The Generosity of Spirit

The type of leadership that climate stabilization will depend on

Photo by Andrew Wagner on Unsplash

I was reading Molly McKew’s Great Power Substack yesterday morning—her series on what she calls “wars of incidental liberation”—and I started weeping at my kitchen table.

McKew was writing about American power, the wars in Iran and Venezuela, and how this administration has debased the country's greatest achievement: the 20th-century codification of human rights and freedom in international law. But the part that broke me was her writing about what's been lost more broadly. I want to quote her at length because she said it so perfectly:

While there are plenty of times in history when our language of liberation to justify foreign intervention fell short of its goals or was really just reflexive geopolitics, the embrace of the cynicism — “At least Trump is honest that it’s all bullshit and we never cared at all” — is a reflection of our eroding belief in the founding ideas of our republic. It is a reflection of the exceptionally poor leadership that currently fills the ranks of public and private posts on America, in elected and appointed office, in institutions of education and civic life, in posts of moral, financial, corporate, and scientific authority. No one can be bothered to convince anyone of anything. Polls are designed to capture the laziest and most detached definition of citizen responsibility, and our leaders rely on them to absolve themselves of doing anything hard. The metrics by which we judge our lives are wrong, and the money is rewarded to those who stand for nothing and are the least willing to give any consideration to the people around them.

The generosity of spirit that once defined our nation — generosity of shared freedom, generosity of opportunity, generosity of possibility, generosity of common aspiration — is tangibly absent now, a dream that was so desperate and sweet that you did not want to wake from it and reach out your sleepy fingers to brush the wisps as they dispel.

I talk about this absence of any real leadership anywhere in our society all the time with friends. There is this palpable sense that corruption and grift and incompetence are rewarded while genuine conviction is punished. But McKew put it so beautifully that it cut through all my intellectual defenses and just hit me in the chest. And it resonated with me on why working on climate stabilization feels so urgent and so difficult at the same time: the kind of leadership we need—the kind that makes an affirmative case for doing something ambitious and hard—is exactly the kind that our culture has stopped producing.

---

Martin Gurri published a book in 2014 called The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority, whose central argument keeps proving itself right. The digital age, he argued, has given rise to populist movements that are extraordinarily good at tearing things down but almost entirely incapable of building anything in their place. Gurri calls this negation—the capacity for destruction and opposition without any corresponding capacity for construction. The information environment practically guarantees it. Outrage is the native language of social media, and tearing something down in 280 characters will always be easier than building a coalition around a complicated, uncertain idea. So the culture gets very good at one thing and loses the capacity for the other.

What I notice is that even the writers and thinkers I admire who push back against this, who advocate for building and creation and ambition, often do so with a layer of snark or irony or darkness over everything. There’s almost no space in our current cultural moment to take a courageous stand with sincerity, without the protective coating of cynicism. Being earnest about something you believe in makes you a target. Being above it all keeps you safe. So even the builders hedge, and the muscle for making a genuine, exposed, generous case for something keeps weakening from disuse.

That’s what McKew was doing in that passage, and that’s why it made me tear up. She was being sincere about ideals in a media landscape that rewards cynicism. She was making an affirmative case for what America should mean, with real emotional investment, knowing it would be easier and safer to just be angry. Encountering that felt like finding water in a desert.

---

I’ve always loved history, and I think this is part of the reason. I’m drawn to Lincoln during the Civil War, Washington during the Revolution, and Eisenhower managing the impossible complexity of D-Day and the Allied command. These are leaders who operated in circumstances where good outcomes looked unlikely and who chose to make the case for something larger than themselves anyway. What they shared was a willingness to articulate a vision of what could be and then do the grinding, unglamorous work of convincing others it was worth pursuing.

The speech that defined the American civil rights movement wasn’t a negation. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t get up and catalogue injustices, though we know he had the material. MLK’s “I have a dream” speech made the affirmative case for what America could become, and it was so powerful that it reorganized the entire moral landscape of the country. He did this while facing a level of hostility that makes our current discourse look gentle, and he still led with vision rather than grievance. That’s what generosity of spirit looks like when it’s applied to the hardest problems. It’s the belief that your fellow citizens are capable of being moved, and that a case made with conviction can actually change what’s possible, even when everything around you suggests otherwise.

