Changing the World, or Changing Ourselves?
Our age has an almost instinctive affection for the phrase ‘changing the world’. This is hardly surprising. Humanity has spent a very long time learning not to remain entirely at the mercy of its surroundings. We built embankments so that rivers might no longer overwhelm cities so easily; developed medicines for illnesses that once carried a sentence of death; made aeroplanes and shortened the distance between continents; and eventually built rockets, allowing ourselves to consider, in earnest, whether human beings might one day leave the Earth and live on Mars, or somewhere farther still. In recent years, artificial intelligence has given this confidence a new intensity. Machines now process quantities of information beyond any individual capacity, assisting us in research, medicine, education and creative work. One by one, possibilities once constrained by time, knowledge and the limits of the human body are beginning to open before us.
All of this is progress. A person who is ill ought to be treated; a city exposed to natural disasters ought to be made safer; and if one day human beings can live securely on another planet, that would surely be an achievement worthy of wonder. I do not believe that we ought to refuse the task of changing the world. Yet I have gradually come to think that there is a boundary within that task which is very easily overlooked. We begin by wishing to lessen suffering; before long, however, we may find ourselves wishing for something rather different — that the world should behave according to our wishes.
Nature should accommodate our plans; events should unfold as expected; those close to us should understand our feelings; other people should choose the paths we judge to be wiser. When something fails to turn out as we hoped, we hasten to find a solution. When another person does not change, we are tempted to conclude that our method was insufficient, or that they have not yet properly understood. Again and again, our attention turns outwards, as though one further adjustment might finally restore life to its proper arrangement.
Yet the world appears never to have made us such a promise. Nature has its laws; life has its arrivals and departures; other people have roads of their own. We may influence many things, but we cannot possess their outcomes. This is not particularly difficult to understand. To accept it is another matter. Perhaps much of our suffering does not arise simply because the world has failed to obey our wishes, but because somewhere within us remains the conviction that it ought to have done so.
We Can Always Find a Reason
Many years ago, when I was still a student, I was walking along Shaftesbury Avenue in London and passed a stretch of scaffolding. It was, as it so often is, crowded. People were hurrying to work, restaurants and Underground stations, walking quickly and seldom looking very closely at what was beside them. Near the scaffolding sat a homeless man, with a small container for coins in front of him. He sat so low that the people passing seemed almost to move above his head. I, too, had already walked past him.
As I passed, he looked up at me and said, very softly, ‘Please.’
His voice was so faint that it was almost lost beneath the noise of the street. Yet that small sound broke my heart. I walked on for several steps and found that I simply could not go any farther. Those few steps have remained strangely long in my memory. I did not suddenly recall some grand moral principle, nor did I imagine that I was about to do anything worth remembering. I knew only, with a clarity that was almost stubborn, that this was a step I could not take.
So I turned round and went back.
It was, in itself, a very small movement. The crowd continued in the same direction; the cars went on passing; the lights in the shop windows did not grow any brighter because I had turned around. Yet I have often thought of that moment since, because it made me understand, in a very ordinary and immediate way, that the bond between one human being and another need not always be complicated. You need not know someone. You need not understand the whole of his life. You need not even be certain that whatever help you offer will prove useful. Sometimes you realise only that another person's suffering has appeared before you, and that you can no longer pretend it is merely part of the scenery of a city.
My friends said that such things ought to be dealt with by the government. Britain had a welfare system; taxes had already been paid; there were institutions responsible for these matters, and so on. I usually said very little when I heard this. Their arguments were not without reason. Governments have responsibilities, as do institutions; and a society that could deal with poverty only through the chance kindness of passing strangers would hardly be an ideal one.
Still, a simple question has stayed with me: when did taxation, institutions and all our other arrangements become reasons for overlooking suffering that is directly before us? If every appeal for help must first wait until we have established whose responsibility it properly is, there will never be any shortage of reasons for walking away. It is the government's responsibility. It is the family's responsibility. It is the responsibility of a charity. It is the life he chose for himself. There is always a reason, and sometimes a perfectly correct one. Human beings seem especially gifted in this respect: if we wish, we can construct an admirably complete explanation for almost any form of indifference.
