’s 1999 Commencement Speech At Stanford University Essay, Research Paper
June 13, 1999
I’ll start in the formal
traditional way by addressing President Casper and Provost Rice, the trustees and faculty,
the honored guests, the graduates and their families and their guests. Thanks a lot for
inviting me to come here. I really appreciate it. I call attention to the formality of the
traditional beginning of this kind of speech, because one of the things I want to talk to
you about today is the question: What are we doing here?
Graduation exercises, like this one, embody one of the
great secular rituals in our culture, unique and strange occasions involving funny hats
which some here have made funnier and more light-hearted and more individual and more
festive with pineapples and inflatable surgical gloves and trees and things I don’t know
what they are. But you have not succeeded in the making the hats any more strange than
they already are. Many of us have traveled great distances to wear these special get-ups,
to witness a procession of individuals in these unusual garments whose colors are part of
the symbolic code elaborately explained in your program and remembered by almost nobody.
We have come to take part in the handing over of special emblematic objects, diplomas,
which bear language dimly understood or downright incomprehensible inscribed on unfamiliar
materials signed and stamped with seals so formal they’re nearly mystical with symbols and
mottoes. The hats are like a ritual symbolic surrealist mystery, a symbol flamboyantly
representing mystery itself.
By comparison, other secular rituals, like the inauguration
of an American president, for example, or the ceremonies of becoming an American citizen,
get accomplished with a kind of quick, understated simplicity, more like getting a
driver’s license than our ceremonies today.
Why do we mark these occasions with such intense degrees
of, as the song title is, "Pomp and Circumstance"?
My question is only put the more by the Stanford tradition
of doing something a little silly or weird to go along with it. It’s another way of
putting the same question: What is this?
There are two usual explanations for this remarkable
intensity of ceremoniousness. One is that the graduates have worked very hard for their
education. Possibly so. Another is that the parents and family have made material
sacrifices, sometimes mortgaging homes or taking second jobs in order to pay for the
education. There’s something in that notion, too. But neither one seems an adequate
explanation of these rituals.
On some deeper level, I think that what we see today is the
celebration here of the two great obligations or standards, the two great tests that apply
to every tribe and culture on earth, the two values by which any human society must be
judged. These two measures of any people, of any nation, challenge us Americans at the end
of what has been called "the American century" in special ways. These secular
rituals and extraordinary gowns and processions invoke those two monumental standards and
propose that on this splendid campus in the midst of a prosperous, technologically
sophisticated society, which this is in some ways the center, in a richly burgeoning mass
culture, we do continue, so these exercises are meant to assert, to fulfill the ancient
fundamental purposes of community.
I mean the two great requirements of the human animal,
without which human community is corrupt or useless, namely, caring for the young ones and
honoring the wisdom of the old ones, including the ways and wisdom of the dead. The tribe
or community or nation that fails at either of these missions brings woe and destruction
on itself. Today the graduates pass symbolically from being the objects of the first
concern, young ones who have been nurtured, to bearing the responsibilities of the second,
those who are supposed to care for the young and who will preserve and extend the wisdom
of the dead.
Colleges and universities are places where those
fundamental activities — taking care of the offspring, revering the ancestors — come
together in a single effort. Commencement exercises are a sort of transition or meeting
place between those two broad purposes. If you come on a tribe that neglects its children
or ignores its old ones, you know that some tremendous woe is about to extinguish that
people’s spirit.
I think that the special outfits and music and titles and
diplomas are a kind of prayer that our spirit be healthy, that those missions are still
sacred one way or another. And clowning is part of the sacred; clowning is a way of
pointing toward the sacred.
I’m going to try to comment on those missions in a specific
way that apply to Americans today, and to these graduates, but first let me elaborate the
general idea a little bit. Most mammals have to care for their young, but in the famous
classical tag, the human animal is an especially puny creature. Its claws are almost
useless as weapons. So are its feeble little teeth. Its hide offers only flimsy
protection. The pathetic animal can’t swim very well. It can’t fly at all. It can’t jump
very high. Its climbing is mediocre and even its most athletic specimens are not very
fast, compared to other animals. But we’re a clever, observant, busy little monkey. And
for survival, we have developed means of communication — communicating not only
horizontally, so the animal can cooperate with its peers in gaining food or shelter, but
also vertically with its predecessors and successors so that the experiences of past
lifetimes can be applied to make up for our physical weakness.
