Office of the President

New Student Convocation — September 1, 1996

Please Name Your Great-Grandparents

Mayor Antaramian. Members of the Carthage Class of the Year 2000. Transfer Students in the Classes of 1997, 1998, and 1999. Parents, Family Members, Friends, and Guests. Colleagues in the Faculty, Administration, and Staff. How many of you can name your great-grandparents? Like me, you may have to pause for a moment to remember just how many of them you have. The answer is eight. Four men, four women. They were born, on average, eighty or ninety years before you. That is not long in the sweep of human history. Without them, you would not be here. What were their names?

Let me ask all the men among the new students please to stand. Now, after the men are seated, would all the women please stand. Thanks. You probably are not aware of what just happened, but the chances are that a few of you have just seen, for the first time in your lives, your future husbands and wives. Four years ago at this convocation, we did this same exercise. A young man remembered that occasion, and, last May at graduation, actually stopped the degree procession in order to propose to his girlfriend. Yes, he took quite a risk in front of 3500 people. Happily, she did say "yes," and they are getting married down in South Carolina later this month.

Well, you have had time to think of those great-grandparent names by now if you are going to, and it might be interesting to tell each other just how many you can name. In a moment, I shall ask everyone in the chapel to stand. Students, parents, please introduce yourselves to those around you. All of you are rapidly becoming part of the Carthage community, so feel free to tell others what your magic number is. Remember, it has to be somewhere from zero through eight.

(Pause)

The parents are paying the bills, and the faculty and staff members are doing the work around here, so we should not embarrass them. From all you new students, however, let me see a show of hands concerning the number you could name.

(Pause)

Your response was highly predictable — so much so that I have written this speech on the assumption that very few of us can remember very far back in our family histories.

* * * * *

In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was a young French aristocrat who believed that American democracy provided the model toward which the older societies of Europe would develop. He visited the United States, traveled widely, and analyzed American political and social structures and practices. The book he wrote about us, Democracy in America, is one of the most penetrating studies of democratic societies ever penned.

By and large, Tocqueville believed in what the Americans were doing. He thought historical development was moving toward what he called an "equality of conditions," in which all individuals were independent and equal. The old hierarchical forms of social organization would disappear. Yet he grew concerned about the impact on social community that freedom and equality produced.

In a chapter entitled "Of Individualism in Democracies," Tocqueville contrasted the connectedness of individuals in aristocratic and democratic societies. His discovery that Americans know very little about their ancestors led him to reflect about the institution of the family in those two social orders. He wrote:

"Among aristocratic nations families maintain the same station for centuries and often live in the same place. So there is a sense in which all the generations are contemporaneous. A man almost always knows about his ancestors and respects them; his imagination extends to his great-grandchildren, and he loves them. He freely does his duty by both ancestors and descendants and often sacrifices personal pleasures for the sake of beings who are no longer alive or are not yet born." In contrast, Tocqueville observed: " Among democratic peoples new families continually rise from nothing while others fall, and nobody's position is quite stable. The woof of time is ever being broken and the track of past generations lost. Those who have gone before are easily forgotten, and no one gives a thought to those who will follow. All a man's interests are limited to those near himself . . . . . .
" Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart."

You may agree with Tocqueville, or you may not. In any case, however, all of us have just heightened his challenge to us by our inability to think back just three generations in our own families. And, Tocqueville says, we are therefore unlikely to care anything about our own great-grandchildren. (Or, for that matter, they about us.) That should be a sobering thought. You have the longest life expectancy of any generation in human history. Many of you, indeed, will live to see your great-grandchildren. Will you care about them? Will they care about you?

In my years of teaching freshman humanities, when we read this text from Tocqueville, no student ever named more than four of his or her great-grandparents. Yet virtually every single student insisted that he or she cared deeply about all those children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren yet to be born. Those students did not like Tocqueville's attack on them. Let's concede they were right. Admittedly, they did not know much about the past, but they did care about the future  what is the logical implication of that claim?

In essence, they were saying that the world began with them, themselves. They were the creators. They were starting something entirely new. Whatever they might create, from scratch, would be good for future generations simply because they were the ones doing it.

That kind of thinking betrays a terribly constricted "presentism." So constricted that it is truly naive. The process of education is little more than learning from the past. To be teachable, to be capable of learning, we must desire to know what others have discovered or created before us. Several years ago, a Carthage baccalaureate speaker defined education as a "movement into a larger world." The blinders fall off, the range of vision broadens, the awareness of the world without and within us becomes much more intense. Simply put, we "get a life."

