Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon (2020).?Commanding hope: The power we have to renew a world in peril.?Alfred A. Knopp Canada

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2?Accumulating scientific evidence and data show that key trendlines gauging humanity’s well-being – economic, social, political, and environmental – have indeed turned sharply downwards

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4?Some of us rally to authoritarian leaders who tell a simple story about what’s wrong and declare they can make things better with bold, harsh action

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4?the best way to ensure we’ll fail to solve our problems is to believe we can’t

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5?books The Ingenuity Gap (2000) and The Upside of Down (2006) … this third book

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6?three changes are essential to keep us from descending into intractable, savage violence.

????First … understand how and why we see the world the way we do … Second … a shared story of a positive future … And, finally … produce that future.

????Each of these changes requires that we have hope

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13?by 1957 … The United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom had by then detonated a total of 125 nuclear bombs in the atmosphere

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16?1961 … 179 atmospheric blasts in just two years

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16?1963, the United States, Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom finally signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty – moving all nuclear testing underground … France and later China … kept testing in the atmosphere well into the 1970s

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16?Stephanie May … had accomplished something truly remarkable

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21?Nuclear weapons’ dangers.?Donald Trump’s 2016 election.?Vast clouds of wildfire smoke.?A global pandemic.?

????These four things seem entirely different, but they share one key similarity: each signals that something is going awry in the story of human progress

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21?As authors such as Steven Pinker note, rates of wretched poverty, infectious disease, and mass violence have all plummeted around the world in recent decades

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23?Mood matters

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24?Authoritarianism gains ground

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25?Humanity can’t and won’t address its urgent challenges unless enough of us from a broad range of cultures and societies recognize ourselves as one group, with a shared sense of identity, facing these challenges and developing solutions together

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30?some brain scientists suggest that normal human sleep is bimodal, coming in two segments in the night

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31?today’s science is telling us that life will become phenomenally hard in a climate-changing world, if greenhouse gas emissions continue at anything like the current rate

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33?greenhouse gases in the atmosphere … extra heat is trapped … about three-quarters of a watt per square meter of Earth’s surface … across the surface of the entire planet, it’s equivalent to the energy that would be released by detonating about five hundred thousand Hiroshima-size atomic bombs in the atmosphere every day … It makes almost all our weather more extreme

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34?We’ve already jumped from an equilibrium climate

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35?What can I do to change humanity’s course, even in the tiniest way, to make sure that future is brighter for us all??

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35?the enough vs. feasible dilemma

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37?The rising discord, contention, and extremism that Trump and other populist leaders were injecting into world politics would now make implementing good solutions to the climate problem – or to other urgent problems our species faces – even less feasible

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38?“complexity science,” … University of Waterloo … applying complexity science to what goes on in people’s minds … their “worldviews.” … intractable polarization … blocking good solutions

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38?a worldview is a densely connected network of concepts, beliefs, and values in a person’s mind

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39?two practical tools to help us understand … people’s worldviews.?The first … “state-space method,” it provides a way of identifying and analyzing key differences between worldviews … The second tool, called “cognitive-affective maps” or CAMs, was invented by Paul Thagard … it’s a way of diagramming people’s mental networks of emotionally charged concepts

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40?Together, the state-space and CAM methods can, I believe, help us bend humanity’s curve upwards again

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41?Using these tools … we might discover ways to catalyze the major worldview shift … away from resentment, anger, division, and political extremism, and towards a rough-and-ready but shared global worldview that’s generous, inclusive, trusting, and compassionate

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46?the distinction between non-renewable and renewable resources is misleading … Instead, the critical distinction is between what we call “complex” and “non-complex” resources

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47?complex resources are intricately connected by countless flows of matter and energy … the internal workings of complex resources are “nonlinear” … it’s these scarcities … that are the real limit to further economic growth

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48?The changes in our everyday material circumstances in the future will be harmful enough … but their impact could be multiplied a thousand-fold by flips in our emotional attitudes and worldviews

