Beware The Study Of Turtles

By Charles Krauthammer

This essay is adapted from the author's commencement address at McGill University in Montreal earlier this month.

Exactly 23 years ago, in this very building, I was sitting in your seat. Today I report to you on my two-decade reconnaissance expedition into the world beyond McGill College Avenue. Like Marco Polo, I return -- without silk, but with three pieces of sage advice.

First, don't lose your head. I'm speaking here of intellectual fashion, of the alarming regularity with which the chattering classes are swept away by the periodic enthusiasms that wash over the culture.

Only a decade ago, for example, the West was seized with a near mass hysteria about imminent nuclear apocalypse. The airwaves, the bookstores, the Congress were filled with dire warnings about our headlong dash to the abyss. Indeed, those who refused to lose their heads were said to suffer from a psychological disorder. "Psychic numbing," it was called.

Ten years later, with nuclear weapons still capable of destroying the world many times over -- not a word about the coming apocalypse. The fever has passed. But not the propensity for fever. Another day, another fever. With nuclear apocalypse now out of fashion, we have eco-catastrophe, a doomsday of pollution, overpopulation and resource depletion.

Do not misunderstand. There is still a nuclear problem. There are environmental problems. But there is a difference between a problem and panic. The next time you find yourself in the midst of some national hysteria, remember the tulip craze that swept Holland three centuries ago, an orgy of panicked financial speculation in which land and houses and gold were all traded for . . . tulips. At the mania's peak, a single Semper Augustus tulip could fetch 20 town houses.

Remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which launched the Vietnam War. It passed the U.S. Senate 88 to 2. That should have been a warning.

In the old Soviet Union, which routinely rewrote and rearranged history to fit its political needs, there was a saying: In Russia it is impossible to predict the past. Well, in the bourgeois normality of the democratic West, one should say: Here it is impossible to predict the future. So when confronted with the apocalypse du jour, keep your head.

Lesson two: Look outward. You have been rightly taught Socrates' dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living. I would add: The too examined life is not worth living either.

Perhaps previous ages suffered from a lack of self-examination. The Age of Oprah does not. One of the defining features of modernity is self- consciousness: psychological self-consciousness as popularized by Freud; historical self-consciousness as introduced by Hegel and Marx; literary self- consciousness as practiced in the interior, self-referential, self-absorbed world of modern fiction.

The reigning cliche of the day is that in order to love others one must first learn to love oneself. This formulation -- love thyself, then thy neighbor -- is a license for unremitting self-indulgence, because the quest for self-love is endless. By the time you have finally learned to love yourself, you'll find yourself playing golf at Leisure World.

The story is told of the sultan who awoke in the middle of the night and summoned his wizard. "Wizard," he said, "my sleep is troubled. Tell me: What is holding up the earth?"

"Majesty," replied the wizard, "the earth rests on the back of a giant elephant."

The sultan was satisfied and went back to sleep. He then awoke in a cold sweat and summoned the wizard. "Wizard," he said, "what's holding up the elephant?"

The wizard looked at him and said, "The elephant stands on the back of a giant turtle. And you can stop right there, Majesty. It's turtles all the way down."

My friends, don't get lost in the study of turtles. Endless, vertiginous self-examination leads not only to a sterile moral life, but also to a stilted intellectual life. Yes, examine. But do it with dispatch and modesty and then get on with it: Act and go and seek and do.

Which brings us to lesson three. When you do, what to do? Everything. But above all this: Save the best.

In this country, at this great university, saving the best means something very particular. It means saving your unprecedented historical achievement in ethnic coexistence. It is no accident that when boat people are found floating in some distant sea, their preferred destination is invariably North America. Not just because of its prosperity or democracy. But because of its ethnic harmony. We have figured out how to live together without raging civil strife.

In the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, where peoples that have lived together for centuries are now at each other's throats, there are today 300 Canadian soldiers sheltering the innocent. Soldiers from a country that might have been . Yugoslavia -- serving as protectors in a country that is Yugoslavia.

Yours is a legacy not to be thrown away. In the U.S. there are those prepared to dispense with the American approach to ethnic diversity and begin counting by race. It is a dangerous, thoughtless course that we will one day regret with Balkan intensity. Similarly, the Canadian solution of dignified if sometimes disputatious coexistence between two great peoples is one too precious to throw away. Save the best.

Look outward. And don't lose your head.

End of sermon. Now go out and change the world.