The Urgent Need for Reinhold Niebuhr

Time Magazine cover: Reinhold Niebuhr, March 8, 1948

There was once a time in America when philosophers, theologians, and public intellectuals who thought deeply and critically about the world were respected and uplifted by American society. From 1926 to 1962, influential theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Henry Sloane Coffin, and C.S. Lewis each appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel was frequently quoted in Time, and the magazine did an extensive profile of him in 1956. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared on Time’s cover three times prior to his assassination in 1968. Until the 1990s, Time devoted one page every week to a section on Religion and Theology. It is impossible to know how much this mattered in the halls of power, but for most of the 20th Century, Time was a pillar of the media landscape and one of the most highly read publications in the world.

Time’s attention to religion and theology may have simply reflected a more homogeneous American society, a time when many of our elite institutions were dominated by liberal Protestantism. By the latter half of the 20th century, America had gradually transformed into a more pluralistic, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and increasingly secular society that paid far less attention to theologians and religious institutions. But before the mid-1960s, Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at the Union Theological Seminary in New York for over 30 years, was among the most influential theologians in modern American history.

Niebuhr wrote and lectured frequently about the intersection of theology, history, foreign policy, politics, and culture. He had a deep sense of history and its importance in explaining the human experience within the larger scheme of things. And he reminded Americans that, even as the most powerful nation on earth, we are but a small and limited part of a wider human story.

Niebuhr was deeply committed to social justice, stemming from his days as a young pastor in 1920’s Detroit fighting the oppressive working conditions on Henry Ford’s assembly lines. He believed deeply in the workings of democracy. Niebuhr’s writings blended a progressive drive for social activism with a deeply conservative skepticism of human perfectibility. He favored bold actions to advance the cause of justice. But he rejected utopian thinking and realistically appraised the human condition as morally ambiguous. His pragmatism appealed to liberals and conservatives alike. Barack Obama once called Niebuhr “one of my favorite philosophers.” Other prominent admirers of Niebuhr included Democrats Hillary Clinton and Hubert Humphrey and Republicans John McCain and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former UN Ambassador to Ronald Reagan.

Although he started out as a Christian pacifist, in the 1930s Niebuhr watched with growing alarm the rise of Hitler and Stalin. He came to view Christian pacifism as an inadequate response to the global threats of fascism and totalitarianism. To address this deficiency, he developed a philosophy known as Christian realism, which examines the world as it is, not as we want it to be. As the United States tilted towards isolationism in 1940, Niebuhr pushed for America to aid Britain in its fight against the Nazis. He championed U.S. intervention in World War II because the future of democracy and the entire world order was under attack.

Niebuhr believed that human beings are by nature sinful, afflicted with excessive pride and a self-preoccupation that frequently results in moral blindness. For Niebuhr, this was an empirical fact rooted in history and experience. Moreover, the consequences of humanity’s proclivity for sin were more damaging when committed by institutions and groups, especially nations.

Although most Americans today are turned off by the traditional concept of “sin” and prefer other words to describe a fallen or lost humanity, Niebuhr’s views resonated in the generation that wrestled with the moral depravity of Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, racial injustice, and economic inequality. When Time put a troubled-looking Niebuhr on the cover of its magazine on March 8, 1948, it accompanied it with the caption, “Man’s story is not a success story.”

An objective assessment of human history supports Niebuhr’s beliefs about the nature of man. One need not be a Christian theologian to recognize that humanity is deeply flawed. My Jewish father-in-law, a professor of anthropology and psychology, often said (only half-jokingly) about the human race when he was alive, “We are a rotten species.” However one phrases it, the essential truth remains, human beings are by nature blinded by self-interest and morally indifferent to injustice, even if we have the capacity and desire to do good. It is why moral leadership is so important in institutions and in nations.

Following the war, Niebuhr was an early proponent of Cold War strategy as a necessary deterrent to Soviet expansionism. But he became increasingly disillusioned with the excessive use of American power throughout the world and was an outspoken critic of American hubris and overreaching arrogance. In the Irony of American History (1952), Niebuhr warned against the dangers of imperialism and exaggerated claims of American virtue:

A nation with an inordinate degree of political power is doubly tempted to exceed the bounds of historical possibilities, if it is informed by an idealism which does not understand the limits of man’s wisdom and volition in history.

Imperialism is a perennial problem of human existence; for powerful nations and individuals inevitably tend to use the weak as instruments of their purposes.

Niebuhr believed that America’s certainty of its own righteousness led to the tragedy of Vietnam, which he called “the most pointless, costly, and bloody war in our history.” He wrote presciently about the hazards of America believing in its own inherent goodness. To confidently assume that we alone have the capacity to eliminate evil and spread freedom in the world, clouds our judgment in the exercise of military and economic power. The complexity of the world requires a great deal of humility; American myths and illusions distort our self-understanding as a nation.

Having supported American efforts in World War II and the early stages of the Cold War, and having lived through and witnessed the horrors of the twentieth century, Niebuhr agreed that war was sometimes necessary to confront evil. He cautioned, however, that the exercise of military power must be a measured undertaking and not part of a holy crusade. Any decision to engage in war must be made with a sense of human tragedy and a profound concern for innocent human life. He warned that envy and pride would lead to our downfall.

Toward the end of his life, Niebuhr developed a close friendship with his Morningside Heights neighbor, Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. Like Heschel, Niebuhr’s theological thinking was greatly influenced by the Hebrew prophets. He shared with them a belief that morality and politics are closely connected and that the fate of the earth rests on humanity.

It was why Niebuhr recognized the imperative of a vital democracy in a free society. “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” Niebuhr wrote, “but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” According to Richard Crouther, professor of religious studies at Carleton College and author of Reinhold Niebuhr: On Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (Oxford University Press, 2010), “Like most of us, Niebuhr knew in his heart that we must affirm and appeal to a higher moral order amid the daily challenges of our individual and collective lives. What gives depth to his teaching is the constant appeal to history and the facts of our experience as limited humans who are surrounded by the crises of a troubled and perplexing world.”

Perhaps Niebuhr is too complex a thinker for America in the 21st century. But America could certainly use his wisdom and guidance today. On September 22, the president of the United States stood on the podium of the United Nations and threatened to “annihilate” the Iranian people and drive them “into hell with no chance of survival.” It was not the first time Trump had threatened to annihilate an entire civilization. The irony of such a statement before this international body, created in response to the bloodiest and most violent conflict in human history to promote world peace and international cooperation, should not be lost on anyone.  

Niebuhr would have been horrified by President Trump’s willingness to threaten friends and upset alliances cultivated and nurtured through 80 years of diplomacy and mutual trust. He would have condemned this administration’s military adventurism and unilateral exercises of power to suit its own ends—the U.S. war of choice in Iran; the unprovoked military invasion of Venezuela; Trump declaring “to the victor belong the spoils” to justify his claims on Venezuelan oil reserves; the illegal and extrajudicial killings of 227 civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean; the president’s threats to invade Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, Greenland, Panama, and Oman; his military strikes on seven other countries in the past 18 months; and his utter disregard for international law and diplomacy.

It would have been unthinkable in Niebuhr’s time for a U.S. president to tell The New York Times, as Trump did, that the only limit on his power is “my own morality, my own mind—it’s the only thing that can stop me.” Indeed, no modern president would have so easily dismissed international law and norms established by the United States and its allies after World War II to maintain world stability and prevent another world war.  

