Graduation Address

"Notes for Patrick Watson’s Encaenia Address" (25 May 1989). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

Humanity's long voyage towards democracy was seriously interrupted by the invention of civilization. The journey towards democracy began, and began well, with the first nomadic peoples, the hunters and gatherers, as they strode across the landscape at the dawn of the human experience, following the game or the rainfall; it began and began well with the first settled peoples in caves and grottoes as they huddled around their fires against the dark and the beasts that lurked outside in the dark.

And it began with talk.

How do I know this wonderful thing? I know it the way others have invented their scenarios about the dawning of the human experience, by piecing together what little evidence there is, letting the old speculative mechanism loose, watching the pictures form in the brain till they look like an HYPOTHESIS, and then seeing how the hypothesis FEELS, once it is formed.

The traditional liberal hypothesis was a very different one.

Thomas Hobbes' view of the life of early humans in the so-called state of nature has been the dominant view in the modem age; it said that our ancestors, before the civilizing effects of government, lived lives that were nasty brutish and short. And liberals since Hobbes have hypothesized that the purpose of government was to keep us from killing each other off, since violence and competition are our natural tendencies and without the restraints of government there would be continual carnage.

On the basis of what we see when we look around us now, that does not seem an unreasonable thesis. But in fact there is a big flaw in it. What we see when we look around us now is human society after several millennia of CIVILIZATION, of the acquisition of property and the divisions and inequalities of power that come with civilization, and the slow rerouting of the human vehicle towards tolerance and a measure of equity and justice as a result of Law and its related institutions.

But wait a minute!

Humans and humanoids, we and our predecessors, were around for a very long time before anybody thought up governments. If our natural tendency was to kill each other off, then how come there are any of us left?

Chinese paleontologists and anthropologists tell us that Homo Pekinensis, who appears to be one of our more interesting immediate ancestors, lived in the same cave not far from Beijing for (— mark this number carefully, what I am about to say is what I mean —) for 260,000 years. For more than a quarter of a million years they managed not to kill each other off. We do not know whether they had governments or not. In my hypothesis they did not. In my hypothesis they resolved their conflicts by doing what the particular design of the new human-like brain meant them to do: they talked things over.

In the recorded experience of a very small number of tribal peoples still living out their ancient cultures into the age of cultural anthropology we can see them still talking things over. In a movie called THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY we met the !KUNG people of Botswana, hunters and gatherers with no written language, no code of laws, no war, no competition. The !KUNG work out conflicts by talk. One of their biggest sources of disagreement comes when the game thins out or the roots have been pretty well all dug up and somebody suggests it is time to move on. But one hunter is not convinced. He says, "Listen, there is a big buck I am on the trail of. I just missed him today. Why not wait a day or two and I'll get him sure and we can have a good feed before we move." One or two of the other hunters think this sounds okay; but the majority is ready to move. Now.., They don't vote. Their tradition is to get consensus. They talk for quite a while!

The women say, Well, the roots are really finished, you know; from our point of view it is finished here. Pretty soon only one or two hunters are holding out. If it seems they can't be persuaded, then the women quietly begin to gather together the digging sticks & cooking things, and quietly leave the meeting and move off. Seeing this, most of the other men begin to get up and collect their bows and arrows and so on. And finally it is clear what has to be done to achieve that consensus, so the last holdouts get up too, grumbling a bit first, then laughing at themselves soon (for laughter is very much a part of this kind of decision-making,) and off they all go, following the women.

While the bows and arrows and digging sticks are important, the most important tool these people have is LANGUAGE. Language is the best tool we ever invented. And language is a game that requires at least 2 to play, and a lot more than 2 if it is to grow and elaborate and survive. It seems to need something like a rich genetic pool to keep it evolving. Language needs society. And language MAKES people social. While it is conceivably true that language grew out of a need to communicate... it is also in the nature of language to invite us to collaborate. Language wants to be used. It implies exchange with each other, not solitary activity. Of those who talk to themselves we say they are mad.

Language is the inventive expression of the uniquely human experiences of love and irony and difference and questioning. It is the great tool of investigation; it allows us to ask questions and enlarge our understanding of our experience; and so it allows us to make generalizations out of particular experiences:

"Listen, every time I put a flame under the pot the water gets hot. Why does it get hot? Will it get hot if I put the water directly on the flame?"

The answers I get from my experiments I can tell YOU about, and then you don't have to do the experiment yourself . . .and then we have collaborated again.

Language and IMAGINATION are utterly INTERdependent; as I begin to conceive objects and actions and systems that do not yet exist, I begin to put words on them so I can store them and investigate them. And ask YOU what YOU know about them.

And ultimately, because of this social tendency of language, if we give language free play it will lead, inevitably, to democracy.

But if we do NOT give language free play, if we limit it and allow some to have language privileges and others not, then we shall become angry and probably do some of that killing which Liberals think we are naturally gifted.

That is why censorship is against democracy; because censorship restrains democracy's greatest single tool.

And that is why a proper education in a healthy democracy will always contain plenty of food for the imagination: exposure to art and music and poetry and all literature because these are the fiber and protein and vitamins of the imagination; they will make possible the generosity and understanding that Democracy, in a modern age of technical fears and national rivalries so desperately needs. Because only when we imagine can we move towards those worlds from which we are kept apart by the barriers of civilization, the worlds of peace and tolerance and rejoicing in the human experience.

Neglect not language, then, or we neglect love, tolerance and the growth of the human race away from fear, anger, war and tyranny, and towards the superbly creative destiny for which our mental and spiritual capacities have given us humans a natural talent.