More Wisdom, Less Harm A Commencement Address to the Class of 2018
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| Cartoon courtesy Tom Toro: | http://tomtoro.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1-tom-toro-yes-the-planet-got-destroyed-but-for-a-beautiful-moment-in-time-we-created-a-lot-of-value-for-sh1.jpg |
Good afternoon students, parents, staff, teachers, guests,
and of course the amazing class of 2018, arrayed before us here today.
Congratulations to you for completing this stage in your lives and your
education. Each of you is outstanding in your own right, but I want to commend
you as a group. I have watched you throw yourselves, headlong, into every task,
be it class discussions, presentations, Socratic seminars, group essays, skits,
school plays, choir—anything really. Even if you were exhausted, depleted,
overworked, flu-ridden, or otherwise indisposed, you embraced your work with
determination and, well, gusto. Therefore,
I’d like to thank you for working with me, and with all of us, day in and day
out. You brought academic curiosity and a willingness to hone your critical
skills to the classroom with you, and there’s little more a teacher can ask
from a group of students than that. Thank you.
Because I am so very fond of this class, I can’t stand up
here and lie to them about their futures. I can’t pretend that this is just
another group of young people, one link in a shining chain adjoined to the
anchor of history that we are lowering into the depths of the world to do the
kinds of things that people have always done when they reach adulthood. There
is a difference now. There is a whole herd of elephants in this room that I’m
not supposed to mention—for we live in a civilization that is in severe decline,
though we rarely consider this truth. No one person caused it; no one person
can fix it.
Since you are entering a future that is deteriorating
ecologically, economically, and ethically, the most important thing for you to
remember as you enter the world is to be a person of integrity and to strive to
do no harm. This may seem like a platitude, but our current way of doing just
about everything has degraded our world, so every path you choose can feed more
harm into the system. Your career and life choices are vitally important if we are
to change course, and changing course means working against every day systems.
In short, being a person of integrity and striving to do no harm are radical
acts.
These seniors know the truth about the kind of times they
are headed for. We have spoken of it now and again. In their junior year, they
studied a work by Calvino in my class entitled Invisible Cities. In it, the famed explorer, Marco Polo, describes
to Kublai Khan the many cities in the Khan’s crumbling empire. Mostly, the
cities are complete fabrications, but the Khan listens anyway, as Polo recounts
each one. Calvino writes:
Now I will tell how Octavia, the
spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the
city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and
catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in
the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for
hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can
glimpse the chasm’s bed.
This is the foundation of the city:
a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising
up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes
hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on
strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable
cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.
Suspended over the abyss, the life
of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They
know the net will last only so long (75).
The class of 2018 knows they live in Octavia, a place that
will surely fall, probably in their lifetimes, resulting in displacement,
economic insecurity, and the beginning of unknown times.
That’s the first stretch of the road to being an ethical
person: recognize the truth that is all around you. To do otherwise, to turn
away or distract yourself, is just stumbling down the path of ignorance and narcissism.
It isn’t easy to accept or even see the truth. Knowing and speaking truth is a
form of defiance. In George Orwell’s novel 1984,
Winston, the protagonist, discovered this when O’Brien interrogated him in
the Ministry of Love. O’Brien kept asking him to acknowledge that the four
fingers he was holding up added up to five. Winston speaks first:
“How can I help seeing what is in
front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston…. Sometimes
they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at
once. You must try harder. It is not
easy to become sane” (250-251).
This passage shows what it’s like to challenge the culture,
to try to learn the truth. There will be push-back, and you will be
gas-lighted, that is, made to feel like you are the crazy one or the one
without reason or authority. It also shows how human beings tend to view the
world: we will deny what is clearly true in order to maintain a condition that
serves power.
We have created ecological and social decay because our
civilization was built on the unstable foundation of fossil fuel consumption, exploitation,
endless growth, short-term profits, and rugged individualism. Moving forward in
this type of world is disheartening for ethical people, not to mention
confusing. If we want to live with integrity, what are we supposed to do?
Obviously, going forth into the world as most people before you have done,
pursuing careers that make you great sums of money, can’t be all there is to
existing anymore. That’s how we got into this mess.
