Last Collection
Speech
Spring 2002
When I was asked to give the talk this year, I grumbled that this was a burden,
that I didn’t know what I could possibly say that hadn’t been said
thousands of times before.
But in truth—and I’m sure this is no surprise to anyone who has sat
in one of my classes or sat with me in a meeting and heard me say for the thousandth
time, “Well, I do have an opinion about that topic”-- there was a
part of me that was rubbing its hands in glee thinking about the opportunity
to sound off in front of a large audience. So I started drawing up a list of
things that I’d like to talk about. Let’s just say that it started
with Afghanistan and ended with Zimbabwe and there was enough in between that
Fidel Castro would have been seen as a master of brevity by the time I was finished
So I cut everything in between the beginning and the end, which left Afghanistan
and Zimbabwe.
What lies in between Afghanistan and Zimbabwe is the main piece of advice that
I have for Swarthmore graduates (well, aside from telling you to think very
carefully before deciding to go to graduate school, but you can get that off
my web site) .
I know that unsolicited advice about your future is something that you just
can’t get enough of around graduation time, but I’ll try not to be
too annoying. Mostly I want to tell you this because I get endless cheap thrills
out of saying, “I told you so”.
This has been a hard year for all of us, and in the middle of your well-deserved
pleasure in your accomplishments I am sure some of you have been looking back
with sadness as well as joy. For me, the sadness of September 11th has been
tempered by raising my 16-month old daughter, and deepened by the unexpected
death of my father almost exactly a year ago today. Much of what I am going
to tell you now comes as much from my father as from me, from my contemplation
of his life and my own, of what he taught me and what I hope I taught him.
I think many Swarthmore students often try, immediately after graduating, to
accomplish a critical task at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong way.
I am not referring to your next jobs. Many of you will be doing jobs next year
that you will be underpaid in and overqualified for. Tough luck on that, but
it’ll get better eventually.
What I am thinking of is that many of you will try to do good and change the
world for the better. And I do not think that you should. I think that this
is exactly the wrong time for you to try and you will try to do it in exactly
the wrong way. In trying, you misunderstand what it is that you are best qualified
to do in the coming years, and you misunderstand exactly how it is that you
go about doing good in the world.
What did you learn at Swarthmore? Many of you acquired specific bodies of knowledge,
and all of you (I hope) acquired at least some of the art of knowledge. You
learned how to think, how to reason, how to adapt to changing circumstances
and requirements. Many of you also honed your own fierce desires to expose and
defeat injustice, or had those desires awoken within you. You acquired some
measure of what President Bloom calls “ethical intelligence”.
Keep those desires. Hone your ethical intelligence. But you are now about to
discover what it is that Swarthmore does not and cannot teach, and you will
need to have humility in the face of that.
You must remember that the faculty here relate to knowledge the same way that
a farmer relates to his animals. We domesticate it. You are now going into the
jungle, where knowledge roams wild and dangerous. Many of you will continue
to act as if you are down on the farm, and some of you will be sad or frightened
or shocked the day you discover that this is not so. Some of you will have the
courage or willpower to face that change. Some of you will turn away and walk
deeper into comforting delusions, or will defer a confrontation that every truly
intelligent and wise person must eventually go through.
I was an undergraduate at Wesleyan in the 1980s, and I think it is fair to say
that in terms of social conscience, in terms of the imperative to “do good”,
it is very similar to Swarthmore except with more drugs and fewer Quakers. I
left Wesleyan with the same hunger that many Swatties experience, the desire
to make the world a better place.
Not very long after that, I found myself doing research for my dissertation
in Zimbabwe, drawn there in part by my earlier involvement with the anti-apartheid
movement. I had scholarly reasons for being there, but much of what I said and
did and thought when I arrived was also governed always by the thought that
I was trying to change things for the better, to fix a world which seemed to
me to be evidently broken.
I started to feel the stirrings of discomfort with this commitment as the months
went by. On one occasion, I met another American scholar who had an even more
activist sensibility than myself, and he took me to a squatter camp that he
brought food to regularly. When we arrived, some members of the Rhema Church,
a local evangelical movement, were just leaving after having brought food themselves.
My colleague proceeded to yell at the headman of the camp for having allowed
the church into the camp, since they were in his eyes reactionaries. All I could
think as I sat over to the side listening to his harangue is that squatters
aren’t exactly in a position to refuse food, whatever the source, and that
perhaps my colleague’s ideological lessons were no more or less palatable
to them than the Rhema Church’s.
The longer I was in Zimbabwe, the more typical this colleague seemed to me.
Changing the world or doing good seemed for some reason to invariably be accompanied
by an invisible set of rules and directives to ignore some things and refuse
to see others. I was supposed to see the evident signs of the continuing power
of white Rhodesian settlers (and there were indeed plenty of those signs) but
I wasn’t supposed to see the massacre of Ndebele-speaking farmers by the
Zimbabwean government. I was supposed to see the injustices of capitalism (and
there were plenty of them) but I was not supposed to be alarmed by the epidemic
spread of the abuse of official power. I was supposed to see how bad things
had been before 1979, but not see how bad things were in 1990 or 2002—unless
I was always willing to say that how bad things were right now was a direct
consequence of how bad they had been 20 or 50 years ago (but never 200 years
ago: that was equally off-limits).
