Graduation Address

"Dispassionate Enquiry: The Academic Task" (16 October 1974). (UA Case 69, Box 2)

Your Honour, Mr. Chancellor, Mr. President, Mr. Premier, Madame La Belle Ministre, Distinguished Guests, Members of the Graduating Class, Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is a great happiness to return to these halls where cheerful associations abound and where so much that one believes in has for so long been cherished.

My subject is the value of dispassionate critical intelligence, considered as the most distinctive of the qualities fostered by a University. It may sound dull but it’s really very interesting. The word dispassionate: recall it does not mean indifferent, disengaged, disenchanted or uncaring. It means free from bias, objective, impartial; not controlled by preconceptions or by emotions; ready to move as the evidence points; agreeable to taking up fresh positions if reason shows them to be tenable.

Now you may immediately think – unless you are incredibly charitable or else half asleep – Who are you to harp on critical intelligence, and so forth, as though you were superior to the rest of us? But, no, that isn’t it at all. In my own unimportant personal life, I’m full of emotion, of fear and trembling, of bias and prejudice. Dispassionate reason maintains her charming stance in my own mind with real difficulty. And for that very reason her contribution is greatly to be desired; we value highly what is in short supply, either personally or nationally.

At the present time, change is the order of the day. We are told – truthfully and urgently told – that the University must increasingly engage itself with the affairs of the community, must be concerned with the preservation of our wild land, our woods, our waters; with the offering of courses for citizens at large; with controlling social injustice, expanding medical services, renovating the concept and practice of law; and so forth. Yet, in the midst of this new activity, this new incitement of endeavor, a still small voice within us says that the University has something unique to offer, something that emanates from its innermost sense of purpose and its historical record, something it must put to the forefront of the battle if it is to be true to itself. And that something, however we conceive or phrase it, finally boils down to an unbiased and dispassionate intellectual enquiry, which acts in many ways: to conserve, to innovate, to discover the unknown, to evoke new interpretations of the familiar; sometimes to reassure us, sometimes to startle and disturb.

In the sciences, the effect of this operation of the mind is well known. A nice traditional instance is the discovery, from observation, that the heavenly bodies move along approximate ellipses which are not easily defined. Aristotle conceived that all heavenly bodies move in circles, because the circle is the most perfect curve. His idealism, nurturing his intense desire for a perfect universe, misled him. His passion for perfection played him false.

We should not suppose that reason is dull and mechanical, that it conducts its followers along a small pathway, step by step. The journey, my friends tell me, is unpredictable. "In any field of science there are periods of relative tranquility separated by revolutions during each of which there is a shift from almost exclusive support of one theory to almost exclusive support of another theory that is incompatible with the former. Each such shift is characterized by…a fundamental change in the way the whole field is comprehended." How is that for dispassionate excitement?

As for the social sciences, for psychology, for sociology, and for subjects like teacher training: those of is so engaged will be the first to say that in these fields emotional beliefs, strong idealism and quaint personal heresies are certain to appear, and that here, consequently, reason has a special obligation to be dispassionate.

And the humanities, my own field? In humane studies, it is not sufficient to transmit tradition, to cultivate knowledge, taste and appreciation. The pattern of the past needs continuous renovation, reinterpretation of men and ideas, often quite radical. Francis Bacon used to be thought of as the one who introduced scientific method into England and, in his life, as a wise and beneficent figure. But, as we read his experiments, we see how often his love of the curious, the splendid and the exotic intruded. It was the Royal Society of London that got on the track of experimental science as we know it. And Bacon’s biography reveals his horrible ambition, his acquiescence in judicial torture, and other unpleasant things. He is more often a dreadful warning than an exemplar.

Or consider Shakespeare. This autumn, I’ve been privileged to present MacBeth to the class, after not having dealt with the play for a number of years. This time round, it all looks different. The action has hardly begun before a wounded man straight from battle appears before the king and they keep this man standing, with open wounds, while they question him, until he is ready to fall from exhaustion and loss of blood. It disturbs our sense of decency. And, on a larger scale, you remember how casually, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are treated, how they are dismissed with the line, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead." A few years ago Tom Stoppard wrote a play with that title, where we see the two men as living souls, much like ourselves, and coming to an untimely end. Suddenly Shakespeare serves to reveal how inevitable in the early seventeenth century was the belief that the fate of members of superior classes is far more significant than anyone else’s. And we become aware afresh how repugnant this is to us now and how far we, in Canada, have come down the road of history.

