Baccalaureate address
by Sam Williams
May 21, 2006
(Thank you, Robin—and thank you and Ari and many of you seated here today for what you have contributed to Colorado College during your years here.)
President Celeste, Dean Ashley, members of the Board of Trustees, my esteemed colleagues, families and friends of the graduates, members of the class of 2006:
Having made the effort to be here, all of you are welcome to listen in on the remarks that follow, but it is specifically to the graduating class that I wish to speak.
As we gather today and again tomorrow, tradition invites us to take a cue from Janus, the double-faced Roman god of gates and doorways, and look back upon the past four years and ahead to what we expectantly call “the future.” These are days for celebration — celebration of your academic achievements, of course, but celebration as well of the rich friendships that you have made and the experiences that you have shared. I need not exhort you to celebrate. Somehow I sense that you know how to do that — and that you will! As most Baccalaureate speakers do, I will focus on the future.
Many years ago, I decided — against earlier inclinations — that I was not “cut out” to be a Southern Baptist preacher. I had not enough answers — and far too many questions. In the intervening years, the clear and assured answers have become fewer. The questions have continued to multiply. You could possibly have a similar experience.
To this ritual occasion, then, I bring some questions — a proper enough move for a professor, I think. After all, my colleagues and I have been asking you questions throughout 32 blocks! The questions will not cease when you leave this place; and if you are thoughtful and engaged, you will not try to avoid them — not if you choose to be learners all your days.
The ancient story that Robin read earlier is a cautionary tale, akin to other stories about over-reaching — stories like Pandora’s box or the misadventure of Eve and Adam with the serpent. It is a story about boundaries, boundaries ignored and overstepped.
In a wide variety of permutations, this theme of boundaries courses through the religious, moral, and political landscape of our cultural legacy. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, the boundaries set by God in Torah define the elect people and set them apart from the “nations.” Plato and philosophers who followed in his wake have sought to mark off the true from the false, the real from the unreal. In the post-Enlightenment West, a central question has been: What are the proper limits of the authority of the state and, conversely, the limits of the freedom and rights of the individual? Today some of my questions are about boundaries.
In the so-called “primeval history” of Genesis, the story about the tower of Babel marks the move to “civilization” and technological advancement, to life in cities, to projects requiring economic arrangements. In this story, writes one eminent biblical scholar, we can still feel traces of a primal awe regarding the colossal potentialities of humankind. Certainly this is a story about ambition: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” But you will have noticed the irony: These emigrants from the east wished to build a mighty tower to make a name for themselves so that they would not be scattered abroad, but their project unsettled the deity, whose domain the heavens are: “Nothing will now be impossible for them.” And so the Lord scattered the tower-builders abroad over the face of the whole earth.
Planning, innovating, constructing — those enterprising emigrants from the east sound suspiciously like us. In the old story we can see ourselves, us humans being human, using our imagination and creativity, devising technology, improving our lives, pursuing progress.
But what about boundaries? I don’t mean the boundaries set by legal and moral codes. Here I’m asking about the limits fixed by the natural order of which we humans are a part. Has our admirable Jeffersonian ideal gotten out of hand? Has the “pursuit of happiness” become the pursuit of pleasures dependent on increasing exploitation of natural resources, accelerated productivity in order to ensure economic growth, ad-stoked consumerism, and conspicuous consumption? Can we be sure that there are no limits to our projects of making our lives longer and more comfortable and convenient? Will the earth forever indulge us? Or is the planet already beginning to protest?
Your answer might depend on whom you listen to. Is Senator James Inhofe correct when he calls global warming a hoax perpetrated by environmentalists on the American public? A writer in Capitalism Magazine argues that jobs are created and human life is sustained — and made longer, healthier, and happier—by industrial development and technological progress. Who could disagree? When the Colorado temperature hits 94, I like an air-conditioned office. What would I do without my computer? Do I want to give up advances in medical technology as I face old age? But what about limits?
Some of our best scientists are telling us that limits there are. They hold that earth is at a tipping point. Some are saying that the actual dimensions of global warming — caused by greenhouse gases — are being masked by yet another phenomenon called “global dimming,” a reduction of the sunlight reaching the earth that is caused by particulate pollution. Now we humans are caught in this bind: reduce the particulates and increase global warming; or allow the particulate shield to continue and risk devastating drought and famine.
