A Graduation Speech on Human Faces and Relationships

Good evening Ms. —, Dr. —, the — Board, — faculty, and to the parents, siblings, family and friends of the graduates.  And, of course, good evening to the Class of 2025.  It is an honor to be asked to give the faculty address at this year’s graduation.  Thank you.

Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

These lines appear near the end of a novel that I recently reread by C.S. Lewis called, Till We Have Faces. It’s a creative retelling of an ancient Greek myth involving Cupid and Psyche. These lines are spoken by Orual, the main protagonist and narrator of the story, shortly after she’s had a mysterious encounter with the gods.  The “they” to which she refers – “why should they hear… how can they meet us…” – are the gods.  If you know this book and you know C.S. Lewis, you know that he’s working on a theological theme with these lines. But in rereading the story recently, I was struck by the significance of the face. Lewis is drawing on the sense that our face is where our true selfhood is expressed and it’s where we see the unique personhood of others. There’s also a link between these two lines; the second refers to our faces, while the first refers to our words.  The face is not only the location of our mouth, through which we speak; it is also where we express so much non-verbally when we communicate with others.  A furrow on the brow, a curl on the lips, a dimple on the cheek, a wink of the eye– these often communicate as much or more than the words we speak.

Even if we don’t often stop to think about it, we recognize the importance of the face. I can hear my dad now when he was angry with me as a child. He would say, “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” By this, of course, he meant that in order to really understand him, I had to look him in the face.  In other cultures, the opposite is true. A child being disciplined, or a subordinate addressing their superior, would never dare to look directly in their face. That would denote some sort of equal status in the social hierarchy. But in both instances, we still see the cultural significance that we place on the human face.

We even project the importance of the face onto our deities. All of the Abrahamic faiths, for example, speak of the Face of God.  Think of the well known blessing that appears in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Old Testament: “May the Lord bless you and keep you.  May the Lord make his face shine upon you.”  In Islam, Muslims speak of the Face of Allah, by which they refer to the all encompassing divine presence of God.

Coming back down to more mundane examples– just this past week the seniors had professional graduation photos taken.  We took headshots of each graduate in their cap and gown.  By headshots, what we really meant was that the photos were focused on each student’s face. Why would we take a close up of their shoulder, or their back, or the top of their head? It’s by the face that we know who they are. In our senior seminar class this past semester, we discussed at one point the concept of umwelt, which refers to the subjective experience of the world of a particular species based on the particular sense and perception capacities of that species.  Recognition of other people by their face is a key part of the human umwelt. 

It’s a really strange thought experiment, which we did in class, to try to imagine the umwelt of a different species. How is the world subjectively perceived by a bumblebee?  How do bumblebees recognize other bumblebees?  What about a bat?  What about your pet cat or dog?  Well in the case of dogs, this is pretty well known. I’ve stood on the street a few times talking to Ms. — while trying to ignore the fact that my dog is sniffing at the backside of her dog.  Evolutionary biologists point out something interesting about dogs, however.  While they recognize each other largely through smell, their domestication and evolution alongside the evolution of humans seems to have developed in them a recognition of human faces. Your pet dog is unique among animal species in that when it wants your attention, it will look you in the face. And, when it’s done something naughty, its gaze will avoid your face.

Science supports the importance of the human face.  We know there’s a specific brain region for face recognition, located in the temporal lobe, called the fusiform face area, or FFA.  We also know, from a study done at UC Berkeley a few years ago, that there is more trait variation in the features of the human face than in any other physical features of the human body.  Not only that, but an investigation of the human genome reveals more genetic variation within the genome area related to facial features, than in other areas of the human genome.  In fact, scientists have suggested that the variations within this part of the human genome support the claim that every human face on earth is unique. It also suggests that the uniqueness of each human face, and our ability to recognize others by their face, has been evolutionarily advantageous to us.  It’s likely linked to the role the face plays in our interpersonal communication and our building of social bonds.  These have, even more than the size of our prefrontal cortex, been the key advantages of homo sapiens as a species.

