CFI Michigan

EVIL: Should we speak of it in the 21st century?

Presented by Daniel Balfour, PhD, Professor and director of the School of Public and Nonprofit Administration at Grand Valley State University, Grand Valley State University

About the Speaker

Danny L. Balfour, who is the professor and director of the School of Public and Nonprofit Administration at Grand Valley State University. He received a BA in history from Michigan State University and a PhD in public administration from Florida State University. He was also Professor of Religion at F.S.U. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of organizational theory and behavior, social policy, administrative ethics, and the Holocaust.

Professor Balfour has published more than 20 scholarly articles and book chapters. He is co-author of Unmasking Administrative Evil (M.E. Sharpe, 2004l Sage Publications, 1998), which won the 1998 Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration, the 1998 Best Book Award from the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management, and the 2002 Book Award from the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management. In 1999 he was named a Distinguished Faculty Member by the Michigan Association of Governing Boards of Universities and won the Academician of the Year Award from the West Michigan Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration. In April 2000, he received an Administrative/Professional Service Award from Grand Valley State University. He served as the managing editor of the Journal of Public Affairs Education from 1995 to 2000. He was elected the 1997 Program Chair of the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management and served as the Division Chair for 1998–1999.

About the Event

Meeting Minutes for February 22, 2006; #202

Announcements

Check our website: http://www.cfimichigan.org for the most up to date information about upcoming events and opportunities. And for questions regarding specific items of interest, send e-mails to: . Meetings are held at 7PM on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month at the Women’s City Club, 254 E. Fulton Street, Grand Rapids, MI. We welcome first time attendees and honor our stalwart members as well.

We also provide many extra-meeting activities and ways to socialize. After each meeting, those who wish to gather at VITALE’S Restaurant, located at 834 Leonard St., for food, drinks and socializing in a pleasant setting.

We also have FREETHOUGHT MOVIE NIGHTS on the first and third Wednesdays of each month (alternating with regular meetings), hosted by Jason Pittman at his Lockwood Street home. On March 1st he will feature the film: The Fog of War. The following Movie Night, on March 15, we will be h3. treated to the movie: The Devil’s Playground. Jeremy Beahan hosts

The next Freethought Meditation Group gathering is on March12, at 6PM, located at 1416 Wilcox Park Dr., SE GR. The following one will be on March 19th. The FREETHOUGHT WOMEN’S GROUP meets on the third Saturday of each month, hosted by Jennifer Beahan

There will be an FWG meeting on March 18, at 10AM. DINNERS FOR 8 is a time for adults to get together for food, drinks and good talk and is coordinated by Jan Van Oosterhout, who with her husband Bill, host the annual summer COTTAGE ON THE LAKE party.

Freethought Arts Night is coordinated by FA Secretary Charles LaRue (yours truly). This will take place on April 12 at the WCC. This event is an opportunity for members to participate by sharing their passion for painting, poetry, singing, dance, juggling, instrumental music, film, or even interesting collections, arts and crafts or other hobbies/pursuits. Please contact me at: for details.

Dr. Greg Forbes be presenting a three part lecture series on Evolution at the Congregation Ahavas Israel, located at 2727 Michigan Avenue (about 2 miles west of the East Beltline on Michigan Ave., on the north side of the road). The dates are March 5, 12 and 19; all are from 9:30–10:45AM. The first one is an evolution primer, the second one deals with science, pseudoscience, and just plain nonsense—learning to tell the difference. The last installment will be on the topic: Intelligent Design—a challenge to evolution or an evolving challenge? These lectures are free and childcare is provided. Come on now, you know your Sundays are open.

Our next regular meeting (at the WCC) will feature the topic: Mindful Materialism; Science & the Sense of Self, to be presented by FA member Jeremy Beahan. This will be on March 8, at 7PM.

FA Board member, Dr. Robert Collins has been invited again (a third time) to address the Comparative Religions class at Grand Haven High this spring. Dr. Collins has been an excellent source for spreading the non-theistic approach to life to those not well versed in it as well as disseminating information on the secular basis of our country and its godless Constitution and its inherent separation of State & Church, and has spoken before various groups on these issues.

