History makes it clear that no matter how much new knowledge is achieved by the human mind, that new knowledge will always be balanced by new problems created by selfishness, lust and folly.  The campaign now being waged by aggressive forces, largely in the industrialized nations, to redefine the family, and to eliminate the moral codes and civilized restraints which protect the natural family may well represent a new extreme in the short-sightedness and stupidity of presumably educated and intelligent people.  Should their campaign be successful, it will surely be a catastrophe for civilization.

This Congress provides the opportunity to create an international counterforce to block their momentum and begin to undo the damage they have already inflicted.  Our Mexican friends deserve the warmest congratulations for initiating and masterminding this impressive assembly, and they deserve praise, also, for scheduling this session about the think tank.  A think tank is an essential resource in serving the purposes of this Congress.

Over the years I have been involved with a number of think tanks in Europe as well as The United States.  From that experience, it seemed to me that it might be most helpful for me to offer suggestions about three aspects of the program of a think tank.  If you are interested in auxiliary features such as money-raising, publications, promotion and recruiting members, I would be glad to respond to questions later.

In the United States there are now hundreds of think tanks.  Most of them are engaged in matters of public policy.  That is, they work to persuade government -- whether national government or regional or local government – to persuade government, to accept their advice about economics or foreign policy or the environment or whatever area of study is their particular concern.  The Howard Center and a relatively small group of other think tanks are working, not with government, but in the cultural arena.  Our work focuses on human behavior and the attitudes, traditions, ideals, and values which cause people to behave as they do.  These cultural think tanks are also concerned with the schools, the laws, the family, the churches, the news media and all the other social institutions through which people conduct the common activities of their lives.

To introduce my first recommendation, I will take you back to an incident that took place when I was President of Rockford College.  I had just finished a speech about education and the next speaker walked up on the stage to the lectern.  He was Buckminster Fuller, famous for his brilliant work in several professional fields, sort of an all-purpose genius.  He was evidently troubled about something.  He was silent for a minute or two, and then he said, “Before I give my talk, I want to say something to that College President who just finished, pointing at me in the audience.  “You people in the colleges and universities are going to ruin this nation.  What you do is identify all the bright students as they come through and make them all experts in something.  That isn’t all bad, but the trouble is that some of the rest of the students, the ones with less brain power; they are the ones who have to become the generalists who are needed to serve as college presidents.”  When the audience stopped laughing, he continued, “And the president of the United States.”

In that momentary interruption of the scheduled program, Mr. Fuller made a brief statement, and then turned it into a joke, but in that short interlude he phrased a truth of the greatest importance, a truth which so far as I know, no other public figure had ever recognized, or enunciated.

Let me try to explain its significance.  In the last fifty years, there have been revolutionary advances in medicine and transportation, in communications, genetic engineering and micro-machinery, in the production and processing of food, and in the whole universe of science technology and machines.  My grandparents were certain that travel to the moon was eternally impossible and they would have regarded all these other accomplishments I have just mentioned as equally beyond the limits of reality.  This has truly been an era of the rapid fulfillment of impossible dreams, all across the universe of science.

However, during this period when things prospered, human beings did not.  In the same half century, many of the industrialized nations have suffered a serious decline in the emotional stability of their peoples.  Alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide and neurosis have afflicted a large and growing segment of the population.  The demand for psychological counseling and psychiatric treatment keeps multiplying.  Not only are individuals much less able to live at peace with themselves, but they are increasingly hostile toward other people.  There has been an appalling growth in theft, robbery, embezzlement, murder, rape, wife abuse, child abuse, divorce, vandalism, blackmail, and innumerable other actions that harm other people.  The savage, selfish instincts are breaking free of the civilized restraints which centuries of experience and common sense have determined were essential to the civil order.

The cause of this modern duality of a Golden Age of Technology and a Twilight of Human Wisdom was tersely stated by Buckminster Fuller.  The training for the rapidly expanding scientific and technological professions requires such an extensive mastery of specialized material, that it leaves little time in the student’s schedule to encounter the wisdom supplied by history, philosophy, literature, drama and religion.  It is these and other branches of the humanities which familiarize the student with human frailties and human grandeur, with the spiritual and psychological needs of the individual, with the central role of the family in nurturing and stabilizing the lives of young people, with the rise and fall of governments, and the whole network of other social institutions of community life.  The new generation of experts, with a narrow and intense focus of interests, is increasingly unaware of, or simply not interested in, the obligations and responsibilities and rewards of being a wholesome and contributing member of society.

