Thank you very much for that generous introduction. It is an exceptional privilege and honor for me to be here this evening to deliver this lecture on behalf of the New Zealand Foundation for Peace Studies. I admire very much this Foundation’s contribution to the work of peace studies, which has been well known to me for some years; I commend especially the Foundation for being so deeply committed to the work of peace before peace became as fashionable as it now is, fortunately. It is the quality of this commitment that has helped build awareness and provided the witness that humanity is not forever locked into the war system. It is this abiding commitment that has helped create a climate enabling such a powerful peace movement to take hold in this country. This achievement inspires us in other parts of the world.

I want to take this opportunity tonight to try to say some things that are tentative, that look toward extending the horizon of what seems possible. I do this at the risk, a hard one for academics to undertake, of seeming foolish. This fear of seeming foolish is a severe inhibition upon the creative facilities of our educators. It is one of the ways we deprive our students of any hope for the future. Unless a teacher is prepared to be foolish at least in the sense of defying the canons of conventional orthodoxy, patterns of thought and belief will remain trapped forever within the confines of what I call an obsolete realism.