Who Cares If Homer Nodded?

A St. John’s graduate shares his favorite commencement speech, from National Review’s founder.

Editor’s Note: Thirty years ago today — on May 19, 1996 —National Review founder William F. Buckley delivered the commencement address at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md. Aaron Lewis was a student leader on the committee that selected Buckley to speak and recounts why the speech remains his favorite commencement address.

W hen the Commencement Speaker Committee at St. John’s College, Annapolis, unanimously agreed to invite William F. Buckley Jr. to address the graduating class of 1996, there was some mild pushback from the administration. “He’s too controversial,” they said. That left us scratching our heads, but we were quick to reflect that much of the faculty and staff at the time had been les étudiant(e)s during the turbulent era when Buckley was l’enfant terrible.

Nevertheless, the invite went out, Buckley accepted with alacrity, and he came to campus where he received exquisite hospitality on May 19, 1996. Beneath the massive limbs of the Liberty Tree on front campus during a swelteringly hot day, he repaid us handsomely by delivering a speech that we absolutely needed to hear after living a cloistered existence for four years: “Do not be overawed by what you have not learned.” The world was changing head-spinningly fast at the time, with a whole new digital economy emerging that threatened to demolish established paths. Buckley reassured us that the best way to face this brave new world was by grounding ourselves (as we had done as students of the Great Books at St. John’s) in the timeless material of Western civilization. Our investment had been worth it.

This speech is just as relevant today — if not more so for today’s graduates. Artificial intelligence makes the revolutionary technological developments of 30 years seem like Little League. There was something else about this speech that made Buckley call it “my personal favorite” in his book of collected speeches, Let Us Talk of Many Things. In his commencement speech, he imparts some personal history that I’m not sure many people knew at the time: William Buckley Sr. had wanted his son to attend St. John’s. Perhaps Buckley considered this moment at St. John’s to be a meritorious act of belated piety to his father. Both Buckley and the Liberty Tree he spoke beneath are now gone, but the coolness of the shade and wisdom of the address are indelible upon my memory. For me, Buckley’s is still the best commencement oration I have ever heard and my personal favorite, too. — Aaron Lewis

 

The following is the full text of Buckley’s commencement address:

You will not be surprised, I take it for granted, if a commencement speaker makes mention of his association, however attenuated, with St. John’s College. Well, I mean to do just that — to invoke St. John’s — and not to stop there but to deduce from the association a theme, my ambition being to catch your attention, however fleetingly, in competition with the fireworks that are so understandably a part of this day.

From quite early on, beginning when I was twelve or 13, I heard my father say that he hoped his sons, of whom I was the third, would, when reaching college age, attend St. John’s. This did not happen, my brothers opting for the geographically expedient Yale, only an hour’s drive from where we lived. But my father’s reverence for the idea that animates St. John’s lingers in the memory, and later on I would read references to this college in the work of my father’s friend Albert Jay Nock. Mr. Nock was not given to ambiguity, and if I remember right, at one point he pronounced St. John’s the only college in the United States where a student could still receive an education. As I think back on it, his views on education were more complacent than my father’s, who in a moment of exasperation with the modern curriculum told his ten children that, in America, either one went to college, or one received an education.

Mr. Nock exaggerated, of course, but he would not be distracted from his main point, which was that any attempt at education that is not grounded in Athens and Rome is quite simply evasive. Because, he said, every subject that challenges the human curiosity and intimates the resources of the human mind is sitting there in the copious inventory left by ancient Greece and Rome. To ignore them, as most curricula now do, is to ignore the primary deposits of Western intellectual experience.

Most educators would classify any such claim as exorbitant, and many even deal with it condescendingly: This is easier to do now that Mr. Nock is dead, because he knew very well how to bite back, in any of the five languages he had mastered. Critics will cite the huge events in human thought and experience that came after the fall of Rome. No matter — St. John’s is not here to deny the importance of what came after, which after all figures prominently in your own later curriculum. Albert Jay Nock was insisting on the indispensability of root knowledge, of what is learned only, he insisted, by knowing first what was thought and done between the time of Homer and Marcus Aurelius.

But our mind then turns to the other end of the scale, to the proliferation of knowledge.

How is it possible to keep up in today’s world?

The answer is that it isn’t possible to “keep up,” in any actuarial sense.

