Remarks at New School University’s Sixty–seventh Commencement Ceremony

A UNIVERSITY commencement is an occasion for congratulations to those awarded degrees, and for celebration of the occasion itself. Let me begin my remarks this afternoon by saying how pleased I am to participate in this celebration, and all the more because it is a great honor to be honored by an institution of higher learning whose history I have known and admired and that has been uniquely important in the life of the mind in New York City. I congratulate all those of you who receive degrees today, and as if on a birthday—the birthday of yourself as a more knowledgeable and accomplished person—you should all be wished many happy returns. Not, of course, returns of a long string of subsequent academic degree ceremonies, but of occasions on which you can each for yourself feel that you have completed some course in the curriculum of your own mental life, a course devised, taught, and graded by yourselves. Free of degree-granting institutions, we work toward degrees of our own devising. Those who understand this form an important community about which I’ll say a bit more shortly. But also, having each met your own and your school’s expectations for you should be heartily and joyfully acknowlSOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003) Remarks at New School University’s Sixty-seventh Commencement Ceremony JOHN HOLLANDER edged. So not only do we all congratulate you on your good fortune—again, as on a birthday, in having reached this point—but more important, we acknowledge your achievement . Acknowledgement is recognition, assenting to the truth or validity or authenticity of an assertion or formulation —and remains a terribly important human act, although in the overinflation of contemporary rhetoric the very word “acknowledgment” seems weaker than it is. But it also contains a broader term, “knowledge,” which is particularly pertinent to today’s celebration of an end of schooling. Having been through various schools, you will be joining a strange kind of community it is currently common not to acknowledge —that of the better educated. But beyond that, yet one more group will be there to claim your loyalty, the worldwide community I mentioned earlier. For each of its inhabitants, it is a sort of patria, or native land, but composed entirely of naturalized citizens. It is the dominion of knowledge itself. These days I am guarded in my use of the word “loyalty,” particularly when I speak of anything like a patria. For in these days I’m reminded more and more of Samuel Johnson’s celebrated claim that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I had grown up feeling myself to be quite patriotic, yet at the same time distrusting people who loudly asserted such patriotic feelings of their own. For me these two notions walked hand in hand, and not in opposition. Chauvinism felt like an affront—and certainly an embarrassment to—what I felt was my relation to my native land. So that in high school and first encountering Johnson’s remark, I took it as sufficiently naughty to be true, and sufficiently true to be more than merely naughty. In any case, it seemed to vindicate my feelings . But also, like most people, I misunderstood it by not reading it carefully enough. In saying that scoundrels would appeal to their own or their listeners’ patriotism when all other claims or arguments failed them, Dr. Johnson was not 334 SOCIAL RESEARCH saying that only scoundrels were patriots or vice versa; but he was observing that if you walked through the door of the sacred house of patriotism, you’d certainly find a lot of scoundrels there among the other virtuous residents. This didn ’t mean that patriotism was itself a bad idea or institution. It did point out one of patriotism’s particular defects, namely that it attracts the most desperate, coarse, and sleazy seekers after justification. But patriotism has to be protected from scoundrels, and though this will never be taught in schools, it remains one of the many conclusions toward which education in and for a free society must lead. A nation-state—which is what we call with our ungendered English...