Thoughts on Obama

In 1998 I covered a Los Angeles-based conference for Wired.com on the effect of the digital revolution in publishing, music, and art. In the course of a panel discussion at the gathering, the musician and record producer Brian Eno made a statement that’s always stuck with me. Describing the frustrations and difficulties of working with computers, he said—“There’s not enough Africa in them.” In other words, there’s not enough of what is often equated with black culture—cool, beat-driven, intuitive, fluid, non-linear. Computers are all-western and left-brained in their makeup—rigid, hyper-logical, hierarchical, unforgiving. Throw a little Africa into them, as Eno suggested, and it might be the perfect combination of left-brain and right-brain.

What I’ve always found particularly appealing about Barak Obama is the intriguing clash of cultures in both his genes and his upbringing—born of a white mother from the American mid-west and a black father from a small village in Kenya, raised by working-class white grandparents in Hawaii, educated in the Ivy League of the American east, came into his own on the south side of Chicago, possesses a Middle Eastern middle name, but has been a practicing Christian for most of his adult life. While Obama often describes himself as a “mutt,” it actually goes much deeper than that. He’s a racial, cultural, and geographic mash-up, who seems almost a living metaphor of the global era that we now inhabit. He appears equally at home in flip-flops on the back streets of Honolulu, or in a winter coat on the mean streets of Chicago.

And perhaps it’s because of this unusual background that Obama seems adept at bringing together disparate and often warring factions. Science has increasingly come to recognize that the human race contains two often-conflicting hardwired directives—to form cooperative communities/tribes, and to compete for territory and resources (read: “wage war”) with other communities/tribes. That evolutionary survival strategy worked for millennia within the context of small groups existing in close proximity to one another. But biological evolution often lags social evolution. Tribes turned to villages, villages turned to cities, cities turned to states, states turned to countries, and countries have morphed into the now often-cited “global village.” To make matters worse, weapons of mass destruction that were once the exclusive reserve of superpowers are now within conceivable reach of any small group of individuals. It only took $3 box cutters to bring down super skyscrapers in Manhattan, and to nearly destroy the White House or the U.S. Capitol. And it’s a small conceptual leap from there to dirty bombs or briefcase nukes.

In reality, it is such hardwired tribalistic behavior that lies at the heart of almost all current world conflicts. “Secular fundamentalists” and conservative Islamo-phobes often attempt to portray such conflicts as being spawned by the “evils” of a particular religion. But few read a religious text and then decide to engage in an act of terrorism. In fact, things usually occur in the reverse order—a decision is made to engage in terrorism (often spawned by poverty or ethnic/tribal conflict), and then a particular religious text is combed for justification of that act. Obama has long recognized the richness of diverse faith traditions and the pitfalls of religious doctrine taken to extremes. As he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope”—“For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. However, in her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology.”

Historian Karen Armstrong regularly explores such diversity of human faith in her writings. She reports that during the “Axial Age” (900 BC – 200 BC), an exponential increase in violence/deaths from newly developed iron-age weapons, along with a growing human revulsion to that violence, helped to spawn parallel religious/altruistic philosophies: Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in China, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. The practice of Yoga is a striking example of this profound shift in human thought. Yoga was originally a term for Aryan warriors in northwest India “yoking-up” their horses in preparation for raids waged against their neighbors. But during the Axial Age, such real-world warriors morphed into “spiritual warriors.” They instead yoked-up the power of their minds—toward introspection and non-violence. In a parallel path of non-violence and mental introspection, the Buddha insisted that his monks send out waves of benevolence to all corners of the earth and to all creatures. And in the book of Leviticus, the Israelites were commanded to treat strangers as one of their own.

According to Armstrong, such a profound paradigm shift in human consciousness didn’t come into widespread practice simply out of a sense of goodness and altruism. It caught on because it worked, ultimately proving to be to the benefit of all. Perhaps there is an important modern-era lesson to be learned from this time, and one that we are only now beginning to recognize. The idea of a global village is no longer just a trite buzz-phrase—as seen by the ever-present danger of loose nukes, the crisis of global warming, and the current economic meltdown that is sweeping the globe.

