True Greatness is Always Complicated

February 25, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

After my post about Kobe Bryant two weeks ago, I heard from a number of you who couldn’t get over the accusation of rape that still metastasized in the middle of his legacy.

I’d acknowledged that Bryant was an introvert who still needed to tell his story about the struggle between good and evil inside him—and, by implication—how laudable that was. But as I read it again, the shortness of the piece didn’t do justice to the darkness in him, at least in part because so many of Bryant’s mourners didn’t seem to be grappling with his dark side at all. They were fans who had lost a hero, and for them the “Mamba” in him was mostly, if not entirely, a good thing given the adolescent ways we think about winning and sum up complicated lives while the grief of loss still stings.

So I’ve poured over the memorial articles about him, including those that Longreads (an on-line curator of stories) assembled into “The Ugliness of Greatness Reading List” about his life, his passing and our reactions to it.

After he retired from his obsession of playing basketball better than anyone, Bryant reverted to an even deeper preoccupation, making it (along with his family) into his fulltime projects. Since his retirement from basketball in 2016, a big part of his life work became telling the story that had always interested him most, so that he could profit (and others might too) from his portrayal of struggles like the ones that were inside of him. Stories about competition and the pursuit of excellence and falling along the way. Like his storytelling heroes created Darth Vader, Voldermort and Jaws, Bryant would tell stories that spoke to his alter-ego and how to hold him in check.

I thought it a worthy encore career for him (or for anyone, really), but again the short-form of my research and subsequent post didn’t remove the suspicion that this might be a marketing proposition for the Kobe Bryant product line instead of the kind of soul-searching that could impact the ways that we saw ourselves too. So I wanted to read more, and by seeing him through others’ eyes, decide whether I’d been right in concluding that there are deeper lessons in his life, in his death and in what we seemed to be taking from them.

What follows are excerpts from articles that were written about Kobe Bryant after his helicopter fell from the sky and his story risked getting lost in the shuffle of our grief. My job was easier because the Longreads editors gathered so many terrific stories, with the haunting (but unattributed) photograph up top coming from one of them: Jeremy Gordon’s “Two Things Can Be True, But One is Always Mentioned First” in The Outline.

I brought three questions with me while I read, and I’ve grouped what I discovered about Bryant and the troubling ways we process the passing of conflicted heroes under them.

What set Kobe Bryant apart?

First off, it is useful to recall the range of his excellence as an athlete. In his article in The Outline, Gordon says of Bryant:

He exemplified excellence as grim-jawed killer instinct (murder your opponents on the court), relentless hard work (practice for hours, because the sport demands it), blunt honesty (if your teammates suck, call them out), and beatific monologing about loving the game, which to him was a way of life.

Of course, as it turned out, “his way of life” was what he wanted to tell us about most. Writing about Bryant in The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas beautifully observed:

It seemed, for a while, that he only saw himself as a winner, but it turned out that he saw himself as a storyteller. At times, this quality could make him seem a little slick, aware of his own personal mythology. But as his career progressed—and as he fought back from injury after injury—he became more expansive about the narrative power of sports, its ability to transform an inner struggle into an outer one. He didn’t hide the fact that he was angry, that he could be selfish, that he was warped by his overwhelming competitive instincts. In a 2014 [New Yorker] profile by Ben McGrath, Bryant, in discussing an outburst by the football player Richard Sherman, talked about the “ugliness of greatness.

Part of it, surely, was because Bryant’s focus was narrow, inwardly focused and relentless. In his piece “What Made Kobe Different” Jonathan Abrams began with Bryant’s own words to describe his careers as a basketball player and more recently:

I have such a narrow focus. As you can see, I didn’t have much time to socialize at all. When I wasn’t training, I was writing and I was studying the art of writing, of filmmaking. My days were booked. It wasn’t that I went out of my way not to be social. It was just that I was busy preparing for what I’m doing now.

Abrams quotes Del Harris, who was Bryant’s first NBA coach, to similar effect: about his player’s isolation from others and his mesmerizing obsession with doing his best. That he was so unsocialized may also help to explain his troublingly anti-social and often predatory side.

[Bryant] never paid attention to any outside activities that I could tell. He never went out. Of course, he was only 18 and 19. On the airplane, he never had any particular fun—no cards, no video games. He was always looking at basketball things on his computer. In those days, we did not have the DVDs of games to take with us right after the game, no iPads, etc. But he had plenty of DVDs from our earlier games, or of the next team or of [Michael] Jordan. He was a total student of the game.

And, Abrams might have added, to the contributions that he wanted to make and ended up making as a positive role model, but Bryant knew there was more to his story than that.

Around the time he was charged with rape, he started talking about Black Mamba. As he explained in “Muse” (a documentary about his life), Mamba personified his attempt to channel his mean, relentless rage more productively both on the court and off of it, vividly incorporating the serpent into a personal struggle that made sense to him, and maybe to those who were watching too.

The New Yorker’s Thomas brings that story down to today as Kobe Bryant worked with his customary diligence and single focus to continue writing it.

After Bryant retired, in 2016, he made an animated movie that won an Oscar. He launched podcasts, movies, television shows. Many of them were about why he was set apart from the world, even as he tried to connect with it…Bryant’s stories involved rage and self-discipline and anger and, yes, greatness. By all accounts, he was as involved—and even obsessive—with those projects as he was with anything else.

Bryant’s need to write his story was far more than a marketing angle for an encore career. It was like he was fleshing out his character in his own morality plays.

How does public grief reduce greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place?

In my prior post, I should have set out more of the facts about the rape charges against Kobe Bryant. Here are some of them.

In 2003, Bryant was accused of aggravated assault by a 19-year-old hotel worker in Colorado. She later told the police, “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me.” A week after he was charged, Bryant gave a tearful press conference where he confessed to cheating on his wife Vanessa, but vehemently denied the assault allegation. What happened next was all too predictable for its time. Jeremy Gordon recounted what was happening in both the courthouse and in the court of public opinion:

Over the next year and a half, his lawyers attacked the accuser’s credibility by pointing out she’d had sex with another man in the week before the alleged assault, that she’d attempted suicide in the past, and that she had been initially excited to meet Kobe. (Her identity was also leaked.) Predictably, NBA fans took his side. I — and almost every other casual basketball observer from that era — can remember multiple conversations about whether Kobe had really done it, most of which concluded that he had not. (A popular line of logic: ‘Why would someone as famous as Kobe Bryant need to rape someone?’)

