Distinguished Speakers Series - Salman Rushdie

Undergraduate Commencement Speech

Sunday, May 7th, 2006
By Salman Rushdie

The great French novelist Gustave Flaubert – I hope you will not find it insulting or offensive that I have immediately uttered the “F” word. France, I mean, not Flaubert. Well then, the very great and very French novelist Flaubert, in his last novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, published in 1881, tells us of the dangers of too much book-learning. The heroes, a pair of foolish, retired clerks, try to run their lives by information gleaned from how-to books, with comic and catastrophic consequences. As you have all spent several years learning things from books, it may strike you as inappropriate that I should commend to you this seditious foreign text containing so radical a denunciation of such studies. Nevertheless, I do commend it to you, if only because of the appendix which Flaubert attached to the main body of the story, the justly celebrated Dictionary of Received Ideas. Flaubert was fascinated by – how to say this delicately? – by the general stupidity of most human beings by their ability to absorb and parrot clichés and other nuggets of fools’ gold as if they were the wisdom of the gods. In this dictionary, he offers us some fine instances of what my friend the British novelist Martin Amis, quoting Saul Bellow, who in turn was quoting Wyndham Lewis, once called the Moronic Inferno. Here are a few excerpts:

AMERICA: Fine example of injustice. Columbus discovered it and it is named after Amerigo Vespucci. If it weren’t for the discovery of America, we shouldn’t have syphilis…Praise it all the same, especially if you’ve never been there.

ARTISTS: All charlatans…what artists do shouldn’t be called work.

AUTHORS: One should “know a few authors.” No need to know their names.

BASES (OF SOCIETY): i.e. property, the family, religion, respect for authority. Show anger if these are attacked.

BEETHOVEN: Don’t pronounce Beat-oven.

BRUNETTES: Hotter than blondes.

CELEBRITIES: Find out the smallest details of their private lives, so that you can run them down.

CENSORSHIP: A good thing, whatever people say.

DEVOTION: Complain how little other people show.

DOCTRINAIRES: Despise them. Why? Nobody can say.

ENGLISHWOMEN: Express surprise that they can have pretty children.

FRENCH: The greatest people in the world.

GLOBE: Genteel way of referring to a woman’s breast.

HOMER: Never existed.

IDIOTS: Those who think differently from you.

IMAGINATION: Be on your guard against it.

INNOVATION: Always dangerous.

ITALY: Is very disappointing.

JUSTICE: Never worry about it.

KORAN: Book by Mohammed, which is all about women.

LIBERTY: “Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” We have all the liberty we need. “Liberty is not license.” (Conservative saying.)

STUDENTS: Never study.

YOUTH: What a wonderful thing it is!

Enough. As you see, life was very different in 1881. Or – let me clarify that statement, because irony can be misunderstood, and I would not wish to be misunderstood, indeed, such a thing has never happened to me before, and I hope it never will – life in 1881 was not so very different at all.

In Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, the hero is constantly beset by what he calls “reality instructors.” Many of these are women. Some of them are not. All of them constantly tell him what, and how, and indeed when to think. The questions they seek to answer are the usual mighty inquiries, into how life is, and what women want, and whether justice on this earth can or cannot be general, and if Romanticism is “spilt religion,” and why one’s wife might run away with one’s best friend, even if one’s best friend had only one leg, and so on. “They want to teach you – to punish you – with the lessons of the real,” Herzog mourns. On all sides, he is assailed by “the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about inauthencity and Forlornness.” Moses Herzog, losing his mind as well as his wife, laments. “I can’t accept this foolish dreariness.”

The real world, to which you are about to return after these years in Florida, is full of wonders and brilliance, I am happy to report, but you will also find yourself beset from every quarter by dreariness and folly.

You may come across genuinely original minds, like the Indian Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen, who argues that when we define our identities too narrowly – in terms of race, or religion, or class, or nation, or tribe – we “miniaturise” ourselves, and make conflict and violence more likely. On the other hand, you may encounter a rival professor, in many ways a counter-professor, Professor Samuel L. Huntington, telling you that we face a “clash of civilisations,” in other words, encouraging you to miniaturize yourself in exactly the way Professor Sen proposes you do not.

How to tell who is right and who is wrong? Are we plural selves who may have much in common with those we are asked to perceive as our Others, or are we singularities, closed to one another, hostile, and never more aggressive than when we believe we are being victimized? Who shall we follow, and – an even harder question – how shall we lead?

You are, or so the dictionary of contemporary received ideas tells us, “the leaders of tomorrow.” If you look in to the subject of leadership, you will be offered a great deal of reality instruction, from the unknown satirist who described a leader as someone who turns his back on the people and then claims they are all standing behind him, via the ruthlessness of Machiavelli’s Prince, in which you will be told that fear is a more effective tool of governance than love, to the President of the United States, who has memorably said that “a leadership [sic] is someone who brings people together,” and that, in life, you can’t have these things both ways, you can’t “take the high horse and then claim the low road.”

How to distinguish the smart lesson from the dumb utterance? If this is the sort of question you have already been asking yourself, I congratulate you. If it’s a line of inquiry you find to be of no value, then party on, dudes. If, however, you find yourself somewhere in between these two poles, then perhaps the following may be of some little use.

Thinking for yourself, the good idea I am here to recommend is not a “given.” You will find yourselves herded in many directions, encouraged or bullied to be a good member of your various groups, your family, your country, your profession, your social class, your gender, your fellow baseball fans, your faith. There is a spirit abroad in the world that values collective responsibility more highly than individual liberty. You will accordingly be urged to receive, and follow, the ideas of one or more groups which will claim you, and which will all demand that you value your membership of that group more than any other: that, if offered a single ticket to the World Series on your wife’s birthday you should put your loyalty to your marriage above your love of your team; or, the other way around; or, that in a conflict between your religious faith and your country, you should answer the demands of God and reject those of the state. We live in a time of competing group thought, and our ideas of right and wrong, of what is permissible and what must not be permitted, are shaped by such thinking to a degree so alarming that it may have stopped being funny.

In 1938, E.M. Forster wrote this, in “Two Cheers for Democracy.” “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Which is to say that “elective affinities” – Goethe’s term for the allegiances we choose, rather than those which are foisted upon us – are the basis upon which each of us may construct a valuable, moral, and free self, if only we find in ourselves the courage to do so. And that it may be more instructive to take a look at the ideas and behaviour of the unorthodox, the rebels and refuseniks of the world, than to admire those who have marched along with, or even at the head of, the crowd. In 1633 Galileo Galilei was forced by the Catholic Church to recant his heretical notion that the earth went round the sun, an idea it took the Catholic Church a mere 359 years to accept. (On October 31st, 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for Galileo’s mistreatment.) At the height of the power of the Soviet Union, it was the dissidents, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the rest – who told us the truth. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in jail for standing up against apartheid, but emerged to change his country, and the world.

If individual freedom is what you’re interested in, then heterodoxy, the ability to reject received ideas and stand against the orthodoxies of your time, may help you find your way there.

The power of orthodoxy has not diminished. Governments still routinely accuse their opponents of lacking patriotism, religious leaders are quick to anathematize their critics, corporations dislike whistleblowers and mavericks, the range of ideas available through the mass media diminishes all the time. Yet right and wrong, good and evil, are not determined by power, or by adherence to this or that interest group. The struggle to know how to act for the best is a struggle that never ceases. Don’t follow leaders: look out, instead, for the oddballs who insist on marching out of step.

Thank you for listening, and good luck to you all.