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49?mainstream climate science … social scientists who understand this latest science are usually more worried about our collective future than even the climate scientists themselves

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52?today’s right-wing populist leaders are of course already exploiting many of these Mad Max ideas and emotions – ideas and emotions aligned with white-supremacy ideology, climate-change denial, and authoritarian nationalism … Powerful worldviews tend to create their own antithesis … alternatives that define themselves in opposition to it

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53?how could enough of us adopt such a worldview in time – to put humanity on a genuinely better path??… we need a new attitude towards and understanding of hope

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56?What can we do to change our course for the better??… accepting hope’s death is, very simply, unacceptable … without hope, humanity’s situation is unsalvageable

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57?honesty and hope are often in tension with each other

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58?wishful thinking

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58?As T.S. Eliot famously wrote, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,”

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60?Charles R. Snyder … “high-hope persons consistently fare better than their low-hope counterparts in the arenas of academics, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment, and psychotherapy.”

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61?key difference between “hope that,” which is passive and timid locution, and “hope to,” which is active and bold

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64?1970s … Bill Epstein … “You know, it was mothers who stopped the testing; they organized huge protests around the world, and in the end the leaders of nuclear powers couldn’t ignore them.”

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65?Elizabeth May – Stephanie May’s daughter, the leader of Canada’s Green Party

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66-67?Stephanie’s hope was honest – in three vitally important ways:

1.?????It didn’t hide from the danger of nuclear testing …

2.?????It never rested on exaggeration or selective use of evidence …

3.?????And her hope was grounded in an acute moral clarity

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67?She also appealed to people’s better nature by starting from the assumption that her opponents were good people who wanted to do what was right

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69?science predicts, a sixth great extinction this century and next – one that eliminates from half to 95 percent of all species

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70?we simply can’t predict the future behavior of the systems that we’re part of accurately enough to know one way or the other

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71?The very complexity of our social systems can preserve possibility, and our awareness of that possibility can sustain hope

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71?Even a relatively simple system like a wind-up clock has three basic constituents: a set of parts or components, a persistent pattern of causal links between those parts, and a flow of energy through and between those parts that sustain the pattern of links … the causal links among a complex system’s parts typically assume many forms and can change over time … These combinations can be a powerful source of innovation

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72?“the whole is more than the sum of its parts” … “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.”

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72?feedback loops … “positive” … “negative” …

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73?“disproportionate causation.”?

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74?one often can’t be sure in advance which small events will matter a lot and which big ones won’t … “nonlinearity.”

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75?“hysteresis.”

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75?we should avoid making definitive and sweeping statements like “it’s too late” or “it’s hopeless.”

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75?Hope only exists when there’s uncertainty

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80?Mere perseverance isn’t enough: we need to become engaged

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80?Samuel Taylor Coleridge … “hope without an object cannot live.” … a commanding hope

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81?imagination is a mental process that’s crucial to hope

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81?We need to turn our hope THAT the desired future will happen into hope TO make it happen.?Such a psychological shift makes us active agents in the story – converting us from spectators to protagonists

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84?Commanding hope has three components … Honest hope is a moral attitude … Astute hope is an epistemological attitude … And powerful hope is a psychological attitude

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85?honest hope regards “truth” as a scientifically meaningful and defensible concept

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86-87?Astute hope is strategically smart … develop an understanding of the minds of … friends, potential allies, or implacable opponents

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87?Powerful hope motivates us, as agents, to push through adversity and work to solve our critical problems

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90?First Encyclopedia of Seas & Oceans … “Up to seventy million sharks are caught each year … Their fins are used to make soup.?The rest is thrown away.”

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94?Thomas Aquinas … Summa Theologica … “the object of hope is a future good, difficult but possible to obtain.”

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94?Stuart Kauffman … the “adjacent possible.”

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95?“episodic memory.”

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95?“recursive thinking,”

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96?Fran?ois Jacob … “Our imagination displays before us the ever-changing picture of the possible.?It is with this picture that we incessantly confront what we fear and what we hope."

