indians), and Africans (blacks). Under apartheid the government established 10 Bantu
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SOCIETY’S PROBLEMS A WORLD PERSPECTIVE UNITED NATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
finally overcome.
However, we have also seen the perpetuation of racial and group prejudice in many parts of the world for example in Ireland, in Bosnia and Serbia, or in recent years in Rwanda where there has been bitter strife and genocide practised between the Hutu subsistence farmers, which make up 90% of the population, and the Tutsi traditional aristocratic landowning minority. We whites in Australia have not reached reconciliation with our own indigenous Aboriginals for the injustices done to them over the last 200 years, initially by slaughtering them and dispossessing them, and more recently by taking children from their parents and educating them institutionally.
We have seen the passing of amateur sport, and the rise of professional sport based upon monetary gain. We have seen the re-establishment of the ancient Olympic games, not pitting the skill of competitor against competitor in friendly rivalry, but with intense nationalistic competition in which any means, such as performance-enhancing drugs, may be used without regard for either ethics or the true spirit of the games. Everyone deplores it, but most will stoop to it if they think they can get away with it, and the stakes are high enough.
We have seen two attempts to establish internationally cooperative bodies, first with the failed League of Nations (1919 - 1939), and now with the United Nations established by charter on 24 October, 1945, with the purposes of maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations on the principle of equal rights and self-determination, and encouraging international cooperation in solving international economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems. However, this body has had only limited success, and has been starved for funds by the major members.
In 1948 the United Nations drew up a “Declaration of Human Rights” embodying thirty articles covering such items as the right to life, liberty and security of person; freedom from slavery and inhuman punishment. It stated that no one should be subject to arbitrary arrest and that everyone had the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the right to freedom of opinion and expression. It declared that everyone had the right to free education directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms with the aim of promoting understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups. . .
This was a fine set of ideals and aspirations but, ever since 1948, there have been innumerable breaches of human rights. When nations have sought to criticise an offender, they have usually been told to mind their own business: the offender claiming complete sovereignty and freedom from external control over matters that they regard as internal to their state.
Since those that criticise often have lucrative trade relations with the offender, which they do not wish to jeopardise, their words are often no more than rhetoric. As with everything, the bottom line is money and personal advantage.
Within the world economy, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were set up in 1944 to secure international monetary cooperation, but when used to “bail out” a country in deep financial difficulty, strict economic measures have usually been imposed on the recipient, by hard-headed economic rationalists. These measures usually imposed great hardship on ordinary people. The policy of providing foreign aid may sound philanthropic, but it was introduced after World War II for reasons of self-interest: it was to counter the fear of Soviet expansion. When aid is given, donor countries usually insist that the aid be spent buying products from the donor country - so once again, self interest
(African) national homelands to which it assigned specific tribal groups, and in 1970 all blacks were made citizens of one or another of these small polities. The black majority was thus effectively stripped of South African citizenship and its attendant rights.
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prevails. Perhaps it will always be so. Man appears poised midway between the angels and his baser instincts.
We started our story of technological change by recounting the discovery by J. J. Thompson of the electron in 1897. Now, one hundred years later, in 1997, that discovery has changed the world; it has led to great improvements for some, but it probably has not greatly increased our happiness. It has made possible a world economy in which our fortunes are inseparably bound together. It has also enabled self-interest and big-money to develop large monopolistic organisations in the face of which the individual has little power. It has created and imposed gigantic problems, whose solutions lie not with those of my generation, but with our descendants. I hope they give a better account of their stewardship than have we.
II
In the face of the bewildering pace of change and the social problems that we have created for
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ourselves in the 20 century, is there anything that stands firm, that endures, and from which we can learn? The most obvious answer is, yes, man himself. Over the centuries, man has not changed greatly, he has always had the same basic aspirations, has confronted the same problems; and has continued to ask the same question: How should one live? Social structures, such as the Church and State have always been quick to tell him the answer. Sometimes this has made him feel secure; sometimes it has placed him in shackles. Now, for the first time, he is thrown on his own resources, but still asks the question: How should one live?
It would be a brave man who would give a definitive answer. During my lifetime I have encountered many people and have discovered a wealth of attitudes and dispositions. Some have sought satisfaction through adventure, embarking on exciting, exhilarating, and even dangerous activities. Others have thrown themselves into the frenetic pursuit of a satisfying career - often to be caught in a meaningless rat-race dictated by others towards dubious ends. Still others have dedicated themselves to a cause, or to an ambition. Most have looked for a relationship of value. Many have simply been carried along by life without ever making firm decisions. I discovered that what might seem important to me may not be important to another, so I would hesitate before saying to anyone: This is how one should live.
To explore this, let me first look back on my own life. In the good or happiness, or to December 1991 issue of the Australian Bulletin magazine the subject prevent the happening of of happiness was addressed. An article by psychiatrist Malcolm mischief, pain, evil or Dent discussed what he called “The Life Cycle and the Eight Ages of unhappiness . . ." Man from infancy to the end of life”. I list these on the right.
Mankind, he said, was When I look back, I recognise the Eight Ages, of which I am now in governed by two sovereign the last. I have known happiness and sadness in each of these stages. motives, pain and pleasure; Perhaps “Happiness” is one of the unchanging qualities that all and the principle of utility people desire, although the direct pursuit of it has rarely been recognized this state of affairs. successful, because we often mistake what will bring us happiness. The object of all legislation
must be the "greatest happiness But the idea that we should seek happiness has a long history: The of the greatest number." school of Utilitarians arose in the late eighteenth century with Jeremy Bentham who, defining his principle of utility, wrote of it The early stages of the eighth as "that property in any object whereby it tends to produce pleasure, age when one seeks integration
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WHAT IS THERE THAT ENDURES? THE 8 AGES OF MAN THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS
and wisdom, before infirmities set in, possibly to rob life of its enjoyment, may be the period of greatest happiness. In childhood, lack of mature experience prevents one from savouring the nature of happiness, hence joys are limited in their depth. The earlier stages of adult life still have uncertainty about them. There is a growing awareness of existential responsibility, and the angst that this creates.
But in the Eighth Age, when integration and understanding are at work, even the periods in the past that seemed times of gloom or suffering, slot themselves into the jig-saw puzzle that is life. They are part of the process that has made you become what you now are.
They have imparted their own fragment of understanding of what life is about.
To know happiness, the reverse side of the coin must also have been experienced. So contentment and integration, to "have become the person one is capable of becoming," or to have accepted the shortfalls in this achievement, is finally the stuff of which deep happiness is made.
When I walked over to the Garden City shops one day, I overtook an old man when near the Melville City swimming pool. Many children were swimming, laughing and shouting. The old man had a small dog on a leash, and walked very hesitantly leaning heavily on a stick. He heard me coming up behind him, so stepped off the path for me. I said to him, "Isn't it lovely to hear the sound of the children enjoying themselves?"
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He paused, and then said with nostalgia, "Ah, those were the days." He may now be frail. He may have physical disabilities that take away from him the ability to participate fully in life, but he has within himself both his memories and his understanding. He is not just the old and infirm man. He is the infant, the toddler, the child, the adolescent, the young adult, the worker, the lover, the father, the grandfather, and now the old man in his Eighth Age. He is all these. Hopefully he can look back, integrate the whole, and say to himself that to have lived, is happiness.
But there is an aspect of happiness that disturbs me: This is the conflict between awareness - or the growth of consciousness - and happiness. We have all heard of the Greek philosopher, Socrates, who posed the question: Which would you rather be, a pig satisfied, or a man dissatisfied? Most say that they would opt for the man. We value awareness above an ignorant satisfaction. The growth of consciousness, of awareness, forces on us the responsibility to make decisions. This leads to another question: Can we be happy when others around us are unhappy?
A priest, who was one of the contributors to the series of "Bulletin" articles on Happiness, pointed out the obvious: happiness is related to human friendship and commitment. Happiness is related to love. Because human relationships are enduring, our grief is very painful when we lose one we love, or when one we love suffers. Our personal happiness is linked to the well-being of those to whom we are committed. It would be false to think we could increase our happiness by forsaking such commitments. Experience has shown us that knowing that we are loved and having the opportunity to love others is
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basic to our experience of contentment. No man can be, in John Donne's words, "entire unto himself." We have to relate to others not just for what they might do to satisfy our needs but also because human relationship gives us the opportunity to give to others and so become more complete. The priest said that happiness is about being at peace with oneself, with others, and with God.
It follows from this that my personal happiness is related to the happiness of those to whom I am committed. There is a corollary to this: As I expand my area of awareness, moving away from my "piglike" condition, so my association with others extends to all those around me. Can I be happy while there are people in this country living in poverty? While street kids take drugs and sleep on benches? While marriages break down and there is child abuse?
I can take this even further. Political history is a sorry story of man's inhumanity to man. Of killing and misery, of starvation and threat in other countries. Once I become aware of these, can I be happy? Does awareness bring with it responsibility? Do I choose to ignore this responsibility, blocking it out from my mind, thus reverting to the state of the satisfied pig? Or do I increase my awareness, and so become a man dissatisfied? And, if I become aware, should I be taking action to alleviate the unhappiness of others in this world? Is true happiness to be found through a sense of personal commitment to all others, so that one works for others whilst being fully aware of the unhappiness that abounds in this world?
I once met a university man who was brought to a state of complete inaction because, having recognised his fellowship and responsibility with all people in the world, felt completely inadequate to do anything. My attitude is that one must recognise personal limitations and not be crippled by the enormity of world problems. So one remains a man, dissatisfied at one level, while seeking to work with others within one’s human ability and limitations.
Perhaps we do not really seek after happiness, but rather a feeling of completeness and contentment within ourselves, living as best we can to achieve that, but accepting our human limitations.
⁷⁴ born in 1572 at London, died in 1631, John Donne was a leading English poet of the Metaphysical school and dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London (1621-31). Donne is often considered the greatest love poet in the English language.
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HAPPINESS, AWARENESS, COMPETENCE, COMPLETENESS THE GNOSTIC VIEW
One day early in 1992 Kay drew my attention to a quotation from John Buchan in one of the books that she was reading:
This seemed to me to strike at the heart of the matter. It is not happiness that we want, but a sense of competence and completeness within ourselves, so that we are at peace and at one with ourselves. To
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feel content is not, however, to be complacent. There is a kind of Yin and Yang in our attitude, an essential balance of opposites. We reach contentment by striving for that which is worthwhile while recognising and accepting the limitations that our humanity imposes on us.
In my own experience, we cannot feel complete in ourselves unless we have related deeply to something or someone outside ourselves. Such a feeling of completeness cannot be handed to us, it is the result of personal gnostic⁷⁶ experience. There is a sense in which many people today have a gnostic outlook, even though they neither acknowledge it, nor belong to an organised body. These are the people who say that true knowledge comes from within themselves, and is to be experienced, not thought out intellectually. They reject dogma and creed as human creations placed between knowledge and man. Someone who adheres to a dogma without a background of experienced knowledge, is blind to the truth. The dogma is simply a prop.
The gnostic says that truth cannot be communicated in its entirety but must be experienced. In this their attitude is like that of Taoism: "He who speaks does not know; he who knows does not speak." They say there is a wealth of difference between "belief" and "knowledge."
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Yin and Yang literally mean "dark side" and "sunny side" of a hill. They are mentioned for the first time in the Hsi tz'u, or "Appended Explanations" (c. 4th century BC), an appendix to the I Ching (Classic of Changes): "One [time] Yin, one [time] Yang, this is the Tao." Yin and Yang are two complementary, interdependent principles or phases alternating in space and time; they are emblems evoking the harmonious interplay of all pairs of opposites in the universe. First conceived by musicians, astronomers, or diviners and then propagated by a school that came to be named after them, Yin and Yang became the common stock of all Chinese philosophy.
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Gnosticism started as an early branch of the Christian church whose followers believed in a secret knowledge, a knowledge of the heart, not a knowledge of the intellect. They believed that to find true knowledge one should examine oneself and look deeply into oneself, and find there divinity. As the Christian church established and built a structure modelled on Roman lines, and adopted an Aristotelian line, it became important, for self preservation, to have a unity of belief and of doctrine. This was counter to the view of the Gnostics, in which every man was enjoined to find his own truth. Thus, Gnostics were regarded as heretics. I first came across Gnosticism in 1960 when I read the stimulating book, "History of Western Philosophy," by Bertrand Russell. My own attitude is that truth must be discovered for oneself rather than through paying obedience to an authoritarian set of doctrines. So I am nearer to the Gnostic outlook. The Gnostic outlook of finding truth within oneself also has something in common with Buddhism.
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Carl Jung caused an uproar when he made his now famous, but simple response to the question, "Do you believe in God?" Jung paused, and thought for a moment, as though it were difficult to frame the answer. Then he said, "I do not believe in God, I know." This attitude is one that rings true for me, and is consonant with my own feelings.
The Christian is worried by the place of evil in this world. He explains it by saying that a perfect God did not create evil, but that it is a consequence of man's Fall: it is a consequence of his sins. There is emphasis on atoning for one's sins, and on redemption. There is thus much emphasis on personal guilt. The gnostic takes a different view. He simply accepts life as it is, with its good and its evil. It is how man responds to this that matters. Few people today believe in Original Sin.
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As I have already written I have long considered that the aim of life is the seeking of unity with all things. Unity within oneself, unity with others, unity with nature, and eventually unity with God, whatever each of us may mean by that. Love is part of that expression of unity. Many years ago I wrote that sin is separation. Sin is that which separates man from himself, so that he is divided and troubled. Sin is separation from others, so there is no love; separation from nature, and separation from what we mean by God.
There is an affinity between the gnostic view, Taoism, and Buddhism. Or for that matter, the view of the existentialists. This must be so in basic religious experience, since it springs from the deep unconscious experiences of man, and these are probably the same, no matter the culture in which he finds himself. But, as soon as his aesthetic experiences are clothed in the thought-forms of his culture, they become distorted. The resultant intellectual creeds differ from one culture to another, but they all spring from similar primary aesthetic experience.
He who speaks does not know; He who knows does not speak.⁷⁸
sums it up beautifully.
In the early 1990s Caroline Jones conducted a series of radio interviews under the title The Search for Meaning. The primacy of a sense of unity arose time and again with different interviewees. After taking a walk with Kay in February 1991 during which we discussed an interview that we had heard that day, I made the following notes in my diary:
The person interviewed spoke of the unity, the continuity and yet the constant change in all things. She said: We tend to regard everything as separate, and yet this is false. It is only a convenience, fabricated by our minds so we can more easily cope with things. You and I may be sitting on the opposite sides of the table; we may regard each other as individuals, but we are connected. The air that I breathe out one moment is the air that you breathe in the next. Thus we are not physically separate. There are many other connections, such as the psychological, and perhaps many less understood relationships that mean we are not really separate at all but part of a single unity.
There is continuity, too, with our past and with our future, yet each moment is different from the next and from the last. We are faced with constant change and, if we are to live harmoniously, we must be at peace with both the continuity and the change.
⁷⁷ See pages 266-7
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Taoist Scripture: Lao-tzu - The Tao-Te-Ching, verse LXXXI
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UNITY & LOVE IN LIFE THE SEARCH FOR MEANING SUFFERING
One of the causes of personal suffering is our desire for repetition. Our desire to repeat something we had before. This is simply not possible. Our modern society tells us that Youth is the most desirable state, and we constantly strive to regain our youth. This makes us unhappy and we suffer, as we cannot repeat our youth. Youth, like old age, is part of the continuity of our existence. Our task is to live in harmony with each of the stages of our life, to acknowledge them as part of the whole, but not to regret a passing of any one stage. Old age brings its own benefits as well as its infirmities, and both are to be accepted as part of the way things are.
Some people suffer, and their lives take wrong directions because they reject their childhood. Some have had unhappy childhoods and they block these from their minds. You ask them to tell you about their childhood, and they say, "I can't remember anything about my childhood." Their childhood has been too painful to accept. Yet it is important to recognise the importance of the continuity of life and that your childhood, however painful, was part of it. If you cannot resolve this and come to terms with it, if you block it out, then you will suffer, and you will make errors in living your present life, with further suffering as a result.
Many people find it difficult to accept old age and death. Old age is as valuable as youth. There can be a serenity, and a degree of wisdom and understanding not possible in youth. Infirmities there may be, but we should not regret the loss of our powers. We should simply accept it as a natural part of living. In the same way we should accept death as part of living.
Just as there is both change and continuity in our lives, so there is change and continuity with those that came before us, and with those who will continue after us. We have continuity with our ancestors. We ourselves will be ancestors. We are all part of the totality of human life stretching both backwards and forwards in time.
Meaning comes into our life if we simply accept our place as one part in the changing pattern of life stretching through time.
In another program, Caroline Jones interviewed Stan Arneil. He said:
When you have been to the bottom of human experience through suffering, everything else is placed in its proper perspective.
I had never heard of Stan Arneil but, being impressed with what he said, I made the following notes in my diary:
Stan, as a very young soldier during the second world war, was captured by the Japanese and was a prisoner of war for three and a half years. The prisoners were starved, beaten and set to work on such tasks as the infamous Burma Railway construction. Men became sick and died. Cholera was one of the worst illnesses. Stan said that he came through this experience with a deep understanding of what was fundamentally important in life.
This was love for one's fellows. He sees society today as often deprived of love. Often there is no closeness between members of the family. Modern society keeps people apart. We may have material possessions but we have neglected to love one another. When he was a prisoner of war, everyone looked after everybody else. When you were down to basics, this was all you had. No one was neglected by others. If a mate could not walk, he was carried by others. If a man was dying, then at that time, all he wanted was love. All he wanted was people around him who cared about him. And everyone provided this.
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For Stan, compassion and love for one's fellow human beings has emerged as the one sustaining value in life. "If we could but love each other," he said, "there would be no wars." He spent his life trying to put into practice what he had come to understand.
Long ago I came to realise the central importance of love. Every religion will repeat this message, to love your neighbour. But how hard it is put this into practice. Individuals find it hard. Society, even harder, and we, and society become consumed with unimportant things - such as our possessions. I worry about our financial future. Will we have enough money when I have been retired for ten years? Stan said that such matters concern him very little. "When you have been to the bottom of human experience through suffering," he said, "everything else is placed in its proper context."
Stan said that he thought he had been a very privileged person to have experienced this suffering. He said, "It is only through suffering that you discover true values in life. I have discovered those values, so I am privileged."
I always remember the young Vietnamese student in the mid 1970s, who had gone through a bad emotional experience, saying to me "I think the only time I learn anything of value is when I suffer." He was right. It is personal pain, and the overcoming of it that teaches us fundamental truths.
A year later I read the book The Death of Forever by Darryl Reanney. I was impressed by his closing words:
I believe that what is missing in our lives is a sense of the sacred. By this I do not mean a return to religion in any formal sense. Religions like Christianity and Islam are, in my view, profaners of the sacred, denying in practice the very truths they profess in principle. . .
By a sense of the sacred I do not mean a new set of beliefs, which will inevitably harden into dogma. I mean an experiential sense of trust and caring, a renewed feeling for beauty in whatever form it may be found. . . We need a parable, not a textbook, a poem of reality so rich and beautiful that its meaning will transcend the words it uses. . .
The problems of this world. . . are a direct consequences of the me-first competitiveness of the ego-self. The only way to reverse planetary degradation is to break down the barriers that wall us off from each other and the world, to recognise that aphorisms like #The brotherhood of man' are not romantic, pie-in-the-sky daydreams but practical patents for survival. . .
To achieve this, I believe we need to introduce a cycle of rituals into life - not grandiose, self-important charades but participatory ceremonies that have their roots in human needs. . . When a group of people gathers to share a meal, they could, for a minute, link hands. Small though this gesture is, it is rich in significance: We all need that human contact because we all need to belong to something bigger than ourselves: something that remembers our past and affirms our future. We should create new rites of passage to celebrate the phases of the human life cycle, rituals for birth, for the transit into adolescence, and, above all, for dying. . .
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SUFFERING A SENSE OF THE SACRED CAN I KNOW WHAT LIFE IS ABOUT?
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George Bernard Shaw once quipped: Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. How many of us, looking back to the mistakes and indiscretions of our own youth, have said ruefully: If only I knew then what I know now. But, of course, that is impossible. If, when we are young, a person in his eighth-age tells us of his experienced knowledge, we cannot use it. To us it is only intellectual knowledge: we hear it, but cannot apply it because, with our limited experience, we
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are not yet ready for it. As Robin Gray once said , an educator must wait for the teachable moment: that moment when the young person’s emotionally felt experience has prepared him to hear the intellectual knowledge, absorb it, and turn it into experienced knowledge of his own, and so learn.
In this sense I am quite unqualified to write usefully about how one should live. But there is another, deeper sense in which I am unqualified: I have lived a very privileged and restricted life. There is much of the real world that I have never experienced. I belong to a very small fraction of the world’s population: compared with most people in the world, I am an affluent and fortunate person. I was brought up in a largely trauma-free environment. I have never known poverty, hunger, want, unemployment, war, or the destructive forces of emotional conflict within my family. I had an advantaged education, going to private schools and completing a high level of tertiary education. Within my marriage I have not had conflict or pain. I have not suffered debilitating ill health. My life has been spent in university circles so that most of the people with whom I have associated have been highly educated and highly motivated. So what can I know about the problems of living faced by so many?
Shortly after my father returned home from three-and-a-half years of ill-treatment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Java, I smugly said to him that I had never hated anyone. He replied: Then you have never been hurt enough. My trusting attitude to relations with other people has only been possible because of the privileged position I have had in life. Had my life been different, my whole attitude may have been different. If I had not been born into an affluent society where there was no struggle for physical survival, if I had not had a strongly supportive, loving family background, how would I have developed?
Some years ago I read an article in the daily paper about hard-core juvenile offenders. It described “John”, a seventeen-year-old repeat offender. He had attacked a boy of sixteen who was a stranger to him simply because he did not like the way the boy looked at him. He broke the boy’s kneecaps, his jaw and his ribs, and sat there, laughing at him. John came from a broken home; now, his parents were both dead and he had been moved from one unsympathetic foster home and institution to another. He had never known love.
If I had had John’s background, would I have behaved like him? Maybe I would. John had been emotionally crippled and damaged. Can he be repaired, or is he beyond repair? I cannot accept what he did, but neither can I accept the background conditions that perhaps led him to be like this. I feel anguish for a boy like John, and say There, but for the Grace of God, go I.
In what follows I write about trusting people and believing the best of them. Would this be my attitude had I grown up in hostile circumstances and had my emotional growth stunted? The only possible
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George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and died in England in 1950. He was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and Socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963), English novelist and critic gifted with an acute and far-ranging intelligence, once wrote: Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you. His works were notable for their elegance, wit, and pessimistic satire.
⁸⁰ See page 315
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attitude for me to take is one of humility and of thankfulness that life has treated me so well. I realise that the usefulness to others of my experience of life is consequently very limited.
This disclaimer aside, what guideposts have I seen and what have I learnt in my travel through life? Firstly, I have discovered that the aim of my life is to evolve, and secondly, to recognise and live by the principles of Yin and Yang.
The Aim of life
Put very simply, the aim of life is to live it well; to live it in a way appropriate to each of our eight ages so that eventually we can look back with pleasure and without regret in spite of the many vicissitudes we have encountered. The aim is not to achieve “success” as the attainment of wealth, favour, or eminence as judged by other people, but to gain that feeling of competence so well expressed in John Buchan’s novel: to experience “that splendid joy in your own powers and the approval of your own heart”.
The road of life is a very rocky one that continually climbs upward towards a summit. Initially, it is little more than a dusty track that twists and turns so that one can never quite see what lies ahead, and at first we look little further ahead than our feet. Sometimes it splits into two tracks and one cannot decide which to take, not realising that both will lead eventually to the summit.
Many a time, when I was sub-dean of Engineering or living in Currie Hall, a young student would trip on a rock and fall over, to lie prostrate on the ground, bloodied and bruised. Sometimes he would say, “Why has this got to happen to me - I always get the bad breaks”, or he would start blaming someone for his fall. Because I had travelled a little further along the road of life than had he, I could see that his proper action was not to feel sorry for himself or to blame others, but to scramble to his feet, dust himself down, face the direction that he was travelling and again set off along the path, saying to himself “In future, I must look out for rocks like that.” It was not always easy to persuade him. He was likely to retort: “But you are not the one that fell over.”
The response of blaming others and feeling sorry for ourselves is natural and appropriate for a certain stage of life: we have all done it. Hopefully, as we gain experience by tripping over enough rocks, we learn that such a response does not help us, and we discover not only how to avoid some of the rocks in our path but how not to experience either blame or self-pity.
As we travel along the road it slowly widens from a track to a path, and then to a well-defined thoroughfare. Not that we can always see very much more clearly where we are going, but we can look back down the hill and see from where we have come. The road gradually becomes crowded with more people, all travelling the same path. We react with them and learn from their experiences just as they learn from ours. Sometimes someone catches us just as we are about to trip, and steadies us. Another time we do that for someone else. Occasionally, someone may intentionally try to push us over. We form travelling companions and friendships and, maybe, special relationships where we travel, hand-in-hand, together. However, essentially, we are always alone.
In our eighth age, when we near the summit of the hill, we can look back, having learnt much on the way. Hopefully we have achieved that sense of competence and completeness that enables us to say: To have lived is happiness. That is success.
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THE AIM OF LIFE: EVOLVING AS A PERSON EVERYONE IS UNIQUE AND IRREPLACEABLE
If the aim of life is to evolve as a person, how is this to be achieved? As a young person, I had no idea. Indeed, the question did not even arise as I was too uncertain of myself to entertain such a notion. I now realise that it was not until I was in my mid-thirties, had taken part in an Apex Club and experienced working with people as Sub-Dean of my faculty, that I had reached a “teachable moment” in my life.
It was then that I came across the writings of Viktor Frankl. His quotation from Goethe had great emotional impact on me⁸¹:
If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as though they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming.
The aspiration: To become the person one is capable of becoming, suddenly made sense to me. Here was a worthwhile purpose in life: To learn to understand myself. But how? Goethe provided me with the answer when he posed the question: How can we learn to know ourselves? And gave the answer:
Never by reflection, but by action. Try to do your duty and you will soon find out what you are. But what is your duty? The demands of each day.
I now realise that, when I was in Apex and when I was Sub-Dean, I simply threw myself into the task of working with people because it felt worthwhile. I did not ask myself “What’s in it for me?” I lost myself in the task that I was doing, not counting the cost. It was then that I grew as a person; it was then that I started to understand myself. Unwittingly my “investment” paid off a thousand fold. Perhaps I was simply doing my duty by responding to the demands of each day.
In 1994 I listened to a BBC radio program in which two women were interviewed about a book they had written. They were searching for their own sense of inner being and spirituality. As part of their search they interviewed many hundreds of women asking each of them about their own search for meaning. They discovered that everyone found contentment when they felt whole and complete, but what this meant was different for different people.
Finally they realised that finding oneself was not a matter of finding perfection. They likened people's wholeness to a garden: some had roses neatly planted, others had a vegetable patch wilderness. All that mattered was that you faced your reality, whatever it might be, and accepted it.
Coming to terms with yourself and not battling with yourself was the key to achieving a wholeness and a sense of spirituality.
This took my mind back to Viktor Frankl:
Each person is unique and irreplaceable. No one can replace him.
⁸¹ See pages 268-269
⁸²The Feminine Face of God
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If he has found his true place in the world and has filled it, he has
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thereby fulfilled himself .
The Yin and Yang of Life
Sometimes when we are young we set ourselves ambitious goals, seek perfection and then become despondent when we inevitably fail. In later life we usually learn to accept more realistic goals: We come to realise that we are frail human beings who will always make mistakes and that our achievements will lie somewhere between perfection and failure.
Most young people lack self-confidence. Being uncertain of themselves and of their untested abilities, some see success only in terms of perfection; anything short of this they judge as abject failure. So they refuse to face the challenge of life. When I was Sub-Dean I spoke with many students who had failed their exams. Quite often they said:
I failed my exams because I did not study. Had I given it my all, and studied well, I would have passed.
This was the excuse they gave themselves: I would have passed, had I studied. In reality some feared failure from the outset and did not have the inner confidence to put themselves to the test. So they purposely - or perhaps unconsciously - did not study. Then when, inevitably, they failed, they had a face-saving excuse: I’m really OK, it’s just that I did not study. Behind all this they probably feared that they were “not OK” but did not have the courage to find out. What they had not yet discovered was that everyone is “OK”⁸⁴
The conflict between the desire for success and the fear of failure dogs us all. It is part of the Yin and Yang of life where we recognise many pairs of opposites. However, Yin and Yang are essentially emblems that evoke the harmonious interplay of all these pairs of opposites in our lives. The art of living is to balance these opposites harmoniously: The balance between desire for success and fear of failure is to live with a positive, hopeful optimism. This principle in Chinese philosophy finds an equivalent in the Western world with such mottoes as All things in moderation, and Nothing, too much as practical guidelines for living. This precept was espoused by the ancient Greeks, but rarely followed by the Romans⁸⁵
⁸³ See pages 268 and 541
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During the second half of the 20th century many self-help books on personal development were published mostly based on humanistic psychology, a 20th-century movement that believes that man, as an individual, is a unique being and should be recognized and treated as such. The movement grew in opposition to the two mainstream 20th-century trends in psychology, behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Humanistic psychologists believe that behaviourists are over-concerned with the scientific study and analysis of the actions of man as an organism, to the neglect of basic aspects of man as a feeling, thinking individual. One influential therapy was the technique known as transactional analysis, developed by Eric Berne. As practiced by its founder, transactional analysis proved to be both a method of examining human interactions as well as a way of labeling and systematizing the information gained from observed transactions. The goal of this approach is to build a strong state of maturity by learning to recognize the "child" and "parent" aspects of personality in oneself and others. This work was popularised in a book by Thomas Harris: I’m OK - You’re OK. He postulated four basic types of relation between people typified by the statements: I’m not OK - You’re OK, I’m not OK - You’re not OK, I’m OK - You’re not OK, and I’m OK - You’re OK.
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The ancient Greeks practiced moderation in all things, but the Romans were known for their excesses. Ordinary citizens subsisted on barley or wheat porridge, fish, and ground pine nuts (edible pine seeds), but the Roman emperors and wealthy aristocrats gorged
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THE YIN AND YANG OF LIFE THE MIDDLE PATH AND THE GOLDEN MEAN
Surely this maxim to live with moderation is something that has endured down the centuries. The Buddha proposed a "middle path" between self-indulgence and self-renunciation⁸⁶. In fact, it was not so much a path between these two extremes as one that drew together the benefits of both. Aristotle is also responsible for much later thinking about the virtues one should cultivate. He wrote of the Golden Mean, which is essentially the same idea as the Buddha's middle path. Two examples that he gave were:
# Courage - an example of the mean between two extremes: one can have a deficiency of it, which is cowardice, or one can have an excess of it, which is foolhardiness.
# The virtue of friendliness which, he said, was the mean between obsequiousness
exhibiting a fawning, subservient attentiveness -and surliness - showing an arrogant
lack of civility or graciousness.
At heart, we all recognise that the principle of Yin and Yang - of moderation in all things -is an important part of the art of living well. It has always been so but, while it is one thing to know it intellectually, it is another thing to know and practice it emotionally. Perhaps it first looms large when we reach our fourth age - the age of puberty - when both our passions and our idealism run high and when sometimes, incensed at the way things are, we become rebellious. This is also the age when we are uncertain of ourselves and may oscillate between extremes: one moment showing much trepidation, and another moment acting with daring and seeking adventure. Sometimes we are shy and hesitant to commit ourselves, another time we are brash and heedless of the consequences.
It is the age when almost all of us experience the problems of both extremes. It is often the age when we would like to “live it up and experiment - and hang the consequences” - even if this only remains a wishful thought in our imagination. Maybe it is a time in life when it is a danger to be too concerned about the consequences. Carl Jung once remarked that it is a pity to see in youth an over introspection, just as in old age it is a pity not to see it.
But how can we learn to choose a middle path in later life, if one has not explored the two extremes and discovered for oneself -or at least become emotionally aware of the extremes and their consequences by observing the actions of others and learning from them? There is an old saying that
Advice is what older people give young people
themselves on a staggering variety of foods. They staged lavish banquets where as many as 100 different kinds of fish were served, as well as mountainous quantities of beef, pork, veal, lamb, wild boar, venison, ostrich, duck, and peacock. They ordered ice and snow hauled down from the Alps to refrigerate their perishable foods, and they dispatched emissaries to outposts of the Roman Empire in search of exotic delicacies. (I couldn’t resist this irrelevant footnote!)
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In Buddhism, this middle path is known as the Noble Eightfold Path consisting of right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right mode of living, right endeavour, right mindfulness, and right concentration. It includes four Noble Truths which are that: [1] man's existence is full of conflict, dissatisfaction, sorrow, and suffering.
[2] all this is caused by man's selfish desire--i.e., craving or "thirst." [3] there is emancipation, liberation, and freedom for human beings from all this, which is nirvana. [4] there is the Noble Eightfold Path, which is the way to this liberation. The Eightfold Path consists of:
(1)
right understanding--faith in the Buddhist view of the nature of existence in terms of the Four Noble Truths;
(2)
right thought--the resolve to practice the faith;
(3)
right speech--avoidance of falsehoods, slander, or abusive speech;
(4)
right action--abstention from taking life, stealing, and improper sexual behaviour;
(5)
right livelihood--rejection of occupations not in keeping with Buddhist principles;
(6)
right effort--avoidance of bad and development of good mental states;
(7)
right mindfulness--awareness of the body, feelings, and thought; and
(8)
right concentration--meditation.
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when they can no longer set them a bad example.
There is in us, at all ages, an almost innate desire to live with complete freedom which our social conditioning inhibits but never quite destroys. We can all look back at our indiscretions and certainly do not condemn ourselves for them. Committing them was part of learning what life was about.
One important balance is that of enthusiasm. At one extreme we have apathy and indifference - where there is a lack of feeling, emotion, interest or concern in things, and at the other extreme there is fanaticism - where our excessive enthusiasm often leads to intense and uncritical devotion to a cause or action, while disregarding other considerations. The fanatic is convinced of his own belief and cannot be dissuaded from it, while the apathetic says that no belief or action is worthwhile.
With the principle of Yin and Yang we recognise the desirable balance between these two extremes as a tempered enthusiasm -a strong excitement of feeling that inspires zeal and action. When we have enthusiasm, we have an eagerness and an ardent, emotional interest in pursuing something, but we stop short of fanaticism. I believe that it is important to throw oneself into what we are doing with enthusiasm. It is through enthusiasm and commitment that positive actions occur, the best is achieved, and discoveries are made.
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I inherited the quality of enthusiasm from my mother’s side of the family where it abounded , and have always had much enthusiasm for those activities that interested me. Enthusiasm is contagious and one
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person’s enthusiasm can kindle it in another . However, while I believe that enthusiasm is a good quality, I have often been unable to keep it properly in balance. There have been times when I became too intense and poured my energies into what I was doing so that I neglected other things, or became physically unwell through over-stressing myself. Perhaps this is one lesson in my life that I know intellectually but have never been able to apply emotionally!
Much more important than enthusiasm is the task of gaining a realistic understanding of oneself. If a child has had encouragement and approval, then he is likely to develop his own inner approval and acceptance of himself. He will have a modest self-confidence. This is the healthy balanced position between two extremes. If he has grown up with little sense of self worth he may deprecate himself, disapprove of himself, and make little of himself; he could be self-effacing. At the other extreme he may become boastful and bragging, calling attention to himself and be arrogant in manner. To my mind such a person also has a low self-esteem: if it were otherwise, he would not have the need to boast or be arrogant.
If a young person has not been brought up with a modest self-confidence, he has the difficult task of discovering his own true self. If he is self-deprecating, he needs to discover that he is “OK”, and someone of unique value. If someone tells him that he is of value, he will hear the words intellectually but will not act on them emotionally until he experiences his “worthwhileness” for himself. On the other hand, if he is boastful and arrogant, he also needs to discover that he is “OK” and of unique value. With proper self-understanding there is no need to be arrogant.
Such people, only by forcing themselves to engage in life will, little by little, find their true worth. This may be a hard struggle. When young, I was self-deprecating but managed to gain understanding by forcing myself to act in spite of the fear of doing so:
⁸⁷ For example, my uncle Humfrey was wildly enthusiastic about his fishing (page 40) while my mother, aunty Phyl and uncles Eric and Leslie all showed the trait strongly.
⁸⁸ See comment by Peter Bartley on page 337
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EXAMPLES OF OBTAINING BALANCE AUTHORITY & FREEDOM GUIDEPOSTS TO LIVING
If there was something that I knew I should do, but found the fear of action too great, I would invent a series of stepping stones. Each step was small enough to be faced, and each step, having been taken, made it difficult to go back.⁸⁹
Lack of knowledge of ourselves often causes us to confuse our wants with our needs. If we do not have full understanding and acceptance of ourselves, we may unconsciously tell ourselves that we would “feel” all right if only we could satisfy our desire for material things, and for power. When we cannot feel the natural approval of others, we may develop a need to dominate them, so that they fear and “respect” us. Then we believe that in the eyes of the world - and so in our own eyes - we will be judged successful and have approval. But, when our large house becomes filled with coveted possessions; when we have our motor cars and yacht, our stocks and shares, and when we occupy a powerful position in society, we are still not satisfied, and want more.
Until we understand and accept ourselves, we will never be satisfied. Until we fulfill our basic physical needs - such as hunger, thirst, safety, shelter and love - we cannot satisfy our need for self-esteem . It is only when we attain true self-esteem that we discover that most of our wants for material possessions and our desire to dominate were false. Once we have a strong feeling of self-worth, while we may still own many material possessions, they are no longer needed in the hope of making us feel good about ourselves.
There is a very long list of opposites that we must balance in life. Amongst the most profound is our desire for freedom and lack of restraint, and our need for authority and discipline. Perhaps collectively we may point to democracy as the golden mean between these opposites, but there are many conflicts between freedom and authority in our individual lives. I once read a very thought provoking book by Paul Nash, Authority and Freedom in Education, in which he discussed many of the issues arising out of this conflict. For example, how do we reconcile the authority and conformity of the group with the freedom to be ourselves? Or the authority and restraint imposed on us by the need to work, as opposed to our desire to play? Then there is the authority of established tradition which may stifle our freedom to create for ourselves. How do we resolve the problem of the authority of commitment with our freedom to grow? These are all profound questions but ones that I cannot discuss here.
Guideposts to Living
As one walks down the road of life there are many guideposts. Sometimes our experiences along the track make us receptive to a particular one. We take its message on board and endeavour to live by it. If we find the message useful, it becomes part of our own way of life. Sometimes we are not ready: we see the message, read it, but cannot yet use it. Fortunately the guideposts are often repeated so that, if we cannot use one now, we may do so later. Many of the guideposts that I have noted on my journey through life have been discussed on previous pages. My purpose here is not to present a practical, do-it-yourself guide to living but simply to summarise the signs I have seen that have made sense to me, and perhaps to elaborate a few.
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Taken from page 227. See also pages 274 - 276 ⁹⁰ See Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, page 265
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Ever since man lived in society he has developed codes of behaviour to regulate that society. Some included a rough form of justice, of which the best known is An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This appeared in ancient Babylonian society and was written in the code of Hammurabi around 1750 BC, but can be found in various forms in other societies. For example, among the Nandi of East Africa there was the proverb, A goat’s hide buys a goat’s hide, and a gourd, a gourd. The law of retribution was common and was the basis of much of our criminal justice to the end of the 18^th century when severe corporal punishment was still in use. Some people today still want vindictive retribution.
th
Written codes with a more humanitarian attitude did not appear until around the 7 century BC. The Christian commandment found in the New Testament to
Love thy neighbour as thyself
and the Golden Rule
In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you
simply gave a renewed divine authority to codes that had long been stated. Their basis is in The Book
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of the Covenant - one of the oldest collections of law in the Old Testament. They are also found in
th
the Law of Moses (about 5 century BC). The famed Ten Commandments are thought to be a legacy of Semitic tribal law when important commands were taught, one for each finger, so they could be more easily remembered.
From a limited cultural perspective, we are apt to think of these precepts as peculiarly Christian or Jewish, but this is not so. The ideas can be found in many places and cultures. For instance, the Hindu Mahabharata, written around 500 BC, was a brief narrative poem but grew eventually to “the greatest work of imagination that Asia has produced”. It contains the following:
Do naught to others which if done to thee would
cause thee pain and
Even if the enemy seeks help, the good man will be
ready to grant him aid⁹²
They are also found in early Greek writing, while Confucius (551-479 BC) defined the process of becoming human as being able to “conquer yourself.. .” He is said to have freed himself of “opinionatedness, dogmatism, obstinacy and egoism” He believed that he should be loyal to himself and considerate of others. His “Golden Rule” was stated in the negative: “Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you”. He also said:
A man of humanity, wishing to establish himself,
also establishes others, and wishing to enlarge
himself, also enlarges others.
The Analects of Confucius describe his notion of the character of the Higher Man, which is an overflowing sympathy towards all men:
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In Exodus 20:22-23:33. It is similar to the code of Hammurabi, and also contain the “eye for an eye...” law.
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These extracts were quoted by Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Part I, Our Oriental Heritage, 1935, page 564
