William Jewell Commencement

WILLIAM JEWELL COMMENCEMENT SUNDAY, MAY 12, 1996

A LOCAL COACH

IS GOD IN THE WEB

Performers and athletes usually take the stage or the field with last words from the director or coach.

One of our local teams takes to the field with a message from its coach. It always ends the same way: "we are the luckiest people in the world; we are capable of good things; make something happen."

First, “We are the luckiest people in the world”.

We should take that to mean the most blessed. It is an American condition as we share particular American blessings.

"Count your blessings, name them one by one." What is our greatest blessing?

Some years ago a wise friend asked me, "What is our most important natural resource?" My answers -- ranging over various miracles of technology, -- were unsatisfactory. The correct answer, according to my questioner was "English". English, he said, is your greatest natural resource.

English -- your mother tongue -- is your birthright. A Kansas City Star columnist, Jerry Heaster, discussed these ideas recently. He wrote, "English is our native language, the global software. English is the world's most powerful unifying force both politically and intellectually. As such, it makes the world work. It is the universal language of commerce, technology, science, medicine, and every other pursuit essential to human progress and prosperity. Therefore, a mastery of English is not only crucial for Americans, but also for any citizen of the world who aspires to economic betterment."

It is the passport to global citizenship.

This column was reprinted widely. Shortly after its publication, Heaster was surprised to receive a note on the internet saying he'd left out a very important aspect of English's primacy. This reader admonished him that he had neglected to say that English was the language of the internet and the worldwide web.

Of course, it seemed obvious that the engine of the web is American English -- the American language -- and that the web is an essential element in the technology underpinning the global free market in which all must work.

This American language is the deep structure, the operating code of our global software.

But its power rests on more than the largest vocabulary and an efficient grammar, its vibrancy and suppleness in speech and writing -- the American language embodies and communicates necessary assumptions about individual rights, values, and opportunities. In this sense, American English is the source of the democratic mentality, and its ingredients, "fairness", broad ideas of equality, intense skepticism, recognition and support of personal initiative, self- reliance, self-actualization, but also their dark sides, self-indulgence, self-absorption -- all qualities making up that individualism de Tocqueville "discovered" when he came here in the 1820's. American English is unique among languages in the personal values it carries with its use. Our vocabulary, idioms, habits of speech, necessarily and constantly reveals these values and points of view. Speakers of American English, whether they know it or not, whether they want to or not, embody these values.

George Gilder, a farsighted observer of these matters, has said, speaking of the internet: "The new world spun from the electronic web is above all an opportunity to recover Tom Paine's vision of global communication between free and equal citizens".

Tom Paine is the intellectual and spiritual founder of this republic. Gilder imagines Paine and each of you as citizens of the cyber culture, intervening in everyone else's debates and with the ease of a keyboard and the speed of electronic mail. The essence of computers and networks, such as the web, is 'egalitarian'.

Competition will only make it easier and cheaper to use computers and the internet, he believes. "The physics of such technology," Gilder says, "means it will only get cheaper. As it does, power and knowledge will be decentralized."

New technology will allow the poorest children on the darkest streets, the smallest business in the most modest store front, to summon the best teachers, managers and advisors in the world to their desks and offices.

Your blessing is your "head start" in mastery of the global software. This American language is your competitive advantage and a primary part of your good fortune. Second, “we are capable of good things, of good works.”

What are two essential capabilities for "good work"? In recent years industrial psychologists, organizational consultants, have studied the question "what makes people effective in the work place," whatever and wherever it is.

Many conclusions as to basic skills have been considered, but two are especially appealing to me. There are two basic capabilities or skills which serve as the foundation for all others:

- First, the skill to seek out and learn multicausal possibilities and effects; that is, the skill to learn what actually happens as a result of agencies outside of oneself. - Second, because all work is done, all objectives are achieved in groups, the skill to work together, to learn together with other people to turn these real life events, unexpected causes, and effects, to common use.

These essential skills are illustrated curiously and powerfully by a recent play and a cartoon character.

Tom Stoppard was in residence at William Jewell several years ago to lecture and speak about his plays. He is commonly regarded as one of the great contemporary dramatists. His play, Arcadia, perhaps his best, was first presented two years ago. Linking the early 1800's to the present, it offers profound meditations on chance, causality, and the reaction of ordinary people to uncertainty in their personal and intellectual lives, and finally, the collaboration of those people in projects, both vulgar and sublime. At the end of the play all of the characters with their various strivings and desires are united in a fabulous dramatic metaphor -- prevailing over entropy and history, in shared discovery, and dancing in time together.