Perhaps a place to start is to stop valuing the things that
have contributed to our society’s turmoil. Why not begin with the way we
congratulate ourselves and others for their abilities? We value intelligence to
a lopsided extent. “Oh, she’s such a smart student; she’ll go to Harvard some
day.”
I would feel prouder if someone called me wise. If we are to
lighten the effects of our uncertain future, shouldn’t we be speaking and
acting in ways that reflect a wise outlook rather than a smart one? Smartness
is one’s ability to exploit opportunity. Wisdom is the holistic view that is
the basis of so many indigenous cultures; wisdom values all people, not just
the individual; wisdom considers the preservation of the environment to be more
important than preserving profits for a few.
In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck would
call this kind of shift in thinking a seed for revolution by moving from “I” to
“We.” Steinbeck, here, addresses rich owners as if to warn them. Quote:
…This is the zygote. For here “I
lost my land” is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the
thing you hate—“We lost our land.”
The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And
from this first “we” there grows a still more dangerous thing: “I have a little
food” plus “I have none.” If from this problem the sum is “We have a little
food,” the thing is on its way, the movement has direction…. If you who own the
things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If
you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx,
Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you
cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts
you off forever from the “we” (151-152).
One of the pitfalls in our culture that keeps us in an “I”
mindset, instead of the “we,” is the need for external validation. If you’ve ever caught yourself saying “I want
to be rich and famous” or “I have to be the best—otherwise, what’s the point?”
then you may be trapped in the pit of external validation. If you pursue a
discipline, be it history or chemistry, visual arts, what have you, make sure
it is because you have a passion for that discipline, not a desire for the
rewards that might come with it. The “I” culture of smartness over wisdom tells
us that we are nothing unless we are celebrated or have at least 20,000 followers
on Instagram. Those kinds of rewards may seem to assuage your insecurity, but
they are hollow achievements. If you live ethically by wanting to make things
better for everyone, not just yourself, you know you are living a life of
integrity, and that, not praise from outside yourself, will validate your
existence.
Thoreau believed human beings could pull themselves out of
the stupor of blindly following selfish pursuits that separate people. He
believed that all we needed was a jolt, some kind of catalyst to start us down
the path of wisdom. In one of the earlier chapters in Walden, Thoreau notices a snake in a torpid state, presumably
coming out of winter hibernation. Quote:
It appeared to me that for a like
reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they
should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of
necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life (26).
What better condition for the “spring of springs” is there
if not the deterioration of our civilization to bring about a shift from
smartness to wisdom, from “I” to “We”?
Part of living with integrity is to strive to do no further
harm. To accomplish that, we must reduce consumerism, with all its resource
inputs and waste. Choose careers that tread lightly upon the Earth. If
engineering, then design only sustainable creations. If you start a company that
makes products, be sure the product is a necessity, and if it is, be
responsible for it throughout its lifespan. How can your profession do no harm
upon this ailing planet? This is a radical idea because it is a radical change.
My favorite one-paneled cartoon depicts a man sitting on the
ground in front of a campfire, wearing a tattered business suit. He is speaking
to a group of three dirty children seated opposite, the faint jagged teeth of a
ruined metropolis looming in the background. In the caption, the man says to
the children:
Yes, the world was destroyed—but
for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for share holders (Tom
Toro).
That cartoon haunts me. It reveals our unspoken attitudes
behind nearly all our actions: profit over people; profit over planet. It is so
easy to put on that business suit and just churn out bucks for share holders. Your
work will be what you do for the majority of your life, and it contributes to
either the well-being or the further deterioration of our society. There are
ethical implications in the work you do.
Your job or the company you work for contributes directly or indirectly to
the socio-economic and environmental problems in our world – for good or for
ill.
It isn’t always easy to identify the harm our work causes,
however. In Orwell’s 1984, we, as
readers, with the advantage of living outside Orwell’s world, can not only see
the harms of Winston’s work, but we can observe the way in which his career is so
compartmentalized in his mind that the harm he causes is completely invisible
to him. Orwell writes:
Winston’s greatest pleasure in life
was in his work. Most of it was tedious routine, but included in it there were
also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in
the depths of a mathematical problem—delicate pieces of forgery in which you
had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and
your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say (43).
