Posted on
Jul 4, 2017
by Henry Giroux
Editor’s note: This is the
text of a commencement speech given by Henry Giroux on Tuesday at the
University of the West of Scotland. On that occasion the university presented
him with an honorary doctorate. (See press release here.)
Chancellor, Graduates,
Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am deeply honored to be with you
today and to share in your success and the celebration of your talents and
achievements. It is a humbling task to stand before you and say something
worthy of this memorable event. Rather than dwell on my own biography, I want
to take the advice of the great philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who insisted that
award winners should talk less about their own merits and much more about the
challenges the next generation will face and what it will mean to conduct your lives
with a sense of dignity, civic courage, and social responsibility.
All generations face trials
unique to their times and your generation is no different. Though yours may be
unprecedented. High on the list would be the precarity of the current historical
moment–a time in which the security and foundations enjoyed by an earlier
generation have been largely abandoned. Traditional social structures, long
term jobs, stable communities, and permanent bonds have withered before the
speed of consumption, disposability, and the scourge of unbridled production.
This is a time when massive
inequality plagues the planet and resources and power are largely controlled by
a small financial elite; a time when the social contract is shrinking, war has
become normalized, environmental protections are being dismantled, fear has
become the new national anthem, and more and more people, especially young
people, are being written out of the script of democracy. Yet, around the globe
the spirit of resistance on the part of young people is coming alive once
again.
My first hope is that you will
not be discouraged by the way the world looks at the present moment. Against
the looming threats I have mentioned, the lesson I want to reinforce today is
that hope is a precious gift and should never be surrendered to the forces of
cynicism and resignation.
On the contrary, I want to
repeat what my friend the late Howard Zinn once wrote: “The lesson of
history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist,
things will change…To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic.
It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but
also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.”
For change to happen, you must
be visionary, risk taking, willing to make trouble and think dangerously. Ideas
have consequences, and when they are employed to nurture and sustain a
flourishing democracy, in which people struggle for justice together, you will
learn how to make history rather than be swept away by it.
Reject measuring your life
simply in traditional terms of success–wealth, prestige, status, and the false
comforts of gated communities and gated imaginations. These goals are
politically, ethically, and morally deficient and capitulate to the bankrupt
notion that we are consumers first and citizens second. Instead, be brave,
generous, honest, civic minded, and think about your life as a project rooted
in the desire to create a better world for yourself, your children and all
children.
Expand your dreams and think
about what it means to build a future marked by a robust and inclusive
democracy. In doing so, embrace acts of solidarity, work to expand the common
good, and collectivize compassion. Such practices will bestow on your
generation the ability to govern wisely rather than simply be governed
maliciously.
Remember, democracy is not
given to us, it has to be fought for and its benefits have always emerged out
of collective struggles of mass resistance. Democracy at its best raises
questions about what your generations’ responsibility might be in the face of
an unspeakable and unlivable future.
Rather than be numb and
silent, refuse to look away and act with courage in the face of injustice.
Make the unimaginable ordinary
and the space of the possible larger than what currently exists.
I have great hope that your
generation will confront the poisonous authoritarianism that is emerging in
many countries today.
One strategy for doing this
suggests reaffirming what binds us together, how we might develop new forms of
solidarity, and what might it mean to elevate the dignity and decency of
everyday people everywhere.
Today, you leave one
experience of education and enter into another in which you will need to develop
an active relationship with history because “memory produces hope,” enables
critical questioning, and prevents justice from going dead in ourselves.
Against the current moral
vacuum overtaking market-driven societies, you will need to learn how to translate
private troubles into public considerations and public issues into individual
and collective rights.
Learn how to bear witness to
the injustices around you and accept the call to become visionaries willing to
create a society in which people, as the great journalist Bill Moyers argues,
can “become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.”
Near the end of her career,
Helen Keller was asked by a student if there was anything worse than losing her
sight. She replied “yes, I could have lost my vision.”
To add to this eloquent
comment, I would say, that history is open and it is time to think otherwise in
order to act otherwise, especially if you want to imagine and bring into being
alternative futures and horizons of possibility.
The future is now in your
hands and it is a future that needs your skills, critical judgment, sense of
responsibility, compassion, imagination, and humility.
Let me end by quoting my first
teacher, the great novelist and critic James Baldwin. “The precise role of
[your generation]…, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that
vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose,
which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
No comments:
Post a Comment