Dare to be, dare to do*

(First of three parts)

Dean Caesar Saloma, fellow faculty, the College of Science graduates of 2010, and your ever-so-proud parents and families, thank you for making me a part of this special occasion. Congratulations to you all and most especially to your parents!

A student once asked American inventor and architect, Professor Buckminster Fuller, if he believed there was life in outer space. Fuller answered: “Young man, just where do you think you are?”¹ Life is, in many ways, what we see it to be. I imagine that for many of you, UP was outer space in your first year. Guided by our ikot/toki, you learned to navigate your way around this space. I am sure you had out-of-this-world professors, both in the good sense and bad, and experienced close encounters of different kinds. For me, your labs will always look like outer space even if, for you, they have become (oddly enough) your temporary sanctuary and home.

So yes, life is what we see it to be and we do not all see it alike. But more important, life is what we make it to be. We have a wonderful term in history for the power to make or create; we call this power human agency — the agent as the historical actor, the mover of things, the maker of events, the decider. We are all historical agents at different stages of our lives, and the degree of agency heightens as we progress through life. Now that you are about to leave university, our “power” as your professors disappears and that of your parents subsides. Soon, very soon, you will be on your own and it will be your turn to make important decisions about your lives.

There are three things about the power to make. The first is that we have a choice to act and how to act, or not to act at all. Growing up is about learning to exercise agency and to do so responsibly, to make decisions and carry them through. This sounds easy enough to do when things are normal and life runs fairly smoothly. But in the face of wrenching dilemmas between competing goods or outcomes — say, one’s personal gain vis-à-vis another’s or the larger welfare — the human tendency is to just let things be, to accept the status quo, which often means to do nothing. Under such pressure, studies of risk show that acceptance of the status quo is the default mode of human action.

There are many reasons for the reluctance to change the status quo. The fear of loss or risk is one. The uncertainty of the result coupled with a desire to avoid error or humiliation is another. Laziness, or sometimes the deceptive comfort of habit with the way things are, or worse, plain indifference are other causes. And then there is the pressure from those around us — oftentimes people we love and who love us — who, because of these same fears and attitudes, also choose not to act.

Yet human history, indeed our very own, is replete with stories of women and men who seized the initiative to change things and make life better at tremendous cost to themselves. Our struggle for independence, for example, was launched by men and women about your age or barely older than you, with a clear vision of the future they desired for the nation they were building. These young Filipinos were not foolhardy dreamers acting on a whim or just aiming to be cool or different. How does one explain their readiness to go against the default mode and change the status quo?

This question has puzzled students of history. British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in his seminal 12-volume work on 21 civilizations and societies,² argued that the best human achievements have resulted from difficult rather than easy conditions. In other words, when there is no challenge, or it is too easy to overcome, the human response typically results in nothing new or outstanding. But when the challenge is tough or demanding, the human response invariably results in an achievement of high order. As an example, Toynbee cited the stimulus of “hard countries,” pointing to Chinese civilization, which grew out of the constant struggle to deal with flooding of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, or Egyptian civilization, which learned to drain the lower Nile River in order to cope with the dryness of the Sahara Desert. Of the stimulus of “new ground,” Toynbee noted: “Virgin soil produces more vigorous responses than land which has already been broken in and thus rendered ‘easier’ by previous ‘civilized’ occupants.” Toynbee cited other stimuli in human history, such as the stimulus of “blows” or stunning defeat that propels the losing party to rebuild itself and prepare for future victory; the stimulus of “pressures” such as life at the frontier, exposure to constant threats of attack, which compel such societies to advance more than their well-protected neighbors; and the stimulus of “penalties,” which compel excluded sectors or classes of society to dig inward and push themselves further.

(To be continued)

* College of Science Recognition of Graduates, UP Diliman, April 23, 2010.

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Maria Serena I. Diokno is a professor in the Department of History, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, UP Diliman. She was former vice president for academic affairs of the UP System. E-mail her at [email protected].

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¹  Cited in the commencement address of Alice Greenwald, “Why Does Memory Matter?” Sarah Lawrence College, 18 May 2007. Accessed on 25 March 2010 from http://humanity.org/voices/commencements/ speeches/index.php?page=greenwald_at_sarah_lawrence.

²  Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 1934-1964.