Fifty freekin' years.

That's a big number.  In today's age where half of all marriages end in divorce and most don't make it past a decade, these two are rare ducks indeed.  And I'm grateful for that- they raised the girl who I would one day marry.   Together their children have 7 children of their own (one of which is my son, Liam).  Together they've caused a whole lot of lovin' to go down.

 

 

Today I'm on Maui, celebrating with my wife and her siblings (and their spouses) the fiftieth wedding anniversary of her parents, Bob and Cynthia Clotworthy.  They are, to put it bluntly, bonkers.  Both of them.  And I love them to distraction.

 

Bob and Cynthia met while both were members of the US team for the Pan American games in Mexico City, circa 1955.  Bob won olympic bronze in Helsinki (1952), and would go on to win olympic gold in Melbourne the following olympiad.  Since then, he's coached swimming and diving for a living, and has recently retired.  Along the way they raised some sweet kids- not all of them necessarily related to them.  When you coach, you leave your mark on people.

It turns out that our host in Maui was one of them- he captained a university swim team Bob coached, and happened to have a guest house available (and an insatiable appetite for longboarding, an appetite I was all too grateful to accompany him with).  Our visit turned into an opportunity to meet cousins on the island I'd never met, and the occasion of our visit turned up connections nobody knew about- Bob has coached a lot of people over the years.

 

As part of the festivities, we went on a whale-watching cruise, went snorkeling at Molokini, ate fantastic food, slept in a friend-of-a-friend's guest house, surfed, swam, and basically did homage to the culprits responsible for it all.

 

        

If you haven't yet read Robert Wright's book NonZero: The logic of human destiny, drop everything and go get a copy.  In it, he provides a compelling analysis of history through the lens of game theory, and he derives from it a number of trends, the most compelling of which is that the arc of history is driven by the evolutionary process of ideas and culture, and that this evolution is not merely one of greater technological complexity, but also of increasing moral capacity as well.

He arrives at this broad conclusion by turning the rightly-reviled idea of social darwinism on its head- instead of arguing that we as individuals are more advanced than our forebears (a notion used by social darwinists to justify horrifying inhumanity), he notes that the cultures in which we live are significantly evolved- more interrelated, predicated more and more upon mutually beneficial arrangements and rule of law than ever before.  By any measure, the cultures in which we operate evolve over the broad arc of history, and are moving inexorably in the direction of greater capacity for moral behavior.

 

This is seemingly at odds with the 'common sense' view, in which each atrocity in the news provides fresh evidence of how brutal and amoral humanity can be- how, precisely, does one argue that morality is advancing, when the news still reports genocide in our time?

 

The answer is ironically rooted in cynicism: out of necessity.  It's in our interest to not just get along, but also to create mutually beneficial relationships with everyone we can.  In this age where weapons are getting cheaper and longer-range, where communication is instant, world-wide, and available to anyone, the correlation of everybody's fortunes is closer and more meaningful than it has ever been.  It is in our self-interest to not only understand the impact we have on others, but also to be responsible for the impact we have, and to work to right wrongs on the other side of the world.  And although it's easy to become frustrated at others' unwillingness to figure it out, it is happening- at the speed of consensus, which is (of course) appallingly slow, but inevitable.

 

To be clear, we haven't always cared about that stuff- the welfare of people on the other side of the planet hasn't been remotely interesting to us until very recently, and as Adam Smith observed, we cannot understand those we have no interest in understanding- our moral capacity therefore extends no further than our sphere of self-interest.  Arguably, if you look at our foreign policy for the last 60 years, we still don't care enough to change the way we do business.  Our policy has been to support stable governments friendly to our interests, even when those governments haven't necessarily represented their people very well.  A good part of the chaos in the world today is due to the self-interested, moral rejection of this sort of hegemony- and it serves to remind us that our own interest really is in making the world a better place for everyone- our fortunes really are intertwined.  That doesn't mean submit to the domination they offer, or for us to dominate them- it means find common ground.

 

In sum: we have a clear choice: we can react negatively to the news, or we can learn the lesson it's teaching us: until we can make the world work for everyone, it won't work for anyone.  This is a hard thing to propose: after all, it's not like a suicide bomber presents a compelling case for evolving your capacity to see things his way.  It's much easier to demonize him(her?) and send in the troops to stamp out that sort of bad behavior.  The only problem is that our troops are no more appealing to their better angels than their suicide bombers are to ours.

Einstein once famously said, "the problems of today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them”, and he was right: this calls for an evolution in our capacity to put ourselves in someone else's shoes, see things from their perspective, and take responsibility for the impact we really have on them, instead of demonizing and suppressing them.

 

Yeah, it's cynical- we have two options, neither of which we'd rather take.  We don't want to change our ways any more than anybody else does, but the alternative is worse: if we fail to evolve and thrive in the face of a changing world, we become dinosaurs ourselves, watching resentfully as history marches onward, over our resistant, increasingly irrelevant corpses.

 

So why be upbeat?  Deep down, we already want to do the right thing.  Scratch the cynical surface of even the most resigned of us and you'll find someone burning to make the world a better place.  And the truth is that although we all say we want peace, our cultural conversation has not yet evolved in sufficient numbers to the point that we want to be peaceful.  We want respect, but haven't internalized the fact that this means respecting others.  We want the benefts of global commerce and evolving technology, but we haven't been interested in making it beneficial to others. We want the results, but if we're really honest with ourselves, the real reasons we don't have those results is not that they're impossible, it's that we haven't really been at all interested in doing what it takes to produce them.  This might sound like bad news, but it's empowering news: the reasons for all the trouble in the world are within our grasp, within our power to change.  Now all there is to do is whatever it takes to be the change we all want to see in the world.

 

The way we create the best possible world for ourselves is by creating the best world we can for everyone.  ...and take heart from the fact that it's going to happen, even if we're not the ones that deliver.