In 2004, the assault case was dropped by prosecutors after the accuser decided not to testify at the trial. Following the dismissal of criminal charges, Bryant made the following statement:

Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did. After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.

While Gordon read this as Bryant’s “literally admitting” his sexual assault, Ashley Reese in her “How to Talk About Kobe Bryant’s Legacy” saw it differently. To her:

This came off as a non-apology. Sure, he acknowledged how she felt, but it still read as if her interpretation of the night diverted from reality—namely, his experience. But over 15 years later, the allegations are just a blip in Bryant’s legacy.

While they interpreted Bryant’s statement differently, both Gordon and Reese agree that everything seemed to shake out in Bryant’s favor at the time and both find it unacceptable to treat it “as little more than an aside” in his story now. When Bryant was killed in that helicopter crash, Gordon lamented the two divides that seemed inevitable on social media, between:

those who cared that Kobe Bryant committed a brutal sexual assault, and those who did not, at least not right now, but probably not ever. In a world in which the creative bodies of numerous public figures — some more talented than others — have recently been invalidated because they (allegedly or not) committed sexual assaults, I knew that Kobe was going to receive an infinite number of gauzy, heartbroken tributes from strangers glossing over or even ignoring the worst thing he’d ever done.

Gordon went on to describe the “acceptable” trade-off for too many people this way: “what’s one maybe-rape measured against 81 points in a game and five championships? What’s the private pain of one anonymous person against the public joy of millions?”

Ashley Reese argues that the consequences extend beyond these false equivalents, recounting the experience of Felicia Sonmez, a journalist at The Washington Post, a few weeks ago.

After Bryant’s death, Sonmez posted to social media a link to a 2016 Daily Beast story titled, “Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case: The DNA Evidence, the Accuser’s Story, and the Half-Confession.” For doing so and triggering a thundering backlash across the internet, she was subsequently suspended by the Post. The newspaper’s argument was, essentially, that her doing so was poor timing while people were still coming to terms with their grief.

In an argument that says a great deal about our inability to hold two conflicting thoughts in our heads at one time and our rush to black-or-white judgments, Reese wrote:

People who work at news outlets are going through these same emotions, but they have a responsibility to tell the truth. It can be hard to tell the truth sometimes—especially when it diverts from the legacy we want from a celebrity; especially one who died tragically and young, one who a city revered, one who his daughters loved and who he loved in return, one who fellow athletes looked up to. But someone has to do it, and while it should be done with care, it must be done. The fact that it cannot be done without death threats as a result speaks volumes, but none louder than when a publication that prides itself on defending the truth acts complicit in that violence.

When our public storyteller’s tell an incomplete story about a hero, they effectively reduce his greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place.

Did Kobe Bryant’s full story matter to him and to those who lived (and will continue to live) in the arms of his legacy?

The strength of Bryant’s legacy depends on what you end up believing about him, but one set of beliefs risks losing the almost Greek sense of tragedy in it.

In his Esquire farewell Charles P. Pierce talks about “the terrible irony that he died in a fall from the sky,” because (I think) Bryant’s death speaks to both the lightness of his air and the pull of his gravity. Every mythic figure like him is caught in between, inviting us to look, to never stop looking and to judge him on how he met or failed to meet his internal conflicts head-on. But those judgments are never easy. According to Pierce:

There was no way to work that night in the Colorado hotel into the biography that unspooled thereafter and came to such a sudden end on Sunday. In Massachusetts, for decades, political writers wrestled with where to place Chappaquiddick into the saga of Ted Kennedy, and too many of them gave up and erased the event and Mary Jo Kopechne. But it is 2020 now, and Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Harvey Weinstein is in a New York courtroom, and erasing a female victim is no longer a viable moral and ethical strategy [if it ever was]. Kobe Bryant died on Sunday with one of the young women in his life, and how you will come to measure his life has to be judged by how deeply you believe that he corrected his grievous fault through the life he lived afterwards, and how deeply you believe that he corrected that fault, immediately and beautifully, and in midair.

I don’t think Bryant corrected his faults with the stories he’d already told or in a sacrificial fall from the sky. But I do believe he was still seeking redemption through his stories, bringing the obsessive introspection–that only someone like him could muster–to working through his torments and relieving his soul.

My intuition a few weeks ago was to believe in the earnestness of that quest and the more I discover about him, the more I believe that Kobe Bryant would have attempted to reconcile his demons and angels for his benefit and for ours for as long as he walked among us.

The real tragedy is that he won’t be here to keep trying to tell that story. Elemental struggles like his belong to all of us, whether we grapple with our own versions of them or not.

This post was adapted from my February 23, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them are later posted here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter (and not miss out on any), you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Work That Our Fragile World Needs Now

October 21, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

After 9/11, I had a two-part image in my head.

I recall the strikingly clarity and vividness of that morning as if it were yesterday. A storm had swept the Northeast the day before, giving rise to a rare meteorological phenomenon known as “severe clear.” I remember looking up while I was walking Rudy and just diving into its photorealism, inhaling everything that was rejuvenating about it. I know where I was standing when it hit me.

But then, like a punishment, the clarity and wonder almost got dashed by the weeks and haunting years that followed, but still I remembered the daybreak that started it all, and how different its offering was.

Maybe because both branded me so powerfully, both have stayed—conjoined in my head—down to this morning. Promise then punishment. Hope then pain.

Has that ever happened to you, where opposites find themselves standing side-by-side and it becomes impossible to forget their inevitability?

That you should never fall for the one because there’s always the other.

As it’s turned out, there was another terrible prophecy in that cerulean blue sky 18 years ago, and it’s two-part disharmony is proving equally indelible. It’s the daily splendor I see outdoors together with all that our failures of stewardship have wrought, as Greenland melts into the sea and hot spots pop up in Rhode Island and now, right across from me, in New Jersey.

I live in a kind of arboretum that frequently astonishes me with its beauty–whether it’s Rudy or now Wally who lets me stop and look up at it, down and all around at it every morning.

In my mind’s eye, I refuse to harness the promise of “severe clear” or even of more dappled mornings to the degradation that almost daily seems to be marching my way.

When I see the one I no longer want to see the other. But it takes daily acts of faith, hope and love to break them apart.

A Deeper Future Than Man Can Make On His Own

When I read Robert MacFarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey last summer, I responded to it with notes, markings on the page and, at least twice, with a “Wow” and exclamation point. The book chronicles MacFarlane’s intrepid wanderings through caves, excavations, sink holes, labyrinths, the quietest tunnels of bedrock, and some of the world’s remotest places. I regularly wondered “why” he was seeking out these claustrophobic and often dangerous destinations and his answer always seemed to be: because he was somehow drawn to them.

