Gardner's Lectures

IT WAS ALTOGETHER fitting and proper that John W. Gardner's Godkin Lectures should be the first to be delivered exclusively on television. Not that the former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare had prepared any deep tricks for exploiting the medium. He sometimes sat down and other times stood up in the rather unconvincing WGBH imitation office-study, delivering the three speeches in an even, almost monotonous voice, with many more verbal fluffs than one would expect from a public man of Gardner's titanic reputation.

But the television presentation was significant not for what it included but for what it omitted. It omitted, for the first time in the history of the lectures, a live Harvard audience, one which cheers (and someimes hisses). It left out also the traditional question and answer period in which the lecturer is forced to defend and make specific the doctrine he has set forward.

There is no reason to doubt the official explanation of the new format--that it was fixed upon to avoid the embarrassment of small crowds and the discomfort of speaking into blinding television lights at Sanders Theater. Gardner, a busy man these days at the Urban Coalition, reportedly wanted a time-saving method of giving the lectures and television provided that too. At the same time, though, one can easily guess what the response of a normal group of Harvard students and Faculty would have been to Gardner's comparison of Marcuse's disciples to the businessmen who supported Hitler or his line that "protest has become a disorderly game for 12-year-olds." There would have been, at the least, a chorus of boos, which the WGBH audience never had a chance to hear.

Gardner's critique of the excesses of radical demonstrators was a telling one. He hit most of the vulnerable points of such protest--their theatricality, their callous manipulations of officials and police, their irresponsibility, and their numbness to the hostile and repressive reaction of the mass of United States society. But why did Gardner decide to abuse the worst of the radicals for the better part of his final speech and cast only an occasional critical sentence at what he called "that complacent lump of self-satisfied Americans who fatten on the yield of this society but never bestir themselves to solve its problems?"

Guerrilla demonstration tactics have been steadily losing their base of support, even among leftishly inclined students, since Columbia and Chicago. So Gardner's indignation at "the politics of derision and provocation," has a certain bandwagon quality, and his long tirade against abusers of dissent was effectively, if not intentionally, demagogic, especially when delivered from the sanctuary of a television studio.

ON THE BAD manners of the protestors Gardner was eloquent; on the substance of their discontent he was considerably less cogent. He was quick to attack the Marcusian concept of a "directed society" as being authoritarian and wishfully elitist. But his own prescription for such fundamental problems as the alienation of the individual was that society be "redesigned." He did not specify by whom, but did several times suggest the need for an ever-growing class of professional "problem-solvers."

Even more confusing were Garder's comments on assumptions about human nature. In his second lecture, he called people "paranoid" who believe that "evil people with evil purposes are running things behind the scenes." Leaders, including the much-abused military-industrial complex, are doing about the best they can within an inherently defective problem-solving system, the first two lectures seemed to say. But in taking some querulous swipes at the new morality and radical lifestyles, Gardner suggested that this is "a world of imperfect people, some of them savage, some foolish, some undisciplined, some rapacious." And in his third lecture he reproached revolutionaries for falling victim "to an old old and naive doctrine--that man is naturally good, decent, humane, just and honorable, but that corrupt and wicked institutions have transformed the noble savage into a civilized monster." The only way to reconcile these two sets of dogma is to assume that Gardner, despite the more-democratic-than-thou air he assumed toward radicals, believes that the mass of mankind is bumbling and even a bit vicious, and that society will collapse unless its machinery is run by highminded and extraordinarily competent men like him.

These confusions were at least partially resolved in the extraordinary view of power in United States society which permeated Gardner's three lectures. Here he was explicit: we should stop abusing political leaders and the military-industrial complex and admit that "perhaps no one is in charge." And in the first lecture he commented ominously, "Only those who know the Federal Government very well indeed know how disinclined it is to think in the largest terms about the nation's future." Right or wrong, the theory is an ingenious one, and like much of Gardner's writing it rings with a convincing air of sophistication.

But the pungency of such frequent bits of straight talking is vitiated by the circularity of Gardner's thinking. The lectures diagnosed a crisis in morale running all through Unites States society, but offered only rhetorical affirmations as a cure--"we can build a society to man's measure--if we have the will." Gardner acknowledged that "there are things gravely wrong with our society as a problem-solving mechanism," but, except for a slight shift from federal to local government, seemed always to be urging only more and better of the same. The United States "urgently needs leaders to symbolize its values, to clarify choices, to help sift priorities, and most of all perhaps to keep hope alive," Gardner said. That may be, but the effect of Gardner's performance was to make his style of liberalism look a flaccid and intellectually featureless position and to drive the undecided into a re-examination of the alternatives he disparages.