But the encounters that interest me most are not so simple. In the encounters of people and cultures, much depends on the path that each has taken to that point. These are not stochastic processes. The subjects have histories. The encounter has complexity and rich dimensionality.
Encounters therefore have aspects of both the general and the specific.
What makes our current time distinctive are the new combinations of people and cultures that are participating in these encounters. Two ongoing social and political changes illustrate the reasons for these new combinations. The first is the collapse of Communism in the USSR and eastern Europe. You graduates may feel that you have been at MIT forever, but it really is remarkable that the overturning of most of the Communist world has occurred since most of you started your studies here. You go out into a world where the rules are different from those that held when you entered.