Ken Burns Commencement speech at WU - Remarkable and Profound

Parent Cafe
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Certainly Ken Burns has earned the title of “wise elder.” His intense study of our history has led him to remarkable insights about Americans and human nature in general. He shares those insights in a 2015 commencement speech at Washington University that is not to be missed. Please check it out and share if you like it.

VIDEO and TRANSCRIPT at link: http://commencement.wustl.edu/speakers-honorees/

Excerpts:

… Over the years I’ve come to understand an important fact, I think: that we are not condemned to repeat, as the cliché goes and we are fond of quoting, what we don’t remember. That’s a clever, even poetic phrase, but not even close to the truth. Nor are there cycles of history, as the academic community periodically promotes. The Bible, Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right, I think: “What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun.”

What that means is that human nature never changes. Or almost never changes. We have continually superimposed our complex and contradictory nature over the random course of human events. All of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, our puritanism and our prurience parade before our eyes, generation after generation after generation. This often gives us the impression that history repeats itself. It doesn’t. …

…

It is into this disorienting and sometimes disappointing world that you now plummet, I’m afraid, unprotected from the shelter of family and school. You have fresh prospects and real dreams and I wish each and every one of you the very best. But I am drafting you now into a new Union Army that must be committed to preserving the values, the sense of humor, the sense of cohesion that have long been a part of our American nature, too. You have no choice, you’ve been called up, and it is your difficult, but great and challenging responsibility to help change things and set us right again.

Let me apologize in advance to you. We broke it, but you’ve got to fix it. You’re joining a movement that must be dedicated above all else — career and personal advancement — to the preservation of this country’s most enduring ideals. You have to learn, and then re-teach the rest of us that equality — real equality — is the hallmark and birthright of ALL Americans. Thankfully, you will become a vanguard against a new separatism that seems to have infected our ranks, a vanguard against those forces that, in the name of our great democracy, have managed to diminish it. Then, you can change human nature just a bit, to appeal, as Lincoln also implored us, to appeal to “the better angels of our nature.” That’s the objective. I know you can do it.

…

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I’d rather watch his films.

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He is right about history not repeating itself, the whole cycles thing and such is silly, but I think the real answer is found in similar words, that history does not repeat itself but men do, because human beings don’t change all that much. One of the causes of division is very human, human beings tend to be comfortable around people just like themselves, whether it be beliefs , how people look, how people appear, and breaking those barriers has caused more struggle and grief and hate in history than anything else. The divisions you see in this country reflect that, a lot of them are caused by people who are upset that the world has changed and they don’t want it to, they grew up in a time and place where you could assume a lot of things about your neighbors and the rest of the country, and it isn’t true any more. Places that had legal segregation could count on the rest of the country of ‘respecting their culture’, Christians could expect that most of the other people where they lived were Christian, so having Christmas pageants and singing religious Christmas carols in school, and having school prayer, was no big deal, and they resent this being ‘taken away’ from them (never thinking, of course, that maybe in the good old days there were people who didn’t feel comfortable with those things, but wouldn’t dare say anything).

To be honest, I am not sure how much the country really came together in the past, I think the tensions of today are the same as they always have been, the rural versus cities, the educated versus the less educated, has been around a long time. I think back then people weren’t aware of the divisions, but they were there, not all that much different than today. The tea party of today has it roots in the farm populist movement of the late 19th century with William Jennings Bryan as their leader (and obviously, the religious folks as well), the divisions were there back then. I think people had the luxury of believing everyone pulled together, the divisions didn’t exist, because people really only were exposed to what they saw locally, and there, everyone was pretty much the same. It is only when it reaches a crisis, like the issues around slavery that helped lead to the Civil War (and sorry, folks, the myth it wasn’t about slavery is bs…it ultimately was about slavery, the key issue being the expansion of slavery into the territories). If there was a major crisis, like WWII, people did tend to come together and forget differences, but in times of relative piece those divisions were there. I think today it is just a lot more obvious, and between the power of the media and the internet, and the crazy political situation that reminds me of the 1850’s, I think people see it a lot more than they did in the past.

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I appreciate Ken Burns appealing to the idea of the American demos. I was talking to my dad recently about changes he’s seen in his lifetime. He said the biggest overall change since he was a young adult in the 1950s has been the decline in faith in institutions (government, church, universities, the court system, the police, political parties, unions, corporations, fraternities/sororities, you name it). Things aren’t actually worse than they used to be; in some ways they are much more fair and transparent, but they are perceived as worse. Maybe it was because in the past, we didn’t know what was going on, and in the age of cell phone cameras and social media, outrages that used to be swept under the rug cannot be hidden. I don’t know. What I do know is that a lack of unity or a shared sense of identity and values is very damaging to a nation.

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@ njsue-

I think your dad is dead spot on. Quite honestly, I think in some ways the trust people had in institutions was pretty naive, they blindly assumed that government and churches and the like somehow had their best interests at heart and always behaved in the best interests of everyone, and back then the dirt was kept far away from people.What we have found out is government didn’t always act the way it should back then , corruption if anything was a lot more above board (back then you had the machine political machines of Tammany Hall and Mayor Curley of Boston) whereas these days you have the K Street lobbyists and the corruption of big money. Churches were doing crappy things back then, and used their power and influence to make society reflect their views of things, that often led to other people suffering, people trapped in dismal marriages, gays and lesbians a despised, hidden minority, Jews often treated like crap. While the unions did help workers gain a decent wage back then, their leaders were often tied up with the mob, siphoning off union funds to fund their various illicit activities.

With all of that, I also think that in some ways we have lost something. As corrupt as politicians in places like Tammany Hall were, or the big machines, they actually had some caring about their constituencies. Whether I agreed with them or not, politicians back then seemed to care about the country, even as corrupt as Nixon turned out to be, I think he cared about the country, cared about the people, as corrupt as Tammany Hall was, taking money out of the public till, they also returned something to people, left something behind. When Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court, he did so to try and help stop the court overturning his New Deal Programs, not for personal gain of his friends or to try and make sure his party could gerrymander voting districts (say what you want about the New Deal, it certainly didn’t benefit people of Roosevelt’s class, he was considered a traitor to his class by many of the well off).

Today it is all about one thing, winning, and in order to achieve that politicians are willing to let things go to hell in a handbasket, leave issues unresolved. Real issues, like the national debt, gets twisted into being about the personal goals of a handful of people, and we have had at least one war , one of whose purposes seems to have been for political gain. Business leaders, who once claimed to represent the best interests of the country (anyone remember Charlie Wilson testifying in front of congress, saying “What’s good for GM is good for America?”…anyone think that holds true any more, about any company, somehow I doubt Lloyd Blankenfein of Goldman Sachs could say something like that and not have people outright laugh with derision.

Eventually I think people are going to realize how they have been played for chumps, separated for political expediency,used by the well off and corporations and figure out that when you divide yourself, you let the scalawags and swine win, and will come together, but going to be a rough ride until then.

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Like Ken Burns films, not sure about his speech as a commencement speech.