A Song in the Night (35 page)

We have been resilient because of our inner strength and our dynamic institutions. American achievements are so large and so astonishing that we actually forget to speak about them and thus learn their lessons. Consider what we have already done. In a few decades at the beginning of the nation, we established bustling ports and built factories that competed with the greatest
empires of the day. We tied two oceans together through a web of railroad tracks and canals. We created thousands of extraordinary inventions, everything from the flat broom to the light bulb, from electric current to refrigeration, from the telephone to television. All came from a single country that did not have a population over 100 million until the 1920s. We invented the automobile and the airplane. Then came radar and radio, the transistor, the atomic bomb, the microchip, the computer, and the Internet. We walked on the moon. Earlier generations would have seen the abilities that we now take for granted as the powers of gods.

How can anyone, faced with the most radical transformation in technology in the history of human civilization, argue that the world is not primarily driven by ideas? Who can say that something to which we might aspire today is automatically impossible? They cannot. The question is not
can
we do something, but what do we
want
to do?

I often think about how much the nation we call “the United States” has evolved within a few generations of one family. My great-grandfather Robert Kinloch Massie was born in 1864 into a Virginia family of modest farmers and middle-level gentry whose livelihood depended on land they had already held for nearly two hundred years, most of which was worked by slaves. They were Christians and Americans, and they believed in the brotherhood of man and the ideals of the United States, yet their economic interest and cultural training blinded them from extending these principles to the women and the slaves in their midst. They were living a terrible contradiction,
though to them it was not obvious—and indeed, the thought may never have occurred to them at all.

Their lives were thrown into moral, political, and economic chaos during the Civil War. They watched their sons and cousins die on the battlefields, they abandoned their belief in slavery, they sold or lost their farms, and they moved into town to pursue various learned professions. My great-grandfather eventually became a minister and left the United States to become a missionary and schoolteacher in China. His son, my grandfather, was born far from the American South, in Shanghai, in 1891. The family eventually returned and settled in the United States again, first in Virginia and then permanently in Kentucky, which is where my father appeared, in 1929. During much of this same period the members of my mother’s family were going about their lives in the towns and mountain villages of Switzerland, with no thought that some of them would ever move to the new English-speaking empire rising thousands of miles away. Every person comes from such a succession of families filled with such twists and turns in their history.

Consider the political changes that we eventually achieved in our country through argument and agreement. We implemented the principle of free and compulsory education for all children. We set aside millions of acres and billions of dollars for public schools and universities. We fought an agonizing civil war, full of waste, denial, brutality, and suffering, but it achieved the goal of ending slavery. The nation delayed its political promise to women for an unacceptable amount of
time, but after a protracted struggle, America embraced women’s suffrage. We fought tyranny in two world wars. After long and shameful denial, we finally faced up to the obvious conclusions of our own principles and ended segregation. We installed a first line of defense against the poisoning of our water and air. And now, after asking Americans to look deeply into their hearts about the nature of love, we are moving toward the universal acceptance of gay marriage.

None of this was easy. It all required vision, courage, and leadership. And it all happened, in historical terms, in the twinkling of an eye. Who says the eye cannot twinkle again?

Together we now must create a new, more fair, more prosperous, and more just America. To do so, we must measure and manage the things that matter to us as a whole people. Economic growth is one piece of the puzzle. A new American economy would enable us to chart our course so that our communities are improving, our children are learning, our workers are finding meaningful work, our natural world is flourishing, our cities are becoming safer and more beautiful.

All of this comes back to the concept of sustainability, which governs discussion throughout the world but is still barely mentioned in the United States. Sustainability is a point of dynamic equilibrium where all the forces for good—our creative gifts, our economic genius, our skillful use of resources, our desire for freedom and happiness, our longing for comfort and convenience, our reverence for the dignity of every human life—come together. It recognizes the diversity of goals among the seven billion people who live on the planet
and balances them effectively with all the other biological forces at work in the world to create a system that not only works for us but will last for generations.

Sustainability is an improved and logical progression within capitalism. It expands the definition of capitalism to acknowledge what we already know: that there are different forms of capital, such as financial capital, natural capital, human capital, and intellectual capital. The goal of an economy should not be to deplete one form of capital in favor of another—for example, mowing down life-giving rain forests or stripping the vitality of workers in order to obtain short-term financial returns—but to create systems that allow every capital stock to increase.

The good news is that this is already happening. The conversations and actions are already taking place in hundreds of groups and communities around the United States. One can find new names for new ideas and thus bring them into sight. And powerful institutions are moving to put the pieces in place. To give one example, the largest accounting societies and firms in the world are now working with the Global Reporting Initiative, under the overall sponsorship of the Prince of Wales and the United Nations, to merge sustainability and financial accounting into a single tool for measuring corporate performance. If they succeed, the way corporations are financed, rewarded, managed, and structured will be transformed.

