Ecumenical Institute: Chicago
Collegium
March, 1971
MODEL BUILDING METHODS
I went rather reluctantly two days ago to the inauguration
of the president of Garret Theological Seminary. It started with a banquet
and after the banquet some speeches. There was a speech by the president
of the University, and then Archbishop Cody, His Eminence the Archbishop.
The Master of Ceremonies got confused and said "His Immense.' And
then the director of the Church Federation of Chicago, the president of
the bishops of the Methodist College, and then the mayor of Evanston, and
about six others. Then they called on one of the students at Garret to
speak and they, out of sentimentalism I suppose, chose a black man. Black
student. Afro haircut, cleanly cut, finely dressed, Harvard looking type,
and said something to the effect (I'm going to paraphrase it. He said it
a whole lot better) "Garret is a ghetto of white racism. It's been
a ghetto of white racism and nothing's been done about it in the three
years that I've been here. There is now a group of us on campus who intend
to do something and we have a plan for getting that done. And if you prove
to be in favor of that plan, you will find us your friend, but if not .."
Then he sat down.
A quiet hush went over the whole hall) and the Master
of Ceremonies stood up. He had next to introduce the man who represented
the faculty, and he introduced him as the student representative. And then
corrected himself. Before that he said, "Well it's good to have a
bit of the prophetic note, even in a celebration."
It was an unusual inauguration. I still get a little excited
talking about it. Actually I enjoyed it because I had just been teaching
a couple of times in the Urban Academy and it was good to have some other
people get a taste. I found myself with great detachment. But ever since
then, that word IF NOT..., IF NOT.... has been ringing in my ear and I
can't help but stand before that. We're at a point where we're going for
broke. We're at a point where we either produce or we shut up. We're at
a point where either we produce now or we go underground. We're at a point
where either we do it or get off the pot. We're at a point ...
And furthermore, as Charles Moore said the other day,
the whole world is hesitating. It's like everyone has come to a dead stop
and is waiting for someone to tell them what to do. The whole world is
standing on tiptoe and waiting for the sons of God to reveal what the future
will be. This point is the time that the revolutionary elect choose to
move with dispatch. We're in that kind of a moment, I would want to reaffirm
And I believe 1 at what will enable us to move in the midst of that is:
(1) Whether we are able to hold the comprehensive.
(2) Whether we are able to maintain our corporateness.
(3) Whether we are able to take matter and turn it into spirit. Whether we are able to take every moment of our lives and transcend, go through every moment to the universal, to the transcendent.
(4) Whether or not we are able to adequately build the models that are going to be needed in the future.
(5) How well we are able to grasp and to articulate the
word or how welt we are able to teach R.S.1.
Now to look at model building. I want to give a very brief,
a very sketchy overview and then find out where your questions are about
model building. The fact of the matter is, all of us build models. You
don't have any choice there period. You are a model builder. What
it means to be a human being is to build models. The only question is whether
your models are adequate, or whether your mode to really produce humanness,
or whether your models are comprehensive, futuric, intentional and archaic
to use our code words. That's the only questions you've got on your hands.
I'll do four things. I'll look at the function of model
building, and then want to look at the sense of flow of some of the principles
anyway very broadly, and then at the process of model building, and then
at the import of model building.
THE FUNCTION OF MODEL BUILDING
The function of model building first of all is to give
you your reality. You don't have any reality outside of model building.
I am my model period That is to say, I don't have self consciousness
save I have self -consciousness in and through some sort of model. My model
is my reality. The picture that I have of the world is my reality
period, And if I have a picture of the world as divided between the bad
and the good people, then you can see that's who I am, that is my reality.
That's why you've got John Birchers Not because they are
naughty, naughty, or tish, tish. You've got John Birchers because of the
reduced model that they operate out of. The reason Goldwater is a reduced
human being is not because he is a naughty person, but because he operates
out of the model of the nation state being the primary reality for political
maneuvering. And if your basic model for political maneuvering is the nation
state, then you don't have any choice but to be what Goldwater is or something
like him. I am my model.
