Distance and Hurdles
The Olympic Games burnish our hope to remake a world undone by conflict and crisis. The rituals, ceremonies and contests all suggest a tension between friend and enemy that tips ultimately toward handshakes and hugs. The question left over, however, is one encoded with idealism: can the pageantry translate beyond the field of athletic competition?
Inspiring the idealism was the background music of the London Summer Games, actually the theme song from “Chariots of Fire.” Most listeners, if they were not tuned out by cloying repetition of the Bolero-like rhythms, would be surprised that the origin of the story is a William Blake poem. Blake’s refrain is Olympic in tone: “Bring me my Bow of burning gold,/Bring me my Arrows of desire.” Clearly, what he had in mind was not the decathlon, but the rebuilding of the walls around Jerusalem. He was imagining a world that could someday be a “green and pleasant land.”
As the world writ small, a place green and pleasant, St. Lawrence attains its highest-ever enrollment of international students this year. It is now possible to imagine the campus as the academic equivalent of the Olympic Village. We are also seeing record increases in the number of American-born students who will study and travel abroad within their four-year college careers; practically all have passports and more than half will spend a semester in another country. St. Lawrence may be rural, but it is no longer isolated, and it is certainly better balanced in local and global sensibilities than ever before. Six hundred of our alumni live and work outside the U. S. Predictably, the broader Laurentian presence in the world will continue to expand in the years ahead.
How do we get our students ready for all this international exposure? How do we help them translate the ideals of the flame, the poem, or the race in order to rebuild what each generation always risks losing from war and stiff memory? How will they travel the path of “human otherness” or their own “differentness” that begins in a void of unknowing, and is a transition from void to adversity, and from adversity to friendship? These are large abiding questions for all alumni to ponder after rehearsing them for a while in a close-knit campus community framed by a liberal arts curriculum.
Whether it is achieved by deep thinking or lived experience, I believe two themes necessarily emerge in an education that includes worldly and liberal qualities: power and scale. It is not enough for students to gain mere familiarity with social customs or cultural arrangements foreign to themselves. They must also understand there can be no social order or Olympic comity without a power to uphold and preserve peace, keep order, and defend shared values. Reinhold Niebuhr once warned that innocence and power are a dangerous combination: the world is competitive, not passive, never innocent; and, even with good intentions no group of idealists, no mighty nation, no airtight philosophy can reliably move the patterns of history or human nature toward the desired goals of security and prosperity for all. Power is not enough.
And then, there is the curious lesson of scale as we learn the balances of the world in gaining and losing. How can a country with just under 3 million people compete successfully against nations ten or a hundred times bigger in population? Jamaica won 12 medals, more than Mexico, Poland, Turkey and Kenya. Power is sometimes an inverse ratio, and scale is importantly indicative of defying expectations, when the few can have the affect of the many.
The Oxford don R. G. Collingwood looked back upon the medieval centuries when nation-states were first created, incredible cathedrals were erected, and systems of law and philosophy achieved. About scale, he said, “they seem to be tiny people doing colossal things.” Similarly, St. Lawrence represents great principles expressed in small ways while running races that may change the world.
Fall 2012
