delivered to a graduating class
December 2008
The Gerding Theater
Portland, Oregon
I walked over to this wonderful theater the other day to have a look at the stage – I noticed that the backdrop was set up for a performance of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Without any reason I just kind of let this scene sink in. I let my mind wander around a bit. I got to thinking about the Victorians
The Victorian Age is a fascinating period and looms large in the way we think about the world – right away I began to think about giants like Nietzsche, Freud, Marx – also Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Kipling, George Eliot, Dickens too of course – any would make a great subject for a short talk – all great subjects rich with ideas – these are all amazing people, artists, and just human beings too.
Ultimately I settled on a childhood hero, the explorer Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, who died in 1890 – he is the main topic for my talk today – I think Burton shows us the best and worst of Victorian times and makes us ask some terrific questions – Burton is a problem case, an interesting case – he is (I think) a good case for real reflection, especially for our graduates today as they step into the whirlwind.
Victorians were drawn to faraway places, India for Kipling and the far Pacific for Conrad – the distant future for H.G. Wells and the unconscious for Freud – they were also oddly uncurious about the here and now – poverty, child labor, misogyny, racism, imperialism, pretty much endless war. Victorian hypocrisy has a terrific expression in the life and work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – creator of the inspired character Sherlock Holmes, who is the very archetype of skeptical reasoning – whereas Doyle himself was wildly unskeptical and believed in ghosts, fairies, spirit materializations, table knocking and "voices from the beyond."
Burton shows the same contradictions – off to faraway places and blind about himself – but in his case, this is far more troubling and surprising. To begin, Burton’s knowledge was astounding, and may even be unequalled in human history. By one account, he knew and spoke twenty-three languages – including all the main European tongues and also odd cases such as Basque and Romany – also Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic – also Sanskrit, Urdu, Gujarati, Turkish, Hindi, Farsi, Syriac – some Chinese, Japanese, Thai – he translated works from Arabic, Wolof, Portuguese, and Sanskrit into English. He was besides a soldier, anthropologist, hypnotist, diplomat, surveyor, spy – he wrote a history of the Mormons, of the Abeokuta people of Cameroon, and travel accounts from Brazil, Syria, Zanzibar, Paraguay, the Holy Lands – he is sometimes credited with discovering the source of the Nile and was among the first Europeans to enter the city of Mecca – the first to explore Somalia – he made the first true English rendering of the Thousand and One Nights, the Perfumed Garden, the Lusiads of Camoens – no less, he was considered among the great swordsmen of his day.
Few if any human beings have wandered more widely or had the sheer desire that Burton had to learn as much as he could about every kind of human religion, literature, language, geography and custom. Yet despite his Promethean abilities and accomplishments, Burton’s works are filled with the basest racial, religious and class prejudices – something we do not see in George Eliot, or Thomas Hardy or in the greatest Victorian thinker – perhaps the greatest of any age – Charles Darwin. Burton in any case has no qualm about condemning entire tribes, though by his own odd principle of taste. He admires the Arabs and the Mormons but hates Jews, the Hopi, the Navajo, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Pawnee tribe, the Wanika, the Dinka, the hill peoples of the Andes, the Gypsies – though as a young man he learned Romany from a Gypsy girl – he especially didn't care for French-Canadians, who he said were “a queer lot…much addicted to loafing.”
Burton shows us that it is possible to amass great knowledge and even become closely familiar with people, yet still be
Plato held that ignorance is the only sin – also that by getting to know other peoples we draw closer to them – Burton’s case seems to refute this – with all his wealth of knowledge, he was bigoted and cruel.
Burton would have made an amazing drinking buddy but you would not want him as the best man at your wedding – in brief, Burton gives us contradictions, but he also gives us some good questions such as: what would be the point of travelling so widely or learning so much? Real learning changes a person. Arguably, Burton did not move very far in himself, whatever he may have seen. He is heroic and noble, but also bigoted and cruel.
Another issue is what relation there is – if any – between great intelligence, such as Burton exemplifies as few others, and moral understanding. – Arguably, Burton was a great man, but we want more than this for a human being. A person can have enormous experience and also be a 'big brain' but still lack very basic human, sentient, common sense, feeling, heart – I am talking about seeing the person in front of you and having something like character.
In one sense Burton is like everyone else in being an emotional creature whose conscious reasoning seems often to come in afterwards to provide justifications for feelings he already has, and of which he may even be unconscious – but it was in his day that people began to talk about the deep thing in us that we cannot see – our very deep Heart of Darkness.
In Burton's case, the mind seems more like a lawyer hired to defend a cause and less like a scientist searching for the truth. But Burton is also a social creature, like ourselves, powerfully connected to his people, to a living community, having taken in its frames, biases and filters – social scientists tell us that our behavior is organized by our attachments. I don’t know what Burton was attached to – he loved his friends and he was a driven person – he loved his life – he was also a member of the nobility and was knighted. One of his famous sayings is, do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause. When I first heard these words, Burton shined in my imagination. But another of his famous sayings, which I understood much later, is that you should always support your compatriot against an outsider, even if your countryman is a fool or a thief – or worse – and even if the stranger is in the right or a great man. I would call this is a very bad piece of advice, if there ever was one.
It is natural to wonder how someone like Burton, who was so brilliant and who had such great powers, could ever have failed to become wise – he was such a wide-ranging observer of cultures and places of his time and, with a knowledge of so many languages, and true fearlessness, he had an enormous advantage in trying to understand other peoples and take in some of their wisdom. But he was so busy entering these people in the ledger and judging people and placing one race , language, custom or religion above another, that he stayed on the outside and never really “went native” – which he was often accused of doing – and which is probably what he really wanted to do, but never did.
I may be wrong of course, but the lesson I draw from admiring my hero, Richard Burton, is that moral character – or being a genuinely human being – being human – has less to do with seeing things as they are – with being objective or reporting facts – moral character (whatever it is) is not the result of wide experience. When the Founding Fathers wrote “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, this was neither self-evident, nor true. They were not reporting facts. They were dreaming – i.e. proposing a vision for the future, and working to bring it into life.
Thinking about Burton makes us ask about hypocrisy – about trying to apply what we learn to ourselves – about aiming this great critical power we have, not just at other people, but at ourselves. I am not asking our graduates today to resolve the contradictions we see in the Victorians; we have our own problems. But Burton helps us ask the question – ‘what is the purpose of education?’ – It seems to have something to do with getting over the rough parts of ourselves, trying to grow and be more. There also seems to be a difference between knowledge and wisdom – e.g., knowledge can be stolen or misused, but not wisdom. Probably also a person who is wise – whatever this is – opens up a bit, in his or her circle of sympathy – caring about people who live outside their own small circle of family and friends – people who are beginning to recognize themselves in many kinds of human face – so that a person becomes a little more a citizen of the world, and not just a person from London or Portland or some other place, who is trying to win the game or be first or climb highest. Learning has got to have something have something to do with aspiration, a sense of readiness for life, proposing a vision, a bit of utopia, not just settling for what is going on right now, dreaming a bit and also trying to lend a hand and make things a little better – say: maybe to design something or start something or help someone to bring something about or even to just make ourselves a little bit better – I am just talking about creating something good.
