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<br />JACK WilLIAMS <br />Radio Commentator and Columnist <br />Phoenix, Arizona <br /> <br />"ETHICS IN BUSINESS" <br /> <br />. <br /> <br />The Editor of the Tulsa Tribune, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, said it this way: <br /> <br />-. <br /> <br />"Our Puritan ancestors were preoccupied with sin. They were hag-ridden and <br />guilt-ridden and theirs was a repressed and neurotic society. But they had <br />horsepower. They wrested livings from rocky land, built our earliest colleges, <br />started our literature, caused our industrial revolution, and found time in <br />between to fight the I ndians, the French and the British, 'to brawl for <br />abolition, women suffrage and prison reform, and 'to experiment with graham <br />crackers and bloomers. They were a tremendous people. <br /> <br />"And for all their exaggerated attention to sin, their philosophy rested on <br />a great granite rock: Man was the master of his soul, You didn't have to be <br />bad. You could and should be better, And if you wanted to escape the eternal <br />fires you'd damned well better be. <br /> <br />. <br /> <br />"In recent years all this has changed in America. We have decided that sin <br />is largely imaginary. Wehave become enamoured with 'behavioristic <br />psychology'. This holds that a man is a product of his heredity and his <br />environment, and his behavior to a large degree is foreordained by both. <br />He is either a product of a happy combination of genes and chromosomes <br />or an unhappy combination, He moves in an environment that will tend to <br />make him good or that will tend to make him evil. He is just a chip tossed <br />helplessly by forces beyond his control, and, therefore, not responsible," <br />Actually, everything man has.,., his body, his mind, his social order,., is in very large <br />part an inheritance from men long dead, <br /> <br />A book I read some years ago titled "Human Destiny" clarified for me part of the para- <br />dox of man's nature wherein he is both good and evil by contrasting his inherited animal <br />and spiritual nature, <br /> <br />We are inheritors of a tradition based on the spirit of religion and the spirit of a gen- <br />tleman, that Edmund Burke tells us, gave to modern Europe and the Western World, every- <br />thing generous and lovely in our culture. Ideas, good or bad, still rule the world. <br /> <br />, <br /> <br />Man has always been compelled to choose among conflicting traditions. . . . and the <br />sober, startling question today is whether your life." my life... is an argument for or <br />against the accuracy of our western tradition. <br /> <br />With your permission, let me delineate this conflict. Is man wholly good or wholly <br />evil? What is the nature of man (If the totalitarian prophets are right, and the present <br />forms of economic and governmental structures are dissolved, will man become a perfect <br />creature? <br /> <br />- 21 - <br /> <br />