Someone somewhere remarked that Erasmus was probably the last man on earth about whom it could more or less safely be generalized that he knew everything there was to know. By “everything” was meant everything in the Western canon. Probably that means that Erasmus was known to have read every book then existing in those Western languages in which books were written. Knowledge was finite in the 15th century, and so tightly packed that the entire Western library fitted into a single room in Salamanca. One still finds there, framed and hanging over the arched doorway, a papal bull of excommunication automatically activated against any scholar who departed that room with one of those invaluable volumes hidden in his vestments.

Five hundred years later we are told that twice as much “knowledge” is charted with the passage of every decade. Suppose, by way of illustration, that at the end of every decade the penetrating reach of a telescope doubles. In that event you begin the decade knowing x about astronomic geography. At the end of the first decade, you know 2x; at the end of the second decade, 4x; and so on.

All this is so primarily because of the multiplier effect of computerized explorations. On that question skepticism is dead, very dead. It was only a hundred years ago that George Bernard Shaw was told that the speed of light had been ascertained to be 186,000 miles per second. He replied that such a finding was either a physicist’s effrontery or a plain lie. But we know now that raw knowledge has to increase. Pol Pot made a titanic effort to bring about nescience in Cambodia. His undertaking, 20 years ago, was to kill everyone who was literate — excepting, presumably, those at his command who needed to decipher his instructions to kill everybody else who could read instructions. He tried very hard, killing almost one-third of the Cambodian population; but he did not succeed in his ambition, and no one will. The wonderful line from the Russian novelist Ilya Ehrenburg comes to mind here, that when all the world is covered by asphalt, somewhere a blade of grass will force open a crack, bidding its ineluctable way through to sunlight.

The knowledge explosion, as we have come to refer to it, is philosophically accepted. With this acceptance comes a discreet resignation to live in relative ignorance, on a progressive scale.

So then the question peeks in at us: What is it that we are expected to keep on knowing? And what are the prospects in the years ahead of the survival of a common cultural vocabulary? If we mean to continue to talk to one another, don’t I have to understand what you’re saying if, to excuse an inattention, you remind me that, after all, even Homer nodded?

To know this is different from knowing that the earth is round, that a day comprises 24 hours, or that the seasons follow one another. But can we assume that the computer programmer, master of his own discipline, will in a moment of frustration console himself by reflecting that — even Homer nodded?

It is fair to ask, why remember this formulation? To which the reply is that there is no design here to forsake others, merely to give an illustration. Besides, the defense avers, with the ascendancy of myth-breaking science, we should cherish a formulation that reminds us of man’s fallibility. The impulse to self-government, along with the exercise of the scientific method, wore down many encrustations. The belief in the divine right of kings began to wither on the overburdened wings of certitude. It was in the 17th century, the lexicographers tell us, that the phrase about Homer gained currency. If fallibility could catch up with Homer, how much likelier it is that we will err. Homer was the august poet universally regarded as unerring (the divine Homer). Yet it was before the time of Christ that textual explorations caught him up, in one case describing a ship in which he placed a rudder on the boat’s bow end. It was Horace who wrote that “even excellent Homer sometimes nods.”

By documenting an imperfection in the excellent Homer, we are reminded of the comparative magnitude of our own errancy. A knowledge of individual fallibility nudges us on to accept the probability of collective fallibility, and — indulge me, please, my glide pattern — our mind then turns to such safeguards as government by laws, not men; to the concept of checks and balances; to human rights. And one is prompted to reflect that the knowledge of human fallibility may orient us to hunger after infallibility, which surely gives rise to the religious instinct. And this instinct acknowledges what some of us insist on calling “eternal verities.”

Your curriculum takes you from Homer to Flannery O’Connor in literature, and from Plato to William James in philosophy. You have trod the great highways and byways of Western culture and thus you have in hand the basic instruments of communication. Do not be overawed by what you have not learned. Everything over there, in the high galaxies of experimental science and indeed social surmise, is deracinated, except as it is rooted in what you have studied, and what you do know.

What so many of us experience, even those who have never laid eyes on St. John’s, is the special lure of this campus, and a feel of the serenity it continues to irradiate with its emphases on the initial struggle for knowledge, back when Thales first restated the quest for an understanding of man and his universe. You have every reason to be proud of what you have learned, and to be grateful to those who taught it to you, and to the parents who expedited your passage first into the world, then to St. John’s. You will not easily be surprised, standing on the shoulders of the giants; and, as you experience commencement speakers who come and go, you will be reminded, as today, that even Homer nodded.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955. Aaron Lewis is a public affairs executive in the space industry.