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Victor Davis Hanson Commencement Address St. John's College Annapolis Graduates, Parents, Faculty and Staff of St. John’s College—Thank you for your kind invitation. The New Old Education What you have read, how you have been taught, and why you are at St. John’s have all made you uniquely educated in America today. Rather than being prepped on the latest –ism of the day, or made aware of the paradigm shift of the week, you are now of the Old Breed—strange folk more at home in an age long past than with the majority here in the present. By your very apprenticeship here at St. John’s, you have been anointed as stewards of the ancient knowledge—the rare few who accept Homer’s brutal truth, who are disturbed by Thucydides’ portrait of human nature, and who perhaps wish Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Nieztsche were not so wise so often. Of what value is your liberal education, others will ask? You will reply to many of the wealthier and more proud, who are half-educated and who do not know its nature, that it is simply the power—today, tomorrow, always—to use the abstract wisdom of the ages to make sense of the daily chaos of the present. St. John’s has given you all a reservoir of learning from great men and women. These are your intellectual acquaintances for life. Each hour, each day from now to the end they will be there with you—to remind you, chastise you, enlighten you that you and what you experience are neither novel nor unique. When you are surprised that you find that those you help may resent, rather appreciate, your largess, John, Matthew, and Mark will be there. When you are depressed that in this, our greatest age of affluence, learning, and leisure, we of the sophisticated and enlightened classes, still must battle, rather than reason with or sweet talk, those who torture, beat women, and murder the innocent, Tacitus will sigh and remind you that it is always so. When others suggest that educated citizens should not profess patriotism or think of their culture as unique and worth defending, you will remind them of Aeschylus at Marathon and Socrates at Delium. And when you despair that men with money, degrees, status, and fame can be petty rather than noble, and are as likely as the illiterate and impoverished to steal and defame, Juvenal, Dante, and Swift will laugh along with you You do not need to go to Polynesia, New Guinea, or Siberia to understand the nature of man; because as fascinating as such inquiry and travel might be, it will merely tell you that there are only different colors, sizes, and cultures of people—not different people themselves. Literature and history have already taught you, that wherever you go, the nature of men and women remains constant, only their details, appearance, and local habits change. Out of that learning you have also acquired a method of inquiry—in addition to such a majestic body of knowledge: observe, question, compare, and conclude—always oblivious to whether your answers make you among the hated or loved, or more likely rarely even noticed. Like Euripides, you are hunters of beauty, which Socrates reminds us is really the The Good and The True—what the Greeks call aletheia “that which cannot be forgotten.” You, like Thucydides, are skeptical of those who would change language to mask a reality that cannot really be masked. Shakespeare has taught you that people are never either 100% admirable or completely evil, but yet they still can be helped and supported if perhaps 75% good, and in turn must be opposed and soundly defeated if 80% bad. So you, almost alone now in this great nation, have been afforded an education that makes you empirical and inductive, open to truth when it comes from enemies and the uncouth —and resistant to lies when they are sweet and well meant from friends. You will not just ponder and equivocate, but decide, judge, and act. Because those who wrote what you have studied were not, as most of us who write today most surely are, academic and scholastic, you have learned that word must match deed. There is a physical world that gives flesh to mental bones, —and weak wisdom can often lose to muscular ignorance. So use your knowledge to be in the arena—like Socrates, Jesus, Augustine, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln—the Coliseum of action that will so often be to your great peril and discomfort. You must not, out of some misguided sense of exalted erudition, allow your gift of learning to remain on the shelf, your life’s wisdom kept as rarely-turned pages between foreboding leather covers—at times to be brought down from on high to nuance this or footnote that, embarrass the less learned, or bolster the pedant. Remember instead Danton—“audacity, always audacity, still more audacity.” Rapier-like cut through cant and fad of the majority. Seek out the like-minded whom you will instantly recognize by their shared desire to plunge in and take on the world—thus earning, at least in your lifetime, the world’s obvious dislike and even anger at your obtrusive presence. Like Odysseus you are beginning a great voyage home in perilous times to rendezvous with suitors feasting away at our society’s once ample social capital and spiritual reserves. So there are now in this country all the same old Sirens and more still who will seek to mesmerize, delay, and cast you upon the shoals. The Charybdis of the Right assures that the university and education itself are simply to be utilitarian and commercial—certifications of dexterity with spread sheets, glibness with the law, or mere mastery of regulations, tables, charts, and graphs. You will answer back that your reservoir and your method already make you a journeyman businessman, lawyer, or doctor, for you can later quickly gather up the minutiae of their trade—but can they so easily acquire your reason and wisdom to properly enhance their specialized skills? Most of you