Tyranny and You

[Editor's note: Michael Fellman, a noted historian and director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Simon Fraser University, gave this commencement address at SFU on Wednesday, June 7.]

This is an exciting moment for you and your loved ones and for your teachers as well. This is a poignant moment, as you are poised on the edge of new worlds. Be proud of yourselves. Congratulations!

My challenge today is how not to speak in platitudes; and of course to be brief.

Three weeks ago, I was walking down a narrow street in the perfect baroque Sicilian hill town of Noto, built from the rubble of an earthquake in 1699, when I slipped and fell hard into a stone balustrade, opening a huge gash in my forehead and the bridge of my nose. My lovely wife called out for help and at least 20 people rushed up with gauze and concern. Soon two policemen hustled us off to the local hospital in their squad car and within two more minutes a young and careful emergency room doctor was stitching me up -- eight here, five more here. And there was little paper work -- Italy is without health insurance and with totally free medicine for all, even for falling Canadians.

Such experiences catch us short. They make us realize that sometimes we must rely on the kindness of strangers. They also make us realize just how accidental life can be -- just how much luck defines us however hard we work at defending ourselves against contingency. A few centimetres lower down, a retired Dutch colonel in our hotel told me the next day, and I would have been dead, my nose driven up into my brainpan. All I have is a bit of a scar as a souvenir.

In our guts, we all know about the random nature of much of life -- the importance of things we cannot control. But of course we should rejoice in our times of good fortune -- here we are gathered to celebrate a commencement after all -- a time of transition from prolonged and difficult tasks completed into some sort of hopeful new livelihood. It is fitting that we should share our times of joy with one another as we do here, our hopes and that secret trepidation as well.

Sustain independence

If we faculty have constructed a liberal education with you, which I hope you all have had -- you will have gone well beyond mere skill training and grade point accumulation and grown into sophisticated question making. You will have learned that there are no simple answers to complex problems, but only more and better ways to ask more nuanced questions about an indeterminate and unavoidably problematic world. On the personal level, at once emotional and intuitive as well as intellectual, you will have learned that none of us can ever get beyond internal uncertainties, tensions and anxieties into some state of perpetual happiness, though of course we keep on pitching, and we cherish the good times. And you will have learned that the world is not always going to be champagne and oysters, but often blood, sweat and tears, that the great challenge in life is how you deal with failure, and how you deal with those moments of confrontation with fundamental moral issues.

Though we come together we are also alone -- necessarily forming our own moral judgments when we make difficult social and personal choices. Most of all in this context I hope you will have learned better ways to sustain independence and to resist what I will generalize as "tyranny" -- the attempt to control the ceaseless fluidity of life with absolutes that will lend the impression that living can be made safe, secure and without the necessity of accommodating to change.

Some tyrants are internal -- seemingly unending appetite for more and more material goods and experiences, money, status and power. Some tyrants are more external than that -- the faith system or the leader who promises simple answers to resolve all of life's problems; the forces that sound fear-inducing calls to sacrifice freedom for security, a clear and present danger in Canada today, or those who urge you just to accept their authority because they know more than you do (and implicitly have the power to punish you if you challenge their authority). And then there is the tyranny of the inner voice that tells you that really perhaps you do not know what is best, and that the smart thing to do is to submit rather than question, at the least to just go along and not ask uncomfortable questions, of them and of yourself.

Tyranny from omission

Much tyranny grows from simple acts of omission to stand up when you realize that power is being abused where you are concerned, or more importantly, when those with less capability to actualize their lives than you are dominated unjustly. Often the language of tyranny is quite bland -- let's just do a cost benefit analysis of the problem of insufficient resources and take more for people like ourselves at the expense of people unlike ourselves -- really it is for their own good and the greater good of the greater number. Self-serving utilitarianism and bureaucratic manipulation are most often the hallmark tyrants in our society. No jackboots, just domination by convenience.

It is my proposition that a few times in every life, one confronts abuses of power just like these, more often posited by well-intentioned "experts" than by snarling demagogues, and that the easiest thing to do is just not to notice, or if to notice, not to act. Fear is easily internalized, but it is not a necessary adaptation. Sometimes one needs to risk standing up and protesting, acting as best one can, not in the name of absolute truth, but in concern for others, often for strangers unlike us. We must strive to connect our intellects with our intuitive human empathy; we must strive to cultivate the practice of justice. Those are the times when liberal education is truly tested. That is what I think university education, in the final analysis, is all about.

Best of luck to each one of you. May your life have purpose as well as pleasure.

Michael Fellman is a frequent contributor to The Tyee. You can find his articles here.