Emmet Flood, PhD, BA ’78, gave the keynote address at Commencement 2019 after an introduction by Executive Vice President John Plotts.
Our honorary degree recipient today is also our Commencement speaker. In welcoming Dr. Emmet T. Flood to speak to you today, we are closing a circle. Dr. Flood stood in front of his class at commencement in May of 1978 as Valedictorian, Intramural Athlete of the Year, and the Cardinal Spellman Award winner. Since receiving his philosophy degree at UD, Dr. Flood has had an inspiring career.
After graduating from UD, Dr. Flood has led an inspiring life, one that can give hope to our graduates today in terms of the breadth and depth of his achievements. He spent a year teaching English at Bishop Lynch High School in Dallas, then attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving a doctorate in philosophy in 1986. He then attended Yale Law School. Following graduation from Yale, he served as law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia at the Supreme Court of the United States. Flood practiced law at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, D.C. In addition to his judicial clerkships, Flood’s government experience includes service as Counsel to the President, Special Counsel to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President. He is the author of published articles in philosophy, comparative literature, law and political science. One of six siblings to attend UD, he is married to Ariel Vannier Flood and is the father of four children: Kate, Erin, James and Jack.
In his valedictory address, Dr. Flood wrote: “The search for truth involves a surrender of the self, which all of us have undergone, to something greater than ourselves. … We are humbled and yet we are elevated. Although our academic disciplines are things greater than ourselves, in a sense, each one of us is greater than our discipline and broader, too … . This has been the challenge of the University of Dallas, to submit to be upraised, to realize that we are not whole, but only part of the whole, and in so realizing, become whole ourselves. Our academic achievements stand as a mark of our true greatness and an indicator of our human feebleness.”
Dr. Flood has lived a life worthy of the call he made to his fellow graduates over 40 years ago. We are proud to welcome Dr. Flood home.
My thought for your graduation day comes from an unlikely source, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:
"The essential thing 'in heaven and in earth' is ... that there should be long OBEDIENCE in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living ... "
With that thought in mind, I propose for your consideration a few rules of the road for my fellow UD graduates.
Rule #1: UD has given you the elements of a culture; internalize it, live it, and pass it on. The great sociologist Emile Durkheim said (1) that education is the internalization of culture; (2) that culture is essentially a matter of authority; and (3) that education is the main institution for communicating modes of authority from one generation to another. Why do I begin here?
Because UD gave you an education in a certain culture, or family of cultures. It provided you models for how to think and to act and to feel. The books you’ve read together, the questions you’ve debated, and the visual arts you’ve contemplated – all involve the basic question of what it means to be truly human. And they communicate truths about our humanity – through argumentation in philosophy, empirical work in the sciences, and non-propositionally in art and literature. In your UD studies you learned something about how to think, and think with feeling, about the actions and characters and fates of our fellow humans. This is a critical function of culture.
A culture of any depth distinguishes between high and low, true and false, knowledge and ignorance. You have encountered this feature of culture, variously inflected, in the heroic world of Homer; in the Aristotelian world of the virtuous citizen, and in the many Christian-Jewish worlds reflected in Western literature and Western theology, both natural and revealed.
As you go forward on your journey, translate the knowledge of the good acquired from, and reflected in, the Core by modeling it in your own conduct and by passing it on to your family, friends and co-workers; and then to your communities and your children. Cultures survive, where they survive, in the users, observers and ultimately, the inhabitants of that culture. The continuation of what is best in the culture you inherited depends on you.
On your path, be conscious of the ways in which the models of the human you absorbed from the Core differ from the alternative models of the human that are ascendant in contemporary life: the purely biological model, the information processor model, and the therapeutic model of the person whose ultimate good consists in maintaining at all times a sense of psychological well-being. Engage with these alternatives in word and action. Interrogate them. Take what is valuable from them. But ask, always, whether these models offer a compelling vision of what is highest and best for the human person. Indeed, ask whether they contain any such vision. For that is the ultimate question of culture.
Rule #2: Slow down, take your time, look around, digress. It’s graduation day. The desire to take the world by storm can be very strong now, especially for those of you who have an identified career track and concrete plan for pursuing it. Don’t shelve those plans and don’t lose that drive. But consider the “long” part in Nietzsche’s “long obedience.” As you know, the ancient adage is ars longa, vita brevis, but today it is life that’s long and art that’s short. So don’t be in too big a hurry. Don’t fear to digress and pursue forms of work and study and service and travel that will not be there when the full weight of responsible adulthood completes descends upon you. A period of meandering will not be fatal. You may gain a perspective that you can never get from a narrow track and a tight timetable. Not all who wander are lost.
Rule #3: Do not make what the world calls “success” your goal. Instead seek excellence in your personal and professional lives.
This is where the “obedience” in Nietzsche’s “long obedience” comes in.
