Who Do We Think We Are?

The sky over Cambridge is grayer these past few months.
It has been a difficult semester for Harvard. We lost two students—one to an accident and the other to suicide. The former was a prodigious and ambitious young scientist set on shaking up the world for the better, the latter a kind and poetic soul that lit up rooms with his music, warmth, and smile. Losing these young men made it impossible not to question if Harvard is really the promising, compassionate community we want it to be.
The most disheartening thing about the cheating scandal that made national news early in the semester was how unsurprising it was to students. Some in the outside world may think of us as paragons of hard work and academic achievement (perhaps with some snobbishness thrown in for good measure), but we are painfully aware of our own failings. It is no secret on campus that not every course is an uplifting intellectual experience and that even those that could be are not always made meaningful by the students in them.
And this election. The candidates have three Harvard degrees between them, and yet they spent the majority of last week’s town hall debate barking at each other like rabid bulldogs. This campaign has shown flashes of coherence, even substantive discussion about big ideas. But for the most part it has been characterized by the shallow and closed-minded politics with which we have become so accustomed. And for as much as each candidate tries to pin down the other on his plans for the future, how either will play with an inevitably dysfunctional legislature is anything but clear.
The world, like an overcast Massachusetts afternoon, is a bit grayer too. It is grayer not just because of the challenges facing the global economy and our oft-insufficient politics at home. It is grayer because it is more uncertain.
It is unclear which way things break from here. We have killed Osama bin Laden, but we have not defeated terrorism. Ghadafi, Mubarak, and Ben Ali are gone, but the Middle East is not close to stable. Globalization represents the greatest hope for increased human productivity and prosperity since the Industrial Revolution and the greatest threat to our social and economic order since the same.
The demons of today are in many ways fundamentally different from the demons of the past. Nazism and Communism were existential evils, but they were existential evils that could be confronted—ideologically, militarily, and morally. Absent these unitary threats, but still plagued by uncertainty about the future, we’ve turned inwards. The Tea Party is the enemy. Or the President. We can no longer claim to be experiencing the end of history, but neither can we be sure of the narrative in which we are living. Are we destined for decades of economic instability? Is America truly in decline? What happens next?
We hear a lot about pivotal moments, pivotal elections, pivotal ideas, and pivotal times in our lives. The argument that remains to be made is for ours as a pivotal generation, and no one will make that argument but us. We’re a generation that has so far experienced much. We witnessed September 11th. We’ve weathered disasters natural, political, and economic. We’ve seen historic elections at home and abroad. And we’ve watched as our country has developed deficits monetary and moral, and our peers across the globe have thrown off oppressive governments only to see their struggles co-opted by entrenched political, religious, and social interests.
So the question becomes: how do we deal with this uncertainty? How do we grapple with this incipient grayness?
I won’t presume to have any definitive answers—things aren’t that black and white. But it would seem to me that answering this uncertainty will require of our generation at least two related attributes.
The first is honesty—intellectual and otherwise. The greatest value of a place like Harvard, and a place like the HPR, is exposure to those that think differently: differently from the norm and differently from one another. The true challenge for our generation, and the personal challenge I issue readers and writers of this magazine, is internalizing these modes of thinking and treating them fairly and truthfully.
And if ours is to become a pivotal generation, we will require a different kind of leadership. We need leaders who embrace the uncertainty of our times, and we need to see such recognition not as weakness, but as strength. We must constantly be striving to improve and must constantly redefine who we are, or, perhaps more accurately, who we think we are. Our principles can and should remain the same—peace, prosperity, tolerance, and freedom—but our methods and our mindsets must change. We may not be able to dispel uncertainty, but if we recognize it and adapt, the skies will be a little brighter in the months and years ahead.