Prof. Ronald Aronson

Wayne State University

Detroit, Michigan, USA

April 17, 2002

Facing Reality

Graduation Address - University of Natal, Durban, South Africa

          Receiving this honor gives me tremendous pleasure not only because it has allowed me to return to South Africa, Durban, and, especially, the University of Natal, but also because it suggests that at least some of the things I had to say during my previous visits here found resonance. And that perhaps speaking my mind openly and fully during the State of Emergency in 1987 and shortly after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 was not unwelcome. If so, the least that I owe you today, graduates, your families, and my colleagues, is to speak my mind no less directly today.

          Graduation usually means that it’s time to “face reality.” But most of you have been doing this for a long time. You’re no strangers to the real world and its ups and downs. So you may rest assured that I have not come ten thousand miles to remind you how difficult life can be. However distant in time it might perhaps now seem to some of you, you recall apartheid and the struggle to end it. Today, you know the unemployment rate, and the crime statistics. And you know, in your own lives, the consequences of poverty in South Africa. After only seven years since South Africa’s first free elections marked a decisive break with apartheid, you do not need me to remind you what ideals are worth living and fighting for in the real world. In fact South Africa was my school for relearning this at the time the struggle was reaching its climax.

          Much has changed since 1994, in the world as well as in South Africa. Today, we all know, is the time of the global economy. It has brought its own realism into our lives. We are taught, and not only in economics courses, that a single economic bottom line subjects everything and everyone to its dominion. There is no alternative, we are told. In the post-Communist world adapting to the bottom line has become the watchword of governments, educational institutions, and individuals. Today the iron logic of economic life governs ever more widely and ever more deeply.

          But looking more closely we immediately identify a paradox, namely, that the cutting edge of globalization is not the various industries devoted to meeting fundamental human needs but what has been called the “infotainment” industry. South Africa is just now being introduced to its latest product Oprah magazine. What is being produced, by the most advanced societies might seem frivolous in places where hunger still dominates. Do you know for example what is the chief export of the world’s largest economy? - Hollywood films and television programs. How ironic that the most serious human activities are increasingly being built on such a seemingly unserious foundation. But this is what appears when we begin to think more deeply about the global economy.

I’ve used the words “real” and “reality” and “realistic” several times, and I’d like to devote my speech on Graduation Day 2002 to exploring what it means to be realistic. When someone tells you to “be realistic” today what are they saying? Usually it means that you should not hope for too much, and that you have to adapt to the real world. You have to learn to fit into the way things are done. You have to adjust yourself to the reality you see before you.

          I share much in this usual attitude, but it often implies another meaning which I don’t share: “Accept the game and its rules; don’t try to change them. Limit your hopes to small things, for example, concentrate on your own individual life and forget the larger picture.” This is bad advice. There is a good side to the usual realism, but making use of it depends on how we see reality in the first place. So let’s put the usual advice on the shelf for a few minutes while looking at a contrary way of being realistic - one which demands that you regard social and political and even your personal “reality” in ways that are fuller and deeper than usual. And I will suggest that this expanded definition of reality, rather than the usual narrower one, should accompany you in the next phase of your lives.

          Certainly the whole of South Africa has had a lesson in the usual realism since 1994. Many of you have been struggling to keep alive your ideals, inherited perhaps from the anti-apartheid movement - values which are having increasingly tough sledding as 1994 recedes into the distance and South Africa feels more and more pressure to organize its economy along lines defined by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. No wonder some of you not only have become disillusioned by the country’s inability to become more democratic and more egalitarian, but have decided that inequality, poverty, and huge discrepancies of power, are all inevitable. After all, isn’t this the norm everywhere? And no wonder that among you are those who, aware of these difficulties, are convinced that pursuing your own individual wellbeing is the surest and most realistic path to improving South Africa.

          Now I am not going to argue economics or history with you, or political science or sociology. My professional interest lies elsewhere: in how you view the reality you are living, in what it means to hope, and in the lenses you wear when you peer into the future. For help I’ll turn to the great German Philosopher Immanuel Kant who, over two hundred years ago, created a philosophical revolution by insisting that it made no sense to talk about a real world “out there,” separate from human beings who know and live in this world. What does this mean? The “real” world that shapes our lives and actions is not given, out there, independent and moving on its own, but is a collective human creation. And what humans have created, humans can change. Sometimes astonishingly so - as the political history of South Africa in the past twenty-five years shows, producing new institutions, new opportunities, new forms of social interaction, new living patterns, new elites. So, to those among you who may be feeling cynical about the possibilities of social change, I want to say that you are not being nearly realistic enough. Don’t project conclusions drawn from a few months or a few years onto the whole sweep of history. Don’t forget just how much has changed, in so few years, and how much for the better - the results are literally all around us. Indeed, all of you, graduating together, are one of its results. Look around and it is impossible to ignore the reality of change. Who, then had a better sense of reality – the people who decreed that the University of Natal must be for whites only, or those who struggled to make possible today’s multi-racial student body?