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101-102?Serenity Prayer … Reinhold Niebuhr … God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference … Niebuhr … downplays our agency … Wisdom and imagination play equally vital roles helping us discern what’s open to positive transformation

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102?we can … look for and even create entirely new possibilities for our future – “how abouts” … the complex nature of our world comes to our aid here, because complexity expands the number and variety of novel, unexpected combinations in the adjacent possible

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104?“deep uncertainty.”

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104?the World Wide Web … nonexistent in 1992 and widespread by 1998

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105?Most things in our social world … exist only because enough people believe they exist and then act in light of those beliefs

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107?“A world without time,” writes … Lee Smolin in his book Time Reborn, “is a world with a fixed set of possibilities that cannot be transcended.?If, on the other hand, time is real, and everything is subject to it, then there is no fixed set of possibilities and no obstacle to the invention of genuinely novel ideas and solutions to problems.”

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119?we might use our agency to make some … less likely outcomes real

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120?That hope thrives on uncertainty is not a weakness but its greatest strength

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121?courage and hope often go together, as do despair and cowardice

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121?It will take all our courage to hope honestly and never to give up trying to make things better

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127?emissions to date have already increased Earth’s surface temperature to that last seen during the Eemian period (115,000 to 130,000 years ago), when sea level was six to nine meters higher than it is today

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138?if we look more closely at the evidence, we find that the techno-optimists’ vision of the future is almost always highly selective

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141?many of humanity’s critical problems can’t be solved through simple technological fixes, because they’re not at root technological

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142?techno-optimists often downplay the political, social, and economic roadblocks to implementing them

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147?throughout our species’ history: we’ve consistently displaced our problems beyond … our “awareness horizon.”?

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149?powerful groups “externalize” many of the costs of solving their problems by shifting these costs to less powerful people, often elsewhere in geographic space or in the future.?This in turn results in an enormous transfer of wealth from the weak to the powerful

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152?it helps to distinguish between slow and fast social processes .. slow processes have far-reaching effects … we can confidently pinpoint several slow processes that create a structure of both constraints and opportunities around us

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152?One group of these slow processes … human population growth

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154?humanity’s consumption and waste

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154?second slow biophysical process … is atmospheric warming

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156?In a major 2019 study, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that “the stability of food supply is projected to decrease as the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt food chains increases.”

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157?Third slow biophysical process … the broad and steep decline of biodiversity, in what is now known as the Sixth Mass Extinction

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158?The fourth slow biophysical process of note is the rising “energy cost” of finding crucial natural resources and making them useful for our economies

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159?Slow processes are operating simultaneously within our social systems.?The most important is widening economic inequality

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160?Branko Milanovic … a narrowing of overall economic inequality between poor and rich countries … But the story has been very different inside both poor and rich countries, where economic inequality between wealthy people and everyone else has generally risen steadily

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160?Rising inequality magnifies the harm caused by the other slow processes

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160?A last key slow process affecting our world is rising migration of people within countries and across borders

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161?“We are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record,” said the United Nations in 2017

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164?“we” needs to come to mean … the entire human species?

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165?Today, creating such a species-wide feeling of “we-ness” … is among our most urgent collective tasks … a global identity is not only essential – it’s entirely feasible, too

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167-168?human social systems … are … “complex adaptive systems.”

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168?“combinatorial innovation.”

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169?climate change, biodiversity collapse, worsening economic inequality, and the risk of nuclear war

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172?2009 … US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences … “Overcoming Systemic Roadblocks to Sustainability: The Evolutionary Redesign of Worldviews, Institutions, and Technologies.” … WITs

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174?WITs are the primary “unit of selection” in the evolution of our societies

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175?It looks increasingly likely that today’s dominant worldviews, institutions, and technologies will soon lose the unforgiving evolutionary contest to other WITs, still to be determined , that are better-adapted to our ever more extreme situation

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175?Social power is among the most elusive phenomena studied by the social sciences

