A Commencement Address for 2020

Good afternoon faculty, family members, and graduates of 2020,

Raise your hand if you’ve heard the phrase “uncertain times” used to describe our current moment. These are uncertain and unprecedented times.

But when were they not? In 1963? 1929? 1941? 2001? 1918?

That’s JFK’s assassination, the stock market crash, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the attack on the World Trade Center, and the Spanish Flu epidemic, respectively.

Looking at the last hundred years, I could’ve selected 2015, 1945, 1928, 1989, or 1969 as well. Those breakthrough years for gene editing, the atomic bomb, penicillin, the World Wide Web, and man’s landing on the moon mark humanity’s own contributions to life’s uncertain nature.

For centuries, we found comfort in the echo of tradition. We grew old following the same rituals into which we were born. Avoiding the specter of change and loss took some selective vision and thought on our parts, but humans learned to excel in such storytelling and nostalgia as a species.

That’s why the grandparents in the audience miss broadcast television — and having only three channels.

Now, we invent conspiracy theories seeking similar comfort. We need to give the personal and global upheavals in our lives some kind of logic, a sense that someone is in control, even if it’s not us. A nefarious hidden plot is better than no plot at all.

It’s ironic that each White House administration now plays the villain for such a large part of the public — because there exists so little plot there. Despite rabid fears to the contrary, neither the Clintons nor the Bushes held power for long. And certainly no one could have predicted Donald Trump or Barack Obama just fifteen years ago. We the People contribute to the growing uncertainty just as much as mother nature and creative genius.

That’s my point today. The world feels more uncertain by design. We asked for this.

America wanted to build a country where anyone could lead, where every citizen was heard, and where creative freedom — not ancient ruins — directed the culture. Apathy was our theoretical problem a few years ago. Now, you can catch all sides of the national debate wondering if China isn’t innovative in its authoritarianism because everyone wants to make their conspiracy theory into the only one.

Dictators, other nations, our elected officials, and voters alike ignore or dismiss what truly makes America exceptional because it stands in the way of their individual interests.

America was never about being great. It certainly wasn’t about everyone achieving a comfortable standard of living. America’s 20th century dominance was always an unintended consequence of its enterprise. What’s exceptional about our nation is its desire to be the exception and remain uncertain.

From the way its checks and balances government forces compromise to how easily it assimilates new cultures to its Constitution of interactive amendments, the government’s daily mechanisms foster unpredictability. America is an experimental lab. Its greatest triumphs were always uncharted territories.

When the Pacific coast stopped our physical land grabs, we kept going into outer space, inner space, and virtual spaces. Yet at the same time, we were the civilizing cowboy, the steeple, and the social fabric. Social movements found their greatest momentum on the same soil because a nation of diversity is yet another frontier.

Lawmen on Capitol Hill still talk about cleaning up the wild west as more invented wildernesses pop up around them.

The American founders knew they were flawed. That’s why they created a government that uses human imperfection — especially our wish for power and certainty — against itself. They didn’t expect our natures to change, as individuals or as mobs, and they clearly haven’t. The most natural behavior on Earth is to go to war, tear everything down, and make the other side lose.

The American experiment seeks dialogue. That’s exactly what the Covid-19 experience has been so far — a deliberate, slow, and painful conversation.

We’ve wanted to hide from the pandemic, ignore it, face it, turn to science, turn to God, turn to politics, hear comforting messages, and ridicule those messages — often in one mind. We’ve called for leaders to lead, while criticizing all of their choices, and across the 50 states, we’ve seen all the possible choices.

Many of those choices were also understandable.

The motivations of the Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn who wanted to pay tribute to a Holocaust survivor and let Yahweh sort out who else acquired the virus at the funeral — they were pretty easy to understand, I think.

The Mayor of New York who stopped that funeral and similar ones from happening around the five boroughs as doctors warned against crowds and the pandemic overwhelmed the city — he was right and clear in his goals too.

I understood the New Yorkers that became draconian in their actions to prevent one of the worst outbreaks of the disease from overwhelming them and their neighbors and their essential workers.

I understood those same New Yorkers when they suddenly gave up their motivations for safety because they believed the need for protest and the safety of others trumped their own.

And I understood the many business owners from Broadway to Wall Street who argued that economic relief from the quarantine was as essential to survival as the protests and the quarantine.