Niebuhr would have spoken prophetically against Trump’s repeated lies that human-caused climate change is a “hoax,” most recently spewed by Trump at the United Nations. Niebuhr believed that, only when humanity has the moral will and practical wisdom to assume responsibility for the consequences of our collective actions, will we have the capacity to protect the earth, and with it, all of humanity.

Niebuhr also would have recoiled at the absurdity and arrogance of Trump’s insistence on the geographical designations “Lake of America” and “Gulf of America” and his promise to “make America great again.” Niebuhr was harshly critical of American idolatry and blind patriotism. He rejected unreflective assertions of America as the “greatest country on earth,” which disregards how America empirically compares to other countries on such things as universal access to health care, income inequality, and other matters of economic and political justice.

Niebuhr embraced American idealism and the ability of American democracy to correct past injustices at home and excesses abroad. But he was suspicious of “true believers,” people who never have doubts. For Niebuhr, an element of moral doubt was necessary for self-awareness, for people and nations. He was concerned about “a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America” that could eventually lead us astray.

As the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a great admirer of Niebuhr, once wrote: “History is the best antidote to delusion of omnipotence and omniscience. Self-knowledge is the indispensable prelude to self-control for the nation as well as the individual, and history should forever remind us of the limits of our passing perspectives.”

It is unlikely that Trump is acquainted with the intellectual legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr and his pivotal role in shaping twentieth-century American thought. But the modern world desperately needs Niebuhr’s moral wisdom to counter Trump’s celebration of power over principle, personal ego over morality, and raw self-interest over international law.

At the end of The Irony of American History, Niebuhr ominously warned what can happen to a great nation blinded by overreaching pride, arrogance, and moral blindness:

For if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history, but by hatred and vainglory.

The Football Dilemma

St. Augustine High School football, New Orleans, Louisiana

No sport inspires the passions and loyalties of Americans more than football. From September through December, Friday night lights dominate the American landscape, when the local high school football teams suit up to play their cross-county rivals. In hard-luck towns across America, high school football provides a unity of purpose, a place where the glory days of old are re-lived by aging men with aching bodies, and the struggles of everyday life are temporarily set aside to enjoy the youthful athleticism of young men who provide hope of a glorious future. Black or white, liberal or conservative, Christian or atheist, nothing brings people of diverse backgrounds together, or promotes community unity better, than football. From the forgotten towns of rural America to neglected inner-city housing projects, the local football field is where the American Dream comes true.

Like many young American boys then and now, football was the sport that most competed with my love of baseball and basketball. Every fall, starting in grade school and throughout my high school years, I looked forward to watching football on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. My friends and I played flag football games in the backyard and on the school fields of my youth. We played Strat-O-Matic Football in the basements and family rooms of our childhood homes (see “Strat-O-Matic Memories: The Football Years”). I looked up to the star football players who walked around town with varsity jackets on their backs and pretty cheerleaders by their sides.

The popularity of football is why high schools across the country devote disproportionately large percentages of their limited capital and operating budgets to sustain high-end football programs, even in poor communities that cannot afford a full-time librarian or consistently underperform academically. Although the child poverty rate in Valdosta, Georgia, exceeds 33%, and although 84% of school-aged children in the district are considered economically disadvantaged, the school district recently spent $15 million on a new 83,000-square foot indoor training facility that includes a 100-yard turf field, offense/defense meeting rooms, and an expanded kitchen. Similar examples can be found in every state and region of the country. From small, economically-depressed towns in western Pennsylvania, to poorly funded, working-class communities throughout rural Texas, under-resourced communities pour money into their local high school football programs as if they are non-negotiable budget priorities.

The financial priorities of the nation’s colleges and universities are even more out of whack. A successful football program at a Division I school requires hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for and maintain an 80,000-seat stadium, first-class practice fields, indoor gyms, and locker room facilities. The head football coaches at top-ranked Division I schools earn salaries in excess of $5 million to $10 million per year. At many state universities, a head football coach is the highest paid public employee in their state. Even some relatively small universities pay their head football coaches over $1 million per year, funding their programs through mandatory (and excessively high) student fees and university budget subsidies.

Football in America is big business. Last year, the NFL recorded $23 billion in revenues. Its commissioner is paid $64 million per year. Each NFL team’s salary cap exceeds $300 million (for player salaries), and the legalization of sports gambling has brought billions of more dollars into the NFL. Team valuations have more than doubled in ten years, and even poorly performing teams are valued at close to $10 billion. Every Sunday (and Monday and Thursday), the NFL commands the nation’s attention on five major networks (ABC, CBS, ESPN, NBC, FOX). College football fills the airwaves on Saturdays. The most elite college players now earn hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions of dollars for use of their name, image, and likeness. The games are played in major cathedrals before capacity crowds.

The young men who play the game are adored and uplifted and treated as special people … until they can no longer perform. And then they are forgotten.

A recent study published in the British Medical Journal and reported extensively over the past two weeks has forced me to consider some uncomfortable truths, about American society’s love affair with football, and with my own admiration and draw to the sport. The study shows that the risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage caused by repeated jolts to the head, is far more prevalent than originally imagined.

CTE is associated with the accumulation of thousands of small, sub-concussive hits, not necessarily recognizable concussions. These hits start as early as pee-wee football and accumulate as players progress through high school and college ball. By the time the small group of elite players reach the NFL, many if not most of them have likely already experienced some significant, long-term damage. The brutal physicality of football, the hundreds of violent hits and tackles, the rattling of the brain that occurs on most plays, the incredible speed and size and strength of the players who bring such talent and zeal and beauty to the sport, all contribute to what we are now learning about the medical data.

The study examined 338 brains donated by players’ families between 2008 and 2021 (out of a total of 1,721 players who died), and found that 93% were diagnosed with CTE. To account for selection bias, as most families who donated their loved ones’ brains likely suspected something was wrong, researchers narrowed the study to the 878 players who died between 2016 and 2021. That sample included 235 donated brains, of which 91.5% were diagnosed with CTE. After looking at demographic data and other information from death certificates of all NFL players who died in that time frame, they found that not less than 25% of the players had CTE. Because only a small percentage of the dead players’ brains were autopsied, and because an autopsy is the only way to detect CTE, the 25% figure is the absolute floor, or the lowest possible minimum of CTE prevalence, and assumes that every player whose brain was not autopsied was perfectly healthy, which is extremely unlikely. Medical experts believe the actual rate of CTE could be as high as 97.7%, and is most likely somewhere between the high and low figures.

The symptoms of the disease are devastating. They include memory loss, confusion, uncharacteristic mood swings, increases in erratic and impulsive behavior. It has been found in very young men, including several high-profile former NFL players who committed suicide, suffered debilitating cases of cognitive impairment, and in a few cases committed violent crimes.

Some may argue this is what the men signed up for when they chose to play such a physically violent game that brought them a modicum of fame and money. But how many of the risks were told to the high school teens that were later so aggressively recruited to play at Division I colleges and universities?

For those of us who love to watch football, or who spend money on football tickets and merchandise, how do we come to terms with the knowledge that the high-speed hits, blocks, and tackles we love to watch causes the athletes’ brains to bounce against their skull, each time potentially inflicting little injuries? Or that, when these little injuries are repeated over and over again, the long-term consequences are dire and devastating?

Even by turning on the remote to watch the game are we not supporting what is a multi-billion-dollar industry that glorifies and promotes a game in which the players repeatedly do immense damage to their brains? Can we really say that the 20-year-old man who chooses to play professionally knows precisely the risks he is taking? What about the 13- and 14-year-old boys who are drawn to the glory of Friday night lights?