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181?“market failure.” … It’s a grim reality today that many of humanity’s emerging global problems – like climate change and biodiversity loss – produce the conditions for market failure in stunning abundance

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182?the key factor that hinders the supply of solutions to our critical problems and, ultimately, makes positive change so hard to achieve: the blocking power of strong vested interests who want to maintain the status quo

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183?There’s no entirely objective test for venality, or for altruism

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183?fossil-fuel companies … have spent millions upon millions of dollars propagating phony science on global warming

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184?the response of the world’s nations to the 2008-09 financial crisis … because of lobbying by powerful financial interests, major governments and their finance ministries left in place almost all the financial system that had contributed to the disaster

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187?continued economic growth … is now fundamentally incompatible with the radically altered material world around us

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188?the environmental, and in turn political, damage that growth will cause will eventually halt growth

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188?the idea of sustainable growth rests on a cluster of profoundly flawed premises

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189-190?“internalizing” costs … we’re still not paying anything close to an appropriate price for throwing our carbon junk into our air

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191?catalytic converters … lower our cars’ overall gas mileage by about 10 percent … less visible smog but more invisible CO2

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191?the environmental [Simon] Kuznets curve … the last half of the inverted U – the downward part – is largely missing

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192?the US economy became somewhat cleaner because some economies overseas became dirtier

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193?the historical track record shows that we can’t come close to solving growth’s environmental impacts through better technologies and efficiencies alone … sustainable growth is at best a fantasy and at worst a bald-faced lie – a pernicious source of false hope

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194-195?three assumptions about growth’s benefits … GROWTH EQUALS HAPPINESS … GROWTH EQUALS FREEDOM … GROWTH EQUALS PEACE

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198?when dominant WITs are replaced by new ones, the process is rarely smooth and peaceful

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200?some key components of our worldviews have become far more uniform … two trends – higher connectivity and higher uniformity

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201?while high connectivity might boost innovation, high uniformity often doesn’t

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202?Researchers have found, too, that high connectivity across large systems can actually be dangerous when it’s combined with high uniformity: together the two factors can make systems far more susceptible to cascading failure if hit by certain kinds of shock … contagion

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202?The human population is now among the largest bodies of genetically identical, multicellular biomass on Earth

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204?longer-term trend toward lower economic growth … Robert Gordon

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205?overload can cause failures in the highly connected networks that carry our societies’ information, energy, and materials … the mechanism behind the huge electricity blackout in North America in August 2003 … The process can operate in our highly connected social systems, too

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206-207?honest hope demands we be clear: today’s children, and even most adults alive today, will see, during their lives, pulses of harmful social earthquakes … But we can acknowledge these likely prospects without capitulating to them … beneficial outcomes, while perhaps rare, are still very much possible

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209?[J.R.R. Tolkien] The Lord of the Rings is an extended meditation on what one should do when things appear utterly hopeless

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211 a sober book about hope

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212?In a conversation about hope that Tolkien crafted … he distinguished two kinds: “Amdir,” … and “Estel,”

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215?we should often look for good possibilities, he [Tolkien] advises, in the opposite direction of what seems to make most sense at the time

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216?the enough vs. feasible dilemma

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216?deus ex machina

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218?Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

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218?a “superordinate” goal

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219?humanity has a profusion of big problems … because of both deep uncertainty about the future and bitter ideological differences among us, we heatedly disagree about what our problems are and their severity, about whose responsibility they are and to what extent, about what their solutions should be, and about whether these solutions will work, even if we implemented them

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220?2019 … climate change … the problem is still identified as a threat to one’s own country, not as an existential threat to humanity as a whole … responses … fall into three broad categories: adaptation, mitigation, and geoengineering

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223?The idea put forward by some techno-optimists, like Bill Gates, that we can invent our way out of a food crisis by developing genetically modified crops adapted to such a world, is sheer idiocy

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223?truly meaningful emission cuts simply aren’t going to happen in the foreseeable future, because they aren’t politically, socially, and economically feasible, especially given the implacable opposition of fossil-fuel vested interests and their political allies

