A WORLD GROWN SMALLER ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON ON THE OCCASION OF THE BERKELEY MEDAL
FRIDAY, 18 OCTOBER, 1991
Ladies and Gentlemen,
- It is an enormous pleasure that I should come to Berkeley today to receive the great honour of your Berkeley Medal. The name Berkeley connects us across two countries and an ocean. Bishop Berkeley was, after all, a Fellow of Trinity College, my own University, and his name is attached both to your University and to this medal which I am so honoured to receive.
- But it is his spirit also which is fitting to invoke today because I want to take this occasion to talk to you about the challenges on this new world we live in. Bishop Berkeley, after all, confronted and questioned the ideas of his time. He is now so much a part of our philosophical heritage that we might forget that in his day he was both daring and sceptical. It was he who challenged the new world picture of Isaac Newton and John Locke. It was he who questioned, and then roundly dismissed, accepted views of space and time, concepts I am afraid which seem to have survived him. Yeats called him:
"God-appointed Berkeley who thought the
world a dream".
- Those dreams of challenge and unorthodoxy, that spirit of daring, is needed as much now as then.
- I speak to you today as coming from Ireland, a country which was lucky in his time to have in Bishop Berkeley a forceful and original thinker; and a country which shares with yours a tradition of democracy and of questioning.
- But the world is a much smaller place now. As we stand much closer to its boundaries so we must be much more aware of its problems than Bishop Berkeley could ever have been. I believe it right to look especially to you who are young and to your idealism for this awareness. Berkeley once said "Our youth we can have but today. We may always find time to grow old". He's right, of course. But in that moment which is youth there are real responsibilities and real adventures. I want to commend to you today one of these adventures - not an exterior one. But an inner adventure of sympathy and imagination.
- I believe that this campus at Berkeley is a good place to begin those adventures. I spent my L.L.M. year at Harvard in the late Sixties. It was possible then even at that distance to feel the powerful energies of dissent which had their focus here in this place. I think we can see now that in many ways the dissent of those years was much more than just a local upheaval or the reflexive questioning and dissidence of youth. The black American writer Ralph Ellison, speaking of his own writing, said with great eloquence.
"There are ways of celebrating my experience
more complex than terms like protest can suggest".
- Of course protest can be taken to an extreme - as it was by some - an extreme which carries it outside the bounds of democracy. But in the late 60's and in this University I think that, for many people, protest was itself a form of celebration - a celebration of democracy. I certainly believe that the democratic spirit thrives on critical questioning by a concerned public opinion informed by a strong sense of what is right and wrong.
- It is that spirit of vigilance, for which the United States has been so noted down through its history, that we need today - this time at world level. And it is that that I want to urge today on you here, you of a new generation who will do much to make the tomorrow of our world.
- In that year in Harvard, which was so important to me, I was already aware that the world as I knew it was shrinking before my eyes. Its boundaries were lessening. Its distances were disappearing. And since then it has got smaller still. We know the reasons for this. Communications, which are themselves so vital to democracy, have linked all parts of our world and made it in that sense a single community. Communication too has put us in touch with the power of our civilisation and the limits of that power. When Archibald MacLeish, the American poet gave a speech of welcome to Edward R. Murrow on his return from reporting the Second World War, he spoke of Murrow's reporting as having
"banished those old superstitions of time and distance".
Those superstitions are vanishing every day before our eyes.
- But as time and distance shrink and we see in the clear light of day that our world is one, it could be that we who are in a position of relative privilege might become either complacent or fatalistic: complacent because we may fail to see the problems of other nations and peoples or fail to see that we too have some share in responsibility for them; or fatalistic because we may not think that the attitude of concerned individuals can make a difference. My fear is that if we are complacent or fatalistic parts of the world are sending us, sometimes desperation.
- The fact is that, whether we like it or not, events are moving at breakneck speed all around us. Changes are happening today which could not have been foreseen a year ago let alone a decade ago. As a European and a lawyer I have been moved and fascinated, as I know you must have been, by what has happened in Central and Eastern Europe. Whole political systems have been transfigured in front of our eyes. Who could have predicted a year ago that paths to democracy would have opened out so quickly in countries dominated for so long by the very reverse? It appears now to be widely accepted that the Cold War, to all intents and purposes, is finished. The way seems clear to seek a new type of international cooperation. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh began one of his poems with the lines
"I have lived in important places. Times when
great events were decided."
- He was writing about his own local world. But today, when the local has become the global, we can take his words as our own. We now live in "important times" when great events are being decided.
- But in some ways the reduction of tension between the superpowers has only mad clearer the severity of other world problems: poverty; lack of human rights; regional, and national conflicts; ethnic and religious differences between and within nations. These are all the more visible now. When you hear them put to you in those terms they may well sound like abstract issues. Or they may seem localised, distant and not of pressing concern. Or you may even say, what have they to do with me, on this side of the world, at the start of my career? And in any case what can I do about them?