But that day, the question before me was not how poverty ought to be solved, nor how the British welfare state should be organised. Those matters lay far beyond my power; I was not even a British citizen. What belonged to me was something much smaller. A living being on this Earth had asked me for help, and I had heard him. I could not decide what the rest of his life would become, nor could I guarantee what one small act might achieve. I could decide only whether I would turn back.
Over time, I have come to think that this small incident touches upon an important distinction. We often imagine kindness as a means of changing another person: helping him escape his difficulties, encouraging him to make better choices, directing his life towards what we believe to be a better course. Yet another person's life is not our project. We may offer a hand, but we cannot walk in his place; we may care, but we cannot possess the outcome. What remains ours, always, is the choice we ourselves make at that particular moment.
When ‘Can Be Changed’ Becomes ‘Must Be Changed’
Artificial intelligence has given this old question a new weight. In the past, there were severe limits to what human beings could control. Distance, time, knowledge and the body itself placed boundaries around our desires. Today those boundaries are moving rapidly outwards. Algorithms can predict preferences, analyse behaviour and influence attention. Artificial intelligence is entering medicine, education, finance, administration and private life. In the future, the number of things we are able to intervene in, adjust and optimise will almost certainly increase.
There is nothing inherently frightening about these abilities. The difficulty is that a civilisation increasingly skilled at altering the world around it may gradually acquire an illusion: if something can be changed, perhaps it ought to be changed. If behaviour can be predicted, perhaps it should be guided; if preferences can be analysed, perhaps they should be optimised; if risk can be reduced, perhaps uncertainty ought to be eliminated altogether. Technology first gives us capability. Capability, almost unnoticed, may then alter our attitude towards the world.
The same process can occur within an individual life. At first, we merely wish for things to become better; later, ‘better’ can quietly come to mean ‘closer to my own judgement’. We want those we love to be happy, and therefore want them to follow the road we believe to be right. We want society to improve, and gradually lose patience with those who persist in choosing differently. We want a relationship to survive, and begin trying to correct the other person. Control can even arrive dressed as benevolence, precisely because we are so certain that what we want is for their own good. When a supposedly benevolent utopia is to be achieved by remaking other people and the world around them, it is difficult not to remember the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century, and the disasters produced by the conviction that human beings themselves could be forcibly remade.
There is a quiet arrogance in this. It is not necessarily the belief that I matter more than another person, but the belief that I understand his life well enough to know which outcome would be best for him. Yet everyone has a road of his own. We do not know why a person has arrived at a particular point in his life, nor what he may need to pass through before reaching the next. We may accompany him, advise him, and offer a hand when he falls; but love does not give us the right to pave the whole road on his behalf.
Nature is no different. We can build embankments, treat disease and make cities safer; but we cannot require the seasons never to change, the body never to age, or every relationship to remain forever at its happiest point. Life itself contains ageing, separation, change and the unforeseen. If happiness depends upon everything around us finally arranging itself in accordance with our wishes, happiness will always remain one step away. There will always be someone who has not changed, an outcome that has not arrived, a kind of weather that refuses to respect our plans.
Control therefore turns very easily into resentment. Why can he not understand me? Why can things not happen according to plan? Why does reality remain imperfect? We imagine that what we resent is the irrationality of the world. Yet sometimes what we truly cannot accept is something much simpler: the world has never been obliged to submit entirely to our will. Perhaps it is not the world that is imperfect, but the mind through which we insist upon seeing imperfection everywhere. And in the sight of a God beyond form and image, perhaps all things already belong to the perfect order of the universe.
The Gift of Genius — If We Ever Reach Mars
The human heart is more powerful than the blade. It can turn a land into a place of bloodshed; it can also turn a blade into a sweet. Brilliant minds have created instruments beyond anything earlier generations could have imagined, and one important test of such inventions has often been whether they possess military value; when they do, military applications are frequently among the first to receive serious attention. Yet across the innumerable small moments of the past, the present and whatever future awaits us, another sort of genius has continued to illuminate the world. Its ‘inventions’ can turn a sharpened military blade into a silver-wrapped sweet, a child's crying into the small sound of chewing, the rigidity of a uniform into the gesture of a man bending down. These inventions share a single name: compassion.
