Transcript KEN BURNS COMMENCEMENT AT BRANDEIS

– Brandeisian, love it. (audience laughing)

President Liebowitz, Ron, Chair Lisa Kranc,

and other members of the board of trustees.

Provost Carol Fierke, fellow honorees,

distinguished faculty and staff,

proud and relieved parents,

calm and serene grandparents,

distracted but secretly pleased siblings,

ladies and gentlemen, graduating students

of the class of 2024, good morning.

I am deeply honored and privileged

that you have asked me here to say a few words

at such a momentous occasion that you might find

what I have to say worthy of your attention

on so important a day in all of your lives.

Thank you for this honor.

Listen, I am in the business of history.

It is not always a happy subject

on college campuses these days,

particularly when forces seem determined

to eliminate or water down difficult parts of our past,

particularly when the subject may seem

to sum an anachronistic and irrelevant pursuit,

And particularly with the ferocious urgency

this moment seems to exert on us.

It is my job, however, to remind people

of the power our past also exerts,

to help us better understand what’s going on now

with compelling story, memory, and anecdote.

It is my job to try to discern patterns

and themes from history to enable us

to interpret our dizzying and sometimes dismaying present.

For nearly 50 years now, I have diligently practiced

and rigorously tried to maintain a conscious neutrality

in my work, avoiding advocacy if I could,

trying to speak to all of my fellow citizens.

Over those many decades I’ve come

to understand a significant fact, that we are not condemned

to repeat as the saying goes, what we don’t remember.

That is a beautiful, even poetic phrase,

but not true, nor are there cycles of history

as the academic community periodically promotes.

The Old Testament, Ecclesiastes to be specific,

got it right, I think.

What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again.

There is nothing new under the sun.

What those lines suggest is that human nature never changes,

or almost never changes.

We continually superimpose that complex

and contradictory human nature

over the seemingly random chaos of events,

all of our inherent strengths and weaknesses,

our greed and generosity, our puritanism

and our prurience, our virtue, and our venality parade

before our eyes, generation after generation

after generation. This often gives us the impression

that history repeats itself.

It does not.

“No event has ever happened twice, it just rhymes,”

Mark Twain is supposed to have said.

I have spent all of my professional life on the lookout

for those rhymes, drawn inexorably to that power of history.

I am interested in listening to the many varied voices

of a true, honest, complicated past

that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy,

but equally drawn to those stories

and moments that suggest an abiding faith

in the human spirit, in particularly the unique role

this remarkable and sometimes also dysfunctional republic

seems to play in the positive progress of mankind.

During the course of my work, I have become acquainted

with hundreds if not thousands

of those voices. They have inspired, haunted,

and followed me over the years.

Some of them may be helpful to you as you try to imagine

and make sense of the trajectory of your lives today.

Listen, listen.

In January of 1838, shortly before his 29th birthday,

a tall, thin lawyer prone to bouts

of debilitating depression addressed

the young men’s lyceum in Springfield, Illinois.

“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?”

He asked his audience,

“Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant

to step the earth and crush us at a blow?”

Then he answered his own question.

“Never.

All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not

by force take a drink from the Ohio River

or make a track on the Blue Ridge

in a trial of a thousand years.

If destruction be our lot,

we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

As a nation of free men, we must live

through all time or die by suicide.”

It is a stunning, remarkable statement, one

that has animated my own understanding

of the American experience since I first read it

more than 40 years ago.

That young man was of course Abraham Lincoln,

and he would go on to preside over the closest this country

has ever come to near national suicide, our civil war,

and yet embedded in his extraordinary, disturbing,

and prescient words is also a fundamental optimism

that implicitly acknowledges the geographical forcefield

two mighty oceans east and west

and two relatively benign neighbors north and south

have provided for us since the British burned

the White House in the War of 1812

and inspired Francis Scott Key.

Lincoln’s words that day suggest what is so great

and so good about the people who happen

to inhabit this lucky and exquisite country of ours.

That’s the world you now inherit. Our work ethic

and our restlessness, our innovation

and our improvisation, our communities

and our institutions of higher learning,

our suspicion of power. The fact

that we seem resolutely dedicated to parsing the meaning

between individual and collective freedom:

what I want versus what we need.

