Commencement address at Williams College
Williamstown, Massachusetts
June 14, 1987
For twenty years, Ms Greenfield was the highly-respected editor of the Washington Post opinion page. On the day of her death in 1999, Roger Rosenblatt said, "All Washington gathered to her, not for her influence as an opinion-maker, but for her wit, her common sense and heart.
----------------------------------
"President Oakley, trustees, faculty, friends and most especially members
of the graduating class. One always says it, but this time it is true: I am honored
to be here. Williams is one of the few truly great colleges in this country, known
consistently over the years for both its academic excellence and its civility.
"To those
of us who were once young and spent some time here, it is, of course, also known
for other things. These I will not dwell on except to say that from my years
as an undergraduate at Smith, I still retain many happy memories of utterly
dissolute weekends at Williams. In my wildest imaginings at the time I could
not have supposed that one day, doddering and infirm, I would be standing up
here with the forces of law and order.
"I want to
talk to you today about journalism, not just because it is pretty much the only
thing I know, but also because what journalists try to do is really little more
than what everyone tries to do, one way and another, in daily life."How can you yourself protect against interpreting the world around you in a similarly fatuous way? Precisely by avoiding the pitfalls of bad journalism and bad general analysis that lead to it."
You might
not judge this to be the case from the turbulence that attends much of our activity
and the self-dramatizing way in which we sometimes describe our calling. But
it is true. What we do for a living is merely what you are going to have to
do every day of your life: try to figure out what is going on and how to think
about it. So the process is worth a few minutes of your thought.
"The first
thing to be said about that process, of course, at least as it is carried out
by working journalists, is that nobody, or practically nobody, is ever pleased
with the result. Nobody ever has been. There have been trouble making pundits
in our midst, after all, since the days of the Hebrew prophets and Greek seers,
folks who really know how to rain on a politician's parade. Agamemnon spoke
for more than himself I think and more than he knew - including perhaps a whole
succession of American presidents - when he said to the seer Kalkhas, the first
syndicated columnist, as I see it:
You visionary of
hell, never have I had fair play in your forecasts. Calamity is all you care
about, or see, no happy portents, and you bring to pass nothing agreeable.
"Or, as it
is regularly put these days: Why don't you people ever report the good news?
"But, importantly,
it is not just politicians and other objects of journalistic attention who are
inclined to resist discomfiting news. It is just as often the general public
too, and again, always has been. No one in history summed up the sentiment more
concisely than the 19th century bishop's wife, whose words, upon learning of
Charles Darwin's thesis that all humankind was descended from apes, speak to
the ages.
Let us hope it
is not true, she said, and if it is, let us pray it does not become generally
known.
"Let me quickly
say that I am not endorsing here the idea, beloved of some in our business,
that the very resentment we stir must be proof of both our accuracy and our
virtue. On the contrary, it demonstrates neither. The amount of hostility and
discomfort we generate, is no more reliable an index of the quality of our reporting
and analysis than is the presence of the sunnier, chirpier view of things, the
view so devoutly preferred by Agamemnon, the bishop's wife and whatever rogue
politician or preacher we may be scrutinizing that day.
"It is lazy,
defective journalism and, by extension, lazy defective thinking on the reader's
part, to assume otherwise. Saying things are terrible does not automatically
establish the reliability of your account.
"You need
to understand this not just if your are going to be a good professional journalist,
but equally if you are going to be an intelligent lay journalist in life; you
need to understand it if you are going to be able to read your newspaper critically
or react reasonably to the Babel of high-powered analysis that comes your way
so relentlessly these days.
"Consider
the moment - June of 1987. It is, according to the fashionable consensus, the
most immoral of times. And included in the impressionistic evidence that this
is so, I am sorry to say, is a recurrent, blanket condemnation of the class
of '87, culminating in the preposterous assertion that there is just no intellectual
energy or even public service heartbeat to be found in your generation, nothing
but a lust for possessions.
"Obviously
there are some who fit the description. But anyone who knows more than a handful
of people of your age, and anyone, I may add, who has read into the literature
of Williams College as I have recently done and followed the tremendous individual
volunteer efforts going on, will know that this is not true. Yet somehow, despite
the evidence, the crazy all-devouring generalization lives on.
"How can you
yourself protect against interpreting the world around you in a similarly fatuous
way? Precisely by avoiding the pitfalls of bad journalism and bad general analysis
that lead to it. I will identify just a couple of these. They are habits of
mind which have not only helped to create the present overwrought sense of universal
moral collapse, but also, ironically, worked to keep us from seeing what may
be truly distinctive and repugnant in the age. Two stand out.
"First, if,
God willing, you have studied some history while you were here, you will have
helped guard against the most empty-headed of these: the disposition to suppose
that everything is happening for the first time -- that every human foible and
ethical lapse you see is not just the first, but also the worst. This is uneducated
and ahistorical. In the great preacher wars and revelations now going on, for
instance, some of us may be meeting Jim and Tammy Baker for the first time.
But history isn't. They and many of the other principals in the drama are well
known. Will Rogers and H. L. Mencken knew them. So did Mark Twain. So did Edward
Gibbon and Geoffrey Chaucer and Lucretius, all of whom had plenty to say about
what they regarded as religious flummery.