For more than 15 years now, I have been writing about the relationships between landscape and the human heart. What began as a wish to solve a personal mystery — why I was so drawn to mountains as a young man that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them — has unfolded into a project of deep-mapping.

These “relationships” between landscape and the human heart are richer and more complicated than Nature gives, on the one hand, Man takes or Man destroys, on the other. In ways he couldn’t always explain, MacFarlane was convinced that there was more to it than that, and whatever was calling out to him might be found if he climbed higher, probed deeper and kept better maps. He described his current motivation this way:

Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving

With his “why-question” in mind, my first Wow came towards the end of a chapter called “The Understorey (Epping Forest, London)” about the extraordinary subterranean connections that fungi make to unite the trees into the organism of a forest. MacFarlane finds the modern words that we have—our human-centric words–inadequate to describe what the trees and the fungi have accomplished here, so he looks to a Native American language. (“In Potawatami, not only humans, animals and trees are alive, but so too are mountains, boulders, winds and fire.”) Acknowledging the life around them and their almost intentional roles, native language always made humans integral to the world but never at the center of it because all these other intentionalities have their priorities too. If we’re to restore the relationship between landscape and the human heart, we need to look deeper than the language-based understandings we have today.

The real underland of language is not the roots of single words. but rather the soil of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time. Grammar and syntax exert powerful influence on the proceedings of language and its users. They shape the ways we relate to each other and to the living world. Words are world-makers—and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene [or Age of Man].

As we consider the underland of today’s language amidst the trees of Epping Forest, MacFarlane suggests that we can reshape, with words, the world that we experience into one of interdependence or symbiosis—create what one philosopher has dubbed “the Symbiocene”—instead of furthering a language-driven age that is dominated by human imperatives alone.

Another Wow came towards the end of a harrowing rite of passage. It delivered MacFarlane to an ancient cave on a remote Norwegian island that had been decorated with paintings of people dancing in the fire that had by brought by pilgrims since the dawn of time.

His Norwegian hosts, only too familiar with the environs, ask him why he is so driven to travel there alone in a dangerous, storm-tossed season, but his “reasoning” seems “weak” to explain it, so he doesn’t even try. It’s likely because the pull of a “thin place” like this, where “the borders between worlds or epochs feel at their most fragile,” is deeper than either reason or emotion, buried in heredity, like some instinct to find a better way to survive. And indeed, it’s the very different life force of our ancestors that MacFarlane manages to encounter deep in a cave in Lofotens, Norway.

At first, depleted by the penitential route, he can’t even see the cave paintings. But in his battery’s light:

when I open my eyes and look again, there is—yes, there, there—the flicker of line that is not only of the rock’s making. The line is crossed by another, and joined by a third, and there, there, yes, is a red dancer, scarcely visible but unmistakable, a phantom red dancer leaping on the rock. And there is another, and another, here, a dozen or more of them, spectral still but present now, leaping and dancing on the rock, arms outstretched and legs wide, forms shifting and tensing as I blink.

Their red is rough at its edges, fading back into the rock that made it, blurred by water and condensation, and all of these circumstances—the blur, the low light, my exhaustion, my blinks—are what give the figures their life, make them shift shapes on this volatile canvas in which shadow and water and rock and fatigue are all artists together, and for once the old notion of ghosts seems new and true in this space. These figures are ghosts all dancing together, and I am a ghost too, and there is a conviviality to them, to us, to the thousands of years for which they have been dancing here together.

MacFarlane’s story–about risking your safety to see what ancient joy and celebrating life might have looked and even felt like–ends with a modest claim about its significance. He even lets someone else make the necessary comparison.

Shortly after the Nazi death camps were liberated during World War II, the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux, France were discovered: an extraordinary counterpoint about the nature of humanity. Fifteen years later, when an escalating nuclear arms race was foreshadowing a different kind of doom, philosopher George Bataile went down into the Lascaux caves. When he returned to the surface, MacFarlane quotes him as saying: “I am simply struck by the fact that light is being shed on our birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears to us.”

MacFarlane’s job as a writer is to connect the underland of his instincts and intuitions with his readers’ world. As we’re pressed each day with the “inevitability” of a dying, unsustainable planet, he shows us that there are deeper ways to envision our future in the language that we use as well as in the ways we can recapture our truer natures beneath the cerulean sky.

It’s embedded within us. We’ve done it before. There are maps that can help us find it.

A Modern Photo Arc and Additional Irrational Acts

Joel Sartore is a National Geographic photographer who has been documenting the world’s captive animal species. Many of them are on the verge of extinction or are endangered or may soon be. He’s already photographed around 9,000 out of around 12,000 in captivity, and his pictures—which are taken in special sets to highlight each animal’s unique characteristics (a story in itself)—are strikingly beautiful at the same time that they engage us with their plight.

To Santore, the zoos where he takes his pictures are no longer warehouses or curiosity shops but conservation centers providing hopeful bridges from where we are today to where we may be headed. As Sartore recounted in a 2017 interview, by the turn of the next century we could stand to lose half of the earth’s current species and many of his photographs could merely be reminders. Or maybe far more than that.

His project is called the Photo Arc. His photos are featured in a series of books, in magazine articles and on his website. They glow like votive candles.

More than a documentarian, Sartore is also a storyteller with an eye for the funny or moving details that make his critters come alive when he talks about them. (He is the man that you hope will bring out the armadillo to meet your children at the zoo.) But as wonderous as the Photo Arc project—his protecting on film these animals that may soon be lost—it was not nearly as compelling to me as what he and some of his fellow naturalists are also doing right now to sustain the animals that still remain.

As Sartore heralds in his interview, one of these Noahs is Tilo Nadleer, who was an electronics specialist but now runs a primate center in Vietnam. Nadleer noticed that the police who were capturing animal smugglers had nowhere to put the animals they also recovered (baby primates, mostly) so they would euthanize them. It seemed unthinkable, but what could he do? So he took on the job of caring for these orphans himself, eventually building huge enclosures, feeding them with native vegetation from an adjacent national park. Nadleer tried to release them back into the wild but his primates kept getting shot, eaten or captured by smugglers again, so he now has successful breeding colonies, with a big percentage of the world’s population of three or four species. Sartore calls him “a time capsule.”

He started a project that he knew in his lifetime would never be complete. He is buying time for many of these animals, hoping that people will quit shooting them and people will leave the forests intact,

His work is an act of faith, hope and love.