That we are all so dedicated to understanding

what Thomas Jefferson really meant when he wrote

that mysterious phrase, “The pursuit of happiness”.

Hint, it happens right here in the lifelong learning

and perpetual improvement this university is committed to.

But the isolation of those two oceans

has also helped to incubate habits

and patterns less beneficial to us,

our devotion to money and guns and conspiracies,

our certainty about everything, our stubborn insistence

on our own exceptionalism blinding us

to that which needs repair, especially with regard

to race and ethnicity. Our preoccupation

with always making the other wrong

at an individual as well as a global level.

I am reminded of what the journalist I.F. Stone once said

to a young acolyte who was profoundly disappointed

in his mentor’s admiration for Thomas Jefferson.

“It’s because history is tragedy,”

Stone admonished him, “Not melodrama.”

It’s the perfect response. In melodrama,

all villains are perfectly villainous

and all heroes are perfectly virtuous,

but life is not like that.

You know that in your guts and nor is our history like that.

The novelist, Richard Powers recently wrote that,

“The best arguments in the world,”——and ladies

and gentlemen, that’s all we do is argue——

The best arguments in the world, he said,

“Won’t change a single person’s point of view.

The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

I’ve been struggling for most of my life to do that,

to try to tell good, complex,

sometimes contradictory stories,

appreciating nuance and subtlety and undertow,

sharing the confusion and consternation

of unreconciled opposites.

But it’s clear as individuals and as a nation,

we are dialectically preoccupied.

Everything is either right or wrong,

red state or blue state, young or old,

gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli,

my way or the highway.

Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired,

binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties.

For filmmakers and faculty, students and citizens,

that preoccupation is imprisoning.

Still, we know and we hear and we express only arguments,

and by so doing, we forget the inconvenient complexities

of history and of human nature: that, for example,

three great religions, their believers

all children of Abraham, each professing at the heart

of their teaching, a respect for all human life,

each with a central connection to

and legitimate claim to the same holy ground,

violate their own dictates of conduct

and make this perpetually contested land

a shameful graveyard.

God does not distinguish between the dead.

“Could you,”…

“Could you,”

A very wise person I know with years of experience

with the Middle East recently challenged me,

“Could you hold the idea

that there could be two wrongs and two rights?”

Listen, listen.

In a filmed interview I conducted

with the writer James Baldwin, more than 40 years ago,

he said, “No one was ever born who agreed

to be a slave, who accepted it.

That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without.

Of course, the moment I say that,” Baldwin continued,

“I realize that multitudes and multitudes

of people for various reasons

of their own enslave themselves every hour

of every day to this or that doctrine,

this or that delusion of safety,

this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example,”

he went on, “are slaves to a delusion.

People who hate Negroes are slaves.

People who love money are slaves.

We are living in a universe really of willing slaves,

which makes the concept of liberty

and the concept of freedom so dangerous,” he finished.

Baldwin is making a profoundly psychological

and even spiritual statement, not just a political

or racial or social one.

He knew, just as Lincoln knew, that the enemy is often us.

We continue to shackle ourselves

with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.

Another voice, Mercy Otis Warren, a philosopher

and historian during our revolution put it this way:

“The study of the human character at once opens a beautiful

and a deformed picture of the soul.

We there find a noble principle implanted

in the nature of people, but when the checks

of conscience are thrown aside, humanity is obscured.”

I have had the privilege for nearly half a century

of making films about the US,

but I have also made films about us.

That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun.

All of the intimacy of “us” and also “we” and “our”

and all of the majesty, complexity,

contradiction, and even controversy of the US.

And if I have learned anything over those years,

it’s that there’s only us.

There is no them.

And whenever someone suggests to you,

whomever it may be in your life

that there’s a them, run away.

Othering is the simplistic binary way

to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way

to your own self imprisonment,

which brings me to a moment I’ve dreaded

and forces me to suspend my longstanding

attempt at neutrality.

There is no real choice this November.

