- Nov 7, 2001
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I attended the Bard College commencement a month ago or so. I wasn't expecting much in terms of political commentary but was treated to an absolutely wonderful speech by the president of the college. I think some of you here will appriecate it, others not.
<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://inside.bard.edu/tools/pr/fstory.php?id=888">Bard Commencement 2005
Leon Botstein
President, Bard College</a>
EDIT: added bold
<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://inside.bard.edu/tools/pr/fstory.php?id=888">Bard Commencement 2005
Leon Botstein
President, Bard College</a>
Time, its passage and perception, makes its presence felt acutely at institutional rituals?notably this Bard Commencement. The calendar of college life is strikingly at odds with our individual sense of how time passes. Each of us gets to graduate only once from college. Yet each year, with uncanny regularity, Commencement returns. This is Bard's 145th. Like a public monument, or a work of art, or a book, a college defies the process of aging; there is a circular regularity and a sense of renewal that define our institutions of learning. The students always stay the same age; they never get older, although we do. What is unique for every graduate and becomes a memory for each of them recurs each year here under this tent. The institutional gift of permanence?its appeal from mortality?is justified by the commitment to inspire and teach young adults to think, to imagine silently, and to speak.
The dichotomy between how time is experienced by a single individual over the course of life and the illusion of temporal stability within institutions?the tension between the dynamic and the static sense of time?deserves particular attention this year. It is with awe and humility that we recall the quiet cataclysm of thought that took place one hundred years ago in the spring of 1905 that revolutionized the modern world, particularly our sense of time. Between March and September 1905, a young official working in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland?Albert Einstein?published five papers that transformed our understanding of the world. In rapid succession, in the heat of intense, pure thought and concentration, with unparalleled elegance of prose, this obscure physicist first successfully exploded an accepted truth, that light was a wave. Rather, he showed that it consisted of "a finite number of quanta localized in points in space." That was in March. In April and May, much to the consternation of a hero of his, the physicist Ernst Mach, by measuring molecular dimensions and analyzing Brownian motion Einstein proved the real, not imaginary, existence of atoms. By June, when someone here at Bard had just graduated from college, Einstein published his most famous and perfect paper supplanting Newton's notion of absolute space and time by positing the special theory of relativity. Simultaneity of events together with absolute space vanished as realities.
Einstein's stunning moment of intense thinking was a burst of creativity by a young man of whom little had been expected, by someone who could not get an academic position. His achievement has become synonymous with genius, originality, the beauty of thought, and the calm, modest clarity of expression. At the same time, his discoveries remain uncomfortable, for they seem to defy common sense and seem hard to fathom. We celebrate the radical originality of his discoveries but actually resist their meaning. To the consternation of many, it has turned out that what he argued was not only beautiful, but also brilliant and simple, and to the best of our knowledge, true. He pierced the veil of contradiction and mystery in the universe, making logical such anomalies as the constancy of the speed of light.
The so-called miraculous year of 1905 was, however, no miracle. It was rather a dramatic affirmation of the rewards of being a real student, of an intense engagement with thinking and the traditions of thought. Einstein was forced to question common sense and convention because he wanted to understand the universe and resolve the most elusive paradoxes. At the core of Einstein's breakthrough was a fundamental faith in causality and order within the universe and, above all, the power of humans to understand the universe through the use of reason. It is ironic that the theory of relativity has been abused and misunderstood, applied indiscriminately beyond the world of science. Einstein did not replace truth with subjectivity, but rather supplanted an inadequate formulation of time and space. By rejecting the priority of a single frame of reference, he recast the universe, just as Copernicus and Newton had before him. There was not a hint of relativism in Einstein about truth, morality, and beauty?of the sort decried by the new Pope, Benedict XVI?only a verifiable challenge to received wisdom, to what was once thought to be the last word and the final authority.
We recall Einstein's triumph of a century ago on this glorious day of celebration because it his example, his pursuit of the traditions of questioning and thinking, that the degrees you, members of the Class of 2005, will receive today challenge you to emulate. These acts of the mind are dangerous. They confront complacency and routine. They demand freedom. They cherish the idea of the individual. They embrace dissent. They welcome counterintuitive changes in how we understand the world.
Although questioning and thinking are at the core of the experience of teaching and learning here at Bard, these traditions are in grave danger in contemporary America, if not in the world at large. At risk is not the courage and ambition of the young. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that this graduating class is leaving here to pursue work or further study at a moment when rigorous free and challenging inquiry are being voluntarily abandoned and overtly discouraged.
