Graduation Address

"The Human Situation" (17 October 1973). (UA Case 69, Box 2)

Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen. We are gathered together today in a ceremony that will take its place in a long series of similar ceremonies that have marked the graduation of groups of students who have achieved what they set out to do in this very old university. I do not need to labour the point of the joy of the occasion for not one of us would be in attendance today were he not proud of what has been accomplished and not grateful for a system that allows us to participate in the privilege of higher education. I remember well the several years of hard work that went into my first degree from UNB and how, after successfully dodging all the traps and the artful professors, the requirements were ultimately satisfied and they sort of had to give me a degree. This new degree today I cherish perhaps even more because they actually volunteered it. I may note, too, that when I was an undergraduate here I used to see old folks getting honorary degrees each spring. It is remarkable to note how youthful and vigorous this group today is and how my own judgement of such matters seems to have matured in the interim.

Now what is a Convocations Speaker to say? I supposed I could launch you upon the stormy seas of life, clutching your brand new diplomas close to your bosoms, with the assurance that you only have to mutter the words "Sapere Aude", the Latin motto of this university, to see you through thick and through thin. An examination of the Coat of Arms on the front of this podium, on the other hand, shows me that I cannot do this. As you see at the top, the two beavers are arguing vociferously about the meaning of this motto which is hyphenated in the wrong place and, besides, is not even in their own language. Underneath that there appears to be an aeroplane, or something that needs no water. If, on the other hand, one accepts it as a ship, it is equally difficult for me to hold this up as an example to you. Even the lowliest draftsman in the remotest marine architectural firm would recognize at once that if it were launched upon the calmest of waters it would immediately turn turtle.

Perhaps I could lecture you on my specialty – "A Correlation between the Rectal Temperature of Snakes in the Southern Sahara Desert with the Rate of Loss of Ships off Cape Horn during the Disastrous Winter of 1905"...but, no, that seems a trifle specialized for a group with interests as broad as those you represent. I, therefore, look upon it as more my function to wonder a little bit about the kind of world we live in and where we are going from here. Of course, none of you dreamed that the Director of the National Museum of Science and Technology wouldn’t somehow work into his address something of his own science and technology interest. It is perhaps customary to look forward in Convocation Addresses as it is also customary to speak of the "unusual times through which we are passing." In my own fifty years or so of experience in the human situation I have never found myself living in anything other than "unusual times." It seems to be a little like weather forecasting in Newfoundland or crop conditions in the Maritimes – there never seems to be an average day or an average condition...it is always unusual.

Now, what about the future?

To sense the currents of civilization it is necessary to marinate ourselves a little in the history of past human experience. It is clear, I think, from even a preliminary glance that our times are dominated by the sciences and the technologies that are derived from them. This gathering today, for example, is clearly of our times – relatives and friends have come from various corners of Canada in a few hours by jet aircraft and from all parts of the province by modern automobile highway transportation to gather in a hall with an artificial environment, where the human voice when not adequate can be amplified to fill the space. The fine gowns and robes we fresh graduates sit in are no longer made from seen bolls of the cotton plant or hair from the backs of sheep but are blends of synthetic fibers coloured by chemical dyes and sewn on automatic machines controlled by tapes or computers. It would seem clear from any analysis that our world will continue to be dominated by science and technology for some time to come no matter how our goals are changed or our focus altered.

I am impressed as I read on the subject how very quickly books on the future of mankind or of science and technology have become out of date. One of the difficulties of prediction has been the way that profound changes have so often come from ideas or actions that began in obscurity. Mendel worked for decades on his peas before the importance of his genetics was realized in the slightest. Darwin reluctantly published his revolutionary book on the origin of species more than 20 years after the grand generalizing idea came to him. Robert Goddard worked for more than 35 years with rockets and dreamed alone of visiting the moon and planets. Frank Lloyd Wright had great difficulty within his own profession when he started his new philosophy of architecture.

The Chinese had rockets for a thousand years before the principle was put to the transportation of anything more serious than coloured lights. And now – we rocket into space and most long distance transportation of people is done by jet airplane.

And there have been some bad prophecies in the past too. Many were convinced that powered flight by heavier-than-air craft was impossible. In 1945 the top scientific advisors in the United Kingdom and the United States said that inter-continental ballistic missiles could not compete with manned bombers in the foreseeable future. Space travel was viewed as impossible by many until it actually happened. In short, the history of science and technology is full of unpredictable surprises and over and over again it has been the unpredictable or the unrecognized that has turned out to be the mist significant event.

Yet, the new human situation demands that we plan intelligently for our future, and that certainly calls for projection if not prediction. New human situation? The new human situation which has arrived only in this generation is that we stand in a position where we can intelligently control most of our future. This is different from the situation at any time in the millions of years of human history when the essential preoccupation was a struggle to get enough to eat and to survive the rigours of the environment.

To me, therefore, it is clearly time for a change of human objectives.

These thoughts lead me to believe that technology, and the science that lies behind it, must be directed. We must first gain a deeper insight into the laws that govern human behavior and work from there to human organization and needs and from there to the technology to satisfy them.

