By John W. Garnder
This is a book about the importance of renewal for both societies and individuals – and the interdependence between the two to accomplish it.
Tell me more . . .
Societal renewal (think government, education, race relations, international affairs), hinges on a creative society, which itself hinges on the capability of individuals to move from apathy to self-renewal. What sounds simple is complicated by entropy, the slowing pace that invariably occurs in societies, organizations, and individuals as they age. Gardner writes, “[V]itality diminishes, flexibility gives way to rigidity, creativity fades and there is a loss of capacity to meet challenges from unexpected directions” (5). Shocks to the system (think wars, disasters, pandemics, loss of a job) often unlock “new resources of vitality.” How to continually initiate renewal apart from these external prompts is the secret and subject of this book.
About the author:
John W. Gardner (1912-2002) held many high-level leadership posts, including Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon B. Johnson. His book, On Leadership, is one of the finest I have ever read on that subject. Gardner was an academic, activist, WWII veteran, and an astute reflective practitioner.
My take on Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society
Gardner is the master of reflective analysis. Self-Renewal is insightful, challenging, and so applicable to me, especially as it relates to academic leadership. While the book is fifty-years old, I think it is as fresh and applicable as the day he wrote it. I appreciate the way Gardner demonstrates the inter-relatedness of personal and societal renewal. In a day of the preoccupation with the self, Gardner point higher than just “self-leadership.” Pick it up. Take your time. Get ready to make a few notations . . . and probably some life adjustments.
My favorite quote:
“The renewal of societies and organizations can go forward only if someone cares. Apathy and low motivations are the most widely noted characteristics of a downward path. Apathetic men accomplish nothing. Men who believe in nothing change nothing for the better. They renew nothing and heal no one, least of all themselves. Anyone who understands our situation at all knows that we are in little danger of failing though lack of material strength. If we falter, it will be a failure of heart and spirit.” xv
Overview: Self-Renewal
Gardner divides his thoughts his thoughts into twelve brief chapters. He examines the cycle of “growth, decay and renewal” as well as the factors that contribute to or diminish from societal and personal renewal. Chapters include: “Innovation,” “Obstacles To Renewal,” “Tyranny Without A Tyrant,” “Individuality And Its Limits,” “Commitment And Meaning,” and “Moral Decay And Renewal.” My book is highlighted and underlined. I have notes for personal application scrawled throughout this work. I found his words about innovation and organizations especially helpful.
My takeaways from Self-Renewal:
1. Self-renewal hinges on continual self-assessment: “Exploration of the full range of his own potentialities is not something that the self-renewing man leaves to the chances of life. It is something he pursues systematically, or at least avidly, to the end of his days.” 11
2. Educators must develop life-long learners: The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else. . . . The world is an incomparable classroom, and life is a memorable teacher for those who aren’t afraid of her.” 12
3. Have the courage to fail: “We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. . . . There is no learning with some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure—all your life. It’s as simple as that. When Max Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize he said:
Looking back . . . over the long and labyrinthine path which finally led to the discover [of the quantum theory], I am vividly reminded of Goethe’s saying that men will always be making mistakes as long as they are striving after something. 15
4. Live in generalist/specialist tension: Societal growth necessitates specialists who help us achieve what we could not on our own (transportation, medicine, engineering, etc), which in turn fosters compartmentalism, which can diminish individual versatility. “Note, it is not a question of doing away with the specialist. It is a question of retaining some capacity to function as a generalist, and the capacity to shift to new specialties as circumstances require.” Individual versatility is a priceless asset in a world of change. 24-25
5. Cultivate fresh thinking: "We tend to think of innovators as those who contribute to a new way of doing things. But many far-reaching changes have been touched off by those who contributed to a new way of thinking about things." 30 I read this against the backdrop of an educational partnership that was on the verge of collapsing. Collaborative “fresh thinking” is part of what God used to re-build it. Today it is flourishing.
6. Creativity is a path to innovation. Recognize it. Foster it: Gardner highlights four “traits of creatives.” I list them here, with a few additional notes, but the pages (32-39) are a good read. Creatives exhibit: (1) Openness: A receptivity to current experiences; (2) Independence: Creatives are “independent but not adrift.” They see the gap between what is and what could be, which requires a certain level of detachment. While such independent detachment may garner criticism, the creative ignore that type of criticism; (3) Flexibility: Creatives with “play with an idea,” “try it on for size.” Related to flexibility, creatives have a tolerance for ambiguity. The creative “is not uncomfortable in the presence of unanswered questions or unresolved differences.” 38 (4) Capacity to Find Order in Experience: Creatives impose order on their experience. I found this sentence fascinating: “Every great creative performance since the initial one has been in some measure a bringing of order out of chaos.” (39). Zeal, hard work, and arduous application is what it takes and what creatives give.