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224?Despite the optimistic language from international climate negotiations, humanity has waited too long to get serious about mitigation, so warming beyond the 1.5-degree threshold is now inevitable

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229?a world where poor people and children are protected from warming’s ravages

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230?Through collective ignorance and inaction, we’re deciding, basically, that some … aren’t important enough to save … when we put values, identities, and goals that justify triage at the center of our worldviews … we’re lowering the bar on what we count as enough for our response to the climate crisis

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231?a good first step: identify a bedrock set of pertinent values and goals that most people around the world share … A strategy of triage will merely postpone the inevitable

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232?When we look at humanity’s profusion of big problems through a lens of basic needs and deepest shared values, they seem far less disparate and contentious

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232?three bottom-line injunctions for the future: ??

-????????Don’t wreck our planetary home.

-????????Don’t commit mass suicide by fighting among ourselves.

-????????Protect our children.

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233-234?“Sustainable Development Goals,” … United Nations in 2015 … from an intensely bureaucratic and highly political process of global consultation, the seventeen SDGs … linked in turn to 169 policy targets … The ambition is noble … But the goals sometimes contradict each other … they’re simultaneously too elaborately technocratic and too blandly anodyne to truly motivate us

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239?To reach a positive future, we need to find ways to shift today’s dominant WITs with as little trauma and violence as possible.?Rather than trying to overthrow these WITs with head-on, brute-force efforts, we should look for their weak spots to achieve the radical change needed

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239?Donella Meadows … 1972?Limits to Growth study … Titled “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” [corresponding table of 12 items on page 241]

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247?Greta Thunberg … 2018: “Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope.”

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247?(By “paradigms,” Meadows meant worldview … )

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248?individual worldview change is entirely feasible

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248-249?it’s true that because our worldviews, institutions, and technologies are tightly connected in self-reinforcing systems, we must act on all three fronts more or less simultaneously if we want to produce real, positive change in those realities

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250?worldviews … this is our best place to cross the boundary into the adjacent possible, and to find a feasible route to a future that’s enough

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251-252?In early 2019, the Pew Research Center reported that pessimism about children’s economic future had become “widespread in most economies,”

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253-254?Four … stresses … seem to be having an outsized impact on people’s moods, especially in the West.

????The first is a combination of widening economic inequality and rising economic insecurity …

????The second stress affecting our collective mood is the growing movement of people, chiefly economic migrants and refugees …

????The third stress is climate change …

????The fourth and final stress that’s having a major effect on humanity’s collective mood … is … “normative threat.”

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256?Instead of creating a digital environment that draws us together and makes us smarter, the companies at the core of the social media revolution – Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the like – have used the vast amounts of data they harvest about our preferences and behaviors to create an emotional environment that tends to pull us apart and make us dumber

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258?persistently high levels of fear tend to divide people into short sighted, rigidly exclusive, and antagonistic groups

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258?climate change.?There’s something about the issue that can make reasoned conversation formidably hard and even turn people into bitter opponents

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260?“climate change contrarians.”

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260?I regard my conversations with contrarians as little case studies into why people (including me!) sometimes have so much trouble rationally working out their deepest disagreements

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260?I might learn something from talking to people who strongly disagree with me; maybe my views are wrong in some respects

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F263?[Blaise] Pascal’s Wager … the existence of God

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268?I used a thought experiment to explore my own worldview … I started by imagining what I’d think and how I’d feel if I were to learn that climate change is not a critical problem

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272?I’d recommend this kind of mental exercise if you want to understand better how your worldview affects your perception of the world around you, and especially how it supports your sense of purpose and self-esteem.?Take a scientific, social, or political “fact” that’s central to your worldview and that you regard as incontrovertible … and see what happens when you tell yourself that this fact is simply not true

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272-273?Psychologists say that we all unconsciously downplay evidence that doesn’t support or justify our personal interests and motivations while highlighting that which does.?They call the process “motivated inference.”