There is only the perpetuation, however flawed

and feeble you might perceive it,

of our fragile 249-year-old experiment

or the entropy that will engulf

and destroy us if we take the other route.

When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say,

“The checks of conscience are thrown aside

and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.”

The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid

of all opioids, an easy cure for

what some believe is the solution

to our myriad pains and problems.

When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved

with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction

and addiction, “a bigger delusion”,

James Baldwin would say, the author

and finisher of our national existence,

our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies.

Do not be seduced by easy equalization.

There is nothing equal about this equation.

We are at an existential crossroads

in our political and civic lives.

This is a choice that could not be clearer.

Listen, listen.

33 years ago, the world lost a towering literary figure.

The novelist and storyteller, not arguer,

Isaac Bashevis Singer.

For decades he wrote about God and myth and punishment,

fate and sexuality, family and history.

He wrote in Yiddish, a marvelously expressive language,

sad and happy all at the same time.

Sometimes maddeningly all knowing, yet resigned

to God’s seemingly capricious will.

It is also a language without a country,

a dying language in a world more interested

in the extermination or isolation

of its long suffering speakers.

Singer, writing in the pages

of the Jewish Daily Forward help to keep Yiddish alive.

Now our own wonderfully mongrel American language is

punctuated with dozens of Yiddish words

and phrases, parables, and wise sayings,

and so many of those words are perfect onomatopoeias

of disgust and despair, hubris and humor.

If you’ve ever met a schmuck,

you know what I’m talking about.

Toward the end of his long and prolific life,

Singer expressed wonder at why so many

of his books written in this obscure

and some said useless language would be

so widely translated, something like 56 countries

all around the world.

“Why,” he would wonder with his characteristic playfulness,

“Why would the Japanese care about his simple stories

of life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe 1,000 years ago?”

“Unless,” Singer paused, twinkle in his eye,

“Unless the story spoke of the kinship of the soul.”

I think what Singer was talking about was

that indefinable something that connects all

of us together, that which we all share as part

of organic life on this planet, the kinship of the soul.

I love that.

Okay, let me speak directly to the graduating class.

Watch out, here comes the advice.

Listen. Be curious, not cool.

Insecurity makes liars of us all.

Remember, none of us get out of here alive.

The inevitable vicissitudes of life, no matter

how well gated our communities, will visit us all.

Grief is a part of life, and if you explore

its painful precincts, it will make you stronger.

Do good things, help others.

Leadership is humility and generosity squared.

Remember the opposite of faith is not doubt.

Doubt is central to faith.

The opposite of faith is certainty.

The kinship of the soul begins with your own at times

withering self-examination. Try to change

that unchangeable human nature

of Ecclesiastes, but start with you.

“Nothing so needs reforming,”

Mark Twain once chided us, “As other people’s habits.”

Don’t confuse success with excellence.

Do not descend too deeply into specialism.

Educate all of your parts, you will be healthier.

Do not get stuck in one place.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice,” Twain also said.

Be in nature, which is always perfect

and where nothing is binary.

Its sheer majesty may remind you

of your own atomic insignificance,

as one observer put it,

but in the inscrutable and paradoxical ways

of wild places, you will feel larger, inspirited,

just as the egotist in our midst

is diminished by his or her self regard.

At some point, make babies. One of the greatest things

that will happen to you, I mean it,

one of the greatest things that will happen

to you is that you will have to worry,

I mean really worry, about someone other than yourself.

It is liberating and exhilarating, I promise.

Ask your parents.

Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity,

discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness,

sacrifice over self-indulgence.

Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology

the word enthusiasm means simply, “god in us”.

Serve your country.

Insist that we fight the right wars.

Denounce oppression everywhere.

Convince your government, as Lincoln understood

that the real threat always and still comes

from within this favored land.

Insist that we support science and the arts,

especially the arts.

They have nothing to do

with the actual defense of our country;

They just make our country worth defending.

Remember what Louis Brandeis said,

“The most important political office is

that of the private citizen.”

Vote.

You indelibly…

Please,

vote.

You indelibly underscore your citizenship,

and most important, our kinship with each other when you do.

Good luck and godspeed.