Don and Ann Butler’s work at Pheasant Heaven in North Carolina is too. They’re breeding species of pheasant that are extinct in the wild. And then there is Santore himself, call it his second job. He bought land in Nebraska, where he lives, that included “alkaline wetlands and really steep uplands” where a rare breed of bird (long-billed curlews) along with other migrating species, like avocets and sandpipers, happen to breed. “I just wanted to save a little piece,” he said, “to save a little corner, protect something,” not really knowing whether it would make a difference, but feeling that he had to anyway.

These aren’t coins in a wishing well, but counter-testimony that Nadleer, the Butlers and Santore are giving (without breast-beating or fanfare) so that their actions are also recorded in the record of degradation and destruction around them. What else could they do? Well, they could do nothing because there is no assurance that their work will even begin to turn the tables. But they’re doing it anyway.

As Robert MacFarlane might put it, they’ve chosen to deepen the relationship between landscape and the human heart. And that, just that, might end up making all the difference.

This post was adapted from my October 20, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

A Course Correction for the World Wide Web

July 15, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Pink shock and emerald green in the back yard

Emily was here for breakfast on Thursday and I had the morning’s news on public radio—the same stories staring at me from the front page of my newspaper—and she said with millennial weariness: Why are you listening to that?

It was a good question, and one I often answer for myself by turning it off because it’s mostly journalist shock, outrage or shame about whatever the newsmakers think is going on. Who needs their sense of urgency in those first moments when you’re still trying to figure out whether you’re fully conscious or even alive?

On the other hand, short ventures into my yard quickly provide more hopeful messages. It’s the early summer flush, fueled by plenty of rain, and everything is still emerald green. Summer is telling different stories than the radio, sees different horizons, including the one some kind of watermelon sprawl is trying to reach with its tentacles. These co-venturers aren’t fretting about the future, they’re claiming it by inches and feet, or celebrating it with explosions in the air.

While shock, outrage or shame can push you to do good work, it’s hope that sustains it by giving it directions, goals, and better horizons. Everything around the creeping reality of surveillance capitalism tiggers all those negative feelings and keeps me snapping at its purveyors with my canines because—well—because it deserves to be pierced and wounded.

But then what?

That’s where others who have shared these angry and disgusted reactions start showing me more hopeful responses in their own good work–the productive places where gut reaction sometimes enable you to go–and that my radio provides little if any of (ok, so now what?) on most mornings.

In the early days of the internet, the geeks and tinkerers in their basements and garages had utopian dreams for this new way of communicating with one another and sharing information. In the thirty-odd-years that have followed, many of those creative possibilities have been squandered. What we’ve gotten instead are dominant platforms that are fueled by their sale of our personal data. They have colonized and monetized the internet not to share its wealth but to hoard whatever they can take for themselves.

One would be right in thinking that many of the internet’s inventors are horrified by these developments, that some of them have expressed their shock, outrage and shame, and that a few have ridden these emotions into a drive to find better ways to utilize this world-changing technology. Perhaps first among them is Tim Berners-Lee.

Like some of my backyard’s denizens, he’s never lost sight of the horizons that he saw when he first poked his head above the ground. He also feels responsible for helping to set right what others have gotten so woefully wrong after he made his first breathtaking gift to us thirty years ago.

1. The Inventor of the Internet

At one point the joke was that Al Gore had invented the internet, but, in fact, it was Tim Berners-Lee. It’s been three decades since he gathered the critical components, linked them together, and called his creation “the world wide web.” Today however, he’s profoundly disconcerted by several of the directions that his creation has taken and he aims to do something about it.

In 1989, Berners-Lee didn’t sell his original web architecture and the protocols he assembled or attempt to get rich from them. He didn’t think anyone should own the internet, so no patents were ever gotten or royalties sought. The operating standards, developed by a consortium of companies he convened, were also made available to everyone, without cost, so the world wide web could be rapidly adopted. In 2014, the British Council asked prominent scientists, academics, writers and world leaders to chose the cultural moments that had shaped the world most profoundly in the previous 80 years, and they ranked the invention of the World Wide Web number one. This is how they described Berners-Lee’s invention:

The fastest growing communications medium of all time, the internet has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can connect with each other instantly, all over the world.

Because he gave it away with every good intention, perhaps Berners-Lee has more reasons than anyone to be concerned about the poor use that others have made of it. Instead of remaining the de-centralized communication and information sharing platform he envisioned, the internet still isn’t available everywhere, has frequently been weaponized, and is increasingly controlled by a few dominant platforms for their own private gain. But he’s also convinced that these ill winds can be reversed.

He reads and shares an open letter every year on the anniversary of the internet’s creation. His March 2018 and March 2019 letters lay out his primary concerns today.

Last year, Berners-Lee renewed his commitment “to making sure the web is a free, open, creative space – for everyone. That vision is only possible if we get everyone online, and make sure the web works for people [instead of against them].” After making proposals that aim to expand internet access for the poor (and for poor women and girls in particular), he discusses various ways that the web has failed to work “for us.”

What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared….the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to weaponise the web at scale. In recent years, we’ve seen conspiracy theories trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke social tensions, external actors interfere in elections, and criminals steal troves of personal data.

Additionally troubling is the fact that we’ve left these same companies to police themselves, something they can never do effectively given their incentives to maximize profits instead of social goods. “A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives may help ease those tensions,” he says.

Berners-Lee sees a similar misalignment of incentives between the tech giants and the users they have herded into their platforms.

Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate. On both points, we need to be a little more creative.

While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people – and can be fixed by people. Create a new set of incentives and changes in the code will follow. …Today, I want to challenge us all to have greater ambitions for the web. I want the web to reflect our hopes and fulfill our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.

As the late internet activist, John Perry Barlow, once said: “A good way to invent the future is to predict it.” It may sound utopian, it may sound impossible to achieve… but I want us to imagine that future and build it.

In March, 2018, most of us didn’t know what Berners-Lee had in mind when he talked about building.

This year’s letter mostly elaborated on last year’s themes. In addition to governments “translating laws and regulations for the digital age,” he calls on the tech companies to be a constructive part of the societal conversation (while never mentioning the positive role that their teams of Washington lobbyists might play). In other words, it’s more of a plea or attempt to shame them into action since their profits instead of their public interest remain their primary motivators. It is also unclear what he expects from government leaders and regulators as politics becomes more polarized, but he is plainly calling on the web’s theorizers, inventors and commentators and on its billions of users to pitch in and help.