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276?fear of death is one of our most powerful motivators

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277?Terror Management Theory … TMT proposes that fear of death is a primordial feature of the human mind

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279?“immortality project,” … Ernest Becker

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280?The groups we’re part of are “codified hero systems,”

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283?each side plays the villain in the other’s hero story

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295-296?When Stephanie [May] stepped outside her own paradigm to make sense in her mind of other people’s worldviews, she was using the natural human capacity for recursive thinking – she was thinking about other people’s thinking … It made her more strategically effective, and not just because it helped her better understand other people’s passions, motivations, and weaknesses; it also helped her see how other people saw her.?This gave her some distance from her actions, allowing her to judge their effectiveness more objectively and, in turn, better strategize her “moves” in the political game she was playing

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308?Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have concluded that six common moral intuitions – relating to care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty – affect people’s ideological positions

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311-312?humanity’s conversation about alternative worldviews is astonishingly impoverished … we desperately need new ideas about how to live together on our imperiled planet and redefine our relationship with Earth’s material environment

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312?until relatively recently the worldviews of modern Western societies almost always represented human beings as fundamentally distinct from, usually superior to and having mastery over the surrounding natural world … But … with … greater attention to Indigenous ideas … humanity is deeply enmeshed in nature and so intimately dependent on it

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312?Rachel Carson … Silent Spring

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314?our Waterloo group’s research suggests that humanity as a whole might be able to jump well beyond the adjacent possible directly to another worldview

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315?Between about 900 and 200 BCE, an era … Karl Jaspers labeled “the Axial Age,” civilizations in ancient China, India, Israel, and Greece … experienced remarkably similar shifts in their dominant beliefs and values … a change that made possible, among other things, modern science and universalized ethics

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316?When we view humanity’s situation today through a complex-systems lens, it looks like conditions could finally be ripe for a jump of similar magnitude – a kind of second Axial Age

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320?questions regarding Social Differentiation, Source of Personal Identity, and the Relationship between Humans and Nature are together particularly critical to shaping humanity’s evolving conception of itself

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321?COGNITIVE-AFFECTIVE MAP (… CAM) … helps us see key elements of a person’s or group’s worldview

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321?Paul Thagard … “Emotions are central to human thinking … not peripheral annoyances.”

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323?The maps are easy for anyone to understand and use … (You can find further details on CAMs and an online tool to draw them at www.commandinghope.com.)

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323-324?We’ve now reviewed two tools … can help us better understand … worldviews and better see how worldviews might be changed … the state-space model … And … the cognitive-affective map

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329?For anti-communists in the early 1960s, US nuclear weapons were keeping America safe; but for Stephanie and her fellow activists, they increased the risk of war, illness, and death

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332?For adults, a happy story is one that offers a clear and appealing purpose for our lives and gives us a sense of agency to realize that purpose.

????But now, around the world, fear is causing many of us to pit our stories against each other, eroding humanity’s already diminishing sense of collective purpose and feelings of common identity

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333?our children will live and participate in one of the most turbulent, exciting, and decisive periods in our species history … it’s so important to help our children believe they can make a difference ????

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334?humanity is in fact doomed only if we collectively choose to be doomed

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334?Real social and political change only happens in times of crisis

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335?In the dark days of late May 1940, as Hitler’s forces closed in on British and Allied troops at Dunkirk, and England faced the real prospect of Nazi occupation, the British writer and theologian C.S. Lewis wrote to a friend: “Oddly enough, I notice that since things got really bad, everyone I meet is less dismayed.”

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336?I see human values as coming in three main types: utilitarian, moral, and existential

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336?To maintain economic growth, mammoth industries of persuasion have arisen to foster mass consumption regardless of its actual importance for our well-being, and a huge apparatus of economic theory has made this consumption morally legitimate purportedly to sustain the “health” of the economy

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337?Very roughly, as we move from the bottom to the top of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs …, we start with utilitarian values at the base, shift to moral values in the middle, and ultimately come to existential values at the top

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337?I also see three general types of temperament in the human populations: exuberant, prudent, and empathetic

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340?none of the three temperaments is good or bad in any absolute sense … each … serves a vital social purpose

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345?humanity doesn’t need anything like a universal consensus around a single, precisely defined alternative worldview or even a single alternative vision of that future … diversity is a source of resilience … At the same time, there’s a clear and present danger that too much diversity, or the wrong kind of diversity, will only produce weakness through fragmentation … our positive alternatives need to be centered on a core set of generally shared principles …????

