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You know, I am so bad at tech

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that my daughter -- who is now 41 --

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when she was five, was overheard by me

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to say to a friend of hers,

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If it doesn't bleed when you cut it,

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my daddy doesn't understand it.

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(Laughter)

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So, the assignment I've been given 


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may be an insuperable obstacle for me,

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but I'm certainly going to try.

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What have I heard

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during these last four days?

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This is my third visit to TED.

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One was to TEDMED, and one, as you've heard,

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was a regular TED two years ago.

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I've heard what I consider an extraordinary thing

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that I've only heard a little bit in the two previous TEDs,

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and what that is is an interweaving

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and an interlarding, an intermixing,

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of a sense of social responsibility

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in so many of the talks --

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global responsibility, in fact,

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appealing to enlightened self-interest,

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but it goes far beyond enlightened self-interest.

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One of the most impressive things

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about what some, perhaps 10,

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of the speakers have been talking about

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is the realization, as you listen to them carefully, that they're not saying:

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Well, this is what we should do; this is what I would like you to do.

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It's: This is what I have done

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because I'm excited by it,

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because it's a wonderful thing, and it's done something for me

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and, of course, it's accomplished a great deal.

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It's the old concept, the real Greek concept,

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of philanthropy in its original sense:

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phil-anthropy, the love of humankind.

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And the only explanation I can have

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for some of what you've been hearing in the last four days

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is that it arises, in fact, out of a form of love.

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And this gives me enormous hope.

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And hope, of course, is the topic

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that I'm supposed to be speaking about,

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which I'd completely forgotten about until I arrived.

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And when I did, I thought,

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well, I'd better look this word up in the dictionary.

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So, Sarah and I -- my wife -- walked over to the public library,

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which is four blocks away, on Pacific Street, and we got the OED,

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and we looked in there, and there are 14 definitions of hope,

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none of which really hits you

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between the eyes as being the appropriate one.

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And, of course, that makes sense,

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because hope is an abstract phenomenon; it's an abstract idea,

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it's not a concrete word.

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Well, it reminds me a little bit of surgery.

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If there's one operation for a disease, you know it works.

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If there are 15 operations, you know that none of them work.

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And that's the way it is with definitions of words.

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If you have appendicitis, they take your appendix out, and you're cured.

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If you've got reflux oesophagitis, there are 15 procedures,

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and Joe Schmo does it one way

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and Will Blow does it another way,

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and none of them work, and that's the way it is with this word, hope.

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They all come down to the idea of an expectation

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of something good that is due to happen.

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And you know what I found out?

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The Indo-European root of the word hope

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is a stem, K-E-U --

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we would spell it K-E-U; it's pronounced koy --

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and it is the same root from which the word curve comes from.

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But what it means in the original Indo-European

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is a change in direction, going in a different way.

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And I find that very interesting and very provocative,

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because what you've been hearing in the last couple of days

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is the sense of going in different directions:

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directions that are specific and unique to problems.

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There are different paradigms.

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You've heard that word several times in the last four days,

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and everyone's familiar with Kuhnian paradigms.

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So, when we think of hope now,

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we have to think of looking in other directions

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than we have been looking.

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There's another -- not definition, but description, of hope

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that has always appealed to me, and it was one by Václav Havel

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in his perfectly spectacular book "Breaking the Peace,"

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in which he says that hope

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does not consist of the expectation that things will

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come out exactly right,

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but the expectation that they will make sense

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regardless of how they come out.

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I can't tell you how reassured I was

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by the very last sentence

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in that glorious presentation by Dean Kamen a few days ago.

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I wasn't sure I heard it right,

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so I found him in one of the inter-sessions.

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He was talking to a very large man, but I didn't care. 


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I interrupted, and I said, "Did you say this?"

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He said, "I think so."

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So, here's what it is: I'll repeat it.

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"The world will not be saved by the Internet."

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It's wonderful. Do you know what the world will be saved by?

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I'll tell you. It'll be saved by the human spirit.

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And by the human spirit, I don't mean anything divine,

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I don't mean anything supernatural --

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certainly not coming from this skeptic.

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What I mean is this ability

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that each of us has

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to be something greater than herself or himself;

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to arise out of our ordinary selves and achieve something

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that at the beginning we thought perhaps we were not capable of.

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On an elemental level, we have all felt

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that spirituality at the time of childbirth.

