Commencement at McGill - McGill University, Montreal, Canada - Charles Krauthammer's honorary degree acceptance speech Jun 14, 1993 - Transcript

Public Interest, Fall, 1993 by Charles Krauthammer

LET ME BEGIN by saying how deeply honored I am by the honorary degree you have conferred upon me by the invitation to deliver the commencement address at a university for which I have such respect and affection. And let me apologize for speaking entirely in English, my French having suffered the disuse ofof living in a land so vast that bilingualism is considered, expect for the newest of immigrants, an exotic intellectual acquirement.

Antoine de Rivarol once said "Ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas francais." I shall not be francais. But I hope to be clair. Even more important, given the fact that after long years of seat and study I am the last thing that stands between you and your diploma, I shall be brief.

Exactly twenty-three years ago, in this very building, I was sitting in your seat. What I shall offer you today is a reconnaissance report from a two-decade life expedition into the world beyond McGill College Avenue. Like Marco Polo, I return--but without silk, with few stories, indeed, with but three pieces of sage advice.

First, don't lose your head. I'm speaking here of intellectual fashion, of the alarming regularity with which the chattering classes, that heard of independent minds, are swept away by the periodic enthusiasms that wash over the culture.

Not a decade ago, for example, the West was seized with a near-mass hysteria about imminent nuclear apocalypse. Tens of millions of my countrymen, including the intellectuals who should have known better, were in the grip of a nuclear anxiety attack. The airwaves, the bestseller lists, the Congress were filled with dire warnings about our headlong dash to the nuclear abyss. It was quite a scene.

A political movement rose to avert the End. It was the nuclear freeze movement and its slogan was "The freeze: Because no one wants a nuclear war," as if those who resisted the freeze were in favor of nuclear war. Indeed, those who refused to lose their heads to the hysteria were diagnosed as suffering from some psychological disorder. "Nuclearism," "psychic numbing" it was called.

Ten years later, with nuclear weapons still capable of destroying the world many times over--not a word about the coming apocalypse. The fever has passed.

But not the propensity for fever. Another day, another fever. With the end of the Cold War, with nuclear apocalypse now out of fashion, the vacuum is filled by eco-catastrophists predicting a coming doomsday of uncontrollable pollution, overpopulation, and resource depletion.

Some prefer their catastrophes more mundane. For them there is economic apocalypse. Look at the best seller list. It is hard to think of a time when it did not feature a Crash of Nineteen-something book. A few years ago, it was The Crash of '79. Then The Panic of '89. (Same author, by the way.) Today it is Bankruptcy 1995. The idea is the same. Only the date gets pushed back.

Do not misunderstand. There is a nuclear problem, especially in the form of nuclear proliferation. There are environmental problems. And every soceity has economic problems. But there is a difference between a problem and panic.

So the next time you find yourself in the midst of some national hysteria with sensible people losing their heads, with legislatures in panic, and with the media buying it all and amplifying it with a kind of megaphone effect, remember this:

Remember that a people--even the most sensible people--can all lose their heads at once.

Remember the tulip craze taht swep Holland three centuries ago, on orgy of panicked financial speculation in which, as historian Simon Schama tells it, "tracts of land, houses, silver and gold vessels and fine furniture were all commonly traded" for tulips. At the mania's pak, a single Semper Augustus tulip could fetch twenty townhouses.

Remember that when the people or the legislature or the media approve something with unanimity, they're probably wrong. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which esssentially launched the United States into the Vietnam war. It passed the U.S. Senate 88 to 2. It passed the House 410 to 0. That should have been a warning.

In the Old Soviet Union, where the commissars would routinely rewrite and rearrange history to fit their political needs, there was a saying: In Russia, it is impossible to predict the past. in Israel, at the time of hyperinflation some year ago, it was said: In Israel, it was impossible to predict the present. Well, in the normal, bourgeois, middle-class, democratic West, one should say, when confronted with the apocalypse du jour: Here, it is impossible to predict the future. So when confronted with a national riot of dread: Keep your head.

LESSON ONE. LESSON TWO: Look outward. By that I mean: Don't look inward too much. You have been taught--rightly taught--Socrates' dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living. I would add: The too-examined life is not worth living either.

Perhaps previous ages suffered from a lack of self-examination. The Age of Oprah does not. Our problem is quite the opposite.