In recent weeks, the conventions of the two political parties have generated rhetoric staking out claims to a "bridge to the past" or a "bridge to the future." The trouble is that no one bridge will suffice. We live neither at the beginning nor at the end of human history, and we must therefore have bridges in both directions. As Tocqueville would say, each generation is a link, a critical link, in a long chain of being. Our lives, in our own time, connect the past with the future. Your professors, indeed all of us, fully expect that you will be very successful in your careers over the next fifty years. You may make breakthrough discoveries in the sciences, invent new business techniques, develop better ways of teaching, or create music, art, or literature with a fresh and unique style. You possess the potential to do those things.

First, however, you will need to command the state of knowledge as it now exists. That is why you are at Carthage. The knowledge you need to master has been built up over many generations. This period of intense formal education allows you to speed up the process of learning from the experience of those people. To be sure, you could become a well educated person without ever going to college, but normally that would take a much longer span of time. By committing yourself to a demanding academic experience now, you will emerge an intellectually stronger and more mature person at an earlier age. That points to self-confidence and success throughout your lives.

The envisioning of your creativity in the next century implies a belief in progress, your progress. However, any commitment to human progress is subject to severe and repeated testing. As a college student in the late 1950s, little more than a decade after the Second World War, I wrote an essay imagining a battle among stone-age people on a south Pacific island while a plane flew overhead delivering an atomic bomb to Hiroshima. And I asked: "Is that progress?" Despite many such essay opportunities, I do believe in the possibility of moral progress. I think it comes through religion and education, and that is why I am profoundly grateful to work at a church college. But you will have to answer that question concerning moral progress for yourself. Perhaps it has occurred to you that Tocqueville's remarks about ancestors and descendants actually focused on his concept of community. Those who have lived, those who do live now, those who are yet to live are all members of one human community. Normally, we think of community with our contemporaries. So did he. But, for Tocqueville, community also spanned the centuries. Indeed, community across time and across the neighborhood formed one inseparable whole.

In the selection I read, Tocqueville worried that if we forget our ancestors, we not only lose sight of our descendants but also isolate ourselves from our contemporaries. Democratic individualism threatens to create men and women who are "shut up in the solitude" of their own hearts. With so much liberty, can we hope to sustain community? If we as individuals are free to do completely as we please, will we focus on anything or anybody except ourselves?

In entering Carthage, most of you are gaining a much greater measure of freedom than you have known before. If you respond as Tocqueville thought Americans in the 1830s did, the results will be very encouraging. He discerned in American life a host of free associations and voluntary service among individuals that reinforced local community and kept American society together. He wrote: "...to gain the affection and respect of your immediate neighbors, a long succession of little services rendered and of obscure good deeds, a constant habit of kindness and an established reputation for disinteredness [or justice] are required."

Americans believed in the doctrine of "self-interest properly understood," Tocqueville observed. In other words, Americans considered it in their own personal interest to provide voluntary service to their communities and to act with kindness and justice to others. Their individual actions, collectively, would determine the kind of communities in which they lived. Tocqueville attributed to Montaigne the argument: "If I did not follow the straight road for the sake of its straightness, I should follow it having found by experience that, all things considered, it is the happiest and the most convenient." Here at Carthage, you will create your own living environment in the residence halls and around the campus. You also will have a host of opportunities for voluntary service both on the campus and in the Kenosha-Racine communities. Your own self-interest, properly understood, logically would point you toward a habit of kindness and a reputation for justice. That would be Tocqueville's argument to you.

In the Heritage Seminars, you will read a novel entitled Beloved, written by contemporary American author Toni Morrison. That book has won her the Pulitzer prize and helped her win the Nobel. The heroine of the story is a Black woman who escaped from slavery and is trying to keep her family together in southern Ohio in the years shortly after the Civil War. Protecting her children is her consuming passion, her very virtue, her reason for existence. Her fierce determination, her tragic excesses, yet her indomitable dedication to those she loves provide the theme of the book.

At the end of the story, when she loses for the final time the daughter who was so beloved, she cries in her anguish, "She was my best thing." The man who finally had become a permanent part of her life listens, waits, then leans over and takes her hand. And he says, "You your best thing, Sethe. You are." In surprise and wonder, all she can say is "Me? Me?" It took someone else to understand that the best thing she had was herself. She had to be told her own worth because of the very kind of person she was.

So what is your passion? What is your virtue? Few of us did very well naming our great-grandparents, but perhaps we do have a little more consciousness of them. If so, we might still apply Tocqueville's message. Let's pause a moment and give names to our great-grandchildren. You can have as many of them as you want, no need to stop at eight. Now that they have names, make them people. Visualize them. What do they look like? What do they enjoy doing? What kind of future do they have?

What difference does your life make for them?

Welcome to Carthage.