To obey is to recognize an authority greater than your individual self. Living under authority means that not everything is permitted. That certain virtues must be cultivated and exercised and rewarded. And that certain vices must be renounced and avoided, punished and made-up-for. In your reading and discussing and contemplating at UD, you have absorbed this feature of authoritative culture. You internalized frameworks of understanding and models of true-and-false, good-and-bad. You may even have learned that to understand such a framework at its absolute deepest is to experience it as a summons: to something higher, more perfect, even holy; and also as a prohibition: against what is lower, wrong, forbidden. And from the Iliad forward you have learned that a truly authoritative culture situates you in something larger than the self and requires you to put someone or something dearer than your own self first. Which is to say, it teaches you to sacrifice. And without the expectation of material reward.
Now, the world beckons you to something it calls “success.” But, when you examine it, the ideal of success does not actually provide any specific guidance to the person seeking it. “Success” is the name of a destination; but it provides no map and no means of transportation. By contrast, consider the life of virtue animating Jane Austen’s novels. Think of the exemplary kindness of Alyosha, the youngest of the brothers Karamazov. Reflect on the cosmic order exemplified in Dante’s Commedia. Of course, none of these is a how-to manual for climbing the corporate ladder. But these works, and many more you’ve encountered at UD, point to things more basic, more substantial and more enduring.
What the world calls “success” is a secondary effect of the more enduring, primary traits: honesty, piety, judgment and integrity, among others. Success itself may be largely out of your control; but the primary traits lie wholly within your power to practice. So practice them. If you do, you may encounter this paradox: that living the virtues without any concern at all for their consequences in a given case may prove to be the surest path to the good, including sometimes the goods associated with success. But be warned: If you mistake the secondary effect for the goal, you run the risk of becoming like the (very successful) businessman-politician in the Evelyn Waugh novel, of whom his own wife said this: “he isn’t a real person at all; he’s just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn’t there.”
As for your professional life, follow the advice of C.S. Lewis gives in his essay on The Inner Ring: “If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself ... inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it.”
Whether you become a teacher or a businessperson or a member of some learned profession, use what you have been given, as hard as you can, to master your craft. Such mastery may prove to have only a tangential relationship with what the world calls “success.” Or it may make you a big star. But professional excellence, like personal character, endures in a way that success, which is elusive and sometimes even accidental, cannot.
So, as the Book of Sirach says, “Excel in all that you do.” Then success will take its rightful place – as a by-product.
Rule #4: Obstacles, setbacks, disappointments and sorrows are inevitable: what matters is how you respond to them. Remember that the obedience Nietzsche wrote about is “in the same direction.” And a “direction” is not a single endpoint in a linear progression. Do not expect to leap in a straight line from triumph to triumph. Remember the very first book that you read at UD four years ago, and that I read 45 years ago, in Lit Trad I. At the close of the Iliad, Achilles tells Priam of the two urns Zeus keeps at his doorstep: one filled with blessings, the other with evils. Zeus distributes them in thunder, and mixes the two so that each person experiences both fortune and misfortune. So it will be with you. The obstacles and the setbacks, and the struggle to keep your bearings and stay your course – these are what make life an adventure and something worth living. For some of you, challenges and obstacles – sometimes professional, sometimes personal – will become the central, defining experience of your life: a child with disabilities, a family member needing years of care, a struggle with depression. Through these ordeals, remember that the obstacles do not necessarily block your true path. Consider the mysterious possibility that the bearing of such burdens may itself be the path to the good. Either way, keep in mind what the Roman philosopher Seneca said of the god: “He does not make a spoiled pet of a good man; he tests him, hardens him, and fits him for his own service.” Expect to be tested. And through whatever befalls you, keep working, keep praying, and -- having internalized what is best and highest – keep moving toward it. In the same direction.
When Nietzsche wrote of the meaningful life resulting from a long obedience in the same direction, he referred specifically to several forms of liberating constraint: virtue, art, music. But mostly he was thinking of something we at UD are well familiar with – Christianity and its positive and disciplining effects on the European spirit.
This morning I wish for each of you individually the course that Nietzsche recognized as fundamental to European Christianity: “a long obedience in the same direction.” An occasionally meandering, often arduous, obstacle-strewn pursuit. A pursuit of something demanding and forbidding, of something great because it is something good. Your parents and your UD education have armed you with the necessary tools – habits of mind and character that are authoritative and inspiriting, that demand obedience from you, and in that obedience, free you to struggle mightily to attain the Good.
When I look back as an alumnus who sat 41 years ago where you sit now, the sustaining elements on my path can be distilled to just three: my family, the Catholic faith, and the University of Dallas. When you look back someday from the vantage of the years, I hope you may say that a long obedience in the same direction has given your life the shape of a story, a dramatic narrative, perhaps even a quest. Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage. Happy the man who like Ulysses has had a beautiful journey.
But if today is a day for me to look back, it is for you to look forward. So I will finish with a verse from that great 20th-century epic hero, Frodo Baggins:
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
God keep you on your journey, Class of 2019. Congratulations.
