“Mr. Pfister, our gracious host, Associated Parents and Teachers of Reedville and those of you serving on the school board:
“My wife Katherine and I thank you for your kind hospitality throughout the day.
“This evening I was to talk on the world of tomorrow. But after having spent a day in your midst I have discovered, my friends, that for all practical purposes that world is yours today.
“Or what more do you really want, do you really need? And if you had it, what would you do with it? Is it more satellites whirling around you overhead that you want, more buttons to push to rob your hands and your heads of what little skill is still required of them in our day, more silken cushions to lie on while your three score and ten years slip meaninglessly through your idle fingers? Do you really want to be spared life’s trials, when it is in struggling with these very trials that all the great men and women of our past have been forged from the soul breathed into us by our Creator and from the raw materials of our human clay?
“I realize that the skit we have just witnessed was a clever spoof. Or at least so it seemed to me. I hope to God it was! Because I saw in it also something dark and disturbing. I saw in it a depiction of the troubling mind-set we encountered today in unchallenged control of far too many of the young people we met. I will describe this mind-set now as a tantalizing mirage that has so overpowered them that they fail entirely to see the two obstacles over which all who chase this mirage will inevitably stumble and fall.
“The mirage itself is nothing more or less than the illusion that as science solves man’s problems one by one, it draws us ever closer to a state of bliss, a utopia, a kind of ersatz heaven on earth. The reasoning behind this illusion runs something like this: Problems cause anxiety and anxiety is the enemy of bliss. Therefore, eliminating problems guarantees a state of virtually continuous bliss.
“But who in their right mind would ascribe to science the power to eliminate all problems? We all face sickness, aging and death, with or without science. Anyone can experience the devastating and irreversible consequences of a tragic accident that can come out of nowhere, with or without science. Science cannot prevent the terrible curse of an upbringing that creates narcissists of our children who become adults that never grow up and are never really able to see beyond themselves, which, as we all know, is the very definition of hell. Do you really believe that these huge problems whose solution is always spiritual, and before which science stands helpless, will simply go away if we subject ourselves to a continuous lifelong barrage of entertainment as depicted in the skit?
“So expecting science to solve all our problems is truly a mirage, a substanceless chimera that must always remain out of reach. And here we have also touched on the two obstacles I drew to our attention a few moments ago.
“To understand the first obstacle, we must understand the radical difference between working to eliminate evil, which is our divine vocation, and working to eliminate problems, which, as we have just seen, is impossible.”
Here he paused and bowed his head.
Then he repeated very slowly:
“We must understand the radical difference between being rid of evil and being rid of problems. They are emphatically not the same thing. Judging from our experience in your midst today, we have a long way to go to get this straight, and there is no time to lose. Most of our youth have got it all wrong. Most of our youth are hypnotized by the mirage I have just described to you which will kill them if they don’t get free of it.
“There is a note of irony here. What is it that motivates a scientist to tackle a difficult issue? It is the satisfaction you experience when you work hard and rise to the challenge of confronting and solving a particular problem. This makes your life meaningful, even exciting. Now every human being experiences a similar need to be motivated at some level to confront and solve problems if his life is to have any meaning at all. So what has the scientist actually achieved if he has resolved some of the very problems you need in your life for your own well-being, and left you with little or nothing left to challenge you? Without realizing what he is doing to you, he is depriving you of enjoying the very thing that he enjoys so much. Now, in science, the challenges of problem-solving are limitless, so there is no chance that a scientist will ever run out of problems to enjoy solving. But he could very well be depriving you, in the course of your everyday life, of having to tackle the problems that have inspired and challenged our forebears and made them strong and generous and good in years gone by. When science does that, it is not eliminating evil from the face of the earth. It is multiplying it. And the evidence of this has been all around us here today. My friends, happiness is not found in the momentary thrill of getting something we think we want, still less in giving something that does others more harm than good. Happiness is found in the lasting satisfaction of giving something that reduces evil in someone’s life and meets someone’s real need. If science cannot distinguish between eliminating problems and eliminating evil, it is no longer serving God’s purposes but the enemy’s.
“This is important because it is so easy to bury this question until it is too late. The types of problems that challenge such scientists as nuclear physicists, medical researchers, geneticists and biologists are highly specialized. As a result, you can have only a tiny percentage of the human race enjoying the privilege of tackling such problems, whereas the consequences of their work can at times have a revolutionary effect on the entire human race, often in areas totally unforeseen by the researchers themselves. All the amenities I mentioned in my talk this morning, plus some of those that we saw in the skit, and many more besides, are in one way or another the outcome of their work, and all of them have a potential for great good if they become our servants in the higher cause of eliminating true evil, but also a potential for producing great evil if they become our masters and enslave us to themselves for their own sake. We delude ourselves if we think that the average person, if he is no longer required to work hard to meet basic needs, will automatically blossom forth and replace that hard work with such ennobling pursuits as reading, studying, praying, meditating, caring for his neighbor in need, engaging in public service, or contributing positively to our cultural heritage. Too many of our own children are the proof of it. Rare is the young adult in our midst today whose mind and spirit are not at this very moment drowning under a tidal wave of perpetual entertainments and whose only goal in life is to keep it that way.
