Commencement Address
Kwame Anthony Appiah

Let me begin by congratulating the class of ought eight at Dickinson College. Welcome to the other side of the great divide between those who wear their tassels on the right and those who wear them on the left!

It is a great honor that Dickinson College has bestowed on me in inviting me to speak to you. My challenge is to see whether, amid all this excitement, I can find anything to say worth remembering. One of the advantages of being a philosopher is having some two and a half millennia of predecessors to draw on; from the heirs of Confucius (who died a decade before the birth of Socrates in 469 BCE), through the descendants of Plato and Aristotle; by way of the masters of the six Darshanas, the schools of classical Indian philosophy, and the great Arab and Latin scholars of the Middle Ages; and right up to yesterday. As I was thinking about what to say to you, I recalled one of those predecessors, Diogenes, from the fourth century BCE. If you’d asked Diogenes to speak, you’d have certainly had a memorable graduation: because Diogenes was one of history’s great eccentrics.

He was born to a respectable family in Sinope, a Greek colony in what’s now Turkey. But there was nothing respectable about Diogenes. He lived not in a house or even a cave, but in a large terracotta tub. He did what my English nanny would have called his “business” in public; and I’m afraid he did what Hugh Hefner has made his business in public, too. So he was a sort of fourth century performance artist. His central philosophical idea was that we shouldn’t mistake the customs of our country for real virtue. That lack of respect for the local proprieties was why the school of philosophy that he founded was named “cynicism,” from the Greek work kunikos, which means doglike. The Cynics were regarded as the doggy philosophers, despite the fact that nobody could make them heel, lay down, or turn over.

Anyway, thinking about Diogenes suggests one way of being memorable: strip down and get into a terracotta tub. Let me reassure the trustees of Dickinson College. Diogenes is worth remembering for other reasons. For one thing, he was a great opponent of pretension. Once, when Plato was lecturing about Socrates’ famous definition of man as a featherless biped, Diogenes marched in with a plucked chicken. Point made.

But Diogenes posed a deeper challenge to the prevailing wisdom of his day. He was the first person we know of to say that he was not a citizen of his country—whether his native Sinope, where he was kicked out, or his adopted Athens—but a citizen of the world … kosmou polites, in Greek: whence our word “cosmopolitan.”

What Diogenes meant by global citizenship wasn’t a single world government. We know this because he once met someone who was a big fan of global government: Alexander the Great, who favored, as you know, government of the world by Alexander the Great. The story goes that Alexander came across Diogenes one sunny day. The Macedonian world conqueror, who, as a student of Aristotle’s, had been brought up to respect philosophers, asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him. “Sure,” Diogenes said, “you can get out of my light.” For Diogenes, being a cosmopolitan wasn’t about belonging to a single polity; it was about being open to good ideas from other societies, rather than assuming that your own habits of mind are inevitable and right. It’s worth listening to others, he thought, because they may have something to teach us; it’s worth their listening to us, because they may have something to learn. That’s a key thing I want to borrow from him: the value of dialogue, conversation as a fundamental mode of human activity.

So you see, you never know when an old idea is going to prove helpful. That’s one reason it’s important to sustain the study of the humanities—the reflection on the range and depth of human creativity. In the art of Asante, where I grew up, you often see carvings of a little bird, with its head turned backward, a bird called sankofa, which means, literally, “Go back and get.” There’s a proverb in my father’s language that says, “Woto twene na wosan köfa a, yénkyiri”—the gist of which is: go back and retrieve what you need from the past.

Now there’s a sense in which Diogenes’ idea arrived prematurely, because if you are to take this metaphor of global citizenship seriously, at least two things have to be true. One: you have to know something about your fellow citizens. And two: you have to be able to affect them. Neither was the case back then. It’s in our age that Diogenes’ idea has finally come into its own. In the past few centuries, as every human community has gradually been drawn into a single web of trade and information, each of us can now realistically imagine contacting any other of our seven billion fellow humans and sending that person something worth having: a radio, an antibiotic, a good idea. Sadly, we can now also send, through negligence as easily as malice, things that will cause harm: a virus, an airborne pollutant, a bad idea. And the possibilities of good and of ill proliferate once we turn to policies carried out by governments in our name. Together, we can ruin poor farmers by dumping subsidized grain into their markets; cripple industries with punitive tariffs; deliver weapons that will kill multitudes. But together, we can raise standards of living by adopting new policies on trade and aid, prevent or treat diseases, take measures against climate change, encourage resistance to tyranny and a concern for the worth of each human life.

And the worldwide web of information—radio, television, telephones, the Internet—means not only that we can affect lives everywhere but that we can learn about life anywhere, too. Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities. The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.

