https://youtu.be/eIXFiLYUEFk
Madam Director General of ORT Uruguay, deans, members of our university’s faculty, friends of ORT, and especially, our dear graduates and their families.
Today, I welcome you with two overwhelming and conflicting emotions. I am deeply gratified to be sharing this celebration with you. At the same time, however, many members of our academic community are deeply shaken by Hamas’s attack on the State of Israel and the war that appears to be breaking out as a result.
But let's start with the good news. Today is a great day to celebrate and feel proud. It's also a great day to give thanks, dear graduates, because like everything important in life, graduation is a team effort. Your families have surely been a great source of support over the years. Take this opportunity to thank them.
Some of you may be thinking about your next steps. Whether to seek the stability of a job or the adventure of starting a business. Whether to further your education with a graduate degree or enter the workforce. Whether to dedicate yourself to public service or to your personal development. There are no right answers to these questions. Each person must find their own path. Every choice involves risks, and there will always be paths we won’t take. Don’t wait for your turn to do what you believe is important to you; don’t wait for the perfect moment or ideal circumstances, because they never come.
Dear graduates: You are graduating into a tumultuous and contradictory world. It seems we are living through continuous technological progress, but moral regression. War is once again emerging as an accepted extension of politics. Distortion and lies are becoming the most common form of public information. What seemed a few years ago to be the end of history has turned into the beginning of a nightmare. It falls to your generation to harmonize our technological capabilities with our moral compass.
This is a day of celebration for everyone, but for many, myself included, it is also a time of anxiety due to the war between Israel and Hamas. Many of us have friends and relatives in that friendly country, and we follow the situation there day by day. If they live in the south, there is a high likelihood that they have been killed, wounded, raped, or kidnapped. In a single day, Hamas killed more than 1,500 people—men, women, children, the elderly, the healthy, the sick, those in wheelchairs, people with autism, pregnant women, Israelis, and people of 23 other nationalities, including Argentines, Brazilians, and at least one Uruguayan.
The Hamas attack was more than a terrorist attack; it was more than an act of war; it was a massive act of violence against defenseless people, with no discernible military objective. The attackers filmed their own actions and broadcast them live so that families could watch in real time as their children or siblings were killed, thereby creating evidence of war crimes themselves.
There is a propaganda objective, of course, but this is more than just propaganda. It is the glorification of violence, the supremacy of armed men over defenseless women and children, and the right to indiscriminate sexual abuse. The only way to understand it is as a postmodern form of human sacrifice.
It seems we are returning to the dark ages. What comes next—a return to slavery? All of us who believe in moral progress and human rights should stand united in rejecting this barbarism. Day after day, we follow the funerals and listen to the families of the kidnapped. We all hope that the war does not spread, that there will be no more innocent victims. We hope that the criminals will be defeated and that both populations can live as we all wish to—in peace, with hope for the future, and with neighbors who aren’t obsessed with killing us. Today it seems very difficult, but as the Talmud says: “We are not obligated to repair the world, but we are obligated to try.”
This attack by Hamas is not just a heinous crime; it is a test. For the perpetrators, it was a test of their willingness to resort to violence. For Israel, it is a test of resilience, but the most important test is for those of us who are far away. Are we capable of unequivocally condemning the murder of hundreds of unarmed civilians? It shouldn’t be a difficult test. Can we condemn gang rapes without making excuses? Can we declare that the kidnapping of children is unacceptable? And if we cannot, what does that say about us?
Tomorrow we may condemn other actions if they trouble our conscience; we may support other victims; we may delve deeper into the history of the conflict; we may propose solutions from afar. But today we should all respond by supporting a wounded country, the families of so many innocent victims, and the hundreds of hostages.
Unfortunately, many were unable to muster the minimum level of moral decency and intellectual honesty required to pass this test of humanity. For years, we have heard groups, organizations, and political parties rightly assert that human rights are eternal and universal. That murders, disappearances, torture, and the abduction of children are unacceptable crimes that must be condemned in every possible forum, and that there is no statute of limitations—neither legal nor moral. And yet, now, in the face of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, some of these organizations and parties have remained silent. It is a false ethic, something equivalent to fake news. If the crimes were committed by Videla or Pinochet, they are crimes against humanity, but if Hamas commits them, we must first understand them as part of a historical process and perhaps the victims had it coming; as they used to say in Argentina: “they must have done something.”
I am sure that most members of those parties or organizations that condone terrorism shudder when they see those videos and tremble at the thought that this could happen to their loved ones. And yet, they still go along with it because, for them, ideology takes precedence over morality.
Putting ideology before morality poses a risk to democracy. The supremacy of ideology stifles individuals’ critical spirit; there are no longer citizens, only believers and heretics. In a democracy, there are no single ideas; opinions change as a result of dialogue. That is why universities must educate people who are always capable of persuading and being persuaded. Citizens capable of appreciating the force of reason, not the reasons of force.
Strengthening our moral compass requires rejecting the profound fallacy that any end justifies any means. Albert Camus, one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, warned us more than 50 years ago that it is the means that justify the end. Just causes cannot be defended through unjust means. Dignity cannot be defended through undignified means.
Dear graduates, the challenge facing your generation is the emergence of new forms of intelligence—a domain that has, until now, been the exclusive preserve of humans. Artificial intelligence will not be just another technological change; it will impact human activities in ways that are difficult to foresee. Universities had to take a stance quickly in the face of new generative artificial intelligences that have the potential to alter how we learn, how we teach, and how we assess. Our position from the outset has been not to prohibit the use of these artificial intelligences. On the contrary, we aim to encourage their use by students and faculty, as graduates will need them.
Remember that you won’t be competing with machines; you’ll be competing with other people who make better use of technology. Only by understanding technology can you help minimize risks and maximize benefits—both economic and social. We are entering a phase in which the marginal cost of adding intelligence to systems will gradually approach zero. In other words, it will become increasingly cheaper to replace human tasks with automated ones. We humans will have to continuously retrain and adapt, and redefine our comparative advantages over machines.
The major challenge will be managing the ratio of knowledge obsolescence to the acquisition of new knowledge. The higher this ratio, the fewer opportunities we will have for development as individuals and as nations. The ability to learn will become one of the key skills for personal development. The challenge for our country is precisely to create a system that allows more people to retrain regularly in shorter time frames—that is, to prevent a divide from forming between those who can be educated and everyone else.
Dear graduates: we have much to be proud of in our country, which is growing in freedom while democracy is in retreat around the world. We weathered the pandemic more united than other countries, more rational than others, and more resilient than much larger and wealthier nations. Of course, there is much to be done. Many Uruguayans are struggling to find a way forward. Education needs to be modernized. We haven’t been able to agree on how to ensure sustainable pensions for our young people, but everything can be solved. That is your mission: to take our society to the next step on our path to development.
Dear graduates: Go out into the world to learn and gain experience, but come back to our country. Make it fair and prosperous, innovative and dynamic—a beacon for the region. Find your own path, but know that ORT will always be your home.
Thank you very much.