Commencement Address | 2020
Welcome parents and students, faculty and staff, friends, neighbors, and all others who are joining us today to celebrate the achievements of these students.
An apocryphal story has it that an ancient Chinese curse was expressed by the words: “May you live in interesting times.” The thought being, better to live in uninteresting tranquility than interesting chaos. In the 1930s when this became a popular sentiment, the world stood on the brink of something so immense that it would bring nations to their knees and ultimately consume the lives of millions. Frederic René Coudert wrote to a friend in 1936 that, “Surely, no age has been more fraught with insecurity than our own present time."
Instead of fascism and totalitarianism and the Holocaust, our world is being altered by a disease of which we have little definite knowledge, few effectual treatments, and no cure. At the present time, it is believed to have taken the lives of some 85,000 people in this country. Arguably, no one was well prepared for the magnitude of this challenge, just as our forebears were not prepared for the challenges of their own times. We were hardly prepared to engage the most powerful military in the world in 1776, we were naively unprepared for the horrors of a civil war in 1861, we were ill equipped to go to war in Europe in 1914, and Herculean efforts had to be undertaken to make us prepared to enter the Second World War in 1941.
It is possible for one to say that a disease is different than a war, and it is. But, smallpox in the 1600s, yellow fever in the late eighteenth century, three waves of cholera in the nineteenth century, multiple waves of scarlet fever that predominantly affected children, typhoid, for which a vaccine remained unavailable until 1914, the Spanish flu that took the lives of 675,000 Americans in 1918 and the Asian flu that followed it in 1957 that took 70,000 more lives; diphtheria in the 1920s, polio for much of the first part of the twentieth century, periodic outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and HIV/AIDS that has killed nearly 1.2 million people since the early 1980s. We are no strangers to disease. We have faced down grimmer challenges than COVID-19, and it is likely that the future will greet us with still greater challenges and crueler heartbreaks. To be alive means to be caught up in a contest for survival.
Each year, thousands of speeches are given about how graduates will meet the challenges of the world. One of two things can be meant by this. First, how individuals will make their way through college and find their way into the workforce. How they will earn an income, find their way into a marriage, raise children, own a home, and in general, what they will do with themselves. Second, we mean to ask how they will improve the world. Will they develop the next vaccine, or find their way into space, or do something especially grand? To twist Dickens’ words from David Copperfield a bit, will they be the hero of their own story or the hero of our collective story?
When I consider these seniors, and all of the things I have seen and heard from them over the past several years, I believe that there is good cause for hope on both of these important fronts. By this, I mean that I expect they will develop themselves and be a positive force upon the world. Saying this though is facile: what evidence is there for such a belief?
It would be easy, and it would be wrong for Ridgeview to claim too much responsibility for the success of our seniors. It would be false for us to assume that we alone forged their character. It would be foolish of us to assume that what they will do in life is a product of our making. If we are lucky, we have influenced their lives, we have helped to shape their characters, we have shared in their successes. The wonderful thing about an individual is that he draws from many sources and contains within himself a great deal of tension. If he is intelligent and thoughtful, he is torn between many kinds of success, he develops his quiddities in emulation of people living, dead, and fictitious. An individual may have his character shaped by his education, but the source of his personality is a synthesis of so many things that it is more often a mystery. An individual is such a combination of influences, random and intentional, conscious and subconscious, so complex in their potentiality, and so full of curiosities that each person is a kaleidoscopic wonder.
Pondering the wonder of each these students has been one of the most gratifying experiences of my career at Ridgeview. The philosopher Alain de Botton contended once that human beings are not born; they are brought into being through education. On a biological level, this is obviously not true, but when we say ‘human being’ or to be ‘fully human’ we do not intend a definition that is limited to our biological existence. We regard ourselves as something more and given some of the challenges I have mentioned already, to say nothing of the more quotidian ones that we deal with even in the best of times, it bears mentioning that we ought to be as prepared as we can be.
