The Age of the Unthinkable (32 page)

The Red Guards who found his books knew Li wasn’t alone. They wanted the names of his friend and the booksellers and anyone
else.
Did his parents know?
they asked. Li had a choice: slip into the general mindless madness of the moment or stand by himself, take a beating, and
perhaps worse.
Give us the names,
they demanded. Li took the beating.

What should I do?
This is the question Li faced in that moment. It was the question his friend, a few years afterward, faced and answered: he
jumped off a building. Later, after Li became very successful in China, people who had been Red Guards decades earlier, often
under assumed names, would invite him to dinners and holiday parties. They had risen to important positions. They could help
him advance even further. Li remembered every single one of them. He recalled what they had done in great detail. He remembered
their assumed names and their faces.
What should I do?
he wondered. He never attended the dinners.

What does this revolutionary age demand of each of us? In trying to answer that, what matters most is to keep in mind that
crucial distinction between us and the grains of sand on Per Bak’s slippery piles: we
can
act. We’re not just passive. We can choose what to do and what not to do. We don’t have to take what we’re being told unquestioningly.
We don’t, and can’t, let the same people who got us into this disastrous misalignment with our world pull us further into
danger. But making a difference demands that we do, in fact, act. We can no longer outsource our security or our foreign policy
the way we might once have. The line between our lives and the world is ever more permeable. In our comfortable cars and houses,
in our wealthy-looking nations and our secure-feeling businesses, we can’t delude ourselves about the facts: we’re
in
history now.

One could in fact fill an entire book with interesting experiments to be tried in coming years as we wrestle with this new
order: fresh ways to boost national savings rates; international efforts to reduce sugar consumption; plans to use the Web
to make a catalogue of every person in the world dying of AIDS. These and ten thousand other ideas need to be offered and
tried — tried free of the cynicism of “we’ve done that” or “it won’t matter.” The fact is, we can’t know if what didn’t work
yesterday will work today; we can’t predict the impact of our attempts to make change, and that is why we have to keep trying.
It’s tempting to feel that the forces at work now are so big that there is no point in action at all. But in fact the opposite
is true. Even small changes can have an impact on our future — and this is why we all must get involved. We are at the start
of a profound crisis that is going to demand radical changes. It is a struggle that, as Immanuel Wallerstein has written from
his perspective as a historian, may “continue for twenty, thirty, fifty years and the outcome is intrinsically uncertain.
History is on no one’s side. It depends on what we do.”

Change in our world isn’t going to feel like something far away from us. As I said at the opening of this book, it is a contagious
force that is going to infect every part of our lives. It presents, in the same instant, cause for great hope and great fear.
We are living in one of those moments when history is going to reach into each of our lives. Yet — and this
is
truly unthinkable using any of the old ways of dreaming about our lives — is that now we can touch history too.

For all the bad that a dozen hedge-fund traders or a few terrorists can do, it is also possible that each of us,
any of us,
can unleash powerful and permanent change. Some of this change will be simple. We can each start to live more resiliently:
saving more, eating better, driving smart, educating our children to be global and competitive, volunteering, reaching out
to neighbors and new friends. Such things are essential elements of deep security. But far more of the change will be difficult.
It will involve tremendous sacrifice. At times it will involve profound discomfort, when we won’t know if our sacrifices will
succeed or be worth the effort. It requires a psychological shift from being certain about our future to being uncertain,
a transformation that is as stressful as it is productive. It will mean learning to react differently to threats we face,
the difference between responding to an attack like 9/11 with a war or spending at least as much money at the same time on
schools or hospitals. At the times we’re most scared we’ll need to replace the habit of striking back with new efforts to
connect to the world instead of alienating it and isolating ourselves. This is as true for trade and economic policy as it
is for our work in defense and diplomacy. All this will require a new sort of patience, something hard to understand in a
culture that emphasizes instant gratification.

