A Commencement Address ¶

Joseph Wood Krutch

Delivered at the University of Arizona, June 1, 1960. Published in A Krutch Omnibus

Editor's note:

Joseph Wood Krutch delivered this address at the University of Arizona on June 1, 1960. It is, in a sense, a commencement speech about commencement speeches — a warning that the platitudes of the great age of science were missing something, and that what they were missing was the inner life of the person being commenced. Last Friday, May 15, 2026, Eric Schmidt — the former CEO of Google, now one of the principal financiers of AI infrastructure — delivered a commencement address at the same university. He told the graduates that AI would touch every profession, every classroom, every relationship; that when someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. The graduates booed him.

The two speeches were sixty-six years apart, on the same stage, and they are almost exactly reversed in their concerns. Krutch worried that the worship of power and technique was draining the moral and philosophical substance out of the human being — that we were learning to ask only what was useful and what was usual, and forgetting how to ask what was right. Schmidt's speech assumes the question is settled: the rocket is leaving, the only choice is to get on board. Where Krutch told the class to "be, if necessary, a lonely candle which can throw its beams far in a naughty world," Schmidt told them, in effect, that no candle is necessary because the floodlights are already on.

It's hard, reading Krutch now, not to feel that the booing was not really about Eric Schmidt. It was about the absence — across most of public life, and certainly across most commencement stages — of the kind of philosophical seriousness Krutch took for granted his audience would tolerate for forty minutes on a June evening in Tucson. He spends paragraphs distinguishing social morality from personal honor; he quotes Swift and Oppenheimer; he asks what a textbook of psychology has quietly conceded by defining "moral" as "in accord with the laws and customs of his society." It's an ordinary speech from a culture that still expected its old men to think out loud about good and evil in front of the young.

Krutch's speech is below.

When an old man has an opportunity to address a youthful group on such a traditional occasion as this, it is certain that many platitudes will fall on impatient ears. You will then not be surprised if I begin with some very familiar platitudes. My excuse for doing this is that I would like in the end to make at least one deduction from these platitudes which is not as commonly emphasized as I think it should be. Unfortunately, however, the platitudes must come first.

This, as you are well aware without being told as often as you have been told, is a great age of science; also one in which science has come to mean more and more the techniques for acquiring power. We call it the power to control the forces of nature, but we are becoming increasingly aware that it means also power over human life including, unfortunately, the power to destroy life on an unprecedented scale—on so large a scale that it may just possibly involve the destruction of ourselves as well as of our opponents.

In one way or another these platitudes will be the theme of a large proportion of the commencement addresses delivered this week in hundreds of schools and colleges. Thousands of young men and women will be urged to devote themselves to science as the great need of our time and urged to do their part in making our nation strong. At the same time a lesser but still immense number of young people will be warned of the dangers as well as the promises of technology and not a few will be urged that philosophy, ethics, religion and the arts are an essential part of the human being and that we neglect them at our peril.

Those who stress the dangers as well as the promises of technology are not always either querulous old men or professors of the humanities, though the latter are sometimes suspected of merely defending their shrinking classes. Among those who sound a warning are some who have been themselves very deeply involved in expanding science and technology. Here, for instance, is a singularly brief, trenchant statement from a great atomic physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer:

Nuclear weapons and all the machinery of war surrounding us now haunt our imaginations with an apocalyptic vision that could well become a terrible reality: namely, the disappearance of man as a species from the surface of the earth. It is quite possible. But what is more probable, more immediate, and in my opinion equally terrifying, is the prospect that man will survive while losing his precious heritage, his civilization and his very humanity.

Now what is this “humanity” which Mr. Oppenheimer is afraid we may lose? Is it simply poetry and music and art? Can we keep from losing it by insisting that all students, even in scientific institutions, take courses in the romantic poets and music appreciation? Well, it is partly that and the proposed remedy is good as far as it goes, but that isn’t very far.

The issue is much larger. It has, of course, something to do with our almost exclusive stress upon wealth and power increasingly greater, our willingness to accept what we call “a high standard of living” as necessarily the equivalent of hat philosophers used to call “the good life.” It is, to use a platitudinous word, “materialism.” To be human certainly means to be capable of valuing some nonmaterial things. As we lose interest in things other than the material, we are at least becoming that much less like human beings of the past and, in that sense, are indeed losing our humanity.

