Bill Clinton’s Commencement Speech at Harvard – June 6, 2007
The former President explained much societal dysfunction when he asked a simple question: Should we focus on what human beings have in common or should we obsess about their minor differences?
The outcome of this simple choice determines innumerable personal and political agendas. To the extent that we choose incorrectly, the resulting contentious rhetoric has the capacity to mushroom into oppression and violence that can displace, maim and kill millions of people. It has done so repeatedly.
Many of our political and moral disputes stem from this basic low-level perceptual choice: whether to focus on differences or commonalities. Here is how Clinton captured the issue:
So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent?
For at least six years, the air has been thick with violence, bigotry and oppression because too many people are making the wrong choice up front. The current Administration excels at choosing badly. The result? A de facto national policy that anyone who is different is suspicious.
As eloquently stated by Bill Clinton, the alternative would be to focus on the fact that humans are 99+% the same (I’ve written on this sameness in many places, including here [1] and here [2]). Perhaps it’s tempting to resist this thought in a country where we so often stress individual liberties and where our moral system is so rooted in personal responsibilities. We aren’t as different as we’d like to believe, however.
I agree with Bill Clinton that to the extent that we fret about minor human differences we can expect massive societal dysfunction. It’s difficult to turn this all around, though, because focusing on differences sells media ads. We are currently living in an environment created by media corporations that are spraying out stories involving accusations, threats and paranoia. What’s more interesting, a news story where people get along or a news story where people threat each other? Massive societal dysfunction is thus the price we must pay to sell lots of jeans, perfume and cell phone plans.
Bill Clinton commencement address is extraordinary, well worth the 30-minutes it will take you to view it. I also enjoyed several of the terrific speeches by several Harvard grads, all part of this same video. If you’d like to go straight to view Bill Clinton’s speech, you can pick it up here [3] (at Andrew Sullivan’s site), then start viewing at about 1:36:00. You’ll find the transcript of Mr. Clinton’s speech here. [4] Below, I’m printing my personal “best of” excerpts “below the fold,” based upon this transcript.
When the human genome was sequenced, and the most interesting thing to me as a non-scientist – we finished it in my last year I was president, I really rode herd on this thing and kept throwing more money at it – the most interesting thing to me was the discovery that human beings with their three billion genomes are 99.9 percent identical genetically. So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent? I mean, don’t we all? How much of the laugh lines in the speeches were about that? At least I didn’t go to Yale, right? [LAUGHTER] That Brown gag was hilarious. [LAUGHTER]
But it’s all the same deal, isn’t it? I mean, the intellectual premise is that the only thing that really matters about our lives are the distinctions we can draw. Indeed, one of the crassest elements of modern culture, all these sort of talk shows, and even a lot of political journalism that’s sort of focused on this shallow judgmentalism. They try to define everybody down by the worst moment in their lives, and it all is about well, no matter whatever’s wrong with me, I’m not that. And yet, you ask Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Bono to come here. Nelson Mandela’s the most admired person in the world. I got tickled the other night. I wound up in a restaurant in New York with a bunch of friends of mine. And I looked over and two tables away, and there was Rush Limbaugh [LAUGHTER], who’s said a few mad things about me. So I went up and shook hands with him and said hello and met his dinner guest. And I came just that close to telling him we were 99.9 percent the same. [LAUGHTER] But I didn’t want to ruin the poor man’s dessert, so I let it go. [LAUGHTER]
Now we’re laughing about this but next month, I’m making my annual trek to Africa to see the work of my AIDS and development project, and to celebrate with Nelson Mandela his birthday. He’s 89. Don’t know how many more he’ll have. And when I think that I might be 99.9 percent the same as him, I can’t even fathom it. So I say that to you, do we have all these other problems? Is Darfur a tragedy? Do I wish America would adopt sensible climate change regulation? Do I hate the fact that ideologues in the government doctored scientific reports? Do I disagree with a thousand things that are going on? Absolutely. But it all flows from the idea that we can violate elemental standards of learning and knowledge and reason and even the humanity of our fellow human beings because our differences matter more. That’s what makes you worship power over purpose. Our differences matter more . . .
I believe the most important problem is the way people think about it and each other, and themselves. The world is awash today in political, religious, almost psychological conflicts, which require us to divide up and demonize people who aren’t us. And every one of them in one way or the other is premised on a very simple idea. That our differences are more important than our common humanity. I would argue that Mother Teresa was asked here, Bono was asked here, and Martin Luther King was asked here because this class believed that they were people who thought our common humanity was more important than our differences [APPLAUSE] . . .
In the central highlands in Africa where I work, when people meet each other walking, nearly nobody rides, and people meet each other walking on the trails, and one person says hello, how are you, good morning, the answer is not I’m fine, how are you. The answer translated into English is this: I see you. Think of that. I see you. How many people do all of us pass every day that we never see? You know, we all haul out of here, somebody’s going to come in here and fold up 20-something thousand chairs. And clean off whatever mess we leave here. And get ready for tomorrow and then after tomorrow, someone will have to fix that. Many of those people feel that no one ever sees them. I would never have seen the people in Aceh in Indonesia if a terrible misfortune had not struck. And so, I leave you with that thought. Be true to the tradition of the great people who have come here. Spend as much of your time and your heart and your spirit as you possibly can thinking about the 99.9 percent. See everyone and realize that everyone needs new beginnings. Enjoy your good fortune. Enjoy your differences, but realize that our common humanity matters much, much more. God bless you and good luck.
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