Given by Douglas Fox, professor emeritus of relgion
May 21, 2000

President Mohrman, parents, friends, colleagues, and most of all, graduates:

There are certain rules governing baccalaureate addresses: You must take a conspicuously brave stand in favor of something you can expect everybody present to like anyway; you must say something memorable, but not controversial; you must be hilarious; above all, you must make the new graduates feel that at heart you are as young as they -- but a great deal more innocent. Now, I'm afraid I can't do any of that, so you're going to have to put up with something else.

When the great Japanese Buddhist, Dogen, returned to Japan after years of study in China, he was met by an old friend who said to him, "Well, what did you learn over there?" Dogen said, "I learned that my eyes are horizontal and my nose is vertical." I'm not going to unravel the deeper meaning of this famous Zen remark; I offer it to you graduates in case when you get home, a friend or a relative asks you the same intolerable question that Dogen asked. You now have an answer that might just change the subject.

On the other hand, if that won't do, perhaps we had better be thinking about what you did learn. Oh, not in sordid detail, of course, but simply in the most general terms: What did a liberal education teach you?

I subscribe to the idea that education is what you have left when you've forgotten everything you heard in class. So what do you have left?

I hope that at the very least you have acquired enough wisdom not to be guilty of the sort of wild and unconsidered judgement that afflicts many quite prominent people who have not had your advantage of attending Colorado College. Let me illustrate what I mean.

In 1890, Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society in Britain, said, "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible." Or, to bring it closer to home, in 1899, Charles H. Duell, who was director of the U.S. patent office, declared with confidence, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." (He probably recorded that on his computer.) Finally, and most obtuse of all, Grover Cleveland -- do you remember him -- in 1905 uttered this profundity, "Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote."

It is my sincere desire that you, armed with tomorrow's diploma, will never be guilty of utterances like those. But I hope for more than that. I hope that you have acquired the habit of thinking critically and constructively and facing the world with a certain amount of both objectivity and hope. Let me say something about the objectivity first.

In one of the last books he wrote, H. G. Wells said that the modern world, as he saw it, is like a rudderless ship adrift in an unfamiliar sea with pirates storming up the sides. He called his book, Mind at the End of its Tether. A little later, early in his final illness, a friend visited him to cheer him up because he was known to be somewhat dispondent, but Wells said, "It's no use. I've looked at the future and it won't work."

I'm sure there are times when any of us might feel like that. The world, and our nation as part of it, do seem sometimes out of control, and we can easily identify a number of the pirates who are clambering aboard. Of course, one person's pirate may be another person's patriot, but that's part of the problem. One of those most powerful pirates of our day threatening the stability and security of our ship is called Alienation, and this one's sharp sword severs generation from generation, even within a single family sometimes, and nation from nation, class from class.

Thinking about this, Robert Kaplan recently wrote, "As wealthier Americans increasingly live their lives within protected communities, private malls, and health clubs . . . class divisions are growing in the United States." And he fears that the end of this process will be a country divided into two nations -- rather like the England described in Benjamin Disraeli's novel Sybil, or, more recently, in Alan Silitoe's short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner."

This is a pirate clambering aboard our ship, but there are others. According to the United States Census Bureau, almost one in five children in the U.S. live below the federal poverty level, and nobody has ever described that level as generous. To break this down a bit, 15 percent of white children, 34 percent of Hispanic, and 37 percent of African-American children live in such conditions. This means that America's child poverty rate is higher -- in some cases double -- that of other industrialized nations. This is a pirate that must trouble anyone with a spark of compassion.

There are other pirates. There is the growing fear that our planet's species and resources are being wasted frivolously in pursuit of short-term profit. There is the obvious collapse of serious conversation, which includes listening as well as speaking, between certain political, religious and other social groups. There are the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts about abortion, gun control, and other emerging issues.

Now, if these are the pirates assailing the tranquility and peace of our ship, it means that we -- and especially you and your generation -- will face some pretty insidious threats in your lifetime. Perhaps, however, the most dangerous of all these pirates is what seems to me to be the debasement of the understanding and use of one of the most treasured words in our social vocabulary, the word liberty.

Michael Sandel, not long ago, wrote an article in which he tried to trace, to describe a shift in meaning that he felt he had detected in the use of the very word liberty or freedom, a shift that he felt reflected a change in motivation governing our behavior. He suggests that when we speak of freedom or liberty these days, most of us tend to mean simply freedom from something, from some sort of restraint. We want to be free to choose our own values without regard to other persons, certainly without regard to authorities. The task of government is simply to get out of our way.

But Sandel says that liberty, in an earlier time, meant, above all, freedom for something, especially freedom to live and participate in a society in which each person recognized the need for some concern for the whole. It was, in a word, freedom for community, and this freedom meant that we were willing to concern ourselves with things that bind us together and to accept some restraints on individual impulse. If, as Martin Buber argues, community is something more than mere collectivity and different from isolating individualism, then Sandel fears we are drifting perilously toward one or other of those things -- especially toward individualism.

