David Brooks’ Speech at UChicago’s Inaugural Class Day 2017 (Transcript)

That’s what I call living for something larger than self.

The Temptation to Retreat

When I realized what was going on, I confessed I was tempted to do what millennials at other schools are always doing. I decided I would feel triggered and unsafe, lead a campaign to get myself disinvited. All the historical traumas of being a lower-middle-range celebrity came back to me. I retreated to my safe space, which is under the bar at Jimmy’s.

But since none of you did your generational duty and got me blocked from this gig, I’ve decided to go ahead. Now, Chicago is new to this game, so I should note there are certain traditions to these kinds of occasions. At occasions like this, a major university asks a person who has achieved fantastic career success to give a speech telling you that career success is not that important.

At occasions like this, major universities often ask billionaires to give speeches telling you how much they learned from failure. From this, you can take away the lesson that failure seems really great if you happen to be Steve Jobs or J.K. Rowling. Then, we speakers are supposed to give you a few minutes of completely garbage advice: listen to your inner voice, be true to yourself, follow your passion, your future is limitless.

First, my generation gives you a mountain of debt. Then, we give you career-derailing guidelines that will prevent you from ever paying it off. That’s why when I’m asked to speak at these sorts of things, I always try to tell the graduates that since you’ve never graduated from college before, you may not know the etiquette. Tomorrow, when you get your degree, it’s always nice to tip President Zimmer $10 or $20 just to show he did a good job.

Glittering Futures Ahead

It’s also nice to slip the class day speaker a few bills: $2,000 or $3,000, $5,000 for the econ majors. On these occasions, I always try to tell students about the glittering futures in front of them. Within just a few short years, many of you will be sleeping on your parents’ couches while working for a completely dysfunctional NGO. Others of you will have soul-crushing jobs as corporate consultants, working on PowerPoint presentations past midnight at the Topeka Comfort Inn.

I’m here to help you navigate these exciting possibilities. I’m here to help you take advantage of the skills you learned at the University of Chicago. You learned how to dominate classroom discussion while doing none of the reading. You learned, as now, to stare at your professors with looks of complete rapt attention, even though secretly you are completely asleep.

I’m here to urge lives of public service, working on Capitol Hill for fine congressmen, bringing the nation’s top leaders coffee and sexual tension. I’m here to urge you to serve the world’s poorest peoples in ways that will look good on your resume, organizing anti-malarial bed drives while rocking Jimmy Choo’s at Goldman Sachs. I’m here because as someone who now teaches at Yale, I thought you should have some sense of what it would have been like if you’d been accepted there. But ultimately, I’m not here to give you some standard speech.

This is Chicago. This is the only time in my life I’ll get to address the graduating class of my own school at the place that formed me down to my bones. I confess I didn’t enjoy every day I spent here. I majored in history and celibacy.

Moments of Intensity

I learned to walk through campus while awkwardly averting my eyes to anybody I might know. But like all of you, I was changed fundamentally in this place. And the older I get, the more I become aware of how this place shaped me. I’m 34 years out from the college, and I feel more influenced by the University of Chicago today than I did on the day I graduated.

So today, I’d really like to talk to you about two things: the things Chicago gave me, which I’ve carried through life, and the things Chicago failed to give me, which I had to learn on my own. When I think back on my time here, I remember certain moments of great intensity. There was one very odd moment during my first year when I was reading a book called “The Death of Tragedy” by Nietzsche in a carrel in the A-level of the Regenstein.

I don’t know what it was—the driving semi-insane power of Nietzsche’s thought, the overwrought or intoxicating nature of his prose—but somehow while reading that book down there in the basement, reality seemed to slip outside its bounds. I lost all sense of where I was or who I was or how much time was passing or whether it was passing at all. Hours flew by, and I was just buried inside that book. I was not so much as reading it; I was immersed in the torrents of its prose and in the fury of its ideas.

