COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
for the College of Engineering Commencement,
University of California at Berkeley Greek Theater,
9:00 AM, Saturday, May 20, 1995
by John H. Lienhard
Mechanical Engineering Department
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-4792
jhl@uh.edu
It is such a pleasure to be here -- to be part of this ceremony.
I finished my Berkeley degree in the Summer of 1961. I didn't get
back for my own graduation. So today, like most of you, I'm at my
first Berkeley graduation. I join with you in a belated celebration
of my own graduation.
And the odd thing is I'm asking myself the same question you're
asking yourself: "What does my future hold?" I'm a lot further down
that road, but I still face that exact same question.
My last visit here to the Greek theater was in 1960. I came to
hear Konrad Adenauer. He was the first chancellor of post-war Germany.
He was then 84 years old, with three years to go as chancellor. They
called him Der Alte -- the Old One! And he offered an odd reminder
that, if we keep our head in the game, the game will be much longer
and richer than we expect.
In those days I'd go to swim in the University Pool. There,
every day, was the noted chemist Joel Hildebrand. Hildebrand was
then almost 80. I thought he was in the twilight of his life. How
wrong I was! By the time he published his last paper, decades later,
he was 101. And, for all I know, he was still swimming in the UC Pool.
Hildebrand, like Adenauer, kept his head in the game. He showed
us that our brain is our real fountain of youth. But those old ones
evoke the question that I face as surely as you do:
Is my long, promising, threatening, and wholly unknowable
future going to be wasted on a world that's deteriorating
and slipping into self-destruction?
Students in every age have, on some level, feared the world they
enter. And their teachers, ever since Socrates himself, have fed that
fear as they see the values and virtues of their own youth shifting
into something unfamiliar.
But that fear dissipates in a simple trick of etymology. Start
with the word engineering. It's from the Latin word ingenium. Engineering
is the practice of your own ingenuity in creating our technologies.
Now, look at the word technology: It breaks down into two Greek
roots, techni -- the art and skill of making things, and ology -- the
knowledge of. Technology is the science of -- or, better, the lore of
-- making and doing.
It took two anthropologists, Malcolm Smith and Robert Layton, to
show me the power of that word, technology. They tell a strange tale
about the integrity of the human race. They begin by visiting an
African lake that teems with strange fish called cichlids.
The cichlids in the lake come in 200 different species. They're
all pretty similar. Only their lips, jaws, and teeth have all evolved
differently. Some have evolved into fin eaters -- some into worm
eaters. Some cichlids eat snails. Each has evolved into a tiny niche
of the ecology. That kind of subdividing is pretty common. That's
why we count almost 40,000 species of fish, birds, and mammals.
So why haven't we splintered like that? Humankind is only one
species. One hunter can catch a rabbit. Another can spear a fish.
Yet we don't specialize into races of rabbit catchers and fish
spearers.
Why are we alike in all but the most minor features -- like
skin color and hair diameter? After all, we've faced every environment
on Earth. We've had every chance to divide into specialized subspecies.
The answer lies in one key attribute: Humans share! We share in
complex ways that no other animal does. Back in camp, the rabbit
chaser and the fish spearer exchange food. We've done that as long as
we've existed.
Of course it helps that we're omnivorous. We eat almost anything.
If it lives, we've eaten it at one time or another. But we've also shared
it.
Our sharing goes beyond food. Most societies have taboos about
mating across the lines of clan, ethnicity, or race. But the important
thing about those taboos is that we break them. Intermarriage is
another kind of sharing that holds our species together.
But the essential thing we share is our technique -- for
gathering food or meeting other needs. One cichlid fish had to
develop a specialized jaw for crushing and eating snails. We share
our techniques for cracking snail shells.
Technology shapes us into one body instead of a thousand
subspecies. We're bound in a unique and instinctive tether of
generosity. And our technologies are right at the core of that
generosity.
So technology is generosity, but it's also something else. It
has a second, most surprising, dimension. Ask yourself:
Why do the reckless among us survive?
The reckless expose themselves to more danger. Surely that threatens
their Darwinian survival. You'd expect each generation to be more
careful than the last.
But recklessness does survive -- generation after generation.
Maybe we need risk-taking for survival. The hunter who won't face a
buffalo will starve. The parent who won't risk her life to save her
child faces Darwinian extinction.
Author Melvin Konner asks us to look more closely at the risk-taker -- the sensation-seeker. Psychologists talk about four faces
of that person.
First is thrill and adventure-seeking
-- race cars and mountain-climbing.
Second is experience seeking
-- like travel or new friends.
Third is disinhibition
-- hedonism in its various forms.
Fourth is boredom-susceptibility
-- simply being unable to bear routine.
That list catches us short. This psychological profile for
recklessness perfectly fits the inventive mind -- the technologist.
Thrill and adventure seeking is at the heart of creativity.
The Eureka moment is a mountain-top experience, make no mistake!