“But the scientist is not wholly on the wrong track. Mark this. In the life of every man, woman, and child there is a definite point that distinguishes the excessive problems that burden us from the manageable problems that challenge us and give us a reason to get up in the morning. It is the point that separates our oppressive problems (such as totally lacking the means to feed your starving family) from our stimulating problems (such as raising enough food for our family on our plot of fertile land). The greatest service, perhaps the only service, science can render mankind is to decrease the incidence of oppressive problems while increasing the incidence of stimulating problems. The moment science starts attacking our stimulating problems, it is robbing us of one of the ingredients that have been essential to a meaningful human life ever since God turned the Garden of Eden over to Adam and commissioned him to ‘till and keep it.’ If this happens, we will have destroyed our own future as surely as any hydrogen bomb could. How? By producing a generation of vegetating sluggards unable or unwilling to use their freed-up time and freed-up energy in productive and healthy ways for the good of others and to ‘till and keep the Garden.’ Imagine the capacity for mischief-making and worse represented by such a collection of raw directionless energies turned loose on society. With no moral sense other than the incessant craving for personal pleasure, I can see us now on the verge of an ‘anything-goes’ society in which the good and the beautiful become the enemy because they stand in the way of the ‘rights’ claimed by a culture in which raw narcissism has become the new norm. Is this the future we want? Is this what we are asking of science? If not, then we must address head on the fact that this is beyond a shadow of a doubt the society of tomorrow which we are producing right here today.
“This leads me to assert here and now—in acknowledgement of the great company of men and women who have risen through the heat of tribulation and been refined in the furnace even of oppressive problems, and in confessed fear of the hoards of flabby directionless energies which our extreme surfeit is producing this very day—that no science at all is much to be preferred to science improvidently and indiscriminately squandered on all sides with no regard to its devastating effect on people. Is our entire civilization doomed to degenerate into a mob of effete eighteenth-century French noblemen? Can you imagine what a whole society of sinecures would look like, or how it would survive?
“I see clearly, therefore—and I trust that you do too—that there is a point up to which the gifts of science can be a blessing and beyond which they are an incalculable curse. For who can attach a price tag to the unique properties of the human soul, forged through eons of meeting and overcoming the challenges which life on earth has placed in its path? Who will dare to assess the extent of our loss if these properties should wither and die because science has rendered them useless? This very day Katherine and I have seen with our own eyes the rusting away of human resourcefulness, and with it we have heard the death rattle of human inventiveness. On top of that, we have observed that the most elemental human expressions of generosity and mercy are being trivialized, if not entirely lost, by our next generation of leaders, driven as they are by their insatiable demands for stuff, stuff, and more stuff, for fun, fun, and more fun. And—I must be frank—this loss terrifies me….”
His voice broke. The audience was dead silent.
“You see, eradicating all evil is indeed man’s greatest problem, but eradicating all problems is turning out to be one of his greatest evils. Left with no basic needs to be met by their own constructive efforts and energies, what will people do with those energies? Will they turn to crime, to cheap thrills at the expense of others, to unimaginable behavioral perversions to relieve the tedium of their life, to aphrodisiacs of all kinds to fill the emptiness of a life without love, to attachment to fanatical ideologies to vent their frustration, to pure sloth as the summum bonum of the nouveaux riches? I do not want to believe that this generation is becoming a monstrosity created in large measure by a few men and women of science who ‘know not what they do’!
“Yet, this outcome is virtually inevitable unless we all understand what is at stake here and take decisive action to ensure that we constantly aim only at overcoming man’s oppressive problems without robbing him of his stimulating problems. If we can’t achieve this, we face an unenviable future in which the immense power for good or evil created by today’s highly motivated scientists is left by default in the hands of the unmotivated—of our youth—who seem to have lost all capacity to distinguish good from evil. Have we created a monster we can’t control and turned it over to those who are even less able to control it than we are? This is the grim prospect we face in the near future.
“This then is the first obstacle we stumble over in chasing the mirage: life without trials is not bliss. It turns out to be the greatest of trials.
“The second obstacle preventing us from reaching the mirage which has spellbound our youth, and some of us as well, is that chasing the mirage excludes by definition all concern for the well-being of anyone whose well-being does not directly affect ours. Seeking a worry-free life automatically excludes worrying about others. As logical as this may be, it is also extremely perilous. Creating a large island of unspeakable luxury in the heart of a much larger world of unspeakable poverty, and believing that it is possible to protect the former while ignoring the latter, is a formula for disaster. How?
