When Is Generosity Something Else Again?

February 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The Sacklers are best known as patrons of the arts, including the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York with its Temple of Dendur, and the Sackler Gallery, the national museum of Asian art at the Smithsonian. Over the years, the family’s generosity has been noteworthy in areas like education and medicine as well.

More recently, the family has become almost as well known as the principle shareholders of Purdue Pharma LP, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Their business endeavors have made them the subject of multiple legal actions claiming that the company’s aggressive marketing has helped to produce the nation’s opioid epidemic. Purdue Pharma has helped the family to build the fortune it’s been using in its philanthropy. In 2016, Forbes estimated the family’s wealth at $13 billion. Since it was introduced to the pubic in 1995, OxyContin has reportedly generated more than $35 billion in revenues for the company.

A spokesman for the Sachler family responded to the OxyContin-dirty money allegations that were made in a Massachusetts lawsuit as follows:

For more than half a century, several generations of Sacklers have supported respected institutions that play crucial roles in health, research, education, the arts and the humanities. It has s been a privilege to support the vital work of these organizations and we remain dedicated to doing so. While plaintiffs’ court filings have created an erroneous picture and resulted in unwarranted criticism, we remain committed to playing a substantive role in addressing this complex public health crisis. Our hearts go out to those affected by drug abuse or addiction.

In their statement, the family places the allegations of predatory business behavior in the context of their longstanding generosity—asking us to give them the benefit of the doubt given all the good they have done. An article in Esquire at the time was far less forgiving:

the family’s leaders have pulled off three of the great marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is selling Oxycontin; the second is promoting the Sackler name; and the third is ensuring that, as far as the public is aware, the first and second have nothing to do with one another.

Given the high emotions around the “deaths of despair” that are associated with opioid addiction–and the overuse of OxyContin in particular–it is easy to join activists and many in the press who have condemned the Sacklers before they’ve had their day in court. After all, no one forced doctors to prescribe these painkillers or anyone down the line to take them. But this story does raise some broader questions, including:

– How often is philanthropy (and the moral afterglow of generosity) a cover for wealth that wasn’t earned in nearly as moral a way?

– What might the givers and the receivers in this situation have done differently?

– Since “generosity born of success” always seems to come with the suspicion that you’re “dressing-up the road that got you here,” how can gifts like the Sacklers ever hope to match their best intentions?

– And beyond philanthropy, what responsibilities should all receivers and givers—including you and me—have in supposedly “generous exchanges”?

1. The Toxic Givers

The Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Temple of Denhur

Nothing about these questions is easy.

For example, some members of the Sackler family have no financial interest in Perdue Pharma, the opioid manufacturer, although it has been argued that marketing strategies pioneered by the family patriarch utlimately drove OxyContin’s success. Some of the Perdue profits that did go to Sacklers were attributable to other products or were produced before the opioid painkiller entered the market. Linking particular individuals to toxic profits that then went into specific gift giving is a complicated question of attribution. In fact, it is a problem for all philanthropy that may have toxic origins. How do you know that the donated Picasso was purchased with a philanthropist’s dirty money?

In the case of the Sacklers, it seems clear from an Inside Philanthropy piece last year that at least some of their OxyContin profits likely became gifts to organizations as diverse as Tufts University’s School of Biomedical Sciences, New York Presbyterian Hospital, the Central Park Conservancy, the Guggenheim and Victoria & Albert museums, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies upon for independent scientific advice on issues like opioid addiction).

While the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was funded long before OxyContin came to market, it continues to bear the family name and has been at the epicenter of protests against the family’s toxic giving.

It’s a thorny path from here for the givers as well as the receivers.

For givers like the Sacklers, a couple of avenues are clear to me at least, but neither seems to have been taken by individual family members to date. The first is new philanthropy aimed at opioid addiction treatment, a need that remains woefully underfunded nationwide. Maybe in a strange twist of public relations and legal advice, family members are waiting for a court to tell them what to do instead of making up their own minds.

The second road-not-taken is any suggestion that Purdue Pharma is curtailing its global roll-out of OxyContin. According to a 2017 New Yorker article that helped to trigger the current outrage: “the Sackler family has only increased its efforts abroad, and is now pushing the drug, through a Purdue-related company called Mundipharma, into Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.” Again, the better part of valor would suggest that the company should be reducing, instead of expanding its marketing outreach for this painkiller—even if its marketers and lawyers are advising that to do so could be construed as a kind of admission of liability.

For receivers like the supposedly independent government bodies that play a role in regulating opioids, the answer also seems clear. They should disclose how OxyContin-related donations were used by them in the past, modify standards that permitted receipt of donations by interested parties in the first place, and refuse to take any additional donations from them.

For other receivers of Purdue Pharma related largesse, the issue is complicated by two additional factors: how desperate many (most?) non-profits are to reach their fund-raising goals each year, and how nearly all significant gifts and naming rights are bound up in legal agreements.

Even if the public or moral pressure were enough to make reluctant institutions consider returning toxic funds, in most situations the donors would need to voluntarily agree to take their money back or to removal of their names from programs or buildings. Whenever the givers demur or outright refuse, the receivers need to convince a court that they have the right to unwind the gift agreement unilaterally. In addition to the preoccupation and expense of a legal proceeding like this, the non-profit might also have to prove that the donors were personally responsible in some way for their gift’s toxicity (the attribution issue again). According to Marcus Owens, former director of the IRS’ tax exempt organization’s division:

For the institutions, it’s a real balancing act where there hasn’t been an actual conviction of a crime and it’s more that the donors have done something that is optically troubling to the recipient.

While there has been litigation involving Perdue Pharma and OxyContin, no court to date has tied its toxic marketing to any individual member of the Sackler family, despite the fact that several are in senior management or board members.

Given all of the brouhaha, I assume that institutions that stand to gain from future Sackler donations are considering the risks of acceptance before they do so. But even here, the path regarding toxic gifts that have already been given or may be given in the future is far from clear. Some insist the amount of good that tainted money can do when invested in a school or museum offsets whether it was made in a deplorable fashion or was given by a deplorable individual. Even if you buy the argument that the ends justify the means, the 24-7 social-media environment makes every receivers’ reputation a key factor in the calculation of ultimate ends .

