The speech at the inauguration of
The Yan P. Lin Research Center
for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and
Modern Worlds
Professor Emeritus John Dunnl
Dean Prof. Hudson Meadwell
Dean Prof. Jim Nicell
The consul of the Consulate General of PR China to Montreal Mr. Xiong Sheng
Vice-Principal University Advancement Marc Weinstein
Provost and Vice-Principal Academic Prof. Christopher Manfredi
The Honourable Chancellor Michael Meighen
McGill Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Suzanne Fortier
All the professors
and my guests
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you for being here to celebrate together!
It is a great honour for me to be here to experience such a historical moment.
I understand that this inauguration and celebration is not only for one center, and this tribute is not for one person, rather it is a declaration of a principle, which is the principle of the value of Canada.
I am forever indebted to McGill and Canada
Here I am praised as a donor and a giver, but deep in my heart I feel forever indebted to this great university McGill in particular and this great country Canada in general. It is McGill and Canada that offered me such great opportunities to come and study here and made it possible for me to do what I do today.
I still remember the day when I arrived in Canada, which was Aug. 24, 1986. I arrived at Montreal airport, carrying less than $50 with a one way ticket bought by my parents with their lifetime saving.
I also remember how I filled my application to McGill for my PhD program.
On the question “How much money do you have to support your study at McGill”, my answer was “0”;
On the question “Who will support you during your stay in Canada?” I wrote “you”. Then I erased it and changed it into something more polite, but the meaning was the same: I have no money, no relatives, no any resources, therefore, if you don’t give me financial support then I cannot come. But I really want to come. You will not regret supporting me because I will reciprocate your support.
I filled the form as carefully as I could and sent it to McGill.
A month or so later, I received the wonderful reply that I was accepted as PhD student with a “Research Assistantship” of $11,000 per year. In addition, my tuition would be waivered. That was an astronomical figure for me and it was that money got me the visa and got me here.
I thank my supervisor, Prof. Melek Akben, for choosing me out of many applicants. She later moved to Ottawa Univ. She passed away many years ago. She will never be forgotten. I also thank Prof. Steve Yue for stepping in at the last stage of my PhD program due to the heath issue of my supervisor.
I met so many wonderful people during my study at McGill, professors and fellow students alike. It is these details of my journey that made me carry on with great enthusiasm and pleasure. It was these daily events, big and small, great and trifle, happy and sad, wonderful and awful, brilliant and dumb, that all taught me the Canadian values and made me understand what McGill and Canada meant to me.
Time passed fast, but I have never forgotten my promises. “Reciprocating” is the word I always remember, with time passing by, it slowly became “Redemption”.
Immediately after I graduated from McGill, I tried to find a way to deliver my promise.
I remember my first donation was no more than $500. Soon after, I received McGill’s reply, praising me one of the “new leaders”. I am sure that they were over generous on this, but it was a good tactic to encourage graduates to give. Now I am told that I am in the category of “founders of McGill”. I still prefer “new leaders” to “founders”, because the former sounds so fresh and the latter a bit old. But I like both, though more former than latter. The “New Leader” sounds like soprano and the “founders” sounds like bass. I like base too, not only because I was singing at Ottawa Univ. choir as a bass, but also that without bass soprano would lose her beauty.
I continued. I did not donate for anyone else, rather I did it for myself. If I don’t deliver my promises, I have problem of sleeping. At the time when I made the promise of “reciprocation”, I never thought the consequences could be that serious.
That reminded me a TV commercial: A taxi driver found his passenger depressed, cheering him that he could win the lottery. The passenger responded hopelessly with a promise that if he won the Jackpot then he would take the driver for vacation to Caribbean. Then he won. And he did take the driver to a beautiful island for vacation. And he was painfully reluctant. You know that when you make some big promises like this, you should make it to a beautiful lady, then you will never regret.
For me, McGill is that beautiful lady.
Why should we give? Because we have taken
My parents set an example by giving all they had to a university in China.
I will never forget that remote village in China, where an old peasant among many helped me during my most difficult years. He died before I had ability to help him, leaving regret that I can never recover. I rebuilt his tomb, which is never enough for me.
We have to give back to the society when we can and it is impossible for us to give more than we have taken. We are forever indebted, especially to the great minds.
We are given a free ride by these minds. What we have both in spirit and material today were created by great minds, through science, technology and arts. Without them we would still be in Neolithic Age.