Presentation

Our topic for this meeting was: EVIL; Should We Speak of it in the 21st Century? It was presented by Danny L. Balfour, who is the professor and director of the School of Public and Nonprofit Administration at Grand Valley State University. He received a BA in history from Michigan State University and a PhD in public administration from Florida State University. He was also Professor of Religion at F.S.U. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of organizational theory and behavior, social policy, administrative ethics, and the Holocaust.

Dr. Balfour had his book that he co-authored with Guy B. Adams, Unmasking Administrative Evil, for sale at this meeting and his presentation was based on many of the ideas contained within it. It begins with a quote by Aldous Huxley: The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was before the crusades began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself. End quote.

He told us how he became aware of our organization. In the magazine Free Inquiry (published by the Council for Secular Humanism), Balfour responded in a letter to an article by magazine contributor, Nat Hentoff, which dealt with the Terri Schiavo case, regarding the preservation of life. Dr. Balfour’s letter was picked up on by the FA, we were in contact regarding his work with non-profit groups and about his research which led to his book and his presentation to us.

Dr. Balfour acknowledged that his vocational involvements and interests may seem to have been disparate upon a surface inspection, but he explained the connections and the common threads running throughout, from religious studies, to administration, policy and business management issues, to historical research and the study of evil in societies. While evil is discussed as a concept as it pertains to the massive horrors perpetrated in genocidal programs, or other historical events, and it is thrown around perhaps a bit too casually when one person or group wishes to demonize another person or group, Balfour found that it was not ever mentioned in regards to public administration or about the State’s role in genocide. He helped introduce a refocusing upon these issues.

Evil is not the domain of the occasional Hitler or Pol Pot alone, but permeates entire societies where it is maintained and supported by all levels of involvement. In Nazi Germany, for example, it took the efforts of everyone from those who built and ran the railroads to the doctors and public policy administrators to carry out the infamous deeds done. It was an entire, massive infrastructure of death that necessitated countless hands and minds to implement and run.

Not only is evil not something that emanates from only certain monstrous individuals scattered through history, but it is also not exclusively a concept for ancient times and people, or for those modern people who look at the world with unsophisticated and dichotomous (black & white; good and evil) and/or religious fundamentalist eyes. It takes in wide swaths of ordinary people in ordinary times and, rather than its power being diluted by modern thought, it is actually, Dr. Balfour asserted, enhanced by modernity. As to this last point, he points out that the scientific-analytic mindset with its technical-rational approach to social and political problems enables a new and frightening form of evil to arise: administrative evil. We have thought of the singular evildoer in the past and could put a face to such miscreants, but now evil is able to wear many masks, which enables ordinary people to unintentionally contribute to it.

One is rarely invited to participate in the creation and maintenance of evil and almost all would rebuke (so to say) it if it was unmasked and overtly soliciting their involvement. Expert and technical roles may be required and the ideas are couched in the appropriate language where one’s contribution to evil may be to play a very tiny role without their awareness. The masks evil wears allow for stealth. It can be successfully disguised as a good, noble and worthy project, for instance. Something that is innately evil or destructive that is redefined as a positive, worthwhile undertaking, Dr. Balfour calls Moral Inversion.

With administrative evil, a favored mask of modern evil, both in public and private organizations, so much is underneath the awareness of those within the organization (and certainly not part of the public ken), where people are engaged in patterns and activities that may culminate in evil without the individuals involved comprehending their own or the organization’s role until after the fact~and not always even then! Striving toward certain goals may drive out ethical concerns that would otherwise mitigate the formation of evil-empowering action. When translated via moral inversion into a positive, such policies may be pursued with the full support of all involved. The masks of evil in administration makes it entirely possible to adhere to the tenets of public service ethics while still participating in a great evil.

The relationship between evil and public administration is often not regarded at all or if it is, then it typically is seen as only a temporary political departure from otherwise untarnished standards; and/or dismissed as some isolated aberration (the Enron executive here; the business dealings with a brutal authority there, etc.). We want to believe (Dr. Balfour noted in his talk and book) that evil only originates in unique historical times and places. We tend to think that certain cultures or societies are fertile ground for evil to come about, especially when coupled to specific social events and certain political climates… and in extraordinary circumstances. This perception makes it all the easier for everyday evil to go undetected until the damage has already been done.

