In 1944, 18 year-old's stormed the beach at Normandy into almost certain death.
In 2016, 18-year-old's feel unsafe because words hurt their feelings!
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I served on The Board of Visitors of St John's for 8 years. It is the Great Books College and 3rd oldest in America. Frances Scott Key founded the Alumni Association.
St John's is devoted to assisting students in critical thinking so they will be able to cope in this changing and challenging world. (See 1 below.)
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Dick
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1) “Fit for the World”
Commencement Address, May
2017
St. John’s College in
Annapolis
Christopher B. Nelson
Thank
you for the honor of the invitation to address you today. The last time I did
so, you had no choice in the matter, as you seniors were just embarking on the
four-year adventure of your studies at the College, while you in the Graduate
Institute were just undertaking an exciting extension of your formal studies.
In August of 2013, when most of you arrived, I welcomed you to the Wonderland
that is St. John’s College. Today we send you out into the World, another kind
of Wonderland.
Indeed,
I have wondered at something Scott Buchanan said nearly 50 years ago about the
relationship between these two worlds. Most of you know that Buchanan was the
principal architect of the New Program of study brought to St. John's College
in 1937. That New Program, back when Buchanan was dean, was in large measure much
like the program we enjoy today. Shortly before he died in 1968, Buchanan was
interviewed by his old friend, Harris Wofford. These conversations were
collected in a book entitled Embers of
the World: Conversations with Scott Buchanan.
The
book closes with a comment by Buchanan that has bothered me since I first read
it some 45 years ago. It was this: "We used to say at St. John's that we
were preparing people to be misfits, and we meant that in a very broad sense.
Perhaps misfits in the universe for the time being."
I
can imagine that if I were to affirm that statement without explanation and
close these remarks now, some of you would demand a refund of your tuition. So,
you can understand why I have been restless for all these years, wondering at
Buchanan’s remark while serving as your president. At long last, I thought I
ought at least to make an effort to understand why Buchanan said this, what he
meant by it, and whether I thought it was true, for your sake as well as my own.
The
Case for the Misfit
Why
might it be a positive good that the College should be preparing you to be
“misfits” in the world?
Consider,
for example, the place of a misfit in a world characterized by conflict, where
change is sought through violence alone, where rhetorical force is laced with
fear-mongering or hatred. Such a misfit might bring reason to bear on the
rancor, and imagination to the resolution of conflict.
Or
consider a world that is so conventional that people rarely contribute anything
original or inventive …. where so little of our natural human capacity, and
none of our imagination, is exercised! What kind of world would it be if
everyone acted as though they had the answers to life and no one had any
questions of it?
What
is the place of a misfit in a world that is out of joint? Or a world that has
reduced all value to an economic metaphor? Where everything has a price and
nothing is priceless? Where the end of life is service to the global economy?
And the end of education is simply to fit one for the marketplace!
What
is the place of a misfit in a world governed by one rule only: that it’s what
we can get for ourselves that counts, a world that does not accept that it is
in our nature to do good for one another?
Many
of you will recognize those worlds or will imagine that all of these
descriptions characterize aspects of the world we live in. The world is hardly
perfect; a misfit may be what it needs from time to time to get it on a better
path. Perhaps when Buchanan spoke of preparing “misfits in the universe for the
time being,” he meant that misfits entering the world today could help shape
the world of tomorrow, one that would be a better fit for the imaginative,
reform-minded individual.
Question:
Why is Socrates so beloved of many of us at St. John’s? Is it because he was a
misfit in the world of Athens? Recall his argument for the defense in Plato’s Apology:
“I was
attached to this city by the god – though it seems a ridiculous thing to say –
as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size
and needed to be stirred by a kind of gadfly.
It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me
in the city. I never cease to rouse each
and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you all day long and everywhere
I find myself in your company.”
Socrates
even likened himself to Achilles, who despised death rather than shirk his
responsibility to avenge his friend and live the life of a coward ever after. If
Socrates is a kind of hero to many of us, dare we ask whether we are prepared
to be the gadfly he claimed to be and run the risks he ran? It is a lot of
trouble to speak truth to power, and it takes courage.
Recall
Antigone, a heroine to many! Are we prepared to make the sacrifice she made for
her defense of community mores that were out of favor in a kingdom itself out
of joint?