What matters is beginning to explore the idea that we can do unthinkably decent things with our lives, from starting schools
to leaping into that “caring economy” Unger described to investing years of our lives to understand cultures different from
our own. Ultimately no one can tell you exactly what to do, any more than anyone can say “go start an amazing Internet search
company” or “go bomb a building” — events that emerge naturally from a system of spontaneous creation, in which the good can
no more be predicted than the bad. Specific aims, like building moderate Muslim nations or providing global hospice care,
matter, but mostly we must just engage with a world that is now touching us in so many ways. Energy will emerge from the friction
of all of our good works, though we can’t predict precisely where real heat will appear or where the flames will illuminate
or what they will burn down. What this sort of progress surely demands is that we sharpen our instincts to rebel against what
is and against what we are told can never be. As Niels Bohr remarked in later life, “Every valuable human being must be a
radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.” Conformity to old ideas is lethal; it
is rebellion that is going to change the planet.

We stand now like viewers of that Kiefer painting, aware that something dramatic is happening to the world around us. The
people and institutions we might once have relied on to rescue us can’t. But what we decide to do now, the decisions we make
as history touches each of us, will mark the future for all of us. The power of individuals has never been greater. This is
the energy we’ve seen animating people as indecent as those Hizb’allah guerrillas and as virtuous as Tony Moll. It’s the spirit
that prompted me to write this book, to see what we could do once we understood the nature of the tsunami coming our way.
But answering this call requires, finally, a leap of faith. It means accepting — because this can never be proved in advance
— that change will always produce more good than bad. This is the hope without which the great acts of self-sacrifice and
imagination that we now require will be impossible. It is the optimistic spirit buried, finally, in the answer to the question
everyone asks at those moments when history bursts through its diorama case, when it unthinkably appears in front of us, when
it threatens much that we cherish. It is the question Kiefer was trying to answer, the question my friend Li had to come to
terms with. And now it is also the one we must all confront every day of our lives in this unstable, terrifying, and hopeful
new order, the one, yes, you must, in two seconds, answer for yourself and for the people you love:

This age, what does it demand of me?

No attempt to do something as ambitious as rethinking grand strategy could ever be done as a solo act. This book is no exception,
and I’m incredibly grateful to the people who made it possible.

My editor at Little, Brown, Geoff Shandler, poured his own energy into this book with a generosity and patience that surpasses
anything an author could ever hope for. He served as both an enthusiastic supporter and a disciplined, creative, and brilliant
critic. My agent, Binky Urban, was limitlessly helpful in sharing advice and handling the demands of an intense author.

The whole team at Little, Brown offered tremendous support for the idea of this book from the very beginning. Michael Pietsch
and David Young were both ardent boosters, and Heather Rizzo and Heather Fain, along with their hardworking teams, brought
elegance and sophistication to the challenge of bringing the book out on a compressed time frame. Peg Anderson, Peggy Freudenthal,
and the entire staff of copyeditors helped make sure the book looked good and read clearly — though any errors that remain
are, of course, the author’s fault. Joe Pierro, who read every line of the book and offered priceless corrections and insights,
was a backstop I could not have done without.

The intellectual freedom and encouragement to write the book came from many sources, not least my good friend John Eastman,
who was instrumental both in helping me frame my ideas and in finding a home for them. Henry Kissinger, Stape Roy, and Paul
Speltz at Kissinger Associates were generous with their time and support — and in helping me to have the space I needed to
finish composition of the book. My close friend and book coach, Bruce Feiler, offered what can only be called a heroic level
of counsel — sometimes on an hourly basis — and in the process not only made this a better book but by his example made me
a better person.

My friends in China and around the world, along with my family in New Mexico, gave me a constant and reassuring foundation
from which to write and think courageous and out-of-the-box thoughts. And my mentors, the people who have taken risks on me
over the years in the hope I would pay them back by making the world better, gave me a sense of confidence and of obligation
without which this book would never have been written. I owe them everything, including the promise to never stop working
to make the dream of a more decent world real.

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