It is only the generalists, armed with the wisdom of the ages that have the insight and judgment to guide a confused world through the perils of modernity.  You will understand, then, the importance I attach to finding highly competent generalists to serve in the leadership positions on your pro-family think tank.  For the staff of your think tank, employ generalists.

My second recommendation is that you give primary and constant attention to principles.  You must identify, understand, and apply the principles that pertain to any subject addressed in the program of your think tank. A principle is a constant, unvarying fact about cause and effect.  It cannot be changed.  A principle just exists through eternity.  We all readily understand that you cannot build an airplane that will fly unless you understand the principles of aerodynamics and apply those principles in the design of your plane.  Unfortunately, many people do not realize that there are principles which govern the effectiveness of the systems and institutions of a society just as rigidly and inevitably as principles of physics govern the development of technology.

In order to fix this fact in your memory, I want to report to you a dismaying story about how the colleges and universities in the United States somehow lost sight of the most fundamental principle in their profession and eventually not only excluded it, but turned it inside out, prohibiting the very purpose that had defined the meaning of education down through the ages.  I should at this point note that there is a small group of our institutions of higher education that are still on the right track, but my analysis now reports on the great majority of colleges and universities, including the most famous and influential ones.  I should also state that my reason for providing such detail is that it will help you understand how the family came to be perceived in the United States as an obstacle to the good life, as well as why the natural family is now a primary target for elimination by much of the intellectual and opinion-making forces in the United States.

Until the middle of the twentieth century it was universally recognized that the fundamental purpose of the educational process is to train each new generation how to live responsibly and productively in their own society.  This was just as true of tribal nations as industrial ones.  The young were taught the ideals of the society, why these ideals were important, and why they must be sustained and protected.  They were taught the obligations they must fulfill and the taboos they must observe in support of those ideals.  They learned about the heroes who sacrificed greatly for those ideals and were celebrated for their deeds, and the traitors who defied and compromised those ideals and were punished and scorned for their betrayal.  Education’s first and foremost task is to socialize and acculturate the young for life in their own society.  This process took place as a matter of course, learning the standards of behavior very much in the same manner that the young learned to speak their native language.  Schooling covered many other subjects, too, but the core of the program was acculturation.

In the United States, education performed this process quite effectively up until World War II.  After The War certain ideas and circumstances that were incompatible with the traditional culture increasingly eroded the university’s commitment to the ancient truths and ideals.  The rapid spread of Marxist doctrine among the professors reduced the faculty’s willingness to advocate the traditional American culture which was essentially Christian in its outlook.  The huge expansion of programs in science and technology, paid for by a great outpouring of funds from the Federal Government, rapidly produced a very large number of technological experts on the faculty, who often were unsympathetic to their colleagues in the humanities department and outvoted them on matters of university policy.

In December of 1964, an aggressive band of students, angry about the Vietnam War, and stirred up by Marxist radicals, erupted in a protest at The University of California at Berkeley.  This was the first chapter of turmoil that spread to campuses across the nation, which over a period of five years involved sit-ins, shouting down speakers, burning some buildings, bombing one science laboratory, in which a professor was killed, destroying library card catalogs, spray-painting buildings, and an incident at Cornell University where student revolutionaries armed with guns told the University President to sit on the floor until he was invited to speak.  It was a nightmare chapter in American history.

Returning to the University of California in 1964 we find that that campus and all of the other coeducational colleges and universities of the country had what were called parietal rules.  These rules prohibited men students from being in the women’s dormitories at night after a specified time and conversely barred women from being in the men’s dormitories beyond the same hour.  Here was the perfect illustration of the entire national academic community, by policy, supporting that fundamental educational principle of transmitting to the students the ideals of their society.  Other than the church, the family had always been the centerpiece of American life, and was cherished and honored and respected by the people.  To protect the family, the parietal rules had been established so that all of the nation’s students would understand the great importance of the code of sexual morality that sustains both marriage and the family.

