Graduation Address

"The Courage to Act Alone" New Brunswick Reader (4 November 1995): 8-9. (UA Case 69, Box 3)

I want to talk about professions for a moment and of their place in the world. In the social world; in the private world.

I don’t think it matters what profession we talk about or examine—there is not a profession or a vocation that cannot be rewarding determined by the right attitude or that won’t be destroyed by the wrong attitude.

If it is unusual to tell men and women who have just graduated that just as professions and vocations are important, in another way—a more significant way—they are not. I still think it is a maxim that can and must be applied by anyone to their own art or craft.

I certainly can apply it to writing and make the same statement, just as I can to the medical or legal professions. All are noble, and worthy, and needed—but not because society maintains they are. In fact, at times, society will turn its back on any profession or vocation—writing and art almost daily, but law and medicine and teaching not excluded.

Professions and vocations are significant, not because of themselves, but because of the wisdom of those of us who decide to perform them. That again is a truism which, I know, sounds trite. Yet it is a truism that can get buried by self-interest or ambition, the fear of not belonging, or the insistence of maintaining the status quo.

It is a truism in danger and we must safeguard against becoming blasé about it, because it is with a fear of no belonging, coupled with self-interest and the feeling of comfort if we do belong, that most of us must wrestle with most of our lives, in any profession or vocation we are in.

Whether we are a professor of English, a parish priest or a spokesperson for a popular cause, the same determining factors—of speaking up or not speaking up, of being cautious or manipulative, of being honour bred or dishonest—are always at our shoulders instructing us what to do.

We must all wrestle with this, most of our lives. And make no mistake—it is not an easy wrestling match. At times it is like Alfalfa against Hulk Hogan. Because most other self-interest and ambition, or the general and all too natural fear of being left out of what C.S. Lewis called the "inner ring," will seem like wisdom to the person at the moment he or she is giving in to something that is contrary to their better nature; whether it is a slight against someone we know innocent, or turning our back on a friend in trouble, because we know by doing this we will gather the support of someone more important in the administration or the firm or it will make us feel superior.

Public opinion is the most tyrannical because it ostracizes those who do not share common thought. So the fear of not belonging to the right people or prevalent or new opinion always allows us to believe that by belonging we are being wise.

This is where the secret wars is our chosen professions are always waged. In whatever our chosen profession, there is a pull to believe that the wise course is the safe course, the safe course is the course others have taken and I therefore must take it too, because if I do not take it I will miss my chance. I will look like a fool.

I know writers and politicians who have adopted this course all their lives, without considering its terrible consequence. Professors also.

Common concern and shared outrage or mob opinion is an easy mask to wear into the wrestling ring, a hard mask to take off once we have put it on. It is a mask, a make-over that most often sticks to the skin.

This then is the wrestling match we all enter into—our finer self pitted against our self interest—and in the end, no matter if we want it so, or believe it to be so—it is no tag team match. One only has to look about when they themselves feel the sting of being ostracized by society, by their home town, by old friends, to realize this. We can’t get a toe on Sweet Daddy Seekie and have him come into the ring for us.

The inner ring, to use C.S. Lewis’ phrase once again, will always someday, somehow turn into a ring of individual trial.

This is said not to admonish us, but to let us realize that there is something great and noble going on within ourselves and our chosen walk of life that has nothing to do with the props that life provides.

It is in this ring, when we are alone in whatever profession we choose, that our real attitudes, designs and motives are known, if only to ourselves.

It is then when we will find ourselves wrestling like Jacob, without benefit of others, with our own angels and demons.

It is then when we must make a case for ourselves, and decide finally if our chosen life is worthy or unworthy, not because of the profession, but because of ourselves.

It is here where we can find that a man who has stacked bowling pins in a bowling alley for 47 years has had the same intense human experience and love as the head of a large and important law firm. A man who has been sent to jail has made mot any more moral mistakes than the manager of a large corporation. Perhaps less.

It is here where we must find the significance of our professions, and decide whether we have done well or not. And no one else can decide for us. No one can give us the bad review that we will give ourselves privately if we fail our own fundamental truths.

From Aristotle’s time until the present, society has created props which can, if effect, allow us to think we are being generous and truthful when we are being self-serving, being altruistic when we are using others. Entire institutions are formed and based upon this premise without much introspection and set up so the introspection is not wanted or considered warranted.

Social props are needed, because they allow.

They allow us to be brave at a dinner party or in a crowd against a single man or woman when we have never stood alone, happy to belong to an inner circle until it starts to crumble beneath our feet.

This is what social props are at least partially for. To grant us an intellectual and physical comfort. To provide us with a sense of well-being.

If social props continually, in some Kafkian way, were to cast a naked likeness of ourselves on the wall we wouldn’t want them. We wouldn’t need them, and we would be most offended by them.

But each of us, every new day, has a chance to make our professions singularly ours, and by doing this never offend ourselves by veneer or self-serving motive.

There is a section of Tolstoy’s War and Peace where these props—used by all of us at certain times in any lifestyle or profession—disintegrate.

It occurs after the Battle of Borodino in August of 1812. The Russian army is in retreat. Thousands of soldiers lie wounded in the yards of Moscow’s citizens, and with the French army of Napoleon at the door the entire population is getting ready to abandon their homes—to leave Moscow to the invader, go into the hills.

It is during this whole section of the novel—from the Battle of Borodino until Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow a few months later—that Tolstoy’s characters crystallize into their true, individual natures, without the benefit of professional props or prevailing meandering social attitudes, which sometimes sustain people throughout their entire lives; props which actually remain pretty much the same in any age.

One can take many things from this particular section of Tolstoy’s great epic.

One of the things that I like to think is that Tolstoy, at least at this point in his life, did not believe there was not a need for such props. Society is here no just because of self-delusion. Universities, businesses, institutions, like individual families, have great and needed merit in sustaining we who belong to them.

There is always a purpose to institutions greater than even the inventors of such institutions might think.

But Tolstoy, knowing this well and celebrating it as much as any writer, saw social and professional props and the palatial society of the 19th century Russian nobility to which he himself belonged, as child’s play.

That is, he knew that all child’s play sooner or later must end. For child’s play always contains a set of implicit instructions—and whether the instructions are read out to us by a faulty hiring quota, the betrayal of a friend or a family member we counted on, an unexpected natural disaster or a Napoleon, the instructions follow the same general rule.

An individual life enters alone at the ropes of an individual wrestling ring. And no social prop or profession can overcome this. Our true worth is measured in how we finally face ourselves.

This is what occurs during the aftermath of the Battle of Borodino. Everyone, from the simplest peasant family to Napoleon himself, feel failure of these props, the failure of his professional life, and is then left supremely vulnerable to his own nature. It is then only individual integrity and personal goodness which can be counted on.

It is always a person’s own nature that sustains or crushes him when professional props fail.

In this section of War and Peace the mayor of Moscow, Rostopchin, has no control over the citizens, the French army has no control over the fires. The French who believe they have won the battle are mortally wounded, and though the citizens of Moscow are supposed to be honorable (in Napoleon’s view) and stay in the city to welcome him, they refuse to speak and head to the hills. Instead of brokering peace and meeting for talks like he is supposed to, Czar Alexander refuses to negotiate.

The social props have fallen to the ground, and the world has been turned on its head.

Those who seemed to be important are no longer so, those who were not important, have taken control of themselves.

And Napoleon, for all his military genius, ends up fleeing in front of his terrified troops back to France, while his entourage still calls him Emperor, and he still calls them King of Naples, King of Milan. But no longer is it a comfortable inner circle. It is at this moment in the book where these titles are far more meaningful than ever before, for they show in their irony the unending nakedness of human ambition, greed, cruelty, folly, deceit and failure, any Cossack chasing behind them has individually more power than they do.

So the professions—especially in this instance, the military profession—fail, and individual men and women are left to rely upon themselves, and what they are underneath their social skins and professional exteriors.

Underneath the prop is always what matters.

There is just one specific thing I would mention about this section of War and Peace.

The Russian Count Pierre Bezuhov, one of the great characters of the epic, remains in Moscow after the citizens have fled. He is uncertain why everything about him has been destroyed, his palatial residences empty, the city on fire. He is uncertain why. But he believes he knows who caused it. Napoleon—the anti-Christ. Pierre carries a pistol certain he will kill Napoleon and become a martyr. His individual life won’t matter.

He sees in his mind’s eye how it will happen. He will go to the palace where Napoleon is housed. He will wait for him and when he sees him he will step forward and shoot him. He himself will them be put against a wall and shot, but it won’t matter—for he will have done what is necessary to help save Russia.

This is what he things as he is walking through the back streets of tortured, burning Moscow.

But of course it never happens because his inner nobility is far greater than his outer title of Count or nobleman.

He stops his plans to find and kill Napoleon because of a child trapped in a fire. No one is willing to risk themselves in the smoke and flame to save the child except himself. The killing of Napoleon as desirable as Pierre Bezukov might think, fades into the background and becomes simple petty artifice and part of the social prop.

Pierre’s scheme for social and political revenge fails because, individually Pierre is far greater than society or social revenge, even in a time of mayhem and murder. The child, squalid, poor, naked, and worth nothing, trapped in a fire and a world it didn’t create, becomes more important to a good man than a hundred Napoleons.

That is the secret, laughed at and thought of as ridiculous by society throughout this novel, by all of those others who had perfected the art of wearing social props, of Count Pierre’s greatness as a human being.

My congratulations comes from the heart, and with a compliment. And the compliment is this:

Individually we are all far, far greater at any given moment than the props or professions that we sometimes believe support us and that sometimes dictate to us about how to act or think. Vocations we sometimes believe we cannot do without.

And all our professions, social contracts, and vocations come from honourable and meaningful intentions. That is why we are here today.

They are admirable—just as any job on can do is worthwhile, from cutting pulp to inventing the Canada Arm.

They are all given meaning by us—and are rendered meaningless only if we, through pettiness or self interest, forget why we chose to do what we do, and by this, lose sufficient respect for ourselves.