While the opioid crisis has thrown Sackler family philanthropy into bold relief, the moral debate today is hardly confined to individuals who are trying to launder their unclean profits by giving money to prominent institutions.

On this page, I’ve briefly considered whether living artists (like Chuck Close who was accused of victimizing his female models) should have existing art they have given to museums taken down and new art they are creating boycotted by collectors. I’ve discussed Anand Giridharadas contention in Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018) that Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook are using their philanthropy as a rationale for “us liking them” however much they are also causing us harm. As Giridharadas said at the time:

What I started to realize was that giving had become the wingman of taking. Generosity had become the wingman of injustice. ‘Changing the world’ had become the wingman of rigging the system…[L]ook at Andrew Carnegie’s essay ‘Wealth.’ We’re now living in a world created by the intellectual framework he laid out: extreme taking, followed by and justified by extreme giving.

It sounds a lot like what the Sacklers are being accused of today.

There is also the complicated moral dynamic between individual givers and institutional receivers when it comes to sources of information and the reporting of that information by the press. Media outlets eager to capture audiences with breaking news usually have little time to consider either the truth of the story their source has brought them or the bias and other hidden motivations that could undermine it after publication. When lapses in this kind of giving-and-receiving occur, the implications are wide-ranging because they tend to erode the press’s general reputation for truth telling.

Consider too the prominent individuals who may have been too quick to believe the story that Jessie Smolett gave to the media about a racist and homophobic attack in Chicago—and if it turns out to be false—how the breakdown in that exchange could call into question the veracity of everyone who claims they were victimized by a hate crime going forward.

Giving nearly anything that has value to an institution today (be it a donation, a work of art, or even an interesting story) can easily become a morally fraught transaction.

2. Giving and Taking One-on-One

I started this post with a picture of a sculpture from prehistory that conveys—to me, at least—the openness of giving. The bad news is that generosity is rarely this simple, pure or beautiful.

Generosity towards others is the key corrective for acting on our own behalf. Whenever we act, we try to be mindful of how that act impacts us as well as others. In autonomous exchanges, we strive to realize the best we have to offer while having the generosity to respect the same kind of striving in others.  The aim is reciprocity in how we treat ourselves and others and how we hope that others will treat us in return.

Of course, problems arise in life and work when any part of this exchange become unbalanced, but it seems to me that far more attention is spent on the imbalances caused by selfishness than on those that are caused by generosity.

Not unlike a wealthy family bearing much-needed gifts for a non-profit or a source dangling a juicy story before a ravenous press, giving can foist significant burdens on the receiver or mask a giver’s less than noble motivations. These pitfalls seems equally likely in our exchanges with one another.

For example, it’s easy to be ravished by someone’s seemingly spontaneous generosity, until you’ve been singed by it.  A stranger offering you a trinket when he’s looking for a hand-out makes you reluctant to take anything that’s being handed to you when you’re walking down the street. But what if they are items with real value, graciously offered, and part of you wants to accept them? This happened to me while I was traveling recently and unfamiliar with the local customs. It was only later that I discovered what was expected of me in return and could safely provide it…but not before I felt the burden of indebtedness born of generosity.

To return to the Sacklers for a minute, there may have been several motivations behind their gift-giving, but at least where philanthropy and random acts of kindness are concerned, such motivations become irrelevant whenever the giver gives anonymously. Unfortunately, among lovers, friends, neighbors, co-workers, bosses, employees and (when in Rome) strangers on the street, anonymity is simply impossible.

In our personal relationships, we’d prefer not to focus on the ledger balances between us most of the time. Rough reciprocity in what we give to and take from one another will usually suffice. But losing sight of these balances altogether can weaken and even jeopardize those same relationships. Overly generous givers can feel depleted and exploited by others’ needs. Givers who use their generosity to gain others’ approval can be oblivious to the burdens their giving places on receivers to reciprocate. The needs and motivations at play are as relevant when we give to one another as they are in the seemly less personal world of philanthropy.

There simply aren’t many rules of thumb here, but maybe Khalil Gibran (that Siddhartha for hippies) came closest to providing one:

“Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do.”

This post was adapted from my February 24, 2019 newsletter.

Choosing a Future For Self-Driving Cars

November 5, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It looks pretty fine, doesn’t it?

You’ll no longer need a car of your own because this cozy little pod will come whenever you need it. All you’ll have to do is to buy a 30- or 60-ride plan and press “Come on over and get me” on your phone.

You can’t believe how happy you’ll be to have those buying or leasing, gas, insurance and repair bills behind you, or to no longer have a monstrosity taking up space and waiting for those limited times when you’ll actually be driving it. Now you’ll be able to get where you need to go without any of the “sunk costs” because it’ll be “pay as you go.”

And go you will. This little pod will transport you to work or the store, to pick up your daughter or your dog while you kick back in comfort. It will be an always on-call servant that lets you stay home all weekend, while it delivers your groceries and take-out orders, or brings you a library book or your lawn mower from the repair shop. You’ll be the equivalent of an Amazon Prime customer who can have nearly every material need met wherever you are—but instead of “same day service,” you might have products and services at your fingertips in minutes because one of these little pods will always be hovering around to bring them to you. Talk about immediate gratification!

They will also drive you to work and be there whenever you need a ride home. In a fantasy commute, you’ll have time to unwind in comfort with your favorite music or by taking a nap. Having one of these pods whenever you want one will enable you to work from different locations, to have co-workers join you when you’re working from home, and to work while traveling instead of paying attention to the road. You can’t believe how much your workday will change.

Doesn’t all this money saving, comfort, convenience and freedom sound too good to be true? Well, let’s step back for a minute.

We thought Facebook’s free social network and Amazon’s cheap and convenient take on shopping were unbelieveably wonderful too—and many of us still do. So wonderful that we built them into the fabric of our lives in no time. In fact, we quickly claim new comforts, conveniences and cost savings as if we’ve been entitled to them all along. It’s only as the dazzle of these new technology platforms begin to fade into “taking them for granted” that we also begin to wonder (in whiffs of nostalgia and regret? in concerns for their unintended consequences?) about what we might have given up by accepting them in the first place.

