In the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech, we asked a number of scholars, college presidents, and writers to answer this question: If you were giving the commencement address at Virginia Tech this year, what is the core of the message you would like to leave with the graduates?

Amy Gutmann | Michael Eric Dyson |Ariel Dorfman | Lionel Shriver | Edward J.W. Park | Donna E. Shalala | Barry R. Glassner | Sissela Bok | Robert Coles | Karla Jay | Bobby Fong

April 20, 2007

Sissela Bok, senior visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies

Create a Space for Peace: You have lived through unspeakable horrors and looked upon the face of hatred. But you have also witnessed luminous acts of self-sacrifice and love and reached out to one another to comfort and console. Now, as you graduate, are there further steps you might take to counter the hatred and murder you have seen at such close hand? What models might there be to show the way?

Two who offer such guidance are Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi. King could have been speaking of the crisis you have lived through when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” And a suggestion of Gandhi’s can be of immediate help: that we carve out personal spaces, territories where violence will not be usedterritories in the family, in the community, with friends and even enemies, at work as in recreation.

In that personal space, neither Gandhi nor King could have foreseen the violence in entertainment that now comes your way. Your generation has been exposed, as none before, to graphic savagery in films and interactive games mass-marketed to young audiences. You’ve seen films and heard songs that portray murder, torture, and rape as thrilling. You know games that invite players to assume the role of “first-person shooters,” training them to aim with precision, then rewarding them for shooting and eviscerating victims in gory and photo-realistic detail.

Even if there were no such media offerings, that would obviously not wipe out easy access to guns, or poverty, drug addiction, dysfunctional families, mental illness, and other risk factors for violence. But for disturbed and psychologically vulnerable people, a combination of glamorized entertainment brutality and sensationalized news coverage contributes powerfully to blurring the line between fantasy and reality. And for a far greater proportion of people, studies show that heavy exposure to media violence increases fearfulness for oneself and desensitization, or numbing, when it comes to risks to others.

Striving for resilience instead of fearfulness, and for fellow feeling instead of numbness, will help as you carve out spaces in your own lives where violence will have no sway. It will matter, for this purpose, to think through your uses of media entertainment. I doubt that you will ever look in the same way again at films or games that glamorize mass killings. But others do. The most potent influence on young people today is that of the media, with their huge financial stake in enlisting new consumers of violent programming. At the same time, there is growing international cooperation among groups aiming to take a stand against violence, including entertainment violence. Gandhi’s hope, expressed over 60 years ago, still resonates:

We are constantly astonished at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamed of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.

Previous: Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Children of Crisis' series
Next: Barry R. Glassner, professor of sociology and executive vice provost at the University of Southern California, and author of 'The Gospel of Food' (Ecco, 2007) and 'The Culture of Fear' (Basic, 1999)