What I want to talk about this evening is something which seems to me even more characteristically and exclusively human than art or letters. You may call it “morality.” I prefer to call it a strong clear sense that the difference between good and evil is, for the human being, the most important and fundamental of all distinctions.

As I say this, I hear from you an almost audible protest. “You don’t mean to imply,” I can almost hear you exclaim, “that we are not today deeply concerned with morality! Surely ethical questions are among those of which our society is most deeply aware. Has any other age ever talked so much about social justice, ever professed so much concern for the submerged common man? Has any other age ever appeared to take more seriously human rights, political and economic rights, the rights of racial minorities, the rights of colonial peoples? Do we not acknowledge, as no age before this ever did, our responsibility for what we are for the first time obviously calling ‘one world’? Isn’t ours the great age of social conscienceness obviously as it is the great age of science?”

All this I readily grant, but I am also aware of a strange paradox. It is often said, and my observation leads me to believe it true, that this increasingly great growth in social morality has, oddly enough, taken place in a world where private morality—a sense of the supreme importance of purely personal honor, honesty, and integrity—seems to be declining. Beneficent and benevolent social institutions are administered by men all too frequently turn out to be accepting “gifts.” The world of popular entertainment is rocked by scandals. Candidates for the Ph.D. in social, as well as in other studies, hire ghost writers to prepare their theses. College students, put on their honor, cheat on examinations.

The provost of one of our largest and most honored institutions told me just the other day that a questionnaire was distributed to his undergraduates and that forty percent of them refused to say that cheating on examinations is reprehensible. Again I seem to hear an objection. “Even if this is true, haven’t these things always been true? Is there really any evidence that personal dishonesty is more prevalent than it always was?”

I have no way of making a statistical measurement. Perhaps these things are not actually more prevalent. What I do know is that there is an increasing tendency to accept and take for granted personal dishonesty. The bureaucrat and the disc jockey say, “Well, yes, I took presents, but I assure you that I made just decisions anyway.” The college student caught cheating does not even blush. He shrugs his shoulders and comments: “Everybody does it, and besides, I can’t see that it really hurts anybody.”

Recently a reporter for a New York newspaper stopped six people on the street and asked them if they would consent to take part in a rigged television quiz for money. He reported that five of the six said “Yes.” Yet most of these five, like most of the college cheaters, would probably profess a strong social consciousness. They may cheat, but they vote for foreign aid and for enlightened social measures.

Jonathan Swift once said: “I have never been surprised to find men wicked, but I have often been surprised to find them not ashamed.” It is my conviction that though men may be no more wicked than they always have been, they seem less likely to be ashamed—which they call being realistic. Why are they less ashamed? I think the answer is to be found in the student’s reply: “Everybody does it, and besides, I can’t see that it really hurts anybody.”

Precisely the same thing was said in many newspapers about the TV scandals. If you look at this common pronouncement, you will see what lies behind the breakdown of private morality as opposed to public, of personal honor as opposed to social consciousness. If everybody does it, it must be right, “moral,” “decent” mean only what is usual. This is the reverse.

I open, for instance, a widely-used college textbook of psychology to a chapter headed “Morality.” It is a very brief chapter and in it I read: “We call a man moral when his actions are in accord with the laws and customs of his society.” No qualification follows, no suggestion that a thing may be evil even though sanctioned by law and custom. Certainly no hint that under certain conditions a man should be called moral only when he refuses to do what a bad law permits or an evil custom encourages.

If you accept this psychological concept of morality as no more than mores, then you are logically compelled to assume, for instance, that in Nazi Germany a man who persecuted Jews was a moral man, that one who refused to do so was immoral since persecution was certainly both the law and the custom in the country of which he was a part. I doubt that the author of this textbook would have followed his logic to that extreme, but he gives no reason why one should not do so. He certainly implies that a student may cheat on examinations and a public official take bribes without ceasing to be moral if cheating and bribe-taking are the common practice of his group or his colleagues.

What social morality and social consciousness sometimes leave out is the narrower but very significant concept of honor as opposed to what is sometimes called “socially desirable conduct.” The man of honor is not content to ask merely if this or that action will hurt society, or if it is what most people would permit themselves to do. He asks first of all if it would hurt him and his self-respect. Would it dishonor him personally? He is not moved, as the cheater often is, by the argument that cheating would not do society any harm and, even, perhaps, might enable him to “do good” because it would help him to get a job in which he would be “socially useful.”