7. Identify signs of self-interest that form an obstacle to renewal: “In colleges and universities many of the regulations regarding required courses which are defended on highly intellectual grounds are also powerfully buttressed by the career interests of the faculty members involved in those courses. Vested interests can lead to rigidity, rigidity to defensiveness, and defensiveness to resistance and diminished capacity for change. 52-53
8. The importance of fostering a free society: But it is by means of the free society that men keep themselves free. If men wish to remain free, they had better look to the health, the vigor, the viability of their free society—and to its capacity for renewal. 66
9. The necessity of order for freedom: These words stood in sharp contrast to vandalism, looting, and riots in protest to the killing of George Floyd: “[C]onceptions of freedom that are not linked to conceptions of order are extremely disintegrative of the social fabric. There can be order without freedom, but no freedom without some measure of order.” 70-71
10. Educational administrators must apply the same rules of innovation toward their own university structure that they guarantee their professors: “ Much innovation goes on at any first-rate university—but it is almost never conscious innovation in the structure or practices of the university itself. University people love to innovate away from home .” 76
Conclusion:
As noted at the outset, I appreciate the insights of John Gardner. His observations are those of the informed reflective practitioner. Gardner recognizes the capacity (tendency?) of SELF-renewal to slide toward egocentricity. Even as he encourages the self-renewing man to do “something about which he cares deeply,” he recognizes such SELF-renewal can lead to self-centeredness.
He writes, “And if he is to escape the prison of the self, it must be something not essentially egocentric in nature.” 17 One must be intentional about this work of self-renewal: “Exploration of the full range of his own personalities is not something that the self-renewing man leaves to the chances of life. It is something he pursues systematically, or at least avidly, to the end of his days. 11 He continues that them in chapter 9, “Individuality and Its Limits.
We must combat those aspects of modern society that threaten the individual’s integrity as a free and moral responsible being. But at the same time we must help the individual to re-establish a meaningful relationship with a larger context of purposes.
In the process of growing up the young person frees himself from utter dependence on others. As the process of maturing continues he must also for him himself from prison of other self-preoccupation. To do so he need not surrender his individuality. But he must place it in the voluntary service objectives. If something prevents this outcome, then individual autonomy will soar into alienation or egocentrism.
Unfortunately, we have virtually no tradition of helping the individual achieve such commitment. We now have a fairly strong tradition of helping him detach himself from the embeddedness of childhood…. Just as we help him in this way to achieve independence, we must later help him to relate himself to his fellow man and to the best in his social, moral and intellectual tradition.
It is just this kind of level-headedness, the kind born of years and reflective experience, that makes Self-Renewal an important book for his generation and ours.
In his concluding chapter, Gardner urges his readers to charge students not to stand watch over ancient values, but to continuously re-create those values in their own day. 126 As with the rest of his work, he is urging conscientious action over inaction; advancement as the antidote to entropy.
Gardner is no Pollyanna, he advocates neither “uncritical optimism” (“The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in” A. E. Housman) or “corrosive melancholy.” But . . . a certain buoyancy is absolutely essential. 113 Why? Because society is not a wind-up machine sustained with a few twists, but one continuously re-created “for good or ill, by it’s members.” 127 Gardner wants us to lock arms with the cohort bent on continuous renewal.
Quotes worth examining:
1. On intractable people: The most stubborn protector of his own vested interest is the man who has lost the capacity for self-renewal. 10.
2. On educating for renewal: “All too often we are giving our young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. We are stuffing their heads with the products of earlier innovation rather than teaching them to innovate.” Are we approaching their minds as storehouses to fill or instruments to be used? 21-22
3. On change: So stubborn are the defenses of a mature society against change that shock treatment is often required to bring about renewal. . . . Someone has said that the last act of a dying organization is to get out a new and enlarged edition of the rule book. 44-45 The new thing will usually look barbarous compared to the old. 49
4. On creativity: "Creative minds are seldom tidy." 49
5. On tyranny and renewal: A state which dwarfs its men . . . will find that with small men no great thing can be accomplished. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. Gardner adds: “We need only add that no new thing can be accomplished, no renewing thing, no revitalizing thing.” 54
6. On peer conformity: The Image Managers encourage the individual to fashion himself into a smooth coin, negotiable in any market. 58
7. On freedom and renewal:
We are in bondage to the law in order that we may be free. Cicero, The Speeches of Cicero,
Men of intemperate minds cannot be free; their passions forge their fetters. Edmund Burke
8. On protecting dissenters as a condition of renewal: Emerson said of the scholar: “Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, through the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm that it be a crack of doom.” Ralph W. Emerson, "The American Scholar," An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, 1837 (page 74 in the book)
9. On individuality: “. . . if I were to desire an inscription for my tombstone, I should desire none other than “That individual.” S. Kierkegaard, “That Individual”: Two “Notes” Concerning My Work as an Author, 1859. (In Soren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, Walter Lowrie (trans) [Oxford University Press, 1939], p. 115.)
10. On happiness, virtue and hard work: The storybook conception tells of desires fulfilled; the truer version involves striving toward meaningful goals—goals that relate the individual to the larger context of purposes. Storybook happiness involves a bland idleness; the truer conception involves seeking and purposeful effort. About that effort he quotes Montaigne: “Virtue will have naught to do with ease. It seeks a rough and thorny path.”
11. On calling: Every calling is great when greatly pursued.” Oliver Wendell Holmes. About this Gardner writes, "One my not quite accept Holmes’ dictum – but the grain of truth is there." 104
The author piqued my curiosity about these books:
Escape from Freedom, by Erich Fromm. Fromm examined why Nazi and Fascist movements of the 1930’s found it so easy to win adherents. He noted that the person who submits willingly to an authoritarian regime relieves himself of the anxieties and responsibilities of individual autonomy. 91-92
True Believer, by Eric Hoffer explored the same thesis.
The American Scholar, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