Berners-Lee proposes a new Contract for the Web, a global collaboration that was launched in Lisbon last November. His Web Summit brought together those:

who agree we need to establish clear norms, laws and standards that underpin the web. Those who support it endorse its starting principles and together we are working out the specific commitments in each area. No one group should do this alone, and all input will be appreciated. Governments, companies and citizens are all contributing, and we aim to have a result later this year.

It’s like the founding spiritual leader convening the increasingly divergent members of his flock before setting out on the next leg of the journey.

The web is for everyone, and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won’t be easy. But if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web we want.

In the meantime however, while a new Contract for the Web is clearly necessary, it is not where Berners-Lee is pinning all of his hopes.

The seed came from somewhere and now it’s (maybe) making watermelons

2. An App for an App

The way that the internet was created, any webpage should be accessible from any device that has a web browser, including a smart phone, a personal computer or even an internet-enabled refrigerator. That kind of free access is blocked, however, when the content or the services are locked inside an app and the app distributor (such as Google or Facebook) controls where and how users interact with “what’s inside.” As noted recently in the Guardian: “the rise of the app economy fundamentally bypasses the web, and all the principles associated with it, of openness, interoperability and ease of access.”

On the other hand, perhaps the web’s greatest strength has been the ability of almost anyone to build almost anything on top of it. Since Berners-Lee built the web’s foundation and its first couple of floors, he’s well-positioned to build an alternative that provides the openness, interoperability and ease of access that has been lost while also serving the public’s interest in principles like personal data privacy. At the same time that he has been sponsoring a global quest for new standards to govern the internet, Berner-Lee has also been building an alternative infrastructure on top of the internet’s common foundation.

One irony is that he’s building it with a new kind of app.

Last September, Berners-Lee announced a new, open-source web-based infrastructure called Solid that he has been working on quietly with colleagues at MIT for several years. “Open-source” means that once the rudimentary structures are made public, anyone can contribute to that infrastructure’s web-based applications. Making the original internet free and widely available lead to its rapid adoption and Berners-Lee is plainly hoping that “open source” will have the same impact on Solid. Shortly after his announcement, an article in Tech Crunch reported that open-source developers were already pouring into the Solid platform “in droves.” As Fast Company reported at the time: Berner-Lee’s objective for Solid, and the company behind it called Inrupt, was “to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it.” Like a second great awakening.

First and foremost, the Solid web infrastructure is intended to give people back control of their personal data on-line. Every data point that’s created in or added to a Solid software application exists in a Solid “pod,” which is an acronym for “personal on-line data store” that can be kept on Solid’s server or anywhere else that a user chooses. Berners-Lee previewed one of the first Solid apps for the Fast Company reporter after his new platform was announced:

On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across the top: Tim’s to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this app–one of the first on Solid–for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In fact, it’s so plain that, at first glance, it’s hard to see its significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The app, using Solid’s decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly–his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It’s like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsAp.

The difference is that his (or your) personal information is secured within a Solid pod from others who might seek to make use of it in some way.

Inrupt is the start-up company that Berners-Lee and John Bruce launched to drive development of Solid, secure the necessary funding and transform Solid from a radical idea into a viable platform for businesses and individuals. According to Tech Crunch, Inrupt is already gearing up to work on a new digital assistant called Charlie that it describes as “a decentralized version of Alexa.”

What will success look like for Inrupt and Solid? A Wired magazine story last February described it this way:

Bruce and Berners-Lee aren’t waiting for the current generation of tech giants to switch to an open and decentralised model; Amazon and Facebook are unlikely to ever give up their user data caches. But they hope their alternative model will be adopted by an increasingly privacy-aware population of web users and the organisations that wish to cater to them. ‘In the web as we envision it, entirely new businesses, ecosystems and opportunities will emerge and thrive, including hosting companies, application providers, enterprise consultants, designers and developers,’ Bruce says. ‘Everyday web users will find incredible value in new kinds of apps that are impossible on today’s web.

In other words, if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web that we want.

+ + +

At this stage in his life (Berners-Lee is 64) and given his world-bending accomplishments, he could have retired to a beach or mountaintop somewhere to rest on his laurels, but he hasn’t. Instead, because he can, he heeds the call of his discomfort and is diving back in to champion his original vision. It’s the capability and commitment, hope and action that are the arc of all good work.

Telling him that Solid is a pipe-dream would be like telling my backyard encouragers to stop shouting, trumpeting and fruiting.

This post was adapted from my July 14, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Dissenting Voices Never Fall On Deaf Ears

June 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Hong Kong could still swallow the dragon.

A cover story in the Wall Street Journal today was called “Hong Kong’s Flickering Hopes.” “Flickering” because to Gerard Baker, the Journal’s “editor at large,” it seems inevitable that Hong Kong’s rule of law and civic traditions—it’s utterly unique experiment in Asian democracy—will eventually be swallowed by the giant that surrounds it.

On the other hand, I think it’s far from inevitable.

Over the past month, millions of residents have taken to their City’s humid boulevards to protest an extradition proposal that would allow China’s resident proxies to arrest anyone in Hong Kong that it wants to, extradicting them to “justice” in the motherland—a “chilling effect” on critical thinking and democratic expression. But why I wonder isn’t the personal witness of millions of Hong Kong Chinese a ray of hope instead of a glimmer on the road to subjugation?

Hong Kong could still confound us because, despite having the hottest, wettest and least hospitable climate for masked protest I can imagine, millions of its citizens took to the streets to voice their dissent about this latest erosion of their rights to speak, assemble and disagree. Despite sweat and dehydration, pepper spray and water cannon, they have also managed to protest peacefully so that their resounding “No” conveyed a Confucian depth of confidence and resolve. Constructive instead of destructive.

On the other hand, and demonstrating even more of their British influence, the Hong Kong Chinese have talked and written their rationales for “No” everywhere that they could find a platform for doing so—patiently, painstakingly and exhaustingly—although the meat of their dissenting opinions has received little attention in the press. And finally, the City’s residents have sketched out futures that are not merely a return to the status quo that existed twenty years ago but instead are thoughtful re-workings of Deng Xiaoping’s “One Country, Two Systems.” Despite a divergence of details, their over-arching visions have one thing in common. All imagine a unified China that’s built around the pounding, life-giving heart of Hong Kong today.

Will (1) their acts of dissent; (2) the personal risks that have been taken by, and moral commitment of these dissenters; together with (3) their hopeful vision of a “different and better outcome” persuade the billions of non-Hong Kong Chinese to reconsider their acquiescence to “the Great Firewall,” the desirability of “good citizenship scores,” and the subjugation of a total surveillance state for something more like what these dissenters have in mind?

