William F. Buckley asserts faith in 'central planning' in Baccalaureate address

By Susan Lang

Although religion "rides in the back of the bus" in the academic world today, asserted William F. Buckley Jr., the renowned American editor, writer and founding father of modern conservative thought, professed his faith in "central planning" during his Cornell Baccalaureate address May 28.

From left, Isaac Kramnick, the R.J. Schwartz Professor of American Studies; President Hunter Rawlings; John Ford, the R.W. and E.C. Staley Dean of Students; and John Hopcroft, the J. Silbert Dean of Engineering, listen to William F. Buckley deliver the Baccalaureate address May 28 in Bailey Hall. Robert Barker/University Photography

Buckley referred to "central planning" as "a superintending intelligence" that created "a world exciting enough to nurture people who doubt its creator." His Commencement morning address was delivered in Bailey Hall, which was filled to near capacity with graduating students and their families.

A Yale University graduate, Buckley is a syndicated columnist and was host of PBS's Firing Line for 33 years, with guests ranging from presidents and prime ministers to personalities such as Groucho Marx and James Michener. Buckley also is the founder of the magazine National Review.

President Hunter Rawlings introduced Buckley, crediting him with bringing conservatism "from the periphery into the mainstream." He praised Buckley as a skilled debater and noted Buckley's Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan, 35 honorary degrees and his prolific writing career, which includes the seminal God and Man at Yale and Buckley's new book, Let Us Talk of Many Things, a collection of his speeches.

In keeping with the baccalaureate tradition, Buckley's address took the form of a sermon addressed to graduating students. Each year a different faith is represented. Buckley, representing American Catholicism, quoted widely from other thinkers, such as George Marsden, who noted how the soul of the American University has shifted to "established nonbelief" and that religion has been "anachronized by our culture of science." He also quoted from David Hollinger, Thomas Kuhn, Benjamin Disraeli, Paul Elmer More and Malcolm Muggeridge, who noted the irony that, during the Vietnam crisis, "the Christian message should be withdrawn for consideration just when it is most desperately needed to save men's reason, if not their souls."

"The enduring question, of course, is which of two alternative explanations for human life is more plausible, that put forward by evolutionary materialism or that which argues a superintending intelligence," Buckley said.

Although, he said, "raw epistemological confirmation" is not readily available to contemporary thinkers to validate the identity of Christ, he asserted that we come upon "little substitutes, every now and then, intimations of empirical validation far, far removed from scientific exactitude, but somehow enlivening of the faith."

Buckley shared some of those intimations that had caught his eye or given him "huge fugitive glee," he said, including the day 25 years ago he used an early computer program from Hewlett Packard to calculate his sail from Miami to Gibraltar. Amazed at the banks of digital numbers flying by in "chaotic frenzy," he had thought: "All of that from the mind of man."

Nevertheless, Buckley said, his "belief is in the order of the universe, the arching of the human spirit to otherworldly challenges, in the enduring mysteries of love and the bottomless depths of the Christian faith, a faith that these are the result of 'central planning.'"

"I am programmed to love God and to seek, however vainly, to obey him, and to trust that the course he laid out for me in this grand voyage through time and space and uncertainty, to infinity and transfiguration and final resolution, is as certainly charted as the toyland course that led me from Miami to the Rock of Gibraltor. I'll pursue the star of Bethlehem, however waywardly; and if I fail to reach it, I shall be guilty of every delinquency save that I ever doubted that it was there."