THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD
Chairman, EEI SCHOLAR™ International Examining Board
Your Excellency Mr President, Chancellor, Rector, Faculty
Staff, students, and fellow guests,
It is a very great privilege to be invited to address
you today and to be part of this
gathering involving, as it does,
people from countries across the globe. Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of your foundation is
a great occasion and I feel tremendously honoured to have been invited to
participate.
The opening of a new bridge between Singapore and the Republic of Northern Cyprus is
also an exciting occasion for us in EEI.
My
talk is called The Centre of
the World , an idea which I
hope to show may be worth a little attention and perhaps some re-thinking.
Many years ago, in a famous library in England, I saw a very
ancient map of the world on which
I could not, at first, even find England.
At the top, clearly of great importance, were Constantinople and
Jerusalem. In the middle of it all, looking even more important, was Rome and
at last I made out, tucked away in a bottom corner a strangely misshapen
Britain. This was a
land-traveller¡¯s map, perhaps based on the campaigns of the Roman legions but
somewhat later in history. The
known world was rather sketchy and around the borders were only desert and
ocean with mysterious beasts and serpents showing the perils of venturing beyond the boundaries of the map.
In
a remarkable book which I am reading at present is a 15th century
map of the world showing the voyages of the fleets commanded by the
astonishing Chinese Admiral Cheng
Ho. This map clearly shows that,
among many other important
outcomes, America had probably been ¡®discovered¡¯ by those Chinese, decades
before Columbus even set sail.
Naturally the map has the
Central Kingdom of ancient China at its heart with distant lands indicated by
just a coastal outline, leaving the lands themselves a continuing mystery. It
was, naturally, a seaman¡¯s map.
Such encounters reminded me of an occasion when I was a schoolboy, deeply interested
in maps, and came across a very impressive example, of the western
hemisphere, produced by The
National Geographic Society in The United States. Again finding my homeland was
tricky. It was not coloured pink, along
with many of the other countries of the world, as was ¡®normal¡¯ to me then, but eventually I found it, tucked up,
sideways on, almost touching the rest of Europe. Very strange!
When the first two maps were prepared most people believed
that the Earth was flat and it was natural to show the ¡®centre of the world¡¯ as
the focus of the map.
So the world known to Rome and the world known to the
Chinese had that in common if nothing else. Each was at the centre of the
world!
The map - makers still make their own country the centre of
the map because that is what is important to them. This treatment will
often completely mislead the rest
of us!
By
the time of my third map we knew that the world is a sphere, even though we
have since discovered that it is not perfect: that it has a bit of a bulge around the waistline - (but it is
pretty old).
We also now
know that geologists can tell us where the centre of the earth is. But absolutely no-one can say where the
centre of the world is since the surface of a sphere has no centre.
In
the 21st century not only
do we know that the world is a sphere but also that it is surrounded by several
other significant spheres, one about 10 km above us, the other at about 40,000 km out in space. The first the
network of flight paths and the other the network of satellites.
These two
networks have created a world
which neither Rome nor Cheng Ho
would have recognised and they would surely have had great difficulty in
adapting to it. Cheng Ho, by all accounts, might have worked at it the more
successfully because the China of that time far exceeded Europe in its
technological mastery and greatly valued imaginativeness and creativity.
It
is by no means certain, however, that even we 21st century people
have yet fully adapted to this paradigm shift in the nature of our world. Many
of us still cling to the notion that the geographical entity in which
¡®I¡¯ live is the centre of that world.
On this day, celebrating twenty years of the life of this
university, at the start of a new academic year full of hope, of expectation and
of promise, I would like to propose the hypothesis that the centre of the world
is here. Not literally as the old
map-makers would have had it but in each of us, as a thinking, learning,
imaginative person It may be that this is the only true centre of the world and
that each of us is throughout his or her life, creating a fresh map of the known world. When we act responsibly and at times
concertedly in this world of networks we can even create new ways of looking at
the world, or new organisations of importance in that world.
By my suggestion I do not intend to say that we should each
be self-centred. That would be to deny that the rest of the world exists when
everything depends upon knowledgeable interaction with that world. My meaning
is rather that we need to look, not
to some outward sources of richness as were the explorers of old , but
into ourselves to evaluate our individual potential for growth and development
so that we enrich ourselves but also contribute to the knowledge and
capabilities of our countries in their interactions with the rest of the world.
I have long admired the state of Singapore and am proud to
have been associated with it for many years. Here is a small country, a
multi-racial society, which has harnessed its only form of wealth, the brains
and skills of its peoples to become a significant world player whilst greatly
enriching the daily lives of its individual citizens.
In a word I am talking more of responsibility than of
selfish interest and of using and developing our autonomy to the greater good.
Most immediately for the greater good of ourselves as the ultimate
beneficiaries of our intellectual and spiritual growth and the acquisition of
new skills. But also because the future good of our countries depends upon the
growing knowledge and skills of every one of us.
That autonomy needs, nevertheless, to be informed by what
other people are doing and thinking, and no matter how proudly nationalist our
feelings, by a knowledge and understanding of internationalism. With this we
can expand, not only our personal world, but help our country to achieve great
things. We celebrate the two
decades of achievements of this university, not only because of its yearly pass
lists but because it is
international at its very roots, is a wonderful servant of that cause as
we at EEI also try to be.
A conviction which has grown upon me during my own travels
is that wherever I go and actually
meet people, rather than merely looking at the maps, there is far more in
common between the peoples of this
world than those things which divide them.
The
flight-level network has significantly diminished the importance of crawling
around on the earth¡¯s surface and many people can now travel, quickly and
easily, to experience the cultures and accomplishments of other nations at
first hand . It is a great joy to see so many young people, when they can
afford it, reaching out in this way. But it is the satellite network which is,
for many of us the ultimate map without boundaries where we can pursue
knowledge of all kinds with great freedom and relatively low cost. Each of us can have a
personally-centred world of limitless mapping.
On this network we can share easily in the learning
experience, with people from all over the globe, not only here in this
international University whose
foundation we are also celebrating today.
Today we can even see, without leaving our individual
¡®centre of the world¡¯ , that
¡®knowledge¡¯ is not some universal certainty but may be perceived
differently from different
perspectives in different cultures.
Without such vision our personal world will be small, cramped, limiting and, at its
boundaries the dragons of fear and the serpents of ignorance.
To you who are students I say in particular, we do, nevertheless,
need to learn in formal ways: and university offers us a potent learning
environment, as well as freedom and fun.
Whatever our chosen field we must learn how to use our
technology to find the information, to meet people, to broaden our intellectual
opportunities, to develop flexibility, imaginativeness and creativity. We also
need the discipline of intellectual rigour to understand how to filter
information, to classify and organise it, to understand its implications and to
apply it to good effect. It is, most of all, that intellectual rigour which we
celebrate when we mark the 20th anniversary of this proud university.
Simply
put, information and understanding are the keys, not only to progress in our
ultimate professions, but also to our individual development to the limit of
our ¡®I¡¯-centred world maps. I say ¡® the limit¡¯ of one¡¯s own world map. If it is
of any comfort to you, at my age I have still not discovered where that limit
lies. Is there, necessarily, any
limit?
Thank you.