Rock Island, IL

Evidence that some students really are flagellants: I was asked to address the ODK inductees this year. Herewith, a short bit of speechification (with the opening jokes and throat-clearing omitted):

As a man grows older he sometimes feels compelled to impart some useful bit of wisdom to the young. It may perhaps be said that there’s a piece of man left in me somewhere, and I am certainly growing older, but what I wish to impart to you this evening is not a piece of wisdom. Rather, it is a piece of ignorance.

Let us take for an example the science of economics. I do not understand economics. The reason for this is no doubt my intellectual mulishness. I look upon this dismal science as a collection of minute and very dull facts that simply cannot be made interesting—much, I suppose, the way a dull fellow with a face like eight miles of bad road knows he cannot be of interest to a beautiful woman. I stand with Emerson, who could not prefer vast knowledge of little-known facts and details to sweeping explanatory schemes. We hold this view, Ralph Waldo and I, because we are no good at facts and details. I should add that I feel the same way about chemistry and racquetball. I have simply decided that if I am no good at something, it isn’t worth being good at, and there you have it.

But I have made a few attempts at the sweeping explanatory scheme of economics—and I’ve paid a bit of attention to others who have also made attempts. For example, it has been well said that our economy is a system of legalized vandalism, or that our main economic practice is to delegate work to others. I agree with these remarks. And recently, which is to say in the last few years, I have been using a phrase and asking myself whether it is an accurate description of our economic behavior, and so far I have been satisfied that it is accurate. The phrase—and some of you have probably heard me use it—is this: we use the world up when we make things and we poison it when we throw them away. I think that is an accurate description of our behavior.

Perhaps you will join me for a moment in wondering whether this practice of using the world up when we make things and poisoning it when we throw them away befits rational creatures presumably capable of distinguishing between right and wrong, or between good and bad. And perhaps you will begin to suspect, as I do, that at a very fundamental level, and for quite some time now, we have been acting not out of knowledge but out of a stunning colossal ignorance. And having realized that alarming fact, we might go on to hope as rational creatures capable of making fine distinctions that we could turn this new knowledge to good account, especially if we wish to know ourselves and to live without offense or error or regret. Do you agree that it is not very smart to use things up—and that it is even dumber to poison your own well? You’re members of ODK. Of course you agree.

I say this to you tonight to prefigure a distinction I will make at the end of these brief remarks. I also say it because I have had on my mind of late a troubling notion recently articulated by a well-meaning but, I’m afraid, misguided ignoramus. Thomas Friedman is a columnist for that once prestigious, now benighted, newspaper called the New York Times, and recently he argued strenuously that there is no time to waste: we must throw our money and energy into math, science, and engineering if we are going to turn out leaders who will help us sustain our current level of prosperity.

I’m skipping a full summary of the argument, and resisting the urge to point out that great leaders must also be great servants, but Friedman’s assumption is that the point of education—indeed, of life—is prosperity, an ever-increasing standard of living, which, of course, if you examine it closely and name it accurately, is actually a standard of dying. We would know this if we were more honest about our economic life—if, that is, we realized that we use the world up when we make things and that we poison it when we throw them away. By the way, it would help if we stopped cranking out economists from our colleges and universities who are ignorant of thermodynamics and the basic principles of ecology, or accountants trained to cook their books by ignoring the ecological costs of doing business as usual, or lawyers-turned-legislators who approve of this form of public lying, but that’s a matter for another speech.

Now there’s more to be said about all this, obviously, but time, like the American attention span, is short.

So to the point: I’m pretty sure that we have witnessed the peak of Thomas Friedman’s beloved “prosperity”—that you young people are going to have to figure out how to make your way in a very different kind of world from the one you are accustomed to, a world that is likely to include resource scarcity and therefore resource wars. And so making your way in this very different world is going to require some goodness on your part, some circumspection about your intelligence and some respect for your ignorance. Here let me quote a writer whose identity you will probably be able to guess. This comes from a commencement address, and at this point he is suggesting we resist the economic determinism that has brought about the “toxicity, the violence, and the self-destructiveness of our present civilization.” He asks the graduates:

What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order to live at home? (I don’t mean “home” as a house for sale.) If you decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself? At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? Will you be satisfied to live in a world owned or controlled by a few great corporations? If not, would you consider the alternative: self-employment in a small local enterprise owned by you, offering honest goods or services to your neighbors and responsible stewardship to your community?

[After asking these important questions, he concludes by saying,] I join the rest of your elders in worrying about you and in wishing you well

If I join this writer, Wendell Berry, in worrying about you, which I do, and if I join him in wishing you well, which I also do, I do so with this reminder: the word “well” is not a synonym for “prosperous.” It has much more to do with health than wealth. And whereas wealth at least as we have understood it is a small uncomplicated thing you can get to the bottom of pretty quickly, health is a large and complex thing, fraught with mystery, which we imperil as soon as we have presumed to understand it, as when we start yammering about the “health care industry” or permit ourselves to use such odd locutions as “health food,” surely as redundant as “successful teaching.” True health and wholeness and well-being are not industries and cannot be understood in industrial terms.

This is merely a small example of the larger point I wish to leave you with. Because the world is larger than our views of it, it follows that our knowledge of the world is necessarily limited by our ignorance. Keeping this fact present to our minds is the first step in learning to be on the look-out for the ignorance, masquerading as intelligence, that governs our lives.
You always hope people will remember what you say when, in fact, a great many of them quit listening almost as soon as you start talking. So here’s a little mnemonic device: If you wish to be well and not to be ignorant of what “well” means, try to remember that really “intelligent” economists believe that poisoning our own well is an acceptable cost of doing business. I’m here to tell you that that cost is born of ignorance—of ignorance masquerading as intelligence. It is also born of our failure to remember that ignorance is both our limit and our measure. When Thoreau said the world is larger than our ideas about it, he was reiterating what Hamlet said before him: there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in thy philosophy.

Really “intelligent” economists are fond of calling us “consumers.” They don’t seem to know that we are larger than their ideas about us. Tonight I am happy to congratulate all of you on your membership in ODK. As one of your elders who worries about you and wishes you well, I hope you will refuse to be regarded and treated as something less than what you are, and that you in turn will refuse to treat the world as something less than what it is.

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