Evil reverberates down the centuries of human history without weakening at the dawn of the 21st century and apex of modernity. There is the prevailing belief that we are at the pinnacle of human progress and achievement; however, Dr. Balfour asserted, this is the bloodiest time in both absolute and relative terms in human history with a greater capacity for mass destruction and more resources poured into such activity than ever before. To back this up, he stated that there have been more than 100 million people killed as a direct or indirect consequence of the epidemic of wars and state sponsored violence in this century.

Evil is a difficult subject to study as to how it operates in ordinary society; it isn’t a well-accepted term, most people (as aforementioned) do not see it as something applicable to their lives, times and place in society, and evil is always other and elsewhere. Science prefers to describe behavior, avoiding ethically loaded or judgmental rubrics—to say nothing of (Danny Balfour notes in his book) what is normally considered religious phraseology, which takes it outside of the scientific arena. So this all hampers applying a scientific approach to the subject as well as engaging the general public awareness of the subject as it applies to ordinary individuals who, themselves, would never be defined by such an inflammatory term and could never believe they had taken part in something that culminated in evil.

In his book, Dr. Balfour presents the definition of evil from Katz: Behavior that deprives innocent people of their humanity, from small scale assaults on a person’s dignity to outright murder… [this definition] focuses on how people behave toward one another—where the behavior of one person, or an aggregate of persons is destructive to others. End Quote. This introduces the idea of a spectrum of evil that our presenter discussed. Evil can be thought of as arranged along a continuum, with the little white lie at one end and mass murder/ genocide at the other. But at every point, even with the supposedly harmless white lie, there is the possibility for serious personal and social consequences, especially as they accrue over time. The road to evil begins often with small steps that present themselves as innocuous-seeming ones. But this road may lead ordinary people in ordinary times down the proverbial slippery slope. We no longer look to a devil as a source for evil, but looking only at certain individuals in certain circumstances as the embodiment of evil is no more productive in understanding its influence, scope, and how diffused it becomes in standard operations.

A gulf emerges now in our modern culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it… via un-naming evil. Administrative evil often goes unseen, wearing as it does many masks. Only by unmasking it can we understand and deal with it.

A recent issue of Free Inquiry magazine (a publication mentioned earlier) dealt with the idea of evil, with the claim that this term should not be part of our current lexicon. Dr. Balfour disagrees. Michael Shermer’s book, The Science of Good and Evil, shows us the relevance of considering evil in contemporary times and situations, but Balfour believes it does not go far enough in exploring this theme. As he spoke, our presenter showed us an artifact he picked up in downtown Grand Rapids: the famous Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil simian trio. In an interesting turn of phrase, he stated that his goal was to leave us striving to do the right thing more than to do things right. We must try to always think of the consequences of our behavior and look for the hidden connections between seemingly innocent actions and the potential for harmful results; the devil still resides in the details.

Our speaker contributed to a chapter on Bureaucratic Domination in the book The Cunning of History by Professor Richard L. Rubenstein. This book deals with the Holocaust from the perspective of sheer organization and an economy of effort, as well as the application of technical expertise toward the death of millions. When we have unwittingly slid down that slippery slope mentioned above, the consequences from the accumulation of small actions can result in such mass death and destruction. He doesn’t want to see this occur again. Awareness is key.

Organizations have ethical guidelines in place but this does not protect them from administrative evil emerging. When grave misdeeds are uncovered, those who were a part of it generally discount their own role or say they were only following orders; or only doing their jobs. The set up in administration is often one where departments are compartmentalized, where only certain people report to certain others, where directives are uncertain as to point of origin and little or no option exists for feedback or questioning. Jobs are specialized and specified and everyone’s piece of the operation is treated as a positive one toward the greater good and larger progressive goals. If some sense of wrongdoing filters down to individuals, they simply cannot imagine that the engine they contribute to is one that is driving harm, and they have even less comprehension of how their little component can play any significant part in the process. They will often assume they are misreading the issue and/or they will live in denial.