Of the many remarkable ways in which these students are prepared, one is their extraordinary politeness. Politeness may not seem extraordinary or worthy of mention in a commencement address as one of the essential qualities that will be needed in facing the kinds of crises I have previously mentioned, but it is notable for several reasons. Firstly, most people their age are impolite; in fact, it is arguable whether they are even aware of what politeness is or what it demands. For them to say hello when they enter a room, to say thank you or goodbye on leaving, to write e-mails thanking their teachers for the good they have brought to their lives, these are actions that set them apart from many of their peers. Secondly, politeness may be pretense, but it is, as one philosopher has written, that without “this make-believe, this transmission of morals and the development of a moral sense within each of us, virtue would not be possible. ‘States of character arise out of like activities’, says Aristotle. Politeness is that pretense, or semblance, of virtue from which the virtues arise.” It is easy enough to be polite when the world is at ease; it is harder in an anxious age. Living now in the latter, the only people who will preserve their humanity, their convictions, their pursuit of virtue are those already habituated to developing and esteeming those qualities. Such is the condition of our senior class, and consequently they are better prepared to face down the peculiar challenges of their time.
In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address in which he famously said, “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” On March 9th of this year, I wrote in a Principal’s Perspective that, “There is almost nothing that unsettles the mind quite so badly as disease. We can generally imagine ways in which to defend ourselves against any number of enemies, but the invisibility of a bacteria, virus, or prion combined with the sense that merely going about our day-to-day lives invariably puts us at risk of contracting something from which we might not recover, can nearly undo us.” The fear now is real, and of the virtues that our students have become habituated to, it is courage and wisdom that must confront it.
“Bravery,” contended one philosopher, “is to face danger unflinchingly.” Another countered, “to face danger, yes, but despite flinching.” It would be reckless and imprudent and intemperate to face danger without considering the consequences, but courage is doing so whilst consciously aware of the potential costs. Courage, universally admired, is “the capacity to overcome fear,” and is “always valued more than cowardice or faintheartedness, which succumb to it.” We sometimes erroneously imagine courage to be limited to battlefield heroisms, but the triumphs of moral courage are oftentimes the more lasting and influential. When we consider those who, believing that their rights were theirs at birth and deniable by no man or government, stood up in defense, and sometimes gave their lives so that others’ rights and lives could be preserved, we comprehend the magnitude and importance of moral courage. When we read, “We pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” we should recall the potency of moral courage. When we recall Patrick Henry demanding, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” we should be inspired by the poignancy of moral courage. When we consider the accomplishments of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we ought to realize that we do not need a bellicose conflagration in order to exhibit this most necessary of virtues. But, without wisdom, born of knowledge and comingled with experience and suffering, courage might still bring us to ignominious ends. Courage, being esteemed by wise men and scoundrels alike, cannot make bad acts, courageously done, good. Courage, in order to be a virtue, requires the assistance of other virtues.
Our seniors, in presenting their senior theses this year, spoke eloquently and persuasively about the necessariness of friendship, love, gratitude, charity, and God. They have not only written and spoken about these things, I have watched them in and out of class live them. That is one of the highest aspirations of this kind of education, that the reading of important works and the discussions that ensue will be so thoroughgoing that they will stain a person’s whole character with their color. Their influence does not wane the moment a class ends or when a student departs campus, even if for the last time as they graduate. It gives me great confidence to believe that their courage, and principally their moral courage, will be tempered and informed by their compassion and their love and their perseverance and determination no less than by the wisdom they have now in nascent form.
Seneca, writing on wisdom, posited that,
Those things on which philosophy has set its seal are beyond the reach of injury; no age will discard them or lessen their force, each succeeding century will add somewhat to the respect in which they are held; for we look upon what is near us with jealous eyes, but we admire what is further off with less prejudice. The wise man’s life, therefore, includes much; he is not hedged in by the same limits which confine others; he alone is exempt from the laws by which mankind is governed; all ages serve him like a god. If any time be past he recalls it by his memory, if it be present he uses it, if it be future he anticipates it; his life is a long one because he concentrates all times into it.
