I have never been here before, and yet this place is familiar to me. That’s because Mary told me so much about it. Mary was my young wife who sat in this spot attending her own graduation 18 years ago. She was killed in an automobile accident 3 years, 3 months and two days ago.

I met Mary when she was at Graduate school, at UC Irvine in California. She worked hard there, she earned her graduate degree there, and yet afterwards whenever anyone asked her where she had received her education, she always answered St. Bonaventure.

We talked often about her life here. She loved to talk about her friends and her teachers. When anyone asked her why Bona meant so much to her, she always answered, "We cared about each other." She felt she had learned a lot here, that she had grown up here. She valued the formal part of her education, but more than the formal part, what she valued most was the community, this place where people care about each other.

Value changes. That’s what I want to talk about this morning, caring about each other. My professional work involves measuring and tracking social trends and value changes in America and other nations. I started to do annual surveys of changing values and morals in the late 1960s, and have done so every single year since then. So we now have thirty years of trend measurements. And oh how the country has changed in those three decades…

Let me share with you just three social trends that play an important role in people’s lives.

First are changing attitudes that people have around the idea of sacrificing for others. Way back in the 1950s when I first started to work, the dominant ethic in the country was one of "self-sacrifice." Self-sacrifice for others — your children, your husband, your wife, your parents -- was felt to have an inherent moral virtue, quite apart from its practical economic necessity. It was the dominant moral norm in the nation to sacrifice for the family because it was the right thing to do.

Then in the 1960s, a change began to occur. It started on the nation’s college campuses. In the mid 1960s, college students from affluent families (a very small proportion of the total population) had begun to question their parents' assumption that sacrifice for the family was necessary. They had concluded that their fathers' nose-to-the-grindstone way of life and their mothers' sacrifice of her own self-expressiveness no longer made sense in the emerging affluence of the time. They felt that sacrifice for the family was all well and good if you were obliged to do it because times were tough economically. But if it was unnecessary, why sacrifice something as important as one's own self-expressive needs?

In the 1970s this new attitude began to spread far beyond the college campus. Ever larger numbers of Americans came to feel that their own self-expressive needs should receive greater priority and unnecessary sacrifice less priority. By the end of the 1970s, this new attitude had spread from a tiny 3% of the population to 80% of adult Americans — just about everyone!

Then in the 1980s, Americans took the issue of sacrifice one step further. They began to question not only unnecessary sacrifice but any form of sacrifice at all. This was the "me" generation when people became preoccupied with themselves and their own needs. Now in the 1990s, we are starting to have some second thoughts. We are not going back to the 1950s’ ethic of sacrifice for its own sake, but Americans are coming to realize, once again, that regardless of how well off you may be economically, some degree of self sacrifice for one’s children is necessary if we want the next generation of Americans to develop as healthy, responsible, thoughtful adults who are capable of enduring commitments, of building relationships to others and of caring deeply about others.

I-Thou-ism. A second trend is a strong yearning for closer personal relationships. People want to find a way to overcome the distancing and impersonal transactions of modern life with something more human, more intimate, more personal.

Many years ago, the philosopher Martin Buber introduced us to his illuminating distinction between "I/thou" and "I/it" relationships. I/thou relationships eliminate the distance and impersonality of the transactions we have in everyday life. In the I/Thou mode we encounter each other as equals and as complete human persons, and as Buber observed, in such encounters we transform each other. I-it relationships are the impersonal transactions we have with products, institutions and people every day of our lives.

Our studies show that most Americans yearn to shift the balance of their lives in the I/thou direction — in marriage, friendship, the workplace, neighborhoods, and even in the marketplace. This is what Americans mean by community — people cherish the idea of community: the opportunity to live among others who know you and relate to you as a person, rather than merely as customer, patient, voter, student or mailing address. In private life, personal relationships create intimacy and bonding between individuals. In public life, they create the kind of civility and respect that Americans want but feel is lacking in so many aspects of our culture.

Spirituality. A third change in values I want to mention relates to the growth of spirituality. There is a growing hunger in the nation for new forms of transcendence and deeper meaning — a reaching beyond the self and one’s everyday mundane world. The quest for spirituality pervades all domains of American life. Some of it is channeled into conventional forms of organized religion, but much of it is not. In addition to the church or mosque or synagogue, people seek spirituality in personal relationships, in the quest for community and in the spiritual dimension of health and the healing of body and soul through recourse to alternative health care.

