Community & The Company of Friends

The following is a reflection by President Greg Weiner, read at “Community & The Company of Friends” on January 30, 2025.

Let me begin with the obvious. We are here in part because of one incident of which we’re all aware. But our purpose today is not to discuss any single event. That would be a cop-out, an exercise in moral self-indulgence whose effect would be to congratulate ourselves on not having erred in some particular way.

We are here instead to reflect on who we are and who we hope to be. By “who we are,” I mean members of the Assumption University community. I mean “we” in the fullest sense: each of us, no matter our role or authority, and all of us, as a community seeking a common good. Before we are members of this community, though, we are human persons. That means we are all made in the image of God. It also means every one of us is capable of both tremendous good and immense evil.

We are also a community in whose capacity for friendship and character my confidence is every bit as strong as it was last week, last month, or last year. I have never had a conversation with an employer or an alumnus or a candidate for a position in which I did not say what I wholly believe: The character of Assumption students is unique because of what you possess, which is grit, and because of what you lack, which is entitlement. That we are here as a community today affirms that confidence.

We also know that the most admirable traits of this character—a readiness to earn what we have—call us to know, and to tend to, our moral imperfection. It is easy enough to observe moral imperfection in others. It is even easier when that imperfection is captured on camera, or when we’ve sent a text message we regret, or when we’ve said something in public we ought not to have expressed.

What I want to suggest we reflect on today, starting with me and extending to us all, is the fact that whatever dispositions or temptations may lead to those more public moments start long before in quieter ones—and none of us who reflects honestly on those moments, again including me, is untainted by sin or regret. Our character is defined less by what happens in the public eye than in the quiet choices between cruelty and kindness that present themselves to us daily and repeatedly.

The dignity of every human person—one of the most fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church—is not something we required to respect merely when a camera is filming our choices. The reality is quite the opposite. It’s often said that character is what we do when no one is looking. It may be even truer to say that character is what we do when no one could possibly see.

We all know, or should, that nothing is ultimately anonymous, either online or off. But the fact that we can, to an unprecedented degree, ridicule, taunt, or harass others anonymously online imposes both unprecedented challenges to character and unprecedented opportunities to cultivate character. The mistakes we make on camera are not sudden eruptions of bad judgment. They begin with the coarsening of the simple interactions of daily life, when we violate human dignity—the dignity of others and, in doing so, our own—in what feels like a one-off moment. The journey from that moment to larger, more public ones, occurs step by step. And if we do not challenge ourselves on the first steps, we all march steadily to the larger ones.

Not everyone on this campus has behaved controversially on camera. But all of us have surely made choices in private moments that would have been destructive to ourselves and others had they been known. And it is those moments—not the extremes of outrage—that define our character.

It is often said that a given technology has upended everything humanity knows or has known or will ever know. That is rarely as true as we think. It is never the case that technology erases or alters the essence of the human person or our capacity for good or evil. Technology can, however, amplify both. The particular challenge of social media is the anonymity it enables. I do not mean simply anonymous posts.

I mean the temptation to see the online world as a realm of fiction—the seductive but false denial that there are always real people facing real consequences, whether tragic or kind, based on our own choices.

The moral risk of anonymity is not new, nor is it confined to social media. In a text I often teach, Federalist 55, James Madison remarks that if every Athenian had been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

When I teach that passage, I’ve always asked students how many have ever yelled at an athletic official. Invariably, most people have. Then I ask how many would use the same abusive language if the official was sitting across the dinner table. I knew I had arrived in New England when the universal response to that question was that it depends on the call.

That’s a warm-up. It’s funny because it’s absurd. I know of no Assumption student who would actually behave that way. St. Augustine, who lived in a distant and prehistorical time, by which I mean a time when social media did not exist, knew that human beings behave differently when they are cloaked in anonymity—whether of crowds or of online avatars. The importance of the story we heard Sofia read is not that stealing is evil. It is. It is that Augustine says he stole for no reason except the love of evil and that being among a band of friends made him likelier to do so.

But, as Augustine also teaches us, that is not true friendship. The true friend is neither a killjoy nor a moral scold. The true friend does have the courage to stand up in a crowd and challenge it. In doing so, that friend stands for the crowd, not against it. And when we say Assumption is a community, the kind of place where we open the door for and smile at one another, we also mean that we share responsibility for the common good—that the common good is truly common, not the simple aggregation of our individual choices.

Daily, Jews recite the central prayer of our liturgy, which confirms the oneness of God. It includes a paragraph from Deuteronomy in which God promises that, if His commandments are obeyed, our crops will be blessed with rain. If God’s laws are violated, there will be no rain and therefore no crops. The Talmudic rabbis notice something unusual.

These rewards and punishments apply to the community regardless of any one individual’s innocence or guilt. God is not going to make it rain on my field but not yours next door. The lesson rabbis then draw is that we are all responsible for our community. The character of Assumption is the character of all of Assumption. We cannot say that my choices are my choices and your choices are your choices. We cultivate character in community. The Gospel of John begins by equating God with “the Word.” In the original, “the Word” is logos—the fusion of speech and reason. The purpose of speech is intrinsically interpersonal.

I am quite certain that, in meetings or in classes or in articles, I have said things or heard things said that imposed moral responsibilities I have failed. But these dramatic moments create a fiction of their own: They tempt us to believe the real issue is the dramatic moment. But the character we display in the moments everyone sees is cultivated in the moments no one does.

That requires discernment. In the passage we have just heard from First Kings, that is what Solomon asks for and receives. But the language is striking. God gives him “a listening heart.” How can a heart listen? We listen and—as the word is sometimes translated, understand—with our minds. But the phrase is a striking reminder that the fullness of our humanity invokes our hearts and our minds in conversation with one another.

To listen, we must pause. And the briefest of pauses—the pause in which we ask whether we would say to someone face-to-face what we are about to post online, or when what we are about to do means for the humanity of someone else—can make all the difference. For we cannot discern if we do not stop to do so. And the pausing is often sufficient to break the spell.

When I ask members of our community to challenge me, I am not bestowing a privilege. I am seeking a gift. For constructive engagement with one another is an act of friendship and love. That gift takes the form of helping one another cultivate our character. Our character is what makes us Greyhounds. And the most essential part of that character is the knowledge that we all can do good, and we all can do evil. We all have done good and have done evil. We are all more than the worst we have done, and none of us can afford the arrogance of resting on the best we have done. Today, we recommit ourselves to who we are—to who we aspire to be—and to the ethic of community that is essential to both. Thank you for who you are, and for who we can be together.