Cosmopolitanism can be seen as an ethics for a global era; but the spirit of cosmopolitan exchange has been essential to our intellectual progress, too. Throughout history, but especially since the seventeenth century, we’ve profited from the cosmopolitanism of the mind. Let me give you just one example. In 1654 the chevalier de Méré, a gambling gentleman, had a run of losses. Nowadays, I suppose, he’d have entered a 12-step program at Gamblers Anonymous, but that wasn’t an option. So, being a chevalier—a guy with a title—he simply wrote to a couple of prominent mathematicians, Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal, and asked what had gone wrong. That got the two mavens thinking, and they wrote each other a series of letters that year, which were published a couple of years later in Holland. These two people never even met, yet in those letters they launched the modern mathematical theory of probability.

Those were a pair of first-rate minds, but then it almost seems as if everyone got smarter in the seventeenth century. Just in math, you’ve got René Descartes laying out the foundations of analytical geometry (which is why those coordinates are called Cartesian), and later, of course, Newton and Leibniz each developed the calculus, drawing on work by Descartes and Fermat and others. Logarithms, probabilities, infinitesimals, differential equations. The intellectual firmament was changed forever.

Now Fermat was usually in Toulouse, Leibniz in Hanover, Newton in Cambridge, Pascal in Paris, and Descartes most often somewhere in the Netherlands. They worked in Latin, but they spoke English, Dutch, French and German. And to figure out how they could nevertheless have been part of an intellectual community, you have to think about something else that happened in the seventeenth century.

Starting in the 1630s, in England, the public was allowed to use the Royal Mail, which had hitherto been reserved for the King and members of his Court. The conveyance of private letters by the royal poste aux chevaux in France took off just a few years earlier. The cosmopolitan spirit went postal, and, suddenly, thoughts that nobody had had before were being thought. We talk about these great thinkers as if they did it on their own, as individuals. The truth is, new thoughts really emerge from collections of individuals and instruments. The basic space where new thinking happened wasn’t between anybody’s ears. It was actually in the mail, along the post roads that started crosshatching the planet like cortical neurons, in the feverish letters exchanged among far-flung souls with similar interests and different skills. Imagine what might have happened if they’d been able to text-message one another on their cell phones as well!

Someone once devised a way of quantifying the growth of scientific knowledge, and saw a more or less exponential curve. Human knowledge doubles in the 1500 years between the birth of Christ and the Renaissance; doubles again in the 250 years between the Renaissance and the French Revolution; and again, between the French Revolution and the dawn of the automotive age, 125 years later, and again between then and the start of the Cold War, another fifty years; then it doubled in the decade preceding the election of JFK. Now—by some estimates—it doubles every two years. Soon, it looks like, it will double in . . . the course of a graduation ceremony.

Given all this connectivity, yours will be the most intellectually powerful generation in history: the most networked, the most cosmopolitan. Your computer doesn’t just connect you with millions of gigabytes of data; it connects you with millions of human minds. In the space among all of you, amazing things are going to happen. The genius of modern science isn’t that we’ve figured out how to make more scientific geniuses. It’s that we’ve worked out how to take normal human beings and link them up in institutions where they can develop new understandings by challenging old ideas.

And that’s why I can say with confidence that this is the smartest class to graduate from Dickinson College since Benjamin Rush signed your founding documents in the first years of our American republic. If you forget everything else I said today, I hope you’ll remember that. At Dickinson, you haven’t just acquired knowledge; you’ve acquired the skills to acquire more knowledge. You’re the smartest generation because other people have built the tools and the resources that make you smarter: the world wide web, the cell phone that allows you to ask a question by text message or access a news site or a blog; the devices that will make you productive in all you do at work and at home in the life ahead of you. And in that life you’ll be creating things that will help other people to be smarter, too—even smarter than you, if that’s possible to imagine. The Department of Labor lists many, many thousands of occupations. Whichever one you take up—or even if you invent a new one—you’ll be drawing on a great collectively-created resource; and, almost certainly, contributing to it, too. You’ll be building the post roads of a new millennium. Yours will be an age of intellectual abundance, such as the world has never seen, and you face challenges such that the world as never known—problems that, alas, we your elders have bequeathed you as well. In facing those challenges, Diogenes’ ideal of global citizenship, like Pascal and Fermat’s ideas about probability, will be useful tools, one of many you have acquired in your education here. Still, there is, as that understanding of probability teaches us, no absolute guarantee of success. So, in the spirit of that old gambler the chevalier de Méré, and speaking for my own generation, I’d like to say, “We’re betting on you.”

© Kwame Anthony Appiah

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