Life aversion
Mitch Daniels is the former governor of Indiana. Before that he ran the federal budget office (OMB). And after being governor, he became the president of Purdue University. He has held that job since 2013.
He has excelled at every job he has ever had and has been just as good at running a university as a state government — the university job is arguably harder because the constituencies and political landmines are myriad.
A lot of people wish Mr. Daniels had run for president, and he almost did in both 2012 and 2016. He represents the Republican Party at its best — plainspoken and empirical; skeptical but humane; moderating.
Mr. Daniels was the commencement speaker at his own school this year. Maybe the folks at Purdue couldn’t get a big name at the apparent wind-down of a pandemic. Maybe someone said, “We have the best possible speaker right here.”
If someone did say that, he, or she, was correct.
Mr. Daniels, who kept Purdue open with precautions and protocols when it was considered quite controversial, gave a brief, direct speech that was easily the best of the season. It carried a simple message: Calculate the risks in life, but don’t be paralyzed by them. Be smart, but be not afraid.
The sign of a rational human being and a well-ordered mind is the ability to absorb information and bring some kind of organization and sense to it, said the president. That’s how we assess risk.
So, he advised, dissect, interpret and evaluate information. But then choose a course of action. No action is not an option. Or should not be. Mr. Daniels quoted the great humanist man of letters Jacques Barzun: “The last degree of caution is cowardice.”
What you must avoid in your lives, said Mr. Daniels, is “the mad pursuit of zero risk.”
There is no such thing, except in death and extinction.
During much of the pandemic, he said, extreme aversion to risk won out. Fear won over the spirit of adventure. In this regard, he said, “Your elders failed you.”
A free people have to have confidence that we can deal with our problems, that we can cope with crisis, and that we can order our priorities (free speech trumps correct speech; survival trumps being right). This applies to a democracy like the U.S. during a pandemic. It applies to dealing with all forms of bigotry and to gun violence, in any open society. It applies to Israel trying to find a point of stability and equilibrium in its democracy right now.
Mr. Daniels also invoked the late scientist and visionary Carl Sagan: We never reach perfect social order or perfect personal enlightenment. Science never gives an “answer,” or a clear path, because knowledge is dynamic. What we strive for, said Sagan, is a successive improvement in understanding. Progress is tentative and cumulative — “proximate” was Reinhold Niebuhr’s word — in both people and in cultures.
So here is a message for the Class of 2021: Leaders take risks.
Fully realized and alive human beings take risks.
To live in the world, to live life, is to risk.
Life is risk.