And so with figure after figure. Paradise Lost was long regarded as a repository of detailed religious truth. Now, as we read of Adam and Eve, of archangels fallen or unfallen, or things in heaven and in earth and under the earth, the message Milton gives us concerns the role if the individual will, the personal act of choice, in our lives. What you and I decide upon, this is vital.

Or think nearer to home. Alexander Mackenzie was to his friends the successful fur trader; to historians later on the skillful and determined explorer. We now, looking critically at Mackenzie’s record, are likely to regard his having caused the painful death of thousands of animals, to satisfy the senseless demands of fashion in Europe, as something we would like never to have known. What we delight to remember is that in his great expeditions he never lost a man, that he never offered harm to the native peoples he traded with, that, on one occasion, in the midst of a journey, wearied by travel and facing a climb up a precipitous bank, he stopped in order to carry a sick Indian on his back through the cold and rapid current of the river.

Consider Canada’s present problems and how few of them can be solved by blind loyalties, by excellent intentions, by simple idealism and goodness of heart. George Grant asked in 1963, Can Canada survive as a nation while increasingly defining its values in terms of American corporate capitalism? A decade later, answers are emerging – ask any student – not from some surge of anti-American sentiment but because thoughtful analysis have begun to show us ways in which, though juxtaposed to the most powerful and vocal nation in the world, we can establish and maintain our identity.

Or think of the threat of disintegration felt to menace Canadian unity. (Have you, by the way, heard of a proposal to split Alberta and British Columbia off to form the Kingdom of Albumbia?) What gets clearer every day is the pressures, bribes, appeals to patriotic sentiment and so on do not abate any real threat of separatism. Our only solution is a continuous dispassionate examination of causes, adjustments, ameliorations, at as low an emotional temperature as may be. The wisest and most dispassionate words I have ever heard uttered on the subject of the two languages were put to an audience in Victoria by that good man our Governor-General: We cannot ask (he said) that every Canadian speak two languages, but we can ask that he welcome the one who does.

But, you say, surely there are concerns into which critical analysis should hardly be allowed to intrude. Religion, for example, or the creative arts. Yet, in matters of religion, may we not hope that, if God has given us the gift of reason, He expects us to use it to the full? I have been disturbed, in many talks with friends who are men of faith and also men of learning, to find how high a proportion of them do not distinguish between denying reason and transcending reason. Long ago, Froude wrote an essay called, "A plea for the free discussion of theological difficulties." Were he alive now, he would plead that true faith should not deny the role of logical enquiry though in ultimate cruxes it may transcend logic.

That reason has a superb stake in the creative arts hardly needs demonstration. I would remind you that Michelangelo, Milton, Bach, Thomas Mann and a multitude of others have relied upon thought as much as upon instinctive creative power which they drew from their emotional centres. Andrew Marvell, writing in praise of Milton, says, "Thou hast not miss’d one thought that could be fit."

Dispassionate critical enquiry has not always been the primary need, the immediate necessity, the urgent requirement of this country of ours. In many pioneer communities, endurance was what, in other days, made life possible. In time of war, a virtue which has served Canada superbly, is that of simple loyalty. During the depression, the twenties and thirties of this century, the virtue of kindness was at a vast premium. (I myself worked as a farm labourer during some of those years and my heart still warms with the recollection of the kindness with which I was treated by people who were themselves barely able to pull through.)

What I am now urging conflicts not at all with this record of Canadian endeavour or achievement. But it points to the much greater complexity of contemporary events, to Canada’s intricate world-wide involvements, to the absence of straightforward solutions to many of our difficulties. Such primary virtues as courage, endurance and compassion are no longer enough.

Let is recognize in passing that governments are, of themselves, seldom dispassionate. They have to be prompted and prodded and their doings protested. Their decisions are taken, too often, with the desire of influencing the electorate and this can hardly be helped. Even the best intentioned government can become emotionally committed to measures that turn out very oddly. Or so, at least, we think on the far Pacific coast. Perhaps here on the Atlantic you are governed with immemorial wisdom.

What then, Ladies and Gentlemen, is our hope? It is for a Canada in which the University’s gift assumes an ever growing role, a Canada in which honesty and decency, skill and labour, expertise and initiative, compassion and understanding, do not flow confusedly into national policy and into the fates that govern individuals but, on the contrary, are guided by dispassionate reason into the most productive channels, are yoked with critical analysis in the performance of each necessary task, each innovative endeavour. Desiderantes meliorem patriam, says the motto of the Order of Canada. I would simply argue that our search for a better community deserves to be more that instinctive, stronger than impulsive, and better than improvised.

To ensure this is your task, members of the Graduating Class, a task no less essential, no less significant, no less exalted than any hitherto undertaken on behalf of Canada, our country.