Making Heaven on Earth: Harvard Commencement

This post is going to be about a particular topic I’ve spent a great deal of time pondering lately, but it is also about a specific event: my graduation. Or, still more specifically, about Mark Zuckerberg’s commencement address at my graduation. It was a very emotional week for me, but there is always time for critical thought, especially when waiting in the rain for hours, so here are a few of my thoughts:

I was prepared for the address by an earlier address given at the chapel service that morning (Zuckerberg’s speech was in the afternoon). The entire chapel service struck me as exceedingly strange. It was meant to be a solemn ritual, the “festival rites” by which Harvard is surrendered “from that age that has pass’d/to the age that is waiting before.” However, in actuality, it was as if everyone were implicitly apologizing for making us do all this silly stuff before we graduated. It was as if a man wanted to propose traditionally, but wanted to assure his bride-to-be that he wasn’t patriarchal, and so settled for kneeling while grinning sheepishly and making snarky remarks about how silly kneeling is. I would have preferred actual solemnity.

In any case, much of the theme of both addresses centered around dreaming big, around believing and doing great things, about finding purpose in a cause larger than oneself. All of this resonates deeply with me as I move out into the world. Then, though, we begin to confuse ideals with manmade institutions, specific political and economic stances. And however much the speakers assured us their dream was universal and bipartisan, they were in fact extremely attached to a very particular set of institutions.

For instance, Mark Zuckerberg takes it for granted that idealism means advocating to stop global warming, guarantee basic income, and legitimize illegal/undocumented immigrants (this topic I’ve just written on). These issues are not bipartisan; they reveal a certain political stance that depends on debatable assumptions. As further proof of this, our passion about issues seems to be determined not by their importance but by our particular biases; thus, there are near-tears and approving cheers for an undocumented student who wants a book on social justice, and awkward silence and scattered applause for a woman who risks her life to fight for peace in Somalia. Somalia isn’t a partisan issue; documentation is.

These partisan assumptions hit closer to home for me with the multiple times the Class of 2017 was heralded for our support of the dining hall workers’ strike; it was pointed out as evidence of our passionate care for others. This was strange, first off, because we were being congratulated by the very administration that had been demonized by the strike supporters. More than this, however, the approbation seemed not to remember the real events of the strike.

I don’t remember reasonable argument and sympathetic support; I don’t remember kindness to fellow man or bipartisan agreement (living wage was involved; this is another secretly partisan issue). I remember people shouting “we see you – shame” and “no justice, no peace;” I remember policemen guarding the doors of the administration building. I remember emails prolific in their accusations and sparse in their facts; I remember reasonable people feeling railroaded by crusader calls. I’m sure this isn’t the only side of the strike, but it’s the side I saw, and it seemed strangely absent in all these declarations of praise.

These problems point to a fundamental misattribution of transcendent purpose. Mark Zuckerberg and I agree that people need purpose in their lives, but transcendent purpose simply can’t be found in institutions, in politics or economics, in temporal things invented by fallible men. Those things aren’t big enough to hold up the weight of our aspirations, and if we make them into ideals, we will end up warping reality to make partisan issues that aren’t black-and-white seem that way. We want to devote ourselves to ideals, and that is good. But we have to look for them where they’re really to be found, not invent dragons to slay out of the lizards we happen to find roaming our backyard. If we do (speaking as one of those lizards occasionally mistaken for a dragon) only bad things come of it.

This became clear to me during the chapel service, when we were told that instead of focusing on giving to charity, we should focus on building a system where charity is no longer necessary. This was meant well, but you cannot use a system to force people out of greed or apathy or indolence; that change has to come from the inside. More than one totalitarian regime started with a utopian dream that forgot about this. We must be wary of partisan causes that claim to embody universal ideals and systems that claim to solve the human condition. Every time man tries to make Heaven on earth, he winds up with Hell instead.