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THE GOLDEN RULE LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR AS THYSELF KNOW THYSELF
He is not angered by the excellence of other men; when he sees men of worth he thinks of equalling them; when he sees men of low worth he turns inward and examines himself; for there are few faults that we do not share with our neighbours. He pays no attention to slander or violent speech. He is courteous and affable to all, but does not gush forth indiscriminate praise. He treats his inferiors without
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contempt, and his superiors without seeking to court their favour .
While, within Jewish history and later in the Christian Church, it was doubtless convenient for the State and for the Priesthood to have divine sanction for the laws they wished to promulgate for the good and for the control of their society, I regard these statements simply as an expression of the accumulated wisdom of humankind on how to live at peace and harmony with oneself and with others. We have never improved upon them. They neither need nor require the stamp of divine authority as they have the authority of common human experience.
Of course they are idealistic and impractical but, like the bull’s eye of a target they are something to be aimed for, even if we have little hope of attaining them. They are nonetheless the best admonitions ever given because those who sincerely try to emulate them find fulfilment. In the recorded history of humankind, these precepts have endured, unchanged, just as has our inability to meet the challenge they throw down to us.
Love thy Neighbour As Thyself
We have all heard this phrase a thousand times. My experience is that one cannot love one’s neighbour unless one first loves oneself. But what does it mean to Love oneself? Obviously we do not mean it in the sense of the phrase: He loves himself too much. We have all come across people who appear to love themselves too much. They are narcissistic: arrogant, self-centred, self-important, full of their own opinions, conceited with an excessive appreciation of their own worth. They often put others
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down. Such people have not yet reached understanding of themselves .
No, to love oneself truly is to know, value and accept oneself. So, to love oneself is to have achieved
th
the Socratic injunction to Know Thyself. This springs right back to Protagorus in the 5 century BC who first gave the admonition to Know Thyself, and said that Man is the measure of all things something very dear to present day humanists in the face of the dehumanising effects of large scale organisation in modern society.
How do we come to know ourselves? How do we come to understand ourselves? This is ground we have covered already: By tending to the demands of each day and by being an active participant with
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others in the act of living . It is then that we are modest about ourselves without show of conceit or vanity; it is then that we respect ourselves for what we are; it is then that we value ourselves and can show humility: There is no need for assertive arrogance because we do not have to prove ourselves to
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Durant, page 670 ⁹⁴ See page 620 ⁹⁵ See pages 617 and 611
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anyone as, in modern terms, we know that we are OK.
Confucius said : A man of humanity, wishing to establish himself, also establishes others, and wishing to enlarge himself, also enlarges others. I have found this to be true. There is a kind of reciprocity of benefit in our relation with others. I have said that one cannot love one’s neighbour unless one first loves oneself. But one learns to understand and love oneself only through interaction with others. There is a kind of mutual “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” as little by little we grow when we help others grow.
As I slowly developed as a person, I noted a few other guideposts. Unfortunately I could not always heed them when I first saw them, and it took time for me to change old habits and discover that their messages really worked. Some of the more useful were:
Be gentle on yourself and on others
One of the very important truths I eventually learnt was that, because we are human beings, we are all frail and imperfect. If we hold ideals and values before us, as a shining light to guide us then, from time to time, we will fail to live up to them. Sometimes we will misjudge ourselves and fail to achieve an ambition. We must not condemn ourselves or judge ourselves badly when we fail.
The moral that I learnt was not to be too hard on myself, and not to take myself too seriously. Sometimes, when I did something particularly stupid, I stood back and looked at silly little John Fall strutting about on the stage of life and, in my mind, took him down a peg or two. I did not judge him or condemn him: I accepted him for what he was: neither saint nor devil, neither genius nor dunderhead, but simply human. I now know that it is important to be able to laugh at oneself, to recognise one’s weaknesses and to forgive oneself, and to learn what is realistic for us, while still striving for a life of higher quality. I discovered that, as my acceptance of myself grew, then so did my self-esteem and self-confidence. This led me to accept other people as I found them.
I learnt that, while I could condemn someone's bad actions -including my own, I never needed to condemn the person themselves. I found that many people cannot separate a person from their actions. If their actions are bad, then the person is bad. Eventually I learnt to make the distinction: the action might be bad, but I could never know the circumstances that led to that action, so I could not judge the person themselves. Sometimes those circumstances forced them to act in ways that were inappropriate. My proper course of action was to do what I could to help them (or myself) change the circumstances, so they might discover for themselves a more satisfactory approach to life.
My daughter Judith once remarked that she was brought up in a household where her parents were not judgmental of others; she thought that everyone was like this and only discovered in later life that most people were very judgmental of others.
It is very easy for us to judge others on superficial grounds - simply because they seem different. Maybe their skin is a different colour to ours, or they speak with a different accent, or come from a different country or social group. Maybe they hold somewhat different values to our own. Sometimes we reject someone because we don’t know how to handle the situation: they may be blind or have an
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affliction. A friend once told me that a few years ago she suffered from Bell's Palsy caused by a
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Bell's palsy is the most common lesion of the facial nerve. An abrupt weakness of all the facial muscles on one side, it is often accompanied by pain around the ear, unusual loudness of sounds heard in the ear on the same side, and loss of taste on the front of the tongue. Many patients believe that they have had a stroke, a conclusion
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BE GENTLE ON YOURSELF BE NON-JUDGMENTAL RESPECT & VALUE YOURSELF
nerve problem in the neck. This paralysed one side of her face and it took about three months for her to recover. During this period her face remained paralysed and her speech slurred. She recalled the incident:
People treated me like an imbecile. They spoke to my daughter and husband but would not speak to me; nor would they look at me. But I had a perfectly functioning brain! It was just that I looked peculiar and spoke strangely. It showed me how people react to anyone who does not look normal. Nowadays, If I see a disabled or partly paralysed person, I go out of my way to speak to them and treat them as though they were perfectly normal, because I know how they must feel when people shy away from them.
Respect and value yourself and others
It is very easy to judge ourselves badly when we see what we imagine are our shortcomings. Often we react to what we believe are other people’s expectations of us, and find ourselves wanting. I was always sensitive to what I thought other people thought about me, not realising that their main concern was
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what I thought about them! What we forget is that everyone slowly evolves as a person . When we are young we do not know ourselves well enough not to make mistakes: mistakes are our learning
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experiences and may involve some pain and suffering . People can tell us this a thousand times but it takes time for us to realise that we are unique; that no one has the same background, the same restraints or the same opportunities as we, and that we occupy a significant place in the scheme of things.
Sometimes we do not gain respect for ourselves until we see that we are valued by others. If we are fortunate, we are truly loved by our parents for our own selves - and this gives us a head start. Very often it is only by relating to others and living and working alongside them that we learn the value of sincere friendship: when others see us as worthwhile, we see ourselves as worthwhile. When we attain some small positive achievement, it strengthens our feeling of being worthwhile. We start to gain respect for ourselves.
When we feel good about ourselves we can open ourselves to experience, and grow. No longer do we need to be timid like a snail and crawl into our little shell where we feel safe. Unless we venture out and explore, valuable learning experiences will be denied us. Nor do we need to be aggressive and “tough”, giving the attitude that we don’t care about anyone because they don’t care about us: we do not need to be like the porcupine who sticks out his sharp quills to protect himself from anyone coming too close, saying “if you come too close, you will get hurt.” Unless we can allow others to come close to us, we will remain stunted in our growth.
Just as we need to gather courage to extend ourselves and allow others to come close to us, so others have the same need: they need to extend themselves and come close to people like us. And this is where we meet the Golden Rule.
The Golden Rule
It is often said that what comes first is self-interest: the “me-first” philosophy. There is some truth in this, as it is difficult not to consider one’s own interests. However, I do not believe in altruism - having an unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others without any concern for oneself - because when someone works for the welfare of another they invariably grow as a person, and this growth is in
corrected when it is seen that they cannot close the eye on the affected side. ⁹⁷ See the comment at the foot of page 462 ⁹⁸ See comments on pages 513 and 614
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their own self-interest .
Because my growth towards becoming an authentic person and so discovering and becoming my true self, can only happen through my relations with others; and because the same can only happen for them by relating to me or someone else, the Golden Rule: Do to others what you would have them do to you makes profound common sense. It only fails to make sense when we misinterpret the aim of life, To live life well, as meaning acquiring fame and fortune in the eyes of the world. Many people acquire fame and fortune by disregarding others, but do not achieve a sense of fulfilment.
Of course there are many examples of disregard for others in society. We come across them every day from the lowest to the highest level. ´Twas ever so, particularly when the actions are anonymous. For example, people show a lack of concern when they create litter: Currie Hall students were forever littering the place, showing little concern for others; people throw bottles out of cars or smash bottles, unmindful of the danger of broken glass to children; unthinking vandalism and graffiti are widespread. Kay has borrowed magazines from the public library only to discover that a previous reader had torn out recipes without regard for future readers. In recent years there have been many examples of ravaging bush fires lit by unthinking arsonists. Acts of dishonesty abound: there is ample evidence of fraud and corruption among business people, among the police or in the political arena where power
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and influence exists; Barwick has suggested that there is more tax fraud among the ordinary population than in big business. This list could go on and on. There has always been a segment of the community that has mistaken the path to self-development, who have the “me-first” philosophy, and whose greatest principle is that anything goes, provided one does not get caught.
It is a mistake to interpret living life well as acquiring material possessions, fame and fortune in the eyes of others. In 1992 I watched a television program titled: A poor man shames us all, meaning that if we see a poor man, he should not be despised for being poor, but we should be ashamed that we and our society allow such a man to be. The program looked at American society with its emphasis on material possessions, and the never ending list of ‘wants’, not ‘needs’, created by the advertising industry. It drew attention to the impersonal level of our lives in which things become more important than people. Material possessions were more valued than personal relationships, and yet, we all needed those personal relationships.
A garbage collector was interviewed who said that he was amazed at the things that people throw out as worthless. He did not possess material wealth, but he possessed all that mattered: He was happily married and he had happy children who depended on him. His sense of value in life, and of self-worth came from the dependence of others on him and on his ability to supply his family with love and with their needs. He said that he was rich.
The program compared American society with that of the Gabra tribe in Kenya who measured their wealth by gifts of love. A stranger, who had fallen on bad times and had lost all his camels, came to their village. He asked the village to give him a camel from their herd. This, they did. In a simple, practical sense, the village had a system of personal indebtedness: I do something for you and this makes you indebted to me. You do something for me, and I become indebted to you. This creates a bond of fellowship between members. The Gabra tribe depended on an intricate set of mutual indebtedness, including that to ancestors: We are indebted to them because they produced us and gave
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I was groping toward an emotional realisation of this, rather than an intellectual realisation when I was in my mid-thirties. My experience then taught me not to harm another or myself, and always to act for the greatest good of another - and for myself (see pages 253 & 270)
¹⁰⁰ See also comment on page 589
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us life. We repay that indebtedness by giving them respect. When we give, we become rich. The tribe weaved song and dance, ceremony and ritual into their everyday life and this contributed to their sense of belonging and of community.
This was in great contrast to the stark individualism of much Western society with its large organisation and impersonality, with its banks, credit cards and false imagery, feeding on capitalistic greed. Perhaps it is simply a consequence of moving from a small society to a large society which, because it is impersonal and anonymous, enables false values to thrive. To borrow from a book published in
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1974, perhaps we should remember that Small is Beautiful .
In 1959 I bought a book published by UNESCO: All Men are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma
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Gandhi as told in his own words . Gandhi wrote:
The end to be sought is human happiness combined with full mental and moral growth. I use the adjective moral as synonymous with spiritual. This end can be achieved under decentralization. Centralization as a system is inconsistent with a
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non-violent structure of society .
We should be ashamed of resting or having a square meal so long as there is one able-bodied man or woman without work or food¹⁰⁴
Perhaps Gandhi and Shumacher are right: Small is beautiful; large is dangerous because it enables our basic humanity and our important ends to be forgotten. When important ends are forgotten, we forget the Golden Rule. Because we do not know our neighbour, our community values are weakened.
Even in our everyday activities it is difficult to live by the Golden Rule because we do not see that our attempt to do so enlarges us. However, I have noted these minor guideposts along the way:
# Treat everyone with genuine respect, no matter who they are, whatever their circumstances or actions
# Recognise that it is very easy to be prejudiced, even
unconsciously: Examine yourself and overcome prejudice
wherever you find it
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E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered
¹⁰²This work was published in 1958 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. Gandhi was born in India in 1869, led a life of self-renunciation and non-violence and became of huge political influence in India. He was shot dead by a young Hindu Fanatic in January 1948. Gilbert Murray prophetically wrote about Gandhi in 1918, warning that people and governments "should be very careful how they deal with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing for comfort or praise, or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy, because his body which you can always conquer gives you so little purchase upon his soul." The book All Men are Brothers is filled with wisdom.
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All Men are Brothers, page 124
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Ibid. page 133
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# Everyone is my equal no matter what their age, status or
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circumstance: treat them that way .
# Never belittle someone, bully them or put them down. This is destructive.
# As already stated, make a clear distinction between condemning the action and condemning the person. Be ready to forgive.
If we could but follow these precepts, we would be well on the way to applying the Golden Rule in our lives.
Adopt a positive, enthusiastic approach to life