This, I hope, is one of the inheritances we have bestowed: a long life that is full because it is not one that has been hedged in; one in which life is long because so many experiences are concentrated into it. If you reflect on this in your actions, I believe that the courage you possess will serve you well.
Of course, something else must inform the treasury of wisdom and ensure that it does not grow callous or cold, but you have given us all an assurance that it will not develop in this way. Despite your ambitions, and in some cases your admirable competitiveness, you have nevertheless preserved an appreciation for compassion. And, not only an appreciation, but an exhibition. Compassion, as Immanuel Kant contended, cannot be a duty. It is something we either do or do not feel. If it cannot be a duty, it is nevertheless something Kant asserts that education can awaken in us the ability to feel. Compassion is both a feeling and a virtue; a kind of emotional excellence, and without it, the experiences and knowledge that make up wisdom would be incomplete.
What I and others heard in these theses gives us, as I have said before, cause to hope that you will meet the challenges before you with not only the bare facts, but their meaning for human beings in the stupendous ways in which they encounter the world, and in their associations with one another, and that you can and will be called, by compassion and wisdom and courage to something higher than mere self-service.
What will or ought to call you? My hope, which I reckon I share with many others, is that this will be that quality that so many of you so ably described, and that is love. Not, I almost needn’t note, love of money or fame or notoriety. Love, instead, of one’s neighbor as one’s self. In order for this to animate us, we cannot come to love and find it ridiculous, or to think it incompatible with reason. We must love love as redundant or pretentious as that might sound. As the philosopher André Comte-Sponville has written, “Without this love of love we are lost, and therein perhaps lies the true definition of hell, by which I mean damnation or perdition in the here and now. We must either love love or love nothing, love love or be lost. Constraint, morality, ethics—how could they be, what would they be, if we did not love love? Without love, which of our virtues would remain? And what good would they be if we did not love them?”
The seniors I have advised have often asked me what I might write were I to write a senior thesis. The truth is, I have often thought of these commencement addresses as such as an exercise—one touchingly informed by what I have learned during my time with them. The lesson this year is that we are living through a season of fear that requires our courage, and that that courage must be not only of a moral variety, but one informed by wisdom, tempered by compassion, and driven by love. To put this another way, the good life, I believe, will be achieved by you behaving in this way.
In doing this, you will make practical successes of yourselves, but this is almost incidental to the more important ways in which you will live full lives. That you develop all of your potentialities and talents is more important than what you do to earn an income. Be more than what you do. In so doing, you will contribute to the greater good, the collective good, whether you intend to or not. As I noted in an earlier essay, the betterment you bring to the world and your fellow man need not be thought of in terms so grandiose that the whole project is rendered unachievable. Small acts of kindness are wholly welcome. A good will is imperative. Good cheer cheers all. Justice may be hard won, but be a happy warrior. Such acts, though they be atomistic contributions to the greater good, matter tremendously—not only to the world, but to our own self-perception. No defeat stings so badly as the conclusion that we have failed to live up to our own ideals, our own estimation of ourselves; or worse, that we have none to live up to. Do not forget what you have been given here. Do not forget what you have achieved. Do not forget your youthful optimism about what can be.
These are, unfortunately, interesting times. It is regrettable that I am standing in my living room rather than on the stage at Griffin Hall. It is regrettable than I will not be shaking your hands today and conferring your diplomas. There is, frankly, too much that is regrettable to list out, but despite these regrets and the circumstances within which we must make do as best we can, I am tremendously proud of the way you have accorded yourselves these past two months. My being proud may mean little to you, but the reasons I am proud of you will serve you well throughout your lives. For all of the reasons I have discussed, I am confident that you will each live good lives, and I happily congratulate the Class of 2020.
Congratulations!
D. Anderson
Principal
