Larry Brilliant Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 5 of 5
We were on a trajectory where the world seemed to be getting better and better, and then 9/11 came along. We had to confront the reality that this technology and all the ideals that we thought we were realizing could be turned on their heads. I know that you, as somebody who had worked on smallpox, became involved at the Centers for Disease Control to look at that as a potential terrorist weapon and what could be done about it. What was that like for you, to suddenly realize that all of where we thought we were going could be turned on its head?
I have two separate responses. The first is, as you say, when I saw those young firemen running up the stairs while everybody else ran down to escape the towers, it affected me very deeply and I quit all my corporate boards and I went down to CDC and I offered to help set up a program in the unlikely event that someone would get their hands on some smallpox and use it as an instrument of bioterrorism. So, certainly what you say is true. The only issue that I would have is I don't think the trajectory of things getting better ended with 9/11. I think they ended with our response to 9/11.
9/11 was a horrific criminal act. The problem began when instead of going after the criminals, or the criminal conspiracy that had created that, we made one of the worst mistakes that we've made as a nation. I love this country more than life itself, but for us to take that horrible crime that was committed against us and suddenly convert it into a war, and then launch our missiles and our bombs at the wrong combatants, began a series of events that we shall not recover from for generations.
Immediately after 9/11 we were the most beloved nation in the world. I mean, I could barely stop from crying because everybody -- their hearts opened up for us. What we've done is, we've squandered that. So, I'm not sure the trajectory changed with 9/11, but certainly it has changed now.
So, our role has changed that trajectory. You said recently in an interview or a speech, "We're again in a war against hate and intolerance, and violence coming from outside, and just as important, we are in a war against our own ignorance and our own arrogance right here inside America."
You know, 80 percent of U.S. congressmen did not have passports at the time they were elected to Congress. Think about that! And yet we're the most powerful nation on earth, we're the most powerful nation that has ever existed, and I say thank God for that. After the Second World War nobody behaved as well as we behaved as an occupying army. You can go all the way back to Thucydides: there's never been a nation which in victory treated the vanquished as kindly, and I would say as lovingly, and as generously as we did, after the Second World War. Think of the Marshall Plan, think of what we did to bring Germany, and even Japan -- they were our enemies.
However -- and there is a however -- it's different now. After the Second World War, the rest of the world wanted there to be a single superpower: us. In fact, there's a Reuters' poll that's taken every year, and from 1945 until the second year of the Bush administration. Every year that poll, which is taken by 100 different countries -- every year they said, "We only want there to be one superpower, just the U.S. They're the good cops." Now it's completely reversed. We are, by some measure, the most despised nation in the world. Only one country still wants there to be just one superpower, and you may not guess who that is. That's Japan. I think they think the other superpower might be China.
So, we've done something incalculably wrong. It's a bit like an autoimmune response. You know, you hear about bird flu, that people who die from bird flu are sometimes the ones who have the strongest immune system. We have such a strong immune system because we have a good military, because we're very smart, and we're a wonderful country. But 9/11 was like a virus affecting us, and our immune system overreacted. And in that mode, we are still reacting.
We're not aware of anything else in the world right now. It'll take a long time for the scales to equilibrate. I spent a lot of time visiting people's homes in Mississippi, and in New Orleans, and in Florida, and I've had a chance to talk to a lot of people. Everybody is beginning to question now who we are, what we want to be. We sort of know something's gone terribly wrong. We might all have different definitions or descriptions for what it is, but I'm confident we'll figure it out. We'll get it right.
It seems that in your past work, and probably your future work, you are very focused on posing the right question and finding the best answers, then a solution, and then acting on it. You said recently, "What is worthy of discussion is the world is now changing so much because of the trajectory of technology that we need to examine all our hypotheses and theories about infrastructure, politics, science, morality, and religion." You've done "soul work," I guess you would say. What is the way to go about doing it? Is it only a mind thing, bringing the best minds together to think over issues, or is there a people element to this, too? You talk a lot about love. What is the strategy to address some of these problems?
I attended a remarkable meeting the day before yesterday. It was a meeting convened by Muslim clerics, Imam Khurasani from Fairfax, who's a Shiite imam. These twelve or thirteen Islamic teachers and imams know that the violence, which is like a virus, infected Islam, is destroying Islam and debilitating Islam. They wanted to have a meeting and talk about how to confront radicalism, extremism, fundamentalism and violence within Islam. Surprisingly (maybe not so surprisingly), the person that they asked to arbitrate or convene was His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, a Buddhist monk.
So, a meeting was convened in San Francisco that was chaired by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and he brought rabbis, and he brought fundamentalist Christians, and he brought Catholics and Hindus and other Buddhists, and very quickly it became an interfaith conversation, and it moved from violence just in Islam to violence in all the religions. Isn't that one of the major things that is facing us today in the world? So, your question is, is it inner work or is it outer work that deals with the real problems? One of the biggest problems that we face as a world is religious violence. I don't think that can be solved without inner work, and I don't think it can be solved without trust and deep fellowship.