Are
these the kinds of misfits Buchanan was talking about? Are these sacrifices to
be expected of you? You want to be a doctor or lawyer, a soldier or farmer, a
writer or painter, a scientist or engineer, a teacher or librarian. You are attracted
to politics, or investment banking, or the revolution in technology. These are
all fitting occupations in our world,
all useful to it. Was Buchanan speaking of you when he said what he did? What
should distinguish you from others in the worlds you are entering when you
leave here?
When
Buchanan made his remark about misfits in the universe, he seemed to have used
it as a punctuation to his reflection on the fate of tragic heroes. He
understood that people generally identify tragedy with calamity or death, but
he thought that these were merely accidental to the real point: that tragedy is
about blindness and recognition, what the hero or heroine has learned from some
misfortune, like Oedipus recognizing who he is - his father's killer, his
mother's husband, and his children's brother - and then destroying his offending
eyes that were useless to his recognition of himself as the source of the
pollution in Thebes!
This
may be why we sometimes call such a protagonist a "tragic hero,"
someone "willing to pay the price for a certain kind of integrity and
rationality and honesty...," Buchanan would say. He even went so far as to say that
"happiness would be the life of a hero...who's willing to pay the price"
for that integrity for he will have "maintained his soul." Such
happiness can extract a high price, sometimes beyond the breaking point, he
acknowledged. (Of course, the tragic hero may also come to recognize his
blindness without enjoying the happiness that might have followed. Recall
Othello, confronting his green-eyed monster; or Lear, his blindness to a
daughter’s love.)
Ask
yourselves: Is this what you have been up to at St. John’s College: stretching
your imagination, confronting your blindness and ignorance, and coming to some
recognition, however tentative, of who you are in all your imperfection, what
propels you to go where you must, what calls you to do what you will, what
gives each of you a singular soul, what makes you whole?
Do
you recognize that you have sometimes been brought to a breaking point, when it
hurt you to accept your blindness of something or someone, or when you heard a
voice within you that you hardly recognized confront you with a truth you
wished you could deny but could not? Are you prepared to keep asking these
questions when you leave here, alive to the learning now begun? Do you have the
courage to maintain your integrity in a world that may often seem not to care
for what you think or who you are? Will you continue this search for an
understanding of yourself and your world while engaged in the career you may
choose to pursue, even if you should confront an uncomfortable truth about the
work you are doing?
The
Case for the World
I
recognize that in trying to make a good home for our misfit, I may have come
down pretty hard on the world, blaming it for our woes, setting up heroes and
heroines to confront it. I now would ask you to look again at that world.
In
your four years at the College, you have been asking as many questions of your
world as you have of yourselves. You have studied the heavens above and the
earth below, the movement of planets and the elements of matter, the conception
and growth of living things and the relation of their parts to their wholes, the
laws of nature (such as they are) and the forces at work in the world - even
spooky action at a distance.
In
the world of human affairs, you have studied political, societal, religious,
psychological, historical, economic, and ethical forces that have more or less shaped
the societies we live in … or vice versa. These forces may seem more capricious
than those you have studied in the laboratory, but they have nonetheless
influenced the world you will be living in, the world that belongs to you as
much as you belong to it.
The
mysteries of the human heart, and of the soul within you, are every bit as
wondrous as the mysteries of the political and the natural worlds. And so you
have asked questions of the world, in part because it is your nature to wish to
know, in part because you wish to know your place within that world, and in
part, I dare say, because it is your
world and you are bent on loving it as you love yourselves. It will be your love of the world that will bridge the
divide between you and it.
Your
world needs you; it needs your desire to understand it, your openness to what
it has to teach you, your acceptance of its imperfections, and your sincere
wish and best efforts to be useful to it because you care for it as it has
cared for you, however unconscious that care may have been.
The
Case for the Hero in the World
Once
again, consider Socrates and how he put the case in his own defense: that he
was a gift of the god, and that he
was attached “as upon a great and noble horse” that needed to be stirred. That
great and noble horse was the City of Athens, the world’s first democracy of
any sort, the city that reared and educated the man, the city that Socrates so
loved he would not trade a death sentence in Athens for life in any other city.
This was Socrates’s world. He saw his service as a gadfly to be a divine gift, a gift of love for his
world in the hope that he could help Athens recognize the corruption within it,
correct its course and recover its integrity. How different is Socrates’s world
from ours?
In
her essay When I was a Child I Read Books,
Marilynne Robinson located the American Western hero on the frontier, something
she called “neither a place nor a thing.” Such a hero could perhaps be located someplace
in the imagination, on a frontier of society, a frontier of science, a frontier
of medicine or law or technology or any other discipline you might commit
yourselves to. The frontier might be on the edge of a habitable wilderness, at
a town hall meeting, in the workplace, or even within the warmth of a
household. These frontiers will always remain open.