Could it be:

-the loss of chunks of our privacy to advertisers and data-brokers who are getting better all the time at manipulating our behavior as consumers and citizens;

-the gutting of our Main Streets of brick & mortar retail, like book and hardware stores, and the attendant loss of centers-of-gravity for social interaction and commerce within communities; or

-the elimination of entry-level and lower-skilled jobs and of entire job-markets to automation and consolidation, the jobs you had as a teenager or might do again as you’re winding down, with no comparable work opportunities to replace them?

Were the efficiency, comfort and convenience of these platforms as “cost-free” as they were cracked up to be? Is Facebook’s and Amazon’s damage already done and largely beyond repair? Have tech companies like them been defining our future or have we?

Many of us already depend on ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft. They are the harbingers of a self-driving vehicle industry that promise to disrupt our lives and work in at least the following ways. They will largely eliminate the need to own a car. They will transform our transportation systems, impacting public transit, highways and bridges. They will streamline how goods and services are moved in terms of logistics and delivery. And in the process, they will change how the entire “built environment” of urban centers, suburbs, and outer ring communities will look and function, including where we’ll live and how we’ll work. Because we are in many ways “a car-driven culture,” self-driving vehicles will impact almost everything that we currently experience on a daily basis.

That’s why it is worth all of our thinking about this future before it arrives.

One way to help determine what the future should look like and how it should operate is to ask people—lots of them—what they’d like to see and what they’re concerned about. In fact, it’s an essential way to get public buy-in to new technology before some tech company’s idea of that future is looking us in the eye, seducing us with its charms, and hoping we won’t notice its uglier parts.

When it comes to self-driving cars, one group of researchers is seeking informed buy-in by using input from the public to influence the drafting of the decision-making algorithms behind these vehicles. In the so-called Moral Machine Experiment, these researchers asked people around the world for their preferences regarding the moral choices that autonomous cars will be called upon to make so that this new technology can match human values as well as its developer’s profit motives. In an article that just appeared in the journal Nature, the following remarks describe their ambitious objective.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence have come concerns about how machines will make moral decisions and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behaviour. To address this challenge we deployed the Moral Machine, an on-line experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. This platform gathered 40 million decisions [involving individual moral preferences] in ten languages from millions of people in 233 different countries and territories. Here we describe the results of this experiment…

Never in the history of humanity have we allowed a machine to autonomously decide who shall live and who shall die, in a fraction of a second, without real-time supervision. We are going to cross that bridge any time now, and it will not happen in a distant theater of military operations; it will happen in the most mundane aspect of our lives, everyday transportation. Before we allow our cars to make ethical decisions, we need to have a global conversation to express our preferences to the companies that will design moral algorithms, and to the policymakers who will regulate them.

For a sense of the moral guidance the Experiment was seeking, think of an autonomous car that is about to crash but cannot save everyone in its path. Which pre-programmed trajectory should it choose? One which injures (or kills) two elderly people while sparing a child? One which spares a pedestrian who is waiting to cross safely while injuring (or killing) a jaywalker? You see the kinds of moral quandaries we will be asking these cars to make. If peoples’ moral preferences can be taken into account beforehand, the public might be able to recognize “the human face” in a new technology from the beginning instead of having to attempt damage control once that technology is in use.

To collect its data, the Moral Machine Experiment asked millions of global volunteers to consider accident scenarios that involved 9 different moral preferences: sparing humans (versus pets); staying on course (versus swerving); sparing passengers (versus pedestrians); sparing more lives (versus fewer lives); sparing men (versus women); sparing the young (versus the old); sparing pedestrians who cross legally (versus jaywalkers), sparing the fit (versus the less fit); and sparing those with higher social status (versus lower social status).

The challenges behind the Experiment were daunting and much of the article is about how the researchers conducted their statistical analysis. Notwithstanding these complexities, three “strong” moral preferences emerged globally, while certain “weaker” but statistically relevant preferences suggest the need for modifications in algorithmic programming among the three different “country clusters” that the Experiment identified.

The vast majority of participants in the Experiment expressed a “strong” moral preference for saving a life instead of refusing to swerve, saving as many lives as possible if an accident is imminent, and saving young lives wherever possible.

Among “weaker” preferences, there were variations among countries that clustered in the Northern (Europe and North America), Eastern (most of Asia) and Southern (including Latin America) Hemispheres. For example, the preference for sparing young (as opposed to old) lives is much less pronounced in countries in the Eastern cluster and much higher among the Southern cluster. Countries that are poorer and have weaker enforcement institutions are more tolerant than richer and more law abiding countries of people who cross the street illegally. Differences between hemispheres might result in adjustments to the decision-making algorithms of self-driving cars that are operated there.

When companies have data about what people view as “good” or “bad”, “better” or “worse” while a new technology is being developed, these preferences can improve the likelihood that moral harms will be identified and minimized beforehand.

Another way to help determine what the future should look like and how new technologies should operate is to listen to what today’s Cassandras are saying. Following their commentary and grappling with their concerns removes some of the dazzle in our hopes and grounds them more firmly in reality early on.

It lets us consider how, say, an autonomous car will fit into the ways that we live, work and interact with one another today—what we will lose as well as what we are likely to gain. For example, what industries will they change? How will our cities be different than they are now? Will a proliferation of these vehicles improve the quality of our interactions with one another or simply reinforce how isolated many of us are already in a car-dominated culture?

The Atlantic magazine hosts a regular podcast called “Crazy Genius” that asks “big questions” and draws “provocative conclusions about technology and culture” (Many thanks to reader Matt K for telling me about it!) You should know that these podcasts are free and can be easily accessed through services like iTunes and Spotify.

A Crazy Genius episode from September called “How Self-Driving Cars Could Ruin the American City” included interviews with two experts who are looking into the future of autonomous vehicles and are alarmed for reasons beyond these vehicles’ decision-making abilities. One is Robin Chase, the co-founder of Zipcar. The “hellscape” she forecasts involves everyone using self-driving cars as they become cheaper than current alternatives to do our errands, provide 10-minute deliveries and produce even more sedentary lifestyles than we have already, while clogging our roadways with traffic.

Without smart urban planning, the result will be infernal congestion, choking every city and requiring local governments to lay ever-more pavement down to service American automania.

Eric Avila is an historian at UCLA who sees self-driving cars in some of the same ways that he views the introduction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. While these new highways provided autonomous access to parts of America that had not been accessible before, there was also a dark side. 48,000 miles of new highway stimulated interstate trade and expanded development but they also gutted urban neighborhoods, allowing the richest to take their tax revenues with them as they fled to the suburbs. “Mass transit systems [and] streetcar systems were systematically dismantled. There was national protest in diverse urban neighborhoods throughout the entire nation,” Avila recalls, and a similar urban upheaval may follow the explosion of autonomous vehicles.

Like highways, self-driving cars are not only cars they are also infrastructure. According to Avila, if we want to avoid past mistakes all of the stakeholders in this new technology will need to think about how they can make downtown areas more livable for humans instead of simply more efficient for these new machines. To reduce congestion, this may involve taxing autonomous vehicle use during certain times of day, limiting the number of vehicles in heavily traveled areas, regulating companies who operate fleets of self-driving cars, and capping private car ownership. Otherwise, the proliferation of cars and traffic would make most of our cities unlivable.

Once concerns like Chase’s and Avila’s are publicized, data about the public’s preferences (what’s better, what’s worse?) in these regards can be gathered just as they were in the Moral Machine Experiment. Earlier in my career, I ran a civic organization that attempted to improve the quality of Philadelphia city government by polling citizens anonymously about their priorities and concerns. While the organization did not survive the election of a reform-minded administration, information about the public’s preferences is always available when we champion the value of collecting it. All that’s necessary is sharing the potential problems and concerns that have been raised and asking people in a reliable and transparent manner how they’d prefer to address them.

In order to avoid the harms from technology platforms that we are facing today, the tech companies that are bringing us their marvels need to know far more about their intended users’ moral preferences than they seem interested in learning about today. With the right tools to be heard at our fingertips, we can all be involved in defining our futures.

This post is adapted from my November 4, 2018 newsletter.

Looking Out For the Human Side of Technology

October 28, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Maintaining human priorities in the face of new technologies always feels like “a rearguard action.” You struggle to prevent something bad from happening even when it seems like it may be too late.

The promise of the next tool or system intoxicates us. Smart phones, social networks, gene splicing. It’s the super-computer at our fingertips, the comfort of a boundless circle of friends, the ability to process massive amounts of data quickly or to short-cut labor intensive tasks, the opportunity to correct genetic mutations and cure disease. We’ve already accepted these promises before we pause to consider their costs—so it always feels like we’re catching up and may not have done so in time.

When you’re dazzled by possibility and the sun is in your eyes, who’s thinking “maybe I should build a fence?”

The future that’s been promised by tech giants like Facebook is not “the win-win” that we thought it was. Their primary objectives are to serve their financial interests—those of their founder-owners and other shareholders—by offering efficiency benefits like convenience and low cost to the rest of us. But as we’ve belattedly learned, they’ve taken no responsibility for the harms they’ve also caused along the way, including exploitation of our personal information, the proliferation of fake news and jeopardy to democratic processes, as I argued here last week.

Technologies that are not associated with particular companies also run with their own promise until someone gets around to checking them–a technology like artificial intelligence or AI for example. From an ethical perspective, we are usually playing catch up ball with them too. If there’s a buck to be made or a world to transform, the discipline to ask “but should we?” always seems like getting in the way of progress.

Because our lives and work are increasingly impacted, the stories this week throw additional light on the technology juggernaut that threatens to overwhem us and our “rearguard” attempts to tame it with our human concerns.

To gain a fuller appreciation of the problem regarding Facebook, a two-part Frontline doumentary will be broadcasting this week that is devoted to what one reviewer calls “the amorality” of the company’s relentless focus on adding users and compounding ad revenues while claiming to create the on-line “community” that all of us should want in the future. (The show airs tomorrow, October 29 at 9 p.m. and on Tuesday, October 30 at 10 p.m. EST on PBS.)

Frontline’s reporting covers Russian election interference, Facebook’s role in whipping Myanmar’s Buddhists into a frenzy over its Rohingya minority, Russian interference in past and current election cycles, and how strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Phillipines have been manipulating the site to achieve their political objectives. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s limitations as a leader are explored from a number of directions, but none as compelling as his off-screen impact on the five Facebook executives who were “given” to James Jacoby (the documentary’s director, writer and producer) to answer his questions. For the reviewer:

That they come off like deer in Mr. Jacoby’s headlights is revealing in itself. Their answers are mealy-mouthed at best, and the defensive posture they assume, and their evident fear, indicates a company unable to cope with, or confront, the corruption that has accompanied its absolute power in the social median marketplace.

You can judge for yourself. You can also ponder whether this is like holding a gun manufacturer liable when one of its guns is used to kill somebody. I’ll be watching “The Facebook Dilemma” for what it has to say about a technology whose benefits have obscured its harms in the public mind for longer than it probably should have. But then I remember that Facebook barely existed ten years ago. The most important lesson from these Frontline episodes may be how quickly we need to get the stars out of our eyes after meeting these powerful new technologies if we are to have any hope of avoiding their most significant fallout.

I was also struck this week by Apple CEO Tim Cook’s explosive testimony at a privacy conference organized by the European Union.

Not only was Cook bolstering his own company’s reputation for protecting Apple users’ personal information, he was also taking aim at competitors like Google and Facebook for implementing a far more harmful business plan, namely, selling user information to advertisers, reaping billions in ad dollar revenues in exchange, and claiming the bargain is providing their search engine or social network to users for “free.” This is some of what Cook had to say to European regulators this week:

Our own information—from the everyday to the deeply personal—is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. Today, that trade has exploded into a data-industrial complex.

These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them. This should make us very uncomfortable.

Technology is and must always be rooted in the faith people have in it. We also recognize not everyone sees it that way—in a way, the desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new.

“Weaponized” technology delivered with “military efficiency.” “A data-industrial complex.” One of the benefits of competition is that rivals call you out, while directing unwanted attention away from themselves. One of my problems with tech giant Amazon, for example, is that it lacks a neck-to-neck rival to police its business practices, so Cook’s (and Apple’s) motives here have more than a dollop of competitive self-interest where Google and Facebook are concerned. On the other hand, Apple is properly credited with limiting the data it makes available to third parties and rendering the data it does provide anonymous. There is a bit more to the story, however.