I was just sort of dissolved, lifted out of myself, transported, subsumed in some sort of trance or odd reverence that’s a spell cast by a semi-crazy, long-dead mind. There I was in the shabby carrel on the basement level of the ugliest building on God’s green earth. And I was experiencing something close to transcendence. And when I awoke from that state, I looked around, startled and blinking, shocked to re-entering the world of the 20th century and to real life.

Intellectual Debates and Passions

I never really became a Nietzsche fan, but it was exciting to know that the ideas of some dead genius could transport me and give me a glimmer to a higher realm. There were other intensities during my time here. There was the intense arguing with all my friends about bullshitty subjects during the dining hall, hour upon hour. There were intense pseudo-intellectual debates with graduate students at Jimmy’s.

There was the intensity of serious moviegoing at Doc Films. And most of all, there was a certain intensity to class, mostly at Cobb Hall. In those days, it was pure great books for the first two years. And our professors didn’t just teach them; they proselytized them.

Some of the old German refugees from World War II were still around then. And they held the belief with a religious fervor that the magic keys to the kingdom were in these books. The mysteries of life and how to live well were there for the seizing, for those who read well and thought deeply. There was a legendary professor named Carl Weintraub teaching Western Civ then.

Years later, when he was nearing his death, he wrote to my classmate Carol Quillen about the experience he had teaching those books. Teaching Western Civ, Weintraub wrote, “seems to confront me all too often with moments when I feel like screaming at the students”:

“Suddenly, oh God, my dear student, why cannot you see that this matter is a real, real matter, often a matter of the very being for the person, for the historical men and women you are looking at, or are supposed to be looking at? I hear the student answers and the statements that sound like mere words, mere verbal formulations to me, but that do not have the sense of pain or joy or accomplishment or worry about them, if they ought to have, if they were truly informed by the live problems and situations of the human being back then for whom these matters were real.

The way the disembodied words of students come forth can make me cry, and the failure of the student to probe for the open wounds and such behind the text makes me increasingly furious. If I do not come to feel any love which Pericles feels for his city, how can I understand the funeral oration? If I cannot fathom anything of the power of the drive derived from thinking he has a special mission, what can I understand of Socrates? How can one grasp anything about the problem of the Galatian community without sensing in one’s bones the problem of worrying about God’s acceptance?”

The Tragedy of Teaching

Sometimes when I have spent an hour or more pouring all my enthusiasm and sensitivities into an effort to tell these stories in the fullness in which I see and experience them, I feel drained and exhausted. I think it works on the student, but I just do not really know. It is a tragedy of teaching, sometimes, that the professors pour more into the class than the students are able to receive at that moment. But the truth is, with intense teaching, it is more like planting.

Those teachers like Weintraub were inserting seeds that would burst forth years or decades later when the realities of adult life called them forth. I hated Edmund Burke when I read him here freshman year, but later he exploded in my mind and has become one of the great guides of my life. I was blandly indifferent to Augustine when I encountered him. It was only later that I understood the power of his loves, the wrestling with his own soul, and the need to be careful about what you love because you become what you love.

Chicago gave me glimpses of the mountain ranges of human existence that I had never imagined before. It gave me a set of desires, higher desires than any I had had. In the first place, I longed to know how to see. Seeing reality seems like a straightforward thing.

You just look out and see the world. But anybody who is around politics or many other arenas of our public life knows how many people see the world with a distorting mirror, how many see only what they want to see or what they can see by the filtering light of their depression, their fear, their insecurity, their narcissism. Sometimes I think the whole disaster of the Trump presidency is because of a breakdown in intellectual virtue, a breakdown in America’s ability to face evidence clearly, to pay due respect to the concrete contours of reality. These intellectual virtues may seem elitist, but once a country tolerates dishonesty, incuriosity, and intellectual laziness, everything else falls apart.

The Greatest Thing a Human Soul Can Do

John Ruskin once wrote:

“The more I think of it, I find this conclusion more impressed upon me, that the greatest thing a human soul ever does is to see something and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”

At Chicago, I encountered so many writers who could see so purely and carefully: Shakespeare, Hume, Socrates, George Eliot, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt. I met so many professors and students who could weigh evidence and who didn’t tolerate intellectual shabbiness. There aroused in me a desire to have that virtue, the ability to see clearly and face unpleasant facts. Then, there was the second yearning, which was the yearning to be wise. I really couldn’t tell you what wisdom consists of, and I still can’t really give you a concrete definition. But we all know wisdom when we see it.