Two generations ago the world was genuinely shocked when the Imperial German Government dismissed a solemn treaty as a “mere scrap of paper.” Today we only shrug when a government breaks a treaty as men are not expected to be men of honor, only to do whatever seems advantageous to their government.

The cheating student has come to believe, perhaps even been taught, that immoral means simply “socially undesirable,” perhaps even that what everybody does is permissible since, after all, “moral” means no more than “according to custom.”

When some scandal breaks in government, or journalism, or broadcasting, the usual reaction of even the public, which is still shocked by it, is to say that it couldn’t have happened if there had been an adequate law supervising this or that activity. College examinations, government bureaus and television stations should be better policed. But is it not usually equally true that it could not have happened if a whole group of men, often including supposed guardians of public morality, had not been devoid of any sense of the meaning and importance of “individual integrity”? May one not go further and ask whether any amount of “social consciousness” plus any amount of government control can make a decent society composed of people who have no conception of personal dignity and honor, of people who, like students, don’t think there is anything wrong in cheating?

It was a favorite and no doubt sound argument among early twentieth-century reformers that “playing the game” as the gentleman was supposed to play it, was not enough to make a decent society. They were right; it is not enough. But the time has come to add that it is nevertheless indispensable. The so-called social conscience, unsupported by the concept of personal honor, will create a corrupt society. Moreover, I insist that for the individual himself, nothing is more important than this personal, interior, sense of right and wrong and his determination to follow it rather than to be guided by “what everybody does” or by the criterion of mere “social usefulness.” It is impossible for me to imagine a good society composed of men without honor.

I shall not labor the point further. But I will assume the privilege of a commencement speaker to give advice; and what the advice comes down to is this: Do not be so exclusively concerned with society and social conditions as to forget your own condition. You are your own self and you cannot shift the responsibility for that self to world conditions, or social conditions, or the mores of your civilization. That you cannot shift this responsibility is your burden. It is also your ultimate resource.

The time may come when you lose hope for the world, but it need never come when you lose hope for yourself. Do not say “I will do what everybody else does.” Be, if necessary, a lonely candle which can throw its beams far in a naughty world. And I say this not only because I think that in the end that is best for society. I say it first of all because I’m sure it is the best and happiest course for yourself. If you must be pessimistic about the world, if you must believe that society is corrupt, then do not see in that any reason why you should be corrupt. Be scornful of the world if you must, but base your scorn on the difference between yourself and that world which you think deserves your scorn. Some will say that if you do this you run the risk of spiritual pride. I think the world could do with a little more spiritual pride because there seems to be so little of it about.

You will be told that you risk thinking yourself wiser and better than the common run of men. I hold that this, too, is preferable to being content not even to try to be better and wiser and more honest than they are. You may think that personal integrity and self-respect are not what you want more than anything else. You may say to yourself that putting them first would make it too difficult to get along in the world and that you want to get along in the world; that you would rather have money, power and fame than personal self-satisfaction. You may even say that you want money, power and fame so that you can “do good in the world.” But if you do say any of these things, you will be making an unwise choice. You will be surrendering something which cannot be taken away from you to gain something which can be taken away from you and which, as a matter of fact, very often is.

We hear it said frequently that what present-day men most desire is security. If that is so, then they have a wrong notion of what the real, the ultimate, security is. No one who is dependent on anything outside himself—upon money, power, fame or whatnot—is, or even can be, secure. Only he who possesses himself and is content with himself is actually secure. Too much is being said about the importance of “adjustment” and “participation in the group.” Even cooperation—to give this most favorable designation—is no more important than the ability to stand alone when the choice must be made between the sacrifice of one’s own integrity and adjustment to, or participation in, group activity.

No matter how bad the world may become, no matter how much the mass man of the future may lose such of the virtues as he still has, one fact remains. If you alone refuse to go along with him, if you alone assert your individual and inner right to believe in and be loyal to what your fellow men seem to have given up, then at least you will still retain what is perhaps the most important part of that humanity which Mr. Oppenheimer fears we may lose.