What would be the world if Pythagoras did not connect music and mathematics? What if Aristarchus did not measure the relative distances between the Earth and the Sun and the Moon then found that the Sun was much bigger than Earth so as to propose that our Earth must be circling around the Sun rather than the other way around? What if Eratosthenes did not measure the Sun shadow differences to calculate the earth’s longitude? What if Democritus did not hypothesize that all the materials were made of some basic indivisible elements called atoms? What if Socrates did not fetch randomly the pedestrians on the streets of Athens to make them realize their common senses were actually illusions? What if Euclid did not bother summarizing the great “Elements” to give us the most powerful scientific method of thinking?
I did not even mention Archimedes, Aristotle, Plato or other great minds because the list would otherwise go endless.
We are indebted to these great minds, and the great minds after them. This is the reason that we should give back to our societies so that the generations to come will enjoy our contribution.
Descartes said “I give, therefore I am.” Oh, no, of course not accurate. Rather “I think, therefore I am.” But we have to realize that thinking is giving, and thinking is the greatest giving. Our human civilization is not built on labour, not on materials, but on mind.
In this way, we say “I give, therefore I am”.
This is our country
I have some words to my fellows in Chinese community. Canada is our country. We must be involved ourselves into the Canadian society. Canada is not a hotel. I heard someone complaining about discrimination in Canadian society. I have to say that I have never encountered any systematic discrimination in this country and have never felt that I was unfairly treated than my fellow European Canadians. We have to understand that there is a huge difference between a systematic problem and a random problem.
Canada is such a great country, so much so that we are allowed to criticize her imperfections and problems.
In this country, you shake hands with a politician, that is his honour;
In this country, you criticize her problem, it is counted as your deed of patriotism.
As new comers, and even not so new ones, from a different culture, we do have a lot to understand and adjust. Building a bridge of understanding is the best way to make the individuals in society successful, thus the whole society.
I know that between East where we are from and West where we live now, there are differences. We have to bridge them by understanding rather than isolating ourselves by assuming that the cultural difference cannot be bridged.
Three bridges and why?
Yes, I am talking about a bridge. I actually will talk about three bridges, which are the purposes for me to support the research center.
1)Between West and East;
2)Between the past and present;
3)Between science and humanity.
It is important for us to have these “bridges”. The studies of the past and present will make us understand the development of the world in terms of time; that of West and East will make us understand the difference in terms of space; eventually, humanity and science should be inseparable twins in academy, for humanity is the purpose of science and science is the best way to enhance humanity.
Here are some examples to explain why it is so.
A) The West and The East
1) The theaters in Greece and East
To understand the differences between West and East, the best way is to compare them. There is an astonishing difference in theaters of the East and West. The Greek theater, which is the ancestor of the Western theater, has its stage at the center but the lowest position. The audience seats are circularly arranged with higher position as the increase of the radius. The theater in the East was completely the opposite, with its stage at the highest position and the audience is at the lower ground.
This arrangement of the stage and audience seats reflects the political and social reality. When a politician in ancient Greece talked to his fellow citizens, he was on the lowest position, facing the citizens sitting higher than him. This would never happen in the East, because it was impossible to ask an emperor to stand lower position to face his subjects sitting higher than him.
2) Migration from East to West:
It has been a disaster as the Syrian refugee floods into Europe. It is impossible to stop such human migration by any conventional measurements.
A bridge must be built, which is the bridge of culture and trust. The countries that produce refugees should give up their lands proportionally to the countries that accept them. This principle is very difficult to be applied, because the people escape a country and those who rule it belong to totally different interest groups. However, there is something that can be achieved as long as we have the political will. The countries of the migration source should be forced to lend their lands to the countries of immigration destination. For instance, if you like to move to Germany, we build a Germany for you in your land. If you like Canada, we build a Canada in your country. It is a development exemplary for the problematic countries. The land will not be taken by any foreign countries. It is like that you let other people to enter your backyard to renovate it for free.
Are there common values for both the West and the East? If we have not had it yet, we must find it or create it. These common values are the base for the bridge.
B) The Past and The Present
That we look into history is like looking into a mirror. We look hard into a mirror, not because we want to only see the mirror itself, rather we want to see ourselves inside the mirror. It is ourselves in the mirror that is our ultimate purpose of looking into it.
Without the understanding of history, we would lose the understanding about ourselves in the present. How much we understand the history decides how we can avoid repeating the same historical mistakes.
To see ourselves inside the mirror as we really are without distortion, we need a perfect mirror. We must build the perfect mirror, which means we need to restore the history as it was. We need to make the mirror accurate so as to reflect our present time, but we cannot distort the mirror to beautify our time and our activities and the results from them. We cannot go back time to tell our ancestor what to do or not to do so as to achieve more and fail less. But we can search the answers that they did not have thus could not tell us because they did not understand then.
