Dr. Randy Pausch passed away yesterday. His famous “Last Lecture,” an intellectual exercise that turned literal in his case, turned him into a living Mitch Albom tale for many Americans. Between the youtube links and the best-selling book, his impending death became a phenomenon for the American public. I do not mean any disrespect in saying this, in fact, I mean quite the opposite. The Christian ethic in general tends to be one in which people suffer privately and also give anonymously. I remember that one of my earliest graduate course conversations was defending the view of Aristotle that it is important to do such things in plain sight. Anonymous virtue and anonymous suffering have the disadvantage of hiding them from view, and sometimes it is helpful for us to look to others to see a real person carry these things. In showing us his thoughts on his own life, I’d like to think that Dr. Pausch both gave publicly and suffered publicly in a way that clearly, a lot of people were thankful to catch a glimpse of.
Yes, he got money in return for the book, and he recieved fame as a result of his lecture, but I think one must have a rather ludicrous view of money being corrosive to turn such facts into something negative. The lecture itself is characterized by childhood dreams that were ambitious in their reach, and yet innocent in that they were dreams born of aspiration rather than driven by psychological injury. Perhaps more than anything, in such a competitive, cynical world where faith in even values like liberalism and truth are on shaky grounds, people were inspired and excited by a person who just wanted to be the person he thought would be a good person and made it happen. Rather than the American dream of, “you can be whoever you want to be,” I think that Pausch more represents the Aristotelian dream: “you can live a life happy, as if accompanied by a good spirit.” It is a very good dream.
Posted by stevenmaloney 