If data privacy were as paramount to Apple as it sounded this week, it would be impossible to reconcile Apple’s receiving more than $5 billion a year from Google to make it the default search engine on all Apple devices. However complicit in today’s tech bargains, Apple pushed its rivals pretty hard this week to modify their business models and become less cynical about their use of our personal data as the focus on regulatory oversight moves from Europe to the U.S.

Technologies that aren’t proprietary to a particular company but are instead used across industries require getting over additional hurdles to ensure that they are meeting human needs and avoiding technology-specific harms for users and the rest of us. This week, I was reading up on a positive development regarding artificial intelligence (AI) that only came about because serious concerns were raised about the transparency of AI’s inner workings.

AI’s ability to solve problems (from processing big data sets to automating steps in a manufacturing process or tailoring a social program for a particular market) is only as good as the algorithms it uses. Given concern about personal identity markers such as race, gender and sexual preference, you may already know that an early criticism of artificial intelligence was that an author of an algorithm could be unwittingly building her own biases into it, leading to discriminatory and other anti-social results. As a result, various countermeasures are being undertaken to minimize grounding these kinds of biases in AI code. With that in mind, I read a story this week about another systemic issue with AI processing’s “explainability.”

It’s the so-called “black box” problem. If users of systems that depend on AI don’t know how they work, they won’t trust them. Unfortunately, one of the prime advantages of AI is that it solves problems that are not easily understood by users, which presents the quandary that AI-based systems might need to be “dumbed-down” so that the humans using them can understand and then trust them. Of course, no one is happy with that result.

A recent article in Forbes describes the trust problem that users of machine-learning systems experience (“interacting with something we don’t understand can cause anxiety and make us feel like we’re losing control”) along with some of the experts who have been feeling that anxiety (cancer specialists who agreed with a “Watson for Oncology” system when it confirmed their judgments but thought it was wrong when it failed to do so because they couldn’t understand how it worked).

In a positive development, a U.S. Department of Defense agency called DARPA (or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is grappling with the explainability problem. Says David Gunning, a DARPA program manager:

New machine-learning systems will have the ability to explain their rationale, characterize their strengths and weaknesses, and convey an understanding of how they will behave in the future.

In other words, these systems will get better at explaining themselves to their users, thereby overcoming at least some of the trust issue.

DARPA is investing $2 billion in what it calls “third-wave AI systems…where machines understand the context and environment in which they operate, and over time build underlying explanatory models that allow them to characterize real word phenomena,” according to Gunning. At least with the future of warfare at stake, a problem like “trust” in the human interface appears to have stimulated a solution. At some point, all machine-learning systems will likely be explaining themselves to the humans who are trying to keep up with them.

Moving beyond AI, I’d argue that there is often as much “at stake” as sucessfully waging war when a specific technology is turned into a consumer product that we use in our workplaces and homes.

While there is heightened awareness today about the problems that Facebook poses, few were raising these concerns even a year ago despite their toxic effects. With other consumer-oriented technologies, there are a range of potential harms where little public dissent is being voiced despite serious warnings from within and around the tech industry. For example:

– how much is our time spent on social networks—in particular, how these networks reinforce or discourage certain of our behaviors—literally changing who we are?

– since our kids may be spending more time with their smart phones than with their peers or family members, how is their personal development impacted, and what can we do to put this rabbit even partially back in the hat now that smart phone use seems to be a part of every child’s right of passage into adulthood?

– will privacy and surveillance concerns become more prevalent when we’re even more surrounded than we are now by “the internet of things” and as our cars continue to morph into monitoring devices—or will there be more of an outcry for reasonable safeguards beforehand?

– what are employers learning about us from our use of technology (theirs as well as ours) in the workplace and how are they using this information?

The technologies that we use demand that we understand their harms as well as their benefits. I’d argue our need to become more proactive about voicing our concerns and using the tools at our disposal (including the political process) to insist that company profit and consumer convenience are not the only measures of a technology’s impact.

Since invention of the printing press a half-millennia ago, it’s always been hard but necessary to catch up with technology and to try and tame its excesses as quickly as we can.

This post was adapted from my October 28, 2018 newsletter.

The Truth Between You and Others On Your Career Path

September 23, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week, it’s impossible to ignore the unfolding story of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The politics aside, there are two threads in this controversy that affect everyone who interacts with other people while trying to build a career.

It has never been truer than it is today that everything you’ve said and done (or not done) will find its way into your work record—particularly when the stakes are high like they are here. That being said, there is no denying that Kavanaugh has amassed a sterling resume as a lawyer, judge, colleague and community stakeholder. The number of people who have come forward to testify to his good character is remarkable; we should all be so lucky to have this many people we have known stand up for us. But after the testimonials were over, Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct in high school.

Her accusations put Kavanaugh between a rock and a hard place. The job of a lifetime is within his grasp. It seemed that he had already proven his fitness for it “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But in this hyper-political context, there seems to be almost no possibility for any kind of resolution of Ford’s charges.

It’s likely that we’ve all faced “moments of truth” like Kavanaugh’s while climbing the career ladder—where whatever you say or do could jeopardize your reaching the next rung. When your sense of personal responsibility and the uncertain path of forgiveness collide with your fear of letting yourself and those who have vouched for you down, how do you respond?

Much of the answer comes from the philosophy we bring with us to work. The ego and ambition that drives a candidate for the Supreme Court is only different in degree from what motivates us to gain the raise, the next promotion or the coveted office perk. Is the deep-down philosophy “whatever is good for me,” while I keep up the appearances of modesty and collaboration? Or is my drive “to realize my best self though my actions” bound up with “my enabling others to realize themselves through their work too?” These are two, very different orientations.

Of course, it’s never just either/or between our selfish and generous impulses.

To put us (along with Kavanaugh) in the most favorable light, what if our drives have been almost entirely generous towards those who have been touched by our work over the course of our careers? Would an 11^thhour charge of behavior that is sharply inconsistent with the reputation you have built stimulate your long-standing generous impulses or the more selfish ones that have been in tension with them all along, particularly if your’re ambitious and competitive by nature? In the heat of that moment, will you define your character by its lesser angels or its better ones?

