Hampshire College Convocation, September 8, 2005

Address by President Ralph J. Hexter

Warm thanks to Carol Christ, a dear friend, by no means the least of the attractions of Pioneer Valley for me and Manfred as we contemplated the big move we are still in the process of making, though of course now we’ve discovered how true it is that, as we were often told, we’d make many wonderful new friends here. The presence of the President of Smith College reminds us that historically, Hampshire owes — and this is no exaggeration — its very existence to the vision of the other four institutions of what is now the Five College consortium. The collaborations that have grown up and flourished over the years have been extraordinary, and I look forward to working with President Christ and the heads of the other schools over the coming years.

Welcome to Hampshire. I have myself, as I said last week to the new students and their parents, only been here a bit more than a month, so that it seems almost a stretch for me to be welcoming any of you. I have much in common with the first-year students especially, although they may well be ahead of me in learning who everyone and where everything is, and in settling into their college housing. Like all students, I’m still making adjustments to my schedule; perhaps like a first-year student, I’m not even sure how I should be constructing my schedule, since I’m a little uncertain about the requirements of being president. I know I’ll have some good advisors in this — several of them are up here with me today — and I have a definitely positive, almost giddy sense about the beginning of this school year. Now that I’ve returned to the northeast of my own schoolgoing years, my body understands the freshness of the morning air as “back to school” weather. I had an even deeper sense of having gone back to college Tuesday night, when I attended with a good number of you a showing of our former student Lee Hirsch’s Amandla! in Franklin Patterson Hall. What a powerful film that is, and I’m going to be trying to get as many people to see it as I possibly can.

Amandla! is about the power of song, really of all song, even as it depicts the role of song in the social struggle that brought down apartheid and the apartheid regime of South Africa. It is beautiful, visually and aurally, joyous, moving. Joyous is one of the adjectives that should apply to this convocation, billed in the orientation literature as a “celebration of a new academic year in recognition of all new members of our community.” The initial guidance I received was to keep my talk short and sweet — on the light side — and this seemed right. After all, I will in a little over a month be delivering a weightier speech on the occasion of my inauguration — sorry, it sounds pompous to me, too, but that’s what they’re calling it.

As the events of the last twelve or so days have unfolded, however, it seemed increasingly unthinkable that one could sustain a light tone, if light meant “frivolous,” and if there is anything that marks Amandla! as the work of a member of the Hampshire community, it is that when there are important things to say, we will find a way to say them. The film itself manages to be joyous and earnest at once, and while I cannot and do not aspire to the beauty and emotional impact of art, I will let the film inspire me to think that our spirits might be lifted together — for that is something a convocation should aim to do — by reflections on the storm and what might come of it. For while this storm has not directly changed most of our lives the way it has for those along the gulf coast in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, it may yet mark more than the beginning of an academic year, for us and for the country.

It has directly impacted, of course, some of our students and those of our sister colleges in the consortium, and we welcome them back to the Pioneer Valley whenever they can get here; over time we will learn if there are other ways we can help them and their families. Several students of institutions that Katrina shut down — Xavier, Dillard, Tulane among them – have made their way to Five College institutions; small and crowded though we are by a near-record incoming class on top of record returning numbers, we have already been joined by Clayton Faits, who was just about to begin his second year at Tulane, and William Rintala, a fourth year student at the University of New Orleans. We welcome them both to our community and know we will learn much from them, and possibly two others whose studies at Louisiana institutions have been interrupted.

With typical Hampshire pluck, four of our own students who are trained Emergency Medical Technicians on their own initiative asked to be excused this first week so that they could help out in Louisiana. “Awesome” is overworked, but “awe” is the way to describe how I feel about their courage and commitment. We of course gave them our leave and, with our blessings mixed with expressions of concern for them, they flew to Baton Rouge on Monday and will do what they can to support local efforts, returning to Hampshire on Sunday. After they arrived, they learned that they would also spend some time in New Orleans itself. If so, I hope that they will still find many individuals to assist with their training as EMTs and will not often come face-to-face with death itself.