Because enthusiasm comes to me naturally, it was generally easy for me to read and apply the message of this guidepost, and yet there were times when I could not. As a late teenager I had several dark periods when, in very depressed mood, I felt that nothing was worthwhile. My enthusiasm was shut
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down and there seemed no way of getting out of the mood. Basically I was very lonely and it was only when I made a good friendship that I slowly came out of my black state. I have known many young people who have become discouraged, either through failure to make friends or through failing to reach an objective they set themselves. Sometimes, part of the problem was that they had unrealistic expectations of themselves because they did not yet understand themselves sufficiently.
Viktor Frankl pointed out that it is not what happens to you that counts, but the attitude you adopt to
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what happens to you . However, when you feel depressed, it is very difficult to adopt a positive attitude. Most times this feeling is not so much depression as pessimism: we judge our situation hopeless; emotionally we emphasise all the most adverse aspects and anticipate the worst possible outcomes. Very occasionally a depression is severe and professional help is required, but usually it is short lived, and circumstances change. Gradually we put a more favorable construction upon events.
Since that black period in my life I have rarely been depressed: with increased relationships and activities I forgot to think about myself. I started with a negative self-image, threw myself into life and then discovered one day that I had a positive self-image. I learnt to be optimistic, and to anticipate the best possible outcomes in life, but found that I had become realistic: I aimed for the best outcomes because that gave me incentive, but accepted the inevitable shortfalls. Enthusiasm returned to me and a positive outlook on life emerged.
Be optimistic, but realistic
An old friend once said to me:
¹⁰⁵On page 248 I noted that, after I had been in the Sub-Dean’s position for a year, I decided that every student would have my respect and would be treated as an individual, and in a personal, non-bureaucratic way.
¹⁰⁶See page 93
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See page 267. Also see footnote 79 page 615 for the comment by Aldous Huxley about experience
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BE POSITIVE, OPTIMISTIC, ENTHUSIASTIC DEVELOP A SENSE OF WONDER & CURIOSITY
I'm 88 next year. Not this year, next year. I'm only 86 now, I turn 87 this year. You must always keep a positive outlook on life. I've just planted some shrubs that will not flower for three years, so I must be around for that. And just before they flower I will plant some more that will take three years to flower. It's important to live for a purpose; if you've got no purpose to live for tomorrow, then you have no purpose to live for today and you might as well die.
Optimism is a far more useful quality than pessimism. Some people seem to thrive on being pessimistic. They anticipate that things will work out badly. They then approach their activity in such a manner as to ensure their predicted outcome. The realistic optimist approaches every task from a positive, enthusiastic point of view, so that he gives himself the best possible chance of success. It is not surprising that he is often more successful than the habitual pessimist.
Encourage a sense of wonder, curiosity and interest in everything around you
How wonderful if you can retain throughout your whole life a sense of wonder and excitement for the world around you - particularly if, as an adult, your senses have not been completely dulled and you start putting your experiences into perspective. Small children have this wonder and excitement. Initially, all experiences are new and simply exciting. Just look at the joy on a young child’s face as it discovers something new about nature. Perhaps it develops the capacity to dream and to wonder.
And then, when the child goes to school and becomes constrained and “socialised”, how often does it lose that excitement of being part of a wonderful world. Perhaps the pre-school youngster simply looks at the sky and the hills and hears the song of the birds with unfiltered senses: it is a pure, aesthetic experience.
Then people start limiting and structuring its experience: That bird is a magpie, this one, a kookaburra. The little child no longer hears them with the same delight: they become part of his intellectual, artificially constructed interpretation of nature, and something is both gained and lost. Most of us forget the unfiltered joy that we first experienced in nature, but something of it trickles back to us when we walk in bare feet along the ocean shore and watch and listen to the breaking of the waves. Standing on a mountain top, many of us momentarily recapture that sense of beauty and awe.
Perhaps this loss is inevitable as we gradually learn how to cope with the complexity of our man-made world. Nonetheless, we are fortunate if we can retain a sense of curiosity and start asking: Why is it so? Why are the clouds sometimes white and sometimes black? Where does the rain come from? Why is the sky blue? Where do I go when I am asleep? Why am I sometimes sad? Why do I feel that a butterfly is beautiful? What a wonderful curiosity this is, even though it belongs to the intellectual world.
I remember how, when I was eight, my parents bought the ten-volume set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s
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Encyclopedia . Within it there were many sections headed “Wonder” in which these and other questions were asked, and simple, but thought-provoking, answers given. This strengthened my curiosity whether I read about the nature of stars, the domestic life of ants, or the crystal structure of common salt. The world became a wonderful, exciting place with so much to discover.
¹⁰⁸ See page 32
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And so it is: the world is a wonderful and exciting place for people of any age. What can be more exciting than to experience, to explore, to wonder, to learn and understand, and so to appreciate the world in which we live? It matters not whether we experience the joy of walking in the countryside, tramping through the bush, searching for new flowers, plants, birds or insects, or whether we ponder on the slow development of man, his skills and struggles through the ages, or whether we immerse ourselves in the written thoughts of other people. It matters not whether we are captured by the beauty of music or the skill of the painter. It is enough that we are enthralled, held spellbound, and propelled with the desire to learn and appreciate the world that is ours.
All these are part of the excitement of being alive: the fully alive person lives with a constant sense of wonder and excitement for the riches that life offers, if only he opens the door to them. I believe that we should always encourage in ourselves that sense of curiosity and wonder that can enrich our lives and teach us that, rather than being the centre of things, we are but a small fragment of life, contributing to the greatness that is Life.
When you do something Throw yourself into the task
This guidepost on the road of life has two subsidiary messages written underneath. They are:
[1] Don’t count the cost to yourself
[2] If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
I can smile now at the second of these. It’s one of those old cliches that are jokingly referred to as the typical admonition of one’s school teacher: To the reluctant little Tommy the school teacher says, ‘Now look, Tommy, if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’ To which Tommy responds, ‘Yes, teacher’, with resignation but no commitment. Tommy has heard the advice, but is not convinced. He would much rather play and have fun than put in the hard work to do the job well - in any case, he is not convinced that he can do it well. He is a little like that university student who said, ‘I would have passed, had I really tried,’ but who, deep down, doubts it.
I discovered that there are tremendous rewards to be had by throwing oneself into a task without counting the cost to oneself. There are two problems with counting the cost before you commit yourself to the task:
First, you may think that you know the cost, but perhaps you are mistaken. Also, you are unlikely to estimate accurately the rewards and benefits that flow from doing the job well - because often those rewards are unexpected and not realised until the job is done.
Second, if you always count the cost to yourself, you tend to adopt the attitude: ‘I won’t do it unless there is something in it for me.’ That is the narrow and limited “me-first” attitude. With that attitude you never escape from being self-centred and so fail to achieve the personal growth that commitment can bring. This is akin to the attitude of the economic rationalists who say that the only thing that matters is the bottom line: The dollar return to me.
Just down the road from the above guideposts there is another that simply says:
Explore and Discover Your talents.
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DO THINGS WELL DON’T COUNT THE COST DON’T GIVE UP TOO EASILY
Everyone has a multitude of talents. To develop and enjoy our talents, we don’t have to come out on top, or prove ourselves better than others. We only have to discover where our natural abilities lie, and then work on them so that we have the immense personal, inner satisfaction of seeing those talents develop. We may have the talent of being a good runner, or player of football or tennis; we may have a talent for music; we may be good with our hands and enjoy the creative act of building a bookcase, shaping a piece of pottery, tinkering knowledgeably with the engine of our car, knitting a garment, or developing a garden. We may have the latent talent of being a good and understanding listener to others: perhaps our gift is that we can form reliable friendships of value to others and ourselves. There are as many possible talents as there are human activities, and in some of these we can excel to our own satisfaction.
At first we do not know where our talents lie. Unless we explore those activities that capture our initial interest, and then give them all we have got, we will remain without the rewards, and without the knowledge of ourselves that could be ours. When I was at school I could not draw well compared with other students, and told myself I was no good at drawing. Years later I turned my hand to oilpainting¹⁰⁹ and, although I could not produce a masterpiece by other people’s standards, I gained much personal satisfaction from discovering what I could do. In the act of trying, and of accomplishing a satisfying result to my own standards, a part of me grew in stature. This is what personal discovery of talent is about: about achieving inner satisfaction and personal growth; it is not about proving oneself better than someone else, becoming the best, or engaging in fierce competition with others. Those are false values.
Sometimes we believe we have a talent only to discover that it does not develop, and gives us no final satisfaction. So we give it up and turn to something else. Our effort was not, however, wasted, so we should not feel frustrated at our failure. The only way we learn where our talents lie, and who we are, is by experimenting, by trying ourselves out. Some of our efforts are bound to fall short of our expectations but, in the process, we have come to know ourselves better. Sometimes we have a latent talent but try to develop it before we are ready for it. At a later stage, when we are ready, that talent may prove our greatest asset by giving us immense personal growth and satisfaction.
This can happen with a career change. When we are young we may set out on a career path only to discover in later life that a different path would give us more satisfaction: so we make the change. This happened to me. When I was young, I was too shy, sensitive and insecure to relate to people, so I threw myself into a career that did not directly involve other people. I had some talent for abstract thought and imagination, so I became an academic engineer. I greatly enjoyed this work but, as I developed, I became interested in the social implications of engineering and then, when I had discovered more of myself, changed career to one that had intense involvement with other people -a career that gave me immense satisfaction - but not one that I could have tackled when I was younger. Most of us make changes as we develop. In the “Eight Ages of Man” listed on page 609, a possible career change is shown at the 7^th age, but it can occur much earlier.
When one is discovering one’s talents, there is another guidepost on the roadside that says:
Don’t give up too easily Everything worthwhile takes effort.
I remember my father several times quoting the phrase:
¹⁰⁹See the two examples: page 11: The Firs at Long Buckby, and page 385, Leighton Cottage.
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Nothing for Nothing And very little for sixpence
Nothing worthwhile is achieved without effort. Everything costs you something. During the last year I bought a scanner so that I could scan photographs and include images in this autobiography. I paid $1,100 for it, but noted that I could have bought a different scanner for as little as $250.
‘What is the difference?’, I asked the salesman. He gave the well-known reply: ‘You pay for what you get.’ It is so in most things: If you want quality, it costs. It is the same in one’s life: If you want quality in your achievement, then it does not come cheaply - you must be prepared to put in the effort needed, and not give up the first time it becomes hard.
I hadn’t gone very far beyond the last guidepost when I saw another:
If you want real freedom you must submit to the authority of discipline
A majestic river of great beauty flows to the sea and gives both pleasure to those who see it, sustenance to those whose crops depend on it and successful commerce to those who navigate it. But it only achieves these worthwhile ends because it is constrained - because it has banks. Without those banks, the river would spread over the countryside and become an amorphous, shapeless, dank swamp of no use to anyone.
I remember saying to the concert pianist André Tchaikowsky that I wished that I could play as he did, and received the reply: ‘And so you could, John, if you were prepared to practice at least five hours a day for seven days a week for many years.’ Because he submitted to the authority of self-discipline,
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André had the freedom to create at the keyboard what I could not . It was the same with my friend Alistair Macfarlane who mastered his craft of theoretical dynamics through patient practice of honing
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his skills . And so it is with everything: the carpenter gains his skill at making a precise dove-tail joint through constant effort and practice. The same with the first-rate tennis player, the accountant, the medical doctor, or with anyone who has acquired mastery of skills and developed his talent.
Effort and mastery set us free. Depending on our attitude, the disciplined effort may seem a drudgery, or, as we slowly make progress, we may experience the exhilaration of the mastery of one component skill after another. If we paddle up a river in a tropical jungle, we discover something new every time we turn a corner. We do not count the effort of paddling, because we see our achievement. When we negotiate a difficult and demanding set of rapids successfully, we feel not only exhilaration but joy and happiness at that achievement.
So, if we wish to master a skill, we should adopt a positive attitude towards the effort required and rejoice every time we make progress. If the progress, however, eludes us, no matter how hard we try, we should be prepared to change to some other endeavour, not counting our efforts a failure, but a discovery about ourselves. The difficult decision is always at what point to call halt.
¹¹⁰ See page 313 ¹¹¹ See page 353
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REAL FREEDOM NEEDS DISCIPLINE DON’T LOOK BACK WITH REGRET LIVE IN THE NOW
Don’t look back
with Regret
This important guidepost applies not only to giving up a sought-after skill, but also to
the passing of any phase in our life.
When I left Currie Hall at the beginning of 1987, several people said to me ‘After the strength of the commitment you had to Currie Hall, surely you will miss it?’ My answer was ‘No.’ Then, when I retired completely, early in 1993, people said: ‘Surely you regret coming to the end of your career?’ Again, my answer was ‘No. Not in the slightest.’
It was simply the closing of one door and the opening of another that would give me new opportunities
- some of which I may not have as yet even glimpsed. Moving on to new adventures, whilst valuing and learning from the old, is simply a matter of adopting a positive attitude to all the experiences that life can offer.
In 1996 I received a letter from a past student who had recently turned forty. He wrote:
It must be scary for people of my age to visualise that the past good times now belong to the past.
I knew the student very well, so replied:
‘It is fruitless to try to repeat the past good times, as any attempt to do so is to live with constant regret. But, I have not found it scary. If you let the past go, but value it for what it was: a vital part of your experience, then you can concentrate on gaining the most from the present, which will ensure that you gain the most from the future.
‘When I was young, like all young men, the hormones ran strongly through me and I had urgent and powerful sexual drives. Satisfying those drives was very important to me and gave me not only some peak experiences but also some great frustrations. Now, at a much later age, the hormones no longer surge through me with the same intensity. If I had always placed great emphasis on sexual gratification for its own sake, then I would probably regret the passing of its intensity. Do I? No I don't! It was a vehicle that once helped me foster close emotional relationships. As the years have passed, Kay and I have shared more and more of our lives, and so have grown in our mutual emotional security. We have a rock solid foundation of trust that we now realise gives us both great pleasure and happiness. Intensity of sexual experience was important at an earlier age; now, the deep satisfaction of a strong bonding with another person and the mutual caring between people, is recognised as an even greater pleasure.
