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Address to the first graduating class of the new millennium -- June 2001

by Steve Welzer

Much about the "unique challenges and opportunities" your generation faces will be heard in hundreds of commencement addresses at college campuses around the country this month. My inclination would be to avoid such boilerplate -- but I happen to believe it to be the truth. However, the challenges and opportunities I have in mind have nothing to do with the Information Age or the Entrepreneurial Spirit or the Brave New World of Bioengineering. I have in mind something different -- something that speaks more directly to the fundamental issues of your life now and in the future.

Columnists and pundits, examining the surface of things, can readily make a case that this is the best of times or the worst of times, depending upon their disposition. On the one hand, the Cold War is over and there has been no major conflagration in over 50 years; nuclear stockpiles are slowly declining; overall world gross production and consumption is higher than ever before. On the other hand, disparities of wealth and income, within and between nations, have arguably never been more extreme; ethnic conflict, infectious disease, breakdown of community -- problems abound; but so do solutions . . . as usual, it might be said.

"There is nothing new under the sun" we are advised in Ecclesiastes. But a recent book by J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, makes the case that your generation faces conditions which are historically unprecedented. It asserts that the massive changes humans have wrought since the Neolithic Revolution, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, have created something very new indeed. During the twentieth century the world's population quadrupled, the global economy expanded 14-fold, energy use increased 16 times, industrial output expanded by a factor of 40, carbon dioxide emissions went up 13-fold, and water use rose 9 times. "The history of the twentieth century really was different, in environmental terms, from that of any preceding period," according to McNeill.

Resultant phenomena such as climate changes, species extinctions, and global epidemics indicate that we are rapidly approaching or surpassing ecological thresholds beyond which recovery becomes problematic. Such profound challenges ought to be eliciting profound responses. Yet our culture, in these times, bedazzled by the pace and scale of technological advancement, seems bereft of inspiration for making social or environmental progress.

In a recent poll, college seniors like yourselves were asked to describe, in a word, the sensibility of their classmates in regard to their "prospects for leaving the world a better place." The most common single word offered was: "cynical." This is distressing, of course, but only logical given how intractable our problems must seem to those developing intellectually within a political climate dedicated to the perpetuation of the status quo.

A theme of Earth Day 1990 was that the '90s needed to be and could be "the turnaround decade." There may have been the political will in the streets to make that happen, but certainly not in the legislatures. Moreover, the ideological inspiration for creative praxis (the "vision thing") seems all but absent. The significance of this can hardly be overemphasized, and I believe it to be attributable to the fact that the historic progressive movements of the last several centuries have exhausted themselves.

The great movements for human liberation and social harmony -- which were the first conscious, deliberate, long-range movements for social transformation -- had, for two centuries, held out great hope for a "bright future for humanity" characterized by democracy, justice, rationality, and prosperity. In our post-modern, post-liberal, post-socialist era, it is debated whether the 19th/20th century liberatory movements "failed" or merely "disappointed" -- but in either case, the extent to which expectations were raised and then unrealized is the extent to which cynicism now permeates our cultural landscape.

Coming of age in the era of Boris Yeltsin's burial of Communism, Bill Clinton's illiberal "Third Way," Tony Blair's class-unconscious "New Labor," and a seeming consensus in regard to TINA ("There Is No Alternative"), your generation can hardly be expected to appreciate the sense of hope engendered by the Enlightenment-inspired movements. As if it were ancient history, you may have studied about how these movements spurred great revolutions and bold new social philosophies; how the philosophies divided into two essential variants; how the variants evolved into the contending ideologies which dominated intellectual and political discourse for so long.

One variant was based on a conception of "economic freedom" holding that free markets and the freedom to start a business constitute foundations for human liberty. The other variant was based on a conception of "economic democracy" asserting that private ownership of the means of production necessarily results in wealth/power disparities that vitiate political democracy.

