With such a past we cannot be optimistic about the possibility of a humane society, in which humane decision-making is the prime goal of educators, ever becoming imagined and therefore realized. We cannot be optimistic, but we can be clear. We can identify the enemy. We can begin by asking ourselves what is right rather than what is expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease. Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful. Careful to avoid the imprisonment of the mind, the spirit, and the will of ourselves and those among whom we live. We can be careful of tolerating second-rate goals and secondhand ideas.
We are humans. Humans who must have discovered by now what every three-year-old can see: “how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions.” We are humans, not rice, and therefore “we have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises.” We are the moral inhabitants of the globe. To deny this, regardless of our feeble attempts to live up to it, is to lie in prison. Of course there is cruelty. Cruelty is a mystery. But if we see the world as one long brutal game, then we bump into another mystery, the mystery of beauty, of light, the canary that sings on the skull….Unless all ages and all races of man have been deluded…there seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as harmony…all wholly free and available to us.
The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care
I WANT to talk about a subject that influences and, in many cases, distresses us all. A subject that is a companion to each graduate just as it is on all campuses as well as communities all over the country, indeed the world. A subject that is an appropriate theme of a speech delivered to students during these provocative times of uncertainty.
That subject is money.
Whether we have the obligation to protect and stabilize what we already have and, perhaps, to increase it, or whether we have the task of reducing our debt in order to simply live a productive, fairly comfortable life, or whether our goal is to earn as much as possible—whatever our situation, money is the not-so-secret mistress of all our lives. And like all mistresses, you certainly know, if she has not already seduced you, she is nevertheless on your mind. None of us can read a newspaper, watch a television show, or follow political debates without being inundated with the subject of wealth. Immigration discourse, health care implementation, Social Security, employment opportunities—virtually all personal problems and government policies twist and coil around money. Nations, regimes, media, legislation all are soaked in and overwhelmed by the wealth narrative concerning its availability, its movement, its disappearance. How its absence and mismanagement topples nations at worst, distorts and manipulates them, or how wealth keeps nations safe. Austerity or stimulus? War or peace? An idle life or a productive one?
The subjects studied here—art, science, history, economics, medicine, law—are by and large constricted by or liberated by money in spite of the fact that the purpose of each of these areas of scholarship is not money at all but knowledge and its benefit to the good life. Artists want to reveal and display truth while pretending to rise above money; scientists want to discover how the world works but are limited or supported by financial resources, as are historians and economists, who need funds for their projects and research; medicine seeks to save life or at least make it livable but cannot do so without somebody else’s wealth.
All that is obvious, but in case we forget, I believe it is helpful to rehearse something of the price of wealth, its history. The origins of its accumulation are bloody and profoundly cruel, involving as it always and invariably does war. Virtually no empire became one without mind-warping violence. The Spanish empire saved itself from collapse and irrelevance by the theft of gold from South America necessitating massacres and enslavement. The Roman empire became one and remained one for centuries by the conquest of land, its treasure, and the labor of slaves. More war and aggression were used to rape Africa of its resources, which, in turn, sustained and empowered a plethora of nations. Rubber, for example, was extracted by a country literally privately owned by Leopold, king of Belgium (thus its once-agreed-upon name—the Belgian Congo). Sugar, tea, spices, water, oil, opium, territory, food, ore all sustained the power of nations like the United Kingdom, like the Dutch, like ours. Here in America the slaughter of millions of bison in order to replace them with cattle required the massacre of Native Americans. Here a new agricultural nation moved quickly into the industrial period via the importation of slaves. Chinese empires destroyed legions of monks to acquire the gold and silver they used to decorate temples and representations of gods. All of this robbery was accomplished by war, which, by the way, is itself a wealth-making industry regardless of victory or defeat.
The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.
But alongside that price, something interesting and definitive began to happen in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. “Noblesse oblige,” which soothed the nobility by suggesting that generosity was not only honorable but in their interests and allied perhaps with their religious beliefs, morphed into a conviction that wealth could not be its own excuse for being. There was some moral impediment to the Midas effect, to the Gatsby gene, some shame attached to the idea of being more by having more, of vanity projects posing as genuine commitments to the elevation of public life.
These alterations were made more felicitous in the United States by the tax code and, in some cases, worker strikes and organizations. Instead of building transcontinental railroads with Chinese labor slaves, instead of producing sugar for rum with the constant importation of more slaves (a turnover made necessary by the quick deaths of so many of them), instead we figured out how to have electricity, roads, public hospitals, universities, et al., without searing brutality.
Citizens began to realize the costs of caring was money well spent. Foundations, government support, individual largesse, service organizations grew exponentially to improve the lives of citizens. As you well know from the creation of this university, gifts to build institutions, care for the indigent, house art and books for the public are only a few of the projects in which the costs of caring are happily assumed. The consequences of these costs are varied, of course—some were weak, some were nefarious—but it became unthinkable that no elementary services existed. Inviting compassion into the bloodstream of an institution’s agenda or a scholar’s purpose is more than productive, more than civilizing, more than ethical, more than humane; it’s humanizing.
This powerful commitment to caring, whatever the cost, is now threatened by a force almost as cruel as the origins of wealth: that force is the movement of peoples under duress at, beyond, and across borders. This current movement is greater now than it has ever been and it costs a lot—to defend against it, to accommodate it, to contain it, protect it, control and service it. It involves the trek of workers, intellectuals, agencies, refugees, traders, immigrants, diplomats, and armies all crossing oceans and continents, through custom offices and via hidden routes, with multiple narratives spoken in multiple languages of commerce, of military intervention, political persecution, rescue, exile, violence, poverty, death, and shame. There is no doubt that the voluntary or involuntary displacement of people all over the globe tops the agenda of the state, the boardrooms, the communities, and the streets. Political maneuvers to control this movement are not limited to monitoring the dispossessed. The transplantation of management and diplomatic classes to globalization’s outposts, as well as the deployment of military units and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts to exert authority over the constant flow of peoples. This slide has freighted the concept of citizenship and altered our perceptions of space: public and private, walls and frontiers. It may be that the defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times. Porous borders are understood in some quarters to be areas of threat and have actually become places of chaos.