‘A boy of seventeen when he first gains his drivers' licence will do "wheelies" in the street and "burn" his tyres with screeching take-offs. When he is twenty-seven, he will no longer do this. He "has been there, done that", and his former excitement has been replaced by something more appropriate to his age. Does he regret that he no longer does "wheelies"? I doubt it. He remembers the period probably with pleasure, and possibly with a little pain if he were involved in an accident at the time. But he does not look back with regret. The "wheelies" were part of the experiences that made him what he is today; they are a part of the rich fabric that is his life.’
In the 1960s and 1970s Betty Friedan was a very influential American woman espousing the feminine cause and empowering women to take their place beside men as equals. In 1992, in her seventies, she published a book, The Fountain of Age in which she pointed out that, just as many years ago men used myths about women to keep women “in their place”, so, too, there were now myths about the
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inadequacy of old age, which deny the old their rightful place and push them to one side as discarded and on the rubbish heap, waiting to die but, while waiting, getting in the way of youth.
In her new book she dispelled these ideas: Everyone glorifies youth, she wrote. Magazines show no one over thirty. The ideal is to be a woman of twenty, and the aim of life is to preserve that youthfulness in the face of the ageing process. This, she said, was nonsense: As one grows older, there is the opportunity to fully realise oneself, to become independent of criticism, and to enjoy the freedom that this confers. It is a mistake to look back on lost youth with regret. It is right to live life as fully as one can in the present, utilising the accumulation of wisdom that experience has brought.
I totally agree with this. I note that there is some small print beneath the guidepost that says
Live in the Now, but learn from the past
In my association with MALA, our school for Seniors¹¹², I have encountered many older people, some in their eighties. I met an eighty-five year old man who was full of life, had a boyish twinkle in his eye, and was full of humour. He had a few physical disabilities, but what of it? He retained a zest for life that was refreshing to see. If someone said to him, ‘What is it like, to be old?’ he would reply: ‘Old? Old age? What’s that? I’ve still got a great deal of living to do.’ I think it is wonderful when an old person, full of the experience of life, can nonetheless maintain a youthful outlook. It is only a pity when a person has reached mature years but never learnt how to accept personal responsibility for his life and for those around him. Then, I feel sad that they have never truly “grown up”.
Growing up by accepting responsibility while retaining a youthful outlook, a natural curiosity, a committed approach to life and the desire to do something worth doing is a great gift. We should encourage it in ourselves and in others. This brings me to the next group of guideposts:
Trust other people
There is a very sad, and rather sick story of the little boy who climbed on to the roof of his house and then was too afraid to jump down. His father tried to coax him, finally holding out his arms, urging his son to jump. ‘Don’t worry,’ said the father, ‘I will catch you.’ So the boy plucked up courage and jumped, whereupon the father folded his arms and let the boy fall to the ground, badly shaken. ‘There,’ said the father, ‘let that be a lesson to you, my son. Trust no one in this life, not even your own father.’
This is an apocryphal tale but many people have been brought up - or their experience has told them to trust no one, at least not until their trustworthiness has been proved. This is a great pity.
My parents, having faced disappointments in life had the motto: Expect nothing and you will not be disappointed. Dad often said to me:
If you do a kindness for someone, they are surprised, and thank you; If you do them a second kindness, they thank you, but are no longer surprised; The third time, they abuse you for not doing it.
¹¹²See pages 536 - 540
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TRUST OTHERS MAINTAIN YOUR INTEGRITY ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOURSELF
I found this a cynical attitude to life, and I have steadfastly refused to be a cynic, but we can all recognise the situation. However, I remember the time that I failed an examination and Professor
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Weatherburn trusted me . I remember how his faith in me caused me to grow, and how I learnt an important lesson. I then decided that I would trust people, and that I would believe in them. Time and again, when working with young people in later life, I discovered that by adopting a positive stance, by assuming the best motives, by trusting them, and by believing what they said, they were better able to overcome personal limitations, and move forward to greater self-fulfilment. When I placed trust in them, they rose to the occasion, placed trust in me, and we started to communicate with sincerity and
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honesty .
Occasionally someone would let me down, but it was very rare. I believe that we should all build trust with others, because this is the very basis of sincerity, honesty and community. To give and receive the gift of trust, is one of the greatest gifts we can bestow on each other. It is the lubricant that facilitates honest communication because it makes us feel safe.
Maintain Personal Integrity Be honest and truthful
This guidepost is closely related to the last as an important part of trust depends on personal integrity. If someone cannot believe what you say, then they cannot trust you. So honesty and truthfulness are a part of integrity. But the word means more than this: it implies a state of being whole, complete and undivided. If one seeks unity within oneself and unity with others - which I regard as a central aim in life - then honesty and truthfulness are the starting points. I have found that openness with others and a lack of deceit brings great personal rewards, even though it is tempting at times to be dishonest or untruthful. Perhaps I was fortunate in that my parents were very honest and truthful: these were the
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standards held before me and to which I aspired .
Not that it is always easy or possible to be completely truthful. When we are afraid of the opinions of others; when we have not yet reached the point of unreservedly accepting ourselves as “an OK person”, we are tempted to be deceitful to get out of a sticky situation or to gain an advantage. Unfortunately, while this may give an imagined temporary advantage or solution to a problem, it is only temporary. If one starts on the path of coping with life, its fears and difficulties by deception and a lack of honesty, it soon becomes the standard way of trying to cope with problems. It seems the easy way out but, initially, we feel bad that we have indulged in the practice, as we become divided within ourselves, and these feelings often confirm for us that we are “not OK”. If the habit becomes ingrained, we bury these bad feelings deep inside ourselves because they are too painful.
My dictionary tells me that honesty implies fairness and straightforwardness of conduct, sincerity and a refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any way. When we are dishonest we become self-centred, disregarding the needs and rights of others. We lose sight of the Golden Rule, all for the sake of apparent personal, short-term advantage. Real communication breaks down and we cease to care about others. Our care is for ourselves, but in failing to love others, we cease to love ourselves.
An important element in any relationship is trust. If we trust another implicitly, and they trust us, then each bestows much freedom on the other. Deception and a lack of honesty are very difficult to
¹¹³See page 98 ¹¹⁴See page 252 regarding my experience as Sub-Dean and page 322 when I was in Currie Hall ¹¹⁵See pages 51 & 109 for my early comments; Also see page 253 where, in the 1960s, I set out
my private guideposts to living.
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preserve. When this lack is discovered, trust is shattered and relationships fall apart. Much real love and forgiveness is needed to rebuild the bridge of trust. Few things are as important as developing the quality of sincerity, having an honesty of mind and a freedom from hypocrisy.
Be Responsible: Never blame others
This guidepost does not appear until we are some way down the track. It contains few words, but its
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command is daunting. Eric Berne wrote an entertaining book on the psychology of human relationships titled Games People Play, which was a popular example of his main book Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy.
In it he described an oft-played game that he called Why don’t You - Yes But. A typical example of the game goes like this:
A: ‘My dog is always running out into the street and annoying motorists.’
B: ‘Then Why don’t you keep him constrained to your back yard?’
A: ‘I would, but there are some pickets off the fence and he gets out.’
B: ‘Then why don’t you just hammer the pickets back on again?’
A: ‘I would but my son-in-law has borrowed my hammer.’
B: ‘Then why don’t you get it back from him?’
A: ‘I would, but I think he’s lost it.’
B: ‘Then why don’t you. . .’
C: ‘I would but. . . ‘
. . . And so on.
While there are doubtless many underlying motives in playing this game, such as posing as the helpless person, and having the satisfaction of rejecting every solution that is offered, it also displays a basic lack of accepting responsibility for oneself and a desire to blame things outside ourselves.
Sometimes we reluctantly accept responsibility that is imposed on us. I remember being somewhat uneasy when, at the age of seven, my mother said that I had reached the age of reason, knew right from
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wrong, and was now responsible for what I did . I did not feel very comfortable about that. Then I remember the contrast between the Australian and Asian students when I went to Currie Hall in 1967. To the Asian, the Australians seemed empty-headed with no sense of responsibility. Ingrained in them, often through the conditioning of their society, was a deep respect for their parents and a sense of
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responsibility to them . Neither of these senses of responsibility were personally held convictions.
As a young man my sense of responsibility was still a response to an externally imposed precept. Maybe I acted “responsibly” because I feared the criticism of others if I did not. It took me many years to realise that no matter what had happened to me in early life, the future was under my control:
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See footnote 84 on page 618. Eric Berne was the founder of Transactional Analysis ¹¹⁷See page 43 ¹¹⁸See page 328
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BE RESPONSIBLE DON’T BLAME OTHERS BE REASONABLE MASTER YOUR ANGER
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I, and I alone, was responsible for the way in which I allowed my life to develop .
It was not until I was in my mid-thirties that I was influenced by existential thought. When I realised that responsibility was something that we all faced, but feared to accept; When I saw that at every moment in life we were free to choose our action but could never be sure that we would choose well; When I finally understood that nonetheless making a decision, and then accepting and living with the consequences, caused me to grow as a person, I at last internalised the idea that self-responsibility was
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part of what life was about .
Freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand; freedom is freedom to be responsible, not to be irresponsible. When we conform or submit to external authority we give up part of our wholeness. believe this is true in many areas. As long as we need a “security blanket” and depend on someone else or on some institution to protect us, to make us feel safe, or to give us a tick of approval, we are
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not a fully whole, or integrated person .
Being fully responsible is scary, but blaming others for our situation is totally non-productive. It deprives us of being fully human, and it drives a wedge between ourselves and others. It obstructs our desire for unity with others and ourselves.
Sure, some other people, limited in their own development by various factors, may act inappropriately. Their action may damage us. Maybe we have little control over this, but it is not what happens to us that matters, it is the attitude we take to what happens to us. For example, if we feel that someone has injured us, or slighted us, we may respond with harsh words. The confrontation is very damaging to us. We feel bad about the situation and perhaps bad about the words we spoke in the emotional heat of the moment. The person whom we damage by blaming others is ourself.
Of course, it is inevitable that we will have a difference of opinion and sometimes arguments with others. To relate to others we must communicate. Without communication we do not understand, and so cannot love. But communication is very difficult. Even in trivial, non-confrontational matters I am sometimes a very bad communicator. Sometimes I choose one word, with an intended meaning, while my listener puts an unintended meaning on it. So, I am misunderstood. Sorting out the intended communication is not always easy, especially if the words are emotionally charged.
Holding a different opinion to someone else is natural and part of what living is about, but it need not lead to heated argument provided we hold a genuine and deep respect for the other person and recognise their right to feel different. Our ability to accept different attitudes in others is closely related to our own inner feelings of self-confidence. When we are under-confident we don't like to admit that we might be wrong. An attack on something we say may be emotionally experienced as an attack on our person. Only when we are sure of ourselves, and know that we have an inner strength, can we take a difference of opinion as what it really is, a difference in attitude, and an attempt to communicate.
Be reasonable: Don’t be stubborn Anger rarely helps
119See page 182
¹²⁰ See pages 268 and 253
¹²¹I wrote on page 611: Someone who adheres to a dogma without a background of experienced knowledge, is blind to the truth. The dogma is simply a prop. See also the story of the Archbishop and his son on page 312
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This guidepost follows from the last. We must remember that we are finite and frail. No matter how strongly we hold a view, we must remember that we may be mistaken. If we are uncertain of ourselves we may find it necessary to be stubborn and insist on our own point of view. If we admit that we are wrong, we feel that we are decreased in stature. However, when we know ourselves well and accept ourselves, we rarely need to hold firmly to our own viewpoint and insist that others are wrong.
While we remain self-centred, we find it hard to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and understand where they are coming from, and why they feel as they do. And yet it is important that we develop the skill of doing so. From their background, their own attitude may be as reasonable as ours. Perhaps we can simply accept their point of view, although different from our own, or amicably agree to differ.
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In May, 1992, the Dalai Lama visited Perth and over 10,000 people attended a talk that he gave. vividly remember one statement made by this gentle man:
The most important principle in life is to show compassion to others and not to be subject to anger. Anger is destructive. It does not hurt your opponent. It only hurts you. Have you noticed how people remain calm in an argument while they can produce logical statements to support their view? It is only when they run out of logic that they turn to anger.
Of course, he is right, but how many of us can live a life of compassion?
It is often said that man is motivated by an aggressive drive which originally had significant survival value, and that society, as it developed, had to find ways to externally impose restraints to inhibit that aggression. Maybe our competitive sense feeds on our natural aggression; maybe a small competitive sense is useful in helping us to succeed, but is not good when our aim is to beat others at all costs.
Most of us feel a build up of anger - that strong feeling of displeasure and antagonism - at some stage in our lives. Psychologists tell us that it is not good to bottle this up inside ourselves, until it grows and grows to a point where it may erupt as rage, resulting in a complete loss of self-control from the violence of our emotions. It is better, they say, to show our anger before it becomes too great. This is like taking the cork out of a bottle that has internal pressure, so that the pressure escapes before it bursts the bottle and causes damage not only to itself but to anything nearby.
Emotional anger may be helpful if we can let off steam in a gentle way before it becomes damaging. However, it almost always divides us: it puts us at war with ourselves because it is an unpleasant emotion in itself.
As I have walked along the path of life and slowly achieved a greater sense of unity within myself and with others, I have discovered that there is rarely need for anger. To let off steam before anger becomes too great may be good, but surely it is better not to experience the anger in the first place. Today, anger is almost a foreign experience for me. Once I understood myself, once I tried putting myself in the shoes of the other, once I understood that most people live as best they can, but differ in
¹²²The Dalai Lama is the Buddhist spiritual leader of Tibetans, and is regarded by them as a God. When a Dalai Lama dies, the priests search the country for his reincarnation, and the present Dalai Lama was found in this way, as a small child. I first become aware of the Dalai Lama years ago when I read the story of a German mountaineer who climbed Annapurna, one of the tallest peaks in the Himalayas. The author encountered the Dalai Lama who was then fourteen years of age. When the Chinese annexed Tibet, the Dalai Lama was forced to flee. Today he resides with a following in India, but has little hope of recovering Tibet from the rule of the Chinese.
