Graduation address: Dr William Tooman
Wednesday 4 December 2019
Vice-Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, and — most importantly — graduating students. Congratulations. Today is your day.
The last time that I had the pleasure of addressing a class of happy St Andrews graduates, the theme of my speech was ‘death’. Keeping to tradition, I have striven to identify a similarly maudlin topic for your day of glory and joy. I thought long, and I thought hard about topics like contagious disease, bankruptcy, and toothache. But in the end, I settled on a run-of-the-mill graduation theme, the theme of ‘ambition’.
As new graduates, you are freshers all over again, entering a new phase of life, not knowing exactly how to go about it or what it will bring you. This comes with an appropriate measure of uncertainty and anxiety, but most of you, I am sure will hope to excel; to rise, however slowly, in position and prosperity.
So you are probably expecting me to celebrate ambition. You are, I suspect, anticipating quotations like Emerson's pretentious adage: ‘Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds’, You might be bracing yourself for clichés like: ‘seize the day’, or ‘ambition is enthusiasm with a purpose’.
Ambition, though, is not a virtue. It is a force of character that leads many to success, but it is also the cause of many of the world’s greatest ills. The need to get, only to be getting; the need for position, only to have power. Ambition is not, in itself, good or bad. Let no one tell you that you should be ambitious, don't be fooled into thinking it will bring you health, or wellbeing, or happiness.
The unpleasant truth is that ambition has no fulfilment. There is no achievement that completes it. It just goes on and on. In some cultures, the endlessness of ambition identifies it as a vice, raher than a virtue. Taoist proverbs in this vein abound: ‘There is no guilt greater than to sanction ambition’; ‘There is no calamity greater than to be discontented’; ‘There is no fault greater than the wish to be getting’.
Put differently, ambition is the enemy of contentment.
But contentment, good as it might be for your mental health, is not any more a virtue than is ambition. The pursuit of contentment can be profoundly self-centred. It can lead to unhealthy artificial prioritisation of one’s personal good, to the neglect of others. Protecting your time, your money, you health, your wellbeing can be self-defeating, causing you to live in a bubble of self with narrow horizons and comfortable habits.
So what can you do? If ambition and contentment are irrevocably in tension, which do you choose?
Twice already I have referred to ‘virtue.’ For some of you, I imagine, 'virtue' is a word deserving only of a smirk. A self-serving word; a word for suckers; a threadbare religious word.
Fear not. I am not going to extol the virtues of ‘virtue.’ I am not going to tell you to throw in your lot with the ‘common good’ (whatever that might be) or to forego personal gain. I am going to tell you that you should choose contentment rather than ambition, out of self-interest.
The happiest, most contented, least regretful people are those whose lives revolve around others: striving to create happiness, and connection, and harmony, and whatever other kindly word you choose. It's those people, those who seek what’s best for those around them, who lead the most contented lives. So, be selfish by acting selfless.
I have a friend who started a niche publishing company many years ago. Early on he had grand ambitions for his one-man shop. He wanted to grow and command his corner of the marketplace. As it grew into a three-person shop, and then a ten-person shop, and eventually into a corporation, his ambitions changed. He began to use his company to give second chances to people damaged by the endless frictions of the corporate world. He began to give positions to people whose personal lives were in ruins. He began to see his profits as a way to invest in people, to lend a hand. These days, his company’s profits are redistributed to his employees and to charities that they choose together. He established a hardship fund to help the extended family members of his employees. He has employed refugees. My friend still works very long hours, but he is one of the most centred and calm, dare I say it, contented people that I know. We will all have deathbed regrets, I doubt he will have as many as most of us.
So, why reject ambition? Because, ironically, it will not serve you well. The late novelist David Foster Wallace said it more eloquently than I ever could:
‘Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship intellect and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. If you worship money and things, you will never have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in our daily consciousness because the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or that they're sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious’.
If, you, like me, you are not a person naturally overflowing with loving-kindness, it does not much matter. You do not have to be kind to act kind. A study conducted at Emory University some years ago asked subjects to wear digital recorders for days at a time, capturing every conversation. The results were astonishing. Aware that they were being observed, test subjects were more empathic, spent more time with other people, laughed more, and used the word ‘I’, far less. In short, they became better people.
Today is your day. May you use all your other days selfishly. Wherever you find yourself and whatever you find yourself doing, if you dedicate your days to those around you, you will discover, mysteriously, that that you have dedicated them to yourselves.
Dr William Tooman
School of Divinity