Due to Barak Obama’s life path, his “global lineage,” and his basic temperament, I felt early on that he was the ideal candidate for this time in our history. Like a second Axial Age, it’s essential that we shift our perspective toward the common global good. We are simply too inextricably bound together to do otherwise. When Obama spoke of the “fierce urgency of now” during the early days of his campaign, I didn’t think for a moment that he was overstating his case. Nor did I see this as hollow campaign rhetoric. My Los Angeles-based brother and his wife walked precincts in Las Vegas during the weeks leading up to the November election. During one such visit, their small group of campaign workers met with Gov. Bill Richardson, who was also campaigning in the state for Obama. Richardson told a fascinating personal anecdote from the televised democratic primary debates. Not expecting to be called upon during a particular debate question, he had been busy preparing notes for the next round of questioning. Suddenly, the reporter asked him his thoughts. As Richardson struggled to recall the thread of the current questioning, he said that Obama whispered to him – “It’s about Hurricane Katrina, tell them your thoughts on the response.” Richardson told the small gathering of Obama campaign workers in Las Vegas that he realized at that moment, this was a very different kind of politician—someone who would actually help a rival during a nationally televised debate.

But having won the election is only just the beginning for Obama and his supporters. As Martin Luther King once said, “we’ve got some difficult days ahead.” On November 5, while making a many-hour drive, I tuned-in conservative talk radio, curious as to their take on the election outcome. From the on-air vitriol, it was clear that such conservative commentators couldn’t imagine Obama was for real—that he genuinely believed or meant what he said. So they were desperate to “figure out his game”—how he had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. But I never thought he had “a game.” I genuinely believed that he meant what he said—that he believed it was possible to find common ground between disparate groups, and move forward in a way that was beneficial to all.

And such criticisms don’t just come from the right. Conservatives may call him a closet terrorist, but progressives often say that he’s too conservative. And then some blacks say that he’s not black enough, or not black at all. Meanwhile, more than a half-dozen state and federal legal suits have been filed challenging Obama’s “natural born” citizenship. One such suit doesn’t even challenge that he was born in Hawaii, but simply asserts that by having a Kenyan father he was born with “split and competing loyalties,” and is therefore unsuitable for the presidency. But it is this very lineage that I believe makes him particularly suited for the American presidency of this era. While conservative pundits relished referring to him as “Barak Hussein Obama” during the campaign, I read several man-on-the-street viewpoints from the Middle East that expressed optimistic wonder that America would consider electing a man with such a middle name. In so many words, they repeatedly said—“Maybe they don’t dislike us after all if they would consider this man for their president.”

I see the election of Obama as the potential beginning of the end of ages-old, tribally based mindsets that have to give way if we are to survive as a race. Modern brain imaging demonstrates that humans are hardwired to categorize others as “in-group” and “out-group,” and that such assessments occur within milliseconds. But with our higher-brain capacities, we can consciously override such tendencies. And someone like Obama is the perfect leader to facilitate such a shift in perspective—born of white and black parents, with family ties to both America and Africa, and having spent major portions of his life in both a tropical island culture and an urban city setting. It’s no wonder that he throws a monkey wrench into the tribally based thinking of conservative pundits. They can’t easily peg him, and that infuriates them at a visceral level.

I’m also heartened by Obama’s appeal to the younger generation, and his groundbreaking use of the Internet during the campaign. It is always the younger generation that is most adept at breaking free from the past. And the Internet generation is particularly situated to recognize an interconnected world beyond race, tribe, and nationality. Connected from birth by technology, they arguably represent a new global super-tribe. Even my ten-year-old son and his classmates became energized by the election. Obama campaign buttons covered many a backpack at his school, and the student body even held a mock election. (Obama won by a landslide.)

I believe that the era of radical extremism is entering its dying days. In country after country, including our own, such extremism is proving to be a failed proposition, benefiting neither its proponents nor its victims. And I believe that the election of Obama is yet another sign of this transformation—a fundamental shift in human thought and human relations. I only hope that we, and the community of nations, can indeed seize the “fierce urgency” of this moment. It is an opportunity that may not come again for a very long time.