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the extent to which they have achieved knowledge of themselves, I found it unnecessary to feel anger. I feel concern at injustice and wrong-doing, but not anger. I have found that anger is almost always hurtful to myself and others and that it does not solve a problem. Because it usually causes an emotional, irrational outburst, it deepens the problem and does not cure it.
Dispel Anger and Forgive others
When we look at the world today, we see many instances of hatred between groups. In recent years,
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no love has been lost between the Croatians and the Serbs . In 1992 I watched a television program in which the interviewer talked with many students from the Cabramatta High School in New South Wales. Students at this school came from over seventy different nationalities. Some had been born in Australia; others were born overseas, or their parents had migrated to Australia, or entered as refugees. Many had experienced racial prejudice springing from the problems of their home country. One Croatian boy said that he would never mix with Serbs. The interviewer asked him to shake hands with a Serbian girl in the audience. They both refused, although they had never previously met. While one could understand the parents finding it impossible to forgive those at whose hands they had suffered loss, or been subject to atrocities, surely it should be different for the children who had come to a new country to start a new life? But no. The parents were fiercely loyal to their country of origin and felt hatred towards those who had treated them badly. They communicated this to their children from an early age, so that the children grew up with the same hatreds and prejudices. There was one exception to this. A young Chinese girl said that her mother had been severely mistreated by the Japanese, and so would hate the Japanese always. However, the mother had impressed on her daughter that she should not hate the Japanese. The young girl belonged to a different generation and was growing up with Japanese of a different generation. The mother had taught her daughter that the problems of parents should not be visited on the children, so brought up her family to respect all people equally.
I can understand how difficult it is for anyone, who has been badly hurt by another, to find it in their heart to forgive. I remember how, when I told my father that I had never hated anyone, he simply
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responded: Then you have never been hurt enough . He held his hurt within himself, but would never buy a Japanese car or associate with anything Japanese, but he did not pass his feelings on to me. Perhaps it is true: I have never been hurt enough by any group, or individual, to find it impossible to forgive. Therefore, I am unqualified to comment. However, Stan Arneil¹²⁵ suffered badly, learnt from the experience, and turned it to positive use: in hindsight, he thought that he was very privileged to have gained an important insight into life through his suffering.
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And yet the problems between racial groups persist . Antagonism in Ireland has existed for decade after decade with no one willing to forgive and forget, with no one willing to act on the greater principle that, in terms of Gandhi’s book, All men are brothers. We tear ourselves apart in hurtful actions between individuals, neither party being willing to forgive. Perhaps the problem is not solved by only one party forgiving, because then they may see themselves as the vanquished, while the victor lords it over them. Perhaps the solution requires that neither party blames the other for the state they are in. No one should say ‘It’s all your fault.’ Only when they can truly say ‘It’s everyone’s fault’,
¹²³See page 607 ¹²⁴ See page 615 ¹²⁵ See page 613 ¹²⁶See page 607
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accept the fact that hurt and damage has been done, and then seek mutual forgiveness, that we can overcome the problem. That is easy to say, but so hard to achieve because few of us have gained the understanding and acceptance of ourselves that is necessary before we can take the first step.
Hide your virtues Disclose your weaknesses
Many tips on how to live came to me during my mid- to late-thirties¹²⁷; this guidepost was one of them. It proclaimed that I should hide my virtues and disclose my weaknesses. This seemed strange advice when I first encountered it. Usually, we like to receive accolades, are apt to be proud of our achievements and have a desire to proclaim them so people will think well of us, while we do not want others to be aware of our shortcomings. Yet, eventually, I found that this advice made good sense, although it was not easy to practise.
If we do a good act towards another, we should not go around with the attitude “look how good I am.” Bragging is not an endearing virtue. If our motive in doing the “good” act is to have praise heaped on us, and to be well thought of, then the act is not good in itself. All our acts should be done simply because they are worth doing, without thought of reward. This, I have found, is one of the great principles of living: Act for no other reason than that it is worthwhile. Then keep the act quietly to yourself. This is not always possible, but it does contribute greatly to our sense of well-being, and to our sense of wholeness and integrity.
I am reminded of the story of the disciple sitting at the feet of the wise and good guru, who had been espousing the virtue of rising above our baser instincts so that we never sought praise or recognition for our virtuous practices. The disciple proclaimed, ‘Oh my guru, I cannot be like you, I give way to all my baser feelings, while you always rise above them..’ The story concludes with the simple words: ‘To which the guru smiled.’ The guru was not above being receptive to praise! We are all human, and often fall short of our aspirations.
As discussed on page 265, while it is desirable to keep our good acts to ourselves, conversely, if we have done something of which we are ashamed, the knowledge of this destroys our internal unity because it engenders a sense of guilt. Only by revealing our bad act to someone who is significant in our life can we resolve its negative influence upon us.. I found that self-disclosure was a very scary and difficult thing to do. However, I eventually found immense benefit in following the advice, and now try not to keep bad acts hidden within myself.
I have always found that if I do something without counting the cost, simply because it is worth doing, and without asking for, or expecting reward, nonetheless, reward always comes to me in some form. It may be that I simply experience a growth of self-esteem and self-confidence; it may be that through my actions I gain greater insight into myself, and increase my sense of completeness and fulfilment. Such rewards, once experienced, are of far greater value than other more tangible rewards.
This experience also threw light on another oft-heard guidepost:
The world does not owe you a living.
How often have we heard this. How often have we seen people acting as though the world does owe them a living. They are unmindful of the admonition that:
¹²⁷See comments on “Your are your secrets” on page 265 and my comments on self-disclosure on pages 274 - 277
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It is not what the world can do for you that counts, but what you can do for the world.
Once we recognise that we are completely responsible for ourselves and that what we make of ourselves and our lives depends on us and on us alone, this admonition starts to make profound sense. Our proper role as human beings is to lead an active life, participating in life. Our task is to gain from life everything we can that will cause us to grow as people, to enjoy our experiences and to reach a rich fruition.
As small children we naturally depend on our parents and others to provide for us but, as we grow older and seek independence, we realise that our task is to depend on, and to provide for ourselves. When we expect others to provide for us, we do not grow. The world has achieved what it has through the accumulated contributions of many millions of people throughout the ages. We are unique and, during our brief spell in this world, have the opportunity to add to that contribution. Our personal contribution may not be earth-shattering, but in its own sphere it is significant.
If we wish to grow and reach a sense of fulfilment and completeness, our thoughts should not start with ‘They ought to. . .’ That makes us passive absorbers of the efforts of others. No, we should engender in our attitude the thought ‘What can I do. . .’ Then we become active. If something needs changing or developing, then say to yourself, ‘How can I help make that happen?’. When someone asks you to contribute to doing the task, then say ‘Yes’ if it is within your capacity, and above all, don’t grumble about what has been imposed on you. Either accept a role willingly, or don’t accept it at all. And do not count the cost. That way, you grow.
While I have been writing the section on ‘how to live’¹²⁸, three imaginary critics have been my constant companions, peering over my shoulder. I have become more and more conscious of them, and now realise that I can constrain them no longer.
Jason is a twenty-year old blond, sun-tanned surfie¹²⁹, a fine physical specimen of young manhood. ‘Hey, Man!’ he says, ‘Get real! What are you, a preacher, or something? Don’t you know that life is for living - so let’s have none of this responsibility or do-gooder stuff. That’s not cool: that’s for oldies who are past it. It’s just not like that. You’ve got to suck out of life all that you can, while you can. Man, when I’m out there, on top of a big wave that’s curling and breaking, it can’t get much more real than that: the adrenaline is pumping, and I don’t have a care in the world. That’s when I’m fully alive. It’s me against nature. Life is for fun, for enjoying myself at a rave party, for getting pissed¹³⁰, and maybe chatting up a chic with the hope of shacking up with her for the night. And when I do, that’s something again. That’s cool, I can tell you.’
I guess that Jason is still in the fourth age¹³¹, and is gripped by a hedonist philosophy - which proclaims
¹²⁸Pages 608 - 640
129
One who spends much time at the beach riding the crest of waves to the shoreline on a surfboard and who regards it as a way of life
130
A vulgar expression used by the young for getting drunk.
¹³¹See page 609
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that pleasure is the chief good in life. Of course, he has a point: what I have written may seem all very serious and dull, although not intended. While I have written about enthusiasm, about encouraging curiosity and interest in everything, perhaps I have not emphasised sufficiently the value of spontaneity, of doing something on the spur of the moment, without always thinking of the consequences. It’s natural for a person like Jason to explore life, not to be introspective, and to take risks. So I am not perturbed by his reaction. I notice, by the way, that he is very good on his surfboard, and know that you don’t get that good without much practice and self-discipline to gain the skill. Because he enjoyed the act of mastering the skill, he threw himself into it, unconscious of the effort required. That’s how we should approach most things.
When I was at Currie Hall I remember many young men who came up to the University with Jason’s outlook on life. They lived it up, got drunk, went to parties and had a wild time. More often than not, those same students, three years later, had a completely different outlook. They had “been there, done that” and now had moved to the next phase of life. Today they are respected and responsible members of the professional community. A seventeen or eighteen year-old might vehemently advocate free-love with as many partners as possible. Three years later, when he has discovered more about intimacy, he may say that one should not indulge in sex unless there is a sense of commitment between the couple.
-oOo-
My second critic, Debra, is approaching middle age. She has three children from the early teens, down to five years. The children are always demanding, and most of the time she feels worn out. She no longer sees eye-to-eye with her husband, Tom, and there is constant bickering. ‘I’ve been reading what you have written,’ she starts, ‘and you are far too simplistic. You write: trust other people, never blame others, don’t be stubborn, don’t experience anger, and forgive others. It’s just not that simple. I ask you, how can you trust people when you’ve been let down, so many times? I just can’t do it.’
‘Tom and I started off happily together but, as the years have passed, we have come to realise that we have very different personalities. He always wants his way, but says that I’m the stubborn one. So we fight, then we get angry, and it gets out of hand. How can I forgive him when he has hurt me so many times? He probably feels the same about me, because when you’re angry you say things you don’t mean. I tell you, you are not realistic.
‘And then you say, “develop your talents.” Ever since I married I’ve been at the beck and call of my husband and children. Doing things to support him in his work, feeding the kids, looking after them, getting them to school, sorting out their squabbles. Where has there been any time for me? How can I possibly develop my talents when I have no time for myself, and then, if I do find some time, I am too worn out to do anything with it. Life’s just not fair - particularly to women.’
There are many people in this world, like Debra, caught up in difficult life-problems, and maybe I am being over simplistic. If these problems were easily solved, we would not have so many unhappy people, so many divorces and the like in this world. But we do have them, so the world is not a simple place in which to live.
No one can show another how to live; it has to be discovered for oneself. At the outset I wrote that, what I observed along the road of life as seeming useful to me, might not be of use to someone else. Each person must find their own way of solving their problems, and some people may be faced with much more difficult problems than others. I have simply been fortunate. However, although difficult to apply, I believe that most of the guideposts I have noted, are at least pointers to the right way to go. It would be delightful if we could all be masters of ourselves. However, generally we are not, and the way ahead to a more satisfactory life becomes clouded and confused with many emotional issues.
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-oOo-
George, my third critic, is a bully. In his mid-fifties he has spent all his life in the hard-headed world of international commerce. He has made a great success of it in material terms, but has developed a reputation for using bull-dozer tactics to get what he wants. In this he has been successful.
He looks me in the eye, and starts aggressively:
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‘I’ve been watching what you write - and it’s nothing but a load of crap . It’s dog eat dog our there. None of this mamby-pamby nonsense about trust and consideration, thank you very much . Sure, we use those words in our rhetoric, but we don’t for one moment believe them: ruthless competition is the name of the game. It was like that yesterday, it’s like it today, and it will be like that tomorrow. The world belongs to the cunning, to the manipulators and to the powerful. Everyone else is simply the cannon-fodder. That’s the real world. Cain killed Abel, and that’s been going on since the year dot. If you don’t believe me, try stepping out of your ivory tower into the real world, and see how quickly you get shot down. You wouldn’t last a minute. I know, because I’ve had to survive in the real world, and the only way to survive is to play the game their way. So, if you want to write about how to live, you must be in the real cut-throat world as your starting point.’
I have no answer to George. I think he exaggerates since, even in his world, finer feelings sometimes prevail. However, he typifies that which causes me greatest concern for the future: People like George controlling giant multinational companies, lacking in all human concern, and whose only regard is for the growth of their own and their company’s power and control of the market. Someone said that the problem is that you can’t bring contentment and happiness into the economic equation. But I remain an optimist: Maybe, in future, we can, and humanistic values will again emerge triumphant.
III
The future belongs to my immediate descendants and to their descendants. I have written little about our obligations to children, but they are many. There is a little book of profound wisdom by Kahil
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Gibran called The Prophet . In a section on children, he wrote:
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you, but not from you,
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A very vulgar, but widely used term to signify nonsense or rubbish.
133
Gibran was born near Mount Lebanon in 1883, and died in 1931. The Prophet was written in 1923 and first published in Britain in 1926, since when it has gone through one edition after another, and is still immensely popular.
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And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies, but not their souls For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrow may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so also he loves the bow that is stable.
We all know that children learn not from what we say but from what we do. I am impressed by the oft-quoted words of Dorothy Law Nolte:
Children learn what they live
If a child lives with criticism, He learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility, He learns to fight.
If a child lives with ridicule, He learns to be shy.
If a child lives with shame, He learns to feel guilty.
If a child lives with tolerance, He learns to be patient.
If a child lives with encouragement,
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He learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise, He learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with fairness, He learns justice.
If a child lives with security, He learns to have faith.
If a child lives with approval, He learns to like himself.
If a child lives with acceptance and Friendship, He learns to find love in the world.
Let us heed these words of wisdom and so help our children, and their children, to benefit positively from our own experience of life, and from the experience of life that we pass on to them.
Finally, a comment about the pot of gold:
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EPILOGUE CHANGE, CONSTANCY & THE POT OF GOLD

