In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful than it ever was, and then they cling to it like a rosary or a strand of worry beads, rather than imagining a better future and acting on that. It is dangerous enough when other countries go down that route; it would be disastrous for America to lose its bearings and move in that direction. I think my friend David Rothkopf, the former Commerce Department official and now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said it best: “The answer for us lies not in what has changed, but in recognizing what has not changed. Because only through this recognition will we begin to focus on the truly critical issues—an effective multilateral response to weapons of mass destruction proliferation, the creation of real stakeholders in globalization among the world’s poor, the need for reform in the Arab world and a style of U.S. leadership that seeks to build our base of support worldwide by getting more people to voluntarily sign onto our values. We need to remember that those values are the real foundation for our security and the real source of our strength. And we need to recognize that our enemies can never defeat us. Only we can defeat ourselves, by throwing out the rule book that has worked for us for a long, long time.”
I believe that history will make very clear that President Bush shamep. 452lessly exploited the emotions around 9/11 for political purposes. He used those 9/11 emotions to take a far-right Republican domestic agenda on taxes, the environment, and social issues from 9/10—an agenda for which he had no popular mandate—and drive it into a 9/12 world. In doing so, Mr. Bush not only drove a wedge between Americans, and between Americans and the world, he drove a wedge between America and its own history and identity. His administration transformed the United States into “the United States of Fighting Terrorism.” This is the real reason, in my view, that so many people in the world dislike President Bush so intensely. They feel that he has taken away something very dear to them—an America that exports hope, not fear.
We need our president to restore September 11 to its rightful place on the calendar—as the day after September 10 and before September 12. We must never let it become a day that defines us. Because ultimately September 11 is about them—the bad guys—not about us.
We’re about the Fourth of July. We’re about 11/9.
Beyond trying to retain the best of our own imaginations, what else can we do as Americans and as a global society to try to nurture the same in others? One has to approach this question with great humility. What leads one person to the joy of destruction and what leads another to the joy of creation, what leads one to imagine 11/9 and another to imagine 9/11, is surely one of the great mysteries of contemporary life. Moreover, while most of us might have some clue about how to nurture a more positive imagination for our own kids, and maybe—maybe—for our fellow citizens, it is presumptuous to think that we can do it for others, particularly those of a different culture, speaking different languages, and living half a world away. Yet 9/11, the flattening of the world, and the continuing threat of world-disrupting terrorism suggest that not thinking about this is its own kind of dangerous naïveté. So I insist on trying to do so, but I approach this issue with a keen awareness of the limits of what any outsider can know or do.
Generally speaking, imagination is the product of two shaping forces. One is the narratives that people are nurtured on—the stories and myths p. 453 they and their religious and national leaders tell themselves—and how those narratives feed their imaginations one way or another. The other is the context in which people grow up, which has a huge impact on shaping how they see the world and others. Outsiders cannot get inside and adjust the Mexican or Arab or Chinese narrative any more than they can get inside the American one. Only they can reinterpret their narrative, make it more tolerant or forward looking, and adapt it to modernity. No one can do that for them or even with them. But one can think about how to collaborate with others to change their context—the context within which people grow up and live their daily lives—to help nurture more people with the imagination of 11/9 than 9/11. Let me offer a few examples.
eBay
Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay, once told me a wonderful story that went like this: “We took eBay public in September 1998, in the middle of the dot-com boom. And in September and October our stock would go up eighty points and down fifty in a single day. I thought, ‘This is insane.’ Anyway, one day I am minding my own business, sitting in my own cubicle, and my secretary runs over and says to me, ‘Meg, it’s Arthur Levitt [chairman] of the SEC on the phone.’ ” The Securities and Exchange Commission oversees the stock market and is always concerned about issues of volatility in a stock and whether there is manipulation behind it. In those days, for a CEO to hear that “Arthur Levitt is on the line” was not a good way to start the day.