There’s a deep humanity and gentleness and stability to a wise person. That person can perceive with love and generosity the foibles of another heart. That person can grasp the nub of any situation, see around corners, and has developed an intuitive awareness of what will go together and what will never go together. That wisdom, I imagine, comes from paying deep and loving attention to the people around you.

The Building Blocks of Wisdom

It comes from many hours of solitary reflection. It comes from reading the greats. It comes from getting out of your own century, thinking outside your own assumptions, and embarking on a great lifelong journey toward understanding. That sort of humane wisdom was admired here.

And we wouldn’t have told each other this because it would have been too pretentious. But all those bullshitty dinner table conversations and Barth school conversations about the great ideas were attempts to put together the building blocks of that kind of wisdom. They were attempts to put ourselves together so we could be of use. They were attempts to imitate the penetrating insight of Hume, the smile of Voltaire, the gentle guidance of a dozen professors whose names you may or may not know.

Some living, Nathan Tarcov, Joseph Stern, some of my old professors who are now dead. Third, Chicago gave me a yearning for ideals. It is sometimes said that we humans seek happiness. We seek fulfillment of our desires, but of course that’s not true.

The Yearning for Struggle and Ideals

Peace and happiness is great for a while, but after a bit, it gets boring. What our human emotions seem to require, William James once wrote, is “the sight of struggle going on.” The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to the uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through it alive and then turning back on its success to pursue another rare and arduous journey.

This is the sort of thing that inspires us. James summed it up pretty well. Human existence is the same eternal thing: some man or woman’s pains in pursuit of some exalted ideal.

I recently saw the movie “Hidden Figures” about some African American women who served the cause of space exploration and racial justice. Those women weren’t exactly happy during the movie or the story told in the movie, but there was a spiritual intensity serving their two great ideals, and that’s what we want in all our lives: intensity struggling for the good. If nothing else, Chicago and the great books presented us with the high ideals in profusion: the patriotism of Pericles, the commitment of Fermi, the American nationalism of Alexander Hamilton. I certainly wasn’t smart enough to come up with my own philosophy or set my own ideals, but I could try on the different ideals passed down to us from our betters, and I could see which one seemed to fit, and I could join their parade.

The Yearnings of the Soul

They say that life here is about the life of the mind, but that’s an injustice. The mind and the soul are not so easily separated. These yearnings that I’ve just described, which are implanted in me here—to see the world clearly, to be wise, to pursue ideals—these weren’t really yearnings of the mind. They were yearnings from deeper, from the part of us that can only be called the soul.

We don’t talk about this much in our secular culture, but there’s a part of each of us that doesn’t care about Facebook likes or annual income or even how popular you are. This is the part of us that yearns for permanent things: for beauty, truth, justice, transcendence, and home. This is the part of us that is morally valuable, that in each of us is worthy of dignity and respect. The poet Rilke had an education like ours.

He wrote:

“I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish. I have an inner self of which I was ignorant. Everything goes thither now. What happens to it there, I do not know.”

I’ll never be as deep as Rilke, but I was deeper when I left Chicago than when I arrived. And more important, I graduated from the University of Chicago with a sense of my soul and its yearnings. And there’s still a lot of that that goes on today.

The Enduring Spirit of Chicago

Two Saturdays ago, my wife Anne and I got together with the philosophy professor Candace Vogler in Cobb Hall and led a seminar under the sponsorship of the Hyde Park Institute. It was a beautiful spring day, and we all spent it inside, talking about character and spiritual growth, about Aquinas, Beethoven, and Viktor Frankl. We took a lunch break, and instead of going outside to enjoy the sun, some of the students had their sandwiches inside and had an internal debate amongst themselves about the immateriality of the soul. Only at Chicago.

