Unpacking “Humbled & Honoured” : Introspection of a self-styled Global Citizen
Good afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,
Could I start by asking you all to take a photo of me on your phones please? I’d like to share it on social media. It will probably say something like “I’m honoured and humbled to be here”. And I’ll try my best, not to make it sound like a humble-brag.
Tricky phrase: “honoured & humbled”. “Humbled & honoured”. What does it mean?
The honour part is obvious.
You are graduating from one of the world’s foremost places of learning in social sciences, having navigated not only the intellectual rigours of your respective subjects, but also this uniquely rich cross-cultural community. Today, you deserve to feel honoured for what you have achieved: pure, unadulterated, guilt-free honour. Enjoy it. Savour it, especially with your loved ones.
But tomorrow is another day.
Tomorrow is when the “humbled” part kicks in. Tomorrow, we wake up to the enormity of what has not been achieved in the twenty years between my graduation and yours.
I am your stereotypical global citizen: Born in Bangladesh, primary school in the Middle East, secondary in Africa, Sixth-form in Wales, University in England: Muslim boy, married to a Singaporean-Chinese-Christian.
“The World is Flat”, the “End of History”, “Why Globalisation Works” — these are not just titles of best-seller books from around the time that I graduated. They were almost uncontested truths, factual certainties, settled issues.
I took it for granted that those of us privileged to have sat in rooms like these would take back the benefit of our exposure, our knowledge of cross-community understanding, our training in trying to “understand the causes of things” (our motto) and spread it far and wide.
What we may have done instead, is create our own supremacy of enlightenment. We became missionaries for what we have learned, not advocates of how we have learned and how much more we have to learn.
Perhaps we forgot about the “humbled part”.
Perhaps we forgot that our motto of Rerum cognoscere causas (to understand the causes of things) is a continuous pursuit — not something that ends with this graduation ceremony and this echo-chamber. Perhaps we forgot that it takes effort to interact with empathy, especially with those who seemingly lack empathy.
The world today is in the throes of a fantastic fourth industrial revolution characterised by extreme connectivity, extreme automation and extreme disruption in every part of our lives.
It’s the Future of Finance, Future of Jobs, Future of Education, Future of Healthcare, Future of the Future — everywhere you look, there’s a seminar on the Future of something or the other going on right now. We are in the throes of massive structural change. This is exciting, promising and empowering for those of you entering the workforce or enterprise right now:
You can crowd-source, you can cloud-store, you can Uberise this and you can block-chain that.
So today, with most other industrial resources available to us at a retail level, the most valuable capital we can have is our ability to collaborate with others.
This in turn needs two things: 1) Our ability to proactively seek out diversity: to ask “what is missing in my model of the world?” and 2) our ability to engage in constructive conflict.
Diversity isn’t just about the visual — gender and race. I mean, genuine cognitive diversity. Diversity of perspective, diversity of background.
We also need to get better at conflict. On too many occasions, we shy away from conflict, pretend that it’s not there, until things bubble over. Or when we do engage in conflict, it degenerates into personal attacks very quickly.
When we fail to recognise that our style of conflict is not constructive, we provide openings for hate, prejudice, labels, identity-based conflict and sometimes, violence. We allow ourselves to be exploited by polarisation. Religious and secular. Right-wing and left-wing. Explicit and dog-whistles.
So I wish you greater success than we have had in understanding the causes of things. I wish you greater success in constructive conflict and proactive diversity. I wish you continued & continuous success in feeling honoured and humbled, humbled and honoured throughout your lives.
Thank you for your time.
** Text of Speech from LSE Graduation Ceremony, July 2017 ***
