Think

Think

Home

William J. Bennett
GMU 32nd Annual Commencement
May 22, 1999

Mr. President, Director, Ed Meese, my good friend, thank you very, very much. Ladies and gentlemen, graduates, friends, parents, faculty, alumni, members of the Board of Visitors, and everyone. Good morning. First of all, for your perseverance, your hard work, your stick-to-it-iveness, your intelligence, and your drive, I congratulate you--that's for the parents.
As for those of you sitting in front of me, more about you in a moment. Good morning ladies and gentlemen and graduates of the class of 1999. I am deeply privileged to be your speaker this morning.
A very bright man and a student of the humanities, a writer named Robertson Davies, has helped me here. He recalls what the usual thing is at a commencement; to be very stern and joyless. The statistically normal thing for a commencement speaker to do is to tell the graduating class that they are going out into a world torn by dissent, racked by problems of unprecedented naughtiness, difficult problems heretofore unseen, and that we are all headed for the abyss of destruction unless you--you the graduating class--shoulder your burden and do something splendid to put everything right in the world.
The commencement speaker usually says he can't help. He generally says that he's at the end of his tether, the end of his rope. He's so old and broken on the wheel of fate, so much decrepitude, so many wounds he has received in the great battle with the world's problems that he can't be asked for any more. He then says, throwing the torch to you, that nothing, absolutely nothing can be expected of him in the future. And from flailing hands and with gasping breath, he throws you the torch and plants, dear graduates, the task of setting the world right square on your shoulders. He says he does it with confidence because he believes that you are wonderful, but graduation speakers, I have found, are often so gloomy that one wonders how much their confidence in the graduates is worth. Sometimes one even gets the impression that immediately after commencement the speaker is going to go home, sit in a dark room, and sink into a deep depression.
Well, that is not my intention. Either to throw you the torch or sink into torpor at twelve o'clock, but to offer you, if I may, the graduating class, some advice. It's real advice. It's my advice anyway. You may think it is simple, perhaps even pedestrian. You may even know it. Some of this is commonplace. These things may be good even if they are commonplace; they may be true even if they are simple. So here are four pieces of advice, general but personal advice to each one of you about the other parts of the real world to which you are now being transferred. I don't wish today to speak of life in the government and Washington scandal, or of public policy or some burning public issue of today, but rather of some steady and enduring issues of every day. And all for a little of what I think that particular blessing of civilization or literature or history or philosophy has advised us about these things.
My first piece of advice, my longest one if you are timing me: if you can, try to like life. Be good humored about your mortality. I don't mean that you should like all parts of your life, or all parts of the world, or that you should be happy with everything that occurs in your life--you certainly won't be. My advice is that your attitude be one of optimism, engagement, and interest, and that's largely under your control. Writing about disappointment, the great novelist, my favorite novelist, George Elliot once wrote, "Everything depends not on the fact of disappointment, but on the nature affected and the force that stirs it." Let disappointment, when it comes--and it will come--stir you, stir your force. I wrote that before "Star Wars." So that is practical optimism that I recommend to you, practical optimism.
You may wish to be a theoretical pessimist. I am. That is, you may wish to believe as I do that in the end, in the real long run, everything here is dust and ashes, and that our common enterprises, our institutions, our plans, and our schemes will be as nothing. As Isaiah says, all our works are nothing, our molten images are empty wind. Yes, there is support for theoretical pessimism, but practically, operationally, you should not bring that attitude to your tasks and the short run, the run which is the compass of your life. I recommend that there you need practical optimism. It's my belief that you only live one life, in this body and this world at least, therefore, I think that you should go about your business with some measure of enterprise, of seriousness, of good humor, and of compassion. But by recommending interest in this world, this body, and this life, I do not mean to recommend, as the Joseph Schlitz brewing company did some years back, that you only go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto you can. I'm not really talking about grabbing gusto or swilling beer--I mean living well because living well really is good revenge.
You see, if you think about it, living with interests and engagement is an attitude to which there is simply no reasonable alternative. Beware the cynics; beware the dampers. Cynicism, gripping a state of chronic disappointment and complaining about the world, is no way to have life work for you or to live it. And those who start out feigning cynicism, making believe they're cynics, soon become cynics for real. Cynicism corrodes. It corrodes passion. It corrodes commitment. So take into your enterprises what the writer E.M. Forrester calls "pluckiness." Pluckiness of spirit. Take good will and, for pete's sake, in our world, take a good sense of humor.