A lifetime of good work is almost never called into question by facts or accusations but by how you respond to them. This is why our system of justice is based on regular people (the so-called fact finders) determining whether witnesses who have sworn to tell the truth are actually doing so. Whether it’s a global audience watching on TV or the managers and co-workers in your office, regular people can generally “hear the truth,” so it helps to be able “to speak it” when your character is called into question

What follows are some of the factors that I’ve been mulling over as I get ready to sit in the Kavanaugh jury box with everyone else.

Some Similarities and Differences With Judge Kavanaugh

I have a lot in common with Judge Kavanaugh.

We both grew up in similar towns in the urban corridor that stretches between Boston and Washington. In our lifetimes, many of these zip codes became the breeding grounds for an elite that, according to Charles Murray, would see men and women like us intermarry and establish an aristocracy of education, income and status that increasingly divides America socially and economically. In other words, we are both on the fortunate side of that divide. I’d argue that good fortune like this creates noblesse oblige or a special obligation on the part of its beneficiaries to act in a noble manner—not to justify our privilege but to serve others along with ourselves. In other words, we’re duty bound to act beyond our self-interest.

When I was 14 and 17, I know what I was doing on weekends (and often during the week) when I was in high school. Hormones and drinking never made for a pretty picture. No one here seems to be disputing that Kavanaugh did some partying too.

He and I also profited mightily from our Jesuit educations, which for me at least included a weekend bar in every college dorm to alleviate the academic pressures imposed by the right graduate school and career. Maybe it was some kind of Irish-Catholic rite of passage. All I know is that by working hard and playing hard, Kavanaugh and I ended up at similar law schools.

On the other hand (and at least as far as I know today), Kavanaugh and I don’t share anything like what happened next for me in common. The fellow lawyer I met in law school and later married went on to testify a few years later at the first federal trial in the US that was brought by a female lawyer against a major law firm for sex discrimination. I held my baby daughter in the courtroom during her mother’s testimony. The experience couldn’t help but provoke a great deal of thinking on my part about both Fran’s and Emily’s future prospects in what I increasingly came to realize was a man’s world.

The Moral Education We Had (or Didn’t Have) When You Were Young

This week, I heard a public radio segment called “How to Talk to Young People About the Kavanaugh Story.” Of course, kids and teenagers are following it and thinking about how his story relates to them. This radio piece was aimed at giving parents points of entry into a timely and important conversation.

Part of the dialogue that the piece was urging relates to consent in the exchanges that kids have with one another. For example, your 4- or 5-year old grabs a crayon from another kid. The adult in the room (or you, when you find out about it at home) needs to explain to him that he has to ask for the crayon first, and if the other child says “no,” you need to find another way to get your own crayon. It’s the beginning of consent education, flows naturally into discussions about bodily autonomy, and should always predate conversations about sex later on.

Another point of the broadcast was about our need to have this conversation about consent with boys as well as girls, particularly as the sexes become interested in one another. The fear was that we’re not having those conversations with boys as much as we need to. Here is the part of the segment that included comments from Karen Rayne, a sex educator:

When talking about sexual assault and consent, we often focus on victims, and primarily on girls. But, ‘it’s the people who are doing the sexual assaulting that need a different kind of education and a different kind of support starting from a very young age,’ says Rayne. ‘About things like [what to do] when they’re attracted to someone or interested in someone and that person rejects them. With the right education a young man might be able to say, Oh, you know what? I’ve been drinking too much and I feel like my capacity to make wise decisions is failing me. Or, Hey, you know, when someone’s trying to push me off of them, that’s something that I should take as a cue to get off.’

In 2018, it’s a conversation that many boys are still not having with their parents or anyone else.

Finally, older boys as well as girls are following the Kavanaugh story for suggestions of a double standard. By the end of these Congressional hearings, these kids are likely to learn something about whether adults in power take claims like Ford’s seriously, and whether alerting those in authority about bad conduct results in harsher consequences for those who speak up than for those they are complaining about.

It bears reminding that our kids are part of the public who will be listening for the truth in Kavanaugh’s and Ford’s testimony.

Listening For the Truth in Unanswered Questions

Kavanaugh has already stated “under oath” that Ford’s claims are “categorically and unequivocally false.” On the other hand, it seems likely that Ford will testify that when she was 15, a drunken Kavanaugh held her down on a bed, tried to engage in sexual activity with her, covered her mouth when she protested, feared for her life, and that she only escaped when one of Kavanaugh’s friends who was also present fell on top of them, interrupting his advances.

“The truth” of these accounts will emerge from a couple of directions as questions we have today begin to get answers. The first direction concerns the motivations behind Ford’s assertions and Kavanaugh’s denial.

We already know what Ford has lost (or stands to lose) by coming forward: her privacy, having to relive the incident she alleges, having to relocate her family to maintain their privacy, a disruption of her worklife, hounding by the press, name-calling and condemnation by strangers, harm to her reputation, risks to her safety and her family member’s safety, the longer term consequences for her children and husband, to say nothing of the expense of lawyers, security guards and therapy for months if not years to come. What we have not heard is why she is willing to pay such a steep price for coming forward. This is the as-yet unspoken part of her truth, and if her motives seem political or delusional, most of us who still have open minds will likely be able to tell.

Part of what motivates Kavanaugh’s response to Ford’s charges is substantive (the prize is close and, until now, seemed well-deserved) and part of it is tactical (a flat out denial has a better chance of getting him over the finish line than a more equivocal one). On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder whether just such an equivocal response might have served him better—something like:

I went to several parties in high school and I don’t remember encountering you [Ford] at any of them. If I did and you were injured by something that I did or said, I also don’t recall your complaining about it to anyone at the time or contacting me afterwards to demand an apology. If you had, I would have done everything in my power to make it right at the time and I am still prepared to do so.

A statement like this concedes the possibility that Ford’s alleged injury happened but that Kavanaugh had had too much to drink to remember it. It also offers to address her pain if he can. It’s not about his prospects on confirmation but about her alleged injuries at his hands and a willingness to make amends.

Of course, that’s not how Kavanaugh responded. Where we are today, either he or Ford is lying–and because she is paying more for her accusation than he has paid for his denial, Ford has the presumption of our belief. Moreover, Kavanaugh’s denial to a jury that’s entirely comprised of current and former teenagers will likely leave everyone who still has an open mind with the suspicion that a liar is about to be confirmed to the highest court in the land.

It didn’t have to play out this way.

