The Pursuit of Excellence; R. Bradford

About the time of Christ, Publil ius· Syrus was lamenting how long it took to bring excellence to ma turi ty ; and Sophocles, some 400 years earlier, fretted because peo ple didn't know the excellence of what they possessed until someMr. Bradford is well known as a writer, speaker, and business organization concultant. He now lives in Ocala, Florida. 344 body took it away from them. Browning, on the other hand, at tributed the growth of excellence to a whim of "the Great Gardener" - a kind of grafted-on gift from heaven, rather than an attainable goal that men might strive for. Of late the pursuit of excellence has tended to be thought of prin cipally as an academic matter, and students have been frequently and somewhat tiresomely exhorted to adopt it as their aim. And that is all well and good, to the degree that it may help set a productive life pattern. But to limit the pur suit of excellence to the classroom is as futile as it is to assume (as is often done) that education itself is exclusively an academic process.

Actually, the ceremony of a gradu ation, the acquisition of a coveted 1975 THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE 345 degree in some discipline of learn ing - these events are but the ini tial milestones along the way to ward the balanced intellectual ful fillment that constitutes an edu cation. A Life-Process The concept of education as a life-process is well expressed iIi an episode related by Jean Renoir in the excellent biography of his father which he published some years ago. After the long struggle that led finally to general recogni tion and acclaim, Pierre Auguste Renoir grew old and became ill. In time he lost the use of his right hand through crippling rheuma toid arthritis, and at 60 he taught himself to paint with his left hand. But by the time he was 70 that hand also was so deformed that he could no longer hold the brushes normally, but had to wedge them between his permanently clenched fingers. Yet he painted on, still ex perimenting, still striving for per fection. And on the day he died, he asked for his palette and a can vas and, sitting propped up in bed, he worked for several hours on what was to be his last bit of painting. And as he finished it, he said to his son, "You know, Jean, I think I am beginning to under stand something about it!"

That was one man's pursuit of excellence, as it applied to the art of painting. Other craftsmen have been equally assiduous .in their special fields: the sculptor who makes and destroys many models in his quest for perfection; the poet who scribbles and discards through many a midnight to achieve the right phrase or a fe licitous rhyme; the naturalist who experiments for twenty years to produce a new rose; the dramatist who writes and rewrites, even after his play has been produced; the research scientist whose 150th laboratory experiment may be only half way along the road to a final discovery that shall benefit man kind. These and their spiritual comrades in many fields are seek ers after excellence. In Search of Freedom But what of us who labor in a realm that is no less vital and should be equally demanding? It is our purpose, we say and believe, to express and defend and interpret the spirit of freedom, which we are convinced is of vast importance to the human family. This is truly a high calling, and should require of its followers the same devotion to excellence that we demand of others in their various fields. But this is not always easy to encom pass, for while freedom is an ap pealing abstraction, it is so related to material things that we are apt to express it in physical terms, and 346 T'HE FREEMAN· June so lose half the battle of ideas at the outset.

Thus if we merely assert that people ought to be free from bur densome taxation, we can be ac cused of poor citizenship - of hav ing an unsportsmanlike desire to shirk our fair share of the cost of government. About such matters we need to be explicit. We are not opposing the idea of taxes as such. They are necessary to defray the costs of government, which in turn is a human necessity. The point is that we object to having the power to tax used whimsicaIIy and arbi trarily, to finance ventures that are outside the proper realm of government, and that may be of no benefit whatever, either to the individual taxpayer, or to society as a whole. The Example of Foreign Aid We can add that we object to being taxed to support an ever expanding bureaucracy that has grown up about agencies that were supposed to be temporary, to meet some emergency, real or fancied, but that tend to be perpetual. One example out of many that might be cited is our experience with what may be lumped under the general head of Foreign Aid. It started in 1946 as the Marshall Plan. Its purpose was to help rehabilitate western Europe, mainly France, Germany, England and Italy, after the ravages of World War Two. A plausible case could be made for this, aside from humanitarian con siderations, on the ground that these countries, with Belgium and the Netherlands, were the econom ic backbone of western Europe, whose continuance as industrial nations was essential to the west ern world - and also because they were very large users of American goods and services. The original idea was to help these nations at a total cost of about $32 billion - a sum that was vast, but support able. Once they were on the way to recovery the Marshall Plan would go out of business. Or so it was assumed.

Erosion of Freedom But what happened? Instead of phasing out, Foreign Aid became a cornerstone of American foreign policy, and is still in business after nearly 30 years and several reor ganizations, including five changes of name. And the cost? I have not checked it for the purpose of this article, because we are not con cerned here with statistics, but with the torrential inertia o~ gov ernmental programs, once they get started. But if you like figures, the latest I have at hand show that this program has cost the Ameri can taxpayer at least $171 billion. This is not written as an argu ment against foreign aid as such.

1975 THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE 347 Clearly there can be cases where a loan or even an outright grant to certain countries may be in our national interest. But one can only look with dismay and unbelief at the list of some 120 countries all over the world to which our coun try has poured out all these bil lions. Why dwell on such matters? Be cause they are part of· the erosion of freedom that accompanies ac cumulating and unamortized debt - a debt, in our case, that is now temporarily pegged at a possible $500 billion, with a deficit for the current fiscal year estimated at around $50 billion! But why worry about so crass and materialistic a thing as mere dollars? One very good reason (and this gets us at once to the relationship between freedom and physical things) is that dollars are what we use to buy food and clothing and pay bills; and when the value, Le., the pur chasing power, of those dollars is eroded or destroyed through debt induced inflation, our freedom to live without threat and fear of bankruptcy has been reduced and may ultimately be destroyed.

And freedom is the essential condition, not only for happiness, but for achievement and progress. Its denial or curtailment is the precursor of social and economic stagnation, and often of personal degradation. Man, of course, has never been wholly free from the inner tyranny of his own nature; 'but granting that, it is true that he has attained to the highest levels of happiness and both ma terial and social. progress in those eras of time when he has enjoyed the largest degree of personal and political freedom. But freedom, unfortunately, is not a constant of the human con dition. It comes-and, alas, it goes. It is gained, usually at pain of sac rifice and struggle - and it is lost, often through sheer carelessness with respect to life's political and economic realities. Nations have grown great and powerful, and they have sickened and died; and the malady which' laid them low has often been the failure of their own people to understand, prize, enjoy and protect that vital, in tangible thing called freedom.

Lack of Vigilance At various times in human his tory men have walked erect and unafraid through streets in which their not-tao-remote descendants sometimes, indeed, their own grandchildren, or even their own children-would cringe and wither under tyrannical laws and condi tions. At times, of course, such conditions of disaster were im posed by foreign conquerors; but often they resulted from intellec tual and moral sloth and the un348 THE FREEMAN June willingness to make the sacrifices and exercise the vigilance that are the price of freedom - or even, in deed, to understand that such a price is demanded. And the loss or curtailment of freedom is not always a disaster of the remote past. In our own times we have seen it happen. Some of the nations that were great only fifty years ago a-re now reduced to near-bankruptcy or vassalage. Others have been brought down until they are only debt-ridden, tottering relics of their former greatness, whose peo ple are burdened with confisca tory taxes and stifled with re pressive laws and bureaucratic regulations. And why? Did they do this voluntarily? Yes, alas - but not intentionally. I mean they vol untarily took certain actions, or permitted them to be taken, in what they thought was for the general good; but they certainly did not intend to bankrupt their country or impoverish themselves in the process.

Unintentional Injuries Nowhere that I know of is there any evidence that a great people chose deliberately to be less great, or that a free people elected to be less free. The measures that have led to their abasement - to debt, inflation and smothering statism have usually been quite cheerfully adopted by the people themselves through action by their elected representatives, all for the greater glory. Nobody that I am aware of in England ever said, in effect, Look, fellow Britons, let us become a second-rate power; or See here now chaps, let us tax ourselves un til we stifle our economy. Nobody in Sweden, I believe, ever sug gested to the enterprising people of that country that they should tax themselves to economic death for alleged social benefits. Instead, the English Fabians and their Swedish counterparts proposed only to improve the condition of life for all the people. Juan Do mingo Peron never, so far as I am aware, threatened or intended to destroy the money and cripple the economy of Argentina; he was just ,going to do something for the "descamisados." Salvador Allende, being a devoted Communist, may have intended to bankrupt Chile; but he never said so. His purpose, he said, was to improve the lot of the common people. And so on and on, through the list of good inten tions that have paved the hell of inflation, bankruptcy and the death of freedom, for much of mankind.