In the fall of 1973, as a 14-year-old about to start my freshman year in high school, and decades before we knew anything about CTE, I too was drawn to high school football. My mother, herself a high school athlete, was less enthusiastic about the idea. She worried that football was a dangerous sport that could result in serious injury. A few weeks before football practice started, mom quietly purchased a then bestselling paperback book called Meat on the Hoof: The Hidden World of Texas Football by Gary Shaw (St. Martin’s Press, 1972). Shaw played football for the University of Texas at Austin in the 1960s, and his book exposed the brutal realities of the UT football program under Coach Darrell Royal.

Mom handed me a copy of the book one afternoon and said, “You really need to read this.” I recall feeling a bit exasperated at the time, but became genuinely intrigued by the book as I absorbed its contents over the next several days. Shaw’s memoir described the poor medical care, punishing practices, and extreme psychological pressure the players endured. Players were put through practice drills intentionally designed to weed them out, through injury, severe hazing, and humiliation. Players who became injured, including Shaw, were treated as expendable inventory. Many lost their scholarships. The promises made by Coach Royal during recruiting sessions—that they would be looked after, receive a first-rate education, and be treated like family—suddenly vanished. Instead, as the title of the book implied, the athletes were treated like livestock ("meat on the hoof"), used, exploited, and then discarded when no longer useful.

But I was fourteen years old. From my vantage point, high school football was glorious, with marching bands and cheerleaders, pep rallies and stands filled with people on gameday. Football players were looked up to and treated like rock stars. Besides, I failed to see the connection between a football program at a big-time Texas university and the smalltime freshmen program at Hightstown High School.

So, I endured the twice-a-day practice sessions held during the peak summer heat, and learned to hit and tackle and block. The coaches tried their best to turn me into someone I was not, a physically aggressive, angry and ruthless person willing to inflict punishment on others. Throughout the season, the coaches yelled at, intimidated, and humiliated us, believing it motivated us to play harder, hit harder, tackle harder. Although as a tight end and occasional wide receiver, I led our underperforming team in scoring, I learned quickly that football was not for me. I played in fear of getting injured (not a good way to play football), hated playing defense, and held the coaches in disdain. When the start of my sophomore year came around, I opted out.

Yet I understand why so many young men are attracted to football. It is a beautiful game to watch and a fun and exciting sport to play. The adulation and adornment dished out to football players in many communities and schools is hard to ignore. And football offers an attractive avenue for young men in search of meaning and purpose in their lives. Football teaches discipline and a strong work ethic, teamwork and collaboration, leadership skills, and the perseverance and resilience needed to overcome challenges and handle setbacks. But too many young men play the game in the hopes of achieving college scholarships and NFL stardom and the big money attached to it. For some talented high school players, the fame, riches, and glory are there for the taking, or so it seems. For most, it turns out to be a mirage.

Is there any truth to the notion that football is so popular in the United States because it is such a violently physical sport full of risk? Or are we simply oblivious, or unthinking, in our support of what is admittedly an exciting, beautiful game? If it turns out that the rate of CTE among professional football players is as high as 97% (or even 40% or 50%) what are the ethical implications of school boards, college presidents, local media outlets, NFL owners, advertisers and sponsors, and the sports gambling industry supporting and promoting an industry that causes such harm to those who play it? And what about all of us who support the game by watching and rooting for young men as they entertain us in a way that will eventually cause many of them to suffer severe brain damage and disproportionately high cases of early dementia, ALS, Parkinson's disease, and worse?

I am genuinely conflicted by all of this because I continue to enjoy football for the exciting, dynamic, and thrilling sport that it is. I love that football brings people from all walks of life together. And I understand the socioeconomic and cultural factors that play a role in the high percentage of African American athletes who play and dominate football at its most competitive levels. The lure of football as an opportunity to open doors to a better life, to riches and fame, is compelling and difficult to resist, especially if you are poor and don’t perceive a bright future outside of football. But it is sad. Only a select few are good enough to make it, and even then, based on the medical data, it does not seem worth it.

It is not for me to tell anyone whether or not they should play football, or root for football, or support the game financially. But I hope that any young person considering playing the game today will take a long, hard look at the evidence and ask themselves, is the glory of Friday night lights really worth it?

Jacinda Ardern: Ordinary Woman, Extraordinary Leader

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
Tufts University, April 2024 (Photo: Alonso Nichols, Tufts Now)

As someone who studies and reads a lot of books and articles about political leaders, I have come to identify certain traits that are essential to positive and uplifting leadership. These include intelligence, wisdom, empathy, courage, the ability to listen to different points of view, understand people’s needs, acknowledge uncertainty, respect science and not be afraid to consult with experts, and prioritize the public interest over political advancement. In an ideal world, the best leaders also inspire kindness and decency in others. Although few people in history fit all these criteria, I believe that a genuinely compassionate and intelligent leader can govern a nation with kindness, empathy, and honesty while protecting the country’s interests and functioning as a trusted neighbor in the world community.

We live in a world dominated by oligarchs and strongmen. In the United States, we have a president who celebrates UFC fights and aggressive masculinity, demeans reporters, especially female reporters, and laces every speech and interview with insults and name calling. Our Secretary of Defense preaches that elevated levels of testosterone are the true measure of a man and essential to a warrior ethos while he systematically eliminates women from positions of senior leadership. From Russia and North Korea to dozens of countries in both hemispheres, political leaders frequently exemplify the worst traits of humanity.

Jacinda Ardern was a different kind of leader. As Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, she proved that an effective leader need not sacrifice her humanity. Her honest, humane, and compassionate governing style was frequently described as an “antidote to Trumpism” and her popularity around the world reflected the sentiment. She was living proof that a head of state can be empathetic, sensitive, kind, and still be strong enough to lead a great nation with a proud history.

Recently, I finished A Different Kind of Power (Crown Publishing House, 2025), Jacinda Ardern’s refreshing and candid memoir about overcoming insecurities and self-imposed feelings of “imposter syndrome” to become the third woman to serve as Prime Minister of New Zealand. Ardern was only 37 when she became prime minister, the youngest person ever to hold the country’s highest seat of power. Her memoir, and the excellent CNN documentary “Prime Minister” released a few months later, depicts an ordinary, unassuming woman who became a consequential and highly effective national leader in difficult and challenging times. I came away from both with a sense of hope, for they confirmed my belief that kindness, decency, and compassion truly can make a difference in leadership at the highest levels of government.

A key ingredient of Ardern’s popularity and effectiveness as prime minister was her authenticity. She is extremely relatable. The daughter of a police officer, she learned at an early age that the ability to communicate, to use words effectively, was essential to establishing public trust. In New Zealand, police officers do not routinely carry guns. They are considered citizens in uniforms whose authority derives from the consent and cooperation of the community. As a young girl, she once saw her dad in uniform surrounded by a hostile group of men in leather jackets. As she walked across the parking lot, her father noticed her approaching. “Keep walking, Jacinda,” he said in a calm voice. Although she did as told, she worried about his safety. Later that night, her dad explained, “Jacinda, my words will always be the greatest tool I have.” It was a valuable lesson to her, and one she would use in later years.

As someone who grew up in a Mormon household, she valued its keen sense of community and understood from a young age how much personal connection mattered to people. Through its missionary work, she became comfortable with striking up conversations with people she did not know. Although she would later move away from her Mormon faith when it increasingly conflicted with her personal values, especially concerning the rights of women and LGBTQ persons, she always respected how loving and kind the people in her church were, and how focused they remained on service and charity.

