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Squamish, BC
Canada V8B 0N8
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www.questu.ca
CONVOCATION ADDRESS, AUGUST 28, 2009 -­‐ JIM COHN On behalf of the faculty, it is my great pleasure to welcome you, the graduating class of 2013, to Quest University Canada. In its Latin roots, "convocation" means "a calling together." You have chosen us to educate you. It is a job we take very seriously, and we are flattered by your trust in us. We have therefore called you to this beautiful place so that you could gather together with the teachers you see assembled before you. The faculty have demonstrated outstanding preparation in their fields of knowledge, as well as a talent for, and a dedication to, teaching. We come prepared to guide you through a curriculum that we have thought out with some care. The Quest education is nonetheless an experiment, a living hypothesis, because we are not sure yet of the outcome. We have not yet graduated a class, but do not let that worry you. If we were sure of the outcome from the outset, then we would merely be repeating what had already been done in higher education. We did not want to do so because it was not good enough for us. It was not good enough for you, either. What have we called you here to do? Ultimately we want you to learn how to think seriously and deeply about essential questions. In the Cornerstone class that you will begin on Monday, the first essential question you will take up is the relationship between human beings and nature. The issue of climate change and of the domination of the environment by human activity has taken on genuine urgency in our day. It is a deadly serious issue, but the opinions you hear are about it are seldom serious or deep. You have no doubt heard the story that the twin evils of science and capitalism are ravaging the planet Earth. This notion often gets packed into the word "unsustainable." We mean that we are exhausting our natural resources and soon will no longer have enough of them. Consequently, we feel guilty for indulging in our first-­‐world consumption habits. Typical North Americans -­‐ and I mean myself here -­‐ eat meat and fly on airplanes and drive in cars and water their lawns and air-­‐condition their houses and enjoy lots of other comforts that the rest of the world simply cannot share with us. If whole world's population lived as we do, it would take five planets the size of Earth to support everyone. And we do not have five planets.1 We also mean by "unsustainable" that we are afraid of what we are doing to the environment. We are poisoning the water, the air, and the soil with noxious chemicals. Moreover, the consequences of all our consumption mean that we are slowly cooking ourselves to death in a atmospheric carbon-­‐dioxide demi-­‐glaze. In short, we are bringing environmental destruction down on our own heads. As a society, we know we are doing it, but we cannot stop ourselves. We cannot rein in private interests because they have too much clout -­‐ they make the economy tick, after all. Faced with imminent cataclysm, it is not easy to know what to do. After much hand-­‐wringing, we are tempted to think that human beings are the problem, and that Nature would get along just fine without us. Or, more to the point, we imagine that Nature would actually be better off without us. I hope this story sounds familiar to you. Unfortunately, it is a cliché. And, like many clichés, it is not exactly untrue, but rather it does not go very deep, or help us think through the problem. I do not doubt that human beings are capable of ruining the environment. I do not doubt that we could kill ourselves off by our own mistakes. The conditions we need for life are frighteningly fragile, and we homo sapiens sapiens are a stupid, stupid species. So, yes, the planet probably needs saving. But I hesitate to placate my guilt and my fears by buying an organic cotton t-­‐shirt that bears the imperative, "Save the planet." Nor do I want to put a bumper sticker on my Toyota Prius -­‐ printed with biodegradable soy ink, naturally -­‐ that says, "Love your Mother Earth." I do have a reusable cotton sack that I take to the store -­‐ when I remember it -­‐ so that I will use one fewer disposable plastic bags and perhaps save some poor sea turtle out in the Pacific Ocean from choking to death on it after I am done carrying my groceries. But I am not congratulating myself on saving the planet with this small measure. How do we get beyond the clichés? That is why you are sitting in those chairs. It is our job as your teachers to make the relationship between human beings and nature a question for you. Questions open us up to the world. They prepare us to look for answers that we had not suspected were there. Let's start by asking ourselves the difficult question about the relationship between human beings and nature. What are we talking about when we talk about "nature"? I am guessing that the first image that pops into our minds when we think of "Nature" is the wilderness. If you go to Google Images and put "Nature" in the search box, you