For this purpose of memory and transmission the animal has
devised the binary code of the computer, and before that, printed marks, and before
printed marks, incised or written marks, and before the incised or written marks, the
creature made a technology out of its own body, notably with the highly refined system of
grunts emitted through its feeding orifice. Like the griots in Alex Haley’s Roots
who could call up across centuries information about dynasties, family relations, property
rights, the human animal through this amazing grunt code of speech can retain subtle
shades of information — which food is available at what time of year, what customs for
mating or burial best serve a community, information as precise or as subtle as "Get
me a pound of galvanized ten-penny nails" or "I love you but not that way."
Mostly we take this process for granted, but not always. I
remember when I was in grade school they used to show us movies provided by industrial
groups — "The Story of Glassmaking" or "The Amazing Truth About
Paper" — and these movies had these informative graphic diagrams and vivid scenes
showing very complicated machinery pulping paper or making bottles or fiberglass curtains,
and also shots of technicians in lab coats working the machinery or developing the
processes, making notes on clipboards. And in grade school I used to watch those machines
in assembly lines in the movies, those elaborate diagrams of chemical processes, and I
used to think to myself: "There’s no way kids are going to learn to do this
stuff." I felt that when the grownups who worked in those factories and laboratories
died, it was all going to fall apart. There would be no more Coke bottles or paper or
whatever. "I know these kids," I said to myself. "When it’s our turn
to manage all this stuff, they’re not going to work those machines, where the caps come
down on the bottles ten times a second!" I knew in my bones that maybe one or two
kids in a hundred had absorbed the diagrams, and none of us could work the machines! It
was all going to collapse.
In a way, it is amazing that of course the people in my
generation and later did learn to work the machines, and the machines that make the
machines, and we not only mastered the process, but extended and improved and supplanted
and developed and exceeded what had come before. It still surprises me. Most or all of the
people who made those movies about glass or paper or whatever are dead now. Most of those
people in those obsolete factories are dead, and those who practice their crafts and
professions today honor them in their work, without necessarily thinking about them. Or
maybe once in a while they do think about those old ones of glass or paper. I hope they
do. In the interest of the community, the community instructs the young in the ways of the
past; and if I have one superstition, my superstition is that we had better honor those
before us as we hope to be honored by those to whom we pass on our treasures of knowledge
and skill.
Maybe the most powerful, even disturbing, statement I know
concerning that process of receiving from the old ones to give to the young is the
legendary half-mythical speech given by Chief Seattle, the Suquamash Indian leader. In the
most authentic of the many versions of Seattle’s speech, he recognizes that the white
invaders have displaced and conquered his people, reduced now to a remnant who have to
rely on the goodwill of the white leaders. His people are a faded, hopeless community now,
says Seattle to the conquerors, and soon there may be none left of a people who once were
more numerous and hopeful than yours. He muses that the white men have said that their god
is the god of the Indians as well, but Seattle says he has to doubt that. Why, if the two
peoples have this one father, does he treat the one so much better than the other? And how
can we be brothers, he says to the triumphant newcomers, when we’re so different.
As his great central example of that difference, Seattle
points to how differently the two peoples behave in relation to their dead. He says:
To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their
resting place is hallowed ground.
You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and
seemingly without regret.
Your dead cease to love you and the land of their
nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars.
They are soon forgotten and never return.
"Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave
them being," he says, and he explains that they often return to advise and comfort
the living.
This is very smart, cunning rhetoric on Seattle’s part,
seeming to concede and submit while it defiantly chastises. Then his speech takes a
different, rather surprisingly rhetorical turn, musing that despite these differences, on
the other hand, he says, all peoples eventually wither and die away; nothing lasts
forever. "We may be brothers after all," he says.
"We may be brothers after all" — brothers in
mortality, brothers in the fact that all nations wither. Nothing lasts forever. And then
Chief Seattle makes a remarkable statement, a sentence that has rung in my mind since I
first read it: "They are not powerless, the dead."