How are we going to do this?

I believe at the beginning that we must increase the scientific and technological literacy of the whole population. When governments are elected or hold office by permission of whole populations and when they are in positions to make decisions that may affect generations of people, it is important indeed that not only the people in government itself but those who put them in office appreciate the significance of what is to be decided, that various courses open and the consequences, and why decisions are made. Nowadays we boast that in Canada literacy runs at a very high level. But by this we mean only that people can read and write. In my view our age demands that the lever of literacy be very much higher than that and particularly in the scientific and technological fields. We should never have seen the present day ecological hysteria – where sensation seeking scientists can get away with declaring that the Saint John River or the Ottawa River are dead, that an oil spill in the east coast will damage the beaches forever, that earth is a dying planet, that the world will shake itself apart following what is really a pin-prick atomic blast in the Aleutians, and you know all the rest. On the other hand, these are very serious matters for human occupancy of Earth. Politicians certainly must not make decisions in scientific and technological ignorance that unnecessarily mortgage our futures.

Perhaps the process of change will be a natural one as modern technology allows us to look forward to more and more leisure, and curiosity drives people to learn more and more about more and more. Scientific and technological literacy has already taken a great jump forward with the coming of television, the growing number of educational programs that are thus provided in every home, and the ringside seats we can enjoy for any process or event in the world. Countdown, ignition, and the roar of mighty rockets are known now to every child because of this marvelous tool of communication and so are the results of indiscriminate use of DDT; carelessness in waste disposal and sloppy use of environment; over-framing; unthinking squandering of non-renewable resources. I think it is already clear that the next generation will see a shift in educational emphasis from youth to the whole population, from basic literacy and earning a living to education for living. And, related perhaps, we’ll begin to face the genetic facts of life – that men are not born equal – and as a result will make quite different and perhaps better arrangements in many aspects of life – schools, games, social organizations, government, attitudes toward and the whole structure of reproduction.

As for the tools of science and technology themselves? I find in my own career of some 25 years in science that I have come around the circle to believe that we must have mostly directed research. In this I differ from Hertzberg, our Nobel physicist, who has been making eloquent please for leaving the scientist in his ivy covered laboratories to pursue the lonely and grand path of personal curiosity in lines of "pure" research. Surely this kind of approach is becoming more and more old-fashioned as we decide that social engineering and the human element are of primary importance in our total efforts and that we need to develop the enabling science and technology. My approach here is close to the appeal of your own President who called on the University at this installation to get useful to the society that supports it. When I was an Associate Professor here at UNB about 20 years ago the Head of the Department and I once looked over the list of our dozen graduating geologists and found that each one of them was going out to start life at a salary higher than our own. In those days a professor’s research activities, in the time beyond his 18 or 20 contact hours with students per week, were logically his own business. Professors are now very well paid, indeed, so it is reasonable to say to the, "get useful!"

All this is a little like the settlement of this Province. When my great, great, great grandfather went into the woods back of Chipman he cleared a piece of land in what he thought was a good place. Later when things were more settled, individual’s plans became more dependent on neighbours’ holdings and the location of roads and churches and schools. Nowadays, planning is everywhere and to a purpose. I think research has generally arrived at this last stage.

For those who fear direction in research I have only to say that research has always been directed to a small degree even among those who feel that they have been completely independent. It will not be the end of initiative and imagination, or originality or invention, for direction can be accomplished in subtle ways – the development of national pride in progress in some fields, the supplying of monies for research in particular fields or for particular purposes, the building of an environment of prestige for particular style of effort, the provision of scholarships and educational opportunities in some fields but not necessarily in all fields. Perhaps the time has come when we should recognize that the great bulk of researchers who pursue their own interests do not contribute very much to the betterment of the human situation. Perhaps a dual system where a few evidently fertile minds are left alone in pure undisciplined research and the rest are channeled into needed progress would be the way to have the best of both worlds.

All these are glorious generalities but what will it be like in 25 or 50 or 100 years? Man’s most fundamental aim – to feed himself adequately is within reach of attainment. If he will but cast away primitive approaches to reproduction based on jungle survival and plan his populations relative to resources, he has at his disposal the scientific knowledge and the accompanying technology to provide the food, the clothing and the shelter he needs.

In the matter of energy there seems to be a great deal of mis-information cast about in the media these days. When I was an undergraduate at university I was taught that there was a reserve of petroleum large enough to last for 20 years at predictable rates of consumption. Now, 30 years later we are still teaching virtually the same figures, even though consumption has risen enormously and reserves of the earlier days have long since been used. It would be ridiculous, on the other hand, to suggest that this can always be the case. We have 20 years of oil and 3,000 years of coal left in the ground that we know about. We must nevertheless hurray development of the alternatives already in use in nuclear energy and the enormous potential of fusion just over the horizon.

In travel and transportation I would look for increasing efficiency in transporting bulk materials and the development of revolutionary methods of transport to bring valuable materials from remote places to where they can be used.