And secondly, my model gives me my context out of which
I made my decisions. I don't have any context, except the context that
my models give me. My models give me the framework out of which I made
my decisions. And because of that, the model is the decision below the
decision, or the decision below every decision that I make. That is why
I believe that to make models is to pray. Because when you are building
models, you are creating a framework: you're rewriting the past and you
are creating the present and you are intending the future. And that is
the milieu in which you make your decisions about when you get up in the
morning, about what you are going to eat, and about where you are going
to spend the next five years of your life, and how you are going to live
this particular day and this particular moment. It is your model that gives
you your context or framework out of which you operate. And again the question
is whether they are adequate.
It is your models, thirdly, that motivate you. If your
model is not adequate, men you are not motivated. If your model is adequate,
it motivates you. It is your model that locates where the action is, that
points you to what needs to be done and places on you the imperative for
doing that. If my model tells me that this buiIding will only hold a hundred
people, then I have got a pretty clear imperative: "Get out!"
If my model tells me that it will hold five hundred people, then I can
be fairly comfortable. That's a silly example, but you can take that into
your own thinking. It's your model that delivers unto you your imperative,
that relates you to your life existentially rather than abstractly. A model
is not an idea. An idea is an abstraction on life. A model, where it is
a genuine model, relates you to life on the gut level. It relates you to
what you must do in the existential dimension of your life. It makes whatever
it is that you feel you have to do seem possible. If your model is not
adequate it doesn't seem like it is possible for you to move. It's your
model, when it is adequate, that enables you to grasp your task as being
possible. And it is your model that innovates - I'm still talking about
motivation your model innovates and gets you out of the rut
and redirects you when you've gone into some sort of rut.
The fourth point is the assumption that it is your models
that give you your responsibility. Or your ability to respond to any given
situation is determined by the adequacy of your model. Your ability to
respond is directly related to the adequacy or inadequacy of your model.
The old metaphors of good and evil, right and wrong, are
no longer adequate for deciding, what your moral decision is. But what
you're to recover is that the metaphor which is replacing the great metaphors
of good and evil, right and wrong, is the metaphor of responsibility. And
that is directly related to your model. Or the way you are a responsible
person, to put it in another way, depends on whether or not you have an
adequate model.
Two men walking down the street. One of them is an immoral
man, and the other is a moral man. The moral man is a man who is a walking
globe. The moral man has in his mind a picture of the entire globe, and
then a picture of his area, and then a picturee of his region, and
then a picture of his metro, and then his community. That's your moral
man. Not whether or not one goes into the pub or whether one goes home
to his family. And it's the adequacy of your modes that gives you that
ability to respond.
THE PRINCIPLES OF MODEL BUILDING
You always begin with the most comprehensive factor, and
that for me is the category AWE. Or translated, that means you always begin
where you are impacted with the most comprehensive, the most intentional,
the most futuric and the most archaic. That's where awe breaks in upon
your life. Or if you want to speak theologically, all model building begins
finally with God, and with nothing else.
We've elected to work with the categories of time and
space in our model building. You could work with other categories. Begin
with awe and you begin with that relative to time and space. And then you
always begin with the given. You don't start with some abstract principle
and bring it to the situation you are in. You begin with that situation
and then you abstract from that situation. That is why in order to work
in the inner city you've got to live in the inner city.
We came to the inner city and we lived here for a year
before we finally put together the model that we would use to enter into
the Fifth City project. We called it our entrance model. I could put all
of it on half a page. And you entered with that model and you got involved
in the situation with the model that you had. And then you abstracted from
that and created a better model. And then you went back into the situation.
And then you abstracted and created another model. And then you went back
to check it against you data in the milieu of the situation and then you
abstracted. And model building is this continuous process of being engrossed
and involved in the situation and abstracting yourself from that situation
in order to create your model and then thrust back into the situation.
I refer you here to Sartre's paper. You don't even know, you don't have
the foggiest idea of what's going on, unless you commit yourself to change
that situation. And then you build a plan how you are going to change that
situation. And then that plan in the midst of acting that plan out
that reveals to you what's down here in the situation. And it
is only the man who has that disengagement with the plan but is also deeply
involved in the situation that can have the slightest idea of what's really
going-on.
You want to know whether your community is prejudiced
or not? You build yourself a plan about how to integrate that community,
and then you inject that plan, and you find out whether or not your community
is prejudiced. You begin, though, always with the givenness of life and
never with some abstract principle, although you realize you always come
to any given situation with the biases, the prejudices, the models that
you show up with. That's Ortega, if you want to read that.
