Baltic Summer Academy 2010, Pärnu (Estonia)

CLOSING REMARKS: THE NEED FOR MORAL COURAGE

We have discussed the rapidly disappearing fossil energy sources, climate

change and all the other negative effects which are intertwined with this stage of

the Industrial Age or fossil economy. And I told you we need nothing less than a

whole system change, and that bringing about this revolution is in fact the

challenge for our generation.

The challenges are great, one might even call them enormous and I tried to make

my point that we in our time will face nothing less than the end of an era –the

Industrial age – by going through a inevitable revolution. Either that, or the end

of civilisation as we know it.

The question now comes really down to the following: do you have the guts to

become a revolutionary?

At the beginning of our talk I spoke about three categories in which you could

fall:

- you can be cynical about climate change and dwindling fossil resources,

and think it is either a big fuss about nothing or that the world is going to

hell anyways and there is nothing you can do about it;

- you can choose to ignore it, by closing your ears and eyes to the warning

signals and the logic that our growth-mania cannot last, in fact copying

the externalising behaviour of the big corporations I mentioned before;

- or you can choose to become involved, to care and to act.

I hope there are not too many of the first two categories around in this

generation, because then we can congratulate Saremaa in a few decades on

becoming the new Mallorca, with the Mediterranean turned into a desert.

If you, however, feel that you need to do something, the challenges ahead might

seem overwhelming to you.

„There is“ an Italian philosopher once said, „nothing more difficult to take in

hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its succes than to take the

lead in the introduction of a new order of things.“ Yet this is actually precisely

what is required from this generation!

Because the barriers of this quickly changing earth will not be taken away by old

dogmas and outworn slogans. Change cannot be achieved by those who cling to

an Age which is in its terminal phase, who prefer the illusion of security to the

excitement and risk which belongs to every new direction taken. This quickly

changing world demands the qualities of youth: not as a certain age, but as a

state of mind.

What I ask foremost of you –what I ask of myself – is that you question

yourself. That you are most critical of the taken assumptions and dead ends you

were told there are. That you do not shy away of answering those critical

questions, even if the answers might change your whole paradigm.

How many people sometimes feel there is something more, there is more to their

lives than just work, watching television and sleeping –with the occasional

drunkeness called a social gathering– and who still seek security in their jobs,

houses, seemingly stable yet superficial relationships –in short comfort..

But if you consider what I told you before just only a little bit true, then you

realise that these securities are false, that this security is an illusion. We, in our

lives, will experience climate change still and –if we do not act – maybe even

global conflict which affects us too, especially in our material posessions.

Ask yourself: when you are looking back on your life when you are 80 years

old, will you actual care about the material gains you made, the houses and cars

you had, and the seemingly stable yet dull and loveless relationship you stayed

in? Wouldn’t you have the feeling that you relied on your fear of losing, on

other people’s ratio and wouldn’t you regret you did not follow your own heart?

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: „Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron

string.“

You people call yourself politically engaged, you state you want to contribute to

society. Then maybe it is time to listen where your heart vibrates to.

You can choose to be the well-meaning politician of whom there are so many,

who fools himself in thinking: „Okay, I have the choice: either I stand up to

these big challenges and fail surely because they are so great and I am so small

and maybe because of this failure I will lose my job, wreck my career. Or I can

conform only a little and try to bend and improve the situation a little bit better.

Well, if I loose my job, nothing is going to change, right? It will be a failure..

And if I stay, well, at least I can do something.. It will be a little bit less of a

failure..”

But it will be a failure nonetheless!

How many people do not dare, how many people convince themselves not to

act, because it seems too risky, too uncertain, too insecure.. while not realising

that they are in fact taking the biggest risk: the risk of not living their lives to

their full capabilities and possibilities!

The Need for Moral Courage

If, however, you do stand up and try to answer some of the questions and at the

end take on some of the challenges – step out of the bubble, so to speak – then

maybe you’ll find yourself very alone. Because you are in politics, and you will

have a hard mission to fulfill, while you can lose everything by not adhering to

your party chiefs, the logic of the media or the pressure of public opinion –but

instead: by becoming an independently thinking and acting –at all costs -

politician.

This takes something which is called moral courage, which is hardest to find.

“Because true courage is not fearlesness, recklessy riding towards the sound of

the guns. True courage is overcoming fear, the kind of nameles dread that curls

around the heart in the hours before dawn.”

There were many before you, who acted courageously. Traudl Junge, the

personal secretary of Hitler who stayed in Führer-bunker till the end, told the

following in an interview one month before her death. She was twenty-one when

she entered into Hitler’s service and in the years after the war she coped with

this by telling herself that she was too young to realise the wrongness and the

horror. Then, in Munich, three years after the war, she came across the statue of

Sophie Scholl, a twenty-one year old student who was part of the resistance

group the White Rose and was executed for writing resistance leaflets. She had

the chance to blame everything on her brother and walk freely. Instead Sophie

told her Gestapo investigator: “No, I was part of this resistance and I am proud

of it!” She was put under the guillontine directly after her trial. Seeing this statue

and acknowledging that Sophie Scholl was murdered at exactly the same age as

Junge started to work for Hitler, she realised that youth is never an excuse to

ask the right, difficult questions.

Another example: Robert F. Kennedy. His brother, President John F. Kennedy,

was murdered in 1963. As an attorney general, he was a tough guy, dedicated

entirely to his brother’s program and glory. After the death of his brother he re-

invented himself and –after long hesitations – he ran for president in 1968

because he felt the war in Vietnam and the detoriating situation in the States,

with growing poverty, the growing power of corporation, the almost divine

meaning which was given to GDP growth, was hurting America deeply morally.

And although he had this gut feeling, like many with him, that there were, in his

words “guns between me and the White House”, he continued on campaigning.

He told his audience once:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change

a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the

history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to

improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny

ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of

energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the

mighiest walls of resistance.”

I do not pretend I posess the moral courage Sophie Scholl and Robert Kennedy

displayed. But we can all look at them as examples, and at least strive to be as

courageous as them one day.

At the end it is a matter of belief, that might the biggest challenge to you

personally: Do you believe that change is possible and do you believe that

you can contribute to this?

We, the human race, are capable of destroying ourselves but also to achieve the

most amazing goals. And therefore I believe: this generation truly can be the

best generation yet or the last.

As Bobby Kennedy said many times in his last campaign:

“Some men see things the way they are and ask: why? I dream of things that

never were, and say: why not.”

Thank you.