The Responsibility of the Educated: A Graduation Address

Transcription

1 Henry Regnery The Responsibility of the Educated: A Graduation Address There are certain subjects which everyone, whether he knows anything about them or not, feels free to discuss education and responsibility being two conspicuous examples. Only a physicist would dare to talk publicly about physics and only a person with specialized knowledge in the field about mathematics; but almost anyone feels he has something important to say about such a broad subject as education. You will find, if you ever go into the business of publishing books, that almost everyone feels competent to write a book. As a publisher, I am one of those people without specialized knowledge of any kind; and so I have chosen one of those subjects today which, as I say, people who don t know much about anything in particular feel perfectly free to talk about. You will, I hope, extend the customary indulgence to me. Oswald Spengler remarks some place that we are all, each one of us, born in a certain time, a certain society, a certain family; that we arrive in the world with a certain cultural tradition; that this is our fate, and with this fact, everything else is pretty much determined. To a certain extent, of course, this is true. The time, place, and circumstances of our birth are the given facts of our specific situation how we meet them, what we make out of these and of ourselves, however, are the measure of our achievement and of our worth. Most of you who are students now were born during the early part of World War II. This war, and the consequences of the decisions which followed it, have profoundly influenced the world in which you will live. We are thrust into a world not of our making; and we must bear the consequences, good and bad, of decisions over which we had no control, just as those who follow us will have to bear the consequences of the decisions we make, and will have to live in whatever world we leave them. As Americans, you have had the great advantage of being born into a free society. You will inherit the free institutions which wise and brave men established and preserved for us, and you benefit by educational institutions other people have provided. Furthermore, we live in a century, though no fault of our own, where there is not only unequalled wealth, but opportunity available that few others enjoy, to develop our abilities and to lead our own lives. On the other hand, we belong to the nation that created the atomic bomb and first used it against helpless civilians. It was an American president who needlessly prolonged the war by demanding uncondi- Henry Regnery is the author of A Few Reasonable Words: Selected Writings, from which this essay was adapted. THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall

2 tional surrender of our national enemies, something unprecedented in modern history among civilized societies; who thoughtlessly and heedlessly consigned millions of people to virtual slavery and despair; who brought Communist Russia to the middle of Europe; and who laid the basis for another World War. These are some of the elements of the world in which you must live and which you, as educated men and women, must understand. Something else to which you, as educated people, must give some thought is how it could happen that a country that produced such a document as the American Constitution could also produce leaders who in the Yalta, Teheran, and Potsdam agreements lost for the world s free people what we were told had been won by terrible cost and sacrifice in the two world wars. What went wrong? How much it went wrong, and how completely it went wrong, was brought very vividly to my mind one evening not long ago when I heard the ambassador of an Arab country talk at a small dinner. He began by saying that he belonged to one of the countries which are at the edge of the great events of history, which suffer the consequences of those events, but which have little or no influence on the decisions which bring them about. He then recounted, as he saw it, the procession of European-American history since 1914: the slogans of World War I Peace without Victory, Self-determination of Peoples, the Fourteen Points, which were followed by the Versailles Treaty; the promises of independence to the Arab nations, followed by the disclosure of the Sykes- Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, which had been made at approximately the same time, and by which the Arab countries were to be divided among the victorious powers and the Jews promised a homeland in Palestine. He spoke of the interminable wrangles over boundaries and reparations, the Ruhr invasion, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and then more slogans. This time it was the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter which were followed by unconditional surrender, Yalta, Teheran, and Potsdam. The dismal story went on; there is no use going into further details. The point I wish to make is not only that these decisions were made by educated men, but what is, perhaps, even worse, that those who should have known better almost without exception approved, or did little or nothing to raise their voices in protest. We quite rightly reproach the German universities and intellectual leaders for not doing more to oppose Hitler, but how conspicuously did the intellectual and moral leaders of our country speak out against the monstrosities and incredible immoralities of Yalta? I know of one college president who did; he soon lost his job, and received no support for his position from the academic profession. The ordinary man, the soldier, the famous man in the street, could hardly have been expected to object when Soviet Russia was called our noble ally, when one of the bloodiest tyrants of history was called good old Uncle Joe, when half of Europe was turned over to Communist Russia because, it was thought, this would assure peace, at least for us. The educated should have objected, however. The intellectual and moral leaders of the country should have spoken out. That was their responsibility! By their silence, they failed their country. By their silence, they failed the generations to come. Silence is the temptation of the educated man or woman who finds himself or herself in the minority. The bitter results of the last decade should be a warning to every educated person. When you see truths which others miss, that is the time to speak. Education without courage is useless. The conformity expressed by silence is a betrayal of your own soul, and of your own mind. Courage is a virtue whose value cannot 24 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE R EVIEW Fall

