President Harward, graduating seniors of Bates College, ladies and gentlemen. There’s a tradition in giving college commencement speeches: The speaker explains to the graduating seniors what they have to do in life to become happy. It usually boils down to that they have to be as much as possible like the commencement speaker [laugh].

I’m not going to do it; it seems presumptuous to me. You’re all so different from each other and from me. I’m not so sure how to be happy myself and I certainly don’t know how to tell you to be happy [laugh].

But there’s another tradition: one of welcome. At some point in many commencement ceremonies, the president says, "I welcome you to the company of educated men and women." And I want to add my own welcome. I want to welcome you also in your status as college graduates, as allies, in a movement that is about 300 years old -- the movement known as the Enlightenment. Many of you know all about the Enlightenment. It began in Britain and France in the 18th century and spread from there to some of the rest of the world. It may have been triggered by discoveries in science, in particular by the work of Sir Isaac Newton. At least I, as a physicist, like to encourage people to think so.

It’s not that Newton was the first to discover little details like the law of gravitation. The exciting thing was that he showed the power of human reason, assisted by observation and mathematics, to discover laws that govern the heavens as well as the earth. The Enlightenment was characterized by skepticism about all sorts of things: from the divine right of kings, to the power of prayer, to the existence of witches. For instance, in 1714, Jane Wenham -- a name you probably don’t know -- had the honor of being the last person in England to be burned as a witch.

Skepticism, of course, was nothing new in the history of the world. It surfaced from time to time in writings from people from Xenophanes of Colophon to Shakespeare, but now was out in the open in the writing of people like David Hume and Voltaire. And it became greatly influential. As a byproduct of skepticism, there slowly developed an idea, one that was new in the history of the world, that the state had no business inquiring into anyone’s religious beliefs or practices. After all, if you’re not absolutely certain about what you believe yourself, you’re less likely to impose your beliefs on others. Our own constitution was one of the finest products of the Enlightenment, in its application of reason to government, forbidding any sort of hereditary aristocracy, and guaranteeing religious liberty -- at least against the federal government.

Like Voltaire, many founders of our country, such as Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison, made frequent references to Providence or the Almighty in their writings. But beyond that they showed no allegiance to any particular religious sect or doctrine. I don’t want to go overboard here in praising the Enlightenment. It was a long time before the law recognized racing equality. Sexual equality is still not assured. And we seem to be moving away from economic equality.

But the Enlightenment did make the world a freer and gentler place than it had ever been before. Today, some historians, philosophers, and cultural critics talk as if the Enlightenment were over, as if we were now in a post-Enlightenment age. Don’t believe it. Even here in America we have religious zealots who try to corrupt the teaching of biological and astronomic science in public schools, who try to ban research on therapeutic cloning, who try to prevent building astronomical observatories on the tops of mountains that some people think are sacred, and who, in extreme cases, bomb abortion clinics.

Hindu mobs in India tear down mosques, while under the leadership of a Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, India has taken first steps away from its great tradition of secular democracy. But America and India are wonderfully enlightened compared with most Islamic countries. This is a touchy subject, and I don’t intend to make any generalizations about Islamic people. There are certainly many gentle and tolerant Muslims. I worked closely with one of them, the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam. But with a few exceptions like Turkey, the governments of Islamic countries have generally not accepted the separation of state and religion or the equality of men and women. For a long while my friend Salam could not go back to his home country of Pakistan because he belonged to an Islamic sect that had been declared heretic. In several countries today, apostasy from Islam is punishable by death. It’s in part the Koranic promise of paradise for attacks on nonbelievers that incites Muslim zealots to fly airplanes into buildings in America and blow themselves up with randomly chosen bystanders on streets and busses in Israel.

Perhaps I can sum this up by saying many Islamic countries to today resemble Christian Europe before the Enlightenment. The work of the Enlightenment is really just begun. I call on you, as allies in this work, because you’ve had the sort of secular education that is at the same time a product of the Enlightenment and its bulwark. Your education is not consisted of endless repetition of sacred texts, as in Islamic madrasas or Hindu imitators in India. If you’ve taken course in physics, you probably didn’t even look at Newton’s Principia. And why should you? Your understanding of the laws of motion now is much better than Newton’s was. Any good graduate student today understands general relativity better than Einstein. You’ve been encouraged to be skeptical about what you’ve learned in course in philosophy, in history, and in other subjects. Or at least I hope so.

And it’s even just barely conceivable that some of you are skeptical about what I’ve been saying this morning. Partly as a reaction to racism, sexism, and imperialism, in American and European universities there is a widespread commitment to a kind of multiculturalism, which doesn’t look kindly on a movement like the Enlightenment, which originated with the proverbial dead white European males. Well, they weren’t all dead then [laugh]. Though it has spread far beyond this origin. Even so, the dedication to principles of equality that is inherent in multiculturalism is itself one of the fruits of the Enlightenment and not the least valuable.

I suppose that being part of a grand historical movement is not the thing that’s on your minds this morning as you look forward to a new stage in your lives. But now and then in the future, in your work or voting or in bringing up your children, you may have a chance to push the world a little toward the goals of the Enlightenment. So I want to welcome you to the company of educated, and enlightened, men and women. Thanks very much for letting me have the honor of speaking to you here, and congratulations to you all, and be happy.