For those who have never heard of TED, here is the description from there about page.
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
Monday through Friday every week they post a new talk from one of their conferences on their web site for all to enjoy for free. The talk posted on Friday of this week, Sherwin Nuland: A meditation on hope, is a profound study of the idea of hope and how it drives us to make the world a better place.
The follow is from Dr. Nuland's biography.
A practicing surgeon for three decades, Sherwin Nuland witnessed life and death in every variety. Then he turned to writing, exploring what there is to people beyond just anatomy.
Watch the full video below the fold, or at the TED web site.
Dr. Nuland speaks eloquently of hope, philanthropy, global responsibility and our roll in shaping the future. It is a strong call for progressive ideals to shape the future. It was recorded in 2003, but it is still extraordinarily relevant at this time. I have nothing profound to add to his words, so I'll share a few of them which strike me as particularly insightful. I transcribed this directly from the video, and any errors are mine.
First his definition of hope.
The word hope is a stem, keu, we would spell it keu, it's pronounced koi, and it is the same root which the word curve comes from. But what it means in the original endo-European is a change in direction, going in a different way.
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When we think of hope now, we have to think of looking in going in other directions than we have been looking.
There is another, not definition, but description, of hope that has always appealed to me, and it was one that Vokliv Hoval(sp?) in his perfectly spectacular book, "Breaking the Peace", in which he says that hope does not consist of the expectation that things will come out exactly right, but the expectation that they will make sense, regardless of how they come out.
He goes on to talk about how the human spirit can save the world. First quoting Dean Kamen.
"The world will not be saved by the Internet." It's wonderful. You know what the world will be saved by? I'll tell you, it'll be saved by the human spirit. And by the human spirit I don't mean divine, I don't mean anything supernatural, certainly not coming from this skeptic.
What I mean is this ability that each of us has to be something greater than herself, or himself. To arise out of our ordinary selves and achieve something that at the beginning we thought perhaps we were not capable of.
Quoting the poet Percy Shelly he speaks of the true root of the progressive idealism I believe.
He begins talking about the notion that he calls 'moral imagination,' and here's what he says, roughly translated.
"A man, (generic man), a man to be greatly good, must imagine clearly, he must see himself and the world through the eyes of another, and of many others."
And he goes on to talk about the role of the United States in the world.
There is a great deal of argument about whether we, as the great nation that we are, should be the policemen of the world. The world's constabulary. But there should be virtually no argument about whether we should be the world's healer.
There are many more important and profound insights in this talk, and I hope you take time to experience them all.