An effort to change the entire world economy might seem like folly, an enterprise too large to imagine, let alone to achieve. Yet if one can imagine a different world, that new
world already starts to shimmer into view. Most human practice is the result of social convention. We have learned from America’s struggles with race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation, that as ideas about social convention change, so do practices and laws.

Consider how far we could go if we regarded our current challenges through the very simple lenses of innovation and investment. Innovation and investment both focus on the future. They involve the creation or exchange of something today in order to generate a larger benefit tomorrow. They testify that everything is interrelated.

In the field of energy, we know that innovation means moving away from our excessive reliance on fossil fuel by expanding renewable energy, improving efficiency, and creating new energy sources. These are the right things to do economically and the right things to do morally and scientifically, given the large-scale climate crisis bearing down on the planet.

In education we also have tremendous opportunities. The nineteenth-century model of pouring children into a classroom for part of the day to listen to one adult is not a complete model. Through the Internet it will be possible within our lifetimes to provide education for everyone everywhere for free.

We can go through every major problem facing America and show how a commitment to innovation and investment would chart a course for progress. In foreign and military policy, we need to create new networks and relationships with other countries so that we strengthen the web of interconnections and the power of American ideals within the global
system. In medicine, we are constantly innovating, but we are not making the results—from which I have personally benefited—evenly available. And in dealing with our democracy, we must continue to create new ways to bring our citizens—particularly our young people—more into the political process. As we do so, we must put an end to the tsunami of secret money flooding into our elections to corrupt our elected officials.

The creation of a sustainable economy built on innovation and investment, leading to justice and prosperity, is a large goal, but no more challenging, and no less worthy than many that the United States has already achieved.

To make these changes, we are going to need to let go of some of the labels we employ to classify each other. They harm our judgment and taint our souls. And we are always bigger and deeper than the names others apply to us.

For my whole life I have been a Christian, because on balance I have believed that this term captures my belief in God and many other strong and worthy ideas about how people should be guided in their decisions and relations to each other. Yet I recognize that some people who call themselves Christians have done hateful things that I reject, and that I bear the risk of being tarnished by that name because of the poor judgment and bad behavior of others.

I have devoted thousands of hours to leadership as an environmentalist, yet I would dearly like to find another name for
that movement, since it seems to me that anything with the term
mentalist
in it automatically sounds somewhat loopy.

Though I have long been a Democrat, I understand the passion of the members of the Tea Party to discover and bring to the surface the original motivations of our revolutionary founders, though having made my own study of these leaders, I believe that many are drawing the wrong conclusions. The authors of the American Revolution never believed in moving backward in time, as the Tea Party seems to insist on doing—they believed in balancing political stability and invention, sometimes in enormously creative and risky ways. The true legacy of the American Revolution is that we must continue to refine and improve our democracy until a more perfect union, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, has been fully achieved.

Let us choose a new way of talking to each other that honors each other’s dignity even as we disagree, perhaps profoundly, with each other’s views. Even though I have fought passionately for the ideas that I believe are right for this country and this world, I want everyone to be reminded of the mysterious nobility of life itself. We need terms that offer dignity, honor, and respect to our souls.

We need a term for those who are profoundly in love with the privilege of being alive.

We need a term for those who stand in awe of the beauty of the whole world—from gardeners and hunters and astronauts to nurses, from mountain climbers and sunbathers and skiers to pilots, from explorers and fishermen to farmers, from scientists
and painters and poets to dancers, from old people breathing their last breath to children putting their first toe into the water.

We need a term for anyone who straightens up from a tractor, glances out the window of an office, strolls through a park, hikes through a forest, or turns a face upward to meet a summer rain and feel a moment of release.

We need a term for those who desire to work without causing harm, and to eat and to drink with gratitude, for those who long to sing and to laugh and to see the sun rise again to signal the dawn of a new day.

We need a term for the huge majority of us who want to use our time and talents to create new chances for beauty, who want to dwell in peace and reverence for the gifts that have been given to us for millions of years for free.

And, truthfully, we already know what that term is.

It is
human being
.

What does one do with a second chance in life? That is a question not only for me but for every person, and for our world as a whole.

Personally, I am going to take on the struggle, with all my passion and with all my flaws, and with as many allies as I can assemble, to find the path to prosperity and sustainability, from whatever side, and in whatever place, so that humans may be seen for what they often are and what they always can become: honorable, strong, responsible, and beautiful. Others have given to me, and within whatever time is still mine I want to give back.

I want to share the secret that was lying in plain sight for my whole life but that only became clear to me when I awoke from my brush with eternity. And that truth is that every person and every community, as a function of our free will, can always find a second chance. Every instant offers the gift of renewal. The choice for each of us and all of us is whether we choose to see and embrace that moment.

The world may have its structures and consequences, but it is also full of grace that confers healing and freedom. That is the blessing of our residence on this lovely planet, which, no matter what we dream or do, will continue to spin gently into the future across an infinite ocean of stars.