Summer 2002
“Contrived Adversity”
The Baccalaureate Address of John Silber, Chancellor
of Boston University, May 17, 2002
Today, you experience joy in the completion of
a rigorous course of study, for which The George Washington University
is well known and highly regarded. At the same time you may experience
sadness at the parting from classmates and faculty friends, and from
the habits of life in pleasant and memorable surroundings. You may be
inclined to agree with the Duke of Wellington, who said on the battlefield
at Waterloo, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy
as a battle won.”
You have won your battle with the demanding curriculum of a great university,
but there is nonetheless that melancholy associated with a farewell
not only to friends and places dear to you, but a farewell to late adolescence
— a parting that may be sweet sorrow for you, but is probably a
moment of joy and relief for your parents.
You now begin your entry into the world of business, professional school,
or graduate school. You do not leave GW to enter the “real world,”
for the world of activities and ideas in which you have lived and worked
here is as real as any you will ever experience.
The courses you have mastered and the demanding extracurricular activities
you have tested yourself against have prepared you well to succeed in
the larger real world with persons who are presently strangers. You
graduate with confidence and with courage in the belief that you are
ready for the less sheltered and still more rigorous tests that lie
before you.
You will be tested by graduate or professional school, by work, and
by life far more severely than you have been tested at GW, and after
the last class you will be without teachers or parents at your side
to see you through each crisis. You will be increasingly on your own,
and it will be up to you to make choices from which your future achievements
and disappointments will follow.
Sometimes you will confront choices you would far rather avoid. You
will inevitably confront the presence in your life of moira, a Greek
word usually, but inadequately, translated as fate. Moira refers to
the hand you are dealt in life. Up until now, you have been dealt winning
hands: all of you have been given minds far above average. I need not
remind you that not you but moira chose your parents, who passed on
their genes to you with all the native abilities they carried. The moira
of this graduating class also entails the habits your parents and professors
have encouraged in you through their demanding expectations. In sum,
you are highly privileged and thus far have been dealt wonderful hands.
Moira has been more than kind.
Most of you know little of sickness, hardship, and loss. But no one
lives to comb gray hair without being yoked with necessities imposed
by unsolicited and unwanted choices.
Suppose you are driving at a modest speed when a child suddenly darts
in front of you and you cannot stop in time. Moira: your innocence compromised
through no fault of your own. Or, like the Great Santini, you are flying
a plane that has lost power and your choice is to bail out over a heavily
populated area, endangering the lives of many innocent people, or to
stay with the plane and guide it to your death in an uninhabited spot.
You don’t choose the alternatives, but you must choose among them.
Let your imagination run and you will quickly conjure up hundreds of
ways in which your best laid schemes can “gang aft a-gley.”
Like Robert Louis Stevenson, you may find yourself struck down by a
fatal disease. Will you follow his injunction: “Even if the doctor
does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one
brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week?” Or will
you wallow in self-pity and bitterness at the termination of your unpaid
lease on life under the mistaken notion that you have been robbed of
a freehold?
When I was a graduate student at Yale, I tried to sell handbags wholesale
in New York. One evening after work, a friend took me to P.J. Clarke’s
for a drink with the celebrated author of the recently published best
seller “From Here to Eternity.” In the course of a lively
conversation, James Jones declared, “This country will never be
civilized until the last brave man is dead.” Frequently when teaching
philosophy, I have used his statement on the final exam and asked my
students to discuss it. Now I invite you to do the same without the
risk of being graded. Was Jones right? In order to save our civilization,
must we discourage courage until this quality, heretofore thought to
be a virtue, is extinct? Or was General MacArthur right when he said,
“Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die?”
Are Jones’s and MacArthur’s statements both right? Are both
wrong, or is only one right and the other wrong? If we assume that those
who are not afraid to die are brave, a reasonable assumption, then it
follows that only the brave are fit to live. From that we may conclude
that no one in Jones’s civilized country — sanitized by the
exclusion of all brave men and women — is fit to live. But if no
one in a civilized country is fit to live, what is the value of civilization?
Jones must have his turn. Jones claims that MacArthur and brave men
like him are precisely the problem. They are neither civilized nor fit
to live, for they are the cause of war, the destroyers of civilization.
But a civilized country is one in which individuals and institutions
are good and worthy of support and protection. A civilized country is
one for which free men and women live according to law and not license,
pursue knowledge in the sciences and humanities, practice or enjoy the
arts and worship or not in accordance with their beliefs. When these
precious institutions and individuals are threatened by an enemy who
can destroy them, all civilized citizens, according to Jones, are committed
— not to defend their country — but to collaborate passively
in the destruction of their country and themselves.
But how can a country be civilized if it is committed to permitting
the destruction of its civilization whenever it is attacked? Why would
we want to live in a civilized country if there is nothing in or about
that country worth protecting and, if necessary, worth dying for? Would
there be any reason for calling such a country civilized? If our country
and its people are worthy and worth dying for, then brave men and women
will always be needed.
My evening with James Jones reminded me of Stevenson’s observation
that “man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone but principally
by catch-words.” Jones delivered himself of a catchy phrase, which
appeared to have some initial plausibility. On examination, however,
it proved to be nonsensical.
Your professors have led you in one class after another to reflect on
what you read, to take arguments apart, to discriminate between what
is true and what is only titillating. I am sure they have tried in every
way they can to teach you to resist the blandishments of Circe, the
obsession with amusement that trashes our sensibilities in pursuit of
pleasure and excitement without regard to the quality or decency of
either, a presence that turns human beings to swine almost as easily
as Circe transformed the companions of Odysseus.
I trust you have been taught by faculty dedicated to the sound principles
outlined by George Steiner: “To quote accurately is to give thanks.
To refuse the cant of ‘political correctness’ is to try and
keep the language in its fixed and vital kinship with the truth. To
learn by heart is to buttress one’s very minor self against barbarism;
it is to give the masters an inward welcome and lodging.”
GW and its president have also avoided the pitfalls Steiner has cautioned
us against: “Those who would negotiate their moral and intellectual
passions are probably lost. Those who forget that ‘fashion is the
mother of death’ (Leopardi) are caught in self-betrayal. Those
who apologize where they should proclaim have cheapened their vocation.”
That is not the way of GW, and you are fortunate to have prevailed in
the University, mastered difficult material and had the guidance of
worthy mentors.
We cannot predict what lies ahead, but your education at GW has prepared
you for whatever moira you face. Although you are members of a generation
reared in luxury, which Juvenal cautioned “is more ruthless than
war,” by coming to GW, you have imposed on yourself the contrived
adversity of this demanding University, whose physical, intellectual,
and spiritual discipline has freed you from the demoralizing consequences
of luxury and left you strong, clear of mind, and prepared to face the
challenges and obligations that lie ahead with courage and joy that
accompanies those who live without fear.
I am confident, from what I know of your president, some of your colleagues,
and your curriculum that you graduate ready for the tests that lie before
you, and aware that the severity of those tests will offer you opportunities
for greatness in overcoming them.
Robert Louis Stevenson, because of his frail health, was acutely aware
of our mortality. “Old and young,” he wrote, “we are
all on our last cruise.” Since none of us know how long it will
last, we are reminded of the wisdom of Socrates and so many others who
observed that it is not the length but the quality of one’s life
that is important. Moira may well dictate the duration of your life
but each of you has the freedom within those fated limits to choose
wisely and well and to live nobly. GW has prepared you to do just that.
And we of an older generation invest our hopes for a better world in
you.
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