At Berkeley, the radical student leaders, coached by their Marxist professors, said to the University President, “We are old enough to be drafted into the army and get killed in Vietnam, surely we are old enough to make decisions about how we lead our lives.  The university has no right to tell us what to do except in matters relating to our studies.  The Chancellor of the University and his associates decided that the radical students’ request should be granted and the parietal rules were abolished.  No generalist in his right mind would have made that judgment.  Before long, most of the other colleges and universities also eliminated their parietal rules.

This widespread cancellation of institutional support for standards of sexual morality was a major landmark, not only in fundamentally changing the purposes of American education, but also in transforming a society that once had a clear sense of right and wrong into one that generally asserts that each person should judge for himself what is right and what is wrong.  In the next few years, many other traditional standards which had sustained campus communities characterized by civility, decency and courtesy, as well as morality were casualties of the new non-judgmentalism.  Bawdy, vulgar language became a commonplace as did slovenly dress and grooming.  Plays and movies shown on campus for the first time presented nudity and open sexual activity.  Professors and distinguished campus guests no longer were treated with respect by the students, but were subject to rudeness and indignities, previously unknown.  Right and wrong had become a matter of personal choice.

In 1969, four years after the Berkeley uprising, President Nixon appointed a national Task Force on Priorities in Higher Education to evaluate the turmoil on the campuses and make recommendations to The President and The United States Congress about what the Government could do to help the universities calm things down and resume their proper activities.  That Task Force was chaired by The President of New York University.  Other distinguished members included the Presidents of the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the President of several state universities.  I was a member representing the smaller colleges.  In our second year, we met in New York City to take action on our final report which had been drafted by the staff to reflect the proceedings of the meetings we had held.  The three recommendations in the draft report were that the government should provide more funds, and do more to support research and give special help to black colleges.  After we had had time to read the draft report, our chairman asked if it was satisfactory.  The other members were pleased with the text.

I said that it seemed to me the report failed to address any of the causes of campus turmoil for which we were asked to propose remedies in which government could be helpful.  I noted that all our campuses had a serious problem with the usage of illegal drugs, that students were involved in damage to property and other illegal acts and the university officers usually did not take punitive action or seek help from the police, that our nation was at war in Vietnam which was a source of great distress to our students who needed understanding and reassurance from the government about the war.  The universities couldn’t resolve these problems without help.  The other committee members were surprised by my statement.  After a pause, one of the most distinguished members said, “But John, all these matters involve value judgments.  We can’t take institutional action on anything involving value judgments.”  The other members agreed with him.  They were a representative group of the most highly regarded, influential university presidents.  Thirty-four years ago non-judmentalism was the dominant educational philosophy.

Here we see the total inversion of the educational principle.  The educational principle acknowledges the requirement that a society must transmit its heritage of ideals and wisdom to succeeding generations, but the educational philosophy now dominant prohibits that transmission.  It also prohibits any standards of right and wrong and that is why it finds it intolerable that homosexuals do not have all the same rights and privileges as married people.  The mind of the narrowly focused technological experts is incapable of understanding and appreciating that the natural family is an institution of such great importance to any society that it must take precedence over other claims.  The educational principle has been cancelled and the educational system is effectively spreading moral chaos.

Before turning to my third recommendation, let me highlight one of the most critically important principles pertaining to the family.  The human sexual impulse is so powerful that societies have found it necessary to establish standards of sexual behavior to protect the family.  And because human nature is strongly inclined to act contrary to those standards, the societies have established taboos against behavior that does not conform to those standards.  The parietal rules at all the nation’s colleges and universities about which I spoke reflected the common judgment of the American people approving the natural family and disapproving contra-family sexual activity.  The principle, here, is that the family and sexual liberation cannot co-exist.  The more there is of the one, the less there will be of the other.  The family and sexual liberation are mutually exclusive.  This principle needs to have a prominent place in any program in support of the family.

The third recommendation is to search out success stories which prove that the changes advocated by your think tank are possible and will deliver beneficial results.  It is especially important in the cultural arena that a think tank not develop a reputation as a chronic complainer, dwelling only on all the bad things the opposition is doing.  The think tank’s influence will be far greater if it is saying, “Here is a good thing that should be accomplished, this is why it is important.  Here is one way to do it, and look at the wonderful results.”

