Grandfather revolutionaries' conversation piece

Richard Whitfield

On the banks of the Tairua River estuary, sheltered from the Pacific coast of the Coromandel, life could not be more calm and peaceful. It is a place with a deep and industrious history, but now the area is sleepy, perfect for beach walks and musing.

It was here this week that two unlikely radicals prepared to fire a thundering warning. The setting may have been serene, but their cry was of catastrophe.

"This is a serious wake-up call to take ourselves and each other seriously as whole persons, or face the dire consequences of social decay and implosion," says Richard Whitfield.

Co-protagonist Bruce Gilberd contemplates equally stark possibilities: "Will we have internal cultural collapse, civil wars, even within my grandchildren's lifetimes?"

Surely the crazed warblings of two conspiracy theorists. No. Whitfield, 67, is a British emeritus professor of education, a man of thinning white-grey hair who has held respected public positions. Gilberd, 68, and balding, is a former Anglican Bishop of Auckland, now retired and living in Tairua.

They lament modern styles of leadership and the loss of human values, and call for a seismic shift in people's priorities. But rather than just complain, they have come up with practical suggestions for change and have written a book, launched last night at Parnell's Holy Trinity Cathedral by Judge Mick Brown and child advocate Lesley Max.

They believe the "eroding acids of greed, power and deceit" have already begun to cause calamity in the corporate world (such as the collapse of Enron), and see strife for the "ecology of human relationships" on a similar scale to the environmental damage the world faces.

Their work, Taproots for Transformation, is written as dialogue, the two talking back and forth about their worries for the world.


A 'real and aching absence'

Over the phone with them from Gilberd's Tairua home this week, the conversation was disarming and charming. They are open, disclosing personal details, tragedies and hopes. Through the process, they have become good friends.

They met in 1997 as fellow keynote speakers at a values education conference in Wellington. Whitfield had been brought out from Britain by the New Zealand Herald, a co-sponsor of the conference. They kept in touch and met again the following year when the idea for the book was born over dinner in an Auckland restaurant.

They sat and talked for two week-long periods, one at Whitfield's seaside home in Lyme Regis, Dorset, and the other in Tairua.

They had much in common: both were married with grandchildren, both had a background in science, both had held senior positions in their chosen fields, and experience as teachers.

Both also had lost their fathers prematurely to heart attacks (Whitfield's father was 65, Gilberd's 58). It gave them a great sense of loss. At crucial points in their lives they missed having their fathers to turn to for advice.

"I wish he were still around, especially for that demanding period when I was Bishop of Auckland, to be a wise mentor, as he had had a parallel position in health administration," says Gilberd.

Whitfield: "When I later had my greatest life-test phase, he wasn't there ... I knew he would have understood the various ethical and psychological struggles involved. I needed him hugely at that phase for gentle guidance based upon his experience. What do we do when the person we need most for wise advice is not there, except as a real and aching absence?"

It is these life experiences which have given them the wisdom they express in the book. The world they see is one of distrust and loneliness, where too many people, especially children, do not experience reliable love. It is a world of busyness.

"I notice that even young children are often too busy - busy with homework, busy in the classroom, busy with music, busy with sport, busy with computer games, busy in holiday time. The modern busyness seems to start very young, and that leads into, I believe, further overwork, whereby relationships are [not] tended, let alone mended in the way they need to be if we are to be sustained and grow," says Gilberd.

Whitfield is not claiming there was some lost golden age. But he does say his generation should bear responsibility for the woes of this period.

"We have broadly gone along with excessive and shallow materialism. Spirituality in politics is almost a no-go area, so whole personhood is not the business of governments, even though we allow them to set social priorities - not least in education - that actually shrink our potential."

If there are targets at which these grandfather revolutionaries are taking aim, then leaders of politics and business are prime among them.

They are calling for leaders who are good people, not just managers. Gilberd says he is encouraged by the number of organisations instituting "triple bottom-line reporting", striving for human and environmental benchmarks, as well as commercial ones.

Whitfield is not so convinced, saying he remains cynical about such reports, seeing them sometimes as merely public relations exercises.