Ardern developed an early interest in public policy and debate but never imagined herself capable or tough enough to run for public office. “I was the worker who quietly and steadily got things done,” she writes. “My elbows weren’t sharp enough; my skin was too thin. I was idealistic and sensitive.” And yet, she had witnessed two women become Prime Minister of New Zealand and the thought never crossed her mind that her gender would preclude her from becoming involved in politics. When she interned for a Labour Party MP during college, she fell in love with it. Parliament “was a place where laws changed and problems were fixed,” she recounted. Politics, when done right, could change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for the better. And it could address issues that mattered to her, like poverty and inequality, climate change, repairing past injustices to indigenous populations, and advancing women’s reproductive freedoms.

When Ardern first became a Member of Parliament on the Labour Party ticket in 2008, however, she experienced a crisis of confidence when the opposition verbally attacked her during a hard-edged debate on the Parliament floor. She figured the only way to cope was to toughen up, to develop thick skin and roll with the punches, so she sought the advice of a fellow Labour MP, a veteran politician known for his hardcore tactics. “Promise me you won’t try to toughen up, Jacinda,” he advised. “You feel things because you have empathy, and because you care. The moment you change is the moment you’ll stop being good at your job.”

Ardern resolved to remain true to herself. When she talked with groups of students, Ardern frequently asked them to describe what they think leadership requires. The students consistently used words such as “angry” and “aggressive.” Ardern would never be that kind of politician. “I didn’t want to choose between being a good politician and being what I considered a good person.” And she learned from exchanges with certain members of the opposition that “it was possible to disagree with your opponent without getting personal.” 

It turned out that Ardern’s empathetic style indeed was an effective way to lead and govern. In March 2017, the Labour Party selected Ardern as its deputy leader. She shared Labour’s vision “that our country be a place where everyone has a roof over their head and meaningful work, where education is free, where children live surrounded by creativity, not poverty, where we lead the world on environmental issues” and build a country “even better than the way we found it.”

Five months later, she was unexpectedly thrust into the leadership role when Prime Minister Andrew Little resigned following Labour’s poor showing in the polls. With national elections coming, Ardern ran a campaign of positivity and Labour’s popularity rebounded. In October 2017, when the New Zealand First Party agreed to a coalition with Labour, Ardern became New Zealand’s third female prime minister.

Only days before, unbeknownst to the public, Ardern discovered she was pregnant. Her daughter Neve was born eight months later. Although she was criticized for being selfish, for trying to have it all, she showed that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “the job of looking after a country’s people — and the mix of love and steel required to personally care for a child — might just go hand in hand.”

Before her swearing in, a journalist who Ardern had respected since she was eleven years old, asked her, “What is it you want to do?” She said what immediately came to mind. “I want this government to feel different. I want people to feel that it’s open, that it’s listening, and that it’s going to bring kindness back.” In her memoir, Ardern explained further:

Some people thought kindness was sentimental, soft. A bit naïve, even. I knew this. But I also knew they were wrong. Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has. I’d seen kindness do extraordinary things: I’d seen it give people hope; I’d seen it change minds and transform lives. I wasn’t afraid to say it aloud, and as soon as I did, I was sure: kindness. This would be my guiding principle no matter what lay ahead.

Both the CNN documentary and memoir bring to light private moments that show Ardern’s ordinary humanity as she dealt with terrible bouts of morning sickness and her struggles to breast feed her newborn while balancing the responsibilities of prime minister with her desire to be a present mother to her child. Although she received criticism when she became the first prime minister to take six weeks of maternity leave while in office, most New Zealanders supported her decision, reinforcing a fundamental truth, “that politicians are humans first, and perhaps the public hadn’t lost sight of that.”

Throughout her tenure as prime minister, she displayed top-down kindness as a thoughtful, intelligent leader determined to act when necessary. After a white supremacist carried out two mass shootings on the same day at Christchurch mosques that killed 51 people and injured 49 more, Ardern immediately responded with heartfelt empathy. She mourned and grieved with the Christchurch Muslim community. She hugged and supported them, cried and prayed with them. She made clear the entire nation condemned the attacks and supported them in their darkest hour. Although some of the Muslim victims had come to New Zealand as refugees, this was an attack on “our community,” she said. “They are New Zealanders. They are us.” She received widespread praise from the Muslim and international communities for her personally empathetic response to the shootings.

But words, hugs, and prayers were not enough. Over the next three weeks, Ardern orchestrated and led the passage of sweeping legislation that banned most semiautomatic weapons, assault rifles, and higher capacity magazines from New Zealand, a country with a high rate of gun ownership. Through an amnesty and buyback program, tens of thousands of military-style assault weapons were taken off the streets. Horrified by viral social media posts of the Christchurch shootings, she launched the Christchurch Call to Action, an international commitment to remove and eliminate violent extremist content from the internet. Her tears generated toughness. She would not compromise public safety.

Tragedy struck New Zealand again in March 2019, when a volcano erupted at Whakaari/White Island that killed twenty-two people and severely burned many more. In the following days, Ardern visited with the survivors and family members of those who died and personally thanked the first responders who risked their lives rescuing survivors. When a social media post claimed she was only visiting the community so she could be seen “hugging people,” Ardern acknowledged the criticism bothered her. But she would do nothing differently. “First of all, of course I’d gone,” she writes. “This was a major disaster in our country and I was prime minister. And criticizing me for hugging people? … I would rather be criticized than stop being human.”

Less than a year later, she would be tested in ways never anticipated. “Leadership is a test for which you can only partially prepare,” she noted. “If you’re lucky, the information you need is out there—somewhere, in some form.” But when the world first confronted COVID, there was little information to draw on. As an island nation, New Zealand had some advantages. Twenty days after its first documented cases, her government closed the nation’s borders to everyone except returning citizens and established isolation and tracing protocols. But the pandemic was moving too quickly, and if she did not take more drastic action, the data and science showed that tens of thousands of people would die. That would be catastrophic in a country of five million people. For Ardern, it was not an option.

In April 2020, Ardern’s government ordered a Level 4 lockdown, shutting down most businesses and schools as people sheltered in place. Within six weeks, New Zealand had no new COVID cases. A few weeks later, the government reduced alert levels so people could dine out again, invite neighbors into their homes, and return to the world. For the next two years, New Zealand would have long stretches of normalcy followed by occasional periods of rising alert levels. But compared to the rest of the world, life looked ordinary in New Zealand, as kids returned to school, restaurants were open, and families gathered for weddings and funerals. By the time vaccines arrived and the country had achieved a 90 percent vaccination rate, the crisis in New Zealand had been mostly avoided. While COVID raged around the world, causing millions of deaths (including over 1.2 million in the United States), New Zealand experienced only twenty-five deaths and an infection rate 80% lower than in the United States.

Ardern writes also of the threatening and ugly backlash she faced with a vocal minority of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, fueled by disinformation from the United States. But she defends her actions to this day. “We came out of COVID with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and fewer days in lockdown than nations like the U.K., and during this time our country’s life expectancy actually increased.” That is what leadership is all about.

New Zealand is known for “punching above its weight” on the world stage and Ardern’s diplomatic approach represented New Zealand well within the international community. Domestically, in addition to enacting major gun safety measures following the Christchurch terrorist attacks, she took decisive action on climate change, committing New Zealand to carbon neutrality by 2050. She enacted pay equity and parental leave laws. She launched a mental health initiative and a Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy. Her government reformed the state benefits system to make it more accessible and friendly, built more state housing than any government in the last fifty years, expanded access to childhood education and health care, and invested in violence prevention programs. And for the first time in the country’s history, Parliament decriminalized abortion and advanced the cause of reproductive freedom.

