MCC 2023/24 opening ceremony speech
Greetings, professor! Greetings to the board members, the teaching staff, and the students of MCC!
In preparing for this occasion, my aim at first was to encourage everyone with some inspiring, striking thought, preferably about the academic year ahead of us, full of challenges and achievements. About how good it is to use our talents, so that we can become our best selves, and other such things that one says at events like this.
Then I came across a quote from the great musician Zoltán Kodály about talent, which reads as follows:
“Everyone under the age of fifteen is always more talented than their elders: only the most exceptional geniuses keep continually developing”!
Thud! Not exactly inspiring—in fact it is downright depressing. Especially considering that exceptional talents are only born once a century or so. By this logic, everyone in the room is likely already past their peak. No matter whether you are an undergraduate or a graduate student, a lecturer, a member of the Board of Trustees or, ad absurdum, the President of the Board of Trustees. And since life expectancy at birth in Hungary is approximately 78 years, we are doomed to live four-fifths of our lives as mere shadows of our former selves.
So the situation is tragic. Tragic, but not hopeless. Because the fact remains that we humans are able to confound trends, just as we are able even to alter our inevitable destinies. Moreover, it can have a downright inspiring effect on us when we see an obstacle in front of us that cannot be comprehended by human reason.
If there is a high mountain, we want to climb it; if there is an unforeseeable problem, we want to understand it; if some mighty power seeks to overwhelm us, we move to confront it. We are not satisfied with who we are, and want to become someone. We want to become the one who climbed the mountain, the one who grasped the unfathomable, the one who challenged the whole world and bested it.
This is what talent management is all about: not merely accepting who we are, but becoming someone. It is about the fact that even though we understand Kodály’s truth, because it is true that at the age of fifteen we feel that the world is ours, but we still want to prove that the laws of the world are not valid in our case; we are the exception, the one who keeps developing.
I think one of the key aspects of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium lies in this recognition. In this general human desire to make the most of ourselves, to become who God created us to be. So that at a later stage of our lives we do not have to brood—as Goethe has his protagonist do at the beginning of Faust—over the shades of our youth, and what we could have been. It is a goal and basic attitude that characterizes all people, and without which a meaningful human life cannot be imagined. This is one of the main drivers of MCC’s work.
But MCC also has a special meaning beyond this general truth. That is because the MCC is meant to take care of Hungarian talent. MCC helps young Hungarians, not only to become better people, but also to become young people who love their country, understand the Hungarian world, and act accordingly, yet also have experience of the wider world and are able to get the most out of themselves.
The question arises as to where this special Hungarian perspective comes from. After all, if knowledge is equally valid all over the world, if two plus two is four even in outer space, then what need is there for a special Hungarian perspective? What does talent management have to do with our national existence or non-existence?
The fact is, I think it makes a world of different, and apart from us Hungarians, I am not sure many people truly grasp it. Because while knowledge is universal, the action towards which our knowledge is directed arises in a specifically Hungarian context.
This specifically Hungarian context is what the poet Vörösmarty was referring to when he asked: “What are we doing in the world?”
This is the question that we Hungarians, together, must answer every day. There are large and strong nations, cultures with many kindred peoples, who do not have to face this question, because simply by their economic power or their numbers, it is quite clear that they exist, that the world takes account of them, and a world without them could scarcely be imagined.
We Hungarians, on the other hand, are few in number, live in the middle of Europe without any near cultural relatives, with an economic strength that cannot be compared to the great production centres of the world, and few would even notice if we disappeared. That is why every day we must continually search for that little something extra we can give to the world, so that everyone will recognize that the world is a better place for having Hungarians in it.
Vörösmarty’s question also applies here, and different answers can be given depending on the vehemence with which it is asked. There are at least two possible strategic answers.
One is to withdraw, and keep the world away from us. Not to expose ourselves to any foreign influence. Thus, in ‘purity’, so to speak, free from foreign fripperies, we could figure out what the true Hungarian is, and why the world is a better place if we live here, in the middle of Europe, in the Carpathian basin.
But I believe this is a bad strategy. Like trying to pull ourselves out of the pit by our own hair, as Baron Münchausen does. But we cannot become our best selves by sitting with a jug of wine, brooding over Hungary’s fate.
Instead, what is needed is stimulation, challenge, and experience. And most of all, we need to constantly confront, measure and test our specifically Hungarian way of thinking against the worldviews of peoples living in other parts of the world. We can only achieve our best performance by competing against the best in the world.
In this lies another strategy for confronting our specifically Hungarian challenge.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writes that trees grow truly large only in stormy winds. What makes Nietzsche’s idea special is that although he originally intended it only as an aphorism, it has since been confirmed by science. Trees that live in artificially sealed, perfectly undisturbed environments grow smaller than their wild counterparts.
You need the wind, you need the storm to make the trunk stronger, so that it can support its sprawling foliage. Just as Don Quixote needed his Sancho Panza to help root his airy fantasies in the real world.
Needless to say, here at MCC follow this strategy, based on performance under pressure and a stimulus-rich environment.
We cannot make a reservation of our home here in the Carpathian Basin, and shut ourselves off from the world. Any country that shuts itself off will simply be ignored by the world, until one day its inhabitants will wake up to find that foreign peoples from distant lands have come to take their place, and the natives will have to defend their land with sticks and stones against newcomers with rifles and cannons. We have to keep up. MCC’s job is to help us keep up with the world.
That is why we are doing everything we can to bring as many inspiring speakers as possible to conduct research, lecture, and involve our students in their work, and why we are especially grateful to Professor Romer for visiting us. That is also why we also do everything we can to ensure that as many of our students as possible can take advantage of scholarships abroad, enabling them to research, give presentations, and collaborate with others in a new setting.
We are following this course because we believe in it, and because we have learned from experience that it is not enough to think beautiful thoughts, we must also be able to express the beautiful things we think. And for that, one has to understand the debates, see the problems, and master the forms of speech that are used in other parts of the world.
As such, we can only add something to the world if we raise our own national characteristics to the global level. The Hungarian language and way of thinking are of great value: a unique way of seeing, and an ability to formulate different answers. That is why, of course, we are sometimes celebrated, sometimes castigated or even crucified, but never ignored. However, unless we have Hungarians who understand the world and can express their ideas in a language the world understands, no one will pay us any heed. The job of Hungarians is to be interesting, original, and talented. I think this is the answer to Vörösmarty’s question.
So, this is the task. I wish you the best of luck in it! I hereby solemnly open the 2023–24 academic year at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. Our watchword is: bonus intra, melixor exi!
Thank you for your attention!