A Generous Instead of Selfish Response

Suggesting that this Supreme Court nominee might have been better off with a statement like the one above seems like a lawyerly solution to a sticky problem, and to some extent it is. Every trial lawyer begins with what everybody else (i.e. his or her potential jurors) already knows, which is what most teenage boys in high school are like, and to build your defense from there. How can Kavanaugh be “unequivocally and categorically sure” that what Ford alleges didn’t happen in the fog of high school partying?

But if Kavanaugh really has no recollection about what allegedly transpired 35 years ago, there is another, far better reason for an equivocal explanation here.

It’s the possibility that regular people in the court of public opinion (and maybe in the Senate too) could acknowledge your imperfection, forgive a drunken transgression that may have happened before you reached adulthood, and be grateful to have a flawed but human Supreme Court nominee. Under these circumstances, Kavanaugh’s response would have “spoken to” his character instead of merely defending his “perfect record.”

If Kavanaugh had responded in this manner, the shame today is that many would still have politicized it, and many others would never have forgiven him. But far more importantly, at some point in this process Ford might have if she felt his remorse, and others of us who are watching would have been glad for his admission that he might have hurt her. Sadly, he didn’t say that and it’s almost impossible to see how any of us will get to healing from where we are today.

“I don’t remember” opens up possibilities for understanding and forgiveness that “It couldn’t have happened” does not. At the workplace, in the ambition of our careers, in fact in all of our dealings with one another, I’d argue that acknowledging our shortcomings and offering to make things right (at least as best we can) imagines understanding, even forgiveness, and a better way for everyone involved to move on.

Unfortunately, in the selfish rush to protect ourselves and get what we want, it’s easy to miss the opportunity to be generous to an accuser– to have enough confidence, accomplishment and good fortune to also admit that we’re flawed, and maybe in our honesty and regret, still end up with the job.

+ + +

Over the years, several people who have come forward at great personal cost to speak their particular truths to power have been profiled here. These are links to posts about a Yale ethics professor and nun who confronted the Catholic Church over a book she wrote about love, internal whistleblowers in the American security establishment who challenged government surveillance programs, and Edward Snowden. There have also been stories here about admirable public figures who were trying to talk their way past their accusers at the time, including Lance Armstrong Post 1 and Post 2, before he confessed his sins to Oprah Winfrey, and Eric Greitens, who went on to resign as Missouri’s governor last May. Their stories are all similar to Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s.

I believe that the only way to nurture moral leaders and citizens is to talk about these controversies, learn from their successes and failures, and ultimately, to acknowledge that an accused’s response—whether made by a public figure, an institution like the Church or a government—always provides the opportunity for a better future when it’s motivated by generosity instead of selfishness.

This post was adapted from my September 23, 2018 Newsletter.

Good Work’s Foundations

September 2, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I saw rooms full of models of imagined buildings and cities at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this week. The artist was Bodys Isek Kingelez from central Africa. Pictured above is one of his futuristic building models. They reflect “dreams for his country,” known during his life as the Belgian Congo and later as Zaire. Kingelez said he was envisioning “a more harmonious society” than he saw around him.

Artists are sometimes better at envisioning than the rest of us. It can be even harder for us to bring a better future into our day-to-day work—but when we do, our hopes pull us forward, particularly as we struggle to realize them.

Acting on what we hope for is one of good work’s foundations. So are acting out of our aim for both generosity and autonomy on the job. I’ve been thinking about demonstrations of generosity, autonomy and acting on hope this week from teacher/writer Roxanne Gay, actor/rap artist/omnivore Riz Ahmed, and activist/public intellectual Rebecca Solnit, respectively—3 powerful voices with a lot to say about how we spend our time and talent every day.

Generous Judgment

Generosity is about acknowledging the autonomy or self-determination of others (like co-workers, clients/customers, suppliers, members of your business and non-profit communities) in the course of your work.

You probably know comic Louis C.K. Highly acclaimed, his semi-autobiographical cable TV show Louis and stand-up comedy specials have won 6 Emmy awards, a Peabody, and star-struck interviews at places like Fresh Air. To me, his comedy seemed deep, subtle, smart, and self-aware. Until late last year, when he was “outed” by several women who worked with him, it seemed that Louis C.K. could do no wrong. They accused him of pretty egregious conduct that reminded me of apocryphal stories I used to hear about neighborhood “flashers,” only this time much worse, because he was not the sicko stranger in a trench coat. Instead, several in his reluctant audience had tied their careers to his.

As the story came out (on the heels of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose and others), I was surprised by the “not enough” of his public reactions and the suggestions around them that he had previously tried to bully his accusers into silence. Well this week, less than a year after the revelations first surfaced, Louis C.K. returned to a thunderous reaction “on the come-back trail.” The crowd that felt lucky enough to be at a NYC comedy club for his unannounced performance was reportedly ecstatic.

Clearly, Louis C.K. didn’t know how to handle the “world of hurt” around his abusive conduct when it first came out and was similarly clueless when he concluded “that all had been forgotten” and “it is time for everybody to just move on.” In a New York minute, Roxanne Gay told him otherwise.

It might have been easier for Louis if his comeuppance hadn’t been in the New York Times. But she didn’t just excoriate him. She met him like she acknowledged his intelligence, his talent, his fans who might still learn from what she was about to say. Instead of writing him off as a perverted loser, Gay told him what he (along with others who don’t know but need to hear) what should be done by adults who behave this way. It was a gift he may not have deserved, but it was a judgment that was elevated by the light that she brought to it.

“If Louis C.K. doesn’t know what to do when he’s caused this kind of damage, then I’ll try to explain it,” she seems to say—so he can make it right this time, and others like him can learn what they need to do too. Anger followed by patience in that New York minute was an act of generosity. Indeed, it’s a balance that elevates nearly everything that Roxanne Gay does.

While you should read her entire commentary, this is Gay on Louis C.K.’s “comeback road”:

How long should a man like Louis C.K. pay for what he did? At least as long as he worked to silence the women he assaulted and at least as long as he allowed them to doubt themselves and suffer in the wake of his predation and at least as long as the comedy world protected him even though there were very loud whispers about his behavior for decades.