get thousands upon thousands of photographs of the wilderness, many of which are intended without irony to be wallpaper for your computer screen. By definition, the wilderness is a place where Nature exists without human beings at all, except perhaps as tourists. The Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente humorously points out that Canadians identify this country and themselves with the wilderness2 -­‐ you can picture the screen-­‐savers yourself: calm, unspoiled lakes; vast windswept tundra; towering granite mountains; endless boreal forests. The official Canadian icons prominently feature the wilderness. Canadians stamp wild animals like loons and polar bears and caribou and beavers onto the coins. And the Canadian flag is the only national flag in the world that sports a very large plant. No other country identifies with the wilderness to such an extent. "But Canadians," Wente goes on to say, "like the idea of the wilderness a lot more than the thing itself."3 As it turns out, the Canadian wilderness is chock-­‐full of natural pests like mosquitoes and black flies, not to mention natural cliffs, crevasses, grizzly bears, class-­‐six white-­‐water rapids, deep sub-­‐zero temperatures, and other naturally terrifying ways to die. In short, as the joke goes, the wilderness is a nice place to visit, but I would not want to live there. And very few Canadians do.4 What does the idea of the wilderness mean? We like to think that civilization has not completely triumphed over nature, has not tamed all the wild beasts, has not made the whole world as safe as a playpen. The wilderness despises bourgeois comfort. Its very hardships therefore stand for a kind of human freedom. Even in the imagination, the wilderness offers an ever-­‐present challenge that is always ready to demand from us the exercise of our full powers -­‐ powers which the successes of civilization have taken away from us. We need the wilderness, for the idea of it reminds us of the possibility of freedom. The wilderness is a place, both in reality and in our minds, but in the end, we do not think Nature itself is a place. Dandelions grow up between the cracks in the city sidewalk, and they are part of nature. Since human bodies are natural, too, we would not want to define nature as any place where we were not. Let's not forget all the stuff that is not alive -­‐ like the ocean and the atmosphere and the stars -­‐ that we also think of as natural. If we make an exception for man-­‐made artefacts -­‐ like the Great Wall of China and Hamlet and marshmallows -­‐ we probably think that Nature includes everything out there. Now we have entered the province of natural science. It is the dominant view of Nature in the world, and I would therefore like to dwell on it for a minute. In its classical form, modern science understands nature as matter in motion, working according to a set of inexorable laws all of which go on by themselves without any help from people. Although materialist theories of physics go back to Ancient Greece, no one did more for this view than Isaac Newton. In the 17th century, he published in Latin his brilliant treatise, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Newton demonstrated that the universe can be understood in depth, and described in depth, by mathematics. The popular imagination compared Newton's mechanistic world to an intricate watch. God was said to have created the watch and wound it up, and then He stepped back to let it tick away by itself. All the parts of the watch are interconnected, and all the gears work together according to rational principles. When it runs, it creates the motion and change that we understand as Nature. In the past three hundred years, the scientific imagination has taken that image of Nature and Photo-­‐
shopped out the watchmaker, leaving us with just the watch ticking in the void. Since no one witnessed God making the parts, or winding it up, or oiling the gears, it was thought that He was finally not needed. No scientist can say scientifically where the watch came from or who wound it up, but explaining the ultimate origins of the universe seems not to matter to the investigation of the stuff that is actually there. In the meantime, the watch has been updated to an atomic clock. There have been some tweaks in the mechanism to include new weird stuff like electromagnetism and quantum mechanics and relativity. We have replaced the springs and gears with electricity and microchips. And time itself apparently does not tick in such a straightforward manner anymore. Nonetheless, our fancy new atomic clock runs with amazing efficiency and predictability. The fun part about this intricate mechanism is that there is no end to all the cool stuff you can find in there. The scientific revolution that began rolling in Europe around the 17th century has continued at an accelerating pace until the present day. It has triumphed everywhere -­‐ East and West -­‐ as the best account of why things in the natural world happen the way they do. By "best" I mean most comprehensive, most tested, most verified, and most capable of prediction. You