Human needs often contradict one another, and we rarely acknowledge this in our desire to appear assured and intelligent. Yet science has proven we are each inconsistent — mired in our individual biases and necessary rules of thumb. Everyone has struggled these past three months, eager to distinguish overreaction from logic and surprised to find they were the same thing.

Of course, the dictatorships around the world behaved more smoothly; they had one narrative. They govern and broadcast by conspiracy theory. Americans have the rare right — rare both in history and in the present moment — to question motivations publicly. How many homegrown political cartoons have you seen online making fun of Vladimir or Xi or Kim?

American illustrations of authority as a buffoon go right back to King George III. It’s one of our domestic principles. Our effort to find agreement among more varied perspectives than have ever existed before is not our problem — it’s our mission statement.

Americans continue to make their individual ways through this pandemic. While infection numbers rise, many have reduced preventative measures for their wallet, for their beliefs, or for their sanity. This supposed chaos was calculated a long time ago and few of us can see how well it’s working. We use the term “working” to indicate a document or a plan that is still under construction.

America is forever under construction. It broadcasts the illogic and the mistakes and the struggle of existence. We don’t trust anyone to make the right decisions, including ourselves; we are just the only species with the ability to try. What’s exceptional is we insist, not in a comforting system, but in staring straight at the ongoing doubt and disorder.

People need to believe in a greener grass, but in America it will always exist off in the distance, and not on the other side of the fence. A few years ago, the Internet was going to solve everything, then everyone hated it, and now in the middle of the pandemic, we simply require it — in all of its imperfection.

We will never create anything perfect. We create effective methods, the best draft we can gather, until we have time or cause to do better. Some of you must be familiar with German illustrator Quint Buchholz’ 1984 painting “Giacomond.” It’s been both a greeting card and a meme. It features a tightrope walker practicing among the rooftops in the moonlight — and he’s holding one end of his rope. He’s feeding the tightrope out in front of him and under his toes at the same time he’s balancing on it too.

Can we all agree that’s what the world feels like right now? Can the faculty and parents and grandparents out here confirm this is what the future has always looked like to a graduate?

That’s also how the world looks to leaders. There are people whose job it is to perceive the many ways today is unprecedented. That probably makes you think of the jobs and positions many of you hope to earn someday, world dignitaries, or maybe CEOS, and certainly the intelligence community. For the head of the CIA, I’m sure every day is still September Eleventh.

But there’s another community always tasked with seeing the authentic, unknown tomorrow: artists. The best artists working in any discipline — from oils to medicine to architecture — they don’t have a process. We use that phrase all the time — artistic process — but there isn’t one really. Artists only succeed if they throw away and upstage what they’ve done previously. Otherwise, they just fade into the monotony of a one hit wonder.

To be artistic, to be truly creative, is to live your whole life in the uncertainty of your unique work. It’s choosing to make things that are strange and different instead of reassuring. Come to think of it, that’s the most American ideal I can summon: to choose the unknown horizon instead of home.

We don’t teach that artistic struggle enough. You can see it in our reaction to this moment. Everyone is rushing around for knowledge, a process, an established algorithm wherever they might find it. The pundits can’t wait for hindsight so they can blame the opposition. But right now, we are still in the center of this storm. We don’t know the right answer — and we never do.

The hospital staff on the front lines, the governors steering their individual states, and the scientists and artists trying to invent what does not yet exist — at best, they will only find working answers for this moment. Everyone yelling that they have a sure way simply doesn’t have the power or position to know they don’t.

The way we find good working solutions is together. That can sound like a Hallmark card, but scientific consensus and artistic critique and political compromise are the forced conversations America uses to acknowledge the human imagination — that the future is in our hands. Covid-19 has shown us how much we can change our behavior in the moment. Wielding that potential is an awesome responsibility.

And maybe, just maybe, you are entering a world that recognizes that now, instead of one that will only tell you how it’s been done before.

We see more clearly because of the pandemic. The way this country’s schools had to rethink classrooms and graduations and then find answers in their own unique ways was infinitely better than yet another routine of academic caps in the air. It was precisely the artistic struggle we need right now.

We have produced an exceptional new civilization designed to ensure we recognize uncertainty — a lack of precedent — and you are the first generation to fully understand that. It’s your advantage and your burden.

We will learn to live with this uncertainty, recognize it, and embrace the anxiety that comes with it — just as our argumentative founders intended.

In uncertainty, comes that which makes us most human. In our uncertainty, comes the opportunity to do something new.

Congratulations, Class of 2020, on your extraordinary future.