I read that in 2005 the Greenland ice sheet melted at more than twice the rate of 1996. Here’s one scientific prediction: If that melt rate continues and if West Antarctica undergoes a similar meltdown, rising sea levels will drown coastal civilizations around the world before your century is done. Alarmist? Perhaps. But, if creditable, can we expect God to rescue us? Or our modern god, technology? My question for you and your generation: Can we continue to afford the luxurious levels of consumption and convenience, ease and comfort, that we have become accustomed to? Our desires may be natural enough, but are our present ways of satisfying our desires consonant with the natural order of things? Perhaps your generation needs to rethink the very notion, the meta-narrative, some would say, of progress itself.
To nudge us out of our comfortable anthropocentric perspective, imagine with me a Congress of the Creatures, called together because of global warming and dimming, toxic rivers, vanishing coral reefs, shrinking habitats. If they had mind and voice, might the species of the earth issue charge like this: “You — you humans — have become the curse of the earth. Who do you think you are? What gives you the right of Olympian indifference to our plight, the mess you’ve made of things? Why can’t you understand that you, like us, are creatures of the earth, not gods?” A more capacious, planet’s-eye view would require a change of perspective hardly less momentous than the Copernican shift that removed us from the center of the cosmos, or the Darwinian shift that put us humans in our biological place. Here’s a prediction: Unless such a change does take place, those who follow us will one day be asking: How could you possibly have been so short-sighted, so preoccupied with lesser things?
So far I have asked questions about how we humans shall live on and with our planet. Another is how we can live with other people — and with other peoples. I take it as a given that if we wish to live, we must learn to live together, in ways that blunt the divisive effects of race and class and culture, of religion and ideology. So here’s another question: How can your generation help us to learn to regard difference not as threat but as a matter of absorbing interest, even a source of delight?
Most of us easily enough take delight in the near-infinite diversity of the natural world, the utter profusion of living species, of colors and shapes and configurations of all kinds. And we humans have, as it were, taken nature’s cue. Walk through any town or city, take down book after book from any library shelf, visit any museum, cruise the Internet, and think, just think, of the uncountable poems uttered, stories told, films made, songs and symphonies composed; treatises written and systems designed, paintings painted and sculptures carved, opinions voiced and arguments constructed; theories propounded; experiments conducted; edifices built. Profusion all over and all around, the profusion of human creativity.
But — and a very consequential “but” it is — many people get edgy and defensive when profusion invades the sanctum of beliefs and values. And understandably so. I take it as another given that we humans are meaning-making creatures. We seek and we create significance, and the values and convictions that we fashion or inherit shape us and provide the centers, shifting and swirling though they may be, out of which we live and act; so we cannot part with our deep commitments so easily as we might discard last year’s fad. Indeed, beliefs and values have for millions of our fellow humans been a matter — sometimes literally — of life or death.
Values and convictions necessarily entail distinctions and difference: this and not that. And, to revert to my earlier theme, such differentiating implies boundaries. Now, however, I’m thinking not of boundaries whose transgression might threaten disaster, but of boundaries that protect a dangerous insularity and foster hostility. Benign boundaries can provide a salutary sense of identity. But when demarcations become walls, when convictions petrify into unchallengeable certainties, when beliefs become unquestioned and unquestionable dogmas, when Absolute Truth ascends the throne and demands obeisance, the human cost can be high indeed. Religious and moral absolutism provides the security that many of us crave, but it also blocks the way to mutuality and cooperation. Too easily it whitewashes vexing problems; denies ambiguity, ignores complexity; and panders to fear. It blinds the mind to new and different possibilities. And when dogmatic certainty arms itself with missile planes and roadside bombs or resorts to slander and distortion, it becomes a lethal danger.
How, then, might you well-educated citizens respond to the dangers of absolutism? Adopt for yourselves and commend for others a gutless relativism so as not to add to the world’s strife? Stand for nothing as the only way of preserving civil peace? I should hope not. A human world without the zeal and zest of passionate convictions and energizing commitments would be as dreary as a natural world without the variety of shape or color. So here’s another question: How might you manage to be ardently committed to your own beliefs and values and yet be genuinely open to alternatives? How can you take a stand and yet hear, really hear, those whose projects you disapprove? And in the communities of which you will be a part, how can you encourage others to do the same? I hope you are more imaginative than I, but here are some possibilities to consider. Recognize the social constructs that trigger your reactions to those you think perverse. Strip off the labels. This “lesbian” is a person. So is that “red-neck,” that “liberal,” that “fundamentalist” — persons with their own hopes and hurts, akin to yours. Consider the possibility that their views and values have an internal coherence and validity as defensible as yours, that yours are no less shaped by life experience than theirs. Sit down with your enemy — no excuse that she is not present; you have your imagination. It is harder to demean and dismiss the other and his views when you allow him to get close enough to see his face. Suspect categories and conceptualizations. Stay close to the actual. And acknowledge clear-eyed the contingency, the conditionedness, of your own claims.