I’ve now rambled on esoterically about human faces long enough, so let me get directly to my point, which is this: next year at university, you need to get out of your dorm rooms, and off of your screens, and interact with other people, face-to-face.  Avoid online classes whenever possible, get your but in the seats in a classroom with a teacher and other students.  Get to know your teachers, and get to know your classmates.  Ask questions, participate in discussion, use your own words – not those of AI – to express your ideas, both spoken and written.  Get involved in clubs, play some intramural sports, and take your headphones off and talk to people when walking across campus.  Not only this, but get connected to people in the community outside of your campus. Don’t just Uber Eats everything; frequent a neighborhood cafe, bring your business to the local shop owners, ride public transportation, and attend community events.

I grew up in a very religious household. At 18 years old, I thought I wanted to go into church ministry work, so I attended a religious college for my undergrad degree. There are some aspects of that college experience that don't value when I look back upon it now, but, if there was one thing that my college did right, it was to push us to get out in the community and volunteer once per week.  I went to college in Chicago, so once per week for my first two years I was tutoring kids in an after school program in the Robert Taylor Homes. Then for another two years, I taught English to resettled refugee families from Croatia and Bosnia.  These were incredibly valuable experiences because it's through them that I interacted with people beyond my campus, including children, older adults, and people from cultures and backgrounds very different from mine. These experiences also helped me to connect with the people and neighborhoods of the city in which I was living, including their concerns and challenges.  I would encourage you to do the same. Find a place outside of campus to get involved somehow.  Volunteer, participate in a neighborhood organization, join a local religious community, or get a part-time job.

Seniors, I’ve enjoyed our learning together this year, first in our Global Citizenship class and then in Senior Seminar.  Though not really by intention, I think there were some connecting threads for us across both of these courses all year.  I guess this makes sense. In a way they were both about preparing you to leave high school and head out into the world; one was about sending you out as independent, healthy individuals, while the other was about helping you develop the attitude of a responsible and engaged global citizen.  

Let me briefly pull on a couple of those threads and remind you of a few of the big learning take-aways this year that relate to what I’ve said so far.  Recall the Ray Naylor science fiction novel that we read together, and the AI companions called “point-fives.”  Even from their name, we discussed the inferior, fractional relationship they provided.  They were designed algorithmically to reflect the users’ own self back to them as a companion, which resulted in an easy, zero-obligation, conflict-free, but completely dissatisfying facsimile of human-to-human relationship.  

Also recall the Harvard University Longitudinal Study of Adult Development that we discussed.  Remember that this study collected data on hundreds of adults, many of them a consistent cohort, for over 75 years.  The study has found that the number one predictor of a long, fulfilling, and healthy life is the quality of the participants' interpersonal relationships. Not only did committed, trusting relationships associate with the affective well-being of the participants, it literally correlated with their physical health and life longevity.  The researchers leading this study have hypothesized that humans best manage the inevitable stressors of life when they can share those stressors with others who love them, support them, and care for them. Without these social supports, over time, unrelieved stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine, literally take years off of our lives.  Though the Harvard study didn’t explore this, I would venture to predict that AI companions will never produce the same life-giving effect.

Just as an aside, I want to point out that the conclusions from the Harvard study didn’t distinguish between extroverts and introverts.  It’s not about the quantity of friends you have, or how much time you spend on the dance floor at prom.  It’s about the quality of the relationships you have, even if just a few.  There are some introverts within this group… —, —, Mr. Haines. We’re maybe not up in the club every weekend, but this advice about interpersonal relationships still applies to us.

Let me also get you to recall what we learned in Global Citizenship class. Remember how we talked about Smokey responsibility, the idea that citizenship is, in part, about assuming a level of responsibility for the well-being of people and planet outside of ourselves.  We discussed how we, as humans, are embodied beings situated within specific local environments, which are human cultured places.  Our actions in the world can only happen in the local place in which we’re situated. We learned about the ethnographer’s mindset, and the phenomenological approach, the idea of actively listening and non-judgmentally observing in order to learn from the people around us, valuing others as the experts of their own subjective experience of their world.  In other words, we discussed how a global citizen is one who learns from and acts with others.

In conclusion, let me go back and say it clearly again.  My advice to you as you head off to university next year: go to in-person classes, interact with teachers and classmates, hang-out, in-person with those living in your dorm, get involved in clubs and intramural sports, get to know the surrounding neighborhood, figure out ways to engage with people beyond campus, volunteer in the community, walk places, and take public transportation.

In short, as we emphasized all year, I encourage you to learn from others, act with others, and do it… face-to-face.

Thank you.