This week we publish excerpts from the baccalaureate address given in May by American journalist Bill Moyers at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Mr. Moyers has enjoyed a career of extraordinary diversity. He holds a master's degree in theology; in the mid–1960s he was special assistant and press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson; he has been a director of the Peace Corps; and he has won over thirty Emmy awards for his contributions to public affairs television. Last year he hosted the series Genesis: A Living Conversation.

Mr. Moyers began his speech at Brown University by recalling a similar occasion at another American university when a young woman who had just graduated came up to him and said, "Mr. Moyers, you've been in both government and journalism. That makes everything you say twice as hard to believe!" For that reason, he said, he had chosen this time to draw upon more personal than professional experiences. "I want to talk to you not as a journalist," he said, "but as one more pilgrim wading through the postmodern swamp."

OVERCOMING THE CONFUSION

In this great, disputatious, overanalyzed, over-televised and undertenderized country ... I find myself reassessing a hundred assumptions that have served me comfortably through most of my life. I am alternately afraid, cantankerous, bewildered, occasionally hostile, sometimes gracious, and battered by a hundred new sensations every day. I can be filled with a pessimism as gloomy as the depths of the Middle Ages, yet deep within me I'm possessed of a hope that simply won't quit. So I vacillate between the determination to act, to change society, and the desire to retreat into the snuggeries of self, family, and friends.

The hardest struggle of all is to reconcile life's polar realities. I love books, Bach, and chocolate brownies. Yet how do I justify my pleasure and good luck in these in a world where millions can't read, violence mutes the music, and children go numb with hunger? ...

We have to choose sides in this universe, and no choice is more important than which side of our own nature will we nurture: the side that can grow weary and even cynical and is tempted by the illusion that it's me against the world ... or the side that yearns to be in the world, to connect, affirm, and signify. I hope you have gained the skills and tools of knowledge necessary to make that choice....

SHARING BREAD

Civilization is that web of cooperation joining individuals to family, friend, communities, and country, creating in each of us a sense of reliance on the whole, a recognition of the self, yes, but rooted in companionship with others, through "habits of the heart." ...

[Take] a loaf of bread. I live a lot of my life in a world of ideas. But I've learned through the years that bread is the great reinforcer of the reality principle. Bread equals life. Now, if you're like me you have a thousand and more times repeated the ordinary experience of eating bread without a thought for the process itself. It just shows up on the shelf or on the table. Yet, in fact, I depend for bread on hundreds of people I don't know and will never meet. If they fail me, I go hungry. If I don't return to them something of value in exchange for their loaf, I fail them. We're in each other's debt. Bread requires a market, but a market isn't enough; there must be moral reciprocity.

I've prayed the Lord's Prayer all my life, but I've never prayed "Give me this day my daily bread." It's always "Give us this day our daily bread." Shared realities. Whether it's the baking of bread, the building of a great university, or the creating and nurturing of a civilization, we're in this together.

Excerpts used with the permission of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.