James Carroll’s Commencement Address
Claremont Graduate University
May 16, 2009
President Hough, honored guests, trustees, faculty, family, Claremont Graduate University Class
of 2009,
What do you do with disappointment? A strange question, perhaps, for a joyous occasion like
this one. When you graduate from the distinguished schools and departments of Claremont
Graduate University, you take proper satisfaction in your accomplishment, and your dear ones,
including not only family members and friends, but also faculty and administrators of Claremont,
take proper pride in sharing the day with you. This day is the opposite of disappointment.
But still. What do you do with disappointment? It is a more useful question, actually, than its
opposite: what do you do with success? WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THAT. Look
around. Success abounds here today, and what we do with it is celebrate, express gratitude
perhaps—but above all, prepare for more. The elite character of the degrees you earn today will
see to that.
Disappointment, on the other hand: grin and bear it. Suck it up. Put it behind us. Get over it. Get
back to normal—which is… well, success.
At the risk of engaging in what those of you who are scientists might dismiss as “baseless
speculation”—also known by its two letter acronym—let me invite you to cast your mind’s eye
back to our very most primeval ancestors. My speculation? That it was less often success that
prompted the great leaps forward of human evolution than disappointment.
It was not the four-legged forager who succeeded in finding food within reach who stood up on
those rear legs—but rather the ones who were disappointed. Homo erectus—the creatures
walking upright—were disappointed crawlers.
Among Homo erectus, it was not those who succeeded in adjusting to limits of merely sensory
awareness who leapt into what we call consciousness—and then self- consciousness. No, it was
those creatures for whom material awareness was not enough.
The gatherers who succeeded in sustenance by picking up the seeds and fruits that fell before
them did not become hunters. Hunters were disappointed gatherers.
And then… the disappointed hunter-gatherers—planting those seeds—were the ones who
invented agriculture and then the city and then civilization – and then, yes, the university!
Disappointment- you get my drift- drove Homo erectus to walk upright; drove Homo erectus to
become Homo sapiens. The human who knows. But knows what?
That this: whatever it is: that this is not enough.
Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens sapiens—the human who knows that knowing is always
incomplete.
It was not success that drove human evolution. It was disappointment. Indeed, one could argue
that disappointment—the in built capacity to wish for something more, the omnipresent longing
for a different outcome—is what made us human in the first place.
The glory of humanity lies in what we do with disappointment. Again, a strange theme perhaps,
for a joyous day such as this. But perhaps not. Longing for a different outcome—humans
invented a different outcome. Again. And again. This is what you scientists call adaptation.
So that is the deep past. Baseless speculation, perhaps.
But what about us?
Let me give you two examples from my own lifetime of this principle at work, both from the
1980s—when most of you were just getting going.
A young graduate student at MIT named Randy Forsberg suffered what to her was the crushing
disappointment of the election of Ronald Reagan. This can seem a partisan reference, but hold
on: Reagan is a hero of this story. I say the election of 1980 was disappointing because Randy
was obsessed with the out-of-control nuclear arms race: 40-50 thousand nukes in both the
American and Soviet arsenals and still growing. And Reagan was elected promising to add even
more. Ultimately, the US and the USSR would build more than a hundred thousand of the
monsters.
Randy drew up a one-page plea for what she called a “freeze” in the nuclear arms race. She
asked a few of her fellow grad students to sign it. In their disappointment, they did. The freeze,
as it was called, ignited a grass roots fire. The freeze became heat. Within a year, a million
people gathered in Central Park pleading for it. And then Congress passed a resolution
demanding it and Ronald Regan began speaking of CUTS!
A short time before Randy’s political disappointment, an electrician in a shipyard in Gdansk,
Poland received a more personal disappointment—he was laid off. In that Soviet controlled
nation, he and his fellow unemployed workers had no right to unionize and could do nothing. So
the electrician hitch-hiked to Krakow to see the Polish Pope say mass in a field. He had nothing
better to do. And what he heard was John Paul II saying: Be not afraid. Of, among other things,
disappointment. A few weeks later, that electrician signed what should have been his death
warrant—the charter of the union he founded, Solidarity. His name was Lech Walesa.
What Randy Forsberg and Lech Walesa did with their disappointments was nothing less than
ignite grass root movements for change on both sides of the Iron Curtain, movements that
changed Ronald Reagan, empowered Mikhail Gorbachev, and brought about the non-violent
resolution of the Cold War. Nuclear weapons not frozen but dismantled! A dismantling that
President Obama is now resuming, in concert with Russia. Success did not initiate that most
hopeful event of our lifetimes. Disappointment did.
Let’s not be glib about this. Success is great. We all want it. Disappointment can be crushing,
even tragic.
But let’s pay deeper attention to what is going on here this morning. Look around. Success, to
repeat abounds. But every person here has created their success out of a dozen disappointments,
a hundred refusals to be defeated, a thousand decisions to keep going when there were reasons to
quit. This is our glory.
We are—today—the successful people, and proud of it. Degree recipients, faulty, staff, family,
and friends, congratulations to you all. But equally, we are--- like the best of those who go before
us, all the way back to our ancestors who learned to hunt, invented farming, found ways out of
war—the disappointed people. Sucking it up, yes. Getting over it, yes. Knowing more
disappointment lies ahead, for sure. But always transforming disappointment into nothing less
than the human future.
This is who we are. It is what we do. And why should we NOT REJOICE?