I rewatch Band of Brothers most years around D-Day, the HBO miniseries based on Stephen Ambrose’s history of Easy Company, who fought from Normandy to the end of the war. What strikes me every time is the sheer weight of what was required to win that war and the kinds of things that ordinary people had to do and endure, day after day, to get through it. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation, on the total competence porn of Captain Picard and his crew solving thorny problems through intelligence and integrity. I’ve seen The Lord of the Rings I don’t even know how many times, and one of the many scenes that always gets me is Sam’s speech to Frodo in Osgiliath, when everything is falling apart and there’s no reason to keep going and Sam tries to explain why they can’t give up. “Because there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

I know these are fictions, or in the case of Band of Brothers a dramatization of real history, but they reveal what we ought to value. And in every case, the thing that resonates is the affirmative vision of something that is worth building, worth protecting, and worth the cost.

---

The reason I’m writing about all of this in a newsletter about climate interventions is that this is the central problem. All of this <flails hands about> requires the thing that’s disappearing.

Climate stabilization—the project of humanity actively intervening to preserve livable conditions while we scale decarbonization and carbon removal—is maybe the most ambitious affirmative project ever contemplated. It requires trust in institutions when trust is cratered. It demands coordinated global action in an era of fragmenting alliances. And most of all it needs leaders willing to make a public case for something uncertain and unprecedented, when the entire information environment that Gurri describes punishes exactly that.

The broader climate movement has long been stuck in its own version of the negation problem. We have had decades of opposition saying stop drilling, ban this, and phase out that. To be clear, I agree with all of it. I very much want to see fossil fuels phased out. But I’ve long known that I don’t identify as an environmentalist, and I think one of the reasons is that environmentalism as currently practiced is primarily organized around opposition. It’s a movement defined by what it’s against. Nobody will ever storm a beach for “sustainability.” The word is a placeholder, not a vision.

I want to be for something.

What I’m for is the idea that humanity can rise to this moment. That we’re capable of the kind of coordinated, intelligent, ambitious action that the climate crisis requires. This goes so far beyond just stopping the harm. We must reduce emissions, remove carbon dioxide, and also stabilize conditions while those slower solutions scale. That’s a technical framework, sure, but more than that it’s an affirmative vision of human capability, a statement about what we believe people can do together.

When I look at the history I love, the moments of greatest moral achievement came not from opposition alone but from people articulating what could be and then building toward it even when the odds were terrible. The Second World War required a level of society-wide mobilization that had never been attempted, and something extraordinary came out of it: the codification of universal human rights and the construction of international institutions designed to prevent it from happening again. A generation looked at the worst thing humanity had ever done and decided to build something better from the wreckage. That’s what McKew is mourning the loss of. And it’s what climate change requires of our generation, if we can find a way to answer.

---

I hold two things simultaneously and I know they’re in tension. I believe in targeted, strategic work, by which I mean finding the right people, making the case where it has the highest leverage, and unlocking resources through focused effort rather than trying to go viral. That’s the realistic path in a world where mass persuasion is broken, and it’s the approach I take in my actual day-to-day work. At the same time, I feel the loss of something that strategic influence can never replace: the public act of leadership as generosity, and of treating whole populations as worthy of being brought along rather than worked around.

Climate stabilization will eventually need both. Strategic work can unlock research funding and build institutional capacity. But you can’t deploy interventions that affect the entire planet’s climate system on the strength of insider buy-in alone. At some point, we need public leaders willing to make the case—the real, full, emotionally honest case—that humanity should choose to actively stabilize its climate, and that this project deserves the ambition and collective effort it will require. Many people will be needed to describe the vision.

We’re not there yet though. I don’t think the space is ready for that, and I don’t pretend to have a formula for getting there. But reading McKew reminded me that the capacity for generosity of spirit is dormant, not dead. People still respond to it when they encounter it. I responded to it. The instinct to be moved by a genuine case for something bigger than yourself, to want to join up and contribute, hasn’t been bred out of us. It’s just been starved by an environment that feeds on negation instead.

What climate stabilization needs—what the world needs, honestly—is more people willing to starve the negation and practice the alternative. We need more people making the affirmative case for something, clearly, with conviction, without retreating behind irony or hedging into pure opposition. No one person’s argument is going to turn the tide, but the muscle only comes back through use, and the problems we face won’t wait for us to get comfortable first.

---

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.