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President Osgood, Board of Trustees, Dean Smith, faculty, family, friends and most of
all the graduates of the class of 2010 with your green ribbons and all. I’m thrilled
to be with you today to celebrate your graduation, to receive with gratitude and humility an
honorary degree, and to share some ideas with you. But especially to touch ground in this
place, a revered site in the long history of progressive thinking in action in our country.
Pull the thread of social justice and economic advance in this country, and much of the fabric
comes back to this very special place.
When I think about the lives of political leaders in the past decade who led our country
into two useless wars and a massive economic crisis, I often refer to the immortal words
of a great lawyer, Joseph Welch, who remonstrated against the ranting of Senator Joe McCarthy
by declaring, “You’ve done enough! Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last,
have you no sense of decency?” But where did Welch himself imbibe of that decency?
Of course, it was here at Grinnell College. When I describe the soaring potential of our
age to solve problems of hunger, poverty and disease, I often turn to the miracle of the
semiconductor in the digital age that it has wrought. But where were the first transistors
studied and from where did those studies lead to a new global industry? It was of course
in the introductory physics course here at Grinnell College, where Robert Noyce, a young
student, was enthralled by the new device which he would then carry to Silicon Valley
and from there to the world. And when I describe the potential of public action to solve social
problems, to put ethics into practice, I like all of you of course look to the New Deal,
to the programs like the National Emergency Relief Administration that inspired all of
the progressive public policies that followed. And from where did the New Deal draw much
of its inspiration? From the brilliant ideas, amazing administrative capacity and unswerving
vision of Harry Hopkins, advisor of FDR, administrator for the nation, and son of Grinnell College.
We are all heirs of the past and stewards of the future. We are shaped by our parents,
communities, churches, mosques, temples and synagogues, and by our colleges, which shape
us at the moment of our maturation from students to adult moral agents. You, graduates, are
very lucky to have been shaped by Grinnell College, and the world is lucky for that as
well.
While I’m thrilled to be here, I can’t say that I’m thrilled with state of the
world we find ourselves in today. Frankly, I had hoped and expected better with the turn
of the political page last year. But we have found, as I perhaps should have known, that
the rut in which our country finds itself is deeper than an individual or a single administration.
We are facing a societal crisis, one that will now fall partly on your shoulders, graduates
of 2010. Fortunately, you are prepared to shoulder it.
My own discipline of economics is sometimes called the dismal science, but I promise to
spare you of that today. My message today is drawn indeed from Welch, Noyce and Hopkins;
that decency, science and management capacity can fix what ails us. There is no reason for
despair. But there is no option for complacency either. Of course, pessimistic or optimistic
as I might be and optimistic I am, you are free to discount my words fully and form your
own judgment. After all, the best recent definition of an economist is a person put on the planet
to make astrologers look good. I prefer a slightly older and more elegant formulation,
that an economist is a person who, when he or she sees that something works in practice
tries to find whether it works in theory. And that’s not quite as silly as it sounds,
because if we can understand the essence of what makes something work in practice, if
we can create a sound theory of success, then we can multiply the good, limit the bad, and
thereby improve the lot of the world. That after all is the challenge of all of us that
would combine thinking and action.
If we start from that vantage point, there is indeed much to describe that is not working
today. You, graduates, will enter a somewhat frightening job market, though I predict that
with your special skills and knowledge you will find important footholds for your economic
future. It is for the millions of your generation without a college degree, whose poverty and
circumstances led them to drop out of high school, or stop at high school graduation,
or required them to withdraw from college in order to pay the family bills that life
will be especially hard. But our worries extend past the economy to the larger society and
its very purpose. A massive oil spill threatens the gulf coast just a few years after the
devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Our national capacity to prevent and to respond to disasters,
whether human or natural or more realistically a combination of the two, has been shown once
again to be sorely wanting. And I shudder to think that Halliburton was instrumental
in the current failure. That company has carved an arc of disaster from Iraq to Nigeria to
Louisiana, protected time and again by unsavory people in high places.
[applause]
Our worries extend to Afghanistan where the end of the Bush administration regrettably
did not put an end to our nations tragic and wasteful overreliance on the military. Afghanistan
is an impoverished, drought-prone landlocked country destabilized by decades of war, suffering
from water stress, from a lack of schooling and from desperately inadequate infrastructure.
It is, in short, a country facing the scourge of extreme poverty. Its national income is
about ten billion dollars per year, roughly 300 dollars per person. Yet, America will
spend 100 billion dollars this year, ten times Afghanistan’s national income, in a futile
and misguided effort to restore order through a military approach. We could raise that country’s
income ten-fold, but instead we will leave it in even deeper rubble. One reason for this
tragic blunder can be inferred from pictures of President Obama and his war cabinet of
generals, politicians and advisors. We don’t see one true expert on Afghanistan – on
its culture, language or history – within that group.
[applause]
Our worries extend to our public morality, where business leaders publicly defend the
right to deceive. Wall Street became a place where Goldman-Sachs – and I promise you,
no relation to your speaker today – peddled toxic assets to clients while shorting those
same assets in its own proprietary trading. Goldman then had the audacity to declare that
its clients just have to look after themselves, caveat emptor, buyer beware indeed. Despite
the claims of Goldman’s CEO, this is certainly not God’s work, to me or to the rest of
America.
