This essay is adapted from the author's commencement address at McGill University in Montreal earlier this month.
Exactly 23 years ago, in this very building, I was sitting in your seat. Today I report to you on my two-decade reconnaissance expedition into the world beyond McGill College Avenue. Like Marco Polo, I return -- without silk, but with three pieces of sage advice.
First, don't lose your head. I'm speaking here of intellectual fashion, of the alarming regularity with which the chattering classes are swept away by the periodic enthusiasms that wash over the culture.
Only a decade ago, for example, the West was seized with a near mass hysteria about imminent nuclear apocalypse. The airwaves, the bookstores, the Congress were filled with dire warnings about our headlong dash to the abyss. Indeed, those who refused to lose their heads were said to suffer from a psychological disorder. "Psychic numbing," it was called.
Ten years later, with nuclear weapons still capable of destroying the world many times over -- not a word about the coming apocalypse. The fever has passed. But not the propensity for fever. Another day, another fever. With nuclear apocalypse now out of fashion, we have eco-catastrophe, a doomsday of pollution, overpopulation and resource depletion.
Do not misunderstand. There is still a nuclear problem. There are environmental problems. But there is a difference between a problem and panic. The next time you find yourself in the midst of some national hysteria, remember the tulip craze that swept Holland three centuries ago, an orgy of panicked financial speculation in which land and houses and gold were all traded for . . . tulips. At the mania's peak, a single Semper Augustus tulip could fetch 20 town houses.
Remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which launched the Vietnam War. It passed the U.S. Senate 88 to 2. That should have been a warning.
In the old Soviet Union, which routinely rewrote and rearranged history to fit its political needs, there was a saying: In Russia it is impossible to predict the past. Well, in the bourgeois normality of the democratic West, one should say: Here it is impossible to predict the future. So when confronted with the apocalypse du jour, keep your head.
Lesson two: Look outward. You have been rightly taught Socrates' dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living. I would add: The too examined life is not worth living either.
Perhaps previous ages suffered from a lack of self-examination. The Age of Oprah does not. One of the defining features of modernity is self- consciousness: psychological self-consciousness as popularized by Freud; historical self-consciousness as introduced by Hegel and Marx; literary self- consciousness as practiced in the interior, self-referential, self-absorbed world of modern fiction.
The reigning cliche of the day is that in order to love others one must first learn to love oneself. This formulation -- love thyself, then thy neighbor -- is a license for unremitting self-indulgence, because the quest for self-love is endless. By the time you have finally learned to love yourself, you'll find yourself playing golf at Leisure World.