Coming-of-Age. Valedictory Dinner Speech 2013

Transcription

1 Coming-of-Age Valedictory Dinner Speech 2013 Deep in human culture is the notion that at some point we cross a threshold from youth into adult life. Traditional societies marked this transition with trials, rituals and ceremonies. Some of you I suspect are probably glad that you haven t had to face a tooth extraction, adult circumcision or tattooing. But in the cultural dilution of these customs of coming-of-age we have lost something important. Now if you happen to belong to a community still nourished by its religious roots you might have experienced a Bar Mitzvah or First Communion. For most a 21 st birthday party is as close as it will get or perhaps participating in schoolies week whose social gravity derives from the cultural vacuum it fails to fill. The fact we still make a fuss of 21 st birthdays gives us a sense that marking this transition matters. A big party with family and friends and speeches that follow a formula closer to the comic than the profound is no bad thing but it is no substitute either. Although there is no common cultural template, traditional transitions had elements of preparation and learning, reflection, testing and trailing, celebration and inclusion. Throughout the journey there is a twining of the physical and psychological a recognition that maturity is a matter of mind and muscle. Together this process creates the opportunity for young people to confirm the capabilities that will enable them take on the responsibilities of adult life, reflect on who they want to be and to be honoured by other adults and welcomed into their world. There is a profound healthfulness, both social and personal, in such a process. I hope over time that as a society we will recognise what we have lost and the cost. Most prominently some men have been lamenting the loss of these rites of passage and recognise the inadequate imitations that they end up replacing them with. In reality it has been a loss for both genders. Perhaps institutions like schools and colleges will over time do a better job of helping to fill the void. In the meantime I think we need to take charge of the process ourselves. I don t think there is a simple formula here and I certainly don t have any particular answers. But reflecting on my own journey across the threshold I have a few questions that might help you design a process of your own. My first question is: what is your trial? What will you do that will comprehensively test your resourcefulness and your character? 1

2 My answer to that question in the years that followed school was a series of journeys inspired by the adventures and stories of an earlier age. There was a testing and drama in these stories that I felt was slipping from our reach in our risk averse age. I set out to find what I knew could only be echoes of those times but I wanted to hear them before monoculture of modernity had whitewashed the world. Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness took me up a jungle river in Malaysia into the offlimits lands where the Orang Asli the original inhabits carried on their traditional ways. It took some coaxing and cash to get the fisherman I found to take his boat across the invisible line in the river. Wilfred Thesiger, the last explorer to travel to uncharted places, took me on a land journey across post-revolutionary Ethiopia and Eretria. Robert Byron s Road to Oxiana found me in Islamic celebrations in the remote corners of Iran. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, led me through the deserts of the Middle East following in the footsteps of the Arab revolt. Travelling a story meant I was always in conversation with the past and with someone else. On these journeys I negotiated myself across forbidden boundaries, travelled with locals, built trust with priests on a sacred island who guarded the hidden treasures of the kings of Gondar, got very sick, was imprisoned in Africa for an afternoon and experienced the mesmerising diversity of human life and culture. When you say it in a sentence it sounds a lot more dramatic than it was because I also learnt a lot about patience and waiting. These journeys tested me. I was at various times exhilarated, exhausted and downright scared. My wits mattered as much as my endurance and my people skills more than physical ones. They were my trials. I would invite you to think what trial will you set for yourself? What test of your character and capability? If it is to play its role it needs to take you out of your ordinary life. What will you do that has enough risk it that will test you but still leave you in one piece? If we are taking responsibility for our own coming of age then my second question is, what will be your wilderness moment? It was a common practice to traditional people as part of coming of age rituals to take young people into the wild places. The great myths of western culture have retreats to be alone as turning points in lives. 2