And we chance terrible frustrations and defeat to get there.
Experience seeking means opening ourselves to the dangers of
change. That's how we forge creative connections.
Creativity is certainly hedonistic. The moment of discovery
is pure pleasure. Like other physical pleasures, it is a moment of
letting-go -- of abandoning control.
And invention is the only real way to beat back boredom. It
takes off the comfortable protective old shoe of familiarity.
The reckless survive because invention is the primal act of
human recklessness. It's also our major survival trait. Unlike
bears, we can't survive the cold without heaters and houses. Unlike
lions, we can't kill prey without weapons. Unlike oxen, we can't graze
grass that we didn't plant and harvest.
Recklessness is more than entering a burning house to save a
child. For our frail species it is that, but it's more. It's the
courage of the creative spirit. It's the hedonistic pleasure of
abandoning control. It's risking change.
We're the only species that must give its future over to the
fruit of its inventions. That's dangerous business. And some of
the reckless among us do perish. But recklessness survives, just
because our species depends upon it. I love something Robert Louis
Stevenson said:
For God's sake give me the young man who
has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
You've all heard the stories we tell school children about
technology. The old stories of Morse, Edison, and Ford -- of
airplanes, rockets, and computers. Those stories hide the deep,
human, and subjective texture of the technology that will be your
life. I'll tell you about a victim of those stories.
One day, about ten years ago, I ran into Ralph Seban at a
meeting in Dallas. Ralph taught mechanical engineering here, all
his life. He was a formative agent in shaping the field of heat
transfer. Ralph was a tough old bird who touched many people very
deeply.
That day, Seban held a pocket calculator in his hand. He shook
his head and said,
What's my life been worth? Now: the person who invented
this really improved the world. What have I done!
I wanted to yell and shout! Ralph, don't you know what you've
done? Don't you know how the fabric of our lives is shaped by small
acts -- not by grand ones? Ralph, don't you know what the real
measure of a life is?
I suppose a few engineers do indeed invent the cotton gin and
the steamboat -- the things we talk about on TV shows or in school
books. But my heroes shape our culture in far more subtle ways. My
heroes are the people who form us into one unified species by the
ongoing act of generosity, and courage, that is technology. Ralph
Seban makes a very fitting hero.
You see, there's a terrible disconnect between what technology
really is and how we talk about it. "Great Nations," wrote John Ruskin:
write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the
book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the
book of their art. Not one of these books can be read
unless we read the other two, but of the three the only
trustworthy one is the [book of their art.]
Well, I've been reading the book of our art, of the things we
make, long and carefully. I've told well over a thousand stories on
my radio program. And out of all that, something has gelled.
You see, the book of our art starkly contradicts what we write
in the books of our deeds and words! Ask most people how we're doing
and, like the media around them, they'll bring up crime and war --
the decline of courtesy and good will.
When a Massachusetts insurance company recently surveyed American
attitudes, most people were quick to say that the underpinnings of
society are collapsing. Yet those same people were happy with their
neighborhoods, their schools, and their friends.
Politicians tell us we're living in some latter-day Sodom from
which only they can save us. The media join in with all the well-documented horrors of 20th-century America: deceit, rape, murder. The
books of our words and deeds make grim reading indeed, but it is
misleading reading.
For example, the number of murders per capita is just the same
as it was when I was a baby. Evil remains, but it is not getting
worse. We do have a moral center of gravity, and we do keep evil
in check.
So, for a change, read the book of our art and of the things we
make. That truest autobiography tells an overwhelmingly positive
story. That's exactly because the word technology means the lore, or
the sharing, of technique. It is our essential act of generosity, and
it defines us as a species.
I meet that generosity of spirit everywhere I'm willing to see
it. And so do you. Every act of rudeness is balanced by a hundred
quiet acts of kindness.
Do not overlook the goodness of intent behind all the invisible
technology that serves us. We've distorted the record by using the
competitive lives of a few famous inventors, or a few machines of war,
to tell the history of technology. Look closer, and those few pale
against the instinct for creative sharing that shapes our
technological civilization.
You've had the best education. You're in for a long, rich life
-- a life with a full measure of toil and frustration, no doubt. But
you have been shaped for a life of reckless generosity and sharing --
a life of the mind, and a life entirely worth living!
SOME SOURCES
The story of the cichlids is told by Smith, M.T. and Layton,
R., "On Human Nature," The Sciences. New York: The New York
Academy of Sciences, January/February 1989, pp. 10-12.
The Insurance Company survey is described by Donn, J., "Americans polled believe "I'm OK, but you're not,'" Houston Chronicle,
Monday, Nov. 21, 1994, p. 5A.
The murder statistics I quoted come from "Murder rate little
changed in six decades," Houston Chronicle, Thursday, Feb. 2, 1995,
p. 8A.
Konner, M,, Why the Reckless Survive, and Other Secrets of Nature,
New York: Penguin Books, 1991, pp. 125-139.