Commencing Inspiration

There are three purposes to a college commencement. The first is to make it memorable to those who just paid a lot of money over the past four years, to give them a show that says, “your money was well spent.” The second is to leave a final impression to the graduates that says, “share with us the income you earn the rest of your life.” Neither of these purposes is particularly high brow, but money makes the world go ’round.

The third is to inspire the graduates. It’s both the easiest, and the hardest, to pull off. Sitting through three plus hours of exceptionally hard-to-pronounce names being read gave me tons of time to consider what I heard, and what I might say had anyone asked me to inspire the students.  The most impressive thing that happened was that every student was handed his actual diploma on stage. That’s rarely done, and was an amazing feat of organization. If only they had been so organized all along. But I digress.

There were two primary speakers at MIT’s commencement ceremony. The president, L. Rafael Reif, gave a speech that was so banal, so generic, so impersonal, that I assumed he got a good deal from CommencementSpeech.com. It was delivered in his thick accent, which meant a word was missed, or mispronounced, at least once per sentence.

That was the least of his issues. His message was play well with others and commit random acts of kindness. This must have been a great speech in the 1990s.

The main speaker was Matt Damon, who demonstrated how to work a crowd.

Damon offered some advice to MIT’s 2016 graduating class: “The world wants to hear your ideas — good and bad. But today’s not the day you switch from ‘receive’ to ‘transmit.’ Once you do that, your education is over. And your education should never be over. Even outside your work, there are ways to keep challenging yourself. … Whatever you do, just keep listening. Even to people you don’t agree with at all.”

As the graduates go out to tackle the world’s problems, he said, “There are potentially trillions of human beings who will someday exist whose fate, in large part, depends on the choices you make … on your ideas … on your grit and persistence and willingness to engage.”

Then there was his “two fake graduations,” this one (since he didn’t get a degree, but instead an MIT Pirate Certificate) and when he walked with his class at Harvard, where he didn’t get a degree because he was only there for two years. Why he was allowed to walk went unexplained, and at MIT, the Harvard is referred to as “that other local Cambridge college.”

Damon’s speech would have been great but for three things. First, he preached about his virtues a bit much. He’s big into bringing clean water to areas of extreme poverty, which is great, but this was a crowd more interested in thermal fluid transfer rates than the joy on people’s faces.

The other two problems were bookends, that Trump was horrible and Elizabeth Warren was wonderful. He should have kept his politics out of it. The word “Pocahontas” was never uttered. The lesson elsewhere might be hold the right political beliefs, but no one graduated from MIT with a bachelors of science in gender and deviant sexual studies. This wasn’t Harvard.

Over the next few hours, as the names of graduates were called out in the passion play of diversity and inclusion, it gave me an opportunity to reflect on Damon’s and Reif’s speeches, and I did. Up to now, I would have imagined my speech to include phrases like “special snowflakes” and, perhaps, “time to put away your childhood toys and leave the puppy room behind.” But my mind turned elsewhere.

Instead, I thought of the millions of people who came before. I thought of the brilliant minds that existed, some of whom were mentioned by the speakers. And I thought, none of them, despite their acknowledged genius, had achieved Utopia. None had solved the world’s problems. None had ended the travesties that we wring our hands over today.

A theme at commencement was that the graduates should strive to make the world a better place. Why then, I thought, had so many brilliant people failed so miserably to do so, giving us the world as we now find it? How is it we know so clearly what has to be done, and yet none of these brilliant men and women figured it out before us? Sure, they invented things, fixed particular problems, gave us miracles, and yet our world remains filled with tragedy, misery and suffering?

Maybe there is no answer. Maybe there is no “right thing to do” that doesn’t give rise to another wrong thing. Maybe alleviating one person’s suffering means dumping misery on someone else. Maybe every seemingly apparent “answer” just gives rise to the next level of problems, and we’re fooling ourselves into believing that this “one simple trick” is going to fix everything.

Does this mean we stop trying to do better, to help others, to fix our world? That seems nuts, selfish. It would mean our existence is pointless, beyond a bit of hedonism. That can’t be. But at the same time, our grandiose notions that indulginng our social justice flavor of the month will finally the create that Utopia that has eluded every brilliant person who ever lived seems, well, the height of hubris.

So what’s the answer? Beats me. I’m certainly not in the league of great thinkers who might offer a clue. But then, if none of the great minds that existed before you came up with the right answer, what makes you think you will?

Maybe the best we can do is take baby steps, do little things, do what we think is right and hope we don’t screw things up too badly. Maybe we should let go of the certainty that our feelings of truth and justice are the “right” feelings. After all, smarter people than us tried and failed to achieve that perfect world. Maybe we need to learn a little humility from that.

22 thoughts on “Commencing Inspiration

  1. Ray K

    I’d give the worst graduation speech ever, because I’d be that guy talking about his kid. I’d tell the graduates how much I worry about my 2-year-old son. I worry about big things (like something catastrophic happening to him) and small things (like whether he goes outside enough to play). I worry about whether he’ll be a good person. I don’t even know what the hell that means. But I hope he still is one. I’ll be overjoyed if he graduates from MIT one day, but proud if he needs to fight his way through Bunker Hill CC. I’m not a good enough person to devote my life to causes like clean water for the impoverished. Devoting it to this kid is all I got right now. It’s terribly selfish, easy in the grand scheme of things, but harder than my life was before. I may even show them a picture of him on my phone.

  2. Richard G. Kopf

    SHG,

    It is worth comparing American collegiate graduation ceremonies with those held at Oxford University in England. I have just watched a video of the 2015 ceremony at Oxford in the Sheldonian Theatre designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

    With a very short introduction by the Vice-Chancellor of the University in English, the ceremony then proceeds entirely in Latin. The ceremony recalls the 800 or so years that have past before this particular ceremony.

