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Baccalaureate
Address Summer
2002 We hoped and expected that our spectacular Tercentennial celebration last October would be the most memorable public event of your senior year. But by the time it occurred it had already been overshadowed by the events of September 11. The terrifying images of that morning will never leave us, but neither will the reaffirming image of our candlelight vigil that evening. Confronting shock, horror, and terrible uncertainty, we came together to affirm toleration in the face of hatred, humanity in the face of barbarism, civilization in the face of anarchy. Not quite nine months later, uncertainty remains, but toleration, humanity, and civilization endure. We admire the bravery of the public servants and private citizens who helped others to safety on September 11. We admire the courage of the passengers who overcame their captors on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. And we admire the devotion of the soldiers who have risked their lives in the war against terror. I think it entirely appropriate that as this year ends, we recall how it began, by remembering those who, wittingly or unwittingly, gave their lives in the cause of the freedom we enjoy. I would ask you to join me in a moment of silence.
How do we comprehend the meaning of September 11, for the nation, for the world, for our own lives? No doubt we will all wrestle with these questions for some time to come, for September 11 revealed that we have much to learn -- about the Islamic world, radical and moderate, about how America is perceived by others, about the conditions that give rise to extreme hatred and violence. My own strategy in seeking to understand something difficult and elusive is to read -- to read some things new but also many things familiar. To acquaint us with the new, we have been fortunate to have the intelligent commentary of Tom Friedman writing twice weekly in The New York Times, the Sunday night lecture series organized by John Gaddis and Cynthia Farrar, and the volume of thoughtful essays edited by Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda of our new Center for the Study of Globalization. But we need also to draw upon our own personal bibliographies for solace, insight, and inspiration. The way in which we gather together disparate texts is beautifully captured in the metaphor of a fan suggested by the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam. 1 Imagine that each fold of one's own fan represents a favorite work of literature, science, history, or philosophy. When we collapse the fan, we bring together works that are widely separated in time and space. We thus create a unity that is neither temporal nor geographical, but integral to our own individual construction of reality. No doubt each of you has such a fan, composed of texts that give meaning and definition to the reality you construct. As I reflect on September 11, I gather in certain folds of my own personal fan, some proximate, others very distant in time and space. Close together are some of my American icons -- Jefferson, Adams, and Whitman. But they juxtapose with a man of the Old World, who in his time saw the New World more clearly and comprehensively than any of its inhabitants -- Alexis de Tocqueville. He in turn is linked across time and space with a Latvian Jew who recreated himself as a British philosopher and historian of ideas -- Isaiah Berlin. Berlin's ideas connect to the work of my faculty colleague Maria Rosa Menocal, to Sigmund Freud, and then finally to the Talmud. Each of these folds in my personal fan, each of these chapters in my intellectual history, has helped me to understand something about September 11 and the world we inhabit in its aftermath. In Jefferson and Adams one finds a powerful sense of America's destiny, and by this I mean more than their prescient observation that the young nation would come to span the continent. Both also believed that the American example of commitment to personal freedom and democratic government would spread around the globe. In Jefferson's view, the extension of personal liberty and democratic institutions, along with the progress of science and scholarship, would foster continual improvement in the material and intellectual condition of humanity. And this progress was not to be deterred. In 1821, Jefferson wrote to Adams: ". even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. In short, the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776 have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism." 2 Walt Whitman, writing a half-century later, held the same vision of American leadership, even in the wake of a devastating civil war. By virtue of the rights asserted and protected by our founding documents and broadened by civil war, and by virtue of the development of a transcontinental railway and the invention of labor-saving machinery, Whitman believed that America had already established the political and material foundations for the unfettered realization of human potential. In the next stage of America's development, Whitman expected a full flowering of the human capacity for self-expression in a literary, artistic, and philosophical renaissance that would radiate from the New World to the Old. "America," he wrote, "filling the present with greatest deeds and problems, . counts . for her justification and success . almost entirely on the future. Nor is that hope unwarranted. Today, ahead, though dimly yet, we see, in vistas, a copious, sane, gigantic offspring. For our New World I consider far less important for what it has done, or what it is, than for results to come." 3 Despite the strong counterweight of isolationism, the idea that it is America's destiny to spread liberty and enlightenment throughout the world has had a powerful influence on American attitudes and behavior in the family of nations. Did not many of us recognize this Jeffersonian sentiment within ourselves in the aftermath of September 11: That it was our responsibility not simply to defend ourselves but to ensure that the entire world was safe from the disruptive forces of terrorism, safe for freedom and democratic self-determination? Indeed, might not the actions of the terrorists themselves be understood as a desperate response by those who perceived not only America's economic and military power, but also its materialism, its secularism, its popular culture, and its insistence on individual freedom and democracy as threatening a way of life based on deeply held and profoundly conservative religious beliefs. In his brilliant and still unrivaled analysis of America and its fate in the world, the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville recognized in the 1830s that the triumph of liberty was not inevitable, nor was the American version of democracy necessarily suitable for universal export. We should heed Tocqueville, for in my experience no one else comes close to matching his 165-year record as a long-term forecaster. He correctly foresaw the elimination of hereditary rank and class distinctions around the world. He explained why Russia and the United States would at a certain point become the world's dominant powers. And he noted that once distinctions of rank and social class had become attenuated, despotism was all the more to be feared because tyrants (think of Hitler and Stalin) would be capable of stripping their subjects of all vestiges of humanity in a manner previously unthinkable. And so what is Tocqueville's lesson for us, in the wake of September 11? It is that if personal freedoms and democratic institutions are to flourish around the world, their form must adapt to local conditions -- to the geography, history, culture, and traditions of other nations. If we are to champion the virtues of liberty and enlightenment around the globe, we will be more likely to succeed by recognizing and respecting cultural differences. This brings me to another fold in my personal fan -- to Isaiah Berlin, who, in contrast to Jefferson's faith in perfectibility, took as a favored quotation this line from Immanuel Kant: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever built." Berlin argues, contrary to Marx, that ideas have a powerful impact upon history, and that such ideas often involve the pursuit of some ideal future state of being -- a religious vision of paradise or a secular utopia such as Plato's republic, Marx's communism, or Hitler's reich. Inevitably, such visions of an ideal world come into conflict with an intractable reality, visions become dogmas, and visionaries become tyrants. The Taliban and the Al Qaeda provide us with examples of contemporary visions of perfectibility that have turned to hatred and violence. We must be wary that our American enthusiasm for institutions like our own does not lead us to mistreat those who fail to embrace them. Berlin gives us little solace other than to call for moderation; he urges us to take no single objective or doctrine as absolute, to balance competing claims, to live with ambiguity and make trade-offs. But in her brilliant new book, The Ornament of the World, Yale Professor Maria Menocal gives us hope by showing us the remarkable example of fruitful coexistence among Muslims, Christians, and Jews for seven centuries in medieval Spain. The period was not entirely peaceful and less than tolerant by modern standards, and for much of it either Muslims or Christians were politically dominant. Still, Professor Menocal describes a time and place in which separate scientific, philosophical, literary, and artistic cultures flourished both independently and interdependently. And, of course, medieval Spain is not the sole example of a society hospitable to widely diverse ethnic and religious groups. Though we are far from perfect, just look around this hall. Let me come back to where I started. We have much to learn about the forces that have turned many against us, and we must shed our insularity and seek to comprehend them. We need not abandon our Jeffersonian passion for extending freedom and democracy around the globe, but we should temper our enthusiasm by the recognition that not all peoples are alike, that differences should be respected, that we aren't always right, and that we have sometimes acted badly. It makes sense to recognize that some cultures do not share our conception of human rights and democratic processes, and we should tailor our expectations accordingly. But even toleration has its limits. It makes no sense to tolerate those who violently threaten our life and liberty. Sigmund Freud once defined the goal of psychoanalysis in this way: "Where id was, there ego shall be." 4 This is also the task of statecraft. In confronting the terrible violence of September 11, in confronting the irrational hatred of our nation that is all too manifest in some parts of the world, stern discipline has been and sometimes will be necessary. But we will ultimately prevail only through reasoned engagement. We must work to alleviate the objective conditions -- poverty, malnutrition, and disease -- that give rise to hatred. But we must also counter with fact and reason the hatred that is rooted in irrational fantasy, acknowledge differences that cannot be reconciled, and find a peaceful way to live with them. This is all very serious business, but, to keep it in perspective, we must remember that September 11 did not change everything. As you leave here you are entering a world in the midst of revolutionary transformations wrought by science and technology. We have in our grasp the capacity to alleviate poverty and malnutrition, to protect the planet from further degradation of its environment, to prolong human life and improve its quality. We have and will continue to develop the technology to accomplish these hitherto unimaginable goals; we need only the will. You have the opportunity to shape lives that produce both private happiness and public good. I know that you will rise to this challenge. Women and men of the Yale College Class of 2002: I congratulate you on your extraordinary accomplishment and wish you success in every endeavor. As you reflect on the world you are entering, after graduation, after September 11, I leave you with one more fold of my personal fan, the one I have tried to live by, from the section of the Talmud known as the Pirke Avot, the aphorism of Rabbi Tarphon: "You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it." We cannot
build a perfect world, but we must strive, you must strive -- in
your families and communities, in this nation and around the globe
-- to build a better one.
1. Mandelstam's metaphor is cited and developed by Wai Chee Dimock, "Literature for the Planet," PMLA, volume 116, number 1, January 2001, pp. 173-188. I thank Jane Levin for directing me to Professor Dimock's essay. 2. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, September 12, 1821, in Lester J. Cappon, ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1959, p. 575. 3. Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas," in Mark Van Doren, ed. The Portable Walt Whitman. New York: Viking Penguin, 1974, p. 317. 4. Sigmund Freud, "New Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis," in James Strachey, ed. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1966, Volume xxii, p. 80. |
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Yale
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