Office of the President

New Student Convocation — August 31, 2003

Classical Virtues

New students in the College. Your family members and friends present today.

The rest of us here are perpetuating a time-honored annual event as we welcome you into the Carthage community. The Mayor of Kenosha; trustees, the faculty and officers of the College; and returning Carthage students gather each Labor Day weekend for this academic convocation celebrating the new life arriving on campus. This is our New Year's Day. Now, it is becoming yours, as well.

You would be our guests of honor, except you are no longer guests. You already are Carthaginians, and are being honored at your first convocation here in Siebert Chapel. Even as you enter a new world, the worlds you bring with you are new to many of us.

This is my seventeenth New Student Convocation, which means I have been writing a speech like this every year since you were very young. In approaching this assignment, my attitude is far from "been there, done that." The reason is: each of you is unique. As a group, there has been and will be none other quite like you. Your experiences, your reference points, your very language are different from those classes that have gone before or will come after you. You will renew the rest of us as we learn to see the world from your point of view.

Yet, if you and we are to engage our minds in shared discourse, all of us must find some common ground on which to begin our discussions. Our purpose in an intellectual community is to talk with each other, not past each other. In this speech, my challenge is to find a starting point about which both you and I know. Your challenge is not just to sit politely and let your minds wander, but to critique my statements, to agree or to disagree in your own minds, and to consider your answers to my questions. In that process, you will be refining your own views.

Last year, my task was easy. Everyone shared a graphic mental image of the terrorist attacks of 9-11. It was possible in a few minutes to start with those memories and to move along to the theme of "Great Ideas" and to dwell on the examples of John Milton and Ludwig van Beethoven - a blind man writing the greatest epic poem in the English language, a deaf man composing Western culture's most monumental symphony. Paradise Lost and the Ninth Symphony offered radically different focal points from the sight of passenger jets crashing into tall buildings.

This year, again, it is easy to discover common knowledge among us. Early last spring, the war with Iraq monopolized the news for weeks, and attempts at building a democratic society in the Middle East could command the world's attention for months and years to come. The massive explosions in the night skies over Baghdad, the toppling of the statues of Saddam Hussein, the faces of the wounded and the frightened - those graphic images of war are part of our shared vocabulary. Inasmuch as education is a process of finding common ground among us and venturing toward new insights together, you and I can start with our images of a recent war.

Thinking about death and devastation may not be the most pleasant way to begin a college career. If you are to get full value out of Carthage over the next four years, however, you will need to learn and to reflect upon much information that is not particularly attractive. Consider, for example, the tribal chieftain centuries ago who, after a victorious battle, blinded all the enemy fighters except one, to whom he left one good eye in order to guide the others back home. Appalled by such stories in my own college years, I wrote an essay in the late 1950s describing an imagined foray by head-hunting cannibals against a neighboring tribe on a Pacific island, even as the Enola Gay flew overhead delivering the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima. My obvious thesis was that civilization had brought no moral progress to human beings.

Intellectual growing pains are very real. I was hurting when I wrote that, and it does hurt to grow up, yet that is why you are here. A few minutes ago, in Carthage tradition, we sang the hymn "I Was There," with its verse: "I was there when you were but a child, with a faith to suit you well; in a blaze of light you wandered off to find where demons dwell." Seeking out the demons is part of the adventure, even part of fun of life. As we come to understand the demons, we can shed our naiveté, and, with appropriate responses, build our own moral strength. Yet, demons also can overwhelm us. We can reach points in our lives when it seems as though there are demons here, demons there, demons everywhere.

Take, for example, what we know about war and the Middle East. Let's start by admitting that neither you nor I know very much. We do know there is much trouble, much conflict, much suffering, much death. Let me ask you: what makes a person your age decide to seek a martyr's death by blowing up a truck bomb so that he can be in heaven within ten minutes? Presumably, you like the idea of heaven too, but only after many more years here on earth. Why does the young martyr want to rush there right away? Why does he think that murderous explosions are a better way to advance his vision of society, than working persistently toward his goal across all the years of his life? Is he willing to recognize that his own ideas might evolve as he continues to live? You are closer in age to him than I am. What do you think?

And what of American policy? Is it true we are in the Middle East only for the oil? If so, why did we not strike a deal with Saddam and let the oil flow? That policy would have been easier and cheaper than the war. Of, if we really wanted to overthrow a brutal dictatorship, there are plenty of others around the world. Why don't we do something about them? What do you think?

Some people in Europe believe Americans have become too fixated on terrorism and 9-11, and point out we never found large stocks of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Have we let ourselves get spooked, or is there a real terrorist threat, using biological agents or nuclear devices, that could devastate American cities far more than 9-11 did? What do you think?

If our mission is to build a stable, democratic society in Iraq as a model for others in the Arab world, what are our chances of success? Do enough Iraqis actually want that kind of country? How long would it take them and us to succeed, and at what price in the blood of young Americans? On the other hand, if Iraq and other Arab societies do not change, will they continue to breed young men who demonize America and the modern world, and opt for murderous martyrdom? How much havoc could they wrack on us and others in the future? What do you think?

These are very real questions confronting the world you soon will inherit. You can ignore them only at your own risk. Here at Carthage, the faculty will encourage you to face issues head-on, to think them through, and to draw your own conclusions. That will be true regardless of your academic concentration. Whether you major in biology, business, education, music - or any other academic discipline - your capacity to think for yourself will be our objective for you. Such discipline of mind will serve you well all your life.