“So I called my general counsel,” said Whitman, “who came over from his cubicle, and he was white like a sheet. We called Levitt back together and we put him on the speakerphone, and I said, ‘Hi, it’s Meg Whitman of eBay.’ And he said, ‘Hi, it’s Arthur Levitt of the SEC. I don’t know you and have never met you but I know that you just went public and I want to know: How did it go? Were we [the SEC] customer-friendly?’ And so we breathed a sigh of relief, and we talked about that a p. 454 little bit. And then [Levitt] said, ‘Well, actually, another reason that I am calling is that I just got my tenth positive feedback on eBay and have earned my yellow star. And I am so proud.’ And then he said, ‘I am actually a collector of Depression-era glass, post-1929, and so I have bought and sold on eBay and you get feedback as a buyer and seller. And I thought you would just like to know.’ ”
Every eBay user has a feedback profile made up of comments from other eBay users who have done transactions with him or her, relating to whether the goods bought or sold were as expected and the transaction went off smoothly. This constitutes your official “eBay reputation.” You get +1 point for each positive comment, 0 points for each neutral comment, and -1 for each negative comment. A colored star icon is attached to your user ID on eBay for ten or more feedback points. My user ID on eBay might be TOMF (50) and a blue star, which means that I have received positive feedback comments from fifty other eBay users. Next to that is a box that will tell you whether the seller has had 100 percent positive feedback comments or less, and also give you the chance to click and read all the buyers’ comments about that seller.
The point, said Whitman, is that “I think every human being, Arthur Levitt or the janitor or the waitress or the doctor or the professor, needs and craves validation and positive feedback.” And the big misconception is to think that it has to be money. “It can be really small things,” said Whitman, “telling someone, ‘You did a really great job, you were recognized as doing a great history paper.’ Our users say to us [about eBay’s star system], ‘Where else can you wake up in the morning and see how much people like you?’ ”
But what is so striking, said Whitman, is that the overwhelming majority of feedback on eBay is positive. That’s interesting. People don’t usually write Wal-Mart managers to compliment them on a fabulous purchase. But when you are part of a community that you feel ownership in, it is different. You have a stake. “The highest number of feedback we have is well over 250,000 positive comments, and you can see each one,” said Whitman. “You can see the entire history of each buyer and seller, and we have introduced the ability to rebut . . . You cannot be anonyp. 455mous on eBay. If you are not willing to say who you are, you should not be saying it. And it became the norm of the community really fast . . . We are not running an exchange—we are running a community.” Indeed, with 105 million registered users from 190 countries trading more than $35 billion in products annually, eBay is actua
lly a self-governing nation-state—the V.R.e., the Virtual Republic of eBay.
And how is it governed? EBay’s philosophy, said Whitman, is, “Let’s make a small number of rules, really enforce them, and then create an environment in which people can fulfill their own potential. There is something going on here besides buying and selling goods.” Even allowing for corporate boosterism, Whitman’s essential message is really worth contemplating: “People will say that ‘eBay restored my faith in humanity’—contrary to the world where people are cheating and don’t give people the benefit of the doubt. I hear that twice a week . . . EBay offers the little guy, who’s disenfranchised, an opportunity to compete on a totally level playing field. We have a disproportionate share of wheelchairs and disabled and minorities, [because] on eBay people don’t know who you are. You are only as good as your product and feedback.”
Whitman recalled that one day she got an e-mail from a couple in Orlando who were coming to an “eBay Live” event at which she was speaking. These are big revival meeting–conventions of eBay sellers. They asked if they could come backstage to meet Whitman after her speech. “So after the keynote,” she recalled, “they come back to my green room, and in comes mom and dad and a seventeen-year-old boy in a wheelchair—very disabled with cerebral palsy. They tell me, ‘Kyle is very disabled and can’t go to school, [but] he built an eBay business and last year my husband and I quit our jobs, and now we help him—we have made more money on eBay than we ever made on our jobs.’ And then they added the most incredible thing. They said, ‘On eBay, Kyle is not disabled.’ ”
Whitman told me that at another eBay Live event a young man came up to her, a big power seller on eBay, and said that thanks to his eBay business he had been able to buy a house and a car, hire people, and be his own boss. But the best part, said Whitman, was that the young man p. 456 added, “I am so excited about eBay, because I did not graduate from college and was sort of disowned by my family, and I am now the hit of my family. I am a successful entrepreneur.”
