Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

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reality, in a society which staunchly affirms that it is a Christian society, re- placed religion, and money has become man's God. As well as being ruthless, the pursuit of wealth is also a thing which allows no time for love of anything other than wealth. And this is the worst feature of it. It makes of men hollow shells who can appreciate nothing. They can have no love of beauty, art, ideas, culture, and most important of all, theif fellow man, because the business of making money becomes and must become so all- engrossing. I realize that all these things which I have just mentioned are abstract terms which regularly get the hell kicked out of them, but despite their abstract quality, they are, I think, things without which no one can have a life with any meaning. The man who looks at a sunset, and feels no thrill or sense of awe or humbleness, but sees it merely as a large blob, all of the colour of gold pieces, has little, I maintain, which makes his life worthwhile. Yet men whose lives are solely concerned with the acquisition of things, almost of neces- sity have no time to regard a sunset or a piece of music or a work of art as anything else, if indeed they have time to regard them at all. There may be exceptions but they are few and far between. The point I am trying to make is this-that the main concern of man today is getting things for himself, and that this is essentially a selfish individual business which rules out most of the things that are fine on the planet. This in turn means that a whole selfish society is created in which each man watches out only for his own interests, no matter who is hurt in the process. In such a society it is, of course, inevitable that all kinds of conflicts arise between men, and translated to an international scale, these result in major wars .... This then, is the kind of world into which we are going-a selfish world, hang- ing because of its very nature, always on the verge of war, in which we must look out for ourselves from the word 'go' or get trampled. Now this is not the sort of conditioning which we have had in this school. Here, we help each other to a fair extent. If you're out of a cigarette and someone else has lots, you ex- pect him to give you one, or he's a shmoe, and he usually comes through, I think. And this is the major pattern of life in this school. You have had. all in all, with varying degrees of success, a fair training in helping the other 'guy' out. You have sat in these seats for some twenty odd chapels at least, and read off glowing phrases like 'transmitting this city better than it was transmittedf or 'the good life shared by all', or 'the second mile', or 'Ending our welfare in the general good', and so on. And now you're going into the world. I wonder how much some of these things will mean to you after a few years in the world. I wonder how many of you will still be concerned with going that second mile or sharing the good life. I also wonder how many of you will simply, as soon as you leave the school, slip into the selfish way of society. and rush into the rat-race for the big pot of gold: and then, once every couple of years. sitting Th fr! mfr:

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Yet the first thing we must notice about the world today is that few of these things seem to exist. Indeed they look as far away as ever. The second thing is that it seems very doubtful that the nations of the world really want any of these things for which they were supposed to have fought-certainly I find it very diflicult to believe that any of them want these things badly enough to sacrifice one iota of their self-interest for them. Indeed, the pattern which is forming day by day now, would seem to differ very little from the pattern which followed the first world war. If this is true, we can reasonably assume that in a matter of some months or years, we shall have another war on our hands. To me this i-s a rather terrifying thought. I am not particularly concerned by the fact that the atom bomb would be used in this war and that it is extremely destructive. Indeed, I believe that if the human race can allow another war now, then it is high time for the race to exterminate itself, and not much will be lost. But the idea that another war can even be contemplated so soon, and more, that there is ultimately so little to choose between the opposing forces in that war, is, to me, quite terrible . . . However, this is the kind of world into which we are going-ruled by mutual mistrust, hatreds, and jealousies, all of which are rather petty. Why is it, though, that this should be? Why should this be the kind of society which, aware of it or unaware of it, we have inherited? To answer this question I think we must look for a moment at the moral state of our society. Let's examine briefly this morality, or the lack of it. I'm not asking you to consider the trifling, so-called moral issues of the number of illegitimate children born in a given year, or the excessive amount of liquor consumed last month. These things are simply results, I think, of something far greater, of one fundamental moral lack in our society-a lack of what I will call, for want of a better name, generosity or love, or if you like, of an overabundance of selfishness. Almost since societyls inception, man has concerned himself with getting power for himself. At one time, this power was measured by the number of cattle he possessed, later by the amount of land he owned, and for the last two hundred years, power has been synonymous with money, and man has been primarily concerned with getting more and more money. This is, of course, essentially a ruthless business which leads finally to the 'every man for himself' and the 'survival of the fittest' attitudes, not to mention starvation, greed, ex- ploitation. In other words it creates a selfish society in which most men spend most of their time in thinking solely of themselves, and in trying to acquire for themselves more and more money and more and more things. Money, then, has become the main motivating feature of society, the thing without which nothing can be done and the measuring rod of success and failure. It has, in Twelve

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comfortably somewhere, think back for a moment to 'the common good', and derive some satisfaction from knowing the soothing words. I hope there won't be many in this last category ..... h Quite a few years ago now, there was a guy wandering around the Mediter- ranean shores, telling people for God's sake to smarten up and realize that when, tby following graven imagesl, they denied themselves the love of their fellow man and what he called the 'life of the spirit, which you can take to mean whatever you like, they were throwing away the only things that made the business of living at all worth while, the only things that raised it from a. stupid routine of being born, then suffering, and finally dying, to something glorious and triumphant. His name was Jesus of Nazareth, and most people thought He was crazy. Finally they nailed Him up on a cross because they got a. little afraid that if they let Him talk long enough everyone would start taking Him seriously. If He were on earth today I think He'd say just about the same things now as He did then. I don't think He'd admit that we've made much progress in His particular field. Probably the same thing would happen to Him as did then, and He'd be hung, electrocuted or put in a straightjacket as a radical or a nut.. It's my contention here tonight, however, that it's about time we realized He had something, and took His advice and acted on it. Those of us going into the world now have a great opportunity to do just that, at the same time using the conditioning of this school. We can refuse to accept the rules of a selfish society, and fight to find better ones. We can decide to stay out of the rat-race, and to put whatever energies we save thereby, and they will be considerable, into the much finer pursuit of whatever is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is honest, in the universe. We can decide to Wipe selfishness out of our lives and dedicate ourselves to helping others. We can resolve that by doing these things with many others, we can put an end to war, and greed, and starvation, and injustice. We can, in other words, make up our minds to follow in the tradition of man's few moments when he was at his best .... Perhaps the desire for power in man is an inescapable fact, but surely it's about time to at least give it a twist, and exchange the power of money for the power of knowledge, truth, and ideas. Going into the world now, we have an opportunity to do these things. It isn't, however, quite as simple as saying it. It means relearning a great deal, and sacrihcing a great deal, and working a great deal. It means being looked on with ridicule and being treated with disrespect. In the end, however, it is well worth it, and the end will be achieved when there are enough people of this sort. It is in such people, living such lives, that the only hope for a rather lpopeless world can be found. I hope that there are some of these before me tonight ..... FUI11'ff'1'I1