The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [112]
Whatever the deeper neurochemistry, humans have a profound ability both to cooperate and nurture and to shun others and fight.8 In our advanced technological age, with the capacity of our weapons to end human life, our ability to master our baser emotions and channel them toward constructive and cooperative outcomes will provide the basis for our survival. Like all of the challenges described in this book, this, too, will require unerring mindfulness. The Buddhist teaching of compassion—the training to treat all other sentient beings as objects of our care—is smart not only for our long-term mental well-being, but also for our ability to avoid self-destruction.
The challenge of diversity will be front and center of every policy and crisis, domestic and international, in the decades ahead. We have arrived at a global society, but with the clannish instincts inherited from the tropical savanna. Or, as E. O. Wilson put it inimitably in his foreword to my book Common Wealth, “We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology. That, in a nutshell, is how we have lurched into the early twenty-first century.”9
John F. Kennedy and his counselor and speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, were America’s greatest exemplars of an exacting mental discipline and empathy in the quest for global survival in the midst of diversity and conflict. Kennedy was president at the height of the Cold War, when tensions and tactics nearly led the world to mutual annihilation in the Cuban missile crisis. In his reasoning and his coaxing of his fellow Americans, Kennedy invariably bade us to respect our competitors, in his time the Soviet people, and to consider carefully how they might perceive, and dangerously misunderstand, any provocative actions on our part.
The core of the Kennedy-Sorensen message was consistent: that our common humanity made it possible to find common cause in the midst of competition and that peace depended on our own virtue and ethical behavior. As Kennedy put it in his famous “Peace Speech” at American University in June 1963:
“When a man’s ways please the Lord,” the Scriptures tell us, “he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.” And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence?10
Kennedy’s virtue in pursuing peace was evident to his Soviet counterparts, led by Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev. Upon hearing Kennedy’s words, Khrushchev quickly responded with his desire to pursue peace as well. A few weeks later, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed, setting the world on a far safer course. It is a great lesson in mindfulness that will inspire us for generations to come.
The Next Steps
The great role must now be played by each of us, as citizens, family members, and members of our society. For several decades now, money has trumped votes; expediency has clouded the future; and we Americans have been too distracted to defend our rights. We must now redress a society dangerously out of balance. Yet as large as these problems are, they can be overcome if we face them as a unified society, acting on shared values of freedom, justice, and regard for the future. In the Peace Speech a half century ago, Kennedy told his fellow Americans, “No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.”11
Let us move forward, then, with our reason and spirit. Let each of us commit first to be good to ourselves and our long-term happiness by disconnecting from TV and the media long enough each day to regain our bearings,