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Some of you have felt it in laboratories;

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some of you have felt it at the workbench.

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We feel it at concerts.

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I've felt it in the operating room, at the bedside.

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It is an elevation of us beyond ourselves.

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And I think that it's going to be, in time,

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the elements of the human spirit that we've been hearing about

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bit by bit by bit from so many of the speakers in the last few days.

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And if there's anything that has permeated this room,

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it is precisely that.

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I'm intrigued by

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a concept that was brought to life

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in the early part of the 19th century --

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actually, in the second decade of the 19th century --

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by a 27-year-old poet

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whose name was Percy Shelley.

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Now, we all think that Shelley

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obviously is the great romantic poet that he was; 


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many of us tend to forget that he wrote

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some perfectly wonderful essays, too,

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and the most well-remembered essay

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is one called "A Defence of Poetry."

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Now, it's about five, six, seven, eight pages long,

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and it gets kind of deep and difficult after about the third page,

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but somewhere on the second page

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he begins talking about the notion

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that he calls "moral imagination."

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And here's what he says, roughly translated:

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A man -- generic man --

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a man, to be greatly good,

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must imagine clearly.

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He must see himself and the world

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through the eyes of another,

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and of many others.

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See himself and the world -- not just the world, but see himself.

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What is it that is expected of us

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by the billions of people

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who live in what Laurie Garrett the other day

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so appropriately called

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despair and disparity?

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What is it that they have every right

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to ask of us?

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What is it that we have every right to ask of ourselves,

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out of our shared humanity and out of the human spirit?

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Well, you know precisely what it is.

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There's a great deal of argument

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about whether we, as the great nation that we are,

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should be the policeman of the world,

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the world's constabulary,

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but there should be virtually no argument

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about whether we should be the world's healer.

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There has certainly been no argument about that

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in this room in the past four days.

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So, if we are to be the world's healer,

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every disadvantaged person in this world --

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including in the United States -- becomes our patient.

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Every disadvantaged nation, and perhaps our own nation,

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becomes our patient.

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So, it's fun to think about the etymology of the word "patient."

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It comes initially from the Latin patior, to endure, or to suffer.

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So, you go back to the old Indo-European root again,

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and what do you find? The Indo-European stem is pronounced payen --

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we would spell it P-A-E-N -- and, lo and behold, mirabile dictu,

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it is the same root as the word compassion comes from, P-A-E-N.

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So, the lesson is very clear. The lesson is that our patient --

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the world, and the disadvantaged of the world --

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that patient deserves our compassion.

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But beyond our compassion, and far greater than compassion,

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is our moral imagination

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and our identification with each individual

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who lives in that world,

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not to think of them as a huge forest,

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but as individual trees.

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Of course, in this day and age, the trick is not to let each tree

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be obscured by that Bush in Washington that can get --

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can get in the way.

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(Laughter)

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So, here we are.

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We are, should be,

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morally committed to

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being the healer of the world.

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And we have had examples over and over and over again --

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you've just heard one in the last 15 minutes --

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of people who have not only had that commitment,

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but had the charisma, the brilliance --

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and I think in this room it's easy to use the word brilliant, my God --

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the brilliance to succeed at least at the beginning

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of their quest,

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and who no doubt will continue to succeed,

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as long as more and more of us enlist ourselves in their cause.

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Now, if we're talking

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about medicine,

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and we're talking about healing,

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I'd like to quote someone who hasn't been quoted.

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It seems to me everybody in the world's been quoted here:

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Pogo's been quoted;

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Shakespeare's been quoted backwards, forwards, inside out.

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I would like to quote one of my own household gods.

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I suspect he never really said this,

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because we don't know what Hippocrates really said,

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but we do know for sure that one of the great Greek physicians

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said the following,

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and it has been recorded in one of the books attributed to Hippocrates,

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and the book is called "Precepts."

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And I'll read you what it is.

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Remember, I have been talking about,

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essentially philanthropy:

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the love of humankind, the individual humankind

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and the individual humankind 


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that can bring that kind of love

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translated into action,

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translated, in some cases, into enlightened self-interest.

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And here he is, 2,400 years ago:

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"Where there is love of humankind,

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there is love of healing."

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We have seen that here today

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with the sense,

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with the sensitivity --

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and in the last three days,

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and with the power of the indomitable human spirit.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)