“Here we are, perhaps five hundred of us congregated in this one auditorium. For most of us, science has long ago alleviated most of our oppressive problems, the ones that are not spiritual in essence, but it has also deprived us of many of the stimulating problems we actually require to stay healthy in mind, body and spirit. The results are obvious—a great increase in the nervous tension of a society in which far too many people know of nothing they really must do. It’s not that there are no stimulating problems left in the world to motivate us: God knows there are! Herein lies the baffling paradox. While we are chasing one mirage after another to relieve our boredom with a life that lacks stimulating problems, two out three persons in the world are struggling under the burden of their oppressive problems, untouched by the science that once fed us, then satisfied us, and now is overstuffing us and killing us. Our virulent superfluity which we are tempted to hang onto for dear life is the answer to their desperate necessity! What is killing us by degrees could be saving them!
“Thank you, my friends. Until today, I myself refused to see this clearly enough. I must have thought that any peaceful use to which developments in science are put is automatically a good use. How little I understood its potential to corrode the human soul…. It must have been,” he said as if to himself, “that I was too insulated in my own satisfying little world to notice the effect our achievements were having on real people. I thought people would be inspired by them to help others. But just look at what we are facing instead. I did not know Man. And I think I may also have greatly underrated the hold which the evil one has on our race.
“Now I see that if the great strides in science are to count for good, they must be diverted not only from the suicidal armaments race (and there seems to be little prospect for this), but even more from the suicidal demands of the gluttony that rots the human soul from within (and there seems to be even less prospect for this).
“Is there any way forward?
“There is but it requires a conversion, a conversion we may or may not be capable of making as a nation. We must commit ourselves to work, to work hard and single-mindedly, to bring relief, immediate as well as permanent, to our brothers and sisters worldwide who lack adequate food, medical care, gainful employment, personal shelter, and security. We whom gluttony imperils must share generously with those whom starvation threatens if there is to be healing, both for us in our need and for them in theirs. The glutton who refuses to be converted is consigning himself, not just the neglected poor, to a life of prolonged misery. The misery of the poor is largely physical and easy to relieve with a little effort, whereas the misery of the wealthy, of many of us, is spiritual and impossible to relieve despite recourse to alcohol, drugs, unfettered gluttony, pleasure-seeking, easy sex, a life of luxury, psychiatric care, and on and on and on. Without a deep conversion, our misery will go with us all the way to the grave.
“The indolent wealthy unusually don’t even notice the poor, but you can be certain that most of the poor are well aware of the wealthy. I know next to nothing about the world of international business, but I do know that it is easy for the wealthy to toss a few crumbs at the poor and make off with huge profits. I do know that international businessmen who are truly concerned about working conditions, worker safety, fair wages, reasonable hours, and product quality control in the foreign countries where they do business are few and far between. Most businessmen pay attention only to the bottom line, the ease with which they and their stockholders can make bigger profits where workers are so helpless that they are forced to take what’s given them, even if it is shamefully less than they need and deserve. We have a friend who has bucked the tide. It has not been easy, but he can point to three notable successes in India, Ethiopia, and Malawi, along with several failures elsewhere. Could we survive the tide of ill-will aimed at us from all sides if the rest of the world were to see us only as exploiters lacking a conscience, not as partners in eradicating the evils of destitution? We need to remember Our Lord’s reminder that greed always turns back on the miser, ravaging him first from within and then from without.
“Thus it should be plain to all here this evening that our only hope lies in cultivating in ourselves and in our youth a deep commitment to what I will call having a ‘toiling plenty,’ an attitude toward our wealth in which we retain only what we actually need, and we find effective ways, perhaps through our churches and other well-placed organizations, of using the rest of our resources to lift unbearable burdens from the shoulders of our fellowmen wherever they may be found. For if mankind, that is, if you and I, with our strong Judeo-Christian heritage, are not moved by the freedom which the bounty of science has given us to a truly effective charity and a truly loving regard for the bitter needs of so much of the rest of the world, no nation on earth will ever be so moved, and our doom is sealed. If you and I are not so moved,”—his voice faltered—”you force me, you force me to conclude that our achievements in science have been a colossal disaster for the human soul, both yours and mine. If these achievements serve only to inspire in us a greed that knows no bounds even when we are already satiated beyond sensitivity, if these achievements cannot evoke in you and me a love for the needy and a passion to use our plenty to address their poverty, then you could not make me give our glorious ‘achievements’ away to the poor for fear that surfeit might do to them and their societies what it has done to us and ours. Better by far for the human soul to be faced with grinding poverty than with runaway prosperity. The soul can survive poverty but, in the words of Our Lord Himself, few souls can survive the ravages of wealth.”
He paused, stunned by his own words.
Then he gathered his thoughts together and concluded his address with painful slowness and intense passion.
“Now go home, all of you. Make today your tomorrow. Figure out tangible ways to share your abundance with our brothers and sisters where the need is greatest. Be the beginning of the conversion of our nation from a community of grabbers to a community of givers, remembering always that if we fail in this, far from eradicating evil through the advancements of science, we will be entrenching it. We can’t let this happen!
“God help us.”
Dr. Pearson nodded his head. He was done. A pervasive hush descended on the auditorium. Then someone from the balcony began to clap, detonating an explosion of long swelling applause.
Kay was standing in the wing waiting for him as he left the stage. She threw her arms around him.
“O Steve,” she whispered, brushing back a tear, “you were wonderful.”