Perhaps one day the Earth will no longer be suitable for us, and farsighted minds will lead humanity towards another home. I sometimes imagine a real city on Mars. It may represent the furthest expression of our ability to alter an environment: air would have to be made, temperature controlled, water endlessly recycled, while food, energy and living space would depend upon extraordinarily precise calculations. Artificial intelligence might maintain much of this system. A planet never intended for human life, transformed into somewhere in which human beings could live — the thought alone is enough to inspire wonder.
But would the opening of that road by our greatest minds really be enough? I find myself asking: would my own mind be worthy of the road they had shown us? Natural disasters may perhaps be met with ingenuity, but human malice towards other human beings has hardly disappeared. Wars continue along the old tracks of jealousy, hatred, greed and pride. We are heroic: our footprints may one day be scattered across the stars. Yet we are also humble creatures of dust, because the capacity of the human heart can remain as narrow as the point of a needle.
The *Flower Adornment Sutra* says:
‘Everything is made from the mind alone.’
— The Flower Adornment Sutra
The world outside us, in this understanding, is never wholly separate from the mind through which it is apprehended. Wherever human beings may travel, a narrow heart is capable of reproducing its own hell. Malice is a poison that can leave barren ground wherever it goes.
And so, if we really reached Mars while carrying with us all the desires we have failed to put down here, what then? If we remained unable to accept that others may choose different roads; if we continued to believe that possessing power entitled us to determine everything; if reality still angered us whenever it failed to satisfy expectation, Mars would not become a new world merely because it lay millions of miles from Earth. We would simply have carried the old world farther away.
Perhaps by then we will possess machines far more intelligent than those we know today. They may calculate the fairest distribution of resources, forecast weather, manage energy and even offer advice on our emotions and private lives. But I find it difficult to believe that they could do the hardest part on our behalf. AI can tell us more, but it cannot accept for us. It can analyse another person's behaviour, but it cannot relinquish our desire to control that person. It can assemble thousands of years of philosophy, literature and religious thought on impermanence, restraint, compassion and freedom; but when something is truly lost, no machine can perform the act of letting go for us. The tools outside us may advance very quickly. The part within us changes much more slowly.
None of this means that we should cease trying to improve the world. Quite the opposite. I hope humanity continues to discover new medicines, build safer cities, develop better artificial intelligence and, one day, perhaps travel to other planets. Changing the world and changing ourselves should never be treated as alternatives. The difficult task is learning to distinguish between them: which suffering ought to be relieved by our effort, and which realities require acceptance; when to extend a hand, and when to release our hold; what is genuine improvement, and what is merely the wish that the whole world should finally obey us.
Humanity is learning how to alter a planet, even as it learns how to build increasingly intelligent machines. At the same time, perhaps we must learn another ability, quieter and much older: not how to make the whole world conform to the wishes of the mind, but how to make the mind spacious enough to contain a world that does not entirely conform to its wishes. Nature has its laws. Every person has a road of his own. We may still strive, create, help and reach out; we simply need not demand that every outcome belong to us.
And all these things, too, will eventually pass. What can travel across centuries is the sincerity of a human heart, and the force of character capable of moving people long after a life has ended. I sometimes picture the young Alexander Hamilton amid the wreckage of St Croix after the hurricane of 1772, writing with the urgency of someone who had seen suffering close at hand. His words have survived for more than two and a half centuries.
Hamilton wrote:
‘O ye, who revel in affluence, see the afflictions of humanity, and bestow your superfluity to ease them.’
— Alexander Hamilton
He went on to urge those who still possessed more than enough to relieve the miserable, and in doing so to lay up treasure in Heaven.
If the future truly contains light, I do not think it will come only from the fire beneath our rockets, nor only from machines of ever greater intelligence. Perhaps there is another, quieter light: the moment in which a person finally understands that the world need not belong entirely to us in order to be understood, cherished and loved.
That is what I mean by the light of tomorrow.