Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Response by Lord Parekh
Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen: I am most
grateful to the University of Essex for conferring upon me the degree of
Doctor of the University. The University of Essex is one of our finest
universities. It is ably led by Professor Ivor Crewe, whom I have known
and admired for his academic distinction, genuine humility and great
integrity. Over the years I have had the pleasure of getting to know
many members of staff in the Departments of Government, Philosophy and
Sociology. All this adds to my deep sense of gratitude for this honour.
I must also thank my good friend Dr Michael Freeman for his most
generous oration. I think it was Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest
philosophers of the twentieth century, who once said that there was one
great pleasure in life which we mortals are condemned never to enjoy,
and that is the pleasure of reading your own obituary. Michael Freeman
has given me a foretaste of that inaccessible pleasure, and all I can
say in response is that I don’t find it entirely disagreeable !
I must also congratulate all those young men and
women who have received their degrees this afternoon, and I should also
like to congratulate their families, and their parents, for their
support and encouragement, without which the young graduands would not
have made such a success of their academic career. The graduates of
today are going to enter a highly complex, volatile and globalised
world. The world is changing with such bewildering speed that one is not
quite sure how to cope with it. Our identities are constantly in flux,
and we cannot rely on inherited definitions and norms to structure them.
We see our poorly-talented leaders act in a manner, from time to time,
by which we are deeply embarrassed, and of which we are sometimes
ashamed. We are constantly confronted with vivid images of human
suffering in distant parts of the world, which deeply trouble us, agonise us, and about which we helplessly feel that we are able to do
very little.
Our problem, the problem of the young graduates
today, is how to lead a decent and sane life in such a world, which is
constantly on the move. How to be at peace with ourselves and how to
ensure that when we look back at our lives in thirty or forty years
time, we are not overwhelmed by a deep sense of regret or failure. There
is no moral formula for a good life; but if the young graduates of today
can take away three important ideas with them, and endeavour to live by
them, I don’t think they will go terribly wrong.
The first of these ideas which I would like them
to take away with them, is the capacity for self-reflection, or the
ability to conduct a silent dialogue with oneself. This is what thinking
is ultimately about. In one of those memorable Platonic dialogues,
Socrates has a wonderful remark to make. He is analysing the nature of
thinking, and he says that at the end of the day he would go home, close
the doors of his house and open those of his mind, and set up an
internal drama, an internal stage, where he was both the actor and the
critical audience. Thinking is an activity in which we unfold an
internal stage, and we interrogate ourselves, both as an actor and as
audience. The capacity for self-reflection is the basis of conscience
and sanity, and guards us against the temptation to do much evil. It is
thoughtless people who do far more evil than the wicked.
The second idea I would like the young graduates
to take away is the capacity to sympathise with the suffering of our
fellow human beings. Millions in our society and elsewhere lack many of
the opportunities that we customarily take for granted. Their suffering,
their humiliations, their despair, address us with a great sense of
poignancy. Not to respond to it is to be callous, and morally coarse.
Just as a religious man constantly lives in the awareness of God, and
sees his thoughts and feelings as offerings to God, a truly moral man
lives in the constant and instant awareness of other human beings around
him. He asks how his actions affect other people, and whether they will
increase, relieve or at least attenuate human suffering. This is not so
much a question of donating money to OXFAM, or to victims of disaster.
Being moral is a way of structuring every aspect of our life, every
thought and every feeling, such that it is suffused with the response to
the sufferings of others. It informs, for example, where I should buy my
daily newspaper – from a corner shop which might go bankrupt without the
custom of people like me, or from a W H Smith or from a supermarket to
which my custom might make little difference. Moral awareness also
informs where I should buy my shirt – what kind of shirt ? Manufactured
in the United States or in a poor country where it might relieve the
suffering of a few ? And at a more mundane level, moral consciousness
also affects whether I should walk down to my office or take the car,
and add to the environmental pollution. In short, when every act of ours
and every feeling and every thought is suffused with the thought of
others, it acquires a particular kind of vitality and depth. Obviously
we cannot live up to this highly demanding ideal. But if we can take it
as our loadstar and use it as a moral compass, we have a good chance of
leading a worthy life, and of being at peace with ourselves.
The third idea which I would like young graduates
to take away with them is as follows. In life we need a judicious dose
of scepticism. We live in a world in which we are constantly
manipulated, whether it be by advertising companies, or the newspapers
or the visual media or the politicians. Everyone seems to have a design
on our souls. We are not only fed misleading information but are also
channelled, pushed, coxed, nudged into feeling and thinking in certain
ways. All of this violates our innermost selves, and makes it difficult
to maintain our sense of integrity. How do we respond to this kind of
world and how do we live within it where everyone is wanting to have a
go at our integrity and our souls, and to manipulate us to think and
feel in certain ways? Corrosive cynicism, distrusting everybody around
us, is not the answer, and is just as corrupting as blind surrender to
the machinations of our manipulators. What we need is watchfulness, a
healthy dose of scepticism of all claims to truth and infallibility, and
an uncompromising rejection of all peddlers of ‘correct answers’. In an
age in which science has led us to think that everything is possible, we
are in danger of becoming even more gullible than our forefathers, which
explains the paradox that the more scientific the age, the more gullible
its people, because the bounds of possibility can be stretched
infinitely. If we can negotiate our way past blind trust and equally
blind distrust, and learn to view the world with a measure of judicious
scepticism, we can be reasonably confident of guarding ourselves against
unhealthy corporate interests and unscrupulous politicians.
I hope what I have said makes at least some sense
to some of you, if not now, then when you are my age, or at least the
Chancellor’s age. I wish you all, new graduates, a fulfilling and
meaningful life in years to come, and I also wish this distinguished
university yet greater success in its pursuit of excellence. Thank you.
Bhikhu Parekh
9 July 2003