"They are not powerless, the dead." I believe
that these famous remarks of Chief Seattle speak to something deep in the nature of the
United States of America, as though Seattle intuited something profound about our
possibilities and our risks. I associate his saying that the dead are not powerless with
the nature of American memory — our particular national ways of honoring the old ones.
It’s been said that while the United States is beyond doubt
a great nation, it remains to be seen if we are a great people, or whether we are perhaps
still engaged in the undertaking of becoming a great people. I propose to you that a
people is defined and unified not by blood, but by shared memory — a people is held
together and identified by what successfully gets passed on from the old ones to be
remembered by the young. A people is its memory, its ancestral treasures.
The greatness of our military and political and economic
power, the greatness of our technology, are beyond question. And beyond that power and
abundance there are our great national documents — the Constitution with the Bill of
Rights, the Declaration of Independence. And beyond those, some of our cultural
accomplishments seem unarguably great — our jazz certainly, our feature films maybe, the
poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, writing by Cather and Ellison and Faulkner.
But the crucial question is: Who are the people who
remember those documents, who are the people who remember the music of Ellington or
Parker, the films of Buster Keaton, the poems of Dickinson or Whitman? Am I right in
supposing that these are among our sacred shared treasures? Or is the list more uncertain
than that, or different from that? Do we or do we not recall our treasures? Do we know
what they are, and do we remember them, whatever they may be?
In this country, it’s especially evident that a people is
defined by memory, not by blood — more evident than in a country where more of the
citizens resemble one another physically. In our country, where we don’t all resemble one
another quite so much physically, the conscious process of memory, the deciding who we are
by what we remember, is more overt and visible because also, relatively speaking, we do
without the two great supports of memory in many other cultures. Even our racial division,
with its history of injustice, in this context is perhaps only the greatest and most
painful example of our still ongoing quest to be a great people. What are the two things
that we do without?
On one side, we do not have a single unifying folk culture
in which the grandparents all tell the same stories and sing the same songs to the
children. The Italian American grandma and the Eastern European grandma and the African
American grandma and the Lebanese and Chinese and Southeast Asian grandmas in America all
tell somewhat different jokes and tales and sing somewhat different songs. Secondly, on
the other extreme, we are relatively without a social class that considers itself the
hereditary curators of art. That is, possibly in that imaginary village of President
Casper’s, that one person with a college degree who says, "I’m well born. My
ancestors and I take care of this memory, these things. Somebody else does the folk
memory, I do the aristocratic memory." But here, there’s relatively little snob value
to art. There are countries in the world where politicians must pretend to love the great
national poet. In those countries, if a driver is angry at another driver, he yells at
him, "You have no culture!"
I submit to you that this is not an American insult.
In the absence of a single folk culture, in the relative
absence of the aristocratic notion, where do we Americans get the memory that holds us
together as a people? How do we stave off the withering away that’s implicit in Chief
Seattle’s observation that we don’t keep our dead with us? How is it that we have managed
to hold together as a people? How can we expect to?
One answer is that we’re still working on it — that we
have developed a national genius for making it up as we go along. Improvisation
characterizes our music, our clothes, our blue jeans, the get-ups that you have on today,
the headlong invention and energy of our businesses, our mass entertainment. But the
spirit of improvisation alone, though we may be proud of it, it alone cannot sustain the
process that transmits the ways of glassmaking and papermaking, or the ways of
understanding ourselves across the generations.
A second, perhaps terribly anticlimactic answer to how do
we get along without a single folk root, and without a dominant aristocratic ideal, answer
can be expressed in one disappointing yet hopeful word: school. In America’s public
schools and in our colleges and universities — this particular university improvised by a
couple not far out of living memory — we have improvised some notion of who we are. Or,
to be precise, who our old ones are. Who are the dead we keep with us?
My personal favorite example of that process of choosing
our old ones is in the writing of the great American essayist W. E. B. DuBois. In a
memorable paragraph, where DuBois associates the great works of the past with the spirit
of freedom, DuBois writes — you can tell a good 19th-century prose style by the way he
writes, almost in blank verse — he writes:
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the