We Are Not Alone -- Independence is Achieved through Broadening our Connections: Intellectual, Spiritual and Human
Bart Giamatti was a classmate of mine. He served as President of Yale from 1977-86. His convictions and eloquently expressed beliefs mirror my own.
This is an extract from his address to the entering class at Yale thirty years ago, in fall 1988:
At the heart of the American belief in individual initiatives, in solitary striving and common responsibility, in sacred individual and shared freedoms, in consent leading to liberty leading to a civil order that guarantees liberty build on consent, is the covenant of the family. And while the idea and the reality of family may be exploited or made banal, while there is always a gap between the ideal of family and anyone’s actual familiar circumstances, nothing can finally lessen the power of the idea of the family or indeed lessen the sum of humanity’s wisdom that tells us the family provides an irreducible and yet splendidly elastic model for the coherence of freedom and order.
And thus by a circuit roundabout but relevant we come back to today. You have—perhaps for the first time—now removed yourself from family at the beginning of your journey toward what I called at the outset a state of independence. The University cannot and should not, and will not, displace your family. Your family, in whatever shape it takes, is and always will be yours, the first seminary of values and affection and connection. But as you grow, the University will provide other versions of family, connections of intellect in common academic pursuits, connections of shared striving in athletic and artistic and social activities, connections of shared and pleasurable daily life in the manageable, intelligible life of a dormitory or residential college. You will find, to say it all, that a state of independence is achieved by broadening your connections and affiliations, intellectual, spiritual, human.
The paradox into which one gradually grows, through education and throughout one’s life, is that independence is achieved through consenting to interdependence. I believe we grow in individual liberty in this country when we recognize the human needs and rights of others. I believe a state of independence comes when we decide through our intellect and spirit to forge human connections. Without connections, there is no individual coherence. There is no independence to uprootedness, there is only drift and decay; there is no growth of the moral and mental powers of the self if the self alone is the ultimate goal of learning. Independence of an enduring kind, noble and practical, arrives only when one realizes what it means, in all its glory and responsibility, that one is not alone.
In all I have said of family and a state of independence, I urge you to engage the paradox. I believe we all come to live, that the individual begins to fulfill his or her potential and power through a deepening awareness of and contact with the differing needs and rights of other people. I am urging you not to resolve that paradox but to use your opportunity for education fully to fulfill that paradox. It takes work. The human race or America or Yale or you in your relationships are not a family because someone says so. The encouragement to individual strivings and the shared guardianship of freedoms does not occur because someone declares that the family lives. Labels do not make life no matter how assiduously or skillfully applied. It takes work.
As we all have, you too may find difficult moments here as you grapple with how best to fit together individual initiative and community custom, how best to maintain tolerance while pressing disagreement, how to remember that the freedoms you assume must be maintained for everyone else too, or yours disappear. Do not doubt for a moment, my friends, your capacities for living fully the paradox of independence and interdependence.
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