From all we hear, see and read, those working in New Orleans — and elsewhere less often in the news — are engaged in a grim task, but none of us is unaware that death is the inevitable and honest outcome of every life, and little has been more central to any society, or more reflective of its values, than the respect paid to its dead. It is no surprise that Amandla!, a documentary by a director who told us he was uncomfortable with narrative, nevertheless uses as one of its structuring principles the exhumation and reburial of one South Africa’s most noted singers and poets, Vuyisile Mini, hanged and initially buried in Rebecca Street Cemetery in Pretoria in 1964, then reburied with pomp and ceremony in the presence of his family by the new state in Port Elizabeth in 1998. We see his bones, Mini’s family members and friends handle his skull; this is elemental.

”Death,” I said, and perhaps it struck you as an odd phrase, is life’s “honest outcome.” By that I meant to say more than that it is the great leveler; it is the end of all all pretense, all show. When I say that what Katrina did was to lay bare a host of illusions, I don’t believe I am indulging in the kind of silly anthropomophism that speaks of the storm’s “ferocity” or “rage,” though of course by giving these storms names we are inviting just this. Of course the storm did not “rage”; it simply was. Perhaps some day soon — with our scientists showing the way — our so-called leaders will understand that a category-five hurricane is simply a matter of energy, the product of various pressure differentials themselves born of oceanic temperature differentials. Given the enormous complexities, and scale, of climate, it may possibly be too simplistic – I am bending over backwards here — to draw a direct line from our massive use of hydrocarbons to the strength of this one storm, but there is no doubt that human energy use is no longer a neglible factor in the energy equation of our global system. It’s a physical principle that the sum total of energy is conserved; what goes in will come out. If anywhere in all this there is an “energy crisis,” it is here, not at the gas pumps. $3.80 per gallon gas prices might begin to destroy the illusions of some of our fellow citizens, though as we all know well, illusions die hard, especially when we have held them for so long and when, as is natural for us all, we want to return to what we have come to think of as “normalcy,” to be told that “everything is all right.”

But Katrina — by this shorthand I mean the storm and its aftermath both on the ground and in our minds — did not merely reveal the fragility of a large chunk of our petrochemical production and distribution system. Katrina may be said to have destroyed all our illusions, though even as I suggest this, I recall that some had cured themselves of those illusions quite a bit sooner. Last weekend, as I was beginning to draft this talk, I wrote the sentence, “One thinks of the fable of the emperor and his new clothes, only now, it is no longer one lone voice that is pointing out that he has none.” I wasn’t striving for originality, so I wasn’t in the least surprised to discover that the “emperor and his clothes” was to be one theme of a television ad – this made the allegory somewhat more graphic and rather less ambiguous – prepared for airing by one of the candidates for borough president in New York; it was turned down by the local Fox affiliate on the grounds that it “mocked the office of the president.” I had thought to be rather more vague with my allegory, but it seems to me that if there is any proof that we have at least conceptually tipped into empire, it is that some folks are actually thinking in terms of lèse majesté or laesus majestatis, insult to His majesty. I thought we Americans prided ourselves on not having royalty in these United States.

If one hesitates to say “some of the emperor’s party” for fear of giving offence, then let me say, rather, that some of the imperial party admonish us not to “play politics” with human tragedy. Cluck cluck tsk tsk. In my view, piously draping oneself in human tragedy as if it were a cloak of invisibility is the much greater mockery. Moreover, no one should be playing politics; politics, the life of the polis, is no more and no less than how we conduct ourselves as a community. After Katrina, can anyone have any illusions that we are one community? I think not. Nor can one have any illusions about what the years of disinvestment in the public sector – the common weal as it was once called – have wrought. Surely, no one can have any illusions about whose voices carry weight through the corridors of power to the places where budgets are devised and funds allocated. Tax cuts, we are told, are so much more important for “our” prosperity — but, then, who is this “we”? No one can have any illusion that it included the poor and elderly of New Orleans or southern Louisiana. It would take a man of Jonathan Swift’s mettle to make the “modest proposal” that such total neglect might prove a handy way to trim medicare costs.

Reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — so-called “intelligence” that in the administration’s arrogance it did not feel needed to be corroborated by international inspections or the consensus of the majority of our NATO allies – led us to assess that country, under its then current leadership, as so imminent a threat that it was said to justify invasion. There are many reasons to question that logic, but what kind of “imminence” was that threat, even if traces of WMD had been found, compared to the threat of annual hurricanes and storm surges against levees whose elevation and conditions could have been discovered without teams of UN inspectors?

Above all, from now on, no one should have any illusions about equality in turn-of-the-millennium America. Should this be a surprise in a country where, nationally, the poverty rate has increased significantly over the past two decades even as — amazingly! — the rich have become richer? A recent story by Sam Roberts in the New York Times focused on the staggering difference in median incomes between the top and bottom quintiles — “The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lowest fifth make — $365,825 compared with $7,047…” (Sept. 4, 2005; A 16). Since Manhattan is such an extreme example, Roberts thought to compare the next most extreme case, Clay County, Georgia, where “the rich, on average, made about 38 times what the poor made.” Only 38 times as much! And this is comparing incomes within counties. How do the richest of the richest across the nation fare compared to the masses along the Gulf Coast?

Again, should this surprise us in a country where all the ongoing “reform” of our health care delivery system leaves vast numbers uninsured — unimaginable in any of the other G7 nations, to pick only a set of countries one might expect to be our cohort. Rather, what these “reforms” have done is to open yet more opportunities for large “health care” organizations that are skilled in wringing yet more opportunities from their supporters in the government. And while our medical establishment may offer truly amazing care to the lucky few who have gold-edged health plans (who are in most cases among the stronger earners already), it delivers ever less to the rest. Those who drive these changes believe they are well justified; there is a “moral hazard” — I cite the philosophical term that has come to be used in this context – in providing too much care. Folks will take way too much advantage of all that subsidized care, and that would be bad for them, or at least for the system as a whole.

The litany may already be too long, but gone as well is that much cherished illusion “equality of opportunity.” As we have seen now all too vividly, how equal was the opportunity of flight between families with multiple automobiles and those who had none? Between those who had handicapped or elderly relatives housed elsewhere and those who had them living in their homes unassisted except by family members and neighbors? Between those who had both bank accounts and credit cards, on the one hand, and those who, on the other hand, had neither? But it is nonetheless important for our administration and the congressional majority to expand the tax cuts and to remove, permanently, death duties, because they apparently want to guarantee that inequalities of opportunity remain preserved from generation to generation.

The storm was a natural event compounded, first, by patterns of human settlement and economic activity, and, then, by negligence both before and immediately after its landfall into a disaster of nearly incomparable proportions. But “nearly incomparable” is not “incomparable.” I have heard comparisons with Pompeii, gratifying, on the one hand, to me as a classicist, but, on the other, somewhat curious. What is making people think of the town entirely smothered by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in the Roman Empire in 79 A.D.? That the sybaritic life in and around the Bay of Naples was New Orleans-like? Or that they’ve just watched a DVD of Gladiator or the new TV series Rome?

I’ll just make the observation that there have been, to my mind, oddly few comparisons with the Tsunami of just eight months ago, and leave it at that. Maybe you can tell me why.