“It’s this blend of economic opportunity and validation” that makes eBay tick, concluded Whitman. Those validated become transparent as good partners, because bad validation is an option for the whole community.
Bottom line: eBay didn’t just create an online market. It created a self-governing community—a context—where anyone, from the severely handicapped to the head of the SEC, could come and achieve his or her potential and be validated as a good and trustworthy person by the whole community. That kind of self-esteem and validation is the best, most effective way of producing dehumiliation and redignification. To the extent that America can collaborate with regions like the Arab-Muslim world to produce contexts where young people can succeed, can achieve their full potential on a level playing field, can get validation and respect from achievements in this world—and not from martyrdom to get into the next world—we can help foster more young people with more dreams than memories.
India
If you want to see this same process at work in a less virtual community, study the second largest Muslim country in the world. The largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia and the second largest is not Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, or Pakistan. It is India. With some 150 million Muslims, India has more Muslims than Pakistan. But here is an interesting statistic from 9/11 : There are no Indian Muslims that we know of in al-Qaeda and there are no Indian Muslims in America’s Guantánamo Bay post-9/11 prison camp. And no Indian Muslims have been found fighting alongside the jihadists in Iraq. Why is that? Why do we not read about Indian Muslims, who are a minority in a vast Hindu-dominated land, blaming America for all their problems and wanting to fly airplanes p. 457 into the Taj Mahal or the British embassy? Lord knows, Indian Muslims have their grievances about access to capital and political representation. And interreligious violence has occasionally flared up in India, with disastrous consequences. I am certain that out of 150 million Muslims in India, a few will one day find their way to al-Qaeda—if it can happen with some American Muslims, it can happen with Indian Muslims. But this is not the norm. Why?
The answer is context—and in particular the secular, free-market, democratic context of India, heavily influenced by a tradition of nonviolence and Hindu tolerance. M. J. Akbar, the Muslim editor of the Asian Age, a national Indian English-language daily primarily funded by non-Muslim Indians, put it to me this way: “I’ll give you a quiz question: Which is the only large Muslim community to enjoy sustained democracy for the last fifty years? The Muslims of India. I am not going to exaggerate Muslim good fortune in India. There are tensions, economic discrimination, and provocations, like the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya [by Hindu nationalists in 1992]. But the fact is, the Indian Constitution is secular and provides a real opportunity for economic advancement of any community that can offer talent. That’s why a growing Muslim middle class here is moving up and generally doesn’t manifest the strands of deep anger you find in many nondemocratic Muslim states.”
Where Islam is embedded in authoritarian societies, it tends to become the vehicle of angry protest—Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. But where Islam is embedded in a pluralistic democratic society—Turkey or India, for instance—those with a more progressive outlook have a chance to get a better hearing for their interpretation and a democratic forum where they can fight for their ideas on a more equal footing. On November 15, 2003, the two main synagogues of Istanbul were hit by some fringe suicide bombers. I happened to be in Istanbul a few months later, when they were reopened. Several things struck me. To begin with, the chief rabbi appeared at the ceremony, hand in hand with the top Muslim cleric of Istanbul and the local mayor, while crowds in the street threw red carnations on them both. Second, the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes from an Islamic party, paid a visit to the chief rabbi in his office—the first time a Turkish prime p. 458 minister had ever called on the chief rabbi. Lastly, the father of one of the suicide bombers told the Turkish newspaper Zaman, “We cannot understand why this child had done the thing he had done . . . First let us meet with the chief rabbi of our Jewish brothers. Let me hug him. Let me kiss his hands and flowing robe. Let me apologize in the name of my son and offer my condolences for the deaths . . . We will be damned if we do not reconcile with them.”