As you know, the family members are all influenced for better or worse by the environment in which their home is located.  Here is a success story about the complete renovation of a housing development which had deteriorated to a desperate condition. “We are not a housing project!  We are a neighborhood!”  This was the declaration of Bertha Gilkey on an unforgettable television show in 1986.  Bertha Gilkey is an impressive African-American who led a successful battle against crime, drugs, vandalism, disrepair, filth and rats, transforming the Cochran Housing development in St. Louis from a badly rundown high-rise slum into a neatly-kept, safe and lawful, up-beat residential dwelling.  The Cochran public-housing facility, like many others in America’s inner-cities was built by the Federal government to provide low-rent housing for those citizens who have very little money.  Unfortunately, the planners of these projects were not generalists and were unable to foresee that such buildings owned by a distant government without proper management quickly degenerated into filthy, crime-infested slums.  Since the tenants had no pride of ownership and there were no rules and no resident officers responsible for order and cleanliness, the criminal and disorderly tenants quickly made these residences virtually uninhabitable. Those buildings turned into warehouses for underprivileged units of population.

By contrast, a neighborhood refers both to dwelling places and the people who live in them.  Neighborhood implies a sense of unity and a sense of belonging, a sense of interdependence and continuity, of lasting concern for the common good.  A neighborhood stirs pride in the hearts of the inhabitants.  It is the concept of home on a larger scale.

What happened in St. Louis?  How did Bertha Gilkey and her partners transform a slum into a neighborhood?  First, they obtained authorization from the government for the residents to manage the buildings.  And then they did a remarkable thing.  They used their own common sense to draw up a set of rules to govern the behavior of the people living there.  The new rules required that children be properly supervised.  Illegal drugs were forbidden.  All apartments had to be kept in good repair, and all the tenants were required to take turns cleaning the hallways.  Security guards were hired to police the premises.

The rules are enforced by elected officers.  They have the authority to evict a tenant who does not abide by the rules, or whose children do not.  Applicants for an apartment are carefully screened by a committee as to whether they measure up to the established standards of upright and neighborly conduct.

When Bertha Gilkey explained all this on television, the astonished host of the show asked how they could evict someone from public housing who used illegal drugs.  She declared, “Public housing was not built for criminals and vandals and people who do drugs!”  And she is right, of course.  After the new rules took effect, there was a long waiting list of people who wanted to live in the Cochran buildings.  And the prices of homes in that neighborhood increased as it became known as a good place to live.

Bertha Gilkey was a very talented generalist.  She didn’t need university training, she simply used her common sense to bring order out of chaos.  The standards of right and wrong and the traditions of civic order derived from the nation’s Christian heritage, which had been taught by the schools and churches and families, had worked well in the past and she proved they can work well again when they are reapplied.

I have just mentioned that the standards of right and wrong which served the civil order so well were standards derived from religion.  It is my firm belief that the new circumstances which endanger the institution of the family worldwide are circumstances in which ancient religious ideals have been challenged and changed or rejected by self-centered and self-serving judgments of modern man.

I will conclude with two quotations and a summary comment.  The first quotation is the concluding paragraph from an essay entitled “Religion Is The Basis of Society” by William Ellery Channing.  He was a renowned theologian and author writing in the early nineteenth century.

Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man.  Appetite, knowing no restraint, and suffering, having no solace of hope, would trample in scorn on the restraints of human laws.  Virtue, duty, principle, would be mocked and spurned as unmeaning sounds.  A sordid self-interest would supplant every feeling; and man would become in fact, what theory in atheism declares him to be – a companion for brutes.

The second quotation is from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s response in 1983 when he received The Templeton Prize.  He entitled that speech, “Men Have Forgotten God.”

…(E)vil, like a whirlwind triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth…The entire twentieth century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction...

It was Dostoevsky who drew from the French Revolution and its seething hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.”  That is absolutely true.  But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism.  Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, hatred of God is the principal driving force.

Solzhenitsyn concludes that speech by asserting:

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success, but in the quest for spiritual growth.

I would note, finally, that the task this Congress has set for itself of defending, preserving and strengthening the natural family is a daunting one, with the anti-family forces dominating the intellectual and political market place of ideas, but if this Congress and its allies recognize their work as part of their duty to God, they will not falter in performing that duty.