America on the Brink

David Ger­gen has served four dif­fer­ent Amer­i­can pres­i­dents (Nixon, Ford, Rea­gan, and Clin­ton), and he now heads the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Lead­er­ship at the Har­vard Kennedy School. Last month Ger­gen, known for being a mea­sured observ­er of pol­i­tics, spoke before the Com­mon­wealth Club of Cal­i­for­nia and issued a very sober warn­ing: Amer­i­ca faces mon­u­men­tal prob­lems. But unfor­tu­nate­ly our capac­i­ty to address them has nev­er been so dimin­ished, and we’re this close to head­ing into a civ­i­liza­tion­al decline. Just what is lim­it­ing our abil­i­ty to han­dle these prob­lems? If you cut to the chase, it’s a mediocre gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­cans – politi­cians, busi­ness lead­ers, media moguls, cit­i­zens – habit­u­al­ly putting per­son­al inter­ests first and the greater good sec­ond. It’s not a pret­ty pic­ture, but Ger­gen sug­gests a few ways out of the woods. (Hint: edu­ca­tion counts here.) You can stream the talk here, grab it on iTunes, or lis­ten below. And if you think there’s noth­ing you can per­son­al­ly do to make this gen­er­a­tion a bet­ter one, I sug­gest you watch the last few min­utes of this Robert Sapol­sky video.