Employees feel they must tell the higher ups what they want to hear; that to rock the boat by dissent is to harm the overall organization, and that those at the top must already be aware of compromising behavior and must surely be dealing with it. In this light, Balfour mentioned Strategic Evil, which involves pretending not to know of wrongful activity. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to stop; the momentum becomes a powerful force that may overwhelm individuals who wish to do the right thing, even when the mask has fallen away. The status quo is easier to deal with, and doesn’t put one at great personal risk, although the guilt and shame that accompany knowing participation in wrongdoing has its own consequences on mental health. Workplace fear regarding retaliation over whistle-blowing is a strong factor as well. Being a team player is a highly valued attribute in an organization. Another factor mentioned is that when things get incredibly bad they become… well.. incredible. People simply cannot believe such things are actually going on and try to come to grips with it through denial and rationalization and other mechanisms. Cover-ups are almost always never successful; ultimately they are uncovered, and operating covertly only serves to make things worse, increasing the harm done by the end.

One thing we must avoid is using the term evil as a label for groups or individuals. The focus must be on the behavior of people and how the behavior and practices contribute toward evil, not that they themselves are evil. Evil may be defined as the actions of individuals that needlessly inflict pain and suffering on others. Labeling people or groups as evil serves no utilitarian purpose and feeds into the idea of personified pure evil—single agents who do evil. When labeling is used in a more diffuse manner, it tends to generalize groups of people, segments of society, other cultures, etc. It is too easy to misuse the concept or term evil as an avenue for demonizing others; this dehumanization makes it easier to perpetrate evil upon others, to fail to recognize their humanity and the understand the underlying mechanisms involved in their actions. It sets up the US & Them dynamic that creates the hated Other (or out-group) that J. DeLeeuw referred to in her previous presentation to our group.

Dr. Balfour discussed the idea of surplus people who are expendable and easily marginalized. Sometimes just being considered to be in the way of an organized force, greases the tracks for policies to be developed and plans to be made that result in the euphemistically rendered ethnic cleansing as seen in Darfur or Rwanda for examples. Two examples in our own country are when Americans of Japanese ancestry were sent to detention camps, and, arguably the aftermath of the displaced masses of disenfranchised people following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Language can come into play to help define marginalized people in a way that makes them more expendable.

Danny Balfour mentioned how those who became surplus people throughout history would commonly be referred to as vermin or roaches; subhuman beings that carried disease and societal debasement, and how public health metaphors were then more easily applied to rid the pure society of its surplus people. One exterminates pests. One cleanses the environment to rid it of filthy harmful elements… and again we think of the use of the phrase ethnic cleansing. Other uses of language to make evil more acceptable include the phrase collateral damage (the death and maiming of civilian non-combatants), and resettlement (as if merely involving a move, rather than a violent uprooting that leads to suffering and often death.) Such phrases enable us to disconnect and have a moral disengagement from the issues and consequences of certain actions. It also makes it easier for the perpetrators to rationalize their behavior.

Professor Balfour referenced the book Radical Evil; A Philosophical Interrogation, by Richard J. Bernstein. In this book, Bernstein turns to philosophers such as Kant (who coined the term Radical Evil), Hegel and Schelling on the subject; examines the explorations by Nietzche and Freud on the moral psychology of evil; and lastly looks at post-Holocaust thinkers, such as Levinas, Jonas, and Arendt, who come to grips with evil after Auschwitz. His primary concern is to enrich and deepen our understanding of evil in the contemporary world, and to emphasize the vigilance and personal responsibility required for combating it.

Balfour emphasized the importance of organization in evil, saying that genocide is the organized extermination of a people. Organization is more important, he said, than modern weaponry or advances. He talked about the idea promoted in several books about an innate mindset of the German people that created fertile ground for the Nazi Final Solution to grow. He refuted this by explaining that Germany had actually been a welcoming and comforting place to live for Jews. There was nothing inevitable that could be foreseen for the Holocaust to occur there. He cited startling statistics including that 2 of every 3 European Jews were murdered during that time; in Poland 90% of the Jewish population was killed; whole towns and villages were wiped off the map. The culpability is generally thrown on the government—the top war criminals, but such organized slaughter required the participation of people at every level, with no segment of society untouched.