In the world of materials we will undoubtedly see the revolution of the last generation continue with new and better materials replacing some of our earlier synthetic ones and replacing natural materials. Five thousand years ago we had a dozen basic materials. Five thousand years ago we had a dozen basic materials – now hundreds of thousands enable us to improve human performance in engineering, the arts, in architecture and medicine and, of course, science and technology themselves, for we build better, bigger, smaller, more efficient than ever before.

In medical matters I look for some real revolutions. After all we still extract teeth in exactly the same way the ancients did. We still stand helplessly by while people die slowly of cancer. We watch each other grow older in an orderly process which has not changed significantly since human consciousness of the process began. We still produce genetic defects which we neither control nor cure. Our repairs to the human machine, spectacular by earlier standards of doing nothing, are still very primitive. Whether we wish to increase the lifespan or not is another question but perhaps it would be a reasonable goal for average humans to remain in good health and strength for eight or ten decades instead of six or seven.

In the last very few years biochemists have discovered a great deal about the mechanisms in living organisms that allow offspring to inherit characteristics from their ancestors. Deeper knowledge of the laws of heredity and its mechanism may one day enable us to make far better use of the fund of variable characteristics and abilities already present in the human race. It seems unlikely that we will continue to permit medical salvage to pollute our genetic pool with bad genes that nature formerly discarded. This to me is one of the real shockers of our age.

In work and leisure we must look forward in the next generations to revolutionary social changes as science and technology provide more and better tools to produce our necessities and luxuries. Decreasing work and increasing leisure will require a completely different organization of living. The amount of health and leisure that we enjoy today would have seemed fantastic and completely unbelievable to anybody living and viewing the social problems of the early nineteenth century. There will be another quantum jump like this, I am sure.

But my thoughts wander back to general principles and I wonder where the next 100 years will take us? I marvel at how strange it is that the more we seem to find out in any area of investigation, be it pure science or human behavior, the horizon is still there, always inviting us to get closer. Where the horizons will be teasing us to approach in 50 or 100 years…who knows? How strange it is to recall that explorers for centuries have set out across the unknown seas to discover what was far away when they did not even know what was a half mile directly below their feet or what was beneath the sea just there in the harbour mouth or a mile off the coast. We are experiencing great excitement now as we discover the insides of the oceans, explore their temperatures and salinities, their currents and their depths, map for the first time enormous mountain ranges, tens of thousands of miles long and higher than anything on the land surface, and great valleys and plans spread out beneath the sea, invisible until we bothered to look. Imagine missing this for so long – perhaps we humans were too fixed in our viewing…and perhaps are in the present day, too.

For a couple of generations now we have nurtured an astonishing specialization of individual human development when more and more people are trained to know more and more about smaller and smaller areas of human experience or knowledge. In Darwin’s times, because of the state of knowledge, a natural historian surveyed the whole field pretty well in all its aspects. Now, the pendulum has swung too far and near-sighted educationalists require specialization in universities from high school days. Training takes the form of an extraordinarily detailed accounting of some extremely narrow portion of one field of knowledge so that we have experts who know all there is to know about left handed fleas and are perfectly capable of walking through the Alpine meadows in glorious mountain scenery and seeing nothing except likely spots for collecting left handed fleas. Yet when we think of major advances in science it has been so often the generalist and the synthesizer. Are we allowing adequately for generalizers and synthesizers in our educational system? Alas, I think not.

Another question of some importance to our futurist – will the rate of advance of science and technology continue at the present ever-increasing one or will we find that we are now seeing the tail end of a great spasm of development that will taper off just as suddenly as it began? All nature is cyclical and human affairs are probably the same. Perhaps the increasing disaffection with science, the turning away of the young from specialized training, declining rates of increase of enrolments in universities, increasing questioning about bothering with all this research stuff, growing reluctance on the part of governments to subsidize research per se, a lowering of respect of the ivy walls if academe – maybe these are all parts of the beginning of a slowing down, with humans generally becoming more concerned with living and less with advancing, whatever that is.

Whatever the long range fate of man, it is clear that the fantastic present day technology, and that already in sight, can make life for future generations peaceful, prosperous, and materially nearly perfect. Plenty can replace famine. Pleasurable human living can take the place of drudgery. Creation and enjoyment of our world can supersede aimlessness. But without intelligent planning mortal peril lurks in that same technology.

I cannot help but end on a simple note for no matter what I read, or how I think about the future, I conclude from my experiences of life that you new graduates should go forth in good cheer, for being human in 50 or 100 years will have the same fundamental satisfactions as being human now or a hundred years ago. It will be love and affection between people whether it be within the family unit, between individuals, or in the community. Deep satisfaction will come from doing things whether it is physical effort, creating a picture or music, whittling a sailboat for a grandson or building a house. And perhaps the greatest experience of all will be in just enjoying our environment – sitting on the shoreside or the top of a mountain, watching the mighty energies of a storm, enjoying a calm day, or seeing the hope of a new sunrise and wondering about the human situation – as all men before you have done.