are all believers in science. Probably everyone here has flown in an airplane, and consequently every single one of you trusts that Bernoulli was right about the relation between air speed and air pressure. Whether you know about Bernoulli or not, fortunately for you it turns out that airplanes can use the difference between the speed of the air above and below the wings to create a low pressure zone above them in order to counteract the force of gravity. Once the Wright brothers figured out how to engineer this principle into an airplane, it has worked every time. It is a very safe bet that Bernoulli will turn out to be right once again the next time you board an aircraft. Please do not tell me that you do not buy the scientific view of the world. You bet your life on it, all the time. The scientific view of Nature is so very successful that we often tend to think of this intricate, interconnected, rational, law-­‐abiding, material mechanism as simply "natural," by which we mean, "the way things really are." Well, yes and no. That would be like saying that our atomic clock did not merely keep time, but was time. The scientific view of Nature is a model of the universe, or rather a whole set of models. It is not a fact about Nature. It is not something you can observe directly, like, say, sticking your head out of the window and observing that it is a sunny day. Models represent the way things might be. As an example of scientific modelling, take what we call gravity. 2500 years ago, when Aristotle dropped his wooden stylus, you can be sure that it fell to the ground. To describe this phenomenon, Aristotle said that the earth element of the stylus was returning to its "natural" place in the cosmos. Aristotle believed that earthy things are heavy and tend to move toward the centre of the Earth. He never really explained why that should be the case, but, to be fair to him, it was obvious from the evidence. If you try it yourself, it will work every single time. 350 years ago, when the famous apple fell on Isaac Newton's head, it set him to thinking. To describe this phenomenon, Newton produced an equation that gave the attractive force of gravity in terms of the mass of the Earth and the mass of the quill and the inverse square of the distance between them. The precision of this relationship allows us measure masses and say a lot about how they will behave. Among other things, Newton was able to accurately calculate the masses of the sun and the planets, which no one before him was able to do.5 Newton never really explained why the inverse square law of gravitational attraction happened to apply to our universe, but on the evidence, it does. By the way, we still do not know why it applies. 100 years ago, when Einstein dropped his fountain pen, it also fell to the ground. To describe this phenomenon, he showed how the mass of the planet Earth warped the space-­‐time continuum in such a way as to bring the pen and the ground together on a collision course. This theory advanced beyond Newton because it explained certain phenomena that Newton did not know about and his model could not account for, such as the observation that even light bends under the influence of gravity when it passes by massive objects like the sun.6 Einstein never really explained why things must move through space time, but on the evidence, it seems that they must. And to be fair to Einstein, no one so far has been able to give a satisfactory account of why they must. Perhaps one of you can take on that question. (That will keep you busy.) In each of the three cases, we understand that the object fell by itself, under its own natural powers. The conceptualization of gravity, however, resulted from an act of the creative human imagination. Even if objects have always fallen to the ground when people have dropped them, the concept of gravity obviously does not exist by nature. Someone had to think it up. That is the difference between the way things really are, and a model of the way things really are. However close we think the model is coming to Nature, we nonetheless should keep the distinction between the two in mind. The models that we call natural science are stories about how nature works. They almost always exclude human agency. For example, anatomy and physiology as applied to your own body mostly disregard you as a personal agent. A doctor setting your broken leg might well want to know how you did it, but she does not necessarily need to know your name. Even a neuroscientist analysing your brain with an fMRI is looking at matter in motion, and not at your thoughts. (Thank Goodness!) The depersonalization of nature does not affect the power of science, and might in fact even help explain its fabulous success. In a way analogous to our concept of the wilderness, the science of nature is a human creation that is paradoxically inhuman. We do tell ourselves other stories about nature that are highly personal. We usually call them myths. Such tales or fables allow our minds to grasp the vague and otherwise invisible powers that seem to run the universe. Allegorical figures like Mother Nature