Now against my view, the French poet Beaudelair, who was always gloomy, said this: "Life is a hospital in which the patient believes he will be better if he's moved to another bed." Well, as graduates you know that this is very French. It's very gloomy, and I believe, very wrong. I believe there are more things in life to be affirmed than to be scorned and depressed about, even when there's bad news; but if you are a scorner by nature and wish to scorn or be depressed about something, then scorn indifference.
My second piece of advice is a corollary of the first. Look forward to work, don't dread it. Look forward to it and approach your work with passion and engagement. Listening to my contemporaries, I can tell you that I have found over and over again that those men and women who like what they do from day to day are happier then those who do not like what they do, even if the latter make twice or three time or five times as much money as the former. Think of your work in terms of what you know and what you love. Try to expand the number of things that you know and love. There are blessings, ladies and gentlemen, blessings to be won in this way, blessings to be won from work that can not be won from idleness or leisure. The humanities have long taught that work killed fewer hearts than boredom or idleness do. Modern medical science bears this out.
Perhaps for some of you your first job may not be the one you really want--it certainly wasn't for me. That's not unusual. The idea that every person should be able to choose the job he wants is in fact, as history goes, a very new idea, still a relatively rare reality. So if that's your situation, the only reasonable thing to do is to make the best of it. But, while making the best of it, don't let your passions dry. Don't lose the passion to do what you know and what you love. We are at our best when we do that which we know and which we love. In the great movie "Chariots of Fire," the great English runner Eric Liddell told us he loved to run. "When I run," he said, "I feel God's pleasure." I think all of us have the opportunity to feel God's pleasure through us, but only if we're willing to stay at it. To be at one with one's work, whether it is dentistry or running or sales or teaching or farming or even government, is worth a very great deal.
My third piece of advice: Let me talk just a little tiny bit about what is an old issue, and a contemporary preoccupation as well. You see it all the time on television and they talk about it in the movies, and no doubt the subject is still a late-night dormitory conversation. That subject of preoccupation is called happiness. Well, here's what I've learned about it. First, I say to you that I wish happiness for all of you, and I have no doubt that you wish it for yourselves. But my advice to you, strange as it may sound, is not to seek happiness. There are all sorts of people who think that happiness is a condition that can be sought, then caught, and then maintained indefinitely, kept in a jar or in a cage. Some also believe that the quality of a life is determined by the number of hours of happiness you can chalk up. That's not true. The thing is, the irony is, that you will have a much better chance of finding happiness if you don't bother your head about it, if you worry about other things.
No doubt, some of you have already discovered, as I did when I was an undergraduate, through various experimentation of my own, that happiness is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure comes and pleasure goes, but happiness is a different thing. The point is, as Robertson Davies again has written, "The nature of happiness is such that happiness retreats the more intensely you pursue it." Happiness is like a cat--if you coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it won't come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you will find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap. So forget pursuing happiness. Instead, pursue learning, pursue work, pursue honor, pursue your commitments and keep them, pursue the truth, pursue decency, look honestly for God. Be faithful to your spouse, to your children, to your friends, to your country. Forget pursuing happiness--pursue other things and with luck happiness will come to you.
I'm about finished, but I'm not going to finish in the usual way by saying I resign from life so that the world now belongs to you and no longer belongs to me. No, I'm not that much older than... Well, yes I am. I don't plan to retire soon. I'm having too much fun, working. In fact, you and I and most of the rest of us, and just about everybody here, will be spending a lot of time yet trotting around this planet.
But finally, since we are at a university, one very last thought--the fourth and last piece of advice, about your mind. A very smart man, a philosopher, once said, "The purpose of a college education is to help a man know rot when he hears it." I hope you know it when you hear it. I hope you haven't heard it today. And second, to know a rotter when you see him. I agree. For this advice, this very brief last piece of advice, is about your mind. Here I offer the wise words of a very wise lady, giving her advice to her children. She said to her children, "Children, be good children, and children, keep an open mind. An open mind is a very good thing. But don't keep your mind so open that your brains fall out."