Last year, I heard from a Swarthmore alumnus who had gone off after graduation
to teach English in a developing society that I honestly think is one of the
worst places on Earth to live. He was terribly depressed because he’d had
to leave in a hurry, both because he felt completely helpless and psychologically
overwhelmed in the face of how truly bad the place was and because he’d
actually said a few things about local politics and been told that he was in
some danger as a result. But the thing he felt most burdened by was that he
felt that he couldn’t even admit to himself how horrible this society was,
that somehow to describe what he’d seen honestly and unsparingly was a
betrayal of his activist principles. I knew where he was coming from. I had
been there myself.
If you set out to change the world for the better a week, a month or a year
from now, with will and determination, with a sense of commitment and dedication,
you are like an agronomy student setting off to practice your best cow-milking
technique on a jaguar. It’s the wrong time, but more importantly, it’s
the wrong attitude. People whose only goal is a total, overall or general change
to the world for the better are people who end up disillusioned at best, and
at worst, become the tools of—or weapons of--more cynical and calculating
people.
What you are qualified to do tomorrow, or the next week, or the next year—not
just qualified, but superbly capable of doing—is bearing witness. You are
qualified to see the world as it is, to observe it meticulously, without blinders
or filters. You are qualified to tell the truth, with rigor and discipline.
This may come as some news to you, given how conflicted and ambivalent academics
have become about what constitutes truth, and for good reason. Truth is not
simple. It is not black and white. It is never predictable. Two people can witness
the world honestly and end up seeing something very different, and both visions
can be equally true. Truth is often a matter of perspective, and is often found
through insight, inspiration and creativity.
Truth is hard, not easy. You can see it, if you will only allow yourselves to.
That’s what critical thought does for you. That’s what ethical intelligence
really is.
Your job now is to open yourselves as fully as you can to the richness and mystery
of the human condition, to its irresolvable contradictions, to the dangers of
knowledge. Don’t look away because you’re not supposed to see something.
Don’t let anyone bully you out of being curious, or having a passion for
knowledge. Don’t ever convince yourself that you have an obligation to
lie, or to conceal the truth, to simplify things for reasons of political expediency.
My colleagues in southern African studies—and to my shame, myself for the
early part of my career—looked away from the truth of what was happening
in Zimbabwe after its independence in 1980. As a result, some of them are still
unable to speak with any ethical clarity or even empirical accuracy about the
contemporary situation, and my little corner of the profession has been diminished
as a result.
Too many scholars who study Zimbabwe don’t seem to know what virtually
all Zimbabweans know about the nature of the current crisis, and that is an
obscenity.
I think most fields in the humanities and social sciences have silences like
this, problems that have been quietly shelved, contradictions that have been
glibly resolved, complexities that have been simplified not for reasons of momentary
heuristic clarity but for reasons of dogma. There are scholars in our disciplines
who have been ostracized or attacked merely because they wrote about what some
consider an inconvenient or unimportant truth. We diminish ourselves when we
try to stage-manage knowledge, to make it be what we need.
Similarly, it is no secret around Swarthmore that I was disappointed by the
reaction of many academics to September 11th. I think many academics were too
attached to inflexible paradigms, both political and scholarly, and unable to
speak clearly and unambiguously about the wrongness of that day. We wanted too
much to quickly domesticate the event, to resolve away the painful mystery of
evil (even given all the descriptive shortcomings that the word 'evil' has)
in the world into banal, familiar and manageable propositions about history
and politics. Too many simply dusted off worn-out slogans and tired formulations
in the face of uncertainty and change.
Of course, this all applies with equal or even greater force to many of those
who have supported the ‘war on terrorism’, particularly to the propaganda
ministers of the Bush Administration. Everything I have said today applies with
equal force to conservatives as well as liberals, to reactionaries and radicals.
That is why it falls to you to bear witness, to be fiercely devoted to truth,
because so many who should do not, because so many who have a responsibility
to see the world in all its mysterious complexity so willfully and grotesquely
abrogate that responsibility. You must shoulder that burden because it is yours
to bear, and because if you do not, no one will.
A liberal arts education and its accompanying ethical intelligence should make
you a better citizen, a better member of a democratic public, whatever society
you are a part of. That is what you can do starting Monday morning—and
that is where doing good in the world really begins.
Of course I want you to do good, to not just be good but act with good intent
in the world. And of course I want you to change the world for the better. But
doing good, it seems to me, is frequently not a matter of commitment to causes
or fidelity to ideologies. It is usually a matter of small decencies and ordinary
kindnesses. It is harder in some ways day in and day out to be a good father,
a good friend, a good lover, a good teacher, a good colleague than it is to
minister to thousands of lepers or airlift food supplies to a famine-stricken
region.
If you look at the people who really have changed the world for the better—because
most injustice is systematic, and really does require systematic attention from
organized groups of people fighting for what’s right—you’ll see
that most of them didn’t set out in life with the activist’s version
of a “will to power”, determined above all things to change the world
for the better. Nelson Mandela just wanted to escape an arranged marriage and
live his life the way he wanted to. Gandhi just wanted to be a lawyer. If you
want to change the world, just wait. The opportunity will find you at the right
time, and when it does, your commitment to change will be organic, a part of
your life rather than something outside of it. It will arise from within the
conditions of your journey through the world rather than from hubris or fierce
neediness.
You cannot change the world unless you first learn to bear witness unsparingly
to all the horrible and beautiful things it contains. Keep a sense of wonder
alive, an open-minded appreciation for the unpredictable and unknown. That is
your first responsibility. Do this for yourself, and do it for us all. Good
luck to you.