Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

maintained as a matter of right, at first morally felt, then on a social scale,passing over into the rights sphere.) If they put all surplus capital into afoundation trust to be fed back into the economy in the form of loans to newor developing enterprises and, on repayment, of gifts to cultural institutions,or in any other appropriate way implement their ideals in the service ofwhat Franklin has called the Common Good, then they cannot be accusedof having an ulterior, self-serving motive, and they thus belong to the NewCulture. There are examples of it springing up all over the world. Perhaps themost encouraging thoughts come from publications dealing with businessethics where one might encounter the startling claim that honest, simple,straightforward, descriptive advertising is not only ethically superior tohype, but also sells more.As the new wave gathers momentum, what will happen to ourpresent concept of government? For one thing, it will seem increasinglyinappropriate for any agency or department or branch of it to attempt tosettle controversies. Controversies should first be settled culturally and onlythen be implemented by our repository of coercion. Impossible? Not at all!The new recycling laws were enacted only after widespread concern for theenvironment had settled the controversy in principle. Laws should ariseout of overwhelming popular demand. That is where government belongswith respect to a vigorous culture, a culture where the human spirit, led bypenetrating individual observation and conceptualizing, and inspired bycommon ideals that do not make the mistake of invading a person’s verypersonal space, and, carried forward by appropriate action without fussingaround too much with images, defines the lifestyle for this or that identifiablegroup of like-minded people. The task of government is actually notto govern. It should monitor and deal with the inevitable margin of error,where equal rights are violated by force or fraud; it should no longer presumeto write the text. A German periodical recently characterized Greenpeaceas a cultural institution, however activist it may be. Its primary objective isto educate, to teach, to demonstrate, not to coerce. That rings true. Cultureshould no more pussyfoot than it should throw bombs. It should have visionand courage in trying to pinpoint and settle controversies and so facilitatethe evolutionary move toward, say, a world economy based on maintenanceand without the overbearing hierarchy.The thrust of the New Culture is by definition ethical and moral,with no need for any fundamental ulterior motive. Morality, as Wilson sayselsewhere, is a function of civilization itself dealing with the complexitiesand confusions that beset specialization. Ethics is often a matter of little331