Long after the current set of issues about the Middle East has subsided, there will be others around the world - as well as challenges in your individual personal and professional lives - we cannot predict. The faculty is here not to supply you ready-made answers that soon will become outmoded. They are here to help you equip yourselves to respond to challenges still many years in the future. You are becoming learners, not narrow technicians.

Here at Carthage, we hope you will learn from the best. We shall introduce you to some of the greatest thinkers and ideas in human history. You will discover intellectual explorations from many centuries ago that still influence the ideas and values of hundreds of millions of people around the world today, even though they may not know it. Classical virtues have survived across many generations because they are classic.

The banners this year along campus drive read "Goodness, Truth, Beauty." That triune vision goes back at least to Socrates and Plato. For Plato, ultimate reality is the Idea of the Good. When a person, through thought and reflection, comes to sense the Good, he or she begins to understand just how true and how beautiful the Good actually is. Therefore, Plato taught, to know the Good is to do the Good. True knowledge compels true action.

Aristotle made the simple observation that everyone wants to be happy. He argued that happiness derives from living an ethical life. Ethics involve recognizing and living in accord with your own nature as a human being and the nature of the world around you. If you live in harmony with your virtue, you will be happy.

Names like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle intimidate many people. Those minds, and many others like them, need not intimidate you. Classical virtues are universal. Classical virtues are simple.

Today's young Arab "martyrs" are too ignorant, and therefore too exploitable. If they understood Islamic history and culture, they could find much more significance in this life. Their own heroes are just waiting to be discovered. For centuries, Islamic civilization was far ahead of its Christian contemporaries.

Around the year 1000 in what is today Iran, there lived a man named Ibn Sina (who became known to Europeans as Avicenna). A precocious youth who memorized the Koran by the age of 10, he became the most eminent physician, mathematician, and philosopher of his day. His two most famous books, The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine, established a medical system that set the standard in Europe, as well as the Middle East, for centuries. Avicenna wrote long commentaries on Aristotle, and relied on classical thought in fashioning his own world view.

A century later at the other end of the Moslem world in Spain, Ibn Rushd (better known to Europeans as Averroes) was an equally universal thinker. Whether writing on philosophy, law, medicine, or astronomy, Averroes left contributions studied for generations in European universities. It was largely because of Averroes that Christian Europe rediscovered Aristotle after centuries of ignorance. Those of you who are Catholic owe a particular debt to Averroes. A century after him, St. Thomas Aquinas used the Aristotelian system to develop the theology that remains the orthodox teaching of the Catholic church to this day. St. Thomas knew Aristotle because of Averroes.

In short, Moslems, Christians, and Jews as well, share a common debt to the great thinkers of antiquity. Our cultures are not so different as we sometimes think. Our roots are intertwined. Classical virtues have helped mold the ways all of us see the world today.

I noted earlier that Aristotle aimed at human happiness in arguing for ethical lives. Let me conclude by telling you about some happy people I encountered just nine days ago.

These days, all recruits into the United States Navy go through basic training at Great Lakes Naval Training Center just twenty miles south of us. As a guest of the command, I had the opportunity to watch your exact contemporaries in the midst of high-stress drills. Like you, most had graduated from high school last spring. They were nearing the end of their nine weeks at Great Lakes.

By 5:00 a.m. when we visitors came to their "Battle Stations" drill, they already had been up and working for twenty-four hours. Caked with dirt and sweat, sometimes wearing gas masks, dog-tired, they were going through simulations of emergencies on board ship resulting from accidents or terrorist attacks. With sirens blaring, lights flashing in the dark, twisted metal and turmoil everywhere, they were charged with rescuing wounded shipmates, transferring munitions, and doing everything possible to save themselves and their ship.

When the tests finished a couple hours later, and grimier than ever, the recruits came to their "capping" ceremony. They were wearing their navy blue ball caps with the gold letters spelling "Recruit." They received the praise of their commanders and repeated the Sailor's Creed with its emphasis on the core values of honor, courage, and commitment. Then, they were ordered to take off the caps as new ones were passed out, while the sound system played the country-western song "God Bless the U.S.A." On order, together, they put on their new caps spelling "Navy," and, thereby, were recognized for the first time as sailors.

The visiting naval officers and I were invited to walk among those new sailors, congratulating them as they shook hands and clapped each other on the shoulder. Soon, many of them were crying, as it became clear that, for many, this was the proudest moment of their young lives. More and more, I fought back my own tears, as I thought of the lives stretching out before them with all the ups and downs they would face-and, then, remembered my own father, who had gone through basic training at Great Lakes back in 1932. In the Navy as a 19-year-old, he had learned to be a welder, and thereby was able to support my mother and me when I was born a few years later.

Classical philosophers would say those young men and women were fulfilling their virtue and therefore were happy. In other words, those new sailors were acting in harmony with their own true nature and in harmony with the world around them. The vision bequeathed to us by thinkers of antiquity is that ultimate reality is good, it is true, it is beautiful. As those young sailors pledged themselves to honor, courage, and commitment, I recalled that classical trinity of goodness, truth, and beauty. Classical virtues are really quite simple.

What of you?

Wars will come and go. Some will be just, some not. There will be much ugliness in life you cannot ignore. You must face facts squarely, think them through, and reach your own conclusions. You are meant to be sharp.

You also can be sustained and reinforced by the guiding principles of your own culture. Our religious traditions teach us about the goodness of God; our philosophical origins hold that ultimate reality is good, true, and beautiful. As you embrace and live by that vision, you can and will be happy.

Personally, I long since have abandoned any despair of my student days. I do believe humans can achieve moral progress. In you, I see that hope.

Welcome to Carthage.