and Mother Earth come to mind. You might have read the Greek myths or the Norse myths. For centuries the ancestors of the Squamish nation living in this shining valley have told creation stories, setting human beings into their proper place within nature. As a teacher of literature myself, I would rather think I fell in love because of Aphrodite's power than to think that my pheromones and my beloved's pheromones interacted and produced other chemicals in my gray matter associated with euphoria, giddiness, loss of appetite, and despair. I feel more at home in the personal, mythic universe than I do in the impersonal, scientific one -­‐ except, of course, when I am boarding a jet airplane. It matters a lot to us that Nature should have an order that we can discern and describe. Nature itself does not speak; we must speak on its behalf. To explain nature to ourselves, we therefore need stories. We tell ourselves many kinds of stories about nature -­‐ from tales of the Canadian voyageurs, to highly developed scientific models, to myths about Olympus or the Raven. If we want to think deeply about our relationship to nature, if we want to get past the clichés, we must pay careful attention to the stories we tell ourselves. Stories have the power to determine those relationships because they tell us how to think about them. With that counsel in mind, let's now go back to the story we started with, the so-­‐called inconvenient truth that humankind is swiftly rendering the planet uninhabitable. One of the essential lessons of the story as it is told is that somehow we have lost touch with nature. If we fail to recover this connection, we will destroy the planet and ourselves. This Western sentiment of being out of touch with Nature, as widespread as it is today, is hardly a new phenomenon. It has been around throughout human history. The Romantic poets caught the sentiment especially well. William Wordsworth wrote a splendid sonnet expressing the loss and longing of it. It is called, "The World is Too Much With Us." It starts like this: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! Wordsworth goes on to long for the closeness to Nature that he associates with the pagan gods of ancient Greece. We often associate this lost harmony with the mythological thinking of so-­‐called primitive peoples, for we think that they live closer to nature. Believe it or not, Wordsworth wrote this poem in 1802, but it still does a marvellous job of catching the longing for a lost harmony that we share today. 200 years ago, however, no one was thinking about environmental collapse. At that time, the industrial revolution had hardly got up a full head of steam. When Wordsworth was wandering around the English countryside, nature still consisted largely of fields cultivated by hand, sheep-­‐
cropped meadows, beech hedges, and manicured groves -­‐ to our minds, it sounds more like a garden than a picture of desolation.7 Funnily enough, I could produce examples from Ancient Greece in which they likewise express the sentiment that the golden age of humankind had already passed. How is it possible that people who clearly lived much closer to nature than we do nonetheless felt that they had fallen out of touch with it? The sentiment seems to be almost universal, which implies that it is part and parcel of our human nature. Advances in technology by themselves do not explain the sentiment, although, like scratching a mosquito bite, technology surely makes the bite of longing itch worse. Moreover, in 2009 we are in a much better position than Wordsworth ever imagined possible to destroy life on Earth altogether. Our longing for natural harmony is getting urgent, acute, and even violent. The most famous account of paradise lost is told in Genesis, which some of you will read in your Cornerstone class. It is the creation story of Judaism and Christianity and Islam. As such, I could not overstate its importance or its influence on Western thinking. Whether or not you are religious, this story has embedded itself very deeply into the western mind. In this account, the Garden of Eden represents the original and natural home of human beings. As a symbol, it powerfully expresses the idea that, in our origins, we lived in harmony with Nature. God planted the garden with trees especially for our sustenance, and all we had to do was farm it. It was always summertime, and the livin' was easy. But there was a glitch. The story goes, in Robert Alter's translation, "And the Lord God took the human and set him down in the garden of Eden to till it and watch it. And the Lord God commanded the human, saying, ‘From every fruit of the garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die.'"8 Sure enough, eventually the woman and the man eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, and God banishes them forever from the garden. He posts an angel with a flaming sword in front of the still-­‐