????Four interlinked principles are key, I believe: they concern opportunity, safety, justice, and identity

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346?Amartya Sen has proposed a “Capability Approach” to human well-being … The first three of my principles – opportunity, safety, justice – map closely onto Sen’s approach: the principle of opportunity corresponds with Sen’s notion of capability, while the principles of safety and justice concern the range of outcomes (functionings) available to a person

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348?any viable, humane worldview must meet the challenge of rising authoritarianism, and the violence it often expresses, head on

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352?“social capital,” which consists of strong bonds between people of mutual trust and reciprocal obligation … Research shows that communities and societies with lots of social capital are better at solving their problems big and small

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352?humanity can’t and won’t address its urgent problems, like climate change, until enough of us from a broad range of cultures think of ourselves as facing these problems together, as members of a common “we.”

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353?Because our critical problems are now global in both their causes and scope, we need broad collective action across the world’s societies to address them successfully … distrusting ethnic, religious, and cultural tribes – can’t possibly solve global problems

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353?Powerful vested interests in each country – fossil-fuel interests like oil companies, in the case of climate change – use this collective action problem as an excuse to declare it’s in their nation’s economic and security interest to delay action

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355?all parents care about their kids and want more or less the same things for their kids

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356?Urgent danger is a fabulous catalyst for action

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357?“a common-fate community”

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358?The two ideas together – that all human beings share a moral community and also a common identity – are now usually referred to as “cosmopolitanism.”

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359?There’s no reason in principle why our respective community and national “we” identities can’t complement, in our minds, our global “we” identity … Such pluralism of intersecting identities across scales from the local to the global is something to be cultivated and treasured; it can make for vibrant and resilient societies

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359?while we beneficially and accurately acknowledge that people have a plurality of identities, we need to emphasize the overriding fact of people’s basic similarities

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360?we must each make personal membership in the global “we” part of our individual identity

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360?it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no clear boundary between human beings and their surrounding natural world – that the natural world is intimately part of us

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361?the broader our “we”, the broader the reach of our group’s principles of justice and the protection they afford

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361?Enormous and growing inequalities in income, wealth, status, and power in and between our societies – across gender, racial, ethnic, religious, and national divides, for instance – will stymie any and all efforts to create a common human identity, if they’re left unaddressed

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361?Powerful hope is hope that motivates us to work together as a species to solve our common problems, and to win, if necessary, any future struggle with Mad Max foes … a compelling vision of the future that’s supported by appropriate worldviews … four principles – commitments to opportunity, safety, justice, and a shared global identity

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362?we need an “immortality project” for all humanity … Our collective, species-wide immortality project is simple to describe, but it’s going to be staggeringly hard to execute … We must commit to fixing the hideous environmental mess we’ve made

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363?the “Renew the Future” worldview

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366?The superordinate goal of rebuilding nature supports both the development of the “we” identity and the idea of a positive future.?The positive future then justifies hope, which, in combination with danger, motivates agency

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368?more positive emotion associated with hope means less negative emotion from danger

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371?humanity’s planet-spanning economic, social and technological networks are critically vulnerable and unstable

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373?David Orr … the arguments used to defend the fossil-fuel regime today bear striking resemblance to those defenders of slavery once used

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373?we must look for ways to use the dominant system of worldviews, institutions, and technologies against itself … a bit like a jujitsu fighter

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374?Let’s not aim for what’s merely feasible and falsely hope it will be enough.?Instead, with commanding hope, let’s aim for what we’d all consider enough – a future in which our children and life on this planet can flourish – and then strive to make that future our reality ??