In this vein, Balfour talked about evil as work. Government officials had to establish difficult rules and regulations on the Jewry but all other levels of civil servants had to impose them. Laws had to be enforced by enforcement officers, clerks had to do the paperwork, the Church had to look the other way (at best—or bind itself up in State power for a potent force in extinguishing a people, at worst—and Hitler himself believed he was carrying on the unfinished work of Luther), builders had to build the camps; teachers, the medical profession, businesses of all kinds all contributed; the railways had to be made, accountants had to work with a tax system established to impoverish the Jews disproportionately… the entire infrastructure had to be maintained toward a goal, the end result of which nearly all ordinary people would find revolting, yet their part in it at the time was fully acceptable to them.

Dr. Balfour talked of the famous Milgram experiment which showed how readily regular people can yield to authority directives to do harm. It was set up as having a Learner, a Teacher and a researcher (the authority figure). The Teacher was the actual subject of the experiment. He or she was to ask test questions of the Learner and when the Learner (who was in on, and part of, the experiment) got answers wrong, the Teacher was to use the device in front of him/her to give a shock to the heard but unseen student. The shocks intensified as the wrong answers accumulated and were labeled in a way to show it becoming dangerously, and even lethally violent. The Learner (who was unharmed actually) would moan as the shocks increased. The researcher would simply stand with clipboard in hand, in a lab coat, and quietly and simply ask the actual research subject to continue. There was no coercion or escalation of tone on the part of the researcher. The subjects felt compelled to continue inflicting ever greater harm upon the Learners; sometimes pleading with the Learners to concentrate and try to get the answer right. But most did not just refuse to continue, even as they edged deeper into the clearly marked danger zone. None of the subjects were depraved sociopathic sadists. They were ordinary, unexceptional people doing what was expected of them… which looked to be inflicting increasing suffering on an innocent person whom they had no qualms with, simply because they were told to continue by the person in charge of running the experiment.

He also alluded to the Stanford Prison experiment where individual Stanford University student subjects were classified as Prisoners or Guards, complete with appropriate uniforms. They of course knew that they were all students actually in a part of one of the university facilities, and the authority of the Guards was not earned any more than the criminality of the Prisoners was valid. Nonetheless, soon both groups fell into their roles and evil emerged when the Guards became cruel to the Prisoners, while the latter behaved as if they were a truly incarcerated criminal population. The students who were designated Guards could never have imagined the activity they engaged in if asked about it before they committed those acts. One thinks of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prison abuses (to name but two sites). Certainly not all who participated in the abuses were innately cruel or hate-filled people. They were directed by authority sources only, and all too easily fell into their dehumanizing (for both the abused and the abuser) roles. Societal structures and roles are, Dr. Balfour said, much more powerful than we think. He went on to say that we expect that most individuals will overcome pressures to do bad things. We frame it as that there are a few bad apples or some psychos who do despicable things. The majority of us, we tend to think, will surely not fall prey to participation in harmful behavior.

In large scale evil activity, Balfour said that those in what he called supporting roles, seldom feel guilty. They are masked and have handy exculpatory defenses such as that they personally never shot anyone, threw the switch, etc. Ironically the victims often tend to feel more guilt. One of our past presenters, J. Stenesh, dealt with this phenomenon in a chapter on Holocaust survivors in his book Rot on the Vine; The Many Dark Faces of Religion.

He also talked about Hannah Arendt (above-mentioned; cited in regards to the book Radical Evil), who lived from 1906–1975 and was a German political theorist, bought up in a secular Jewish family and who lived through Nazism in Germany. Perhaps her most influential book was The Human Condition, but the work that pertained most directly to this portion of Professor Balfour’s lecture was Eichmann in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann was central to the Nazi evils and everyone expected that when he was captured and brought to trial for his war crimes (a year before his death) that he would be evil made manifest in the flesh… some twisted, monstrous creature. Instead they saw that he was a most ordinary-seeming man, and in all ways (bearing, speech, appearance, etc.) was not what one would have associated with the author of so much death and suffering. He claimed that he broke no laws and only performed the duties that were expected of him.