What do these changes mean to you? You are just about to leave a small, tight-knit community where the idea of self-sacrifice is not a stranger, where people seek and find I-Thou relationships, and where spirituality is a living presence to enter the larger society where the sense of community is much weaker.

If you had graduated into the United States of my generation in the 1950s, you would have entered a world where there was plenty of community, but not much personal freedom and self-expressiveness. In many ways, life would have been easier because there was far less choice or room for individual decisions. If we turned the clock back and imagined that this was the 1950s instead of the 1990s, would that kind of world and environment have satisfied you?

Probably not. It didn't satisfy my generation -- the people who did graduate from college in those years. As soon as they felt they could afford to do so, they transformed their lives and American culture….

Leap forward a generation and pose the same question to yourself. If you had graduated in the 1980s instead of the end of the 1990s, would you have entered a world where you could have realized your full human potential? Once again, probably not. In a backlash against the constraints on the individual, the country had moved very far in the opposite direction: toward too much self concern, too much self preoccupation, too much narcissism, too little caring for others. The result: lots of loneliness, isolation, loss of community. And also a loss of moral grounding.

So then, what about today? What are your chances in today’s world? My take on it is that you have partly lucked out in your decision about the best time to be born. A great many of the constraints that inhibited the happiness and well-being of the last two generations of Americans have lessened or disappeared.

The opportunities for realizing a good level of material well-being have vastly improved:

• It was difficult in the 1950s, and also tricky in the period from 1973 to 1995, but it is much better now and for the foreseeable future.
  
• Of particular importance for you personally is that the economic prospects today for those with a college education are better than they have ever been in our own history and maybe in world history.
• You also will enjoy much more individual choice in how you want to live than your parents and grandparents did, especially women. There is far more individuality and fewer pressures for conformity than ever before. There is much more freedom. Prior to the 1960s, American individualism was mainly political -- freedom to speak our minds, to pursue our own religious beliefs, to live where we choose to live. In the 1950s we were political individualists but social conformists. The 1960s ushered in a radical extension of individualism, broadening it from the political to personal life styles. You are the beneficiaries of that American cultural revolution.
• Perhaps most important of all, our society has recovered from its orgy of narcissism and self-centeredness and is now seeking to reconstruct a sense of community that had been lost and perhaps to build a better society. There is more pluralism than ever before, less snobbery, less prejudice, less excluding the other. Americans have come to accept pluralism of all sorts: pluralism of ethnic groups, races, ages, life styles, styles of music, styles of action, styles of thought.

If these are such positive developments, why do I say you have only partly lucked out? Because there is a huge missing piece to our society. Most Americans (87%) feel we have lost our way, morally speaking. There is a conviction among our citizens that our society is floundering in terms of its ethical commitments, and that Americans are no longer confident of the moral ground on which they stand and which they can pass on to their children…

So I think that in addition to being lucky, you have your work cut out for you. You start with many gifts that the floundering and experimentation of past generations of Americans have created for you.

• Opportunities galore
• Explosive technology
• One of the great periods of American entrepreneurship and creativity.
• A climate of acceptance for individual choice
• A growing awareness of the need for civility and mutual respect.

I think we are living through one of the most creative eras of American civilization. But at the same time, this is also a period of great moral confusion.

Part of the human heritage is the harsh reality that each generation must make its own mistakes and learn its own lessons.

It is always treacherous to tell other people how they should live their lives. But one of the advantages of rituals like commencement ceremonies is that they provide a tiny window for the old ones of the society to pass through to the young ones, who are at the beginning of their adventure as independent adults, some smidgen of their experience that can be useful to them in a world of moral opaqueness and confusion.

So, as an old one, I would pass onto you the lesson that my beloved young wife learned here at Bona’s: that a genuine community is one in which people genuinely care about each other. If you absorb and internalize that lesson, and if you extend your caring not just to family and friends but to the wider circle of other Americans and to the human family, you will discover that you have built for yourself a firm ethical foundation on which you can then realize all of the grand possibilities that American life offers you today.

So, I wish you all well and a bona ventura.