“This I Believe”
I first learned of Edward R Murrow — legendary reporter and radio anchor — from the movie Good Night and Good Luck. I was thrilled to find, on going to graduate school, that his collection had been donated to the school, and indeed that we were home to a Centre for Public Diplomacy named in his honour.
Diving into those archives, the piece of Murrow’s work I found most fascinating was This I Believe, a series of 5-minute conversations with people across America, asking about their personal philosophy, their approach to the world and to life. These broadcasts ran for about four years, between 1951 & 1955, and I found every episode I listened to deeply moving: poignant and inspiring in a way that only someone speaking with utter honesty can be.
[The introduction to This I Believe aired in 1951. NPR re-created the series in 2005; including this stunning essay from Muhammad Ali, read by Lonnie Ali.]
I’ve loved this series, and gone back to it every so often. I’ve also thought of writing one of these essays myself. Never got round to it before, and essay one of a new blog seems like the perfect occasion. (No promises about keeping to the 5-minute limit: maybe I will come back to edit it down to that someday.)
Voila.
— — — — — —
1.
My name is Ameya Ashok Naik, and this I believe:
I am a student of the human mind, and I believe in the infinite human capacity for change. Indeed, as an atheist I believe in little else; nor have I felt the need. I believe that every human being is capable of learning, of self-reflection, of growth, of empathy, and of shaping both themselves and the world in whatever image they desire. If there is hope for our world, or for our species, surely it lies in this ability to learn, to adapt, to change.
I am a true millennial, having started my teens in the year 2000. That was the decade when every thesis about the pace of change went from being true to being passe — or at least that’s how it felt in my joyously privileged corner of South Bombay. I watched my parents cope with all of it, how it changed both work & home: learning new skills on the job, their older child off to study abroad, the younger one (me) spending hours on the computer (mostly on games).
We are a precocious generation, the first to have all the knowledge and experiences of the world at our fingertips, the first to be able to learn pretty much anything vicariously. It irrevocably shifted the balance of power between us and the adults in our lives. The older I become, the more I marvel at the sheer grace with which my parents — and so many of their peers — adapted to this new world of possibilities. When I say the capacity for change is infinite, it is with their example foremost in my mind.
2.
I know, too, that this is a fairy tale. There are millions around the world, thousands in a 10-km radius of me, who did not experience the turn of the millennium this way. Computers? Internet? Jobs? Parents? Grace? Possibilities? All accidents of birth, the unearned and happy by-products of being a certain gender, bearing a certain surname, living in a part of the world not grappling with war, or displacement, or famine. These happy accidents compound: the privileged kids don’t just have a wider set of options — they have adults who tailor for them a set of options that excludes all of the bad ones.
This I believe: a single opportunity can alter this trajectory. While we have millennia of prejudice and discrimination to work on as societies, the life of any one person can transform far more easily. This, too, I have seen. Family and friends and classmates who have grasped one opportunity, which led to another, which led to another, shaping themselves to meet the next opportunity, shaping a world of new opportunities for those around them, for their parents, their siblings, their children, their friends, their peers.
The challenge is doing this at scale. The challenge is not providing a trampoline or two, the better for one or the other individual to fortunately vault to a new plane of opportunity. The challenge is to raise the floor. The challenge is to smash the ceilings, glass or otherwise, that so painfully interrupt so many of these upward leaps — the barriers and the gatekeepers whose only job is to prevent those who might skyrocket from achieving escape velocity.
3.
I am not a romantic about change. I say it is possible, not that it is easy. Change is neither easy to make nor easy to sustain. Any change that’s important enough to be contested will be contested; progress will always be two steps forward, three back. The absence of apparent resistance is no indicator of success: make a change, and some will become sophisticated to meet it, and others will become sophisticated to avoid it.
It is useful to think of change as happening at two levels. There’s big-picture CHANGE, to rules and institutions and systems, affecting large groups of people all at once. This is what shows up in the historical record. What precedes it, and indeed what follows it and determines whether it works at all, is the more mundane work of intra- and inter-personal change: people who come to see the world differently than they did before, and decide to shape it based on this new vision.
To quote Murrow again: “the real crucial link… is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact — one person talking to another.” History seldom records those last three feet in detail. In hindsight, change appears linear, even inevitable. Each generation takes the world they inherit as a given, the natural state of things.
Perhaps you, like me, were taught about rivers carving sharp valleys in the mountains and then meandering courses in the plains? Turns out that’s only partly true. What’s missing from that account is human activity: by tilling and ploughing on either side of the river, humans made the soil less dense, the easier for rivers to cut into — expanding the width of the meander — and adding to the total load of sediment carried, making the formation of estuarine deltas or islands more likely.
We have always shaped the world around us, sometimes subtly, sometimes as garishly as at Mt. Rushmore. The challenge is seeing the result of change in our own lifetimes. The challenge is staying motivated, doing the work of change, even when it seems unlikely to lead to CHANGE in our lifetimes.
4.
This I believe: there is no other way.
I have studied all about CHANGE, first at law school, then at graduate school. I study the big questions, the too-smooth answers, about why our world looks the way it does today. And I come away profoundly convinced the answer is in those last three feet.
There is no such thing as change in the abstract: a change is always a shift in some underlying thing, a “before” and an “after” arrayed around some boundary. (“Research” is the effort to determine what came before, what has come after, and what exactly the boundary is/was.)
What comes before and after CHANGE is changes in us and our relationships. One of my classmates described it this way: you can’t stop at identifying or designing a solution. You have to shape yourself into the right vehicle for that solution, to shape the world into a place where that solution fits. And you shape the world a handful of people at a time.
Or as Auden put it: we must love one another or die.
5.
In my penultimate month at graduate school, I went for a performance of Persian and Turkic music. One of the pieces sung that evening was from the great Sufi poet Shams Tabrez; I scribbled the translation on the back of the playbill.
Some say the journey is without
One who walks a thousand miles
Will surely find the truth.
Some say the journey is within
The truth is to be found within
If it is to be found at all.
Shams says: the journey is those that travel with us
The truth is, we will go together, or not at all.
This I believe: we will go together, or not at all.