Different context, different narrative, different imagination.
I am keenly aware of the imperfections of Indian democracy, starting with the oppressive caste system. Nevertheless, to have sustained a functioning democracy with all its flaws for more than fifty years in a country of over 1 billion people, who speak scores of different languages, is something of a miracle and a great source of stability for the world. Two of India’s presidents have been Muslims, and its current president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, is both a Muslim and the father of the Indian nuclear missile program. While a Muslim woman sits on India’s Supreme Court, no Muslim woman is allowed even to drive a car in Saudi Arabia. Indian Muslims, including women, have been governors of many Indian states, and the wealthiest man in India today, high on the Forbes list of global billionaires, is an Indian Muslim: Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, one of India’s most important technology companies. I was in India shortly after the United States invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, when Indian television carried a debate between the country’s leading female movie star and parliamentarian—Shabana Azmi, a Muslim woman—and the imam of New Delhi’s biggest mosque. The imam had called on Indian Muslims to go to Afghanistan and join the jihad against America, and Azmi ripped into him, live on Indian TV, basically telling the cleric to go take a hike. She told him to go to Kandahar and join the Taliban and leave the rest of India’s Muslims alone. How did she get away with that? Easy. As a Muslim woman she lived in a context that empowered and protected her to speak her mind—even to a leading cleric.
Different context, different narrative, different imagination.
This is not all that complicated: Give young people a context where they can t
ranslate a positive imagination into reality, give them a context in which someone with a grievance can have it adjudicated in a court of p. 459 law without having to bribe the judge with a goat, give them a context in which they can pursue an entrepreneurial idea and become the richest or the most creative or most respected people in their own country, no matter what their background, give them a context in which any complaint or idea can be published in the newspaper, give them a context in which anyone can run for office—and guess what? They usually don’t want to blow up the world. They usually want to be part of it.
A South Asian Muslim friend of mine once told me this story: His Indian Muslim family split in 1948, with half going to Pakistan and half staying in Mumbai. When he got older, he asked his father one day why the Indian half of the family seemed to be doing better than the Pakistani half. His father said to him, “Son, when a Muslim grows up in India and he sees a man living in a big mansion high on a hill, he says, ‘Father, one day, I will be that man.’ And when a Muslim grows up in Pakistan and sees a man living in a big mansion high on a hill, he says, ‘Father, one day I will kill that man.’ ” When you have a pathway to be the Man or the Woman, you tend to focus on the path and on achieving your dreams. When you have no pathway, you tend to focus on your wrath and on nursing your memories.
India only twenty years ago, before the triple convergence, was known as a country of snake charmers, poor people, and Mother Teresa. Today its image has been recalibrated. Now it is also seen as a country of brainy people and computer wizards. Atul Vashistha, CEO of the outsourcing consulting firm NeoIT, often appears in the American media to defend outsourcing. He told me this story: “One day I had a problem with my HP printer—the printing was very slow. I was trying to figure out the problem. So I call HP tech support. This guy answers and takes all my personal information down. From his voice it is clear he is somewhere in India. So I start asking where he is and how the weather is. We’re having a nice chat. So after he is helping me for about ten or fifteen minutes he says, ‘Sir, do you mind if I say something to you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I figured he was going to tell me something else I was doing wrong with my computer and was trying to be polite about it. And instead he says, ‘Sir, I was very proud to hear you on Voice of America. You did a good job . . .’ I had just been on a VOA show about the backlash against p. 460 globalization and outsourcing. I was one of three invited guests. There was a union official, an economist, and myself. I defended outsourcing and this guy heard it.”
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