ON LIVING WITH ONE'S TROUBLES

I am going to start with something personal: I am very sorry to be saying goodbye to a class that my wife and I have come to know so well during this past semester. However, I have hopes that we may have a chance of meeting many of you again. Grinnellians are travelers. We ourselves were already travelers before we became Grinnellians. People in general are traveling more and more today. This is one of the more encouraging signs of the times; because one of the human race's first needs in our time is that the different sections of it should get to know each other better.

I have had the pleasure of having a number of discussions with a number of groups from among the student body of this college. This has given me an opportunity of learning something of what is on your minds.

I am conscious of a difference in expectation between your generation and mine at the time when my generation was your age. My generation were like animals on the way to the slaughter-house. We did not know what was going to happen to us; we did not foresee the coming of the First World War. Your generation, like the one between yours and mine, is conscious that it is living in a critical time.

The time is critical, but the outcome of the crisis is not predetermined in advance. You are not doomed to die a premature death in a world war. My generation was not doomed to that either, though, as it happened, about half the members of my class at the University had been killed by 1917. This need not have happened. The First World War might have been avoided. The Civil War in this country might have been avoided. These wars could have been avoided if the people who bore the responsibility had made different choices - had made different decisions.

You have the same freedom of choice. Human freedom is not unlimited, but we do have enough freedom to be able to choose, as the Book of Deuteronomy puts it, between life and good on the one side and death and evil on the other. But freedom of choice carries with it a responsibility for the choice that one makes.

In your generation, a responsibility, such as no minority has ever borne before, will rest on the shoulders of you in this country and on the shoulders of your Russian contemporaries. This responsibility is a joint Russo-American responsibility. Between them, the United States and the Soviet Union have about 80 per cent of the power in the World today, though together, you are no more than a small minority of the human race. But 80 per cent of the power means 80 per cent of the responsibility. Between you, you have the destiny of the human race in your hands. The scientists tell us that the entire surface of this planet will continue to be habitable for human life for another 2000 million years, unless we choose to make it uninhabitable. This means that seven or eight hundred million still unborn generations are appealing to you and your Russian contemporaries, in your generation, to allow there future generations to enjoy the gift of life that you are enjoying. You and your Russian contemporaries h ave a joint responsibility for ensuring the future of the human race at a time in which the human race is in danger of bringing upon itself a catastrophe of immeasurable magnitude, such as never before.

Americans and Russians have an identical responsibility today, but your have different traditions and habits of behavior. Americans are traditionally men of action, When you meet a troublesome problem, you expect to be able to take effective and decisive action which will enable you to solve your problem, to get rid of it, to forget about it, and then to live happily ever after. The Russians, on the other hand, if I have interpreted them right, expect to have to live with their troubles for an indefinite time to come. One characteristic feature of the Russians' traditional attitude is patience. This can, of course, be a weakness, but it can also be a strength.

The American attitude to life comes, I believe from the experience of the pioneers who won the West. The pioneers did take effective action for getting rid of their troubles once and for all. They got rid of the forests, the bison, the Indians, and they have not been troubled by them since. Human beings can deal with non-human nature in this drastic, high-handed way. The Indians were, of course, your fellow human beings; but they were so much weaker than you that they were practically part of the fauna of this continent, like the bison.

But you cannot deal in this traditional American way with other human beings who are your equals in power. At least, you can, but only at the price of immediate and overwhelming disaster. When you are living, as you now are, on the Atomic Age, and when you are up against other people who, like you, hold the atomic weapon in their hands, do not try to take any once-for-all action. If, in this situation, you try to get rid of your troubles by taking decisive action, you will not succeed in living happily ever after; you will be lucky if you survive at all.

We are familiar with having to live with our troubles in family relations. For instance, bringing up one's children is always a problem for parents, and sometimes it s a troublesome problem. But no parents who are in their senses could ever imagine that they could, once for all, punish a child for being naughty, or reward it for being good, and then be able to forget about that child from that moment onwards. We know quite well that we have to live with the problem of bringing up our children - to live with it, day in and day out, year after year, until at last the children are grown up. This is a problem of a kind that it is impossible to get rid of by solving it once and for all in some single drastic piece of action.

What has been true, always and everywhere, about relations between parents and children is also true, in the Atomic Age, about relations between nations. For food or for evil, modern technology has no 'annihilated distance.' The whole surface of this planet has become one world, and all its human inhabitants have become a single family. We have to learn - and learn quickly - to behave towards each other as we do behave towards members of our families. We have to learn to put up with each other. Parents and children sometimes find each other awkward to live with and to deal with. All human being are awkward at times. But we do not try to solve or family problems by knocking each other in the head. In our family life, we are almost Russian-like in our capacity for living with our troubles. I should say that your generation in this country needs to learn to practice this Russian virtue of patience in the field of international relations. International affairs have always been dangerous. Today, if they are m is handled, they threaten to bring an unprecedented disaster on the human race.

I will conclude by just briefly repeating the point that I have been trying to put to you in this talk.

In the Atomic Age, any attempt to get rid of one's international troubles, by taking once-for-all action, would certainly not lead to living happily ever after, and might lead to ceasing to live.

You and your Russian contemporaries hold in your hands, between you, not only your own lives but the lives of the huge majority of mankind, the majority that are your contemporaries and the far greater majority that are still waiting to be born.

You are jointly responsible for seeing that God's gift of life, which you yourselves have had handed down to you by previous generations, shall be handed on by you to seven or eight hundred million later generations. I believe you will rise to this great occasion. I shall not live to see whether you succeed or fail. I pray that you may succeed, and I have confidence that you will.

You will succeed if you preserve your faith in an individual human being's power to influence the course of public events, and if you act on this belief, as your predecessors have done. This belief is the foundation of democracy. If you lose it, democracy is dead in fact, even if it still exists on paper. Our faith in our individual power to influence public events has been shaken by the increase in their scale and complexity. Yet the presuppositions of democracy still hold good, because these presuppositions are rooted in human nature. Being human means having freedom of choice and being responsible for the choice that one makes. Under a democratic constitution, it is politically within one's power to exercise this built-in human freedom of choice. Use it in your time to safeguard mankind's future.

This freedom, and the power and responsibility which it carries with it, are, of course, shared between two generations. The members of the class that is graduating at this Commencement will only gradually take over the responsibility from their parents. Both generations are present here today. Between them, these two generations of Americans and Russians are, I believe, going to decide the destiny of the human race.