The Time of Our Lives Read Online Free PDF Page B

preaching, never questioning his conclusions or reasoning. Equivalents can be found on the left as well, slavishly loyal to the shibboleths spouted by the liberal faithful. You’ll find very little self-doubt or second thoughts on left-leaning websites such as Daily Kos or MoveOn. Org.
    THE PAST
    More than twenty years ago, a wise American who had served at the highest levels of the academic, public, and corporate world warned against just such a condition in American life.
    He was John Gardner, a PhD graduate of Stanford University; U.S. Marine Corps officer during World War II; president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; secretary of health, education, and welfare in the LBJ administration (he quietly resigned over Vietnam); and board member of the Shell Oil Company, American Airlines, and Time, Inc., among others.
    Gardner founded Common Cause, the citizen-based organization that brought together disparate groups to work on the problems of a changing America. He was also a member of President Reagan’s task force on private sector initiatives.
    Few members of America’s leadership class had the depth and breadth of his experiences, and fewer still commanded the personal and professional respect that Dr. Gardner did. He embodied what the Founding Fathers must have had in mind when they envisioned a republic of engaged citizens.
    As Gardner watched the rise of special interest groups across the political and economic spectrum in the sixties, he had serious concerns. In his seminal book On Leadership , Gardner wrote, “Unfortunately a high proportion of leaders in all segments of our society today … are rewarded for a single-minded pursuit of the interests of their group. They are rewarded for doing battle, not compromising.”
    In a chapter called “Fragmentation of the Common Good,” he asked,
How many times have we seen a major city struggling with devastating problems while every possible solution is blocked by one or another powerful commercial or political or union interest?
We are moving toward a society so intricately organized that the working of the whole system may be halted if one part stops functioning.
    He continued, “A society in which pluralism is not under-girded by some shared values and held together by some measure of public trust simply cannot survive.” That was written more than twenty-five years ago and is truer now than it was then.
    To emphasize his point, Gardner concluded, “ Pluralism that reflects no commitment whatever to the common good is pluralism gone berserk .” The italics were his, to underscore his concern.
    I miss John Gardner as a fellow citizen. I came to know him personally, and I was always impressed by his quiet but forceful commitment to the common good. We have too few of those voices these days.
    THE PROMISE
    Another was the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, Renaissance literature scholar and president of Yale University. I collected his speeches, including the one he made to the incoming Yale freshman class in 1980. He said to these bright and no doubt anxious eighteen-year-olds that he understood their unease. “What is the point of it all?” he guessed they might be wondering. “And will anyone tell me or am I expected to know?”
    Giamatti, a true Renaissance man in his scholarship and wide-ranging interests, then reminded the class of something I trust they carried with them through Yale and beyond. “You are not expected to know,” he said, “but you are expected to wish to know.”
    What better advice for a young man or woman on the cusp of what passes for the real world? Think. Reason. Explore. Question.
    He went on to raise a rhetorical question—“Why does any ideology tend to be authoritarian?”—and then answered it: “These closed systems are attractive because they are simple and they are simple because they are such masterly evasions of contradictory, gray, complex reality. Those who manipulate such systems are