But my truth is not contingent, say many in our world. It is revealed from on high, and we have it here, contained in this holy book. But a holy book can speak for itself no more than could King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. It speaks only when persons interpret, and interpretation, quintessential human act that it is, takes place always from some location, some particular angle of vision, some merely partial perspective. And so we must not dispense with conversation — talking with the different ones, talking across walls and boundaries of every kind.
In your tumultuous day, does not the enterprise of living well and living together require the grace and skill of making our way in the absence of certainty? Try this oxymoron: provisional certainty, belief confident enough to act but open always to alteration, conviction grazed — and graced, and humanized — by the shadow of doubt.
Now I realize full well that some of you might feel unnerved less by the absolutist certainty claimed by some than by the specter of uncertainty. I’m thinking beyond the real but still manageable uncertainties of your personal futures — jobs, relationships, and such. I have in mind a pervasive intellectual-cultural uncertainty bequeathed to us by a company of thinkers from David Hume to Jacques Derrida. The last quarter of the 20th century, in particular, witnessed an emerging consensus across a number of disciplines regarding the impossibility of securing certainty by establishing indubitable first principles, principles that could ground all subsequent claims about truth and knowledge. From various angles, contemporary academic disciplines are calling into question the quest for essence, the referential power of language, the decidability of texts, the pretension of objectivity, the validity of sharp binary oppositions such as good/evil, nature/culture, male/female, body/mind; and, indeed, the very notions of free will and intentionality. Forget getting to “know yourself,” we are told; there is no substantive and enduring self to be known. Amidst such developments, it is hardly surprising that many in our society sense a shaking of the foundations. Perhaps you have not yourself felt the tremors, or perhaps if you have they give you no concern. But you live your lives in a popular culture pervaded and shaped by questions that earlier generations could not have imagined.
Nevertheless, it would be understandable if a different order of uncertainties were your most pressing concern: Iran; the dirty bomb in Manhattan; the pandemic caused by a not-yet-identified virus. You read the newspaper, you watch CNN: You can easily extend the list. I speak like a Cassandra only in order to set up this question: As you graduate, if you were to take a personal inventory, what would you discover your resources to be—I mean the resources required to make your way with some confidence and equanimity through an uncertain future? Your intelligence and imagination, certainly. The skills and habits of mind that you have developed here, I hope. An openness to awe and wonder, one could wish. The capacity to laugh and rejoice and savor the world and those you will love, if you are blessed.
What about hope? Even on those days that you will find it difficult to be optimistic, will you have reasons to hope? Is courage on your list? In his book “The Courage To Be,”the theologian Paul Tillich analyzed the existential courage able to confront the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, guilt and despair, death and non-being. Some have found a moving example of the courage-to-be in Dr. Rieux, the narrator in Camus’s novel, “The Plague.”We read that Dr. Rieux resolved to compile his chronicle in order to bear witness on behalf of the victims of the plague. But, Camus writes, “. . . he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts . . . [done] by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.” A quiet and simple courage would be something to celebrate.
And compassion? Not a pity that makes the do-gooder feel good by subtly depriving unfortunate persons of their worth, but a willingness to stand alongside and, if need be, suffer with, others in their distress, a distress that could well have been our own had life been tilted differently.
Whatever resources you can now claim or wish to acquire, is it likely that you will change the world? Probably not. Well, yes — of course. Probably not if your measure is having your accomplishments written up in the history books. But yes if . . . . Consider: There are on the order of 10 to the 15th synapses in the human brain — a staggering number. Ask yourself: Are there demonstrably fewer “synapses” in the networks of relationships across the human landscape — connections that no one can track or measure? Think chaos theory. You cannot ever possibly know the eventual consequences of a single word or act, to say nothing of a lifetime of engaged living.
A final word: The Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew tells a short parable, a one-liner, about engaged living, about seeking, about searching. He likens the kingdom of God to a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, when he finds one pearl of great value, sells all he has to buy it. Here’s a gloss:
In search of fine pearls
most of us crack open many easy, accidental shells
but find there few smooth-rounded things
of lasting joy and beauty.
Even so,
surrounded by this safer breed,
there breathe among us yet those few
who, discontent with this, our dry and dusty world,
still plunge themselves into our cold-now birthing sea
searching for
the costly thing
hard
with quiet
and unobtrusive
luster.
Graduates of the class of 2006: May you dive deep waters and be searchers all your days! Along the way may you discover much that will energize and captivate you. May you keep on asking big questions whose answers will have no final, certain resting place. And tomorrow, as you leave this campus and this special community, go with the assurance that we who have been your teachers and your friends are grateful that you were here — and that we wish you every good thing.