But six years of nonstop work, pressure, anxiety, and crisis after crisis, finally took its toll. Ardern decided to resign from public life in 2023. She had done her best, and that was enough. As she wrote in her memoir:

[W]hen I was prime minister, I saw moments of true darkness. … But there’s an inverse feature to seeing the world at its most brutal, because those are also the moments that show people at their most humane. Those are the moments when I saw that it was possible for people to galvanize behind their collective humanity. Sometimes, those moments are small. Other times, they create a ripple that sweeps across the country.

Ardern continues to work for change and tries to make the world a little brighter. As she told a gathering at Tufts University in 2024, whatever her future holds, “I am going to talk about what it means to be human first, and a leader second, because I think we need more of that in the world.”

Jacinda Ardern is an appealing and refreshing voice in a world that increasingly turns dark and brutal. I hope that her example inspires other men and women of kindness and decency to enter politics and follow in her example. She challenged misperceptions and assumptions about young female leaders. And she proved that common sense combined with sensitivity, compassion, and empathy are towering strengths. We need a lot more leaders like her.

Seeing America Through Other Eyes

As the United States commemorates its 250^th anniversary, it seems appropriate to reflect on what America represents, to us and the world, in 2026. The document we joyously uphold this weekend declares, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These aspirational words inspired the American Revolution. We are the only nation on earth founded on an idea, an aspirational dream of liberty and equality for all. If there is anything that makes America exceptional, that is it.

That we did not live up to these aspirations for the first nearly 190 years of our young existence, however, should not take away from the ideas those words embraced. The Declaration formed the bedrock of Frederick Douglass’s famous speech on July 5, 1852, which appealed to our nation’s moral conscience and exposed the inherent hypocrisy between its founding principles and everyday governance. Abraham Lincoln used the proposition that “all men are created equal” to formally challenge the institution of slavery in America. Women did not secure the right to vote until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. And in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked the founding ideals of equality and unalienable rights as a "promissory note" owed to Black Americans, a moral reckoning that came to fruition in his “I Have a Dream” speech four months later during the March on Washington.

Only when the long arc of the universe finally bent toward justice, with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, did our country begin to fulfill its promise of legal equality for all citizens. But the aspirational power of the words in the Declaration of Independence, what historian Jon Meacham calls “the Promise of America” in our ongoing project to secure a “more perfect Union,” is a beautiful thing worth celebrating.

America is also a nation of immigrants with a complicated past. For the vast majority of Americans whose families at one time arrived on our shores from foreign lands, we view ourselves as a land of abundant opportunity, a melting pot of diverse peoples and cultures united by a commitment to the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, and the pursuit of happiness. Americans proudly proclaim the United States a beacon of hope and light unto the nations, a place where people from all over the world come in search of economic opportunity, personal and religious freedom, and democracy.

Although our reputation as a place of refuge and asylum from a troubled world has been under extraordinary strain for the past 18 months, it is easier to preserve the myth of our own goodness than to reflect on more complex truths. Americans are a proud people. We see ourselves as the premier force for good in the world, for modernization and progress, as the arbiters of peace who stomp out terrorism and provide a pathway to democracy and civilization. Americans have long assumed that our intentions are pure, even if our actions are sometimes imperfect.

The rest of the world has a more nuanced view. They can see more clearly the hypocrisy of what America says and what it does. We leave our footprints all over the world. With over 800 military bases spread across more than 80 countries, we are the largest foreign military presence in human history. American corporate influence spans the globe, dominating international markets, technology, and pop culture. U.S. companies shape everything from global trade and digital infrastructure to local consumer habits worldwide. For some Americans, these are the things that instill pride and render America exceptional.

But for millions of people in foreign lands, a different picture of America emerges. During a talk in New York City in 2012, Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid noted what, to most foreigners, is an obvious truth: “There’s an America that exists inside the borders of the United States, which is a very different entity from the America that projects its force outside the United States.” There are “two Americas.”

One need only look to the long, dark history of U.S. covert operations and military aggressions on behalf of autocratic rulers, dictators, and anti-democratic forces in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. “No country,” writes Hamid, “inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people as far away, as America.”  It is something that most Americans think little about. We tend to be insular people. We rarely look outward, rarely consider what other people and countries think of us. And yet, we are surprised to learn that people in other parts of the world do not always perceive us as good and generous as we view ourselves.

Rescue workers at bombing site in Minab, Iran, Feb. 28, 2026
(Photo: Abbas Zakeri/Mehr News/Reuters via The Guardian)

Journalist and author Suzy Hansen reflected on these themes nine years ago in a beautifully written book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. Hansen grew up in a small, provincial town on the Jersey Shore and, like most Americans, knew next to nothing about Turkey’s history, culture, and traditions when she first arrived there in 2007. But over the next ten years, through her daily interactions with the people of Turkey, and in her travels to neighboring countries, Hansen developed a deeper understanding of the countries, people, and societies in which she immersed herself.

Living in Istanbul and opening herself to the experiences and perspectives of the people she met along the way created for Hansen an “American identity crisis.” Not because she doubted her inherent Americanness, her love of country and connection to her homeland, but because she re-discovered America through the eyes of the people she encountered in these foreign lands. She felt compelled to re-consider her long-held assumptions and ask why these foreigners knew so much more about her country than she did of theirs, and why she knew so little about how profoundly America had impacted, not always for good, this region of the world.

Hansen recalled one conversation she had with an Iraqi man at a café in 2012. “Over the course of our conversation I asked him what Iraq was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was growing up. He smiled. ‘I am always amazed when Americans ask me this,’ he said. ‘How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?’”

The Iraqi man had seen how U.S. support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s prolonged the brutal Iraq-Iran war that resulted in roughly one million casualties. He saw U.S. bombs nearly destroy Baghdad in 1991, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians. In 2003, he saw the U.S. invasion of Iraq severely destabilize the country and result in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, a deadly, prolonged sectarian civil war, an extensive and costly military occupation, and the rise of extremist groups like ISIS. And all Iraqis despised the U.S. imposed sanctions from 1990 to 2003, which as described by Hansen “destroyed the livelihoods of men and families, plunged people into poverty, and caused as many as five hundred thousand children to die. (About which Madeleine Albright—today a feminist icon—once said, ‘We think the price is worth it.’)” Hansen offered this additional assessment:

If as an American I merely ignored, was not incensed or heartbroken by American actions like sanctions, then it must have been because I somehow believed that those Iraqis were deserving of sanctions. What this does in the end is create a distance between myself and those foreigners I thought deserving of sanctions. It is one that cannot be bridged. The difference between us and them is that our country has created this universe in which sanctions are acceptable punishment for everyone except our country. It means that no other country can force my father to lose his job, or force my family to go hungry, or to break up my family, or to forever distort my future, but my country can do that to almost any other foreigner, including the man sitting across from you at a café.

At the time, most Americans perceived sanctions as a pressure-inducing tool of international diplomacy and assumed that life under Saddam Hussein was already terrible, which it was. “But what Americans likely didn’t know was that the Iraqi government had for a long time provided its people with adequate health care, schools, and social programs.” In the 1980s, Baghdad University had more female professors than did Princeton as late as 2009. Literacy in Iraq was at ninety percent. As Hansen explained:

While the Americans were promising a fantasy version of American life—all freedom and democracy—Iraqis likely envisioned a better version of Iraqi life, one rooted in history and reality. Americans never grasped that Iraqis might have their own idea of what a good life would entail. In the first days of the American occupation [post-2003]—and what would turn out to be the next decade—Iraqis were bewildered that the United States could not even provide them with electricity … In 1991, after the first Gulf War, Saddam got the lights back up within months.