    The ceremony is highly formal, with much bowing and donning and doffing of the academic headgear by all. There is a focus on age-old traditions and stylised civility.

    So far as I can tell, there was no commencement speech similar to the ones we see here in America. The beautiful ritual spoke for itself. It allowed everyone to infuse into the proceedings the personal meaning of the moment.

    All the best.

    RGK

    PS To find what I watched, see “My Graduation Ceremony (University of Oxford)” at YouTube. The background from the author states: “Published on Aug 3, 2015. A video of my graduation ceremony from my Master of Science (in Mathematics and the Foundations of Computer Science) to my Doctor of Philosophy (in Computer Science), which took place on June 21st, 2015 at 11am in the Sheldonian Theatre, University of Oxford.”

    1. SHG Post author

      I love tradition. It connects us to history. I fear that it’s fallen out of fashion and will be forgotten. What a shame.

        1. SHG Post author

          Progress is forgetting history and ignoring tradition? Not my idea of progress. Nor George Santayana’s.

  3. Jim Tyre

    I would have imagined my speech to include phrases like “special snowflakes” and, perhaps, “time to put away your childhood toys and leave the puppy room behind.”

    Getting a head start on the audition to be a commencement speaker, somewhere, next year. Good on ya, mate.

  4. B. McLeod

    As you point out, the do-gooders who advocate running over anything and everything to implement their Utopian ideas really do assume that the great thinkers of prior generations were mere primitives by comparison. This is a monumental arrogance. Ironically, when these go-gooders have failed, the next generation of do-gooders will make the same assumption about them. It is a perpetual cycle of arrogance, and never achieves the Utopian goal. Perhaps this is for the very reason that the modern do-gooders reject the lessons and experience of their forebears, who were, after all, too primitive to be relevant.

  5. wilbur

    Should a “commencement” ceremony be held before your first year?

    I went to my high school graduation because it seemed like the thing to do. Thus, I then knew enough to skip my junior college and university ceremonies. My parents insisted on attending my law school graduation so I gladly went for them.

    Kidz, if you can get out of it, do so. I suggest doing something else you enjoy. Life is short.

    If you are scheduled to speak, go. Then be brief, be sincere and be seated. And don’t be Matt Damon. No one cares who you’re voting for.

    1. bobo

      why is it that the English seem to get it right most of the time and we get it wrong most of the time? or, is it just pond envy?
      and i don’t care how matt damon wants to vote or anyone else, do they think they will actually change our minds?

  6. Sabine

    I spoke at my high school graduation. Don’t remember what I said. I attended my college ceremony. Don’t remember what any of the speakers said. Was I inspired along the way to want to make the world a better place? Oh absolutely! How’d that go? Thirty years later, all I know is that the best I can do is be kind to every person I meet in a day. And I’m not always so good at that. I’m backing Ray and his two-year-old for the future of our planet. Good people bring up good people, who bring up good people. That’s really all we’ve got.

    1. Billy Bob

      “My goal in life,… is to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.” We wonder if the pomp and circumstance of the university graduation ceremony comes from the same place in the human psyche that the rituals of the court come from? (Our Anglo-Saxon heritage that RGK is so fond of, above? No wonder he was drawn to the Court!) And of course, the rituals of The Church would make up the third leg of the pomp and circumstantial stool.

      This was a nice essay. June 4 is an important day. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But we have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep. And miles to go before we sleep. Show me a kind person, and I will show you a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Well, Chancellor L.R.R’s “random acts of kindness” sounds like a plan. Yea, we can go along with that. Stop barking, Fido; it’s only the mail-person.

  7. Keith

    I don’t remember what the speakers at my college graduation said. I’m sure it was a good attempt at inspiration.

    But I remember my parents sitting in the audience waiting for their eldest to graduate college.

    I may not have realized it then, but that’s the real reason the ceremony was worth attending.

    Congratulations, Scott

    1. SHG Post author

      There is a certain amount of pomp and circumstance needed to mark auspicious occasions. That’s what makes them auspicious. But without someone in the audience waiting for someone to graduate, there would be no one to watch and appreciate the pomp. They do better together than apart.

  8. Robert Zeh

    There have been plenty of “right things to do” in the past that haven’t involved shifting misery around.
    Sewers.
    Washing your hands before delivering babies.
    Vaccines.
    Weather satellites.

    No one simple trick will fix everything. But things have gotten better.

    But when we go swimming this summer, I don’t have to worry about my kids coming back with polio. That doesn’t mean there won’t be heartache in their lives. But it is an unambiguous improvement. The kind I’d hope new graduates strive for.

    1. SHG Post author

      So you prefer war and famine to disease. Duly noted.

      On a more serious note, history is replete with great inventions and discoveries. Yet, humanity continues to suffer a constant onslaught of trauma. At least infant mortality was a better cause than microaggressions, but our nature never seems to adjust well to advancements. Things have gotten better. People, on the other hand, apparently have not.

      1. B. McLeod

        And one of the assumptions do-gooders need to discard is that they will magically make people better. Maxim is an example, envisioning the machine gun as a device that would bring worldwide peace by making further wars too horrible to contemplate. (Let’s not try to run that play again, please).

        1. SHG Post author

          Weird how solutions beget new, often unforeseen (or at least denied), problems. Or they just don’t turn out to be solutions at all.

  9. Froggy64

    Speaking of tradition, there’s a traditional answer to why so many brilliant people can’t get the world right – ‘original sin’.

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