If You Want to Serve the Age, Betray it.
There's a truly great Irish poet. His name is Brendan Kennelly, and he has this epic poem called the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it."
What does that mean, to betray the age? Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.
Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.
Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was — which was ungodly and inhuman. Benjamin Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age. May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.
What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now?
If You Want to Serve the Age, Betray it.
There's a truly great Irish poet. His name is Brendan Kennelly, and he has this epic poem called the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it."
What does that mean, to betray the age? Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.
Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.
Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was — which was ungodly and inhuman. Benjamin Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age. May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.
What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now?
Source
Commencement Address at the University of Pennsylvania (17 May 2004)
http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v50/n34/commence-b.html
Contribution #2861