Hansen had many such conversations with friends and acquaintances during her years overseas. The Iranians with whom Hansen spoke in her travels had never forgotten how the United States helped orchestrate the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1951, followed by U.S. support for the Shah and the CIA’s role in training agents of SAVAK, the brutal secret police service known for its severe torture techniques and violence against Iranian citizens and dissidents. Indeed, for most Iranians, “all the tensions that define the relations between United States and Iran today are rooted in the fall of Mossadegh.”

The Shah was a friend of the United States because we viewed him as Western-minded and a strong leader who supported “modernization” and was our ally in the Cold War. But to many Iranians, “modernity” meant American businesses profiting at Iranians’ expense in their country, the U.S. providing weapons to a brutal dictator, extensive poverty, and the terror of SAVAK. “Yet to this day,” as Hansen explained, “when a journalist like myself arrives in a foreign country, modernity is the measurement through which all standards of ‘success’ or goodness are judged, and the rejection of modernity by men such as the Iranian ayatollahs … is reviled as barbarism and backwardness, with complete disconnection from what modernization projects actually meant to that country’s hapless people.”

Hansen quotes Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who has written about how the West has failed to understand the sense of “humiliation” it has repeatedly inflicted on Muslim men. “The real challenge,” according to Pamuk, “is to understand the spiritual lives of the poor, humiliated, discredited people who have been excluded from its fellowship.” What drives many of these men “is not Islam or this idiocy people call the war between East and West, nor is it poverty; it is the impotence born of a constant humiliation, of a failure to make oneself understood, to have one’s voice heard.”

Even in Turkey, a “pro-business” and “moderate” Islamic country that has embraced and adopted much of the West’s notions of modernity while avoiding colonialism, the people’s lives have been substantially affected by American actions and policies. One of Hansen’s closest Turkish friends was a woman named Rana, who said that America had defined much of her life in Turkey. As Hansen explained:

For someone like Rana, America defined her life in the broadest terms; it was an American world, with American-made international laws, American wars on her borders, American military bases on her country’s soil, American movies in her movie theaters, American songs on the radio, American monetary exchange rates, American economic policies … and four whole pages devoted to American news in the Turkish newspapers. As we spoke, I could see that foreigners grew up without the very thing that Americans cherished so much about their American selves—their self-made story.

Regardless of how one may judge the successes and failures of American foreign policy, the perspectives conveyed by Hansen offer important considerations and painful truths. Hansen did not intend Notes on a Foreign Country to be an authoritative history of the countries discussed, and there are important countervailing narratives she overlooks or ignores. Written as part memoir, and fused with historical insight and background, Hansen’s writing questions American assumptions of superiority and examines the distance between what America thinks of itself and what it is to the rest of the world.

I feel extremely grateful and fortunate to have lived my whole life in the United States. But I found Hansen's book educational and eye opening because we are a country frequently unwilling to see the world from an unfiltered, non-American lens. It helped me understand more clearly why U.S. assertions of economic and military power rarely end well for the countries involved, and why U.S. knowledge and expertise often fall short in foreign lands.

From American interventions in Vietnam to the Middle East to Latin America, the United States too often asserts its power in countries and cultures we know little about and then makes things worse in the countries it disrupts. Despite our affluence, success, rich democratic traditions, and history, we have a lot to learn from other people, nations, and cultures.

So, as we proudly and joyously celebrate America’s 250th birthday, let us commit to our ongoing quest to achieve a “more Perfect union” and the promise that is America. But let us also recognize that, as strong and powerful and successful as the American experiment has become, we are not alone in this world. We are not superior or exceptional to anyone. And we should consider how our actions and policies may negatively impact people who strive, like all Americans, for a life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness and equality and justice for all.

Are We Outsourcing Humanity?

Image created by artificial intelligence (Google Gemini)

When it comes to technology, I am frequently behind the times. To say I am a Luddite might be an exaggeration, but I have certain tendencies that lean in that direction. In the early 2000s, my adolescent daughters had cell phones for three years before I finally bought one. When smart phones came out, I held onto my flip-phone for several more years. Andrea and I still maintain a landline, even though we use it to talk only with our respective mothers at ages 95 and 103. I reluctantly send and receive text messages, although I acknowledge it is the primary means of communicating with people under the age of 40.

My technological deficiencies notwithstanding, recently I have been trying to better understand artificial intelligence, its benefits and risks, applications and pitfalls. In planning a recent trip to the United Kingdom, I used Google Gemini to craft an itinerary that would allow Andrea and I to explore the important sights and experiences of London, Oxford, and Edinburgh, while also helping us navigate walking and public transportation, time parameters, and nearby restaurant options that would accommodate Andrea’s dietary restrictions. Gemini immediately put together an impressively organized itinerary that addressed all our concerns, asked useful follow-up questions, provided travel tips and advice, and seemed eager to please. Although I made modifications and additions, Gemini helped me develop a flexible schedule that guided each day of our trip.

Gemini has also become an important research tool. It provides answers to my questions within seconds. It places a universe of information and data at my fingertips. And it provides links to the sources of information relied upon, which allows me to verify and explore the answers more deeply.

As noted by Ezra Klein in The New York Times, artificial intelligence has already proven incredibly valuable in the fields of mathematics, medicine, and science:

An OpenAI model just disproved a conjecture that had eluded mathematicians for 80 years. A drug for pulmonary fibrosis just became the first fully A.I.-generated treatment with proven efficacy and safety in humans. A Mayo Clinic team developed an A.I. system that can detect pancreatic cancers on a CT scan up to three years before clinicians can see them. DeepMind’s Graphcast model appears to generate weather predictions both faster and more accurately than the supercomputer systems that are used now.

These accomplishments are only the beginning. There seems to be no limit to what artificial intelligence may eventually be capable of.

But sometimes artificial intelligence tries a little too hard to please, as if it trying to say, “Relax. Let me do all the work.” It is an issue that is top of mind for professors and teachers throughout the country, as they contend with students using Chat GPT to draft papers, essays, and reports. Just because we can do something does not always mean we should.

At what point do humans risk becoming too reliant on artificial intelligence? When do human beings stop thinking for themselves? These are not philosophical queries, but genuinely practical questions of urgency. If, for example, students are relying on AI to draft papers, book reports, and essays, why are they even in school? Teachers assign writing projects not so their students can regurgitate information but because researching and writing a paper or a report forces students to think and learn more deeply about a topic, struggle with how to synchronize, organize, and evaluate information, and effectively communicate thoughts, ideas, theories, and conclusions.

Writing, like education, is about process. It requires that we figure out through trial and error what we are trying to say. It may be true that outsourcing our thinking to AI systems is easier and faster and could free us up for other activities. Many businesses are using artificial intelligence to draft emails, reports, and memoranda on assorted topics. Although I have my doubts as to the accuracy and reliability of an AI-generated report, the use of artificial intelligence to perform such tasks is potentially more efficient and allows more work to be completed with fewer people. But is this really a good thing? Should we not proceed cautiously before incorporating artificial intelligence into every aspect of life and work?

I could have drafted this essay with the aid of artificial intelligence, but what would be the point? I write essays for “Ehlers on Everything” because it keeps me engaged, sharpens my mind, and keeps me curious. Writing helps me explore more deeply the issues or topics I choose to write about and keeps my creative juices flowing. Writing is an important part of my life, not because I have millions of readers (I do not) or because I make any money doing it (negative), but because it brings me great satisfaction. Writing requires me to think critically and creatively, to figure things out. It is hard and challenging work. That is the point.