A natural disaster, and its aftermath, can change the world not only by rearranging coastlines and killing tens, even hundreds of thousands of persons; it can change the world of thought. I have, I hope not overly optimistically, suggested that Katrina might have shaken us out of our complacency and stripped us, as a nation, of some of our most dearly held illusions. I am inspired to think that it might when I reflect on the famous earthquake that more or less destroyed Lisbon on November 1, 1755. The earthquake, estimated to have reached 9 on the Richter scale and which caused a tsunami, involved terrible loss of life — contemporaries spoke of 100,000 — in the capital city of Portugal, not, you might say, one of the most important countries of eighteenth century Europe, but think again. In the early modern period, Portugal was no inconsequential power, thanks to its colonial empire, above all the incomparable wealth of Brazil, which flowed into Europe, and especially Britain, via Lisbon, and its worldwide network of trade, in goods of all sorts, including slaves.

In its wake came the significant Cape Ann quake here in Massachusetts on November 18, 1755, felt and reported on in Boston. In Lisbon and Europe, the earthquake had both literal and metaphorical aftershocks as Europeans, now more than ever readers of daily newspapers, weeklies, and monthly magazines, learned of the devastation on their own continent. Responses were more varied than they would have been even fifty years earlier. In earlier times there would be few if any who would have thought of the earthquake in terms other than divine punishment for human sinning. Such voices were still heard in 1755, as they are heard today in the wake of any natural disaster; there were, however, important new responses. There was a scientific one. Geology was advancing as an empirical science, and it has been maintained that the Lisbon quake of 1755 was the first to be interpreted and discussed as purely the product of physical seismic forces.

Perhaps the most interesting intellectual impact was to inspire critique of early eighteenth-century enlightenment thought, in particular, the optimistic sentiment that “all this is is right” and that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” No doubt the most famous of such critics was Voltaire, who in 1756 published his “Poem on the disaster of Lisbon.” It goes virtually without saying that Voltaire rejected from the outset the idea that such destruction was punishment from a just God: as he pointed out, Lisbon had been no more plunged in vice than either London or Paris, yet it is only Lisbon that was destroyed, while “in Paris they are [still] dancing.”

That was the easier target in Enlightenment Europe. The more significant one, in terms of contemporary thought, and perhaps even politics, was that one could contentedly believe, even in the face of such a local cataclysm, that “all is well, tout est bien.” Voltaire’s immediate target was the widely-cited dictum of Alexander Pope, “all that is, is right.” Voltaire thought it obscene to imagine that anyone would actually think he could persuade a victim of the earthquake that his or her personal misfortune was of no consequence, indeed, that it was required for the perfect good of the whole: “All your woes constitute a ‘good’ in the general laws. God looks upon you with the same eye he does the worms of the earth whose food you’ll be in the depths of your tombs.”

Some of the arguments he cites and holds up to ridicule have eerily contemporary overtones, for his optimistic contemporaries were quick to point out that “the heirs of the dead will maximize their own fortunes, masons will earn money rebuilding the destroyed housing stock,” and so forth.

Voltaire did not leave the matter with his poem of 1756. In his most famous work, the philosophical novel Candide, he held the idea that ours is the best of all possible worlds up for ridicule, mocking Leibniz in the guise of Dr. Pangloss. We must avoid, he argues, both negative and positive fatalism, and instead, simply make our way as best we can through a reality that is often harsh, and that certainly doesn’t care about us one way or another.

What his theme has in common with mine is this — and here I make my conclusion — natural disasters occur. There is nothing good about them, but by reflecting on the ways such natural events constitute shocks to our ways of thinking and living, we humans can more readily clear our minds of any illusions we may still be holding. It seems to me it is no long way from this lesson to the kind of exhortation you might expect to hear at a college convocation: you will, each of you, learn many things this year, but there are few courses, and few cases, in which our advancement in knowledge does not begin with the removal of illusion. Let us have no more illusions, and let us proceed from a heightened awareness of the power of illusion, and of systems that induce and reinforce illusion. There is every reason to be joyous in the freedom this brings even as we deal earnestly, and with deep sympathy, with the aftermath of a terrible storm.

Thank you.