Dr. Balfour spoke, in this context, of those who behave in an unexceptional way to do exceptional evil. Far from being a devil-like font of immense evil, those who perpetrate, as individuals, the greatest evil are usually better defined by their lack of empathy, shallowness, selfishness and detachment. The files on mass murderers and serial killers are ones of people who do not stand out particularly and who do not fit the conception of what people expect.

Evil is often done in the guise of lawfulness and professionalism. No one accepts overt evil, but if one is doing one’s job well, following the rules s/he is given, etc. it is considered to be OK. Hitler, Balfour noted, was very concerned that laws be obeyed, reports filed well and that the trains ran on time. History is filled with cases where a segment of society has full rights, but through the passage of laws and the implementation of certain rules, they become disenfranchised to a greater and greater degree. Therefore the citizenry that is still enfranchised can commit large and small acts of evil upon the new out-group while still regarding themselves as good citizens and law-abiding, decent people.

We examined how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act created a court-like body in South Africa after the end of Apartheid where anyone who felt s/he was a victim of violence could come forward and be heard. A significant aspect of the TRC Act was that the perpetrator(s) had to admit responsibility for closure to take place.

We discussed how we see the big picture better at a distance. This applies to our perception of evil as well. When there is both temporal and spatial distance between ourselves and evil acts, we see them clearer. Contemporary, local (including national) activity contributing toward evil is therefore much more difficult to see.

As was alluded to earlier, people do not go to some booth to sign up for evil acts. Choices are not clearly laid out as to what different courses of action end up entailing ultimately. With administrative evil, choices have built-in ambiguity and abundant gray area; especially on what pertains to ethically loaded questions and conduct, and one becomes involved in serial commitments which push to the side—or even drive out—morality in the process.

Systems, organizations—much of what is valued—are products of potential for great benefit but also for great harm. At a minimum, Dr. Balfour stressed, we need to employ critical reflexivity and to see beyond our own compartments and components of the larger system. In short, we need to think outside the box. We should establish a critical distance from the situation to better perceive the processes and procedures taking place. We must ask questions regarding the ethics of the situation and seek out a group of colleagues whom we may talk freely and openly with, who are not in our particular unit (for different perspectives and to help see that larger picture). These approaches must become part of our general operating principles.

Evil refers to something very real; it is no longer part of the realm of demons and mysterious dark forces, but part and parcel of lives and culture. In the aftermath of unchecked evil, once unmasked and amid the grave damage done, we always say: never again. We had the War to End All Wars, back so many wars ago. We back the same brutal dictators and support death squads and those groups who devastate another group of people when it is in our interest to do so, then turn around and declare that they are evil and must be dealt with by force, once they have served their purpose or our interests have shifted. We see displaced people, slaughtered or starving, wrongly imprisoned, tortured, raped and dehumanized and shake our collective heads at the enormity of it all—it is by then almost too much to fathom, let alone grapple with, yet all the small acts leading up to it went unimpeded, when it was still possible to wrap our minds around the issues and mitigate what was taking place.

In Darfur, the estimates of those dead since the conflict began range from over 70,000 to over 300,000 (different numbers are given by different organizations such as the World Health Organization, the British Parliamentary Report and the UN estimate) from direct killing to disease and starvation, with over 1.8 million people displaced from their homes and 200,000 who fled to Chad. The 1994 Rwandan genocide resulted in the deaths of up to one million people. Dr. Balfour also spoke of Mittelbau-Dora, Peenemunde and the Marshall Space Flight Center in connection with evil occurring at these places.

So in conclusion, to answer his topic question, Dr. Balfour said that yes, we must think of evil in the 21st century, but not some bogeyman. It is us and in us, BUT it is not all that we are. We can do better and we have so much potential for true greatness.

I have two and one half manuscript pages of notes from the intellectually stimulating Question & Answer period, and Professor Balfour’s presentation generated a great deal of fascinating discussion after he left the stage as well, but I shall close here, letting the two sentence paragraph above stand for our need for vigilance and awareness (which unmasks evil), the necessity for girding ourselves in the courage to stand up to the small wrongs we see before they gain momentum, and to keep a sense of hope in the face of so much daunting evil in the world. We have many gifts and much promise and we, the survivors of a grand, almost 4 billion year experiment in life, are worth fighting for.

Secretary: Charles LaRue