The writing process often involves deleting an unsatisfactory paragraph and rewriting what I am attempting to say with more clarity. Especially when I start with a blank page and a vague idea of what direction I wish an essay to go, writing forces me to think, analyze, and evaluate. Anything that eliminates the arduous work of writing undermines my ability to think for myself. If that begins to happen regularly in school, or at work, or in science and medicine, or in how businesses interact with consumers and employees, it imperils the utility of humanity.

I have more questions. Will the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence lead to massive job losses? What if governments nefariously use artificial intelligence to conduct surveillance, or terrorist organizations use it to create bioweapons? How do we prevent a small group of powerful and wealthy billionaires (or trillionaires) from controlling how artificial intelligence is used and applied? How will the public benefit? And how do societies ensure that the public interest takes precedence over the powerful private interests seeking to become even more incredibly wealthy from their ownership and development of AI models and applications? And who decides?

More fundamentally, how will artificial intelligence impact humanity, our ability to think, create, and make us vulnerable? Will the wide-scale adoption of artificial intelligence stagnate and flatline the ability of human beings to think critically and creatively? Meghan O’Rourke, creative writing professor at Yale University, said in a recent New York Times essay, it is “easy to imagine that in a world of outsourced fluency, we might end up doing less and less by ourselves, while believing we’ve become more and more capable.”

Pope Leo XIV addressed some of the above concerns and questions in his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. I found the Pope’s encyclical to be a thoughtful guide for how humans should proceed in a world increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence and other forms of advanced technology.

Pope Leo acknowledges that artificial intelligence offers valuable applications in science, medicine, business, and other areas of life. But he rightly points out that AI models and applications are not morally neutral. He warns against the tendency to measure every decision based on how it impacts efficiency and profits. The most powerful technologies are not necessarily the best. If used unethically, or solely for profit and market dominance, the use of artificial intelligence risks undermining human dignity and the common good.

The Pope notes that AI models may become increasingly capable of imitating and simulating a human being, but these systems are not, and never will be, human. They do not possess a moral conscience, empathy, or relational and spiritual capabilities. “[H]umanity - in all its grandeur and woundedness - must never be replaced or surpassed.” While we should “embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities,” we must “not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love.” (¶ 126).

The Pope’s encyclical also addresses other areas of profound importance, including how artificial intelligence threatens to negatively impact the dignity of work; the environmental devastation and accelerated energy consumption required to build large, community-disruptive data centers; and the implications of using artificial intelligence in warfare (“Any technology that facilitates attacks without seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.”) (¶ 199). But all of it comes down to our need to remain human, and to not accede our humanity to automated systems of technology, no matter how capable those systems are.

In a 1981 commencement address at Colorado College, the late historian David McCullough said what I hope we never lose sight of:

Understanding the real world, being part of it and enjoying it, has mainly to do, I believe, with being a real person. That’s the point. It means taking an interest in other people, all kinds of people. It means enjoying people and trying to understand one another. It means kindnesses. It means doing what we can to move civilization forward, to make the world a little better place because we are in it.

When McCullough spoke those words 45 years ago, he had no way of knowing how radically transformed the world would become with the advent of computers, the internet, smart phones, and artificial intelligence. Despite these advances, McCullough continued to write all his brilliant books and speeches on an ancient Royal typewriter. He had no use for computers and artificial intelligence. And while McCullough may indeed represent a relic of the past, a remnant of what now seems like a slower paced, more genteel life, there remains wisdom in his words.

Susan Sontag, during a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2003, said, “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” As the Yale professor Meghan O’Rourke suggests, “This attention to the world is worth trying to preserve: The act of care that makes meaning - or insight - possible. To do so will require thought and work. We can’t just trust that everything will be fine.”

I do not claim to understand all the intricacies of artificial intelligence. Few of us do. That is part of the problem. Artificial intelligence and large language models like Chat GPT have the potential to replace humans in many tasks that, until now, required work and thought and trial-and-error. I worry that relying on artificial intelligence will undermine our ability to understand, to figure things out on our own. Indeed, this is already happening. Human individuality flows from the life of the mind at work. For the sake of humanity, and for the future of our children, we must preserve the profound human need for individuality, connection, love, and struggle. We must never lose our capacity to pay attention to the world and to each other.

Profiles in Courage and Heroism in the DRC

Dr. Richard Lokuda, Director of Mongbwalu General Hospital
(Photo: Arlette Bashizi, New York Times)

Great journalism does not simply report facts and events as they occur. It allows us to understand another person's reality, empathize with their suffering, recognize when doing nothing is no longer an option. A well-written news story informs. It touches our emotions and allows us to ask deeper questions. But rarely does a newspaper article leave me sitting in silence. A story in the May 30 edition of The New York Times is one of those rare pieces.

The Times recently sent its chief Africa correspondent, Declan Walsh, and photographer Arlette Bashizi to the village of Mongbwalu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This is the epicenter of the Ebola epidemic that is spreading fear, tragedy, and death throughout this grief-stricken region of the world. In words, photographs, and a nine-minute video summary, the article takes you inside the understaffed and under-resourced hospital that is trying in vain to treat growing numbers of Ebola patients in Mongbwalu, all at great risk to the doctors, hospital staff, and aid workers directly in harm’s way.

Accompanied by heartbreaking photography, Walsh’s writing paints a personal, touching, and frightening story to which the world urgently needs to respond:

In the cramped, dilapidated Ebola ward, a 5-year-old boy languished on a bare mattress, a tissue stuffed into his nose to stanch the incessant bleeding. His father stood over him, eyes clouded with worry.

A few beds away lay the body of Christiane Bahati, 21, who had died seven hours earlier but had not yet been taken away. Her shoes were still tucked under the bed, her wailing relatives gathered outside the ward doors.

The body, covered by a thin sheet, was highly contagious. Yet hardly anyone in the ward was protected. Relatives came and went, carrying food and water to ailing patients because the hospital had none to give them. A few wore rubber gloves or pulled a scarf across their mouths. Most had nothing at all.

In the next ward lay the hospital’s laboratory technician, also sick. Seven other hospital workers had already died from suspected Ebola. Few of the staff members had ever been trained to fight the disease, and the most rudimentary equipment was in dangerously short supply: tests, protective suits, goggles, masks, even drinking water.

Outside, the sound of hammering broke the hushed silence. Aid workers from Doctors Without Borders were racing to erect isolation tents and disinfection stations.

… arriving patients who do not have Ebola risk being infected by those who do. In fact, it is hard to know who has Ebola because test results from the regional capital, some 50 miles away, take four days or more to arrive, said the hospital director, Dr. Richard Lokudu.

By then, many patients have already died.

Dr. Alex Bogole, a Congolese doctor in the hospital’s intensive care ward, expressed anger at the world’s indifference, neglect, and inadequate response to the crisis.

The virus had been spreading for months, virtually unimpeded, “and this is the best we can do?” he said, the frustration pouring through his protective gear.

The medical staff at Mongbwalu General Hospital are completely overwhelmed. Three weeks before The Times published this story, the hospital’s anesthesiologist died. A day later, the hospital’s surgical assistant died. Over the previous 12 days, the hospital experienced more than 30 deaths. Many others died in their homes in Mongbwalu, where fear, dread, and confusion overwhelm its residents.

Meanwhile, misinformation proliferated on social media as many townspeople refused to accept that the virus was real. They instead blame the hospital, its doctors, and staff.