Could Hong Kong swallow the dragon?

One thing is absolutely certain: the steady, confident voices of Hong Kong’s Chinese dissenters are not falling on deaf ears. There are more than a billion of them, listening or trying to listen.

(In case you don’t recognize it, the image above is of Tankman, a sole protester confronting Chinese state power in Tianamen Square, 1989. The power of dissent. The power in a picture. Inviting us to imagine being that solitary Chinese man.)

Meanwhile, an old service station re-purposed as a coffee joint on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago.

1. Take a Sad Song and Make It Better

To all of you: I promise to get off this horse soon, I do, but there is a West Coast echo in this story of dissent too.

California, which is also the home of Silicon Valley, passed the toughest data privacy law in the US last year. (Its prohibitions and sanctions will go into effect at the beginning of 2020.) By giving individuals a way to protect themselves from the predations of surveillance capitalism, California’s leaders expressed their dissent from the silence and/or inability of our national representatives to do the same. Disappointingly, the same non-response has come from most other state governments too.

I’ve railed about data privacy repeatedly here because our personal information is being taken without our informed consent and used in ways that track us like animals (“These Tech Platforms Threaten Our Freedom”). I’ve argued that exchanging our personal data for “free” social networks like Facebook’s and “free” search engines like Google’s eliminates sources of potential income in a changing economy (“Blockchain Goes To Work”). And I’ve at least begun to make the case that theft of our personal data undermines our personal autonomy (“Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?”). There are important issues here, and outside of a few leading jurisdictions most policymakers have been neglecting them.

“Leading jurisdiction” is lawyer-speak for “being in the vanguard” or “a dissenter from the prevailing view.” These places have tired of everyone else’s silence on an issue of importance that demands attention. They have talked about the values that drove them to raise their voices, and have painted a picture that speaks to how the future will be better—or at least more manageable—than it is today with their new laws or regulations on the books. They’re holding up their end of the conversation by trying to get their fellow states and the rest of the nation engaged in it.

California lawmakers passed a data privacy bill in 2018 that, among other things, includes an expansive definition of what constitutes personal information, gives the state’s consumers the right to prohibit the sale of their data to third parties, and also allows them to “opt out” of sharing their personal data altogether. It’s common for a new law’s effective date to be a year or more later to allow all parties affected to prepare for its various impacts. As interesting as anything about California’s recent action in support of data privacy has been Congress’s re-action.

According to a news report today:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthey backed the idea of national legislation to safeguard consumer’s data privacy, adding a prominent GOP voice to the bi-partisan support in Congress for tackling how technology companies amass and use that information.

‘There needs to be national-level regulation, not state-by-state on what we’re going to do about privacy,’ Mr. McCarthey, a California Republican said in an interview…

A data privacy law passed last year in California helped spur action from both Mr McCarthey and a bipartisan group of lawmakers working on privacy legislation in the Senate.

As a result of California’s commitment and template for action, Congress is wrestling with its divisiveness and dysfunction to pass a federal data privacy law that will go into effect before California’s to avoid a patchwork of regulation. From one vantage point, it’s like how many clowns can get in the phone booth before the bell goes off. But from another, more serious perspective: where would Congress be today on data privacy if a leading jurisdiction like California had failed to act?

A similar dynamic is currently at play involving state laws (like California’s again) that are aimed at reducing the likely causes of climate change. The impact on state residents of actions like this are immediate and direct, but the impact doesn’t end there. According to two scholars who have studied public opinion around climate change, those who have not bothered to act are also reluctant to be left behind. This is from another recent post:

Egan and Mullin cite research that proves ‘the very strong correlation between state policy and public opinion’ and argue that states like California and New York are already influencing the national policy debate by acting alone. While the authors don’t say, I’d argue that it’s harder for fence-sitters on climate change to continue to remain uncommitted when majorities in other states are investing their tax dollars in targeted policies. Those ‘watching but not yet acting’ are also susceptible to committing more deeply if the advocate they’re listening to avoids the partisan bloodletting while persuading them with arguments that have already succeeded in these vanguard states.

When a commitment is grounded in values and acted upon (by speaking up, passing a law, taking any kind of objective step) to help realize a better future for everyone, others in the room, state or nation are more likely to be mobilized to define their own positions, to move the conversation forward, and sometimes to reach a new consensus than would never have been possible if those in the vanguard hadn’t taken a stand for their beliefs. in the first place.

An apartment building by Herzog & de Meuron in Tribeca

2. Taking a Stand Is Like Playing Jenga

Kids love the game Jenga. Many adults do too.

To play, you begin with a vertical rectangle of interlocking wooden pieces that are slotted in to create a stable structure. In each successive turn, a player attempts to remove one of the slotted pieces without destabilizing the structure and causing the remaining pieces to crash into a heap on the floor.

I’m convinced that the sound explosion of crashing pieces is key to enjoyment of the game. When you lose (or win), you do so shatteringly. There is no question that what you did made a difference.

The Tribeca apartment building above looks like a Jenga tower after—in mid-game—removal of some of the pieces has caused others to move and jut out a bit from the sides.

To harness the metaphor: the original Jenga tower is where prevailing opinion always starts. The room/community/state/nation is for something or against something. Then, in each successive turn, dissenters (along with the other players) modify the prevailing view.

Dissenters, leading jurisdictions, those who can’t keep their convictions to themselves are the key pieces that get removed. Every time they “make their case,” other pieces in the Jenga tower are impacted. Sometimes you can actually see their affect, because certain pieces jut out a little or a lot, their minds visibly beginning to change. Other times the change is imperceptible, but some pieces in the pile have become less stable as their original certainty has been clouded by doubt. Eventually, as the monolith begins to teeter, the moment of truth arrives and one final player’s testimony makes the original certainties dissolve.

Anyone’s turn can shatter the stability or inertia of the prevailing view.

Everyone’s turn affects other pieces either perceptibly or imperceptibly.

Anyone’s dissent can make the original certainties come crashing to the floor.

Anyone’s action can cause the crash that finally allows a different, better future to be built.

Dissenting voices like these are never as lonely or futile as they seem.

And they never fall on deaf ears.

