Baccalaureate Address to Class of 2006

By Eric Lunger, Latin Instructor

Ladies and Gentlemen, Graduates, Parents and Grandparents:

Today is a day of celebration, of looking forward and looking backward, and a day of taking stock. So many of you I have known for four years. Some of you I have taught – from the difference between the ablative and the accusative, to reading Petronius and Ovid. Some of you I lived with when you were crazy, hyper, exasperating and fun freshman on the Flightdeck. [You know who you are, Cronce] Some of you I have coached on the lacrosse field or the hockey rink. And some of you I have lived with during the challenging junior year in West Hall. And many others I have known only in passing, but one thing which always amazes me about kids at Blair is the way you all tend to unify during the senior year, including PG’s who become an integral part of the class. You are a tremendous group of young adults. Congratulations to all of you for all of your accomplishments: it is such an honor and privilege to address you this evening.

One is never quite sure what tone to adopt for these occasions. Should I dispense wise advice? (Don’t worry I will get to that, and you will immediately forget it). Should I endeavor to be funny, and relieve the inevitable boredom that such speeches engender? (No, I am not going to be funny, at least not on purpose) Should I address some pressing social issue and charge you - as the next generation - with carrying on where we have faltered?

No. I shall do that which I have been trained to do, which is, being a student of antiquity, to look backwards. One of the strange things about teaching Latin and Roman history is that I live my life now in the present but also in the past. When I look around me, I see a church, but also a future ruin for archaeologists to dig up. I see the woods and fields of NJ, but also a land depopulated of its indigenous inhabitants by colonial imperialists.

For one by-product of studying ancient Greece and Rome is the realization that culture, civilization and society are fragile things, are things which do not last, and things, which are ever in ascendancy or decline.

A couple of years ago, along with several teachers from Blair, I went to Tunisia in North Africa, and we spent many days visiting the major Roman archaeological sites there. As you probably know, the Romans had a significant presence in North Africa for about 400 years, or the same length of time Europeans have been in North America.

So I would like to take a moment to read from my journal from that trip:

“The most overwhelming impression in Roman North Africa – from the villas at Bulla Regia, the capitol at Dougga, the aquaduct at Tunis – is the amazing sense of confidence the Romans had: this is our way of life, we enjoy and we rejoice in our social achievements, and we recreate our architectural and urban forms wherever we go. The pathos of course is that such confidence, such absolute belief in their way of life, with no regrets and no fear, now lie buried and in ruins, laid low first by Christianity, and then by Islam.”

In other words, life and culture are by their nature, very brief and transitory. When we, today, in our pride and confidence, look on our civilization, we don’t envision its decline and disappearance. But why, considering history, should we be any different?

The Roman Empire, which at one time ruled under one administration what are now some 17 different nations, disintegrated and disappeared. What the Romans left behind, aside from remarkable ruins which speak of their enormous societal self-confidence, is what I would call the duty of civilization. That sounds like, and is I suppose, a grand phrase and reminiscent of the out-dated imperialism of the 19th century. But I also think the duty of civilization means that we, as human beings, have an obligation to live according to our highest ideals.

Let me give you an example, rather than just blather in abstract terms. The emperor Marcus Ulpius Traianus, or Trajan as he is known, ruled from 98-114 A.D., one of the so-called adoptive emperors, during the period of Rome’s greatest height and power. He was born in Spain, had a vigorous military career, was a man of subdued and moderate tastes, and a very hard worker. He was strict but fair; firm but generous. The watchwords of his reign were FELICITAS, SECVRITAS, AEQVITAS, and IVSTITIA, which mean PROSPERITY, SECURITY, FAIRNESS, and JUSTICE. Were these ideals always met under Trajan’s reign? No, let’s not be naive, but his reign was considered by his contemporaries and those ever since to be a model of enlightened rule.

When his imperial procurator, a man named Gaius Plinus Secundus, wrote to him from the province of Bithynia (a far-flung outpost in what is now northern Turkey), asking Trajan whether anonymous accusations were to be given weight in criminal proceedings, Trajan, having consulted his legal advisors, wrote back this reply, and I quote:

“Anonymous accusations should have no place in criminal prosecutions, as they set the worst sort of precedent, and are out of keeping with the spirit of our age.”

So here is Trajan, the unlimited ruler of the known world, laying down a general legal principle based on the highest ideals of his culture, and he does it with quiet conviction and sense of duty. He could have made any decision he wanted, but he made the one “in keeping with the spirit of his age.”

Do we have such courage in our convictions today? I wonder.

Do we demand in ourselves and our leaders the strict observance of our professed values? Again, I wonder.

But as I said, Rome, the empire, all her achievements, did not last. Why should we care? Why should you, the graduating class, care? What relevance can this have to our age, a digitalized age where the word “empire” has a tainted sound?

Well, I submit that the lesson the decline of the Roman world holds for all of us is that culture, civilization, states, everything around us which defines us, is constantly changing. We live in a permanent state of impermanence. All that is, is decaying, changing form, and shifting into new structures.

So what conclusions should we draw from this?

The first seems obvious and a bit silly: namely, don’t take things so seriously. Things that you can’t change, things people think about you, material things: let them go, don’t waste your thought and energy on them. They are simply not important. Keep your eyes and your heart on those things which are important to you.