In terms of the beginning, you a ways are the totality
of a given situation. The second basic principle is that you always begin
with the comprehensive and move to the particular. If you don't begin with
the comprehensive and move to the particular you start with your own particular
and you move up to the comprehensive and all the way up you build in your
own little petty biases, your own little petty notions. It is beginning
with the comprehensive and moving to the particular that enables you to
know what is really in the particular. And if what is in the particular
is not directly related to the comprehensive, then you do not know what
is in the particular. If the basic problems in Fifth City are not the basic
problems that are facing the entire globe, then you have not found the
basic problem in Fifth City.
Thirdly, in terms of the basic principles, your model
1S always dogmatic. When you have built your model, then that's the way
life is. No other way, but that way. And if that is not the way life is,
then you haven't buiIt your model, you've still got some other model that
you are operating with. You don't get out of bed in the morning unless
you are operating upon some final reality. You don't walk in this room
unless you are operating out of some final convictions about life. These
people that talk about being flexible or undogmatic are just stupid. You
have the choice of being dogmatic about your model or just being a pile
of mud. That doesn't mean that your model is not open. It is only the man
who is dogmatic that can finally be open. The man who is undogmatic is
the man who is open to everything, and therefore open to nothing O He is
nothing. There is nothing there for him to respond to things, and therefore
he is not open to anything.
The only way you can be present to anything is to have
a stance about the way life is. And then if something does not fit into
that stance, you change your model. But you decide that this is the way
life is, then you create your model, and then you operate with that dogmatically
until your model tells you that it is time to change the model. You don't
just go around changing your model 'willy nilly' because some little old
lady pushed you this way or because somebody didn't like you for doing
this. You set your model and then you stick with your model until your
model tells you "Look here. We're not handling all the
data adequately.' Your model stands up and waves a red flag at you, but
not until then do you change your model.
Fourthly, how do you tell if a model is true? There are
four basic questions:
(1) Is it comprehensive? Does it include every possible
blade of grass, does it include every single bit of data that is available.
(2) Is it internally consistent? That doesn't mean, is
it consistent with your particular views. But starting from the premise
that your model begins with, is it internally consistent.
(3) Is your model intentional? And by intentional I mean
are you literally willing to risk your life upon that model. If you're
not willing to risk your life, that's not your model. You're unconsciously
operating on some hidden model.
(4) Is it the most simple and clear mode! that's possible
to handle the data. You have a certain amount of data. The model that is
truest is the model that's simplest and clearest, but still able to handle
all the data.
We work with space and with time in our model building.
And the first job in model building is to locate yourself in space. That
is, you build yourself a grid. You find out what's up or where you are
or what's the relationship, the geosociaIspatial relationship
that you exist in.
Have you ever suddenly showed up in the dark. Somebody turned the lights out. You know the paralysis that you feel until you can remember where certain things were in the room, or until the lights come back on and you can see your grid. You feel paralyzed until you have an adequate grid of your space. If you have ever come up out of a subway on the wrong street. You are paralyzed until you are somehow able to readjust so that you get your grid straight. Or, if you have a certain grid in your mind about your bedroom, and you go out to summer camp, sleeping on your top bunk, as one of my colleagues was recently. kind you wake up in the middle of the night operating out of the grid that you have from home, you fall flat on your face and scar your nose. Your grid is the essential.
Then you have to have an analysis. We use another model
to get this and that is the economic, the political and the cultural. A
triangle. What you do with your analysis is to take whatever framework
you have got to think with and you overlay your framework with the grid.
What are the economic relationships, the political relationships, the cultural
relationships within this geosocial unity that you are operating in.
And it is that analysis that delivers you to your problomat.
There is no such word, by the way, that I can find in the dictionary. That's
the word we made up, And your problomat is simply the gestalting of the
problems that are delivered to you through your analysis.
The point where time and space meet is in your goals.
Now your goals are simply a flip of your problomat. You have your problems,
and then you flip those and state them positively and you come up with
your goals or whatever it is in your particular situation that you want
to accomplish. And then in order to get your goals you have got to have
your strategy laid out. And your strategies are the broad basic moves.
Do you want to take Italy first, or do you want to attack Germany first.
That is a strategic decision. Do you want to move in your air force first
or your tanks. And then you've got your tactics. Your tactics get you down
to the nitty gritty. Your tactics get you down to what you put on your
time line. Your tactics get you down to what you do Monday morning at 8
o'clock. Your tactics get you down to how many calls you have got to make
between eight and none o'clock Monday morning in order to arrive at your
goal.