"It is the quality, including the sincerity, of leadership in all such organisations that is the key," he says.

Leaders should serve

He believes society needs to be led by people who are not afraid to show their emotions. He notes that this failing extends to women who achieve senior political leadership positions.

"The kinds of women who get to senior positions in politics tend to behave in masculine kinds of ways and they are not warm and vulnerable," says Whitfield.

Both men want leaders to adopt the idea of being servants to those within their care or organisation. "Servant leadership is bound to empower through its player-coach and team-building elements," says Gilberd. "Leadership has a good connotation so long as we explain what sort of leadership we want: people of vision, of compassion and resilience, of humility, but nevertheless of stature."

Whitfield: "I think our societies remain in two minds about whether we want true leaders at all ... Such people might be so challenging about our socio-economic premises as to make too many feel uncomfortable. If something of a prophetic voice is a part of leadership, then those voices are now rather silent among the big structures of society."

Both men are committed Christians and the book is peppered with spiritual references. This was a problem when it came to finding a publisher. "The secular publishers thought it was too religious, and the religious publishers thought it too secular," says Whitfield. (In the end, they found a Canadian firm, Trafford Publishing.)

But despite the spirituality, the Church gets no easy ride, even from the former bishop, Gilberd.

"I contend that God is not all that interested in 'religion'," he says. "What my God is interested in are communities of people who corporately and personally seek to live by faith, hope and love ... I still think we need to baptise (the first symbol of belonging, of being identified with the love of Christ), and to break the bread (an aspect of inner nourishment). But I'm less sure about signing up to an institution. There is a multiplicity of ways of being the Church 'out there', learning to be a part of a local fellowship, and to grow in faith and spirituality on the inside, 'in here'. Signing a parish roll, if it happens, is far, far from the first step."

But they do want people to return to core virtues: courage, justice, honesty, temperance, discernment or wisdom, and compassion.

Mentors key to change

If the world is to change, what needs to happen? Whitfield and Gilberd believe strongly in mentors. They see a strong role for mentoring in the workplace, including for senior leaders. Within their own careers, they relied on the wisdom and support of outsiders. "I had, for 20 years until he died five years ago, a retired Methodist minister [as a mentor]," says Gilberd. The mentor guided him with spiritual direction and deep personal support, especially when he took on new responsibilities.

"Mentoring can be personal, within organisations, and our peers can be part of that. We can have more than one mentor at once, perhaps one aware of all of our life, one focusing on one area, one on another." But it is important that the mentoring is not purely technical, concerned only with the job at hand.

"On that model, deep questions are not asked, sensitively, about our hopes, world-views, relationships, ethical dilemmas and so on."

One of the deepest questions in the book is for heads of organisations, including civic, church, business and education leaders: why are they leading?

"What is their true motivation?" asks Gilberd. "What is yours and mine, our hope for the people we reach, teach, or lead? Where are we leading them? Is there a sense of empowerment rather than misuse of power? Is there a sense of long-term loyalty to them rather than a spectacular impression? What are the ways in which we can appropriately enrich and sustain each other?"

The big question for Gilberd and Whitfield, then, is how are they going to bring about this seismic shift? Beyond writing about it, what else can two softly spoken men do?

Without hesitation, they say they want to engage in debate, to get people talking, to lead study programmes, and crunch policy with politicians. Whitfield has had previous experience of this in New Zealand, helping develop the youth-development strategy launched in 2002, and is not afraid of speaking out on social programmes. The policy of encouraging mothers of young children back into the workforce, for instance, he describes as catastrophic.

Gilberd says he would like to see concern with the "social ecology" adopted as a mainstream political issue, like environmental problems.

"We have got less time to deal with this than we have to look at climate change," he says. "It's a serious issue for the top people in government."

Just as world leaders - well, at least some - became concerned enough about the environment to develop the Kyoto Protocol, the men say leaders should tackle social issues with a similar level of seriousness.

The Tairua Protocol, perhaps?


* Taproots for Transformation, published by Trafford Publishing (www.trafford.com). See link below