But I promised you that I would not be dismal, and I will keep my promise. Not one of these
problems is beyond solution. As a country, we have just not been thinking straight, we
have been drifting, a combination of greed at the top, confusion in the public, and a
political system that has created a corrupt mutualism of politicians and corporate lobbies.
[applause]
In short, we have not been applying Grinnell’s triple standard of decency, science and management
capacity. Despite this poor performance in recent years, I side firmly with President
John F. Kennedy who said, “Our problems are man-made. Therefore they can be solved
by man, and man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human
beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe
they can do it again.” And I side with you, graduates of Grinnell College, who are already
choosing Kennedy’s way through exploring the world in your third year abroad, by joining
the Peace Corps, the GrinnellCorps, Teach for America, the One Campaign, the Millennium
Campus Network, Unite for Sight, Partners in Health, the Milliennium Villages Project,
and other efforts. By standing and helping Haiti in its urgent relief needs today. I
side with you in opposing the Arizona immigration code,
[applause]
which commands its policeman to chase down its own residents
on the basis of fear rather than cause. I side with you in opposing the Obama administration’s
policies of holding countless prisoners outside of the country and aggressively denying them
their day in court, a shocking repudiation of a standard of justice that goes back hundreds
of years, and is at the core of our legal and moral tradition.
[applause]
We are, graduates of 2010, facing an again an age-old battle of two ideas. The first
holds that the world is dangerous and hyper- competitive; that we need to take what we can before
someone else grabs it; that life is harsh and sometimes even ruthless; that only the tough survive.
The other idea holds that humankind is a species of designers, problem-solvers and strivers;
that we don’t have to accept our follies and our missteps as inevitable; yes, that
human nature is flawed, that we are wired to see the world as us versus them, but that
we can know ourselves, and most importantly, recognize our common humanity and thereby
aim to do better. I don’t deny the need for you and me and for America to be vigilant
in the face of threats. But I do deny that we should define the world by its dangers
rather than by its opportunities. There is, I would assert, an inherent benefit for all
of us in choosing the more optimistic course, the one based on a vision of cooperation and
mutual gain, what economists would call the gains from trade. When we choose the aggressive
or defensive course, we are condemned to spend vast sums merely in opposing others, we are
condemned to miss the opportunities for finding mutual advantage, and we become, wittingly
or not, reckless gamblers with the fate of the planet, making the spread of war, environmental
destruction, and social division all that more likely. We live in a time of resource
stringency, when conservation and wise use of our resources, natural, human and financial,
will be vital for our survival.
It is time to deploy decency, science and management in the interest of humanity. We
now spend – and waste – much of 750 billion dollars each year on the military, as much
as the rest of the world combined, while spending roughly one-twenty-fifth of that amount, a
mere 30 billion dollars to combat the diseases, hunger and deprivation that lie at the root
of conflict and instability. Let us invest in peace more than in war. You are the generation
that can end poverty on the planet. Take the tools you need and get the job done.
[applause]
We lose around 10 percent of our national
income each year to crime, and we incarcerate two million mostly young and poorly educated
young men, yet we refuse to spend even one percent more of our national income in the
preschool, head start and other programs that are proven to help poor children to escape
from poverty. [applause] Let’s invest in education rather than suffer the blows of crime and
the waste of young people that lack the skills for the twenty-first century. We face a growing
swath of ecological disasters as we dig deeper for coal and oil, as we hydro-fracture the
shale underneath our farms, and convert our food grains to biofuels, and allow greenhouse
gases to concentrate evermore dangerously in the air. Let us invest a small part of
the steeply rising costs to clean up, before it is too late, in the research, development,
demonstration and deployment of clean energy sources.
[applause]
These are ideas and the spirit of social purpose that I ask you, the graduates, to carry forward
from Grinnell College today. During your years at Grinnell, you have been part of a revered
community seeking the truth, drawing strength from diversity, yet grounded in a common humanity,
and founded on the deepest faith that knowledge is power that can be deployed for the common
good, or as Grinnell’s mission statement puts it, “The College aims to graduate women
and men who are prepared in life and work to use their knowledge and their abilities
to serve the common good.” With the skills and values that you have learned, you are
not only empowered to find your own personal way around the dangerous twists and turns
we now call the U.S. economy, but also around the challenges that your generation will face
and that will define the very future of this planet, the end of poverty, the sustainability
of the planet, and the avoidance of conflicts on a crowded earth. You have learned well
that we are entering a new era, in which the United States is but one of many powers, and
in which our fate and that of the world will depend more on our ideas and values than on
America’s weaponry and military bases. Grinnell’s values have helped to guide this country,
and through you they can help to inspire the world. Take your values from Grinnell today
- social purpose, community, diversity, management skill and scientific knowledge - and go forward
to show what you can do to improve the world. This is your turn, the great challenge of
your generation. Congratulations to you, the graduating class of 2010.