24th World Conf report.doc
Version date: Oct. 10, 2005
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ISGF 24
th
World Conference 2005
Conference Report
instincts were admirably clear. This man became close to 100 years old, and until his death
he would regularly come to the office and get to know everyone there. And while he was still
alive and everyone knew him, the partner told me, one of the most-used sentence whenever
one encountered moral challenges and problems would be: "What would he have done?"
This sentence, or its female equivalent "What would she have done?" contains so much
meaning! To have good examples to hold before one's eyes is one of the greatest strengths
a human being can have. This applies to you on two levels: First, internally, you need to
identify among yourselves and those who have gone before you good examples who can
show the way for ISGF's work. And second, externally, we need to think through how we
may be good and visible examples to the scouts and guides and potential scouts and
guides of the world. In other words, we have to both find and be good examples. This is
also closely connected to the question about how we can make sure that our ideas and
activities are noticed by those around us. And this leads us to our final point:
Imagination. In order to be noticed, in order to be seen, we have to think in new and fresh
ways. We have to be willing to listen to ideas that may at first seem strange and see whether
they may actually represent interesting new ways of doing things. There are dangers here as
well. Either we end up with something that's not constructive at all, or we end up with
something that takes way too many resources from other, more important work. Let us say
that someone suggests that the ISGF, every time it meets, should meet in the nude stark
naked with the chairman or -woman dancing, standing on his or her hands while singing
the Norwegian national anthem. Backwards ... Yes, it would be different and grab some
attention, but it would surely not be the attention we want, nor an attention that has anything
whatsoever to do with our aims and goals. In the world of advertising and marketing, or
tabloid newspapers, it sometimes seems that this is actually how one is thinking, with lightly
clad women tempting us to buy cars and soaps. But that's not for us! The point about
resources is also important, however: Yes, we need to think daringly and differently, but not
in ways that wear us out completely that take so much effort that we're left with no energy
for doing anything else.
One point, however, has to be added to "imagination": willingness to listen which we also
touched on earlier. We must try not to break each other off when someone suggests
something that's different or unusual. But there is also a duty incumbent on the one who tries
to think and speak differently: to do it with respect, and to really use one's best
communication skills, so that one's point comes across, and so that the message does not
get lost in mere noise.
One common theme of what I have said is the following: I have not just talked about what we
do, but equally much about who we are. This is what philosophers discuss under the heading
of virtues. And maybe the primary virtue for a good moral life, according to the old
philosophers, is good judgement or prudence. The aim of your work is to build character and
virtue, and to make sure we have young people who can build good societies, with friendship
between human beings and respect for nature and that great work of creation that God has
given to us. And that takes a lot of virtue and not least good and sound judgement. We
know that there have been people who were seemingly law-abiding citizens, who may even
have come across as true gentlemen, but who also have been able to commit terrible
atrocities just think of Adolf Eichmann or Albert Speer during the Second World War. They
were war criminals of the worst kind, but they never got their own hands really dirty, because
they managed to get other people to do the dirty work, while they could coldly or even
elegantly stand in the background and pull the strings of evil. They remind us that we need
young people of character people who have a solid sense of virtue and good judgement,
which will make it possible for them to think, to judge, and thus to withstand the pressures
and temptations which can make even seemingly upright people succumb to evil. Remember
the philosopher Hannah Arendt's judgement about Adolf Eichmann: Eichmann's problem