will in fact enter the professions. Many–I have no doubt of it—shall become rich and powerful. But I am also equally confident that such success will accrue more because you shall be deft and experienced about what Thucydides called “the human thing,” and resigned about the way humans think and act, rather than because you were simply adept at a particular skill. Your education, after all, is a great head of water. Pumps will come and pumps will go—computers, telecommunications, gadgets whose complexity we can scarcely imagine, and all the false knowledge that accompanies them. But the water—the flowing water of knowledge about the human thing and the method to use it—is eternal and timeless and cares little about the circumstances of its delivery system of the particular age. As you steer clear of the whirlpool, also beware of the everready Scylla of the Left. The idea is now almost universal that the purpose of education is therapeutic, to change what words mean, to deny how people act, to create absolute equality of results, rather than of opportunity in the here and now—or else! Would that your education had such power to end the miseries of the age and do it so cheaply and instantaneously as promised! But alas it does not. Should you seek to be angels of absolute wizened power, you will more likely become devils of machination. Consider the temptations of Tolkien’s alluring, but dreadful One Ring. And so do not employ your power of knowledge to deceive the gullible or through well meaning sophistry and false wisdom, seek to better what in a perfect world should be bettered. Education used foully for a good cause, is nevertheless foul, and the cause not so good after all. Remember instead the first and oldest commandments of the humble Greeks—know yourself / nothing too much / grow old learning. So besides the great gift of wisdom that St. John’s has bequeathed to you, it has also given you the power to do great harm. Do not be tempted, but instead remember Ecclesiastes that the ‘race does not always go to the swift, nor learning to the wise’, and so seek not to inject reason alone in those few sacrosanct realms where faith and belief, not reason, have hold. And recall the warnings of the clever Euripides and the foul-mouthed Aristophanes that with intellectual progress can come moral regress. Do no use that ring of power, that ability of education to explain away every wrong, confuse the good but uneducated, and turn your own real sins into glib but artificial morality. Do not seek to force upon the less gifted utopian bromides cheaply and at a distance—ones that you and your own would not first embrace in the here and now and at great cost to yourselves. Instead remember Petronius’s warning “sumus homines, non dei” --“We are humans, not gods” and so resist the age old arrogance of the Enlightenment, that we can cure every evil and bring light to every darkness if we are just given absolute power to match our intellect. Humility is now rarely appreciated; but it is as good an attribute as self-righteousness is bad. And so out of that modesty also in the day-to-day, fight that temptation to be rude to the 18th year old ignorant freshman, to scare off the uneducated housewife who seeks your assistance, and the unlettered field hand who approaches you as the bothersome autodidact. Because you have spent your years here at St. John’s with The Great Books—with Latin and Greek, French and German, with expository essays and real physical work—you are atolls in a growing sea of American uniformity, sadly often a uniformity of ignorance and the pursuit of the immediate and cheap over the eternal and irreplaceable. In our devil’s bargain of the present age, we have accepted the homogeny of big government, big corporations, big everything in exchange for the near instantaneous satisfaction of our growing appetites which these obtrusive—but, oh so efficient entities—can alone bring. Yet do not tilt at windmills against them—for they it seems can surely at times help to cure cancer, explore the universe, and give shelter and food for billions of the needy. And yet do not quite join them either. Seek out, or perhaps at least protect and enhance—if only for a year or two of your odyssey—those sand bars and reefs that are washed over but not quite, not quite yet submerged—the love of Greek and Latin, the knowledge of the mason and woodworker, the family nursery, and small farm, the horseman and the shoemaker, the town of 2,000, and the art and music of rural America, and each evening the remembrance of, and homage to, the mangled veteran of Shiloh and the shredded Marine at Okinawa. Like your Great Books these unobtrusive people, things, and memories —forgotten by Wal-Mart and unknown at Blockbuster — also possess wisdom—learning that we need in our present hour of peril against enemies cruel and Medieval. So I leave you all today with a great pledge, that each of us here today, each of us according to our station, must use our wisdom to help this great nation so that our children can be aroused from their growing amnesia of the past, an ignorance that is the bastard child of our most breakneck material success and so often arrogant academic elite. I promise you, this graduating class of 2002 at St. John’s College—that as farmer, as a student of Latin and Greek, as a resident of a rural community, as a writer, and as one who at times has failed at all that and so much more still—that I will join with you, each of you, as we call on each other as friends and fellow lovers of wisdom in years to come--to keep alive the ancient education that we still know to be good and necessary— and can alone keep the melodious Sirens at bay. It is customary to end with a final note of advice. Say thank you once this year to the farmer as you eat his peach—and to the men and women who picked it and brought to you fresh. Thank you and Ave atque Vale.
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