- Let us remember how small the world seemed when we feared that it might be destroyed. Let us not forget that it is no bigger now that we need to reconstruct it. In this small world there are no safe distances.
- This is where the acts of imagination come in - acts which I think you, as students of this University are well qualified to make and well taught to understand. For the fact is there are whole populations, whole nations and communities in need of our help and our imaginative understanding. During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln argued that it was not possible to have a nation which was half slave and half free. In today's global village, I would argue it is not possible - it is certainly not advisable - to have a situation in which two-thirds of our villagers are poor and hungry and one-third are rich.
- The Ghanian playwright Efua Sutherland has the chorus say in one of her plays:
"Let's relate in love/that we may thrive".
- It sounds like wishful thinking. But in a world as small as ours it may well be a necessity and not a fantasy. We who are relatively privileged need an imaginative concern for those who are not, for those whose lives are stunted by poverty and hunger as millions are in many parts of the world: in parts of Asia; in Latin America; and perhaps this winter in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. All of these deserve our imaginative concern and, to the extent that we can give it, our help - at government level and at the level of voluntary organisations, through which people can exercise the faculty of giving - the spirit of charity - themselves, by their own volition, out of their own generosity.
- But it is to Efua Sutherland's own continent Africa that I want to draw your special attention today - not because a death from famine there is necessarily more tragic than elsewhere but because Africans today have come to fear that as we spread our concern to other areas they will be forgotten; or if remembered, that their case will be dismissed as hopeless. I think we need to realise how deep these fears are. Their fear is that external support for development in Africa, which Africans already believe to be inadequate, may fall further if industrialised nations should come to believe the situation of that continent hopeless or should decide to divert vital support - by which I mean both money and technology - from South to East. I would ask you, imbued as you are with the idealism of youth, to keep us aware that our compassion must not become fatigued or our attention diverted from continuing need when our attention shifts temporarily to other needs elsewhere.
- We have a folk saying in Ireland which I think is both true and vivid though it evokes troubled times for us. We say
"it's easy to sleep on another man's wound".
- It's a bleak enough statement and it's one made out of our past and our own memories of struggle and oppression. A major nightmare of that struggle was the famine which decimated our population of the 1840's. Maybe some of you today are descendants of some of those who suffered in that famine. Do you know what that means? It means that in a not-too-distant past the survival of your ancestors and thus ultimately your own presence here today, was hostage to every stratagem of compassion and sustenance and random help which those people, your ancestors could find.
- Others are in that position today. Famine still decimates populations. Men and women and children are starving. And this time, as their sufferings are brought to us through our communications media, they suffer under our very eyes. The tragedy of this - apart from the individual human lives destroyed - is that it is happening at the very same time that powerful energies of democratic reform have been sweeping through our world, energies which in themselves have a strong potential for better human living. These energies are bursting through in Central and Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union and in Latin America. They are stirring strongly in Africa too - in parts of it hitherto dominated by single-party rule and by military dictatorship. Free elections have been held or promised in many countries; and the institutions which we know to be essential to democracy - media and trade unions and grassroots organisations - are beginning to grow and develop.
- And yet everywhere we see human tragedy. Hunger is one of those tragedies which has always been there. But Aids is a new and devastating scourge which has now added plague to famine. In some areas the parts of the population most afflicted by it are women in their early 20's and late thirties. In a country like Uganda it is estimated that 11% of the population is infected. Under this enormous burden, family structures are breaking down. Old people are having to take care of their orphaned grandchildren. The shape of societies is altered for generations to come and damaged - perhaps irreparably.
- In societies such as these, women are especially at risk. To understand this, we have to imagine ourselves into a world where there is rarely running water or electricity or gas; where women who bear six or seven children may end up having to walk miles to fetch water or fuel; where a hand hoe can be the only available agricultural tool; where weeding and harvesting are done by hand. And yet this is a continent where women are also hugely active and vital as community workers and managers. Those who know Africa comment on the fact that the vast majority of grass-roots organisations which proliferate throughout the rural areas - whether these are village co-operatives, road-buildings gangs or produce-selling groups - depend on women for their continuance.
- Community workers; mothers; farmers; survivors - these African women should be in your imaginations today. The Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitak bring them closer to us in this poem:
Women of Africa
Sweeper
Smearing floors and walls
With cow dung and black soil
Cook, ayah, the baby on your back
Washer of dishes,
Planting, weeding, harvesting
Storekeeper, builder
Runner of errands,
Cart, lorry, donkey,
Woman of Africa
What are you not?
