A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a profile of a young man named Hugh Sloan, Jr. Few articles, or brief biographies, have struck me more deeply than Hugh Sloan’s story -- for his life could so easily be the ideal life of any recent graduate of Stoneridge, or Georgetown Prep or Exeter, of you or your brothers...Except for one tragic event.
Hugh Sloan went to Hotchkiss, where he graduated with honors; went on to Princeton, where he graduated with honors; married an attractive woman; worked hard at his job and played well at sports. He was blessed with healthy children. He felt no generation gap with his parents. On his father’s 60th birthday, he wrote: my only regret is that I have known you for only half of your life. And his father said of him that he was “everything I’ve ever looked for in a son.”
Hugh Sloan was public-spirited, too. In 1968, he entered politics part-time; shortly, he was spending all his time in national politics. He was competent, capable and, once again, successful. He was a White House aide and then the Treasurer of the Committee to Re-elect the President.
Suddenly, in 1972, the roof fell in on Hugh Sloan, Jr. He found himself unwittingly involved in the Watergate scandal. In disgust and on the verge of disgrace, he resigned.
Here is what he says today:
“I feel lousy. I don’t believe I did anything wrong. I went into politics to help my country, but I found out that if you go into politics for a career, sooner or later you have to compromise…You either compromise or get out. It just sooner or later takes the edge off your values. So I got out.”
Hugh Sloan says that in the White House he had discovered that there was a separate morality. To quote him again:
“There was no independent sense of morality there. I mean, if you worked for someone, he was God. Whatever he said, you did.”
Please try to remember those phrases:
- “Politics takes the edge off your values.”
- “A separate morality in the White House.”
- “Whoever you worked for, he was God.”
- “I feel lousy.”
And please try to understand that this could happen to you -- but that neither politics nor life have to be this way. So today, here at Stoneridge, with your parents and teachers and friends, with the beauty of summer all around us, with the clarity of sunlight and the green of the trees , with peace in our hearts and with joy, let us promise each other that we will never let “success” in business, or “success in the law or medicine, or “success” in sex or sports or politics, “take the edge off our values.”
For “success” is not the same thing as salvation, in this life or the next. Your deepest obligation is to fulfill your own independent sense of morality. Politics can be an honorable profession or a bag of dirty tricks. A lawyer can be a force for justice or a mouthpiece for the mob. A doctor’s career can be spent saving people or killing them in an abortion mill.
Whatever talents you have, they will finally become what you make of them. Leonardo da Vinci made the “Mona Lisa” – he could have painted pornography. Thomas Edison invented the electric light -- he could have made the electric chair. And your gifts, too, are neutral instruments -- you can use them or abuse them; you can enhance life or degrade it; and again and again, you will have to decide.
Yet that is harder for your generation than for others that have gone before. You are living in a world almost without certitudes. So many of the moral values that were unquestioned a short time ago are virtually unheeded in your time. How different, how much less clear, things seem in 1973 than they did to the Stoneridge class of 1953. They were sure of what it meant to be a catholic -- there were no bitter debates in the church then. They were sure of what it meant to be an American -- there were no young men who thought it was right to resist the draft.
Twenty years ago, if a prominent catholic married outside the Church, it was a public scandal. Now when Father Berrigan and Sister McAllister reveal that they have been married secretly since 1969, there is hardly a passing stir.
Twenty years ago, abortion was a shameful crime. Today it is a constitutional right, and a Nobel laureate in medicine has proposed that we permit infanticide until the third day of a child’s life.
Twenty years ago, business as a profession had the respect of most Americans. Today, when the press reports a $2 billion fraud in the equity corporation, many Americans simply accept it because that is all they expect of business.
Twenty years ago, the country trusted the president, despite our difficulties. Today the country wonders and worries whether Watergate is the real way of all politics.
Many of these things are very bad. They represent not merely a material but a moral crisis. But not all the changes in perception and action which we are witnessing are all bad.
As the philosopher wrote long ago, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In my view, it was good that a majority of our people examined the Vietnam War and finally found it not worth fighting. It was good that Pope John examined the Church and found it worth renewing. It was good that we examined discrimination and found it worth defeating.
But the danger in this is that we will disdain every practice and principle of the past -- what is essential as well as what is evil -- that as we change what is wrong, we may betray what is right. Already, we are perilously close to a world in which everything is believable and nothing is true.
That is what makes hard the moral choices you must make. In our society, doing your own thing more and more seems to mean that you can do anything. But it also means that there is a special challenge in doing the right thing. When others ridicule your values, when the pressure mounts to live by their standards instead of your conscience, then keeping and witnessing to the truth is even more precious. As Christ told the doubting Thomas: “Blessed are those who have not seen but still believe.” And in these days, blessed are those who lack the comfort of agreement from everyone around them but still have the courage to serve an ethic that is above us all.
Today everything may be believable -- but there is still something that is true.
My conviction -- and the teaching of your education – is that this truth is found in the message of Christ. It is fashionable to say that we can dispense with Christ and the Church; but what then can support moral principles except individual preference? Who then can say with any foundation that it is evil to allow the killing of babies during their first three days of life? Paul Tillich defined God as “the ground of our being"; and without that ground, there is nothing to stand on.
This does not mean that Christianity has pat answers to every problem. The New Testament is not a checklist of automatic responses to the social and technical changes of each century. But Christianity does proclaim a set of principles. No matter how much change, those principles remain the same. And it is our obligation -- yours and mine -- to apply them to the questions of our own time.
That is what your class did when it asked the National Institutes of Health to ban experiments on live fetuses. There Is no scientific statement in the bible that forbids this desecration of life. But there is a command to hold life sacred -- and you applied it to medical technology. From ethics, you helped to create bioethics.
You will have to face other similar questions in the years ahead. If you are married and the doctor tells you that you are pregnant and your child will be retarded, will you decide to have an abortion? If you are in politics, will you be ready to do anything in the belief that winning is everything? If you are in business, will you seek success at any price? Or will you reject the “separate morality” and seek a meaning beyond mere existence?
We hear a lot these days about the right to be different. But each of you will require the courage to be different. You will need such courage in college, to hold fast to your standards when you are told they are out of fashion. You will need such courage again and again always to take the ethical course while others are saying that almost anything is ethical. All through history moral men and women have had the courage to face immoral society. They have stood for their ideals and insisted on justice; and, often, they have lost their place or popularity, and sometimes, even their lives. Socrates was poisoned. Christ was crucified. Martin Luther King was killed.
Almost certainly none of you will have to pay such a price for your principles. But just as surely you sometimes will have to accept the scorn or derision of others. For example, if you join a right to life group, the sophisticated may regard you as hopelessly naive. If you refuse to cut corners in your profession, the “real operators” may dismiss you as helplessly soft-headed. Today it is hard not only to decide what is right, but to do what is right.
So my wish for you on this graduation day is that you will ask the question -- “What is the purpose of life?” – and reply with the answer of Kurt Vonnegut -- “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the creator of the universe... " I hope each of you will be the eyes of God, not just to see, but having seen, to shape human life in His likeness.
I hope you will be the ears of God, not just to hear, but having heard, to speak by your words and strive by your work for what is right.
And I hope you will be the conscience of God, not just to know the truth, but to heed it in whatever you do with the talents and time you have been given.
That is the way, not only to a life beyond this one, but to a more truly human life here.
Thank you and congratulations.
