Roger Cohen on hope (for a Nobel Prize)

Roger Cohen writes in his column today in the NT Times of his hope for humanity, and for his column to win a Nobel Prize. :)

There are a few snippets I want to grab out of his Chex-party-mix-like posting today. (As if I'm in any position to complain about such writing! Or about anyone who can STAY INSIDE the 820 word limit!)

To wit:

NEW YORK — I want this column to be good. I want it to be so good, it wins a prize. One of those big prizes, like the ones they hand out every year in Stockholm and Oslo.

I want it to be subtle and full of goodness and infuse all humankind with hope. Let me be clear: I want it to be uplifting, conciliatory and bold. In fact I want it to carry some miraculous quality.

I’ve traveled the world, seen the forgotten silos on the plains, the rusting railroad cars, the forbidding watchtowers, the scavengers in the garbage, the fatigue-smudged faces, the refugees sprawled on the school room floor, the lonely lingerers, the freighters hardening the horizon, the beautiful and the damned.

Along the way I’ve learned this: We deny our connectedness at our peril. Let me be clear: ...As children of Abraham we are all responsible for one another. This is the age of responsibility.

... And I want there to be no doubt: The problems we face can only be solved together.

...May the spirit of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad — peace be upon them too — spread in the Holy Land.

Some will say I’m a dreamer. Some might find themselves unable to engage with these engaging aspirations even if this is the age of engagement. But there is no alternative to engagement except, perhaps, divorce, alienation, separation, enmity, competition, rivalry, envy, misunderstanding, threats, intimidation and rage — all of which I reject on principle.

...The hopeful will inherit the earth.


... But, well, I’ve lost my train of thought.

In conclusion, I know this column has fallen short. I am aware of its shortcomings, its banality and its immodesty. I am humbled by all the great practitioners of this 820-word craft — “art” would be going too far — in whose illustrious footsteps I tread. But I know this: If I’ve given momentum to some global fantasy, my time has not been wasted.

...Hope trumps experience every time.

Finally, let me be clear: All prize money is payable to me.

end wit.

To which I can only add, "AMEN!"
As well as a resonating quote from T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets	70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!	75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?	80
...
	85
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,	90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—	95
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

Still, the truth is that "hope" matters. "Faith" matters. They matter because reality has a wonderful capacity for helping us become prosperous and surrounded by beauty, regardless where we are now, but that endpoint requires that we climb a path that curves upwards, which our primitive intuition and primary sight cannot grasp as we extrapolate it out linearly, and say, "No, that won't work. That is not what I meant at all, at all. "

Nor is it what we the hopeful are pointing at. We are referring to the place we can end up if we get into mutually supportive feedback loop shape and let that lifting-body shape attract energy and lift us up in the resulting "thermal" updraft.

And, even that hope is a second-order bounce-shot in pool, because we cannot simply "get into a different shape" or "adopt a different culture" -- those actions, in turn, ALSO require us to reach them through a slow, patient, evolutionary feedback process that starts off ever so slowly on the spiral path upwards.

So slowly, that no politician, speaking to an untrained audience or set of voters, could say, "See, look what I did, I set us on this path forward!"

Here we need faith, hope, trust, belief. Somethings we need to believe in order to see, and this is one of them. ( Well, we can also SIMULATE the behavior in computer simulations and virtual reality, which is what I'm up to today, so that we can lay down a template, a signature in otherwise unprepared minds, of what a climbing, energy-attracting feedback loop lifting-body shape looks like, and behaves like. And then, I hope, we can say "Yes, I can see how that might work!" And then we can dare to look for ways to accomplish exactly that, and if we look, we will find them, because they are all around us and easily within reach.)

Incidentally, the most POWERFUL engines we use in the world of physical technology have the same property -- they compound their power in a feedback loop so that, the faster they go, the easier it is for them to go even faster. On the other hand, what this also means is at the very start of that journey, the first step on the "yellow brick road", they go agonizingly slowly. It is precisely here that our WISDOM (and experience with simulations and new insightful-eyes) has to assure us that we should continue this path, because it is succeeding.

Example -- jet airliners, and even jet fighters, require runways that are over two miles long. The first second when they hit the throttle, there is a lot of noise, but very little motion. If we looked at that and said "nope, this doesn't work!" and cut the throttle and budget, we'd be wrong.

At the start they are very very ponderous and slow. Don't be misled by that. Some kinds of "small progress" are huge. This is one of them.

I need to teach you how to RECOGNIZE and DISTINGUISH between small things that are actually small, and small things that are actually huge.

Then, we need to teach that to policy makers, and to the public, so they too can recognize the tiny steps, well within our budget, that we CAN do, that have more power than all the LARGE steps combined.

Meanwhile, remember jet fighters. They start very slowly. There's a physical reason for this, and in that reason, and that feedback loop process, is the hope for our future. The road curves upwards, so trying to "look down it" we miss the curve and say "That can't possibly work!" We are wrong. It can work. It does work. It will work.

But first, we need new glasses, so that we can see the sucker.



Wade