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COMMENCEMENT 2007 |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Thursday, 31 May 2007 |
[This commencement address was originally published two
years ago. We will rerun it annually at college graduation time. Feel quite
free to send this to any recent college graduate you may know.]
Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents, Members of
the Faculty, Honored Graduates, Families and Friends:
It's funny that they call this ceremony a Commencement, for
you've all reached the finish line:
college, goodbye, we're outta here.
Yet of course, "commencement" means a beginning, not an end.
But one is supposed to at least start - commence - a talk
such as this by saying funny things. So
I'll start by talking about Clark Gable movies. If you've heard of Clark Gable at all, you know he was the
biggest movie star in Hollywood a long time ago. His most famous movie was of course Gone With The Wind.
He made a movie in 1955 called The Tall Men with Jane
Russell as his girlfriend and Robert Ryan as the heavy. It's a pretty ordinary Western flick with
outlaws and cowboys and Indians - and at the end, Ryan, the bad guy, and his
henchmen get the drop on Gable, the good guy, and all seems lost. Suddenly, surprise, Gable outfoxes Ryan and
triumphs. Gable makes his exit, and
after he does, Ryan delivers a line that I want you to never forget.
Serendipity is funny, a very funny thing, finding something
where you least expect it. Out of the
blue, out of a movie awash with pedestrian dialogue, comes a line so profound
it detonates inside your brain. Ryan turns to his men and says:
There goes the only man I ever respected. He's what every boy dreams he'll grow up to
be - and wishes he had been when he's an old man.
Tell me - do you think that's funny? I'll tell you - hearing those words will
make so many old men - and old women - cry.
We get only one shot at life. You grow up with dreams and ideals but the older you get the more
they slip through your fingers, and then you're old - it seems just the day
before yesterday when you were young - and you realize that soon it will be over,
over forever, and you look in the mirror and you think about the man or
woman you once dreamed you would be and you hear those words in some Clark
Gable western movie and... you cry.
You cry because it's too late and there is not one damned
thing you can do about it.
But that's not you.
You are not an old man or an old woman with old dreams that are now a
reproach. You are commencing your life,
not finishing it, and you have that chance, that opportunity that Heraclitus of
Ephesus pointed out two thousand six hundred years ago:
Character is destiny.
Character is destiny.
You, me, all of us, we human beings are not automatically provided with
meaning and significance for our lives. We have to provide it ourselves,
generate it for ourselves out of our individual character and soul.
This is what makes us different from other animals with whom
we have emerged from evolutionary history. No lion, sitting underneath an
acacia tree in the Serengeti, asks himself, "What does it mean to be a
lion? What is the purpose of my leonine existence?"
A lion has no choice but to unselfconsciously follow his
genetic program. But human beings have to figure out how and why to
survive, they have to choose a rationale that gives purpose and meaning
for their lives.
Our character is a matter of choice, our choice. The great gift of Providence to each of us
is that our souls are self-made. Our
destinies are what we choose them to be, because our characters are what we
make of them. Character is destiny.
This does not, most assuredly not, mean that you can be
anything you want. Most all of you
cannot be Olympic athletes or concert pianists or Nobel Laureates. But all of you, everyone of you, can create
a character of honor and integrity and lead a life of moral dignity, so that
when you look into that mirror so many years from now you will not feel
ashamed, you will not wonder how you lost your soul, for you will have always
had it.
You cannot do this, you cannot keep your honor and integrity
and human dignity if you allow your soul to be dissolved in the acid of cynical
relativism.
You know what I mean:
the smart-ass cynicism that says we don't know anything for sure, there
are no absolutes, who are you to say, what's true for you isn't for me. This is idiocy, and if any of you
indulged in it in your years here, well, it's good that you got it out of your
system, because it's time to commence with growing up and being an adult.
And if any of your professors ever taught you this idiocy,
it's time they grew up and started being adults as well.
The idiocy, the absolute stupidity of claiming there are no
absolutes, is apparent every time you have to go to the bathroom. When you gotta go, you gotta go, and that's
the end of it. It's an absolute and no
wishing it away will do the slightest good.
What I wish is that you all could have had my professor who
was my mentor in philosophy back at the University of Southern California, John
Hospers. He had a cartoon framed and
hung on the door to his office.
It was of a father changing a flat tire in the rain in the
middle of nowhere, with his wife and kids in the car. One of the kids is yelling at him, and the caption is the father
replying: "Son, you've got to
understand. This is reality. We can't change the channel."
I asked Professor Hospers what was the greatest amount of
wisdom in the shortest number of words.
Without hesitation, he responded with seven words of the 16th century
Elizabethan, Sir Francis Bacon:
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
Relativists hate this.
They want their whims to command reality. They hate this rock-bottom truth:
That the only way to get what you want out of life is to
understand, understand all the way to your marrow, that things are what they
are, that they exist regardless of your feelings or perceptions, that what is
possible for them depends on what they are and not your wishes - so to get what
you want out of them or change them, you must pay attention to what they are in
the first place.
Reality, you see, doesn't care. Reality isn't conscious.
Clouds, mountains, oceans, buildings, Earth, Mars, the Solar System, the
Milky Way Galaxy, all are not conscious.
We are aware of them - they aren't aware of us. They just are. Reality just is. And thus
it has no intrinsic value. Nothing can
be good or bad for a rock or a cloud or a mountain or a planet or a
galaxy. It is we, conscious living
human beings, that give the world its value, not the other way around.
As the poet Kahil Gibran observed:
We see beauty and magic in the world. But the truth is that the beauty and magic
are inside ourselves.
The universe is almost 14 billion years old. Our Earth is over 4 billion years old. It will continue to exist for several
billion years more, the universe many more billions after that.
In all those eons, you and every one of us, have been
granted this infinitesimally short instant, this femtosecond of time, to
exist. But that tiny instant is the one
that counts - counts for you.
All the vast oceans of time before you and after you don't matter. What matters is the single little drop
that's yours.
For in all those billions of years that have been and will
be, there never has been or will ever be another you. No one, of all the billions of human beings who have ever lived
or ever will live, ever had or will have a life the duplicate of yours.
Never and ever. You
are absolutely unique. And you have the
absolute opportunity to create within yourself a soul of beauty and magic, of
honor and integrity, of benevolence and dignity.
Don't blow it. Don't
screw it up, lose your chance, the one single chance you've got in the history
of the universe. Only you can give your
life purpose and meaning. Only you can
make sense of your life. That's the
great dilemma, the great challenge, the great glory, the great privilege of
being human.
It is such a privilege, such an honor to be a human
being. And it is such a
responsibility. Don't reject that
privilege, don't deny that responsibility.
Feel instead the thrill of being human, the pride of being a member of
the human race.
I love being human.
I want you all to be able to say that to yourselves with the deepest
conviction: "I love being human."
Look to the person next you, feel his or her humanity, and
tell yourself, "I am proud to be a member of the human race." Such pride will make you invulnerable to the
worst mind-poison ever to infect human society: Envy.
If I could give you only two words of advice for the rest of
your life, they would be:
Reject envy.
The wisest of the Ten Commandments, the10th,
tells you to not be envious. There
should be its corollary: To reject envy
directed at you.
It is not easy to do, for the fear of being envied, the fear of the Evil Eye, is a very ancient, primitive fear. Be on guard against it, for you will be surrounded by envious
guilt-peddlers all of your lives, insisting you apologize for your existence,
the existence of your country, the existence of your civilization, the
existence of your species, and for whatever accomplishments and success you personally
achieve.
Dismiss all this envy and guilt-peddling as you would the
ravings of a lunatic, for that is what they are. Embrace instead your humanity, your human existence and
individual identity.
Your character is your destiny. It's the most wonderful thing on this earth to be a human
being. Especially a young human being
who can make of your life what you will.
Do so.
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