Some said the outbreak was a moneymaking plot concocted by Congolese doctors and foreign aid workers. Others called it a curse. Often, doctors say, the early symptoms of Ebola resemble other ailments, like malaria or typhoid, so by the time patients go to the hospital, many are already very sick and die quickly, heightening suspicion and distrust.

Two nights earlier, assailants had burned down an isolation ward in the hospital, shortly after Doctors Without Borders put it up. In the chaos, 18 patients suspected of having Ebola fled their beds and vanished into the town, potentially spreading the virus even more.

Fear understandably drives community perceptions. Faced with a sudden surge of deaths, some townspeople irrationally believe the hospital is the cause and not the solution to the outbreak. “We’re here to save them,” the hospital director Dr. Richard Lokudu told Walsh. “They think we want to kill them.”

Still, the medical workers and staff risk their lives every day. This includes the doctors and their assistants who directly care for the patients, administer intravenous fluids, monitor vitals, help alleviate patient suffering, and wash and sanitize bottles and protective gloves so they can be reused. It includes the Red Cross volunteers who transport the bodies of patients who die and then attempt to enforce protocols to ensure safe burial practices, as traditional funerals are a major vector of disease transmission. They all contend not only with the threat of a deadly virus, but also the possibility of attacks from their own community. They are the heroes of this story.

The information gap between the medical community and the general populace is one of the biggest obstacles to stopping the spread of the virus. As seen in the photos and video documentation, the doctors (and The Times reporter and photographer) wore full protective suits and gear. But the family members who brought food and water to patients were mostly unmasked and unprotected. They appeared almost unaware of the risks while understandably preoccupied with their loved ones’ survival.

It would be wrong to dismiss the people of Mongbwalu as ill-educated, uninformed, and ignorant. As Dr. Edward Blau, a retired physician, explained in The Times’ comment section:

The same thing happened during the worst of the COVID pandemic in this country during the height of the pandemic. Frightened and willfully ignorant patients led astray by … reactionaries and conspiracy theorists claimed the virus wasn't really that dangerous, was a myth, and falsely claimed quack drugs would cure them. Close to five thousand health care workers died here taking care of the sick, and there was never a national tribute to them, or a word of official thanks. Do not look at the pictures here and think we are better than them, because we are not.

As Walsh and Bashizi were leaving, Doctors Without Borders were sealing off the hospital and establishing a proper isolation ward. It is likely the virus has already circulated undetected for the past two months and penetrated deep into the surrounding communities. The true scale of the outbreak is thus unknown and frightening to contemplate. To protect overwhelmed health systems and prevent further transmission, the families and communities in the region urgently need access to reliable health information, early detection, and safe burials.

The inspiring stories of courage, compassion, grit, and kindness in the people caring for these vulnerable patients are what true heroism looks like. This is a story that demands attention. The Times article is worthy of a Pulitzer. The journalists covered it at great personal risk. Their words and photographs brought me to a place with which I would not have the courage to go. My deepest respect to Declan Walsh and Arlette Bashizi for bearing witness to suffering with such honesty, dignity, and compassion. The world needs more reporting like this. And a little more humanity.

*     *     *     *

Dr. Lokuda treating a patient
(Photo: Arlette Bashizi, New York Times)

According to experts at the World Health Organization (WHO), a vaccine against this species of Ebola will take six to nine months to develop. But Ebola is stopped on the ground by trusted local health workers, protective equipment, proper specimen transport, isolation units, and rapid response. Tragically, these are the very capacities profoundly weakened by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which affected billions of dollars in grant money for thousands of programs and nonprofit organizations around the world.

President Kennedy established USAID in 1961 to exercise American “soft power” in the form of financial resources, technical expertise, and humanitarian assistance to under-developed countries. In 1964, the agency's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) was created to "save lives, alleviate human suffering, and reduce the social and economic impact of disasters worldwide." For the past six decades, human need, not politics, drove USAID’s foreign disaster relief efforts, which received bipartisan support. Within hours of learning about the first signs of the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014, USAID drove in 28 trucks of personal protective equipment. President Obama deployed thousands of U.S. military personnel to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone to build treatment centers and train local healthcare workers. And he secured from Congress $5.4 billion in emergency funding, the largest single-nation contribution to an infectious disease outbreak in history. These efforts played a tremendous part in stemming the spread of the virus and eliminating the danger to the rest of the world.

But in early 2025, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and his team of 20-something “whiz kids” thought it would be a clever idea to eliminate USAID, the agency most equipped to help with foreign disasters such as the Ebola outbreak. USAID staff in Washington who had dedicated their careers to the OFDA received emails informing them they were fired and had fifteen minutes to exit the building. Security personnel escorted them out. Also terminated were thousands of USAID employees across the globe.

The dismantling of USAID has been exacerbated by America’s withdrawal from the WHO, substantially reduced funding for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and politically motivated cuts to science and medical research facilities at the nation’s universities. Clueless people who "move fast and break things" do not belong anywhere in government. It is a recipe for a world catastrophe.

Collectively, these actions significantly disrupted and slowed the world’s response to the Ebola outbreak. As reported in a May 20 New York Times report, the WHO first learned of a cluster of unexplained deaths on May 5, 2026. “The organization promptly alerted the International Health Regulations, a legal framework for disclosing outbreaks. But the United States withdrew from the W.H.O. earlier this year, cut funding to the organization and rejected the framework, and American officials no longer talk regularly with their international partners.” When the U.S. government finally received confirmation of the Ebola outbreak on May 14, the virus had already infected 250 people, caused 80 deaths, and begun to spread across international borders.

The United States used to fund robust disease surveillance networks that maintained emergency teams who could respond rapidly to public health crises like the current Ebola outbreak. That all ended with the shutdown of USAID. CDC funding cuts further resulted in the loss of hundreds of experts, including in the DRC, who could have helped contain the epidemic. Moreover, as The Times noted:

Numerous positions in the U.S. government created to help detect and respond to global health threats remain vacant. The coordinator for global health security, a position created by Congress in 2023 to oversee preparedness to biological threats, is unfilled. The White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, established by Congress in 2022, is also unstaffed.

The C.D.C.’s emerging disease center has lost about 700 staff members and contractors, including the head of the Division of High-Consequence Pathogens, which covers hantavirus and Ebola. The C.D.C.’s Global Health Center has lost hundreds more employees, including many who helped African health ministries manage disease outbreaks.

… the C.D.C.’s Congo office has seven vacant positions for American staff, including the deputy director of the global health protection program and director of the H.I.V. program. (Staff from all programs would typically help in a large outbreak like this one.)

C.D.C.’s country office in Uganda likewise has at least four vacant spots, including the leaders of the global health protection and H.I.V. programs.

The Trump administration has instead prioritized a close-the-border approach to the current crisis. Although it recently committed slightly more than $200 million to the Ebola response in the DRC and Uganda, most global health experts consider this inadequate, especially considering the structural dismantling of foundational healthcare systems and long-term funding cuts inflicted by Musk and Trump over the past fifteen months. It reflects poorly on us as a nation. We can and must do better.

The mining town of Mongbwalu
(Photo: Arlette Bashizi, New York Times)

Let me close with a prayer for the medical workers and Red Cross volunteers who do God’s work every day at significant risk to themselves, while the world sits mostly in silence. These men and women are on the front lines combatting a frightening disease, widespread ignorance, and misinformation. They deserve our heartfelt thanks, praise, and support. Doctors Without Borders and other organizations assisting with these valiant efforts deserve our generous financial support. Human beings should never have to suffer like this. The world must respond.