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Page 33 text:
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any of the Lycee ' s graduating students. Ambition is also vile when rt is unrestrained or heedless to competing claims. Yet ambition will not inherently by itself bring about any of these bad results. Despite this fact, the arguments against ambition have been well heard and accepted more and more. Over the past decades ambi- tion has undergone an unjustified demise to the point that a social etiquette regarding it has evolved. The basic rule is: No matter how amfiitious or successful you are, at all costs refrain from appearing ambitious. You all know this standard of manners. Above all, be politely humble. However, just because ambition is no longer openly honored and less often openly professed, it is not at an end. Nor should it be. Historically, the quality of an age ' s ambition distinguishes it from other ages. Eras of great energy and civilization advances were always periods when ambition was passion in good standing. In his book The Century of Louis XIV, Voltaire identified the four most admired historical periods based on their contributions to civiliza- tion. Those eras were Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, Italy un- der the Medicis, and France under Louis XIV. I am confident, were he here today, that Voltaire would have added the United States from Washington through Jefferson and England under Victoria to this list. Of importance is that common to all these esteemed eras is a lack of equivocal feeling about ambition. Ambition was prized and praised. Certainly there were the usual incidents of perversity cases from unbounded ambition such as Aaron Burr in each of these periods. But whatever the excesses at times, ambition has at all times been the drive that best releases energies that advance civil- ization. It always will be. Now, it is not difficult and perhaps instructive to imagine a world devoid of ambition. Walk with me for a second through that imagi- nary landscape shorn of ambition. Undoubtedly, it would be a kinder world without demands, without abrasions, without disap- pointments. People would have more time for reflection. Such work as they did would be for the collective good rather than for themselves. Competition would be unknown. Flutes and oboes might play. Conflict would be gone, tension a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end. Art would unlikely be trou- bling but more purely celebratory in function. Flowers and vegeta- bles would be grown. Children probably raised in common as random consequences of sexual acts. The family would be superflu- ous as a social unit and its former power for cultivating neuroses drained away. Longevity would be greatly increased with the de- cline of heart attacks and strokes from tumultuous endeavor. Anxi- ety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on and on with ambition long departed from the human heart. And, oh yes, how unrelievedly boring life would be! Without ambition. Neither you nor 1 could tolerate such an existence for long, having been exposed already to a world with drives for distin- guishing achievements. There is no question that ambition is on the wane as both a perceived virtue and a common characteristic of our citizens. Why? Again, there are many proposed causes. Some are clearly culprits. Ambition requires hope. Hope, in the sense of desires for great- er, more fulfilling, personal experiences, becomes less evident in our culture daily. Here, I accuse, in large part, television despite all its obvious potential benefits. Just consider what television offers the viewer albeit vicariously. Nearly everything. The pleasures of elegant, luxurious living. Con- quests in love and work. Distant travels. And more and more. And at what costs? Very, very little. The mere manual dexterity to push an on-off switch and twist a channel selection knob along with the effort required to stay awake. It is so easy to be had and so comfort- able to experience. But television and to some degree movies have two very insidious effects. They reduce desires and thus hope to have direct, personal, expanding experiences because of the approximations already ob- tained through identification. Additionally, viewing consumes of- ten unrealized, huge quantities of time which both distract us from other direct activities and reduce our resources to accomplish meaningful tasks. How much time are we talking about? The statis- tics are staggering. Consider the following. . . Sixty percent of all waking hours of preschool age children are spent in front of a television ..Freshman enter high school today having seen over 350,000 commercials through an accumulation of some 10,000 to 20,000 viewing hours . . The average adult today watches some 20 to 50 hours of televi- sion a week. If you subtract the time typically allocated for sleeping, eating, and working during a week, it is clear that most adults do little else than commune with the boob tube. . . This graduating class is a member of about the third complete television generation we have produced in our society. Our best estimates a:e that on the average each member of this genera- tion will gc to her or his death bed having watched ten cumula- tive years of television. That is not ten years of just prime time viewing but rather ten years total of watching television 