May 1972 Commencement Remarks
As many of you have come to the climax of your formal education, it is appropriate to ask what you have learned. Likely you have learned in two areas, acting and thinking. Training is the educational approach which has taught you how to act: how to write a history, how to run a titration, how to conduct a survey, how to analyze a business, how to produce a play. Hopefully each of you is well-trained in the business of your specialty, and that this training will be the basis of a solid contribution which you will now make to society. Knowing the people and the programs under which you have been trained, I have confidence in the future of your contribution.
But I am more concerned with your thinking than with your acting. Learning to act skillfully in the work of the world is crucial, but it is in thinking well that the real power of man lies. Training is basically the process of stimulating imitation. You have served with and under masters who have led you to emulate themselves and thus to be successful producers. But learning to think is never a matter of imitating. Thinking is a process of challenge, it is the unique assertion of individuality wherein you establish your identity as a person. You cannot really be trained to think, but you can be challenged to think. If you can think, you can better meet any challenge, you thrive on difference, you delight in problems. For if you can think, you can rise to meet the exigencies of new occasions, you can bring unity out of difference, you turn problems into progress.
Do not confuse thinking and the challenge to think with iconoclasm, for the latter is an oft seen counterfeit of the former. Every person comes to the university with a worldview, a set of values, a heart full of desires, all more or less naïvely held. The iconoclast is the person who cleverly invades that naïvety, demolishes the appertaining mindset of the naïve and substitutes his own prejudices and opinions in place of that which he destroys. Iconoclasm thus does not teach a person to think; it merely trains him to parrot the responses of the current academic vogues.
The challenge to think, by contrast, is administered effectively only be persons who think. A person who thinks may well have a worldview, values and desires, but each is subject to constant scrutiny and to possible change. He who truly thinks values the freedom and power that thinking brings, knowing that it is his personal access to individuality and increased ability. Treasuring that individuality and power for himself he cannot righteously deny that freedom to another. Thus he will not indulge in iconoclasm, no matter how superior to those of his contemporaries he perceives his ideas to be.
How then does one person challenge another to think? It is done by throwing a person back into his own naïve mind and asking him to justify what he thinks and says. In other words, it is to challenge the person to substitute his own personal deliberate basis for accepting what he believes in place of the happenstances of upbringing and formal training which have produced his naïve initial approach. Whether a person changes anything he believes, values or desires in this process of thinking is incidental. The change is that what he thinks are now his thoughts, a reflection of his personality, and the emergence of a true individual. He who thinks is no longer the creature of his social environment. In one sense he has now become a threat and a challenge to it, for he is no longer subject to it, and now has the power to change it. Any indication of such independence or move to change makes the non-thinkers, especially the iconoclasts, most uncomfortable. I suppose that discomfort is the source of the fear that drives some men to try to dominate others, classic examples of which we see in the auto da fe
of the inquisition, the witchcraft trials of Salem, the liquidation and incarceration of political opposition in communist nations, which are in turn but repetitions of the answers of fear administered to Socrates, to John the Baptist, to Jesus the Messiah, and to Joseph the Prophet.
Let us use an example to show the contrast between the approach to a problem as exhibited by a fearful non-thinker on the one hand and a genuine thinker on the other. I deliberately choose an example which is current.
It is popular among the iconoclasts of our day to speak sneeringly of the “Protestant work ethic.” For their purposes this is a happy collocation of concepts already on the run, and derogating them in unison makes “rhetorical hay” most efficiently.
Protestantism is on the run. A hundred years of iconoclastic attack on the Bible has so withered its foundations that to be a believer is virtually synonymous with being non-rational or non-educated. The original protest has sunk from the noble purpose of affirming God’s revealed word to the support of communist aggression in Indo-China. So it is easy and profitable to kick Protestantism.
“Work” as a concept and an action is similarly on the run. In a day when labor-saving devices are seen by many as the real fruit of scientific endeavor, it is seemingly a mark of progress and intelligence to work as little as possible. Labor unions, whose stock in trade might reasonably seem to be work, are saying, “Workers of the world unite and we will see that you do as little work as possible.” When welfare is perceived as a right, when the criminal is favored over his victim, when men would far prefer to fight than work, it becomes a delightful populist technique to kick work.
The term “ethic” is another rhetorical pushover. In a day that defies restraints both legal and moral, the connotations of the word “ethic” seem like relics of the dark ages. As permissiveness abounds, so do restraints, rules, regulations, and laws, of any sort, become horrendous. The good life is seen to be as one floating in the sea of impulse, washed by the waves of desire, mindless in a wallow of gratification. “Ethic”?: a thing of derision.
But we as Latter-day Saints should know better. We should know that for all of its problems, Protestantism has been beneficial to mankind, nurturing in a sustained way both political freedom and scientific thought as no other culture has ever done. And it laid the foundations necessary for the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in these latter days. Work we know to be the basis of all good things, both in time and in eternity, a commandment of God to men, and a sanctifying activity to all who know when, where and how to apply their strength. We know that ethics is what makes man more than beast, and that as the world sinks in our day into the miasma of sub-bestial permissive irregularity, we know that it is only by wholehearted adoption of the true ethic, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, that there will be anything saved or worth saving when the cataclysm of the Second Coming comes. Hopefully we as Latter-day Saints and as educated people will not mindlessly sneer against the “Protestant work ethic” with the iconoclasts.
Perhaps we do perceive, however, that the Protestant work ethic has some defects. What will the thinker then do? Rather than sneer and destroy, he will go to his own mind and will attempt to conceive a cure for the ills of mankind. Relentlessly he will ask himself why? wherefore? Does it work for me? Will it work for others? Out of the best thinking he can muster will come a hypothesis, an idea he is willing to sacrifice to experiment upon, something worth testing. If his test proves affirmative, he will bear witness of his hypothesis and the experiment he has performed, but without any attempt to coerce any hearer. He will patiently hear others who have sacrificed to perform their own experiments, hoping that perhaps someone has come closer to the answers than he. But above all he will respect the sanctity of the individuality of his fellow human beings. Being true to thinking, he will never try to damn the progress of humanity by attempting to prevent or to inhibit their thinking. And in so acting he will serve his God, the greatest good which he knows.
It is my hope that each of us will think, and think, and think until we become thinkers. Then our education will not have been merely training. Then our lives will not be lived simply as animals. Then we will not mindlessly parrot the cliches of our times. Then we can truly serve our God.