          So this is the first part of my answer to the question, “What should it mean to be realistic today?” - seeing that for all its force, social reality is not given but made, constructed, and is thus subject to change. The prevailing realism also involves a second error, namely, seeing ourselves solely as separate individuals whose well-being, whose success or failure, are up to each of us alone. This individualism claims to explain why people live well or live poorly - solely because of what they themselves do. We know how absurd it was to argue this in South Africa during the days of apartheid, but now that these oppressions have been officially removed, it is more common among people who have just discovered their own social mobility. In the United States, this reigning myth of those who have made it and of the upwardly bound is that “it’s all up to me.”. Oprah magazine, your latest American import, is dedicated to selling you on the notion that there are no limits to what you can do on your own. Today, on this day of all days, it is essential to graduate from such illusions. Of course we want to applaud you on your success, especially today, but I also call on your families to remind you that your individual efforts alone would not have produced it. I ask them to remind you, after the ceremony, of the family and community - and thus the historical, political, and social environments - in which you took shape and which gave you your possibilities.

          Instead of seeing your degree solely as a way of feathering your own nest, isn’t it more realistic in the fuller sense to see that the societal reason for resources having been invested in your education is so that your skills can benefit the larger society? The best symbol of society is not a ladder but a complex electronic circuit in which each part is interconnected with the others. Caring about the others – and about the whole society – is a natural and appropriate way of living this interrelatedness. That the richest country in the world, my own, should have no national health care system and is seeing a revival of diseases once thought to be conquered is a result of people believing the illusion that there is no social reality, just me. Being realistic in this larger sense demands acknowledging that we are, and have to be, social individuals.

          So far, I’ve been mostly addressing my thoughts to those of you who may think of yourselves as “realistic” in the usual sense, and I’ve been trying to encouraging you to enlarge your sense of reality. Now I’d like to draw into the conversation those of you who see yourselves as “idealists.” Many of you are nourished by great principles which you hope can motivate a better world. Perhaps you feel discouraged at how difficult it is to translate these ideals into reality. But democracy, solidarity, and equality do not fall from the sky. Where do they come from, these values, if human beings are not already dependent on each other? If today’s wealth were not built on a foundation inherited from the collective past? If every society did not depend at every moment on the contributions of its members? If we did not all share basic human capacities - to choose freely, to reason, to work, to make moral decisions - which in some way make us all fundamentally equal. Take the value of solidarity. It can be a vision of the future only if it in some deep sense is already our reality, the stuff of our daily lives which is never quite canceled by the inequalities of our daily lives. I mean acts as simple as helping people in trouble, donating blood, contributing to charities and disaster relief funds. Almost unnoticed, I am saying, the shared human values on which we depend to create a better world are already intimately present in our ordinary activities. Seeing this is realism too. Social activists seek to make these dimensions of our lives matter far more than they do today. Still, the ideals that move us are already real forces in our lives.

          My advice to all of you, then, is to become more realistic as you leave the University. See the larger world actively, appreciate its many dimensions that are often ignored or repressed. See reality as made, not given; as changeable, not fixed. See yourselves as its makers, not as its recipients. Experience yourselves not only from your individual side, but also from your social and historical side. See yourselves as part of a family, a community, a society, humanity. And take note of, and be nourished by, the positive principles and relationships already embodied in daily life.

          It is within this context, and only within this context, that I’d like to take the usual definition of realism back off the shelf I put it on a few minutes ago, and draw it into the fuller, richer kind of realism I’m proposing to you. The point is that changing the world is certainly possible, but to do so we need to be "realistic" in the sense of accepting and learning how to live with limits while we’re trying to change them. To hope is to look beyond the present, but we need also to be grounded in the present. To hope is to want to change reality, but this means recognizing how much can be changed at any given moment. Change sometimes happens rapidly, but usually only after many years’ work, struggle, and disappointment. Accepting this can enhance the pleasures of a shared effort, of gaining knowledge, and of sharpening your skills.

          Where do you learn such habits? Where do you learn to struggle, have patience, to hope fully but with a respect for where things really stand as well as where they might be headed? You’re fortunate, because it’s already part of your heritage and, if you turn to it, of each of you. At its best, wasn’t this the outlook of the movement that transformed South Africa?