Robinson
described the archetypal hero or heroine as sometimes a visionary, sometimes a
critic, sometimes a rescuer or an avenger, expressing discontent with the
status quo and a willingness, perhaps even a calling, to seek change, always
with a positive interest in the good of society. But she added something more,
a reflection on the beauty of human society: “Rousseau said men are born free,
yet everywhere they are in chains. Since the time of the Hebrew prophets it has
been the role of the outsider to loosen those chains, or lengthen them, if only
by bringing the rumor of a life lived otherwise.”
The
Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic
reminds us that we need help to break
the chains that have kept us staring comfortably at the mere shadows of things;
that we need to be turned around to face the reality that has been hidden from
us; that we need to be dragged up the rocky slope and out into the light of the
sun where we can see the extraordinary beauty of the world of things as they
are; and that the journey up is a painful one. We realize how exceedingly
difficult, if not impossible, it must be to make this journey to understanding
alone. We need that “outsider” to shake us up and help us free ourselves to
make lives worthy of our humanity.
The
Case for Your Education
This
image of the lone individual in society should be a familiar one. Consider the paradox
you face every day in your education at our College: the learning you each come
to enjoy is yours alone, but you pursue it in the company of others. You make
from the bits and pieces that you have read, heard, and thought through,
something entirely new that belongs to you alone. And yet, you have needed
others around you, helping you with your discoveries of the world, helping you
uncover unsettling truths about yourselves, and opening fruitful paths to your
learning.
Nonetheless,
what you have learned you have freely
learned (it is your learning, not a
learned professor’s or someone else’s.) That freedom has helped you develop an
adaptable mind, equally open to tradition and to progress, one that gives you
practice in the art of inquiry, in asking the questions the human race has
asked since mankind first began to speak. They are questions arising from the
depths of wonder; questions revealing the vast extent of your ignorance about
the world and about yourselves; questions demonstrating a startling truth: that
your ignorance is the source of your greatest strength. For it is ignorance,
not knowledge, that will propel you forward. It generates the desire to
know, which draws you expectantly into the unknown.
This
humility of the intellect is actually a powerful force. We often call it
wisdom, and it is one of the things the world needs: a good understanding of
how to develop and where to direct our desire to know and our desire to be better
women and men. This generative force is also something your professions will need,
something your co-workers and neighbors will need and hopefully appreciate, and
something your children will need to live well in the world they will one day inherit.
You
are fit to enter the world, having had four years of practice in the art of
recognition without having to pay the price of an Oedipus or an Antigone or an
Othello or a Lear. You have had this practice within the confines of a
relatively safe classroom and among friends who have helped you recognize what
you don’t know and what you still need to learn to grapple with what the world
will throw at you. These friends - the books and the natural objects of your
study, your tutors, and your classmates – these friends have helped you
understand both the limitations of your reach and the possibilities open to you.
They have freed you from conventional thinking, freed you to doubt what you
have been taught about the world, and thus freed you to imagine a world
different from the one you find yourselves in and the possibility of a future
that you may lay claim to one day, a future you may even help to shape.
This
mention of the power of the imagination reminds me of a story that may shed
some light on what Buchanan might have had in mind when he said we were making
misfits in the universe. Stringfellow Barr, president of St. John’s when
Buchanan was dean, said this of his friend: “The difference between Scott and
me was that when I see a baby, I’m enchanted with him; and Scott is always
feeling, ‘Well, that’s not the baby I had in mind. Babies ought to do better
than that.’ All human enterprises, including birth, seem to him a little
disappointing. He’s a Platonist in the sense he’s got some notion of the baby
in the back of his mind that no baby lives up to, whereas to me it’s such a
miracle the little brat is alive – so what, if he has defects. His ears stick
out and he’s cross-eyed, certainly, but he’s alive.” Barr was talking then
about the birth of the St. John’s Program, but his observations about Buchanan
– about Buchanan as a kind of Socrates – these observations may help us
understand how Buchanan saw the world in general, and that only misfits were
well fit to recognize the world as it is and the world as it is meant to be … and
then to make the effort to do something to close the gap between the two.
It
is now your turn to take the gift of your education out into the world, which
needs the open, thoughtful, loving stewards, critics, and visionaries you are
capable of being. May you fare well and find happiness in this endeavor!
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