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year. It is a full sixth or seventh of their entire, expected life span. Yes, these nun.bers are amazing but nonetheless clear evidence for how hope and desires are being eroded daily. Yet, I caution you. Hope itself is not sufficient to be productively ambitious. As the French philosopher, Alain, states in his book On Happiness, To hope is not to will. It takes rigor and it takes courage to will one ' s way to what one wants. Too often today, people relegate what hopes they do have to the category of pipe-dream wishes. They lack the belief that they control their own destiny. We have become incredibly adept at attributing nearly every outcome in our lives to external forces beyond our control. This may be very functionally selfserving in providing responsibility absolution for anything we do. But it is also extremely paralyzing. If it is all due to those things outside us, why bother to make it otherwise? The Fates have had a full recreation in our society. True ambition has as one of its major aspects the expression of faith that you can shape your own life. Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it succinctly, we must not hide behind fate ' s petticoats; the most important decisions in our lives, when all is said, we make for ourselves. By one taxonomy, we are all Hamlets or Don Quixotes. There are those of us who hold that we are what we ponder. They mull continually about hidden personal fears and secrets, about possible rights and potential wrongs. They are often stagnant in perpetual questioning. These are the Hamlets. Others of us hold that, what- ever our private concerns are, we are what we do. These believe that what one achieves is what matters. These are the Don Quix- otes. In many of us the two types are combined in unending battle. It seems, at the moment, that the Hamlets are predominant in our culture, especially among the best educated as yourselves. Oddly, and ironically, this loss of ambition comes at a time when the gates of opportunity for all including women and minorities has grown greater and greater as never before. Yet neither hope nor ambition has kept pace. To many of you 1 challenge: Look at yourself and ask if you have used all your faculties to the limit. Are you living your life to the fullest of your capacities? Are you too much a Hamlet and not enough of a Don Quixote? One of the most clear-minded thinkers in the history of America, Justice Holmes wrote, Life is action and passion; therefore it is required of each of us to share in the action and passion of the times at the peril of being judged not to have lived. To this graduating class and to all future students of this superb school I offer you the following thoughts for you full consideration. You did not choose to be born. You did not choose your parents. You did not choose your historical period, country of birth, or circum- stances of your upbringing. For most of you, you did not choose your schooling even though the selection made was obviously excellent. By and large, you will not choose to die nor select the time and condition of your death. But within this realm of choice- lessness, you will choose how to live: courageously or in cowardice, with purpose or in drift, with ambition or without even hope. No matter how indifferent you may perceive the universe to be about your choices and decisions, they are yours to make. No matter how many times your plans go awry or goals are unachieved, choices will remain for you. Decisions still can and must be made. Even deci- sions not to act will yield outcomes of your doing. Not choosing is a decision with real consequences. As Alain, the French philosopher noted, those who seek nothing will have their quest fulfilled. They will get nothing. Thus, you will choose and decide and so your lives will be formed. After all the analyses, cautions, and encourage- ments, forming your own destiny is what ambition is about. There is a substantial cult following of a rock musical entitled The Rocky Horror Show. Fans of both the play and the film know the dialogue so well that they are able to shout clever barbs and puns in anticipation of actual scripted passages. Their fervent dedi- cation to this entertainment is not simply vacuous admiration of some aberrant and bizarre depictions. The show potently expresses some important social values related to my presentation today. The main character of the story is named Frank N. Furter. At the end of the tale, he is zapped by a lethal cosmic laser. In the last throes of dying, he sings a poignant song in which he reviews and evaluates the choices he made with his life. At the very end, he offers his final advice to the audience. It is advice which I entrust to you to remember and use throughout your life. He collapses to one knee, and begs us all: Don ' t just dream it. Be it. Don ' t just dream it. Be it! I wish you all the most expansive of dreams and the ambition to achieve them. Don ' t just dream it. Be it. Dr. Scott C. Eraser 29
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Page 32 text:
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Dr. Scott Fraser delivering his Commencement speech Graduating class, Drs. Kabbaz, teachers and staff members, con- tinuing students of the Lycee, parents, families, and friends, I thank you for this honor to address you today at these commencement ceremonies. My daughter, Nicole, unfortunately cannot be here today but she extends her warmest greetings to all her friends and teachers here. I have taken my license as the guest speaker to permit me to shift roles. Normally, by vocation as a professor and psychologist, I would present some review of current knowledge in the studies of human behavior. However, today I will relish in the luxuries of being able to express some views from my avocations as a social philosopher and interested reader of literature, history, and the arts. Thus, I come to you to talk about some thoughts of Sophocles, Shake- speare, and Voltaire along with the related views of more contem- porary writers such as Michel Cervantes, Budd Schulberg, Arthur Miller, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. To dissuade you of thoughts that you are about to be dragged through dusty and semi-dusty pages of quotes from a basic course in Western Civilization, I will also venture onto the current stage and film productions of The Rocky Horror Show for a bit of a walk on the wild side. Some months ago I was spurred by Joseph Epstein ' s writings to reconsider the nature and value of a particular human characteris- tic, namely ambition. To Mr. Epstein. 1 am indebted for explications of many of the points 1 would like you to consider. The trait of ambition has always been suspect in recorded history. Most of you can probably recall the biblical explanation By that sinne fell the Angels. Yet over the course of the past century, especially in our culture, ambition has become increasingly at- tacked and derrogated. By some arguments, it has been nearly banished permanently from the list of virtues. There have been a host of sociological and psychological explanations offered for this apparent demise of ambition. We have neither the time, nor I am sure, the patience to review those proposed reasons this afternoon. Whatever the causes, the worst that can be said about ambition has been said and increasingly, unfortunately I judge, accepted. From my readings, the arguments against ambition have focused on three basic contentions. To begin with, it is said that ambition is often antisocial. Supposedly, the person strongly imbued with am- bition ignores other people. He or she becomes solely oriented to personal gain and thus socially detached. Ambition then drives the person to wish to rise above the masses and thus causes her or him to forget about the collective good. It makes you believe, the argument goes, it is a dog-eat-dog world and distinguishes you as wanting to be among the dogs that do the eating. Rivalry becomes M. Philippe Pochet, Attache Culturel de France your major emotion and you become somewhat, if not wholely, inhumane in the bargain. Many leading historical figures who be- came great through successful ambition are often judged to have really despised mankind at least a little. Secondly, it is said that ambition is inherently tragic in its conse- quences. It supposedly works on a person, eats her or him away, grinds one down to less than before because it is insatiable. By this contention, success spawns increasing aspirations in some expo- nential growth pattern. This then dooms the individual inevitably to failure. You can never satisfy all the goals you can possibly imagine and ambition, the argument goes, makes you imagine them all As So phocles wrote in Antigone: That greatness never Shall touch the life of man without de- struction. And lastly, but surely not the least of its theorectical ill effects, it is said that ambition is corrupting. By this argument, once one is roused by ambition, conscience goes into retreat. Morality some- how inevitably shrinks in the looming shadow of growing ambition. As Lord Acton is often quoted as saying; Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the belief often is that merely a touch of ambition can achieve quite the same end. Ambition is viewed by this conten- tion as being linked inextricably with the trailing sins of vanity, greed, and the will to power. Whom the gods would make mad, they first allow their dreams to come true and all that. Thus, from these assertions heard repeatedly throughout history, ambition renders people insensately vulgar (like Sammy Click in Budd Schulberg ' s What Makes Sammy Run?), ambition leaves peo- ple pathetically broken (like Willy Loman in Arthur Miller ' s Death of a Salesman), or ambition makes people raving mad (like Shake- speare ' s Macbeth). Such is the virus of success as Theodore Drei- ser called ambition. My suggestion to you today is that all of these arguments against ambition are neither right nor wrong. They provide a useful list of cautions one would do well to memorize and recall regularly. They should serve as checks against possible deterioration of one ' s ethi- cal standards given that you are ambitious. Do not let yourself see others always as antagonistic rivals. Do not become enmeshed in continually rising, unfulfillable aspirations. And do not succumb to vanity, agreed, and the quest for power above all. However, having ambition is no certainty to produce either a good or a bad character. There is no question that ambition repels when it is in too great a disproportion to ability. It is sad when a person tormented by the need to rule an empire lacks the compe- tence to run a good hot dog stand. This is hardly a problem to visit
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