What one piece of advice would you give the human race?
The tradition at commencement speeches is to offer advice to the graduating students—one last lesson before graduates enter the real world.
Alan Kay, the personal computing pioneer, education innovator, and philosopher, broke that tradition last week and, instead, asked graduating students what perspective their college education had given them on humanity and what one piece of advice they would give the human race.
Drawing upon a long line of thinkers, including Francis Bacon and Marshall McLuhan, Kay offered his own answer to the perspective question:
The perspective on humanity I would choose is that “we are the species that fools itself” — in fact we even pay to be fooled — and we have been fooling ourselves for our entire 200,000 years.
But, invoking the example of Helen Keller, Kay argued that humanity is not doomed to be fooled:
Every human being is born with the potential to learn to see as Helen Keller learned to see – with their hearts, bodies, spirit and minds — and to learn to be as vividly alive and human as Helen Keller learned to be.
Therefore, Kay’s advice to humanity is:
Let us learn how to wake up from the slumbers of our nervous system, culture and beliefs, and try to find out what is going on and what is really needed!
It was a provocative ten-minute speech, and well worth watching:
How about you? What of many perspectives on humanity would you choose, and what advice would you give?
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Chunka Mui is the co-author of “Unleashing the Killer App” and “Billion-Dollar Lessons.” Follow him at Forbes or on Twitter @chunkamui
(Disclosure — I am on the board of directors of Viewpoints Research Institute, which was co-founded and still directed by Alan Kay.)
Also — here’s a transcript of the entire speech:
“Learning to See”
June 10, 2012
by Alan Kay
Thank you for this great honor. It is especially meaningful because no one owes more to his research community than I do — and I feel the same spirit of family and community in the wonderful DePaul commitments to “access to everyone” and “it takes a village”, to help all of us succeed in our dreams.
When I asked about graduation speeches, I was told it is a tradition to give advice... and to be darn quick about it!
But since we are all manifestly diverse, everyone needs somewhat different advice — and moreover, after all these years I’m still working on my own process, so I have no lofty pronouncements from my own experience.
But, we are all members of the same species. And part of what Education with a capital E should mean is for us to gain some understanding and perspective on ourselves.
So after acquiring a real education in college, shouldn’t we be able to give the human race at least one piece of useful advice?
What of many perspectives on humanity would you choose, and what advice would you give?
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From female mitochondrial DNA evidence, our species seems to have been on the planet for about 200,000 years.
Anthropologists studying several thousand societies have found that we all have language, stories, particular cultural approaches to life and survival, religion, music, dance, art — several hundred common categories of behaviors in all.
A child born into one culture and moved at birth to another will grow up as a member of the receiving culture.
So despite our manifest diversities, down deep we are also very similar — what seems to differ from culture to culture are not our categories, but how each culture fills them out. For example, we don’t fight over whether we have beliefs about the world, but over what beliefs.
Here is what strikes me about us: even though for hundreds of thousands of years we’ve cared so much about beliefs to fight for them, until very recently we humans have just taken the world of our senses and of our cultures “as they seem” with almost no attempts to invent ways to check if our perceptions and beliefs actually hold water.
In other words, we live inside our heads to an astonishing degree. So much so that we resemble a creature in a dream that only occasionally matches up with the world it lives in. We live in a kind of hallucination of our own devising.
Francis Bacon pointed this out in 1610 when he called for methods to be developed to get around the blindnesses caused by our genetics, individual brains, how we use language, and assimilating the beliefs of our cultures. The already started invention of modern science produced example after example where careful investigations and new kinds of thinking revealed that many of our beliefs about the world did not hold up. We had been fooling ourselves!
So, the perspective on humanity I would choose is that “we are the species that fools itself” — in fact we even pay to be fooled — and we have been fooling ourselves for our entire 200,000 years.
Part of the nature of this foolery is that we think that we can see—and that what we think is there is what is there. A wonderful line in the Talmud says “We see things not as they are but as we are”. (I wonder what happened to that person!)
Marshall McLuhan quipped: “Until I believe it, I can’t see it”.
Yet we need dreams and imagination.
One of my greatest heroes, Helen Keller, was rendered blind and deaf before she was two years old, yet became the first deafblind person to earn a college degree.
In 1932, shortly after the Empire State Building was built at the dawn of the Depression in amazingly less than a year as a statement by its contractors about what humans can do with purpose and will, Helen Keller, who knew a lot about purpose and will, took a trip to the top.
She was asked afterwards by Dr John Finley: "ʺWhat Did You Think 'ʹof the Sight'ʹ When You Were on the Top of the Empire Building?"ʺ
Here are a few extracts from the letter she wrote.
Frankly, I was so entranced "ʺseeing"ʺ that I did not think about the sight. If there was a subconscious thought of it, it was in the nature of gratitude to God for having given the blind seeing minds. As I now recall the view I had from the Empire Tower, I am convinced that, until we have looked into darkness, we cannot know what a divine thing vision is.
I will concede that my guides saw a thousand things that escaped me from the top of the Empire Building, but I am not envious. For imagination creates distances and horizons that reach to the end of the world. It is as easy for the mind to think in stars as in cobblestones.
It was a thrilling experience to be whizzed in a "ʺlift"ʺ a quarter of a mile heavenward, and to see New York spread out like a marvelous tapestry beneath us.
There was the Hudson – more like the flash of a swordblade than a noble river. The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face, and the solar system circled about my head! Why, I thought, the sun and the stars are suburbs of New York, and I never knew it!
I see in the Empire Building something else – passionate skill, arduous and fearless idealism. The tallest building is a victory of imagination. Instead of crouching close to earth like a beast, the spirit of man soars to higher regions, and from this new point of vantage he looks upon the impossible with fortified courage and dreams yet more magnificent enterprises.
What did I "ʺsee and hear"ʺ from the Empire Tower? As I stood there 'ʹtwixt earth and sky, I saw a romantic structure wrought by human brains and hands that is to the burning eye of the sun a rival luminary. I saw it stand erect and serene in the midst of storm and the tumult of elemental commotion. I heard the hammer of Thor ring when the shaft began to rise upward. I saw the unconquerable steel, the flash of testing flames, the sword-like rivets. I heard the steam drills in pandemonium. I saw countless skilled workers welding together that mighty symmetry. I looked upon the marvel of frail, yet indomitable hands that lifted the tower to its dominating height.
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Wow!
Every human being is born with the potential to learn to see as Helen Keller learned to see – with their hearts, bodies, spirit and minds — and to learn to be as vividly alive and human as Helen Keller learned to be.
Our great gift is that though “we are the stuff that dreams are made of”, we can invest those dreams with the clearer knowledge brought by careful study beyond our simple prejudices. There is nothing more powerful than imagination coupled with investigation!
Imagination allows us to dream and conceive of better futures for us all. Investigation finds the powers and knowledge to make better futures happen.
So I think my advice to our species would be: “We can’t learn to see until we admit we are blind”.
In other words, let us learn how to wake up from the slumbers of our nervous system, culture and beliefs, and try to find out what is going on and what is really needed!
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