A Commencement Address

A Commencement Address ¶

Joseph Wood Krutch

Delivered at the University of Arizona, June 1, 1960. Published in A Krutch Omnibus

Editor's note:

Joseph Wood Krutch delivered this address at the University of Arizona on June 1, 1960. It is, in a sense, a commencement speech about commencement speeches — a warning that the platitudes of the great age of science were missing something, and that what they were missing was the inner life of the person being commenced.<br>Last Friday, May 15, 2026, Eric Schmidt — the former CEO of Google, now one of the principal financiers of AI infrastructure — delivered a commencement address at the same university. He told the graduates that AI would touch every profession, every classroom, every relationship; that when someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. The graduates booed him.

The two speeches were sixty-six years apart, on the same stage, and they are almost exactly reversed in their concerns. Krutch worried that the worship of power and technique was draining the moral and philosophical substance out of the human being — that we were learning to ask only what was useful and what was usual, and forgetting how to ask what was right. Schmidt's speech assumes the question is settled: the rocket is leaving, the only choice is to get on board. Where Krutch told the class to "be, if necessary, a lonely candle which can throw its beams far in a naughty world," Schmidt told them, in effect, that no candle is necessary because the floodlights are already on.

It's hard, reading Krutch now, not to feel that the booing was not really about Eric Schmidt. It was about the absence — across most of public life, and certainly across most commencement stages — of the kind of philosophical seriousness Krutch took for granted his audience would tolerate for forty minutes on a June evening in Tucson. He spends paragraphs distinguishing social morality from personal honor; he quotes Swift and Oppenheimer; he asks what a textbook of psychology has quietly conceded by defining "moral" as "in accord with the laws and customs of his society." It's an ordinary speech from a culture that still expected its old men to think out loud about good and evil in front of the young.

Krutch's speech is below.

When an old man has an opportunity to address a youthful group on such a traditional occasion as this, it is certain that many platitudes will fall on impatient ears. You will then not be surprised if I begin with some very familiar platitudes. My excuse for doing this is that I would like in the end to make at least one deduction from these platitudes which is not as commonly emphasized as I think it should be. Unfortunately, however, the platitudes must come first.

This, as you are well aware without being told as often as you have been told, is a great age of science; also one in which science has come to mean more and more the techniques for acquiring power. We call it the power to control the forces of nature, but we are becoming increasingly aware that it means also power over human life including, unfortunately, the power to destroy life on an unprecedented scale—on so large a scale that it may just possibly involve the destruction of ourselves as well as of our opponents.

In one way or another these platitudes will be the theme of a large proportion of the commencement addresses delivered this week in hundreds of schools and colleges. Thousands of young men and women will be urged to devote themselves to science as the great need of our time and urged to do their part in making our nation strong. At the same time a lesser but still immense number of young people will be warned of the dangers as well as the promises of technology and not a few will be urged that philosophy, ethics, religion and the arts are an essential part of the human being and that we neglect them at our peril.

Those who stress the dangers as well as the promises of technology are not always either querulous old men or professors of the humanities, though the latter are sometimes suspected of merely defending their shrinking classes. Among those who sound a warning are some who have been themselves very deeply involved in expanding science and technology. Here, for instance, is a singularly brief, trenchant statement from a great atomic physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer:

Nuclear weapons and all the machinery of war surrounding us now haunt our imaginations with an apocalyptic vision that could well become a terrible reality: namely, the disappearance of man as a species from the surface of the earth. It is quite possible. But what is more probable, more immediate, and in my opinion equally terrifying, is the prospect that man will survive while losing his precious heritage, his civilization and his very humanity.

Now what is this “humanity” which Mr. Oppenheimer is afraid we may lose? Is it simply poetry and music and art? Can we keep from losing it by...