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There is another complication. To challenge someone's ideas at Harvard is to challenge the person. Within this loose federation of brilliant individuals, I do not find a free and open marketplace of ideas. I find instead that people cling quietly, and sometimes desperately, to their own ideas. Yet if their organizational work-the real work of the university itself-is to be effective, it must challenge the known. Effective leaders in academe must be able to suffer the loss of their own creation. They must be able to glimpse a satisfying beauty in the work that others create under their direction.

Once, in Vietnam, I stood in the aftermath of a battle and observed the carnage of war. I helped train the soldiers who won the battle, but I had played no part in the fighting itself. I flew to the scene in my helicopter after the fighting was over and saw the carnage and the satisfaction on the soldiers' faces. Being there was not my job. My work had been done long before the battle, and satisfaction came to me privately as I stood watching those soldiers recover through the saving rituals they performed together-burying the dead, policing the battlefield, stacking ammunition, burning left-over powder bags, hauling trash, shaving, drinking coffee, washing, talking as they restored order and looked out for one another's welfare. They were bound up in the throngs of community, and that communal satisfaction was its own pure reward.

But, as sweet as that victory was, my satisfaction remains tainted. Those men had done the soldiers' dirty job in a war that will probably never end-for them or for this nation. The Vietnam War will not be transfigured by a purifying idea. The men and women who fought there will forever be haunted by the fact of carnage itself. The ones who actually looked straight into the eyes of death will scream out in the middle of the night and awake shaking in cold sweat for the rest of their lives-and there will be no idea, nothing save the memory of teamwork, to redeem them. That will not be enough. That loneliness is what they get in return for their gift of service to a nation that sent them out to die and abandoned them to their own saving ideas when they came home.

We as a nation should never forget that those two and a half million soldiers who went to Vietnam went for want of a better political idea. They were there because we as a nation lacked the resolve-the necessary cooperative effort on the homefront, the necessary sense of community-to prevent the senseless destruction so far away. We lacked a restraining idea. We just didn't put our minds to it. None of us did, neither Harvardians nor West Pointers.

In The Diversity of Life, E. O. Wilson, Harvard's eminent biologist, asks: "How much force does it take to break the crucible of evolution?" The answer to that question had come to him as he sat alone in an Amazonian rain forest studying the riddle of the earth's diversity. Wilson had come to that place in his quest for knowledge. What he saw concerned him enough to make him abandon momentarily that lonely scientific quest, and he issued a call to action-a soldierly plea to the rest of the world.

I like to imagine Wilson sitting in that primeval forest in the midst of a tropical storm looking deep into the earth's complexity-seeing with the eye of a Sphinx all we need to know to know how to survive. When I think of him, I think of Conrad's Mistah Kurtz. Looking deep into the underside of human nature, Kurtz could only exclaim, "The Horror! The Horror!" Marlow brought that insight back to civilization but could not tell the truth about it.

Wilson has sufficient faith in his fellow man to tell the truth about what he saw in that Amazon Basin. "If there is danger in the human trajectory," he writes, "it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations."

From what Wilson tells us it is clear that we need not necessarily be doomed. The order and the mystery of our survival are there in those diverse organisms he studies-what Wilson refers to as the plants and bugs. We are destroying them and ourselves, perhaps through careless disregard. Once we see our place alongside the other organisms, he thinks, we will be able to "acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built."

I wish Wilson had said more about that preferred direction, but I think I get his point. What he has in mind is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but rather the application of knowledge for the sake of our survival, and the world's. The tricky part has to do with that "enduring ethic" Wilson mentions almost in passing-the saving idea that will restrain us and give us life.

Until we can draw comfort and pleasure and direction from that paradox of organic evolution, we may be destined only to catch fleeting glimpses of beauty as the world we should be saving disintegrates before our very eyes. For want of cooperation, and community, and a restraining idea-life as we know it may come to an end. And in the end, we'll all be there together, finally.

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