And I saw that day that this place is still wonderfully itself. I felt some of the old intensity of purpose. There is still the same honest and unironic hunger for wisdom. There is still the willingness to put your ideas out there and argue and listen.

There is still that ardent searching for truth and a willingness to be silly in pursuit of it. Chicago gives you a taste for mountaineering, for climbing up toward the summits of human existence. Afterwards, you’re never quite content living in the flatlands, living solely in the stuff that gets written about on Twitter, or even in the newspapers or talked about on TV. Many years ago, a man named Robert Maynard Hutchins bet this institution’s future on one proposition: that if you put the big ideas in front of a bunch of 20-year-olds, you can change their life forever.

It completely worked for me. And this change that happens in those of us who went here is a very practical change. We have a telos crisis in this country.

The Telos Crisis

Many people do not have a clear sense of their goals and their own purpose. They don’t know what they are shooting for or what fundamental convictions should guide their behavior. They’ve been trained in hyper-specialized research universities that tell them how to do things but don’t ask them to think about why they should do them, that don’t give them a forum to ask the questions: What is my best life? What am I called to do?

Why am I here? From college, they enter the world we all live in, which is a busy world. The flow of 1,000 emails, the tasks of setting up a career and family—these things distract from the great questions of purpose and meaning. I find that many people haven’t even been given a moral vocabulary to help them think these things through.

They haven’t been surrounded with a functional moral ecology and a set of ideals to guide and orient them. And this produces a great emotional fragility. Our friend Nietzsche said that “he who has a why to live for can endure any how.” But if you don’t know what your purpose is, then the first failure or setback can totally throw you into a crisis and a total collapse.

I see this among my former students, and I see it over and over again in people in their mid-20s. The young person without a conscious purpose graduates in hopes that by piling success on success, he can fill the void within. He becomes what the writer Matias Dalsgaard calls “the insecure overachiever.” Such a person, Dalsgaard writes, “must have no stable or solid foundation to build upon, yet nonetheless tries to build his way out of his problem.”

The Reckoning Always Comes

It is an impossible situation. You can’t compensate for having a foundation made of quicksand by building a new story on top of it. But this person takes no notice and hopes that the problem down in the foundation won’t be found out if only the construction work keeps going. But, of course, the reckoning always comes.

It produces a crisis, depression, the sadness. David Foster Wallace noticed it back in 1996. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he wrote. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways.

It manifests itself in a kind of lostness.” This is a generation that has “an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values,” he wrote. You can see the fruits of this telos crisis in the rising suicide rates, the rising drug addiction rates. You can see it in social distrust.

You can see it in isolation and in the lives of people who are adrift. The fact that you went to Chicago means you will always have an orientation that is slightly different than the mainstream culture, slightly countercultural. You’ll have a harder time being shallow. You may not know your life’s purpose or your calling, but you know that the mountain world exists up there and that you can explore it and that the answers can be found up there in the Museum of Beautiful Things.

And that knowledge itself will be a source of great comfort and stability. Life at Chicago is not always filled with day-to-day happiness, but it gives you a glimpse of a cosmic happiness, glimpses of understanding the long story we’re all involved in. And if you have cosmic joy, because you know this story is ultimately about something meaningful and holy and good, you can bear the day-to-day miseries a lot better. So that’s the good side of what I got here, and what I hope you got here.

What Chicago Failed to Provide

Let me finish by speaking very briefly about what the University of Chicago did not give to me and where it failed me. Now here I speak provisionally because I’m going to start talking about the school as it was in the 1980s, and a lot of the problems may have been fixed by now. It’s traditional for alumni to say that the college was better in my own day. As both an alum and a trustee, I can tell you that’s nonsense here.

I’m here to tell you that Chicago is way better now than it was when I was here, and way better than it’s ever been. But in my era, and maybe today, Chicago did not prepare its students for intimacy. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to see that the capacity for intimacy is one of the more crucial talents for a fulfilling life. That’s because the primary challenges of life are not knowledge challenges.

