Connecticut College Baccalaureate, 1972

Remarks delivered by Dean Alice E. Johnson

For many of you, over the years, it has perhaps seemed an interminable time that you have been preparing for the arrival of this particular ritualistic moment (graduation) that celebrates the true arrival of the coming generation. Certainly, in the United States at least, no rising generation has ever been so well-educated, so well-prepared, so highly praised and deeply loved, so harshly criticized and venomously hated as has yours. No other generation has been so cosseted and so indulged from Spockian childhood through Freudian adolescence to Jungian maturity. No other generation has been so noisy, either, in articulating and pursuing the highest of ideals while at the same time so warmly endorsing the single-minded pursuit of purely selfish goals — euphemistically referred to as doing your own thing.

At the same time, no other generation has been so exposed to the danger of total annihilation. A danger so great that unless this generation can pull itself together, can resolve the human hatreds which exist at home and abroad, it may indeed prove to be the last generation upon whom the sun will ever rise again. Yours, then, is a generation whose burden it is to write new articles of faith for a world that has gone astray, for a world that is now caught up in a paralysis of fear. But such articles of faith cannot be written in a world that has no values, no history, no sense of the past.

You have come into being at a critical time for man, at a time when, if one shares Yeats’ nightmare vision of the modern world, Things fall apart: when The centre cannot hold, and when Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. When a Blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned. A time when The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.

For you, the salad days of your lives have occurred at a time when long-cherished and traditional values have been so totally altered that they have in some instances been changed beyond recognition, and in others completely destroyed. In a time when old values are sinking beneath the quicksands of rapid change, the emerging new morality is sometimes reduced to meaning simply: that which gratifies me has got to be all right. For many of you that popular sickness known as the identity crisis has in reality been a crisis of moral identity.

You have come into being at a time when man has become capable of such remarkable violence that the mind grows numb; and the heart can no longer respond. Aside from the assassin who aims his gun at the individual whose ideas do not coincide with his own, the remainder of the violently dead are comfortably reduced for us to daily or weekly statistical body counts — or, as the young GI poet from Vietnam described it, so many plastic bags with the legs sticking out.

You have come into being at a time when, for the first time in your nation’s history, the global as well as domestic purposes of your government have come into serious question. In these last four years many of you have protested vigorously against certain actions taken by your leaders in Washington. Unfortunately, some of you, when the world did not apparently listen and immediately dance to the tune which you loudly piped, concluded that it was pointless to participate in this democratic process; it was pointless to try to become engaged in the never-ending human struggle to achieve freedom, dignity and respect for all shades of mankind who populate this earth.

It is necessary, while tempted to retreat, to realize that ever since Adam and Eve faced that first crisis in the garden on an occasion when God seemed to be very much alive, each succeeding generation has been presented with its own particular crises, with its own particular set of dangers, which at that particular moment in history represent the greatest danger yet faced by man. In that sense your generation is not unique. Only the quality of the danger has changed in intensity. Because we are already living in the Orwellian world of 1984, the quality of the challenge before you, therefore, has also deepened in its intensity.

In this kind of world, it is a great temptation to disdain the challenge, to feel above it somehow, and retreat to some wilderness to commune with nature, or decide merely to think out and work out some private, personal goal that will satisfy and gratify the individual self. To take this route is easy. But this kind of intellectual isolationism, whether it be the safety of the woods or the security of the nine-to-five job, denies man’s relationship to man. As John Donne observed a long time ago:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Yes, you are involved with mankind; you are a piece of this particular main, and now, after these many years of waiting, it remains to be seen just what you will do to reshape and reform this tottering world, this world you have viewed through such sharply critical eyes. Your success or your failure will be measured against the achievements and the failures of the generations which have preceded you. For you, too, will eventually become a part of the historical progress of man.

Will you be content to play the role of the happy hypocrite who can ignore the mote which afflicts your own eye? Such a one clearly discerns the evil motes around him but considers that simply to label or identify evil marks the beginning and the end of his responsibility. Or will you seek first to establish clearly the values you will choose to live by, values that upon serious examination will not turn out to be mere personal desire, values that then may be honestly applied as you move out to remake the world? After all, it is your world now!

I personally hope and believe you will take up the burden of your generation, and that, in the process of writing for mankind these new articles of faith, you will indeed create a brave new world that will once again know the meaning of human and humane values.

My faith in your potentialities for the future comes largely from the ways in which you have expressed your concerns as you have worked toward the articulation of your own philosophies. In this past week, while reading final examinations in an American literature course which dealt with the problem, The Failure of the American Dream, I was particularly encouraged by the aspirations which were expressed. Two quotations from these student papers will suffice, and I trust the two seniors whose comments these are will have no objection to my quotation of them here. Said one: There comes a point in our lives when we carve off the crust of the day-to-day routine of what we say and what we do and become again as children reaching out to discover the wisdom of the old values anew. Said another: But there is an answer (for us) just as there was for the people in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. If Americans are to move toward a society that is less alienating, and one that is worthy of dedication, devotion, idealism and commitment, we must look beyond the outworn dreams of technological abundance and seek new values that reach beyond technology to achieve a new and lasting humanity.

If these thoughts represent the stuff of which this generation is made, and I think that they do, then we may begin to hope again that the madness and the violence which appear to dominate the world today can be and will be cured.

As W.H. Auden prayed in an earlier time, in an earlier period of crisis:

O teach us to outgrow our madness.
Ruffle the perfect manners of the frozen heart,
And once again compel it to be awkward and alive
To all it suffered once a weeping witness.
Clear from the head the masses of impressive rubbish:
Rally the lost and trembling forces of the will,
Gather them up and let them loose upon the earth,
Till, as the contribution of our star, we follow
The clear instructions of that justice, in the shadow
Of whose uplifting, loving and constraining powers
All human reasons do rejoice and operate.

Dean Johnson’s written version of this speech begins with the following biblical quotes:

Ecclesiastes 1:4-9
A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.

Matthew 7:1-5
“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

Matthew 11:12-17
From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John; and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. “But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates, ‘We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’”