Graduation speech: Knowing thyself – University of Sydney

Graduands, my warmest congratulations. It may be Friday the 13th, but this is clearly an auspicious day. I am honoured to be celebrating this occasion with you.

It gives me special pleasure to be with you as an alumnus of the Department. There is a special bond among Sydney’s graduates of Government and International Relations. Few understand what it’s like to be educated in the corridors of Merewether when you had expected to be here in the glorious Quad. You have all survived your encounter with brutal utilitarianism.

When I left this University, I did so with an honours degree – but with nothing remotely close to a complete education. This is not intended as a slight to the Department or to my teachers here; far from it.

Studying Government laid important foundations for my thinking. Under Ariadne Vromen, I studied social movements and political sociology. Michael Jackson introduced me to scholarship about power and leadership. My honours thesis on ethnic politics led me to think harder about theoretical questions about multiculturalism.

But, when I left, I was still poorly read, and mindful of my deficiencies. Two things intervened.

First, after finishing my honours year, I landed a job. Through luck and timing – the two are inseparable – I found myself on the staff of Bob Carr, who at the time was Premier of New South Wales. Working for Carr was an adventure for a 21-year-old. After a few months working on speeches, I joined his media office, where I saw first-hand the workings of a political media machine. But very quickly, I began to feel that four years of University didn’t seem to teach me all that much.

The second development was Oxford. I left in 2004 to begin a master’s degree in political theory, and would remain there for five years. I read voraciously – political theory, history, philosophy, literature. I blew most of my scholarship money buying books from Blackwell’s, Oxford’s famous bookstore, where I would set up office for the day in the café on the first floor. Many mornings were spent reading and taking notes on John Rawls and Charles Taylor; many afternoons were spent eavesdropping on conversations about Berlin, Joyce and Nietzsche. Always, though, I would be buzzing from a quiet exhilaration. Of course, it could have just been the coffee – usually poorly extracted, often burnt, but nonetheless potent.

When I look back, I think about how those first few years after Sydney University gave me my truest education. Working in politics forced me to master speech and language – to understand the power of clarity and persuasion. Having the luxury of postgraduate study, meanwhile, gave me time – the time to think and read, the time to form a philosophical view of the world.

Let me say more about clarity. Often, the idea of clarity is overrated. For example, a zeal of purpose – a clarity in conviction – can in fact be a dangerous thing: as it has been said, ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’.

Yet the virtue of clarity is not always appreciated; certainly, that is the case with language. Our use of the English language today is more often than not defined by a lack of clarity, and by a failure to persuade. This has long been lamented, of course – long before Don Watson began chronicling the ascendency of managerial jargon, and our insidious descent into an age of synergies, learnings and outcomes. Let us have pity on those who tell us they are action-oriented, results-driven thought-leaders who think outside the box, and are passionate about disruptive transformation. 

In his famous essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell compared good English with the egregious form of modern English. He quotes the following passage from Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English, as translated by Orwell:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Such wooliness – which has become characteristic of academic writing as well as bureaucratic writing – often conceals. It conceals poor thought and it disguises laziness. Those who resort to it do so because they want to sound smarter than they actually are, or because they can’t be bothered doing the hard work of getting a point just right. If you can’t say explain something simply, it may be that you don’t understand it well enough.

You may think these are pedantic complaints. But, in my view, they go to the health of our body politic. They affect our ability to have meaningful debates. As the historian Tony Judt has described, across western democracies the language of economics has colonised our conduct of politics. To the point where we can no longer distinguish between means and ends – where we forget, for example, that an economy exists to serve society, rather than the other way around. Our thinking and our language have become so impoverished that we no longer see such distinctions.

And when language is lazy, it can easily be used to conceal power. This is something we see very frequently with racism, the concern of my current work as Commissioner.

We see it in the frequent complaints about political correctness destroying free speech. These complaints are almost always made by prominent commentators who happen to enjoy national media platforms to spout their opinions on television, on radio, and in print. The charge of political correctness is ironically used to shut down anyone who would dare suggest that our public debates be based on civility and respect.

We see it as well in the way that racism is constantly being denied by those in positions of social power and privilege. For example, some commentators define racism only to mean racial superiority or racial malice. The lazy suggestion here is that that casual prejudice should be brushed aside as minor social infractions. But its effect is to reinforce social privilege. It implies that nothing is ever racist unless it’s violent or unless you mean it to be racist. It implies that racism is best defined by those who dish it out rather than by those who experience it.

There is perhaps another way in which we see laziness infect our public conversations. All too often, in public, style triumphs over substance. We are seeing at play what the writer Clive James called our ‘mass-psychotic passion for celebrity … one of the luxurious diseases that Western liberal democracy will have to find a cure for in the long run’.

For James, there is a distinction between celebrity and recognition. Celebrities ‘are recognised in the street, but usually because of who they are, or who they are supposed to be’. To achieve recognition, however, ‘is to be known for what you have done, and quite often the person who knows what you have done has no idea of what you look like’.

Our society places too much value on celebrity, and not enough on recognition. We see it most mornings on commercial breakfast television, where we have to endure the opinions of celebrities about the political issues of the day. We also see it on our more serious current affairs programs, where often a platform is given to people lacking in obvious qualifications to pass expert judgment.

It’s true as well outside Australia. Not even the United Nations is immune. Something is wrong when our global conscience on climate change, gender equality and human rights is becoming defined by the voices of Leonardo di Caprio, Emma Watson and Angelina Jolie. None of us should be surprised that Donald Trump is now one step away from becoming President of the United States.

To be sure, we are all implicated in this. Clive James was right when he said that the cure to our celebrity disease will have to be self-willed. Part of the problem is that, as a society, we aren’t self-aware enough even to realise the harm that is being done. Celebrity culture is the opiate of our digital masses.

Which brings me back to my point about time and self-awareness. In its ideal form, a university education – a liberal education – is an opportunity to develop and cultivate a sensibility. To inquire, to question, to reflect, to absorb. But most of all, to come to know oneself.

Like wisdom, knowing oneself can be elusive. Sometimes it comes with experience, sometimes it comes through hardship; it can never be taught, but must always be willed. Even then, our knowledge of ourselves may never be perfect. To borrow the words of Walt Whitman, ‘I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes’.

Knowing thyself may be easier said than done, but we should aspire to it. Because knowing thyself is arguably a precondition of understanding others. How are we to understand someone who is different, if we cannot even understand ourselves? And if we can’t understand those who are different, how can we even begin to be generous towards them?

On that note, I must say I’ve not nearly been generous enough. To the graduands, this is your day, and I’ve not yet said anything about your achievement. Some of you may well have breezed through your degree; others may have had to fight to get here. Whatever your path, and however you have got here: congratulations. I know that all the families in the Hall this morning are brimming with pride and joy. And to all of you, I wish you the very best in whatever you pursue. Having been liberated from the utilitarian shackles of Merewether, may you now flourish with revived Gothic splendour.