They are motivational challenges. It’s not only knowing what is good, but it being completely and passionately devoted and loving what is good. It’s about passionately loving your spouse and family in a way that brings out their loveliness. It’s about loving your vocation with a fierce dedication.

The Chains That Set You Free

It’s about loving your community with a serving heart. It’s about loving your philosophy or your God with humble fervor. A fulfilled life is moving from open options to sweet compulsions. It’s about saying no to a thousand things so you can say a few big yeses to the things you are deeply bound to.

It’s about loving things so much that you’re willing to chain yourself down to them. The things that you chain yourself to are the things that set you free. And it’s not only loving platonically; it’s actually and intimately living out the day-to-day realities of your fierce love. It’s intimately sharing the same bathroom, getting up every day, and writing on the same damn laptop.

It’s about mastering all the phases of intimacy, being open to that first enticing glance, having the energy to really learn about those people, like a person on the first date who learns how much in common and treats these things as amazing miracles. You don’t like foie gras? Neither do I. Amazing, we should get married.

It’s about having the courage to engage in the reciprocal cycle of ever greater vulnerability. It’s about enduring faithfully when there’s some crisis and you’re not sure you believe in this relationship, this career, or this institution. It’s about forgiveness for the betrayals committed against you and asking forgiveness when you have let down your friends, your profession, or your spouse. When you make an intimate connection to a spouse, a friend, a profession, a community, or a faith, you are, as Leon Wieseltier puts it, “consenting to be truly known, which is an ominous prospect.”

The Skills of Intimacy

And so one needs the skills of intimacy to live well in such close proximity. One needs the skill of intimacy to achieve the kind of fusion that leads to real joy: when a couple becomes one loving entity, when you and your vocation have merged into a single identity, when your love for your God or your philosophy is a complete surrender. What I’m describing here are emotional arts. They are not natural, but have to be acquired by repeated vulnerability, commitment, and experience.

When I was here at Chicago, we students by and large did not excel at intimacy. We were artful dodgers with a superb ability to slip out of situations at moments when deep heart-to-heart connections might come. We were in the business at age 20 or 21 of trying to make a good impression, so of course we weren’t going to show the unattractive sides of ourselves, which is an absolute prerequisite for intimacy. We were busy with our work and our books and our student activities, and we told ourselves idiotically that we didn’t have time for deep relationships.

We too often approached each other shrouded in what Candace Vogler calls an “edifice of thought.” When confronted with uncertainty or difficulty, we tended to revert back to our strengths, which were our IQs, our thinking and talking skills. We sought to be masters of life rather than surrendering to emotions, which are so much out of our control. And the university didn’t help.

An Emotionally Avoidant Atmosphere

The atmosphere at Chicago then was emotionally avoidant from the top down. Too much of life was defined by what could be discussed in the classroom, and everything else just sort of fell by the wayside. There wasn’t enough dancing or drinking or any of the other activities that make diffidence possible. There wasn’t enough joint physical activity.

Too much emphasis was put on scholarship and professionalism, and those things were defined by a pose of detachment, specialization, critical thinking, aloofness, and the mythical belief in cool reasoning. Too much time was spent studying, which is a solitary activity. I left Chicago better at reading books than at reading people.

I did not have the eyes to see the beauty in people who were so open-hearted they had nothing particularly interesting to say. I didn’t know how to handle the deepest and scariest intimacies. I’m hoping I’m a little better now, and I’ve had some graduate tutors in this. Life will offer you a diminishing number of opportunities to show how smart you are.

A Curriculum of Intimacy

It will offer an infinite number of occasions that require kindness, mercy, grace, sensitivity, sympathy, generosity, and love. Life will require that you widen your repertoire of emotions, that you throw yourself headlong into other people, that you take the curriculum of intimacy. If you haven’t mastered it yet, I ask you to turn to this task intentionally now. So I’m asking one final thing of you members of the Class of 2017.

Tomorrow you will graduate, and that’s a great accomplishment. But before you do, I hope that tonight you will do one thing to cap your education. Go to the Regenstein with a special friend in your life. Find a meaningful spot to connect and share with each other from the heart. Thank you, and God bless you.

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