You' time line takes you down into your time dimension.
The important thing in your time4ining is that you always build your
time line relative to tasks and never relative to your druthers nor to
your particular life span. If you've built your grid analysis and your
goals as goals that are going to take a hundred years to build, then you
build a hundred year time line of what needs to happen even if you're not
going to be around. Or if you're not going to be around two years later
and it's a forty year job you build a forty year time line. Then you operate
your two years within that forty year span and then you go on to your heavenly
reward. But the important thing, your time line is always build relative
to your task.
The thing that we've learned, and we've learned it from
lots of sweat, is that the key here is your tactics.
We've been taught to think with goals. You have the ten
goals that you wanted to do. Then you lay out a time line with the six
years that you've got. And then you find that you've taken these goals
and put them on your time line. That's what paralyzes people. You take
your ten goals and you build yourself a time line and you put these goals
on your time line and you've got all those deadlines to meet and you don't
have any way to meet them. And the reason you don't have any way to meet
them is because you haven't done your work on your tactics. The other trap
is that we have our goals and then we tell ourselves that we build tactics
but what we really buiId are subgoals, If your tactics do not tell
you what to d: Monday morning between eight and eightfifteen, then
you don't have tactics. You've got either strategy or you have got subgoals
still on your hands. Of course when you take tactics down two more levels
then what was your tactic now becomes your goal.
Goal, strategy and tactic is not a hard and fast categorization.
It is a dynamic relationship. You have a certain thing you want to get
accomplished, and then you list the things you've got to do in order to
accomplish that, and then you list the things you've got to do under those
things you've listed that you've got to do, and then you list the things
you've got to do under those things you've listed that you've got to do
underneath the things you've got to do. And then that tactic becomes your
goal.
That is still not all. Here you spend five years creating
your adequate grid, doing your analysis. All the time you've been involved
in the nitty aritty of formulating your community, and you've been going
through this process daily if not weekly. And you've built your probiomat
and you've got your goals and have your 9,432 tactics all laid out on a
time line as to when you are going to do them. And then what you do is
you turn around, and you stand before all those tactics and you thumb your
nose at them. You ask yourself , What is the major contradiction
that I'm facing at this particular moment. You can't do that until
you've done all this other. You go around talking about contradictions
before you've got yourself the most comprehensive picture possible. Until
you've built your 9,432 tactics, you're just playing games about major
contradictions. The major contradiction has got to relate back in every
one of these points.
Then you decide, what is the one thing that is blocking
me? And then you take all of your forces and you go and do that one thing.
And the remarkable thing about that is that when you do that, all those
tactics somehow get done. Now I don't know why that works, but I stand
here to testify that it does work. The last quarter in the urban academy
we built something like 32 pages of tactics just for m at little group
of four that was left here on campus. We had each other assigned to specific
areas. We got them all built and they were such beautiful tactics that
we were all anxious to go out and start doing our tactics. And then we
had to say to ourselves "No! We are all going to work together on
the same major contradiction." And we all screamed, "l want to
go do my tactics. I'm assigned to Fifth City. I want to go work in Fifth
City." No! We're going to find the major contradiction that's facing
this city, the continent, the region and the metro (which is the way we
assign ourselves). And then we all go and work on that. And the remarkable
thing is that after doing that weekly and daily for four weeks we found
out that we were a half a week ahead on doing our tactics in every area
except one. It turned out that we'd done the grid wrong there. We didn't
have enough data and our grid was inaccurate, and we were blocked. But
all our tactics were done. So I just bear witness to that.
There are two basic reductions you have to watch in building
a model. First is your space reduction. You say what I want to be responsible
for is the world. Then you think about all those asteroids and, well, I'm
being responsible for the Berth. And then you think about all of those
Chinese over there and you don't speak Chinese and, well, I want to be
responsible for the Western hemisphere. And you think about those crazy
Frenchmen and, well, I'll be responsible for the continental United States
and Canada. And ihen you think 'I'll be responsible for m e United
States,' and then you think about Nixon. No, no, I don't want to do it.
Chicago? Oh well, Fifth City But finally it gets down to you, your wife,
and your parakeet. And that's the grid then that is the fundamental operating
picture for your decision. That is the first danger.
