ustxtxb_obs_1988_11_25_50_00017-00000_000.pdf

A Public Service Message from the American Income Life Insurance Co.Waco, TexasBernard Rapoport, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer to be saved but he refuses to change. I am sorry but there is no salvation of any sort for man or society without change. 4.The tools of salvation are love and rationality. Just love is not enough. Love in the sense of good intentions perhaps, indeed, love in any sense at all is not enough. One must also be wise. One must be studious, thoughtful, judicious, self-critical, ready to learn, and all those other similar qualities which come so hard to the people who compose the “society of the successful.” It is sobering to reflect that ethical conduct does not follow from church membership; nor does it follow from evangelical conversion certainly it does not follow without all of those rare qualities of rationality I have listed. 5.The evidence, unhappily, is that there is not enough love and rationality to come even close to solving any of these problems without the force of government. We, it seems, can hope for little more than enough love and rationality to mobilize the government to do good things. Obviously, if we had enough love and rationality, we would not need government at all; unfortunately, government is the inescapable badge of lost innocence of innocence definitively lost long ago in the Garden of Eden. SOLUTIONS The solutions I suggest are offered in exactly the order of the problems they are designed to treat: 1.The only way, perhaps, to solve the problem posed by the “cancerous growth of population” is to treat the world’s drinking water with the appropriate chemicals. There is not enough love and rationality to do the job on a voluntary basis. Our action must be drastic because current anarchy in this, as in the other problem areas, is fatal in a much shorter run than most of us think is the case. 2.The ecological crisis can be solved only by cutting down on consumption, this applies chiefly to the Western affluent societies. I am confident that this is the case simply because the supply of economically available raw materials is finite. 3.The problem posed by the endless threat of war can be solved only by the establishment of a world government with a monopoly of military power. Again, love and rationality are in fatally short supply. Civilized life cannot survive much more of our traditional anarchy. 4.The problems posed by our work in science and technology must be controlled by government regulations which codify the best judgments of the scientifictechnological community. I prefer their best judgment to anarchy and drift; I do not wish to shoot craps for the future. 5.The problem of the alienation of millions of our fellow-citizens from the society of the successful can be solved only by love and intelligence. I am prepared to defend the statement that no studious, thoughtful, selfcritical person, even if he had never heard of any religion whatsoever, would indulge in the kind of narrow, selfcentered behavior which is responsible for our current racial problems. The government, mobilized by love and intelligence, can help a great deal. But individuals and the private organizations such as churches must depend upon their own unfortunately inadequate supply of love and intelligence. CONCLUSION Diagnoses such as I have offered. are plentiful; my list of problems can be found in nearly any issue of any literature newspaper or magazine. The problem is not even with the suggested solutions; the literate, the informed, the thoughtful, the self-critical people are in general agreement on them. The problem to repeat is that we wish to be saved without changing. To deal with this problem, we must have leaders of the loving and rational sort I have described to whom the less loving and the less rational will listen and whom they will follow. Perhaps some of these leaders will come out of this school in the administration of this loving and rational man whom we honor today. If so, then we can all be proud; and we and our children’s children can continue to enjoy our long run of the good life. Ralph L. Lynn is Professor Emeritus of History, Baylor University. THE TEXAS OBSERVER 17