What is it that humankind has striven for, down the long cen turies of its life? Out of the in stinct for self-preservation, plus the promptings of a deathless hope, the slowly emerging phylum of the 1975 THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE 349 human specie_s has been groping ... for perfection! In a strange, blind, sometimes pathetic, but per sistent way it, too, has been en gaged in the pursuit of excellence ...,... the excellence of a better and richer life .. A Magnificent Quest And what a magnificent quest it has been! Of its earlier stages we know little and must rely on the patient digging and informed Gon jectures of the archeologists and other delvers into the past. If we express the lifetime of the human race as a year, then we have de pendable historic record of only a few hours, or maybe minutes, of the long ascent. But both the evi dence of history and the· ded uc tions of paleethnology. offer a rec ord of tenacity, adaptability, cour age, and an ultimate awareness of man's need for carefully formu lated and generally accepted rules for the complicated business of living together on the Planet Earth.

This led inevitably to the con cept of government - an agency thatwould protect members of one tribe from aggression by other, and hostile, tribes. In time it as sumed also the function of internal guardianship - the protection of individuals within the tribe against the acts of unruly and ag gressive fellow tribesmen. Thus the police function - and power developed, a power that was both necessary and dangerous. Many governmental forms, no doubt, came and. went as the centuries drifted by - tribal chieftains, eld ers, committees, councils. In time these devices evolved into kings, assemblies, parliaments, congress es. Government would undergo re finements - and abuses. Men would fight and die to maintain it ... or to overthrow it. Enlightened chief tains ruled benignly; wicked ones enslaved their subjects. Contradicting Drives Through it all, man held to· one basic idea. As was said of prayer in the old hymn, it was his soul's sin cere desire, uttered or unexpressed - namely, to be protected . . . and to be let alone. But this involved a fundamental contradiction which inhered in his nature: he wanted to be let alone, but he didn't want to let others alone! Simple .laws for protection of life and property were well and good, but they were not enough. Men needed - other men, that is - needed a certain amount of guidance. Developing religious beliefs provided such guidance in the moral sense. Every faith generated its table of thou shalts and thou shalt nots, these being ethical concepts arrived at in the various stages of man's devel opment. And in time these rules or 350 THE FREEMAN June precepts, having evolved into ar ticles of faith, found expression in law.

But even these did not satisfy the strong desire of man to mold others to his moral and political will. Obsessed by a passion for re ligious freedom, he did not hesi tate to impose his beliefs .on others, not only by the' weight of ecclesiastical canons, but by the compulsions of law. Determined to be politically free, and willing to fight and die for that principle, he has also been quite willing, with no apparent recognition of his in consistency, to deny that same freedom to others. Anxious to be "let· alone," he has erected state mechanisms that bind others against their will and j udgment and in the' process he has bound himself. Fearing and indeed ab horing debt in his personal affairs, he has time and time again pushed his governments into insolvency, and in doing so has impoverished himself. Much Has Seen Achieved Yet he is not to be condemned too harshly for these inconsisten cies. In the relatively short time that he has lived on this Blue Planet he has achieved greatly.

The matter of mere survival itself is a test that has defeated many another form of life. Gigantic creatures flourished for a time, but died finally through their inability to adapt; and their fossilized bones are their only bequest to the mod ern world. But man has survived. Century by century, he lives long er, and he lives better. He is the thinker and the rememberer. More over, he is the dreamer and the singer of songs. He is the creator of things outside himself .. He has written great books, carved heroic sculptures, painted inspiring pic tures, composed deathless songs, built great commercial and indus trial processes. By courageous trial and bitter error he has lifted a species of life to the pinnacle of organic achievement. He is arrogant in his assump tions of superiority and infallibil ity, and in his incessant efforts to mold and regulate the lives of his peers. In this endeavor, by the ceaseless extension of the State and its powers, he may yet destroy the great structure of freedom that he has dreamed of. But his rationality and self-interest are strong and will probably yet tri umph over his compulsion to guide, direct and rule. His greatest and most· important field of conquest is still . . . himself.

Fjnally, he has dared greatly, most· of all perhaps in imagining that he himself is· cast in the very image of God - an assumption which is probably the ultimate in the pursuit of excellence. t) Jo NATHAN A Majority of UNTIL RECENTLY, I had so much faith in the intelligence and in tegrity of women that the gro·wing noise over "equal rights" (which I have always claimed) failed to disturb me. As time went on, how ever, I found myself doing some thing I thoroughly. disapprove of; putting labels on people. I have kept my labels few and simple: 1) male, 2) female, 3) Man, and 4) Woman. By accident of birth we enter this world as male or female. By our own effort and maturing we become Man or Woman. For as long as I can remember, I have admired great women and men, identifying more with the women, of course. My parents and teachers encouraged me to believe I could become successful at any' thing I attempted, providing I Jo Nathan is a homemaker, of Lakeview, Oregon.