From Locke and Voltaire and Babeuf to Friedman and Sartre and Mandel, the debate was joined: Right vs. Left; capitalism vs. socialism; private ownership vs. public ownership. During the Cold War the contention of ideologies was manifested in a rivalry between global superpowers: the capitalist (United States) vs. the socialist (Soviet Union). But decades after the Bolshevik revolution it became increasingly recognized that the fabric of life in each of the "rival systems" was characterized more by similarities than by differences in terms of the broadest essentials: industrial modernism, power elitism, social welfarism, environmental degradation.

This recognition motivated the theory of "the end of ideology," which asserted that industrial modernism is a more determinant force than is the configuration of political institutions and economic relations. It suggested that the capitalist and communist systems might converge -- until the latter collapsed entirely, discrediting the very idea of socialism -- hence the notion that "there is no alternative."

"No alternative" to widening income/wealth/power disparities; "no alternative" to a social system ridden with competition, exploitation, alienation; "no alternative" to the grinding work routine and atomization that leaves the majority of people, even in the relatively affluent societies, feeling like cogs in a Machine rather than citizens of a Polis. "No alternative" -- thus our cultural/political/theoretical cul-de-sac.

So you will commence as of this day to go out into a society where tremors of accelerating social and environmental crisis can be sensed, yet no alternative praxis can be envisioned. Surely the great challenge for your generation will be to find a way out of this cul-de-sac, find a way to overcome the cynicism and ideological paralysis of our time.

But I've not yet given an intimation of what I consider to be your great opportunity, and surely that's of more interest.

And I believe it to be a great opportunity, indeed -- a chance to participate in a developing transition of thought as profound as that associated with the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Based on a deep analysis of the deficiencies of the fading ideologies, a re-thinking of the human role and experience throughout natural history, and a critical re-examination of our civilizational trajectory, there is a nascent alternative worldview which is beginning to open doors toward rejuvenation in all the dimensions of human life. It is skeptical regarding the "universal ideology" of industrial modernism. It is attuned to the idea that the ingrained progressive discourse, with its valuation of growth, development, productivity, abundance, and "human dominion," suffers fundamentally from being anthropocentric, ecologically absent-minded, and spiritually impoverished.

The new alternative, neither Left nor Right in the standard sense, puts forward a conception of social transformation based on a generations-long process of cultural transformation. It is based on valuation of community and sense-of-place rather than development; stability rather than economic expansion; quality of life rather than productivity; recognition of limits rather than growth. It is fostering a new politics, yet it is assuredly more about growing new lifeways than proposing micro-policies or instituting superficial reforms.

So, while other commencement addresses today might limit the scope of your generation's challenges to those associated with the Information Age and limit your opportunities to the ordinary aspirations for security, affluence, and leisure, for those among you not satisfied with mere technological and commercial opportunities, for those wanting to make a real difference, I encourage you to pursue the most significant and visionary opportunity of your time -- that of helping to usher in the Ecological Era.

Prior to that he was an organizer for the Raritan-Brunswick Greens in New Brunswick, NJ; editor of the Jersey Greens Journal; on the steering committee of the Princeton, NJ chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America; and a member of the Editorial Board of the Eco-Socialist Review. He currently serves on the Media Committee of the Association of State Green Parties and recently was a member of the Negotiating Committee of the Greens/Green Party USA.

He has written articles about the Greens for many publications, including Green Pages, Green Politics, Synthesis/Regeneration, Z Magazine, GroundWork, CrossRoads, Fifth Estate, and Independent Voice. In addition, he wrote the Introduction to David Watson's Beyond Bookchin, Preface for a Future Social Ecology (1996), and helped edit Watson's book Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and Its Enemies (1998).

Having learned a good lesson from LBJ about the deficiencies of the twin corporate parties, Steve has never had the inclination to vote for a Democrat or a Republican.

Steve lives in East Windsor, NJ and works as a computer support technician for the State of New Jersey. During his college education (NYU, Rutgers) he managed to avoid computers, while switching majors between journalism, sociology, psychology, and history. After obtaining a Masters Degree in Marxian Economics, he had his choice of driving a taxi cab or an ice cream truck to make a living, or programming computers. If he had it all to do over again he'd opt for the ice cream truck.