- Faced with these problems, it may seem that despair or disengagement is a logical option. I don't think so. In fact, quite the contrary. What makes the imaginative faculty so valuable is that it can unite apparently disparate events and occasions and make sense of them. If we use our imaginations we can see that the suffering of individual African people, the complex balances of power and supply, and the survival and strengthening of democracy in our world and theirs - all these are part of a single equation, not separate parts of separate problems. We need to consider them together. And there are always temptations, as we live in the midst of progress and plenty, not to consider them. I want to go back to the American writer I quoted at the beginning: Ralph Ellison. I think the title of his novel Invisible Man is important and revealing. He begins that book with the words
"I am invisible. I am invisible, understand,
because people refuse to see me".
- The spirit of these words is applicable to what I am talking about today. That refusal or inability to see, that turning away from the entrenched difficulties of their cultures is something of which each of us at individual level can accuse ourselves; and it is something of which we in our privileged societies need to be constantly reminded. When the difficulty, the stresses, the instabilities and suffering of the developing world and especially of the African continent become visible to us it will still be no guarantee that wrongs which are deep-seated and supported by infrastructures which are hard to dismantle can be righted. But if we do not use our imaginations, if we allow that human anguish to remain invisible - then we seriously limit the hopes of change for our generation.
- You stand here today having had what many African young people can never hope to have. Education. Nurture, of mind and body. Time to develop - away from the stresses and demands of the market place. Our societies support the development of intellect and the pursuit of non-utilitarian study because we believe in their value. But we also know that such values, in turn, have their only real source in the value we put on human beings; that without that they too easily become empty and ornamental. I want to quote to you the words of the French writer Albert Camus because they relate the commitments of imagination to the purposes of compassion, as I think we also should do:
"I have not written day after day"
he said
"because I desire the world to be covered with
Greek statues and masterpieces. I have written
so much because I cannot keep from being drawn toward
everyday life, towards those, whoever they may be,
who are humiliated. They need to hope,
and if all keep silent, they will be forever deprived
of hope and we with them".
- They and we need not be deprived of hope. There are things we can do at this stage and in this generation. First and foremost we need to work to make that deprived world visible. We need to study and understand the difficulties faced on that continent, particularly in the last decade of economic and military crisis; and we need to see now how the seeds of democracy are developing there and encourage that development.
- We also need to think - to really think imaginatively - about how small our world is now. If we do, we will realise the meaning and importance of multilateralism and inter-dependence. The world's most significant multilateral institution, the United Nations - which was founded so near here in San Francisco at the end of the Second World War - has proved itself to be an important instrument of peace. The international community needs to renew and increase its support for the UN, to develop and improve that structure and to avail of it and use it.
- A restructured and strengthened United Nations could help to relieve the crushing burden of armaments and the diversion to war and to weapons of war of energies and resources which should go instead to development and human need. We have recently seen the important reduction in nuclear armaments initiated by President Bush and now taken further by President Grobachev. These initiatives are of major importance in building a new system of peace and security. But we also have to remember that three-quarters of the world's traffic in conventional arms goes to the Third World. Control and reduction of this trade in armaments is vital. It could help in particular to stabilise African economies and release vital development resources.
- Finally there is the whole complex issue of financial obligations and transfers. Terms of trade shift to the disadvantage of primary producers in the Third World. There is also the pressure of interest payments and repayment of debt - sometimes arising from borrowings wrongly directed or misappropriated. These problems haunt the developing world as a whole and bear heavily on Africa. By some accounts the gap between the developed and the developing world appears to be widening not narrowing.
- These are difficult issues in democracies such as yours and mine; and difficult choices must be made by the governments we elect. In our own societies too, despite our comparative privilege in world terms, there is need and want; there are invisible men and women. It is for democratic governments to make these choices in response to their electorates - to decide the difficult issues of balance and priorities between responsibilities at home and those abroad. I do not seek to say how those choices should be made. What I want to commend to you today as young people is something more general - that imaginative insight which makes those who have been invisible visible and on which governments can rely for support in the choices they make. At the core of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy is a concept summarised in the Latin phrase Esse est percipi - "to be is to be perceived". The corollary, it seems to me is that not to be perceived, to be invisible to those whose attitude can determine one's fate, is in a deep sense to be non-existent or to cease to be. I ask you to perceive so that they - the invisible - may be; and being, live more human lives.
- In Bishop Berkeley's time these problems, these areas would have been too remote for knowledge, let alone contemplation. We have no such excuse. In our time we know that this planet is small and that, as together we share its dangers, so we should share its bounty.
- In case all this seems too big for the individual to grapple with, I want to finish with a story which I think proves that apparently small acts of imagination can have momentous consequences and live long in the popular imagination. In my part of County Mayo the links between Ireland and other people in the developing world are strengthened every year by a walk across our local countryside. Last year, representatives of the Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma were there. What makes this so memorable is that during the Irish Famine, this tribe - who had themselves been forcibly removed from their homeland - raised $710, an enormous sum in those days, for the relief of Irish famine victims. Across a much larger, more distant and remote world than ours in the 19th century, they used their own experience to make an imaginative understanding. They chose not to sleep on our wound. And today, that choice is still an example to all of us.