Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

Nearing the end of his second term in office, President Obama gave voice to exactly this sentiment in the speech he delivered as the first American president to visit Hiroshima, on May 27, 2016: “Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines,” said Obama. “The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.” Our calling today, Obama added, is “to see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.” I don’t have the words to say it better—and it is not naïve. It’s the essence of cold, hard realism today. I repeat: naïveté is the new realism—naïve is thinking that we are going to survive as a species in the age of accelerations without learning to govern our new realms in new ways and our old realms in new ways. And, yes, that is going to require some very rapid moral and social evolution. Where to even begin?