The success and fate of democracy have always been linked to freedom, just as the preservation of freedom has been tied to education. The essential premise of a free and democratic society is persuasion by argument, evidence, and reason as opposed to persuasion generated at the point of a gun or as a result of extreme deprivation?that is, power, violence, and poverty. Whether it is fairness, justice, or a supposed fact of nature, the results of open debate, evidence, argument, reason, and a faith in causality and the process of inching closer to the truth?the notion of human progress?have helped determine not only what we know to be true in science but in our laws as well. Our notions of justice, of right and wrong, are not the products of revelation and divine authority but the consequence of human deliberation, debate, and decision. At the core of a commitment to democracy is the belief in language and reason that Einstein possessed all his life, a faith in the human ability to imagine and justify the truth and distinguish right from wrong. Education is needed, as it was in Einstein's case, to marshal the means to challenge convention and wrong-headed common sense. Education is needed to help us defend conclusions and even retreat from them when we, through the very same process of argument and reflection, discover that we have been wrong.
This faith in human reason and its inherent link to freedom and morality is an 18th-century conceit shared by the founders of this nation. It is an optimistic one. It assumed that the citizens of the future would search for knowledge and truth, legislate laws, abide by them voluntarily, and often tolerate the necessary compromises that daily life, not science, require. The instrument of political debate would be "candor," as Jefferson used that word in the Declaration of Independence, a candor that calls for clear argument and evidence. Democratic politics borrowed its tools from science. A belief in the distinctions between fact and fiction, between lies and truth, and the ability of citizens to distinguish and locate each through education and language became the hallmark of the politics of freedom.
But the most radical 18th-century premise was that truth and knowledge were human propositions, constantly advancing from rational principles and human capacities, always subject to scrutiny through the use of human reason. They were not divine. Religion and doctrine were set to the side in the form of deism, agnosticism, or even atheism. For Einstein, the divine was defined in a manner reminiscent of that Jewish heretic Spinoza, as the belief in the comprehensive rationality of the universe that humans might ultimately grasp.
We cite John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government as the classic 17th-century philosophical inspiration for our form of democratic government. Yet when we teach it in college we too often overlook the very first chapter. It is imperative that we recall it today. In a discreet but explicit manner Locke sets the Bible to the side. He dismisses its credibility from the very start, its story of creation, and its account of the place of the human, Adam and Eve. He elegantly makes the point that each of us is born free and in equilibrium in our possession of reason. Government and laws are not dimensions of an inherited dominion from God but the work and province of humans. Locke strips the Bible of its authority in the establishment of government and in politics just as Galileo and Copernicus had stripped it of its authority in science.
You, however, are graduating at a quite different philosophical moment. In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, radical faith and rigid, intolerant doctrine are on the rise and with their ascendancy a desire to deny humans, particularly the young, their capacity to discover and reformulate the truth. They ask us to reject the dynamic possibilities of progress and leaps in individual insight and understanding. We now wish to reject reason and evidence and derive truth from the revealed; making the real world conform to doctrine and tradition, making government and law coherent with the Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran. Religion and doctrine, understood literally in terms of divine revelation, are gathering momentum as a basis for our understanding of the world, as a guide for society and politics. Our federal government, with the apparent assent of the majority of our fellow citizens, seeks to tear down the essential wall erected by the founders between state and church and hand over education, our social services, and the administration of justice to the authority of organized religion.
The degrees you will receive today, however, represent an achievement in cultivating your reason consistent with the traditions of Locke, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, against concessions to doctrine or to the leap of faith on behalf of revelation. All that we cherish here at Bard, from science to art, is the product of religious skepticism, a secular public culture in which faith remains a private matter. We here cherish the most important dimension of religious freedom, the freedom to have none at all, even less than Einstein's rudimentary faith in the comprehensibility of a complex and chaotic world.
By accepting these degrees today, exactly one hundred years after Einstein demonstrated single-handedly the courage of the young and the power of the human imagination, I charge each of you to lead lives, in religious terms, in any manner you wish, as individuals. But as fellow citizens, however, I ask you to fight to preserve the vision of the founders of this republic on behalf of a world of learning and scholarship and political practice based on human reason and the necessity of freedom. The human reason each of you has displayed with such impressive and delightful style has cured disease and unraveled the secrets of the universe. True, it has led us down false and blind alleys, but it has led us out of them as well. Ultimately, we have shown creationism to be as plainly false as the notion of the sun revolving around the earth.
On this campus your capacity to think and speak has been challenged to demand argument and proof so that lies, half-truths, and superstitions do not prevail. You have learned, as Einstein did, the beauty and exhilaration of insight and understanding. May you use the skills honed here at Bard for the rest of your lives on behalf of the pursuit of knowledge, the search for truth, and its elegant expression on behalf of a free and open society, as citizens eager to respect the great 18th-century secular celebration of the rule of freedom and reason, the very tradition that gave birth to this great and free nation and its institutions of higher learning, Bard among them.
The motto on Bard's seal promises "And I will give you the crown of life." May this class of 2005 go forth with that gift, that crown: optimism and engagement, candid confidence in humanity and reason and in the beauty of the universe that inspired Einstein to rethink space and time a century ago.
EDIT: added bold
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