This post was adapted from my June 23, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Moving On in the Wake of Destruction

April 14, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Since writing about Barry Lopez’s new book last week and hearing a lot from you about that post, I couldn’t escape the cry from his heart that we’ll all need to learn more about how to survive as we face the accelerating destruction of the natural world. But then I look outside, where the spring is exploding with life after the rain this morning and it’s hard—no, nearly impossible—to imagine that what I’m seeing has already changed and that I’ll need to get ready for even more troubling changes. Lopez argues that we’ll all need to prepare for life in this increasingly wounded world by learning from people who are already surviving on destruction’s frontlines, even though these battlegrounds are hard for us to see or even comprehend “from our comfortable seats by the swimming pool.” Nevertheless, Lopez invites us to look through his eyes at these “throttled” landscapes and to respond as if they were what we’re seeing around us too.

We need writers like Lopez to help us see what’s coming—like “the before and after” he describes when he travels between a majestic nature reserve, all purples and greens in Western Australia, and the wasted iron-mining sites that border it on three sides. It requires an imaginative leap through his storytelling to mobilize us into living with greater reverence somewhere between these two extremes.

After showing us what we’ve destroyed and continue to destroy—the fragile beauty along with the pain of its loss for those who live there and remember it—Lopez urges on our struggle to strike a new balance before the trade-offs get even worse. It’s his wake-up call from the wilderness. And because first world privilege makes it difficult to accept survival under diminished circumstances, he brings us stories from indigenous communities like the Aboriginal Australians who have learned (over millennia) how to adapt in the aftermath of natural disaster, whether caused by man or by nature itself. When our wisdom is joined with their wisdom, it may be possible for us to imagine new ways of surviving in Earth’s depleted future.

Settling for less. Learning new ways of living from indigenous people. Neither are what we’re accustomed to, particularly when the nature that we see around us lulls us into a false sense of complacency. We need an unusually powerful voice like Lopez’s to counter that complacency before its consequences become even more dire.

Unfortunately, as actively as we’re destroying the planet, we also seem hell-bent on destroying one another.

Understanding a community’s ability to survive in the aftermath of attempts to destroy it also requires an almost impossible leap of the imagination. How can I bridge the gulf between the community I experience around me and those communities struggling to survive the daily “shock wave” of life in Syria and in the ancient communities of western Iraq, or those who have returned to some kind of normal after the “killing fields” of Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia? Do the deepening divisions between rich and poor, authoritarian and democratic in the Western world, and the frictions between ethnic communities in much of the rest of it, mean that we have to find ways to bridge this gulf in our imaginations too, before these breakdowns grow even worse? Are diminished returns–and a new kind of survival–the best that we can hope for when it comes to our communities as well?

There are voices today who are crying out from this wilderness too, inviting us:

-to look long and hard into communities around the world that have almost been destroyed so that within our own communities we will hesitate to rip apart what binds us together and become more protective of our fragile connections to one another;

-to consider how political leaders and media outlets can quickly devolve into cheerleaders for murder and even mass murder, enlisting willing executioners from the ranks of the susceptible and the under-employed;

-to learn how communities facing annihilation have not only “come back” but also learned how to co-exist with these same murderers because new political leaders and very old community-building programs have helped them to do so;

-to understand how survivors move beyond grief and despair and can find a level of acceptance (if not forgiveness and reconciliation) after what it happened to them; and ultimately

-to accept that accommodations like this may become our new normal too as the ties that bind our own communities together continue to weaken and fray.

Surviving community destruction has much in common with survival in the wake of environmental destruction. There are voices calling to us from this wilderness too, asking whether the future will be delivered by Enlightenment-based progress–that our global villages will always continue to improve–or that we must instead look to more traditional ways of living to learn how to take care of everyone in a community, refuse to leave anyone behind, and know how to recover when our ties with one another have been broken.

Their message seems timely given the march from destruction to rebuilding that is the seasonal story of winter to spring, brown and dry to lush and green, the death of Good Friday to the life after Easter.

It can be glimpsed in the fresco (above) by Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, painted in a Mexico City prison while he was a political prisoner, its rich symbolism pointing towards his own deliverance.

It is also evident in Philip Gourevitch’s writing about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and even more so in how the minority Tutsi tribe that was nearly annihilated by the majority Hutus have built a new future among these same Hutus over the past 25 years.

From this tragedy, many Rwandans (like most survivors) have achieved a quality of being that Finnish people call sisu, a word that has no real equivalent in English. Sisu comes from taking action against the odds and finding courage when it’s difficult to do so. With sisu, you sense that you’re going beyond your capabilities and harnessing inner energy that has never been harnessed before. Something like sisu enables you to move on and not give in to resignation or despair despite the enormity of the challenge.

We’ll all need the endurance of sisu—and other kinds of perspective too—if we’re to survive the destructions of nature and diverse communities that seem inevitable today if we keep our present course.

1. Genocide and its Aftermath in Rwanda

In the spring and early summer of 1994, 800,000 people (mostly Tutsis) were systematically murdered by bands of Hutu génocidaires in what Philip Gourevitch describes a “an unambiguous case” of state-sponsored mass murder. He wrote the book, “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families” to document the tragedy 25 years ago, and he has been revisiting its consequences ever since.

In a Frontline interview, Gourevich described how the Rwandan government at the time used a pop music station (RTLM or Radio-Television Libre Milles Collines) to rally young Hutus with genocidal propaganda that eventually targeted the resented Tutsi minority with elimination. Over time, it’s directives became shockingly personal.

disc jockeys who would say, “So-and-so has just fled. He is said to be moving down such-and-such street.” And [the genocidaires] would literally hunt an individual who was targeted in the street. And people would listen to this on the radio. It was…a rallying tool that was used… to mobilize the population [into a murderous rage].

The genocide dissipated for several reasons, including an on-going civil war, the involvement of U.N. peacekeepers, and huge numbers of refugees fleeing to camps outside Rwanda. When Gourevich visited the following year:

the country was still pretty well annihilated: blood-sodden and pillaged, with bands of orphans roaming the hills and women who’d been raped squatting in the ruins, its humanity betrayed, its infrastructure trashed, its economy gutted, its government improvised, a garrison state with soldiers everywhere, its court system vitiated, its prisons crammed with murderers, with more murderers still at liberty—hunting survivors and being hunted in turn by revenge killers—and with the routed army and militias of the genocide and a million and a half of their followers camped on the borders, succored by the United Nations refugee agency, and vowing to return and finish the job.

But as he could report just 15 years later in a 2009 New Yorker essay:

Rwanda is [now] one of the safest and the most orderly countries in Africa. Since 1994, per-capita gross domestic product has nearly tripled, even as the population has increased by nearly twenty-five per cent, to more than ten million. There is national health insurance, and a steadily improving education system. Tourism is a boom industry and a strong draw for foreign capital investment.