He should pay until he demonstrates some measure of understanding of what he has done wrong and the extent of the harm he has caused. He should attempt to financially compensate his victims for all the work they did not get to do because of his efforts to silence them. He should facilitate their getting the professional opportunities they should have been able to take advantage of all these years. He should finance their mental health care as long as they may need it. He should donate to nonprofit organizations that work with sexual harassment and assault victims. He should publicly admit what he did and why it was wrong without excuses and legalese and deflection. Every perpetrator of sexual harassment and violence should follow suit.

Moral condemnation is easy but describing the “road someone needs to take back” requires a comprehension of the pain that was caused, the actions that would be necessary to alleviate it, as well as the belief that he could act on your advice. Most judgments fail to include these components, but Gay’s has all of them.

The Christian lesson of the crucifixion is infinitely more powerful because it is followed by the resurrection. We’re expert at crucifying people today—at work, and otherwise—but too often seem to be unconcerned about their ability (and ours) to rise afterwards. It’s not about forgiveness but the hard-won path to change.

The last time I wrote about Roxanne Gay on this page was in January.

Creative Autonomy

Autonomy is actively making the most out of what you have, identifying what is important to you, and putting yourself on the line to achieve it. Autonomy is self-determination.

In the limited series The Night Of (on HBO), Riz Ahmed played two roles: the role of a Pakistani student wrongly imprisoned at Riker’s Island for murder and a role beneath his acting that involved you as a viewer in a separate dialogue. You could feel Ahmed’s intelligence, focus and humanity whispering through his role—his interior life giving the 6 episodes counterpoints beyond the writing, directing and acting. (“Whatever he was saying and doing, he was always simultaneously maintaining a second conversation with you about what both of you might be thinking.”)

A profile with that line and additional suggestions about Ahmed’s perspective was this week’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine. You can sense what’s unique about him from the first impressions that Ahmed made on his profiler about his jobs as an actor and musician, pathfinder, role-model and activist.

It’s not that he doesn’t get animated. He does. Talking with Ahmed can be a little like sparring, a little like co-writing a constitution, a little like saving the world in an 11th-hour meeting. He interrupts, then apologizes for interrupting, then interrupts again. He can deliver entirely publishable essays off the top of his head. He pounds the table when talking about global injustices, goes back to edit his sentences minutes after they were spoken, challenges the premises of your sentences before you’re halfway through speaking. This is what happens when you cut your teeth on both prep-school debate teams and late-night freestyle rap battles, as Ahmed has. He is like someone who wants to speak truth to power but now is power — famous enough, at least, to have people listen to his ideas. He is like someone very smart who also cares a lot. He is like someone who doesn’t want to be misunderstood.

Not surprisingly, much of Ahmed’s edge comes from being a Pakistani-Brit, rising from one competitive lower school to another. Along the way, he felt his separateness as a South Asian but always “believed that the flag of Britain should and would obviously include him.” That is, until Al Qaeda’s attack on Twin Towers, which happened the month he matriculated to university and made it even more burdensome to be a Muslim. It was there that he made a critical life choice.

[H]e found himself at Oxford University, just after 9/11 — a brown kid surrounded by the acolytes of seemingly ancient white wealth, who sometimes did have a way of talking to him as if he were a shopkeeper. Rather than retreating into Oxford, he decided to make Oxford come to him. He started organizing parties that celebrated his music and cultural touchstones, parties where he would get on the mic over drum ’n’ bass records. Soon enough, the event he co-founded, “Hit and Run,” moved to Manchester and became one of the city’s leading underground music events.

What could have been angry rejection and a retreat to the company of other South Asian Muslims instead became his invitation for Oxford to join a broader conversation that he was sponsoring. It was a place where he mashed up Pakistani melodies and rhythms with British rap (just as rap was rising to become the most popular music in the world.) As Lena Dunham observed about him, he combined the bravado of someone in the hip-hop world with the intensity of someone who’s mounted a barricade.

Creating this platform was a singular act of personal autonomy (as well as generosity towards others) that has informed Riz Ahmed’s work ever since. He wants to initiate a conversation that’s big enough for him and for everyone else. It’s a theme that shines through every corner of his remarkable story. I hope that you’ll enjoy digging into more of it.

Living Your Vision

Envisioning is living the future that you hope for through your work.

I read Rebecca Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark” traveling to and from New York City. In a nutshell, it’s about living what’s important to you, even though there is no assurance or even likelihood that the better world you’re working for will get any closer as a result. As her title says, it’s hope in the dark.

Americans in particular tend to want more certainty than that. We’re not accustomed to a continuous struggle for a better world or trying to “live our hopes”–particularly when they may never be realized–every day. Instead, we tend to respond to a crisis/problem/challenge, declare victory or defeat, and go home to wait for the next one to demand our attention. Our responses are generally to emergencies that interrupt the normal flow of our lives. We don’t tend to see struggling for what’s important to us as a daily commitment.

Solnit argues that treating struggles for justice, fairness, freedom, for greater opportunity, self-determination or a healthier planet as isolated emergencies results in abandoning our victories while they’re still vulnerable and conceding our defeats too quickly. When we’re committed to achieving what’s truly important to us, Solnit argues: “It is always too soon to go home.”

She illustrates her point by recounting a story she wrote several years back about pay equity for women:

[A] cranky guy wrote in that women used to make sixty-two cents to the male dollar and now we made seventy-seven cents, so what were we complaining about? It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated to acknowledge that seventy-seven cents is better than sixty-six cents and that seventy-seven cents isn’t good enough, but the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the pint of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and to fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished. (italics mine)

It is because the struggle is never easy and never done that Solnit quotes the poet John Keats, who called the world with all of its suffering “this vale of soul-making.” While “Hope in the Dark” is mainly Solnit’s call to continuous political activism, her arguments apply equally to declaring what’s important to you though the work that you do, that is, to any kind of acting on your convictions. To borrow the force of her argument, your jobs become “toolboxes to change things,” places “to take up residence and live according to your beliefs,” and, as Keats would say, “vales” where your soul is made because it is where a sense of meaning, purpose and wholeness (as opposed to partial victories or defeats) can be found.

If you’re unfamiliar with Rebecca Solnit, “Hope in the Dark”‘s 100-odd pages would be a splendid introduction. Her “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster” such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina is a beautiful argument that we’re far more and far better than we often think that we are.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 2, 2018 newsletter