Hope your Christmas season goes well. Just a summary and few comments on a commencement speech by Charles Krauthammer at McGill University in 1993 contained in his posthumous book The Point of It All.
The speech, or as Krauthammer jokingly calls it at the end in summing up, his “sermon,” makes three main points:
- Try to remain independent of “chattering classes.” “herd mentality,” or “periodic enthusiasms that wash over the culture.” He uses the late 20th-century scare about nuclear war as an example; I think the current virus over-alarm is an example too. John Stuart Mill warned against the “tyranny of the majority.” There was an ad for an insurance firm when I was much younger that had a motto that went something like, “we won’t turn a crisis into a panic.”
- “Look outward.” Even though one of the most famous lines of ancient Greek philosophy was that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” Krauthammer warns against “the too-examined life” in what he terms “the Age of Oprah.” He also warns against “the interior, self-absorbed, self-referential world of modern fiction,” which seems to be the main objection to post-modern stories.
- “Save the best.” He quotes G.K. Chesterton that tradition is “the democracy of the dead.” Towards the end of the speech, he notes a cultural distinction between the U.S. and Canada with the former considering itself a “melting pot” of immigrant cultures while the latter considering itself a place of “shared sovereignty.” I suppose he is referring to the ethnically English, French, and Native North American.