At the same time, learn to laugh at yourself. Learn to play. Find some passion or hobby in college, and reserve for yourself some time every week just to play.

More importantly, don’t trust anyone who is too serious. Don’t trust baccalaureate speakers – at least those who fail to quote Roman emperors. People who have all the answers, who are convinced that they possess the one truth, are usually wrong. A famous classicist (Nietzsche) once wrote that “we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”

But this does not mean that you have license to give into cheap cynicism. Nothing is worse than the pose of the cynic who thinks it a mark of sophistication to be cynical. Scratch the surface of a cynical thinker, and often you will find simple intellectual laziness. College is a place to hone your intellect, explore new ideas, challenge your convictions, and adopt new modes of thought.

Please, if you remember one thing from this talk tonight, resist the impulse to be cynical, and allow yourself to be idealistic – you can’t pretend to be disillusioned unless you first have illusions, and it may not, after all, be such a bad thing to have a few illusions.

The second conclusion from the impermanence of all things is encapsulated in the Roman saying memento mori, “remember to die,” meaning not pessimistically that life is short, but optimistically that the best life is a full life. Now this is of course an old cliché that you have heard a million times: life is short, carpe diem, live in the moment, etc.

And I won’t belabor the point except to highlight the difference between the ancient and modern perspective on “life is short.” We moderns tend to react by saying “live on the edge, take risks, push the boundaries, test your limits” and so on.

The ancients saw “life is short” to mean a duty to live according to nature, as the stoics say, which means with reason, moderation and consciousness of your duties as a full human being. Marcus Aurelius, another adoptive emperor who ruled from 161-180 A.D., wrote a handbook on stoic ethics while he was on military campaign in the Danube region. The handbook is called the Meditations. This is my favorite passage:

“Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a human being – to do what you have at hand with simple dignity, and kindliness, and freedom, and justice... do every act of your life as though it were your last, renouncing all hypocrisy, and self-indulgence, and discontent.”

And this is in your power to do every day – it is your choice to live this way.

So, as we see in the different reactions to the old cliché that life is short, one of the values of studying classical antiquity is that it offers us an alternative value system that is not infected with the dominant strains of thought of the modern age: commercialism, consumerism, conspicuous consumption, and the tendency to define oneself by reference to one’s place in the market.

What Aurelius is telling us, what the whole value system of the Roman ruling class – which was infused with and defined by stoicism – stood for was: the ability of the individual to live, as Aurelius says, with
     Dignity
     Kindness
     Freedom
     Justice

Not that the Roman world had a monopoly on these values, nor should we romanticize the past. This was after all a civilization built on chattel slavery. But in that world, in its context, we do find a bright example of humankind articulating and excelling in these virtues.

So now we come to the final point arising from the fact that civilization is impermanent.

Heading off to college, you have an opportunity, and I would submit, the duty as a human being, to explore not just the world around you, but all the different worlds human beings have made, whether today in the great variety of cultures around the globe, or in the dizzying array of cultures of the past, of which the Romans are but one of many waiting for you to discover and explore.

So when you head off to college next fall, I hope you will keep in mind that there are two types of exploration...

The first type is obvious: Travel. When you have the chance, go to different countries, expose yourself to new cultures, and above all, travel outside of the Western world. Since I have been at Blair, I have had the extraordinary good fortune to have friends who have pushed me to travel to countries which I normally would not visit, but countries which have had a profound impact on the way I now view the world.

It is remarkably rewarding (and fun – I shouldn’t leave that out or give the impression that travel should be some kind of stuffy moral pilgrimage) to get out of the western consumer civilization.

Go somewhere where you can’t speak the language. Go somewhere where people live very different lives from you and everyone you know. Go somewhere that will force you to challenge your assumptions and your values. Explore different religions and different attitudes towards work, family and state.

THEN, when you come home to all that is familiar, you will find, I think, that you will see your oh-so-familiar world in a different light, and that your own values and moral compass may have shifted in spite of yourself.

But I also think that you can explore the world and change your perspective without getting on a plane. There are so many new experiences to be had in the college classroom and in the library. Take some anthropology classes, take literature classes, take art history and music history (and of course, take Roman and Greek history). Try something new and totally foreign. Take Sanskrit. Take a class on ancient Mesopotamia. If you are a humanities major, take astronomy, take theoretical physics [kidding, that is way too hard]. If you want to really see how short human life is, take a class on historical geology. Above all, find professors who will engage you and push you to see things in a different way.

Of course, you have to be practical to some extent about what you do in college in order to prepare yourself for your career after college, but even if you are pre-med, you can make time to take courses that will let you travel, as it were, both in time and place, without even leaving the library. Don’t graduate college with the regret that you never took this course or that course.

So before I conclude, I want to thank you, the graduating class, again for all you have done here at Blair. This has been a challenging year, but I will remember your class with great fondness. You have shown courage this year, compassion, and love for one another, and ultimately that is what you will remember about Blair. I wish you all the best of luck in college. Tomorrow, don’t forget to thank your parents. And next fall, Remember the Romans! Live in moderation and reason, and explore your world while you have the chance.

Posted 6/1/06

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