What accounted for Rwanda’s rise from the ashes? Clearly there were several factors, but one of them was that the Hutus and Tutsis who returned to their lives together had gained a kind of acceptance of their mutual tragedy, and, by doing so, unlocked extraordinary energies that might otherwise have remained buried in grief, despair, revenge or the fear of revenge.

One factor in this turn-around was that a new government vowed to protect all Rwandans and actively promoted local processes that aimed at reconciliation. Paul Kagame, a leader who governed his country with an authoritarian hand through much of this recovery period, was elected in 2003 and immediately repurposed a system of community courts that had previously acted without lawyers to resolve local conflicts called gacaca.

With gacaca, towns and villages would conduct communal, town-hall style trials to hold those who had participated in the genocide accountable and to mete out punishments. Gacaca both encouraged and rewarded confessions, but confessions also had to be verified by other community members. Because the Tutsi and Hutu had usually returned to their homes, people almost always knew one another, the identities of those who had suffered or been killed, and who was likely responsible for the atrocities.

Eventually more than 12,000 gacacas were convened and more than a million cases adjudicated with a remarkable degree of public participation and little violence. Gourevich notes that there “were surely false convictions of those who insisted on their innocence, and …a surprising number of acquittals of those who had probably been falsely accused in the first place. But in many cases…confession was its own reward…[with] sentence[s] for multiple murders reduced to little more than time served.” Gacaca justice, as imperfect as it was, produced a degree of catharsis in their communities and, by allowing these communities to work though the facts and consequences of a shared tragedy, to leave some of its pain, despair and desire for revenge behind. Fifteen years after the genocide, Gourevich:

didn’t see any great hope in the eyes of the people I visited… But as I travelled around Rwanda there was a greater sense of ease among people than I remembered. It wasn’t anything that you’d notice if you hadn’t been there before, because what I was feeling wasn’t so much the presence of strikingly positive energy but, rather, the absence of a mood of wary inwardness. The country was becoming less spooked. At times, it was simply a neutral place to be, like anywhere else. It was normal, which [in itself] was extraordinary.

One of the lessons involved finding this new normal. Gacca courts released the steam from a pressure cooker that could now be reused for rebuilding the country’s injured communities. A remarkable nation-wide recovery in a relatively short-time frame is partly explained by gacca justice. But it was the impact on individual survivors that teaches us the most, a cautionary story with only the faintest traces of hope. In documenting and characterizing what individual Rwandans have said about their recovery, Gourevich shows us how the texture of survival feels when we’ve allowed our communities to be torn apart and are left with no alternative but finding the slow way back.

2. The sisu of survivors

The Rwandans who spoke to Philip Gourevich tell us that community rebuilding from the point of destruction is incomprehensible, cynical, frustrating, taxing, re-traumatizing, but all the while, necessary. For the most part, members of this new community have been unwilling to forgive. Like other kinds of survival, the day in and day out of it is difficult, driven by a tenacious kind of coping instead of the promise of brighter days ahead. The passage of time always erodes pain, but it takes even longer to replace the emptiness with anything that approaches reconciliation.

Here is some of what Gourevich found. The quotes below are from a series of interviews that he gave earlier this month.

-On surviors being re-traumatized: the motto of the gacaca courts was “truth heals,” but the fact is that the truth also wounds all over again. “Every time I come to gacaca with an open mind I get even more upset.”

-On forgiveness: “Pretty much everyone I asked in Rwanda told me the same thing,” Gourevich says. “The most fundamental basis of forgiveness is an internal decision, by the forgiver, to forego revenge—literally to let go of the idea of getting even. I called this modest, a sort of bare minimum, but think about the scale and scope of offenses and injuries we’re talking about, and what it would mean for Rwandans not to forgive [even in this limited sense of the word], and you see it’s no small thing.”

-On the mix of incomprehensibility and necessity in doggedly seeking reconciliation even when you have no hope of finding it:

none of the survivors I spoke with thought that there was any better solution [than gacaca afforded]. Never mind reconciliation, Tutsis and Hutus had to coexist. Sagahutu expressed the sentiment most succinctly: ‘It’s our obligation, and it’s our only way to survive, and I do it every day, and I still can’t comprehend it.’ When I repeated Sagahutu’s formulation to other survivors and to members of Kagame’s Cabinet, it was always met with recognition: Yes, that’s it.

-on accepting the realities and trying to move on from them: There is a kind of “pragmatic civility.” “I know this person did it and am grateful that they’re not denying it anymore.” “We don’t have to be friends, but if we’re not a threat to one another [any longer] then other things can maybe happen.”

-and on how thoroughly Rwanda has attempted to rebuild its communities:

Rwanda’s relentlessness in pursuing genocidaires is unusual. After WWII, some Jews became Nazi hunters and kept at it for the rest of their lives, but they mostly focused on very senior figures. And I don’t know that I’ve ever come across stories or accounts of survivors of the Holocaust who say: I would like to go back, investigate and figure out who did this to my grandfather, who chased him out of his house, who put him on that train, who put him to death, and I want to haul them all into court. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to figure out who those people were in some parts of Germany, but most Jews just said: the hell with it…And of course, now they don’t live where it happened anymore. That’s key. Rwanda is unique, as you say…the most litigated genocide. It’s also the only one where everybody [still] lives intermingled in that way.

In an effort to rebuild its communities, Rwanda has confronted the looming problem that was “both behind and ahead of them” after the genocide in 1994. It’s efforts to find a kind of acceptance about what happened to their country are sobering because sisu makes nearly everyone who embraces it into an adult.

When I listened to Barry Lopez in Philadelphia a week ago, I was struck by how often he described those in the developed West as children (waiting for political saviors, for progress to sweep us along, for technology to solve our problems) instead of as adults who need to rely on ourselves and on one another.

Children also don’t like to be confronted with their own destructiveness, preferring to pretend that they never made a mess of things and therefore that the mess doesn’t exist at all. It’s something like that with the destruction of both nature and our communities today. If I don’t see the evidence of this destruction when I look out my window, it’s not happening, I have not helped to cause it, and I’m hardly responsible for limiting any more of the damage.

Conjurers like Lopez and Gourevich are calling “from the edge” to tell us about the kinds of survival that we can still avoid if we face the on-going destruction and respond to it like adults instead of children.

They’re also telling us that more of humanity’s destructiveness probably lies ahead and something about what our own surviving will look like when that destruction is closer to our doors.

This post was adapted from my April 14, 2019 newsletter. You can subscribe—and receive my newsletter in your in-box every Sunday morning—by providing your email address in the right-hand column.