After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

On that trip with Obama in 2017, after we left Shanghai for New Delhi, the Dalai Lama was older and more frail than when I’d seen him last a few years earlier. He and Obama had a pleasant conversation. At the end, Obama—who rarely shows how the troubles at home have backed up on him—let his guard down. How does one retain hope, he asked, in a world so beset by ugliness, tribalism, and strongmen? I could tell he was genuinely searching. The Dalai Lama just smiled his beatific smile, grasped the sides of Obama’s head with his two hands, and said, You must remember that we are all one, and all capable of love. It felt, at the time, like an anodyne dodge from one of the few people on earth who is supposed to have all the answers. But then again, if you do believe that, if you do believe in a sense of common humanity, if you do believe there is irreducible dignity in the identity of every person, then you cannot succumb to a fatalism that human beings are destined to cast aside their own essential nature for a manufactured package of self-serving nationalism and state-controlled prosperity, numbed and monitored by technology. Nor can you restrict your concerns to your own narrow definition of identity. You have to begin from an uncompromising and unshakable belief: This is not who we are.