The second major danger has to do with the reduction in
time. And this is where it protests what I call situational ethics. The
danger there is that you operate out of a picture of time as though each
segment of time were isolated from other segments of time. This problem
is called the problem of the successiveness in contextual ethics. It's
presupposition is that this moment of time and that moment of time are
all separate individual units and your
job in situational ethics is to decide in this particular
moment of time what is the right thing to do. If you do that, you're caught
in a trap. If your indigestion happens to be doing a certain particular
way at this a particular moment and if your juices are turned on in a certain
way and if the lights are low and if the music is just the right music
that hits you where you happen to get hit and the music is turned on that
way then you are a victim to that particular moment of time. That's not
the way life is. That's an inadequate model of the way life is.
This particular moment in time right now is related to
every other moment in time, and the decision that you make and the action
that you take at that particular moment rewrites every other moment of
your life. Have you ever been married? I tell you that rewrites every other
moment of your entire life. You ever lost a leg? That rewrites your whole
history of being a two legged man, Have you ever decided to take RSI? That
rewrites your entire past, but not just your entire past, your entire future,
is rewritten in every given moment of your life. Every decision that you
make is rewriting your entire past and is recreating in a new direction
or a new thrust your entire future. Now when you see that, that saves you
from being a victim to any particular moment in your life.
THE IMPORTANCE
The importance of model building is simply this: (1) That
history is created. It doesn't just happen. Somebody created the situation
we've got on our hands and therefore the situation can be changed. One
of the major contradictions facing the church today is being able to believe
that things can be different. The model builder is the one who knows that
this particular situation was created by man and another situation is entirely
possible. It can be different. And if not, if you decide not to do it,
that's all right. Somebody's going to do it. Somebody's going to create
a model that's going to change tomorrow. If it's not going to be the Church
of Jesus Christ in one manifestation or other, another Karl Marx will sit
for thirty years in some old musty museum and he will create a model of
what the future's going to be. The future won't be like he created it or
like he envisioned it, but the future is going to be created by whatever
it is he created. Do you understand that practically every single model
that Marx created came true' because Marx created it. It wasn't at all
like Marx thought it would be, it didn't even happen in the country he
thought it would happen in. But it happened. Maybe it'll be a Hitler that
will decide the future, And the man who does not have a model becomes Hitler's
accomplice, in creating the future. The tragedy of the youth today is that
they are so ready to move but they don't have any picture of where to go.
And so they collapse. And I mean they have collapsed. They don't have any
models. And all you have to do is to just ask them. "If it shouldn't
be the way it is, what should it be?" And you can just see them wilt
inside. I saw them on TV last night sitting in at an arboretum because
they didn't want this beautiful property destroyed. The news reporter came
up and said "You are protesting them building this science building
in this beautiful arboretum? If they don't build it here, where should
they build it?" And you could just see them wilt. I mean literally
before the cameras. They just turned Into putty. "We don't know. But
they don't want to build it here." Five minutes later they came out
and simply announced, "You either leave, or else you've got a $1,000
fine." They took off.
The anxiety in the midst of all this is the horrible ambiguity,
I mean the horrible ambiguity. There are no three good reasons for doing
this rather than that. All you know is what your model tells you. And the
horrifying transparency of the ambiguity that you and I live in today is
that you and I know that we built the model. Back when you had things like
right and wrong and good and evil you could pretend to yourself that somebody
else built the model, and you just had to find out what the model is. But
the ambiguity of your decision is intensified a hundred fold when you are
clear that you built the model from which you have to risk your own life.
And then the audacity, the horrifying audacity, because this man who is
a model builder knows that he has not just decided his life, he is literally
deciding the life of every other human being on the globe. You build a
model of what a human being ought to be, or you build a model of what a
minister ought to be, you build a model of what a lawyer ought to be, you
build a model of what a mathematician ought to be, you build a model of
what a student ought to be and you give your life to that, and you're deciding
not just for yourself. You are creating the future of every other human
being. That's part of the pain of the lucidity of our day and nobody can
ever get away from that again. And then the finality. The model you build
is the box you're going to lay in to go down to your six foot hole. The
model you build is the cross on which you're going to be crucified. There
is no way out. Either you build your model self consciously, or else you
go to your six foot hole in an unconscious model. There is no stopping
model building in order to get out of that. The question is, What
is the most adequate model for the most adequate human? That's what is
before us. And that's what we're doing when we build models.
George West