The “forgery” that Winston performed was to change history
for the sake of The Party by dropping all evidence of the past down a memory
hole, where is was incinerated, and replacing it with creative lies that were
more palatable to his masters.
Like Winston, we use our intelligence to great effect in our
workplaces, and we “created a lot of value for shareholders,” but as we do so, our
wisdom lies dormant, less than an afterthought—for isn’t it true that today we
often see wisdom as an embarrassment? How could we carry on with our lives if
we were to question the morality of our daily routines?
To help avoid the truth of what we do, we change the words
that refer to it. Here is where Newspeak comes in handy. Newspeak is the
language in 1984 whose purpose is to restrict
dissent by restricting the vocabulary of dissent. Orwell writes:
…the process will continue long
after you and I are dead. Every year, fewer and fewer words, and the range of
consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason
for committing thought-crime (52).
Of course, the thought-crime in our society would be to
consider questioning a way of life that we know will, one day not so far from
now, end that way of life. This is because our ability to tell truths to one
another, which is necessary for dissent, is not only muted, but is no longer in
our lexicon. It is Orwell’s Newspeak, but instead of it being forced upon us,
we have been invited through consumerist enticements, and as we immerse
ourselves into these diversions, we lose the capacity to discuss the herd of
elephants in every room. If we create a language that cannot question our
materialism or narcissism, leading to inequality, poverty, injustice, and
environmental degradation, then we never have to question our complicity in the
decay of our civilization.
It reminds me of the Demotivator
poster that depicts a placid lake with one beautiful drop of water splashing
into it. The caption reads:
No single raindrop believes it is to
blame for the flood (despair.com).
Part of our language deficit is caused by how we argue, or
fail to argue, in contemporary society. As David Foster Wallace put it in his
essay “Authority and American Usage,” another work read by this class, quote:
…we live in an era of terrible
preoccupation with presentation and interpretation…. In rhetorical terms, certain
long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal, Logical Appeal (= an
argument’s plausibility or soundness, from logos),
and Pathetic Appeal (= an argument’s emotion impact, from pathos) have now pretty much collapsed—or rather the different
sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make
it nearly impossible to advance an argument on “reason” alone (116).
When confronting the truth, it is now necessary to couch it
in such a palatable way, that the truth becomes less important than how it is
delivered. Our consumer culture has run with this insistence, creating all
sorts of venues through which to “acceptably” communicate. Our preoccupation
with the online world results in an attenuation of discontent, which is
emotionally satisfying, but removes us from reacting to real concerns unless it
is through unreal means. In other words, we have willfully muted ourselves, and
it is by design, so we will continue consuming and not question or think critically
or take brave action.
To move beyond our failed paradigms, you will have to accept
that the world is an absurd place, and that you have a choice about how you
create meaning within it. You can legally do a lot of harm to people and the
environment through every day living. Recognize the harm and veer away from
creating it, regardless of what others choose.
The reality of the future doesn’t have to depress you just
because it will be hard. The decline is going to happen—it’s happening now. You
don’t have to pretend two and two is five or avoid the inevitable through
distraction or manipulation of the truth or old broken paradigms. The way you live through the turbulence can
be faced if you act with integrity, if you employ wisdom, if you move from “I”
to “We.” These are radical acts because they defy the present course of our
society.
This group of young people before us will have to navigate
this new world. It’s going to be arduous, but I have watched them throw
themselves, headlong, into every task with determination and gusto, so I, for one, know they are brave
enough, ethical enough, and wise enough for the challenge.
So, to the courageous class of 2018: stay strong, choose
with wisdom, and be radical!
Works Cited
Calvino, Italo. William Weaver, translator. Invisible Cities. Harcourt, 1974.
Orwell, George. 1984.
Signet Classics: Penguin, 1950.
Steinbeck, John. The
Grapes of Wrath. Penguin 1939.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.
Dover, 1995.
Toro, Tom. http://tomtoro.com/cartoons/#jp-carousel-135
Despair.com. https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility
Wallace, David Foster. “Authority and American Usage.” Consider the Lobster and other Essays. Back
Bay Books, 2006.
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