3 These moments are most profound when we take ourselves out of the context, the place, the environment we know and are comfortable in. Different places ask us different questions. A wilderness doesn t have be in nature. It could be a situation in city so different to our own that it asks us questions. I have known those moments in the slums of Mumbai or when I have walked alone for entire day in a foreign city. These moments can just happen - and if they do you should seize them - but if they don t then make them a project. All that matters is to be alone for a good time: no devices, no connections, no conversations - just you. In the end, it is not a moment you find, you will gain a skill. An ability to find the space to reflect it is a skill you will need throughout adult life. A third question that I think it is worth asking takes us from the realm of physical adventure to the free climbing of the mind. It is a simple but ultimately challenging question: What do you think? where the emphasis here is on the you. It is a question that is particularly appropriate for a night like tonight where we mark a pivotal point of transition in the academic journey of our valedictorians. Therefore, I will dwell a little longer on this question. To guide my response to this coming-of-age question I want to turn to the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant whose thinking shaped the turn to modern age, the age of reason. His influence on the modern mind is so great that we think his thoughts, even if we only vaguely know his name. The reason for turning to Kant is that he wrote an incendiary essay What is Enlightenment about what he thought coming-of-age really meant. Some of you have heard me quote from it before. For Kant coming-of-age wasn t just a journey for individuals; it was a process for the whole of humanity. That journey to maturity, individual and collective, he called the Enlightenment. He thought that journey was summed up in the latin motto - Sapere aude literally dare to know. For Kant this daring to know meant, in his words: Have the courage to use your own reason. What Kant makes so clear is that what you have won through your education is the greatest freedom any person can have; in his view the essence of freedom itself: the power to think for yourself, not to be directed by others and, even when imprisoned, to be free in your mind never to bow to the will of another. But there is a catch, Kant argues, that the capability to reason is not enough. There are plenty he sees who have understanding but still do not come-of-age because they lack the resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. 3

4 Kant never saw that as easy. He worried less about us finding courage in heroic moments when we need to speak truth to power but about the resolve not to let others do our thinking for us. He worried about the self-appointed guardians who have in his words benevolently taken over supervision of people : If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The temptation to let others think for us is as alive today as it was in Kant s time. We live in a world where there is as much profit or power in outsourcing our minds to others as there has ever been. The high priests of propaganda no longer reside in pulpits and palaces but live in the ante-rooms of politicians, advertising agencies and behind the doors of public relations offices. But more insidious still is the collusive consensus we too easy fall into with the way things are. One of the greatest strengths of youth is the refusal to join in that collusion. It doesn t have to be this way. I hear it in the conversations from my 10 year olds in their outrage at the death of the seas through to our medical students frustration at the countless deaths across the world from preventable diseases. And you and they are right it doesn t have to be this way. To come of age is to have the resolve to hold onto these conclusions. That courage can so easily be corroded. It is easy to let the expanding horizons of your experience lead you to think that explanations for the way things are or their apparent inevitability is a justification. It is easy to let risk of the less comfortable life that might come with the changes needed to put the world to rights to lead you to capitulate to the consensus. Tonight I want to encourage you to fight for the rest of your lives against gravity of acceptance. It is not a counsel to grow up to become an angry old person or to despair because there is always more to do or that one s efforts can seem futile. Rather it is to live with the energy of a free person. It is to embrace a way of life that will always be a touch subversive. It is a way of life that begins with a suspicion about rules. Kant puts it well when he says, Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of humanity s natural gifts, are shackles of permanent immaturity. We are called to think things from first principles; to live out of values rather than rules. It is why a true scholarly community is a values-based one. I would encourage you to work for a values-based organisation and live a values-based life. 4

5 That suspicion about rules should extend to an innate scepticism of ideological prepackaging of ideas where ever it is found. It can be present in university lecture theatres as much as on political podiums. Most deeply, it is a way of life that will challenge power whenever it is unwilling to explain itself. Two hundred years ago Kant said, on all sides I hear: Do not argue! The officer says, Do not argue, drill! The tax man says, Do not argue, pay! The pastor says, Do not argue, believe! The speaking may have changed but the sentiment remains the same. Today we are as likely to hear this call inside the organisations we work for as outside in the public domain. Commonly it is power in defence of prejudice that we asked to confront. Kant was prescient when he foresaw, Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the masses. So often it is prejudice against someone we can identify as the other. Our task is not done in confronting prejudices based on gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or means of arriving in Australia. We cannot leave the task of changing thinking to our leaders. It is not only that we are likely to be disappointed but actually if we have come of age then that task belongs to us. Whether we rise to the challenge of that task will be a true test of our education, our character, of our coming of age. So in rising to that challenge can I encourage you to: Set yourself some trials. Find your wilderness moments. And most of all, with radicalism that Kant had in mind, truly to think for yourselves. Rufus Black Master 5