However, two items require attention: the unprecedented change that has occurred during my lifetime, and what I have learnt about that which endures. Through this I also hope to give an overview of the society in which I have lived.

The Aim of life

The Yin and Yang of Life

Guideposts to Living

Love thy Neighbour As Thyself

Be gentle on yourself and on others

Respect and value yourself and others

The Golden Rule

Adopt a positive, enthusiastic approach to life

Be optimistic, but realistic

Encourage a sense of wonder, curiosity and interest in everything around you

When you do something Throw yourself into the task

[2] If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

If you want real freedom you must submit to the authority of discipline

Live in the Now, but learn from the past

Trust other people

Maintain Personal Integrity Be honest and truthful

Be Responsible: Never blame others

Be reasonable: Don’t be stubborn Anger rarely helps

Dispel Anger and Forgive others

Hide your virtues Disclose your weaknesses

The world does not owe you a living.

Children learn what they live

The Pot of Gold

This book has been the story of my search for that pot of gold. That search is an inner search of the soul, so my story has dealt not only with the external facts of my life, but with the inner quest for the real treasure, the pot of gold, that lies within.

#	Modern electronic telephone switching systems are based on highly sophisticated digital computers that
	perform functions such as monitoring thousands of telephone lines, determining which lines require
	service, storing the digits of each telephone number as it is being dialed, setting up the required
	connections, sending electrical signals to ring the receiver's phone, monitoring the call during its
	progress, and disconnecting the phone when the call is completed. These systems also are used to time
	and bill calls and to transmit billing information and other data relative to the business operations of the
	phone company.
#	Communications satellites have become essential for communicating telephone or video signals across
	great distances. Such communications would not be possible without the automated guidance systems that
	place and retain the satellites in predetermined orbits.
#	Automatic mail-sorting machines have been developed for use in many post offices throughout the world
	to read codes on envelopes and sort the envelopes according to destination.
#	Automation has been applied in various ways in the transportation industries. Applications include airline
	reservation systems, automatic pilots in aircraft and locomotives, and urban mass-transit systems. The
	airlines use computerized reservation systems to continuously monitor the status of all flights. With these
	systems, ticket agents at widely dispersed locations can obtain information about the availability of seats
	on any flight in a matter of seconds. The reservation systems compare requests for space with the status
	of each flight, grant space when available, and automatically update the reservation					status	files.
	Passengers can even receive their seat assignments well in advance of flight departures.
#	Banking and financial institutions have embraced automation in their operations--principally through
	computer technology--to facilitate		the	processing of large volumes of documents and financial
	transactions. The sorting of cheques is done by optical character-recognition systems utilising the special
	alphanumeric characters at the bottom of cheques. Bank balances are computed and recorded using
	computer systems installed by virtually all financial institutions. Major banks have established electronic
	banking systems, including automatic teller machines. Located in places convenient for their customers,
	these automatic tellers permit users to complete basic transactions without requiring the assistance of
	bank personnel.
#	Credit	card transactions have also become			highly automated. Restaurants, retailers, and other
	organisations are using systems that automatically check the validity of a credit card and the credit
	standing of the cardholder in a matter of seconds as the customer waits for the transaction to be finalised.
	Some credit card transactions trigger immediate transfer of funds equal to the amount of the sale from
	the cardholder's account into the merchant's account.
#	Retail trade has seen a number of changes in its operations as a result of automation. Selling merchandise

#	Recognise	that	it	is	very		easy	to	be	prejudiced,		even
unconsciously:			Examine			yourself		and	overcome		prejudice
wherever you find it

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REAL FREEDOM NEEDS DISCIPLINE	DON’T LOOK BACK WITH REGRET	LIVE IN THE NOW
Don’t look back
with Regret