This is not an attack on the individual, but only on an extreme form of individualism that amounts to a kind of narcissism and erodes the basis of community. When it is joined, as it often is, to a greedy consumerism, it is a sickness that threatens any society. Robert Bellah has quoted a young man who said, "The individual is the preeminent being in the universe." There's always a distinction between me and you. Comity, sharing, cannot truly exist. What I have is mine, and it's mine because I deserve it, and I have a right to it.

This seems to me to be a very dangerous attitude dividing what could be a community, in fact, into a kind of jungle where each is waging a war against all others. It reminds me of a study of France done during World War II. Simone Weill, a young French woman, wrote a book called The Need for Roots, in which she tried to answer the question which was haunting many people (many French people but others, too): Why had France fallen so swiftly in that conflict? Why had it, despite a large and seemingly powerful army, offered such feeble resistance -- so unlike its performance in the First World War? Her verdict was that between those two wars something had happened to the people of France; they had largely lost, she said, a sense of community and of rootage in their shared history and culture.

French peasants, she says, learned in the First World War that they were highly expendable, that those with power and affluence in France regarded them as instruments to be used. They had seen their villages pounded, their lives squandered. And since then their sons had been conscripted to defend French interests in various parts of the world, but interests in which they themselves felt no compelling concern.

Industrial workers, on the other hand, had learned that in a society in which the name of the most important game is profit, they were reduced to powerless tools to be used and, whenever it was convenient or profitable, to be discarded easily or, as we would say today, "downsized." The social and economic elite, meanwhile, were increasingly identifying only with others of their own class and becoming indifferent to any large vision of a French people, a French culture.

The result of all this was, as you would imagine, a discordant, disunited society, devoid of real community and of common purpose. It troubles me that this means that, between the wars, France had become the sort of country, the sort of society that many Americans today feel that they are part of; a society whose center is perilously unstable.

So what's to be done? I believe it is the great task of our present and immediate future to try to recover a sense of purpose together in constructing community. This doesn't mean obliterating differences of opinion, but it does mean trying to find some ground of mutuality and caring so that differences need not become irresolvable conflicts with no compromise possible; so that no group or class need feel that it exists on or even beyond the margin of things.

A friend of mine was speaking to a professional gathering about the need to recover a vision, a vision of some value or some cluster of values, that would help to heal the great divisions appearing in their society. And when he'd finished a lawyer came up to thank him and said that this was a fine thing indeed, a very good speech. "Well, I'm glad you agree about what's needed," said my friend. "But, what should we be doing about it? It isn't enough to just talk about it." Perhaps each of us has to find a way through whatever is his/her job or profession, somehow to build a deeper and wider community. You work in the law. How can you help, through that tradition, to bring something back to our community life?

There was a pause, and the other said, "I remember reading a story once about a little boy who went fishing with his father. After a while the boy said, 'Dad, where does this river come from and where is it going?' The father answered, 'I don't know, son; I just fish in it.' That," said the lawyer, "is what I do with my profession."

When tomorrow a diploma is placed in your hands, I wonder what it will really mean. Certainly you have fulfilled all the college's requirements, and in all probability you have done some creditable work in certain subjects. But might it also mean that you have been better equipped to explore and understand the life of your nation and you world, to ask questions about the plethora of conflicting values that claim our allegiance and our attention, to conserve what the past offers that is worth conserving, but never to let the past be a prison for your spirit and mind? Has your education enabled you to see people of any class, ethnicity, color or creed as persons, not as things? I'm not talking about respecting or loving "humanity" -- that's easy, "humanity" is an abstraction. I'm talking about seeing with concern and as partners in the building of a humane future actual persons in all their fleshly angularity, their possibly unacceptable odors, habits and needs. Are you better able to do that now than once you were? If not, perhaps you have a great deal more to learn.

If you are to go out from this place to live fully and responsibly toward the future without forgetting our common past, you will need a discriminating mind; and you will need hope. Now, hope may arise as a spontaneous emotion, but if it doesn't do that, it may also be a deliberately chosen act of your will. And making that choice to hope may be the most important thing that you can bring to the future. Know where the river of your nation's life comes from and find a vision of where it may go for the good of all. And for the sake of the entire confused and confusing world, having found that river, don't just fish in it.

Thank you.

Named the 1995 Colorado Professor of the Year by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Fox joined the CC faculty in 1963. He has written nine books, including the 1995 Direct Awareness of the Self and Dispelling Illusion, published in 1993. In addition to scholarly works, his What Do You Think About God? offers a more personal look at religious views. Born in Australia, Fox earned a Th.D. from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. He also graduated from the Camden Theological College.

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