These skills are also illustrated on the adventures of Dilbert, the "hero" of one of the most popular cartoons seen in our metropolitan newspapers.

Many of you know this cartoon. Dilbert is a lowly software engineer working in a quirky and inexplicable, even capricious, organization. His survival is made possible or tolerable by the advice and counsel of the practical and ingenious Dogbert whose opposite is the evil and mischievous Katbert, director of personnel.

On a hill under a starry sky far removed from the office, Dilbert and Dogbert meditate. In successive panels: Dogbert says: 1. Simple molecules combine to make powerful chemicals. 2. Simple cells combine to make powerful life-forms. 3. Simple electronics combine to make powerful computers. 4. Logically, all things are created by a combination of simpler, less capable

components. 5. Therefore, a supreme being must be our future, not our origin! 6. What if "God" is the consciousness that will be created when enough of us are connected by the internet?!!

Dilbert says: 1. That would certainly limit the types of files I download? I wonder what it would do to response times? Dogbert says: 1. It's so nice to spend time alone with my thoughts.

Dilbert says: 1. My web browser would fly!

(St. Louis Post Dispatch 2/11/96

These wonderful revelations, visited on Dogbert, like all such revelations, are quickly obscured in the workaday and prosaic of all of us Dilbert’s. They persist, nonetheless, and ultimately come fully to life.

Both the images of Arcadia, of Dogbert - sublime/vulgar, sacred/profane - demonstrate the good sense of these two fundamental capabilities. We must expect and seek the unexpected. We must work with the diverse talents of our colleagues. We must share our separate knowledge in the achievement of common objectives.

Finally, “make something happen.”

Many of you have listened over our public radio stations to the annual broadcast of the Last Night at the Proms. The Proms, or Promenades, are concerts performed weekly, through the summer and fall, from Albert Hall in London and are broadcast over the BBC World Service. Albert Hall seats 5,500 -- the last night brings a sold out, standing room only, crowd to close the season of music with mass singing of songs traditional to this occasion.

Now over 100 years old, these concerts are broadcast worldwide and reach out to an unexpectedly eager and durable audience. These listeners in London and hundreds of thousands around the globe include all the old commonwealth countries and English speakers everywhere of every race and religion -- all who ever was part of the "British Empire". Flags from all of these nations and states fill the hall. It is a great festival.

The last of the songs traditionally honored by unison singing is, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, Blake's poem "Jerusalem", set to Elgar's music. As you recall, William Blake was a deeply private, pre-romantic, visionary, poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, who seemed to live in a world of his own. He was a poet of short, radical statements. Some of his declarations were sung, after his death, at mass meetings of working class men and women.

Peter Ackroyd's recent biography of Blake shows him not as a primitive Marxist, but as an individual of genius, awkward to deal with, sometimes nervous, often contradictory, but incorruptible. Blake himself believed there were eternal "states" of rage and desire, even of selfhood, through which each person passes, keeping the individual soul intact. "Blake knew precisely what he saw," says Ackroyd, "and with the sturdy obstinacy of his London stock he refused to be bullied or dissuaded. And so Jerusalem:

"And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon our mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On these pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem built here Among those dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire! I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Until we build Jerusalem In all our green and pleasant land." (modified)

It is remarkable that Blake's apocalyptic dreams would be repeated and voiced in this communal celebration by crowds in England and around the world in this present day and age. But there you have it -- a vivid, compelling and lasting image, at once personal, civic and religious.

Blake's message is carried to this New World as an expression of The Great Awakening. It is a part of us and our opportunity. His poem, his hymn, links all of us to a true Empire -- not of territory or military might, but of language, ideals, and spirit. An empire of the mind -- animated by a powerful language and prevailing mentality. An empire of the word, spoken and sung. We celebrate this true Empire in the shared aspiration, "To build a new Jerusalem in all our green and pleasant land."

Now in the words of the local coach:

"You are the luckiest people in the world".

"You are capable of good things".

"Make something happen".

GOD SPEED.

Landon H. Rowland May 12, 1996