untouched tree of life, to ensure that they do not eat from it, too. They become mortal, and they are doomed to eek out their sustenance from a harsh natural world where great suffering awaits them. The story emphasizes that we cannot have both knowledge and paradise. Knowledge and paradise are deeply and fundamentally incompatible. The harmony between human beings and nature specifically and deliberately excludes the grown-­‐up problems of freedom and responsibility and good and evil and sex and death. Knowing good and evil means being free to make choices, and being obliged to live up to consequences. It is part of our nature. We simply cannot have perfect harmony with nature, no matter how much we long for it, because our freedom sets us apart from all the rest of creation. Paradise is like a memory of childhood, and Adam and Eve were like children. They had the choice to obey or disobey God's command. To my mind as a parent, it is obvious that eventually Adam and Eve were going to disobey. Child psychologists tell us that saying "No" to parents is part of a child's "natural" and healthy development. As every parent here will testify, it sure is a pain in the neck. I imagine that Adam and Eve were also a pain in the neck for God. No doubt you have noticed that we do not live in the Garden of Eden. Like Adam and Eve, we cannot get back to paradise. Our world has problems, including critical and urgent environmental problems. Like it or not, you are going to inherit them. I suppose you could complain and say that it is unfair, for you did not ask for these problems. Why should you have to deal with them? But then you would be acting like a child who did not want to leave childhood. It is only by leaving paradise that you gain the freedom to choose good and evil, which means the freedom to act in the world and to be capable of making a difference. If you are going to save the world, as you promised us you intended to do on your applications for admissions, then you must accept the responsibility for knowing good and evil. You will have to make hard decisions about human meddling with the natural world, decisions that involve money and politics and science and health and human happiness. They will get complicated and dirty. You will have to dig into the tough clay of these questions. You cannot stay on the easy surface, or get comfortable with clichés. That is what it means to open your world up with questions, and to get an education. I sincerely hope you will save the world. The faculty will do what we can to help you, which includes obliging you to take science and math and politics and biology and literature and all the rest of it. Despite our proximity here in Squamish to the fabled Canadian wilderness, this university is not exactly the Garden of Eden -­‐ it is not always summertime as it is now, you will have to work hard here, and you must pay cash for your sustenance. Nonetheless, this campus is like a garden in that it is a small cultivated area, set apart from the quotidian cares of the world, in one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth. All this has been done for your sake. University offers you four years during which you can grow into your freedom and your knowledge, practice your skills, and strengthen your mind in preparation for the challenges to come. That is what you asked for when you asked for an education. And that is what we have called you together to do. Class of 2013, congratulations, and welcome to Quest University Canada. 1 Five planets uses my own example from (http://www.myfootprint.org). Calculate your own ecological footprint on this site for a revealing look at the effects of our consumption. 2 I am indebted to a witty column by Margaret Wente for these ideas and for the paragraph that follows. "How I Became a Real Canadian," Globe and Mail 3 Jul 2009; available from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/how-­‐i-­‐became-­‐a-­‐real-­‐canadian/article1199231/; accessed August 29, 2009. I have omitted the part where she proposes having sex in a canoe as the real test of Canadian identity. 3 Ibid. 4A fact-­‐check of Wente's claim verifies that Canada's population is indeed overwhelmingly urban. See the Statistics Canada website: (http://www41.statcan.gc.ca/2008/3867/ceb3867_000_e.htm); accessed August 29, 2009. 5 Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999), 812-­‐813. Newton gives the proportion for Jupiter, Saturn, and the Earth in relation to the mass of the sun. 6 David Helfand reminds me that Newton's optical theory conceived of light as "corpuscular," i.e., composed of tiny bits of matter, so in principle Newton might well have reasoned this problem out. It was only in the 20th century, after Einstein's theoretical prediction, that the direct observation of the bending of light was made during a solar eclipse. 7 Full text: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours And are up-­‐gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. -­‐-­‐Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. 8 Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: Norton, 1996), 8. I highly recommend to students this excellent book for the reading and comprehension of Genesis; I am indebted to Alter for my own study, for he points out many of the untranslatable subtleties of the Hebrew text.