The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,20

a force almost as cruel as the origins of wealth: that force is the movement of peoples under duress at, beyond, and across borders. This current movement is greater now than it has ever been and it costs a lot—to defend against it, to accommodate it, to contain it, protect it, control and service it. It involves the trek of workers, intellectuals, agencies, refugees, traders, immigrants, diplomats, and armies all crossing oceans and continents, through custom offices and via hidden routes, with multiple narratives spoken in multiple languages of commerce, of military intervention, political persecution, rescue, exile, violence, poverty, death, and shame. There is no doubt that the voluntary or involuntary displacement of people all over the globe tops the agenda of the state, the boardrooms, the communities, and the streets. Political maneuvers to control this movement are not limited to monitoring the dispossessed. The transplantation of management and diplomatic classes to globalization’s outposts, as well as the deployment of military units and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts to exert authority over the constant flow of peoples. This slide has freighted the concept of citizenship and altered our perceptions of space: public and private, walls and frontiers. It may be that the defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times. Porous borders are understood in some quarters to be areas of threat and have actually become places of chaos.

All of this is going on at the same time that technology has narrowed the distances among peoples and countries. Technology has made it possible to see others, talk to, support, or agitate others anywhere in the world. Yet the fear of dispossession, the loss of citizenship remains. We see it in the plethora of hyphenated designations of national identity. In press descriptions and documents birthplace has become more telling than citizenship and persons are identified as “a German of Turkish origin” or a “British citizen of African origin” and being identified as Muslim (at least in the West) takes precedent over country of origin. At the same time a revered cosmopolitanism, a multilayered cultural citizenship, is simultaneously hailed as sophisticated, superior. There is clearly a heightened threat of “difference.” We see it in the defense of the local against the outsider, of unwanted intimacy instead of safe distance.

When the unhoused remain suspect aliens, when the frightened and destitute huddle in beleaguered, garbage-strewn tent cities on land not their own, when “identity” becomes the very essence of the self, then recurring strategies of political construction are demanded. When incompetence and irrationality run roughshod over decency and continue to endanger “lesser” lives, we can anticipate a steep rise in the cost of caring. A cost to be borne if we value civilization.

The ethics of affluence insist upon civic obligations and when we assume that obligation we reveal not our solitary goodwill but our dependence on others. You, all of us, struggle to turn data into information into knowledge and, we hope, into wisdom. In that process we owe everything to others. We owe others our language, our history, our art, our survival, our neighborhood, our relationships with family and colleagues, our ability to defy social conventions as well as support those conventions. All of this we learned from others. None of us is alone; each of us is dependent on others—some of us depend on others for life itself. And it is because of the latter that I choose to share this generous lecture honorarium with Doctors Without Borders—winners of a Nobel Prize for the risks, the direct medical aid, and the determination to serve in the most dangerous places on earth and among the most shattered people.

Your opportunity here and beyond this campus is huge, demanding, and vital. You are singularly able more than previous generations; not because you are smarter (although you may be) or because you have tools your predecessors lacked, but because you have time. Time is on your side, as is a chance to fashion an amazing future. Relish it. Use it. Revel in it.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense but not irrational or naïve. Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong