Articles about "Counterculture of Commitment" speech
The Harvard Crimson has a run-down of graduation day:
Law School student Pete Davis, who delivered the graduate English address, urged graduates to resist “liquid modernity”—which he defined as the impulse to keep one’s options open rather than commit to a cause, community, or person—and instead pursue activism and advocate for justice.
He urged students to “rebel” and “join a counterculture of commitment.”
Harvard Magazine has one, too:
PETE DAVIS, a native of Falls Church, Virginia, who graduated from Harvard College in 2012 (he was a government concentrator) and subsequently worked at the iLab and then on labor issues with Ralph Nader, LL.B. ’58, is completing his law degree. While at the law school, he was a vigorous proponent of public-interest law, running the Harvard Law Forum, which brought speakers to campus, and publishing a bicentennial call to action focused on the school’s public-service mission. Consistent with this personal commitment, his speech makes the case againstkeeping one’s options open, and for dedicating oneself to a worthwhile cause. He traces his own commitments to his parents, Ralph Nader, and the “two professors who influenced me the most during my time at Harvard—Robert Putnam and Roberto Unger”—who
"have spent their careers dedicated to the slow but necessary work of deepening and propagating big ideas. Putnam’s big idea: the importance of community (social capital) in the functioning of society. Unger’s big idea: the importance of deepening democracy—strengthening, equipping and opening up power to the constructive genius of ordinary citizens."
Davis is returning to Virginia, where he will work on building community and deepening democracy, in part by “generating and experimenting with projects that help bring neighbors together—projects that turn strangers into neighbors and spaces into places” and by pursuing “policies that strengthen citizens and communities and open up our economy and our government to the participation of more people in more ways.”
In his address (read his full text here), Davis takes head-on students’inclincation to structure their lives as if it were, so to speak, always shopping week, with commitments deferrable indefinitely into the future. He begins with an image perhaps as familiar to this generation as the Harry Potter references in Lakin’s address—and proceeds rapidly in a no-nonsense direction:
"[I]t’s late at night and you start browsing Netflix looking for something to watch. You scroll through different titles—you even read a few reviews—but you just can’t commit to watching any given movie. Suddenly it’s been 30 minutes and you’re still stuck in Infinite Browsing Mode, so you just give up—you’re too tired to watch anything now, so you cut your losses and fall asleep."
"I have come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of our generation: Keeping our options open.…I’ve been thinking about this recently because leaving home and coming here is a lot like entering a long hallway—you walk out of the room in which you grew up and into this place with thousands of different doors to infinitely browse."
Summoning his undergraduate and professional-school experiences, he interprets the upsides of freedom fromcommitment—and its opposite:
"I’ve seen all the good that can come from having so many new options. I’ve seen the joy a person feels when they find a “room” more fitting for their authentic self. I’ve seen big decisions become less painful, because you can always quit, you can always move, you can always break up… and the hallway will always be there. And mostly I’ve seen all the fun people have had experiencing more novelty than any generation in history ever experienced."
"But as I’ve grown older here, I’ve also started seeing the downsides of having so many open doors. Nobody wants to be stuck behind a locked door, but nobody wants to live in a hallway either. It’s great to have options when you lose interest in something, but I’ve learned here that the more times I do this, the less satisfied I am with any given option. And lately, the experiences I crave are less the rushes of novelty and more those perfect Tuesday nights when you eat dinner with the friends who you have known for a long time, who you have made a commitment to, and who will not quit you because they found someone better."
"I have discovered in my time here that the people who inspire me the most are those who left the hallway, shut the door behind them, and settled in. It’s Fred Rogers recording Episode 895 of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood because he was committed to advancing a humane model of children’s television. It’s Dorothy Day sitting with the same outcast folks night after night after night because it was important that someone is committed to them. It’s not just the Martin Luther King who confronted the fire hoses in 1963, but the Martin Luther King who hosted his thousandth boring planning meeting in 1967."
Davis sees in the dual meanings of dedication—to make something holy, and to stick at something for a long time—a key to meaning:
"We do something holy when we choose to commit to something. And, in the most dedicated people I have met here, I have witnessed how that pursuit of holiness comes with a side effect of immense joy. "
"We may have come here to help keep our options open, but I leave believing that the most radical act we can take is to make a commitment to a particular thing… to a place, to a profession, to a cause, to a community, to a person. To show our love for something by working at it for a long time—to close doors and forgo options for its sake. "
Those acts of dedication can come from diverse causes, he suggests:
"It is not only the bomb or the bully that should keep us up at night—it is also the garden untilled and the newcomer unwelcomed, the neighbor unhoused and the prisoner unheard, the voice of the public unheeded and the long-simmering calamity unhalted and the dream of equal justice unrealized."
To that end, “[W] we should rebel and join up with a counterculture of commitment consisting of solid people. In this age of Infinite Browsing Mode, we should pick a damn movie and watch it all the way through…before we fall asleep.”
The Harvard Gazette did a profile before the speech, as well:
Pete Davis, from Falls Church, Va., is attending his second Harvard Commencement. He graduated from the College in 2012, and, as an undergraduate was one of the founders of “Harvard Thinks Big,” which brought 10 faculty members to Sanders Theatre to talk about big ideas for 10 minutes each.
Davis has an entrepreneurial spirit, judging from his founding roles in several other enterprises such as a website to encourage community engagement and a “tiny house” startup called Getaway that brought him to television’s “Shark Tank.” (Getaway now has 30 employees.) His current ambition is to transform the Democratic Party so that it is less strictly focused on national electoral politics and more focused on building a community to which people want to belong even between election cycles.
“How [can we] get people excited and empower people?” Davis said. “How can we make being part of a political party not just getting hit up for money and votes every four years, but when you’re sick, fellow Democrats bring you soup? You go to meetings that speak to your spiritual and communal side and not just the angry and political side?”
Davis said his speech will deal with something he learned from his parents: that everyday heroism has more to do with getting up in the morning and showing up each day than it does with jumping feet first into the midst of a crisis and slaying a dragon.
“For most of us, the crisis is a long-term crisis. Slaying the dragon is not one moment but waking up every day for 40 years dedicated to continuing the slow walk,” Davis said, adding that his mother found it perplexing when people asked her if she was happy, and she would respond, “I don’t think much about happiness. I think, ‘Am I fulfilling my commitments? Am I feeling strong in my relationships? Am I close to God and holiness?’
“What that is,” Davis said, “is trading happiness for true joy. … My heroes see the joy of a long day’s work.”