I've had the pleasure of meeting some of the right-wing Christian fundamentalists who have taken as an act of Christian stewardship the need to help stop the world from escalating into global warming and the climate crisis, and in doing that they're risking "contamination" with liberal enviros, but [from] their Christian teachings, out of a deep commitment to stewardship which comes out of their belief in Jesus as a teacher, they have taken this radical break. They're some of the most wonderful people in the world. You should meet these eighty-four theologians who are risking everything in their communities because they think that the world is going in the wrong direction. I love those people.
So yes, I take my strength from people like those fundamentalist preachers, from the Dalai Lama, from the imams and the rabbis that recognize the problems that they have to deal with. These are tough times, and we're all privileged to meet people who are struggling in that way, and talking openly and honestly about the problems that they face.
I'll read this quote from you. You said, "If you don't put the spiritual and religious dimension into our political conversation, you won't be asking the really big and important question. If you don't bring in values and religion, you'll be asking superficial questions. What is life all about? What is our relationship to God? These are the important questions. What is our obligation to one another and community? If we don't ask those questions, the residual questions that we're asking aren't as interesting." So, one has to go after those big questions. Why have we lost that, do you think?
Don't you think it's important?
Oh, yes. I agree. I'm not disagreeing; I'm curious. Why has this conversation not been a steady staple, and why has it been subverted by people who want to use religion to get votes?
Do you know about mono-cropping?
No.
When you're a farmer and you're trying to plow your field and you're trying to grow grain, if you were just growing it for your family and a small community, you'd have carrots and you'd have peas, and you'd have some potatoes, and maybe you'd have a little bit of corn, and you'd try to have a balanced meal all out in your field. But if you're making it for export, if you're trying to get to scale, it's so much better to just do sugar cane, or just do corn, and to mono-crop.
I think what's happened is the pluralistic dialogues that are so fertile, the kind that you're talking about, the kind that I watched with the Dalai Lama and these imams, these pluralistic dialogues, they imply that there are many paths to God, that there are many paths to realization. That it's okay if you're going on University [Avenue] and I'm going to go on Hearst Street, we're ultimately all going to get to the freeway.
If you mono-crop, there's no room for that. Straight furrows, big tractors, moving fast in one direction, no time to talk. I don't think you can get to the interesting questions unless you're willing to listen, unless you're willing to have pluralism, unless you're willing to find out that someone else's path and method has deep truth that you can learn from. Otherwise we're all going to be like little advertisements, standing up with a sign that says, "I'm red, I'm blue." It'll look a little bit like the Big Game: you'll be from Stanford, I'll be from Berkeley, and we'll forget everything about why we went there in the first place.
By the way, I'm not against football! I'm just saying that we've gotten too carried away. Haven't we? You know it, everybody knows it, we all feel it. We've lost the ability to engage in meaningful conversation. We don't listen. We don't go into a conversation thinking that the other person has something to offer. We're selling, we're looking for somebody who's buying.
In our conversation you've used a number of public health/scientific metaphors. In your journey, has the reconciling of the spiritual, the soul work, with the scientific -- has that been a fulfilling task? Is there a tension? Talk a little about that dynamic.
It is fulfilling. If you believe that God is the summation of all goodness, then working in public health and trying to improve the health of the public feels a little bit like God's work. It's very satisfying. I don't think I've ever thought of it quite that way, but it's very satisfying.
Let me ask you this. Students will probably watch this brief recounting of this journey that you've been on. What advice would you give them, drawing on your own experience, to prepare for the future?
There's so many different levels to answer that question. First, I would say politically, love this country with all of its flaws. We're lucky to be here. We're lucky to be Americans, we inherit an opportunity that many people in the world will never have. Love it in a way that that famous senator from Wisconsin said, when on the floor of the Senate he said, "My country, right or wrong. My country when right to be followed, when wrong to be fixed."
Politically, that's the way I feel. I love this country so much, but when it's not right, we have to work politically to fix it. Spiritually, be open to everybody. It's like Kurt Vonnegut said, "Unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." Listen carefully, because you don't know where your next instruction will come from. Take yourself lightly. There's a wonderful radio commentator called "The Razor" on local sports television, and he says, "Angels fly because they take themselves lightly."
Well, Larry, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to be here with us today. Thank you for coming to the campus to deliver the Sanford Elberg Lecture, and we wish you best of luck as you fulfill, continue to fulfill, your guru's advice to be one of the lucky ones, one of those who do what they were meant to do.
Thank you, Harry.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
© Copyright 2006, Regents of the University of California
To the Conversations page
To the Globetrotter Research Galleries: The Information Age; Science; Radical Insight and Political Action