"And so, in
a curious fashion, did Harriet Beecher Stowe, not because she was a satirist
or a skeptic like the others, but because her younger brother, the Reverend
Henry Ward Beecher, was the central figure in an absolutely volcanic clitirch-sex
scandal in the 1870's, a news event, by the way, that historians tell us generated
more press coverage and comment than anything had since the civil war.
"I don't mean
to suggest that we as a society or as individuals should become complacent about
serious wrongdoing. What I mean to suggest is that only when you have some feeling
for our unremittingly accident-prone past as a species are you able to put present
conduct in some perspective. Only then are you able to see, as Chaucer did,
say, what is familiar and funny and poignant about the Wife of Bath, as distinct
from trying to book her on a felony.
"History helps
guard against moral smugness too, or it should, anyway. For you are obliged,
if you are honest, to acknowledge at least some reflection or resonance of the
fallen ones in your own nature. Such humility is a conspicuously missing aspect
of our contemporary culture, however. What might be a becoming spell of moral
introspection, tends instead to become an orgy of bashing and blaming. I observe
that now, as always in this country, when people speak of a terrible, all embracing
decline in ethical standards, they are invariably speaking of the decline in
their next door neighbor's standards, not their own.
"Such are
the ultimate wages of ignoring human history, which is to say, ignoring who
we are. But look out: for the flip side of this failure has some dangers of
its own. I am thinking of those analysts who know a little history but misuse
it. These are the half-baked determinists, fatalists and dead-enders of our
society who, knowing that there are historical precedents for certain broad
categories of current behavior, cite this fact as proof that there is not further
purpose in thinking about the present at all. They create a kind of quasi-historical
rationale for the dismissive, "everybody does it" argument. I mean,
"Hell, Agamemnon did it, what's the big deal about Nixon?"
"This tendency
also comes in a cyclical variation. It is worth pondering here that while the
day, the month and the year all exist in nature and were there all along for
us to discern, the week is essentially a human invention. There are no Wednesdays
in nature. It was we who created life as a vista of endlessly recurring Wednesdays
- Wednesdays without end. This being one of the fundamental human methods of
bringing order, or at least an illusion of order, out of chaos.
"Just so,
there is much temptation in journalism to yield to a kind of convenient here-it-comes-again,
Ferris wheel principle of organizing and interpreting experience. It is thanks
to this custom, of course, that your much-maligned generation is seen as an
all-points-perfect recreation of my own much-maligned generation, one full turn
of the Ferris wheel.
"Do not be
tempted by the cycle trap. It results in blurring exactly those distinctions
you should be looking for. I can show you, for example, an article I wrote more
than 25 years ago about a then current wallow in talk of an American moral collapse;
the great moral collapse of the late
1950s. It was about three great moral collapses ago, but it was a doozy. Just
as now, it had money-mad athletes, crooked businessmen, worldly churchmen, corrupt
professionals, a middle-class that loved its household goods too well, lying,
cheating, and all around abysmal behavior. All this was ceaselessly talked about
and condemned, and some of it was even true.
"But what
we are observing today is in key respects different from all that. Such a past
is worth study as an aid to discovering those differences and thus understanding
our own condition better, but not as quest for reassurance that we may be no
better than most, but are no worse, either.
"This, in
large measure, is what respectable - and, yes, honorable - journalism requires.
First finding out, and then working as fairly and unflaggingly as you can to
isolate and understand the precedents, the relationships and the distinctiveness,
the individually, of the figures and events in the landscape you are putting
before your readers.
"I could tell
you a dozen ways in which the public leaders currently in hot water are different
from those who were in hot water about a quarter of a century ago, and an equal
number of ways in which the moral atmosphere is different - in some but not
all of them insidiously worse. I could also show you a dozen ways in which,
based on my own observation, this generation of young people is doing good,
not just doing well, in ways that bespeak an intelligence and generosity of
spirit that their predecessors, including those of the much romanticized sixties,
ought to envy. But it is the discipline for discerning these things, not the
endless example, that concerns me here.
"And now having
pronounced you all honorary journalists, let me offer one final guiding phrase
for your career. Some years back the critic John Malcolm Brinnin wrote a book
about Dylan Thomas which embodied a faithful but very particular perception
of the poet, one that stressed his sad, last, drunken, coming apart days in
New York. It was an affront to Thomas's widow and she engaged in heated exchange
with the critic. I have always remembered her phrasing because I found it so
arresting and right, and I always commend it to would-be journalists. Caitlin
Thomas did not say that Brinnin had told lies, or that what he had reported
had not occurred. She did not say he was in any narrow or measurable sense "wrong,"
because he was not. She said, and this is the phrase: I know a better truth
than Brinnin's.
"As the dispute
over Dylan Thomas's life and his last days still goes on, and as his widow herself
I fear has made her own contribution to the confusion, it would be foolish to
assume that her 'better truth' is the right one. But the phrase, the conception
is the right one for us.
"A better
truth, not necessarily a more positive or friendly or comfortable one, or even
a contradictory truth, but one that is larger, roomier, more complex and more
authentic than any one-shot version can be. That is what journalism, yours and
mine, ideally will be about. Keep the faith. Do the profession proud. We need
all the help we can get."