Since time does not flow back, the beneficiary can only be the ones on the side of later time. We also have the future in our mind, because we will be the past in future and we are building the mirror for the generations to come.
We have seen time to time the histories were revised for the sole purpose to benefit some interest group’s purposes. We can well understand that when someone wants to distort the history, his purpose is to sabotage the present. When someone wants to hijack the present, he has to distort the history.
We know how history was edited to fit someone’s interest today. It is our duty to correct the distortion. It is our duty to leave an accurate, refined and perfect mirror to the future.
This is the meaning of the bridge between the past and the present. Certainly, it is also meant for the future.
C) Science and Humanity
Science and philosophy were not separated over 2 thousand years ago in Greece. The ancient Greeks showed the way how science and philosophy were supposed to be together, not to be independent to each other, but combined as a unity. This tradition was still evident in Newton’s time. His “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” is as philosophical as scientific. However, today we have only the name of “PhD”, Doctor of Philosophy, to echo the beautiful tradition. In universities, philosophy belongs to faculty of humanity and science is not included. At the same time, engineering becomes something related to machine and mechanics without humanity interactions. Engineering and Arts become such an odd pair that they do not even sound right when together on our university camps.
However, we constantly face the challenges simultaneously from humanity and science, from arts and engineering. Here are some examples.
1)Automated car: Soon we will be able to get into our car and tell it where you want to go and the car will drive you there by itself. No driver, but only passengers. The car is your driver. However, making the driver software is not only a task of engineering but also humanity. In some sense it is more humanity than engineering. For example, when the car faces a critical situation that will have only two outcomes, the death of the passengers inside the car and that on road, how do we program the car to act? Before, we hide this dilemma and leave to the driver who unfortunately faces these choices. Now we all have to know what we as a society and collectively want to choose. We can no longer pretend that we do not know. Do we choose the lives of the passengers in the car over the lives of the people outside of the car? Or we choose to kill a few so as to save many? Or we choose to save certain people by sacrificing the others? No one has openly declared how the program will be written, but it is an inevitable challenge facing the engineers. It is more a moral issue than an engineering one. In this sense, we know that separating engineering from humanity is impossible.
2)Humanity is the purpose of engineering, thus engineering should always be associated with humanity. Look back the human civilizations eras, their names are evidences. Paleolithic Age, Neolithic Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Steel Age, etc. The materials and tools that we engineered are the titles of our civilizations.
In our academy, it is even more important to bridge science and humanity. Philosophy without scientific thinking tends to produce hotheaded fanatics, on the other hand, science without humanity leads to heartless society.
On our campus, in engineering, we don’t want to become job training workshop; in humanity, we don’t want our graduates to only have passion but without sufficient rationality.
What future do we want?
The future does not look very promising if we don’t work hard. I am more pessimistic than optimistic. The recent centuries of huge successes in terms of materials have generated growing gaps between West and East, between the past and the present, between science and humanity. We have seen the abandoning of classics on campus. We have seen the national fanatics all over the world. We have seen the recession of spirit versus material in our society… How much longer can our human civilization last if the trends of such continue?
The great material successes made us forget the great minds behind them. It is like that we saw the magnificent building, but we forgot the architect who designed it.
But we do have hope and we do want to work.
I don’t know how I come to the conclusion that Beethoven’s symphony No.9 is about human struggle (1st movement), confliction (2nd movement), reflection (3rd movement) and reconciliation (4th movement). For me reconciliation means a lot, between peoples, and between science and humanity. The bridges that I mentioned here mean only one thing, which is reconciliation.
I remember that it was the second year after I came to Montreal. Montreal Fine Arts Museum hosted the exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci in Engineering. It was my first time to be exposed to some real items beyond books and pictures. His design of airplane model was there. His many drawings of various engineering designs were there.
Leonardo Da Vinci perfectly combined Science and Humanity as well as Engineering and Arts.
His “Mona Lisa” has been smiling at the Louvre, which was one of the reasons for me to visit there so far over 30 times. This famous smile with great confidence has been lasting over 500 years. His engineering designs have been inspiring generation after generation and are still among us. In front of the painting everyday there are thousands people to pay their respect with wonder and curiosity.
We love these great minds, which show that we human beings have something in common - loving beauty, seeking justice and searching reasons.
After all, if we can still think and give, the world will not go dark.
Thank you!
Now let us welcome a thinker who traveled from Old world to New World to attend this ceremony. He is British Academy fellow, Emeritus Professor at Cambridge Univ. My friend Prof. John Dunn.