3 be overestimated. Education without the courage to form convictions from the knowledge a student acquires becomes meaningless and purposeless. This is an age which has great need of courage. We hear much talk in praise of individualism, but how many actually have the courage to practice it? Modern history is literally filled with the individualists who were not there who conformed, who kept quiet. We seem to have turned individualism over to the nonethical people, while the ethical people drop into silence. Hitler and Stalin were notable individualists. Where were the individualists on the other side with the voice and the stature to stop them before they rose to such power that only the whole world in arms could withstand their tyranny? Years of agony for the human race came because of the people who were needed and were simply not there at the time when they could still have been effective. America shows grave signs of having great numbers of people who as far as effective action is concerned simply are not there. As educated people you already know these terrible lessons of our recent history. You must also have the acumen to form convictions from what you know, and then the courage to act upon your convictions. What has gone wrong with America? As the poet Roy Campbell once suggested, Until the idea once more predominates over the thing, and the thought over the action, there can be no faith, nothing but helplessness and paralysis. What went wrong between the time when we could produce a man who could speak with the courage and intelligence Washington showed in his Farewell Address and the fuzzy-mindedness and utter cynicism which resulted in Yalta and Teheran? What did the Founding Fathers possess that people and their leaders in the twentieth century have so far failed to show? What did America lose between the Farewell Address and the Quarantine Speech of President Franklin D. Roosevelt? It seems to me that one attribute the men who wrote the Constitution possessed to a high degree was the ability and moral strength to face things as they are. They were not inclined to self-deception. They wanted to give us free institutions, a government strong enough to govern but not centralized enough to tyrannize; and while they wished their fellow man well, they had few illusions about him or themselves. They knew that man is capable of great achievement but also of great mendacity, and they were well aware of the truth later to be expressed by Lord Acton as All power tends to corrupt. They knew that history was not a struggle of good guys against bad guys, a truth which we Americans of the twentieth century, in spite of some rather ludicrous experiences, still seem to find difficult to grasp. They knew, on the contrary, that history was a struggle for power, for existence, for advantage, that life itself is struggle, and that to see it otherwise is rank self-deception. But they also knew that the task of civilization is to bring, in so far as it is possible, order and justice out of the chaos of the struggle for existence. They knew that man is imperfect, that human institutions are equally imperfect, and that to expect perfection from the one was as futile and deceptive as to demand perfection from the other. They were men who also knew something about the nature of society. They were deeply aware of the fact that, as Edmund Burke expressed it, society is a partnership, not only of the living, but of the dead, and the yet unborn. They did not think of themselves as the end result, as the culmination, of time and of history, but as tiny particles in a mighty stream. They wished to live not at the expense of the future, but so that the future might be better. Most of all, I think, THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall

4 these men, by their actions, demonstrated their belief in an orderly universe. They believed not only that the life of the individual has a purpose, but that all creation has meaning, and that by attempting to establish a more orderly society they were, in a small way, and to the extent of their ability, contributing something to the larger design of creation. If the political arrangements and national decisions of a people are an expression of their moral worth, as I believe to be the case, then it is the responsibility of the educated to concern themselves about them, and to take a stand. If the educated do not fulfill their responsibility, the civilization which has nourished them cannot long survive. Perhaps I can give you some idea of how great this responsibility is if I point out that all the knowledge that humanity has acquired in its long history must be reacquired by each generation. Much can be preserved in books, of course, but this becomes a living force, a part of our lives, only as it is acquired and made vital by living people. You, therefore, are a part of the rather small group on which the future of our civilization rests because you belong to the group which has as its responsibility the transmission and vitality of the ideas and values which will determine the future. The course of human history is determined by what people believe, by the values they hold, and most of all by whether or not they will act upon them. It is because I believe in the power and influence of ideas that I publish books and that I am here today. If we did not believe in ideas and values, education would be nothing more than training in skills. Because man can think, and has been given the freedom to choose, he is necessarily governed by ideas. We live in a revolutionary time, in a time when all values are under attack. The fabric of our civilization has been seriously weakened. There are many who would like to do away with respect and confidence and the voluntary relationships which are the essence of our society, and replace them by compulsion; who prefer a society of mass men organized in a mechanistic totality toward the achievement of specific materialistic goals, to a society of free men making their own decisions. We have long taken for granted a society in which the freedom and happiness of the individual are regarded as legitimate goals. The extent to which society based on the individual and upon values is threatened is well illustrated by the current discussion in which Gross National Product is regarded as an end rather than a means, and in which the only goals even considered are material and quantitative. It will be your responsibility, as educated people, not only to transmit ideas and values to the next generation, but to select those values which ought to be passed on. Above all, you must speak. Coleridge is quoted as having said, In every state, not wholly barbarous, a philosophy, good or bad, there must be. While most people may not even be aware of such things as philosophy or speculation, or conscious of the ideas which dominate their time, it is the educated who give them voice and currency and make them a part of the life of the time. And unless they are made part of the life of the time, unless the ideas which dominate a time are in harmony with basic moral values and traditions of a nation, society is in grave danger. When I speak about the responsibility of our national leaders for what seems to me to be a series of appalling decisions, I should probably have said that they only reflected the opinions and attitudes which many leaders supposed was American public opinion at the time. But what is public opinion if not the opinion of those in a position and with the necessary convictions to express themselves? Was the common man 26 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE R EVIEW Fall

5 responsible for the illusion that we could trust good old Uncle Joe, that Mao Tsetung and his friends were just simple agrarian reformers, that to eliminate Prussian and Japanese militarism was all that was necessary to inaugurate an era of perpetual peace? The common man or the forgotten man, whatever the politician courting his favor and his vote may call him, is common and forgotten precisely to the extent that he either has no opinions, or has no way of making his opinions felt. Public opinion is the opinion of the publicists, teachers, writers, publishers, diplomats, politicians, wire pullers, and all those persons who are in a position to make their opinions and ideas public, and thereby to influence the course of events. It is for this reason that the ultimate influence of a book, or magazine, or newspaper cannot be measured by how many people buy or read it, but by which people. Das Kapital was one of the most influential books published in the nineteenth century, not because it ever attained a large sale it did not but because some very strong-minded, strong-willed men, among them Nicolai Lenin, read it and took it to heart. This was an evil idea put to an evil use. But it does show what can be done with an idea. Held in the beginning by a mere handful of men, it spread to cover the world. You belong to a new educated generation. From your ranks will come the decisions which will shape the future, and determine the philosophy and values on which the decisions will be based. This is a sobering prospect, all the more so when you understand the nature of the world you face. You live in a world divided into two hostile camps, more bitterly divided, perhaps, than ever before in history. Not only your country, but also civilization itself, faces an implacable, resourceful and determined enemy which is intent upon complete destruction of all who stand in the way. You will be called upon to face great challenges. I would urge you courageously to take a position, and with endless courage to be willing to stand by it. You will need to know not only where you stand, but how to think clearly. There are many who will try to confuse you, and you will need to see things as they are, and in the proper relationship to each other. If our free society as we have known it is to continue, you will need to understand and to appreciate it, to know not only the nature and value of freedom, but something about the nature of man. As Ezra Pound put it succinctly and precisely, you will need to regain the habit of thinking of things in general as set in an orderly universe. If I have given you a rather somber picture of the responsibilities ahead of you, and of the nature of the world you will have to face, I can only say that I do not think I have overstated the case. You should remember that if there are great challenges, it is precisely great challenges which invoke great responses, and you will indeed face a great challenge. The greatness of the response of your generation will depend on you I can only hope that you will do better than the last several generations have done. In closing, let me quote a few sentences which Roy Campbell wrote shortly before he was killed. Campbell wrote some of the most beautiful lyric poetry of our century. He was a man of great courage and vitality, who truly understood the challenge of our time, and yet he wrote: At no other time was it ever more thrilling and enjoyable to be a poet, and to be alive, than it is today, when the life of the whole planet is triggered by a hair, when every moment is as precious as bread and wine, and when the rumble and roar of chaos is challenging us for every atom of faith, hope and courage, in a measure which our Maker has never before done us the honour of expecting from His creatures. THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW Fall